Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  Constantine nodded. “He’s right. I’ve lived the last two years of my life believing that.”

  Gillian looked from Constantine to Masaharu and back again. She appeared to relax, leaning back in her chair. She spoke softly. “Okay. I understand that. So if you already know everything that I’ve told you, why am I here?”

  Marion spoke. “Because we need your knowledge. You won’t be able to return to the Oort cloud, you know. We can’t take the risk of those AIs finding out anything that you hear at this meeting.”

  “But what about my work?”

  “Your work here is far more important now.” Marion turned to Constantine. “Would you like to explain?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry, Gillian. It’s true. The reason that I am here…”

  He paused as a strange lightheadedness washed over him. For a moment, the table had seemed to flicker. Looking up he saw two Gillians…No, that wasn’t right, he saw one Gillian sitting inside another. One Gillian seemed frozen in place, her hand paused in the motion of scratching herself behind the ear. The second Gillian seemed to sit inside her and overlap the first, a normal young woman; she looked at Constantine with an expression of interest, shifting in her chair as she did so.

  Constantine blinked hard. He reached out and placed a hand on the table’s surface. Cool and solid, it seemed reassuringly real.

  “Are you feeling okay, Constantine?” asked Jay.

  “Fine.” Constantine rubbed his hand back and forth for a moment, and then picked up his glass and took a sip of water. When he blinked again, the second Gillian had gone.

  “Okay,” he continued. “I’m here to set in motion a train of events I have been leading toward for the past two years. We are here to safeguard against a possible future that has been increasingly apparent to humankind for at least two centuries. It seems to me that everything is finally in place. It is our duty to decide if we are right to take the course of action that is before us.”

  There was a slight pause at this announcement.

  —Look at Jay smiling, said Red.—She’s taken a shine to you. She likes a man with spirit.

  Constantine coughed, then continued. “Okay. So, the order of events is as follows. First, we need to decide if we believe the AIs are working for or against us. Second, and this may or may not be relevant to the first point, do we go ahead with the plan?”

  He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of Jay—Jay who sat motionless, a frozen expression on her face, while a second Jay leaned forward to pour herself a glass of water.

  Damn, he thought. Not now. I’m going mad. Right here at the end, I’m finally going mad. All the effort, all the drive suddenly just left him. Weak and exhausted, he slumped in his chair.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think this is such a good idea anymore,” he mumbled. Jay and the rest stared at him with expressions that ranged from shock to concern to faint scorn.

  He didn’t care. Something seemed to be stirring in his mind, a little tickle, a tiny little feeling so small that it could barely be grasped. He thought about hugging a tree and rubbing a matchstick between his fingers at the same time. It made him feel uncomfortable. What was all that about?

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t feel…”

  The tickling increased.

  “Red, what is it?” he mumbled.

  —I don’t know. It’s like one of the other personae…

  “Red? Are you there? Blue? What’s happening?”

  He held the glass of water close to his lips, hiding their movement. He was fooling nobody: the rest of the group looked on in concern.

  He could feel something inside him waking up, something beginning to speak. Dizzily, he put the glass down. He heard a voice deep inside him, old and dry and incredibly strange. It was Grey, he realized. The grey pill was having an effect at last.

  —Act normally, you fool. Don’t let them know you’ve noticed anything wrong.

  “But…What…Can’t you see…?”

  The others watched him mumbling to himself.

  Grey spoke again, and his voice was petulant.—What’s up with Red? Why hasn’t he noticed? Gillian just got off a shuttle this morning that came from the edge of the solar system. Where did she get the white dress and the bangles? That’s this month’s fashion.

  “Oh…I don’t know…It’s all too…” Constantine was still reeling. Punch-drunk…

  —That’s it. I’m taking over, said Grey.

  Suddenly Constantine began to speak: it was his voice, but the words weren’t his.

  “I’m sorry, but I think I need a drink. It must have been hotter out there than I thought. I’m feeling a little dehydrated.”

  His hand reached out for the glass of water of its own accord, adding supporting evidence to the words he was now being forced to speak.

  It was Grey; Grey was controlling him. But that was impossible.

  He was still reeling from the shock when Grey made him pass out.

  Herb 3: 2210

  …into darkness.

  Darkness and silence.

  Herb could touch, smell, taste, feel nothing.

  A set of memories and no more.

  He could remember their long climb up the tower into space, flickering from room to room and then, without warning, they had stopped. Robert Johnston had paused just long enough to announce that they could go no further with certainty, that they must now jump into the unknown—and they had jumped.

  That was when the memories of a world ended. Memories of touch and sight and taste. Now there was…nothing.

  So where was he? Robert had said that Herb’s consciousness had existed in the processors remaining after the VNMs of the Necropolis had failed to commit suicide correctly. He had therefore viewed the world through the senses of those machines. What if he had now jumped to a place where those senses no longer existed? What if his consciousness now existed in a processor with no connection to the outside world? How long would he remain here? Forever? To spend eternity without any senses, cut off from everyone and everything: the thought was enough to send his nonexistent pulse racing in panic. And then a second, more sinister, thought occurred to him.

  Robert had said that many copies of his personality had been dispersed throughout the Enemy Domain to seek out the secret of its origin. What if other copies of Herb Kirkham were even now trapped in eternal darkness? Tiny bubbles of consciousness glittering unnoticed, suspended in endless silence throughout the dark ocean of the Enemy Domain.

  Nothing, still nothing. A scream was building in Herb’s imaginary throat…

  “Hey, buddy. What’s the matter?”

  Robert Johnston thrust his face over Herb’s left shoulder, his features illuminated from below by some invisible light source. Herb blinked as his imaginary eyes adjusted to the darkness: his senses had switched on again. He felt the weak pull of gravity, smelled the cold, tinny air. Stretching away beneath his feet was a regular pattern of shadows, picking out the edges of a triangular grid. Around and above him, nothing. Only gloom.

  “Where are we? What happened?” Herb’s voice was hoarse with emotion. Robert stepped before him. Am I imagining it, or does he look shaken too?

  Robert was poised on his toes, gently shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he regained his sense of reality. Noticing Herb’s curious expression, he changed his movement into a little dance.

  “Come on, Herb. Get with the beat.”

  “Don’t give me that,” said Herb. “You were as frightened as I was. What happened back there?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle. There was nothing at the top of that elevator. Nothing. I think we lodged ourselves among the unused seed VNMs. I suppose they didn’t see the need to set them growing, once they realized the Necropolis had gone so badly wrong. There were no senses up there for me to use: they hadn’t been grown. I had to make an educated guess and jump us off in the direction of one of those ships hovering above the planet. I remembered the pattern they formed and se
nt us off on the path through the lattice that would most likely intersect with one of them. I got it right, but only just. We’re right at the far edge of the formation.”

  Robert turned around and began to dance his way along the narrow walkway on which they stood, suspended over what Herb now recognized to be a spaceship’s outer hull. It looked surprisingly old-fashioned: struts and bracing were virtually unknown in these days of shell construction. Herb had a sudden sense of the otherness of the Enemy Domain. He wondered under which alien sun these ships had replicated. He imagined their juvenile forms, floating in bright blackness, the cold glare of some star picking out the stretching and sliding as the braces and struts tensed and tore themselves apart while the ships reproduced by binary fission.

  “Look up.”

  Herb obeyed as row upon row of silent coffins suddenly appeared above him.

  “I just found the ship’s monitoring system for those things. I’ve linked them into our personalities as a visual feed. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  Herb licked his lips. “Are they occupied?” he whispered.

  Robert paused a moment. “Let me see…No. They’re empty. I wonder. Do you think that they were supposed to be filled from that planet beneath us? Let me think about that. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Hmm.”

  He lapsed into silence again and strode off along the walkway, his dancing forgotten now that his nerves were calmed. Yet again, Herb found himself following Robert Johnston into the unknown.

  They were standing on the bridge of the spaceship. At least, that’s what Robert called it. Herb didn’t understand the concept. There was a wraparound window that made for ideal star-viewing, three comfortable padded chairs, equipped with straps for some reason, and between the chairs and the window, blocking the best standing position to take in the view, a bewildering array of controls.

  “I don’t understand. What is this place for?”

  Robert grinned. “For flying the spaceship, of course.”

  Herb frowned. He ran his finger over the green, webbed material covering one of the chairs, then began to fiddle with one of the straps.

  “I still don’t understand. How will these help fly the spaceship?”

  Robert was watching him intently, saying nothing; it made Herb nervous. He was being tested, he was sure of it.

  Robert spoke. “You don’t understand, do you? Don’t you remember your history lessons? I imagine that the Enemy Domain is thinking ahead. It’s thinking about what would happen if someone was forced to land this ship with the AIs knocked out. All this is intended for human pilots.”

  “Human pilots? Is that possible?”

  Again Robert said nothing, and Herb cursed himself internally. Of course it was possible. Isn’t that how all ships used to be controlled? Then another question occurred to him.

  “Human pilots? Robert, I thought the Enemy Domain was an alien construction.”

  Robert gave one of his enigmatic smiles. “It depends what you mean by alien.”

  Herb sat down in one of the chairs. It was extremely comfortable, fitting itself to his body perfectly, except for where the straps dug into his back. He wriggled them aside and relaxed.

  “You let me think the Enemy Domain was of alien origin. It’s not, is it? The Necropolis was built for humans, before it went wrong. These ships have spaces on them for human beings. Robert, what’s going on?”

  Robert Johnston sat down on the next chair along.

  “What’s going on? Let me put it this way.” Robert lifted his feet, resting them on the bank of controls before him, and raised a finger.

  “Imagine it like this,” he said. “Look at the first finger of your right hand. Got it? Okay, now look at the first two joints of your finger. Imagine that’s the volume of Earth-controlled worlds. It’s about the right shape, too; we seemed to have expanded more sideways than up or down. Now hold out your hand, just like this, see?”

  Robert moved his palm downward, in front of his body. His pale pink nails were reflected in the window just before him. Slowly, Herb copied him.

  “Look at the first two joints of your index finger: the Earth volume. According to that scale, the planet we are currently floating above would be at the bottom of your right earlobe. You’ve got to get the idea of the scale of things, yeah? Now contrast the size of the tip of your finger with the size of your head and your neck. Run a line down the front of your body, down past your waist, down your legs, right to the tips of your little toes, and then all the way back up to your right shoulder. Think how big all that is compared to those tiny little joints on your right hand. That volume equates to the Enemy Domain.”

  Herb looked down at his feet, seeming so far away on the floor. He looked back to his hand in disbelief.

  Robert continued softly. “Now, we’re at your right earlobe. Above a planet that lies at the edge of the wave of expansion of the Enemy Domain. Think about your right arm, down to the elbow, along to the hand, think of the palm of your hand, your knuckles, down that first finger of your right hand, all of that space. All of it now occupied by the Enemy Domain’s machines. Think of all those tiny metallic bodies creeping over each other, feeding, and reproducing in their own image. Hungry metal tendrils reaching forward, jumping from world to world. Searching for something. And there, at the end of that first finger, that tiny little finger joint, Earth, all those people, everyone you ever knew, all happily unaware of that smothering, suffocating tide of machinery bearing down upon them. Imagine a single ant scuttling over the sand on a beach and looking up to see the tsunami bearing down upon it.”

  A moment’s silence, and then Robert spoke at his softest.

  “Don’t think alien or human. Just think destruction. That’s what we’re talking about.”

  Herb stared at his fingernail for a moment; stared at the veins that stood up on the back of his hand, at the whorls that ridged the top of his knuckles, the pale blond hairs that marched up the back of his forearm. He suddenly shuddered.

  “You’re shaking.” Robert was speaking at his normal volume again. “All this,” he gestured through the window at the few sparse ships floating here at the edge of the vast fleet, “all these ships, that elevator, the Necropolis, the bumblebee robots that buzz around on the planet, the spiders that creep through the tunnels, all of this system in which our consciousnesses find themselves…”

  He paused for breath, easing back into the huge green chair. “All of this system is the tip of the tiniest hair that grows from the most insignificant pore on the very edge of your right earlobe. So, don’t think human or alien, Herb. Just think about being afraid. Being very afraid.”

  When Herb spoke there was just the faintest tremor in his voice.

  “I am frightened,” he said. “I’ve never denied it. Come on, who wouldn’t be?” He smiled sardonically. “An agent of the EA has entered my spaceship via a secret passageway, has captured me, fired my consciousness across the galaxy to the edge of an Enemy Domain, and then that same agent tells me that I am going to help fight something so big I can barely imagine it. It could be said that, yes, I’m slightly nervous.”

  Robert studied him closely, then shook his head. “No. You’re being flippant. Not nervous enough. Do you know what that tower is used for now? The one we just came up?”

  “Of course not.” Herb licked his lips nervously. “But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “Launching cannon for VNMs. The Enemy Domain is seeding the galaxy with copies of itself.”

  Herb gave a shrug. “Figures. That’s how the Enemy Domain got so big, I suppose.”

  “Okay. Have you figured out what all these ships are doing here, then?”

  “No. Have you? You said they were going to be filled from the planet below. I think it would be the other way around. These ships are bringing humans to populate the planet. They would unload them onto the space elevator and take them down below to live in the Necropolis. Would have done if everything hadn’t gone wrong, an
yway.”

  Robert smiled.

  “Good answer. The best—” as Herb smiled, Johnston waited just a moment before smashing him right down again “—given the knowledge you have. Your mistake is in thinking of the human beings who would occupy those coffins as individuals. They weren’t. They were meant to be clones. Clones that were being grown on that planet below us until the VNMs building the city we call the Necropolis malfunctioned. They’re still there, but their growth has been suspended. I felt their consciousness, millions of them, semi-aware in the darkness, as we jumped from the top of the elevator. That planet is almost sentient, there are so many of them down there.”

  For a moment, Herb couldn’t be sure; it almost looked as if there was a tear in the corner of Robert’s eye. As he tried to look closer, Johnston rose from his seat and went to gaze from the window, out into space. He continued speaking, his voice slightly hushed.

  “If you look down on that planet with the right eyes, it’s a dark ball embedded with the brightest little lights. All lost and alone and forgotten at the edge of the Enemy Domain…”

  His voice trailed away and Herb felt a sickening lurch of vertigo. He imagined the ship’s floor splitting open beneath him, imagined the long drop back through the silent, empty fleet of ships, passing their hollow, forgotten shells as he tumbled faster and faster toward the planet below, rushing toward the up-reaching, deformed spires. And there, buried beneath them all, like so many unwatered seeds, the half-formed, twisted consciousness of things that would never become people. What were they like? he wondered. Half-grown adults? Children?

  It was too much. He finally began to shiver.

  “It’s too big,” he said. “You’re right. It’s too big. We can’t fight this.”

  Robert turned back to him.

  “Oh, yes, we can. Come on. We can use this ship’s communication devices to upload ourselves. It’s time to go back.”

  Herb wouldn’t have believed it possible to feel bored and terrified at the same time, but somehow he was. Four days had passed since Robert Johnston had first appeared on his ship, and since then they had done nothing. The ship still floated a few hundred meters above the restless silver sea of VNMs, the mechanical remains of his converted planet. Robert Johnston’s mysterious errands caused him to pass constantly between his own ship and Herb’s. Herb had been told in no uncertain terms not to attempt to look down the passageway that linked the two ships, and Herb was sufficiently frightened of Robert not to attempt it.