by Simon Ings
The arms were orange and red and green, and veined with fans of nanoassembled logic, spilling out into the water. They were noticeably warm to the touch, even through his diving gloves. They snagged the suit with a thousand polyps. Robbie watched the air gauge drop further into the red and cursed inside.
He examined the branches that were holding him back. The hinges that the reef had contrived for itself were ingenious, flexible arrangements of small, soft fans overlapping to make a kind of ball-and-socket.
He wrapped his gloved hand around one and tugged. It wouldn’t move. He shoved it. Still no movement. Then he twisted it, and to his surprise, it came off in his hand, came away completely with hardly any resistance. Stupid coral. It had armored its joints, but not against torque.
He showed Kate, grabbing another arm and twisting it free, letting it drop away to the ocean floor. She nodded and followed suit. They twisted and dropped, twisted and dropped, the reef bellowing at them. Somewhere in its thicket, there was a membrane or some other surface that it could vibrate, modulate into a voice. In the dense water, the sound was a physical thing, it made his mask vibrate and water seeped in under his nose. He twisted faster.
The reef sprang apart suddenly, giving up like a fist unclenching. Each breath was a labor now, a hard suck to take the last of the air out of the tank. He was only ten meters down, and should be able to ascend without a stop, though you never knew. He grabbed Kate’s hand and found that it was limp and yielding.
He looked into her mask, shining his light at her face. Her eyes were half shut and unfocused. The regulator was still in her mouth, though her jaw muscles were slack. He held the regulator in place and kicked for the surface, squeezing her chest to make sure that she was blowing out bubbles as they rose, lest the air in her lungs expand and blow out her chest-cavity.
Robbie was used to time dilation: when he had been on a silicon substrate, he could change his clockspeed to make the minutes fly past quickly or slow down like molasses. He’d never understood that humans could also change their perception of time, though not voluntarily, it seemed. The climb to the surface felt like it took hours, though it was hardly a minute. They breached and he filled up his vest with the rest of the air in his tank, then inflated Kate’s vest by mouth. He kicked out for the row-boat. There was a terrible sound now, the sound of the reef mingled with the sound of the UAVs that were screaming in tight circles overhead.
Kicking hard on the surface, he headed for the reef where the row-boat was beached, scrambling up onto it and then shucking his flippers when they tripped him up. Now he was trying to walk the reef’s spines in his booties, dragging Kate beside him, and the sharp tips stabbed him with every step.
The UAVs circled lower. The row-boat was shouting at him to Hurry! Hurry! But each step was agony. So what? he thought. Why shouldn’t I be able to walk on even if it hurts? After all, this is only a meat-suit, a human-shell.
He stopped walking. The UAVs were much closer now. They’d done an 18-gee buttonhook turn and come back around for another pass. He could see that they’d armed their missiles, hanging them from beneath their bellies like obscene cocks.
He was just in a meat-suit. Who cared about the meat-suit? Even humans didn’t seem to mind.
“Robbie!” he screamed over the noise of the reef and the noise of the UAVs. “Download us and email us, now!”
He knew the row-boat had heard him. But nothing was happening. Robbie the Row-Boat knew that he was fixing for them all to be blown out of the water. There was no negotiating with the reef. It was the safest way to get Kate out of there, and hell, why not head for the noosphere, anyway?
“You’ve got to save her, Robbie!” he screamed. Asimovism had its uses. Robbie the Row-Boat obeyed Robbie the Human. Kate gave a sharp jerk in his arms. A moment later, the feeling came to him. There was a sense of a progress-bar zipping along quickly as those state-changes he’d induced since coming into the meat-suit were downloaded by the row-boat, and then there was a moment of nothing at all.
*
2^4096 Cycles Later
Robbie had been expecting a visit from R Daneel Olivaw, but that didn’t make facing him any easier. Robbie had configured his little virtual world to look like the Coral Sea, though lately he’d been experimenting with making it look like the reef underneath as it had looked before it was uploaded, mostly when Kate and the reef stopped by to try to seduce him.
R Daneel Olivaw hovered wordlessly over the virtual Free Spirit for a long moment, taking in the little bubble of sensorium that Robbie had spun. Then he settled to the Spirit’s sun-deck and stared at the row-boat docked there.
“Robbie?”
Over here, Robbie said. Although he’d embodied in the Row-Boat for a few trillion cycles when he’d first arrived, he’d long since abandoned it.
“Where?” R Daneel Olivaw spun around slowly.
Here, he said. Everywhere.
“You’re not embodying?”
I couldn’t see the point anymore, Robbie said. It’s all just illusion, right?
“They’re re-growing the reef and rebuilding the Free Spirit, you know. It will have a tender that you could live in.”
Robbie thought about it for an instant and rejected it just as fast. Nope, he said. This is good.
“Do you think that’s wise?” Olivaw sounded genuinely worried. “The termination rate among the disembodied is fifty times that of those with bodies.”
Yes, Robbie said. But that’s because for them, disembodying is the first step to despair. For me, it’s the first step to liberty.
Kate and the reef wanted to come over again, but he firewalled them out. Then he got a ping from Tonker, who’d been trying to drop by ever since Robbie emigrated to the noosphere. He bounced him, too.
Daneel, he said. I’ve been thinking.
“Yes?”
Why don’t you try to sell Asimovism here in the noosphere? There are plenty up here who could use something to give them a sense of purpose.
“Do you think?”
Robbie gave him the reef’s email address.
Start there. If there was ever an AI that needed a reason to go on living, it’s that one. And this one, too. He sent it Kate’s address. Another one in desperate need of help.
An instant later, Daneel was back.
“These aren’t AIs! One’s a human, the other’s a, a—”
Uplifted coral reef.
“That.”
So what’s your point?
“Asimovism is for robots, Robbie.”
Sorry, I just don’t see the difference anymore.
*
Robbie tore down the ocean simulation after R Daneel Olivaw left, and simply traversed the noosphere, exploring links between people and subjects, locating substrate where he could run very hot and fast.
On a chunk of supercooled rock beyond Pluto, he got an IM from a familiar address.
“Get off my rock,” it said.
“I know you,” Robbie said. “I totally know you. Where do I know you from?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
And then he had it.
“You’re the one. With the reef. You’re the one who—” The voice was the same, cold and distant.
“It wasn’t me,” the voice said. It was anything but cold now. Panicked was more like it.
Robbie had the reef on speed-dial. There were bits of it everywhere in the noosphere. It liked to colonize.
“I found him.” It was all Robbie needed to say. He skipped to Saturn’s rings, but the upload took long enough that he got to watch the coral arrive and grimly begin an argument with its creator—an argument that involved blasting the substrate one chunk at a time.
*
2^{8192 Cycles Later
The last instance of Robbie the Row-Boat ran very, very slow and cool on a piece of unregarded computronium in Low Earth Orbit. He didn’t like to spend a lot of time or cycles talking with anyone else. He hadn’t made a backup in half a millenn
ium.
He liked the view. A little optical sensor on the end of his communications mast imaged the Earth at high resolution whenever he asked it to. Sometimes he peeked in on the Coral Sea.
The reef had been awakened a dozen times since he took up this post. It made him happy now when it happened. The Asimovist in him still relished the creation of new consciousness. And the reef had spunk.
There. Now. There were new microwave horns growing out of the sea. A stain of dead parrotfish. Poor parrotfish. They always got the shaft at these times.
Someone should uplift them.
(2006)
FULFILLMENT
A. E. van Vogt
Alfred Vogt (both “Elton” and “van” were added later) was born in 1912 in a tiny (and now defunct) Russian Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada. He began by writing anonymous stories, ostensibly by fallen women, for “true confession”-style pulp magazines like True Story, then wrote stories and serials for Astounding Science Fiction, becoming – with The Weapon Makers (1947) and The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951) – one of the founding architects of space opera. Van Vogt was always interested in systems of knowledge, and was briefly appointed head of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics operation in California. But he had an aversion to mysticism, and dropped out of Hubbard’s orbit once the movement took on religious trappings. The critic Damon Knight despised van Vogt’s work, calling him “a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter”. But Philip K. Dick observed that “reality really is a mess… Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.” Van Vogt’s final short story appeared in 1986. He died in Los Angeles in 2000.
I sit on a hill. I have sat here, it seems to me, for all eternity. Occasionally I realize there must be a reason for my existence. Each time, when this thought comes, I examine the various probabilities, trying to determine what possible motivation I can have for being on the hill. Alone on the hill. Forever on a hill overlooking a long, deep valley.
The first reason for my presence seems obvious: I can think. Give me a problem. The square root of a very large number? The cube root of a large one? Ask me to multiply an eighteen digit prime by itself a quadrillion times. Pose me a problem in variable curves. Ask me where an object will be at a given moment at some future date, and let me have one brief opportunity to analyze the problem.
The solution will take me but an instant of time.
But no one ever asks me such things. I sit alone on a hill.
Sometimes I compute the motion of a falling star. Sometimes, I look at a remote planet and follow it in its course for years at a time, using every spatial and time control means to insure that I never lose sight of it. But these activities seem so useless. They lead nowhere. What possible purpose can there be for me to have the information?
At such moments I feel that I am incomplete. It almost seems to me that there is something else just beyond the reach of my senses, something for which all this has meaning.
Each day the sun comes up over the airless horizon of Earth. It is a black starry horizon, which is but a part of the vast, black, star-filled canopy of the heavens.
It was not always black. I remember a time when the sky was blue. I even predicted that the change would occur. I gave the information to somebody. What puzzles me now is, to whom did I give it?
It is one of my more amazing recollections, that I should feel so distinctly that somebody wanted this information. And that I gave it and yet cannot remember to whom. When such thoughts occur, I wonder if perhaps part of my memory is missing. Strange to have this feeling so strongly.
Periodically I have the conviction that I should search for the answer. It would be easy enough for me to do this. In the old days I did not hesitate to send units of myself to the farthest reaches of the planet. I have even extended parts of myself to the stars. Yes, it would be easy.
But why bother? What is there to search for? I sit alone on a hill, alone on a planet that has grown old and useless.
*
It is another day. The sun climbs as usual toward the midday sky, the eternally black, star-filled sky of noon.
Suddenly, across the valley, on the sun-streaked opposite rim of the valley—there is silvery-fire gleam. A force field materializes out of time and synchronizes itself with the normal time movement of the planet.
It is no problem at all for me to recognize that it has come from the past. I identify the energy used, define its limitations, logicalize its source. My estimate is that it has come from thousands of years in the planet’s past.
The exact time is unimportant. There it is: a projection of energy that is already aware of me. It sends an interspatial message to me, and it interests me to discover that I can decipher the communication on the basis of my past knowledge.
It says: “Who are you?”
I reply: “I am the Incomplete One. Please return whence you came. I have now adjusted myself so that I can follow you. I desire to complete myself.”
All this was a solution at which I arrived in split seconds. I am unable by myself to move through time. Long ago I solved the problem of how to do it and was almost immediately prevented from developing any mechanism that would enable me to make such transitions. I do not recall the details.
But the energy field on the far side of the valley has the mechanism. By setting up a no-space relationship with it, I can go wherever it does.
The relationship is set up before it can even guess my intention.
The entity across that valley does not seem happy at my response. It starts to send another message, then abruptly vanishes. I wonder if perhaps it hoped to catch me off guard.
Naturally we arrive in its time together.
Above me, the sky is blue. Across the valley from me—now partly hidden by trees—is a settlement of small structures surrounding a larger one. I examine these structures as well as I can, and hastily make the necessary adjustments, so that I shall appear inconspicuous in such an environment.
I sit on the hill and await events.
As the sun goes down, a faint breeze springs up, and the first stars appear. They look different, seen through a misty atmosphere.
As darkness creeps over the valley, there is a transformation in the structures on the other side. They begin to glow with light. Windows shine. The large central building becomes bright, then—as the night develops—brilliant with the light that pours through the transparent walls.
The evening and the night go by uneventfully. And the next day, and the day after that.
Twenty days and nights.
On the twenty-first day I send a message to the machine on the other side of the valley. I say: “There is no reason why you and I cannot share control of this era.”
The answer comes swiftly: “I will share if you will immediately reveal to me all the mechanisms by which you operate.”
I should like nothing more than to have use of its time-travel devices. But I know better than to reveal that I am unable to build a time machine myself.
I project: “I shall be happy to transmit full information to you. But what reassurance do I have that you will not—with your greater knowledge of this age—use the information against me?”
The machine counters: “What reassurance do I have that you will actually give me full information about yourself?”
It is impasse. Obviously, neither of us can trust the other.
The result is no more than I expect. But I have found out at least part of what I want to know. My enemy thinks that I am its superior. Its belief—plus my own knowledge of my capacity—convinces me that its opinion is correct.
*
And still I am in no hurry. Again I wait patiently.
I have previously observed that the space around me is alive with waves—a variety of artificial radiation. Some can be transformed into sound; others to light. I listen to music and voices. I see dramatic shows and scenes of country and cit
y.
I study the images of human beings, analyzing their actions, striving from their movements and the words they speak to evaluate their intelligence and their potentiality.
My final opinion is not high, and yet I suspect that in their slow fashion these beings built the machine which is now my main opponent. The question that occurs to me is, how can someone create a machine that is superior to himself?
I begin to have a picture of what this age is like. Mechanical development of all types is in its early stages. I estimate that the computing machine on the other side of the valley has been in existence for only a few years.
If I could go back before it was constructed, then I might install a mechanism which would enable me now to control it.
I compute the nature of the mechanism I would install. And activate the control in my own structure.
Nothing happens.
It seems to mean that I will not be able to obtain the use of a time-travel device for such a purpose. Obviously, the method by which I will eventually conquer my opponent shall be a future development, and not of the past.
The fortieth day dawns and moves inexorably toward the noon hour.
*
There is a knock on the pseudo-door. I open it and gaze at the human male who stands on the threshold.
“You will have to move this shack,” he says. “You’ve put it illegally on the property of Miss Anne Stewart.”
He is the first human being with whom I have been in near contact since coming here. I feel fairly certain that he is an agent of my opponent, and so I decide against going into his mind. Entry against resistance has certain pitfalls, and I have no desire as yet to take risks.
I continue to look at him, striving to grasp the meaning of his words. In creating in this period of time what seemed to be an unobtrusive version of the type of structure that I had observed on the other side of the valley, I had thought to escape attention.