Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  “In my culture, we’re all equal,” Eva said.

  Mota tilted her head. “I... read about Earth,” she said. “And our history. Our scholars – when we were on the Segye-Agbaye – historically there was never a culture without hierarchy? It’s innate. Human social trait.”

  Eva looked angry for a moment. Offended? Then it was gone. “Well,” she said, “people earn their positions, where we come from. We’re not born into them. That – it’s unnatural. Not right.”

  But it kept us alive, Mota wanted to say. She wanted to be aboard the Segye-Agbaye more than ever, in the halls that generations of her ancestors had adapted to, in the confines of its hull. Eva had her cornered down here, and didn’t know or didn’t care that she wanted to escape. For years, centuries, there had been no escape from the ship as it sailed through the interstellar medium, but there had been harmony. Or a close-enough approximation.

  “No,” Mota said. “For us, you are not right. Eva, this is uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable.”

  And there, any civilized person should have disengaged. But Eva stepped forward.

  “If you could be liberated,” she said, “wouldn’t you want to be?”

  Mota turned and ran away. The motion was ungainly; she spent more of her life in orbital gravity than terrestrial. But Eva didn’t follow.

  The shuttle ride up to the Segye-Agbaye was silent on the network, and Mota didn’t plug herself into one of the transmitters to reach out. And the ship itself was quiet but filled with murmurs – like we’ve all become ghosts, Yan had said.

  This was the kind of silence Eva lived in, all her life, Mota thought. Worse than this. Absolute silence, without the promise of connection.

  Mota couldn’t imagine it without also imagining going mad.

  She made her way to one of the old science modules, and settled in among its resources. A transmitter linked up the databanks with the central ones on Se, and she called up the records from Yan’s expedition out to fetch the Sojourn. Then she dug deeper: the first moment the Sojourn’s signals had been detected, the first scans that caught the ship and resolved it.

  She requested Yan’s experience from the central banks, and they fed it up to her. Strange feelings, approaching the ship: washes of color and sound across the network as Yan and his fleetmates drew near. Many different signals coming from the ship, and a few of them tickled the network. When Yan sent his own signal to the ship, everything but that channel had died down.

  Yan hadn’t noticed a fade in the network when he’d retrieved the Sojourn or brought it to Omo. But he had before – those incoherent washes, an accident of design, transmitting on the same frequencies as the nanotransmitters interfaced with their neurons.

  It made Mota wonder.

  THE SOJOURN HADN’T been moved from its post at Omo.

  Mota took a databank and loaded it with the translation program, and requested a shuttle to Omo, stewing in her own thoughts the entire way. The spaceport had felt emptier than it was; everything felt empty. At least here, in the far reaches of the inhabited system, the emptiness seemed right.

  She docked at Omo and went into the Sojourn to take a look around.

  Parts of the ship were missing. Some of it, probably was the data storage – taken down to Se so that its encryption could be translated, and Eva’s precious historical record preserved.

  But was all of it?

  Mota ran her hands over the walls, the consoles. She could feel the databank on the shuttle, feel the technicians’ records and the translation program at the edge of her mind.

  The Sojourn seemed to be cast from smooth composite, its hull one large component – not like the Segye-Agbaye, where every piece could have been detatched, recycled, cast into any one of innumerable other forms. The Segye-Agbaye had been designed to be broken apart and remade as it carried a living population from one star to the next.

  The Sojourn had been designed to perform one task competently once.

  And that told Mota something, as she moved from the stasis chamber to what seemed to be a technician access hatch. Everything on the ship had a congruity. Everything that wasn’t part of the stasis system or the engines looked like an afterthought: mismatched.

  She looked at the equipment. There, a processing unit. There, a detachable screen.

  Mota took a deep breath, calling up all the translation they’d established.

  The Sojourn had been able to read the presence of their colony and send out a signal, and Eva had been horrified at the thought of the network laid into human brains. When this craft had been built, someone would have come into this little human-habitable room and calibrated the equipment, would have tested it. And they would have done so with their hands and their eyes, not information communicated directly to their neurons.

  Mota took the screen, and began to interface.

  Reading the translations of the symbols that greeted her, Mota wondered when the screen had last been touched. How many generations ago, those many light years away? Had the Segye-Agbaye still been on its long voyage, or was this ship younger than that? And had the last person to work their way through these menus been a technician, like Mota, or had their society not been organized upon those lines?

  Where we come from, Eva had said, people earn their positions.

  Where we come from. Eva experienced a kind of aloneness that Mota could hardly imagine – lightyears from home, alone in her thoughts and sensations. Why use we?

  And, Yes, there – the ship had transmitters. Not ones that could tap into the larger network, or the smaller one integrated with a human mind. But it had sent out the signals that called Yan to it, and it had sent out... others. And was still sending them out. Mota frowned, and isolated them.

  Two signals. One broadly dispersed, one hyper-focused and sent back the way the Sojourn had come. Mota chose that one to follow, digging into the ship’s scanners until something resolved on them.

  Seven somethings.

  Seven ships.

  None as large as the Segye-Agbaye, but approaching its volume combined. And if they were stasis ships, without the need for living areas and corridors and recreational facilities and maintenance bays...

  Mota sucked in breath, and the hatch opened behind her.

  She spun, eyes wide, and there was Eva. “I thought,” Eva said, “I had asked you to stay away from my ship.”

  Mota moved, revealing the screen behind her. “How many?” she asked. Hoped that the words would carry all the meaning she wanted them to.

  Eva’s eyes flicked to the screen, but if she was surprised to see her fleet on it, Mota couldn’t read it in her face. “On Earth,” Eva said, “our ancestors were allies – good friends, in agreement. I was sent to negotiate cohabitation if my people had to evacuate the Earth system. I didn›t expect to arrive here and find that you were no longer human.

  “We are human,” Mota said.

  Eva looked disgusted. This time, the expression stayed. “You are eugenicists,” she said. “Your genetics are polluted. It was people like you who are destroying my people.”

  “We evolved,” Mota said, “to limit conflict –”

  “By engineering subservience?” Eva asked. “My fleet is on its way. We can stop this practice of hooking you up to this mind-control network – we can help restore your genetic pool. Your children can live lives that are truly free.”

  “You’re interfering with the network,” Mota said. The realization was a nausea.

  “Yes,” Eva said. “Can’t you feel it? You don’t have to submit to everyone you meet –”

  You are alone, Eva seemed to say, seemed to not realize she was saying, in the dark, and you should be happy for it.

  Mota launched herself at Eva.

  Eva startled, and planted her feet as though she were in planetary gravity. Mota twisted, changing her angle enough to catch Eva’s arm and spin her, then pushed off from her and flew toward the hatch leading back to the Omo station proper. Eva growled, disoriented, a
nd Mota swung the hatch closed behind her.

  Omo station wasn’t large. Mota reached a transmitter just as Eva opened the hatch behind her, and fumbled into a connection. If she could just send this information back to Se, slicing through the interference before Eva was upon her –

  And then Eva was upon her, wrenching her away from the transmitter, throwing her into the darkness of network interference again. Mota curled herself and pushed away but this time Eva grabbed her, locking their momentum. Eva’s hand closed around her throat.

  And then the hatch opened.

  This time, they both startled. Eva turned, and the break in her attention was enough for Mota to twist free. And there in the hatch was Io, tall and present, taking in the scene.

  Mota flew to Io and gripped her arm, letting the proximity carry her whole emotional state – anger and fear and incredulity.

  Io turned to regard Eva.

  “I don’t think I should chastise Mota for disobeying your request,” she said. “I came here because I thought I might have to. But I believe one of you should explain.”

  “I will explain,” Mota said. And Io smiled thinly – this close, the network connected them, and the truth burned in Mota for anyone but Eva to see.

  YAN ARRIVED ON the Segye-Agbaye, his presence clear among the ship’s usual population. Mota paused in her work, extracting herself from the old databanks and recycling systems.

  [Here,] she signaled, and felt Yan approach.

  He waited until he was in the same room as her to say anything. “We were able to re-activate the stasis,” he told her. “Eva is stable.”

  Mota nodded. She didn’t have to say – was relieved not to say – how she felt about that, or that her feelings were confused.

  “Io is still angry,” Yan remarked.

  Mota let out a laugh. “So am I.”

  “And most of us, I think,” Yan said. He didn’t feel angry – just a long, slow resentment curling under his words. “If it had been a vote, we might have killed her.”

  Mota closed her eyes. There was a vote, now, and the network visualized the voting for her. The decisions traveled in waves across the colony and outposts, one holdout or another synthesizing and summarizing their views and offering them up for perusal, influencing another shift or dissipating into the growing consensus.

  Yan was there, in her peripheral awareness: washed out by the voting she’d called up, but present. No ghost standing next to her. She could hear a question, lingering.

  “Eva made a bad decision,” he said. “Her people are going to arrive, and if their stasis is the same as hers, they’ll rely on our cooperation to revive them. So why act antisocially? Did she not know?”

  If she’d had the network, she could have felt the fabric of the colony; known that she was making a mistake. Of course, if she’d had the network, she’d never have been able to hide a thing.

  “Maybe,” Mota said, though she wasn’t sure, and she knew Yan recognized that. She felt around for the right words – even the right nuance would do. [She hated us and didn’t disengage,] she signaled, at last.

  It was... unnatural.

  At least, it went against Mota’s nature.

  Yan let out a breath. Then he settled back, and Mota felt him key into the voting.

  “Have you decided?” Mota asked.

  A wistful affirmative came to her over the network. “Majority,” he said. “Redirect their ships to some other system, or back to Earth. I’ll miss their ships – I want to study them. You?”

  Mota closed her eyes again. The visualization was waiting for her, its colors soothing.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Skepticism, from Yan.

  Mota’s fingers moved. Eva thought I didn’t have free will, she wanted to signal. But this is my vote. I have to make the choice. But the words were less accurate than she wanted them to be, and she could catch the edge of understanding, flowing from Yan like a warm regard. That was enough.

  MY DAUGHTER FELL from the top of the world. She tripped, she gripped, she slipped and she fell. Into three kilometres of open air.

  I HAVE A desk. Everyone on the atmospheric entry project thinks it’s the quaintest thing. They can’t understand it. Look at the space it takes up! And it attracts stuff. Junk. Piles. De-print them, de print it, get rid of the dust, free up the space. Surfaces. You don’t need surfaces to work.

  That’s true. I work through Marid, my familiar. I’ve skinned it as its namesake, a great and powerful Dijon, hovering over my left shoulder. My co-workers think this quaint too. I spend my shifts in a pavilion of interlocutors. My familiar meeting my client’s familiar: relaying each other’s words.

  My client is a planetary exploration probe.

  I’m a simulational psychiatrist.

  The proper furniture of psychologist is a chair, not a cluttered desk. And a couch. To which I say; the couch is a psychoanalytic cliché, and try laying a Saturn entry probe on a chaise longue, even before you get to the Oedipal rage and penis envy. The desk stays. Yes it takes up stupid space in my office, yes, I have piled it with so many empty food containers and disposable tea cups and kawaii toys and even physical print-outs that I’m permanently running close to my carbon limit. But I like it, it makes this cubicle an office. And it displays – displayed, before the strata of professional detritus buried it – my daughter’s first archaeological find.

  The technology is awkward by our standards – silicon micro-processor arrays are like asteroids next to modern 2-D graphene films; almost laughable. A finger-sized processor board; its exact purpose unknown. Its provenance: the location where the People’s Republic of China’s Yutu rover came to a halt and died forty kilometres south of Laplace F in the Mare Imbrium on the nearside of the Moon.

  ACCELERATION UNDER GRAVITY on the surface of the Moon is 1.625 metres per second squared.

  I LIKE CALLISTO.

  I don’t like – I don’t have to like – all my clients. Every AI is different, though there are similarities, some of them the constraints of their architecture and engineering, some of them philosophical, some of them the shared AI culture that has been evolving on the Moon alongside human society. Every AI is an individual not an identity.

  Callisto is quick, keen and erudite in conversation, charmingly pedantic, eager and naive. E anticipates the mission with the impatience and excitement of a child going to New Year and there is the trap. I think of er like Shahina, and then I’m making mistakes. I become attached, I make presumptions. I humanise.

  Erm, Nuur did you see what you did there?

  “I beg your pardon Callisto?”

  Erm, you used a wrong word.

  “What wrong word?”

  I can remind you...

  “Please do. I hate to think I’d said something inappropriate.”

  You said, talking about my atmospheric entry aspect, when shegoes in. I think you meant to say...

  E. Er. The recognised pronouns for Artificial Intelligence. My embarrassment was crippling. I couldn’t speak. I blushed, burned. Burbled apologies. I was naked with shame.

  It’s quite all right, Nuur. But I think I should tell you that you’ve, um, been doing it all week...

  When an AI ums, ers, demurs, it is a clear sign of a conflict between its laws: to be truthful, to cause no harm to humans. AIs are every bit as shy and self-deluding as humans.

  I DIDN’T LAUGH when she said, history. I didn’t smile, didn’t interject, object, reject though the arguments swarmed on my tongue. This is the Moon. Our society is fifty years old, it’s a century-and-some since we first walked here. We are five cities, a university, a clutter of habitats and bases and one ever-moving train-cum-refinery; one million seven hundred thousand people. How can we have a history? How much does it take to have a history as opposed to anecdotes? Is there a critical mass? We are renter-clients of the Lunar Development Corporation, employed or contracted by the Five Dragons; history, for us, is over. We work, we survive, we pay our per d
iems for the Four Elementals of Air, Water, Data, Carbon. We don’t just not need history; we can’t afford history. Where is the profit? Where is the utility? So quick, so easy, see? I talk for a living. Arguments come to me as if drawn by whispers and pheromones. But I pushed them behind me and spoke none of them.

  History, she said, spying the shadows of all those arguments and disparagements behind me. Dyeing. Daring me to criticise. We have a history. Everything has a history. History isn’t a thing you find lying around, it’s a thing you make.

  Shahina, I named her. The name means falcon: a small fierce beautiful quick bird. She has never seen a falcon, never seen a bird, never seen a winged thing that isn’t human, apart from the butterfly-fountains AKA make for society parties; that only live for a day and clog the drains when they make it rain to clear the dust from the air.

  I have never seen a falcon either, for that matter. My father kept pigeons in a loft in the shade of the solar panel. I never liked them; they were smelly and rattly and jabby and swarmed around me when I went up on the roof with my Dad to feed them. Their wings clattered; they seemed more machine than bird. The thought of them now, cities, countries, worlds distant, still raises a cold horror. Falcons are the enemies of pigeons; Dad kept an evil eye for their swooshes in the sky. They’re moving into the city, he said. Nesting up in the new towers. To them it’s just a glass cliff. Any shadow he didn’t like the look of was a falcon.

  Shahina has never seen a falcon, never seen a bird, never seen a sky. But she’s well-named. She is so quick. Her thoughts swerve and dodge, nimble and swift. Mine plod in slow, straight lines. She rushes to opinions and positions as if fortifying a hill. My work is deliberate: the identification and engineering of artificial emotions. She is fierce. Those opinions, those positions she defends with a ferocity that beats down any possible opposition. She wins not by being right but by being vehemently wrong. She scares me, when we fight as mother and daughter do. She scares me away from arguing.