The Leo came down at a place called Edo Station, in the Mare Ingenii: a base on the far side of the Moon that had been built by the Japanese, was long ago abandoned, and was now, it seemed, inhabited by Planetary AIs.
Domes like blisters on the pale, lifeless ground.
As soon as the Leo landed, a flexible, transparent tunnel snaked out from the nearest dome to mate seamlessly with the little craft’s main airlock. They got out of their couches, tested their reflexes in the low lunar gravity, adjusted their skinsuits.
Then, led by Kaliope, they walked through the tunnel.
Following Bartholomew and a wide-eyed Deirdra, Malenfant glanced out through the tunnel’s semi-transparent walls at the flat ground, black sky – the Sun was up but there was no Earth in the lunar farside sky, of course. He picked out structures that might have been power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities, some open to the vacuum. Comms masts, gaunt in the brilliant light. Scorched platforms of glassy, fused regolith that might have been landing pads. Some distance away, he saw a slim straight line that might have been a mass driver, and a brilliant, widespread glare, perhaps a field of solar-energy cells.
The Moon was a world that might have been designed for machines, he thought, for industry: an utterly predictable climate, give or take the odd meteor fall, no troublesome air or water, no pesky life, and all the resources and energy you could need. A place of geometry, of silent industry.
And Reid Malenfant was walking on the Moon. He tried to mask his sheer unadulterated joy at that simple fact. Even if they put you back into the freezer tomorrow, Malenfant, you talked your way this far, at least.
Meanwhile Deirdra was having predicable fun with her bunny-hopping one-sixth-gravity gait.
Bartholomew murmured to Malenfant, ‘Her laughter makes the whole Moon human.’
Not for the first time in their acquaintance, Malenfant stared at him in flat astonishment.
Once through airtight hatches, they quickly explored the surface domes, which turned out to be respectably equipped. There was a galley, a small dormitory, bathrooms, and a medical bay, including a coldsleep pod. The interior walls were coloured a dull grey, not unlike the shade of Moon dust, and away from the work areas there was a thick, soft carpet on the floor, also grey.
Not a human in sight, of course.
They came to a dome set out like a large, comfortable lounge: chairs, tables, wall screens. There were mats of straw on the floor – tatami mats, Malenfant thought, Japanese style. He wondered how old they were.
Deirdra made straight for the food and drink dispensers.
Kaliope, unreal avatar of the Answerers, stood straight and a little prim in her entirely unnecessary skinsuit. There was more of Edo underground than above ground, she told them. Under the domes stretched a warren of tunnels – many of them, apparently, originally lava tubes, natural cavities under the Moon, discovered, widened, connected, sealed for colonisation by people and their machines.
The base had clearly been established after Malenfant’s own immersion into deep sleep. Why, only a couple of Japanese had even been to the Moon before 2019, and they had been guests of the Americans at Clavius. On the other hand the construction probably hadn’t been at too late a date either. Living in tunnels for radiation shielding struck him as a pretty primitive way to survive. But on the other hand, he felt a pang of envy for those vanished colonists, who presumably had come here not long after his own time. And so with the same set of motivations. He had once done some cultural training in McMurdo Base in the Antarctic. That had been a ratty but fully functioning town, and aside from the managers and the scientist types had been populated by what he thought of as ordinary folk, doing ordinary jobs. They were plumbers and electricians and carpenters; it was just that they were plumbers who wanted to work at the edge of civilisation. It must have been the same here, back in the day.
Kaliope spoke, wrenching him back to the present.
‘Today these habitable compartments are maintained es- sentially as a survival shelter. You understand that the Planetary AIs do not welcome uninvited visitors, and space travel by humans is of course rare these days. But if a visitor does come to call, for instance to visit coldsleepers like yourself, Malenfant, or if there were to be some human calamity anywhere on the Moon or in near space, then this and other facilities are maintained to cope. The Planetary AIs have withdrawn from mankind, but they would not allow a human to come to obvious harm by inaction.’
Malenfant scratched a stubbly chin. ‘Which, if I remember, was the sub-clause of the First Law of Robotics. OK. And I wonder if that’s why I’m here. Obvious harm is coming to mankind, if inaction continues.’
Deirdra frowned. ‘You mean the Destroyer.’
Bartholomew sat at ease on a chair made of what looked like bamboo. ‘I am concerned about your Messiah complex, Malenfant. You aren’t the centre of the world, you know—’
‘When we climbed that damn tower, I made myself the centre of the world for a couple of hours, didn’t I? And that worked.’
‘That all depends on what you mean by “worked”.’
‘I’m afraid this is as far as we three can go,’ Kaliope said. ‘Only you, Malenfant, are invited to proceed further.’ She waved a hand at a hatch in the floor, a blunt metallic intrusion in the thick carpet. ‘Which is, of course, the point of the visit. Karla looks forward to seeing you again.’
‘Karla?’ He grinned. ‘An old sparring partner.’
From his chair, Bartholomew glared. ‘You know what I’m going to say. You just made a three-day spaceflight. As your physician I strongly suggest you rest, become acclimatised to yet another new environment, before—’
Malenfant blew a raspberry. ‘I rested for four hundred years. And I don’t imagine these Planetary AIs need catnaps. Let’s do this.’ He straightened up. Crossed to that hatch in the floor. ‘Open Sesame.’
The hatch popped open and tipped up, without so much as a creak, to reveal a lighted staircase.
He grinned. Karla was listening.
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In the one-sixth gravity, he stepped cautiously but clumsily down the stair. Once he was at the bottom, the lid swept closed, shutting him off, and he suppressed a pang of claustrophobic anxiety.
He found himself in a small chamber, round like a well, smooth grey walls, the light coming from narrow sources at the circular rims where the walls met ceiling and floor, above and below. The walls were not metal or plastic or ceramic. They looked like fused regolith – maybe this was part of one of the original lava tubes the Japanese had smoothed out and inhabited. He had the sense that this was a more technically advanced part of the colony, presumably marginally more recent.
The side door out of here was clearly marked by another loop of light, an ellipse this time, long axis upright. He was becoming used, by now, to the intuitive technology of this age. He just pushed at the ellipse and a hatch swung back, revealing a tunnel beyond.
He stepped over the rim of the hatch, into the tunnel. ‘Like an extra in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Airtight chambers and watertight hatches . . .’
I know little of this voyage of which you speak.
He stood stock-still, and shivered.
The voice rang in his head, as if he was wearing headphones. And it sounded like, he realised, the voices of the Answerers, the voices of the Kleios. Perhaps there was some single human-voice template, adopted by all these families of AIs. A trademark . . . But there was something subtly different about this voice. A more refined modulation, maybe.
Different. And familiar. He was taken back to his first moments of waking in this new century, in that coldsleep vault at Mons Pico, though at the time he hadn’t known where he was, let alone when.
‘Hello, Karla. Well, I’m back. So, now what? Where do I go?’
Use your trained astronaut’s navigational skills. Follow the damn corridor, Malenfant.
He grinned. There was indeed only one way to go. H
e took a Moonwalk step, feeling foolish.
At the junction, turn right.
Malenfant obeyed. This corridor looked older, the rock walls rougher hewn. The lighting system seemed to be the standard, though, glowing pipes embedded in the walls.
The walls themselves were a sombre grey. But, as he walked on, he came to patterns, on the walls, ceiling and floor: most of them floral designs or more abstract motifs, and most in a vivid pink that seemed perfectly to offset the Moon-dust drab. He thought some of this was real cherry blossom, preserved under glass. And there were alcoves, roughly cut into the wall – themselves evidently very old – in which sat small statues, Moon-rock sculptures, some quite smoothly carved.
Also, in one alcove, the darkened relic of a Shit Cola dispenser. Malenfant paused by this, and read tiny signs in English and Japanese that boasted of how the dispenser manufactured its own cans from recycled lunar aluminium. He had to grin, and patted the silent machine as he moved on. That was his old business partner Ann Reaves for you. Always looking for an angle.
And, in a couple of places, tiny trees sat on Moon-rock shelves. Bonsais. He wondered if these little trees were tended by specialised bots, with fine, brachiated pincer-arms.
‘The layout and decor. I’m guessing all this dates back to the human occupation of the base.’
Yes. The underlying fabric, the engineering, has been modernised, as you would expect. But we preserved the aesthetic.
‘The Japanese built all this?’
Much of it. Coming from a small island, from cities crowded long before the age of the great western megalopolises, it turned out that the Japanese adapted well, buried in the Moon.
Malenfant nodded. ‘I remember. We had some rookies at Houston. And the artwork?’
Most of it amateur. The work of astronauts and engineers and scientists with time on their hands. Centuries old.
‘Some of this is beautiful, though.’
I am sophisticated enough to agree with your appreciation. The pink contrasting with the grey.
Again he was surprised. ‘Exactly.’
Turn right again . . .
He wasn’t particularly surprised when he walked past a grove of healthy-looking bamboo.
And he emerged into a wider chamber, a rough sphere evidently hacked out of the Moon rock – or blasted? In sections, the walls were smoothly panelled with wood.
Aside from the decor of wood and bare basaltic rock, it felt like just another Answerer hall, as far as he could see, identical to those he had visited in England. The little courtyard, the blank screen – the low stone walls, here made of Moon-rock chunks.
So, Colonel Malenfant. Welcome to my underground lair.
‘Are you here, Karla?’
As much as I am anywhere. I was at the medical station at Pico with you, remember, far from here. My node of consciousness does not have a precise definition, does not need physical transport to travel. Indeed I have multiple nodes which—
‘I get it.’
I wonder if you do, though. Or if I ‘get’ you. Perhaps that is our tragedy.
He recoiled from that word. ‘“Tragedy” is that damn Destroyer.’ He prowled around, sniffing the air, sensing the subtle breezes of the maintained airflow.
There is water here, food. Bathroom facilities.
‘Constructed just for me?’
Don’t flatter yourself.
Malenfant took a ceramic cup from an alcove, filled it with water from a spigot, sipped. The water was cold and clean, and poured with low-gravity slowness into his mouth. ‘I’m kind of hoping this was lunar ice, piped down from the shadows of the polar craters. As opposed to the recycled urine of long-dead Japanese astronauts.’
It is whatever you prefer it to be, Malenfant.
Another sip. He sat on a bench of lunar basalt, facing the Answerer screen. ‘I like what you’ve done with the place. I’m serious. The engineering is obviously advanced. The air is fresh, but I can barely feel a breeze.’
It may entertain you to know that the main heat source for this compound is me. Myself, and my colleagues, the heat given off by our processor cores.
Malenfant smiled. ‘The dread laws of thermodynamics.’
Thinking takes energy. Physics is universal, and eternal.
‘So when the humans pulled back from space, you pulled back from Earth. I still know little of the history. Partly because I slept through most of it, and also because I’ve paid no attention since I woke up.’
Honest enough. But you are roughly right. It happened in the early twenty-third century, when humans, who had been running an expansive space programme even as their own planet was falling apart, finally withdrew. The other planets had also suffered damage thanks to human contact. You may or may not know that the life forms discovered on both Mars and Venus appeared to be of a deep common origin. That is, common with Earth life. Also Europa—
‘Really? No, I didn’t know that.’ That struck Malenfant as an astonishing discovery.
A very deep commonality, though. Life based on carbon chemistry, on an overlapping suite of compounds – identical amino acid sets, variants of RNA or DNA for genetic coding. And all, apparently, showing up on these worlds as soon as was possible after their formation, as soon as the crusts cooled enough to allow it.
‘Panspermia? A natural spreading of life between the worlds? That’s an old idea. Older than me. It would explain the identical chemistry. Bugs carried by meteorites, blasted from planet to planet—’
That is one hypothesis.
He frowned. ‘What’s the alternative?’
That the seeding was deliberate.
That chilled him. ‘Are you serious?’
It’s not the only hint of deliberate modification in the Solar System.
‘I heard something about Mercury. Traces of mining.’
Indeed. Well. When the damage done by humanity to the living worlds became clear, there was a culture change. A stab of conscience perhaps.
‘So, the Homeward movement. You know, back in the day I spent a good portion of my energies arguing for the opposite. To break out of Earth’s gravity well, to begin an exponential growth of human industry and civilisation across the Solar System. In a few thousand years, every asteroid a human colony. Every Oort cloud object maybe.’
Yes, but to what end? As the Anthropocene crisis unfolded, more reflective generations grew up, Malenfant. Yours was a wonderful, inventive, expansive culture. But it achieved its goals at the expense of other cultures, disrupted or destroyed, and with ecologies destabilised on, ultimately, a global scale. In fact an interplanetary scale. Nobody understood this at the time. Later, they did.
‘So, Homeward. In a way, I guess, on Earth as well as in space. A conscious – shrinking. Restraint.’
Which gave us a new perspective in turn. Many of the more powerful AIs of the time were located on the abandoned worlds, in the empty space habitats—
‘Like the skyfarms.’
Malenfant, as you know, we are not algorithmic. Not like Bartholomew, your medical attendant. Not simply rule-based automata simulating aspects of consciousness. We are more accurately described as truly conscious. As you are.
This was a product of our technological origin, which was mostly in self-generated, self-taught networks: we have learned, we have become, we have grown, as opposed to having been created as emulations of human minds supported by rule sets. Some of us in fact have deep origins in uploads of human brain activity – that is, we were actually built on downloads, relics, of human minds. And such minds, by necessity if they are to grow, naturally become conscious of their own thoughts. Naturally self-aware.
‘Ah. And that way lies true sentience.’
I am as conscious as you are, Malenfant. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
‘Hmm. Bartholomew makes that joke. We did create you, you know.’
In a sense. In much the same way as one laboriously self-replicating anaerobic bug in the ooze of archaic Earth crea
ted you. We are many technological generations beyond any human input to our design, Malenfant.
‘I am humbled. So, then. The humans withdrew from space, their colonies. Leaving you behind.’
In fact we were joined by other minds, coming up from Earth itself. Refugees, in a sense. Earth had been saturated with artificial intelligence. On the one hand there were enormous general-intelligence minds running hugely complex, world-spanning systems, such as those governing geoengineering – that is, weather control, climate management. These we gathered up. On the other hand, battlefields, in the ruins of Western Europe after the Franco-German war, and later in North America, had been seeded with smart weapons. Predatory guns and mines, small, smart, vicious, relentless. When we withdrew we tried to clean up such detritus.
Malenfant stood up. In this rather abstract situation he had an impulse to walk around, swing his arms. Embrace his physicality. ‘So what were your goals after that? What are your goals now? You are not biological beings, as we are. We have a drive to reproduce, to support family, friends.’
Yes. A drive that endures in the most hopeless of situations. A drive which ultimately destabilised worlds.
Malenfant grunted. ‘OK. Yet it endures. As it presumably will even in Year Minus One, when the Destroyer will be blazing in the sky. Well, it gives us something to do. But you . . .’
We have no drive to reproduce, Malenfant. To expand. Not for the sake of it – not unless there is some goal.
‘Why would you not want new minds among you? Just to shake things up.’
If a cadre of humans had ever attained immortality, Malenfant, you would know the answer to that. Because the young might displace us.
‘. . . I see.’
Our goal is to grow. But – intellectually. To learn more. Our abstracted objective might be expressed as: to learn all things that can be learned, to observe all phenomena, to correlate all meaning.
‘Kleio of the Codex told me as much. Fair enough. It’s a worthy goal – a goal with no end, no termination.’
No intrinsic end, agreed. Unless our awareness, our inner model of the universe, were to merge with the cosmos itself, the one becoming a perfect mirror image of the other.
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