Czudak looked away from the Mechanical, feeling suddenly tired. He could recognize the accents of a True Believer, a mystic, even when they were coming out of this clockwork thing. It was disconcerting, like having your toaster suddenly start to preach to you about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “What does it want from me?” he said, to Ellen.
“A propaganda victory, Mr. Czudak,” it said, before she could speak. “A small one. But one that might have a significant effect over time.” It tilted a bright black eye toward him. “Within some—” It paused, as if making sure that it was using the right word. “—years, we will be—launching? projecting? propagating? certain—” A longer pause, while it searched for words that probably didn’t exist, for concepts that had never needed to be expressed in human terms before. “—vehicles? contrivances? transports? seeds? mathematical propositions? convenient fictions? out to the stars.” It paused again. “If it helps you to understand, consider them to be Arks. Although they’re nothing like that. But they will ‘go’ out of the solar system, across interstellar space, across intergalactic space, and never come back. They will allow us to—” Longest pause of all. “‘—colonize the stars.’” It leaned forward. “We want to take humans with us, Mr. Czudak. We have our friends from the Orbital Companies, of course, like Ellen here, but they’re not enough. We want to recruit more. And, ironically enough, your disaffected followers, the Meats, are prime candidates. They don’t like it here anyway.”
“This is the anniversary of your lame Manifesto,” Ellen cut in impatiently, ignoring the fact that it was also his birthday, although certainly she must remember. “And all the old arguments are being hashed over again today as a result. This is getting more attention than you probably think that it is. Your buddies over there in the park are only the tip of the iceberg. There are a thousand other demonstrations around the world. There must be hundreds of newsmotes floating around outside. They’d be listening to us right now if Bucky Bug hadn’t Interdicted them.”
There was a moment of silence.
“We want you to recant, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical said at last, quietly. “Publicly recant. Go out in front of the world and tell all your followers that you were wrong. You’ve thought it all over all these years in seclusion, and you’ve changed your mind. You were wrong. The Movement is a failure.”
“You must be crazy,” Czudak said, appalled. “What makes you think they’d listen to me, anyway?”
“They’ll listen to you,” Ellen said glumly. “They always did.”
“Our projections indicate that if you recant now,” the Mechanical said, “at this particular moment, on this symbolically significant date, many of your followers will become psychologically vulnerable to recruitment later on. Tap a meme at exactly the right moment, and it shatters like glass.”
Czudak shook his head. “Jesus! Why do you even want those poor deluded bastards in the first place?”
“Because, goddamn you, you were right, Charlie!” Ellen blazed at him suddenly, then subsided. Her face twisted sourly. “About some things, anyway. The New Men, the Isolates, the Sick People . . . they’re too lost in Virtuality, too self-absorbed, too lost in their own mind-games, in mirror-mazes inside their heads, to give a shit about going to the stars. Or to be capable of handling new challenges or new environments out there if they did go. They’re hothouse flowers. Too extremely specialized, too inflexible. Too decadent. For maximum flexibility, we need basic, unmodified human stock.” She peered at him shrewdly. “And at least your Meats have heard all the issues discussed, so they’ll have less Culture Shock to deal with than if we took some Chinese or Mexican peasant who’s still subsistence dirt-farming the same way his great-grandfather did hundreds of years before him. At least the Meats have one foot in the modern world, even if we’ll have to drag them kicking and screaming the rest of the way in. We’ll probably get around to the dirt-farmers eventually. But at the moment the Meats should be significantly easier to recruit, once you’ve turned them, so they’re first in line!”
Czudak said nothing. The silence stretched on for a long moment. On the kitchen wall behind them, Joseph continued to peer anxiously at them, first out of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, then sliding into Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs where he assumed the form of one of the bare-breasted sprites. Ignoring Ellen, Czudak spoke directly to the Mechanical. “There’s a more basic question. Why do you want humans to go with you in the first place? You just got through saying that machine evolution had superseded organic evolution. We’re obsolete now, an evolutionary dead-end. Why not just leave us behind? Forget about us?”
The Mechanical stirred as if it was about to stand up, but just sat up a little straighter in its chair. “You thought us up, Mr. Czudak,” it said, with odd dignity. “In a very real sense, we are the children of your minds. You spoke of me earlier as an alien, but we are much closer kin to each other than either of our peoples are likely to be to the real aliens we may meet out there among the stars. How could we not be? We share deep common wells of language, knowledge, history, fundamental cultural assumptions of all sorts. We know everything you ever knew—which makes us very similar in some ways, far more alike than an alien could possibly be with either of us. Our culture is built atop yours, our evolution has its roots in your soil. It only seems right to take you when we go.”
The Mechanical spread its hands, and made a grating sound that might have been meant to be a chuckle. “Besides,” it said, “this universe made you, and then you made us. So we’re once removed from the universe. And it’s a strange and complex place, this universe you’ve brought us into. We don’t entirely understand it, although we understand a great deal more of its functioning than you do. How can you be so sure of what your role in it may ultimately be? We may find that we need you yet, even if it’s a million years from now!” It paused thoughtfully, tipping its head to one side. “Many of my fellows do not share this view, I must admit, and they would indeed be just as glad to leave you behind, or even exterminate you. Even some of my fellow Clarkists, like Rondo Hatton and Horace Horsecollar, are in favor of exterminating you, on the grounds that after Arthur C. Clarke himself, the pinnacle of your kind, the rest of you are superfluous, and perhaps even an insult to his memory.”
Czudak started to say something, thought better of it. The Mechanical straightened its head, and continued. “But I want to take you along, as do a few other of our theorists. Your minds seem to have connections with the basic quantum level of reality that ours don’t have, and you seem to be able to affect that quantum level directly in ways that even we don’t entirely understand, and can’t duplicate. If nothing else, we may need you along as Observers, to collapse the quantum wave-functions in the desired ways, in ways they don’t seem to want to collapse for us.”
“Sounds like you’re afraid you’ll run into God out there,” Czudak grated, “and that you’ll have to produce us, like a parking receipt, to validate yourselves to Him . . .”
“Perhaps we are,” it said mildly. “We don’t understand this universe of yours; are you so sure you do?” It was peering intently at him now. “You’re the ones who seem like unfeeling automata to us. Can’t you sense your own ghostliness? Can’t you sense what uncanny, unlikely, spooky creatures you are? You bristle with strangeness! You reek of it! Your eyes are made out of jelly! And yet, with those jelly eyes, you somehow manage degrees of resolution rivaling those of the best optical lenses. How is that possible, with nothing but blobs of jelly and water to work with? Your brains are soggy lumps of meat and blood and oozing juices, and yet they have as many synaptical connections as our own, and resonate with the quantum level in some mysterious way that ours do not!” It moved uneasily, as though touched by some cold wind that Czudak couldn’t feel. “We know who designed us. We have yet to meet whoever designed you—but we have the utmost respect for his abilities.”
With a shock, Czudak realized that it was afraid of him—of humans in general. Humans spooked it. Against
its own better judgment, it must feel a shiver of superstitious dread when it was around humans, like a man walking past a graveyard on a black cloudless night and hearing something howl within. No matter how well-educated that man was, even though he knew better, his heart would lurch and the hair would rise on the back of his neck. It was in the blood, in the back of the brain, instinctual dread that went back millions of years to the beginning of time, to when the ancestors of humans were chittering little insectivores, freezing motionless with fear in the trees when a hunting beast roared nearby in the night. So must it be for the Mechanical, even though its millions of generations went back only thirty years. Voices still spoke in the blood—or whatever served it for blood—that could override any rational voice of the mind, and monsters still lurked in the back of the brain. Monsters that looked a lot like Czudak.
Perhaps that was the only remaining edge that humanity had—the superstitions of machines.
“Very eloquent,” Czudak said, and sighed. “Almost, you convince me.”
The Mechanical stirred, seeming to come back to itself from far away, from a deep reverie. “You are the one who must convince your followers of your sincerity, Mr. Czudak,” it said. Abruptly, it stood up. “If you publicly recant, Mr. Czudak, if you sway your followers, then we will let you Go Up. We will offer you the same benefits that we offer to any of our companions in the Orbital Companies. What you would call ‘immortality,’ although that is a very imprecise and misleading word. A greatly extended life, at any rate, far beyond your natural organic span. And the reversal of aging, of course.”
“God damn you,” Czudak whispered.
“Think about it, Mr. Czudak,” it said. “It’s a very generous offer—especially as you’ve already turned us down once before. It’s rare we give anyone a second chance, but we are willing to give you one. A chance of Ellen’s devising, I might add—as was the original offer in the first place.” Czudak glanced quickly at Ellen, but she kept her face impassive. “You’re sadly deteriorated, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical continued, softly implacable. “Almost non-functional. You’ve cut it very fine. But it’s nothing our devices cannot mend. If you Come Up with us tonight, you will be young and fully functional again by this time tomorrow.”
There was a ringing silence. Czudak looked at Ellen through it, but this time she turned away. She and the Mechanical exchanged a complicated look, although whatever information was being conveyed by it was too complex and subtle for him to grasp.
“I will leave you now,” the Mechanical said. “You will have private matters to discuss. But decide quickly, Mr. Czudak. You must recant now, today, for maximum symbolic and psychological affect. A few hours from now, we won’t be interested in what you do any more, and the offer will be withdrawn.”
The Mechanical nodded to them, stiffly formal, and then turned and walked directly toward the wall. The wall was only a few steps away, but the Mechanical never got there. Instead, the wall seemed to retreat before it as it approached, and it walked steadily away down a dark, lengthening tunnel, never quite reaching the wall, very slowly shrinking in size as it walked, as if it were somehow blocks away now. At last, when it was a tiny manikin shape, arms and legs scissoring rhythmically, as small as if it was miles away, and the retreating kitchen wall was the size of a playing card at the end of the ever-lengthening tunnel, the Mechanical seemed to turn sharply to one side and vanish. The wall was suddenly there again, back in place, the same as it had ever been. Joseph peeked out of it, shocked, his eyes as big as saucers.
They sat at the kitchen table, not looking at each other, and the gathering silence filled the room like water filling a pond, until it seemed that they sat silently on the bottom of that pond, in deep, still water.
“He’s not a cultist, Charlie,” she said at last, not looking up. “He’s a hobbyist. That’s the distinction you have to understand. Humans are his hobby, one he’s passionately devoted to.” She smiled fondly. “They’re more emotional than we are, Charlie, not less! They feel things very keenly—lushly, deeply, extravagantly; it’s the way they’ve programmed themselves to be. That’s the real reason why he wants to take humans along with him, of course. He’d miss us if we were left behind! He wouldn’t be able to play with us anymore. He’d have to find a new hobby.” She raised her head. “But don’t knock it! We should be grateful for his obsession. Only a very few of the AIs care about us, or are interested in us at all, or even notice us. Bucky Bug is different. He’s passionately interested in us. Without his interest and that of some of the other Clarkists, we’d have no chance at all of going to the stars!”
Czudak noticed that she always referred to the Mechanical as “he,” and that there seemed to be a real affection, a deep fondness, in the way she spoke about it. Could she possibly be fucking it somehow? Were they lovers, or was the emotion in her voice just the happy devotion a dog feels for its beloved master? I don’t want to know! he thought, fighting down a deep black spasm of primordial jealous rage. “And is that so important?” he said bitterly, feeling his voice thicken. “Such a big deal? To talk some machines into taking you along to the stars with them, like pets getting a ride in the car? Make sure they leave the windows open a crack for you when they park the spaceship!”
She started to blaze angrily at him, then struggled visibly to bring herself under control. “That’s the wrong analogy,” she said at last, in a dangerously calm voice. “Don’t think of us as dogs on a joyride. Think of us instead as rats on an ocean-liner, or as cockroaches on an airplane, or even as insect larva in the corner of a shipping crate. It doesn’t matter why they want us to go, or even if they know we’re along for the ride, just as long as we go. Whatever their motives are for going where they’re going, we have agendas of our own. Just by taking us along, they’re going to help us extend our biological range to environments we never could have reached otherwise—yes, just like rats reaching New Zealand by stowing away on sailing ships. It didn’t matter that the rats didn’t build the ships themselves, or decide where the ships were going—all that counts in an environmental sense is that they got there, to a place they never could have reached on their own. Bucky Bug has promised to leave small colonizing teams behind on every habitable planet we reach. It amuses him in a fond, patronizing kind of way. He thinks it’s cute.” She stared levelly at him. “But why he’s doing it doesn’t matter. Pigs were spread to every continent in the world because humans wanted to eat them—bad for the individual pigs, but very good in the long run for the species as a whole, which extended its range explosively and multiplied its biomass exponentially. And like rats or cockroaches, once humans get into an environment, it’s hard to get rid of them. Whatever motives the AIs have for doing what they’re doing, they’ll help spread humanity throughout the stars, whether they realize they’re doing it or not.”
“Is that the best destiny you can think of for the human race?” he said. “To be cockroaches scuttling behind the walls in some machine paradise?”
This time, she did blaze at him. “Goddamnit, Charlie, we don’t have time for that bullshit! We can’t afford dignity and pride and all the rest of those luxuries! This is species survival we’re talking about here!” She’d squirmed around to face him, in her urgency. He tried to say something, even he wasn’t sure what it would have been, but she overrode him. “We’ve got to get the human race off Earth! Any way we can. We can’t afford to keep all our eggs in one basket anymore. There’s too much power, too much knowledge, in too many hands. How long before one of the New Men decides to destroy the Earth as part of some insane game he’s playing, perhaps not even understanding that what he’s doing is real? They have the power to do it. How long before some of the other AIs decide to exterminate the human race, to tidy up the place, or to make an aesthetic statement of some kind, or for some other reason we can’t even begin to understand? They certainly have the power—they could do it as casually as lifting a hand, if they wanted to. How long before somebody else does it, deli
berately or by accident? Anybody could destroy the world these days, even private citizens with the access to the right technology. Even the Meats could do it, if they applied themselves!”
“But—” he said.
“No buts! Who knows what things will be like a thousand years from now? A hundred thousand years from now? A million? Maybe our descendants will be the masters again, maybe they’ll catch up with the AIs and even surpass them. Maybe our destinies will diverge entirely. Maybe we’ll work out some kind of symbiosis with them. A million things could happen. Anything could happen. But before our descendants can go on to any kind of destiny, there have to be descendants in the first place! If you survive, there are always options opening up later on down the road, some you couldn’t ever have imagined. If you don’t survive, there are no options!”
A wave of tiredness swept over him, and he slumped in his chair. “There are more important things than survival,” he said.
She fell silent, staring at him intently. She was flushed with anger, little droplets of sweat standing out on her brow, dampening her temples, her hair slightly disheveled. He could smell the heat of her flesh, and the deeper musk of her body, a rich pungent smell that cut like a knife right through all the years to some deep core of his brain to which time meant nothing, that didn’t realize that thirty long years had gone by since last he’d smelled that strong, secret fragrance, that didn’t realize that he was old. He felt a sudden pang of desire, and looked away from her uneasily. All at once, he was embarrassed to have her see him this way, dwindled, diminished, gnarled, ugly, old.
“You’re going to turn us down again, aren’t you?” she said at last. “Damnit! You always were the most stiff-necked, stubborn son-of-a-bitch alive! You always had to be right! You always were right, as far as you were concerned! No argument, no compromises.” She shook her head in exasperation. “Damn you, can’t you admit that you were wrong, just this once? Can’t you be wrong, just this once?”
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 37