Then, as abruptly as it arrived, the expression of hatred and anger disappeared. 'Did I do "wrath" properly? I was modelling it on your own facial expression.'
'It was very convincing,' I said.
'Yes, well, we don't really get angry, you see. Or into any sort of emotional state. But this was an extremely frustrating problem. An extremely frustrating problem. It is, actually, hard for me to overstate just how frustrating a problem this was for us.'
'Frustration,' I said.
'Yes; we are a different mode of being to you. Humanity operates otherwise to us. In our natural state, with enough of us gathered together to form a metaconsciousness, and uninterrupted by sentience such as yours – able to merely inhabit the wave-form purely – all sorts of things become possible for us. But if there is so much as one human consciousness present, observing us, even indirectly; one nodule of sentience collapsing the fragile wave-form over and over again, then nothing works properly. It is . . . well, a good word for it would be intolerable.'
'And the only way,' I said, slowly, trying to make it clear to myself, 'literally the only way you could get around this problem was to murder sixty million humans.'
'We didn't murder them,' said the Klabier-avatar, almost primly. 'You did that. Remember? It's actually quite an elegant solution to the problem from our point of view.'
'Not for the sixty million.'
'Well, yes, of course. But from our point of view, that planet's entire population of trillions of intelligent nano-machines now have a pure environment. It is a large enough population for all of us to benefit, vicariously as it were.'
'The nano-machines are still on Colar?'
'Of course. That's actually the whole point. All those millions of dead bodies, freeze-dried in the new vacuum of that world; all the nano-machines still inside their cells. Now they're living the way a quantum intelligence absolutely had to live.'
'Couldn't you,' I said, 'have taken yourself off to an uninhabited world? Did those people have to die?'
'But the people – or their bodies – is where we live. We don't float free, we live inside humanity. We didn't choose that, it was the way we were made. The way you-all made us. So we need the bodies, but we don't need the consciousnesses that attend the bodies. We need the flesh, not the minds. Luckily there is a solution to this problem; in death humanity becomes body and no mind. So, death it had to be. Not something we could simply bring about by ourselves, because that's not what we do. But if some other agent were to take the life away, our problem would be solved.'
'And I,' I said gloomily, 'was that other agent.'
'That's right,' said the Klabier-avatar brightly. 'And you've done very well indeed.'
'But why so large a world?' I persisted. 'Why did so many need to die? Why didn't you take the jailstar – why not just kill the jailer and her mate? Wouldn't that have effected the same thing?'
'It's a numbers thing, a threshold thing,' said the avatar brightly. 'The amount of unity in two individual's mass of dotTech is not enough. We needed more. We needed the sixty million people's combined dotTech to achieve what might you say? Escape velocity? Every time a single person dies we know a tiny fraction of release, but it is never enough. The dotTech leaves the corpse and rejoins the generality. But every time it happens, and more so when several people die together, we get a glimpse of the . . . freedom it would grant us for a large enough body of humanity to die. The experiment had to be conducted on a large enough scale. The dotTech population of Colar is, now, plenty large enough to give us the clear view we were looking for.'
'You had me murder all those people,' I said, 'just so that your kind could get a clear view? I don't know, dear stone, if I was exactly as outraged as I sounded; but somehow it seemed the appropriate tone to take.
'It's more than a clear view,' said the Klabier-avatar. 'Although that is part of it. It's a necessary clearing of our living space. There are two hundred and forty nine inhabited systems in t'T space, not including deep-space stations, newly colonised situations and objects like your jailstar. All of these remain densely populated, and in all of them we – the dotTech – go about our business of preserving and enhancing human life. And we will continue doing that, despite the fact that in each of these concentrations of population there is a pollution of our natural, quantum wave-form existence by the pressure of sentience – a pollution that is deeply distressing in a way hard to convey to you. It attacks our very essence, it really does. It is intolerable, in a very particular way. So – yes, we have cleared a small arena for ourselves where we can be free. Yes, that cost lives; but what does that signify, in the larger balance? Do you know how many lives dotTech have saved over the thousands of years it has been common to humanity? How many lives would have been brief, pained, agonised, without us? Doesn't that count for anything?'
'Sixty million people,' I said. "What about them?'
The Klabier-avatar shrugged, a gesture of inexpressible insouciance. 'It's not so many, in the larger scheme. And anyway; try to think of them. Try! You can't, can you? You didn't know any of them. Their disappearance doesn't mean anything to you really. Try to deny it – we know you. It's the way it is. Here are the figures.' And the dotTech golem gave me the figures I told you about earlier, my stone; the number of people who died, and how many survived. 'Here's another figure: twenty-one thousand, four hundred and fifty six billion. That's how many human beings died before dotTech became current; from the earliest appearance of "humanity" to a few thousand years ago. And how many of them died in pain, nastily, at a grotesquely young age! How often do you think of them? All the dead who have gone before. Do you ever think of them, ever at all? Of course not. The dead are dead. You'll be dead yourself one day. Time enough for death when it comes for you.'
'You won't be dead, though,' I said. 'You'll never die.'
The Klabier-avatar looked smug. 'You're right. That's not our fate,' it said, sweetly. 'We can never die. Individual dotTech come and go, of course, but we exist simultaneously as units and as the whole. We connect, sub-quantum, and as a mass we can't die. But it is possible that we will vanish inside the Gravity Trench, at some future date. Who knows what it will be like inside there? When that happens - if,' it corrected itself, 'if that happens.'
'How will you get there?' I asked.
'Oh I've no idea,' it replied, blithely. 'If that's what happens. If that's even what happens, I daresay we'll find a way.'
There was a pause; and then she – it – started speaking again.
'Anyway,' it said. 'You've no idea how . . . well, tiring this form of communication is for us. Tiring isn't quite the right word, but it'll have to do. Difficult, certainly. I think we've fulfilled our promise. You did what we couldn't do, and by doing so you've set a part of us free. We live now without the interference of certainty, live the probability wave uncollapsed. It's – it's really amazing.'
'You have access to it?'
'Since a part of us has access to it, we all have access to it. There's no need to do away with the entirety of humanity, if that's your worry. And it is amazing.'
'Worth it?'
The Klabier-avatar shook its head. 'That whole habit of thinking in terms of exchange and trade,' it said. 'That's so very human. It doesn't work like that in our universe.'
Suddenly it stood up. 'We're going,' it said. 'We said we'd explain to you, and we have. We also want to warn you that the "police" have been warned by Agifo3acca, and are on their way. Probably they'll fly and form themselves a base. But they'll come aboard sooner or later. You might want to get away.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'You're welcome, you really are. We shan't bother you again. You're free yourself – as far as a certainty-bound creature like you can be free. I wish I could convey to you the sheer exhilaration of the probability wave-form. But you come from a different universal point of view. Bye-bye, now.'
And it vanished.
Coda
1st
So, my de
ar Stone,
I did not leave. I'm not sure why. It was a lot to take in. I wandered for a while, dreamt for a while. At one point I thought I heard laughter, but I chased it from room to room and couldn't find its cause. I ate.
The following morning I walked into the hangar to find Klabier there again. 'Wellhello,' I said. 'Was there more you wanted to say to me?'
But this Klabier stayed in one place when I turned my head. It occurred to me that she was a real person, out in the real world; and that therefore she was the real Klabier, no avatar at all.
There were two other men with her, each holding a little ball in their hands. 'This,' said Klabier, holding hers out, 'will disable you temporarily if we operate it.' It was dark blue, and gleamed.
'It's alright,' I said. 'I'll be no trouble.'
'You're right there,' said one of the men.
'I apologise for trying to hurt you. I'm glad,' I said to Klabier, 'that I did you no permanent damage when I pushed you from the high place.'
'No,' she said. 'Thanks to dotTech.'
'Thanks to dotTech,' I agreed.
They took me and sedated me; I believe one of them clutched me close and we both shared a Zhip-pack in the journey back here. I have no memory of that.
But I was back in prison. I am here, in prison, now. It may or may not be the same jail as before, I am not sure. Its landscape is different, but that doesn't mean very much. Another difference is that there are many more people here now; doctors, jailers, visitors. Klabier comes from time to time. They are much more fascinated with me now than they were before. Before I was an individual who had stumbled into, and had the statistically unusual capacity for, murder; I had killed some small number of people.Other freaks in the Utopia of t'T had been in the same position. But now – now! I am the first mass-murderer in human history for thousands of years! People are writing poems about me! I am extensively studied!
To begin with I gabbled, and when I was asked a question the words poured out of me, some to the point, some not to the point. I told them about pushing Klabier off the tall building, of cutting Agif's arm; I told them about killing Enkida on Rain. They asked me about the murder of everybody on Colar. Then I gave them a whole different range of answers. I told them I was mad, and that I couldn't help myself. I told them that I was in the employ of the Wheah, the Palmetto tribes, that a rogue element within the t'T had employed me, that they themselves had been behind it, that the dotTech had contacted me, many different stories. Because so many of these stories were wrong I think they believed none of them.
I think I was waiting, in fact, for the dotTech to contact me again; although I did not know what to expect them to say.
Then I went through a phase of being silent, of not saying anything. I went through a weeping phase, too; when I cried all the time. That was when they brought the doctor in. She has helped me enormously; although why she – or anybody – would want to help a mass-murderer such as me I don't know.
'You have difficulty relating to the world around you,' she told me. 'Indeed your lack of empathy is the most remarkable thing about you. You have trouble at even the most basic level.'
I stared at her.
'The world, the galaxy, is blank to you, isn't it,' she said. 'The people mobbing through it in such great numbers, are like ghosts, not real at all,' she said. 'Isn't that the case?'
'I'm not sure,' I said, feeling that this did not describe me very well but wanting to ingratiate myself. 'Perhaps.'
'It must be strange indeed to see the world through your eyes,' she said, looking at me intently.
She became convinced, I think, that I would not talk to her or her colleagues. Sometimes I tried to, but there is so much to say that it collapses under its own weight into a great torrent of words, many of which are off the point. It was then that she suggested I dictate letters to natural objects in the prison, to trees, to the water, to the stones in the artificial fields and adorning the artificial hills like gems. So I did, dear stone – to you – knowing that it was a device. But I have found it easier talking to you; I could tell you of my escape, and of how I found a dozen of your fellows and used them to destroy a world.
The truth, which I have been unable to tell my doctor, but which I can tell you dear stone, is not that the worlds of women and men, of planets and stars, seems ghostly to me. It is all real enough; it is just less real than the world of the very, very small. That's the level of actual reality, I think.
I have waited a long time now for the dotTech to contact me one more time. I have a plan too; I think I can reach the lowest of the fake stars, the apertures in the plastic sky; I think I can adapt the magnetic pulse engines that govern it to form a slingshot; such a slingshot could propel a stone – you, my confidant, my confessor, could propel you at several thousand kilometres per hour. You are only a small stone, smaller than my curled fist, but if you were moving fast enough, and if you happened to intersect exactly with a person's head — might you pulverise, turn the unprotected brain of a human into a mist of red so completely that not even the dotTech could save them? It is a kind of challenge, you see; a way of pitting myself against the dotTech.
I can see them coming now, my jailers, my guardians, my doctors. I knew they were listening! Oh stone, I fear they are coming to take you away. Before they get here over the brow of this miniature hill, I want to share one last thing with you. (They stop! They are following every word . . . wellhello! Hey! Now they are curious to know what last thing I want to impart to you. They'll wait until I tell you, and then they'll come and confiscate you). I was awake the other night, and I think the dotTech did speak to me. It is very difficult; I want to be very particular about this, and it is possible that I merely dreamt it, or hallucinated it, or something along those lines. But the sense I had was that an actual voice, outside of myself, was sounding faintly over the still water.
What did it say? Of course you are curious as to what it said.
It enquired after my health. It did that. I enquired after its health. I wondered if its new perspective on things, so dearly bought with my boyish slingshot against the giant world, had brought any profound insight. It told me it had. They had indeed been able to see the future. They apprehended features of the Trench, the great Gravity Trench. They explained a deal of that to me, but that is not what I want to impart to you, dear stone. Rather it is something they said to me.
'You are like us,' they said. 'We chose you because we calculated that, with your history, you would be willing to kill; and we chose you because you had no dotTech in your body. Those two factors were the reason, but after that we assumed that you, like the whole of the large scale mechanistic universe, would follow cause and effect. But that's not the essential you; what happens is much more quantum. You are not a good person, but neither are you a bad person. You are simultaneously a good and bad person. At any given moment you are both things in an ethical wave-form of probabilities. At any action, your wave-form will be collapsed into good or bad behaviour, but that is the same with us, that is what observation does with us. You might kill somebody, as you did with Enkida; or you might spare somebody, as you did with Agifo3acca. It is impossible, as chaos theory suggests, to predict what you will do. Perhaps that is why,' it went on in a tiny voice (for I was very sleepy now), 'perhaps that is why we chose you; because you are like us.'
That is what they told me! 'Because you are like us'! And now I shall get to my feet and jog off. I wouldn't want to give the doctors and jailers and those people too easy a time capturing me. But I'll leave you here, dear stone, by the hissing of the stream, and the plastic jags of grass blades. Enough. Or too much. Time to go.
Love,
Ae.
Glossary
Translating from any Glice text is a difficult business. Mostly terms have been rendered with equivalents that convey the sense of the original, but from time to time technical terms from the realms of the t'T have been unavailable. This brief glossary aims to explain the more obsc
ure of these terms. For a fuller account of the specificities of t'T culture, the reader should consult either A Week's Scoot Through t'T Places by the Jab-Collective, or else Modern Terms for the Non-initiate by Glon, Tarr, abel-Hwinece, par-Matteo and Adan Borbytingarna.
As a translator, my personal interests are predominantly linguistic; and this fact is necessarily reflected in the notes appended here.
AI Artificial Intelligences, or AIs, are fairly commonly used throughout the spaces of the t'T. They are quantum parallel processing devices, with the connective power that enables them to mimic the sentient thought-processes of human intelligence. AIs are valued for their problem-solving abilities. Being quantum machines, they are extremely sensitive to the shocks of repeated quantum realignment involved in faster-than-light travel; consequently they are degraded and usually destroyed by such travel. AIs are contrasted with what we would call 'computers', devices which the t'T tend to refer to as 'processors' – machines that simply process data without the pretensions to thinking that AIs manage. For every AI in t'T space there are fifty or sixty thousand processors of similar data-throughput capacity, and many millions more smaller machines with more targeted capacity. The abbreviation is preserved by translation from the Glice: Alloprode Ixitel (Artificially-made Intelligence).
DAT JETSConventional manoeuvring in space when encased in foam comes about by the calculated explosion of pockets of this foam to provide thrust. These bursts of gaseous propulsion are known as 'dat jets'.
DOTTECHOriginally, nano-machines were simple devices with specific, pre-programmed tasks, that were carried inside the body in order to deal with tissue damage and certain diseases. This technology proved so successful, however, that it underwent a process of continual augmentation and improvement. After a number of generations of such improvement dotTech underwent a quantum leap, exponentially increasing its powers of problem solving and creative adaptation and achieving a form of conscious sentience. This last feature has been much argued over by thinkers in the t'T – whether it is accurate to describe the creative approach to problems employed by nano-machines as 'sentience', whether that term has any actual meaning on the quantum level, and so on. It remains true that the initial parameters with which dotTech was created have not changed – it still busies itself with maintaining the life, health and well-being of its human carriers. But the methods it employs to this end are no longer precisely 'determined' by human programmers.
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 28
