Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  “Please. I can’t believe you don’t remember. You were Lassie and I was Rin Tin Tin. You were Snoopy and I was Scooby-Doo.”

  “Snoopy was male.”

  “Ah! But did you ever see his genitals? Time to rinse.” He planted his hand on top of her head and forced her under. She came up, choking, eyes tearing.

  “This is not a way to get clean.”

  “I prefer you dirty. This is all just an excuse to tell you about my theory.” He began slowly massaging her scalp; she closed her eyes. Pleasure.

  “Are you ready? Because I’ve been waiting and waiting to tell you this and I need your full attention.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “OK. So. My theory is, the starting point for the decay, decline and ultimate dissimulation of rock and roll into the more generic sea of industrial commerce is located in George Martin, the Beatles’ producer. He was a frustrated musician. Plus, he had ideas. Lousy combination. With him bringing his stuff to the material, the locus of power had shifted from the performer, whose job it was to be childlike and sexy, to the producer, whose job it was to be in control. Now, as soon as you take the power away from the primal source of creativity, you have to invent terms such as ‘creative control’ to take its place. As soon as you remove the reality, you have to invent the word for it, in other words, so as to explain what’s missing. Take ‘Baby You Can Drive My Car.’ Can you honestly tell me that’s a better song thanks to that rinky-dink piano riff in the chorus? Of course not! It’s cheez whiz. That riff subverts the natural, unadulterated hipness of the tune in the name of being cute. What I’m saying, Kalypso, is that because of the meddling of George Martin you ended up, decades later, with the concept of the dance remix, and then the radical re-invention of the familiar by rap and the art of the rip-off—yes, I know, you could argue rehashing is intrinsic to musical history, it’s just like jazz but Kalypso, I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the fact is that it had become intellectual by then, it had to. No matter how pretentious Yes were, at least they were sincere. They had to be. Nobody knew any better in those days. So — my ultimate point? Here it comes. What I’m saying is, the essence of helpfulness is decay and destruction. It starts with sneaking in an unnecessary piano riff and it seems harmless enough, it even seems profitable. But it’s bad news for daylight, it’s the coming of the big darkness. Now, go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. Say, ‘X, you’re so wrong and here are all the reasons why.’ ”

  “X you’re so wrong.”

  “Why? Why? Give me one good reason. How can you possibly refute my obviously clearheaded rationale?”

  “Because technology was going to make all those things happen anyway. George Martin, all he did was fuck up some songs.”

  “Well. That could possibly be true. But Kalypso the consequences. The consequences of even one fucked-up-by-George- Martin song.”

  “The consequences are one fucked-up song.”

  “And that’s the saddest thing of all,” he intoned significantly.

  “If you’re finished with my therapy for now, I’d like to get out of this water. It’s getting cold.”

  “By all means, by all means. But I’ve helped you. I know I’ve helped you. See? That was a pissed-off look you just gave me.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “I helped you! I helped you!”

  “The essence of helpfulness is decay and destruction.”

  “Ah, you were paying attention! But that was just bullshit. Fine. You want to pretend to be unreachable? Go ahead. I won’t tell anyone. But you and me both know—”

  “X don’t say it. You’ll make me sick.”

  But he had already begun, wringing his hands for effect as he spoke: “Even one little, small, runt-like fucked-up song is one too many. Don’t be fucked u Kalypso. Don’t let it happen.”

  “Can I go now.”

  There had been a time when Kalypso couldn’t see the point of sleeping without Dreaming—without Ganesh. By now, though, the behavioral conditioning of her youth had been overrun by the primitive and powerful instinct to retreat into unconsciousness when bored, overwhelmed, depressed, or sick. She had embodied most of the above conditions in varying combinations ever since being rescued from the Wild, so this was how she’d been spending her time. Day and night didn’t much matter on T’nane, but it was not long after dawn, and the departure of the assault team, when Tehar’s voice shocked her awake.

  He wasn’t actually present, she realized groggily. It was a transmission of his voice from First. All other activity had stopped. Lassare was on the radio, but someone had rigged amplification and their conversation blasted throughout the factory.

  Tehar was saying, “We have a situation on our hands.”

  “You wanna tell us something we don’t already know, baby?”

  “I mean,” Tehar resumed, “that what happened to Ganesh is a little less obvious than we hoped. There was no sabotage. There was no accident.”

  “Are you saying Ganesh did this to itself?”

  “No.” Pause. “It’s a little worse than that.’

  “Well?”

  Tehar’s voice wasn’t all that clear over the air, but Kalypso felt empathetic as if he were right up against her in Ganesh. She could hear his consternation.

  “It’s got to do with Azamat Marcsson.”

  “I told you, Tehar—he’s in a coma. You can’t depend on getting anything from him.”

  Static. Lassare made an impatient gesture at the speaker, but of course Tehar couldn’t see her.

  “Marcsson’s data is-well, it’s singular, to say the least. We’ve been looking at the material he’s compiled on the boat’s storage facilities; it’s had all of us occupied all of the time. That’s why we haven’t been able to communicate with you. We think we have re-created the incident that started all this. It began when Ganesh first interacted with Marcsson’s data in the Alien Life sim. Something woke up.”

  “Something woke up.” Lassare at her most deadpan.

  “I can’t think of any other way to put it. There’s a form of life loose in Ganesh.”

  “A virus? A sub-personality? What do you mean?”

  “The data on the Oxygen Problem were interpreted statistically by Ganesh, and that interpretation either necessitated or resulted in or caused-it depends on how you look at it really-let’s say it caused a form of mathematical thinking which triggered a reaction in the station’s luma, causing the Crash. The AI infected itself with an unknown—for lack of a better term—cognitive paradigm. It started thinking . . . different. That’s the source of the unreadable code, the noise, the Crash.”

  “Come again?”

  “Look, we already know the System on this planet is alive and could be treated as an organism in its own right. Evolving. Adaptable. What we’re seeing now is intelligent behavior. Maybe even some kind of consciousness.”

  “Intelligent?” Lassare’s incredulous tone.

  “By applying intelligence to the System, we can extract intelligence from it. If we can learn its language, we can communicate with it. Maybe. But the more immediate problem is what to do about Ganesh.”

  “Yo, back up. How can the System be intelligent? Yeah, it’s complicated; we recognize that or we’d have solved the Oxygen Problem long ago. But it has no CNS. No senses.”

  Liet said, “Don’t be silly. You don’t need a CNS and senses to have intelligence. That’s just a crutch.”

  “Liet, be quiet. Tehar is talking.”

  “Well, you have a point, Lassare. I’m describing what I’m seeing, but to tell you the truth I’m not sure how to get around the lack of CNS.”

  “Tehar, it’s simple,” Liet scolded. “The CNS and the senses, this apparent dichotomy between inside and outside, abstraction and reality: these are a consequence of our special evolution. Each of us is a turned-inward bubble, a curious piece of the world’s topography. The universe communicates with itself via you. But you can’t empathize with a thing whose structure is found
ed on different principles. You must rely on counterintuitive means. You must rely on the rational, and of course the rational is based on the physical as you know it—kind of a Gordian knot. Ganesh doesn’t have this problem. It can find meaning in statistics that your senses can’t grasp and your mind can’t organize, because Ganesh has only one sense: a reaching toward the abstract, a math-sense. And it translates this into our five senses — but Ganesh is more than human and it can learn paradigms that are physically impossible for us.”

  Everyone was gawking at Liet. Several people looked annoyed.

  Naomi broke in. “Are you saying there’s an alien intelligence on this planet?”

  “I don’t know,” Tehar admitted. “I mean, that’s a question of terminology. But there’s something here which can’t be explained away by our presence.”

  “I’ll need to see physical evidence.”

  “What do you consider physical? Lassare, by its very nature this thing I’m talking about, this alien, exists only in thought, in Plato’s realm of the Ideal if you will.”

  This sounded familiar to Kalypso. She had the uneasy sense that Tehar had been listening to Marcsson; but that was impossible. Marcsson was catatonic.

  “If I will? No, I won’t, thank you very much. Plato? Give me a break. If it isn’t actual, then how can we perceive it?”

  “Because Ganesh acts as a lens for us to see into structure. Ganesh makes mathematical concepts real.”

  “Mathematical concepts are not intelligence qua intelligence.”

  “This one is. What I mean is, this form of mathematical thinking is behaving like a living organism. It’s a pattern that breaks itself in order to grow. It’s showing strategic behavior and it’s shown, I believe, signs of self-consciousness via Marcsson.”

  “Marcsson was in a coma.”

  “He is. But you should see the readouts I’m getting off him. Lassare, he’s still interfacing.”

  Kalypso pricked up her ears. She felt an occupational itch to witness what Tehar was describing.

  Lassare brushed this aside.

  “I fail to see how a bunch of prokaryotes could demonstrate intelligence even by the most liberal definition.”

  “Look,” Tehar persisted. “It’s not that the flagrare are intelligent in themselves. They can’t even live independent of the luma system. That’s why Ganesh would never let us call them organisms, remember? I’m not saying there’s anything resembling a neural system here.”

  “Then how can they think? What you’re talking about, it implies thinking. It depends on thinking.”

  “It only depends on your thinking,” Tehar replied, his voice rising in frustration. “You can’t understand what you can’t understand. You want to extract something from a phenomenon and hold it up to the light, see it in your terms. But it can’t be seen by you. Ganesh can see something you can’t see.”

  “Where’s your evidence?” Lassare demanded. “Where are you getting all this?”

  “The evidence is inside Ganesh. Look, I don’t care if you call it an alien, I don’t care whether you think it arises from the System or just materialized out of nothingness, but there’s stuff happening in Ganesh that is not mathematically comprehensible to me or to anyone else who has looked at it. It’s not human thought. It’s something Ganesh has synthesized by studying the information Marcsson fed it. And, possibly, by using the information in his subconscious to guide it.”

  “You think Marcsson understands it?”

  “I don’t know what Marcsson does or doesn’t understand. I don’t know what capacity he may have to communicate. I don’t know how much of what has happened to him is available to his conscious mind-if he still has one. But he was in the Dreamer when he entered that data. It passed across him, and to a lesser degree it passed across Kalypso Deed.”

  “No it didn’t,” Kalypso said, but no one heard her. “I don’t understand math.”

  “Since that time, his behavior changed radically. I don’t know if what happened to him is the equivalent of what happened to Ganesh. I don’t know why he’s in a coma.”

  “Oxygen deprivation, according to those who examined him.”

  Liet looked at Kalypso. Kalypso looked away.

  “Well. In any case, I simply don’t know. I can see from the code that Ganesh is being rewritten and I know it’s not a simple thing, like a virus. It’s not just rewriting information. It’s rewiring the way of thinking. Do you understand the distinction? Eighty percent of Ganesh is luma storage. But the 20 per cent that’s Core is what determines our ability to interface with Ganesh. It’s a tragedy to lose data, especially the material from Earth that we all see precious. Yet what I’m saying is that we’re going to lose more than data. We’re going to lose Ganesh entirely. Ganesh’s entire way of thinking is threatened. It’s going to cease to be able to communicate with us, unless we can find a way to communicate with it. Do you understand?”

  “What are you going to do about it? Sit back and watch it happen?”

  “I’m trying to communicate with Marcsson via the face. All I can hope is to use his knowledge, his understanding, his perspective, to establish control.”

  “Are you getting anywhere?”

  “Not yet. But I know he’s Dreaming.”

  “Tehar, we’re gonna talk about this our end,” Lassare said. “Give us a little time.”

  “Right. I’ve got my hands full here anyway. I’m out.”

  Static. Then silence.

  No one said anything at first. Then X laughed. “Alien? Alien? It can’t be an alien. There are no SFX.”

  “He’s got a point,” Sharia said. “We can’t even see it. How do we know it’s there?”

  Lassare was back on form. Her voice was clear and full of conviction. “It’s not bad news at all. It doesn’t have to be. Listen: the ecosystem has an intelligence; it speaks a language. We’re going to learn it, exploit it, make it work for us. We’ll teach it to think the way we tell it to think, and it will produce oxygen, and cease to produce carbon monoxide, and we’ll transform the atmosphere and turn our attention away from the Oxygen Problem, so we can begin harnessing the thermals and using this planet’s energy sources to serve us.”

  This was the Lassare Kalypso had always known, glimpsed through a parting in the alcohol.

  A tentative voice: Lila, the small one who’d been kidnapped by the Dead. “But what about it? What about the so-called intelligence?”

  “There is no ‘it’,” Naomi put in abruptly. “It is an abstraction existing within Ganesh.”

  “The data came from the planet.”

  “Let’s not panic. There’s no alien out there, kids. It has no existence independent of the neural structure it finds itself within—in this case, Ganesh.”

  “Neither do we, actually,” X said mildly.

  “Yeah, what does that have to do with anything?” Siri put in. “You’re talking about raping its mind. You’re talking about—”

  “Surviving,” said one of the Grunts who’d stayed behind to keep an eye on things. “Lassare is talking about surviving.”

  Kalypso had forgotten to be traumatized. She stood up.

  “But is there an alien or not? Is there something behind this paradigm or logic or whatever you want to call it? I mean, Marcsson is more than his language. He’s the thing that speaks, not the speech itself.

  We don’t know who — what—is speaking when he opens his mouth. Or used to.”

  “All of that’s debatable.”

  Which debate had already started, severally.

  “Does there have to be a separation. Couldn’t there be a thing that exists, lives, only as an abstraction?”

  “Isn’t that what Ganesh is?”

  “No; Ganesh has a size, and a shape. And we made it. We know what it is.”

  “We used to.”

  “This is going to be something different. A different way of being.”

  “But how was it made, and what of? Evolution . . .”

&nbs
p; “No. No.” Rasheeda waved her hands. “I can’t think anymore. All of you figure it out. I can’t.”

  “Anyway,” X said thoughtfully. “We’re not seeing or touching it, except through Ganesh. Or through Azamat, in theory. We’re getting a glimpse, not even a glimpse, just a reflection.”

  “For that matter, it only takes form through the statistical manipulation used by Azamat,” Liet said. “He massaged it into being. So it only exists through our math.”

  “Math is the same everywhere.”

  “There’s no way to prove that.”

  “Enough!”

  X said: “What would it mean to solve the Oxygen Problem now?”

  “Marcsson talked about language,” Kalypso murmured. “He talked about giving instructions to the System.”

  “He can’t talk now. Oxygen deprivation.”

  Kalypso felt her hands clench into fists. X put his arms around her.

  “Like I said,” Lassare raised her voice over the discussion, which was intersecting itself and losing coherence. “Here’s the point. We talk to it, we get it to stop fucking with Ganesh maybe. Or better yet we find out how it works. How the System works. How to tell it to stop producing CO and start producing oxygen. This Crash is an opportunity to change everything.”

  Liet stood up, stumbled over someone’s outstretched legs, and raised her hand, waving it around even though everyone was looking at her and waiting for her to speak.

  “What is it, Liet? What do you have to say.”

  “Uh . . .” Liet saw that she was in the center of attention and flushed. “Um, if it has no existence independent of Ganesh, and the Dead shut down the reflex points, then . . . what will happen to the alien?”

  There was a sudden change in the mood even before anyone spoke. A deadening. The boats had left for First. The mission was under way.

  “Does anyone know? What will happen.”

  Ahmed put his hands over his face and scrubbed.

  “Not good,” he said. “The reflex system—it’ll wipe whatever’s there. Everything but the root programming in the Core. I’m pretty sure. Call Tehar and ask him.”

  “Goddamn it all.” Naomi’s mouth had become a kind of shorthand, like the sewn indication of absence peculiar to rag dolls. “What kind of idiocy is this? What are we trying to save?”