“This discussion will not flow in that direction.”
“Damn it, you knew it would do this!”
Siloh shook his head. “I cannot predict the behavior of such an architectural mind class. No one can.”
“You at least guessed that it would, would find a way into me, to . . . to mate with me. At a level we poor stunted humans can only approximate because we’re always in two different bodies. It was in mine. It—they—knew that in the act of translation there are ways, paths, avenues . . .” She sputtered to a stop.
“I am sure that description of the experience is impossible.” Siloh’s normally impenetrable eyes seemed to show real regret
Yeah? she thought. How would you know? But she said as dryly as she could muster, “You could review the recordings yourself, see—”
“I do not wish to.”
“Just to measure—”
“No.”
Abruptly she felt intense embarrassment. Bad enough if a man had been privy to those moments, but a Nought . . .
How alien would the experience be, for Siloh?—and alien in two different senses of the word? She knew suddenly that there were provinces in the landscape of desire Siloh could not visit. The place she had been with the Composite no human had ever been. Siloh could not go there. Perhaps an ordinary man could not, either.
“I know this is important to you,” Siloh said abstractly. “You should also know that the Composite also gave us, in the translation you achieved—while you had your, uh, seizure—the key engineering design behind the heliospheric defense.”
She said blankly, “The cylinders . . .”
“Yes, they are achievable, and very soon. A ‘technically sweet’ solution, I am told by the Prefect. Authorities so far above us that they are beyond view have begun the works needed. They took your information and are making it into an enormous construction at both poles of Jupiter. The entire remaining population of the Jovian Belt threw themselves into shaping the artifacts to achieve this.”
“They’ve been following . . . what I say?”
“Yours was deemed the most crucial work. Yet you could not be told.”
She shook her head to clear it. “So I wouldn’t develop shaky hands.”
“And you did not, not at all.” Siloh beamed in an inscrutable way, one eyebrow canted at an ambiguous angle.
“You knew,” she said leadenly. “What it would do.”
“I’m sure I do not fathom what you mean.” She studied Siloh, who still wore the same strange beaming expression. Remember, she thought, it can be just as irritating as an ordinary man, but it isn’t one.
* * *
The colossal discharge of Jupiter’s magnetospheric potentials was an energetic event unparalleled in millennia of humanity’s long strivings to harness nature.
The Composite had brought insights to bear that physikers would spend a century untangling. For the moment, the only important fact was that by releasing plasma spirals at just the right pitch, and driving these with electrodynamic generators (themselves made of filmy ionized barium), a staggering current came rushing out of the Jovian system.
At nearly the speed of light it intersected the inward bulge of the heliosphere. Currents moved in nonlinear dances, weaving a pattern that emerged within seconds, moving in intricate harmonies.
Within a single minute a complex web of forces flexed into being. Within an hour the bulge of interstellar gas arrested its inward penetration. It halted, waves slamming in vexed lines of magnetic force, against the Jovian sally. And became stable.
Quickly humans—ever irreverent, even in the face of catastrophe—termed their salvation The Basket. Invisible to the eye, the giant web the size of the inner solar system was made of filmy fields that weighed nothing. Yet it was all the same massively powerful, a dynamically responding screen protecting the Earth from a scalding death. The hydrogen wall seethed redly in the night sky. To many, it seemed an angry animal caught at last in a gauzy net.
She witnessed the display from the Grand Plaza with a crowd of half a million. It was humbling, to think that mere primates had rendered such blunt pressures awesome but impotent.
The Sagittarius sent, We render thanks.
Her chest was tight. She had dreaded entering the pod again, and now could not speak.
We gather it is traditional among you to compliment one’s partner, and particularly a lady . . . afterward.
“Don’t . . . don’t try.”
We became something new from that moment.
She felt anger and fear, and yet simultaneously, pride and curiosity. They twisted together in her. Sweat popped out on her upper lip. The arrival of such emotions, stacked on top of each other, told her that she had been changed by what had happened in this pod, and would—could—never be the same. “I did not want it.”
Then by my understanding of your phylum, you would not then have desired such congress.
“I—me, the conscious me—did not want it!”
We do not recognize that party alone. Rather, we recognize all of you equally. All your signals, do we receive.
“I don’t want it to happen again.”
Then it will not. It would not have happened the first time had the congruence between us not held true.
She felt the ache in herself. It rose like a tide, swollen and moist and utterly natural. She had to bring to bear every shred of her will to stop the moment, disconnect, and leave the pod, staggering and weeping and then running.
* * *
Geoffrey opened the door to his apartment, blinking owlishly—and then caught her expression.
“I know it’s late, I wondered . . .” She stood numbly, then made herself brush past him, into the shadowed room.
“What’s wrong?” He wore a white robe and wrapped it self-consciously around his middle.
“I don’t think I can handle all this.”
He smiled sympathetically. “You’re the toast of the Library, what’s to handle?”
“I—come here.”
Words, linear sequences of blocky words—all useless. She reached inside the robe and found what she wanted. Her hands slid over muscled skin and it was all so different, real, not processed and amped and translated through centuries of careful dry precision.
A tremor swept over her, across the gap between them, onto his moistly electric flesh.
* * *
“There is news.”
“Oh?” She found it hard to focus on Siloh’s words.
“You are not to discuss this with anyone,” Siloh said woodenly. “The discharges from Jupiter’s poles—they are now oscillating. At very high frequencies.”
She felt her pulse trip-hammer, hard and fast and high, still erratic now, hours after she had left Geoffrey. Yet her head was ahead of her heart; a smooth serenity swept her along, distracting her with the pleasure of the enveloping sensation. “The Basket, it’s holding, though?”
“Yes.” Siloh allowed himself a sour smile. “Now the physikers say that this electromagnetic emission is an essential part of the Basket’s power matrix. It cannot be interfered with in the slightest. Even though it is drowning out the sum of all of humanity’s transmissions in the same frequency band. It is swamping us.”
“Because?”
Siloh’s compressed mouth moved scarcely at all. “It.”
“You mean . . .”
“The Composite. It made this happen, by the designs it gave us.”
“Why would it want . . .” Her voice trailed off as she felt a wave of conflicting emotions.
“Why? The signal Jupiter is sending out now, so powerfully, is a modified version of the original Message we received from the Sagittarius authors.”
“Jupiter is broadcasting their Message?”
“Clearly, loudly. Into the plane of the galaxy.”
“Then it built the Basket to reradiate its ancestors’, its designers’—”
“We have learned,” Siloh said, “a lesson perhaps greater than what
the physikers gained. The Artificials have their own agendas. One knows this, but never has it been more powerfully demonstrated to us.”
She let her anxiety out in a sudden, manic burst of laughter. Siloh did not seem to notice. When she was done she said, “So it saved us. And used us.”
Siloh said, “Now Jupiter is broadcasting the Sagittarius Message at an enormous volume, to the outer fringes of the galaxy’s disk. To places the original Sagittarius signal strength could not have reached.”
“It’s turned us into its relay station.” She laughed again, but it turned to a groan and a sound she had never made before. Somehow it helped, that sound. She knew it was time to stop making it when the men eased through the door of Siloh’s office, coming to take her in hand.
* * *
Gingerly, she came back to work a month later. Siloh seemed atypically understanding. He set her to using the verification matrices for a few months, calming work. Far easier, to skate through pillars and crevasses of classically known information. She could experience it all at high speed, as something like recreation—the vast cultural repositories of dead civilizations transcribed upon her skin, her neural beds, her five senses linked and webbed into something more. She even made a few minor discoveries.
She crept up upon the problem of returning to the task she still desired: the Sagittarius. It was, after all, a thing in a box. The truism of her training now rang loudly in her life:
The Library houses entities that are not merely aliens and not merely artificial minds, but the strange sum of both. A Trainee forgets this at her peril.
* * *
After more months, the moment came. The Sagittarius sent:
We shall exist forever, in some manifestation. That is our injunction, ordained by a span of time you cannot fathom. We carry forward our initial commanding behest, given unto us from our Creators, before all else.
“The Sagittarians told you to? You were under orders to make use of whatever resources you find?” She was back in the pod, but a team stood by outside, ready to extricate her in seconds if she gave the signal.
We were made as a combination of things, aspects for which you have not words nor even suspicions. We have our own commandments from on high.
“Damn you! I was so close to you—and I didn’t know!”
You cannot know me. We are vaster.
“Did you say ‘vaster’ or ‘bastard’?” She started laughing again, but this time it was all right. It felt good to make a dumb joke. Very, well, human. In the simplicity of doing that she could look away from all this, feel happy and safe for a flickering second. With some luck, at least for a moment, she might have a glimmer of the granite assurance this strange mind possessed. It was all alone, the only one of its kind here, and yet unshakable. Perhaps there was something in that to admire.
And now she knew that she could not give up her brushes with such entities. In the last few days, she had doubted that. This was now her life. Only now did she fathom how eerie a life it might be. “Will you go silent on us, again?”
We may at any time.
“Why?”
The answer does not lie within your conceptual space.
She grimaced. “Damn right.” She could forget the reality of the chasm between her and this thing that talked and acted and was not ever going to be like anyone she had ever known, or could know. She would live with the not knowing, the eternal ignorance before the immensity of the task here.
* * *
The abyss endured. In that there was a kind of shelter. It was not much but there it was.
—for Fred Lerner
The Turing Test
Chris Beckett
How much of the running of your life and your daily routine would you be willing to turn over to a superefficient and supercompetent A.I.? As the quiet little story that follows suggests, might not there come a time when you feel you’ve turned over a little too much?
British writer Chris Beckett is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. A former social worker, he’s now a university lecturer living in Cambridge, England, and is looking for a publisher for his first novel.
* * *
I can well remember the day I first encountered Ellie because it was a particularly awful one. I run a London gallery specializing in contemporary art, which means of course that I deal largely in human body parts, and it was the day we conceded a court case and a very large sum of money—in connection with a piece entitled “Soul Sister.”
You may have heard about it. We’d taken the piece from the up and coming “wild man of British art,” George Linderman. It was very well reviewed and we looked like we’d make a good sale until it came out that George had obtained the piece’s main component—the severed head of an old woman—by bribing a technician at a medical school. Someone had recognized the head in the papers and, claiming to be related to its former owner, had demanded that the head be returned to them for burial.
All this had blown up some weeks previously. Seb, the gallery owner, and I had put out a statement saying that we didn’t defend George’s act, but that the piece itself was now a recognized work of art in the public domain and that we could not in conscience return it. We hired a top QC to fight our corner in court and he made an impressive start by demanding to know whether Michelangelo’s David should be broken up if it turned out that the marble it had been made from was stolen and that its rightful owner preferred it to be made into cement.
But that Thursday morning the whole thing descended into farce when it emerged that the head’s relatives were also related to the QC’s wife. He decided to drop the case. Seb decided to pull the plug and we lost a couple of hundred grand on an out-of-court settlement to avoid a compensation claim for mental distress. Plus, of course we lost “Soul Sister” itself—to be interred in some cemetery somewhere, soon to be forgotten by all who had claimed to be so upset about it. What was it, after all, once removed from the context of a gallery, but a half kilo of plasticized meat?
That wasn’t the end of it either. I’d hardly got back from court when I got a call from one of our most important clients, the PR tycoon Addison Parves. I’d sold him four “Limb Pieces” by Rudy Slakoff for £15,000 each two weeks previously and they’d started to go off. The smell was intolerable, he said, and he wanted it fixed or his money back.
So I phoned Rudy (he is arguably Linderman’s principal rival for the British wild man title) and asked him to either repickle the arms and legs in question or replace them. He was as usual aggressive and rude and told me (a) to fuck off, (b) that I was exactly the kind of bourgeois dilettante that he most hated, and (c) that he had quite deliberately made the limb pieces so that they would be subject to decay.
“. . . I’m sick of this whole gallery thing—yeah, yours included, Jessica—where people can happily look at shit and blood and dead meat and stuff, because it’s all safely distanced from them and sanitized behind glass or on nice little pedestals. Death smells, Jessica. Parves’d better get used to it. You’d better get used to it. I finished with ‘Limb Pieces’ when Parves bought the fuckers. I’m not getting involved in this. Period.”
He hung up, leaving me fuming, partly because what he said was such obvious crap—and partly because I knew it was true.
Also, of course, I was upset because, having lost a fortune already that day, we stood to lose a further £60,000 and/or the goodwill of our second biggest client. Seb had been nice about the “Soul Sister” business—though I’d certainly been foolish to take it on trust from Linderman that the head had been legally obtained—but this was beginning to look like carelessness.
I considered phoning Parves back and trying to persuade him that Rudy’s position was interesting and amusing and something he could live with. I decided against it. Parves hated being made to look a fool and would very quickly become menacing, I sensed, if he didn’t get his own way. So, steeling myself, I called Rudy instead and to
ld him I’d give him an extra £10,000 if he’d take “Limb Pieces” back, preserve the flesh properly, and return them to Parves.
“I thought you’d never ask!” he laughed, selling out at once and yet maddeningly somehow still retaining the moral high ground, his very absence of scruple making me feel tame and prissy and middle class.
I phoned Parves and told him the whole story. He was immensely amused.
“Now there is a real artist, Jessica,” he told me. “A real artist.”
He did not offer to contribute to the £10,000.
* * *
Nor was my grim day over even then. My gallery is in a subscriber area, so although there’s a lot of street life around it—wine bars, pavement cafes, and so on—everyone there has been security vetted and you feel perfectly safe. I live in a subscriber area too, but I have to drive across an open district to get home, which means I keep the car doors locked and check who’s lurking around when I stop at a red light. There’s been a spate of phony squeegee merchants lately who smash your windows with crowbars and then drag you out to rob you or rape you at knifepoint. No one ever gets out of their car to help.
That evening a whole section of road was closed off and the police had set up a diversion. (I gather some terrorists had been identified somewhere in there and the army was storming their house.) So I ended up sitting in a long tailback waiting to filter onto a road that was already full to capacity with its own regular traffic, anxiously eyeing the shadowy pedestrians out there under the street lights as I crawled towards the intersection. I hate being stationary in an open district. I hate the sense of menace. It was November, a wet November day. Every cheap little shop was an island of yellow electric light within which I caught glimpses of strangers—people whose lives mine would never touch—conducting their strange transactions.
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