Love and Other Thought Experiments

by Sophie Ward

  On the walk back he held Arthur’s hand. The rain had slowed to drizzle.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yeah. It was okay.’ Arthur swung Greg’s arm. ‘You?’

  ‘I fell over in the garden and broke all the plates.’

  The boy stopped. His eyes shone in the streetlight. ‘I broke stuff too! Did you get into trouble?’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Oh.’ Arthur walked on.

  ‘You got into trouble?’

  ‘I didn’t start it. Joe told me I was stupid to think my mother was in space and I threw my PSP and it hit the picture behind him and smashed the glass.’

  ‘We need to improve your throwing arm. Was your aunt mad?’

  ‘She said Joe should be nice to me because I was going through a difficult stage. But she said I shouldn’t make up stories.’ Arthur grabbed Greg’s jumper. ‘I didn’t make it up though, did I? You told me anyone can live in space?’

  ‘I did say that.’

  ‘Like in the story. As long as it is just right.’

  ‘Yes. But Arthur …’

  ‘That’s where she is.’ Arthur yawned. ‘She ran away. Like in the story.’

  The boy hooked an arm round the hip Greg had landed on when he fell. He lifted Arthur up and balanced him on the other hip. ‘Oof. Dude, you’re heavy.’

  The house was at the end of the next street. Greg thought he could just make the journey without dropping Arthur. He felt the weight of sleep in the child’s body and held him tighter.

  ‘Nearly there, kid.’

  ‘We don’t know the end,’ Arthur mumbled into Greg’s jacket.

  ‘What’s that?’ They reached the front door and Greg tried to reach his keys.

  The hall light came on and Eliza stood on the other side of the glass. Arthur reached out his arms for his mother.

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ Greg struggled to keep his balance as Eliza opened the door and Arthur leant toward her. ‘There you go.’ He rubbed at his ribs.

  Hal appeared from the kitchen. ‘Thanks, Els.’ He kissed the top of Arthur’s head, buried in Eliza’s neck. ‘Why don’t you come over to us next time?’

  Eliza smiled and tipped her chin to Arthur. ‘Say goodnight, Arthur.’

  The boy held one hand up.

  ‘Goodnight, Arthur.’ The two men kissed Eliza and headed out into the damp night.

  ‘We don’t know the end,’ Greg said as they got into the car.

  Hal glanced at him as he checked the rear view mirror and pulled away from the kerb. ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘It’s what Arthur said. He said we don’t know the end.’

  ‘He’s right.’ Hal nodded.

  ‘That’s why we can’t understand.’

  ‘Is this to do with Rachel?’

  Greg looked at Hal. His husband’s face was blurred through his fogged glasses and the shadows of street lights but Greg could see the statuesque head and waves of dark hair, the deep ridges of his brow and the short beard that softened the lines of his jaw. He put a hand on Hal’s leg.

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

  The hand on Hal’s thigh pressed down a little. Seven years. In that time they had married, had a child, lost a friend and a parent, bought a home, formed an allegiance against the world. A long time, so much lost and won, and a short time, a fraction of their lives.

  Hal parked the car and the two men sat in the dark, their breath clouding together. At the far end of the street a woman struggled across the uneven pavement with a pushchair full of tins. In Illinois, his mother would be home from church, making lunch with the TV on in the background. She would expect his call.

  7

  Arthulysses

  The Twin Earths

  The philosopher Hilary Putnam wanted to examine if words could be defined by external properties, not just the meaning we attribute to them. He wrote the Twin Earth thought experiment in which a person travels to another planet, Twin Earth, where water has the same name and properties but a different chemical composition. When a Twin Earther refers to water they are actually referring to a substance made up of XYZ not H2O, although it seems to be, and they think it is, the same thing.

  Meanings just ain’t in the head!

  Hilary Putnam The Meaning of Meaning

  A short way from the dock, Arthur changed his mind and pulled the ship to the left. He spun unevenly for a few minutes in the magnetic field. Two AU from home and this was the distance that mattered: less than a basketball hoop. Arthur nodded. His moms had said it to him enough times: the last inches before you’re born are the most dangerous. He remembered them both saying it, though it must have been Eliza. That happened a lot. He could see Rachel’s face but it was Eliza’s voice that he heard. He couldn’t really remember much from being five.

  The pilots were taught that each docking was a kind of birth. They were to bring new life to the rocks on which they landed; terra-forms, or terror-forms as the enviromists called them. Arthur didn’t think exploration was political. The way he saw it, human nature was stupid enough to almost destroy itself, and clever enough to survive. He was part of the solution.

  Lights flashed on the console and he answered the signal on his headset.

  ‘Captain Pryce, why did you disable the automatic docking procedure?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Zed. I wanted a few more minutes out here.’

  ‘You’ve had 163 earth days, Captain Pryce,’ said the male voice, ‘It’s time to land.’

  He let the computer tell him what was expected of him for some minutes. Lag. How long had he been out for last time? He must have been roused after the maximum sleep permitted. Three days in stasis, his vital signs monitored, his nutrients intravenous. In all the trials and shorter trips he had woken alert and passed the cognitive assessments easily. But after the first month of this trip he had begun to dread full consciousness and on awakening would stare at the roof of his sleep pod as forlornly as a teenager on a school day.

  His heart beat erratically and he put a hand to his chest.

  ‘Captain Pryce, you need to return to the dock. Are you in need of any help? Your blood pressure is elevated. We recommend some refreshment.’

  The grey light of Deimos moved through the deck as the ship pivoted slowly. Mars was visible on the console, a caramel glow filling each screen in turn as the different cameras changed focal length. Arthur had been down for the Mars Two rota. You were given six placements in your time at the company, two long-haul trips and four short journeys to local space stations. Once you reached a base, you had to stay a year. Arthur’s last tour on the Space Eye, an earth orbit station, had coincided with the company’s plans to develop the second base and he’d missed the Mars launch date. This trip to Deimos was a consolation prize. With the return journey, he’d be gone for two years.

  ‘You’ll be part of the team, Pryce.’ Arthur’s boss had frowned at him from the lousy phone monitor in his office.

  ‘Sure. Like I helped you move house when I was on the Eye. All those smiley faces from space.’

  ‘I hope you’ll be sending the base more than that.’

  Space Solutions were a few years away from being able to pilot rockets on local journeys from Mars. Most of the ships were reusable but they could only take two landings before they required significant repairs. Even with the magnetic landing sites, there was always too much damage to the ship. Arthur would be alone on the small moon.

  ‘You got a problem with the solo trips?’

  Arthur stared at Jennifer’s pixellated image. She’d have him taken off the rota completely at the slightest hint of trouble, personal relationship be damned.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘What’s the ship?’

  They gave him the Spirit 2040 and he’d signed on for the Deimos trip.

  His eyes flicked across the images of Mars rotating on the screens above him.

  ‘Captain Pryce, please focus on the console.’

  ‘Ho
w long have I been awake?’

  ‘Awake?’

  ‘Conscious? How long was it from when I woke up to now?’

  ‘You programmed me to wake you after 72 hours, Captain Pryce. That is the maximum acceptable …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. But how long have I … shit, never mind.’

  ‘Captain Pryce, please concentrate on the program sequence.’

  All his training psych evaluations came back positive for solo excursions; well suited for communication with the AI units and skilled at biofeedback. If pressed, Arthur would have said he preferred the absence of human communication. His was the tablet generation and he’d embraced every tech evo available as soon as he could, thirsty for the relief of the electronic interface. He’d fought constantly with Eliza for screen time.

  ‘You should be out in the real world, meeting real friends. It’s so unhealthy to be glued to your computer all day.’

  In vain Arthur argued that his hobby was no different from Eliza’s book reading. At least he interacted with his virtual environment instead of passively receiving information.

  ‘That is absolute proof that your imagination is being killed. There is nothing passive about reading. Come and see the research we’re doing on the brain’s electronic responses to art.’

  As Arthur saw it, Eliza’s science was a convenient smokescreen for her prejudice. Where were the studies that examined how the integration of AI and human intelligence would leave her evidence for biological synaptic responses in the Dark Ages?

  ‘That’s the future you’re building, Arthur. Your generation. It doesn’t have to be that way.’ Such was the impossibility of argument when you were met with personal responses to every valid point.

  Only Greg had understood the importance of the world available to Arthur online.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, kid. Your mom works in a modern laboratory but she still thinks a computer is a combination of a filing cabinet and an abacus, and the internet is a useful way for old folks to keep in touch with each other. Your dad’s not much better. When I first told Hal I was a mathematician he asked me to work out the bill in the restaurant. It’s no use telling people that I don’t know my times tables from an ant nest, they don’t get it. They want to live in a world where they can walk to a Post Office to get a stamp or see if an apple’s ripe before they take it home. They don’t understand they’re free of all that. They think we’re weird for working with the future? They’re the fetishists, stuck in the past.’ Greg cuffed his stepson on the shoulder. ‘But, you know, don’t tell I said so.’

  ‘Captain Pryce? You are distracted. I am overriding the pilot system and turning us back to the docking station in E minus 60 seconds.’

  Arthur took a breath and looked at the console in front of him. The lights on the landing base were still green for go.

  ‘There’s no need to do that. I’ve got it.’

  The software tracked his eye movement for a moment.

  ‘Very well, Captain Pryce. On docking please report to the med bay.’

  It had been a mistake to christen the new operating system Zeus. Even with the personality settings on neutral, Arthur felt the system’s superiority bias. Other pilots named their OS after parents as a psych shortcut, that way you acknowledged some authority but maintained a healthy suspicion of their motives. His colleagues told him it wasn’t helpful to think of an OS as a best friend; it inhibited the human brain’s defence mechanisms. Trust was better on a case-by-case basis. ‘Especially in space’, Jennifer had added when they talked about it later. Arthur wondered if most pilots had a different relationship with their parents than he did. He liked his mothers and fathers. Maybe that’s what came of having more than the regular amount from the get go. Anyhow, he certainly wasn’t going to call the computer ‘Hal’. He was going to a rock named Deimos; Zeus had seemed appropriate. What he couldn’t tell, after more than six months of interaction almost solely with the computer, was how much of what passed for the OS’s personality was his own projection, and how much was programming. It’s just a word, he reminded himself as he took hold of the controls, a rose and all that.

  He swung the Spirit back to the landing position and began the approach. He was used to the task, had performed this particular landing on the simulator over a dozen times and had docked at the Space Eye only last year. He’d even completed the simulated landing on the old ISS at Johnson. Second in his cohort. So why could he feel the sweat cooling on his skin now?

  The rhythmic rocking increased and reduced as the magnets found each other and locked into a controlled attraction. Ever since the West Coast Superhighway had been completed in 2021, all possible conduits had been magnetised. Arthur was ten when the original San Francisco to LA route went into production, and he remembered cars. Magnets couldn’t compete for the thrill of the engine but no one died at or under the wheel any more. E-cars drove themselves and parked themselves. There were hardly any drivers, only passengers. Even rockets used magnetic fields to navigate landings when they weren’t returning to Earth.

  Still, this particular docking system had never been used in the analogue world and the engineer who built it had voiced some reservations about the structure on her return. Arthur was here to save the ship if anything went wrong. Zeus was here to save Arthur. At least, that’s what the company manifesto claimed. Arthur hoped it would never come down to a choice. Zeus sure seemed fond of the ship.

  Arthur’s module spun as it had always done, allowing a simulation of gravity. The increasing speed was visible on the monitors.

  ‘Captain Pryce, the dock will connect in E minus 12 seconds.’

  ‘That’s what it says right …’

  ‘Nine, eight, seven …’

  He missed his old OS.

  The moon stopped moving on the monitor and disappeared from view as the ship matched its speed and dived into the Voltaire crater where the base was housed. The deck shook and several violent jolts threw Arthur forward against the harness so that it was a moment before he felt the change in gravitational force. Alarms and lights signalled from the console and stopped as suddenly as they had started. Arthur realised he was holding his breath. They had docked. He was alive.

  ‘Captain Pryce, phase two of the docking procedure is complete.’

  Small dips and judders continued to shake the ship. He checked the alignment and proceeded to engage the units that would let him cross to the moon’s single-person base. The sooner he set up the next phase, the greater his chances of success for the year’s mission.

  One year. Not including the two AU on the journey back. He had enough decent food supplies for twelve weeks, after that he hoped the terrarium would have established, or it was back on the hot mush. Not quite up to his dad’s standards but some of the flavours had been Hal’s major contribution to his supplies. A vast improvement from the freeze-dried meatballs he had tried as a child when his dreams of being an astronaut had begun. Hal and Greg still argued about which one of them had inspired Arthur’s star wanderlust, but all his parents were responsible for getting him this far.

  He thought of Eliza at work in London, going home each night to an empty house. He thought about Rachel, the patchwork idea he had of her, a tilt of the dark head, her gentle eyes that everyone said he had inherited, the sound of her bracelets when she put him to bed. ‘She loved you,’ Eliza said. ‘She loved you before you were born.’ And now? young Arthur had wondered, when Eliza kissed him goodnight in the many evenings that followed. But Eliza didn’t like to talk about where Rachel had gone and maybe, for Eliza, Rachel had never left.

  ‘Please proceed to the med bay before preparing for phase three. We will wait for further instructions from earth.’

  The med bay was the capsule behind the one that Arthur currently occupied. In transit it spun at the same rate as the pilot capsule and provided a similar gravitational force. All the internal surfaces of the ship were covered with shelving, netting, hooks, wires and cables, giving the appearance of a tec
h junk shop and reducing movement in the pilot’s dock to necessary operations only. The second module was even smaller, ‘compact’ as described in the company’s literature. It was also the sleeping area.

  ‘It’s just the two of us here, Zeus. You mean, “Get on the bed”.’

  ‘As you wish, Captain Pryce. Although I am not technically “here” and the concept of meaning for geographical locations other than their designated use has no significance for me.’

  It was poor programming, Arthur reminded himself as he crawled through the carbon tubing at the centre of the ship to the other capsule, enjoying the absolute lack of gravity between the two modules. He made a note to check on his bone density when he landed. Weightlessness was a drug; the more you had, the more you needed.

  He strapped himself to the bed and hooked up the IV system to the port located above his collarbone for the OS to administer the fluids and nutrients it deemed necessary.

  ‘Your blood pressure is still elevated, Captain Pryce. Your landing history indicates this is unusual.’

  ‘We don’t need to wait for base. Start phase three.’

  ‘Initiating phase three. Please remain stationary. You are being monitored.’

  Arthur switched the OS’s commands to visual. He still had the opportunity to override the system unless his signs of life were compromised. A sanity valve for the ‘voice in your ear’. He remembered the lectures he had attended as an undergraduate on the dangers of strong AI, the films over the last century where robots had inherited the earth. The singularity was a myth but apparently Zeus hadn’t got the memo.

  ‘Play my space mix.’

  To the opening sounds of ‘Once in a Lifetime’, Arthur unhooked the wires and pulled himself back through to the cockpit. He felt clammy, unfocused. The reduced gravitational force should have helped with the body blow of the landing but every muscle seemed to ache with the effort of coordination. The least Zeus could have done was give him a painkiller. He sat buckled into the pilot’s seat and studied the data feed. Damned if he was going to ask Zeus for an aspirin.