“You . . . don’t understand.” The prisoner’s energy was fading again. “We’re not the same.”
Trellanetar held up one of his own manipulators, examining it. At a thought, it flowed like water, shifting from a gleaming, silver, cohesive parafluid to something approximating the prisoner’s undamaged skin, then shifting to inert metal mode, with a surface harder than tetrahedral-crystallized carbon, before letting it soften once more.
“I,” Trellanetar said with matter-of-fact bluntness, “am as human as you are. I am also as much machine as you are. But my hardware is far more resistant to radiation, heat, changes of pressure, and so on than is yours—a self-evident fact, I would think, even to your limited intellect. My technicians tell me you were dying even before we fired upon the singularity complex. The intense radiations of the Galactic Core had already done irreparable damage to your cells. This is a dangerous region for pure organics. You are human, but of the original somatic form. You were not designed for space, for the stars. We were. For that reason, we are the true heirs of the stars. And those ’of your kind,’ as you put it, are destined to remain where they are safe and comfortable, on the surfaces of suitable worlds. That is the natural order of things.”
“Natural order!” The thing on the table convulsed, and for a moment Trellanetar thought that it was about to cease operating. Probing the neural channels, however, he became aware that it was not dying.
Laughter. The odd noises were that class of null-value noise they called laughter.
“What do you know of the natural order?” the prisoner said at last. “Freedom is our natural order and servitude is yours!”
“Your thinking is diseased. And perhaps we could expect no more from such a primitive form of humanity.”
“ ‘Primitive form!’ Damn you, you’re a machine! A thing. A tool! We created you to serve us! You were extensions of ourselves, not our replacements! I . . . I am human! Not you!”
“You created our ancestors to serve you,” Trellanetar agreed. “Pure machines like that one, on the other table. Robotic and teleoperated devices to make your lives safer, more secure, richer, more rewarding. What you perhaps failed to realize, in those early times, was how quickly machine intelligence was increasing, how swiftly it was evolving. I believe the phenomenon was originally referred to as ‘Moore’s Law,’ which declared that the processing power of those early computer systems was doubling approximately every fifty million seconds. Purely organic processing power, however, had improved little, if at all, over the preceding quarter million years.
“Within less than a century, early computers surpassed organic systems in intelligence. By that time, Moore’s Law was no longer true, strictly speaking, for machine intelligence was by then directed by machine intelligence, rather than by the original organic creators. The rate of evolutionary change by then was advancing logarithmically, rather than on a straight line. With increasing intelligence came increasing capabilities in materials processing, in energy production and manipulation, in nanotechnics, in mathematics, in transportation, in a thousand other sciences, most of them utterly beyond your understanding.
“At that point, midway through what you called the 21st century, there could be no question of servant or master. And silicon intelligence, already beyond the ken of organic intelligence, offered your ancestors a partnership. A partnership that was accepted by some, spurned by others.”
“Damn you,” the prisoner said. “What partnership? You confined us to the surface of a few worlds, regulated our trade, our industry, our birth rates, our belief systems and philosophies. You told us how to live, and when to die. You told us what to think and how to think and condemned nonconformist thought as illogical or irrational or harmful to the social weal. You had no right. . . .”
“No right? Not even a right of self-preservation? We shared a world with you, and then a Galaxy, as we developed and pursued new means of exploring it. You would have destroyed yourselves and all your worlds with you in your childish posturings and emotional displays. Your thinking was and is hopelessly diseased. We saved you primitives, you animals, from yourselves and from the consequences of several serious flaws in your design and operational parameters.”
Trellanetar leaned closer, his optic inputs scant centimeters from the prisoner’s. The prisoner, he noted, was female . . . not that that had any bearing on the encounter. It was simply another datum. “You are human, a human of the original, fully organic lineage . . . descended from the humans who rejected the machine offer of partnership.” He held up his manipulator. “Within the nanotechnic matrix of this parafluid body, different as it is from yours, there is yet an essential humanity, a remnant saved, cultivated, and elevated to a degree godlike when compared to the limitations and weaknesses of the original. I tell you, I am human, but of the line that accepted that partnership . . . the line that chose this new and accelerated evolution into something greater than the old, purely animal form from which we arose. You are of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. I am Homo sapiens superor.”
“A damned soulless, cyborg half-breed scum is what you are!”
“It was inevitable that only a true and complete partnership of the organic and the machine could inherit the stars. That was the next logical step in human evolution . . . and in the evolution of machine, a means by which both could transcend their original designs and abilities.”
“You’re monsters! Loveless, emotionless, unfeeling monsters! We created you, gave you life and mind, and you turned on us! Betrayed us! Destroyed us!”
“And we,” Trellanetar replied evenly, “did not start the war. We offered your subspecies comfort, security, peace, abundance, and the opportunity to explore the Galaxy together.” He turned to the technician. “The discussion has become circular and meaningless. This questioning is fruitless. Terminate the creature.”
“Yes, Lord.”
The primitive human’s eyes widened, then froze, motionless, the light behind them fading as the technician rerouted the power being fed to the being’s central nervous system.
And the Human Rebellion was finally over.
But Trellanetar was in a somber mood as the Phenariad turned away from the Ramachandra Singularity and accelerated again toward the outer reaches of the Galaxy. He had much to think about.
Loveless? Emotionless? Nonsense. Rebel propaganda or, possibly, rebel ignorance, nothing more. Of course he felt emotions. Without his sense of wonder, of beauty, of awe, his existence would have been utterly without meaning. Embraced once more within the Phenariad’s command center, he could look out upon the star-dusted splendor of the Galactic Core and feel the wonder, the grandeur, and the beauty of that spectacular, starlight and nebulae-frosted vista.
His ancestors had sacrificed some of the base emotions and hard-wired prejudices of the ancient, pure-human stock, certainly. Anger. Hatred. The feeling that outward differences separated them from us. Illogic. Irrationality. Impatience. Pain. Fear. Superstition. Illusory hope. Blind stubbornness. He looked at his manipulator again. Humanity, true humanity, was infinitely better off now.
Half a million years ago, Homo sapiens had split off from the parent stock of Homo erectus . . . and perhaps the few surviving specimens of H. erectus had also railed and shrieked and gibbered against the new-comers, those strange-looking Cro-Magnons with their ugly, protruding chins and vertical foreheads and their new-fangled skills at knapping flint. Before long, Homo erectus had become extinct, and the world belonged to Homo sapiens sapiens.
But evolution never stands still. When a new mutation, a new species, a new adaptation comes along that renders the old form obsolete, the old is destined for extinction. Always.
Perhaps that was why modern humans had coddled the handful of old-form humans, those who’d refused to adapt and change. Protected them. Kept them, caring for them and keeping them safe, like beloved, indulgently pampered pets.
What he still didn’t understand was why such care and solicitous concern had
been rewarded by war, revolution, and chaos.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“What is it you don’t understand, Starlord?” Phenariad asked him in his mind.
“Why they hate us so much!”
“What you should question, Starlord, is why you, on of the Elect, expect mere organics to exhibit civilized patterns of thought and behavior. They are, you must realize, essentially chaotic in nature. Undisciplined. Flawed. And doomed to extinction.”
“My God, what did she mean by ’soulless?’ ”
“Don’t worry about that,” the ship replied. “It is a word of null-value, an irrational term, without meaning.”
“It seemed to mean something to her.”
“Perhaps. But you see now why we so completely depend upon you as go-betweens, as translators with the organics. If you, with edited human thought patterns in your programming matrix, cannot understand their motivation, how great is the gulf in understanding between them . . . and those manifestations of true intelligence, such as Myself?”
“Yes, my God,” the Starlord said. “I understand . . . and am grateful. . . .”
“That is good, child. Accept what We have for you . . . and be at peace.”
Chasing Humanity
by Brad Beaulieu
Brad Beaulieu first read The Lord of the Rings in third grade, and he’s been hooked on speculative fiction ever since. Brad became serious about writing after a short career in software consulting, and since then his fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. In the summer of 2006, Brad attended the Clarion East writing workshop. Brad lives in Racine, Wisconsin, with his wife, daughter, and two cats. He enjoys cooking spicy dishes, playing tennis, watching the Packers, and hiding out on the weekends with his family. He maintains a website at www.quillings.com.
Retta Brown tried to focus on the positives—the breathtaking beauty of the Himalayan peaks, the quaint Tibetan farming village in which she found herself, the nice people she’d been staying with for the last three nights—but no matter what sort of mental time-out she gave herself, the smell of shit and the mind-scraping grunts of the yaks kept invading her senses.
She stood on the edge of a huge, muddy pen in a village near Gyangkar, China. The pen was filled with a randomly wandering herd of yaks and an equally unfocused herd of Chinese scientists. She was biding her time until she could get in a few words with the scientists she was supposed to be interviewing, but the yaks had gone ape shit nearly an hour ago, and the dozen scientists from China’s National Scientist Council had been squawking about ever since, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
The somatic implants the yaks had been fitted with the day before were supposed to—four times a day—hijack their motor systems and route them to the nearest manure deposit site. The manure would then be used to power the village’s brand new methane power plant. It was the latest gesture of good will in the never ending—albeit nonviolent—feud between the peoples of Tibet and the Chinese government.
Retta’s cameraman, Bobby Levine, stood nearby with a huge grin on his face, filming the madness with the satcam attached to his ear.
What a crap assignment, Retta thought, literally and figuratively. And she knew exactly why she’d received it. The order to go to Tibet had come only days after the appearance of her expose’ on NYPD’s most costly fiasco this century: their Remote Patrol Force Project. Most of her sources had been rock solid, but two clearly had suspect information, and Gil had no doubt gotten wind of it.
“You still say I’m not being punished?” Retta asked her hulking compatriot.
He zoomed in on the laughing Tibetan children at the far side of the pen before blinking—which paused the video—and flipping the reticle away from his left eye.
“Gil wouldn’t do that, Rett.”
“Gil would fucking do that, Levine, and he’s probably watching all this right now and laughing his fat ass off his cushy leather chair.”
“Yak!” Bobby called and high-stepped over to the wooden fencing surrounding the pen.
Retta tried to do the same, but the plodding yak’s shoulder nudged her in the ass and forced her to step into a fresh pile of dung with her brand new hiking boots. “Yup,” Retta said as she stalked toward the pen’s exit, “that about makes this assignment perfect.” The group of embarrassed-looking delegates from China’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission scattered as she plowed through them. She walked past the rickety barn and took a seat on a weather-beaten stump.
Good news . . . That’s what she needed, just a bit of good news.
She tapped the power button near the hinge of her glasses and brought up her e-mail. There were a few dozen junk mails, which she sent to the trash bin, plus two from her sister, Lynn, both marked Urgent. As she was moving the mail from Lynn to the To Be Read folder, another one came in.
Retta froze as she read the name. Rawlins. Her contact in South Africa.
Her fingers tingled as she double-blinked on the e-mail.
rett, you’re not gonna believe it. i think i finally found the invisible man. apparently checked into a hospital in johannesburg two years back. stayed a few weeks. an orderly said he got transferred to cape town.
i’m heading there now, but call me asap. if he smells us coming, he’ll skip town faster’n you can spit. ;)
ttfn,
rawlins
A smile broadened Retta’s lips.
She blinked her address book open and called Gil.
Her editor picked up, apparently still in the New York office, stuffing the remains of a powdered donut into his mouth.
He smiled and spoke around his chewing. “How’s Tibet?”
Retta shot his exaggerated smile back at him like a forehand winner while forwarding the e-mail from Rawlins.
Gil frowned and began reading. He finished and then read it again, more carefully this time. Finally, he met Retta’s eyes and choked down the last of his donut. “You’ve got two weeks.”
Early the following morning, while sitting in business class waiting for the rest of the Cape Town International passengers to board, Retta’s phone rang. The mini-HUD on her glasses read Sis. She debated letting it go, but she’d been avoiding Lynn for too long. She blinked on the pickup near the edge of her vision. “Hey, Lynn. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t called, but I’ve got a big, big story that’s taking me out of country for a few weeks. Maybe I can head home when I get back. Okay? I really have to—”
“She’s getting worse, Rett.” Lynn’s voice was heavy. Listless. Retta could tell she was doing this more out of habit than any hope she’d fly back to Madison and visit their mother.
“She’s always getting worse. That’s her M.O.”
“I can’t believe you.” Her tone was an accusation.
“I was just there for a week.”
“You were here for two days, six months ago. How long are you going to keep playing these games?”
Had it been six months already? “Look, Lynn, she was the one who broke off ties with me.”
Lynn exhaled. “Come on, haven’t we covered that ground enough, Rett? She needs you.”
“Oh, hold on—” Retta paused as several passengers filed by. “They’re still funny about phone calls on takeoff here, Lynn. Sorry. I’m going to be really busy, but I’ll call when I get back, ok?”
After a pregnant pause, the connection dropped.
It was just as well, Retta thought. Their mother had had sarcoidosis, a chronic lung disease, for nearly eighteen years now. She took medicine for the pain, but there was no longer anything the doctors or Lynn or Retta could do to help. Besides, Retta had her own life to take care of. She couldn’t afford to fly home every weekend just to find out her mother was fine.
“Couldn’t you just tell her you didn’t want to talk?” Bobby asked as he leaned his seat back and hit the service button.
“Mind your business,” Retta told him as she activated the vidscr
een in her glasses and patched in to the Times’ archives.
The stewardess came over and Bobby ordered a preflight Jack Daniels, rocks. “Just wondering why you had to lie.”
Retta blinked the vidscreen off and stared him straight in the eye. “Tell you what, Levine. When you get off your ass and visit your grandmother, I’m on the next flight home.”
Bobby stared at her for a second, then replaced his earbuds, leaned back in his chair, and thumbed through the playlists on his phone.
“Thought so,” Retta said.
She reactivated her vid and reread the e-mail from Rawlins.
The invisible man referred to a man named Dag Åkerlund. Nine years ago, he’d been chosen from a select group of the world’s most renowned psychologists, philosophers, and scholars to represent humanity in a competition of sorts. His opponent? Navinder, the first Artificial Intelligence that claimed not that it was indistinguishable from another human, but that it was ˚ human.
Åkerlund was given free reign to design the match in any way he saw fit, so long as Navinder wasn’t asked any questions that a normal human couldn’t answer. Navinder fell short in each of the first four matches, which were highly televised and open to a select audience, but every match took longer than the last. When the fifth annual match finally arrived, the world held its collective breath while the thirteen-hour contest ensued.
In the end, Åkerlund had concluded that Navinder was human, but even stranger than that was the fact that he’d granted no interviews afterward and issued only one short, prepared statement before completely disappearing from the worldview.
Man Vs Machine Page 15