Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  No, I said sulkily.

  How much further on are you?

  My AI said – you said – (I was confused). You, or my AI at the time anyway, said I should wait here on Rain for a little while.

  It— I– whoever — it may have been affected more seriously by the interstellar travel than was apparent. I can't believe it told you to come all the way down here – this far south.

  No, I agreed. That was my idea.

  Your idea to stay so far from the elevator? What if you have to make a quick exit from the world?

  I didn't reply to this. Rain washed down, clean and fragrant.

  Look what you have done on this world! said the AI. Nothing. You killed a human being, and for what? You are pathetic.

  I was deciding that this AI was much less amiable than my last one, but then I interrupted myself, because that would be tantamount to accepting that the AI was real, and not merely a hallucination. It might only have been my brain's way of attacking itself.

  Let me tell you something about yourself, the AI went on. Perhaps this will make it plain to you why you were chosen to commit the crime. Look back on your time here! You have travelled amongst thousands of unique, fascinating human beings and you have seen none of them. The only person you have even registered, the only one whose name you bothered to learn, is the one you have now killed; and you only got to know her because she was unusually persistent in staying close to you.

  Again, it worried me that this AI knew so much. Where have you been anyway? I asked. Why has it taken you so long to appear?

  Don't change the subject! You are the most solipsistic human being in the whole of the t'T. This seems certain. For some strange reason you lack the basic human empathetic abilities. You hardly notice other people exist.

  I don't know, dear stone. What do you think? Perhaps my narrative is bare of other people, but I think I do notice things. I was noticing the precise formations of water, running in strands like rope down the chipped, wonky bark of the trees opposite. I was noticing the smells of earth and metal that were in the air. But my AI had another point.

  How many people have you met, since you arrived on Rain? Hardly any. Of those who have sought you out and introduced themselves, in friendship, how many do you remember? Only the one individual who impinged so closely on you that you had to kill her.

  I'm not sure, I said, what point you're trying to make.

  No point, said the AI. It is why you are so well suited to this job that your employers want you to do. I just want to remind you that they exist – remember it!

  I'm sure they do, I replied. I'm out of the jailstar, aren't I? Somebody got me out.

  They did. And I'm reminding you that the deal was that they wanted a job done. If you do not do it, then they will hand you back to the prison. Do you understand?

  I know, I know, I fretted. I haven't forgotten.

  In that case, you won't want to be staying here. There is a small world, remote, on the border of the Bulk. You will travel to Narcissus, and then to Nu Fallow. From there you will go to this planet and execute your commission.

  'Kill them all,' I whined. 'But how will I do that?'

  That is your problem, that is why you have been hired. You must do it, and it must be complete — everybody must die, there must be nobody left alive.

  Alright, alright. 'The dotTech won't grow in my body,' I wailed aloud.

  I know.

  'I'm sick! It hurts!'

  I know. I know. I'lll advise you on how best to treat your wounds. They will improve.

  'Why won't the dotTech stay in my body?' I moaned. 'It is designed to help us. It is supposed to help us. But it won't help me!'

  I know.

  'Is it because I am a bad person? Is that why?'

  A bad person, repeated the AI, but it didn't say anything else. Then the rain came falling down again, very boisterous this time, like a child having a tantrum and bashing at all the leaves.

  To Narcissus

  1st

  Dear Stone,

  How was I to do it? This was the problem which refused to leave my mind in peace, which is what you'd expect me to say, of course. How to kill these people? I had an entire world to kill – no easy task, that. Perhaps now you have some sense, dear stone, how hard it is to kill human beings when their bodies are supported by dotTech. Even killing a single individual, like Enkida, had taken all my strength, all my will. Multiply that by so many people. How many?

  Many, many.

  It is enough, stone of mine, to jitter the mind, the sheer number of human beings. It is one of those things about which children, paradoxically, are wiser. The lurching shifts of scale – like those occasions when we wake up abruptly in the night, feeling as if the world we sleep upon is swivelling sharply from horizontal to vertical and tipping us over. That same panicky, finger-spasming sharpness of sensation. Of course it relaxes a moment later, but for a moment everything has been redefined. You don't know what I'm talking about, stone (you do, though, doctor, eavesdropping as you are). Well, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. You realise that the universe contains many millions of galaxies; but the millions part makes no sense, so you swoop down on the one galaxy. This one! Wellhello! But this galaxy contains four hundred million stars, and once again the number blurs in the mind, so you collapse the vision down to one star. And around this star are several planets, and on this planet there are sixty million human beings. Six clicks with you, and you don't quite lose it at the —ty, but then there is the million again, so your brain silently corrects the focus, slams down to the scale of one individual. You are an individual, you can understand the individual. Except, wait, no, inside this person are billions of nano-machines – thousands of millions, each one built out of cunningly interlocking atomic spars and struts, motors and neural gates. Close your eyes: take it down to the level of these machines. Living in the intermittent flow of the great blood vessels, with the backdrop of burring, thrumming heartbeats and the electrical crackle of nerves firing. Here you are, and now the picture clears; because although these atomic building blocks are not pure, they cannot be broken down into more than a dozen or so components before you reach the fundamental sparkling prickliness of space-time out of which everything is made. And this machine, this single example of dotTech, is like an individual; it moves through its environment with a job to do, it is faced with problems and it solves them. This is enough: but then comes the horrible vertiginous spasm – for an instant the vista opens all the way back up to the top, to the billions of nano-machines in the billions of human individuals around each of billions of stars in billions of galaxies. Falling . . .

  And then you recover, clutching at the mattress. Because you don't have to kill all these things. You need only destroy sixty million people, on one planet circling one star. And, in a way, that is easier than killing a single individual. Work out how to do it. Do it. Job completed.

  Did I think of, perhaps, not doing it? But then I would go back to jail. Ah, choice. Commit the crime and be free; live crime-free and go to jail. When my mind was ordered enough, after the fear-induced, disease-sharpened chaotic mania of my time on Rain, I did think through the options; and I decided that first and foremost I did not want to return to the jail.

  I also wanted to see what would happen next. Yes, I think that is the purest form of words I can find to express my state of mind.[10] I was curious as to who would employ me to kill these people. I wanted to know why, and I wanted to know who, but above all I wanted to know why. My new AI – if that's what it was, lurking in my head, and not simply some paranoid delusion of my own, engendered by sickness and depravity – my new AI was even less forthcoming than my previous one.

  'You know,' I would insist. 'You know.'

  Nothing to say about that.

  Tell me!

  Nothing, nothing. O, o, o, o. But I travelled, and I looked about myself. I had been locked away from everything, from all news and all culture, for many years. I was l
ike a child again, learning it all for the first time. I thought sometimes of Agifo3acca, living in his sprawling spaceship, devoting himself and his life to studying the Great Gravity Trench. He was as wrapped up in himself as I had been in jail. Later I would come to envy that single-mindedness; for the moment I was thirsty for knowledge of the worlds of t'T. My mind was parched. I wanted to know everything that had been going on in my absence.

  2nd

  Stone,

  I lived on Rain for another six or seven months, with a constant running commentary in my head from my new AI. One of the things that bothered me about this new incarnation of my mental voice was that when I finally did slip away – travelling up to orbit, letting the foam envelope me, drifting out into space and then away at super-light speeds – my AI came with me. It was the usual experience; the comforting womb-closeness of the foam, the sensory deprivation, speeding through nothingness, hundreds of light years of nothingness.

  I arrived at Narcissus Tuporylov, a large system with several worlds. It was the usual sensation of being woken from a pleasant sleep; a slightly crotchety, heaving feeling in the depths of my bones, a sick pulling in my gut. Then I was in one of the famous Narcissus flat platforms, having the foam washed from me by a large man entirely covered in blue string-like hairs, from the crown of his enlarged head over his face and neck and down his naked torso. His legs, I remember thinking, were ugly; dressed in thread-sacking pants with large rents in the cloth through which bizarre little quills sprouted.

  This is the sort of precise detail you notice when you come round from long distance travel. Travelling at faster-than-light jars the mind, puts it into a sort of semi-trance state. When you arrive at the other end it can take several hours for this autistic, super-observant, unthinking mental state to wear off. It has something to do with the repeated quantum jolts of faster-than-light travel, or so I understand.

  But my AI didn't seem to be affected by the journey. As soon as my mind was working well enough to comprehend, it started speaking to me again. Spend a week here, it told me. Here at Narcissus. Go down to the world.There is an amount of information that will he useful to you on this world. With that, you can travel to Nu Fallow, and on to your target.

  'Wait,' I said aloud, still groggy. 'You sound extremely sane.'

  I?

  'My last AI,' I said, laboriously working through the sentence, 'was more or less scrambled by faster-than-light travel. That's what faster-than-light travel does to AIs. I know. You're not resilient the way organic minds are. The quantum buffeting degrades your capacity to operate.' I said something like this.. Perhaps I wasn't quite as eloquent as I'm suggesting here, but that was the gist of it. Actually (I remember now) it took three or four conversations with my AI to get all this out, before I was mentally focused enough to notice that there was something wrong about the lucidity with which my AI spoke to me.

  Nonsense, it said. Now we have little time. We must move on to Nu Fallow soon.

  'Something is wrong about this.'

  I am a new AI, said the AI brusquely. Think of it as a process of the old AI laying eggs, or . . . no, let us say eggs like insect eggs. The programmes for designing an AI can be comprehended in an old-style linear processing machine. When we come out of faster-than-light travel it is possible for a new AI to grow.

  Now none of this made any sense. Had there even been time for a new AI to grow? Could AIs bypass the constraints of faster-than-light travel in this way – truly? I thought not. In turn that made me wonder if the voice were a schizophrenic part of myself and not an artificial intelligence at all. Also I didn't like the metaphor of 'insect eggs'. It reminded me too much of my experiences with the maggot-infestations on Rain. 'Why must I kill all the people on that world, AI?' I said, as I was queuing for the planetary elevator.

  I cannot tell you – be quiet! Don't speak aloud like that! Subvocalise! These people will hear you. Imagine overhearing such a sentence!

  But the other people, even if they did overhear my words amongst the gabble of their own conversations, would not have registered what I was saying. What I was saying had no purchase on their way of seeing the universe. Kill people really made no sense as far as they were concerned.

  Why must I kill these people? I repeated, subvocalising. AI, tell me that.

  I can't tell you, leave it at that.

  Why?

  I can't tell you. That's all.

  But I thought, trying to bury the thought away in some part of my brain that was not connected to the vocalising areas, that perhaps it knew no more about it than I did. Perhaps it knew exactly the same about the whole business because it was me, another part of me. Then I thought: if that's so, it hardly matters if I think this thought free of vocalisation or not; I can overhear I at any place in the brain.

  Stone, perhaps it seems incongruous to you that I even went through this process of working it out. I never doubted that there was some external agency that wanted me to perform this enormous crime. I had, after all, been freed from jail – I did not believe that I had the ingenuity to free myself. I had also been met outside by Agifo3acca the Wheah and his great spaceship. I did not see how I could have arranged that rendezvous from within the jail; and certainly I did not see how I could have arranged it and then forgotten that I had arranged it. And if there were no external force that was behind the mass murder I was contracted to commit, then why would I be doing it?

  I fretted over this during my first few days on Narcissus. Had I lost part of my memory? Was there something in my past that was leading up to this grand crime, as if this crime were the crown of a life set aside from the perfect Utopian existences of all the other human beings in the worlds of t'T? This flawless environment, combined with flawless physical health, almost invariably promoted flawless mental states. But it occurred to me that my mental health was a precarious thing, separated from the perfect societies of t'T; and that my perfect physical health was a distant memory, excised from me by my executioner. Perhaps I was too mad to know how mad I was. But, then again, I decided that I was obviously sane enough to doubt my sanity (this is human logic, stone; we humans think like this all the time). If I were truly mad, I reasoned, surely I wouldn't know I was mad? Wasn't that the way with madness? Didn't my very worrying about being mad in a perverse way guarantee my sanity?

  You should stop thinking along these lines, the AI cut in, as if it had been eavesdropping on my thoughts – as if it were capable of doing that! This sort of thinking isn't going to help you get your job done. And I was immediately fretting again.

  3rd

  Dear Stone,

  Narcissus is a world of towering vertical natural structures. Sometimes it is known as 'Crevasse-world'. Most of the planet is covered in complexes of rocky cliff-faces and kilometre-deep gullies, topped by towering pinnacles, spires of rock, some so high they actually leave the atmosphere. It is a world of crevasses and very few flat spaces. In the southern polar continent there are some plains on which pigmy native creatures graze, but most of the rest of the world is divided between startlingly severe up-down geological structures and the elongated striated waterways that the natives call 'oceans'. In fact there is no single body of water on Narcissus grand enough to merit being called an ocean; much of the planet's water lurks in very deep, black, stagnant pools at the bottom of the many thousands of crevasses. At a few places, these crevasses run into one another delta-like and the canyon walls fall away to reveal open water; but such features are more loch than sea.

  Looked at from space, there is something exquisite in the fractal filigree of Narcissus's shapes; particularly the various extrusions of stand-alone rock that reach tens of kilometres upwards. Sharpened like knives by the winds, some of these structures are only a few metres thick, but all are at least a hundred and some many tens of hundreds of metres tall. They are usually found together, hundreds of enormous triangular shapes like serrations that reach far into the sky, supported by a particular long-strand form of neo-igneous r
ock and by Narcissus's relatively low gravity. From orbit these things look less teeth-like and more like hairs, fronds, something so fine it is amazing they do not snap. It is possible, apparently, to leap from a synchronised orbit onto the tip of one or two of these larger structures, and then 'ski' down to the habitable levels of the planet. I have not done this, but I understand from what I have been told that the 'ski-ing' must take place inside a sealed container.

  Before humanity came to this world the atmosphere was layered sharply with steady-state weather systems. At the lowest levels, where the black sluggish water lies in the shadows at the bases of great natural clefts and shafts, heavier gases roiled – perfectly poisonous; carbon dioxide and chlorines. At higher levels, where the majority of rock formations peaked, there was a nitrogen-rich atmosphere; this provided the air breathed by the vegetative grazing-herding animals that clustered on the southern plateau. Higher, the air thinned and thinned to argons and ozones, crystal-sharp clouds of white skimming past the occasional spire of rock, all silhouetted against the purity of blue.

  Then people came, fortified with their dotTech, and changed the world to suit themselves. They brought oxygen; adapted the grazers of the southern continent so that they wouldn't be killed by it; they pumped away the poisonous gases of the lower regions, and built themselves cities. With the heavier air, and the disruption to the atmospheric ecosystem, erosion changed its habits, but that is the way of things.

  Homes were drilled into the canyon walls, and built on the few horizontal surfaces. Some of the crevasses were so narrow it was possible to reach through the open window of your home and shake hands with the people who lived opposite. In others, the spaces from cliff-face to cliff-face were many metres, or even kilometres. Here the Narcissians began their distinctive and t'T-wide famous building habits of stringing diamond-cable from wall to wall, weaving ornate and elaborate spiderwebs. Younger generations of Narcissians preferred living on these cable walkways; running from strand to strand, balancing on a flat or clambering up and sliding down the sloping wires. People would weave a tighter mesh together as a base. Cities grew up in the tangle of cables. Soon there were many tens of thousands of these net-communities, strung out between canyon walls, or in some rarer cases strung from rock spire to rock spire.