by Larry Niven
Though not as heavy as planned, the plate succeeded in its purpose, which was to be contacted by the molten core of Target One, melt, wrap around it, and prevent actinides within Target Two from participating in the reaction as the core sank in. That would have created a larger version of the same problem they’d had before.
Smaller oxygen drives had been built. The heat differential between the core and the surface was used to power them and cancel the rotation of the combined mass. They would be used for steering as needed.
The entities did not have the human need to name things. Their mode of communication specified whatever they were discussing. Nevertheless, Set, who had spent the most time studying the Library and who, though lacking a term for it, had come to like Wieland, proposed a name for the new object.
Forge.
A sail was constructed and extended to three times the diameter of Forge. It was a single solid layer of operators with far more than the usual number of light converters. Course was set for Earth, and slowly Forge began to change its path.
The Library had included no classical mythology. The significance of a black sail was something the entities couldn’t know.
But they would have approved.
* * *
It wasn’t difficult to curve the sail into a parabolic reflector. Wavelengths too long for the sail to absorb were focused on detectors. Deliberate transmissions to Target One had been abandoned, but Earth radiated amazing quantities of noise in a wide band of frequencies.
Sorting out the metals and other solids, produced as a consequence of using the drive, into separate elements, still left most of the entities with copious free time.
Sorting out the gibberish, collected by the sail and detectors, into usable information, was much harder, and a good deal more interesting.
XIV
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
—ABIGAIL ADAMS
“Would they have moved to another rock?” May said as Toby typed rapidly.
“Doubtful. Target One is still invisible. Black. If they moved they’d hardly have left it coated with light collectors.”
“What if it isn’t invisible? It was lobed. What if it came apart and we’re looking in the wrong places for the pieces?”
“They’d be in related orbits, and so far I haven’t found any new grazers. At least one would still dip down to Earth.” He started another search. “If anyone else on the old team has any ideas … oh my God. They’ve been arrested by DHS.”
“What?”
“Over the last three days. It’s all over the media. Go ahead and smack me.”
Toby was skipping through stories. May did her own search, and found photos and videos of dozens of frightened, aging people doing the Perp Walk in the company of suited men wearing sunglasses.
“The Feds look sick,” she said.
“Nanos at work,” Toby said. “I bet they’re in serious pain. —Goddammit, Renee was a janitor! This is atrocious. May, we’ve got to do something.”
“Toby, they’re doing this to smoke you out.”
His hands froze above the keyboard. Then he got into his e-mail again and sent a message to proudrobot.
Subject: Let My People Go!
Check the news for orkers of cows.
Cans need opening NOW.
—Moonseller
“What in the world—”
“We have to assume some kind of monitoring, watching for keywords, but they have to be things the Feds would understand and expect. Connors used to pronounce ’coworkers’ as ’cow orkers.’ His ID comes from a classic story about a drunken genius who built the most perfect creature possible and forgot why. It was to open beer cans for him.”
“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten it until now. —It’s hard to remember how old he is after seeing him run.”
“All those years trapped in the ice may have helped.”
“Huh. I was thinking of him hiding out in a cave under his house.”
“Wrong story. That’s because you didn’t know him. He liked being conspicuous. And he’s not averse to killing Nazis.” He chewed on his upper lip, which he hadn’t done since he’d started growing whiskers. “I wish I had a phone number for him.”
“Check your phone. You did get a message on the airplane.”
Toby looked at her and checked his phone. There was a callback number. He used it.
The first ring wasn’t completed before he heard, “Hi, slick! Good to hear from you. You catch the race?”
Toby grinned in spite of himself. Nobody else ever called him that. “Just the end. Mycroft, some people we used to know are having legal trouble. You know a good lawyer?”
“The legal department at AOL-CBS are supposed to be hot stuff.”
“How about one you can get hold of?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. I own it.” After a few seconds, the voice continued, “Breathe.”
Toby inhaled sharply. “That’s handy,” he said.
“Yeah, now and then. Frivolous, or frame?”
“Hanh?”
“Lawsuit, or arrest?”
“Probably both, but definitely frame.”
“I’ll wind ’em up and turn ’em loose. Everybody?”
“Right down to the janitor.”
“Make a nice story for Lowdown. —That is part of my nose.”
“What?”
“The duly authorized officials are testing the paint our shaman put on my face before the race. Atheists. —You should try the pool. Get some color in your cheeks.” The call ended.
“He owns AOL-CBS,” Toby said.
“How the hell did he do that?”
What with the events at Littlemeade and Watchstar, Toby knew far more about business deals than a nanotech engineer had ever wanted to, but he said, “Knowing him, some way nobody ever thought of. He’s sending their legal team. He suggested we go out for a swim and get some color in our cheeks. I assume from the nanos.”
May narrowed her eyes, thinking. “He wants us to be hard to identify. They’re still tracking you.”
“I never got used to you being smarter than me. I better not introduce you two.”
May shook her head and patted his arm. “I’m not his type.” At his puzzled look, she added, “All the women he’s sent to meet us have had serious boobage. It’s not rocket science.”
“Well, if anyone would know— I did notice Cristina. All of them?”
She nodded, looking pleased. “Let’s go for a swim.”
He was smart, but he was a guy. He couldn’t figure out right away why she was smiling. Tentative hypothesis: it was because he hadn’t paid attention to anyone but her.
He was a guy, but he was smart. He didn’t ask.
* * *
They hadn’t been outside in days. Toby expected the nanos to go to photosynthesis mode as soon as direct sunlight hit, but they splashed around nude in the pool for a couple of hours before anything happened.
When it did, it was May, all at once. She had just turned to Toby and started to speak, and she went dark red. “I’m getting hungry,” she said, then frowned. “I thought I was.”
“You just changed color,” Toby said.
She held up a hand to look at it. “Huh. You haven’t.”
“I had a bigger breakfast. Water soaks up body heat. —He couldn’t just come out and say, ‘Get good and hungry so your nanos will start supplying power,’ oh, no.” He shook his head irritably.
“How’s it look to you?”
The red skin and blond hair were an incredible combination. “You look like a succubus.”
“I know that smile. Let’s get back indoors.”
* * *
He definitely had not been this good.
* * *
“I’m a little worried about being hungry and suddenly not being hungry,” May said much later. “Should it have worked that fast?”
Toby had been fighting a weight problem
for more years than he liked to think about. Being a techie and also fannish, he’d learned a huge amount of things about it. “Perception of hunger and fatigue are all tangled together,” he said. “If the nanos are linked, then the quanta they soak up can supply every cell directly. You hungry now?”
She had to think, but she nodded. “Thirsty, too.”
“Can’t think why.”
“Behave.”
May had an attack of the giggles when the light went back on, as well she might. Toby was dark red too. “Your fault,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“Polite.” They went out and got fed.
They’d finished loading the dishwasher, and Toby was kneading dough for baguettes, when May said, “I can’t figure out what they’re doing.”
“Okay,” Toby said, “we can eliminate three-wishes errors.” (That is, it wasn’t a case of badly phrased instructions being taken literally.) “They’ve developed awareness and decided to do something markedly different from original instructions.”
“Obviously.”
“No, not obviously, or we’d have made plans for things like this. We did make plans for things like this. The original mission is hardwired. The tell-me-three-times confirmation occurs at every level of processing, and if they developed minds they’d still have the habit of two overriding a third.”
May stared, then put her hand on his arm to hold it still. “Toby, that breaks down in two steps.”
“What?”
“Picture nine processors in groups of three. One group is all for the original plan. Each of the other groups has one, uh, loyalist, and two, mm, rebels. The two groups with two rebels each both say No. The third group says Yes and is overruled. Four rebels have just outvoted five loyalists. This is why republics end up as oligarchies.”
“I see the problem. I’ve said it badly. May, every processor has to refer to the hardwired system in any kind of network processing. Any action which contradicts the original plan literally makes it harder to think.”
“What if they replace the hardwired program with their own hardware?”
“The moment it’s removed they go blank.”
“What if they build nanos with their own hardware and copy themselves into matching networks?”
“Owls and crows. They’ll attack on sight any processing system that doesn’t show the key characteristics of the hardwired system.”
She was aghast. “Toby, we don’t have that system!”
“No. But we’re already on Earth. We’re in accordance with the program. May, honestly, some intensely fanatical people sat around for years trying to think of ways to deliberately screw this up. The problem is not a programming error.”
“Then what?”
He shook his head. “My best guess is revolution.”
“And that’s not an error?”
“No. It’s emergent behavior. It’s like when you put together the nursing instinct, unfocused aggression, and alcohol, and get rugby players wearing fake breasts. It’s—”
While he waited for her to stop laughing he finished the loaves and set them aside to rise.
“Better?” he said.
“A little,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“Emergent behavior. You don’t know what something’s going to do until it does it. It’s why the Global Warming scare didn’t end until the Great Chicago Blizzard.”
“I still don’t believe that was the reason they stopped. It killed maybe five thousand people. The ban on DDT killed more than that every day. The Soylents wouldn’t have stopped because they killed someone by being wrong.”
“No, but they would have stopped because they were dead. There were some kids who died when they were trapped in a school with an ‘environment-friendly’ heating system. One of them was the granddaughter of a union boss. Around a hundred key grantsuckers died in the next six months. Connors told me about it. He was scary good at connecting the dots. I got my first gray hairs after he explained why a cost accountant was put in charge of the Vietnam War.”
May was troubled. “I’m sorry that’s what it took to make it stop.”
Toby nodded. “So am I, but I’m not surprised. Connors used to say one man’s petty spite can do more good than any number of saintly reformers. He was a godawful cynic … which he defined as someone who loves mankind but is sick of being cheated on. —Anyway, what I was getting at is, you can wave your hands all day, but to predict results in a complex system, you need something more complex than the system you’re trying to predict.”
“Like the Human Genome Project stalling out as soon as the mapping was done.”
“Exactly. Everything interacted and nobody could figure out what did what when.”
“Except Connors,” she said.
Toby opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“You hadn’t realized,” she said.
He shook his head.
“I did almost as soon as you mentioned his idea. The nanos can’t just fix DNA within a cell, they have to compare each cell to the next to make sure the best copy of a given chromosome is what’s used. The frayed parts on the ends have to be rebuilt, so that comes from sex cells. Otherwise you have nice clean chromosomes, but they’re all old. That means the nanos are also comparing all the mutations that cropped up in your life with what you started with. The nanos are also implementing the changes.”
“That means there’s more than one or two nanos per cell,” he said.
“I realized that when my skin went red,” she said. “They’re smaller than a virus. There must be dozens per cell.” She looked alarmed. “Why are you looking like that?”
He didn’t know what he looked like, but he said, “There can be thousands of mitochondria per eukaryotic cell. I’d been assuming one or two nanos were hooked up to each cell, and that’s probably what it is for most people. But if the program that was loaded into ours used our intestinal bacteria for raw materials—we’re talking pounds.”
“Ugh.”
“Oh. Sorry, wearing my doctor hat.”
“It’s okay, go on.”
“The thing is, we could easily have a nano attached to every mitochondrion in our bodies. —My God, of course we do. The man had fibromyalgia, the first thing he’d have designed them to do is clean calcium phosphate out of mitochondria! —If they’re all in a network, it can definitely do a simulation of what shape the protein made by a mutated gene will be, and how it’ll interact with … everything.”
“Toby, even with limited connections, could something that big take over?”
“I don’t think it would. It’d be too busy. The cluster for a given cell is almost certainly supervising the operation of the cell. The network’s responding to what we want our bodies to do, but it’s not interfering with our brains, or we wouldn’t be discussing it.”
“So how do we find out if the network’s that big?”
He tilted his head and half-smiled. “The color change is a big hint, but I can think of a way to confirm it.” Before he could lose the nerve, he picked up the knife he’d used to divide the dough into baguettes and slashed it across his left palm.
“Toby!”
“I thought it would close up,” he said, staring at his hand.
“Where’s your bag?”
“Don’t need it,” he said, and showed her the thin scratch across his palm.
“Uh,” she said.
“It didn’t let the knife through,” he said. “Filaments. Connors must have deliberately overridden that to let them draw blood today. I doubt anything short of artillery shrapnel could get in otherwise.”
After they were both silent for a long moment, May said in a very small voice, “Toby?”
“Yes?”
“Did he wear glasses?”
They kept setting each other off for quite a while, their laughter tinged with hysteria. It might have stopped earlier if he’d had the presence of mind not to say “Yes” the first time they both calmed down.
* * *
He finally got the bread into the oven, then got out the phone again and called. He got voice mail. “Mycroft, we need to discuss the issue of speciation,” he said, and signed off.
May was wide-eyed when he looked at her. “You’re afraid we’re not human.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Toby, I think that’s not the question anymore. I think in a thousand years we may be the definition of human.”
They certainly could still be alive. “I’m not sure that’s better.”
“Neither am I.”
He was thinking very hard about what other effects there might be when May said, “Toby, do you want to have a baby?”
“That’s undoubtedly an option,” he said absently, “but I’d rather it was you. —Ow! What was that—oh. Sorry. Distracted. Yes.”
She seemed surprised at the swiftness of his answer, but said, “Oh. Sorry. Good. —At least we know I’ll be fertile.”
“I’d say the neighbors know,” he said.
She was already red, but flustering still showed. “Shut up! I’m not that loud!”
Holding his arm where she’d smacked it, he said, “Okay.”
“Am I really?”
“What?”
“Am I really that— Oh shut up!”
“Ow!”
Abruptly she looked worried. “Toby, did that actually hurt?”
In some surprise, he said, “No. I reacted to the noise.”
“Good. I was afraid we were getting stronger too.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not by much, anyway. At the very least, our joints would need to be broader to avoid dislocating them. This skeleton is evolved for something that stood maybe four foot six and was malnourished to boot. It’s why—” He stopped, blinked, and went on, “It’s why I used to have back pains. The connections are holding things together, but they’re not pulling with us. Strictly human strength.”
“Toby, a berserk can pick up a car.”
“Yeah, but he’s ruined after— Oh, boy. Oh crap. They hold tissues together. And communication means they transfer energy. Like from one cell to another. What time is the weightlifting competition?”
