by Hammond, Ray
Although usually preferring to drape his muscular bulk in a business suit, Chevannes had decided to underline the authority of this mission and he had borrowed a UN peacekeeper’s uniform of white epauletted shirt with shorts. Now, in the chill of the rarefied Andean air, he could feel goose bumps forming on his exposed arms and legs. Despite the sun he shivered involuntarily.
He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the flat mountain peak immediately above him and the long cordillera sloping gently down to the south. In the far, far distance it rose up again to meet a yet higher snow-covered peak. A little like the Great Wall of China, thought Chevannes as he noted how the ridge had been flattened to provide a vehicle track and a narrow-gauge railroad between the radio dishes along its top. There had been some serious engineering work done up here.
He turned and looked behind him, back the way he had come. It was the first time he had been able to see the full majesty of the view and he took an involuntary half-step backwards and then leaned against his vehicle’s hood. He was way above the cloud line and so high he could make out no detail at ground level. Immediately around and below him were row upon row of black solar-energy capture panels. A long way down, the rocky slopes of the mountain gave way to what he knew to be scrub, then catalpa trees and then to the cultivated coca-bush terraces of the foothills before becoming lost in an arboreal sea of rain forest and epiphytes so lush and dense that in the bright sunlight its green canopy seemed almost black. Above the forest he saw a speck that he thought at first might be a carrancha. Then he realized that a hawk would be almost invisible at such a distance: it could only be a condor circling lazily in the thermals far below.
In the extreme distance, perhaps sixty miles or so to the west, he could see the llano and, beyond, the glint of the Pacific Ocean. To the north the mountain range stretched away towards the equator and its eponymous nation. It was absolutely still and stunningly beautiful here on the mountain top.
Above him, the vast mesh dish of what he presumed to be a radio telescope cast a mottled shadow over the centre of a compound. He estimated the dish was at least 800 feet in diameter. Within its shade huddled six or seven white single-storey concrete buildings. To the east, away from the shadow of the dish, Chevannes could see a windsock hanging listlessly over what he guessed was a helicopter landing pad. That would have been the sensible way to travel, he thought, although few choppers were able to climb so high: perhaps the Canadian Sea King or the Russian Helix, if he recalled correctly. Just over the other side of the peak Chevannes could see the top of a large white dome that, he assumed, covered a conventional optical telescope array. UNISA satellite surveillance had discovered the compound’s existence five years before and had tagged it as a research facility of the University of San Marco, Lima.
Dotted at regular intervals along the flattened mountain ridge to the south was a string of twenty or so smaller radio telescopes, each perhaps 200 feet in diameter, all set along the rail track that disappeared into the snow before the next peak. This installation was a rival for any of the giant observatories he had seen in TV astronomy programmes.
Chevannes had stopped his vehicle in front of a twelve-foot-high steel-mesh fence topped with razor wire. Security cameras inside the compound were trained on the large gates that barred his way. He assumed that someone must have seen him arrive, but nothing stirred in the ultra-clarity of the still afternoon. He opened the door of the Toyota and pressed the horn. The sharp sound was startling, almost deafening, in the thin air and he heard its echo roll away, slapping off the distant rock faces along the ridge.
A few minutes later an all-terrain motorcycle emerged from between the low white buildings inside the compound and sped down the road towards the gate. As it approached, the rider brake-turned the bike to a stop and switched off the engine. He slid lithely from the saddle and walked to within six feet of the gate. This New Age gaucho was neatly turned out in a white, short-sleeved shirt and knee-length black shorts. A holster was on his right hip and sun-viewpers hid his eyes.
‘Hola, buenas tardes. Estas perdido?’
Chevannes watched and waited as his VideoMate identified the language and started to provide the translation in his earpiece. He understood some Spanish but he would need help in framing his replies.
‘Good morning. You speak English? Are you lost?’ asked the guard again before Chevannes’s system had finished translating: as if UN personnel were in the habit of driving up mountains to seek directions.
‘Hi,’ said Chevannes. ‘I’m here to see Doctor Toksvig.’
‘You don’t have an appointment.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘No,’ admitted Chevannes.
‘You have had a wasted journey, sir,’ the guard continued in his excellent English. Chevannes guessed he was Mexican or Cuban. ‘Doctor Toksvig is off-planet, in an orbiting observatory. He’ll be gone for many months.’
Chevannes nodded as if he understood. But he had prepared for this and he had assumed that, even under his new identity, Rolf Larsson would be unavailable to any uninvited visitors.
He turned back to the open driver’s door of his four-wheel-drive and pulled out an envelope he had placed in the map-webbing of the sun visor. As he did so he watched the security guard in his peripheral vision. The man appeared completely relaxed and, Chevannes assessed, this was not a facility that would attract any trouble. It was too high to be of interest to local bandits and it was too remote to pose a threat to the Colombian drug barons who owned many of the country’s coca fields. Despite the impressive fence, the security level here was low.
He returned to the gate and pushed the envelope through the wire. ‘Would you give this to Doctor Toksvig, please?’
The guard approached the fence and took the envelope. It bore the doctor’s name and was marked ‘confidential’. The blue UN emblem was embossed in the upper left-hand corner.
‘As I said, it will be many months, sir,’ repeated the guard. ‘Perhaps not until next year.’
Chevannes took off his sun-viewpers and allowed the guard to see his eyes. He then flipped his wallet from the back pocket of his shorts and held it up to the fence.
‘I’m from the United Nations Security Agency,’ he said. He didn’t offer the ident to the guard for checking. ‘And, at the risk of offending you, I have to suggest you may be mistaken about Doctor Toksvig’s absence. I would like you to take that envelope to him now or, in the million-to-one chance my information is wrong, I want you to give that envelope to the most senior person now at this facility and tell him – or her – that I authorize them to open the envelope. Is that clear?’
‘Where can we reach you?’ asked the guard.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Chevannes. ‘I’ll just wait while you deliver it.’
The guard looked at the envelope, then at Chevannes, then at the UN Toyota with its fluttering white-and-blue flag and nodded. He remounted his motorcycle, started the engine and sped back to the cluster of buildings.
Chevannes walked back to his vehicle and rummaged for a water bottle he had left in the cooler. He drank and then poured water onto his handkerchief and washed his face. Refreshed, he pulled a pair of image-stabilized binoculars from the glove box and walked to the edge of the track to take a closer look at the chain of radio dishes that stretched away into the distance. He understood why optical telescopes needed to be located on mountains, but he couldn’t think of any operational advantage justifying the expense of hauling radio-wavelength receivers to such a height.
He enabled the video link on his binoculars, stabilized the image and scanned along the mountain ridge. Ordinarily, others back at headquarters would now be sharing his view, but the ban on all network communications was being strictly enforced, so Chevannes was recording only in Local Mode. He moved his view from dish to dish, sharpening the image and adjusting the contrast as he went since even the thin atmosphere of the mountain range distorted the light. He saw no movement, and guessed tha
t these dishes were controlled remotely.
He turned when he heard a sound behind him. The ground locks on the central gateposts had snapped up and the twin gates were slowly opening inwards.
*
‘Am I late?’ asked a voice from the darkness of the outer circle in the Network Control Center.
Theresa switched on the holo-projection system and by its ambient light she saw that Raymond Liu had arrived exactly on schedule. When Calypso Browne had got up to go, Theresa had thanked the paediatrician for so forthrightly expressing her views, despite the note of discord they had struck with the team. With the exception of Robert, Theresa had then dispersed all her researchers back to their hiding places and Companion Nests where they could continue work on the next stage of what would be a continuous progression of researcher-designed personality upgrades.
‘Come on down, Raymond,’ invited Theresa as she adjusted the projection controls on the holo-panel that floated in front of her seat. She waved him towards one of the front-row seats.
‘This is Robert Graves,’ she said, by way of introduction. ‘He’s my senior researcher on the Descartes Experiment.’
Liu bobbed his head and took a seat in the row indicated. ‘As in “I think, therefore I am”?’ he asked.
‘Precisely,’ confirmed Theresa. ‘Who else but the person who first posed the original mind/body dualism question would be suitable as our patron saint?’
Liu smiled, but he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t yet know what their experiment entailed.
‘Robert is going to explain the network elements of our Descartes Experiment to you, Raymond,’ explained Theresa from behind the control display. ‘He works closely with me on this long-term project so I hope we can do two things. One, I think we can explain those dark data you’ve encountered in the networks. And two, I think we can reassure you that our experiments and developments in artificial life could not possibly have led to any of the systems failures you have been suffering in the networks. In short, I hope you will be able to eliminate us from your list of suspects. OK, Raymond?’
Liu nodded. That would be a step forward, at least. There had been little progress otherwise in finding the cause of the network faults.
‘Over to you, Robert,’ said Theresa.
The researcher stood up and turned to face his audience of two. ‘I assume that you are bound by the same confidentiality as the rest of us in the university and in the corporation?’ he asked brusquely of Liu. All trace of his balbutience had disappeared – as Theresa had observed many times before when she had asked him to make a presentation.
Liu nodded.
‘We had to get special clearance from Tom to show you this today.’
Liu swallowed, hoping it wasn’t noticeable. He knew his salary, stock options and career were currently hanging by the most slender of threads.
‘I understand from Theresa that you watched our little demo with Miss Scarlett?’
Liu bobbed his head again.
‘That software robot personality is disembodied and lives in the networks, but it’s essentially the same type of D-persona that we use in physically based companions like my own Michelle or Theresa’s Sandra.’ Robert pointed to the CatPanion curled up on one of the vacant seats. ‘Companion personalities are merely simulating speech and human behaviour and deducing how to respond to us by a complex set of rules that we have laid down. They have absolutely no independent consciousness or intelligence and, as Professor Keane has demonstrated so clearly, it is we humans who anthropomorphize them. However, the important point for this discussion is that they are absolutely processor-dependent. In Furries and other companions the personalities run on the microprocessor installed inside each unit. The disembodied versions travel the networks as packets of information but they can run only when they find a vacant microprocessor – or one of the more recent photonprocessors – to use.’
Robert paused to see if he was being understood. He knew their guest was the technical director of the Tye Global Networks so he had assumed he wouldn’t need to explain too much about the basic elements of their technology.
Raymond Liu nodded silently once more.
‘In the Descartes Experiment, our goal has been to try and create a basic entity that is processor-independent. By that I don’t mean software that can run on a wide number of different processors, I mean software that runs without any specific processor.’
Liu smiled his understanding again, even though he was unsure how such a thing could be done.
‘What we wanted to do was to develop an artificial entity that in turn could create its own processing environment from any of the individual single-state switches that exist in the world’s networks or its attachments. There are trillions of those today. Every routing device, every gateway, every amplifier, every laser controller, every multiplexer, every firewall, every relay, every uplink, every downlink, every access device – all the millions of VideoMates and LifeWatches – each have millions of minute, individual switches that are either “on” or “off” at any one time.’
Robert put his hands together and waved them from side to side to indicate the two polarities.
‘We are trying to build a software personality that doesn’t need a computer. It assembles its own from the billions of simple “yes/no” condition switches that are all around it and the more firings – switchings – there are, the more capability it will have. To exist, it has to make up its transient assemblies of processing capability afresh, nanosecond by nanosecond, from the individual single-state components of the world’s networks. We consider that collectively the individual switches produce what we call a “potentially panpsychic” environment. That means the networks and its component parts all become part of the personality.’
‘You mean the individual transistors of all the processing devices attached to the global networks themselves become the processor?’
Robert nodded. Theresa stood up and stepped into the ambient light of the Holo-Theater.
‘Thank you, Robert, well put. You see Raymond, the human brain, the only vessel in which true consciousness of self as we understand it, has emerged, contains about a thousand to the fifth switching combinations – one hundred quadrillion, yes? – and the only possible processor to get anywhere near that number would be a combination of all the individual switches inside the world’s processors connected by the networks. It’s a question of scale – although we still fall far short of the number we’d need to mimic a single human brain. Nevertheless, the global networks at least give us a simple prototype for an artificial neural nervous system. Let me see if we can show you. Robert?’
Her senior researcher had taken Theresa’s seat and now he started to make adjustments to the controls.
‘I’m now going to try and show you what your dark data are,’ said Theresa. ‘But before we start, we must address a fundamental problem that occurs when we contemplate technologies that have yet to be fully developed and harnessed. You see, the difficulty is that I can’t properly describe it to you – at least not in words we’d both understand. Wittgenstein summed it up when he said: “Concerning that of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” In short, we have no language for the future. Whenever something is completely new we don’t have words for it and that means we can’t think about it. When the projector was first invented we had to call it a magic lantern. The car was a horseless carriage, the radio the wireless – we were reduced to describing it either by something it didn’t possess, or by an allusion to an existing concept – the iron horse, the flying machine. I could go on, but you get my point.’
Raymond Liu nodded. He understood that.
‘As a first step, with the comparatively limited processing power of today’s global networks, we’re trying to create an entity that is both omnisentient and anoetic – it has feeling, consciousness if you like, but there is insufficient complexity for real thought. Given the primitive and small-scale state of the neural pathways represente
d by today’s global networks it can’t have any capability for action. We are trying to mimic the way human consciousness may have emerged over the four billion years of biological evolution on this planet. In another quarter of a century we think the global networks will have grown sufficiently to allow real emergence to take place but for now this is more like a gedankenexperiment – a thought experiment with practical components – if that doesn’t sound too much like an oxymoron.’
Liu had no idea how to react. The people in this room were trying to turn the world’s networks into a brain!
‘So, without a mutually agreed language for the new, my following description may sound a little – well, opaque. We can only show you and we’ll do that in a moment. We have been creating and releasing software moneme-microsthenes into the networks for three years – you’re familiar with memes, the information equivalent of genes? We use the smallest elements of language – the lexeme and moneme – and couple that with a grammatical-instruction carrier that Robert has developed – the microsthene – to create a hylozoic ecological system. When there are sufficient memes created from monemes – that’s about a thousand to an eighth, one hundred trillion – and sufficient individual transactions occurring on the networks – the on-off switchings that Robert talked about – we expect to achieve parallel-processing states that create recurrent connections and what we call transient assemblies – the sort of pathways and structures we find in the human brain. From this we hope to observe the earliest stages of emergence, of consciousness, arising. An epiphenomenon. What would you assume that might resemble, Raymond?’
He felt like one of her most ignorant students. He realized how privileged he should feel, but he was numb. He shrugged, unable to respond.
‘It’s a primitive form of dream, Raymond. And we think the very first “primitive dreams” began to emerge about a year ago – Robert?’
‘I’m switching to visual representation now,’ Robert said. ‘Note, this is not a simulation. It is a visual interpretation from the swirling swarms of the memes as they move through the world’s networks seeking out active switches and jumping the gaps in the networks from one to the next. This is made up of about four hundred billion switch firings per second. We call it “René”, after Descartes.’