Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  Constantine rubbed his hands unconsciously as he remembered the odd machine: crouching at the overlarge device, the strange feel of the antique plastic keys moving beneath his fingers as he painfully typed out instructions, the eerie glow of the viewing area on his face; the humming noise and the bizarre way that it blew warm air out of a vent in its side as it worked; the fact it needed a power source—what modern thinking machine needed power?

  “It was a museum piece, Mary,” he said. “Priceless. They can’t make them anymore. You’d have to build a factory just to construct the processor. Too much effort. There’re only about ten of them left working now. When they all die, that will be it. The programs that ran on them will live on in emulators, but the original machines that made those programs live will be just so much metal and plastic. It’s…not sad exactly. I don’t know…The passing of something?”

  He tilted his head to one side. “You know, that’s just like us, isn’t it? Minds without bodies. I never thought of that before.” There was another pause.

  He sighed. “You know, this is nice in a way. Two years alone. It’s nice to speak to someone about things. What I’ve done. What I’ve seen. Have you ever been to Mars, Mary?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s an odd place. A vision of what might have been. The future maybe, but not our future. A Buck Rogers future….” His voice trailed away as he remembered the events of a year ago. Flying up to the Martian factory mine. Its odd pyramidal shape seemed appropriate somehow on the red plain of the Martian desert. The soft voices of the flier’s pilot and of Louisiana Station control were the only sounds in the cabin as they approached the red-and-silver mass of the construction. They had skimmed over the tracks of two robot crawlers, low cylinders suspended from huge balloon tires that were trundling in a straight line from the base, headed who could know where. The mine drew closer. A jumble of steel and iron and rock. A miniature city built by and for machines.

  Constantine jerked himself back to the present. “The AIs haven’t touched the place. It’s a preserved land, but what they’ve preserved there is our human past. The original project has been left to run unhindered. Everything there is a product of human ingenuity. It’s…” He shook his head.

  “The…silence there, the intent…I can’t describe it. We developed Antarctica, we let AIs loose on the moon…I don’t know.”

  Mary said nothing. The young man who had been serving behind the bar had finally left his place and was clearing used cups and litter onto a tray.

  “I landed there and entered through a maintenance hatch. Can you imagine, those earthbound engineers, over a hundred years ago, designing a city that was to grow on another world? A city that only existed to them as lines of code, designed to be built in a place they could never visit. And while they wrote that program, they thought to include doors for future humans to enter the site, and access corridors and interface slots where they could plug in their laptops.”

  He shook his head in admiration.

  “They were building castles in the air, but they made them real.” He shook his head again. “Do you know how long I have waited to talk to somebody about this?”

  “I can guess. I don’t think I can truly appreciate what it really must have been like.”

  “No, I don’t think you could. Anyway. I went in there and plugged in the laptop. Filled it with the program that is the seed of a new factory and then got back on the flier. Went back to Louisiana Station. Back into our world. You know, you sit in a hotel room on Louisiana Station and look out at red Martian plains littered with rocks and you see Mons Olympus rising up over the horizon. Close the blinds and you could be anywhere. You could be back here on Earth. You sit in a room with the same bed and pastel prints and minibar serving filthy vanilla-flavored whisky.”

  He sighed and looked down at the simple white jumpsuit that he had found himself wearing. He suddenly realized that it didn’t have a zipper or any other way to take it off. Whoever was controlling this simulation was making a subtle point.

  “Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I got the VNM off Mars. I’d have thought you could have figured that out for yourself.”

  Red spoke up.—They probably did. It’s an old interrogator’s trick. Start with the easy questions. Get the subject talking.

  Mary smiled at him. “We had some ideas. We just wanted to know for sure. What about the other two questions? Are you going to answer those?”

  “I don’t know,” said Constantine.

  —You’re not. Grey’s tone was low and final.

  Constantine shivered. It hadn’t occurred to him, until that point, that he might not have a choice in his actions. Grey had already demonstrated that he could take over control of his body.

  “I’m not sure I will be able to,” he added, too softly for Mary to hear.

  Mary had already risen to her feet. “We thought you might not be cooperative. Come on. We’re going to try and change your mind.”

  She led him out of the bar. They walked side by side across the large flagstones of the fourth level. The moon was banded by thickening streamers of cloud, giving the impression of being behind a set of Venetian blinds.

  “See the moon?” asked Mary.

  Before Constantine could answer her, the bands of cloud widened, blocking out the moon completely. They quickly narrowed again, but now the moon had gone. In its place was a hole to somewhere else. Through it, a great eye looked down at Constantine. A blue eye; it blinked twice. Long curling eyelashes swept up and down, down and up.

  “Everything you do is being watched. This world has been constructed entirely for you. It can look like this…” She waved a hand around, indicating the Source, the bar they had just left and the nearby concert hall. She took hold of Constantine’s arm and swiftly guided him to a grey door set in the wall of the concert hall, one of the many exits used to empty the building quickly once the entertainment had finished.

  She stood Constantine before the door and looked the other way.

  “Or it can look like this,” she continued.

  The door swung open. Constantine looked through it into Hell. He saw flames. A demon was staring out at Constantine. It held a book tightly gripped in its twelve hooked hands. Constantine saw his name clearly inscribed on the front. The demon was standing by a strange machine made out of stainless steel, all blades and needles and with someone strapped inside it…. The door suddenly swung closed.

  Mary turned to face him, her face pale. “It’s an idle threat, Constantine. It costs too much running the simulation that keeps us all in here. The processing power could be put to better, more profitable uses. You, me, Marion and…the other one. We’re all personalities trapped in this bottle. They’ll just turn us off if we don’t deliver.”

  Mary shivered and looked up to the great eye, staring down from the hole where the moon had been. A look of defiance crossed her face.

  “I don’t care, Constantine. I’m telling you the truth now. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re more honest than we are. You didn’t volunteer to come in here. The real me, the one out there in the real world, has sentenced a copy of herself to oblivion for the sake of a bonus of a few hundred credits. What does that tell you about human beings, Constantine? Would you do that to yourself? I bet you would.”

  She began to shake; she looked as if she was about to start crying.

  “I don’t know what to say, Constantine. I don’t know what to tell you. This is the deal: you tell us what we want to know and we keep the simulation going. That way, you have a life; we have a life. You don’t tell us, and I don’t know what will happen. Maybe it will be what you saw through that door. Personally, I think they’ll just turn us off. Why throw good money after bad?”

  “How can I trust you?” asked Constantine.

  “You can’t. But what other choice do you have?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think.”

  Mary nodded. “I bet you do. Well, here’s something els
e to think about. Why are you protecting DIANA? Do you know they’ve already launched three attacks on this computer, the one in which we now reside? The third one almost succeeded. They got a worm into the system that would have wiped the entire simulation if we hadn’t found it in time. For DIANA, the best way to keep secret what you know is to destroy you.”

  Constantine opened his mouth to argue, but he couldn’t find the words. What Mary said made sense. He didn’t want it to be so, but it made sense. What would he do if he was outside and not trapped in here?

  And that was the point. He was outside. The real Constantine was out there somewhere. And Constantine, now shuddering violently in the warm night air, knew exactly what he would be thinking:

  At all costs the project must be protected.

  Somehow I must wipe out the copy of my personality.

  Herb 5: 2210

  The ship reinserted itself into normal space. Herb braced himself for the attack…

  Nothing happened.

  Gradually he relaxed. Herb felt like an old-fashioned wind-up toy. The tension would slowly build up inside him, hunching his shoulders, bunching his fists, restricting his breathing, until he noticed it was happening. Then it took a conscious effort to relax; release his pent-up breath in one huge sigh; force himself to breathe more slowly. And that would appear to work for a while, but all the time the tension was rebuilding, his body slowly winding itself up again.

  It was happening already as Herb scanned the viewing areas.

  Where were they? Where was the attack? Nothing. Only empty sky.

  Robert coughed. He was about to perform one of his little distractions; Herb just knew it.

  “The thing about warp drive, superluminal drive, faster-than-light drive,” said Robert, “is that once you make the jump, you can’t be tracked.”

  Herb was not impressed. He had been expecting better than this.

  “Well, yes. Everyone knows you can’t track someone making a warp jump,” he said.

  Robert grinned. “And they’re right. But what many people don’t realize—and it’s partly because they don’t take the trouble to think about the problem, and partly because the AIs keep quiet about it—is that you can still usually make a pretty good guess at a ship’s position.”

  “How?” Herb’s stomach was tightening with uncertainty.

  Where were they? Robert scanned the viewing field in the floor again and frowned. “The Enemy Domain saw us insert ourselves into warp at a certain point. There is a certain range of speeds at which we can travel using a warp drive, so that gives the Enemy a minimum and maximum distance that we can have traveled. Think of two concentric bubbles expanding outward from our starting point. As the outer bubble sweeps through a system, they will go on alert. After the inner bubble has trailed through later on, they stand down.

  “Once we jump, we’re like the particle in an electron cloud. The Enemy can map a probability of us being at any point within it. Once we materialize, the wave function collapses and a new set of equations comes into play. AIs have been solving these equations for decades. They’re good at them. They need to be; they’re using them to probe—” Robert paused. “Well, that’s another story.”

  Herb nodded blankly. He wondered how long this horrible, twisting tension could be held in by the walls of his stomach. He felt as if it would rupture in an acidic explosion at any moment.

  Robert reached into his left-hand jacket pocket and pulled out another VNM. This one was smaller than that machine of Herb’s which had been dropped onto the last planet. The new machine was an odd shape; it twisted around on itself like a Möbius strip. Robert placed it on the white handkerchief that was still spread out neatly on the sofa next to him.

  “So now we play a game of cat and mouse,” he grinned at Herb, “if you’ll forgive the cliché. Quantum entanglement provides for instantaneous communication, so the entire Enemy Domain will know of our position the moment we are spotted. Therefore, we must try and outguess them. We must try not to be seen.”

  Herb nodded. They seemed to be doing a pretty good job so far; there was still no sign of Enemy activity. He looked around the room, gazing at the viewing fields that covered the ceiling, the walls and the floor, knowing as he did so how unrealistic it was to expect to see anything out there but stars. Nonetheless, he kept looking. The fear that he would see a fleet of ships swooping toward them could not be shaken. Robert remained unfazed. He continued his lecture.

  “As long as we remain within the Enemy Domain, more and more of its ships can jump to place themselves within reach of the expanding spheres of our separate jumps. As the wave front passes them by, those ships will jump to follow it. When we jump again, they will repeat the maneuver. I’m afraid, Herb, we can’t keep this up indefinitely. If we wish to stay in here, then sooner or later the Enemy will catch us.”

  He smiled again. “I’m planning on later.”

  Herb glanced around the screens. He had been expecting explosions, attack ships, anything but this calm nothingness. Where had the Enemy got to? His voice sounded a little high-pitched as he spoke. “There’s nothing happening. Where are we?”

  Robert laughed.

  “About three hundred AUs from where we started, just floating in empty space. We’ve hardly moved at all. Despite all I’ve just said, they’ll never think of looking for us this close to our jump point.”

  Herb got to his feet.

  “I need to do something. I’m going to make a cup of fresh coffee. Do you want some?”

  “No, thank you,” said Robert. “It would be wasted on me. Robots don’t care for coffee.” He folded his hands on his lap and continued his methodical scanning of the viewing fields. Herb opened a cupboard in the tiny kitchen and pulled out the coffee tin. He pulled off the lid to the rich smell of chilled air and roasted beans.

  “Damn. Only half full. I forgot. The rest will be on the other ship. The replicating engine is set not to reproduce luxury goods.”

  Robert said nothing.

  Herb pulled a glass cup from another cupboard. “I’ve figured out why you dropped my VNM on that planet we just stopped at,” he said. “You want it to convert the nickel iron sea into copies of itself.”

  “Come on, Herb, you can do better than that. What about the VNMs already there? They’ll be trying to convert your VNMs back again.”

  “I know. I suppose you’ve got my VNM transmitting the friend code.”

  Robert nodded. “I could have done, but I didn’t bother. Remember Lesson One of VNM warfare, Herb: as long as your machines are converting the opposition at a faster rate than they are converting back, you’re going to overwhelm the Enemy in the end. It’s not about initial numbers, it’s about the conversion vector. You want it pointing in your direction.”

  Herb spooned coffee into the pot and poured nearly boiling water over the grounds. He nodded thoughtfully.

  “I see. But what’s the point? Once the Enemy AI figures out what you’re doing, it will just release a machine a bit faster at reproducing than mine was. They’ll get converted back and we’ll have achieved nothing.”

  Robert’s faint smile widened to a big white grin. “We’ll just have to keep the Enemy AIs concentrating on something else then, won’t we?”

  He looked back up at the viewing fields. “You’d better hurry up with your coffee. We jump just as soon as this ship hits point one lights.” He checked his watch. “That’s in about fifteen seconds,” he added.

  Herb hurriedly pressed the button on the coffee pot and the water shivered in a complex pattern, sending the grounds spiraling to the bottom to be held there. He carried the pot and his glass cup back to the sofa facing Robert’s and sat down, placing the pot on the parquet floor just by his feet. Holding the cup tightly in his hands, he gazed up at the ceiling viewing field. Robert had set a large crimson circle expanding across a 2-D slice of starscape. A gold marker, just off center, indicated their ship’s position. A second gold marker lit up, halfway between the ship a
nd the trailing edge of the bubble.

  “The second marker is where we’re jumping to. They should assume we’re somewhere in the crimson circle at the moment.”

  “Cunning.”

  “I know. But we won’t be able to pull this trick too often, mind. Okay, hold onto your coffee, we’re going to jump…”

  Herb bit his bottom lip…

  Their reinsertion was accompanied by a series of flashes so powerful they tripped out the vision on the viewing fields. Twice the rear fields dimmed, then the left-hand fields, then the portals in the floor at Herb’s feet. Robert thoughtfully plotted the explosions on a section of the viewing field just above Herb’s head. Ripples formed in the dark surface of Herb’s coffee. As he watched, the tiny waves began to interfere with each other and form a fizzing pattern of brown bubbling liquid. Herb stared at the cup with morbid fascination. The ship must be undergoing incredible accelerations for this effect to be noticeable inside the cabin. He dreaded to think what was happening to the fluids inside his own body. The butterflies in his stomach would have steel wingtips at the moment.

  “Got it,” said Robert, animation returning to his face. “Wiped the security net. That took longer than I expected. It’s a good thing we were through here earlier on. There are cut-down copies of my intelligence nested in the processors of a lot of the machinery in this system. Not strong enough to effect a change on their own, but they were helpful in the fight…”

  “We were through here earlier on?” said Herb.

  “Of course, when we scouted the territory. All those saboteurs we planted….”

  Herb felt shaken. He remembered Robert’s earlier demonstration, his simulation of their bodies splitting in two and splitting in two as they sailed through the galaxy.

  “How many of us are there?” he asked in a tiny voice.

  Robert shrugged. “I’ve no idea anymore. You haven’t grasped it yet, have you Herb? This war is about reproduction. Anything that can make a copy of itself does so, or else it gets swamped.”