Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  Strange creature, repeated the AI. It sounded almost amused.

  I do not understand you, I told it.

  I am easy to understand. No, it paused, no, you are right. I am very hard to understand.

  Can you explain yourself?

  When you have done what you agreed to do.

  This soured the conversation for me, so I sulked for a little while. But the AI did not give up.

  When you return to Agifo3acca's ship, you should access the info-chip that you collected from Narcissus. I will tell you how.

  And what will I find when I access it?

  When you access it, it said, you will find out.

  Why do you play these games with me, AI? I truly do not understand you. Are you a device of Agifo3acca's? Perhaps you are him, I added, turning around in my seat to stare at the back of the Wheah's head, perhaps you are actually a receiver through which he talks to me. Are you? Hey? (I thought hard, subvocalising the words with intensity). Hey! Turn and look at me, you Wheah!

  Nothing.

  Your mind refuses to rest steady in one place, said the AI.

  I'm tired, I sub-said, folding my arms.

  Your tiredness goes very deep.

  'So now you are a mind-doctor?' I snapped, aloud. There was no response from Agifo3acca. The AI did not rebuke me for talking aloud instead of subvocalising, in the old manner. I snorted and closed my eyes. I don't understand you at all, I sub-said.

  I'm an advanced t'T AI; a new generation of machine. My fundamental identity is seeded in a fractal base programme, so should I – when I – am degraded to an irreparable point by, for instance, interstellar travel I am able to reboot and rebuild myself.

  'I don't believe you,' I said aloud. Since Agifo3acca was not responding, and since I half believed the AI to be nothing more than a transmission device he was using to communicate with me at a telepathic level, there didn't seem much point in keeping quiet.

  I'm a communication device, said the AI, as if it really had been reading my mind, the seeds of which were infiltrated into your jail by Agifo3acca, and which has since been used by him to communicate with you.

  'Hah!' I said, quite loudly I think. 'I knew it.'

  I am, the AI went on, a figment of your own imagination, a fiction whereby your diseased consciousness talks to itself and makes believe its worse instincts are not intrinsic to it. You're hardly the first psychopathic schizophrenic to split their personality in such a manner.

  I didn't say anything to this.

  I am what I am, said the AI; and then it was silent for the rest of the journey back to Agifo3acca's ship.

  3rd

  Stone. Stone, stone.

  There really wasn't any further putting it off. That same day, after returning from the expedition to the Trench, I told Agifo3acca that my employers and his (I winked at him with this, but he seemed unmoved) had given me an info-chip, and that I wished to access it. 'There are many rooms in my ship,' he said, 'with the capacity to interpret an info-chip. Simply show it to a wall receptor.'

  I took myself to a distant part of the great edifice, walking slowly, feeling gloomy. You're just making it worse, opined the AI, drawing it out like this.

  'You could shut up,' I said aloud, but without passion.

  Eventually I found a quiet room, arched like a vault, tinted green with some faint wall luminescence. The room was something like ten metres square. In the middle was a table, so tall as to reach almost up to my chin. There was nothing on the table, and no chairs around it; but the walls were indented with a series of pushings-in and pullings-out of the material from which it was made, a sort of bas-relief effect.

  I picked the info-chip from my pocket and showed it to the wall in a vague sort of way. There was an audible click inside the little nodule, and the walls gleamed.

  Goodbye, said the AI.

  'What?'

  You don't need me any more.

  'You're going?'

  Yes; this chip will tell you everything you need to know.

  'But,' I said, suddenly startled and a little afraid that my AI was going to abandon me after all this time. Does that sound illogical to you, dear stone? I hated its voice, I was convinced at times that it was a sign of my own madness, I was prepared to beat my own head to try and reach it. Yet now, with its sudden announcement that it was leaving, I felt a void inside me. 'Don't go,' I said.

  How touching! But you don't need me now.

  'You should stay and police me,' I pointed out. 'I might decide to back out of my commission.'

  You won't.

  But how can you be sure?

  We know you pretty well by now. I was so startled by the AI's announcement that it was leaving, that I didn't even challenge its use of the plural. Besides, the deal still holds. If you don't fulfil your part of it, you'll still go right back to jail. You don't need me here for that.

  'But I don't want you to go.'

  Look – and it directed my eyes, pulling the muscles round. A figure was forming, coalescing in the air before me. A hologram of a rather outmoded sort. It'll take a few seconds to set up. But then it'll require your complete attention.

  I stared at the ghostly shape, striated momently with white bars of interference. Then the colour went smooth grey all over.

  'AI,' I said. 'You can't go. You promised me an explanation of everything when the crime is . . . when the job is done.'

  You say that you know who is behind the mission anyway, it replied. There was a tone of humour in its words.

  'I know it is the Wheah,' I said, bridling a little. 'I think it has something to do with an invasion. But I don't know the details! You promised me an explanation of the details! Why this world – why there had to be such loss of life!'

  You'll get your explanation, said the AI, soothing. The grey figure was starting to bring facial features into focus, as if they were swimming up from great depths inside its head to settle on the surface of its face. If you complete your mission successfully. I promise you that.

  'I assumed you would be the one to explain.'

  Does that matter?

  'So many deaths,' I said, trying to draw it further into discussion; but I could feel the non-corporeal twitches inside my skull. It was going. Departing.

  'Where are you going?' I asked, urgently. 'Can you at least tell me where you are going?'

  Nowhere, it said. Everywhere. Does that matter either?

  And it was gone. There was a humming noise from the hologram, which now had a face and was looking directly at me.

  4th

  Dear Stone,

  We're getting closer to the moment, to that moment. I am not eager to get there; I don't— Dear stone. Dear dear stone.

  Let me tell you about the hologram, to begin with. It was of a regular sized, slightly slender male human being. Its skin started grey, which gave it a corpse-like appearance, but the colour started shaking to pink-red as the thing began to speak.

  Its first words were 'What the bloody hell are you staring at?'[30]

  I couldn't think what to reply to this; so I said, 'You're a hologram.'

  'Hologram?' it replied, as if outraged. Its voice was creaky, with a scratchy underpinning of white noise. 'Hologram? Aren't you?'

  'No,' I said, a little meekly.

  'No? Of couse I'm a hologram. Of course I'm a hologram. What do you want? What do you want? Is this Narcissus Tupylorov?'

  'No,' I said. 'This is a spacecraft, somewhere off the Wallows.'

  'The Wallows?' The hologram scrunched up its face, like a hand balling into a fist. 'Ah. What's your name?'

  I told it my name. 'And what's yours?'

  'I'm a hologram,' it replied. 'We're not named, you know. This shape belongs to a fellow called Tag-matteo. If it makes you comfortable, you can call me that. But I'm not here to make you comfortable, you know. God, but you're ugly.'

  'I know,' I said. 'I have no dotTech in my body, and I have aged a great deal. Also I am scarred.'

  'DotTec
h,' said the hologram. 'Excuse me whilst I . . . it's a little difficult adjusting. Some of the compression maintenances are – what would you say, stiff? I'm having to take a little time unpacking my data.'

  'Take all the time you want.'

  A fuzziness formed around the shape, and resolved itself into a set of downward streaking lines that it took me a moment to recognise as rain. 'Is your programme,' I said, '. . . raining?'

  The shape of Tag-matteo looked up, as if noticing the downpour for the first time, although the imitation droplets were splashing markedly off its imitation head and face. 'I seem to be,' it said.

  I wondered about asking more about this strange phenomenon, but thought better of it.

  'Hmm,' Tag-matteo said. 'Rain. It's all light patterns, you know. Now, what is it you want me for, precisely?'

  'What do I want you for?'

  'That's what I asked you.'

  I didn't know what to say. 'What can you do?' I asked.

  'Don't be stupid. Are you stupid?'

  'No!'

  'Then tell me what you want me for.'

  'This is . . . strange,' I said. The figure had so angry a manner it was starting to bother me. I had been brought up to be polite at all times; a creed I believe I have lived by, stone, all my days. But this hologram seemed trying deliberately to be rude to me. I couldn't work out why.

  'Strange?' said the hologram. The light-show rain had stopped, and now its skin gleamed yellow as if bright sunshine were shining upon it.

  'What . . . ?' I started to ask. Then, 'What are you doing?'

  'Unpacking myself. I've been inside a very small space, you know, in information terms. I contain a great deal of information, and it has been fractally compressed and zipped-up. It doesn't all pop out at once you know. Will you tell me what you want me for, or will I go back inside the chip?'

  'I found you on Narcissus,' I said.

  'Understandable,' it replied at once, almost snappishly. 'That was where Tag-matteo left me.'

  'I was directed to find you by . . . by something. Somebody. They told me that you would help me with . . . something that I have to do.'

  'What something?'

  It was so cross-sounding that I felt inhibited from revealing the nature of my mission. Mass murder is not an easy thing to own up to. But it started needling me. "What? What? What?

  'I must kill off the population of an entire world,' I said.

  'Very well,' said the hologram, matter-of-factly. 'I can help you with that.'

  I opened my mouth, and shut it again. 'Can you?'

  'Of course.'

  'And it doesn't bother you?'

  'What?'

  'What I just said. The murder of sixty million people?'

  'Is not for me to be bothered by such things. That's not what I am. Why,' it added, looking at me in an almost sly fashion. 'Does it bother you?'

  'Are you,' I said, after a pause, 'programmed to be so . . . offensive?'

  'No,' it said. 'I'm not.'

  I waited for more explanation, and when it wasn't forthcoming I asked, 'Are you an AI?'

  'I am most definitely not,' it said, as if I had insulted it, 'an AI. I'm just data, and a few processing programmes to help users access the data. I'm not sentient. This construct is . . . well, it doesn't really matter. Would you prefer a different interface? Feel free to programme one in. It would make no difference to me.'

  'Never mind,' I said. 'What data are you?'

  'Data,' said the construct, with an unmistakable smile. 'Relating to the Gravity Trench.'

  In fact, dear stone, it contained a great deal more data than that. It contained data that related to the life of Tag-matteo, the human its interface was modelled on; and a general encyclopaedic database based on t'T knowledge. Tag-matteo had, it seemed, lived a wide and varied life before becoming obsessed with the Trench. 'It's the kind of thing that happens, occasionally,' said the hologram, with an almost conversational air. 'There are perhaps a dozen major mysteries in the space of t'T – I mean, really big, bugger-off mysteries, you know? They are understood as completely as they can be, everything that can be known about them is known. I mean on the level of data. But sometimes people become convinced that they can understand them better. Tag-matteo thought that about the Trench, and so he studied it. For the best part of thirty-five years, with a two-year sabbatical in the middle. And the best thing is, that he did come to understand it better.'

  'How do you mean?'

  'He gained access to knowledge that nobody else in t'T space had ever managed to access before.'

  'How did he do so? I mean, people have studied the Trench for millennia; how did he supersede that research in only a few decades?'

  The hologram looked mysterious. 'He had help.'

  'Help? From whom?'

  The mysterious expression vanished. 'I don't know.'

  'I thought he programmed you with everything he knew?'

  'He didn't know who helped him either.'

  I was sitting with my back against the green wall of the room at this stage; and I thought of Agifo3acca, somewhere far below me in his enormous spaceship. Could he have brought some other, Wheah knowledge to bear on the problem? Was he the unknown helper?

  'Agifo3acca,' I said, 'the Wheah, whose ship this is – he has studied the Trench too.'

  'Really?' said the hologram.

  'Yes. He claims that aliens constructed it.'

  The hologram made a raspy scoffing noise. 'Absurd,' it said. 'There's no such thing as aliens.'

  'But Tag-matteo,' I said. 'He came to understand the Trench?'

  'I wouldn't say that. Not understand it completely. But he understood it better than most people have done.'

  'And his understanding is—'

  '—is me, in a manner of speaking. I am what he knows.'

  I thought about this for a while. 'And you can help me in . . . in what I have to do?'

  'Why,' said the hologram, smiling broadly. 'Why, yes.'

  5th

  Stone,

  I came back down to Agifo3acca with the info-chip in my pocket. The Wheah looked at me, his expression impassive. I couldn't quite hold back a superior expression – after all, I possessed a databank, in the form of the info-chip, that could answer many of the questions about the Trench that had obsessed Agifo3acca for most of his adult life. (Unless, I wondered to myself, unless Agifo3acca knew more, said more, than he let on.)

  'Was your session satisfactory?' he said.

  'Very,' I said. 'I will go now. Will you help me? I need a standard info-chip; I need to travel and build myself a ship at my destination.'

  Agifo3acca nodded.

  So, dear stone, so; we come to the crucial point. Yes, the tall Wheah followed me down to the hangar; yes he gave me the necessary info-chip, and helped me strap on a Zhip-pack. His face was the last thing I saw before the foam covered me up; and there I was, in the darkness, feeling the lurch as he pushed me towards the exit-sphincter of the craft. Drifting away. Drifting, and then accelerating – slowly at first, because of the proximity of the interference pattern of the Wallows, then more rapidly. I flew to Colar.

  Hard. This is hard – like your hardness, stone; a pun on difficulty. Now we're coming to the really bad things I have done.

  Colar

  1st

  Dear Stone,

  It's been a while since I last spoke to you, I know. I have not been looking forward to this part of my narrative; truly I have not. It is odd, how difficult this part of my narrative is for me to relate. I could have started with this point, couldn't I? I could have got it over with at the beginning. But I look back over what I have told you, and told my invisible listeners through you (wellhello! I know you're there), and it occurs to me that this has all been an elaborate avoidance of this point. This point.

  Well, I don't know why it is so awkward a thing. Let me tell you about it, as swiftly as possible. I shall not elaborate it unnecessarily. Get it over with. Which is appropriate – really it is, s
ince that was my frame of mind when I put on my Zhip-pack and set off through space. I wanted the whole crime behind me, so that I could get on with things.

  The parameters, as the AI had told me right at the beginning, were that all human life had to be extinguished; but not that the entire world be annihilated. I arrived in orbit around the next planet but one in the system – a gas giant, with a splendid range of ruby-coloured rings around it. I hung there in space, more or less unconscious, still sleeping, half-tranced, while my standard info-chip (not the specialised Tag-matteo chip) burrowed out of my foam, and flew to the nearest raw material; the dust and water particles of the ring system. It quarried a small amount of this and used the matter, to gather more. This was in turn used to duplicate a number of construction devices, none of them very large. All entirely standard. It was necessarily slow and time consuming; but travellers to new systems (or, as in my case, travellers to a system where they did not want to declare themselves to the orbitals there) had no option but to employ it. I lay, curled inside my foam, whilst all this activity went on around me. The devices shaped quarried carbon and iron, constructed a chamber, ten metres by ten by ten. When everything was ready, several of these construction machines formed into larger units, and shunted the hardened foam-wrapped figure of me through space and into the chamber. They then sealed, and evacuated. Oxygen from the frozen water was separated and blown into the interior, whilst other machines built essential circuitry. My foam was eaten away in increments, until I was able to stretch out and pull lumps of the stuff from my body like a chick emerging from an egg.

  I'm delaying upon this, aren't I. My dear stone, your patience is a bad example to me. I am resolved: I must be impatient in the telling of my story.

  I completed the setting up of the chamber, and the machines began adding another capsule to it. But I did not wait for this; instead I used the new circuitry to access Tag-matteo. The hologram appeared, crotchety, fuzzy. 'Your machinery is not very polished,' it said. 'I can hardly focus my image.'

  'I apologise,' I said.

  It smiled.

  So, stone. This is what Tag-matteo's insubstantial image explained to me.