Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “Shit,” I shouted. “You might have warned me.” I could barely hear my own voice above the roar of the rain.

  “The dicynodonts had no warning.”

  “More eruptions?”

  “Yes. The basalt traps are pumping out chlorine, fluorine, sulphur dioxide, as well as carbon dioxide. These gases are combining with the high air to form a cocktail of acids, hydrochloric, sulphuric, carbonic—”

  “Acid rain.”

  “Yes. The last of the trees and the larger plants are now being burned off. Animals are being flayed alive. Those dicynodonts still shelter in their holes, but there is nothing to eat but a few ferns and moss and lichen in crevices by the river.”

  “And it’s going to get worse, isn’t it?”

  The robot seemed to hesitate. “Would you prefer a warning this time?”

  “Just do it.”

  Another bewildering change.

  The rain had cleared, the sky stripped of clouds to reveal the sun once more. But the sky was tinged a washed-out orange-brown, with barely a scrap of blue. I still stood beside the river valley, but it seemed much broader than before, its banks roughly scoured away. Its floor was littered with boulders and banks of gravel, and further downstream it was incised by channels that cut across each other like braided hair.

  The land was bare rock. I couldn’t see a scrap of green anywhere: there wasn’t even soil cover. It was as if a great knife had scraped over the ground, cutting away all the soil and plants and trees, all the animals and insects.

  That robot still stood at my feet, unchanged, patient. I felt irrationally angry at her, as if she had caused all this devastation. I took a deep breath—and my lungs ached. “Jesus. I can barely breathe.”

  “Actually,” the robot said, “I have used some artistic licence. If you tried to breathe the authentic air of this period you would shortly die of anoxia.”

  “What happened, Gea?”

  “Gas hydrates,” she said simply.

  The carbon dioxide injected into the air by the Siberian volcanic event had caused global temperatures to rise by several degrees. Eventually, at the poles, the ocean margins and tundra began to thaw out. Just as Tom had experienced in 2047, there had been an immense release of the methane and carbon dioxide trapped in the ice—a hundred-fold expansion in volume when that great lid of cold was released. All over the polar regions there had been vast bubbles, water spouts, the very ground crumbling and cracking open as geysers of the stuff spewed into the air. It must have been a hell of a sight.

  The effects were disastrous.

  Gea said, “The injection of the first of these deposits into the air fed back into the greenhouse cocktail already working in the atmosphere, and warming increased further—”

  “Which thawed out more hydrates, which released more gases, which increased the warming effect.” Any engineer would recognize a positive feedback cycle. Around and around it went, getting hotter and hotter, the air filling up with the noxious gas.

  When all the hydrate banks had emptied, a violent warming pulse followed. Not only that, there was now so much carbon dioxide in the air that as it seeped around the planet the levels of oxygen were reduced to far below normal.

  “The last of the dicynodonts probably suffocated rather than starved,” the robot said. “At least it was quick. The ferns and cycads and other opportunistic species that took the chance to propagate during the warming pulse—even they have gone now. A few plants survive, just weeds, clinging on in pockets of soil.”

  I looked around at the barren landscape. “It’s like being on Mars. Nothing but rock and dust.”

  “That isn’t a bad comparison,” the robot said. “Look at the river. Can you see the heavy debris, the braiding effect in the channels? There is no life here, nothing to bind together the soil. When the rains came all the remaining soil was quickly washed away, and heavy debris scoured the channels. You can find such braiding in rivers on Mars, which likewise formed their courses in the absence of life.”

  The oceans had suffered, too. When the rains came all the dead and stinking vegetation was washed away into the rivers and swept downstream to the sea. Around the mouths of the rivers the seabeds were covered in a carpet of organic matter, the rotting corpses of animals, dead vegetation, all mulching down to a thick black slime that choked the life of the seafloor, the molluscs, shrimps, worms, arthropods. As it decayed this foul stuff drew down yet more oxygen from the air and emitted yet more carbon dioxide and other foul gases. Meanwhile the excess carbon dioxide poisoned the plankton, the tiny organisms that were the basis of all marine food chains. Thus oceanic populations imploded just as those on land had.

  Gea said, “Biodiversity was reduced to about a tenth of what it had been before. Ninety percent of all marine species went extinct, seventy percent of land vertebrates. The numbers are approximate, of course; we will never know it all. It was far worse, by an order of magnitude, even than the dinosaur-extinction event. This disaster must have come close to ending the story of multicelled life altogether.”

  “But life recovered,” I said. “Didn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes. Eventually.”

  After this end-Permian extinction event the world was a desolate place, its complicated ecosystems imploded—and its ruins became dominated by a single animal. The lystrosaur, a kind of dicynodont that looked something like a pig, was a chance survivor that took its extraordinary opportunity; soon ninety-five percent of all the animal flesh in the world was lystrosaur meat.

  Recovery came as the descendants of such survivors, shaped by time and evolution’s scalpel, diversified to fill all those empty niches. A new world of dinosaurs and pine trees would emerge from the rubble of the old, and at last, after further extinction events, would follow the flowering plants and the grasses and the true mammals, and mankind.

  But it took time. For some ten million years the world remained empty, dismal, all its old richness gone. And biodiversity would not recover the levels it had lost for fifty million years.

  “Much was never to be replaced at all,” said the little robot. “The old order of the mammal-like reptiles and the spiky trees under which they grazed was lost, gone forever.”

  “Why show me this? You aren’t claiming that the eruptions in Siberia are about to kick off again?”

  “No. But a similar causative sequence may be unfolding. The root cause of the Permian extinction was the Siberian-trap eruptions. Their emissions of carbon dioxide and methane began a global-warming pulse, but the tipping point came when the temperatures rose so high that polar gas hydrate deposits began to be released. After that a positive feedback effect did the rest.”

  “There are no basalt eruptions going on today,” I said. “But instead of the Siberian traps—”

  “Mankind,” the robot said. “Your activities, by injecting heat and greenhouse gases into the air over centuries, have had precisely the same effect as the Permian-era eruptions. And similar consequences.” She said this simply.

  Standing there on that baked, dead plain, I tried to think it through.

  I had grown up with the Warming, laden with guilt over extinctions and environmental degradations that had happened long before I was born. Like most people, I guess I got bored with it, and got on with my life. “It’s like living with original sin,” uncle George once said to me. “We’re all Catholics now, Michael.”

  Then along came President Amin. We all went through the great wrench of giving up our automobiles, and we were smugly proud of the Stewardship. The Warming stopped seeming so bad, the Bottleneck not quite such a hazardous highway. Oh, it was a drag for anybody caught in a flood or a hurricane, and I knew we were still at risk. But we were muddling through. So I’d thought. Even the parts-per-million projections of the final greenhousing load of carbon dioxide in the air were starting to fall.

  Now here was Gea telling me that I had been fooling myself—that Tom was right. I couldn’t believe it, on some deep intuitive level.

>   Gea said, “Perhaps you aren’t thinking about the Warming, the Die-back, the right way. Perhaps, deep down, you imagine that the Earth’s processes are linear. That the response from the biosphere will be proportionate to the pushing you give it. But that isn’t necessarily so.

  “The Earth’s systems are only quasi-stable. For example the Amazon forests, drought-stricken, are dying back rapidly. The injection of their locked-up carbon into the atmosphere raised temperatures, which will in turn accelerate the dying of the forest. This is biogeophysical feedback. And so it goes, on a global scale, geospheric and biospheric systems flipping suddenly to other states.

  “Not only that, the various factors, themselves nonlinear, interact with each other in a nonlinear way: habitat destruction, overpopulation, overharvesting, pollution, ozone destruction, all working together—”

  “Lethe. You’re talking about Lethe. The anti-Gaia.”

  “There comes a point where if you keep pushing you don’t get more of the same but something new entirely, events of a different quality.”

  “You know, I think I imagined that you would be like an electronic Gaia. Here we are talking about death.”

  “I contain both Gaia and Lethe, in my imagination,” she said.

  “OK.” I had to ask the final question. “And if temperatures were again to reach the point where the hydrate deposits are released—”

  “The normal interactions between life and the physical world will break down completely. Gaia will nearly die.”

  “The end of the world?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t put it as severely as that! It won’t even be the end of mankind. You are far more widespread than the lystrosaurs ever were; humans are smart and adaptable and able to recover. You are hard to kill off completely—though it is easy to kill vast numbers of you.”

  “But our culture will be destroyed. Most of us will die. Billions.”

  She rolled back and forth, emitting showers of sparks, her little wheels scraping across a lid of post-Permian bare rock. “You know, it’s a lot easier to move around now that everything is dead,” she said. “No foliage to clog up my wheels, no insects to get in the way or hopping amphibians to knock me over. Perhaps we should give over the world to robots—”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  She stopped still.

  “How long do we have?”

  “That’s hard to say. A decade? Probably less.”

  “This can’t be allowed to happen.”

  “I tend to agree.” A thick bound report popped into existence on the rock surface before her. “I am delivering a definitive study today to all my sponsoring agencies, and all governments and intergovernmental agencies. Not that I expect this to make a difference by itself; people have a tendency to dismiss bad news.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?”

  “You asked to see me, remember,” she said. “You came to me asking questions about the polar hydrates.”

  “OK. But what now? Do you want me to argue the case for you?”

  “More than that.”

  The tinny voice lacked tone, color. But I knew what she wanted of me.

  “You expect me to do something about it, don’t you? . . .” Was that what this was all about? Did Gea, this superhuman artificial intelligence, expect me to come up with a way to save the world? “Gea, if you’re so concerned why don’t you do something about it?”

  The robot rolled back and forth. “I am a biosphere modeler. I have my specified goals. But it is difficult to limit sentience. I am curious. I am concerned not just with my models but their implications. But I cannot initiate any action in the wider world; I have neither the means nor the authority.”

  “You need a human to do it.”

  “I needed a human to come asking the right questions, yes.”

  I said harshly, “What do you care about the destiny of life? You have never been alive yourself.”

  “Michael Poole, I am fearful.”

  “Fearful? You?”

  “I am facing extinction, too, I and the other sentiences you have brought into the world. Hasn’t that occurred to you? Probably not. None of us can survive without the infrastructure of human society. If this goes on, artificial intelligences will be one with the mammoths and the cave bear. . . .”

  I thought I saw movement in the corner of my eye—movement, here on this lifeless VR world, inhabited only by me, a tin robot, and lystrosaur bones. I turned.

  A human figure, slim and silent, stood at the summit of one of the low, bare hills. She was so far away the Mist obscured her. But I knew who she was.

  I whispered, “Do you see her, Gea?”

  “You are important, Michael Poole,” Gea said. “Significant.”

  “I don’t want to be significant. . . . You see her, don’t you? Tell me. You see Morag.”

  “You stand at a crossroads. A tipping point. The world and its cargo of life faces the gravest danger in human history—perhaps since the Permian. And yet you have strength, unprecedented, greater than at any time in human history.”

  “Are you talking about Higgs-energy?”

  “One day the future will be as you imagine, Michael Poole. But first you must make the future come to pass.”

  “How can I shape the future when I’m haunted by a ghost from the past?”

  “But the deepest past and furthest future merge into one . . .”

  Morag stood still, and yet she seemed to be receding from me, sinking deeper into the unreal mist. I longed to run after her, but knew it would be futile.

  In this lifeless world, alone with an utterly alien mind and a virtual ghost, I shivered.

  TWO

  Chapter 24

  I invited Tom and Shelley to my home in upstate New York. I wanted them to help me try to get my head around the problem of gas hydrates.

  I gave Tom a bald summary of my private consultation with Gea. I left out the wu-wu stuff, the mixing up of past and future, Gea’s vague hints about my own cosmic destiny. I definitely said nothing about Morag.

  But even this sanitized version was enough to send Tom’s antennas twitching. “One of the world’s finest artificial sentiences said this to you?”

  “Why not me?” I snapped back. “Gea has to start somewhere. I do have access to some of the world’s most advanced technological capabilities, the Higgs engines. And I have you, Tom. You were right in the middle of that hydrate blow-off in Siberia. Maybe Gea is a good judge of character. Maybe she thinks that as your father I will be motivated to do something about this, to take her seriously.”

  “You really think she’s capable of that kind of manipulation?”

  “You didn’t meet her,” I said fervently. “Besides, you said yourself she’s one of the world’s most advanced minds. But she doesn’t have any kind of formal power in the human world. She doesn’t even get to vote. She can only get things done through people, by persuasion. If you think about it, she’s behaving exactly the way you’d expect her to.”

  He looked doubtful—in fact he looked at me as if I were crazy. But in the aftermath of Siberia we had agreed, kind of, that we would try to work together on stuff, rather than use our interests and motivations as a way to pull apart from each other. So he agreed to fly over to New York, at John’s expense. But, he said mysteriously, he wanted to bring a guest of his own.

  My visitors converged on my house, by plane and train and bus, for my amateur brains-trust session.

  I’d been here a little over five years. The place was only an hour’s commute out of Grand Central Station, so I was hardly remote, but I was happy enough to be away from the stretched-to-the-limit overcrowding of the city itself.

  My house was the modern kind, a big weatherproof concrete brute, suffused with intelligence. With solar cell arrays, a wind turbine I could unfold from the roof, and fuel cells in the basement, I was pretty much self-sufficient in electricity. There was a big chest freezer, and a cellar I kept stocked with cans and dried food. I had deep foun
dations and high sills and doors that sealed shut; I could have ridden out a meter-deep flood. And so on. I was no survivalist, but you had to think ahead. I’d insisted on puncturing the walls with windows, though—real windows, despite the architect’s complaints. Inside I’d faced many of the walls with wood panels. It was still a home, not a spaceship.

  Tom, though, had always seemed to disapprove of the place.

  He had never lived here. After Morag’s death the two of us had never really been comfortable in the old family home; it had room for the larger family Morag and I had always planned, and now it was too big for us. I took a smaller apartment in New Jersey, but it never felt like home, and was of such old building stock it became increasingly costly. When Tom started college I was happy enough to move out and take this place, a house built to modern specs.

  Also I’d hoped my new place was different enough that both Tom and I would be spared any unpleasant memories. But Tom said it reminded him of my family home, my mother’s house in Florida where I’d grown up. It was “a nostalgic facsimile in concrete and gen-modified wood,” as he acutely said.

  “Well, I think it’s cozy,” Shelley said to me when she arrived. “A kind of cozy bomb shelter, but cozy nonetheless.” Shelley was a pleasure, as always, a bustling knot of sanity and intelligence who brought light into my sometimes darkened life.

  My greeting from Tom was more guarded. And I was surprised when Tom produced his guest: Sonia Dameyer, the American soldier who had helped him out in the first hours after his injury.

  It turned out that she and Tom had formed a relationship during his recuperation. She said, “I know it’s a little sad for the only two Americans in a foreign country to glom onto each other. But there you go. I had some furlough due, and a free plane ticket from Uncle Sam. So when Tom said you’d invited him over here, I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be good to meet you in person, Mr. Poole. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Michael. Why should I mind?”

  She was in civilian clothes, a neat, attractive jumpsuit. But she was one of those soldier types who always looked military, even out of uniform; her posture was upright, her manner correct, her intelligence obvious, her attention focused. I hadn’t seen any hint of her relationship with Tom when I’d met her during my VR jaunt to Siberia—though maybe I should have. I liked her, as I had immediately in Siberia, but I found her a bit formidable.