Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Vander said, “The trick is to think of the ecosystems as vast machines. Gea captures information on their inputs, such as climatic conditions, geological changes and human-induced changes, and on the outputs they provide for us, such as food, water purification, nutrient cycling, even tourism income—and less direct benefits such as biodiversity. She follows trends as transient as day-to-day fashions for wearing different gemstones in your ear stud, which might impact mining activities, all the way up to the gradual billion-year heating up of the sun, which will—might—one day render the Earth uninhabitable altogether. This is hard science, however. Everything is interconnected, in a messy way.”

  I understood what he meant. The science of the very big and the very small are relatively simple: stars and quarks alike are governed by simple laws. It’s in the middle scales that things get tricky. This was why I had always been attracted by engineering. You couldn’t compress life, or indeed the weather, into symbols or codes: the biosphere was its own story—and so it was unknowable to any human mind. Maybe not to Gea, though.

  The display moved on to some solutions Gea had already generated. Vander grimaced. “The sales pitch,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it, but we have to fight to keep our funding up.”

  Gea had produced some assessments on what was called a “sub-global” scale. We were shown examples from North America—chosen, no doubt, because we were in an American facility. All over the world glaciers were melting. In the short term the release of huge volumes of pent-up glacier-lake waters could cause catastrophic flooding; that had happened in Peru, Nepal, and northern Italy. But in the longer term the melting was even more disastrous, for the glaciers actually served as frozen reservoirs. The presentation—with pretty images of shrinking patches of old brown ice, floods, dwindling rivers, people queuing at standpipes—told of how Gea’s modeling had helped communities in California adjust to a loss of drinking water, of thirty percent or so over the last decade, without catastrophic dislocation.

  The presentation moved on to an even more local problem: the twenty-year drought that afflicted the central plains of America, including Oklahoma. The crucial causative factor was, again, the heat delivered by the Warming. Hotter seas pushed moist air higher than it used to go, causing heavier rain in the tropical regions, but that meant a paucity of rain for a midlatitude belt around the globe. In America this was actually a reversion to conditions that had prevailed eight thousand years ago, when the corn belt had been a “prairie peninsula.” American farmers had it tough, but again warnings by Gea had given them time to prepare. Images of dust bowls and bleached cattle bones from Tajikistan in central Asia showed how bad it might have been.

  “Gea can’t solve the climate problems,” Vander said. “That’s not her job. But by showing us the future reliably she can help us cope with the human consequences.”

  We listened to this dutifully for a while. It was even well presented. But it was very familiar stuff. And as Shelley whispered to me, “Why is it that the collapse of the environment always reduces to a set of dreary lists?”

  Vander Guthrie seemed more interested in the software engineering that lay behind Gea than the climate modeling itself. As the show went on he leaned forward and began to gossip in whispers. “Shelley tells me your uncle worked through the Age of the Help Desks.”

  I glanced at Shelley, surprised.

  She wasn’t apologetic. “Your uncle George is an old charmer, Michael. He has a lot of good stories about those days. . . .”

  Now that we were on his home ground Vander was engaged, even witty. He seemed to have a genuine interest in the history of his discipline, apparently because he was well aware that with Gea he was working on the hottest ticket in the current generation. His job, though, was only a remote descendant of the software analysis George had once made a living out of.

  He described for us new design paradigms based on something called “surface binding.” This meant breaking down Gea’s model of the world into self-contained modules, like worlds in themselves. “So Gea has a model of global rainfall patterns, say,” Vander said, “and another on ocean heating. One affects the other, of course. But to figure out how, Gea has to let her model oceans ‘drive’ the rainfall in a realistic way. It’s not a question of software protocols, you see. It’s as if it were real. The communication between sub-models is not symbolic, it’s experiential. And that offers Gea a much greater richness of consciousness and experience than we have. You see? She is like a community of minds, but minds linked by direct experiential channels.”

  I exchanged a cautious glance with Shelley, keeping my face carefully straight. The geek with the blue hair was actually something of a mystic, it seemed. However there was something quite moving in the way he described all this, as if he actually envied the complex entity he devoted his life to serving.

  And I started to see the reality of Gea through his verbiage. Her elaborate mental model was as real a representation of the Earth and its cargo of rocks, air, water, and life as could be devised, a model that was improving all the time. In a sense that clunky corporate display had shown the truth in that very first image: the whole, spinning Earth was the center of Gea’s consciousness, and her purpose for being. Meeting her would be like meeting Gaia itself, I imagined.

  He went on, “Of course design philosophies are only at the bottom level of the creature we know as Gea. You don’t program Gea, any more than your mother programmed you. My job title is animist. Remember we’re dealing with a mind here, a conscious entity. I didn’t design her; none of us did. I can’t even necessarily measure her output. How do you calibrate playfulness, joy, beauty, sorrow, fear?”

  “And you can’t control her?” I asked uneasily.

  “This is a climate modeling system,” Shelley said scornfully. “She isn’t a killer robot with laser-beam eyes. What harm can she do?”

  I shrugged. “Lie to us? If she’s so smart, how would we even know? And then, when we build the flood barrier in the wrong place, or stimulate algal blooms in the ocean when we should be containing them—”

  Vander Guthrie smiled, a bit wearily. He’d heard all this before. “The Frankenstein complex? I wouldn’t worry. Gea is actually sentient, remember. And with sentience comes responsibility. Conscience, if you will. And, believe me, for a creature as aware as Gea, that’s a deep inhibitor indeed . . .”

  The image froze. Vander raised a hand to his ear, as if someone had called him. He grinned at us. “She’s ready to see us.”

  To reach the Gea facility itself, Vander led us to a broad, empty plaza, eerily bare of trees or benches. At the center of this circle of concrete was set a building, an unprepossessing box, squat and windowless.

  Vander talked nervously as he led us to the central blockhouse. “You can see we wrap our baby up pretty tightly. Ideally she would be dispersed, maybe even buried underground. But the logic of her architecture dictates that’s impossible.” With a superpowerful computer, aiming for the highest processing speeds, you always aimed for small distances to minimize lightspeed delays between components. But that very density made for its own problems—notably the production of an immense amount of heat, which was no doubt why Gea’s physical manifestation was stuck out here aboveground. Vander said, “But we’ve done our best. This block is as robust as most nuclear power plants. You could drive a plane into it and we wouldn’t even notice.”

  As we hurried across the empty plaza I was aware of camera drones flitting in the air, and before my eyes smaller motes danced in the bright daylight—more security drones, tiny ones. Even the floor beneath our feet looked smart.

  I felt terribly exposed out there. But I could see the logic; this open space, saturated by sensors, was so wide it would have been impossible to smuggle across any kind of harm-making device. Vander also warned us that our minds were being monitored for “inappropriate feelings.” I hoped that awe and dread would not be regarded as too “inappropriate.”

  We reached the bloc
khouse. The wall itself sparkled with embedded processors. Vander palmed a control set in the wall, and a door slid aside out of sight. We hurried inside, with Vander waving us in anxiously; a deafening buzzer sounded the whole time the door was open. As the door soughed shut behind us drones clustered in the air around us, glittering with lenses.

  Inside, the blockhouse was brightly lit by strips set in the roof. It looked even smaller inside than from outside, and was crowded with scaffolding where technicians in white coats and hairnets labored at terminals or waved their hands in the air to manipulate VR interfaces. Some of them peered down at us suspiciously.

  At the center of the room was an installation of support gear and instrumentation. The heart of it was just a sphere, jet-black, only a couple of meters across. The sphere was embedded in a framework of clumsy-looking engineering, ducts and pipes and huge flaring fins. Most of this gear seemed to be refrigeration plant, laboring to keep that central sphere cool. But wires snaked out, and laser light flickered around it, the visible signs of data chattering into and out of the sphere. Was this Gea?

  Vander led us to a corner of the blockhouse. A small room, not much bigger than a toilet cubicle, had been partitioned off; a light shone red above the door. Here we had to wait until Gea was ready for us. Vander seemed tense, as if his god was stirring.

  At the core of Gea was a quantum-computing processor, he told us. Inside that jet-black sphere, the intertwined strands of possibility that make up our actuality were picked apart, and each separate strand used, remarkably, as a computing channel. The subtle use in computer processors of strange quantum effects like entanglement and superposition had actually driven forward the basic science of quantum physics. But still, nobody really understood how these machines worked—nobody human anyhow.

  “Gea and her kin have already far surpassed us in raw intellect,” Vander said worshipfully. “Take mathematics for instance. There hasn’t been a single basic proof achieved by an unaided human in thirty years. Nowadays the computers do the proofs. Our job is to dig into what they’ve discovered and prize out the implications. We are intuitive, emotional; we still have a guiding role to play. But the computers are the intellects now. We will never again be able to grasp what they are doing.”

  “Never? That’s a strong thing to say,” Shelley said.

  “I mean it. At the heart of Gea’s biospheric modeling is a nonlinear problem with millions of interacting variables. But our brains are hardwired for a world with a mere three dimensions, so we can go no further than problems with a handful of variables, because we can’t visualize the solutions. And that’s our fundamental intellectual limit. Gea can see the qualitative content of an equation: she sees the babbling brook in the equations of fluid mechanics, the rainbow in the formulae of electromagnetism. We just can’t do it.”

  “OK,” I said uneasily. “So what’s the future for us?”

  He laughed. “Frankenstein again? There’s nothing to be afraid of. I told you. I know Gea as well as anybody can. The smarter you are, the more you comprehend, the more you love.”

  “Love? You really think Gea loves us?”

  “Oh yes,” said this strange guy with his cowboy body and blue hair and geek-scientist manner. “Gea won’t let any harm come to us, if she can help it.”

  Shelley asked, “So what are we waiting for?”

  “For Gea’s response.”

  I glanced at Shelley, who shrugged. I said, “Vander, are you kidding? You have to wait around until she feels like coming online?”

  He looked faintly embarrassed, and he tousled his mop of blue hair. “Gea is, umm, contrary sometimes. There’s a basic contradiction in her existence which torments her, I think. You see, she’s a climate modeler. She knows that heat dumped into the environment worsens the problems the climate faces. But she knows that when she runs, her hardware stratum itself generates a lot of heat. You see the paradox? And therefore—”

  Shelley said, “You have to coax her to come online, and as soon as she gets the chance she turns herself off again for fear of making the problems worse. Do I have that right?” She stared at me, and we both burst out laughing.

  Vander seemed mortally offended. “Believe me, in the brief fractions she is online she can achieve far more than most minds on the planet, artificial or otherwise—”

  The light on the wall flashed red.

  Vander whooped and punched the air. “There she is!” He tapped his ear.

  Shelley asked, “Is that her? What’s she saying to you?”

  He glanced at me. “It’s not me she wants to talk to. Michael Poole—it’s you.” He actually looked jealous.

  With a faint horror-movie creak, the door to the little partitioned booth swung open.

  Chapter 22

  Reath set up a low tent alongside his shuttle. Servitor machines brought out seats, and bowls of food and drink.

  They sat in the shade: Reath, servant of the Commonwealth, the three Campocs as stolid and alike as the enigmatic statues that lay in the dirt, and Alia and her mind-neutered sister. Alia tried to feed Drea, but the Campocs’ control remained too tight to allow it.

  And they talked about the Transcendence of Mankind.

  Bale said, “We all do it, you know. Witnessing. Every human in the Commonwealth is a Witness; every child is given a subject, somebody from the past to study. Everybody. This is the law, the mandate of the Transcendence.”

  This was a commonplace. “And? So what?”

  Bale said heavily, “Have you never wondered why the Transcendence wants us all to peer into the past, Alia?”

  She looked uncertainly at Reath, who returned her gaze calmly. She said, “Studying the past helps me understand the present. Michael Poole helps me understand myself—”

  Denh guffawed. “You think the Witnessing program—the huge expense of giving every kid in the Galaxy a Witnessing tank—is all for the benefit of you, of us?”

  Seer said, “Nothing the Transcendence does is for your benefit, but for its own. You must always remember that.”

  Alia frowned. “All right. So why is the Transcendence so interested in the Witnessing?”

  “Because,” Bale said, “the Transcendence is tortured by regret.”

  The Transcendence was at a cusp in its destiny, they told Alia.

  Coalescing out of a gathering of humans, it already soared far above the capabilities, even the imaginations, of its constituent members. This was an extraordinary moment in the evolution of life itself, so it was believed, as the Transcendence looked forward to the possibilities of an unlimited future, to infinity and eternity.

  Soon, in any meaningful sense, the Transcendence would become a god.

  But not yet. In these final brief moments, the Transcendents were still human. And they were not content.

  All this was an abstraction to Alia, a matter of theology. The Transcendence itself was still only dimly glimpsed in her imagination, despite her training with Reath. What could a god want? . . .

  The Campocs thought they knew.

  The Transcendence understood the cause of its own anguish very well. It was the past. Of the trillions who had lived, most humans’ lives had been dominated by pain and fear, their only saving grace being that they had been short. But the past was the root from which the mighty tree of the present had grown. So how then could the Transcendence give itself up to the bliss of an unlimited future, while its base was stained with the blood of all those near who went before, and had lived and died in misery? Somehow the past had to be redeemed, for if not the goal of perfect Transcendence could never be reached; there would always be a deep flaw beneath the shining surface, a worm in the apple.

  And so, under great programs administered by the Commonwealth’s Colleges of Redemption, every human child was made a Witness, as Alia had always studied the life of Michael Poole. You were assigned one character, one life thread drawn from the tapestry of the past, perfectly imaged with unimaginable technology. Any and every life was availa
ble to be remembered in this way—and not just the significant and famous, like Poole. Every last one of them needed to be treasured, and remembered. Every one.

  Alia shook her head. “I never thought it through. To catalog the whole of the past, to make everybody a Witness—and to Witness everybody—”

  Despite the tension of the situation Reath smiled. “We humans have always been bureaucrats. And the Transcendence must be supreme in this aspect of our nature, as it is in everything else!”

  But it was expensive. Though it was far from complete, soon the Redemption program, in all its manifestations, was absorbing a significant portion of the energy budget of the Transcendence itself, and so of the combined powers of mankind.

  Bale was watching her carefully. “And that’s what we’re worried about.” He stood up. “I will show you something. Come, we will walk to the statues. Your sister will be safe here, I promise.”

  Alia glanced at Reath, who shrugged, out of control of events once more. Drea just sat passively. Reluctantly Alia pushed back her chair.

  They returned to the fallen statues. Once more Alia stood before that monumental face.

  Bale stepped forward. He bent and gathered up some of the strange bluish sand she had noticed piled by the mouth of the statue, and dug out a little more from its eye socket. “Alia, do you know what this is?”

  “Sand,” she said bluntly.

  He shook his head. “No. This is breath. And these are tears.”

  The fallen forms were more than statues. They were humans.

  In the age of Bifurcation that had followed the triumph of the Exultants, most post-human forms had been more or less similar to the basic human stock—like the heavy-gravity forms of the Rustball, or the aquatic creatures of the water-world, even Alia’s own low-gravity design. And rarely had the bounds of carbon-water chemistry been broken.