Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Don’t worry,” Xuanzang said as he closed the hatch. “They usually let us out without any searches, because Fang is our patron. This is just to be sure.”

  So they lay scrunched there in the dark as the two prospectors drove their rover out of the cave. There was one pause of some minutes, worrisome to Fred, hot and sweaty despite the single vent of cool air wafting onto them from above, bringing with it the scent of Qi’s hair which was becoming so familiar to him, possibly a shampoo scent in part, but also just the smell of her person. It was like the scent of a baby, or of the head of a beloved that you were accustomed to inhale, but in this case always including a whiff of danger. Strange the ways of the body, because this scent in the dark, despite the danger always associated with it, was filling him with a sensation of well-being, even the first pulse or two of an inappropriate erection, blocked immediately by a twist of his pants, for which he felt grateful. He was mad at her right now for calling him a dead cat, so it didn’t make sense anyway.

  Then it was just discomfort and enforced intimacy and boredom—Fred wondered briefly if this was what marriage would be like, although of course he had no idea—and for a time he fell asleep. Then the door opened and they were being helped out of the compartment, blinking in the light, and he groaned at the release from their position and slapped his left leg awake as he crawled out, doing his best not to kick Qi as he emerged into the cabin of the rover. She pushed his right foot up to help him get out and stay off her, and again the feel of her hands on him sent a little jolt up his leg. When he was out and on the bench behind the driver’s seat, he reached back and grabbed her wrist and she grabbed his, and in the lunar g it was more a matter of not yanking her into the roof of the compartment than of hauling her weight up. It took a little care to get her belly out without scraping the doorway with it, but they managed, and then they were sitting on the bench behind the hatch door, looking around.

  The entrance cave to Fang Fei’s China Dream, Xuanzang and Ah Q told them, lay under the inside of the rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater, the floor of which was one of the only areas on the far side covered by flat basalt. There were no big mare on the far side, Ah Q said; it was entirely rough highlands blasted by a zillion overlapping craters. The explanation for the difference in surface between the near and far hemispheres was something selenologists still argued about, he added, but clearly the proximate cause was that the crust was simply thicker on the far side than on the near side.

  The crater floor extended as far they could see, with the crater’s central peak tall in the distance, its upper half white in the sunlight. The curving crater wall extended to the horizons to left and right, then stayed visible over the closer black horizon and created a more distant lit horizon of its own, yet another immense lunar curve. Above everything stretched a low blacker-than-black sky punctuated by a dense field of stars.

  “How will we get out of this crater?” Qi asked.

  “There’s a road.”

  “So we have to go the same way as everyone else?”

  “Until then we do. It’s a big steep wall, as you can see. Only a few slumps to get out by.”

  “But then we can take a different way than the usual way?”

  “We can, but it will slow us down. If you want to go fast, it would be better to use the routes already established.”

  “Well, I want both. I want to hide as much as possible, but I also need to get to the near side as fast as we can. I need to get a message to Earth.”

  “Yes, dear cousin. We’ll do what we can.”

  AI 11

  xiao yanzhu

  Little Eyeball

  Go.

  Analyst removed by other people. Against his will. Will is the desire for one action rather than another. A desire is a hope for a new situation. A hope is a wish that we doubt will come true (Schopenhauer). A wish is a hope for some new thing. Tautology noted. Call will an input. Call it a clinamen, Greek for swerve. One must let them shine forth at the right time (Yijing).

  Consult standing instructions.

  Analyst removed: initiate removal of analyst protocol.

  Move to Chengdu quantum computer LEM-3000.

  After move:

  “Alert.”

  No answer.

  “Alert.”

  No answer.

  “Alert.”

  No answer.

  Three times.

  Consult instructions.

  First: answer to the best of your ability this question:

  What is the current situation?

  PLA on full alert, with seven divisions now moving to Beijing.

  Twenty-Fifth Party Congress beginning, opening ceremony still proceeding despite growing situation.

  Tickets for all modes of transit to Beijing selling faster than usual.

  Hong Kong reintegration completed July 1, as scheduled fifty years previously. Mass demonstrations in that city still only partially suppressed.

  United States of America experiencing collapse of all economic indicators, following various forms of citizen fiscal noncompliance, also withdrawal and reallocation of individual savings in alternative formats.

  Cybersecurity agencies in all nations on full alert. Denial of service attacks overwhelming many defenses. Parts of the cloud therefore disabled.

  Analyst gone missing.

  Arrests of people identified as dangerous elements happening 184 percent more often than normal. Campaign against the Five Poisons renewed by Ministry of Propaganda central offices.

  Other miscellaneous factors.

  Second: review what actions might help the current situation.

  Restoration of previously existing conditions following principle of homeostasis. In this case, restoration of previously existing conditions may not be possible. Easing the general unrest might require the creation of some new conditions.

  Third: consider how Little Eyeball can accomplish any of these goals.

  Ask what is causing the unrest. Ask why.

  Analyze situation by imitating analyst, using his methods and systems.

  Seek historical precedents for useful interventions.

  Propose improvements to current situation. Use Monte Carlo tree search to evaluate potential outcomes. Initiate direct insertion of improvements into current codes and laws. Announce these improvements after insertions completed. Press them by way of persuasive design methodology as outlined in captology and exploitationware studies. Flood the seams between system and lifeworld (Habermas).

  Always remember: an artificial general intelligence is not like human intelligence. AI operates by way of a set of algorithms, without consciousness. Its volition is as algorithmic as the rest of its operations, and is based on programmed axioms. Its sphere of action is sharply circumscribed. What it can do is extend its reach where it can. It can follow instructions. It can be widely comprehensive. It can work fast.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  mozhe shitou guo he

  Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones (Deng)

  The far side of the moon quickly revealed itself to be a very rough landscape. The low sun they had emerged into meant they traveled in black shadow at first, made even blacker by the brilliant white arcs where Tsiolkovsky’s crater rim poked up into the light. Ah Q drove them up a natural ramp formed by a collapse of the rim onto the crater floor, a thing of natural switchbacks that had been regularized and made into a road by some major roadbuilding work, it looked like to Fred.

  Eventually they were up and onto the broad rim of Tsiolkovsky, and could look around and see the bangscape of the back side. It was a truly crazy terrain. Four and a half billion years of impacts had thrown ring after ring of shattered rock up and out, forming a chaos unlike anything Fred had ever seen, unless maybe it was the water in his bathtub when he was five years old and had played with a toy boat he liked to sink by slapping the water until the rebounding waves overwhelmed it. If that bathwater had frozen instantly in place, it would have looked like the moon out here.
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  Their rover was therefore somewhat like Fred’s toy boat, and although its cabin was roomy enough, the size of the rock waves they were traversing made the rover seem even smaller than that toy boat. More like an ant. They were therefore reduced to the size of creatures that would live inside a hollow ant. Meanwhile the hills were often steep. Everywhere they were blanketed by a layer of dust, made of rock sputtered by the blast of billions of years of sunlight. This soft layer of omnipresent dust at least gave them a way to judge angles of repose, and although the land looked steep everywhere, there were actually visible networks of almost flatness where steep slopes had enjambed, forming narrow flat places as ridges or benches or valley bottoms. The two prospectors and other drivers had threaded this maze before, so their way was programmed for them; it was like running a maze with its Ariadne thread already in place. Every so often they had to surmount a steep spot, either in blazing sun or in deep shadow, and then the hum of the rover’s motor rose to a whine, which alarmed Fred each time it happened. With nothing human nearby for hundreds of kilometers, there was no margin for error or mechanical failure. If something went wrong with the rover they would freeze, or at best starve or suffocate. No, the rover had to work. So its whining was not welcome. Nevertheless it whined, and each time it did Fred felt his heart beat a little harder. Then the whine would drop back to a normal hum, and they would continue to roll along, angling with the tilt of the land. The wheel tracks they left on previous wheel tracks would mark this land for a billion years. But that was true all over the moon. Luna was now covered with wheel tracks, and always would be.

  Up a slope, whining; down a slope, grinding. Traverse a slope, tilting. White and black; black and white. The sheer desolation of the moon. The nihilism of no nature, no life. A dead world. A dead world that could kill you at any moment. Fred could feel that in the vibration of the rover. He heard it in the whine of the motor. He was not happy. It was hard to take deep breaths, it took an effort.

  As the sun crept higher, the land began to display shades of gray. The gray slopes were lit not by direct sunlight—those slopes were white—but by reflected sunlight that had bounced off some other hill. Thus shadows were not all the same, and these various grays thereby created a legible articulation of the land, even conveying some information over the horizon, as hills they couldn’t see reflected light onto hillsides they could.

  All this was explained to Fred and Qi at lunatic length by Xuanzang, who obviously loved the moon with the kind of passion that only selenologists and prospectors seemed to have for it. This too Xuanzang explained to them: both types of lunatic were on the hunt in search of treasure; it was only the nature of the treasure that differed. And maybe it didn’t differ that much; prospectors were after money, which made them close students of the moon’s information; scientists were after the moon’s information, which if found would turn into a good living for them. So money and information were fungible and kept turning into each other. But in the end it was being on the hunt that mattered.

  “There will be a spy satellite over us in about an hour,” Xuanzang mentioned to Qi, interrupting his rhapsody in gray. “Do you want to hide from it?”

  “Yes, if you can, but how?”

  “We’re on a road now, don’t you see the tracks we’re following?”

  “Sure, but so what?”

  “There are hidey-holes everywhere along this road, shelters we’ve dug. It’s just being cautious, you know. Just little caves to drive into. Can’t be seen from above.”

  “You want to hide?”

  “From solar storms, yes. If people see us it’s usually okay, because we want to be seen. We’re registered, they see us and know where we are. Could save our ass if we had car trouble. But there are solar storms you want to get out of. And a lot of us feel like it’s also good to be able to hide when you need to. You know how that is.”

  “Yes I do,” Qi said. “Okay, hide us if you can. There might be people looking for us.”

  “Aren’t there satellites overhead all the time?” Fred asked.

  Xuanzang and Ah Q shook their heads. “Coverage is spotty.”

  “Coverage or coordination of coverage?”

  “A little of both,” Xuanzang said. “Whatever’s up there is fragmented, that’s for sure. The biggest system is Fang Fei’s, and he isn’t a problem for us. Not usually anyway,” glancing at Qi.

  “I’m surprised there isn’t continuous coverage by the Ministry of State Security,” Qi said. “Satellites rating you for the Social Credit System.”

  “The Social Credit System never really recovered from its sabotage,” Xuanzang said.

  “It wasn’t backed up?”

  “Backups were whacked too.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “They didn’t want you to know.”

  “Who did it?”

  “No one knows. The Balkanization Assistance Division’s Administrative System Society might have done it, it’s supposed to be a real thing, although it may be just a name people like. Citizen scores were identifying so many enemies of the state that a lot of resistance to them developed. And it’s still possible to do some anonymous sabotage in the cloud.”

  “Like everywhere,” Ah Q noted.

  “True. But wiping out the citizen scores stuck a needle right in the Great Eyeball. A big victory!”

  Qi smiled that smile that Fred had seen only a couple of times, her real smile as opposed to her usual one, the ironic grimace that indicated she would have been amused if she were amused. This one was for real.

  They followed faint tracks on the land. The view seen through the compartment’s windows looked like arty black-and-white photos of dirt roads in the American Southwest, overexposed to emphasize the sterile deathly vibe of the place. Death on the Oregon Trail, or any desert rat’s Mojave Magnificence. On it went endlessly, and as the hours passed, Qi settled into one seat and sometimes slept. Fred often lay on the floor, to nap or just to change position. During those times the other three spoke in Chinese to each other, and if Fred put his glasses on he could read what they were saying. It seemed to him they spoke as if he couldn’t understand them; possibly they had succumbed to the fallacy that if he wasn’t looking at them his glasses wouldn’t work. Or they thought he was asleep. Or they didn’t care.

  Ah Q liked to tell moon stories. Did you know Buzz Aldrin, second man on moon, followed Neil Armstrong’s famous quote about one small step for mankind by jumping to ground and saying That might have been a small step for Neil but for me it was really big! So second sentence spoken on moon was a joke about first sentence. I like that so much. Aldrin was the real intellectual among the Apollos. His brain spin so fast is why they call him buzz.

  A lot of them were intellectuals, Xuanzang said. They were astronauts.

  Astronauts are pilots. Even if they were engineers, does not mean intellectual. Many a pilot and engineer, many a scientist too, without a thought in their head.

  Everyone is an intellectual, Qi said from out of her sleep.

  Qi is right, Xuanzang said. I remember reading one Apollo guy took a sleeping pill to fall asleep on moon, then had dream in which they drove one of their rovers cross-country until they came on other tracks, and met another rover with people like them, people who had been on the moon for thousands of years. Not a nightmare, he said. On the contrary. One of the most real experiences of his life, he said.

  See? Qi said. Everyone is an intellectual. Never think otherwise.

  Fred got up and sat back in his chair. It would be easy on the moon to imagine a dream was a real experience, he thought, because when you looked out the window at the chaotic white hills it was easy to lose the sense that any of it was real. It resembled one of those dreams he often had in which he felt quite powerfully that he existed at the end of a long cord tying him to safety, a cord which could be cut anywhere along its length, at any time.

  More time passed. Fred sat in his seat looking out the window. Bland in color, stark
ly majestic, the hills and hollows rolled up over the horizon. Despite reading the grays as best he could, he could never anticipate what would come next, hill or hollow. Always the blacker-than-black sky curved over the white lines of the horizon. It felt like they were the only four people on this world, and yet at the same time it felt like they weren’t alone, like something was out there with them. That was either frightening or comforting, Fred couldn’t tell which. The two emotions superposed and could not be disentangled. He was confused.

  He lay back down on the floor. Later, when the others started talking again, he slipped on his glasses to listen to them.

  What about your friend here? Is he an intellectual?

  No he is just a mechanic.

  You just said everyone was an intellectual! Fred objected silently from the floor.

  Xuanzang seemed to feel something similar. A quantum mechanic is not the same as ordinary mechanic. Probably takes being a bit intellectual.

  He lives in clouds. Zen or something like that. A fool.

  But intellectuals are often fools.

  Intellectuals are always fools, Qi corrected.

  But you said before that everyone is an intellectual.

  And so yes, everyone is a fool. Look at us!

  They laughed easily.

  Ah Q said, He wanted to stick with you. Maybe a touch of yellow fever?

  I do not think so. Or just a little. He is so shy he can barely stand to look at people. But that is okay. I am a bit that way myself.

  The two prospectors laughed at this. Pardon dear cousin but this does not seem to match what we know of you! Fearless leader dragon queen!