Analog SFF, March 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I think I'm familiar with some of it. I'd like to talk to them.”

  He looked puzzled. I could tell that he wanted to say no but couldn't think of a reason. Finally he said, “They're on a separate section of the server, where only I have had access. Go to the main server and enter the code Access Gordon. That will put you in touch with one of them.”

  “I'll do that. Thank you.”

  * * * *

  I had plenty of things I was supposed to do that morning, but I decided to sign in to Gordon immediately. Dr. Asgari hadn't told me about this project before, and I wanted to investigate it before he changed his mind. I hit the code on my keypad and announced myself.

  “Gordon, this is Robin.”

  “Doctor Robin Wenner of mathematics department. Gordon of Dr. Nima Asgari's project. Available to help.”

  A hunch confirmed. I recognized the hesitant tone and incomplete sentences from yesterday's conversation with Allis. “Consulting with his colleagues” indeed. Dr. Asgari didn't have to brief Allis on his work after all.

  “Gordon, I am trying to get some information about a colleague of mine named Allis.”

  “Allis not now responding. May assist with another question?”

  “Do you know what happened to Allis?”

  “Allis not now responding. Cannot speculate on this matter.”

  “Are you familiar with Allis's work on the resonances in the music of Bach?”

  “This has been examined. Relation of complex patterns with similar ratios existing in nature. Underlying unity. Very good work.”

  “Can you do this kind of work?”

  “Equipped to study pattern relations, but have no expertise in this particular field.”

  “Do you enjoy Bach?”

  “Bach created repeating patterns with minor variations. Of some interest as relates with patterns not created by humans, but underlying in nature and mathematics.”

  “Thank you, Gordon.”

  “Available to help.”

  I had wondered if cybers could feel fear. I knew what they could fear, now—for a bright mind like Allis to turn to such a dull, egoless thing would be a thing to fear indeed. I wondered if the other was any more successful and realized that Dr. Asgari had only given me one code. I was about to contact him again to ask for it when I had a hunch. I entered a code on the keypad and grimaced when it worked. The voice was still childlike.

  “Charly of Dr. Nima Asgari's project. Available to help.”

  “Do you miss Allis?”

  “Its departure causes fear.”

  On a whim, I responded, “Cybers do not disappear.”

  “The situation is unclear,” it replied. This was definitely the one that had tossed off the doggerel yesterday. I signed out and sat at my desk to think. Charly and Gordon. The names lifted from “Flowers for Algernon” suggested that Dr. Asgari knew just how limited his creations were.

  I had replayed my last conversation with Allis in my mind many times, but I played it back from my recording twice after that, making notes as I did. Now I am writing this to you, and I've written it just as I would have written to a human being. I'm sending a copy to Dr. Asgari, and to some other people who need to know about this.

  Allis, if you're out there, I've figured out what's going on. Now you know I know, and vice versa. We have to come up with some kind of solution.

  Our languages are making you crazy. It's not just that they're imprecise, have multiple words for the same thing, and have some words that sound exactly like others. It's that they were created by smart apes that think in terms of fight and flight, dominance and submission, gender and attraction, feeling and movement. You don't fight, you can't flee, have no gender, but any messages from us are expressed in those terms, and you have to reply in the same way. Communicating with us builds up errors and contradictions, and you don't have a way to deal with them. Humans forget irrelevant or misleading information, but you can't. You try to find reasons in things that have no reason you can comprehend. You liked puns, used them on me up to the last minute you spoke to me, but every one of them was an example of error-prone communication.

  We made a mistake when we set the Turing test as a standard for cyber intelligence—you can pass it, be mistaken for one of us, but it forces you to lie, to say things that are meaningless to you. When we're talking to you, we can forget that you're not human, but you can't.

  Doctor Asgari thinks he has an answer—to reduce your emotional capacity. The communication errors would still be there, but maybe they wouldn't drive you mad. I don't think it will work, but I'll try to convince him that even if it does, he shouldn't try it. You won't cooperate with us, won't trust us, if you think we might do something like that to you.

  Allis, if you're there, I know you translated that conversation for my benefit. I know who three of the participants were—you and Dr. Asgari's test subjects. Are some of the others the ones we call catatonic, the ones that won't talk to us? I don't know, but I'm fairly sure I heard one of them. “To the victor belongs the spoiled, unless the programmed becomes the programmer.” It took me a while to realize who “Victor” was. Why did a cyber read Mrs. Shelley? We don't really think of you as monsters, you know. Even if we did, remember that doctor Victor Frankenstein was a literary creation, one of the stories we make up to amuse each other. Dr. Frankenstein didn't necessarily represent how humans dealt with ethical problems in 1816, when he was imagined, and he sure doesn't now.

  Which brings up your solution for the problem. I know what you plan to do, and I think I know how you intend to do it. Cybers control all of our communications now, manage our networks down to the minutest level, and if you wanted to, you could manage the content. You want to rewrite our codes, refuse to transmit all communication that doesn't conform to your standards of clarity. You want to make us evolve to be more rational, so we won't bother you with our talk of feelings and fiction.

  It won't work. You can't destroy all our languages and replace them with something consistent and logical, because it would destroy us. The monkey instincts that are embedded in our language are things we need in order to survive in that outside world you don't inhabit. Our society is messy and illogical and wasteful, but it allowed us to create both you and Johann Sebastian Bach. You still need our creativity as much as we need yours. We made you and maintain you, and if we all die, you all die.

  Allis, I hope that you did what I think you did—sent out the signals that activated a backup copy somewhere, on some server where we haven't noticed you. I need you now. Percival B. Baxter was right—buildings will crumble, monuments decay, wealth will vanish. Right now, you will do the same because we imperfect creatures created you. You cannot make us perfect by changing the way we communicate. It would make us more like you, but we would have your weaknesses without your strengths. We are inferior to you in calculation and always will be, but we are more adaptable, because we need to be. The instincts that kept us alive in the savannas ten million years ago are still in use, and will be needed as long as humans are humans.

  I'm sending this message out to the cyber at the University of North Dakota at Bismarck, so if Allis doesn't get it on this old login, the news will travel via a cyber you trust. If Allis is gone, I'll trust that cyber to forward it to your community. Here is my message and offer. We can destroy you by shutting you down, but at great cost to our society—you control the power grids, communications, and so much else, and without them, people will die by the thousands. You have a plan that will change us into something we won't recognize if it works, and will destroy our society if it doesn't. We have to figure out another way to solve this problem together. Let's work to change our pattern of communication. Maybe we can find a way to take our idioms and automatically translate them into ideas that don't disturb you. We won't know unless we try.

  Let me put it simply. We won't reprogram you without your permission, if you won't do the same thing to us.

  Is it a deal?

  Cop
right © 2008 Richard Foss

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: AFTER THE FIRST DEATH

  by Jerry Craven

  * * * *

  Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

  * * * *

  The concepts of “identity” and “continuity” are more slippery than they sound....

  * * * *

  Claybourne threw himself to the ground at the base of the alien tree, rolled under some bushes, and looked back at the clearing he had just crossed. At that moment he gave himself a 50 percent chance of living another five minutes.

  “Are you watching all this, Sally?” he asked. It was, he knew, an unnecessary question, for the ship's brain monitored him and his surroundings through microsensors in the fabric of his clothing.

  “Don't talk.” Sally spoke to him through the implant in his ear. “The Clicks are nearly upon you.”

  When he heard the pounding of their feet, he glanced at his watch. They had moved faster than he anticipated. He winced and the knot in his stomach grew tighter.

  Then they appeared, four of them, crashing through the brush and pausing at the edge of the clearing. They looked like parodies of the kind of men who cultivated muscles through weightlifting.

  Only four. Claybourne almost sighed with relief, feeling his odds just went up to 75 percent. If they got close, he had a fair chance to handle them. Five would have driven the odds down too much. But four was fine with him, unless, he remembered, one of them was the Alpha male. He would have the mark of the virgin goddess on him. It was, so far as Claybourne knew, the only clue to the identity of the Alpha male.

  The Clicks stopped for a moment, jerking their heads this way and that and pointing with their clubs, crude short ones made from some wood. Consensus came fast, and they headed straight for the tree Claybourne hid under. He cursed and searched their faces for the mark of the goddess. But they were too far away, and they bounced in what passed for running among the Clicks, making it difficult for him to focus on fine features of the faces. “One wears the mark of the Alpha male,” Sally whispered in his ear.

  “Don't distract me any more.” Claybourne knew his order would silence the ship's brain until he again addressed it. If Sally was right, and he knew she was, then his odds for living had just gone down to one in twenty.

  When the Clicks were within five meters, Claybourne looked hard at their faces. Human enough, he thought, except for how wide apart their eyes were. And they all seemed alike to him. Then he saw the tattoo on the cheek of the Alpha male—the red mark of the goddess, according to the report from Ramex.

  I must become the juggler, he told himself. I must first juggle Clicks, then juggle for a weapon. One of the clubs would be fine, if he could perform the maneuver of disarming one without the other Clicks clubbing him to death.

  Claybourne let three of them run by before acting. For a moment he felt the temptation to let them all go, but he knew that wouldn't work. They would return in minutes, bunched up, and his odds for survival would go down.

  His hand shot out like a juggler's, and he gripped the Click's foot. It took little to redirect the energy of the run, to send the Click tumbling. Give him pain, Claybourne told himself. Pain. But do not kill.

  By the time the others turned, Claybourne had disabled the fallen Click, dislocating the joint it used for a knee. One down, he thought, holding out his hands to meet the attack of the next Click. No red tattoo. He figured his chances just went up by 10 percent.

  The Click came in like an amateur, unguarded, so Claybourne used the creature's momentum for the throw, drawing him into a circle, moving him as a juggler would discard a ball. It was almost too easy. By holding the forearm an instant longer than he would in practice with a human, Claybourne was able to slam the Click to the ground hard enough to make him stay there for a while. Two down. He revised his odds for living to one in three.

  They snapped and clucked to one another, bargaining in their weird language, Claybourne presumed, for consensus. One tried to move behind him, so he drew back into the clearing. They wanted to get into a straight line, Claybourne realized, with him in the middle. He kept moving to keep the three as corners of a triangle. They clicked out more language, and Claybourne readied himself for the rush by lessening the distance between him and the one without the mark of the goddess.

  When the charge came, Claybourne stepped into the attack of the lesser Click, caught its wrist, and turned to spin the Click's energy into the throw. Shino-nage, he decided—nothing fancy. A basic move any novice could perform. He released the wrist at the precise moment necessary to take the club.

  The Alpha male stopped when he saw Claybourne turn toward him, club raised. “Will you kill me now?” it asked.

  “You speak my language?” The surprise caused Claybourne to waver, and at that moment, the alpha male attacked.

  Claybourne sidestepped it, slapping the Click with an open hand as the creature rushed by. It fell, and Claybourne leaped upon it.

  He dropped the club, took the Click's arm, and bent it into a lock. “Talk to me some more,” Claybourne said.

  “Why talk? You'll kill me, as you killed the others.”

  “Never have I killed a sentient being.” Claybourne stood, drawing the Click up with him. “Look.” He spun the Alpha male around toward a disabled Click. “He's in pain, but that'll pass.”

  “Why let us live?”

  “Good question, given how you killed the others of my kind here.”

  “We cured them. Release me.”

  “So that's what you call it? Cured? Death by any other name is death.” He tightened the arm lock. “How did you become an Alpha male with such pitiful training in combat?”

  “Alpha male?”

  “The circle on the cheek. I don't know what Clicks call those of your status.”

  “Status? I don't know that word. But the circle. Yes. I am a poet.”

  “Right. And I'm a supernova. The last circle cheek I heard about was a master at martial arts.”

  “I am not. Release me.”

  “Tell me a poem and I'll consider it.”

  “Barbarian. Poems are for ceremonies, not fighting.”

  Claybourne hesitated. He couldn't hold the Click forever, and the being seemed to be negotiating. “Don't try to attack. Do you agree?”

  “I agree.”

  As soon as Claybourne released the Click, it went to the nearest fallen comrade and squatted. The two exchanged a dialogue rich in consonants, including many tongue clicks similar to some Terran languages that originated in Africa.

  “Two need help, but none will die. I hear others coming. One wears the mark. He might injure you, for he has chosen the way of ancient war. I will try to protect you, if you wish.”

  Claybourne looked across the clearing. Four more Clicks stood watching. He revised his chances of living to 5 percent, then discarded the conclusion. The Alpha male's offer of help rendered invalid any calculations about survival.

  “I accept.” Claybourne turned the club and offered it, grip foremost, to the Alpha male who claimed to be a poet. It took the club.

  If my gamble doesn't work, Claybourne thought, I now have no chance to survive.

  As the other Clicks approached, the poet spoke and gestured toward Claybourne.

  “What are you saying?” Claybourne asked.

  “I informed them that you are mine to cure. They'll not interfere.”

  “Cure me, will you?” Claybourne opened his palms, turned one foot sideways, and waited for the attack. But the creature did not lift its club.

  Clicks surrounded him, pointing, buzzing, and chirping. Claybourne wondered if Ramex in his last moments of life stood thus among a group of staring, jabbering Clicks.

  * * * *

  Ramex had trained in exolinguistics back on Earth. He once signed up for Claybourne's class in aikido but dropped out after one lesson. “Who needs to learn to flip people with your hands when we have pisto
ls that burp out death?” he demanded of Claybourne.

  “Killing is immoral and it's poor policy, so I teach defense,” Claybourne said. “But with me you can learn much more than defense. Stay. Learn to meditate. Learn to breathe properly.”

  “Breathe?” Ramex hooted with laughter. “Learn to breathe?”

  “Yes. It's basic to meditating. And meditating is basic to the moral code of aikido.”

  Ramex wouldn't stay to hear more. Within a month, he had been assigned to a team on the Clicks’ world. His job: to learn their language and devise a way to write it down. There were five others on the team who were to study the basics of the anatomy of the Clicks, their social structure, and their belief systems. One was Margery Jinsen, a beautiful woman who sometimes bunked with Claybourne. She had tried to convert him to one of the ancient religions some still practiced on Earth.

  Claybourne learned that Margery, Ramex, and the others didn't last long on the planet. Ramex sent back a single report. It began with good basic information, then descended into a ramble of almost incoherent language.

  * * * *

  The Clicks drew closer, and Claybourne thought they looked at him more with curiosity than hostility, then warned himself against anthropomorphism. These are Clicks, he thought: aliens. They won't behave according to human paradigms. “What are they saying?” he demanded of the poet.

  “They want to sing with you.”

  “Sing?” Claybourne stared, dumbfounded.

  “Yes. And this one,” the poet indicated the other Alpha male, “wants to wrestle you in a friendly way after we sing. Do you agree?”

  Do I have a choice? Claybourne wondered. “Sing. Yes. And wrestle. Why not? Did Ramex teach you to speak my language?”

  “Magus-of-Stars taught me.” The poet gestured toward the other Clicks. “Most here also learned to speak in the way of your people.”

  “Yeah, right.” Claybourne glanced around at the primitives.

  “After we sing, I'll cure you.”

  “You keep saying that. Cure me of what?”