Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  Lieserl? Can you hear me? Are you all right?

  She thrust her arms down by her sides and swooped up into the convective-zone “air”; she looped the loop backwards, letting the floor and roof of this cavern world wheel around her. She opened up her new senses, so that she could feel the turbulence of the gas, with its almost terrestrial density, as a breeze against her skin, and the warm glow of hard photons diffusing out from the core was no more than a gentle warmth against her face.

  Lieserl?

  She suppressed a sigh.

  “Yes. Yes, Kevan. I’m perfectly all right.”

  Damn it, Lieserl, you’re going to have to respond properly. Things are difficult enough without —

  “I know. I’m sorry. How are you feeling, anyway?”

  Me? I’m fine. But that’s hardly the point, is it? Now come on, Lieserl, the team here are getting on my back; let’s run through the tests.

  “You mean I’m not down here to enjoy myself?”

  The tests, Lieserl.

  “Yeah. Okay, electromagnetic first.” She adjusted her sensorium. “I’m plunged into darkness,” she said drily. “There’s very little free radiation at any frequency — perhaps an X-ray glow from the photosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And — ”

  Come on, Lieserl. We know the systems are functioning. I need to know what you see, what you feel.

  “What I feel?”

  She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the buffeting air. She opened her eyes again.

  The huge semistable convection cells around her reached from the photosphere to the base of the convective zone; they buffeted against each other like living things, huge whales in this insubstantial sea of gas. And the honeycomb of activity was driven by the endless flux of energetic photons out of the radiative sea of plasma beneath her.

  “I feel wonderful,” she said. “I see fountains. A cave-full of them.”

  Good. Keep talking, Lieserl. You know what we’re trying to achieve here; your senses — your Virtual senses — are composites, constructs from a wide variety of inputs. I can see the individual elements are functioning; what I need to know is how well the Virtual sensorium is integrating —

  “Fine.” She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face-down, surveying the plasma sea below her.

  Lieserl, what now?

  She adjusted her eyes once more. The flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. “I see the magnetic flux,” she reported. “I can see what I want to see. It’s all working the way it’s supposed to, I think; I can pick out whatever feature of the world I choose, here.”

  “World”?

  “Yes, Kevan.” She glanced up at the photosphere, the symbolic barrier separating her forever from the Universe of humanity. “This is my world, now.”

  Maybe, just don’t lose yourself down there, Lieserl.

  “I won’t.”

  It sounded as if there was some sympathy in his voice — knowing Kevan, there probably was; they had grown almost close in the few days she’d had left after her tour with him around the Sun.

  But it was hard to tell. The communication channel linking them was a path through the wormhole, from the Interface fixed among the habitats outside the Sun to the portal which had been dropped into the Sun, and which now sustained her. The comms link was ingenious, and seemed reliable, but it wasn’t too good at relaying complex intonations.

  Tell me about the flux tubes.

  The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels of magnetic energy cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.

  Lieserl dipped into a tube, into its interior; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. She lowered her head and allowed herself to soar along the length of the tube, so that its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. “It’s terrific,” she said. “I’m in an immense tunnel; it’s like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun.”

  Maybe. I don’t know if we need the poetry, Lieserl. What about other tubes? Can you still see them?

  “Yes.” She turned her head, and induced currents in her Virtual body made her face sparkle with radiation. “I can see hundreds, thousands of the tubes, all curving through the air — ”

  The “air”?

  “The convective zone gases. The other tubes are parallel with mine, more or less.” She sought for a way to convey the sensation. “I feel as if I’m sliding around the scalp of some immense giant, Kevan, following the lines of hairs.”

  Scholes laughed. Well, that’s not a bad image. The flux tubes can tangle, or break, but they can’t intersect. Just like hair.

  “You know, this is almost relaxing…”

  Good. Again she detected that hint of sympathy — or was it pity? — in Kevan’s voice. I’m glad you’re feeling — ah — happy in yourself, Lieserl.

  She let the crisp magnetic flux play over her cheeks, sharp, bright, vivid. “My new self. Well, it’s an improvement on the old; you have to admit.”

  Now the flux tube curved away, consistently, to the right; she was forced to deflect to avoid crashing through the tube’s insubstantial walls.

  In following the tube she became aware that she was tracing out a spiral path. She let herself relax into the motion, and watched the cave-world beyond the tube wheel around her. The flux tubes neighboring her own had become twisted into spirals, too, she realized; she was following one strand in a rope of twisted-together flux tubes.

  Lieserl, what’s happening? We can see your trajectory’s altering, fast.

  “I’m fine, Kevan. I’ve got myself into a rope, that’s all…”

  Lieserl, you should get out of there.

  She let the tube’s path sweep her around. “Why? This is fun.”

  Maybe. But the rope is heading for the photosphere. It isn’t a good idea for you to break the surface; we’re concerned about the stability of the wormhole —

  Lieserl sighed and let herself slow. “Oh, damn it, Kevan, you’re just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go.”

  Lieserl —

  She slid out of the flux tube, relishing the sharp scent of the magnetic field as she cut across it. “All right, Kevan. I’m at your service. What next?”

  We’re not done with the tests yet, Lieserl. I’m sorry.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  One more…

  “Just tell me.”

  Run a full self-check, Lieserl, just for a few minutes… Drop the Virtual constructs.

  She hesitated. “Why? I thought you said you could tell the systems were functioning to specification, and — ”

  They are. That’s not the point… We’re still testing how well integrated they are —

  “Integrated into my sensorium. Why don’t you just say what you’re after, Kevan? You want to test how conscious this machine called Lieserl is. Right?”

  Lieserl, you don’t need to make this difficult for me. Scholes sounded defensive. This is a standard suite of tests for any AI which —

  “All right, damn it.”

  She closed her eyes, and with a sudden, impulsive, stab of will, she let her Virtual image of herself — the illusion of a human body around her — crumble.

  It was like — what? Like waking from a dream, a soft, comfortable dream of childhood, waking to find herself entombed in a machine, a crude construct of bolts and cords and gears.

  But even that was an illusion, she thought, a metaphor for herself behind which she was hiding.

  She considered herself.

  The wormhole Interface was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing hot gas of the convective zone poured into its triangular faces, so that the Interface was embedded in a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun’s flesh. That material
was being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; there, convection zone gases emerged, blazing, making the drifting tetrahedron into a second, miniature Sun around which orbited the fragile human habitat called Thoth.

  Thus the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive with its precious, fragile cargo of data stores… The stores which sustained the awareness of herself. And the flux of matter through the Interface’s planes was controlled, to enable her to move the Interface through the body of the Sun.

  She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.

  At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing, the patterns of bits which, together, comprised her memories. Then, overlaid on that — visually, if she willed it, like a ghostly superstructure — was her logical level, the data storage and access paths which represented the components of her consciousness.

  Good… Good, Lieserl. You’re sending us good data.

  She traced paths and linkages through the interleaved and interdependent structures of her own personality. “It’s functioning well. To specification. Even beyond. I — ”

  We know that. But, Lieserl, how are you feeling? That’s what we can’t tell.

  “You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel — ”

  Enhanced.

  No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone a few inches behind eyes made of jelly.

  She was supremely conscious.

  What was her consciousness? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and in the past.

  Even in her old, battered, rapidly aging body, she had been conscious, of course. She could remember a little of what had happened to her, or in her mind, a few moments earlier.

  But now, with her trace-function memory, she could relive her experiences, bit by data bit if she wanted to. Her senses went far beyond the human. And as for inner perception — why, she could see herself laid open now in a kind of dynamic blueprint.

  By any test, she was more conscious than any other human had ever been — because she had more of the mechanism of consciousness. She was the most conscious human who had ever lived.

  …If, she thought uneasily, I am still human.

  Lieserl?

  “Yes, Kevan. I can hear you.”

  And?

  “I’m a lot more conscious.” She laughed. “But possibly not much smarter.”

  She heard him laugh in reply. It was a ghostly Virtual sound, she thought, transmitted through a defect in space-time, and — perhaps — across a boundary between species.

  Come on, Lieserl. We have work to do.

  She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form.

  Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting… in a way. And yet, she thought, restrictive.

  No wonder Superet had been so concerned to imprint her with sympathy for mankind… before it had robbed her completely of her humanity.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this thin vestige of humanity.

  And then what?

  Bathed in Jovian light, Louise, Uvarov, Milpitas and Mark sat in the soft, reclined couches. The Virtual of Michael Poole held a snifter of old brandy; the glass was filled with convincing blue-gold Interface light sparkles, and Virtual-Poole sipped it with every sign of enjoyment — as if it were the first, and last, such glass he would ever enjoy.

  As, probably, it was, for this particular autonomous sentient copy, Louise thought.

  “To the survival of the species.” Louise raised her own glass and sipped at whiskey, a fine peaty Scotch. “But what’s it got to do with me? I don’t even have any kids.”

  “Superet has a long history,” Virtual-Poole said stiffly. “You may not be aware of it, but Superet is already a thousand years old. It took its name from an ancient, obscure religious sect in North America that worshiped the first nuclear weapons…”

  The Superet creed, in some ways, Louise thought, embodied the essence of the pre-Poole optimism of humanity. Superet believed that nothing was beyond the capabilities of mankind.

  Poole gazed into his drink. “Superet believes that if something is physically possible, then it’s just a question of engineering.” The Virtual’s expression was complex — almost tormented, Louise thought. The Virtual went on, “But it takes planning — perhaps on immense timescales.”

  Louise felt a vague anger build in her. Uvarov was right. This isn’t Michael Poole. Poole would not have defended the grandiose claims of Superet like this. This is a travesty of programming in conflict with sentience.

  “In the past,” the Virtual went on, “Superet sponsored many of the eco engineering projects which have restored much of the biosphere of Earth — the carbon-sequestration domes, and so on.”

  Louise knew that was true. The great macroengineering projects of the last millennium, supplemented by the nano-engineering of the atmosphere and lithosphere and the transfer offplanet of most power-generating and industrial concerns, had stabilized and preserved Earth’s fragile ecosystem. There was more woodland covering the temperate regions, now, than at any time since the last glaciation, locking in much of the excess carbon dioxide which had plagued previous centuries. And the great decline in species suffered after the industrialization of a couple of thousand years ago had long since been reversed, thanks to the use of genetic archives and careful reconstruction from disparate descendants — of lost genotypes.

  Earth had been the first planet to be terraformed.

  The Virtual said, “But Superet’s goals were modified, following the Friends of Wigner incident…”

  “If Superet is such a saintly organization,” Uvarov growled, “then why is it such a thing of shadows? Why the secrets?”

  Poole said, “Superet is a thousand years old, Doctor. No human organization of such longevity has ever been fully open. Think of the great established religions, societies like the Templars, the Masons. Groupings like Superet have a way of accreting tradition, and isolation, around themselves with time.”

  “And,” Uvarov said sharply, “no doubt the long career of Superet has a few dark phases…”

  Poole didn’t reply.

  Louise said, “You said the goals of Superet were changed by the Friends incident.”

  “Yes. Let me use this Virtual box of tricks to explain.”

  The tetrahedron came to life again. It rotated above them, a gaudy trinket miles across.

  “The Cauchy Interface,” the Virtual said. “At the time, the largest wormhole mouth constructed — in fact, the largest exercise in exotic-matter engineering.”

  The Virtual’s face was gaunt in the shifting Interface light — wistful, Louise thought.

  Michael Poole had been rightly celebrated for his achievements, she thought. He had been the Brunel of his day, and more. His wormhole projects had opened up the System much as the great railroads had opened up Great Britain two thousand years earlier.

  A wormhole was a flaw in spacetime — a throat, connecting two events in spacetime that would otherwise be separated by light-years, or millennia. Wormholes existed naturally on all scales, most of them around the size of the Planck length — ten to minus forty three inches, the level at which space itself became granular.

  Working in the orbit of Jupiter, Michael Poole and his team had taken natural wormholes and expanded them;

  Poole had made wormholes big enough to permit spaceships to pass through.

  Wormholes were inherently unstable. Poole had threaded his wormholes with frameworks of exotic matter — matter with negative energy density, with pressure greater than rest mass energy. The exotic matter set up repulsive gravity fields able to hold open the wormholes’ throats and mouths.

  Louise remembered the excitement of those times. Poole Interfaces were towed out of Jovian orbit and set up all over the System. The wormholes enabled the inner System
to be traversed in sublight GUTships in a matter of hours rather than months. The Jovian system became a hub for interplanetary commerce. Port Sol — a converted Kuiper object on the rim of the System — was established as the base for the first great interstellar voyages.

  Michael Poole had opened up the Solar System in an explosion of accessibility, more dramatic than anything since the days of the great sea-going voyages of exploration on old Earth.

  “It was a wonderful time. But you had greater ambitions in mind,” she said. “Didn’t you, Michael?”

  The Virtual stared upwards at the display above, expression frozen, evidently unable to speak.

  Mark said gently, “You mean the Cauchy, Louise?”

  “Yes. Michael Poole used wormhole technology to travel — not just across space but across time.” She pointed up to the tetrahedron in the dome. “This is just one Interface from Poole’s greatest wormhole project: termini three miles across, and the throat itself no less than a mile wide. The wormhole’s second Interface was attached to a GUT-ship — the Cauchy.”

  The GUTship was launched on a subrelativistic flight beyond the fringe of the Solar System — a circular tour, designed to return at last to Jupiter. The Cauchy carried one of Poole’s wormhole Interfaces with it. The other was left in orbit around Jupiter.

  The flight lasted fifteen centuries — but thanks to time dilation effects, only two subjective centuries had passed for the Cauchy’s crew.

  The two Interfaces remained linked by the wormhole flaw. Because of the link, when it returned to the Solar System more than a millennium into the future of the System it had left, the Cauchy’s Interface was still connected to its twin in orbit around Jupiter — where only two centuries had passed since the departure of the Cauchy, as they had for the Cauchy’s crew.