Peace on Earth

by Stanisław Lem

  The catalogs of Telemate and Sony offered remotes from Lilliputians to King Kongs, as well as famous people-in-history remotes, uncanny re-creations of Nefertìti, Cleopatra, and Queen Navarra, not to mention movie stars. In order to avoid lawsuits for “resemblance to persons living or dead,” anyone wanting a copy of the First Lady in his closet, or his neighbor’s wife, availed himself of a mail-order unassembled model. The customer, in the privacy of his own home, could put together the Playmate of his choice, following the instructions. Narcissists ordered their own likeness. The legal system could not handle the flood of new cases, moreover it became clear that one could not outlaw remotes as one outlawed the manufacture of drugs or atomic bombs by private individuals, because the remotes were already big business and indispensable, besides, in agriculture, technology, and science, including astronautics. It was only by remote, after all, that a man could land on such planets as Saturn or Jupiter. Remotes were also used, of course, for mining and for rescuing people in the mountains and during earthquakes and other natural disasters. The Lunar Agency had a special contract with Gynandroics for moon remotes. I would soon learn that they had indeed used them in project LEM, but with results as mystifying as they were catastrophic.

  Chief Engineer Paridon Sawekahu showed me around the Gynandroics plant. Tottentanz and Blahouse were with me. Engineer Sawekahu complained about the new legal restrictions that hampered the firm’s research and development of prototypes. And banks, he said, were now putting sensors at their entrances to detect remotes, but that was only the half of it. The banks, of course, feared remote robbery. But instead of using a simple alarm they employed thermoinduction. The remote, as soon as it is recognized, is blasted with high-frequency waves, which cause its wires to melt and turn it into scrap. And the customers complain not to the banks but to Gynandroics. Also, there have been attacks, with bombs even, on trucks carrying remotes, especially attractive females. Engineer Paridon said his firm suspected the women’s liberation movement for these acts of terrorism but at the moment it had nothing that would hold up in court.

  I was shown the whole production process, from the welding of the duraluminum skeletons to the covering of the “chassis” with fleshlike material. Most of the remotes are produced in eight sizes. A custom-made model costs twenty times more. Remotes don’t have to resemble people, but the more different they are from a human build, the harder they are to control. A prehensile tail would be an excellent safety feature for remotes working at great heights, installing cables on suspension bridges for example, but a man has nothing with which to operate a tail. Then we drove in a small electric car (because of the size of the place) to the warehouses, and there I saw planetary and lunar remotes. The greater the gravity, the harder it is to build a remote, because a remote too small cannot accomplish much, and one too big, powered with big engines to make it move, will weigh too much.

  We returned to the assembly hall. If Dr. Wahatan of the UN had been a diplomatic Asian, with a politely restrained smile, Engineer Paridon was an enthusiastic Asian: his bluish lips never closed, and when he smiled, he showed all his perfect teeth.

  “Do you know, Ijon, what the team from General Pedipulatrics and its robots couldn’t manage? Walking on two legs! They flopped because their prototype kept flopping over! Good, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Gyroscopes, counterweights, double feedback in the knees—nothing helped. Of course we have no problem there, a man balances his remote naturally!”

  I watched the female remotes coming down the conveyor belt, their skin as rosy-white as a baby’s. One after another they were taken by other belts to the packing area, so that we stood under a line of naked women moving steadily over our heads, inert but their long hair swinging as though it were alive. I asked Paridon if he was married.

  “Ha, ha, ha! You make a joke, Ijon! I have a wife and children, of course. A shoemaker doesn’t wear the shoes he makes. But we give our workers one a year as a bonus.”

  “What workers?” I asked. There were none in the hall. On the assembly line worked robots painted yellow, green, and blue, their articulated arms extending like geometric caterpillars.

  “Ha, ha, ha! In the office we still have a few people. And in the sorting room, the control room, the packing department. Uh-oh, a reject! The legs are not quite right. Crooked! Would you like to try one, Ijon? No charge, you can have a week, and we deliver.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not the Pygmalion type.”

  “Pygmalion? Ah yes, of course, George Bernard Shaw! I see the allusion. True, some find it repugnant. But you must admit, it’s better to make women than war! Eh?”

  “There are still objections,” I said. “I saw the picket line at the gate.”

  “Yes. An ordinary woman just can’t compete with one who’s remote. In life, beauty is the exception to the rule, but with us it is the norm! The marketplace, supply and demand, yes, that’s the way of the world…”

  We visited the dressing room, which was full of rustling skirts and lingerie and women busy with scissors and tape measures, not very attractive but then they were only live, and I said goodbye to Engineer Paridon, who accompanied me to the parking lot. Tottentanz and Blahouse were strangely quiet on the way back. I didn’t feel like talking either. The day, however, was not finished.

  On my return home I found a fat envelope in my mailbox. It contained a book with the title The Unhumanization of Weapon Systems in the Twenty-first Century or Upside-down Evolution. The author’s name, Meslant, told me nothing. It was a heavy book, full of graphs and tables. Having nothing better to do, I sat down and began to read. On the first page, before the introduction, was an epigraph in German:

  Aus Angst und Not

  Das Heer ward tot.

  —Eugen von Wahnzenstein

  The author presented himself as an expert in contemporary military history. His subject, the new pacifism at the close of the twentieth century: it was prosperity and cowardice that gave birth to the unhumanization of war. People were increasingly reluctant to be fired upon, and this loss of martial spirit was directly proportional to the standard of living. The youth of wealthy nations weren’t interested in the noble motto Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. And it was just at that time that prices began falling in the intellectronics industry. Microprocessing elements called chips were replaced by corn, the product of the genetic engineering of a culture of artificial microbes, mainly Silicobacterium logicum wieneri, named after the father of cybernetics. A handful of these elements cost no more than a handful of barley. Thus artificial intelligence grew cheap, yet the price of new weapons increased geometrically. In the first world war a plane cost as much as a car, in the second as much as twenty, and by the end of the century it was six hundred times more. It was calculated that in seventy years a superpower would be able to afford from eighteen to twenty-two planes. The falling curve of the cost of intelligence and the rising curve of the cost of weapons intersected, and at that point began the unhumanization of the armies. The military became unliving. At which juncture the world went through two crises. The first was when the price of oil soared, the second when shortly thereafter it plunged. The classic rules of economics went out the window, but few understood what was happening, or that the image of a soldier in uniform and helmet charging with bayonet was becoming as distant as the medieval knight in armor. Out of inertia the engineers continued to make big-gauge weapons for a while: tanks, cannon, carriers, and other fighting machines to be used by men, though already these could have gone into battle themselves, without them. Then followed a phase of accelerated miniaturization. Until now all weaponry had been fashioned to fit man: Tailored to his anatomy and physiology, so that he could kill and be killed.

  As is usually the case in history, no one saw what lay ahead, for the discoveries which were to make possible the unhumanization of weapons took place in fields of science far from one another. Intellectronics produced microcomputers as cheap as grass, and neuroentomology finally solved the riddle of
social insects who live and work together, communicating in their own language, even though bees, for example, have a nervous system 380,000 times smaller than a human brain. The intelligence of a bee is quite sufficient for a foot soldier, as military prowess and intelligence are two different things, at least on the battlefield. The major factor in the push for miniaturization was the atom bomb. The need to miniaturize came from simple facts, but facts that lay outside the military knowledge of the day. Seventy million years ago a huge meteor hit Earth and chilled its climate for centuries, making the dinosaurs defunct but hardly bothering insects and not even touching bacteria. The lesson of paleontology was clear: the greater the destructive force, the smaller the systems that escape it. The atom bomb required the particularization of both soldier and army. But in the twentieth century the idea of making soldiers the size of ants was only a fantasy. You could not reduce people in size or diffuse them. So thought was given to robot soldiers, humanoid, though even then that was a naive anachronism. Industry was unhumanizing itself, but the robots who replaced workers on the assembly line were not made in the likeness of men; they were, rather, human parts selected and enlarged: a brain with a big steel hand or a brain with eyes. But giant robots had no place on an atomic battlefield. So radioactive synsects (synthetic insects) were developed, and ceramic shellfish, and titanium worms able to burrow in the earth and come out after the blast. Flying synsects were airplane, pilot, and missiles all in one tiny entity. The operational unit became a microarmy, fighting only as a whole, much as a swarm of bees acts as a unit to survive while an individual bee is nothing. Thus microarmies of many kinds were made, on two opposing principles. An army based on the principle of independence proceeded like a column of ants or a cloud of germs or hornets. An army based on the principle of teletopism, however, was an enormous flying or crawling collection of self-assembling elements; according to need, tactical or strategic, it could reach its target in extreme attenuation only to condense there into its programmed whole. The simplest example was the self-dispersing atomic warhead. An ICBM could be tracked, from space by satellite or from Earth using radar; but it was impossible to detect a cloud of infinitesimal particles of uranium or plutonium at very low density, which finally would converge and reach critical mass at its target, a factory or an enemy city.

  For a while the old and new weapons coexisted, but the massive machines soon succumbed to the invisible micro. As germs secretly enter an animal organism and kill it from within, so did these unliving microbes penetrate cannon barrels, shell chambers, the engines of tanks and planes, and eat through metal, and detonate the ammunition inside. What could a brave, grenade-carrying soldier do against a microscopic, unliving adversary? He would be like a doctor trying to fight a virus with a hammer. Against an autonomous cloud programmed to destroy all things biological a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary standing with sword and shield before a rain of bullets.

  Even in the twentieth century the tactic of fighting in closed ranks was replaced by the spreading out of troops, but there were still front lines. Now there were none. Microarmies easily penetrated all defenses. Nuclear weapons were ineffective combatting that viral contagion. The cost of a warhead, moreover, cannot be considerably greater than the value of its target. One doesn’t use a destroyer to go after leeches.

  The most vexing problem in this unhumanized stage of man’s struggle with man turned out to be that of telling friend from foe. In the past it had been done by electronics, using the password principle. Challenged by radio waves, a plane or missile either transmitted back the correct answer or was attacked. This twentieth-century method became obsolete. Now the makers of arms borrowed from the plants and animals, from bacteria. For the recognition process they imitated the ways of living species: immune systems, the duel of antigen and antibody, tropism, mimicry, protective coloration, camouflage. A microweapon might pretend to be an innocent microorganism, or the fluff of a plant, a piece of pollen, but beneath that exterior lay corrosive death. The significance of informational combat also increased—not in the sense now of propaganda but as the invasion of enemy communications, to paralyze it or, as in the case of the atomic locust-cloud, to force premature condensation to critical mass before it reached its target. The author of the book discussed the cockroach, which was the prototype for one kind of microsoldier. On its abdomen the cockroach has very fine hairs. When they are moved by the air, the insect flees, because these sensors are wired directly to its rear nerve ganglion, and they can distinguish between a draft and the disturbance caused by a predator.

  As I read, I felt pity for the champions of uniforms, flags, and medals for bravery: the new era of warfare must have been anathema to their high ideals. The author used the term upside-down evolution, because in the beginning of life there were microscopic systems which slowly changed into larger systems, while this military evolution proceeded the other way, microminiaturization, and the great human brain was replaced by mechanical insect ganglia. Microarmies arose in two steps. First, the designers and builders were still human; then the unhumanized divisions were conceived, battle-tested, and put into mass production by computer systems that were equally nonhuman. People were eliminated from the military and then from the weapons industry by a phenomenon called “sociointegrational degeneration.” The individual soldier underwent degeneration: he became smaller and simpler. In the end he had the intelligence of an ant or termite. But the collective of these tiny warriors assumed a greater role. The nonliving army was far more complex than a beehive or ant hill; it was more like a biotope in nature, an ecosystem, a subtle equilibrium between competitive, antagonistic, and symbiotic species. A sergeant or corporal in such an army obviously had nothing to do. To grasp the whole picture, merely to inspect the troops, not even the brain power of an entire university would suffice. Thus officers as well as poor Third World countries did not fare well during the great military revolution of the twenty-first century. The irresistible momentum of army unhumanization destroyed the lofty traditions of maneuvers, marches, drills, changing the guard, and regalia. For a while but alas not for long, it was possible to preserve the highest ranks for people, but the strategy-computational superiority of the computerized echelons of command finally put even the most corpulent leaders, including four-star generals, out of work. A chest of ribbons and medals was no protection from early retirement. These officers, facing permanent unemployment—for they could do nothing else—revolted, forming an underground terrorist movement. The crushing of this revolt with the use of microspies and minipolice built on the abovementioned cockroach principle was a grim chapter in our history, because neither cover of dark nor mist nor any kind of camouflage could save those desperate traditionalists loyal to the ideas of Achilles and Clausewitz.