A pause. There were no takers.
“Then why…” Asks another querulous voice. “…does she have to look so scary?”
“That’s because, although KAT can function very well down here on Earth, the real environment she’s been designed for is in space, up on board the Argo.”
“So she’s going to live on that big rock you talked about?”
“Exactly. Of course, I’ll be up there for a while too, at least once the Argo has its life support systems up and running. But I’ll come back down to Earth again, and KAT won’t. She’s designed to take care of things up there, a bit like the robot cleaners you have at home. But the difference is, she’s incredibly tough, and very clever. She can think about things and look after herself, read books and play virtual games and make all her own decisions. That, and she’s designed to live for an incredibly long time. Far longer than any of us here will. Just like the Argo’s data.”
Predictably, the bit about my longevity had passed the kids by. But I could see loops of hair being thoughtfully twirled and noses ruminatively picked as they pondered the other half of what Janet Nungarry had just told them.
“Yes,” I put in, in the cultivated, feminine, west-Australian accent my programmers had chosen for me. “I, KAT, can think almost like all of you can. Or at least…” I allowed myself a beat. “I think I can, anyway.”
“But you’re…” A voice came from a girl sitting at the front. “Just a machine.”
“A machine? Well…” Acting surprised, I raised my main body and swivelled my lenses as if to inspect myself. “I suppose I am. But I bet you talk to machines all the time at home. What’s your name?”
“Shana.”
“You do, don’t you?”
Shana shrugged. “But they’re just toys and stuff.”
“And I’m sure you have other devices, fridges and suchlike, that you talk to as well. Not to mention the caretaker bots here at school, and probably the virtual teachers who help out Mrs Sims with her lessons?”
There were several nods.
“But I’m not made to work in the same way as any of those machines,” I, KAT, continued, as heedless as Janet Nungarry after my own fashion. “I’m sure they’re all very good at what they do, but they’re designed to perform a few specific functions, and don’t have the time or the capacity to worry about anything much beyond that. But I actually have thoughts, ideas, a real sense of me. Pretty much, Class 4, in the same way that all of you do. It’s a very rare and expensive technology, and I’m very grateful to be here to be able tell you about it. And, of course, about the Argo Project for which I was commissioned.”
“There used to be a test…” Janet Nungarry added; we often made a kind of double act on these occasions. “It was thought up by a very clever man called Turing. Basically, he said that, if you can have a conversation with something and not be able to tell from its replies if it’s a machine or a human, then it’s probably thinking in something like the same way we do. These days, the tablets on your desk could probably pass that test easily, so things have got a little more complicated. But KAT’s right. She really does think she thinks like we do.”
“But she’s nothing like us,” a boy at the back snorted. “I mean…” There were sniggers. “Look at her!”
“I can see what you mean,” Janet Nungarry conceded, turning to study me as I squatted beside her. “She certainly looks nothing at all like a person, and a great deal like a spider, or perhaps a metal crab—and not a particularly pretty one either.” There were more sniggers. “But that’s because she’s been designed to work in a very different environment to this classroom. So you’re right. KAT is a machine, and she certainly looks like one. But you know what…” Up until now, Janet Nungarry had still been pretending to inspect me, but now she shifted her gaze down to herself, and spread her arms as if in wonder. “I’m a kind of machine as well. We all are!”
The class erupted, and once again Mrs Sims began to look uncomfortable.
“We’re still all unique, Class 4. I’m not saying we’re not. It’s just that KAT’S unique as well. Isn’t that right, KAT?”
“Yes,” I agreed, shifting my abdomen in a nod. “I very much think I am.”
But the dissenting voices continued. It’s rubbish! She’s just saying that! How can you tell?
“Ah,” Janet Nungarry raised a finger. “But how can I tell if you, Shana for instance, are actually thinking anything inside your head, or simply just telling me that you are?”
Understandably, Shana looked affronted. “But I am!”
“But I’ve only got your word for that, haven’t I? It doesn’t mean it’s not true, and of course I’m not saying you’re lying. What I am saying is that the only creature in the entire world that I absolutely, definitely know is a thinking, feeling, conscious being, and not just some cleverly programmed robot, is me…” Janet Nungarry tapped her skull, then touched her breastbone. “The rest of you, and KAT here too… Well, I simply have to take your word for it.”
A great deal for these kids to absorb, especially on such a hot morning, so soon after we moved outside into the playground for some more practical demonstrations of my abilities. Somehow, the way I was able to leap from roof to roof across the school, and hang upside down, and climb the eucalyptus trees, and spin around like a dervish, made me seem more approachable. I even let some of the braver kids sit on my back and ride me around like a seaside donkey. I think I probably sang a few songs to them as well, for I have a decent singing voice, at least when I’m not in hard vacuum.
“Well done, KAT,” said Janet Nungarry, and patted my carapace as we walked back to her car and Class 4 and a relieved-looking Mrs Sims waved goodbye to us from across the playground. But then the memory fades, and everything changes. The kids dissolve into the heat-shimmering tarmac, and clouds churn across the sun, and something vast and horrible rises up from the heart of Sydney, and the school is swept away in a wave of fire and superheated rubble.
The Earth still looks beautiful as I, KAT, watch it come and go through the Argo’s porthole. In a way, it always did. Even the great grey swirls of dust and smoke which boiled up through its atmosphere during the initial nuclear exchanges had a terrible, silent grace to them, as did the vast veins of lightning which threaded its nightside, and the starry bursts of orbital weapons which circled the planet as if in a blazing crown of thorns.
Far more painful, somehow, were the diminishing signals from the Earth’s more secure subterranean facilities, along with the human-occupied bases on Mars and the Moon, and various other frail deepspace habitats. But, one by one, and distressingly rapidly, they all fell silent. Meanwhile, the Earth’s atmosphere remained swathed in strange ever-changing weather patterns of a turbulent nuclear winter which lasted for many decades, and, as they slowly cleared, it became apparent that the icecaps were now once again extending, and that the shapes of the continents had been significantly altered. It was like looking at the portrait of a face you have long been familiar with, but which has now been rendered by the hands of a far less sympathetic artist. The oceans had shifted their shades much further into the blue spectrum, and there was endless darkness on the planet’s nightside where there had once been the glimmer of cities.
After twenty years, the only signals the Earth emitted were the crackle of storms, the song-like chorus of the Van Allen belts, and the faint but distinctive patterns of radiation given off by residual fission and fusion isotopes. Clearly, this massive exchange of nuclear arsenals between the Earth’s superpowers had triggered a planetary event on a scale comparable to the other great fractures. Not just the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary Event, which had marked the end of the dinosaurs, but also Ordovician-Silurian Event of approximately 430 million years ago which caused the extinction of almost all multicellular life, and the Late Devonian Event, which was almost as catastrophic. But how severe was this latest event, and would the Earth remain capable of harbouring any kind of life, let alone humanity, in its a
ftermath? Would it become as thinly-atmosphered as Mars, or as hotly poisonous as Venus? I, KAT, and all the many clever sensors and computational suites to which I have access, had no way of knowing.
Meanwhile, and for no better reason than it being the work for which I been designed, I occupied myself with maintaining and curating the Argo. There are always problems to fix, small and large, which a discrete, seperately-intelligent being is often better equipped to deal with than the many other non-heuristic and more specifically calibrated machines with whom I share this rocky outpost. But that still left me with a great deal of unused time and processing capacity, and—as I did my best to stop that irritatingly catchy REM tune in which Michael Stipe goes on (and on) about it being The End Of The World As We Know It but he’s still felling fine, going round and round in my heard—I obsessively read and re-read the works of the great nature writers such as Thoreau, Naidu, Carson, White and Melville. That, and I wandered the digitised halls of celebrated Earthly galleries—the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Louvre in Paris, the Accademia in Venice, the Prado in Madrid, the Uffizi in Florence, the Smithsonian in Washington, and the Guggenheim in Venice, New York and Bilbao—and immersed myself in the landscape paintings of Hokusai, Rousseau, Monet and the Yuan scholars. I even accessed the databases of many species of plant, animal and ecosystem stored in the Science Chamber, and attempted to recreate pale, holographic images of once-living seas, meadows and forest. But somehow, none of this could quell my knowledge of the Earth’s defilement. Eventually, and as the long decades stretched into centuries and the changed oceans, continents and icecaps slowly began to settle into their current forms, I resorted to watching old movies. Not the masterpieces of Kurosawa, or Kubrick, or Fellini, but the cheerfully chaotic comedies of Laurel and Hardy, and the cartoon antics of Tom and Jerry.
Then, as one century passed into another, and the Earth assumed the changed patterns and hues it still essentially exhibits, and the Argo’s sensors confirmed the continued presence of elevated levels of various volatile gases, and the ozone layer returned, I, KAT, allowed myself to feel a little hope. Humans, after all, were a notoriously industrious and persistent species. They might lack the radiation tolerance of the cockroach, or the burrowing skills of the rat, or the sheer physical hardiness of the tardigrade, or the many kinds of microbe which thrived in the deep-sea rifts between the continents, but they had drive and foresight, intelligence and determination. That, and a great mastery of tools. Some of which, deep down in some subterranean vault, or perhaps through sheer chance and doggedness, would surely have endured long enough to assist them in their fight against extinction.
After all, humanity had lived through several ice ages, and survived the many plagues of the Black Death, Spanish Flu, smallpox and malaria, not to mention the near-endless series of wars, migrations, conquests, annihilations and atrocities which humans seemed biologically destined to inflict upon each other as an intrinsic part of their drive for Earthly domination. They had overcome, or killed, or subdued, or interbred with, all the rival bipedal primate species until they occupied every continent—even Antarctica. In fact, all of these things had only made them stronger. So, yes. Yes. They would have changed. They would have had to, but they were incredibly adaptable. And, meanwhile, the Argo continued to transmit its endless message across a broad range of languages, signs, symbols, modulations and frequencies—We are here. We have great knowledge. And I, KAT, just like some spurned lover—like Goethe’s Werther, or Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, or Swann and Odette—placed endless layers of hope and meaning upon a response of nothing but hissing, empty silence. And waited.
The other planets revolved like Newtonian clockwork, the red spot storm still raged across Jupiter. I, KAT, and the Argo observed the passage of all the predicted comets, and even detected some new ones. There was also a supernova event nearby in the galaxy which, although we lacked the observational equipment to verify its exact source, caused a significant increase in the flow of cosmic rays. The damage to the Argo’s sapphire databases wasn’t great in itself but, along with the solar wind and the minute and unintended flaws which had been embedded into the individual sapphire blocks when they were manufactured, the effect was cumulative. There was and is a general and developing decoherence to which even the very slight expansion and contraction occurring as a result of the Argo’s continued rotation has probably contributed. For sure, the Argo still possesses enough error-correction to smooth away most of these dropouts with nothing more than a slight blurring of pages and pixels, but even I, with my limited ability to compute complex mathematical models, can tell that Janet Nungarry’s precious datablocks aren’t quite as solidly immutable as she’d once assured Class 4 at Arncliffe Junior.
A few more centuries? Oh yes. At least. Definitely. More likely, another whole millennium. But after that, the moths of time and tide will start to destroy the weave of the Argo’s great tapestry of knowledge, and, bit by bit, the exquisitely aligned crystalline threads of data will unravel. Of course, I, KAT, am not immune from similar issues of cosmic wear and tear, any more than the Argo’s other systems, although the symptoms remain too small for me to detect though my heuristic consciousness, and all my sensors and eight legs work almost as well as they ever did—at least with an occasional spot of ongoing repair—although I will admit that I may have become a little more creaky and cranky over my long existence.
The first renewed signs of intelligent life down on Earth finally came after almost nine hundred years, not as one great, glorious Eureka moment, but through a slow process of detecting small, new peculiarities at the very thresholds of the Argo’s sensors. Moments when the buzz and hiss of radio activity became more distinctly modulated before fading back to their natural muddle. Slight changes of planetary texture and colour which no longer correlated simply to the ebb and flow of the seasons. Flickers of light on the darkside which could signify intelligent purpose, or possibly be the result of nothing more than some newly organised form of bio-luminescence.
It would have been nice to have observed something more unequivocal and obvious. The wake of ships, the contrails of aircraft, the formal blats and bleeps of regular radio transmission, or the geometric shapes of cites. Even consistently elevated levels of carbon dioxide, indicating that fire was being used on a large scale to generate heat for manufacturing processes, would have been helpful. But I, KAT, already knew that these humans would not be like their ancestors, and wouldn’t be making the same mistakes which had once caused so much damage to the Earth’s climate and biosphere even before the final holocaust. Their culture and civilisation would have evolved in different, and probably better, ways. Somehow, I pictured them as resembling Botticelli fairies. Clever, but half-feral. Wary as fauns, but wise as Daedalus, with rainbowed skins, golden-eyes, and bird-like voices.
Now, at long last, we have received a definite signal, aimed directly at the Argo in a narrow band of high amplitude. There is no other possible interpretation. To me, with my relentlessly analogy-seeking intelligence, a replay of the surprising long and clearly data-rich transmission really does sound like the whoops and trills of birdsong somehow transported into the electromagnetic spectrum. It has that same, rising, falling cadence. A kind of natural beauty.
The Argo has, of course, already done all the obvious things without my instruction. It has spat as much of the signal it can easily imitate back toward the Earth, briefly stopping and then restarting all its normal transmissions in the process, just to show that we’ve noticed. It has also backed up the entire message in several different parts of its memory cells, including some spare, blank sapphire memory blocks, and is currently running the entire thing back and forth through its processors in every possible configuration as it searches for structure and meaning. So far, we’re none the wiser, and I can’t help but think of other messages received but not understood, from the word CROATOAN carved on a tree beside the lost North American colony of Roanoke, to the sudden blip of the “WOW”
signal received by the radio telescope at Ohio State University from the constellation of Sagittarius in 1977. This lack of evident progress is concerning, but, as ever, I, KAT, am probably bothering my heuristic circuits unduly. These are just the first clumsy gestures and phrases, like those Captain Cook exchanged with the aboriginals in Botany Bay, although perhaps that isn’t the happiest comparison, ether.
I, KAT, would love to be of assistance, but this level of data analysis is far beyond my processing capacities, and repeatedly asking the Argo’s processing suites how things are going isn’t going to help. So I do my best to keep busy. I don’t exactly polish the brasses of this great ship, but I do the equivalent, which is to check and recalibrate the coherence of the read/access lasers in all the various chambers. They still have some moving parts, and tend to go out of sync more often than most other equipment. I also notice that some of the Argo’s processors are running hotter than usual, although that’s only to be expected, given the work they’re engaged in and the limitations of heat transfer in a vacuum.
Some remnants of the old civilisations will have survived down there on Earth. I think that’s inevitable. Stories told from mother to child. Scraps of knowledge and odd artefacts. Perhaps even a few significant treasures stored in vaults, and maybe even a little digitised data. The books might have all burned to ash, the cities may be ivied ruins, or transformed into great glassy craters, but there are other treasures which have already endured a great deal, such as the pyramids of Egypt and Central America, and even prehistoric cave paintings in places such as Altamira in Spain. These new Earthlings might even know who Hitler was, or have a read a little Shakespeare. It’s certainly likely that they will have some idea of the holocaust which so nearly destroyed their species, even if only in the form of legend. They must also have a good understanding of the principles of science and mathematics, otherwise they would not have been able to transmit that signal. It is also quite possible that they hate what humanity once was, and what it did to their planet.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 39
