Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "Dormitories," Da Silva said. "Each of these platforms holds maybe 10,000 sleepers, give or take. They built them out at sea because we need OTEC power to run them, using the heat difference between surface water and deep ocean, and it's much easier if we don't have to run those power cables inland."

  "Coming back to bite us now," Clausen said.

  "If we'd gone inland, they'd have sent land-dragons instead. They're just adapting to whatever we do," Da Silva said pragmatically.

  They sped over oily, roiling waters.

  "Is this really Patagonia?" Gaunt asked.

  "Patagonia offshore sector," Da Silva said. "Sub-sector fifteen. That's our watch. There are about 200 of us, and we look after about 100 rigs, all told."

  Gaunt ran the numbers twice, because he couldn't believe what they were telling him. "That's a million sleepers."

  "Ten million in the whole of Patagonia offshore," Clausen said. "That surprise you, Gaunt? That ten million people managed to achieve what you and your precious Few did, all those years back?"

  "I suppose not," he said, as the truth of it sunk in. "Over time the cost of the process would have decreased, becoming available to people of lesser means. The merely rich, rather than the super-rich. But it was never going to be something available to the masses. Ten million, maybe. Beyond that? Hundreds of millions? I'm sorry, but the economics just don't stack up."

  "It's a good thing we don't have economics, then," Da Silva said.

  "Patagonia's just a tiny part of the whole," said Clausen. "Two hundred other sectors out there, just as large as this one. That's two billion sleepers, near as it matters."

  Gaunt shook his head. "That can't be right. The global population was only eight billion when I went under, and the trend was downwards! You can't tell me that a quarter of the human race is hibernating."

  "Maybe it would help if I told you that the current population of the Earth is also two billion, near as it matters," Clausen said. "Almost everyone's asleep. There's just a handful of us still awake, playing caretaker, watching over the rigs and OTEC plants."

  "Four hundred thousand waking souls," Da Silva said. "But it actually feels like a lot less than that, since we mostly keep to our assigned sectors."

  "You know the real irony?" Clausen said. "We're the ones who get to call ourselves the Few now. The ones who aren't sleeping."

  "That doesn't leave anyone to actually do anything," Gaunt said. "There's no point in everyone waiting for a cure for death if there's no one alive to do the hard work of making it happen."

  Clausen turned round to look back at him, her expression telling him everything he needed to know about her opinion of his intellect.

  "It isn't about immortality. It's about survival. It's about doing our bit for the war effort."

  "What war?" Gaunt asked.

  "The one going on all around us," Clausen said. "The one you made happen."

  They came in to land on another rig, one of five that stood close enough to each other to be linked by cables and walkways. The sea was still heavy, huge waves dashing against the concrete piers on which the rigs were supported. Gaunt peered intently at the windows and decks but saw no sign of human activity on any of the structures. He thought back to what Clausen and Da Silva had told him, each time trying to find a reason why they might be lying to him, why they might be going to pathological lengths to hoax him about the nature of the world into which he had woken. Maybe there was a form of mass entertainment that involved waking sleepers such as himself and putting them through the emotional wringer, presenting them with the grimmest possible scenarios, ramping up the misery until they cracked, and only then pulling aside the grey curtains to reveal that, in marvellous point of fact, life in the twenty-third century really was every bit as blue-skied and Utopian as he had hoped. That didn't seem very likely, though.

  Yet what kind of war required people to be put to sleep in their billions? And why was the caretaker force, the 400,000 waking individuals, stretched so ridiculously thin? Clearly the rigs were largely automated but it had still been necessary to pull him out of sleep because someone else had died in the Patagonia offshore sector. Why not just have more caretakers awake in the first place, so that the system was able to absorb some losses?

  With the helicopter safely down on the pad, Clausen and Da Silva told him to follow them into the depths of the other rig. There was very little about it to distinguish it from the one where Gaunt had been woken, save for the fact that it was almost completely deserted, with the only activity coming from skulking repair robots. They were clearly very simple machines, not much smarter than automatic window-cleaners. Given the years of his life that he had given over to the dream of artificial intelligence, it was dismaying to see how little progress - if any - had been made.

  "We need to get one thing straight," Gaunt said, when they were deep into the humming bowels of the rig. "I didn't start any wars. You've got the wrong guy here."

  "You think we mixed up your records?" Clausen asked. "How did we know about your work on thinking machines?"

  "Then you've got the wrong end of the stick. I had nothing do to with wars or the military."

  "We know what you did," she said. "The years spent trying to build a true, Turing-compliant artificial intelligence. A thinking, conscious machine."

  "Except it was a dead end."

  "Still led to some useful spin-offs, didn't it?" she went on. "You cracked the hard problem of language comprehension. Your systems didn't just recognize speech. They were able to understand it on a level no computer system had ever achieved before. Metaphor, simile, sarcasm and understatement, even implication by omission. Of course, it had numerous civilian applications, but that isn't where you made your billions." She looked at him sharply.

  "I created a product," Gaunt said. "I simply made it available to whoever could afford it."

  "Yes, you did. Unfortunately, your system turned out to be the perfect instrument of mass surveillance for every despotic government left on the planet. Every basket-case totalitarian state still in existence couldn't get its hands on your product fast enough. And you had no qualms whatsoever about selling it, did you?"

  Gaunt felt a well-rehearsed argument bubbling up from his subconscious. "No communication tool in history has ever been a single-edged sword."

  "And that excuses you, does it?" Clausen asked. Da Silva had been silent in this exchange, observing the two of them as they continued along corridors and down stairwells.

  "I'm not asking for absolution. But if you think I started wars, if you think I'm somehow responsible for this ... " He gestured at his surroundings. "This fucked-up state of affairs. Then you're very, very wrong."

  "Maybe you weren't solely responsible," Clausen said. "But you were certainly complicit. You and every one else who pursued the dream of artificial intelligence. Driving the world towards the edge of that cliff, without a thought for the consequences. You had no idea what you were unleashing."

  "I'm telling you, we unleashed nothing. It didn't work."

  They were walking along a suspended gangway now, crossing from one side to the other of some huge space somewhere inside the rig. "Take a look down," Da Silva said. Gaunt didn't want to; he'd never been good with heights and the drainage holes in the floor were already too large for comfort. He forced himself anyway. The four walls of the cubic chamber held rack upon rack of coffin-sized white boxes, stacked thirty high and surrounded by complicated plumbing, accompanied by an equally complex network of access catwalks, ladders and service tracks. Even as Gaunt watched, a robot whirred up to one of the boxes and extracted a module from one end of it, before tracking sideways to deal with another coffin.

  "In case you thought we were yanking your chain," Clausen said. "This is real."

  The hibernation arrangements for the original Few could not have been more different. Like an Egyptian Pharaoh buried with his worldly possessions, Gaunt had required an entire crypt full of bulky, state-of-the-art cryopres
ervation and monitoring systems. At any one time, as per his contract with Sleepover, he would have been under the direct care of several living doctors. Just housing a thousand of the Few needed a building the size of a major resort hotel, with about the same power requirements. By contrast this was hibernation on a crushing, maximally efficient industrial scale. People in boxes, stacked like mass-produced commodities, tended by the absolute minimum of living caretakers. He was seeing maybe less than a thousand sleepers in this one chamber, but from that point on Gaunt had no doubt whatsoever that the operation could be scaled up to encompass billions.

  All you needed were more rooms like this. More robots and more rigs. Provided you had the power, and provided the planet did not need anyone to do anything else, it was eminently doable.

  There was no one to grow crops or distribute food. But that didn't matter because there was almost no one left waking to need feeding. No one to orchestrate the intricate, flickering web of the global finance system. But that didn't matter because there was no longer anything resembling an economy. No need for a transport infrastructure because no one travelled. No need for communications, because no one needed to know what was going on beyond their own sector. No need for anything really, save the absolute, life and death essentials. Air to breathe.

  Rations and medicine for less than half a million people. A trickle of oil, the world's last black hiccough, to keep the helicopters running.

  Yes, it could be done. It could easily be done.

  "There's a war," Da Silva said. "It's been going on, in some shape or form, since before you went under. But it's probably not the kind of war you're thinking of."

  "And where do these people come into it, these sleepers?"

  "They have no choice," Clausen said. "They have to sleep. If they don't, we all die."

  "We, as in ... ?"

  "You, me. Us," Da Silva said. "The entire human species."

  They collected Nero and the corpse from a sick bay several levels down from the freezer chamber. The corpse was already bagged, a silver-wrapped mummy on a medical trolley. Rather than the man Gaunt had been expecting, Nero turned out to be a tall, willowy woman with an open, friendly face and a mass of salmon-red curls.

  "You the newbie, right?" she asked, lifting a coffee mug in salute.

  "I guess," Gaunt said uneasily.

  "Takes some adjustment, I know. Took a good six months before I realized this wasn't the worst thing that could happen to me. But you'll get there eventually." One of Nero's hands was bandaged, a white mitten with a safety pin stuck through the dressing. "Take it from me, though. Don't go back inside the box." Then she glanced at Clausen. "You are giving him a chance about this, aren't you?"

  "Of course," Clausen said. "That's the deal."

  "Occurs to me sometimes maybe it would be easier if there wasn't a deal, you know," Nero said. "Like, we just give them their duties and to hell with it."

  "You wouldn't have been too pleased if we didn't give you the choice," Da Silva said. He was already taking off his coat, settling in for the stay.

  "Yeah, but what did I know back then? Six months feels like half a lifetime ago now."

  "When did you go under?" Gaunt asked.

  "Twenty ninety-two. One of the first 100 million."

  "Gaunt's got a head start on you," Clausen said. "Guy was one of the Few. The original Few, the first 200,000."

  "Holy shit. That is some head start." Nero narrowed her eyes. "He up to speed on things yet? My recollection is they didn't know what they were getting into back then."

  "Most of them didn't," Clausen said.

  "Know what?" Gaunt asked.

  "Sleepover was a cover, even then," Nero said. "You were being sold a scam. There was never any likelihood of an immortality breakthrough, no matter how long you slept."

  "I don't understand. You're saying it was all a con?"

  "Of a kind," Nero said. "Not to make money for anyone, but to begin the process of getting the whole of humanity into hibernation. It had to begin small, so that they had time to work the wrinkles out of the technology. If the people in the know had come out into the open and announced their plans, no one would have believed them. And if they had been believed, there'd have been panic and confusion all over the world. So they began with the Few, and then expanded the operation slowly. First a few hundred thousand. Then half a million. Then a million ... so on." She paused. "Establishing a pattern, a normal state of affairs. They kept the lid on it for thirty years. But then the rumours started spreading, the rumours that there was something more to Sleepover."

  "The dragons didn't help," Da Silva said. "It was always going to be a tall order explaining those away."

  "By the time I went under," Nero said, "most of us knew the score. The world was going to end if we didn't sleep. It was our moral duty, our obligation, to submit to the hibernation rigs. That, or take the euthanasia option. I took the freezer route, but a lot of my friends opted for the pill. Figured the certainty of death was preferable to the lottery of getting into the boxes, throwing the cosmic dice ..." She was looking at Gaunt intently, meeting his eyes as she spoke. "And I knew about this part of the deal, as well. That, at some point, there'd be a chance of me being brought out of sleep to become a caretaker. But, you know, the likelihood of that was vanishingly small. Never thought it would happen to me."

  "No one ever does," Clausen said.

  "What happened?" Gaunt asked, nodding at the foil-wrapped body.

  "Gimenez died when a steam pipe burst down on level eight. I don't think he felt much, it would have been so quick. I got down there as quickly as I could, obviously. Shut off the steam leak and managed to drag Gimenez back to the infirmary."

  "Nero was burned getting Gimenez back here," Da Silva said.

  "Hey, I'll mend. Just not much good with a screwdriver right now."

  "I'm sorry about Gimenez," Clausen said.

  "You don't need to be. Gimenez never really liked it here. Always figured he'd made the wrong decision, sticking with us rather than going back into the box. Tried to talk him round, of course, but it was like arguing with a wall." Nero ran her good hand through her curls. "Not saying I didn't get on with the guy. But there's no arguing that he's better off now than he was before."

  "He's dead, though," Gaunt said.

  "Technically. But I ran a full blood-scrub on him after the accident, pumped him full of cryoprotectant. We don't have any spare slots here, but they can put him back in a box on the operations rig."

  "My box," Gaunt said. "The one I was in."

  "There are other slots," Da Silva corrected. "Gimenez going back in doesn't preclude you following him, if that's what you want."

  "If Gimenez was so unhappy, why didn't you just let him go back into the box earlier?"

  "Not the way it works," Clausen said. "He made his choice. Afterwards, we put a lot of time and energy into bringing him up to speed, making him mesh with the team. You think we were going to willingly throw all that expenditure away, just because he changed his mind?"

  "He never stopped pulling his weight," Nero said. "Say what you will about Gimenez but he didn't let the team down. And what happened to him down on eight was an accident."

  "I never doubted it," Da Silva said. "He was a good guy. It's just a shame he couldn't make the adjustment."

  "Maybe it'll work out for him now," Nero said. "One-way ticket to the future. Done his caretaker stint, so the next time he's revived, it'll be because we finally got through this shit. It'll be because we won the war, and we can all wake up again. They'll find a way to fix him up, I'm sure. And if they can't, they'll just put him under again until they have the means."

  "Sounds like he got a good deal out of it in the end," Gaunt said.

  "The only good deal is being alive," Nero replied. "That's what we're doing now, all of us. Whatever happens, we're alive, we're breathing, we're having conscious thoughts. We're not frozen bodies stacked in boxes, merely existing from one instant to the n
ext." She gave a shrug. "My fifty cents, that's all. You want to go back in the box, let someone else shoulder the burden, don't let me talk you out of it." Then she looked at Da Silva. "You gonna be all right here on your own, until I'm straightened out?"

  "Someone comes up I can't deal with, I'll let you know," Da Silva said.

  Nero and Da Silva went through a checklist, Nero making sure her replacement knew everything he needed to, and then they made their farewells. Gaunt couldn't tell how long they were going to be leaving Da Silva alone out here, whether it was weeks or months. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if this kind of solitary duty was something they were all expected to do now and then. Given that there had been two people on duty here until Gimenez's death, Gaunt wondered why they didn't just thaw out another sleeper so that Da Silva wouldn't have to work on his own while Nero's hand was healing.

  Then, no more than half an hour after his arrival, they were back in the helicopter again, powering back to the operations rig. The weather had worsened in the meantime, the seas lashing even higher against the rigs' legs, and the horizon was now obscured behind curtains of storming rain, broken only by the flash of lightning.

  "This was bad timing," he heard Nero say. "Maybe you should have let me stew until this system had passed. It's not like Gimenez couldn't wait."

  "We were already overdue on the extraction," Clausen said. "If the weather clamps down, this might be our last chance for days."

  "They tried to push one through yesterday, I heard."

  "Out in Echo field. Partial coalescence."

  "Did you see it?"

  "Only on the monitors. Close enough for me."

  "We should put guns on the rigs."

  "And where would the manpower come from, exactly? We're just barely holding on as it is, without adding more shit to worry about."

  The two women were sitting up front; Gaunt was in the back with Gimenez's foil-wrapped corpse for company. They had folded back one seat to make room for the stretchered form.