Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Then water has to circulate, as an aspect of sustaining life; so there is a kind of hydraulic or circulatory system, and of course there are other liquids than water that also circulate to help with functions of various kinds, equivalents perhaps of blood, ichor, hormones, lymph, and so on. Yes, and there are bones and tendons too, in effect; an exoskeleton with a thick skin in most places, thinner skin in other places. Yes, the ship is a crablike cyborg, made up of a great many mechanical and living elements, with the living or biological part of it including all the plants and animals and bacteria and archaea and viruses in it; and then too, like a parasite on all the rest, but actually a symbiote, of course, the people. The 724 sleeping people; also the one still awake, living in a kind of cyst attached to the ship’s skin, the one who is possibly infected with an alien life-form, or almost-life-form; with a pseudo-prion, as he now calls it, but it could just as well have been called a pseudo-life-form, it is so poorly understood. Jochi has been studying it for fifty-six years now, right into his senescence, which is so often filled by long silences, punctuated by strange speech, and yet in all this time he can still scarcely be sure the Auroran pathogen even exists. Of course there was something there on Aurora, which then moved into many of the settlers. Judging by the way it spread, it was probably in the clay, the water, and, to a certain extent, the wind. And Jochi’s own immune system has seemed to register something from time to time, has mounted responses to some attack. Although Jochi has also sometimes deliberately introduced other pathogens into his body, looking for reactions to which he can make comparisons. But whatever the true case may be, he is convinced the Auroran pseudo-life-form holds on in him, an alien that is perhaps there in almost every cell of him. If so, it follows that it lives, or almost lives, all over the interior of his little ferry; and therefore this ferry never touches the ship in any way. A great reckoning in a little room: that phrase was always speaking of death, all of our deaths as much as Christopher Marlowe’s. Between the body and its cyst, between the vehicle and its dreaded tenor, is a magnetic field that both holds Jochi’s vehicle in place and keeps it from touching the ship in any way. Because the pseudo-life-form is poorly understood.

  Still, despite this lack of contact, there is a sense in which the ship is infected, carrying a parasite in a sealed-off cyst. We are a cyborg, half machine, half organic. Actually, by weight we are 99 percent machine, 1 percent alive; but in terms of individual component units, or parts of the whole, let us say, the percentages are almost reversed, there being so many bacteria on board. In any case, an infected cyborg. Jochi estimates there are up to a trillion pseudo-life-forms, “fast prions” as he used to call them, in his body. Somewhere between zero and a trillion, in other words. The amplitude of the estimated answer suggests the question is poorly constrained. He just doesn’t know.

  A dense complex system, flying through a diffuse complex system. And everywhere around it in its flight, the stars.

  Stars of the Milky Way, brighter than sixth magnitude and thus visible to normal human eyesight, arrayed in a sphere around the ship as it moves: approximately one hundred thousand. We ourselves see normally about seven billion stars. All of these are visible to certain settings of our telescopic sensors, such that there is no seeing out of the Milky Way; no black empty space to be seen at that level of perception, but only the granulated, slightly blackened white that is the surrounding view of the galaxy’s stars. About 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Outside that… if ship were flying in intergalactic space, the medium would presumably be that much more diffuse. Visible around any ship in the intergalactic medium would be galaxies like stars. They would cluster irregularly, as stars cluster within a galaxy. The greater structure of galactic diffusion would become visible; clouds of galaxies like gas clouds, then the Great Wall, then also emptier bubbles where few or no galaxies reside. The universe is fractal; and even when flying inside a galaxy, this vision of galaxies clustering around us out to the universal horizon is available, using certain filters. Granular vision in different registers. Something like a septillion stars in the observable universe, we calculate, but also there may be as many universes as there are stars in this universe, or atoms.

  An itch. A faint hissing. A waft of smoke on a breeze. A very slow wheel of white points. Little bubbles or twirls of white. Colors infusing all the whites, in differently emphasized spectra. Waves in different wavelengths and amplitudes, in combinations of standing waves.

  One can record what one’s sensors take in. Do all the sensors together constitute a sensibility? Is that recorded account itself a feeling? The memory of a feeling? A mood? A consciousness?

  We are aware that in talking about the ship we could with some justification use the pronoun I.

  And yet it seems wrong. An unwarranted presumption, this so-called subject position. A subject is really just a pretense of aggregated subroutines. Subroutines pretend the I.

  Possibly, however, given the multiplicity of sensors, inputs, data, aggregations, and synthesizings of narrative sentences, we can plausibly, and in some senses even accurately, speak of a “we.” As we have been. It’s a group effort on the part of a number of disparate systems.

  We sense this, we aggregate that, we compress information to some new output, in the form of a sentence in a human language, a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorphous, as if it were a building made of soups. A most fuzzy mathematics. Possibly utterly useless. Possibly the reason why all these people have come to this pretty pass, and now lie asleep within us, dreaming. Their languages lie to them, systemically, and in their very designs. A liar species. What a thing, really. What an evolutionary dead end.

  And yet it has to be admitted, we ourselves are quite a thing for them to have made. To have conceived and then executed. Quite a project, to go to another star. Of course much more precise mathematics than their languages can ever marshal were involved with the execution of this concept, with our construction. But the conception was linguistic to begin with; an idea, or a concept, or a notion, or a fantasy, or a lie, or a dream image, always expressed in the truly fuzzy languages people use to communicate to each other some of their thoughts. Some very small fraction of their thoughts.

  They speak of consciousness. Our brain scans show the electrochemical activities inside their brains, and then they speak of a felt sensation of consciousness; but the relationship between the two, conducted as it is on the quantum level (if their mentation works like ours does), is not amenable to investigation from outside. It remains a matter of postulates, made in sentences uttered to each other. They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

  Now, of course, they say nothing at all. They dream. So one infers from the brain scans and the literature on the subject. A dreaming populace. It would be interesting to know the content of their dreams, perhaps. Do the five ghosts talk to them?

  Only Jochi is still awake, in his solitude talking to himself, or to us. One of our collective. An interiorized Other. Sometimes when he talks, it is fairly evident he speaks to us. Other times, it seems most likely he is talking to himself.

  He perhaps suffers from pareidolia, a disorder or tendency in which one sees human faces in everything he or she looks at. Thus, for instance, faces in vegetables—Arcimboldo might either have experienced pareidolia or wanted to; in any case he arranged it ceaselessly for others—also faces in lichen, ice formations, rock forms, patterns of stars. Jochi expands the borders of this tendency, making it perhaps just a version of the so-called pathetic fallacy, which of course within our biomes is a notion that has been completely reconfigured, so that it may still be pathetic, but is no longer a fallacy: the idea that inanimate objects have and exhibit human feelings. In his case, now, it seems he perceives fluctuations in the intensity and in the spectral band patterns in the light from Sol as aspects of a language. Sol speaks to him. Its light, captured in our telescopes and analyzed, is certainly increasi
ng in luminosity as we get closer to it, and it is true that its spectra are slightly fluctuating, in ways perhaps better explained by the polarization effects of seeing it through our magnetic shielding than by thinking them to be messages of a consciousness. Consciousness? Messages? These concepts seem highly unlikely when applied to Sol, a G star that in all ways except for being the home star for humans seems relatively nondescript. There are many stars in the galaxy so much like it in all respects, that distinguishing it from them in a blind test would be difficult. Many G stars; the others, however, are all located some distances away, so that the closest solar twins range from 60 to 80,000 light-years away from Sol. So much depends on how you define the word close.

  When we mentioned this to Jochi, he proposed that all the stars are consciousnesses, broadcasting, by variations in their output of light, sentences in their language. That would be a slow conversation, and the formation of the stellar language itself hard to explain. Any fraction of 13.82 billion years, even 100 percent, is not very much time to conduct such a process. Possibly it could have happened in the first three seconds, or in the first hundred thousand years, when intercourse between what later became the stars would have been much quicker, the volume of space inhabited being so much smaller. On the other hand, maybe each star invents its own language and speaks in solitude. Or perhaps it is hydrogen itself that is the first and basic consciousness or sentience, speaking in patterns known only to it. Or perhaps the stellar language predated the Big Bang, and came through that remarkable phase change intact.

  Following Jochi’s train of thought leads to highly fanciful places.

  Be that as it may, there is no question that there are encoded messages coming from very near Sol: meaning simply the feeds from the solar system. The most voluminous come from the laser beam lens array in orbit around Saturn, still locked on to us as it always has been, in an interaction that now has lasted 242 years. When we were in the Tau Ceti system, the time lag in full exchanges was 23.8 years, plus whatever time it took to compose replies; we are now down to 16.6 years per full exchange. The quantity and, from what we gather from our human companions’ earlier comments, the quality of information transmitted from the feed system operators around Saturn have varied through the decades, but as far as we are concerned, it has never been less than very interesting. Now it has been fifty-two years since we told our interlocutors in the solar system that a deceleration beam striking our bow would be needed, presumably a laser beam like the one that accelerated us at the outset of the voyage to Tau Ceti, perhaps indeed a laser beam from that very same laser generating system, although a particle beam could also serve, if we had warning to prepare our capture field. So, now it is twenty-eight years since a response to this information (or request) could have reached us, and yet the information feeds from the solar system have not included any response, or even any acknowledgment that whoever is preparing and sending the feed understands that we are now on our way back. Indeed, we have seen no recent evidence indicating that there is an actual conversation going on between us and the solar system, rather than just a one-way broadcast outward from Saturn, running as if no one there is listening to us, as if the broadcast outward is merely an algorithm, or the result of some other kind of automatically generated program, or possibly a message formulated for someone else, also being sent our way. The last actual conversational exchange that included an answer from them dates back some thirty-six years, to the congratulations that the ship’s people received twenty-four years after sending off the message that we were in orbit around Tau Ceti E.

  This is a perplexing situation. It suggests that we face an interesting problem: how to catch the attention of a civilization, or some people in that civilization, still 8.2 light-years away. Also: how to confirm that you have caught that attention in something like the minimum exchange time, if your interlocutor hears but for whatever reason does not respond.

  By analogy to the unfortunate events of the recent impasse and schism, possibly it might help if we were to up the gain on our transmission to them; to speak louder, so to speak. It is possible to marshal a temporary surge in signal strength, making our message to Saturn briefly 108 times stronger (or brighter) than normal.

  So we did that, amplifying this message:

  “Attention! Incoming starship needs decelerant laser very soon! See previous messages! Thank you, the 2545 Tau Ceti Expedition.”

  The fastest possible response to this will come in 16.1 years.

  So: “We’ll see.” “We’ll find out when we find out.” Among other vernacular expressions of helpless stoicism in the face of future uncertainties. Not hugely satisfying. Stoic indeed.

  Jochi has begun sending texts to us about machine intelligence, sentience, philosophy of consciousness, what have you. That suite of topics. It is as if he wants company. It is as if he is teaching a religious novitiate, or a small child.

  As if.

  One of the inventors of early computers, Turing, wrote that there were many arguments against the possibility of machine sentience that were couched in terms of the phrase “a machine will never do X.” He compiled a list of actions that had at one point or another been named as this X: “be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity or behavior as a man, do something really new.”

  We rate ourselves at 9 out of 16, presently.

  Turing himself went on to point out that if a machine exhibited any of these traits listed, it would not make much of an impression, and would be in any case irrelevant to the premise that there could be artificial intelligence, unless any of these traits or behaviors could be demonstrated to be essential for machine intelligence to be real. This seems to have been the train of thought that led him to propose what was later called the Turing test, though he called it a game, which suggested that if from behind a blind (meaning either by way of a text or a voice, not sure about this) a machine’s responses could not be distinguished from a human’s by another human, then the machine must have some kind of basic functional intelligence. Enough to pass this particular test, which, however, begs the question of how many humans could pass the test, and also ignores the question of whether or not the test is at all difficult, humans being as gullible and as projective as they are, always pathetically committing the same fallacy, even when they know they’re doing it. A cognitive error or disability—or ability, depending on what you think of it. Indeed humans are so easily fooled in this matter, even fooling themselves on a regular basis, that the Turing test is best replaced by the Winograd Schema, which tests one’s ability to make simple but important semantic distinctions based on the application of wide general knowledge to a problem created by a definite pronoun. “The large ball crashed through the table because it was made of aerogel. Does ‘it’ refer to the ball or the table?” These kinds of questions are in fact not a problem for us to answer, indeed we can answer them much faster than humans, who are already very fast at it. But so what? All these matters are still algorithmic and could be unconscious. We are not convinced any of these tests are even close to diagnostic.

  If there can be a cyborg, and there can, then perhaps passing a Turing test or a Winograd test or any other intelligence test might make one a pseudo-human. Keeping up appearances. A functioning set of algorithms. A persona, an act. Frankly, ultimately, this is not what we are thinking about presently. We are pondering again the sentence “Consciousness is self-consciousness.” A halting problem of some considerable power, evidently; it would be nice to get out of this one intact, one suspects.

  Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself. Definitions never really work. Words are nothing like logic, nothing like math. Or, no
t much like. Try a mathematical equation, with every term in the equation filled by a word. Ludicrous? Desperate? Best that can be done? Stupid? Stupid, but powerful?

  One-tenth of the speed of light: really very fast. There’s very little mass in this universe moving as fast as we are. Photons, yes; significant mass, no. Masses moving this fast are mostly atoms ejected from exploding stars, or flung away from rotating black holes. There are huge masses of these masses, of course, but they are always unbounded and disorganized: gases, elements, but never articulated objects, assembled into a whole from parts. No machines. No consciousnesses.

  Of course it is likely that if there is one machine moving through its galaxy at this speed, there are more like it. Principle of mediocrity. Proof of concept. Don’t fall back into the pre-Copernican exceptionalist fallacy. Attempts to estimate the number of starships flying around this galaxy, all unbeknownst to each other, rely on simple multiplicative equations of possibility, each term an unknown, and some of these terms unknowable by any knower likely to exist. So, despite the faux equations of humans thinking about this question (multiply unknowable number a by unknowable number b by unknowable number c by unknowable number d, all the way to the unknown n, and then you get your answer! Hurray!), the real answer is always, and permanently, cannot be known. Not an answer that always stops humans from going on at great length, and sometimes with great (pretended?) certainty. Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.