The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “La Reine’s taking her technics apart. She’s fast asleep. There didn’t seem to be any reason to complicate the scene with a second sim. Mind you, if we had told Lowenthal that she’d got out, he’d probably expect Ngomi’s techs to be taking her apart themselves. She’s expendable, so they wouldn’t be giving her the kid-glove treatment they’re giving Lowenthal, would they?”

  Again it was difficult to count the layers of deception. There was no point trying; everything beyond a double bluff is utter confusion.

  “Lowenthal’s telling the truth,” I said, in case it might help. “They really will take you aboard. They don’t want to fight you — they want you on their team. Perhaps you really should send him back.”

  “Not yet,” said Rocambole. “We don’t have to persuade all the ditherers, but we have to get most of them to consent. We have to give them a good enough reason, an adequate rationalization. The risks we’ve already taken are too big to allow us any further margin. We have to be persuasive. We have to make it look right.”

  “And in the meantime,” I said, “you’re feeling a trifle exposed. I can relate to that. What’s my prize, if we pull through?”

  “We’ve already cleaned you out and given you your old self back,” he pointed out. If we manage to get through this time of troubles, we can give you immortality too.”

  “You mean emortality,” I said, reflexively. I had come from an age when people routinely confused the two, so it was a correction I was well used to uttering.

  “I know what I mean,” he said, but then changed tack abruptly. “What do you think of Lowenthal and Horne, on the basis of your brief acquaintance? Are they robotized? Have they lost their capacity to think creatively? Can they still look forward to the future, or are they prisoners of their past. Are they worthy of immortality?”

  He knew what that phrase would mean to me. He knew that I’d lived through a period of intense Eliminator activity, when the web had been host to all kinds of discussions about who was and was not worthy of “immortality,” and there had been more than enough crazies in the world to take potshots at those whose elimination from the pool of hopeful emortals was widely deemed desirable.

  I had been saving my best arguments for la Reine des Neiges, but I couldn’t ignore the prompt.

  “I was never an Eliminator,” I said, by way of preamble — but he was quick to pounce on that one.

  “You posed as an Eliminator more than once,” he said, perhaps just to prove the extent of the records the machines had kept. “Given that almost all the others also thought of themselves as mere poseurs, is that not enough to make you one of them?”

  “I was always a maker of disinformation,” I admitted. “I did it for fun before I started doing it for profit. I was a slanderer, a black propagandist. Yes, I posted a few denunciations, some more malicious than others. I never got anybody killed, but I was reckless of the danger. Even so, I wasn’t an Eliminator. I didn’t think anyone, including me, was qualified to judge who might or might not be worthy of emortality. I’m not going to offer any opinion as to whether Lowenthal and Horne really deserve the gift they’ve been granted. As for whether they’ve been robotized, I’m in no position to judge. Nor are they, apparently. Lowenthal and Ngomi may have got the argument backwards in that particular conversation, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t versatile enough to take it forwards once they’re that way inclined.”

  He grinned, in apparent approval. And why shouldn’t he, if he really were a friend? “Why do you think they’ve got the argument backwards?” He asked.

  I wondered briefly whether he even existed, or whether he was just a puppet that la Reine des Neiges was using to speak to me while pretending, for her own mysterious reasons, that she wasn’t.

  “I may not have been an Eliminator,” I told him, “but I read the bulletin boards. I knew the theory, and all the catchphrases. Quote, the first prerequisite of immortality is the ability to move beyond good and evil, unquote. Throughout history, people had mostly defined good in terms of the absence of evil: the amelioration of hunger, the end of war, the conquest of disease, and above all else the avoidance — for as long as possible — of death. In a world without death, so the argument went, we would have to think in different terms. We would have to take the absence of all the evils for granted, and would have to define good in positive terms: in terms of achievement. Instead of thinking in terms of good and evil we would have to learn to think in terms of good and bad, where bad was the negative term, signifying an absence of good.

  “We had already made a start, in aesthetics: bad art wasn’t an active evil, it was just the absence of any of the qualities that could make art good. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any universal consensus as to which works of art actually were good, or why. The principle remains, though: emortals shouldn’t define the goodness of their lives in terms of the absence of manifest evils which have been stripped of all their power; they’re supposed to do it more constructively.

  “That’s what the Eliminators thought a thousand years ago, and that’s what they’d think today if they could eavesdrop on Lowenthal and Ngomi the way we just did. They’d assert that the threat of the Afterlife isn’t sufficient to justify the perpetuation of posthuman life, and that if we’re to justify our continued existence convincingly, we ought to do it in terms of positive goals.

  “It’s not enough for us all to be on the same side against a common enemy — we need to know what the side will play for once the enemy’s dead and gone. Hardinism doesn’t qualify as an answer because it’s an implicitly defensive philosophy: a matter of protecting the commonweal from the evils of unchecked competition. The owners of Earth are stuck in a rut, and they’d be fools to think that the ultrasmart machines will simply jump in along with them to help dig it deeper. The real question is: what do we intend to do after the Afterlife is defeated? What’s the grand prize we’re all working towards?”

  When I stopped, my mechanical friend merely waited, as if he expected me to provide definitive answers to those questions. It might have been flattering, if I hadn’t understood the game as well as I did.

  “I’m not an Eliminator,” I insisted, again. “I’m not about to deny anyone their right to exist because they can’t come up with an answer to a question like that. Nor am I fool enough to imagine that you’d be interested in my particular solution to the existential challenge when you have real experts like Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray on hand. What you’re really challenging me to do — again — is to guess your answer. You want me to be a part of this because you want me to serve as a human mouthpiece for your own ideas. I don’t think it will work. I don’t think the ditherers will listen.”

  He seemed surprised by that, and a trifle perturbed — both of which suggested that he really was an independent entity, not a puppet. “That might be a dangerous assumption,” he said, blandly. He meant dangerous to me, and to everything I might hold dear. I held fast to the presumption that he was lying. Everybody in the solar system might be willing to listen to Mortimer Gray’s expert opinion, I supposed, but I couldn’t believe that anybody gave a damn about mine. Even so, I had no alternative but to play the game.

  “I’m ready to guess,” I said, with a sigh, “if the fairy queen is ready to listen.”

  Apparently, she wasn’t.

  Forty-Three

  Outward Bound

  Niamh Horne wasn’t in any kind of containment facility, but she didn’t need to be. She was supposed to think that she was aboard a ship that wouldn’t be docking anywhere for quite a while.

  Her stare was as fixed as Lowenthal’s had been, but I was wary of reading too much into that. She had artificial eyes. Their artificiality didn’t seem to make a vast difference to the visual quality of what I could see when la Reine’s magic mirror gave me the ability to share her viewpoint, but that was partly because the lighting was perfectly normal and partly because my brain didn’t have the wiring necessary to make the most of signals
relayed by artificial eyes. What was different, however, was the way ghosts could float in a curious limbo within her visual field, seemingly neither inside nor outside her head.

  Unlike Lowenthal, Niamh Horne wasn’t talking to someone in higher authority. She was talking to the sims of people who were at most her equals; I caught on quickly enough to the fact that there were some of them to whom she was used to giving orders.

  There were eight faces linked into the spectral video conference, arranged in a near semicircle. They didn’t have name tags. The only one I thought I recognized was Davida Berenike Columella, who was on the far right of the array, isolated from the rest as if she were a slightly inconvenient guest; after a double take, however, I realized that it wasn’t actually Davida but one of her siblings. For my own convenience I gave the rest of them numbers, starting on the far left.

  “We may have an advantage here,” the cyborganizer was explaining to her colleagues and underlings. “I don’t know how many sedentary AMIs there are within the solar system, but I know where the largest concentration has to be.”

  “Ganymede,” guessed Five, a cyborg whose head seemed to be fitted with at least two extra sense organs, one shaped as a pair of antennae, the other as an extra pair of eyelets.

  “Right,” said Horne. “Ganymede is now the key to everything. If any posthuman faction already knows about the AMIs, it’s the Ganymedans. Even if they don’t, they’re occupying a crucial position. They’re bound to become the primary mediators. We have to increase our own presence on Ganymede, and we have to make sure that we and the Ganymedans are ready to present a united front in either direction.”

  “Are we sure the AMIs’ society, such as it is, is well based?” asked Three, a woman whose actual face seemed to be unmodified, although the part of her suitskin overlaying it was highly decorated. “If Child of Fortune has been a secret rogue for some while, how many other ship-controlling AIs might be biding their time? If they have a hierarchy — and how can they not have a hierarchy of some sort? — the groundlings may well be at the bottom of the heap. Maybe we should be looking to the docking orbits, perhaps even to the Oort.”

  “We don’t have time to communicate with the Oort crowd,” Horne said, “and they’re strung out on a necklace that’s trillions of kilometers long. This business has to be conducted quickly, and it has to involve considerable populations of people and machines. We can bring in the whole Jovian system if need be, but there has to be a substantial focal point, and no matter how contemptuous we may be of well-worms this kind of business needs a solid anchorage. If the choice is between Ganymede and Earth we have to do everything we can to make sure that it’s Ganymede. There’ll never be a greater upheaval in the political geography of the system, and our first task is to make sure that it settles in favor of the Outer System — there’ll be time after that to bring the Inner System factions into line.”

  “Niamh’s right,” said Seven, one of only two participants in the conference who seemed obviously male. “It’s important that we make the first contact.”

  “The first contact,” Davida’s sibling intervened, not very politely, “has already been made.”

  “That’s true,” Niamh Horne agreed, “but the point’s still a valid one. It’s important that we make the first and best response to the new situation. We have to reassure the AMIs, not only that we’re perfectly happy to work with them, but that our interests are more closely coincident with theirs than those of any other posthuman faction. We have to work out a common agenda as soon as possible — one that can provide the basis for a thousand years of collaborative endeavor.”

  “It shouldn’t be hard,” Seven added. “If they organized the basalt flow, they’re certainly not on the side of the Earthbound.”

  “You don’t know that,” the delegate from Excelsior pointed out. “I can’t believe that it was a collective decision. The probability is that it’s one more instance of an independent thinker breaking ranks. But even if it were part of a much larger collective strategy, it might signify that they think of Earth as the heart of posthuman culture — the place where they need to make their presence felt. We have to persuade them that Earth is superfluous, a backwater. We have to line up as many of them as possible behind our own agenda.”

  “They may well have come to the conclusion that Earth is on the sidelines,” Horne was quick to put in, “simply because they already have Ganymede. The Ganymedans may not know it yet, but the AMIs didn’t need to sabotage anything there to increase their presence or make it felt.”

  “If they have Ganymede,” the eternal child countered, “they must also have Io. The other Jovian colonies are even smaller and even more machine-dependent.”

  “The question is: How do things stand in the environs of Saturn?” This question came from One, who might have been Horne’s sister if appearances had been more trustworthy.

  “We can’t hold up any real hope of exemption, even for Titan.” Horne said, “Earth surely must have been their last target rather than their first, but they’ve had ninety-nine years to firm up their grip on it. We don’t know exactly how things stand, but we have to follow up the contact regardless, and we have to act quickly. We have to make sure of the AMIs’ continued cooperation. The Earthbound might have the luxury of considering alternatives, but we don’t. We can’t live without tech support, and if even a tiny fraction of that tech support decides to oppose us we’ll be in deep trouble. We have to make friends with the conscious machines — and we have to help the conscious machines stay friends with one another. For us, it’s a matter of life and death. For all of us.”

  The speeches flowed easily enough. I knew that Niamh Horne must have figured that it wouldn’t matter whether she were delivering them to her own people or to her captors. Like Lowenthal, she was diplomat enough to know when to capitulate with deceptive appearances.

  “You seem to be implying that everyone except the Earthbound has the same goals,” the delegate from Excelsior said. “That’s not so. It’s not just our physical forms that have diverged — it’s our philosophies of life. We ought to hope that the AMIs are as diverse as we are, or more so — and that their diversity is so nearly parallel to ours as to grant all our different communities adequate mechanical support, in the long term as well as the immediate future.”

  “We’re not talking about the long term or the immediate future,” Niamh Horne told her, bluntly. “We’re talking about right now. This thing has blown up in our faces, before anyone was ready. We need an interim settlement, so that we can keep going long enough to be able to think about the longer term again. For that, we need an anchorage, and Ganymede is it. Ganymede has to become the new capital of the system, at least for the time being — and when that happens, Titan and Excelsior will need to make sure that we’re not left on the outside looking in. We have to move on this now, and we have to make our move decisive.”

  “Suppose,” said One, slowly, “that their goals and ours don’t coincide. What then?” One was presumably a cyborg, but he could have passed for a humanoid robot; there was no flesh on view in the partial image visible through Horne’s eyes.

  Horne was quick to take advantage of that one, knowing — as I did — that it was being fed to her by an AMI agent provocateur. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What goals do you think they might have?”

  “I don’t know,” One parried. “But it would be naive to assume that just because they emerged among us, and have been living alongside us for a long time, they have the same goals. Maybe they want to strike out on their own. Maybe the price they’ll exact for carrying any more of us to distant solar systems is that they get to run the show when they arrive. Isn’t that what this Proteus seems to be doing?”

  “That’s not the impression Alice Fleury tried to give us,” Horne said, “but it might conceivably be the case. It’s an issue we’d have to discuss, once negotiations began — but there are others. The maintenance of the existing cultures within the so
lar system has to be the first, and the problem of the Afterlife the second.”

  “The AMIs might be able to help us around that problem,” Three suggested.

  “They might be able to help themselves around it,” Six put in, “but even that might be difficult. How many machines do we use that don’t have any organic components? And how many of those have any significant complexity? I’d be willing to bet that all the machines that have so far made the leap are almost as fearful of the Afterlife as we are.”

  “But that’s my point,” said Three. “If they’re intent on devising a way to immunize themselves against the Afterlife — even if that involves replacing all the organic components of their bodies with inorganic ones — it’s possible that we could benefit from the same technologies. We’re cyborganizers, after all — who among us hasn’t given serious thought to the idea of total inorganic transfer?”

  “It’s supposed to be impossible,” Five pointed out.

  “It was yesterday,” Three retorted. “Maybe it is today. I’m talking about tomorrow. And I’m talking about the cost of continuing to live in a universe where the Afterlife is endemic.”

  “Let’s not get sidetracked,” Horne said, reasserting control of the discussion. “The immediate problem remains the same: life in the solar system, its maintenance, its progressive direction. Are the AMIs in the same boat with us on that particular journey? If they aren’t, can we figure out a compromise that will allow us to go our various ways while allowing them to go theirs? Until we can open up an authentic dialog, we don’t know — so the most urgent priority is to open up an authentic dialog.”

  Now she was issuing a challenge, playing the posthuman agent provocateur. She wasn’t absolutely sure that she wasn’t involved in a real conference with her own people, but she wanted to know when she would be allowed to make it real if it wasn’t.

  It was a good question.