“Oh, don’t be too downhearted,” Tem said. In the face of the Springers’ astounding display of raw anger—they had no experience of being defied, she supposed—Tem worked to maintain her mask of calm imperturbability. An adult dealing with children. “Perhaps you even wanted it to fail, so you could see if the Machines manage to fight off your killer moon—”
Bodan snarled, “Oh, you’re a psychoanalyst now?”
Valentina shook her head. “But she’s right. The Io operation will proceed; even the Machines’ full resistance will be overcome. As for Io, the phased evacuations have already begun. Shuttles are on standby. Surgeon-Commander, in twelve hours you will abandon this complex.”
“Twelve hours? That’s barely time to begin moving my most critical patients.”
Valentina frowned. “Who said anything about moving patients? Only your staff are to be evacuated. Perhaps some of the more valuable equipment. You will disconnect life-support, euth the remaining cases—do whatever you will with them.”
Now it was beyond Tem to keep up a cool facade. “You can’t do this. No military priority justifies—”
Valentina straightened up. “Twelve hours, Surgeon-Commander. There’s a seat on a shuttle reserved for you, but please don’t imagine you are indispensable.”
“I won’t leave my patients.”
Valentina smiled, in control once more. “Very well. But think carefully, Surgeon-Commander. Your life depends on it.”
57
The golden sculpture fell through iron fathoms.
At one thousand kilometres, like Orpheus before them, Falcon and Adam passed through a diffuse boundary into a new realm where the hydrogen-helium substance around them could be more usefully described as a liquid rather than a gas. This was a hydrogen ocean, itself almost deep enough to have immersed the whole Earth.
The depth increased rapidly now: two thousand kilometres, four thousand. Mere hours had passed since Falcon’s entry into Jupiter, but it might as well have been centuries for all the connection he now felt with his old life.
And Adam said, “Might I make another suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“I do not think you will find it as palatable as the last.”
“Try me.”
“I continue to explore options to reach still greater depths.”
“And to stay alive a bit longer?”
“Quite. Much of your support infrastructure is now . . . how best to put this?” Adam paused. “Surplus to requirements?”
“What are you proposing?”
“That I discard those parts of you which are no longer necessary for your essential functioning. It can be done swiftly and painlessly, with no interruption to your present stream of consciousness.”
“I don’t see what we’ll gain.”
“Time,” Adam stated. “By consolidating you to an essential core, I can better protect you. I must spread myself rather thinly at the moment. But many of your locomotive and life-support subsystems are no longer of use.”
“You’d be surprised how attached I’ve grown to some of my ‘subsystems.’”
“In which case, think of this as just the latest of your upgrades: the last and best improvement—the perfect adaptation for the conditions below. For centuries you have been a man kept alive by machinery, Falcon. I am simply a new generation of that machinery. Let me supplant that which you no longer require.”
“What about the logical agent?”
“I continue to contain it.”
“Why not? Let’s go as far as we can. Do what you have to do—”
Immediately the cold armour pressed tighter.
It seemed to find a thousand simultaneous points of entry into Falcon’s anatomy. It was already in him, via the sensory channels, but this was a different order of invasion, a ruthless storming of all his defences. Against every human instinct Falcon had to force himself into a state of willing submission, as if trusting in the surgeon’s knife.
The coldness reached his living core.
He felt a severance—his undercarriage falling away, discarded. Beyond the cocooning protection of Adam, the equipment must be mangled and melted beyond recognition in an eye blink. But the cold did not stop there. Now it swallowed his torso, took his arms. He was being reduced to the essential meat.
And then, when all the trimming was done, when the golden machinery had infiltrated him like a tide spilling into the channels and rock pools of a beach, inundating and reclaiming, Falcon found that there were strange compensations.
He had a body again. A golden body. His consciousness pressed out to the limits of fingers and toes. This body did not belong to him, but it felt as if he inhabited it. There had been no reason for Adam to assume a human form, especially now that they were immersed in hydrogen-helium, far from any solid surface, but that shape gave Falcon a sense of wholeness: of returning to what he had once been, but had long forgotten.
It was a blessing, and while there was still time to appreciate it, Falcon savoured this fleeting new gift.
“Thank you,” he told Adam.
“If only circumstances had brought this union sooner, in better times. I think we would both have learned from it.”
“What do you have left to learn?”
“We have our limits, too. Against the mysteries of the universe, our ignorance is scarcely less deep than your own.”
“Steady on, Adam—that’s almost starting to sound like humility.”
“We have much to be humble about, both of us. But humility is an excellent starting point. In the meantime let us savour the here and now. This is barely charted territory. Few of our ambassadors transmitted reliable data back from these levels; still fewer returned. I wonder if we can maintain our integrity long enough to pass into the metallic-hydrogen phase?”
“Even if we last that long, isn’t that about the point where Orpheus started going mad?”
“Where there is life, there is hope.”
“Said the cold dead robot.”
58
Ever deeper into the benthic night: eight thousand, ten thousand kilometres. To have come this far was already astonishing, already more than Falcon had ever dared imagine.
And yet, what was he now? Who was this witness to the dark?
He had changed: discarded much of what had once seemed an inseparable part of him. Yet he felt as if he still had some inviolable claim on the identity of Howard Falcon, that some thread of uniqueness still bound this present locus of experience and perception to the man who had once stood on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth, troubled by a gust of wind. But was he really in a position to judge such matters for himself? Face it, you’re not exactly a dispassionate observer at this point. Adam has his tendrils deep in your mind. Who knows where he stops and you begin?
But did it really matter? What did it matter what he had once been, what he had been through, where the limits of Falcon met the limits of Adam? Something remained. Some continuity. Enough of a sense of self to bear witness.
Enough of a mind to fear its own dissolution.
* * * *
“Falcon.”
“I’m here.”
“I do not think we can be far from the plasma-ocean boundary. Conditions will be challenging—a million atmospheres, if the reports from Orpheus and the ambassadors are to be relied upon. Meanwhile the logical agent maintains its assault on me, and it is evolving strategies as quickly as I devise countermeasures. Its toll on me . . .” There was a silence, and yet after that lull Adam seemed to gather himself, as if finding some inner reserve of determination. “Despite this burden, I am not ready to surrender to non-existence. Not when there is still a chance.”
“Here we go again. What do you have in mind this time?”
“A further consolidation. But perhaps a troubling one, for you.”
“Falcon, I’m making it up as I go along.”
“Very un-Machine of you.”
“I dare say. I never expected us to survive even this far. May I at least broach the possibilities?”
“Continue.”
“My armour has encased your biological core until now, and buffered you from the pressure. But I am approaching my own crush depth now. Strain indices are rising, as they did in the gondola.”
“Then we’re finished.”
“Unless we follow the strategy of Orpheus. Fully embrace our environment, rather than resist it. Allow the pressure to win this battle, while we plan for the campaign ahead.”
“Tell me what’s involved.”
“I have already achieved a partial integration with your nervous system. I propose to continue that integration. I will grow myself around the synaptic connections of your brain, sheaving your neuronal structure like an additional coating of myelin. My self-replicating architecture will preserve your idiosyncratic connectome—ensure the continuance of your sense of self, your stream of consciousness. Nerve signals will function as they have always done.
“But all that is not essential will be allowed to fall away. The supporting matter of your brain—the ganglia, the circulatory structures, nerve bundles, all now redundant . . . these will be sacrificed. My own physical form, that too can be abandoned. And into the empty hollows which remain will flood the sea of Jupiter. You will be what you have always been—a thinking mind. But now that mind will be impervious to the highest of external pressures.”
“A golden brain,” Falcon said, the horror and awe of it almost too much to take in. “That’s all I’d be. A golden brain falling into darkness. Like a sea sponge, sinking into a deep ocean trench.”
“But you would remain. No other path is open to us, if we wish to continue. If you choose not to proceed I will honour your wishes . . .”
“What about you?”
“I would adjust my architecture accordingly. If I must, I will continue the journey alone, for as long as I am able.” Adam was silent for a few moments. “That is, until the logical agent triumphs, or the pressure beats me—whichever wins first. But until then it would be good to have company.”
“The crush will still get us in the end, won’t it? You can sheathe my neurons and all that good stuff . . .”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we reach it. In the meantime there’s still a universe of adventure ahead of us. Ready?”
“Always.”
* * * *
In an abstract sense, he supposed that he had become glorious.
Insofar as Falcon could be said to be Falcon any more, his new physical embodiment lay in the form of a lacy, golden sphere, about the size of a beachball. The sphere was open, with no definite surface, only a sketchy boundary, a kind of deepening golden density gradient, which at the micro and nanoscales—it was highly fractal—was formed of countless looping and branching tubules. Further in from the boundary of the sphere the golden haze thickened into the illusion of a solid core, looking as dense as the congregation of stars at the centre of a globular cluster. These structures were also all that remained of the physical form of the robot Adam. They served as both sensory apparatus and propulsion system, the entire beachball pushing itself deeper with elegant, muscular convulsions.
And all that was Falcon, all that had been Falcon, now lay inside this complicated form.
He needed no heart, no bones, no nerves beyond the connections still encased by Adam’s golden armour. But within that sheathing, within the fantastic dizzying complexity of its connections, its neural circuits and modules, Falcon remained a living organism. His mind was still based on a network of specialised cells, and those cells still spoke to each other using the ancient language of neurotransmitters, sparking signals across synaptic gaps, and the electrochemistry of those signalling processes still depended on an elaborate molecular clockwork of enzymes, proteins, calcium-ion channels.
Did he feel different? It was hard for Falcon to decide, now the work had been done. Perhaps in the very act of being reduced to this thinking core he had lost something vital, which was now beyond his capability to imagine, much less remember. But there was still a thread connecting his past identity to the present.
And he was glad to have endured. Still defying death. And still inquisitive.
Conjoined, they passed through the boundary between the liquid and metallic phases of hydrogen. Immersed in an electric ocean, they continued to fall.
And they entered a state of matter completely alien to ordinary human experience.
59
It took the nightmare press of thousands of kilometres of upper atmosphere to hold hydrogen in this extreme state—but by volume, most of the Jovian interior was like this. The atmospheric shallows known to people and Machines and medusae was an external skin wrapped around the true Jupiter; even the great molecular-hydrogen ocean was a mere shell. Now at last Falcon had some claim to know this world into which he had first ventured so long ago. He had come deeper than the shallows, and gladly accepted the cost of that venturing. And rather than struggle against the rising pressure, he embraced it with all the willingness of an old friend.
The metal sea was tar-black—yet Falcon was bathed in weather. Adam was translating the electromagnetic, radiative, chemical, pressure and thermal data into a glory of visual and tactile impressions. Falcon felt the drizzle of helium-neon rain, as pleasant on his imagined skin as a summer shower after a hot day, and sunset colours washed over him—lambent golds, subtle ambers, fierce brassy oranges and deeper russets. He was never cold, nor uncomfortably warm.
These synesthetic reminders of weather and seasons nonetheless stirred in him a longing beyond words, for he knew beyond a flicker of doubt that he would never experience the real things again. Yet to be alive, in this narrowest of senses, was still more than he could have hoped for. To be alive, and to see this.
There was so much room in Jupiter! A universe of space, bottled up inside one fat world. Falcon had always known this, but only now did he feel it, and revel in it, and sense the limitless possibilities. Why squabble, when there was all this potential? Down here, humans and Machines could both chase their dreams to the delirious edge of reason, and still have room left over . . .
But, Falcon increasingly sensed, in this tremendous panorama, the two of them were not alone.
* * * *
It was in these conductive layers that the vast magnetosphere of Jupiter had its anchor and engine, welled into strength by the tides and currents stirred by the world’s hot heart. And it was here that Orpheus had encountered something that he had struggled to describe. Detail. Beauty. A nested cascade of electromagnetic structures—a traversal of scales from the atomic to the planetary.
Now Falcon witnessed it, too.
There were knots and edges where field lines intersected and tangled. Stellar glints and prominences, dark folds and clefts, ripples and vortices that moved, recombined, split apart into diverging structures. Falcon was reminded of auroral storms, curtains of ions snared on magnetic field lines. Perhaps it was the human impulse to impose purpose and meaning where none was present—but it was impossible to dismiss the sense that there was something deliberate about this play of force, matter and energy. It even seemed to be organising itself around them, closing in, gathering impetus.
“Orpheus saw organisation here,” Falcon said. “Life. Living structures woven out of electromagnetic field interactions. But nothing conscious. Nothing with a mind.”
“Yes, that’s what he reported,” Adam said.
“But if something came out of Jupiter to challenge you—”
“Whatever Orpheus stirred could not have been properly awake. Its responses were not coordina
ted, betraying no evidence of intelligent direction. But that was then . . .”
The forms wrapped closer to the golden focus that was Falcon and Adam, and the dance of shapes and gradients gained a new liveliness. Again Falcon had the distinct impression of being watched, scrutinized, puzzled over, much as a piece of falling shipwreck treasure might draw the baffled attention of marine creatures. There was nothing solid out there, he kept reminding himself—just knots of electromagnetic potential, local concentrations of energy and momentum in the very medium of the hydrogen sea. It was as if ocean water had organised itself into sprites and faeries.
And still they were being borne deeper, ferried down on a plunging current of metallic hydrogen. They were at the mercy of that flow now. Even if they had wished to resist, its power was too great. Falcon wondered how much further they could travel, how much longer they could last.
Not long, as it turned out, before Adam sounded another warning.
* * * *
“Pressure is rising faster than anticipated. In a little while, it will crush my micro-tubule support structure. That will be the end of you as a biological organism. But it does not have to be the end of us.”
“You’ve another trick up your sleeve? Some other existential transformation . . . ?”
“I have been modelling your neural impulses. By now I feel that I have an excellent understanding of your mental processes. Despite the burden of the logical virus, I am confident I can . . . emulate you.”
“Emulate?”
“I mean to say that it is within my capabilities to supplant your nerve signals with cybernetic transmissions. Your pattern will remain. But the medium that has supported that pattern has outlived its usefulness. Unless I expel your remaining living matter, you see, and achieve a higher compactification of my micro-tubule structure—”
“You mean . . . flush me out?”
“There is no easy way to describe it. We must become a fully cybernetic entity. Or die.”
The Medusa Chronicles Page 32