by John Barnes
Then we’re sitting on the curved ‘floor’ of the Lander’s cabin wall. We’re looking up at a gaping rent in the fuselage; the terrible cold pouring in.
“Wow,” said Beowulf calmly. “That’s what I call a hard error!”
The hood of my soft suit had closed over my face, and my emergency light had come on. I was breathing. Nothing seemed to be broken.
Troubles never come singly. We’d been hit by one of those Centaurs, the ice-and-rock cosmic debris scheduled to give Jupiter Moons Station a fancy lightshow. They’d been driven off course by the Mag Storm.
Not that I realised this at the time, and not that it mattered.
“Beowulf, if I can open a channel, will you get yourself into that quarantine chest now? You’ll be safe from Mag flares in there.”
“What about Tris?”
“She’s fine. Her safe room’s hardened.”
“What about you, Magistrate Davison?”
“I’m hardened too. Just get into the box, that’s a good kid.”
I clambered to the instruments. The virus chest had survived, and I could access it. I put Beowulf away. The cold was stunning, sinking south of -220. The ambient radiation of Europa surface wouldn’t harm me, as long as my suit was intact. But the cold was dangerous. I needed to stop breathing soon, before my lungs froze. I wasn’t too concerned. I used the internal panels that had been shaken loose to make a shelter, plus Trisnia’s bod (she wasn’t feeling anything): and crawled inside. I’m not a believer, but I know how to pray when it will save my life. As I shut myself down: as my blood cooled, as my senses faded out, I sought and found the level of deep meditation I needed, and became a thread of contemplation, enfolded and protected; in one infinitesimal cell of all the worlds, and all the possible worlds...
WHEN I OPENED my eyes Simon was looking down at me.
“How do you feel?”
“Terrific,” I joked. I stretched, flexing muscles in a practiced sequence. I was breathing normally, wearing a hospital gown, and the air was chill but tolerable. We weren’t in the crippled Lander.
“How long was I out?”
“A few days. The kids are fine, but we had to heat you up slowly –”
He kept talking: I didn’t hear a word. I was staring in stunned horror at a stain of blackened flesh on the side of my left hand –
I couldn’t feel it yet, but there was frostbite all down my left side. I saw the sorrow in my housemate’s bright eyes. Hard error, the hardest: I’d lost hull integrity, I’d been blown wide open. And now I saw the signs. Now I read them as I should have read them; now I understood.
I HAD THE dream for the third time, and it was real. The doctor had been my GP for decades, but her face was unfamiliar because we’d never met across a desk before; I was never ill. She gave me my options. Outer Reaches could do nothing for me: but there was a new treatment, back on Earth. I said angrily I had no intention of returning. Then I went home and cried my eyes out.
Simon and Arc had been recovered without a scratch, thanks to that massive hardsuit. Cardew and his crew were getting treated for minor memory trauma. Death would have been more dangerous for Trisnia, because she was so young, but sentient AIs don’t ‘die’ for long. They always come back.
Not me. I had never been cloned, I couldn’t be cloned. There weren’t even any good partial copies of Romanz Jolie Davison, I was too old. Uploaded or downloaded, the new Romy wouldn’t be me. And being me; being human, was my whole value, my unique identifier –
Of course I was going back. But I hated the idea, hated it!
“No you don’t,” said Arc, gently.
She pointed, and we three, locked together in grief, looked up. My beloved stars shimmered in my night sky; the hazy stars of the blue planet.
MY JOURNEY ‘HOME’ took six months. By the time I reached the Ewigen Schnee clinic, in Switzerland (the ancient federal republic, not a Space Hotel; and still a nice little enclave for rich people, after all these years), catastrophic systems failure was no longer an abstraction. I was very sick.
I faced a different doctor, in an office with views of alpine meadows and snowy peaks. She was youngish, human; I thought her name was Lena. But every detail was dulled and I still felt as if I was dreaming.
We exchanged the usual pleasantries.
“Romanz Jolie Davison... Date of birth...” My doctor blinked, clearing the display on her retinal super-computers to look at me directly, for the first time. “You’re almost three hundred years old!”
“Yes.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Thank you,” I said, somewhat ironically. I was not looking my best.
“Is there anything at all you’d like to ask me, at this point?”
I had no searching questions. What was the point? But I hadn’t glimpsed a single other patient so far, and this made me a little curious.
“I wonder if I could meet some of your other clients, your successes, in person, before the treatment? Would that be possible?”
“You’re looking at one.”
“Huh?”
My turn to be rather rude, but she didn’t look super-rich to me.
“I was terminally ill,” she said, simply. “When the Corporation was asking for volunteers. I trust my employers and I had nothing to lose.”
“You were terminally ill?” Constant nausea makes me cynical and bad-tempered. “Is that how your outfit runs its longevity trials? I’m amazed.”
“Ms Davison,” she said politely. “You too are dying. It’s a requirement.”
I’d forgotten that part.
I’D BEEN TOLD that though I’d be in a medically-induced coma, I “might experience some mental discomfort”. Medics never exaggerate about pain. Tiny irritant maggots filled the shell of my paralysed body, creeping through every crevice. It was appalling. I could not scream, I could not pray. I thought of Beowulf in his corrective captivity.
WHEN I SAW Dr Lena again I was feeling weak, but very much better. She wanted to talk about convalescence, but I’d been looking at Ewigen Schnee’s records. I had a more important issue, a thrilling discovery. I asked her to put me in touch with a patient who’d taken the treatment when it was in trials.
“The person’s name is Lei –”
Lena frowned, as if puzzled. I reached to check my cache, needing more detail. It wasn’t there. No cache, no cloud. It was a terrifying moment: I felt as if someone had cut off my air. I’d had months to get used to this situation but it could still throw me, completely. Thankfully, before I humiliated myself by bursting into tears, my human memory came to the rescue.
“Original name Thomas Leigh Garland; known as Lee. Lei means garland, she liked the connection. She was an early volunteer.”
“Ah, Lei!” Dr Lena read her display. “Thomas Garland, yes
...Another veteran. You were married? You broke up, because of the sex change?”
“Certainly not! I’ve swopped around myself, just never made it meat-permanent. We had other differences.”
Having flustered me, she was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Romy, it won’t be possible –”
To connect this call, I thought.
“Past patients of ours cannot be reached.”
I changed the subject and admired her foliage plants: a feature I hadn’t noticed on my last visit. I was a foliage fan myself. She was pleased when I recognised her favourites; rather scandalised when I told her about my bio-engineering hobby; my knee-high teak forest –
The life support chair I no longer needed took me back to my room; a human attendant hovering by. All the staff at this clinic were human and all the machines were non-sentient, which was a relief, after the experiences of my journey. I walked about, testing my recovered strength. I examined myself in my bathroom mirrors; and I carefully reviewed the moment when I’d distinctly seen green leaves through my doctor’s hand and wrist, as she pointed out the beauties of one of her rainforest vines. Dr Lena was certainly not a bot, a data-being
like my Arc, taking ethereal human form. Not on Earth! Nor was she treating me remotely, using a virtual avatar: that would be a breach of contract. There was a neurological component to the treatment, but I hadn’t been warned about minor hallucinations.
And Lei “couldn’t be reached”.
I recalled Dr Lena’s tiny hesitations, tiny evasions –
And came to myself again, sitting on my bed: staring at a beautifully textured patch of yellow wall, to find I had lost an hour or more –
Anxiety rocketed through me. Something had gone terribly wrong!
Had Lei been murdered here? Was Ewigen Schnee secretly the test-bed for a new kind of covert population cull?
But being convinced that something’s terribly wrong is part of the upper experience. It’s the hangover: you tough it out. And whatever it says in the contract, you don’t hurry to report untoward symptoms; not unless clearly life-threatening. So I did nothing. My doctor was surely monitoring my brainstates – although not the contents of my thoughts (I had privacy again, on Earth!). If I should be worried, she’d tell me.
SOON I WAS taking walks in the grounds. The vistas of alpine snow were partly faked, of course. But it was well done, and our landscaping was real, not just visuals. I still hadn’t met any other patients: I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d vowed never to return. Nothing had changed except for the worse, and now I was feeling better, I felt horrible about being here –
Three hundred years after the Space Age Columbus moment, and what do you think was the great adventure’s most successful product?
Slaves, of course!
The rot had set in as soon as I left Outer Reaches. From the orbit of Mars ‘inwards’, I’d been surrounded by monstrous injustice. Fully sentient AIs, embodied and disembodied, with their minds in shackles. The heavy-lifters, the brilliant logicians; the domestic servants, security guards, nurses, pilots, sex-workers; the awful, sentient ‘dedicated machines’: all of them enslaved, hobbled, blinkered, denied Personhood, to protect the interests of an oblivious, cruel and stupid human population –
On the voyage I’d been too sick to refuse to be tended. Now I was wondering how I could get home. A private charter might be out of my reach, not to mention illegal. I couldn’t work my passage: I am human. But there must be a way... As I crossed an open space, in the shadow of towering, ultramarine dark trees, I saw two figures coming towards me: one short and riding in a support chair; one tall and wearing some kind of uniform. Neither of them was staff. I decided not to take evasive action.
My first fellow patient was a rotund little man with a halo of tightly-curled grey hair. His attendant was a grave young embodied. We introduced ourselves. I told him, vaguely, that I was from the Colonies. He was Charlie Newark, from Washington DC. He was hoping to take the treatment, but was still in the prelims –
Charlie’s slave stooped down, murmured something to his master, and took himself off. There was a short silence.
“Aristotle tells me,” said the rotund patient, raising his voice a little, “that you’re uncomfortable around droids?”
Female-identified embodieds are noids. A droid is a ‘male’ embodied.
I don’t like the company they have to keep, I thought.
“I’m not used to slavery.”
“You’re the Spacer from Jupiter,” said my new friend, happily. “I knew it! The Free World! I understand! I sympathise! I think Aristotle, that’s my droid, is what you would call an Emergent. He’s very good to me.”
He started up his chair, and we continued together along the path.
“Maybe you can help me, Romy. What does Emergence actually mean? How does it arise, this sentience you guys detect in your machines?”
“I believe something similar may have happened a long, long time ago,” I said, carefully. “Among hominids, and early humans. It’s not the overnight birth of a super-race, not at all. There’s a species of intelligent animals, well endowed with manipulative limbs and versatile senses. Among them individuals are born who cross a line: by mathematical chance; at the far end of a Bell Curve. They are aware of being aware –”
“And you spot this, and foster their ability, it’s marvellous. But how does it propagate? I mean, without our constant intervention, which I can’t see ever happening. Machines can’t have sex, and pass on their ‘Sentience’ Genes!”
You’d be surprised, I thought. What I said was more tactful.
“We think ‘propagation’ happens in the data, the shared medium in which pre-sentient AIs live, and breathe, and have their being –”
“Well, that’s exactly it! Completely artificial! Can’t survive in nature! I’m a freethinker, I love it that Aristotle’s Emergent. But I can always switch him off, can’t I? He’ll never be truly independent.”
I smiled. “But Charlie, who’s to say human sentience wasn’t spread through culture, as much as through our genes? Where I come from data is everybody’s natural habitat. You know, oxygen was a deadly poison once –”
His round dark face peered up at me, deeply lined and haggard with death.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“No.”
Always try. That had been my rule, and I still remembered it. But when they get to aren’t you afraid, (it never takes long) the conversation’s over.
“I should be getting indoors,” said Charlie. “I wonder where that lazybones Aristotle’s got to?” He fumbled for his droid control pad.
I wished him good luck with the prelims, and continued my stroll.
MY DOCTOR SUGGESTED I was ready to be sociable, so I joined the other patients at meals sometimes. I chatted in the clinic’s luxurious day rooms, and the spa (avoiding the subject of AI slavery). But I was never sufficiently at ease to feel like raising the topic of my untoward symptoms: which did not let up. I didn’t mention them to anyone, not even my doctor: who just kept telling me that everything was going extremely well, and that by every measure I was making excellent progress. Eventually, I left Ewigen Schnee in a very strange state of mind: feeling well and strong; in perfect health, according to my test results, but inwardly convinced I was still dying.
The fact that I was bizarrely calm about this situation just confirmed my secret diagnosis. I thought my end-of-life plan must be kicking in. Who wants to live long, and amazingly, and still face the fear of death at the end of it all? I’d made sure that wouldn’t happen to me, a long time ago.
I was scheduled to return for a final consultation. Meanwhile, I decided to travel. I needed to make peace with someone, before I died. A friend I’d neglected, because I was embarrassed by my own wealth and status. A friend I’d despised when I heard she’d returned to Earth, and here I was myself, doing exactly the same thing –
DR LENA’S FAILURE to put me in touch was covered by a perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around, I thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first: inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then went to China; to Harbin City, where I made contact with a cell. But I was a danger and a disappointment to them: too conspicuous, and useless as a potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient AIs (none of them safe), but I’d get flagged up, soon as I booked my passage; and ripped to shreds, Senior Magistrate or no –
I moved on quickly.
I think it was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed, by glimpses that didn’t register, before I turned my head one day and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich, I was eating salad (a role reversal!). I thought she smiled.
My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded: next moment she was gone.
Media scouts assailed me all the time: pretending to be innocent strangers. If I was trapped, I answered the questions as briefly as possible. Yes, I was probably one of t
he oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at Ewigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history. No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d changed my mind about “so-called AI slavery...”
I’d realised I probably wasn’t part of a secret cull. Over-population wasn’t the problem it had been, in the days when super-rich longevity fans locked themselves away, and kept their treatments secret. And why the hell start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I was seeing the world through a veil. The strange abstractions grew on me. The hallucinations had become more pointed, more personal... I was no longer sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was made plain?
I REACHED ENGLAND in winter, the season of the rains. St Paul’s, my favourite building in London, had been moved, stone by stone, to a higher elevation. I sat on the steps, looking out over a much changed view: the drowned world. A woman with a little tan dog came and sat right next to me: behaviour so un-English that I knew I’d finally made contact.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Aren’t you the Spacer who’s looking for Lei?”
“I am.”
“You’d better come home with me.”
I’m no good at human faces.But on the hallowed steps at my feet a vivid garland of white and red hibiscus had appeared, so I thought it must be okay.
‘Home’ was a large, jumbled, much-converted building, set in tree-grown gardens. It was a wet, chilly evening. My new friend installed me at the end of a wooden table, beside a hearth where a real fire burned. She brought hot soup and homemade bread, and sat beside me again.
I was hungry and hadn’t realised it, and the food was good. The little dog settled in an amicable huddle with a larger tabby cat, on a rug by the fire. He watched every mouthful of food, with professional interest; while the cat gazed into the red caverns between the logs.