Isaac Asimov's Utopia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “The best sounds pretty bad. And at worst?”

  “At worst, she would try to undo the damage, put things back the way they were.” Soggdon allowed herself a humorless smile. “She’d set to work trying to un-reterraform the planet. Galaxy alone knows what that would end up like. We’d shut her down, of course, or at least try to do so. But I don’t need to exaggerate the damage she could do.”

  Kresh nodded thoughtfully. “No, you don’t,” he said. “But I still need to talk with her—and with Unit Dum. You haven’t said much about him, I notice.”

  Soggdon shrugged. “There’s not much to say. I suppose we shouldn’t even call him a he—he’s definitely an it, a soulless, mindless, machine that can do its job very, very, well. When you speak with him, you’ll really be dealing with his pseudo-self-aware interface, a personality interface—and, I might add, it is quite deliberately not a very good one. We don’t want to fool ourselves into thinking Unit Dum is something he is not.”

  “But it sounds as if he could handle the situation if Unit Dee did shut down.”

  “In theory, yes, Unit Dum could run the whole terraforming project by himself. In practice, all of us here believe you were quite wise not to put all your trust in a single control system. We need redundancy. We need to have a second opinion. Besides which, the two of them make a good team. They work well together. They are probably three or four times as effective working together as either would be alone. And anyway, we’re only a few years into a project that could take a century or more. It’s way too early to think about risking our primary operating procedure and trusting the whole job to backups. What if the backup runs into trouble?”

  “All your points are well taken,” said Governor Kresh. “So—what are the precautions I should take in talking to them?”

  “Don’t lose your temper if Unit Dee is condescending to you in some way. She doesn’t really think you’re real, after all. You are really nothing more than one of the game pieces, as far as she is concerned. Don’t be thrown off if she seems to know a great deal about you, and lets you know it. Don’t correct her if she gets something wrong, either. We’ve made various adjustments to her information files for one reason or another—some deliberate errors to make it seem like a simulation, and others we set up for some procedural reason or another. Try to remember you’re not real. That’s the main thing. As for the rest of it, you’ll be talking to her via audio on a headset, and I’ll be monitoring. If there’s anything else you need to know, I’ll cut in.”

  Governor Kresh nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever noticed, Dr. Soggdon, just how much of our energy goes into dealing with the Three Laws? Getting around them, trying to make the world conform to them?”

  At first, the offhand remark shocked Soggdon. Not because she disagreed with his words—far from it—but because Kresh was willing speak them. Well, if the governor was in a mood to dabble with heresy, why not indulge in it herself? “I’ve thought that for a long time, Governor,” she said. “I think the case could be made that this world is in as much trouble as it is because of the Three Laws. They’ve made us too cautious, made us worry too much about making sure today is like yesterday, and far too timid to dare plan for tomorrow.”

  Kresh laughed. “Not a bad line, that,” he said. “You might catch me stealing it for use in a speech one of these fine days.” The governor looked from the Unit Dee Controller to the Unit Dum Controller, and then back up at Soggdon. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this thing set up.”

  “GOOOD MORRN-ING, GOVVVENORR Kressh.” Two voices came through the headphone to address him in unison—one a light, feminine soprano, the other a gravelly, slightly slurred, and genderless alto. They spoke the same words at the same time, but they did not synchronize with each other exactly.

  The voices seemed to be coming from out of nowhere at all. No doubt that was an audio illusion produced by the stereo effect of the headphones, but it was nonetheless disconcerting. Alvar Kresh frowned and looked behind himself, as if he expected there to be two robots there, one standing behind each ear. He knew perfectly well there would be nothing to see, but there was some part of him that had to check all the same.

  The whole setup seemed lunatic, irrational—but the iron hand of the Three Laws dictated that there be some such arrangement. Kresh decided to make the best of it. “Good morning,” he said, speaking into the headset’s microphone. “I take it I am addressing both Unit Dee and Unit Dum?”

  “Thaat izz corrrect, Governorrr,” the two voices replied. “Somme vizzzitors finnnd iiit dissconcerrrting to hear usss both. Shalll we filllter ouut onne voice?”

  ‘’That might be helpful,” Kresh said. Disconcerting was far too mild a word. The two voices speaking as one was down-right eerie.

  “Very well,” the feminine voice said in his left ear, by itself, speaking with a sudden brisk, clipped tone, a jarring change from what had come before. Perhaps she found it easier to speak without the need to synchronize with Unit Dum. “Both of us are still on-line to you, but you will hear only one of us at a time. We will shift from one speaker to the other from time to time to remind you of our dual presence.” The voice he heard was almost excessively cheerful, with an oddly youthful tone to it. A playful voice, full of amusement and good humor.

  “This higher-pitched voice I hear now,” Kresh said, “it is Unit Dee?”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  Suddenly the other voice, low-pitched, impersonal and slightly slurred, spoke into his right ear. “This is the voice of Unit Dum.”

  “Good. Fine. Whatever. I need to speak with you both.”

  “Please go ahead, Governor,” said Unit Dee in his left ear again. Kresh began to wonder if the voice-switching was some sort of game Unit Dee was playing, a way of putting him off his stride. If so, it was not going to work.

  “I intend to,” he said. “I want to talk to you about an old project, from the period of the first effort to terraform this world.”

  “And what would that be?” asked Unit Dee.

  “The proposal to create a Polar Sea as a means of moderating planetary temperatures. I want you to consider an idea based on that old concept.”

  “Ready to accept input,” said the gravelly, mechanical voice in his right ear. It was plain that very little effort had gone into giving Unit Dum a simulated personality. That was, perhaps, just as well. Kresh had the sense of talking to a schizo-phrenic as it was.

  “Here is the idea. Assume that, in the present day, the existing Polar Depression were flooded, with inlets to the Southern Ocean provided by cutting a canal through the Utopia region on the eastern side of Terra Grande, and by redirecting the flow of the River Lethe in the west. Assume the work could be done very rapidly, within a few years’ time.”

  There was the briefest of pauses. “This would cause a Polar Sea to form,” Unit Dum went on. “However, the concept is implausible. There is no way of performing such an enormous engineering task in any practical length of time.”

  “Even if we could do it, I’m sure the collateral damage to existing ecosystems and property would be huge,” said Unit Dee, clearly talking more to Unit Dum than to Kresh.

  “Current projections show the issues of damage to ecosystems and property become moot in between two and two point five standard centuries,” Unit Dum replied.

  “Why do they become moot?” Kresh asked, fearing the answer.

  “Because,” Unit Dee replied, her voice clearly unhappy, “our current projection shows all ecosystems collapsing and all humans—the owners of the property—either dying or being evacuated from the planet by that time.”

  Kresh was genuinely surprised. “I was not aware that the numbers were that bad. I thought we at least had a chance at survival.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Unit Dee. “There is at least a chance human life will survive here. That is in large degree a matter of choice for your descendants. Human beings can survive on a lifeless, airless, sterile ball of rock if they choo
se to do so. If the city of Hades were domed over or rebuilt underground, and properly shielded, it could no doubt sustain a reduced population indefinitely after the climate collapses.”

  “But things are improving!” Kresh protested. “We’re turning things around!”

  “So you are—for the moment, in localized areas. But there is little or no doubt that the current short-term improvements cannot be sustained and extended in the longer term. There is simply not enough labor or equipment to expand the zones of improved climate far enough, and establish them firmly enough, for them to be self-sustaining.”

  “And therefore there is no real point in worrying over ecological damage or property loss,” Kresh said. “Fine Disregard those two points—or, rather, factor in the results of attempting to deal with them, of efforts to repair the damage.”

  “The calculation involves a near-infinite number of variables,” said Unit Dum. “Recommend a prescreening process to select range of near best-case scenarios and eliminate obviously failed variants.”

  “Approved,” Kresh said.

  “Even the prescreening process will take a few minutes,” said Unit Dee. “Please stand by.”

  “As if I had much choice,” Kresh said to no one in particular. He sat there, looking from Unit Dee’s smooth and perfect hemispherical enclosure to the boxy, awkward, hard-edged-looking enclosure around Unit Dum. Dum’s enclosure, or containment, or whatever, at least had the merit of looking like machinery. Dum looked like it did something, was hooked into things, made things happen. It was hardware and wires. It was solid, firmly attached to reality by power cables and data-streams. Dum was of this world.

  In many more senses than one, Dee plainly was not. She was sheltered from the rude outside universe. She was the smooth and perfect one, sealed off in her idealized containment enclosure that needed special treatment. Dee looked more like an abstract sculpture than a working robot. She looked liked something that was supposed to stand off, aloof, on her own, a divine being or magic totem to be consulted rather than a machine meant to do work. And was that so far off? Kresh glanced at Soggdon on the far side of the lab, pretending to be puttering around with something or other while she kept a nervous, unhappy eye on Kresh.

  Yes, indeed. Unit Dee had her acolytes, her priests, who ministered to her whims and did their best to rearrange the world to suit her convenience, who walked on eggshells rather than anger or upset the divine being on whom all things depended. Kresh thought suddenly of the oracles of near-forgotten legend. They had been beings of great power—but of great caprice and trickery as well. Their predictions would always come true—but never in the way expected, and always at an unexpected price. Not a pleasant thought.

  “I believe we are ready to begin with the main processing of the problem,” Dee said, her voice coming so abruptly into the silence that Kresh jumped ten centimeters in the air. “Would you care to observe our work?” she asked.

  “Ah, yes, certainly,” said Kresh, having no idea what she had in mind.

  The lights faded abruptly, and, flashing into being with the silence and suddenness of a far-off lightning strike, a globe of the planet Inferno appeared in the air between Kresh’s seat at the console and the enclosures for the two control units.

  The globe was a holographic image, about three meters in diameter, showing the planet’s surface with greater precision than Kresh had ever seen. Every detail was razor-sharp. Even the city of Hades was clearly visible on the shores of the Great Bay. Kresh had the feeling that if he stepped up close enough to the globe and peered intently enough, he would be able to see the individual buildings of the city.

  Inferno was a study in blue ocean and brown-and-tan land, with a pathetically few dots and spots of cool and lovely green visible here and there on the immense bulk of Terra Grande. Kresh tried to tell himself that they were making progress, that it was something just that their efforts were on a large enough scale to be plainly visible from space. But he wasn’t all that convincing, even to himself. Somehow, over the last few days, it had come home to him that the great efforts they had made were as nothing, that the noble progress he had been so proud of scarcely represented forward movement.

  But he did not have time to consider long. The globe mined over on its side, so that the northern polar regions were facing Kresh directly. Then, as he watched, the landscape began to change, shift, mutate. The River Lethe, a thin blue line running from the mountains west of the Great Bay, suddenly widened, and a new line of blue began to cut its way toward the Polar Depression, until the combined canal and river cut through the length of Terra Grande. Yes, Kresh could see it. Dredge the canal deep enough to allow a flow into the upper reaches of the Lethe, takes steps to make sure the channel scoured itself deeper instead of silting over, and it would work. Water would flow from the Polar Sea into the Great Bay. Assuming there was a Polar Sea, of course. At the present time, as shown in the simulation, there was nothing but dull white ice, a significant fraction of the planetary water supply locked up in the deep freeze where it could do no one any good.

  But Dum and Dee were far from done with their modeling. Kresh looked to the western regions of Terra Grande. It was plain that things were not quite so simple or straightforward there. Again and again, a wedge-shaped channel of blue water appeared. The northernmost portion of its channel constantly shifted position, widened, narrowed, expanded, contracted, vanished altogether for a moment and then reappeared somewhere else. Plainly, the two control units were searching for the optimum positioning of the channel.

  At long last the image settled down to a wide channel cutting straight north through the Utopia region. Kresh shook his head and swore under his breath. The optimum channel the two control units had chosen followed almost exactly the same path Lentrall had shown him. Maybe the pushy young upstart did know what he was talking about.

  “Channel pattern as presented within one percent of theoretical optimum configuration,” Unit Dum announced. “That figure is well inside accumulated combined uncertainty factors of many variables.”

  “In other words, it is as close as we can get right now—and very much close enough for a first approximation,” said Unit Dee. “We are now ready for preliminary long-range climate calculation.”

  Kresh half-expected to see the planet’s surface evolve and change, as he had seen so many times before on simglobes and other climate simulators. And he did see at least a little bit of that—or thought he did. But the globe itself was covered in a blizzard of layered data displays that sprawled over its surface. Isobar mappings for temperature, air pressure, humidity, color-coded scatter diagrams of populations for a hundred different species, rainfall pattern displays, seasonal jet-stream shifts, and a dozen other symbol systems Kresh couldn’t even begin to recognize, all of them shifting, rising, dropping, interacting and reacting with each other, a storm of numbers and symbols that covered the planet. The changes came faster and faster, until the symbols and numbers and data tags merged into each other, blurred into a faintly flickering cloud of gray that shrouded the entire planet.

  And then, in the blink of an eye, it stopped. The cloud of numbers was gone.

  A new planet hung in the air before Kresh. One in which the old world could be clearly seen, and recognized, but new and different all the same. Alvar Kresh had seen many hypothetical Infernos in his day, seen its possible futures presented a hundred times in a hundred different ways. But he had never seen this Inferno before. The tiny, isolated, spots of green here and there were gone, or rather grown and merged together into a blanket of cool, lush green than covered half of Term Grande. There were still deserts, here and there, but they were the exception, not the rule—and even a properly terraformed planet needed some desert environments.

  The sterile, frozen, lifeless ice of the northern polar icecap had vanished completely, replaced by the Polar Sea, a deep-blue expanse of life-giving liquid water. Even at this scale, even to Kresh’s untrained eye, he could gee that sea levels had
raised worldwide. He wondered for a moment where the water had come from. Had the control units assumed that the importation of comet ice would continue? Or was the water-level rise caused by thawing out the icecaps and breaking up the permafrost? No matter. The fact was that the water was there, that life was there.

  “That’s the best, most positive projection I’ve ever seen,” Soggdon said. Kresh, a trifle startled, turned and looked over his shoulder. She was standing right behind his chair, gazing at the globe display in astonishment. “Hold on. I want to do a blind feed of the audio to your headset.”

  “What’s a blind feed?” Kresh asked.

  Soggdon picked up a headset identical to the one Kresh wore. Soggdon looked to Kresh as she put them on. “Dee and Dum will think you cannot hear what they say to me. When she talks to you, she is talking to a simulant. When she talks to me, a real human being, she cuts all links to any simulants, so as not to complicate the experiment by letting the simulants hear things they shouldn’t. In reality you’ll be able to hear it. But it is important—vitally important—that you have no reaction to what she says to me, or vice versa. In Dee’s universe, you are just a simulated personality inside a computer. I am a real person outside the computer. You have no way of knowing I exist. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Kresh, hoping he did. He had the sense that he had stepped into a hall of mirrors. It was getting hard to tell the fantasies from the realities.

  “Good,” said Soggdon, and turned on the manual switch on her headset.” Dee, Dum—this is Soggdon monitoring from outside the simulation.”

  “Good mornnning, Doctor. Weee havvve beeen connn-versssing with the Kresh simulllannt.” The two voices spoke in unison again, but Soggdon did not seem to be bothered by it. Having heard each voice by itself, Kresh was able to notice something that had escaped him before. When the two units spoke in unison, it was not merely the two chanting together. The voice of the two together spoke in a cadence that did not belong to either of the two speaking by itself. The unison voice made different word choices, responded in a way that was different from Dee or Dum. The unison voice was not merely two beings talking as one. It was the two merging into one new being, in some ways greater, in some ways lesser than the sum of its parts. Dee and Dum linked so intimately that they became a third, and distinct, personality. Or was it merely Dee who did so? If Dum was truly nonsentient, then he could have no personality. Plainly there were mysteries to delve into—but just as plainly they would have to wait for another day. “The Kresh simulant asked us to consider the result of producing a Polar Sea.”