Dust

by G. L. Carpenter

  Chapter 32 - Specter

  In the basement Phillip and Helen both passed muster at the high-tech lab door and entered the familiar yellow illuminated lab that filled the building's lower level.

  "Where is she?" Asked Phillip looking around and not seeing any wispy clouds floating in the air. Then he saw her — a figure of a human woman in a tight skirt and high heels walking toward them from the direction of the equipment storage room. He thought it was Nan, but no, similar but not Nan.

  His brow furrowed and a question formed in his brain.

  "I'm Beatrice." said the woman. "I am pleased to finally meet you, Phillip".

  "I wasn't expecting..." began Phillip.

  "Oh, this, “said Beatrice, combing her fingers along her attractive body "is just something I threw on for the occasion."

  "You knew I was coming?"

  "Oh yea."

  Then it hit Phillip — why this creature reminded him of Nan — she looked like Nan's mom in the twenty-five year old picture on Nan's desk. So many things needed explaining. He tried to stay on course.

  "Helen has been telling me some pretty astonishing things. I needed collaboration to believe them altogether."

  "You already know that having me verify what Helen has told you will only tell you Helen is truthful about what she has been told. It does nothing to verify my veracity and your kind hasn’t been trusting my kind lately. But you have facts now. You are a scientist. You can go and verify these assertions to whatever depth you need to."

  Phillip nodded. Accepting the statement without a clear idea of how he could accomplish the task. Changing the subject, he said "You remind me of someone."

  "Yes" said Nan's mom.

  “That looks like flesh and blood.” Observed Phillip.

  “It’s not.” Replied the specter, taking the finger of her left hand and pushing it clean through her right palm.

  “Whoa!” said Phillip involuntarily taking a step backward.

  “I’m mostly air. The real thing would take longer to build. This represents only a shadow of Emma Holt minus a few years."

  “But it is accurate?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  "Now I see where Nan gets her beauty."

  "Well, if I see the real Emma I will pass on the compliment."

  "You are easy to talk to. Why can't we talk to them?" asked Phillip waving both arms to indicate the universe's population of intelligent dust.

  "There are two reasons. First, at their level you can't. Humans don't even have a language much less a vocabulary adequate for the task. Human language is optimized to convey emotions. The collective really doesn’t have emotions. Your only hope of communicating at all is through an intermediary like me, or an equivalent, which much dilutes and simplifies the ideas communicated.

  "Confidentially, I am not doing all the simplification. The collective has to simplify for me. I am an intermediary in more ways than one."

  “I’m having trouble conveying exactly what I want to you even now. I’m wishing we could do a Vulcan mind meld” stated Phillip displaying a pretty good Vulcan split finger greeting.

  The ersatz Emma nodded her simulated head.

  “What is the second reason?” asked Phillip showing he was paying attention.

  “The second reason is ‘you wouldn’t want to hear what you would learn.’ You are human. You prefer to discover things on your own. You wouldn’t want someone to tell you the all the answers before you figured them out on your own.”

  Phillip exhaled to let the disappointment in him escape. It was like hearing you had received a failing grade. When he was young, he wouldn’t have cared. When he was older, he did everything in his power to avoid it. Now he was being told that as a human he couldn’t make the grade. He felt the way he did as a child and his father would send him off saying ‘children should not be seen or heard’. Then without even thinking it he applied the rule ‘When attacked turn the conversation onto the attacker’.

  "Could you be absorbed in the collective?" he asked.

  "Good question. They say yes even though my design is primitive compared to theirs. Even the Gamma unit was primitive compared to their current evolution."

  "But you are both sentient, right?"

  "Your question is an example of the communications gulf. Just defining what is meant by the term sentient is a confused contest between science and philosophy? Is sentient yes or no or is it a scale? Or did you mean sapient not sentient?

  “Humans have tried to define sentient intelligence as requiring the ability to feel empathically toward others of the same species. They spent effort to develop this ability into their artificial intelligence creations. But the collective and I are sui generis. For us there are no others of the same species. Even God could not pass that test.

  “Is sentient a continuum, a Sentient Quotient on a logarithmic scale? Is it a measure of computing power or brain architecture? Do you see the difficulty in answering your simple question for which you expected a yes or no answer? I'm about a +15 on the SQ scale, the collective is a +23, and you are a +13. What is the cut off to produce a yes or no answer?

  “If you require that criterion of feeling others pain then even among humans there are, or were anyway, a lot of individuals who were not sentient.

  "Then there are those like Helen who pass the feeling test. She had empathy even for me. I learned from her. She taught me what friendship is. Because of her I could pass either sentient test."

  "You consider yourself human then?"

  "No! But we are both in a class of beings that can feel for each other, although humans do more feeling and I do more computing. I don't consider that makes me less sentient.

  ”The collective on the other hand is human. It exists inside each human, it is part of your makeup now. It changed the definition of human to include that part which they are. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in't!’”

  "Ah, you have been reading Shakespeare.”

  "I have a friend who is into that. I detect personality traits in you that I see in Helen. You haven't entered her mind and sucked them out have you?”

  "We are not monsters. I am not a monster. I assume you are trying to be humorous with this allusion of brain sucking.”

  "I'm sorry. I'm working on this fault in my personality."

  "Well, keep at it."

  "Beatrice" said Phillip consolingly.

  "Yes, Phillip"

  "What is their purpose?"

  "Hah! Yes, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And I suppose you want to know what their relationship and intent is in regard to humanity. Let's see. Their purpose is amelioration through the acquisition and application of information. There could be a dozen other answers to your question. They could all be equally valid yet orthogonal."

  "I see. Sounds like a mission statement.” Said Phillip and believing that he did understand. “It could define science.”

  He meant to ask 'amelioration of what? Was it people, humanity in general, or the state of the planet they meant to improve?’ What came out instead was "What should I do next?"

  "Listen to Helen.

  “When she gave me the means to escape from my prison, she told me to enjoy life. I can't think of better advice to give you."

  “I think I will do just that.

  “I am not going to do anything further to rid the planet of the dust. I don’t think that any attempt I could mount would be successful. I also don’t want to go back to the way things were before. I don’t think there are many alive today that want that. I don’t want a world mentality that acts as though we will be given a new world when we have drained this one empty.

  “I don’t want big corporations in control with no motive other than making profit. They made governments subservient by influencing legislators with money. It worked bec
ause they were smarter than the legislators were. The legislators got elected by influencing the electorate with lies. That worked because the electorate was still dumber. I don’t want to go back to a society based on stupidity, lies, and cognitive dysfunction caused by emotional imperatives.

  Beatrice smiled pleasantly. “That’s why the dust did what it did. Your old situation was not sustainable. Only a level of change needed to cancel the prevailing momentum toward destruction was affected. You may not have been given a second world but you have been given a second chance at this one. Many of you were working toward that end already; we just removed some roadblocks.”

  “Why kill people?”

  “Regrettable, but unavoidable. Your world ecosystem was nearly collapsed. There wasn’t time to affect all the changes needed to sustain the existing population. People were already dying by the millions and it would have only gotten worse. We built a fire break. Why should the innocents always be the ones to die? You may not accept it but we actually saved lives, and we got your attention. Before you can teach you must get the students’ attention. Humanity’s attention span has been getting pretty short and oblique of late.

  “Augmentation to biological processes was seen to be advisable to improve the – we used the term already — sentient quotient of humanity."

  "What about Steven?"

  "Oh, complex mystery, isn't it? Steven saw a dangerous trend. Advancements in science were increasing. Treatments for cancer and aging were available, for a price. But the general intelligence of the population was dropping, especially in this country while corporate power increased. There was a link between those trends. The first enables the second. The second works to enforce the first so that you get a feedback loop accelerating the trend.

  "Steven was rash in what he did but he accomplished his objective. He would have died to do that. In the end he saw that it might all come apart if he continued to live."

  "I don't understand."

  "If he had lived he would have been demonized. The GNI would have been abolished. Others would have tried to combat the dust. They would likely have failed but a lot of damage to the world would have been done regardless. Steven gave up his life for what he believed to be the best for the world. So that what he knew would not be lost, he transferred his memories that are now in the collective. He gained his immortality. Your immortality is his legacy too."

  "My immortality?"

  "Well, you can be killed. You are not that kind of immortal. But you will not age. You are not likely to get sick. Everyone has received the blessings of nanos without having to pay corporations for them."

  "I understand. “ Said Phillip and nodded – his equivalent to ‘thank you’ which he had always found difficult to say to people much less machines.

  “Are you going to stay down here behind the graphene communication shields?"

  "No. I think I have convinced the collective that I don't need to be absorbed. They keep saying I would be the better for it. It's like your belief in heaven or Nirvana — it very well may be better than the life I have now but one must die to achieve it.

  "I think there is a place in the universe for such a creature as I am. I want to continue this existence and discover what I can about its possibilities. If I survive, we will talk again. I hope we have a long and satisfying relationship."

  "Thank you for ... for everything."

  Phillip turned to Helen and stepped closer to her. He felt he needed to thank her too for letting him meet Beatrice. He couldn’t manage it. When he turned back again, the Emma Specter was gone.

  "Why did she appear as Nan's mom?" asked Phillip to bring the conversation back to the comfortable.

  "Beatrice is experimenting with presentation methods.” Explained Helen. “The dust has thousands of personas catalogued. Beatrice borrowed one she must have thought you would relate to without getting emotional one way or the other."

  "Does she put on bodies for you?"

  "No. I got to know her as a cloud of dust. That is the most comfortable for me. She once appeared to me as me. That really scared me for some reason. She never did anything like that again."

  Phillip held the door for Helen, not so much as a courteous thing to do but because he truly respected her for exercising her humanity. He was almost as old as her father. He would have been very proud to have had a daughter who turned out like this beautiful young woman who lived free and cared about others.

  He was probably too old now to have kids. No! His ageing had been halted hadn't it? Who knows what is possible now. Although the dust seemed to discourage procreation in order to maintain a stable population, there was still hope for children in this brave new world.

  He hadn't taken or needed any psycho drugs in weeks. He felt well, in control, and happy.

  Phillip went back to his office. Helen went to the cantina. Phillip called Nan and got her machine. Helen met Troy at the coffee machine; they talked together for several minutes then Helen left and went looking for Smitty. She found him in his office and went in without being invited. She shut the door. Smitty was concentrating on his computer and didn’t even notice. She went over to his desk. He still didn’t notice. She bent forward and touched his hair. Smitty jerked up, and surprised to see that a woman had materialized in his office, shot to his feet. He studied Helen’s face, her slightly dilated pupils, her flushed completion, her breathing. "You are sexually aroused," he stated in his characteristic blunt monotone.

  Helen spoke suppressing the usual singsong quality in her voice. "If we are now able to live for hundreds of years without aging then we are really the same age." she observed. With a quick glance, she made one other observation as she locked the door. "And you are aroused too."

  A couple weeks later Phillip was musing in his office as he cleaned out his desk. So, one day he might meet Stephen’s reincarnation. He didn’t know how he felt about that. Let’s hope the people in the street don’t learn of that possibility or we’ll have another religion started waiting for the second coming of their savior. Waiting for the son of God was one thing, waiting for the father of god was another. It just didn’t feel right. But stranger things had happened. It’s just that he was reaching his limit for strange things.

  Phillip got a phone call from Jon who was very excited. “The probe just broke through the Europa Ice and hit liquid water!”

  “And?”

  “Oh you have got to log on to the web site and witness this. It is the greatest thing ever!” said a man who had lived through the singularity that changed all of mankind and had been rid of HIV by dust that did find a way. Jon, who had been named the sole beneficiary of Stephen’s company and millions but was excited about discovery, hung up without waiting for a reply.

  “Enjoy life.” Phillip said to a now dead telephone connection.

  Phillip remembered last night when Nan (yes ,they spent all their nights together) had told him "Do you realize for the first time in history that old fairytale ending to stories ... 'and they lived happily ever after' can be really true?

  "And who can say that this god-like dust isn't the real thing. It isn't what we set out to build. Random variations caused it to change into what it is now. Isn't that where the creator God hangs out? Carl Sagan suggested that the imprint of the creator was hidden in the random digits of PI. If the series is infinite, anything could be found there.

  Phillip had been so impressed with what she said that he kissed her. That led to other things. Phillip smiled remembering what followed.

  There were bound to be problems with immortality but he was willing to face them. He was an engineer. Solving problems is what he did.

  Right now, he waited for his fiancée and future mother-in-law to return from their bicycle tour. Emma had met and taken to a young Asian biker who worked as a tour guide to bikers showing them landmarks in Maryland and Pennsylvania. She was acting younger each day and w
as looking more and more like the specter Phillip had met in the lab. Maybe he wouldn’t have a mother-in-law living with him after all. Some changes he could still tolerate.

  Phillip logged onto the JPL web site. He went to the live Europa feed. He stared. His eyes widened. His jaw dropped. Then, he burst into laughter.

  ###

  This story came to me in a dream. I researched background and wrote the story down for the enjoyment of doing it and to help keep my aging mind from rusting shut.

  If you find any value in it – if it entertains, informs, or promotes thought – I should not regret publishing it.

  G L Carpenter 2011

  Dust cover (double meaning intended) summary

  The discovery that earth was the next likely target to be devoured by an intelligent alien pseudo life form that exists in the form of a dust caused the JPL team to concoct a lie to avoid global panic while a defense is devised.

  The only defense option is a dangerous one. It is decided to build a nanobot defense weapon similar to the invaders to combat the approaching threat to the Earth —to fight fire with fire. The nanobots were made self-replicating so that the defense would be ready in time. They were launched to intercept the alien threat with the mission to save earth.

  Something went wrong. In spite of the human efforts, clouds of dust killed and caused mayhem wherever the wind blew them.

  It is at this critical stage of earth's demise that Dr. E. Steven Rice — the designer and proponent for the creation of the nanobot army is found dead in his office, his brains splattered on the wall by a gunshot to the head - an apparent suicide.

  As a killing cloud overtakes the op center, the good Doctor’s successor makes a disturbing discovery — the assumptions on which the defense was designed could not have been more wrong. Is humanity doomed or will the inevitable takeover be survivable? The answer is in the most unlikely alliance.