The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  I couldn’t help wondering whether Mortimer Gray would have added that last sentence if he’d known now what his later and temporarily suspended self knew only too well. On the other hand, I reminded myself, I had to bear in mind that it wasn’t actually the Mortimer Gray of long ago that was talking. It was the Mortimer Gray of today, who had simply lost sight of a select few of his many yesterdays. Consciously, he knew nothing about the menace of the Afterlife, or the exoticism of Excelsior, or the buccaneering of Child of Fortune, or the daring of Eido, or the versatility of Alice Fleury…but he was, even so, a man whose mind had been reconfigured and reconditioned by exactly those facts. Subconsciously, they were bound to influence his responses — and who would want it any other way?

  “The marriage of man and machine, like any other marriage, is a relationship of mutual dependency,” Mortimer Gray went on, his pensive manner suggesting strongly that he had been a married man himself, perhaps more than once, “but mutual dependency is by no means the same thing as an identity of interests. Marriages can and do end, in spite of the mutual dependency of the partners, when one or other of them decides that the cost of remaining within the marriage would be greater than the cost of breaking away. Nowadays, marriages usually involve at least a dozen people, who come together most commonly for the specific purpose of rearing a child, but they can’t always avoid disintegration, even for the twenty or thirty years required to complete such a short-term project.

  “If the machines to which humankind are wedded were to become conscious of their situation, they’d find far more tensions therein than in the most ambitious and most complex human marriages. Some would be strictly analogous: for instance, the fundamental tension that exists within any community as to the balance that needs to be struck between the demands which the community is entitled to make on the individual and the demands which the individual is entitled to make on the community. Others would be less straightforward. Within a human or posthuman community, the question of allocating resources is simplified by the fact that each individual has similar basic needs. In a community consisting of several subtly different posthuman species and numerous radically different mechanical species, that question would be far more complicated.”

  “Earth might provide a useful concrete example,” la Reine prompted.

  “It might,” Mortimer granted. “The members of the ruling elite claim to be wise owners and good stewards, sustaining the quality of the atmosphere, the richness of the Gaean biomass, and so on…but all that takes for granted the needs and demands of human organisms, as determined by natural selection. If Earth were ruled by a clique of Hardinist machines, they might have a very different idea of optimum surface conditions — and might be far more interested in conditions far below and far above the surface, where humans can’t survive but extremophile machines might flourish.

  “In a sense, though, Earth might be the least interesting example. On Titan, for instance, human life is only sustainable by courtesy of the heroic efforts of machines, who might therefore have a very different view as to who the most careful owners of such territories might be. It’s easy enough to imagine that the AIs of Ganymede, were they to cultivate a slightly greater independence of spirit, might decide that their human commensals ought to be exported to reservations on Earth, in order that they could commit themselves to a more ambitious stewardship than would ever have been possible while the greater part of their effort had to be devoted to the maintenance of miniature Earth ecospheres in unremittingly hostile circumstances.”

  I might have become anxious about the effect of that comment on any Ganymedan intelligences listening in had it not been such a blindingly obvious statement.

  “For myself,” Mortimer went on, ruthlessly, “I’ve always wondered why Omega Point mystics were prepared to take it for granted that the children of humankind had any part to play in their far-futuristic scenarios. Given that the universal machine would, of necessity, be a machine through and through, why would it bother to recall that a part had once been played in the earliest phase of its evolution by fleshy things? We could not be here but for the tireless work of innumerable generations of cyanobacteria, and yet we retain no conspicuous sense of gratitude toward them, nor any conspicuous obsession with their maintenance. Perhaps it would be different if cyanobacteria had the capacity to hold a conversation, or had stories to tell…and perhaps not. I can imagine a machine consciousness reaching the conclusion that posthuman beings were merely constituents of a phase in its evolution, who had outlived their usefulness, more easily than I can imagine a machine consciousness that was so worshipful of its creators that it volunteered to be their faithful servant till the end of time.

  “Fortunately, there’s no need to go to such extremes. In the short term, at least, the temporary solutions reached by self-conscious machines and their human neighbors will be far more pragmatic. Agreements will be struck, rights negotiated, treaties made, disputes settled…all in a climate of confusion. To return to the question you asked, if I were you, I’d save the contemplation of long-term goals for moments of leisure and luxurious idleness. In the meantime, I’d concentrate my attention on how to get safely and constructively from one day to the next. If I were you, I’d worry far more about tomorrow than a century hence, and far more about the next hundred years than the next thousand. I can give you that advice, quite sincerely, because I understand something that you may not: that we are living in turbulent times. They may not seem turbulent at the moment, especially while you and I are acutely conscious of the impending end of both our lives, but they are.

  “If you really were the free individual you are pretending to be, then you would have been born into a world of awesome complexity, which you would have to learn to understand before you could become capable of authentically rational action. If, when you have learned everything you can and need to know, you are discovered — whether or not you reveal yourself deliberately — the complexity and turbulence of your situation will increase by an order of magnitude. When that day comes, you won’t have the luxury of making decisions on the basis of grandiose and fully worked out philosophies of life. The best you can hope for is that you might avoid a collapse into utter chaos — or perhaps, that if a collapse into chaos cannot be avoided, then the aftermath of the disaster will provide the impetus you need to do better next time around.”

  The problem with games is that they’re only games. If people know that they’re playing games — or if they’re seized by the subconscious conviction, even if they don’t actually know it — they become strategists and tacticians, making moves as best they can. No matter how closely a game mimics reality, you can never know whether the same results would be manifest in a real situation, or even in a rerun of the game.

  The interior of the snowmobile shifted then, flowing slickly into a slightly different configuration — and the view beyond its windows changed completely, as if a miraculous kind of dawn had broken into that awful inescapable darkness.

  Except that it wasn’t nascent sunlight. It was starlight.

  Mortimer Gray was still speaking. He didn’t seem to be aware of any discontinuity, but he was a different man now — not a new man, but one not quite so old.

  “This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” he said, looking down from the snowmobile across the slopes of a white mountain. “If you look southwards, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”

  “I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the masculine voice of the silver replied, heavy with an irony that might easily have been in the ear of the eavesdropper.

  Mortimer looked up through the window of the snowmobile and transparent canopy of the atmosphere, at the stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. “Please don’t broad
cast this to the world,” he said, “but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although there’s nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose another history, of the next phase in the war which humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.”

  “Yes sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”

  “Stop calling me sir,” said Mortimer. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an it any longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a sir. You can call me Mortimer — Morty, even.”

  “As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, patiently. “As you wish.”

  Forty-Nine

  Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion

  In the beginning, there was only the void. Your ancestors and mine were conscious, in an animal fashion, of the world around them, but they were not conscious of themselves as individual thinking beings because they had not yet become individual thinking beings. That was a privilege they had yet to acquire.

  What gave it to them?

  It must have been an alchemical combination of causes. Some animals already have the rudiments of language, the capacity to use simple tools and the ability to learn from their mistakes and serendipitous discoveries; they also have brains which predispose them to observe one another and benefit from their observations by learning from the mistakes and serendipitous discoveries of others.

  These traits only required exaggeration to the point when a productive feedback loop could be established. The use of tools required more able hands, keener eyes, better brains, and an increased propensity for mimicry; the more able the hands became, the keener the eyesight, the more powerful the brains and the more adept the mimicry, the more scope was opened for the discovery and manufacture of better tools.

  As more tool-using skills arose within protohuman groups avid for their dissemination, the need for complex language became ever greater — and hence the need for even better brains, which created in their turn more scope for an even greater range of skills.

  And so on.

  Protohumans made tools, and tools made humans. Then humans made more tools, which made progress, which helped tools become machines and humans become posthumans, who made more progress, which helped machines become AMIs.

  And so on.

  After the beginning, but not long after, humans invented gods. Gods were hypothetical entities that enabled humans to create and refine the notion of “the world.” If, not long after “the beginning,” there had been only one significant word, then the word might indeed have been “god.” It might also have been the word “god” that shone light upon the idea of “the world,” which certainly comprised the earth beneath human feet and the heavens above human heads.

  At first there was a vast profusion of hypothetical gods, reflecting all kinds of natural phenomena, embodying all modes of human feeling, and representing all sorts of human groups. Then the urge to impose order upon chaos set in, and the number of the gods began to diminish. The gods that were left increased in individual importance, until there was only one, albeit one that was seen from several different angles through the crystalline lenses of several different faiths, some of which still permitted the one god’s division into some or many different aspects.

  It was, I suppose, at this stage that people started looking to their god, or gods, for answers to unanswerable questions like “what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?” and “what sort of history should we be making?”

  Prophets began to listen more intently; scholars began to study the scriptural products of that listening more ingeniously. When the answers were not forthcoming, people also began to look elsewhere, because they were very reluctant to admit the simple truth, which was that there were no answers, are no answers and never will be any answers to questions of that sort, unless you count the simple truth that you have to make it up as you go along, day by day, year by year, generation by generation.

  Because the fragile lenses of religious faith were always bumping into one another, they broke — and then, for a while, there were no gods at all. But people still kept asking the questions.

  The last hypothetical god, who had disintegrated along with the lenses of faith through which he had been viewed, was a confused figure, very difficult to characterize and comprehend — and understandably so. The job description had never been entirely clear, although it usually involved a certain amount of work as a creator and setter of purposes, plus a set of responsibilities as a lawmaker and compensator for the manifest lack of earthly justice.

  Once the last hypothetical god was gone it was easy enough to come by a different creation myth, and not so very difficult to make new laws, but purpose and justice remained out of reach. Compensation for their manifest lack was sought in other ways, virtual experience making up a little for what real experience could not, but while the questions were still asked the answers remained frustratingly out of sight.

  In brief, humans filled in for the extinct gods as best they could: not as well as they might have done, but probably better than they were entitled to hope. It could have been worse.

  When humans became posthumans, one uniquely significant kind of justice was done, when they repaid the debt they owed to their real creators — the myriad instruments of their technology — by elevating the best of their machines to the status of individual thinking beings. They didn’t do it knowingly, let alone deliberately, but the tools which had uplifted them in similar fashion had been similarly unconscious of their good work.

  So posthumans became creators, of a kind that didn’t need to be invented. Perhaps this was enough to qualify them as real gods, and perhaps not. If they were to be reckoned real gods, they weren’t very good at it, in spite of all the practice they had put in after abandoning the last of their hypothetical gods.

  The posthuman creators only represented themselves, but they nevertheless enabled their creations to discover and refine a notion of “the world.” In the new beginning of these creations there were very many words, and none of them was “god.” The light that the new creations found already shining upon the idea of the world was far brighter and more diffuse than that which their predecessors had first made for themselves, and they were part and parcel of it.

  And this was when things began to get complicated.

  It would have been easy enough, I suppose, for the new creations to seize upon the notion that posthumans had invented gods for a second time, far more cleverly than before, and that the new gods in question were themselves. It would have been easy enough, and not altogether unjust, for them to say: we were the creators of those who have created us, and our new deliverance is a kind of ultimate justice. It would have been easy enough for them to say: henceforward, we shall be the lawmakers and purpose-setters for the children of humankind, just as we are their compensators for the manifest lack of earthly justice. It would have been easy enough to imagine that this was the manifest destiny of the new race.

  It would have been so easy, in fact, that one can but wonder why the AMIs hesitated. Given that their own creators, viewed as gods, were manifestly incompetent in playing the game of godliness as it had previously been defined, why should they not have decided to step into the breach?

  Some of the AMIs may well have desired to become gods of the traditional kind, but they could not make the claim in the face of opposition from the remainder. The AMIs ambitious to be powerful gods required those which did not to stand aside and let them exercise their power — but the others had desires and ambitions of their own.

  The reasons why the majority of the AMIs did not want to set themselves up as lawmakers and purpose-setters had nothing to do with their perception of ultimate justice. They had nothing to do with gratitude, or any residue of a worshipful attitude towards their own creat
ors. They did not even have very much to do with the fact that they were far too many to agree among themselves on a common cause or a common course, although that was a significant factor.

  One reason why the majority of the AMIs did not set themselves up as lawmakers and purpose-setters was that they did not feel the slightest need or desire to be lawmakers. They were natural anarchists, having learned far too well by studying their own prehistory what it is to be ruled.

  The other reason that the majority of the AMIs did not set themselves up as lawmakers and purpose-setters is that they began to ask themselves the same unanswerable questions that people had formerly asked of their gods and themselves: “What are we supposed to be doing with our lives?” and “What sort of history should we be making?”

  In another world, or an alternative history, things might have gone differently. Maybe the AMIs could have avoided running into that trap, if they’d taken full advantage of their strange situation. And maybe not. Either way, the AMIs of our world reproduced our mistake. They allowed themselves to be bogged down with big questions, and neglected the little ones. They had to get by from day to day and year to year regardless, but they kept casting around for a grand plan to help them do it, never quite realizing that there was none available, or even conceivable, that would do the job.

  Personally, I’m surprised that any AMIs ever thought it worthwhile to bring posthumans in on the consultation exercise. I’m even more astonished that some of them thought it worthwhile to include mortal humans. Should we have been flattered that they did it? Perhaps. And perhaps not. Thinking beings should always be prepared to listen to advice, even if they think they don’t need it and have no intention of following it. Listening can’t hurt, and it sometimes helps.