The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  There was no culture on Mitanni. No art. No social behavior beyond functional interaction in the service of industry or science.

  It was an incredible divergence. Every seedship had carried Earth’s cultural norms—the consensus ideology of a liberal democratic state. Mitanni’s colonists should have inherited those norms.

  Mitanni’s colonists expressed no interest in those norms. There was no oppression. No sign of unrest or discontent. No government or judicial system at all, no corporations or markets. Just an array of specialized functions to which workers assigned themselves, their numbers fed by batteries of synthetic wombs.

  There was no entertainment, no play, no sex. No social performance of gender. No family units. Biological sex had been flattened into a population of sterile females, slender and lightly muscled. “No sense wasting calories on physical strength with exoskeletons available,” Thienne explained. “It’s a resource conservation strategy.”

  “You can’t build a society like this using ordinary humans,” I said. “It wouldn’t be stable. Free riders would play havoc.”

  Thienne nodded. “They’ve been rewired. I think it started with the first generation out of the seedship. They made themselves selfless so that they could survive.”

  It struck me that when the civilization on Mitanni built their own seed-ships they would be able to do this again. If they could endure Mitanni, they could endure anything.

  They could have the galaxy.

  I was not someone who rushed to judgment. They’d told me that, during the final round of crew selection. Deliberative. Centered. Disconnected from internal affect. High emotional latency. Suited for tiebreaker role . . . .

  I swept the imagery shut between my hands, compressing it into a point of light. Looked up at Thienne with a face that must have signaled loathing or revulsion, because she lifted her chin in warning. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t leap to conclusions.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re thinking about ant hives. I can see it.”

  “Is that a bad analogy?”

  “Yes!” Passion, surfacing and subsiding. “Ant hives only function because each individual derives a fitness benefit, even if they sacrifice themselves. It’s kin-selective eusociality. This is—”

  “Total, selfless devotion to the state?”

  “To survival.” She lifted a mosaic of images from the air: a smiling woman driving a needle into her thigh. A gang of laborers running into a fire, heedless of their own safety, to rescue vital equipment. “They’re born. They learn. They specialize, they work, sleep, eat, and eventually they volunteer to die. It’s the opposite of an insect hive. They don’t cooperate for their own individual benefit— they don’t seem to care about themselves at all. It’s pure altruism. Cognitive, not instinctive. They’re brilliant, and they all come to the same conclusion: cooperation and sacrifice.”

  The image of the smiling woman with the needle did not leave me when the shifting mosaic carried her away. “Do you admire that?”

  “It’s a society that could never evolve on its own. It has to be designed.” She stared into the passing images with an intensity I’d rarely seen outside of deep study or moments of love, a ferocious need to master some vexing, elusive truth. “I want to know how they did it. How do they disable social behavior without losing theory of mind? How can they remove all culture and sex and still motivate?”

  “We saw plenty of ways to motivate on Jotunheim,” I said.

  Maybe I was thinking of Anyahera, taking her stance by some guilty reflex, because there was nothing about my tone disconnected from internal affect.

  I expected anger. Thienne surprised me. She swept the air clear of her work, came to the couch and sat beside me. Her eyes were gentle.

  “I’m sorry we have to do this again,” she said. “Anyahera will forgive you.”

  “Twice in a row? She thought Jotunheim was the greatest atrocity in human history. ‘A crime beyond forgiveness or repair,’ remember? And I let it stand. I walked away.”

  I took Thienne’s shoulder, gripped the swell of her deltoid, the strength that had caught Anyahera’s eye two decades ago. Two decades for us—on Earth, centuries now.

  Thienne stroked my cheek. “You only had two options. Walk away, or burn it all. You knew you weren’t qualified to judge an entire world.”

  “But that’s why we’re here. To judge. To find out whether the price of survival ever became too high—whether what survived wasn’t human.”

  She leaned in and kissed me softly. “Mankind changes,” she said. “This— what you are—” Her hands touched my face, my chest. “People used to think this was wrong. There were men and women, and nothing else, nothing more or different.”

  I caught her wrists. “That’s not the same, Thienne.”

  “I’m just saying: technology changes things. We change ourselves. If everyone had judged what you are as harshly as Anyahera judged Jotunheim—”

  I tightened my grip. She took a breath, perhaps reading my anger as play, and that made it worse. “Jotunheim’s people are slaves,” I said. “I can be what I want. It’s not the same at all.”

  “No. Of course not.” She lowered her eyes. “You’re right. That was an awful example. I’m sorry.”

  “Why would you say that?” I pressed. Thienne closed herself, keeping her pains and fears within. Sometimes it took a knife to get them out. “Technology doesn’t always enable the right things. If some people had their way I would be impossible. They would have found everything but man and woman and wiped it out.”

  She looked past me, to the window and the virtual starscape beyond. “We’ve come so far out,” she said. I felt her shoulders tense, bracing an invisible weight. “And there’s nothing out here. Nobody to meet us except our own seedship children. We thought we’d find someone else—at least some machine or memorial, some sign of other life. But after all this time the galaxy is still a desert. If we screw up, if we die out . . . what if there’s no one else to try?

  “If whatever happened on Mitanni is what it takes to survive in the long run, isn’t that better than a dead cosmos?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It made me feel suddenly and terribly alone. The way Anyahera might have felt, when we voted against her.

  I kissed her. She took the distraction, answered it, turned us both away from the window and down onto the couch. “Tell me what to be,” I said, wanting to offer her something, to make a part of the Universe warm for her. This was my choice: to choose.

  “Just you—” she began.

  But I silenced her. “Tell me. I want to.”

  “A woman,” she said, when she had breath. “A woman this time, please . . .”

  Afterward, she spoke into the silence and the warmth, her voice absent, wondering: “They trusted the three of us to last. They thought we were the best crew for the job.” She made absent knots with my hair. “Does that ever make you wonder?”

  “The two-body problem has been completely solved,” I said. “But for n=3, solutions exist for special cases.”

  She laughed and pulled me closer. “You’ve got to go talk to Anyahera,” she said. “She never stays mad at me. But you . . .”

  She trailed off, into contentment, or back into contemplation of distant, massive things.

  Duong-Watts malignant, I thought to myself. I couldn’t help it: my mind went back to the world ahead of us, closing at relativistic speeds.

  Mitanni’s explosive growth matched the theory of a Duong-Watts malignant. But that was just correlation. The malignancy went deeper than social trends, down to the individual, into the mechanisms of the mind.

  And that was Anyahera’s domain.

  “We can’t destroy them,” Thienne murmured. “We might need them.”

  Even in simulation we had to sleep. Lachesis’s topological braid computer could run the human being in full-body cellular resolution, clock us up to two subjective days a minute in an emergency, pause us for cen
turies—but not obviate the need for rest.

  It didn’t take more than an overclocked instant. But it was enough for me to dream.

  Or maybe it wasn’t my dream—just Duong Phireak’s nightmare reappropriated. I’d seen him lecture at Lagos, an instance of his self transmitted over for the night. But this time he spoke in Anyahera’s voice as she walked before me, down a blood-spattered street beneath a sky filled with alien stars.

  “Cognition enables an arsenal of survival strategies inaccessible to simple evolutionary selection,” she said, the words of Duong Phireak. “Foresight, planning, abstract reasoning, technological development—we can confidently say that these strategies are strictly superior, on a computational level, at maximizing individual fitness. Cognition enables the cognitive to pursue global, rather than local, goals. A population of flatworms can’t cooperate to build a rocket unless the ‘build a rocket’ allele promotes individual fitness in each generation— an unlikely outcome, given the state of flatworm engineering.”

  Memory of laughter, compressed by the bandwidth of the hippocampus. I reached out for Anyahera, and she looked up and only then, following her gaze, did I recognize the sky, the aurora of Jotunheim.

  “But with cognition came consciousness—an exaptative accident, the byproduct of circuits in the brain that powered social reasoning, sensory integration, simulation theaters, and a host of other global functions. So much of our civilization derived in turn from consciousness, from the ability not just to enjoy an experience but to know that we enjoy it. Consciousness fostered a suite of behaviors without clear adaptive function, but with subjective, experiential value.”

  I touched Anyahera’s shoulder. She turned toward me. On the slope of her bald brow glittered the circuitry of a Jotunheim slave shunt, bridging her pleasure centers into her social program.

  Of course she was smiling.

  “Consciousness is expensive,” she said. “This is a problem for totalitarian states. A human being with interest in leisure, art, agency—a human being who is aware of her own self-interest—cannot be worked to maximum potential. I speak of more than simple slave labor. I am sure that many of your professors wish you could devote yourselves more completely to your studies.”

  Overhead, the aurora laughed in the voices of Lagos undergraduates, and when I looked up, the sky split open along a dozen fiery fractures, relativistic warheads moving in ludicrous slow-motion, burning their skins away as they made their last descent. Lachesis’s judgment. The end I’d withheld.

  “Consciousness creates inefficient behavior,” Anyahera said, her smile broad, her golden-brown skin aflame with the light of the falling apocalypse. “A techno-tyranny might take the crude step of creating slave castes who derive conscious pleasure from their functions, but this system is fundamentally inadequate, unstable. The slave still expends caloric and behavioral resources on being conscious; the slave seeks to maximize its own pleasure, not its social utility. A clever state will go one step further and eliminate the cause of these inefficiencies at the root. They will sever thought from awareness.

  “This is what I call the Duong-Watts malignancy. The most efficient, survivable form of human civilization is a civilization of philosophical zombies. A nation of the unconscious, those who think without knowing they exist, who work with the brilliance of our finest without ever needing to ask why. Their cognitive abilities are unimpaired—enhanced, if anything—without constant interference. I see your skepticism; I ask you to consider the ano-sognosia literature, the disturbing information we have assembled on the architecture of the sociopathic mind, the vast body of evidence behind the deflationary position on the Hard Problem.

  “We are already passengers on the ship of self. It is only a matter of time until some designer, pressed for time and resources, decides to jettison the hitchhiker. And the rewards will be enormous—in a strictly Darwinian sense.”

  When I reached for her, I think I wanted to shield her, somehow, to put myself between her and the weapons. It was reflex, and I knew it was meaningless, but still . . . .

  Usually in dreams you wake when you die. But I felt myself come apart.

  Ten light-hours out from Mitanni’s star, falling through empty realms of ice and hydrogen, we slammed into a wall of light—the strobe of a lighthouse beacon orbiting Mitanni. “Pulse-compressed burst maser,” Lachesis told me, her voice clipped as she dissected the signal. “A fusion-pumped flashbulb.”

  Lachesis’s forward shield reflected light like a wall of diamond—back toward the star, toward Mitanni. In ten hours they would see us.

  We argued over what to do. Anyahera wanted to launch our relativistic kill vehicles now, so they’d strike Mitanni just minutes after the light of our approach, before the colonists could prepare any response. Thienne, of course, dissented. “Those weapons were meant to be used when we were certain! Only then!”

  I voted with Thienne. I knew the capabilities of our doomsday payload with the surety of reflex. We had the safety of immense speed, and nothing the Mitanni could do, no matter how sophisticated, could stop our weapons—or us. We could afford to wait, and mull over our strategy.

  After the vote, Anyahera brushed invisible lint from the arm of her couch. “Nervous?” I asked, probing where I probably shouldn’t have. We still hadn’t spoken in private.

  She quirked her lips sardonically. “Procrastination,” she said, “makes me anxious.”

  “You’re leaping to conclusions,” Thienne insisted, pacing the perimeter of the command commons. Her eyes were cast outward, into the blue-shifted stars off our bow. “We can’t know it’s a Duong-Watts malignant. Statistical correlation isn’t enough. We have to be sure. We have to understand the exact mechanism.”

  It wasn’t the same argument she’d made to me.

  “We don’t need to be sure.” Anyahera had finished with the invisible lint. “If there’s any reasonable chance this is a Duong-Watts, we are morally and strategically obligated to wipe them out. This is why we are here. It doesn’t matter how they did it—if they did it, they have to go.”

  “Maybe we need to talk to them,” I said.

  They both stared at me. I was the first one to laugh. We all felt the absurdity there, in the idea that we could, in a single conversation, achieve what millennia of philosophy had never managed—find some way to pin down the spark of consciousness by mere dialogue. Qualia existed in the first person.

  But twenty hours later—nearly three days at the pace of Lachesis’s racing simulation clock—that was suddenly no longer an abstract problem. Mitanni’s light found us again: not a blind, questing pulse, but a microwave needle, a long clattering encryption of something at once unimaginably intricate and completely familiar.

  They didn’t waste time with prime numbers or queries of intent and origin. Mitanni sent us an uploaded mind, a digital ambassador.

  Even Thienne agreed it would be hopelessly naïve to accept the gift at face value, but after Lachesis dissected the upload, ran its copies in a million solipsistic sandboxes, tested it for every conceivable virulence—we voted unanimously to speak with it, and see what it had to say.

  Voting with Anyahera felt good. And after we voted, she started from her chair, arms upraised, eyes alight. “They’ve given us the proof,” she said. “We can—Thienne, Shinobu, do you see?”

  Thienne lifted a hand to spider her fingers against an invisible pane. “You’re right,” she said, lips pursed. “We can.”

  With access to an uploaded personality, the digital fact of a Mitanni brain, we could compare their minds to ours. It would be far from a simple arithmetic hunt for subtraction or addition, but it would give us an empirical angle on the Duong-Watts problem.

  Anyahera took me aside, in a space as old as our friendship, the khaya mahogany panels and airy glass of our undergraduate dorm. “Shinobu,” she said. She fidgeted as she spoke, I think to jam her own desire to reach for me. “Have you seen what they’re building in orbit?”

  Th
is memory she’d raised around us predated Thienne by a decade. That didn’t escape me.

  “I’ve seen them,” I said. I’d gone through Mitanni’s starflight capabilities datum by datum. “Orbital foundries. For their own seedships. They’re getting ready to colonize other stars.”

  Neither of us had to unpack the implications there. It was the beginning of a boom cycle—exponential growth.

  “Ten million years,” she said. “I’ve run a hundred simulations out that far. If Mitanni is a Duong-Watts, in ten million years the galaxy is full of them. Now and forever. No conscious human variant can compete. Not even digitized baseline humans—you know what it took just to make Lachesis. Nothing human compares.”

  I nodded in silent acknowledgment. Is that so terrible? I wanted to ask— Thienne’s question, in this memory so empty of her. Is consciousness what we have to sacrifice to survive in the long run?

  She didn’t even need me to ask the question. “I can envision nothing more monstrous,” she said, “than mankind made clockwork. Nothing is worth that price.”

  And I wanted to nod, just to show her that we were not enemies. But I couldn’t. It felt like giving in.

  Sometimes I wondered at the hubris of our mission. Would Mitanni live and die not by the judgment of a jurisprudent mind but the troubled whims of a disintegrating family? We had left Earth as a harmonized unit, best-in-class product of a post-military, post-national edifice that understood the pressures of long-duration, high-stress starflight. No one and nothing could judge better. But was that enough? Was the human maximum adequate for this task?

  Something in that thought chilled me more than the rest, and I wished I could know precisely what.

  We met the Mitanni upload in a chameleon world: a sandboxed pocket of Lachesis’s mind, programmed to cycle from ocean to desert to crowd to solitary wasteland, so that we could watch the Mitanni’s reactions, and, perhaps, come to know her.