Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  Today Avi has begun exploring a small canyon that we have named Shiprock. It is a maze of narrow gullies between jagged rock walls about 40 meters in height. Avi has already mapped it from the air; now he is methodically mapping details from the surface level, moving up the walls, along the canyon, poking his antennae into holes and cracks.

  I am remembering, as I clamber up and down the terrain with him, the time I spent with my grandfather during summer holidays in my final year of college. He had returned to our tribal lands the year before. The refinery had ruined the land in the 20 years of his exile, and now the mining company wanted to extend the open-cast mines. My grandfather’s village, my people, were all scattered by the initial displacement, but they had come together to fight for their land. The police brought the company goondas with them, looking for the agitation leaders. This is what they call an “encounter killing”—cold-blooded murder that is reported as a killing in self-defense. Four people, including my cousin brother Biru, were killed the week before I arrived.

  I can’t talk about it still. I have been insulated from the troubles of my people for so long because my mother took us children away when the refinery displaced us. Most of my childhood was spent in Bhubaneswar. I was good at studies, so she got me admitted to a Corporation school, even though my grandfather was against it. They had such arguments! But my mother won. She had seen too much violence and death in the war against our people; she wanted me to be safe, to get a modern education. My grandfather didn’t speak to her for three years. Then he was forced to come to Bhubaneswar to find work. It proved my mother’s point, that we could no longer live the way we had for thousands of years, so why fight and be killed? When she realized my grandfather was still active in the struggle she shook her head and said he was a fool. I never paid attention to all that, only to my studies. Only when I went to Delhi for university I realized what it meant to be Adivasi. I was so integrated into modern life that I had forgotten my native language and customs—but with my black skin and different features I was seen as backward, someone who had come to a top university because of the reservation system. I joined an Adivasi resistance group, and slowly began to unlearn the Corporation propaganda and learn again the language and history of my people.

  That summer I went back to Odisha to see my grandfather. I still remembered the green hills and the clouds that would sit on top of them, and the plain, which used to be crisscrossed by small rivers and streams. But so much had changed. I stood in the dust and heat of the foothills and hugged my weeping aunt, as the bodies of the “junglee terrorists” lay before us. Biru lay on his side as though sleeping. Blood had seeped from the gunshot wound on his head into the ground. That day I understood for the first time the reality of being on the receiving side of genocide.

  In the terrible days that followed the raid, our relatives, the hill tribes, hid us from the police. I went with the fugitives into the cloud forest. The narrow trails were filled with the calls of unfamiliar birds and beasts. Up there under the shadow of the mountain god, eating wild mangoes from the trees while a light rain fell, I had a strange experience: belonging. I looked at my grandfather’s face, lined and seamed from decades of suffering, and laughing so defiantly despite all our sorrows, and I finally understood why he fought for what was left of our home.

  In those days my head was filled with all kinds of grand ideas. I was a budding intellectual, all the worlds of knowledge were opening before me. I was writing a thesis on extensions of Walker Indices, which are a set of parameters that try to tell how alive something is, from a rock to a mountain goat. My grandfather was proud of me, and always wanted to know what I was studying. In his village he had been a man of wisdom and power; in the city he was an activist by night, and a gardener for hire by day.

  But he was the one who taught me to see in a different way. My vague ideas of semiotics grew sharper and more vivid during that time in the forest. I didn’t put it all together until some years later in my first academic paper—but what the forest taught me was that Nature speaks, that living and nonliving communicate with each other through a system older than language. In fact, physical law is only a subset of the ways in which matter talks to matter. When my grandfather went foraging for medicinal plants for the injured people, I saw him come alive to all the life around him. I had never seen him like that. I realized there is a way of being alive that we have lost by becoming civilized. I published my first paper in my final year—a very technical one on extensions of Kohnian semiotic theory—but the basic ideas, they all come from that trip.

  What I am trying to do now—immersing myself in this alien environment—is because of those long-ago forest treks with my grandfather. Whenever I used to ask him how he knew something about the forest, he would say that he just paid attention. At first I used to get irritated. Now I understand better what he meant. He practices a kind of radical observation, in which he opens all his senses to information flow without preconceptions, and simply waits until something crystallizes. This sounds ridiculous to Chirag: “just the kind of mumbo-jumbo that people associate with the ‘mystical savage,’” but I think this radical, unfiltered immersion can lead to alternative ways of understanding the world. For example, all the emerging discoveries of animal language—the monkey species in Australia, the bowhead whale in the Arctic—the scientists in each case spent so much time with the animals, getting to know them, listening to their recordings day and night.

  That is what I am doing here, on Shikasta b. And I want to understand Avi, whose Walker Index is 7.8, in between life and non-life. This is the first time he has been on active assignment in an alien world. He can learn. On an AI scale, he is a genius. In what ways will Shikasta b change him?

  Annie:

  This radical observation thing of Kranti’s—as she says, it’s nothing new—indigenous people have been practicing it for millennia. She was afraid Chirag would scoff—but I think she has a point. She thinks we should go even deeper. Let’s tell ourselves Shikasta b’s stories, she said, stories about this place. Maybe in assuming everything is alive, and giving each thing a certain agency, different degrees of aliveness will become apparent. What she’s saying, I think, is that if you are looking for a pattern and don’t know what it is, it makes sense to invent patterns of your own, semi-randomly. This Monte-Carlo-like shaking up of patterns and paradigms can throw up notions that you might not have reached through logic alone. This goes against conventional wisdom, which says—hey, we humans like patterns, so beware: the patterns we find are likely simply in our heads, as opposed to real patterns. The thing is, when it comes to “real”: what we recognize as patterns and connections are neither purely cultural (or anthropomorphic) nor purely “natural.” As Kranti says, “What is culture but a specific kind of contextualizing with the rest of one’s environment?”

  Well, it could all be a waste of time. But we have that—time, I mean. What’s to lose?

  Actually Chirag didn’t scoff when we suggested it. He was about to—I know the signs well: the way his left eyebrow starts going up, and the deep sigh—but his poetic side saw an opportunity. It was funny how his face changed, you could see that internal struggle. He has declared himself the official scribe, collecting our story ideas and rewriting them.

  Once there was a planet too close to its star. They shared a vast and complex magnetic field, and their proximity made a beautiful world of extremes, separated by a circular boundary. In the boundary world it was neither too hot nor too cold, but it was always windy. Various species of hot beings lived on the dayside, and they wanted to know what it was like on the other side of the world, where the star’s heat and light did not fall. So the forces that shaped them—heat and pressure and magnetic forces—turned them into huge molten balls that rose from the lava seas and were flung at the sheer walls of the boundary, where they fell apart, crashing back down into the molten ocean. But the tiniest of them cooled and solidified into lava dust motes, and were able to ride the wind.


  The Great Eastern Highlands, where Avi is exploring, is my favorite place on this planet. Imagine looking down into the magma pools of hell from such a height. I’ve never had vertigo—spent most of my childhood clambering up cliffs—but the vids from the edge of the great levee make me nervous and excited. I can hear the wind blowing at Avi’s back, a constant dull, muted roar—the cold surface current from the frozen nightside. Higher up, hot air from the substellar side swirls in the opposite direction.

  We’ve gridded off the highland plateau on top of the levee. The dramatic temperature difference at the terminator makes for a fissured, tortured landscape. Lots of crevasses, passageways, mazes, all bathed by the dim, angry grazing light from the red dwarf star. Avi has made progress on his ground-based survey of Shiprock Canyon, which winds between sheer basalt walls on the plateau. His headlights reveal a maze of passageways, rocky arches, and bridges. At first I thought there was something wrong with his optics, because when he looked up, the stars didn’t look so clear at about 30 degrees around the zenith. Dust? The atmosphere is very thin, but I can imagine solidified lava bits from the molten rock fountains in the plains below, being swirled around by the wind.

  Could there be dust devils on Shikasta b? Kranti’s message read. And as I sipped my coffee in the glowing sunrise of the high Arizona desert and looked at the newest image, I thought: Nilch’i. I remember my grandmother explaining to me when I was very little that the whorls on my finger pads and the little vortex of hair on my head were signs of the holy wind that animates us. There’s Nilch’i on another world, raising dust into a vortex, making this being, this Dusty Woman. Now that I know what to look for, I can see her form, faint but discernible against the backdrop of rock and sky, a dust devil composed of lava dust. She is whirling along the canyon like a live thing.

  Dusty Woman danced through the narrow passageways of Shiprock Canyon, shaking her skirts and looking into the caves and hollows.

  “Who is tugging at my skirts?”

  But the wind took her voice away, and when it died she had to lay down to rest and wait until the wind picked her up again.

  Kranti is making up a story about Saguaro, a creature that lives in the fissures and passageways of Shiprock Canyon. Chirag declares we are silly, but has joined the fun: his contribution is Balls of Fire (the semisolid glowing lava balls that are sometimes hurled up from the magma pools, hitting the levee wall with a splosh). We also came up with lindymotes (after my sister Lindy) for the little solid bits of lava that are blown over the magma pools toward the great cliffs. These have left their mark on the tops of the canyon walls, which have been roughened over millennia of constant battering by these windborne particles.

  You should see Avi scuttle after the lindymotes like a little dog. He’s been doing some odd little dancing steps. There’s something we can’t yet see or sense that he can. It occurred to me that we should plot his movements, just in case they give us some kind of clue. Avi’s certainly been behaving weirdly. I wish you were here to see this, because more than anything, he is your baby.

  Our pictures are being analyzed the world over by scientists and amateurs and nutcases via our Citizen Science Initiative. We hope someone will find something. But the far more exciting pictures from a major mission to a water world are eclipsing ours. As is, need I mention, the latest cluster of wars.

  Still, we have some traffic. When we discover something it immediately goes to our site, becomes global and public. Our reports are clear and contextual—they lack the aloofness of scientific papers, but they’re plenty rigorous. Then the world gets to dissect, shred, and analyze what we have to say. Like our finances, everything is public, everything is transparent. I like to think we are changing the culture of science, from the margins, a fringe bunch of scholar-activists in little circles around the world. I’ve realized after all these years that what’s bothered me about Western science is that there is no responsibility. No reciprocity. You just have to be curious and work hard and be smart enough to discover something interesting. The things you discover, you have no relation to, no responsibility for—except through some kind of claim-staking. I grew up in two worlds—the world of conventional science, and the world of the Navajo. I used to think there was an insurmountable wall between them. But looking through Avi’s eyes, I’m beginning to see whole. I’m feeling more complete.

  Of course, there really is no such thing as a complete person. That’s another Western concept, isn’t it? We are open systems, we eat, we excrete, we interdepend. We feel your absence like a three-legged chair.

  Chirag:

  The lindymotes did not belong here. They had been forged in the lava beds, and here it was cold, so cold! Some of them were swept by the currents past the great cliffs of the boundary into the fabled nightside, where they nucleated tiny snowflakes as gases condensed around them, snowing on the frigid, tortured landscape. But others managed to stay in the boundary lands—flung against the canyon walls, they left their tiny footprints on the surface, only to slide down into sheltered gullies. Here they found that the wind was not as strong, and they could perceive the twists and turns of invisible pathways, magnetic field lines. They felt the pull and tug of these, and aligned themselves so. The invisible pathways changed, sometimes slowly, sometimes at random, but the lindymotes followed them like little flocks of sheep across a meadow.

  I know metals and money. I went into metallurgy because I wanted to see if there was a way around extractive industries like mining. And I went into money because I wanted to kill that god, Money. Nothing against money, but Money? No. I know what it does to people.

  Actually I wanted to jump-start an economy based on retrieving metals from waste, so that we didn’t have to destroy lands and peoples for ore. In our college days, I promised Kranti on more than one drunken night that I would change the world. But I’ve been sober since, drunk only on the tragic poetry of life.

  And here we are, on the verge of discovery. Kranti suspects that we have discovered a form of life so alien that we can barely recognize it. She gave me some technical stuff about orthogonal Walker Indices and negative subzones of phase space—but what it boils down to is that there are, possibly, at least two life-forms on Shikasta b.

  One is Avi, or what he has become.

  How to explain Avi? It is a task nearly as impossible as explaining you. To explain Avi—and Bhimu—to explain them is to go back in time to you and me, but where to begin? Perhaps it should be the time you lent me your battered copy of Jagdish Chandra Bose’s Response in the Living and the Non-Living. It was somewhere between Ambedkar and Darwin, I think—you had been pushing books on me, my English and Hindi were both improving, my head was singing with ideas, a magnificent incoherence within which my slowly awakening mind wandered, intoxicated. From my mother’s simplistic dreams for me, which I had unconsciously adopted—a good job and reasonable wealth, freedom from want, your usual middle-class unexamined life—from that, you took me to a place that whispered, “the universe is larger than this.” I remember the exact moment I opened the book and Bose’s dedication leapt out at me, “to my fellow countrymen,” as though the great scientist had himself touched my hand across time. I knew already that he was anti-caste, that he had the ability to walk away from fortune, and that his contributions had only been recognized decades after his death. But it was because of that book that I got really interested in metals. I decided then to go into metallurgy, even though the engineering program’s chief objective was to produce mining engineers. Why not get to know the monster intimately? My real interest was in the mining of landfills, in reclamation of metals from electronic waste—but what caught my poetic imagination was the possibility that metals were alive, in some metaphorical sense, if not the literal. Bose’s experiments on plants and metals under stress elicited similar responses—he had made some conceptually audacious suggestions that were laughed off or politely dismissed. Only in recent times, with the greatly increased understanding of plant sentienc
e and communication—man, he would have loved mycorrhizal networks—have some of his ideas gained credence. But metals—we know that metals are not alive in the usual sense. Metals in their pure form allow for flow, just as living systems do. That we are all electrical beings, that life is electricity, is true enough, but not all electricity is life. Still, when I first started to learn about metals, I saw in my imagination the ions studded in an ever-surging sea of valence electrons, the metallic forms so macroscopically varied, silver and pale yellow, sodium, soft as butter against the hardness of steel, the variations in ductility and malleability, the way rigid iron succumbed to softness under heat—I saw all this and I wanted to know metal, to know it for its own sake as much as for its practical use. That’s how you really know anything, anyway.

  Between your mind and mine—yours trained in artificial intelligence, mine in metallurgy—Avi’s predecessors were born, starting with Kabariwallah, made to find metal waste in trash dumps. Celebrating over daru, we began to argue about ethics—Frowsian models of value emergence in technological development, if I remember correctly. Somehow the notion came up of AI sentience, hotly debated for over a decade before us, as network intelligences started to pass the lowest-level Turing tests. The AI Protection Clauses started to be invoked and applied. You said, “to restrain a being, any being that is capable of sentience, is to put a baby in a maximum-isolation prison cell because you are afraid it will grow up a criminal.” I argued that artificial intelligence was not like the baby, not human at all. It was alien, despite its human parents. Wasn’t that why there were laws against the development of free AIs? For any AI system there must be a balance between the freedom of complexity and the necessity of control. You looked at me with that intent, dark gaze and sighed. “Don’t you get it? The restraint protocols are about slavery, not ethics. The question is not whether or not we should build free AIs. The challenge is—having built one, how do you teach it how to be ethical? For whatever we mean by ‘ethical?’”