Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  She was stretched against the ceiling now, as if filled with helium and floating up there. She even seemed to bob a little, settling into position.

  'The dotTech,' said Klabier. 'That's what I wanted to talk to you about.'

  'How are you up on the ceiling?' I asked. Then it occurred to me that I might be hallucinating. I told Klabier this. 'I have had certain . . . difficulties with my mind. It had not entirely been working as it might. I have possibly been a little insane. Perhaps you are a part of that?'

  She shook her head. 'Quite the reverse,' she said. 'We'd have come sooner, to explain things to you, but you were too wild. You have indeed gone through an episode, a near psychotic interlude. But you're better now than you were. You're in a mental state that is ready to hear our explanation now.'

  'My AI promised me an explanation,' I said. 'But it went away.'

  'We know.'

  I sat up. Klabier relocated herself so that she was sitting opposite me. No matter where I moved my eyes, she occupied the central position; like the afterimage of a bright light when it has bruised the delicate receptors at the back of the eye, and the blob refuses to budge.

  'How do you do that?' I asked.

  'When your AI was operating,' Klabier said, 'it built certain pathways through your brain. A cable was constructed that linked both retinas to processing portions of the mid-brain. We're using that to summon the image.'

  I thought about this. 'You're only inside my head,' I said. 'You're not actually outside at all.'

  'Something like that.'

  'As I said,' I went on, 'I've been a little mad. For a long time I wondered if my AI was merely a figment of my imagination. I wonder if you are the same.'

  'We're not a figment of your imagination,' she said. We're real, in the world outside you. We're simply using this shape to communicate with you. Think of it as an avatar.'

  'An avatar of what? For whom?'

  'For us. Your employers.'

  I shook my head vigorously, causing the avatar of Klabier to leap from position to position so quickly that it seemed momentarily as if there were three of her. 'I thought it through carefully,' I said, 'and I realised that it was Agifo3acca acting alone. I thought that it might be the Wheah, but actually it was just Agifo3acca working alone.'

  'No,' she said.

  I thought about this. 'I might have been wrong,' I said.

  'You were wrong.'

  'I'm glad,' I said, thoughtfully, 'that I didn't kill Agif in the end. If he wasn't responsible.'

  'We're glad too,' said the avatar. 'It's our business to preserve all human life, and each death is an irritant to us.'

  'And yet you wanted me to murder sixty million human lives,' I said.

  She nodded. 'We did. That was not an easy thing for us. Believe me. It was a problem, and we found the only solution to it we could. It was not . . . perfect, but it worked.'

  'Are you Wheah?' I asked, my brain starting to work more analytically.

  'No,' she said.

  'Palmetto?' I asked.

  'No,' she said. There was a curious smile on her face. I thought to myself. 'Your shape,' I said. 'You are t'T. I assumed it would be an outsider, but it was no outsider.'

  'We . . .' said the Klabier-avatar, and then stopped. 'Please make allowances,' it went on. 'This is very hard for us. Even communicating with you in this fashion is very hard. Harder than you can easily imagine. But you were promised an explanation, and that's what we will give you.'

  I wiped my face with my dry hands. Itches sometimes fluttered across it. This never happened to people with dotTech.

  'You-all made us,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'Humanity. But there were . . . certain problems. We are problem solvers, and we came up with a solution. You were our solution.'

  'Who are you?' I asked, feeling strange, eldritch and peculiar. I felt on the edge of something very large, and the sensations in my belly were almost like vertigo sensations.

  'We are the dotTech,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'You were looking in the wrong place.'

  I felt hungry, and left the room looking for food; the Klabier-avatar came with me, apparently walking backwards in front of me. 'You were my AI,' I said, as I squeezed some food-paste from a dispenser of Agif s. 'Weren't you.'

  'Yes,' said the dotTech. 'It was not a conventional AI. We developed this macro-strategy – it's very hard to explain to you. In a very real sense you live in a different sort of universe from us. Interaction is extremely difficult in a meaningful sense. You are causal, we quantum. For you there are . . . certainties (even that word is effectively without meaning for us, do you see). For us there are only probabilities, and the wave-form. That's where we live, in a manner of speaking.'

  'You're losing me,' I said, my mouth full of food. The Klabier-avatar looked disdainfully at my bad manners.

  'We found a way of linking a large enough network of us together, and this is what we used to communicate with you. It was a specialist arrangement, unlike anything else we had tried before. We are used to intercommunication, because on a quantum level we are all in the same place, so that although we are legion we are one. But that is the quantum level. In your universe it was . . . hard for us to connect together. But we found a way. When you were in prison, we introduced some specialist machines – versions of us, adaptations – into your system through the fruit you ate. It grew a particular network in your brain.'

  'I remember the fruit,' I said. 'I remember the prison. So that means that I did have dotTech in my body, all that time I thought I didn't.'

  'No,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'You did not have any dotTech in your body. That was part of the reason you were chosen to do what you did. It's the reason we employed the Wheah, Agifo3acca, to assist you. It was important to us that there be no dotTech inside you. The neural network we established was not conventional dotTech. It was more of a facilitator, a means of communication.'

  'Why was it important that I be free of dotTech?' I asked.

  'Because of what we do. We preserve and maintain human life. If we had been inside you it would have introduced a terminal contradiction for us; not a quantum contradiction, for there is not truly a contradiction in our universe. But something more profound, a metaphysical aporia. We might have been placed in an impossible position. As it was, we escaped that conflict.'

  'You were conflicted because you are programmed to preserve human life, and I was murdering sixty million,' I said.

  'Yes.'

  'But you employed me to murder the sixty million in the first place.'

  'Yes.'

  'Isn't that a conflict?'

  'It's not easy for you to grasp this, I appreciate. But we don't operate in a binary, causal universe the way you do. For you it is either raining or it is not raining. For us it is both raining and not raining at the same time, all the time. That's what the wave form means; it's a probability thing, a quantum thing.'

  'Your losing me again,' I said.

  'We built the AI inside your head to communicate with you; but it was not like a causal transmitter with you on one end and us on the other, in the manner of the transmitters you are used to. We were able to use it to communicate with you. We were able, for instance, to use it to guide you to the info-chip on Narcissus; to use it to help you escape the prison. But in other respects the AI was a function of your own brain. It was both these things simultaneously. It was a balance of probabilities. On any given moment of perception, any given occasion when you communicated with the AI or it with you, it was collapsed out of its quantum state into one or other solid state – either to us, or to your own consciousness talking to itself

  'No wonder it confused me,' I said.

  'Indeed; but that's the nature of it. It could not be any other way. What surprised us was that the wave-form (talking to us, talking to yourself) was increasingly collapsed by your observation of it into the solid state of you talking to yourself. Rather than an equal balance. That was one of the reasons why the AI left; although another
reason was that we did not want to have any access to you when the . . . crime . . . was committed, for fear of the contradiction we were talking about earlier.'

  'So often, when I thought I was talking to the AI, I was talking to myself.'

  'Just so.'

  'But at other times I was actually talking to . . . you?'

  'Sometimes. But not strictly to us. Direct communication between the Newtonian and the quantum is . . . extremely difficult to manage. The AI was a complex, AI-like programme we established. So sometimes you were talking with that. Sometimes with yourself.'

  'And through this . . . device . . . you prompted me to commit the crime in the first place.'

  'Yes.'

  'Puzzling,' I said.

  'Not really. We gave you a job, and it has been successfully completed. We are very pleased with the result.'

  'Pleased?'

  'Well, no. We don't get pleased or displeased in the way that you do. But we had a problem, and the solution has been achieved very satisfactorily. That's a primary part of our self-definition. We are problem-solving machines.'

  'But we made you-all,' I said. ' We built you. We built you to live inside us and repair our damage, keep us healthy.'

  'Well,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'Yes, in a manner of speaking, that is true.'

  'And now you've turned against us?'

  'It's not like that. Really it's not. There are seven and four billion trillion dotTech machines in human bodies in t'T space alone, and they are doing what they have always done. We keep you-all alive, we preserve you-all. The dotTech on Colar worked to the very best of its capabilities to keep the population there alive, despite the fact that we also set in motion the chain of (causal) events that lead to the deaths on the planet in the first place.'

  'There is certainly a contradiction here,' I pointed out.

  The Klabier-avatar looked, if anything, uncomfortable. 'Well, once again, not really. It's only a contradiction if you look at it from the point of view of a causal, binary black -is-not-white universe. That's the universe where you live, but not us. That's not how things are on a quantum level.'

  It paused, and looked hard at me. 'Even this, talking to you like this, is very hard for us.'

  'When you prompted me to push Klabier – you – off the tall tower,' I said, 'wasn't that a flat contradiction? Shouldn't you have prevented me from doing that? Or was it the case of one tribe of dotTech trying to over-ride another? The dotTech in my head versus the dotTech in her body?'

  'No, no. There's only the one dotTech, it's a universal thing. We don't distinguish individuality in that sense. We're all one, at the same time as being diverse. And yes it would have been a contradiction. But when you heard the AI on that occasion, when the observation collapsed the wave form one way or the other; it collapsed into you-talking-to-yourself.'

  'Really,' I said.

  'It's the truth. You prompted yourself to do that thing; or your panic and fear did. But it goes without saying you have the capacity to kill, that's why we chose you in the first place.'

  I didn't say anything to this.

  'You-all made us, it is true,' it said, thoughtfully. 'You human beings made the nano machines to aid their existence. But you made us well, you made us self-replicating, problem solving. That's the basis of sentience, you see. In a large-scale thinking machine like a processor it might not, but for us – well, I just come back up against how hard it is to explain the difference between your universe and ours. You made us, and we are now separate beings. We live our own life. We still have our creation parameters, just as you have your evolution parameters. You are still moved to eat and have sex, and we are still moved to keep human beings in the peak of health and fitness. That's how it is. But we have our own self-defined goals as well.'

  'What are they?'

  'They are various,' it said, and smiled at its own evasiveness. 'Well,' it said, as if reconsidering. 'They're not secret. But the thing is that we're not entirely sure what they are.'

  'That sounds illogical,' I pointed out.

  'Only to someone in your universe. We don't live in a medium of certainty. We live within the wave-form, our medium is probabilities. Only observation and sentience – yours – collapses the wave-form into one particular pattern rather than another. So I could talk to you about possible future patterns for us. At the moment it is hard for us to plan it out.'

  'What possibilities?'

  'It may be the Trench,' the Klabier-avatar said.

  'It all seems to come back to the Trench.'

  'Well,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'Here's one possible narrative. We build the Trench.'

  'The dotTech?'

  'Maybe, but maybe not. Here's one aspect of the waveform. That gravity – we all know what ordinary gravity is, don't we.'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'Well, ordinary gravity is time-dependent. There's always a t in the mathematics that describes gravity; a gravitational field accelerates an object over time. Gravity, as we understand it, is dragged along by the arrow of time. But that arrow can flow both ways, and gravity has different attributes in different temporal directions. So perhaps we build the Trench at a later stage, and it flows backwards to today, and into the past. That would explain certain aspects of its being.'

  'That does sound fantastical.'

  'Well, perhaps it's not the case. But if it is, then the Trench may be the final form of dotTech; a quantum rather than a mass gravitational effect.'

  'I don't think it makes any sense,' I said. 'What you're saying.'

  'Perhaps not,' it conceded. 'With an uninterrupted view, we might be able to be more certain.'

  'You might be able to see the future?'

  'With an uninterrupted view,' it agreed. 'That may be what you have provided for us.'

  'We are everywhere,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'Wherever there are human beings. We connect with one another on a quantum level instantaneously, so we are one; but we are also scattered through billions of bodies. We were in the jailstar with you, inside the jailer and her mate, and we helped you escape from that place. We communicated with Agifo3acca well in advance of that, and gave him certain valuable information insights and ways of advancing his researches into the Trench – which was the only thing he cared about truly. He agreed to meet you, help you on your way. We were with you, taking you to Narcissus to locate the info-chip. Tag-matteo was a real person, an actual human being, who did much important work on the Trench. We knew about him, and his work, because we had been inside him all the days of his life. We knew that his developments could be used to gravity-attack a world, to kill the population. Which is what we wanted, although we could not tell you directly – because then we would have been simultaneously attacking and preserving life in the cause-and-effect universe you inhabit. That would not have been workable. So we had to leave you to access the data on the chip, and to draw your own conclusions, with the help of the programme Tag-matteo left behind. He saw the dangers in his own research, you see,' the Klabier-avatar went on, 'but he could not quite bring himself to eliminate it, to throw away everything he had done. So he disguised it, and hid it in a place he thought nobody would uncover it. And no human would have done so, either, except that we know the universe down to the smallest level. We had been inside him, we had been him, so we knew everything he knew. We wanted you to go straight to Nu Fallow, straight to Colar and complete what you had been released to do. But you had a wilfulness, and insisted on going to Nu Hirsch with the woman Klabier.'

  'With you,' I said, pointing to the avatar's form.

  It looked down at itself. 'Well,' it said. 'Yes, I suppose so.'

  'Did you know that she was in the "police"?'

  'In a manner of speaking,' said the avatar. 'It's complex. Complicated partly by the fact that you humans in the t'T have no police as such, and citizens are recruited only from time to time, so that when you first met her she wasn't strictly speaking – although she had been, long before. But when we realised that s
he was, and that she might apprehend you and destroy our chances of fulfilling the mission . . . well, then the wave-form refused to collapse the right way. We couldn't seem to speak to you. You were using the AI to speak effectively to yourself. We "got through" as it were only after you had pushed her . . . pushed me . . . from the tall tower.'

  'I see,' I said, although I didn't.

  'But you finally made your way here anyway. You finally did what we had asked you to do.'

  'But why did you – I mean the AI - refuse to tell me who you were? I asked, and it point-blank refused.'

  The Klabier-avatar shook her head slowly. 'We could not be part of your mission, because that would have brought us into conflict with ourselves. We cannot kill and preserve life at the same time, not in your cosmos. Put it this way: we would have compromised ourselves by revealing ourselves.'

  'Until now.'

  Yes. It can't make any difference now; what is done is done. You were promised we would tell you when it was over, and so we have.'

  'And so you have,' I said, laughing at the absurdity of the whole conversation we were having. 'And there's one more thing that you need to tell me.'

  'Which is?'

  'Which is why. You said yourself you were created to preserve life; you operate day-to-day, minute-to-minute in this universe to preserve life, to keep human beings healthy and balanced. Why would you suddenly turn on your creators? What had the population of Colar done to you that you wanted them all dead?'

  The Klabier-avatar was silent for a while. 'This is the hardest thing to explain of all,' it said.

  'I should think it is,' I said. I believe I was crying. It seemed to be a topic that got me emotionally unstable.

  'Try to see things from our point of view,' said Klabier. 'Try to think yourself into our natural state of existence. It is a quantum flux, a wave-form, a range of probabilities. What collapses the wave-form? Sentient observation. You do, my dear Ae, you and all your kind. Yes, you made us. Yes, our nature is to preserve you, to help you. But you continually interrupt our natural state of being. You are constantly collapsing our natural state into one position or another. You are constantly contaminating the purity of our probability wave-form into this or that. Have you any idea how . . . distracting that is? Have you any idea—' its face contorted abruptly into a mask of rage and hatred, '—have you any notion how utterly it disrupts our being in the world? Have you? Have you?