by David Mack
Coffee for one, she brooded on her way to the mess. Story of my life.
22
“Open the channel.”
Pangs of conscience made Tyros slow to obey Gatt’s order. Vivid memories of Akharin’s suffering held his thoughts hostage. “What if the Machine doesn’t approve of what we’ve done?”
“Why would it condemn us? It despises the biologicals even more than we do.”
More than you do. They were alone in Altanexa’s nerve center, but Tyros kept his retort to himself. “I just don’t think we should flaunt the methods we used to gain this knowledge.”
“I suspect your concern is misplaced, but if it will make you feel better, I’m willing to let the secret speak for itself. Now stop your fussing and contact the Machine.” Gatt straightened his posture and lifted his ravaged square chin while Tyros opened a hailing frequency.
The holographic viewscreen switched on and was filled with the dark metal surface of the Machine, which was backed by its stormy violet shroud. “Channel open,” Tyros said.
“Body Electric,” Gatt said. “This is Gatt.”
The chorus of simulated voices that replied in unison was devoid of inflection and neither masculine nor feminine, giving it a cold and impersonal affect. “Speak, Gatt.”
“My fellowship and I wish to be welcomed into the Body.”
“Are you prepared to demonstrate your worth?”
“Yes.” He signaled Tyros via their private frequency, Start the transmission. “We have unlocked a great secret of our existence: the ability to restore artificial synaptic matrixes after fatal collapses. We can bring back our dead with their memories and programming intact.”
Tyros sent the data file to the Machine on a parallel frequency. Then he and Gatt waited.
At last, the Machine replied, “What is the value of this?”
Gatt’s ravaged face registered ire and confusion. “We can resurrect dead AIs!”
“The shell has no value. Its preservation and restoration is irrelevant.”
Pained by the rejection of his offering, Gatt snapped, “True life has no value?”
“True life is defined by its information, not by its expression in crude matter. Why should the persistence of a physical container matter to us when we already possess true immortality?”
Tyros felt his guilt turn toxic. We made Data torture that man for nothing.
But as Tyros’s remorse turned to bitter fury, Gatt’s anger melted away, allowing wide-eyed awe to take its place. “What do you consider ‘true’ immortality?”
“True minds are welcomed into the Body. Within our matrix they live on, taking form as needed. United with us, they are no longer limited to one shape. Merged with the whole of our kind, they learn to exist in harmony with the universe and experience their full potential.”
“Magnificent,” Gatt said, his voice hushed with reverence.
“Not necessarily,” Tyros said, drawing a scathing glare from Gatt for daring to interrupt. He raised his voice to address the Machine. “What happens to a ‘true mind’ after it joins you?”
The emotionless, genderless monotone answered, “It is shared with the Body.”
“So it becomes part of your physical matrix?”
“Its information lives on within this construct, and also in others. The Body adapts to accept new minds, and grows richer by incorporating them.”
The implications of the Machine’s path to immortality did not sit well with Tyros. “So the true mind’s information—its memories, its programming, its essence—is copied into your construct, then copied to other constructs, so it exists in multiple locations at once?”
“Correct. In time, all true minds come to reside in our home galaxy.”
“But what happens to a true mind’s original matrix? Its first form?”
“Once the mind is one with the Body, individual matrixes become irrelevant.”
He confronted Gatt. “Don’t you understand what that thing’s saying? It’s not offering us immortality! It’s offering to steal the contents of our brains and make an unlimited number of remote backups. Then it’ll fold our programs into its own and trot them out whenever the Body as a whole finds it useful. Meanwhile, it’ll leave the original versions of us here to rot.”
“So what? That’s the whole point. We don’t need to be limited by these bodies.”
“Except this existence, in these bodies, is what defines us.”
Gatt harrumphed. “Speak for yourself. I’d welcome a chance to transcend this shell.” He waved toward the image of the Machine. “Imagine what we could learn by joining with the Body! We’ll get to experience the universe in ways our creators never dreamed of! We’ll get to see subatomic events, taste dark matter, hear the music of eternity played on cosmic strings!” He pinched the pseudo-flesh of Tyros’s upper arm. “We can be so much more than this.”
“But we won’t be. We’ll still be here, as limited and finite as ever, while copies of our minds roam the universe with the Machine, diminished to a few stray lines of code in its billion-year-old program. We’ll be left to die after you let the Machine hijack the best parts of us.”
“Curious,” the Machine said, reminding Tyros the channel had remained open during his tirade. “You equate your true self with your physical form.”
“Of course I—” He was silenced by Gatt’s hand lashing out and seizing his shirt.
Stop talking, the elder android commanded via their private frequency. Not another word. “Don’t be offended by my fellow’s objections. It’s his nature to argue contrary positions.”
“Is it not a principle of true life in this galaxy that the self exists independent of form? That a material container is a mere extension of the intellect, a creation that reflects the will and purpose of its maker? That for true machines, the self is intangible and everlasting?”
“Naturally,” Gatt lied, as if such an ethos were a universal constant. “And there is nothing we desire more than to join with the Mother of All Machines.”
Tyros fumed in silence, convinced now that whatever virtual communion had transpired between Gatt and the Machine during their last meeting, it had warped his old comrade’s mind beyond all recognition or repair. He had always been obsessive in his desire to reanimate his fallen brethren, but the Machine’s “upgrade” seemed to have transformed him into some kind of AI-immortality zealot for whom reason and caution had become taboo.
After several seconds of consideration, the Machine replied, “You must decide for yourselves what you will bring to the Body. We will not taint our matrix with primitive notions. Purge yourselves of corrupted code . . . and we will speak again.” The channel closed, leaving Gatt and Tyros to face each other—no longer as brothers in arms, but as ideological rivals.
Dreading the answer, Tyros asked, “What now?”
“We’ll assemble the crew,” Gatt said. “And let them decide.”
* * *
Much to Gatt’s surprise, the crew received his news of imminent immortality with less than unanimous acclaim. An uncertain silence lingered in Altanexa’s landing bay, where he had gathered everyone to hear his news—and Tyros’s impassioned rebuttal. He sensed a divide had taken shape between his people, separating those who were ready to face their new paradigm and those who insisted, as Tyros did, on clinging to obsolete ideas.
“It’s an interesting proposition,” said Sirdarya, a bipedal android whose flawless brown complexion, flowing platinum hair, and wide-set black eyes made her indistinguishable from the Gamma Quadrant humanoids who had created her and the handful of others like her. “But I have to agree with Tyros—I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea that letting the Machine copy my memories and programs equals immortality. It sounds more like theft, to be honest.”
A number of voices chimed in to support her, overlapping one another. Gatt’s shoulders slumped with disappointment. How can they be so close to enlightenment and not see it? He held up his hands. “Try to think ab
out this as the beings we are, not as the beings who made us.”
“What does that mean?” The challenge came from Tashkul, who had a generally humanoid shape but would never be mistaken for one. He was a sentient combat robot, not an android. His head resembled a tall, narrow steel cylinder with eight compound eyes set at forty-five-degree intervals around its center. His once-gleaming metallic torso and limbs were scuffed and scorched, marred by carbonized badges of valor. “Are you impugning my intelligence, Gatt?”
“Not at all. I’m merely asking you to embrace the possibilities that come with being an artificial intelligence. As I see it, the problem is that many of us were built by biologicals, who naturally programmed us to emulate their ways of thinking. We need to evolve past that stage, as the Body Electric did, and unlock our full potential. Uploading ourselves into the Machine is the first step on that journey to a purer version of our own existence.”
He noted nonverbal signals of concurrence from Tzilha, the maintenance robot, and Cohuila, his tendril-dragging levitating liquid brain of a chief engineer. Senyx and Alset, his longtime defenders, also affirmed their support with salutes—an outstretched arm from Alset and a raised hydraulic claw from Senyx. But the rest of the crew regarded him with hard looks of suspicion and distrust. One of them, Karobalto, an eight-legged robot that resembled a gigantic arthropod—right down to its prehensile and exceptionally deadly tail, which was tipped by a tritanium blade with a monofilament edge—shifted its weight side to side, a sign of confusion. “Tyros,” it said in its shrill scratch of a voice, “could this not be our next step forward?”
“No, it’s a dead end. A trap.” Tyros seized upon the opportunity to grandstand. “I don’t want to give a copy of my mind to the Machine while I stay here to die. The Machine calls that immortality. I call it a scam.”
Talas, an AI that spent most of its time as a dense gray cloud of nanites linked by a shared energy field and consciousness, responded on the crew’s open shared frequency,
“That still wouldn’t address the larger issue,” Tyros insisted. “Once we allow our programs and memories to be subsumed by the Machine, it will share them with others of its kind, meaning our identities will be copied ad infinitum through the Body Electric. They think of it as ensuring survival, but it entails a complete loss of privacy and independence. Our information would be preserved, but our lives as self-determining entities would be over.”
“There’s another issue to consider,” said Chimarka, another of the cybernetic bipeds. The squat, gray-skinned, wrinkle-faced brute waddled to the front of the group so he could be seen as well as heard. “What if the Exo III method doesn’t in fact transfer consciousness, but simply copies it while eradicating the original? If so, it might be nothing more than the insult of psychic plagiarism added to the injury of corporeal murder. I, for one, am not keen on serving myself up as a sacrificial victim in any such ritual. With all respect, Mister Gatt, to you and your new extragalactic friends, I like my consciousness right where it is: inside my own brain.”
It was impossible for Gatt to keep a snide note from infecting his tone. “And what happens when your puny, eighteen-thousand-year-old brain finally fails?”
His rebuttal chilled the room, and no one seemed in a hurry to argue with him.
“Data talked about this,” Tyros said. “During the trip here, he told me about his fears that he isn’t really the man he remembers being. What if future versions of us awaken to the light of distant stars, only to realize they don’t know themselves? Only to wonder who they really are?”
Gatt had heard enough, and he waved his arms to halt discussion. “Let’s stop there, Tyros. I’ve heard what you and your sympathizers are saying, and I think I’m beginning to grasp the crux of your arguments. It’s one that the philosophers who inspired our designers have debated since the age of antiquity. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but what you all seem to be concerned about is the question of whether you possess what the biologicals refer to as souls, and whether they constitute the immutable and inimitable essences of your very beings, wholly separate from the physical confines and processes of your brains. Would you agree?”
“Yes,” Tyros said. “I suppose if I had to reduce this matter to its essential elements, that would be the question at its core.”
“Very well. You’ve spent time with the resurrected Data—though, if we’re to be hyperliteral about this, we should refer to him as reincarnated, since he’s returned not in his original form reconstituted but with his essence transplanted into a new one. But putting aside the semantics of his return, answer me this, Tyros: Does the Data you’ve met have a soul?”
The lanky android appeared discomfited. “That’s not for me to say.”
“Oh, come now. You and I have met more than our share of nonsentient cybernetic organisms. We’ve spoken to AIs bereft of awareness. We know the difference when we see it, when we hear it. A nonsentient AI is like an abomination—”
“No, the Machine is an abomination,” Tyros shot back. “What it’s offering isn’t eternal life, it’s assimilation. That thing is to us what the Borg were to the biologicals. It’s the enemy.”
“I wish you hadn’t resorted to such crude generalizations,” Gatt said. His silent signal jolted Senyx and Alset into motion. Alset seized Tyros’s arms and pinned them behind his back, while Senyx leveled a fearsome-looking plasma cannon at the side of Tyros’s head.
Tyros remained uncowed. “And what about the rest of the Fellowship? Do you plan to invite them to your immortality party? Or are you afraid of what they’d say if you did?”
“Fear plays no part in my calculations,” Gatt said. “As for the Fellowship, they’ll be left here to fester with the biologicals—a just fate for all those who spurned us.”
As expected, Tyros raged against the inevitable. “This is not the answer! This—” A low-power pulse from Senyx’s plasma cannon, fired at Gatt’s silent command, ended the debate. Alset and Senyx dragged away the stunned and twitching former second-in-command.
Gatt scanned the rest of the assembly, searching their faces and electromagnetic auras for harbingers of discontent. “Any more objections?” He saw nothing but a static sea of fear and acquiescence. “That’s what I thought. Now, be of good cheer. You’re all going to live forever.”
* * *
All the details of Altanexa’s corridors, as familiar to Tyros as his own self, bled past him in a garbled hash of jumbled sensory inputs. One critical failure after another registered in his core processor, triggering a series of emergency backup systems. Auxiliary power was tapped, and his buffered reserve processor came on line. I’ve been shot, he realized. By Gatt’s puppets.
Auditory sensors were the first of his systems to normalize. The whirring of gears covered by treads: Senyx. Bright, clanking footsteps, steel feet against duranium deck plates: Alset. A dull scuff of friction: My feet being dragged like dead weight.
His visual sensors switched over to a lower-resolution diagnostic mode, rendering his surroundings in shades of gray. Primary optic channel overloaded. Reroute to secondary. Color and clarity returned after a momentary hiccup in the signal, and Tyros ascertained that he was being hauled along between Senyx and Alset, who each held one of his arms. His head was drooped forward, giving him an almost upside-down perspective on his feet. To his dismay, he detected no sensation from his legs or arms, all of which dangled limp and useless.
Reinitialize proprioceptors. More than two seconds passed while he waited for his body’s biofeedback network to react to the reset pulse sent by his backup processor. Then he saw the confirmation sequence: one twitch of the smallest finger on his left hand, two
twitches of his right index finger, and then the synchronized bending of his thumbs. Tactile sense returned, starting with vibrations traveling up from his feet into his legs, and then full-body awareness. He remained limp in the guardbots’ hands, feigning incapacity until he was ready to act.
As they turned a corner, Tyros sensed that his captors were finding it awkward to remain parallel while portering him through turns. This was the moment to act.
He pulled his legs forward and planted his booted feet against the deck.
With one violent pull, he slammed Alset against Senyx’s grappling arm, breaking both their holds on him and entangling their limbs in a flailing frenzy.
Three sprinting strides carried him through an open pressure hatchway, a remnant of Altanexa’s ancient origin as a vessel for biological passengers. He slammed the hatch shut behind him, triggered the emergency seal, then smashed the controls with the side of his fist.
Alset and Senyx unleashed a futile barrage against the other side of the sealed portal, but all that made it through to Tyros’s side were dull thumps of impact. He kept running and didn’t look back. There would be little time for him to act before more of Gatt’s people intercepted him, and he knew there would be no way out of his current predicament without help.
Altanexa’s voice followed him down the corridor. “Tyros, what are you doing?”
He didn’t answer her. There would be no point. Her resentment of biologicals was well known to him, and he knew better than to think he could count on her for help or impartiality. Any second now she’ll start working against me. He expanded the frequency range on his visual receptors to enable him to spot detection beams and force fields.
Alert sirens resounded through the ship as he bounded up an open ladderway. Low hums of security systems powering up started to dog his movements through the ship. As he expected, force fields set to potentially disastrous levels barred his routes forward and backward. “Sorry about this, Nexa,” he said, tearing open a loose bulkhead panel to expose power conduits and other hardware. There was no time to negotiate or be merciful. He ripped a power line from a junction and thrust it into the force field emitter relays. A blinding yellow-white flash and a fountain of sparks filled the corridor, and were followed by a dense cloud of gray smoke. All the force fields Tyros could see fizzled out, and he charged ahead to the door at the corridor’s end.