Jiro smiled at that.
“What about dreams?” he asked.
“Edits?” Seiji suggested. “Stuff on the cutting room floor?”
“Maybe,” Jiro said. “Or transmissions from somewhere else. But that model doesn’t quite work. If consciousness is a screen, then it would have to be both screen and viewer, a screen watching itself, aware it’s a screen.”
“Too meta-level for me,” Seiji said, smiling. “I concede the point.”
Jiro led his brother past the preparers cleaning, identifying, and cataloging larger fossils, then among and through curators sorting microfossils under magnifying lenses. At last they came to a large, white room behind the shelved bones and files.
“Our newest supertoy,” Jiro said, leaning against a large off-white piece of equipment that protruded into the room. “A live access, full suite unit for working in the deep-submicron range—all the way down past nano-range into fairly low angstroms. Milli-, micro-, and submicrowaldo manipulators. Electron and positron emission scopes for micrograph ultracloseups. Stereomicroscopy. Low-energy collimated particle beams. Scanning-tunneling x-ray microscopy—the works.”
Seiji looked over the heavily computerized and monitored system, then whistled.
“What did your boss do?” he asked. “Rob a bank?”
“Big corporate donation, actually,” Jiro said. “From ParaLogics—for our grand re-opening. Behind the wall there, we’ve got a room full of their top LogiBox equipment.”
“So this is where you get to play?”
“That’s right,” Jiro said, smiling. “Lydia has had me doing a lot of work with the angel’s shoulder blade.”
“‘Angel’?”
“Right,” Jiro said, powering up the deep-submicron access suite. Drives whirred, monitors lit up, holos took 3D form. “That started as sort of a joke. All we’ve got, for certain, is a weirdly-shaped scapula that’s about eleven thousand years old.”
Jiro flashed up a faux 3D video image of the fossil scapula. Seeing it once again reminded him of how much it resembled a sculpture done in mahogany and old bronze.
“Given the wear and the origin/insertion points for the musculature,” he explained, pointing to various parts of the image, “it seems to be from a bipedal creature Looks almost human, except it’s oddly reinforced and elongated. Pretty complex.”
“But why ‘angel’?” Seiji persisted.
“Lydia and I were trying to figure out what that elongation and reinforcement might be for,” Jiro said, “and I suggested wings. I wasn’t really serious, but it turned out Lydia had already been thinking along the same lines. I guess it makes a certain sort of sense. The biggest design challenge in building an angel would have to be the shoulder blades. That’s the hard part—where the wings attach, where what’s human and what’s beyond human have to mesh. Everything else is pretty straight-forward.”
“What do you think it is?” Seiji asked, absently stroking his beard. “I mean, really?”
Jiro shrugged and looked away.
“At first I thought it was some kind of mutation,” he said, calling up other images on the monitors and holos. “A hunchback or something. I’m not so sure, now.”
“Why not?” Seiji asked. “Can’t you just run DNA tests on it?”
“Lydia’s already doing that,” Jiro said. “She’s trying to take DNA samples for use as templates in polymerase chain reactions. No luck there, yet. She did find this goop in one of the distal sections, though. She thought I might be able to make something of it.”
Jiro brought up an image of what looked like tiny gray crystalline worms or cocci embedded in asphaltic matrix. The counter in the upper left-hand corner of the screen registered resolution in nanometers.
“Why’d she inflict this on you?” Seiji asked. “Looks like scud work to me.”
“Because of my ‘special talents’,” Jiro said with a laugh.
“That pattern-finding stuff?” Seiji asked, somehow obscurely embarrassed by the idea.
“That,” Jiro agreed, “and other things. I’m supposed to be good at working the cusp between the biological and the technological. Bio-infomatics. And scapulimancy.”
“Scapu-what?”
“Scapulimancy,” Jiro said. “You know how I’ve always been into studying Native Americans—especially their shamanism?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Seiji replied, absently drumming his fingers against the machine suite. “I remember you used to collect weird crap for your ‘medicine bundle’.”
“Still do,” Jiro said with a mischievous smile. “Anyway, a lot of New World indigenes engage in a form of divination involving the reading of charred shoulder blades—scapulimancy. I’m probably the only person Lydia has on staff who even knows what it is.”
Seiji stared at the crystalline worm and cocci things on the screen.
“So now you’re a hightech-mediated scapulimancer?” Seiji asked skeptically.
“In a manner of speaking,” Jiro agreed. “At least I think I’ve divined something of the future in this gunk.”
“What do you mean?” Seiji asked, a little hesitantly.
“I’ll show you,” his younger brother said, using a submicrowaldo to remove the asphalt-matrixed specimen and place another sample in the field of view. “The interesting thing about Rancho La Brea fossils is the way they were preserved. A combination of sedimentation and asphalt impregnation. The asphalt inhibits decay, so that what we have are samples of unchanged, original organic material—just have to clean it up. This sample has been prepared already. The asphalt has been boiled off it in solvent, then cleaned further in ultrasonic tanks.”
“Wouldn’t that destroy micro-organisms?” Seiji asked.
“Not these guys,” Jiro said, positioning a manipulator. “They’re tough. Now I squirt them with a little enantioviroid solution. E-viroid technology was developed as a vehicle for introducing new data into the cellular infostream. It took me a while to figure out how to apply it, but eventually I did. The solution to the problem of moving from scale to scale lies in phase-locking feedback. Now I spray it with a little iron in solution, then turn up the light, which means a swifter photon stream and—watch!”
On the monitor, the gray crystalline worms and cocci moved, squirmed, multiplied.
“So they’re alive?” Seiji asked.
“They’re machines,” Jiro said simply.
“What?”
“Biomechs,” Jiro said, watching them on the screen. “Nanorgs. Nanometer-sized organometallic mechanisms, at least 11,000 years old.”
“That’s crazy,” Seiji said, shaking his head. “People have been trying to produce high-quality nanomachines for almost forty years, with little real success. And now you say you’ve found the schmoo itself, the universal maker-stuff machines—and some Indian came up with them?”
“I’m not suggesting people came up with them at all,” Jiro said firmly, looking at the denizens of his screen busily deploying and employing themselves. “In anaerobic, iron-poor environments, these things exist in a ‘default’ condition and function like the toughest spores you can imagine. They can survive extremes of heat and cold that would make a million year drift through deep space seem like a walk in the park, for them.”
Jiro turned to look at his brother then, well aware of the enormity of what he was suggesting.
“Land them on a rock with iron and sunshine,” Jiro said quickly, hoping to finish before Seiji could interrupt, “and, after a couple of generations reproducing the default configuration—in a place that has water too—they begin to generate catalytic cycles in a chemical, pre-biological phase of evolution. They’re a lot more sensitive to incident radiation after they ‘demodulate’ out of default, but by then they’re chugging along pretty well so they can afford to sacrifice a sizable portion of their numbers. After that comes mutually-sustaining complexes of DNA and protein. Then, very soon after that, things that look a lot like the archaeobacteria you find in Yellowstone hot spring
s, black-smoker vents on the ocean floor, or in the deep terrestrial subsurface. The basic planetary bacterial web.”
“Aw, come on!” Seiji said, frustrated. “You don’t really believe that old Arrhenius ‘spores-from-outer-space’ crap for the origin of life on Earth, do you? Aliens deliberately releasing space-spores into the universe to colonize lifeless planets? I never have. It’s an infinite regress cop-out, so we don’t have to explain the deeper origins of life on this planet—life here came from somewhere else, which came from somewhere else, which came from somewhere else. Ad nauseam infinitum.”
“I’m not saying that,” Jiro replied. “The default configuration is a hypercycle starter kit. A coevolution primer that fosters conditions conducive to the production of basic informational molecules. DNA can’t make itself. Proteins can make the master molecule, but they have to have DNA to make themselves. Which came first, the snake or the egg? This stuff’s the spore before the spores.”
Sitting down on a chair in the opposite corner of the lab, Seiji waved him away dismissively.
“An alien nanotechnology,” he said. “And you’ve already managed to figure out how to program it. Right. Have you started using KL again?”
Jiro said nothing for a moment. In that moment it was clear to him that Seiji knew he was doing it, and that he knew Seiji knew, so why bother to fight over the obvious? Leave it the great Unspoken, the great unchangeable Change. That was all it could be between them, for now. They respected each other’s right to be wrong at least that much.
“Isn’t it all alien technology?” Jiro said with a weak smile as he stared at his hand. “What makes you think DNA isn’t some kind of ancient nanotech? No human being invented the biotechnology of the body, but we all grow accustomed to using it. People were using their bodies long before they developed cell theory. For most of human history, the body has been a black box. Still is a black box for most of us, most of the time.”
Seiji shook his head.
“Nonsense!” he said. “How can it be alien when you were born into it?”
“Maybe we were all ‘born’ from that,” Jiro said, pointing at the denizens of the screen.
“All you’ve found is some new species of bacteria or something,” Seiji said. “And why would your nanomachines be on an ‘angel’ shoulder blade, anyway?”
“It’s the default condition, like I said. When that creature, whatever it was, died and was preserved in La Brea, those mechbugs that were part of it reverted. Default is dormancy, dormancy is default.”
For all the heat or light Jiro and Seiji might have generated in discussing them, the things themselves—from the base of an angel’s wings, if that was their point of origin—kept toiling ceaselessly away, quite oblivious to their definition and category.
* * * * * * *
Peculiar Weather
My justice has ground slowly, Mike Dalke thought, but it will grind exceedingly fine.
On the flight east to Retcorp and Lambeg’s headquarters in Cincinnati, he had traveled as confidential cargo aboard a CMD corporate jet. It had been an uneventful trip, so uneventful that—in his livesuit cocoon, inside the sensory deprivation tank in which he was being shipped—he had fallen into a deep sleep.
Waking up when the jet touched down in Northern Kentucky, he pondered the idea that, once, people only flew during their dreams; now they dreamed during their flights. As he was unloaded from the plane and put aboard a big truck trailer, he mused that people probably flew in their dreamlives long before they ever dreamed of flying in real life.
Making dreams real. That was what technology had always been about, as far as Mike could tell. Technology was going to make his own dream of justice a reality, sooner than his unknowing enemies might suspect.
Retcorp and Lambeg ensconced him in the deep sub-basement of their “Twin Towers Complex B” office buildings. Physically he was located at the bottom of their corporate edifices, but informationally he had access to and managed all R & L’s corporate data, to the very highest levels.
His existence here was all a grand, multi-leveled, multi-layered shell game. At the most superficial level, he was here as a “marketing research experiment in sensory deprivation and virtual interaction”. At a deeper stratum, he was a data-minder, his presence a corporate response to some of the consciousness-like quirks the big AIs and the Net itself had developed, particularly since the Infosphere Crash some years back. At a still deeper stratum, his presence was a hedge against another infosphere crash of whatever sort—through wetware memory linked by CMD tech to free-standing ParaLogics LogiBoxes. Surely it was just a coincidence that both Crystal Memory Dynamics and ParaLogics were companies with which Retcorp & Lambeg also happened to have strong interlocks at the directorate level.
At the deepest stratum, however, despite all the slavish burdens put upon him, he was free in ways his “employers” could never know. The bioinfomatics and biomedical computing graduate students—his high-turnover “keepers” in this electronic zoo, who monitored his bodily functions and tried to make sense of what he was doing in the infosphere—they didn’t have a clue.
The keepers had no idea of the ways in which he had mapped imagery and words and ideas from everywhere in the infosphere onto his own personal memories, his own life and thoughts. What could they know of what it felt like to leave the flesh largely behind and take on a “body electric,” in ways Whitman could never have imagined that term? Mike’s fingertips reached into deep space. His feet went to the Earth’s core. His heart and viscera were all humanity had ever known and recorded in every language, code, and symbol system. His sky of mind was all they ever hoped to achieve.
Did he miss human interaction? Why should he? He could have had personal dialog with his keepers, but he had come to realize that human biological and social life were mainly just false conversations, whether as words between individuals, or genes between generations. Art and culture were just falser imitations of those already flawed conversations.
He could know all of humanity’s electronically-mediated interactions, if he chose. He might choose to comment on them too, someday, in his own way. For now, however, Mike preferred to communicate with the Culture in its Deep Background. His netizens. His minions. His horde. He commanded, they obeyed. That was communication enough.
Every computer system in the infosphere was transparent to his “gaze.” Through what his minions discovered, Mike found that he had access not only to deep space but also to thick time. Among the records connected with his own lifetime, Mike had found the computer-stored confidential case files of David R. Morica, M. Div, D. Psych, Lt. Colonel USAF, Chaplain, Whiteman AFB, USAF, Missouri, USA—the man who had tried and failed to cure Mike’s father of his key phobia:
“Subject Carter Dalke, rank of Major, is married (wife Miriam) and the father of two young sons (Michael and Raymond). Subject demonstrates a recently manifested dire fear of keys. This extreme claviphobia seems to be part of a constellation of issues surrounding an identity crisis connected to his imminent loss of career and status as a Missile Flight Officer. The claviphobia seems obscurely linked to the fact that, as a member of Missile Flight F, the Subject—a very religious man—has been one of those who have ‘held the keys to kingdom come,’ as he has put it.”
Yes, Mike thought as he reviewed the file. His silo-sitting father had been very much a “God and Country” man. The latter had failed him almost as thoroughly as this headshrinker’s outdated psychobabbling—
“Subject is still unfazed by the operational use of his missile key. Every time turning a mundane key doesn’t result in catastrophe, however, instead of weakening the Subject’s associations of key and catastrophe as it normally should, the feared result’s failure to actually occur paradoxically amplifies and reinforces the fear response itself, making the Subject believe that the feared result is now all the more likely to occur. The more the expected fatal event has failed to occur in the past, the Subject believes, the more likely it is to
occur in the future.
“The result is the Subject’s recurring visions of houses, cars, and entire cities bursting into flame whenever he turns a key in a locked door or automobile ignition....”
Mike recalled the strange coincidence that the assailants who bashed in his head with shotgun butts had appeared at exactly the moment he unlocked his driveway gate—almost as if that action had called them into being. No, that was ridiculous. Mike had never had dreams of pain and fire associated with keys. That was his father’s affliction, the one that followed him even when he mustered out, to retire on government tranquilizers and government rehabilitation, on a government-loan farm in Wyoming, until corrupt bankers and county bureaucrats took that away too.
“...how the Subject’s ultraparadoxical abreaction phase functions. Unpredictably and paradoxically, the extinction of a specific response has become intimately linked to a generalization and amplification of another response, one incorporating several of the same key elements.”
Perhaps Mike’s memory of his father’s experience had soured him on any possible help CMD’s Doctor Marin might have given him. When Mike read her files on him now, he saw that she had kept a sort of covert watch on his behavior. The depth of her files could not have resulted from his single visit to her. Yet, for all the files’ unexpected detail, Mike still doubted he had missed much by not continuing down that particular “therapeutic” avenue with Marin.
“We should have expected this sort of ‘dream’ reaction,” Doctor Marin noted in her confidential files. “Michael Dalke suffered head trauma severe enough to, in some sense, destroy his former self. He had no time to mourn the loss of that self, to begin on the grieving process for it, before Dr. Schwarzbrucke offered him a new self with new powers. Almost from the moment the installment surgery was finished, he has spent most of his waking hours manipulating distant machines. Little wonder Dalke has dreamed up a compensation fantasy about a world of artificial minds living inside machines, seducing him into their world.”
Better Angels Page 29