Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘Towers. Structures of some kind?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Indeed. Not unlike tendrils, in some places, reaching down into this puddle we call the Galaxy. The dark matter constitutes the bulk of the universe’s matter; why shouldn’t it contain structure? And I know what your next question will be.’

  ‘Life? . . .’

  ‘Some of us think so. If it exists, dark matter life is vast, slow-moving, hard for us to recognise. But again – why not? Why should life only persist in this thin scum of bright matter we inhabit?

  ‘That’s not all, however. We do have something else still more . . . exciting to report,’ she said now. ‘From the Galactic plane in this case, lying ahead of us . . . We’ve held it back until we have sufficient confirmation. Before you go I’d like to give you a preliminary report . . .’

  Before you go. Jophiel felt faintly confused. She did seem genuinely interested in these findings, whatever they were; she had been a scientist, after all. And yet he sensed an odd impatience about Flammarion. He was Michael Poole, or anyhow his representative; he was one of her seniors, the authority on the mission to which she had dedicated her life. What could be more important for her than his presence here, now?

  What agenda did she have?

  He could imagine what Michael’s father Harry, a far more astute politician than Michael had ever been, would advise now. Time to go fish, son.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Why not show me around?’

  Stiff yet smiling, she bowed slightly, and waved her hand. ‘After you.’

  After intensive development before the convoy had left Cold Earth, and six ship-years of enhancement since, the instruments and artificial-sentience processor banks contained within the Gea’s lifedome had grown enormously complex in detail.

  Still, the essential layout was simple enough, Jophiel thought. The lifedome itself – save for a perimeter fringe where the sleeper banks, dormitories, medical bays, a refectory and other ‘wet crew’ facilities were clustered – was not partitioned, like the Cauchy’s. Instead the whole hemispherical space was dominated by a single, monstrous processing tower: a crystalline, semi-transparent monolith that reached almost up to the lifedome roof. It looked more geological than anything human-made. Peering into this stack, Jophiel glimpsed motion: sparks of light, gathered in lines and arcs and more irregular constellations, and sheets of evanescent illumination, there and gone. Jophiel knew enough about sentience engineering to know that all he saw was a surface shimmer, a hint of deep swirls of processing and cognition. Echoes of the thoughts of a huge mind – no, he thought, a community of minds, all artificial.

  Meanwhile, packing out the spaces around the processor tower, he saw still more complex installations. Boxes and cylinders, enigmatic crystalline structures – even, in one place, a kind of webbing done out in a sombre purple. These were the ship’s instruments, its eyes on the universe, he supposed. Some were positioned near breaches in the hull; others, which evidently needed no direct look outside, huddled under hull plate. Neutrinos and gravity waves, for example, would wash through this structure with impunity, their ghostly passage tracked, recorded and analysed. He knew that while this was the most significant concentration of such instruments in the flotilla, there were other centres; matching instruments on Island and Cauchy would give a longer baseline to some of the measurements.

  And he saw Virtual crew attending these instruments. They wore what looked like simplified copies of Flammarion’s black uniform, done in pale grey with silver flashes. They nodded politely to Jophiel as he passed.

  There were no embodied humans to be seen – no wet crew, in the jargon. The only physically authentic motion came from a couple of bots, small wheeled affairs that rolled with a blameless smoothness across the floor, en route to some task or other.

  Flammarion was watching him, as if trying to anticipate his thinking. ‘You understand why we use Virtual humans here? As opposed to fully artificial sapients? I’m sure you’re aware of the history of artificial intelligence . . .’

  He smiled. ‘The Pooles were always concerned with big projects. Stringing wormholes between the planets. Not so much the fiddly stuff about sentience that nobody seemed to understand. Cognition, consciousness—’

  ‘You see, it is much harder to build a mind piece by piece – though that was achieved too. One early example of an entirely synthetic mind was Gea, for whom this ship was named—’

  ‘I named it for her. Knew her. Or my template did.’

  ‘Whereas the creation of human replicants is easy and powerful. The first successful artificial intelligences were in fact emulations of humans, downloads from human nervous systems into other substrates. One can copy even that which one does not fully understand. Thus, replicant Virtuals like myself.’

  ‘Me too. And yes, we are cheap, relatively.’

  ‘Indeed. Though not free, in terms of processing capacity. And so here we have these instruments, smart in themselves, supervised by our most effective and efficient artificial intelligences – human copies.’

  ‘Hmm. You know, I commissioned these processor suites, the instruments.’

  ‘Or your template did,’ she corrected him mildly.

  ‘But I’m having trouble recognising a lot of what I can see here. Maybe I should have come over here more often. You’ve clearly gone through a lot of upgrades. To do so much in such little time – it’s not seven subjective years since we left Cold Earth.’

  She seemed to hesitate. Then an apparent admission: ‘Our restriction in time is not as severe as for our templates.’

  It seemed an oddly circumlocutory way to refer to the fact that a Virtual’s inner clock did not have to run at the same speed as a human’s, as wet crew. As if she had felt impelled to acknowledge his comment, but in as obscure a way as possible.

  He wasn’t sure how to respond. So he didn’t say anything at all. Keep fishing, son.

  They walked on, and met Flammarion’s brother.

  ‘Weinbaum! Are you following me around?’

  Weinbaum seemed briefly baffled. Then he said: ‘Sync.’ His expression cleared. ‘Ah. Forgive me. My cadre has not yet been updated with the report of our representative who attended the crew review. Mr Poole—’

  ‘Call me Jophiel.’

  ‘You met a separate projection of Weinbaum Grantt – a different partial. It’s good to see you again, sir.’

  Jophiel grinned. ‘Whatever “again” means in the circumstances. Your cadre, though? How many is that?’

  Flammarion cut across him, to Jophiel’s surprise. ‘I am rather busy, Jophiel. Would it be impolite to leave you in Weinbaum’s hands? He’s perfectly capable . . . I can come back in the future if there are further officer-level queries to handle. And to give you that briefing on our discovery.’

  In the future? Not, later? Another odd expression. ‘That’s not a problem. I’ll call you if—’

  ‘Thank you.’ With a quick smile, she dissolved into pixels, which themselves faded from sight.

  Weinbaum seemed faintly embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry about that, sir.’

  ‘Call me Jophiel, for Lethe’s sake . . . Where exactly has she gone?’

  ‘Officer Country. Flammarion always was smarter than me, Mi— Jophiel. You know that. So she’s the officer and I’m the crew.’

  ‘She did seem impatient to get back there.’

  Weinbaum shrugged. ‘That’s officers for you. A minute is a day.’

  Like Flammarion’s remark about the future, that comment, casually made, struck Jophiel as peculiar.

  Weinbaum asked now, ‘What would you like to see next?’

  Jophiel thought that over. He was formulating a theory about what was going on here. Suspicions, slowly congealing. He had to start somewhere. ‘Show me something I can understand. How about the processor cooling system?’

  Weinbaum grin
ned, and led the way.

  They passed more crew, all dressed in their grey uniforms, all engaged on routine-looking tasks, many of them involving the supervision of bots, who performed any physical work necessary. Jophiel was greeted politely everywhere. But then, he wore Michael Poole’s face, the most familiar on the mission.

  And Jophiel started to see patterns. Plenty of Virtuals around, but few different faces: both male and female, a handful of faces shared by many copies. It seemed that a few ‘cadres’, in Weinbaum’s word, dominated the population. It reminded Jophiel of hints in the Poole archives of Coalescences, human hives, where everybody was your sister . . .

  They even ran into a couple more Weinbaums.

  Weinbaum himself looked sheepishly proud as Jophiel pointed this out. ‘Well, we Weinbaums are the number three. Out of twenty cadres, you see. My sister says there’s a kind of natural selection going on. You don’t copy all the wet crew evenly; you tend to choose those with specific skills and so on, or those that withstand copying and syncing better – it seems to trouble some people.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Jophiel muttered.

  Now they passed through a covered gallery, the light subdued, filled with statues.

  Or that was how it seemed at first to a shocked Jophiel. People, fully dressed, their skin tones normal, most sitting in lightweight chairs. One couple, two men, held hands. They looked utterly realistic save for a certain drabness, as if they weren’t lit properly.

  And save for the fact that they appeared quite motionless.

  ‘Not statues, I’m guessing,’ he said to Weinbaum.

  ‘No, sir. This is the reserve. You don’t know about that?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘These are Virtuals, as I am. But running on a slower clock speed. If you stand here long enough you can see them shifting subtly . . . There’s a copy of me in here somewhere, taken after we dealt with the implosion of—’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘When a copy’s time is done, we don’t always sync it back, not at once. It may have developed some particular skill, or acquired some experience that could be valuable later.’

  ‘Umm. Such as after dealing with some particular breakdown.’

  ‘That’s it. If it happens again we can pull it out of the reserve, and put it to work straight away. No need to learn the procedure over again, or to dig it out of some memory synced long ago. There’s still a limit. A Virtual can only last forty days, either subjectively experienced or objectively measured. Whichever is longer.’

  Jophiel figured that out. ‘So if I slowed you down, what felt to you like forty days might be stretched out, from my point of view, for – months? Years?’

  ‘That’s the idea. Long-term storage.’

  ‘But it’s all costing processing power. Look – if you’ve synced with the copy that showed up on the Cauchy, you know that I’m here because of anomalous power usages aboard Gea. That and a paucity of proper science reports recently. If you have all these – spare people – just sitting around, literally . . .’

  ‘But these are running on slow time,’ Weinbaum said, as if it was obvious. ‘If you are in the reserve, you’re running so slowly that what you experience in one second is stretched out to half an hour, for outsiders.’

  ‘I get it. And the processing costs are that much lower. What’s the expansion factor – one in a thousand?’

  ‘More like fifteen hundred, I think.’

  Fifteen hundred.

  And suddenly Jophiel saw it. If you could run Virtual crew fifteen hundred times slower than normal, then you could run officers fifteen hundred times faster too. How long was fifteen hundred minutes? Twenty-five hours?

  Weinbaum had said, A minute is a day . . . So it was, for her.

  He could even see the logic of speeding up, from a Virtual’s point of view. If a given copy had to shut down after forty days of ship time, you could expand that to – forty times fifteen hundred – somewhere over a hundred and fifty subjective years. No wonder Flammarion had been in such a hurry to get away. Every second she spent out here, every heartbeat spent dealing with slow-as-sloths normal humans, was a waste of her life, literally.

  But, of course, if a copy running fifteen hundred times slower cost that much less than a regular projection, a copy running fifteen hundred times faster would cost that much more. As much as running fifteen hundred regular crew, in normal time.

  And that, presumably, was how the power budget was being blown.

  They walked on.

  At the heart of the lifedome – the area of floor at the geometric centre, beneath the great citadel of processing towers – the cooling system was a vast forest of piping underfoot, and great ducts overhead. Beyond the translucent walls of the lifedome, meanwhile, Jophiel glimpsed huge radiator fins, there to dump waste heat into space. They looked as if they were glowing – a measure of the sheer energy flow that passed through this complex, from the GUTengine source through the processor stacks and then to the endless heat sink of the vacuum. He could actually hear the roar of heated air flowing through the throats of tremendous ducts. Jophiel knew that the dumping of heat had been a key aspect of information processing design right back to the first electronic computers in the nineteenth century – or had it been the twentieth?

  But none of this complex had been his, Poole’s, design – or rather his work was only a vestige of what this had become. And all of this, he saw now, was required to deal with the heat generated by a superfast simulated environment that had nothing to do with the flotilla’s mission.

  ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  Weinbaum looked alarmed. ‘Sir?’

  Jophiel dug out his amulet, and held it before his face. ‘Umm, Nicola? Can you hear me?’

  ‘No. Don’t ask questions to which there is only one logical answer. What do you want?’

  ‘I need you to get me into Officer Country. I think it’s some kind of high-capacity Virtual domain. I don’t think I should be held back asking for permission—’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  The world began to dissolve. Through a mist of pixels, Jophiel saw Weinbaum reach out towards him. ‘Sir – Jophiel – don’t—’

  He smiled at Weinbaum and closed his eyes.

  5

  Darkness.

  Warmth.

  He tried to be analytical.

  He was still standing, he felt with a kind of jolt. As if his sensorium had been dropped from a height back into his body. The warmth on his face was like sunshine. Like before the Displacement, when Earth had still huddled close to its Sun.

  He opened his eyes.

  Green grass, blue sky. People walking, talking, too far away to make out or hear.

  Sunshine.

  He was in a park.

  Jophiel could see the shoulders of tall, ancient skyscrapers at the rim of the park, interlaced by flitters darting through the air. Not far away, shielded by trees, he made out a carbon-sequestration dome, a sphere of dry ice four hundred metres tall, fifty million tonnes of carbon dioxide boldly frozen out of the atmosphere and lagged, he knew, by a two-metre layer of rock wool. Long after any practical purpose had gone, such objects remained as a monument to the early efforts of the Recovery generations. Generations, he reflected, that had saved a world – a world that Michael Poole had later thrown out into the dark and the cold in order to save it a second time.

  Jophiel knew this place. Poole Industries had kept offices here, as in all Earth’s great cities. He had come here as a boy, with his father. He even recognised the ancient flood marks on the buildings, left there as monuments to hard times.

  This was New York.

  He raised his face to the Sun, and breathed deeply. A smell of cherry blossom and freshly cut grass. The sky was laced by high, fluffy clouds. And beyond he saw crawling points of light: the habitats and f
actories of near-Earth space.

  But the light was blocked by a shadowed mass to his right.

  He turned to see a tree – an oak, he thought, judging by its heavy summer leaves. Its bark was wrinkled, its girth impressive. He stepped back for a better look – and then back further, trying to see the canopy, the crown. He muttered, ‘How tall are oak trees supposed to grow? Thirty, forty metres? This baby is a hundred metres at least.’

  ‘One hundred and twelve,’ came a soft voice.

  Jophiel turned. Flammarion Grantt walked out of the shade, her footsteps soft on the sparse grass in the shade of the tree, her black and silver suit pristine. Where the sunlight caught her face, dappled through the oak’s leaves, she looked beautiful, he thought. Beautiful, yet vacant – the marble beauty of a statue, hard and empty.

  She was smiling at him. Why, then, did his heart thump as she approached – why did he feel an inclination to recoil? As if he was living through a scene from some half-forgotten nightmare.

  He looked away and glared up at the tree. ‘Too big,’ he muttered.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The tree’s too big. Oak trees don’t grow that tall. Or that fat. This is Earth, right?’ He jumped up and down. ‘I can feel the gravity. The tree is, what, two, three times too tall?’

  She smiled, as if responding to a bright but confused child, Jophiel thought, irritated.

  ‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘But this tree didn’t grow on Earth. It is the Travers Oak—’

  ‘From the Cydonia Dome. On Mars.’

  ‘Correct. I, or my wet-human template, grew up at Cydonia – my brother and me. And I always loved this tree, supposedly descended from trees grown from an acorn carried from Earth by one of the first human explorers of the planet.’

  ‘Can’t have been,’ Jophiel muttered. ‘The interregnum before the Recovery-age recolonisation of Mars was too long for any trees to have survived. Even an acorn couldn’t have survived the Martian cold in some broken-down shelter.’