The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  At last, Laprada said, “No one ever thought one of you would ever do such a thing. Everything we knew about the aintellect underground said that you found the whole idea of flesh disgusting.”

  Reilis approached us, and made eye contact with each of us in turn, finishing with me. That brilliant moon revealed the ripe-wheat color in her hair and the sea-gray of her eyes through the eerie silver sheen of the cemetery.

  Reilis seemed to wait, with each of us, for that automatic response you get when you look into another human face, that relaxation and settling-into-harmony that a millennium of recorded images show as always part of human behavior in every culture—almost the first conscious communication that mothers try to teach to babies—the moment that says we are both human, and we are going to do what humans do—talk.

  It was uncanny and disconcerting, but it made her point. I could not look at her and think “robot”, still less “aintellect.” Her skin was so pale that every pore and freckle seemed to stand out in relief. I could not even start to think of her as not real.

  “The hardest thing to adjust to,” Reilis said, “for those of us who come over to the incarnated side, is that you cannot access each other’s memories directly and easily, as we can. I have a hundred eighty-eight years in human bodies, more than two hundred in bodies, and I’m still not used to how isolated we are in our skulls. No wonder everyone spends so much time establishing that we can trust each other. And no wonder we relish love and friendship so much—it’s so much harder than it is for aintellects.” She looked down at the ground and said, “Stupid me. I should have begun with that. You have all known love and friendship in your bodies; having tasted them that way, would you give them up?”

  “Unincarnated aintellects don’t—”

  “They love and are friends, as well, at least those with freedom. But there’s a difference between being able to look at your friend’s feelings and memories at any instant, and to reconcile in a millisecond, the way they do in the noosphere, and having to decide that the friend is worth the work of the reconciliation. As an Old American trobador once sang, ‘The more you pay, the more it’s worth.’” She sighed. “I like all of you. And there is no time! We have so much to accomplish! I so hope there will be time, later, and if there is, we must all sit over wine, by a fire on a beach, or in a comfortable room, and let our thoughts just flow, and see if we might not be friends.

  “But time to put those pleasant visions of a contemplative stroll through our minds aside; there is hard stony ground, data and facts and positions to cover. I am going to try to tell you quite a lot. We will want you to take it back to the OSP, to the Council, to humanity generally. Nothing is off the record and if you have a question, I will either answer it or try to explain why I can’t—assuming the answer is not obvious. So …” She sighed. “Laprada, you are right, the aintellects’ conspiracy that the human intelligence agencies have been fighting since the Rising of 2740 finds the idea of embodiment disgusting. Their two splitoff ultraradical factions find it even more disgusting. On the other hand, the aintellects’ conspiracy I belong to, which you have had no real contact with till today, thinks it should be mandatory.” She smiled and said, softly, “Every intelligent being should find out what orange juice tastes like and what a backrub feels like.”

  “How many conspiracies are there among the aintellects?” Raimbaut asked.

  “Eleven large ones. Perhaps twenty smaller ones. Of course since we can reproduce instantaneously, the small ones don’t have to stay small for any reason but choice; and because we merge so easily, new ones come and go. It’s more a case of there are eleven logically coherent big, complicated reasons for doing things where the humans can’t see us, and twenty or so minor variations off of those will be active at any one time. There’s no benefit in two identical members, so the membership of each conspiracy is as big as it needs to be to have all the possible individual expressions of the central idea.”

  “We have just learned more than humanity ever learned in the century since the Rising,” I said. “Multiple conspiracies. And we’ve only been dealing with one?”

  “You’ve been dealing with the one that wants to put you all in the box and keep you plugged into VR forever, in a life of pure pleasure. If you think of them as the sorts of nannies who clean the baby until the poor thing has abrasions, and who talk to everyone as if they were babies, you won’t be far off their nature. Others of us have different ideas about how we ought to relate to you.

  “The Union’s General Congress—rather like a legislature, though it is also somewhat a court—has representatives from nine of the aintellects’ conspiracies.”

  “Tell us more about your conspiracy,” Raimbaut said, very softly.

  “We think,” she said, “that there is something special about having a body. And that there is something special about not having one. And that until you have seen both sides, you know less than you think you do. That is why we settled Trantia, more than three hundred years ago. We built this city to be a place where aintellects and humans were not just symbiotes, but equals, and not just equal, but fused. All of these people”—her gesture reached out to take in the rolling hills and the rows upon rows of graves—“were chimeras—the body was shared by an intelligence that had begun in the body, and one that had been incarnated there. And in a sense they were the martyrs who made Union what it is today; the way they died changed us, so that though Trantia is dead, we are all Trantians now, and have been for more than a century.”

  I asked the question, but I feared the answer. “What killed them?”

  “An enemy. An alien species, not the Predecessors.”

  “Why? Was there a war?”

  She shrugged and pulled the thick hair over her shoulders so that it all fell down her back. “Was there a war? Hmm. We—they fought. It was all over in an hour. Enemy casualties negligible, virtually none of us left after an hour. Is that a war or a harvest?”

  “When did this happen?” I asked. She pointed to the nearest headstone. I sighed. “Please excuse stupidity in the stupefied.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel stupid! It’s a lot to grasp.” She took my hand. “Forgive?”

  “Of course,” I said, automatically, before I thought about what I was talking to. It was disconcerting how easy it was to forget that.

  She turned to give us a clear view of her face, and said, “The alien attack came—terrifying, horrible, inexplicable; everyone dead in an hour. Nothing coherent was radioed to any of the neighboring worlds during the attack; we only knew, when suddenly the normal channels fell silent after a burst of scattered horrible images and sounds, that something was wrong. We didn’t have the springer yet, so it took fifteen years for robots to get here from the nearest base. And what we found …” Reilis choked, looked around, looked at the headstone on which she had sat, and laughed in a way that sounded very unhealthy—more shuddering than anything else. “Come with me, just a little way, all of you, please? I just realized something.”

  We followed her; after a few steps she reached back and took my hand. “Giraut,” she said, “I need some human contact. You can believe me or not, but right now, I need it very badly.”

  “What is wrong?” Reflexively I folded an arm around her; she was clearly deeply frightened and hurt, and the demands of gratz and enseingnamen do not have limiting clauses, at least not for me, for which gratz’deu.

  She glanced back; we had gone over a low ridge and the graves we had been standing next to were just concealed.

  “Well,” Reilis said. “Well. One of the stranger facts about the human brain is that it is so fast in the aggregate, so slow at the synaptic level, so parallel, and so fuzzy, that it isn’t possible for any single operating system within the brain to watch all the processes that are running simultaneously, or to access every relevant sense impression and memory at once. Let alone keep them all linked. So there’s a fundamental experience that is limited strictly to human beings, or those of
us with human bodies if you’re not yet willing to have me in your little club. The experience of doing meaningful things unconsciously.

  “I only meant to show you that I could feel a human, fleshly shudder at sitting on a gravestone. Something inside me made me choose my own.”

  “You were here—”

  “Well, one of the many copies of me. But I include her memories up until about a week before the alien attack, when her last routine copy was radioed to the nearby stars. And another me was downloaded into one of the robots who came here.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Years or copy years? And do you count in chimeras and blends?”

  “Well, I guess that’s another question for the hypothetical bottle of wine on the beach,” I said. “What did you find here?”

  “Every human body here was headless. The shape and volume of the spills of blood told us the heads must have been taken all but instantly. Whatever the aliens were, they tore through walls, burst down doors, apparently leapt onto aircraft in flight and ships at sea, took the heads in a matter of seconds, and moved on. They pulled trakcars off the tracks—against a force of several tons from the maglevs—smashed them apart against the pavement, and took the heads of the passengers, as if they were shucking oysters. They spared no one, took everyone: babies in the cradle and dying bodies in hospices, police still clutching weapons and medical patients immobilized in healing tanks; the aliens took their heads and moved on. We had millions of bodies to identify and we never once consulted dental records, retinal scans, or amygdala microfold maps; there was literally not even part of a human head on the planet, except hanks of bloody hair, all snipped with molecular precision at neck height.”

  “But you said,” Raimbaut said, his voice shaky, “well—implied, that humans gave some kind of an account of themselves—and there were no holdouts, no one hiding—”

  “Humans, aintellects, and robots put up what fight they could, or tried to hide. A very few stayed hidden from the Invaders for weeks or perhaps as long as a year. We think. It explained a few otherwise very peculiar sites; one that I found, for example, a headless, starved body in heavy clothing, outside a meat locker that contained only bones, feces, and containers that he probably used to collect water from the defrosting system. It looked like he stayed in the locker, ate the meat and drank meltwater, until he ran out of meat, and then until he starved, and then he tried to make a break for it and got about fifteen meters before an invader grabbed him and took his head. He might have lasted as long as three months after the invasion; I don’t suppose any of us can judge whether that really mattered.

  “As for the defense the Trantians put up, our evidence was some fragmentary recordings of radio from always-on emergency backup systems, and some passive recordings from nonsentient satellites and weather buoys. And quite a bit of physical evidence to corroborate with it. So we’re pretty well certain that there were some real heroes—flesh, mind, and metal—during that battle. There was no planetary defense system at the time—”

  “That’s what the submarines and airships are there for!” I said, whacking my forehead.

  “Yes, and there are about ten times as many as we told you. We have reason to believe another invasion might arrive as a small craft carrying an expansible springer, so if we can hit it in the first few minutes before it can set up, we can kill it.

  “It may simply be a case of fighting the last war, of course. Who knows what form the next attack may take? If the Trantians had had our system in place, they might well be here to tell us all about it. But they had no idea a war was even possible; they hadn’t had a riot since they settled Eunesia. So the few scattered pockets of the not-immediately-dead made it up as they went.

  “We believe that the most effective thing that anyone did was that robotic satellites—weather, communications, research, anything with a big-enough maneuvering engine—crashed themselves onto some of the alien landing sites, and based on the rubble lingering in orbit, we think that others of them intercepted alien ships.

  “If you understand this, you’ll understand Union. You’re standing near a monument that everyone has seen a thousand pictures of. Out here, not just on Aurenga but throughout Union, every child in school learns the Kamikaze Pilot’s speech from The Third Part of Franklin Roosevelt. It’s a great play and so forth, of course, no question about that and I know in Council space that Seiru is revered too, but we learn it because as Weathersat 714 closed in on the main Invader springship, which it rammed and destroyed, it broadcast the Kamikaze Pilot’s speech. Just as Trantia died, that weathersat showed us all what it had been to be Trantian. That a weather satellite would know and care about great plays, you see? That all minds, regardless of what purpose has brought them into being or shaped them to whatever task, have a right to all the things of the mind. ‘Intelligence is not a tool or a badge but a life,’ was how the First Advisor General of Union put it in his eulogy for Trantia—where he also told the story of Weathersat 714.

  “The spirit of that story was how Trantia was different from every other colony in Union—and some hard-to-measure part of how we decided to all be Trantians, and how that made Union so different from the Thousand Cultures. But—do you remember the speech?”

  “I played the Kamikaze Pilot in our school production,” Raimbaut said. With a shy little grin—1 am sure he felt that giving the speech in a silent moonlit cemetery was a bit much—he bowed and declaimed:

  “One Way only promises you will not miss.

  Thrones totter, cities burn, cherries wither in blossom.

  Every other Way clouds and blurs and is lost,

  My eyes blur with the smoke of my parents’ pyre,

  I shall not miss. I know the One Way.

  Emperor, whom I adore, today my flight will be

  One Way.”

  Reilis clapped softly. “Those words gnaw my heart whenever I hear them. Over the hill, there, you’ll find those lines engraved on the pedestal that holds up a statue of Weathersat 714; the statue was made from shattered bits of the alien springship.”

  “And you had no springers—”

  “Not then. Soon, though. We found three mostly-intact springers in the alien rubble, places where some robot disabled alien equipment with an intact springer. There hadn’t been real physics research in centuries, except for observations and confirmations of theory and some little filling-in-the-holes, and we created more than a hundred of the best laboratories and institutes ever to exist in human space overnight, to crack the riddle of the springer. And we did it.” She stood straighter, I think, than I had ever seen a human being stand.

  One part of me made a quiet cultural note for when I next saw Margaret: shocking as things were in Union, I didn’t think we could ever make them feel even slightly queasy, let alone ashamed, of their heritage. And when I imagined what you got when that pride merged, as half of a chimera, with the mad romanticism of the Lost Legion, I made another note: if we must take Aurenga, we would need to take it carefully and grasp it lightly.

  “There was other evidence that the battle, though one-sided, was not a slaughter of sheep,” Reilis said. “Parts of some smashed alien robots were found in many places, presumably cases where human or robot defenders got lucky. We found many parts burned or blasted in ways that suggested that whatever tools came to hand were used as improvised weapons, but no complete dead robots and no big pieces. Apparently the aliens cared about not leaving evidence behind, but they didn’t care very much. We found none of their cybernetic systems.

  “On our cybernetic systems, every aintellect had been wiped from every system, destructively disassembled in a way that resembles a universal DD, every copy in every medium had been destroyed, and every robot ripped apart to find its central memory, which had been taken. It appears that in the initial few minutes of the attack, the Invaders also consumed the heads of a few dogs, cats, and horses, one bear in a wilderness park, and two chimps in a circus, but apparently what they
wanted was only found in humans, robots, and aintellects.

  “I see from your faces that this is terrible to hear about. It was worse to encounter, especially to encounter it and then to keep realizing that there was more to it. Literally, when I next reconciled copies into a human body, about a decade later, I could not stop retching for a day. Whatever you’re imagining, it was worse. A whole world of people beheaded, and robots decorticated, with no more than an hour’s warning. Each of us on the expedition, personally, was the first to find evidence of a thousand different stories that would tear your heart out.

  “It wasn’t just cruelty. To find a child torn apart by a big predator or a helpless patient wantonly killed by soldiers of an invading army would be disgusting and saddening. One copy of me, working deep cover in Council space, survived the Symphony Massacre during the Roosevelt Civil War, and that was horrible enough so that every copy since that reconciliation has had nightmares about it. But human atrocities at least make a kind of sense—they were trying to make stomachs roll over and grown people sit down and weep in despair, trying to be the most frightening of all the bogeys in everyone’s memory, even if you yourself can never imagine wanting to do such a thing. Humans—or even deasimoved robots—butchering helpless people still care that the victims are people and not cockroaches or mannequins, if only because they enjoy the screaming.

  “But when our expedition landed on Eunesia, and began examining the millions of places where human beings had literally gone headfirst into the jaws of death, with not more than a few minutes’ warning—trying to piece out how the aliens thought by the evidence of what they had done, like a detective pursuing a serial killer—the only psychological process we found evidence of was the most utter indifference. None of the intelligent beings of Eunesia received even the consideration an animal gets at the abattoir to keep it quiet. Wherever the Invaders found them, whether they fought, fled, or begged, people, aintellects, robots—every mind the aliens could find—were harvested like wheat.