Bruce Holland Rogers has published over fifty short stories in such diverse markets as Full Spectrum 4, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and The Quarterly. In 1989, he won first prize in the Writers of the Future contest for a dark fantasy story, and in 1994, his mystery story, “Enduring as Dust,” was nominated for an Edgar. His first story for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is science fiction with a considerable bite.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Lifeboat on a Burning Sea
DESERTERS.
When I can’t see the next step, when I can’t think clearly about the hardware changes that TOS needs in order to become the repository, the ark, the salvation of my soul, I think of deserters.
I think of men on the rail of a sinking tanker. For miles around, there are no lights, only water black and icy. A lake of flame surrounds the ship. Beyond the edge of the burning oil slick, a man sits in the lifeboat looking at his comrades. The angle of the deck grows steeper. The men at the rail are waving their hands, but the one in the boat doesn’t return. Instead, he puts his back into rowing, rowing away. To the men who still wave, who still hope, the flames seem to reach higher, but it’s really the ship coming down to meet the burning sea.
Or this:
The arctic explorer wakes from dreams of ice and wind to a world of ice and wind. In the sleeping bag, his frostbite has thawed and it feels as though his hands and feet are on fire. It is almost more than he can endure, but he tells himself he’s going to live. As long as his companion is fit enough to drive the sled, he’s going to live. He hobbles from the tent, squints against the sunlight. When he finds the dogs and sled gone, he watches for a long time as the wind erases the tracks.
In these fantasies of mine, the dead bear witness.
From the bottom of the sea, dead sailors wave their arms.
Frozen into the ice, a leathery finger points, accuses.
There must have been a time when I wasn’t aware of the relentless tick of every heartbeat, but I don’t remember it. My earliest memory is of lying awake in my bed, eyes open in the blackness, imagining what it was like to be dead.
I had asked my father. He was a practical man.
“It’s like this,” he said. He showed me a watch that had belonged to my grandfather, an antique watch that ran on a coiled spring instead of a battery. He wound it up. “Listen,” he said.
Tick, tick, tick, I heard.
“Our hearts are like that,” he said, handing me the watch. “At last, they stop. That’s death.”
“And then what?”
“Then, nothing,” he told me. “Then we’re dead. We just aren’t any more—no thought, no feeling. Gone. Nothing.”
He let me carry the watch around for a day. The next morning, the spring had run down. I put the watch to my ear, and heard absence, heard nothing.
Even back then, lying awake in the dark with my thoughts of the void, I was planning my escape.
Tick, tick, tick, went my heart, counting down to zero.
I wasn’t alone. After my graduate work in neuronics, I found a university job and plenty of projects to work on, but research is a slow business.
Tick, tick, tick.
I was in a race, and by the time I was fifty-six, I knew I was falling behind. In fact, I felt lucky to have made it that far. We were living at the height of terrorist chic. The Agrarian Underground and Monetarists were in decline, but the generation of bombers that succeeded them was ten times as active, a hundred times as random in their selection of targets. Plastique, Flame, Implosion…They gave themselves rock-band names. And then there were the ordinary street criminals who would turn their splitter guns on you in the hope that your chip, once they dug it out of your skin, would show enough credit for a hit of whatever poison they craved.
Statistically, of course, it wasn’t surprising that I was still alive. But whenever I tuned in to CNN Four, The Street Beat Source, the barrage of just-recorded carnage made me wonder that anyone was still alive.
Fifty-six. That’s when I heard from Bierley’s people. And after I had met Bierley, after I had started to work with Richardson, I began to believe that I would hit my stride in time, that Death might not be quite the distance runner he’d always been cracked up to be.
I had known who Bierley was, of course. Money like his bought a high profile, if you wanted it. And I had heard of Richardson. He was hot stuff in analog information.
Bierley and Richardson were my best hope. Bierley and Richardson were magicians at what they did. And Bierley and Richardson—I knew it from the start—were unreliable.
Bierley, with his money and political charm, would stay with the project only until it bored him. And Richardson, he had his own agenda. Even when we were working well together, when we were making progress, Richardson never really believed.
In Richardson’s office, he and I watched a playback of Bierley’s press conference. It had been our press conference, too, but we hadn’t answered many questions. Even Richardson understood the importance of leaving that to Bierley.
“A multi-cameral multi-phasic analog information processor,” Bierley said again on the screen, “but we prefer to call it TOS.” He smiled warmly. “The Other Side.”
From behind his desk, Richardson grumbled, “God. He makes what we’ve done sound like a séance.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s the whole point.”
“Are you really so hot to live forever as a machine consciousness, if, fantasy of fantasies, it turns out to be possible?”
“Yes.”
“Your problem,” he said, pointing a finger, “is that you’re too damned scared of death to be curious about it. That’s not a very scientific attitude.”
I almost told him he’d feel differently in another twenty years, but then I didn’t. It might not be true. Since I had always seen death as the enemy, it was possible that someone like Richardson never would.
“Meanwhile,” Richardson continued, “we’ve made a significant leap in machine intelligence. Isn’t that worthy of attention in its own right without pretending that it’s a step toward a synthesized afterlife?”
On the screen, Bierley was saying, “Of all the frontiers humanity has challenged, death was the one we least expected to conquer.”
“As if, Christ, as if we’d already done it!”
Bierley peered out from the screen. He had allowed only one video camera for the conference so that he’d know when he was looking his viewers in the eye. “Some of you watching now will never die. That’s the promise of this research. Pioneers of the infinite! Who doesn’t long to see the march of the generations? What will my grandchild’s grandchildren be like? What lies ahead in one hundred years? A thousand? A million?” After a pause and another grandfatherly smile, a whisper: “Some will live to know.”
Richardson blew a raspberry at the screen.
“All right,” I admitted. “He oversells. But that’s Bierley. Everything he says is for effect, and the effect is funding!”
On the screen, the silver-haired Bierley was rephrasing questions as only he could, turning the more aggressive queries in on themselves. Wasn’t this a premature announcement of a breakthrough bringing hope to millions? Would Bierley himself turn a profit from this conquest of humanity’s oldest and cruelest foe? Would he himself be among the first to enter the possibly hazardous territory of eternity to make sure it was safe for others?
Then he was introducing us, telling the reporters about my genius for hardware and Richardson’s for analog information theory. We had sixty technicians and research assistants working with us, but Bierley made it sound like a two-man show. In some ways, it was. Neither of us could be replaced, not if you wanted the same synergy.
“Two great minds in a race for immortality,” Bierley said, and then he gave them a version of what I’d told Bierley myself: Richardson was always two steps ahead of my designs, seeing applications that exceeded my intentions, making me run to keep up with him and propose new struc
tures that would then propel him another two steps beyond me. I’d never worked with anyone who stimulated me in that way, who made me leap and stretch. It felt like flying.
What Bierley didn’t say was that often we’d dash from thought to thought and finally look down to see empty air beneath us. Usually we discovered impracticalities in the wilder things we dreamed up together. Only rarely did we find ourselves standing breathless on solid ground, looking back at the flawless bridge we had just built. Of course, when that happened, it was magnificent.
It also frightened me. I worried that Richardson was indispensable, that after making those conceptual leaps with him, I could never go back to my solitary plodding or to working with minds less electric than his. All minds were less electric than his, at least when he was at his best. The only difficulty was keeping him from straying into the Big Questions.
The camera had pulled back, and Richardson and I both looked rumpled and plain next to Bierley’s polish. On screen I stammered and adjusted my glasses as I answered a question.
Richardson was no longer watching the press conference video, but had shifted his gaze to the flatscreen on his office wall. It showed a weather satellite image of the western hemisphere, time lapsed so that the last 72 hours rolled by in three minutes. It was always running in Richardson’s office, the only decoration there, unless you counted that little statue, the souvenir from India that he kept on his desk.
On the press conference tape, Richardson was answering a question. “We don’t have any idea how we’d actually get a person’s consciousness into the machine,” he admitted. “We haven’t even perfected the artificial mind that we’ve built. There’s one significant glitch that keeps shutting us down for hours at a time.”
At that point, Bierley’s smile looked forced, but only for an instant.
“The best way to explain the problem,” the recorded Richardson continued, “is to tell you that thoughts move through our hardware in patterns that are analogous to weather. Sometimes an information structure builds up like a tropical depression. If conditions are right, it becomes a hurricane. The processor continues to work, but at greatly reduced efficiency until the storm passes. So we’re blacked out sometimes. We can’t talk to…” He paused, looking at Bierley, sort of wincing, “…to TOS, until the hurricane has spent its energy.”
“You don’t like the name,” I said in Richardson’s office.
Richardson snorted. “The Other Side.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’re right about the money, though. He charms the bucks out of Congress, and that’s not easy these days.”
On the tape, I was telling the reporters about the warning lights I had rigged in the I/O room: They ran up a scale from Small Craft Advisory to Gale Warning to Hurricane, with the appropriate nautical flags painted onto the display. I had hoped for a bigger laugh than I got.
“Can we interview the computer?” a reporter asked.
I had started to say something about how the I/O wasn’t up to that yet, but that TOS itself was helping to design an appropriate interface to make itself as easy to talk to as any human being.
Bierley’s image stepped forward in front of mine. “TOS is not a computer,” he said. “Let’s make this clear. TOS is an information structure for machine intelligence. TOS is interfaced with computers, can access and manipulate digital data, but this is an analog machine. Eventually, it will be a repository for human consciousness. If you want another name for it, you could call it a Mind Bank.”
“No one gets it,” Richardson said, “and this press conference isn’t going to help.” He looked at me. “You don’t get it, do you, Maas?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Trying to synthesize self-awareness is an interesting project. And putting human consciousness into a box would be a neat trick, instructive. I mean, I’m all for trying even if we fail. I expect to fail. Even if we succeed, even if we find a technical answer, it begs the bigger question.”
“Which is?”
“What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? Until you get a satisfactory answer to that, then what’s the point of trying to live forever?”
“The point is that I don’t want to die!” Then more quietly, I said, “Do you?”
Richardson didn’t look at me. He picked up the Indian statue from his desk and leaned back in his chair to look at it. When he put it down again, he still hadn’t answered.
The statue was a man dancing inside an arc of flames.
The next week, Bierley deserted us.
“Brain aneurism in his sleep,” one of the old man’s attorneys told me via video link.
There had been no provision in Bierley’s will to keep seed money coming. If he went first, we were on our own. The attorney zapped me a copy of the will so I could see for myself.
“Makes you think,” the attorney said, “doesn’t it?” He meant the sudden death. I thought about that, of course. As strong as ever, I could hear my pulse in my throat. Tick, tick, tick. But I was also thinking something else:
Bastard. Deserter.
He had left me to die.
WEEKS LATER in the I/O room, I said to Richardson, “We’re in trouble.”
He and a technician had been fiddling with TOS’s voice, and he said, “TOS, what do you think of that?”
“I don’t know what to think of it,” said the machine voice. The tone was as meaningfully modulated as any human voice, but there was still something artificial about the sound—too artificial, still, for press exposure. “I don’t know enough of what Dr. Maas means by ‘trouble.’ I’m unsure of just how inclusive ‘we’ is intended to be.”
“My bet,” Richardson said, “is that he’s going to say our project has funding shortfalls up the yaya.”
“Yaya?” said TOS.
“Wazoo,” Richardson said.
“Oh.” A pause. “I understand.”
Richardson grinned at me. “English as she is spoke.”
I waved off his joke. “There’s talk of cutting our funding in Congress. I’ve been calling the reps that were in Bierley’s pocket, but I can’t talk to these people. Not like he could. And I sure as hell can’t start a grass-roots ground swell.”
“How about that lobbyist we hired?”
“She’s great at phoning, full of enthusiasm, to tell me how bad things are. She says she’s doing her best.” I dropped into a chair. “Damn Bierley for dying.” And for taking us with him, I thought. Didn’t those bastards in Washington understand what the stakes were here? This wasn’t basic science that you could throw away when budgets were tight. This was life and death!
Tick, tick, tick.
My life. My death!
Richardson said, “How desperate are we?”
“Plenty.”
“Good.” Richardson smiled. “I have a desperation play.”
We played it close to the edge. Our funding was cut in a House vote, saved by the Senate, and lost again in conference committee. Two weeks later, we also lost an accountant who said he wouldn’t go to jail for us, but by then we had figured out that the best way to float digital requisition forms and kite electronic funds transfers was with TOS. We couldn’t stay ahead of the numbers forever, but TOS, with near-human guile and digital speed, bought us an extra week or two while the team from Hollywood installed the new imaging hardware.
The technicians and research assistants kept TOS busy with new data to absorb, to think about, and I worked to add “rooms” to the multi-cameral memory, trying to give TOS the ability to suppress the information hurricanes that still shut us down at unpredictable intervals. The first rooms had each been devoted to a specific function—sensory processing, pattern recognition, memory sorting—but these new ones were basically just memory modules. Meanwhile, Richardson paraded people who had known Bierley through the I/O room for interviews with TOS.
The day of the press conference, I deflected half a dozen calls from the Government Accounting Office. Even as
the first reporters were filing into our press room, I kept expecting some suits and crewcuts to barge in, flash badges, and say, “FBI.”
I also worried about hurricanes, but TOS’s storm warning lights stayed off all morning, and the only surprise of the press conference was the one Richardson and I had planned. While stragglers were still filing into the room—security-screening and bomb-sniffing that many people took some time—the video behind the podium flicked on.
“Bierley, regrettably, is dead,” said Bierley’s image. He was responding to the first question after his prepared statement. “There’s no bringing him back, and I regret that.” Warm smile.
The press corps laughed uncertainly.
“But you’re his memories?” asked a reporter.
“Not in the sense that you mean it,” Bierley said. “Nobody dumped Bierley’s mind into a machine. We can’t do that.” Dramatic pause. “Yet.” Smile. “What I am is a personality construct of other people’s memories. Over one hundred of Bierley’s closest associates were interviewed by TOS. Their impressions of Bierley, specific examples of things he had said and done, along with digital recordings of the man in action, were processed to create me. I may not be Jackson Bierley as he saw himself, but I’m Jackson Bierley as he was seen by others.”
Bierley chose another reporter by name.
The reporter looked around herself, then at the screen. “Can you see me?” she said. “Can you see this room?”
“There’s a micro camera,” said the image, “top and center of this display panel. Really, though—” he flashed the grandfatherly Bierley smile “—that’s a wasted question. You must have had a harder one in mind.”
“Just this,” she said. “Are you self-aware?”
“I certainly seem to be, don’t I?” said the image. “There’s liable to be some debate about that. I’m no expert, so I’ll leave the final answer up to Doctors Maas and Richardson. But my opinion is that, no, I am not self-aware.”
A ripple of laughter from the reporters who appreciated paradox.
“How do we know,” said a man who hadn’t laughed, “that this isn’t some kind of fake?”
Thirteen Ways to Water Page 18