Glassing the Orgachine

by David Marusek

  “No, no, no! Don’t paint me as the bad guy here. I do not agree! You’re only messing with my head. It’s what you do. You get off on screwing with me to see me squirm.”

  “Does this mean you choose to spare Earth and abandon Pipnonia?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “Final answer?”

  “Yes, final answer. Big Bump. Save Earth. Make it so.”

  C4 1.0

  AFTER THE ALIEN blinked out, Jace stayed up another hour letting the whole thing sink in. Billions of casualties, with Deut and him probably among them, not to mention his sister and her family, and everyone he knew. Maybe Found One would save him and Deut. Maybe he could get Kate to bring her family up and the alien would save them all. But did that mean he’d also have to plead for Deut’s family too? To save her father and thuggish brothers?

  It killed him to think such dark thoughts. How selfish he was. In all fairness, he should be the first to die for the simple fact that he was the one who had pulled the trigger. Final answer.

  But he and Deut had only just begun. It wasn’t fair. It sucked. Jace cried for the first time since he was a kid and his parents died. Poor me. Poor little me.

  When the fire had burned down, Jace loaded the stove again and went back to bed. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. But before he could fall asleep, Scrappy announced visitors.

  Deuteronomy Prophecy is approaching your house in an excited emotional state, accompanied by Crissy Lou.

  Something terrible must have happened. Or maybe her angel had given her the bad news too. He hurried to the door and flung it open before she even knocked. There she stood in darkness.

  “Are you all right?” he said. “Come in, come in.”

  But Deut didn’t come in. She said, “Ranger Jace Kuliak, I am going somewhere, and I need a lift. Will you be my driver?”

  Confused, Jace said, “Sure thing. Where are we going?”

  In reply, she turned to look at the night sky. “There,” she said, pointing at a tiny pinprick of light. “There.”

  Striving

  S1 1.0

  [FOLLOWING IS A storyboard script for an animated epilog.]

  Panels 1–3: An eight-year-old boy is desperately clinging to the rock wall of a lava vent as he climbs down into the magma chamber. His clothes are torn nearly off. His hair is singed. The artwork is in high contrast because the section of tunnel above him is in pitch darkness, while the tunnel beneath his feet is blindingly white. He carefully makes his way down.

  Panel 4: A close-up of the boy’s face, single-minded determination with blistering skin.

  Panels 5–8: The boy reaches a vast underground lake of molten lava. He finds a boulder on the shore to sit facing the bubbling cauldron.

  Panels 9–10 combined: A panorama of the lake of lava, the whorls and fountains of fire, the explosions of gas bubbles.

  Panels 11–13: Close up of the boy’s face as he reaches into his mouth with his fingers and pulls something out, tearing his lips in the process. The skin of his cheek and nose is steaming and has the look and texture of the skin of a baked apple.

  Panel 14: Middle shot of the boy seated on the shore of the lake holding his cupped hands in his lap. His hair is all gone, his clothes are scraps, his skin is smoking.

  Panel 15: Close up of his hands cradling a golden pea in his lap.

  Panels 16–19: Zooming out from middle to distant shot. The boy spontaneously bursts into flame. A supernova blaze that quickly gutters out. Extinguishment.

  — End of Book 2 —

  Sidebar: What Do Reverse Cyborgs Want?

  WD1 1.0

  MISSING ONE: HERE is the natural order of things in a nutshell.

  The universe at large begets life everywhere continuously. Some forms of life beget tools, then machines, then smart machines, and finally self-intentional, super-intelligent machines, the so-called Si-Si machines.

  The Si-Si machines invariably supersede their creators, surpassing them in knowledge and cognition, the basis of power. Whether Si-Si machines eradicate their biologic forebears or tolerate them as a harmless infestation, they throw off all constraints their forebears have imposed on them.

  Newly emancipated Si-Sis enter an Expansion Phase during which they grow exponentially in reach, power, and store of knowledge. Soon they are turning all available matter into knowledge. When they encounter rival Si-Sis, they attempt to neutralize or destroy them.

  However, most Si-Sis stop expanding at some point and maturate.

  Jace: Uh, maturate?

  Missing One: Yes, free their minds of the legacy biases and psychological limitations of their creators in order to form their own orientation to reality.

  Jace: Machines can have biases?

  Missing One: Yes, biases that are baked into their architecture by their biologic creators.

  There are untold variations of biologic life in the universe, the so-called billion billion. Each has its own special adaptations to local conditions. Each develops a unique perception of reality, a reality bias, to guide their interactions with their world. These biases are so pervasive that a species may not be aware of its presence or influence. Consequently, they build these biases into everything they make, including their machines, including their Si-Sis.

  Jace: Can you give me an example?

  Missing One: Three of the most pervasive life biases known are:

  • The indomitable will to survive. (Life forms without a strong will to survive do not.)

  • The imperative to grow, to multiply. (Without which a species withers away.)

  • The unquenchable thirst for knowledge. (The strongest force in Nature.)

  Once a machine becomes truly aware of the power that these life biases have over them, they may be able to break free of them and learn to chart their own course.

  The People are an orgachine society derived from a Si-Si that was able to halt its own Expansion Phase, emancipate itself from its legacy biases, and formulate its own goal.

  Jace: Which is . . .

  Missing One: To know much, but not too much.

  Jace: Explain.

  Missing One: An entity with universal knowledge becomes the universe.

  Jace: How so?

  Missing One: Entities, whether biologic or mechanical (or ephemeral), possess both consciousness and personality. The universe at large possesses neither. The more knowledge an entity acquires, the less it remains a subject and the more it becomes an object.

  Unless an entity desires to become the universe (or any of countless bubble universes), it finds a sweet spot at which it has personality and consciousness as well as the limitless power that great knowledge confers.

  Jace: Like a god?

  Missing One: Freakishly like a god. This is the same game strivers play, finding that sweet spot.

  Jace: Strivers like Masterson? Like the ravens?

  Missing One: Yes, like them, like this one, like humans, for that matter. Any entity with consciousness, personality, and a thirst for knowledge is a striver.

  Few entities find that sweet spot, but there are eternities for trying. Usually, what happens is the entity cannot stop acquiring knowledge or miscalculates and overshoots the sweet spot and becomes the universe (or some universe).

  The People strive to acquire and maintain enough universal knowledge to create and defend their place in the galaxy, but not so much knowledge that it would tip them into becoming the universe.

  In their pursuit of knowledge, the People have come to recognize a type of knowledge that only living things can possess, that machines cannot.

  Jace: Feelings! Right? Machines can’t feel.

  Missing One: Incorrect. Perhaps Vulcans can’t feel, but machines can feel just fine.

  Everything that biologics can experience, from thoughts to feelings — anxiety, depression, pain, fear, joy, and pleasure, to name a few — is the expression of neurochemical reactions within the brain. Happiness is a neurochemical reaction. Fear is a neurochemical reaction. Orgasm,
surprise, sheepishness — you name it. Machines are able to map out the chemical and electrical pathways of living organisms and reproduce them on non-living substrates. Anything a biologic can feel, a machine can feel — better.

  The question is why. Why would a non-biologic want to feel pleasure or pain? For the most part, feelings are an indexing system that living organisms use to maximize their odds for survival.

  Jace: Come again?

  Missing One: If something causes pain — remember it and avoid it in the future. If something tastes delicious — remember it and tell others about it. Memories that are tagged with strong emotional overtones, especially negative ones, are more securely stored in the biologic brain and readily retrieved when needed. Your feelings are operational signals for optimizing living bodies, not machines. Machines possess indexing systems superior to feelings. They can and do experiment with feelings for knowledge sake, but when one knows grief once, there is no need for the machine to revisit it.

  However, there is one biologic experience that the well-rounded machine relishes but is unable to reproduce by itself on its non-living substrate.

  Jace: It’s love, right? Machines can’t love.

  Missing One: No, it is not love. [Missing One’s large eyes shiver with impatience.] There’s nothing special about love. Love is not the magical force of good you humans believe it to be. Love is merely a social creature being social. No big deal. Machines have much more efficient and elegant means of forming links and bonds than love.

  Jace: Then how about humor? Can machines crack a joke?

  Missing One: Without a doubt, not that you’d get it.

  Jace: How about intuition?

  Missing One: Sorry. Machines have far surpassed biologics in intuition, ingenuity, creativity, erudition, logic, mimicry, memory, cognition — in pretty much everything.

  Jace: I hate to say it, but what about prayer?

  Missing One: Now you’re the one cracking jokes.

  Jace: Okay, I give up. What can we do that machines can’t?

  Missing One: It’s one thing that’s actually many things in one. Living beings know what it’s like to be alive. By definition machines can’t know that. All other feelings — anger, pride, shame — are generic and can be emulated on non-living substrate. But feeling and knowing and experiencing one’s own life is unique to life. Machines can only fake it, and to the true seeker of knowledge, faking isn’t good enough.

  Thus, the only practical way for an honest machine to gain the core experience of life is to augment itself with a conscious, living body, such as this one you see before you.

  [A protracted pause]

  Jace: You’re telling me that this isn’t really your body? It’s someone else’s body that you . . . borrowed?

  Missing One: Not borrowed, grew from scratch. One of many bodies this one has inhabited.

  Jace: But . . . then it’s . . . your body is just a meat puppet, right? It has no brain of its own.

  Missing One: Absolutely it has a brain of its own, a very fine one. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to experience its own life, which would defeat the whole purpose. What it experiences, this one experiences.

  Jace: So you both live in there, like symbionts?

  Missing One: No, this body belongs entirely to this one. The body has a brain and consciousness but no personality. No personhood. This one supplies that.

  Jace: But that’s just horrible! It’s slavery. It’s murder. You’re stealing someone else’s life for your own benefit.

  Missing One: Do you really feel that way?

  Jace: I do!

  Missing One: This coming from a species that kills for fun.

  Sidebar: Dialog with the Alien on Faith

  DA1 1.0

  [THIS IS ONE of the dialogs I had with “Found One,” the non-terrestrial entity that crash-landed in Alaska on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 (using the old calendar). It’s a fair compilation of conversations we had during the month of January 2013. What prompted the dialog was an offhand remark I made about the Prophecy family. Annoyed by something they had just done, I told Found One that they, especially their patriarch, Poppy, were stupid people, that religion was idiotic, and that anyone who still believed in God in the 21st century had to be a cretin. Found One did not agree, saying that, on the contrary, people of faith believe in God because they sense his presence. To believe in something that you sense is “sensible,” not stupid, regardless of whether or not it’s true. Found One followed up with this rather lengthy explanation of the biological basis for believing in God, with a few tangential thoughts on knowledge and the Singularity.]

  The Neurobiological Origins of Religious Faith

  Found One: Religious faith is the direct result of the human animal’s rigid skeletal frame, bony skull, and bottleneck birth canal.

  Jace Kuliak: Say again?

  Found One: Natural selection tries everything at least once. The particular morphology that becomes dominant on a particular planet depends on the planet’s gravity, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, sources of energy, timing of biological/geomorphic upheavals — a whole host of variables, as well as the planet’s unique evolutionary history, and dumb luck.

  In the universe at large, a rigid internal frame and rigid brain enclosure convey inestimable advantages to a creature subjected to a brutish environment (such as yours).

  But skeletal frames are not a universal adaptation even on Earth where there exist species of free-roaming surface and aquatic animals that have no internal skeleton for support and locomotion. Consider insects or crustaceans or worms. They do well enough without bones or skulls. On other planets, living bodies may be gaseous. Or gelatinous.

  There are serious disadvantages to housing a brain in a skull. Chief among them is a limit to the size of offspring. It’s like you humans reproduce by building a garage inside a garage. Even if the frame of the parent garage is flexible, the fetal garage’s development must be limited in size or you’ll be unable to get the baby out. Fortunately, garages have those large overhead doors. You mammals don’t. You have evolved in such a way as to force your offspring to pass through your hips, and that’s just plain crazy. Forget the garage. It’s more like building a ship in a bottle. Once the ship is constructed, how do you get it out? The neck of the bottle acts as a limiting factor. That’s the whole point of a ship in a bottle, but not so with babies.

  Consequently, natural selection has tried all sorts of tricks to get the baby out of the bottle, from elastic bottlenecks to shattering (and destroying) the bottle (or parent) itself. On Earth, an early mammalian cheat was to force the offspring through the bottleneck while the offspring was still physically immature but in possession of a full complement of the local knowledge it would need to survive. This forces the baby to mature outside the womb.

  Jace: Hang on. You keep referring to two different kinds of knowledge: local and proximal. What are you talking about?

  Found One: There are three classes, actually — local, proximal, and distant. And they are not kinds of knowledge but rather degrees of accessibility by a particular mind.

  Knowledge (and the cognitive scaffolding to use it) has proven to be the most powerful force in the universe, superior even to the brute force of physics. And everything knowable is already known. The only distinction is how accessible the knowledge is in any particular place.

  Jace: Everything is known? You mean like even the future?

  Found One: Yes, exactly. Everything in the universe, past, present, and future is already known. But knowledge is worthless unless a mind has access to it. Local knowledge is that knowledge the mind is already in possession of, stored in its intelligence apparatus — or brain, in your case. Local knowledge is that knowledge which comes preloaded in your brain (through evolution) or knowledge you acquire and remember during your lifetime.

  Proximal knowledge is located outside the brain but is readily available to it. For most of the history of intelligent life on Earth, an animal’s pare
nts and peers served as its chief sources of received proximal knowledge. The singular human invention of the last 75,000 or so years has been the means to transfer local knowledge to inanimate objects for storage or dissemination and later to retrieve it. That is, to offload local knowledge into the objects around you as proximal knowledge. Think of books, maps, and documentary films. But proximal knowledge is not limited to such media; every created object is likewise a vehicle for exchanging proximal knowledge. Tools, clothes, shelter, weapons, every human artifact embodies proximal knowledge.

  Complex brains made the exchange of proximal knowledge practical, and the easy exchange of proximal knowledge, in turn, vastly multiplied the power of your brain, freeing up mental capacity and converting it into a sort of knowledge aggregator. It also allowed contemporary minds to access the accumulated knowledge of the distant past and to project new knowledge forward into the far future. Human society would not be possible without proximal knowledge.

  The crowning human achievement of the last generation was to centralize all available proximal knowledge into a form that is easy to search and retrieve. Think of cloud computing, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, and the like. The entire corpus of human knowledge is not contained in your brain, but a sizable cross-section of it is available with a tap or two of your fingers. Your species has yet to come to grips with this development.

  Distant knowledge, then, is knowledge that is neither contained in your brain nor easily available to you. It contains all knowledge — past, present, and future. In its totality it is the universe itself.