Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  Her heart beat faster. There was some hydrazine left in the tank. All she had to do was figure out how the hydrazine got to its catalyst, and to the nozzles.

  She got down in the Martian dust and crawled under the lander, tracing pipes and valves.

  ‘We need to move him away from the lander.’

  Vikram, cradling Jonno, had forgotten Natalie was even there. ‘Huh? Why? We don’t know what this injury is. It’s probably best not to move him any more.’

  ‘Trust me. Look, we’ll keep him wrapped in the bag. You take his legs and I’ll take his shoulders. We’ll be gentle.’ She moved to Jonno’s head and got her hands under his shoulders.

  Vikram didn’t see any option but to go along with it. ‘He’s kind of heavy.’

  ‘I’ve got Earth muscles. On Mars, I’m super-strong.’

  He snorted. ‘After months in microgravity? I don’t think so.’

  But she was indeed strong enough to lift Jonno. ‘OK. We’ll take him behind that ridge, so he’s sheltered from the lander.’

  Bemused, Vikram followed her instructions.

  They soon got Jonno settled again. He didn’t regain consciousness. Then Vikram copied Natalie when she got down in the red dirt, sheltering behind the ridge, facing the lander. ‘I suppose this has all got some point.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She held up Jonno’s wristmate. ‘I hope I got this right. I found a valve under the lander, leading from the fuel tank. I fixed it up to a switch from a spare pump from my backpack. When I touch the wristmate, that switch should open the valve.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘You’ll see. Do you space boys still have countdowns?’

  ‘What’s a countdown?’

  ‘Three, two, one.’ She touched the wristmate.

  Dust gushed out from under the lander, billowing clouds that raced away, falling back in the thin air. And then the Viking lifted off, shaking away a hundred and fifty years of accumulated Martian dirt.

  Vikram was astonished. He yelled, ‘Wow!’ He grabbed Natalie’s shoulders. ‘What a stunt!’

  ‘Thanks.’ Natalie waited patiently until, embarrassed, he let her go.

  The Viking was still rising, wobbling and spinning under the unequal thrust from dust-clogged nozzles.

  Natalie said, ‘I’m hoping that a rocket launch will attract a bit of attention, even on a low-tech planet like this one. I was worried that the whole thing would just blow up, which was why I thought we should get some cover. But even that would have made a splash.’

  ‘You’re a genius.’ He watched the Viking. ‘It’s still rising. But I think the fuel has run out already. When it comes down it’s going to be wrecked.’

  ‘Oops. I hope the park authorities will forgive me. And the ghosts of the engineers who built the thing.’ Suddenly she sounded doubtful. ‘You think this will work?’

  ‘I think you’ve saved my life. And with luck they’ll come in time for Jonno too.’ He said awkwardly, ‘Thank you. Look, we got off on the wrong foot.’

  ‘Well, you did crash into me.’

  ‘You crashed into us – never mind. When this is all over, why don’t you stay on Mars a bit? I, I mean we, could show you the sights. The poles, the Mariner valley. Even some of the domed towns aren’t that bad. You could bring Benedicte.’

  ‘And I could meet Hiroe.’

  He felt his cheeks burn. ‘I’m trying to be nice here.’

  ‘I’ll stay on one condition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me what Jonno whispered before he lost consciousness.’

  ‘That was private. They could be his last words.’

  ‘Spill it, dust-digger.’

  ‘He said if I didn’t want Hiroe, I could always marry a girl from outside the Martian gene pool altogether. That would be legal.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A girl from Earth.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You asked.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  In silence, they lay in the dirt and watched as the Viking reached the top of its trajectory, and, almost gracefully, fell back through the light of the Martian morning, heading for its second, and final, landing on Mars.

  And, only minutes later, a contrail arced across the sky, banking as the rescuers searched Chryse Plain.

  A JOURNEY TO AMASIA

  The priest unfolded a small softscreen. Data chattered across it, barely a scrap, a few words.

  ‘This is all that the data miner we sent down was able to retrieve. Strictly speaking, what came back was a program, a brief algorithm. Written in machine code! We had to dig up expertise on that, create a virtual processor on which the thing could run, before we were able to retrieve even this much output. The crucial term, we think, is this one.’

  The word, in a blocky, old-fashioned font, was underlined.

  AMASIA

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ Philmus said. Her own voice sounded odd in her ears. Tinny. She found, strangely, that she couldn’t remember when she had last spoken.

  ‘No reason why you should. Although you did have a background in the sciences, didn’t you? Before you moved to the policing of the sentience laws.’

  ‘Yes …’ She looked down at herself. She was wearing a drab olive-green jumpsuit, sturdy and practical. She took a step; she felt heavy, stiff, a little overweight.

  She found she couldn’t remember how she had got here either. What had gone before this.

  ‘Amasia is a place,’ the priest said. ‘A tentative name for a supercontinent of the future. To be formed when the Pacific closes up, when Asia and the Americas collide. We don’t know the word’s significance beyond that. We think the miner returned it as a kind of key, a password to let us get closer to Earthshine, in his hidey-hole in the deep datasphere …’

  She looked at the priest more closely. She knew him, a high-up in the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science. He was a heavy-set, intense man of around fifty, dressed in a subdued, plain black outfit: a coverall, but with a dog collar. There seemed something insubstantial about him. ‘Monsignor Boyle.’

  ‘I’m glad you remember me.’

  She was in a kind of reception room, she observed now, a desk, a polished floor, stiff plastic-backed chairs for visitors. No people save for the two of them. At the back of the room was a heavy steel door, at the front a big plate-glass window. She walked to the window, and looked out on an elderly parking lot, tarmac pierced by growing green. A rusting antenna tower stood alone, like an abandoned rocket gantry. On the horizon was a city. Before it, a flooded plain, dead trees rising gaunt from the water.

  Boyle was watching her. ‘You’re in a Cold War bunker, Officer Philmus. Decommissioned long before either of us was born. This is actually the reception for a visitors’ centre. The apocalypse experience.’

  ‘What city is that?’

  ‘York. North Britain. It’s rather appropriate. York was founded by the Romans as a means of pinning down their occupation of Britain. And now we must confront another controlling power, in Earthshine.’

  She swiped her hand at a dusty rope barrier. Her fingers broke up into floating pixels, blocky bits of light, before rapidly coalescing; she felt a sharp stab of pain.

  ‘You understand how you have been created, of course. We used records of your life, your own writings and other legacies. Your timeline was recreated in a virtual cache and allowed to run through several times, with constructive interpolations, in order to generate a plausible memory flow.’

  A plausible memory flow. They had made versions of her live and die over and over in some memory store, until they were happy with the simulation.

  ‘I had the software set you at about fifty years old, physically. The age you were when we met. Sorry for any aches and pains.’

/>   ‘How did I die?’

  ‘Do you really want to know that?’ He smiled, a reassuring priest’s smile.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m a projection, Officer Philmus, not a reconstruction. My original is very much alive. Older than you remember – only by a few decades, however.’

  ‘So I haven’t been dead that long. Makes sense, I suppose – not long enough to be forgotten.’ She closed her eyes; the anger she felt, at least, seemed real enough. ‘I spent my life fighting exercises like this. The frivolous creation of sentience. And now it’s happened to me.’

  ‘You have rights.’

  ‘I know I do. The right to continued existence for an indefinite period in information space. The right to read-only interfaces with the prime world. Even the Vatican signed up to the relevant UN conventions after that incident with the Virtual Jesus. Yet here I am. What is this, Monsignor, some hell customised just for me?’

  ‘Not that. There’s still a priest inside this bureaucratic shell, Officer Philmus. I still have a conscience. I apologise for bringing you back to life. We needed you. I would never have sanctioned this operation if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.’

  ‘What operation? What do you want of me?’

  ‘It’s the Core AIs, Philmus. The three big ones, including Earthshine. I know they were in place before – I mean, during your lifetime.’ He waved a hand at the scene beyond the window. ‘We have a problem. Our world, the human world, is going to hell, while they consume gargantuan resources for their own projects.’

  ‘How can that be so? They are products of human technology.’

  ‘We did not create these entities, not purposefully. They emerged. And you know as well as anyone, Officer, that sentiences once created have a way of … drifting. They are more intelligent than the human. And, indeed, differently intelligent. Their physical nature mandates new goals, different to ours.’

  ‘Physical nature?’

  ‘For example, they are potentially immortal. How would that change one’s priorities, one’s decision-making? Well, now we are going to meet one of them, and maybe we’ll find out.’ He cracked a smile. ‘Come on. I remember you. How can you pass up on an adventure like this? A journey to Amasia, perhaps. Look.’ He handed her a rucksack. ‘I packed for you already.’

  The great blast door was opened for them, and they walked through a surface complex, cramped and old-fashioned, concrete walls and ceiling tiles. The various rooms were marked with big bold labels: dormitories, a sick bay, a decontamination bay, a NAAFI canteen.

  ‘You know the deal,’ said the Monsignor. ‘It’s better to obey interface protocols if you can. You can just walk through a wall, but it will hurt. But that’s going to get trickier the deeper we go.’

  ‘Deeper?’

  ‘The environment we’re going to experience will be a mixture of the physical and the virtual. And the latter will represent, in some crude anthropomorphic way, the environment inhabited by the Core AIs themselves. It may not be easy to tell what’s real for us and what isn’t. Overlapping categories.’

  ‘I’m used to that.’

  ‘We could be killed down there,’ he warned. ‘Whatever we are.’

  He led her down a staircase, lit by dusty fluorescents, which took her beneath the surface of the earth. Here were the old bunker’s operational and technical departments, plastered with restricted-access signs.

  And on the next level down, Cold War oddities. Local government meeting rooms. A comms centre. A life support facility, air scrubbers and water filters, like some 1950s vision of a space station. Even a small BBC studio. All of this was cold, and dust free after decades of mothballing. Nobody visited the site these days, it seemed. Philmus wondered how it was kept free of the flooding that even in her time had been endemic across much of lowland Britain, both north and south of the international border at the latitude of Manchester.

  Boyle led her through corridors, evidently looking for something.

  ‘Why a bunker?’

  ‘For the physical security of Earthshine’s facilities. You understand that the big Core AIs were spawned in the first place by a global network of transnational companies, a network that collectively controlled much of the world’s economy. Within that network, nodes of deeper interconnection and control emerged: super-entities, the economic analysts called them. And beneath the corporate super-entities, AI capability necessarily clustered, evolving the smartness to manage that complex web of information and market manipulation. Then came the demands for security for core processors and data backups, hardened refuges linked by robust comms networks. We gave them what they wanted, such as this bunker. Actually Earthshine’s own central facility is at Fort Chipewyan, right at the centre of the Canadian shield. About as geologically secure a location as you’ll find anywhere. But he has satellite facilities like this one, under cities like Londres, Paris, connected by neutrino links … Yes, we gave all this to them. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ah, here we are.’

  He had come to a hatch in the floor, metal set in concrete. A small laser scanner was embedded in its surface. He held out his softscreen, let the scanner see the word ‘Amasia’. ‘This was the way we sent down the data miner.’ The hatch sighed open, revealing a darkened shaft. ‘You have a torch.’

  Philmus dug in her pocket, found a small head torch on a strap, and fixed it to her brow. By its light she saw that the shaft below had been cut through layers in the earth, like stratified rock. The upper layers looked glassy, and returned the torchlight in a sparkle. ‘A data miner is a software agent,’ she said. ‘Not some kind of mole that literally tunnels in the ground, like this.’

  ‘I told you. Much of what we’re going to experience is anthropomorphic metaphor. If we’re lucky, it will be non-lethal. Luckier yet, comprehensible.’

  ‘I remember dreams of the singularity. When human and machine would merge in a cybernetic infinity. Not this crabby enclosure.’

  He shrugged. ‘The Core AIs follow their own agenda. Why constrain themselves by merging with us? Now, Officer, this, clearly, is the interface between the real and the virtual. I don’t know what lies beyond. If you’re going to turn back, I guess this is the point. Your sentience rights will be respected. You’ll be allowed to contact your family.’

  ‘I have no family. Why you, Monsignor? Why is the Vatican involved?’

  ‘Well, the Vatican is a relatively neutral party. Not corporate, not government, and both those categories are pretty angry at the Core AIs’ hijacking of their resources. By comparison, the Vatican has always resisted the digitisation of its treasures, most notably the Secret Archives. You know about those, Philmus. So there’s little of us down there. As for me – well, I know you.’

  ‘And that’s why I was drafted in?’

  ‘Because of your record. You were a staunch supporter of sentience rights from the earliest days of the formulation of the laws. AIs never forget. We’re hoping you will be acceptable to them, relatively.’

  ‘And why have you brought me to here, to North Britain? I’m a San Francisco cop.’

  ‘Well, Earthshine is the smallest of the Core AIs, in physical resources, compared to the other monsters: Ifa in Africa and the Archangel in South America. Earthshine holds North America and much of Europe; the others have carved up Asia between them. We’re hoping that might make Earthshine more amenable to contact. You are, were, the best in the field, and you did come from territory Earthshine now dominates … Besides, the mind of a Briton was the first layer to be downloaded in the Green Brain process when Earthshine was constructed. A man called Robert Braemann: the first of nine personalities poured into the empty receptacle that became Earthshine … Have I answered your questions? We’re just doing what we can, using any angle we can think of. Shall we go on? Look, there are rungs set in the walls of the shaft. We can climb down.’

  Experimental
ly she reached down, closed her fingers around a rung, a rusty iron staple. She found herself clutching something real, solid. Or as real as she was. ‘I’ll lead the way,’ she said.

  Her coverall was comfortable, practical, with plenty of give, but she had never been a particularly athletic kind of cop; investigations of sentience crimes tended to be cerebral affairs. The physical side of her had evidently been simulated with dismaying accuracy, and she soon found herself puffing with the exertion.

  She concentrated on the layers she was climbing down through. Strata which, she guessed, had nothing to do with the physical geology of Britain. The uppermost layer was glassy, or perhaps like quartz, a reflective, translucent surface with a billion tiny facets that glimmered in her torchlight. She paused for breath and passed a cautious finger over the surface. Touching the razor-sharp facets brought a shiver, like unwelcome memories stirring, whispering voices: Born, lived, died … Known associates, known contact groups … Last seen wearing … A sparkle of faces like a frost on the surface of the wall, faces half-turned away and grainily captured. She took her finger away, and the faces vanished.

  From above Boyle called, ‘What are you experiencing?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. Like surveillance data. Masses, compressed together.’

  ‘This is the metaphor. We’re like data miners ourselves, Philmus. Penetrating the datasphere Earthshine inhabits. Masses of records of different kinds, decades thick. You yourself are a construct of processing and data, accessing these records, or their stubs.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like that.’