They got on a subway car and Jiang showed his wristpad to a conductor, who inspected it and Valerie, then nodded and moved on to the next passengers. The car was almost empty. The train jerked and took off, humming slightly. Jiang explained that they were headed up the Ninety Degree East corridor, which would pass under Amundsen Crater, then Hédervári Crater, then Hale Crater. The libration zone rail and piste would then rise and run over the surface like train tracks, with trains keeping to a regular schedule except when solar storms forced everyone to stay underground.
At Amundsen Station they got off the car and Jiang led her over to another platform, where they got on a much more crowded subway train headed to Ganswinch. That took longer, and it was most of an hour before they got off again, though they were never moving very fast either.
The Ganswinch terminal was guarded by men in uniforms, olive green with red shoulder patches. They looked like PLA to Valerie, but Jiang said they were Lunar Authority security agents—the moon being a demilitarized zone, of course, he explained in a possibly ironic tone. Although a Cantonese accent had a tendency to undercut expressions in putonghua, so it might have just been that. Again Jiang showed his wristpad to various people who then let them pass. There were only a few women out here, and Valerie began to wonder if this was an aspect of this station, or if the Chinese were generally sending mostly men to the moon. The official statistics said they weren’t, that there were almost as many women as men in the Chinese population here. But at this outpost it wasn’t true.
They took an escalator running downward, and at its lower end got off in an interior space bigger than Valerie had seen so far. “Ganswinch Station,” Jiang explained.
Again it was all gray walls marked by bamboo mesh tapestries and potted plants. Broad banks of lighting overhead made for a lit space that was slightly dim, like the light under a thick cloud layer on Earth. The excavated cavernous space was perhaps twelve meters tall and a hundred meters wide, and on its floor stood many house-sized green tents, made of bamboo fabric, Valerie assumed, and set in rows reminiscent of a refugee camp. At the far end of these rows stood a tall mesh fence with razor wire looping its top. Jiang led them to the tent next to this fence and entered through an unzipped flap door.
It was markedly warmer inside, which Valerie took to be the point of the tents. A woman took a look at Jiang’s wrist and then began to tap on her desktop, looking at records and photos. “Tent Six,” she said to Jiang. They left her and went into the fenced compound, where three male guards escorted them down another row of tents to one marked with the Chinese character for six.
Inside the tent were about a dozen metal-framed beds, in two rows, with men sitting on each bed. At first glance, then second glance, they were all Chinese.
“Fred Fredericks?” Jiang said.
They stared at him. He walked to the end bed and looked at the man there. “Fred Fredericks?”
The man shook his head. “Xi Dao.”
“When did you move to this tent?” Jiang asked.
“Three months ago,” the man replied.
Jiang squinted at him. He looked at the other men. “He’s been here all this last week?” he asked them.
They nodded.
Jiang looked at Valerie. “Let’s go back.”
They returned to the tent outside the fence, went back to the woman who had sent them off. “Fred Fredericks isn’t in Tent Six,” Jiang said. “What’s become of him?”
Startled, the woman tapped at her desktop. She gestured to Jiang as she read her screen, and he came around and read next to her.
“Ho,” he said.
The two Chinese officials looked up at Valerie. “He’s not where he’s listed as being,” Jiang said.
“So I gathered,” Valerie said. “But you must have recorded all his movements?”
“We did, but they lead here.”
“What about the cameras here?”
“He’s not on them.”
“How can that be?”
“Don’t know. It isn’t possible.” He glanced at the woman. “Possibly certain other services are taking precedence here.”
“Intelligence services?” Valerie asked.
The two Chinese didn’t reply.
“How can we find out?” Valerie asked. “This man is an American citizen, working for a Swiss company.” It was possible the Swiss connection would carry even more weight than the American one, given all the work the Swiss had done in China and here.
Jiang looked unhappily at his colleague. “We should be able to find out by way of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force, which is the agency I head,” he said. “We keep track of everyone on the moon. So now I will instruct my people to look for him.”
“How will they look?”
“Everyone is chipped, among other things.”
“Am I chipped?” Valerie asked sharply.
They regarded her. “You’re a diplomat,” Jiang suggested. “Do you have your passport with you?”
“Yes.”
“That serves as your chip. Really I should have said that people who are arrested are chipped. Fredericks should have gotten one. We’ll look into that.” Jiang was tapping at his wristpad as he spoke, and after a while he sighed. “From what I see here, it looks like his chip might have been deactivated, or taken out of him and destroyed.”
“Diplomatic incident,” Valerie said stiffly, clenching her jaw and staring at him.
“Possibly so,” Jiang admitted.
He looked annoyed. This was happening above his level, his look said, even though he was supposed to be in charge of Chinese security at the south pole. Which meant there had been an incursion on his turf. For sure he would not like that, no one would. But in the face of such outside interventions, what could a local official do?
Valerie returned with Jiang to his office, and on the way she saw, as one always did when retracing a new route, that the way to Ganswinch was simpler and shorter than it had seemed on her trip out. All the halls and subway cars were crowded this time.
On return to the Shackleton Crater complex she said goodbye to Jiang, who was clearly distracted, even angry. He wanted her gone so that he could pursue lines of inquiry at full speed. She understood that and got herself back to the American consulate, where she reported to John Semple.
He frowned as he heard her news. “They’re fighting among themselves again.”
“Wolidou,” Valerie confirmed. “Infighting. But to involve an American?”
“One group may be trying to embarrass another one, get it in trouble with Beijing.”
“So how do we find our guy? And is there some way we can turn this situation to our advantage?”
“I was wondering about that myself. I think both State and the Pentagon have been hoping to find a good moment to plant a flag down here at the south pole. Something bigger than our office, I mean. The Chinese won’t like it, but I don’t think they would try to stop it right now, because they’re being backfooted by this guy going missing on their watch. Plus the Outer Space Treaty forbids territorial claims anyway.”
He started tapping on his wristpad.
Valerie said, “What about that quantum comms device Fredericks brought with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about finding him?”
“We can’t do that ourselves. We’ll have to demand that they do it.”
One of John’s assistants came into the cubicle and said, “John, there’s a Chinese national here to see you, a DV of some sort, says he knows you. His name is Ta Shu?”
“Ta Shu?” John said, startled. “He’s here?”
“He is.”
“Show him in!”
John smiled at Valerie as the assistant went to do this. “This could be helpful. Ta Shu is a cloud star, very famous in China. I met him in Antarctica a long time ago.”
The assistant reappeared with an elderly Chinese gentleman in tow. After he and John embraced, John said, “What brings y
ou here? Are you doing a piece for your travel show?”
Ta Shu nodded. He was short and stocky, tentative in the lunar g. He had a nice smile, which he bestowed on John and then Valerie. “Yes, I’m broadcasting my travels again. Also I’m consulting as a geomancer for local builders in the libration zone.”
“Good idea!” John said mockingly. “Well, I’m glad to see you again. I remember how much I enjoyed your shows from Antarctica.”
“Thank you. A wonderful adventure. It’s almost more unearthly there than here, I think. Here you are always in rooms, it’s like being in a mall, except lighter on your feet. Down there you’re on an ice planet, like Europa or something.”
“I know what you mean. So what can we do for you here?”
“I’ve been wondering what happened to a new friend of mine, a man I met when I arrived, named Fred Fredericks. He was staying in the same hotel as me, and we breakfasted together, and were going to meet for drinks at the end of our first day, but he didn’t show up, and the hotel people said he was gone.”
John and Valerie looked at each other.
“Well, that’s right,” John said to Ta Shu. “We’re worried about him too. He got caught up in something bad, and now he’s missing.”
He explained the situation. When he was done, and Valerie had described what her day had been like in pursuit of Fredericks, Ta Shu looked seriously concerned.
“Not good,” he said. “Things can get complicated when something like this happens.”
John’s expression translated to No shit, and Ta Shu appeared to know him well enough to get that, Valerie noted. John said, “Do you think you can help us to find him?”
“I can try.”
AI 2
ganrao shebei
Interference with the Device
The analyst in the Hefei office of the Artificial Intelligence Strategic Advisory Committee got another alert from the AI that he now considered to be the most interesting of the ones he was actively programming, even though it was still frustratingly simpleminded and obtuse. But they all were. Quantum computers were magnitudes faster than classic computers in several classes of operation, but they were still limited by their tendency to decohere, also by the inadequacies of their programming; which was to say the inadequacies of their programmers. So it was like being confronted with one’s own stupidity.
“Alert,” the AI said.
The analyst had recently given it a voice modeled on that of Zhou Xuan, the classic actress featured in the 1937 movie Street Angel. Now he checked his own security protocols, then said, “Tell me.”
“The Unicaster 3000 previously mentioned and now on the moon has just been interfered with, and thus experienced wave collapse and quantum decoherence.”
The analyst said, “Did you move this information into the appropriate file and sequester it?”
“I did that.”
“Will this unicaster device continue to function as an open line, or has it shut down?”
“It has shut down, in keeping with its design.”
“Okay. Can you identify who interfered with the device?”
“No.”
“But intrusion always leaves a mark.”
“In this case the collapse of the wave function is the only mark.”
“Can you identify when it happened, and where it was when it happened?”
“It happened at UTC 16:42 on July 23, 2047. It happened on the moon.”
“Can you be any more specific?”
“The device lacks GPS, as part of its design privacy. It was last seen on security cameras being taken into an office occupied by the Scientific Research Steering Committee, at Shackleton Crater.”
“But that committee is under the umbrella of the Central Military Commission. Do they have some of their people on the moon?”
“Yes.”
“Oh dear. Our beloved colleagues. Surely they should not be on the moon.”
“Military activity is forbidden on the moon by Outer Space Treaty, 1967.”
“Very good. And now the device is inoperative?”
“It could be entangled again with another matching device.”
“But to key that entanglement, both of them would have to be in the possession of the same operator.”
“Yes.”
“And the other device is presumably on Earth. What has become of the person who took the device to the moon?”
“He is no longer visible to me.”
“Wait, what? You’ve lost him?”
“He suffered a health problem while with Governor Chang Yazu of the Chinese Lunar Authority. He and Chang Yazu both collapsed. Chang later died. Fredericks was taken to a south pole complex hospital.”
“Chang died? You tell me this now?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you not tell me that first?”
“Your directive instructed me to report on the device.”
“Yes, but Chang! What was the cause of death?”
“The autopsy is not available to me.”
“Both men collapsed?”
“Fredericks and Chang both collapsed.”
The analyst thought for a while. “That sounds like the black ones.”
“I don’t understand.”
The analyst sighed. “I-330, I want you to initiate a covert inquiry by way of all the backdoor taps I inserted into the Invisible Wall when it was built. Work through fourth parties. No detects allowed. Look for any mention of Chang Yazu. See if you can compile his pattern of contacts with everyone on the moon, and also trace his employment history back here on Earth.”
“I will.”
“Act like a general intelligence, please. Make suppositions, look for evidence supporting them. Consider all you find, and attempt explanations for individual and institutional behavioral patterns by way of Bayesian analysis and all the rest of your learning algorithms. Apply all your capacity for self-improvement!”
“I will.”
The analyst sighed again. He was sounding like Chairman Mao exhorting the masses: do the best you can with what you have! This to a search engine. Well, from each according to its capacities.
He sat down and began to ponder again the problem of programming self-improvement into an AI. New work from Chengdu on rather simple Monte Carlo tree searches and combinatorial optimization had given him some ideas. Deep learning was alas very shallow whenever it left closed sets of rules and data; the name was a remnant of early AI hype. If you wanted to win a game like chess or go, fine, but when immersed in the larger multivariant world, AI needed more than deep learning. It needed to incorporate the symbolic logic of earlier AI attempts, and the various programs that instructed an AI to pursue “child’s play,” meaning randomly created activities and improvements. There also had to be encouragements in the form of actually programmed prompts to help machine learning occur mechanically, to make algorithms create more algorithms.
All this was hard; and even if he managed to do some of it, at best he would still be left with nothing more than an advanced search engine. Artificial general intelligence was just a phrase, not a reality. Nothing even close to consciousness would be achieved; a mouse had more consciousness than an AI by a factor that was essentially all to nothing, so a kind of infinity. But despite its limitations, this particular combination of programs might still find more than he or it knew it was looking for. And the outside possibility of a rapid assemblage of stronger cognitive powers was always there. For there was no doubt that one aspect of quantum computers was already very far advanced: they could work fast.
TA SHU 2
xia yi bu
The Next Step
We have always walked over the next hill to see what is there. We left Africa around two hundred thousand years ago, always crossing the next ridge, and by about twenty thousand years ago we were everywhere on Earth. In fact, judging by the recent amazing finds in Brazil, it seems we had gotten everywhere on Earth by about thirty thousand years ago.
S
ome places were particularly hard to get to. The Pacific islands, lost in the empty ocean, came late in our diaspora. In this end game of our long exploration of our planet, the remaining unvisited destinations required the invention of new modes of transport. People took an extra interest in these voyages, which had been impossible in times before theirs. They were tests of our ingenuity and courage. They were the creation of new dragon arteries, and examples of the technological sublime. In terms of yin-yang, they were not the water flow of yin, but the expansive surge of yang. That next step—could we make it?
By the early nineteenth century, these previously impossible voyages—impossible at least to Europeans—included the Northwest Passage and the interior of Africa. Later in the nineteenth century, the goals shifted to the North and South Poles, both truly difficult. When those were reached in the early twentieth century, attention turned to the top of Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench, the highest and lowest points on the globe. After we reached those places, when it seemed we had been everywhere, people began to cross the Pacific on primitive rafts, to see if those ancient first voyages could be reproduced by modern people. This was the archeological sublime, as it seemed an end point had been reached, because we had been everywhere else on the planet. Then, to everyone’s amazement, Russians and Americans put animals and people in low Earth orbit, above the sky. Then, even more amazing, the Americans put men on the moon. Who could have imagined it could be done!
But my friend Oliver once asked me to notice how always, after these feats were accomplished, people’s interest in the places involved moved on. People now live at the South Pole, cruise ships visit the North Pole, tourists are taken on the dangerous climb to the top of Mount Everest. People work in space. For the most part, no one takes the slightest interest in these activities. Instead for several decades all eyes turned to Mars, and it was said to be supremely interesting; then when the first humans landed there just a few years ago, setting up a tiny base overlooking Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars also quickly became no longer interesting! Attention once again moved on.
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