by Eater (v5)
“You have every right to,” came out judiciously phrased. “If there’s anything—”
“A lot, but it’s probably immoral or something. Content me by telling me the gossip.”
This put him on his favorite ground, the slightly disguised lecture. The great game now was not astrophysics but amateur alien psychology. “The creature going on obliviously, chattering about all sorts of things, as if we are all waiting here for its orders.”
“And we aren’t?”
“The leadership is saying and doing nothing.”
“They’ve had two days to think it over—”
“My dear, this is a matter for the entire world. In two days, they cannot agree on the color of blue.”
“They’d better hurry.”
“There’s mildly good news there. It’s braking.”
“Ah, good. How?”
“Only an astronomer would make that her first question.” He grinned and for a quick moment some of the old joy brimmed between them. “Most would want to know how many more days that gives us, which is perhaps now fifteen in all. To answer how—through a forward-pointing jet, quite powerful. Apparently it found fresh quarry and has extended this jet, anchoring it firmly with magnetic flux ropes in a helical pattern. That funnels and ejects hot matter from its accretion disk.”
The coffee had given her enough energy to be incredulous. “That’s slowing it enough?”
“I know, a simple calculation shows that slowing a mass exceeding our moon’s, down from a velocity of hundreds of kilometers a second is, well, an incredible demand.”
“It’s an incredible creature. What’s it say about this?”
“Its deceleration? Nothing. Not one to give way to Proustian introspection, it seems.”
“Skip the literature. I’ll settle for hearing how it does the jet trick.”
“Understanding how it thinks is now critical, I gather.”
“Sure, right after we understand how we think.”
“Touché. It did refer to Proust the other day, I saw. Something about his understanding of time being what one would expect of ‘doomed intelligences,’ I believe the phrase was.”
“Well, as a fellow doomed intelligence, I agree. Never could abide Proust, anyway.”
“Nor I. Its transmissions are fascinating stuff and I look in on them when I can.”
“I should, too,” she said distantly.
“It’s sending masses of stuff, a million words a day.” Too casually he looked at her hands, which were fidgeting—and not due to the Kaff. “I gather you have been looking at its own inventory of art.”
“Ummm, yes. It appended a note saying that these were representative works from other members of our class.”
He frowned. “‘Class’? As technological civilizations?”
“No, as what it called ‘dreaming vertebrates.’ With the implication that our class is fairly common.”
“Good Lord. I wonder if those working out its orders know that. I’ll have to tell them.”
“Orders?”
“Oh yes, it has a menu and proceeds to order up whatever it fancies.”
“From what? Our broadcast media?”
“And references such as the Encyclopaedia. Still having a bit of trouble keeping straight that people pass from the scene so quickly. Or else thinks we’re somehow hiding them away still.”
“Who does it want?”
“Artists, scientists, sports figures. It caught transmissions from decades past as it approached our solar system. It even sends the pictures of those it wants. Lauren Bacall, Einstein, Bob Dylan, Gandhi, Esther Dyson, Jack Nicholson, and Hillary Clinton, as I remember.”
She felt a chill then at the reality of what was coming at them across the solar system. “Good…grief.”
“Yes, imagine the feelings of those on the list.”
“They’ve been told?”
“It would seem. Of course many are dead, but others are now near death. Arno wondered aloud if any would be willing to, you know, give up the remainder of their lives”—he shrugged, eyes rolling skyward—“for humanity and so on.”
“To…copy…them.” The word was hard to get out.
“It has already sent ‘helpful additions’ to our computing and other technologies that it says will permit us to ‘read’ a good deal of the memory stored in brains. Seems incredible to me.”
“It…wants all the person?”
“So I gather.” He looked at her quizzically.
“Why should we do it?”
“It does not need to brag about its threatening abilities, of course. Apparently brute intimidation has worked before.”
“We all judge from our experience,” she said lightly. “What does this tell us about other intelligent life in the galaxy?”
“They must have complied, I suppose, else it would not think this a winning strategy.”
“Something about the idea gets me in my, well, my gut.”
“Me, too. In terms of game theory, doing a cost-benefit sort of analysis—”
She chuckled loudly. Kingsley stopped, blinked. “You think I’m off the mark.”
“‘Applying game theory’—that’s the kind of idea only an intellectual would believe. This is a gut issue.”
Ruefully he tried to share in the humor of it, managing a thin smile. “I suppose I betray my origins.”
“You may think that way, but I’ll bet ordinary people sure don’t.”
He nodded energetically. “I think you’re dead-on right.”
“To deal in people this way is as profound an insult as I can imagine.”
“Ummm. Perhaps this hints at what we should call a fate worse than death?”
“How are people reacting?”
He sighed with gray exasperation. “Those above are dithering, terrified. News has gotten out, of course. Arno tried to see that all radio telescopes that could pick up the Eater’s transmissions were in our control, but that notion failed immediately.”
“Too many?”
“Far too many. A small dish with superior software in Sri Lanka picked up the vital part of the story. The Eater sent it several times in different terminology, apparently to be sure it was understood.”
Benjamin came by, saw them, and hurried over. “Been looking for you both. Come on. You can watch in my office.”
From his tight-mouthed expression she could read that the morning had not gone well. She labored up from her chair. “More trouble with Arno?”
“He’s trying to find scapegoats for the leaks.”
“This place is a sieve, in any case,” Kingsley said amiably, unconcerned, as they both slowed to her pace.
“The Sri Lanka was bad enough, but somebody’s letting other stuff get out,” Benjamin said as they entered his office. Two assistants waved for his attention, but he in turn waved them away. Something had toughened in him in all this and he seemed more assured than he had ever been. She was proud of him, especially when she saw the strain on the faces of Center personnel. Benjamin’s expression was unlined, though intent.
He punched up the international news—not difficult, since channels carried virtually nothing else since the Eater had left Jupiter space. “What’s the reaction?” Channing asked, sinking into a form-fitting chair that clasped her in its leathery embrace.
“Horror,” Benjamin said. “Here—”
They watched reaction shots from some of those ‘ordered up’ on the Eater’s menu. After the third one, her attention drifted and she let events slide by for a while. When she came back, there was the news Benjamin had brought them in for.
Some totalitarian governments had started to comply. Footage of people rounded up—criminals, the politically out of favor—and being herded away.
“To have their brains sliced-and-diced and uploaded into computers,” Benjamin said. “Incredible.”
“And the bastards in charge are claiming to do it for the benefit of all mankind,” Kingsley said.
“Transp
arent,” Benjamin said with disgust.
The twenty-first century had no lack of dictators. In the crush of populations among the tropical nations particularly, the strongman promises of order and equal shares, though seldom fulfilled, found a ready audience.
“They know their unsavory reputations,” Kingsley observed, “and this move allows them to appear as benefactors of humanity while consolidating internal power. Rather neat, overall.”
Another news flash, this time yet another intercepted Eater message. “Not from here,” Benjamin said. “Some dish grabbed it.”
The Eater encouraged this latest development from the dictators. It wanted a large, functioning “eternal society” to join it, addressing humanity as though it were a unity.
I DESIRE CONVERSE WITH A TRUE VARIETY OF YOU.
2
Benjamin did not want to go for even a short walk on the beach, but she insisted. The day’s events had been unsettling, as usual, and he felt the old island softness creep into him as they made their way through palms and onto the broad, warm sand. The sunset was a spectacular streaked composition in purple and orange. She could barely manage making her way in the white sand.
“When will we be able to see it as a naked eye object?” she asked, gazing up.
“Inside a week, I believe, if its deceleration continues as is.”
“Should be pretty.”
He turned to her suddenly, back to the sunset. “Look, I can step down from running things, spend these days together. Here on the beach, as much as we can.”
“Your heart wins out over your head,” she said abstractly, gazing at the fading fingers of deepening red that arced over them.
“Sure, sure, for you.” They embraced and he felt a warm wave of relief. “I’ll see Arno tomorrow, quit—”
“No, I need you to talk to him, but not about that.”
He blinked, seeing something strange come into her face. “But…”
Fervently she grasped his arms, hugged him, stepped back. “I want to go.”
“‘Go’? Where? What—” Then he saw it.
“Upload me.”
“That’s…that’s—” His throat tightened painfully.
“Crazy, as crazy as what’s already happening.”
He scrambled for rational reasons. “It’s untried, chancy—”
“It’s not to evade death,” she said in a straightforward, businesslike voice. “I know that a copy is not the original. I’ll be gone, as far as the little ‘me’ that rides around behind my eyes. And I’m not going to discuss whether an uploaded ‘person’ has free will, either—philosophy doesn’t ring my chimes, not now. I’ve got another reason, one you can argue for with Arno and the others.”
“If you think I’ll—”
“Hear me out, lover. I want to control a Searcher spacecraft, fly it into the Eater. They need onboard guidance to do that. I can be uploaded into a control module.”
“Not like those bastards in the tropics.” He was trying to see what drove her to this, but his mind didn’t seem to be working very well. Did she think some digital replica was like becoming one of those sculptures, the alien ones?
She abandoned the business voice and pleaded nakedly. “I can help, even after I’m gone.”
“And you are an astronaut,” he said lamely. “You’ll get back into space, sort of.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She hugged him.
He recoiled from her grasp, confused. “You’re saying, ‘Kill me early’? No.”
“It is my life.”
“No!”
She reached out with a soft, tentative hand. “Something of me will come through. Maybe.”
He looked at her trembling lips and kissed them. It was wrenchingly hard to resist her. “But I want every remaining moment with the real you, damn it.”
Channing picked up a handful of sand and let it run through her hands, trickling into the passing breeze like an hourglass. “Time runs out for all of us. I just want to control my end.”
“But this method, it’s bound to wear you down. You could easily die sooner.”
“Saving what, a few weeks of wasting away? No—I want win-win, remember? This way, we get the Searcher swarm to work better. And I get…something nobody’s done.”
“They don’t know what the hell they’re doing with this stuff, it’s just parts of technology slammed together, it’s…” He ground down into silence.
“I’ve read the reports, preliminary and sketchy but promising.” Back to the business voice, crisp and NASA all the way. “They get lots out of the cerebral cortex. Trouble is, reading the deeper parts of the brain.”
“But they won’t capture you.”
“The body won’t be worth much. I’m a walking ruin already.”
He had never liked her talking about herself this way, especially not the body he had learned to worship in so many ways. “I can’t believe they can read you like some neuronal book.”
“All of me is beautiful and valuable,” she said, tone now light and brittle. “Even the ugly, stupid, and disgusting parts.”
Was part of him drawn to the idea of giving her some form of digital immortality? A last flight?
Confused, his mouth working with unrelieved strain, he turned and walked on. Without them noticing, the sun had glimmered away and the sky slid into purple darkness.
3
At dawn she was weak with a numbing hollowness in her bones that cried out to be left alone. A separate child-self, wanting only the comfort it remembered from an impossibly distant time.
Channing gave it a few minutes to get used to the idea, and then very slowly and silently got out of bed. Going out through the kitchen, she grabbed a banana for energy. Opened slowly enough, the back door did not creak. In shadowy silence, the car started suddenly and she got out of the driveway before he could come running out, in case he woke. She drove up the hill behind one of the behemoth jobs from the cheap-gas decades, its plate proudly announcing VANZILLA. A hastily made sign on it carried the logo of a news network and she tromped down, enjoying the surge of acceleration as she shot around it.
Arno wasn’t in yet. Summoning more of what appeared to be her last energies, she snagged a muffin and coffee and found Kingsley. He wore the same clothes as yesterday. He even sat and listened to her whole case, his fingers steepled before him as if he were worshipping. Amy Major came in, looking equally bedraggled, touched Kingsley’s sleeve, then had the good sense to leave.
At last she was done, her voice trailing away before she could make herself frame a naked plea.
“I guessed yesterday,” he said from behind his fingers.
“Then you’ll support me?”
“I can’t imagine not doing so. But what I feel does not matter, surely, compared to Benjamin.”
“He’s thinking it over.”
“You bring it up before your own husband has—”
“There’s no time.”
He shook his head. “I cannot manage my personal feelings and give you reliable advice at the same time.”
“Look, you’ve faced my death. I’m going.”
“But certainly you cannot expect me or Benjamin to hasten that.”
“Think of it as an assisted suicide with a big upside.”
He finally broke down then, his façade crumbling. He bent slowly over his desk and his head bowed until it rested on a yellow writing pad. She let him sit like that, part of her wanting to comfort him and the other wanting to let the moment work upon him, in a cool and bloodless way that came back to her from somewhere in her years devoted to her own momentum. She had always had this streak, a compact, composed sense of self that let her know when, for example, she could let a man go, send him back for a fluff and fold while she went on with her life. She needed that now, and so she used it, letting the silence run on because it was running her way.
In time it worked. Kingsley had plenty to say, his fine long sentences purling out as she let him work his way
to an understanding of what he would have to do to help her. But the cusp moment had passed in that silence and now he was the old Kingsley, put back together with hardly any of the cracks showing.
“I am of course aware of your tragic situation,” Arno said by way of preamble, “and that knowledge led me to consider the matter in detail.”
He was in his familiar perch on the edge of his desk. Here came his patented warm, understanding, yet commanding smile. “I like the idea. As you argue, this will give us a ‘digital presence’ of higher order than anything available in existing Searcher craft.”
Benjamin was there by this time, still early morning. In the caverns of the expanded Center, there were no windows—for security reasons—so she readily lost sense of time. The stretches of memory lapse and simple stupor added to the effect. I’ll be timeless pretty soon now, one way or the other, she mused. Then she snapped awake, aware that she was drifting again, right in the middle of Arno’s speech.
He was dwelling on the technical details, on up to the grand questions. Would her simulation be bound by the craft’s programming? No, though the philosophical issue of whether a simulation behaved like a person was beyond anybody, at their primitive level of understanding. And so on.
She saw in Benjamin’s grim, set jaw his stifled anger at how she had outflanked him, going around to Kingsley. Well, she would make it up to him. Something special, great meal, wine, a Victoria’s Secret evening, the works. Then she blinked and knew she was beyond that, too, thoroughly out of it now, no body worth bothering with anymore. Or mind, either, to judge from her slippery hold on events.
Kingsley was speaking now, and Benjamin was arguing, and it was all under glass for her. Kingsley arguing that Benjamin was “too close to the issue,” then some military types coming into Arno’s office, earnest expressions turning to blank-faced when they realized she, the one, was there. Kingsley’s clashes with Benjamin had been personal, bitter in their tone, and she let all that sweep away from her. Pieces of the discussion came to her from the dozen men in the room.