by Tom Maddox
dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen
and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's
hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human
contact. All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's,
Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar-
Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.
Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this
entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out
of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and
so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should
anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all
living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late
at night with an axe.
The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and
intellectual catechism. Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had
bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at
disposal foundered on the simple passage of time. Stable
ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for
anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly
biologists were hard pressed to keep the recordswrite in the
Domesday Book now, mourn later. Temperature norms and
concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in
alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the
fever point.
Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint,
the year 2006 as the time of the change. More than ten thousand
dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton. Crippled
and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in
front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and
volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill
that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste
carried on Gulf Stream currents. Along with the thousands of
volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-
nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions
watched, asking, why all together? why now? And to most it
seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent
protest. Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its
planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,
how did I get here? The conclusion had been plain: unless
humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had
to agree: enough.
Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than
thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how
difficult it all remained. Though all nations served the letter
of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their
interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's
habitatsthey had "friends of the court" status in all nations
and served as advocates for endangered speciesthe war to save
Earth from humankind was not over. Grasping, corrupt, self-
centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its
habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple
greed.
However, though this station, like most all of humankind's
settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon and Mars, the
Orbital Energy Grid, Halo Cityhad been conceived in the bad old
twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New
Millennium consciousness: contrite, chastened, careful.
He walked on.
#
The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by
blinking red lights. From around the corner came the sounds of
scurrying small things. "What's up?" Gonzales asked.
"Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but
we can stand and watch."
A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales,
filled the hallway beyond. Some tried to work their way through
informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and
angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had
gotten tangled in the sections of the maze. Still others shifted
pieces of the maze to one side. Amid clicking extensors and
banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully.
Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing
assembly lines, robots, machines in general.
"A nursery," the sam said. "This group nears completion of
its education. This"it pointed with an extensor toward the
struggling robots"is the prerequisite to training. As small
children must mature in their development, they must learn the
essentials of perception, motion, and coordination. At the same
time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and
then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present
they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of
SimSpeech."
"What about thinking?" Gonzales asked. "Where do they learn
to do that?"
"That comes later, if at all. For sams as well as humans,
thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."
The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't
need any company," and walked on. When he looked back, he saw the
sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its
fellows.
Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light
glowed softly, and returned to bed. He fell asleep quickly, oddly
comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school.
8. Halo City
Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana
through the micro-gravity environments at Halo's Zero-Gate, then
to an elevator at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter,
Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting
for them. The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late
afternoon local time, and its passengers had waited impatiently as
it went through docking and clearance procedures, all eager to
leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from
Athena Station to the city.
Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes
above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth and pointed chin. Her
fine brown hair was cut short in a style Gonzales later discovered
was common to many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in
micro-gravity environments. Gonzales knew that as director of a
major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.
Horn was a tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his
fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight
against his skull in a kind of bun. The man spoke some variety of
New YorkeseGonzales didn't know which, but he could feel the
harsh nasal tones beneath his skin.
The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's vault-like
doors slid closed with a great hiss, locking in more than a
hundred people for the trip from axis to rim. Above their heads
the wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN. The elevator
dropped into one of the city's spokes li
ke a shell into the barrel
of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of
increasing gravity.
Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around a
charge-point, black leads extended to the aluminum post. They
stood silent and motionlesstalking among themselves? Gonzales
wondered.
Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, "We'd like to
assign each of you a sam for your stay in Halo."
"Really?" Gonzales said.
Diana said, "No thank you." Quickly.
Right, Gonzales thought. No point in putting ourselves under
surveillance. He said, "I'll pass, too."
Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to argue.
He said, "Very well. Then be sure you always wear the
communication and i.d. module you were given when you came off the
shuttle." He held up his own wrist to show the small bracelet, a
closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the
electronics inside. "If you have a problem, just yell and help
will be on the way. Or if you have a question, just state it.
Someone will answerAleph or one of its communications demons."
Gonzales asked, "Yeah, they told us that. Are we monitored
at all times?"
Showalter said, "Yes. In fact, there's a real-time hologram
in Operations that shows everyone's movements, not just visitors
but residents as well."
"Seems an invasion of privacy," Gonzales said.
Horn said, "We don't look at it that way. If you can't
accept such simple necessities, Halo will be most uncomfortable
for you." He smiled. "Not that you're likely to be here for
long."
Gonzales said, "I can't imagine people putting up with total
surveillance for long, frankly."
Horn said, "It seems to us a small price to pay for an
unpolluted world shared to the benefit of all."
Showalter looked from Horn to Gonzales. She said, "We are a
far island in a hostile place. We cannot afford some of your
illusions: the independence of the self, unconstrained free will
those sorts of things."
A shutter retracted from a window ten meters square as the
elevator entered the living ring's inner space. Far below lay
sun-lit valleys thick-planted with trees and shrubs and flowers,
broken by one barren space where grayish slurries squirted out of
huge pipe ends to flow across scarred metal.
"Our city," Showalter said.
#
Eight people were gathered around a u-shaped table of beige
silica foam. Showalter sat at the center of the u, with Horn to
her immediate right, Gonzales and Diana beyond him. To her left
were a youngish woman, then two men in late middle age, one white,
one black.
At the open end of the u, the table fronted a screen that
covered its entire wall, floor to ceiling. The screen had been
lit when Gonzales and Diana arrived, showing another room where an
indeterminate number of people sat on couches, chairs, or slouched
on cushions on the floor.
Showalter said, "Let me introduce you all to one another.
Everyone has met Horn, my assistant. Next to him are Doctor Diana
Heywood and Mikhail Gonzales, who arrived yesterday." They both
smiled and nodded.
"Lizzie Jordan," Showalter said, pointing to the woman to her
left. "Hi," Lizzie said. She was blonde, thin, with high
cheekbones; she had a smear of gold dust inset below her left eye
and wore rough beta-cloth overalls gapped to show part of a tattoo
between her breastsa twining green stem. Showalter said,
"Lizzie heads the Interface Collective, and thus will be the
person you'll be working with most closely. The people you see on
the screen are also members of the collective. They have a
proprietary interest in all matters pertaining to Aleph and Halo
and have the right to be present at inter-group meetings, and to
speak to whatever issues are entertained there."
Diana said, "I understand."
Gonzales nodded. He knew from Traynor's Advisor that
communal decision-making was the norm at Halo, but he hadn't
imagined it would be so thoroughgoing.
"Next to Lizzie is Doctor Charley Hughes," Showalter said.
"He will be doing the surgical procedure to upgrade your neural
sockets, Doctor Heywood." The man said, "Hello" and looked
intently at Gonzales and Diana. His sparse gray hair stood up in
spikes; his face was pale, thin, deeply-lined. He had been
smoking constantly since they arrived, one hand cupping a
cigarillo, the other supporting the smoke-saver ball at the
cigarillo's burning end.
"And Doctor Eric Chow," she said. The black man next to
Charley Hughes smiled. Chow was a big man with hands the size of
small shovels; he had a round face, very dark skin, a broad nose
and big lips; he wore his hair cropped short. Showalter said, "He
heads the Neuro-Ontic Studies Group and is Doctor Hughes's primary
consultant on the treatment planned for Jerry Chapman."
She paused and turned to the screen showing the IC members.
A window opened at the left side of the screen, and a figure
appeared. Its arms and torso were clothed in gold; its face
shimmered with a formless brightness. Around its head and
shoulders, a nimbus flared, red, blue, yellow, and green.
"Hello, everyone" the figure said. "And welcome, Doctor and
Mister Gonzales. I am a localized manifestation of Alepha
simulacrum for your convenience and mine."
Gonzales noticed that next to him, Diana was smiling, while
all around him there was silence, as all in the room and on the
screen were intently watching the screen.
#
The IC's viewing window had closed, but the simulacrum's
portion remainedin it, the creature of light sat watching.
Showalter, Horn, Diana, Lizzie, Charley, and Gonzales sat around
the table.
Showalter said, "This is Chow's meeting, and I won't say
much in it. However, I should remind you of certain realities.
This project does not have high priority in the overall context of
SenTrax's responsibilities to Halo City; thus, while we support
this experiment's humanitarian goals, we are not prepared to delay
other projects."
Horn said, "We cannot divert a significant amount of people
to promulgation and we are not or do not want to encourage any
behaviors which might adversely impact other SenTrax outcomes."
Lizzie laughed, and Gonzales, poker-faced, looked at her and
thought, yeah, this guy's laughable all right. Gonzales
recognized the performative chatter of the bureaucratic ape, a
mixture of scrambled syntax and pretentious buzzwordslanguage
meant to manipulate or mindfuck, not enlighten or amuse.
Horn, frowning at Lizzie, said, "If the operation becomes
problematized, threatening to seriously impact other more
essentialized Halo priorities, then we require immediate
resolution through proper SenTrax procedures."
Showalter said, "If you screw up, we shut you down." She
nodded to Horn, and they both
stood and left.
Lizzie said, "You notice they held off on the heavy stuff
until the collective had cleared the screen."
Charley asked, "Do you want to call them on it? They're in
violation of the group's compact."
"No," she said. "I expected all that." She looked at Diana
and Gonzales and said, "Doctor Chow, your show."
"Thank you," Chow said. His voice was oddly high-pitched for
such a big man; Gonzales had been expecting something on the order
of a basso profundo. Chow said, "In the late twentieth century,
the idea emerged of a person's identity as something
transferrable. People spoke, in the idiom of the time, of
'downloading' a person." On the screen, where the IC had been,
appeared a cartoon drawing of a nude woman, her expression
stunned, the top of her skull covered with a metal cap. From the
cap a thick metal cable led to a large black cabinet faced with
arrays of blinking lights.
"Absurd," Chow said, and the woman disappeared. "To see why,
let us ask, what is a person? Is it a pure spirit, fluid in a jar
that one can decant into the proper container? Hardly. It is a
dynamic field made of thousands of disparate elements, held in a
loose sack of skin that perambulates the universe at large. And
of course it is perceptions, histories, possibilities, actions,
and the states and affects pertaining to all these.
"I can be found in the motion of my hand" He spread his
fingers like a magician about to materialize a coin or colored
scarf, and on the screen, the hand and its motion were doubled.
"And in my own perceptions of the handfor instance, from within,
through proprioceptors. And of course I see I." Chow turned and
held his hand in front of his face. He dropped his hand in a
chopping motion, and the screen cleared. "And I am that which
thinks about, talks about, and remembers the hand and has the
special relation of ownership to it. I am also the will to use
that hand." He held the hand in front of his face, made a
clenched fist. "So, to download even a portion of I would be to
download all these things and their entire somatic context.
"Also, of course, I am that which has my experiences, stored
as motor possibilities, recalled as memory, dream, manifest as
characteristic ways of being and knowing. To download I would
require duplicating this fluid chaos.
"Downloading the I thus becomes a most daunting task, perhaps