Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  In many more senses than one, Dee plainly was not. She was sheltered from the rude outside universe. She was the smooth and perfect one, sealed off in her idealized containment enclosure that needed special treatment. Dee looked more like an abstract sculpture than a working robot. She looked liked something that was supposed to stand off, aloof, on her own, a divine being or magic totem to be consulted rather than a machine meant to do work. And was that so far off? Kresh glanced at Soggdon on the far side of the lab, pretending to be puttering around with something or other while she kept a nervous, unhappy eye on Kresh.

  Yes, indeed. Unit Dee had her acolytes, her priests, who ministered to her whims and did their best to rearrange the world to suit her convenience, who walked on eggshells rather than anger or upset the divine being on whom all things depended. Kresh thought suddenly of the oracles of near-forgotten legend. They had been beings of great power – but of great caprice and trickery as well. Their predictions would always come true – but never in the way expected, and always at an unexpected price. Not a pleasant thought.

  “I believe we are ready to begin with the main processing of the problem,” Dee said, her voice corning so abruptly into the silence that Kresh jumped ten centimeters in the air. “Would you care to observe our work?” she asked.

  “Ah, yes, certainly,” said Kresh, having no idea what she had in mind.

  The lights faded abruptly, and, flashing into being with the silence and suddenness of a far-off lightning strike, a globe of the planet Inferno appeared in the air between Kresh’s seat at the console and the enclosures for the two control units.

  The globe was a holographic image, about three meters in diameter, showing the planet’s surface with greater precision than Kresh had ever seen. Every detail was razor-sharp. Even the city of Hades was clearly visible on the shores of the Great Bay. Kresh had the feeling that if he stepped up close enough to the globe and peered intently enough, he would be able to see the individual buildings of the city.

  Inferno was a study in blue ocean and brown-and-tan land, with a pathetically few dots and spots of cool and lovely green visible here and there on the immense bulk of Terra Grande. Kresh tried to tell himself that they were making progress, that it was something just that their efforts were on a large enough scale to be plainly visible from space. But he wasn’t all that convincing, even to himself. Somehow, over the last few days, it had come home to him that the great efforts they had made were as nothing, that the noble progress he had been so proud of scarcely represented forward movement.

  But he did not have time to consider long. The globe turned over on its side, so that the northern polar regions were facing Kresh directly. Then, as he watched, the landscape began to change, shift, mutate. The River Lethe, a thin blue line running from the mountains west of the Great Bay, suddenly widened, and a new line of blue began to cut its way toward the Polar Depression, until the combined canal and river cut through the length of Terra Grande. Yes, Kresh could see it. Dredge the canal deep enough to allow a flow into the upper reaches of the Lethe, takes steps to make sure the channel scoured itself deeper instead of silting over, and it would work. Water would flow from the Polar Sea into the Great Bay. Assuming there was a Polar Sea, of course. At the present time, as shown in the simulation, there was nothing but dull white ice, a significant fraction of the planetary water supply locked up in the deep freeze where it could do no one any good.

  But Dum and Dee were far from done with their modeling. Kresh looked to the western regions of Terra Grande. It was plain that things were not quite so simple or straightforward there. Again and again, a wedge-shaped channel of blue water appeared. The northernmost portion of its channel constantly shifted position, widened, narrowed, expanded, contracted, vanished altogether for a moment and then reappeared somewhere else. Plainly, the two control units were searching for the optimum positioning of the channel.

  At long last the image settled down to a wide channel cutting straight north through the Utopia region. Kresh shook his head and swore under his breath. The optimum channel the two control units had chosen followed almost exactly the same path Lentrall had shown him. Maybe the pushy young upstart did know what he was talking about.

  “Channel pattern as presented within one percent of theoretical optimum configuration,” Unit Dum announced. “That figure is well inside accumulated combined uncertainty factors of many variables.”

  “In other words, it is as close as we can get right now – and very much close enough for a first approximation,” said Unit Dee. “We are now ready for preliminary long-range climate calculation.”

  Kresh half-expected to see the planet’s surface evolve and change, as he had seen so many times before on simglobes and other climate simulators. And he did see at least a little bit of that – or thought he did. But the globe itself was covered in a blizzard of layered data displays that sprawled over its surface. Isobar mappings for temperature, air pressure, humidity, color-coded scatter diagrams of populations for a hundred different species, rainfall pattern displays, seasonal jet-stream shifts, and a dozen other symbol systems Kresh couldn’t even begin to recognize, all of them shifting, rising, dropping, interacting and reacting with each other, a storm of numbers and symbols that covered the planet. The changes came faster and faster, until the symbols and numbers and data tags merged into each other, blurred into a faintly flickering cloud of gray that shrouded the entire planet.

  And then, in the blink of an eye, it stopped. The cloud of numbers was gone.

  A new planet hung in the air before Kresh. One in which the old world could be clearly seen, and recognized, but new and different all the same. Alvar Kresh had seen many hypothetical Infernos in his day, seen its possible futures presented a hundred times in a hundred different ways. But he had never seen this Inferno before. The tiny, isolated, spots of green here and there were gone, or rather grown and merged together into a blanket of cool, lush green than covered half of Terra Grande. There were still deserts, here and there, but they were the exception, not the rule – and even a properly terraformed planet needed some desert environments.

  The sterile, frozen, lifeless ice of the northern polar icecap had vanished completely, replaced by the Polar Sea, a deep-blue expanse of life-giving liquid water. Even at this scale, even to Kresh’s untrained eye, he could see that sea levels had raised worldwide. He wondered for a moment where the water had come from. Had the control units assumed that the importation of comet ice would continue? Or was the water-level rise caused by thawing out the icecaps and breaking up the permafrost? No matter. The fact was that the water was there, that life was there.

  “That’s the best, most positive projection I’ve ever seen,” Soggdon said. Kresh, a trifle startled, turned and looked over his shoulder. She was standing right behind his chair, gazing at the globe display in astonishment. “Hold on. I want to do a blind feed of the audio to your headset.”

  “What’s a blind feed?” Kresh asked.

  Soggdon picked up a headset identical to the one Kresh wore. Soggdon looked to Kresh as she put them on. “Dee and Dum will think you cannot hear what they say to me. When she talks to you, she is talking to a simulant. When she talks to me, a real human being, she cuts all links to any simulants, so as not to complicate the experiment by letting the simulants hear things they shouldn’t. In reality you’ll be able to hear it. But it is important – vitally important – that you have no reaction to what she says to me, or vice versa. In Dee’s universe, you are just a simulated personality inside a computer. I am a real person outside the computer. You have no way of knowing I exist. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Kresh, hoping he did. He had the sense that he had stepped into a hall of mirrors. It was getting hard to tell the fantasies from the realities.

  “Good,” said Soggdon, and turned on the manual switch on her headset. “Dee, Dum – this is Soggdon monitoring from outside the simulation.”

  “Good mornnning, Doctor. Weee
havvve beeen connnversssing with the Kresh simulllannt. “The two voices spoke in unison again, but Soggdon did not seem to be bothered by it. Having heard each voice by itself, Kresh was able to notice something that had escaped him before. When the two units spoke in unison, it was not merely the two chanting together. The voice of the two together spoke in a cadence that did not belong to either of the two speaking by itself. The unison voice made different word choices, responded in a way that was different from Dee or Dum. The unison voice was not merely two beings talking as one. It was the two merging into one new being, in some ways greater, in some ways lesser than the sum of its parts. Dee and Dum linked so intimately that they became a third, and distinct, personality. Or was it merely Dee who did so? If Dum was truly nonsentient, then he could have no personality. Plainly there were mysteries to delve into – but just as plainly they would have to wait for another day. “The Kresh simulant asked us to consider the result of producing a Polar Sea.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Soggdon. “And I see you have produced an impressive planetary projection as a result. Would either or both of you care to comment on it?”

  “Both willl speeak, and then eachhh,” said the unison voice. “We havvve prrojected forward four ttthousand yearss, as we have found that a wellll-planned operrational sequenzzze will result in a zzzero-maintenance planetary ecologggy within apprrroximately three hundred years. In our projection, the planetary climmmate remainss intrinsically stable, selfffcorrecting, and self-enhancing throughout the period of the metasimulation. There is no apparent danger of recollapse evident in any of the data for the end of the metasimulation period.”

  Kresh frowned. Metasimulation? Then he understood. The unison voice was using the term to refer to a simulation inside a simulation – which was what it had been, so far as Dum and Dee were concerned.

  Dum spoke next. “Reference to unit Dum’s prior objections in regard to ecological and economic damage. Projections show that the damage to the general ecology and gross planetary product caused by digging inlets for the Polar Sea would be fully compensated for within fifteen years of project completion.”

  But if the first two aspects of the combined control system made it all seem wonderful, the third voice pulled everything back down to reality. “It all sounds quite splendid,” said Dee. “There is, of course, the slight problem of it being quite impossible. We ran the metasimulation based on the assumption that it would be possible to dig the channels. It is not possible to dig them. An interesting exercise, I grant you – but it is not one that has a great deal of connection to the world of our simulation.”

  “I was afraid she was going to say that,” Soggdon muttered as she switched off her mike. “You’d think she’d be the least sensible of the three possible personality aspects, but instead Dee’s always the one to stick the pin in the balloon. She always reminds us of the practicalities.”

  “Maybe this time they’re a bit more possible than you think,” Kresh said. He keyed his own mike back on, and tried to phrase things so that he would not reveal that he had overheard the conversation with Soggdon.

  “Unit Dee, that’s a very promising projection there. I take it you think creating the Polar Sea would be a good idea?”

  “It is a good idea that cannot be realized, Governor,” said Unit Dee. “You do not have the resources, the energy sources, or the time to construct the needed inlets.”

  “That is incorrect,” Kresh said. “It is possible there is a practical, doable, way to dig those inlets. I came here to have you evaluate the proposed procedure. I first wanted to see if the effort would be worthwhile. I see now that it would be.”

  “What is the procedure in question?” asked Unit Dee.

  Kresh hesitated a moment, but then gave up. There was no way to describe the idea that didn’t sound dangerous, desperate, even insane. Well, maybe it was all three. So be it. “We’re going to break a comet up, and drop the fragments in a line running from the Southern Ocean to the Polar Depression,” he said. Even as he spoke, he realized that he hadn’t put any modifiers or conditionals in. He hadn’t said they might, or they could, or they were thinking of it. He had said they were going to do it. Had he made up his mind without knowing it?

  But Dum and Dee – and Soggdon – plainly had more on their minds than Kresh’s reaction to his own words. There was dead silence for a full thirty seconds before any of them reacted. The perfect holographic image of the Inferno of the future flickered and wavered and almost vanished altogether before it resolidified.

  Unit Dee recovered first. “Am I to under – under – understand that you intend this as a serious idea?” she asked. The stress in her voice was plain, her words coming out with painful slowness.

  “Not good,” said Soggdon, her headset mike still off. She turned toward a side console, paged through several screenfuls of information, and shook her head. “I warned you she took her simulants seriously,” she said. “These readings show you’ve set off a mild First Law conflict in her. You can’t just come in here and play games with her, make up things like that.”

  Kresh cut his own mike. “I’m not making things up,” he said. “And I’m not playing games. There is a serious plan in motion to drop a fragmented comet on the Utopia region.”

  “But that’s suicidal!” Soggdon protested.

  “What difference does it make if the planet’s going to be dead in two hundred years?” Kresh snapped. “And as for Dee, I suggest it is time you start lying to her in earnest. Remind her it’s all a simulation, an experiment. Remind her that Inferno isn’t real, and no one will be harmed.”

  “Tell her that?” Soggdon asked, plainly shocked. “No. I will not feed her dangerous and false data. Absolutely not. You can tell her yourself.”

  Kresh drew in his breath, ready to shout in the woman’s face, give her the dressing-down she deserved. But no. It would do no good. It was plainly obvious that she was not thinking with the slightest degree of rationality or sense – and he needed her, needed her help, needed her rational and sensible. She was part of the team that had set up this charade. She was the one who would have to prop it up. He would have to reason with her, coolly, calmly. “It would do no good for me to tell her any such thing,” he said. “She thinks I’m a simulant. Simulants don’t know they are simulants. She would not believe me telling her there was no danger – because she does not believe me to be human. And she does not believe that because you have lied to her.”

  “That’s different. That’s part of the experiment design. It’s not false data.”

  “Nonsense,” Kresh said, a bit more steel coming into his voice as the gentleness left it. “You have set up this entire situation for the sole purpose of allowing her to take risks, to do her job, while believing she could no harm to humans.”

  “But –”

  Kresh kept talking, rolling right over her protests. “I could even do damage to her if I told her it was just a simulation. There must be some doubt in her mind as to whether her simulants – the people of Inferno – are real. Otherwise she would not be experiencing the slightest First Law conflict concerning them. If I assured her that I was not real, Space alone knows what she would make of that paradox. It seems to me as likely as not that she would reach the conclusion that I was real, and that I was lying to her. If I lie to her, she might realize the truth – and then where would you be, Dr. Soggdon? Only you can do it. Only you can reassure her. And you must do it.”

  Soggdon glared at Kresh, the anger and fear plain on her face as she switched on her mike again. “Dee, this is Dr. Soggdon. I am still monitoring the simulation. I am detecting what appear to be First Law conflicts in the positronic pathing display. There is no First Law element to the simulated circumstances under consideration.” Soggdon hesitated, made a face, and then spoke again. “There is absolutely no possibility of harm to human beings,” she said. “Do you understand?”

  There was another distinct pause, and Kresh thought he detected another, but much sl
ighter, flicker in the image of the Inferno that was to be. But then Dee spoke again, and her voice was firm and confident. “Yes, Doctor Soggdon. I do understand,” she said. “Thank you. Excuse me. I must return to my conversation with the simulant governor.” Another pause, and then Dee was speaking to Kresh. “I beg your pardon, Governor. Other processing demands took my time up for the moment.”

  “Quite all right,” Kresh said. Of course, Dee was no doubt linked to a thousand other sites and operations, and probably having a dozen other conversations with field workers right now. It was not quite a little white lie, but it was certainly close enough to being one. Robots were supposed to be incapable of lying – but this one was clever enough to manage a truthful and yet misleading statement. Dee was a sophisticated unit indeed.

  “Can you tell me more about this... idea under discussion?” Dee asked him.

  “Certainly,” said Kresh. “The idea is to evacuate everyone from the target area, and provide safeguards for the population outside the target area.” It could not hurt to emphasize safety procedures first off. Let her know that even the fictional simulants would be safe. They needed as many defenses as possible against a First Law reaction. “Once that is accomplished, a large comet is to be broken up and the fragments targeted individually, the overlapping craters running through existing lowlands. More conventional earth-moving will no doubt be required afterwards, but the linked and overlapping craters will form the basis for the Utopia Inlet.”

  “I see,” Dee replied, her voice still strained and tense. “Unit Dum and I will require a great deal more information before we can evaluate this plan.”

  “Certainly,” said Kresh. He pulled a piece of paper out of his tunic and unfolded it. “Refer to network access node 43l3, identity Davlo Lentrall, subgroup 9l9, referent code Comet Grieg.” Lentrall had given him the access address earlier. Now seemed the moment to put it to good use. “Examine the data there and you will be able to do your evaluations,” said Kresh.