Bloom

by Wil McCarthy

  “What's in them?” Wallich asked, holding up a hand that instructed us not to touch the packets.

  Now Dibrin looked surprised. “Antivirals, obviously. Base mode inhibitors, plus a mixed vaccine: nucleic acid and trigger proteins. I thought you were a doctor, sir.”

  Wallich sniggered. “Doctor? Not like that, I'm not. Do you mean to tell me that fancy-pants immune system of yours doesn't even screen for human pathogens?”

  Now Dibrin's face went into a kind of “Oh!” thing, and he nodded and started speaking even before Wallich had finished. “Okay, okay. We find it's cheaper to innoculate our bodies directly, and let them maintain their own health as per design. Where is the harm in taking a pill now and then? Jack of all trades means master of none; you build your phages too multi-purpose and they just stop working.”

  “Funny,” Wallich said, “we haven't found that to be the case. Intelligent design avoids the blind alleys that evolution can lead you into. It's a bit more work, that's all.”

  “I'm not going to listen to the 'lazy' speech again,” Dibrin cautioned. “The Munie way is not always so brilliant, not always so desirable. Slow death, that's what you people are about. The Evacuation that never ended.” Wallich opened his mouth to reply, but Dibrin cut him off. “Look, I'm not going to argue with you. I have other work today, plus some personal business to conduct, so just take the damned pills before you get someone else sick. And I have received word of your completed fuel delivery, so at this point you are free to leave. Shall we return to the docks?”

  For a moment, there, the tension in the air was thick enough to climb, but then Rapisardi gave up a pair of sharp, sudden sneezes, and Wallich's answering laughter said that he was willing to let the whole thing go. So we took the pills, gathered up our few belongings, paid the bill and left.

  “So what is it you do for the governor's office?” I asked Dibrin once we were out in the hallway again.

  “Do? Forecasting. Governor sees the future through me.”

  “Huh. Accurately?”

  “Sometimes. Not, like, what are you thinking right now, or what are you going to do tomorrow, but what's the peak energy demand going to be this month, and when? Or economic stuff, or broad issues of public opinion.”

  “Is the governor an elected official, then?”

  “Yes, of course. Not all Gladholds do it that way, but it's easier. People have a harder time complaining how things are run, when the decisions are partly theirs . You do the same thing, yes?”

  “Well, sort of,” I said. Every city had its mayor and small democratic council, after all, and the judiciary presiding over them. But the people like Vaclav Lottick, who formed the very heart of the Immunity, stood wholly outside that process, because really, who was there to replace them? You couldn't hold elections for “most brilliant scientist” or “manager who gets people to work hardest,” and of course power tended to accumulate in the places that needed and exercised it daily. “Too overworked to abuse it” was the typical man-in-the-street analysis of the situation—the dangers of empowering Immune scientists paled against the dangers of hobbling them. Government by expedience: the perfect solution for a society too busy to be bothered.

  “Anyway, yes,” Dibrin said, “part of my job is to see that Governor keeps his job. He maintains a staff of twenty, and we all help out with this. Keep him in touch with what the people want; I'm sure you understand the principle.”

  “And that's always the best thing? What the people want?”

  He shrugged. “No. But not usually too bad.”

  “Huh. I'm not recording any of this, by the way.”

  “But it's on the record,” Dibrin said, not asking. “You'll tell people what I say, correct?”

  “Of course.” Why did everyone seem to have a problem with that lately?

  He smiled faintly. “Oh well. If I had one message to deliver, it would be saying that excessive caution is a bad thing. Fear is a tool to guide us, not a prison. There is great potential in the human spirit, to grow and encompass new things. Not to subdue the universe, but to subvert it. To become it, to cause it to become us. You don't accomplish that by digging a hole.”

  “And if the universe winds up subverting you?” I asked.

  Dibrin shrugged again. “Bad luck, I guess, but not worth giving up your dreams over.”

  Wallich seemed to find this funny.

  “You're a good man,” he said to Dibrin a little later, as they shook hands across Louis Pasteur's open hatchway. “I hope things go well for you here.”

  “You people are not so bad either,” Dibrin returned with that same faint smile. “This mission of yours, you know, it's more dangerous than a day in Saint Helier. You act so shocked by us, but really, it's quite a thing you have ahead. I wish... I wish you all the luck you'll require.”

  “Well, thanks. We'll say hi to the Venusians for you,” Wallich said, and closed the hatch. Then he dogged the airlock shut, skittered up the ramp—awkward in the duck shoes that we hadn't quite managed to fully repair—and addressed the rest of us: “Let's get the living fuck out of this place, all right? We lift in three minutes or it's nutrient pap for dinner.”

  He laughed like maybe he didn't mean it, but we met the deadline just the same. You never know, right?

  FOURTEEN:

  Small Discoveries

  Departing from St. Helier proved a lot easier than approaching it, which is good considering the condition of our engine room crew. The pills were working, though, and by the time we'd cleared the area and begun the long burn that would hurl us down toward Mars, Rapisardi and Davenroy were both looking and sounding much better.

  Alas, our eighteen hours of freedom had served to make Louis Pasteur's interior seem that much more monotonously cramped, and as my duties lessened I eased the claustrophobia by loading my vision up with every sort of window I could think of: net channels, starscapes, Conway's Game of Life...

  The latter drew my attention rather well; a random starting pattern would usually grow and boil and squirm for a minute or two before settling into a permanent rut, patterns of little quivering blobs that didn't go anywhere, and little static ones that didn't do anything at all. Sometimes walking creatures were born from the ooze as well, simple, stable patterns that flip-flopped their way diagonally across the window, self-destructing into frothy blooms when they encountered obstacles in their path.

  All this kept me occupied for several hours, my resource allocation functions interfering only occasionally. But eventually the novelty wore off, and I started feeling a sameness in all those random permutations, the same shapes and structures emerging over and over again, no matter what I started with. Too, I was having a hard time crafting blooms that would sustain themselves for longer than a minute or two; the things seemed determined to die.

  Still, one of the other windows I'd had running was a slide show of Philusburg images, and as my interest in cellular automata waned, I paid more and more attention to this. It really was a very attractive city. And then when I'd seen those images enough times to get tired of them, I started fiddling.

  Ideation, yes, I plead guilty; I started with a small window in an upper corner, but could not resist first expanding the images and then touching them up a little, and before I knew it I was building an interactive idealized environment. It wasn't hard to do, and with reality consisting of such a tiny and uninteresting space, it seemed no great crime to treat it as one more window in the zee. And a small one, at that!

  So I wandered through a Philusburg of the mind, an empty cartoon cavern of a city, first changing the buildings that displeased me, and later erasing them entirely, laying down fields of green grass in their place. It's a compelling thing, this godlike ideative power; when my shift finally ended, some eight hours after we closed the locks, I'll confess I barely noticed the switch.

  Baucum did, though; the knock on my cabin door startled me back to reality, and when I opened the latch, eased the fanfold back and saw her standing t
here (standing, yes—we were under thrust again), I hastily closed all the windows and looked out at her through nothing but the clear plastic of my lenses.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, looking me over.

  “Fine,” I said.

  I must have looked guilty, though, or spoken too quickly; her lips spread suddenly into an amused, conspiratorial half-smirk. “Been messing with the zee-spec, have you? Not messing with anything else, I expect; you've been a zombie ever since we took off. Am I intruding?”

  “No, no,” I assured her, “I was just running your Game of Life thingy. It's very interesting to watch. Uh, surprisingly complex.”

  If she noticed my discomfiture now, she gave no sign. Instead, she leaned forward interestedly, her hands on both sides of my door frame. “Yes, you played with it? I wasn't sure you would. What do you think?”

  “Uh, very interesting,” I tried.

  She waved that comment away. “Be serious, please. Imagine that you're a doctor cataloging some sort of new phenomenon. Document it for me. Be specific.”

  I paused, wondering if she were somehow tricking me, making fun of me. But she seemed sincere enough, probably moreso than I'd ever seen her. She seemed to have a point to make.

  “Well,” I said, “they usually die.”

  “Usually?”

  “Well, always, actually. Sometimes I get little jiggly things, and sometimes I get non-jiggly things. Occasionally I get nothing at all, just a blank window with no live dots in it.”

  She waved an admonishing finger. “No, be specific, Strasheim. Be rigorous. Run a game for me, right here, and tell me what you see.”

  “Yes ma'am,” I sarcasmed. But I opened the Game of Life window back up again, seeded a random cell pattern, and let it go. Amoebic shapes formed, swelled, surged around for a few minutes before blobbing each other to death. In about a minute, all non-repetetive movement had ceased.

  “It's finished,” I told Baucum, then set to examining the amoebas' wreckage. “I see flashing things, little rows of three dots. First they're vertical, then horizontal; they just oscillate back and forth. I also see square blocks made of four dots, and little “D” shapes made of, uh, seven. Neither of those are moving.”

  “Is that all?”

  I nodded.

  “So you have a mixed outcome, then,” she coached, “partly crystalized and partly oscillatory. And you say you've seen some total extinctions.”

  I nodded again. “Yeah, it seems like it can go from a pretty complex form to nothing at all in a fairly short time.”

  “Just a few generations?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  She looked pleased. “And what about degenerate cases? What happens if you start with an empty screen, or a completely full one?”

  “The empty screen stays empty. The full one goes empty after only one generation.” I had tried both of those early on, while I was still trying to get the feel of the game. “There's something else, though, something that keeps cropping up: these little diagonal walking shapes.”

  “Gliders,” she said, nodding. “Sometimes you see them marching across your crystallized landscape, yes? Cutting a straight line between the obstacles, never hitting anything?”

  “Yeah,” I said. That outcome was actually pretty common.

  “But they always return to their starting points, right? The edges of the window connect. The world is round. So now, you recognize an oscillatory structure that takes longer than two generations to cycle. You're ready to accept oscillation as a class of phenomenon, distinct from extinction and crystallization events.”

  I didn't much care for that schoolteacher tone, and I could see more or less where she was headed with this, so I jumped in and spoke: “Three classes of ending, right. But there's a messy fourth one you're not telling me about.”

  She paused, nodded. “Very good, berichter. Yes. We call these 'halt states.' But there are a lot more than four classes of these, so don't get too far ahead of me. Let's just concentrate on the three for right now.”

  She waved and pointed, manipulating zee-spec symbols. My RECEIVING light went on, and a new window icon appeared. I opened it, found a pointillist sprawl of geometric patterns, shapes and icons and letters of the alphabet. It took only a moment to understand what I was looking at: a Game of Life window in the crystalline state.

  At first it seemed there was no limit to the possible forms, but a few seconds' study revealed that the ones larger than about ten dots were actually assemblages of smaller components. So there was a sort of pictographic alphabet, a limited menu of building blocks that fit together in limited ways. That made me feel less ignorant, less like I'd missed something obvious in my earlier explorations. Also, asymmetric forms seemed a lot less prone to crystallization—the building blocks themselves had a comforting regularity to them.

  There were physical laws governing this Conway world, I understood suddenly. All these shapes and patterns were stable because they hung in perfect balance with the cellular automaton rules. But the rules were not so forgiving; drop a single dot in the wrong place, I knew, and all these delicate structures would flail and break apart and be consumed.

  I tried it. Bang! Amoebas formed immediately, reaching out and falling back, reaching out and falling back, and finally extending their gooey arms to embrace the other shapes. Gliders exploded outward, spreading the infection rapidly to all corners of the window. Chains and butterflies and origami flowers all mashed in together, their delicate structures dissolving like a dream.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  The squirming and frothing went on for quite a while, but finally the screen action slowed and settled into a new crystalline pattern, small cubes and ovals and only the occasional three-dot oscillator. Stability had returned, but the delicate order that had previously existed was quite gone. Entropy always wins in the end.

  The next window Baucum sent me was a study in extinction. Again, graceful forms filled the screen, but this time there was something off-kilter about them, a lack of Conwayeian symmetry on some deep level. I didn't have to tamper at all; the moment I started up the simulation, the little shapes twitched and thrashed and vanished, like candle flames extinguished in a breeze. The lesson here was not so obvious. Darkness conquers all? Rarely. Only if your world was constructed especially for that purpose. I grasped for relevance in this, and found none that satisfied me. The third window, though, was to change my view of the universe forever.

  How to describe? Where to begin? Oscillatory structures, Baucum had said, could take longer than two generations to cycle. The truth of that statement had been irrefutable, but now I saw it was also a kind of warning, preparing my mind for the revelation that was to follow. My zee was filled, yes, with oscillatory structures.

  The top row was simple enough—dancing collections of four and six and ten-plus dots, moving and shrinking and growing, looking like little protozoa. Or mycora. The next row down looked less organic: pinwheels and sparkers and little angular shapes passing single dots back and forth between them. Next came a complex structure that looked like a conveyor belt, and then a row of really complex pinwheels and kaleidoscopes. Below that were the clocks, the walkers, the sprinters, and something I can only describe as the Wet Sausage Parade. And finally, at the bottom, two big blobs of foam doing a little bump-and-grind routine that spat gliders out along the upper right diagonal. On the window's edge, a seven-dot crystalline form caught the gliders and destroyed them without a trace.

  The view staggered me; much too much, much too fast. No amount of random fiddling would yield up any but the simplest of these forms, I realized. The Wet Sausage Parade was at least a hundred-dot sprawl, and the odds against such a thing falling together by sheer chance had to be long. One in a million, maybe a lot longer than that.

  “Oh, my, God,” I murmured. I looked and looked for a long time.

  “There's another one,” Baucum said almost apologetically.

  Yes? Well, okay. I braced mysel
f. “Hit me with it.”

  And she did. I opened the new window and... didn't say anything. If anything, this demonstration was less shocking, because I could tell at a glance what it did, what it was. It was a computer.

  The basic structure of it was hollow boxes with lines running through and between them. A lot of hollow boxes. A lot of lines. Inside all this were patterns of bouncing dots, and it didn't take long to see that what happened in one box spilled over into the next, so that patterns shifted and shifted and shifted laterally, and then switched levels and started bumping the other way. And there were pathways connecting the top and bottom and the left and right sides, and things that were clearly input and output channels. The thing had a very mechanical look to it, like some giant, mutant, clockwork abacus, but even my layman's eye could see the calculations taking place. This thing was an actual computer, doing actual computation.

  It could be doing anything, I realized. That was the beauty of computers; they could run anything, simulate anything. Even a human mind, or something very like one, as Chris Dibrin's “separated intelligences” demonstrated. And I'd been told that computers could emulate other computers as well, so flawlessly that there was no way a captive program could deduce whether it ran on a real computer, or a simulated computer, or a simulation of a simulation of a simulation...

  So Conway's Game of Life was itself a kind of computer, capable, at least in principle, of simulating anything.

  “It's a bit much to absorb,” Baucum admitted.

  I watched the window, fascinated. Watched the computer doing its thing.

  “How does the capacity of this... device compare with a real computer?” I finally asked.

  Baucum clucked at that, and I closed all the windows so I could see her face as she spoke. “In terms of speed, you've got it running about a hundred thousand times more slowly than your zee-spec is capable of. Clock speed is a variable parameter, though—play with it if you like. As for the number of actual bits, well, you can expand the game grid and build a machine of arbitrary complexity. The number of states will always be finite, though. Eventually, the pattern has got to repeat itself.”