by John Barnes
When the outflow jet from Clem swung hard around, it swung out over water that was just below 20 degrees Celsius in temperature. Too cold for a hurricane to start. Too cold even for one to be sustained.
Even so, there was a good-sized depression produced, which seems to have become an extratropical cyclone—a large storm, large in area, that is, though nothing like Clem for windspeed or rain, now moving toward British Columbia, which will be dumping loads of rain all over Pacificanada.
She notices a Japanese military satellite in a polar orbit might well have shot some pictures right in the critical eight minutes when the outflow jet switched off on one side of the hurricane, and a new outflow jet formed immediately ninety degrees away.
She quietly pops into several thousand software libraries, looking for any old penetration software she can find; her vast storage and fast-system capabilities can assemble all the little pieces and bits into a sort of super gang-assault on the closed nodes around Tokyo. It’s only a matter of seconds, but she finds herself wriggling and stretching, back in ghostly “real” reality, as she notices how extended she is feeling, how much her consciousness seems to have spread out from her little submarine yacht.
The data are not terribly secure; the Japanese apparently assume this satellite feed is being tapped. It takes little time to break in, find what she wants, pop out.
They have some kind of a radar gadget that lets them shoot cross sections of the atmosphere, and it was turned on while they flew over. This is better data than she could have hoped for—she extrapolates from it instantly—
And finds the bad news. No question. If this had happened over warmer water, a fast-rising column of warm air would have been produced, in the middle of all those swirling waves, currents, winds, and thunderheads: the same kind of column that gave birth to Clem, or starts any other hurricane.
Louie is getting used to walking around on the moon in the silly robot; so used to it that more and more he lets the robot run on autopilot, until he needs to manipulate something himself. The first day was the worst; the manipulations involved in getting some of the “general assembler” machinery back up and running, getting it to make data busses and connector cables for all kinds of things that were never supposed to be hooked to each other, and so forth, were a major pain.
The second-and-a-half delay between him and the robot means the robot is useless for fine manipulations, except by letting it work independently—which means that every time something has to be screwed into place, but not too tightly, he has to take it partway down, then stop using direct interface, tell the robot how much force is allowable, wait to see if that did the job… taking six recessed Phillips screws out of one lousy plate, in order to get at two stupid switches, took him more than an hour.
He’s been quietly stealing all sorts of things from the French. If they don’t like it they can come up and arrest him; they’ve been cutting back too and he doubts they’ll even notice.
But after the systems were generally integrated and robots started up, matters moved pretty fast. The Pentagon zapped up all sorts of Computer Optimized Design software to him, and he’s had it running in the main system for a couple of days now. Later today, if all goes well, he’ll be able to launch a couple of small transport rockets, designed and built by himself and the machine right here on the moon, to bring some of the stored food from the French supplies back to a rendezvous with the Constitution. He’s not yet in any danger of starving but it will be nice to have some variety, and as a test project it’s not too complicated.
He’s also begun to like walking around on the moon in the last few days. The little replicators are now all “slaved”—no longer running loose but under tight control—and they scurry about busily; the astonishing sharp shadows and black sky still delight him.
He wishes he could be back here in person, making his own bootprints in the lunar soil that has lain undisturbed for billions of years, and indeed he’s already dropped them a plan for that. Between the capabilities already on the moon and those he is building now, one of the things he can do is rig up a propulsion system to move all of Constitution—slowly, because the trusses that hold it together won’t take more than a twentieth of a g—out to orbit around the moon. Hell, out to anywhere, though he’s damned if he likes the idea of spending all his time in the Bank Vault, which he’d pretty much have to do for a long voyage.
But all the same… Constitution will be able to go anywhere, once he gets it equipped. He feels like he’s sixteen and modifying the old ’94 Geo for rally driving again.
The odd thing about every task up here—and he now realizes how conservative the French and Japanese were being in their approach—is that you need to work hard only at first. The machines learn, and once they learn they optimize, so that if you get one to do something right once, in a short while it will be doing it brilliantly and faster than you. On this little rocket project, it took the better part of a day to get the throat of the nozzle figured and optimized for the solid fuel… but then it took only an hour to finish the rest of the engine.
Well, time to get on with the work. He turns to the rocket design—
It is completely different. It doesn’t look remotely like what it did the last time he worked on it. Moreover, he knows intuitively it is better—and then, as he looks at it, he understands it completely. Of course that geometry doesn’t let heat build up as much in the throat; naturally if the struts are set up like that, they form strong, stable triangles everywhere—
It looks like he fixed everything in the back of his mind. Now that he doesn’t unhook very often, preferring to leave things running in background, it’s as if all the various tasks that are turning this into a new kind of facility are somehow thoughts in the back of his mind, and as if his mind is enlarging to take care of the additional load.
He has been unplugging only to sleep, and he’s been noticing lately that he doesn’t need to sleep much.
Not sleeping much is one of those unusual things he’s supposed to call Dr. Wo about. It goes against all training and experience, but Louie calls the neurologist; something about it all is giving him the creeps.
Wo gets back to him in five minutes; obviously Louie is a valued guinea pig. In a few short sentences, Louie tells Dr. Wo about it all.
“And you were not aware of consciously thinking about this? The robots just modified it into this newer, better design, and when you came back you understood it?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And I haven’t been sleeping much. And lately, too, I notice that when I think of things from the past, my memory is clearer… is it the optimizers?”
“I’d say there’s no doubt.”
“So what happened? Did my subconscious design and build that rocket?”
Wo nods. “Good question. I think the answer is probably that you did, but not the ‘you’ I’m talking to. One way the optimizers work is that they copy valuable, effective code at one point, and then move it to other places where it’s needed. My best guess—and we’ll have to run some tests to confirm it, I know that’s a scary phrase but bear with it—my best guess is that what the optimizers are doing is copying parts of your mind into programs running on the other processors, including the ones on the moon. You’re sort of dispersing through the system. That’s why you understood it as soon as you looked at it—all those fragments of yourself ‘came home.’ Well, this is very interesting… it would appear that the net you are plugged into is not only optimizing you, it is becoming you. At the same time that you become optimized.”
Louie swallows hard and asks the question he really wants answered. “Doc, am I going to be the same guy?”
Wo sits down, the phone camera lurching as it tracks him, and scratches his head. This might be a major display of emotion; one problem with doctors in military research programs, given that part of their job is to study the patient to see why he’s still alive, is that they don’t have a very wide range of emotional expression. Though he�
�s known him for many years, Louie doubts that he has ever known what Wo felt about anything.
At last the neurologist speaks. “Well, that’s an interesting question. But it’s over toward philosophy rather than in science proper. Offhand I would say that none of us is exactly the same person we were before, but there’s a continuity, and at the least you will maintain continuity. Would you still be Louie Tynan if you trimmed your toenails and got a haircut? Surely. Would you be you with a heart transplant? You’d be different because the experience itself is traumatic, but you’d still be Louie Tynan. And with a brain transplant? How about half a brain? Are you the same guy if you have a religious conversion? And is software the same program if you install an upgrade?”
Louie scratches his head, too—whichever organizations are bugging this must think they both have lice—and says, “I guess my answers to those questions would be maybe, maybe, and maybe.”
“One of our human test subjects, in the optimization work, discovered that he told the truth a lot more—apparently he’d always had a habit of white lies and flattery. His friends were able to notice the difference, but he and they agreed he was the same guy, just more truthful. In other words, telling the truth wasn’t part of him, it was peripheral, like having blue eyes or favoring white shirts. But suppose we infected the Pope with a program that made him a Mormon, or Medal of Honor winners with something that totally destroyed their courage, or gay men with something that turned them straight. Suppose in addition to that we put them in a whole new body, one that wasn’t human as we know it. Would they feel themselves to be the same person? Ever known an Alzheimer’s patient well, before and after, or a schizophrenic? Are they the same or aren’t they?”
These are more words out of Dr. Wo than Louie has heard in twenty years of knowing him. “I suppose the answer is it depends on what they think.”
“That’s the only answer that makes any sense. I’d say if we alter someone that much, and he or she changes name, friends, everything, and starts a new life, it’s probably a different person—but the person might not feel that way. And if he or she keeps everything pretty much the same but changes a couple of old habits, it’s the same person—but the person might not feel that way. And I suppose I’m old-fashioned enough to think that the person involved ought to be the one who says who he or she is. Anyway, if you’ll permit us to run some checks—some on you and some on the processors on the moon—”
Louie nods, swallows hard, and says yes. They set a time and Wo clicks off.
Well, here he is. The process is probably not reversible. He returns to the moon in a moment or two, looks around, feels that again things are different, and better. As to who he is, or who he will be—the question is both more and less than academic. More because it’s real—he can feel them in there, fixing and correcting, there’s an odd clarity to his memory and his concentration is better. Less because he can’t undo it.
Well, whether he is Louie-2, or just Louie-1.1, he’s got a job to do. He’ll think about it when he gets some time.
The supply rocket launches go beautifully, so now he has a launch system, and he puts the network of programs and machines onto the job of copying the stock weather-satellite design sent up from Earth. He decides it can’t hurt to tell them to leave the interface compatible but optimize the rest for function… as long as USSF seems to have optimized him, he might as well optimize them right back. He can feel the net thinking about the problem in the back of his brain as he pulls back into the Constitution. He’ll be coming up on the Pacific soon and no doubt they’ll want him to take some observations.
It’s only then, reading his mail, that he finds out that Hawaii is all but scoured to rock; the estimates are that nine out of every ten people alive on the islands two days ago are dead now, but that’s based on the little the Army has been able to reach and the few surviving hams have been able to tell them. It looks very much like not one, but four great waves went all the way across Oahu.
Carla Tynan had been expecting to have some time for a little friendly talk with Louie, but first he called to say that between all the weird stuff he was doing on “the big project”—she’s afraid to ask him what it is since he seems to think she knows, but whatever it is he’s doing it mostly via telepresence on the moon—and because of all the other observations they want him to take, on this and the next Pacific pass, they probably won’t get time. He’ll try to get to her on satellite link sometime in the next day or two.
She wonders idly why, given that she’s never going to see him anyway, she ever bothered divorcing him.
And then, instead of giving her some privacy and some time to work, Di Callare calls up, along with his useless boss Henry Pauliss, and Harris Diem, who is White House Chief of Staff but is also useless, and they all want her to hold the line while they get something together.
Obviously it’s the President, and Carla can imagine plenty of reasons the President might want to talk to her, but nothing that Carla could say couldn’t be expressed better by a well-written report.
Moreover, the constant sitting and waiting by the phone—every few minutes Di, or Pauliss, or Diem asks if she’s still there—destroys her concentration, so that she can’t get any work done in the interval.
She sits on her sunbathing deck, looking at the wide horizon, enjoying the sun on her face, arms, and bare legs. She’s realizing too that she and Louie have been talking every two or three days—the “weekly” call “just to keep in touch” plus one or two “I forgot to mentions”—for the last year or so, while she’s been at sea and he’s been in space, and you never know what you’re going to miss until it’s gone, now, do you? Now she wishes deeply that she could spend a lazy afternoon just hanging around with him.
Frankly, she’d like to have some conversation, strange as that is for a hermit like Carla Tynan. In front of the suits Di won’t talk meteorology freely (for fear of being misunderstood? or for fear of being understood? Carla would like to know). Pauliss, after all, is the guy who fired her, and now that she’s proving vital, she knows enough of Washington to suspect that the last thing he wants to do is be anywhere near the President when the subject of Carla Tynan comes up. And Diem is utterly bland and noncommittal.
So the available subjects for chit-chat are Di’s family: Lori is fine and almost done with Slaughterer in Yellow, Mark is a pleasant but not precocious kid, Nahum is precocious. And not particularly pleasant, Carla suspects, if what she hears between the lines is true.
Diem interrupts a Nahum story to say, “You mean you’re doing that—I forget what it’s called, but the system where you take naps with them and let them go to sleep anytime they want?” There’s a sort of deep shock in his voice, not entirely masked.
Di Callare is clearly short of sleep himself, for he snaps just a little at this man who holds so much power. “As a matter of fact, yes, we do use the London Method, and we’ve never had a fight about bedtime, and the children do seem much calmer than most. Of course we don’t let them have XV at all or TV much, so that may be the real reason.”
Diem nods grudgingly. “I suppose it’s hard to argue with results, and after all I never had kids, so I sure don’t have any basis for arguing with you. I was just thinking how different it is from when I was growing up. Other than making sure I studied, keeping me working in the old man’s restaurant in Boise—and seeing that I had food and ctothes—I can’t recall ever receiving that much interest from my parents. They just kind of raised us kids any old way.”
Henry Pauliss asks a classic suck-up question. “And how’d you turn out?”
“Oh, I went through law school at night and then paid for the education for the others. My brother went to Harvard Med, the oldest of my three kid sisters went to Purdue for engineering. And then of course the other two dropped out of high school and became streetwalkers.”
Pauliss’s jaw drops. “You—uh, er, that is—”
“Not really,” Diem says, “but I didn’t want to make it
sound like ignoring the kids is the best way to raise them. I was just kind of thinking that sometimes the damndest things work.”
Di chuckles, Carla laughs outright. Henry Pauliss is now turning an odd shade of red; if Harris Diem is willing to undercut him by setting him up for laughter like that, in front of underlings, then Henry is on his way out the door, and will probably be given a hard kick as he goes. Everyone present knows this, so not only is Pauliss getting his termination notice, but he is being given it in front of Carla and Di, deliberately.
Carla might wish she were the kind of nice, non-vindictive person who wouldn’t enjoy this, but as it happens, she isn’t. She’s delighted to see the bastard find out what it’s like to get nailed for just doing what was asked of him. It almost makes the long silly wait for the President (whom they are not supposed to know they are waiting for) worthwhile.
When Hardshaw finally does turn up the first thing that she says to Carla is, “I’m told that you’re always right about the weather.”
Carla snorts. “If I were always right about the weather I’d have gotten rich in commodities futures. I’m pretty good. My feel for it is better than most meteorologists’, and I’m good at the math, and I guess right a lot. But I’m not infallible. And the major reason I’ve been right several times in this crisis is that I haven’t had a job to protect, so I could say what other people were only thinking.”
President Hardshaw grins at her—the kind of grin that you use to lock a vote down forever, Carla realizes, just as she also realizes that it’s certainly working on her. When the President speaks, Carla is still a little dazzled. “Well, then, here’s the question, and if it happens to be a really stupid question, the important thing is that we don’t let it leak that I asked it. Not even at a party over a drink, to impress your date. Because just now the President of the United States cannot afford to look like a ninny, and unfortunately she squandered her youth on law rather than meteorology.”