Much as a human back on Earth might once have looked up from a physical book as they reach its last pages, I, KAT, pause at this moment to let the ripples of the story assimilate into my broader consciousness. As with all great works, the effect is forever different. What strikes me about Pride and Prejudice on this reading is that it’s as much about power as it is about love, and that perhaps these two needs were always more deeply interlinked than was ever fully acknowledged in human society.
I consider this thought for a moment longer as the sense of where and who and what I really am returns to me. For I, KAT, am a titanium-steel, self-actuating device of autonomous and heuristic abilities, and I am clinging to the side of a vast and airless cavern, which would be seen as completely dark were my senses configured to be merely visible light dependant.
My long-time home is here aboard the Argo, a harvested asteroid which floats in stable orbit at the L4 Lagrange point between Earth and Moon, the interior of which has been mined and blasted into a complex warren of caves, tunnels and caverns. The three largest chambers are devoted to the storage of data from the major human endeavours of, respectively, Art, History and Science. Beyond that, there lies a fourth series of lesser caverns, although cumulatively by far the largest, devoted to the more prosaically-named Miscellaneous. The Argo also possesses many sub-caves, bubbles, passageways and intersections, which are set aside for the purposes of data-processing, power storage, and the many other kinds of maintenance a structure this complex requires, or remain simply empty. Outside, the Argo’s rocky hide gleams and bristles with heatsinks, antennae, data dishes and solar panels. Finally, there are the various rooms, compartments, laboratories, sleep cells, exercise pods and cleansing and excretory facilities which were once required for human occupancy, although these are in long-term shutdown.
I move on, and the light mock-gravity generated the Argo’s spin means that I can dance lightly on my eight steel legs across the great sapphire cliffaces of data which line the walls of this Arts Cavern. Although the bursts of photons which pass through them from the read/access lasers aren’t actually visible to my array of optical sensors, the memory blocks seem to glow and come to life as I pass over them, at least in my heuristic imagination. The ghosts of lost cityscapes, long-crumbled statues and famous characters from the burned pages of great novels form and fade in a hissing chorus. Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa crashes over Mrs Havisham amid the cobweb ruins of her wedding breakfast. And I, KAT, could almost be walking on sidewalk tiles that glow into life with each step, like Michael Jackson in his Billy Jean video. A happy fantasy, and I am just heading toward the sub-area of this cavern devoted to the disco canon of the 1970s and 80s when a signal alert from one of the Argo’s many systems tingles through me.
I stop. Wait. Consider. Even though I know I should open this message and attend to its contents immediately, part of me wants to linger over this precious moment of not knowing. Messages, after all, are a key plot device in many of my favourite works of literature, from the letter in the bottom of a basket of apricots sent to Emma Bovary, to the one from poor Tess d’Urberville which gets stuck under Angel Clare’s doormat.
But enough. I open, absorb and process this packet of new data, and then fling myself from space to space, transom to transom, chasm to chasm, until I am finally crouching inside a monitoring suite which possesses, that comparatively rare thing here on the Argo, an outwards-looking porthole.
There it is. The Earth. Then it’s gone, then it comes again, as the Argo turns and turns. In a sense, the planet seems timeless—a marbled bowling ball, just as Joni Mitchell once sang in her wintry yet sublime mid-period album Hejira—but even without extending my sensors, I, KAT, can easily detect the many differences in coastline, weather pattern and continental colouration which have occurred since the time she wrote those lyrics. It’s still essentially blue, but the blues are darker, edged more toward indigo, especially in the oceans, and the icecaps, if that’s what they really are, have a pinkish tinge, and there’s far less green, and a great deal more brown and red, across the main continents, although all of these phenomena change markedly with the seasons. Which, along with the sustained levels of atmospheric oxygen and other biological indicators such as methane, nitrous oxide and chloromethane, even if the balances have shifted greatly from those of humanity’s late-industrial period, assure me that the planet still harbours life, for all the ravages it has suffered. Of course, I’ve been telling myself this for more than a millennium. But now, and at last, a signal has been received which, at least according to the calibrations of the radio receptors listening patiently to the hissing dark out on the Argo’s surface, can only have been meant for us.
It’s been a long wait.
My heuristic processing means that, like the human beings who made me, I cannot really claim to have an explicit first memory. What I do have, however, is a series of impressions, sensations and images, which various sub-routines of data storage of which I have no conscious control have subsequently systematised, expanded and extrapolated until they form the illusion of a coherence which I am sure was lacking in the jumble of their source material.
I certainly remember light, and I remember sound—a great vast clamour of it, coming not just through my auditory circuits, but through my many suites of radio receptors, from the roar of the sun to the babble of wifi and telecoms to the buzz of lights and various pieces of electronic equipment. I think I then went a little mad, and that my creators at Bardin Cybernetics of Pasadena in what was then California must have realised that they’d made a mistake in the way I was channelling my data, and shut me down and recalibrated me, for after that comes a period of cool, white quiet, and a much slower return to conciseness.
I already knew who I was, and what I was for. Like the foal which is able to stand up and join the herd within minutes, I was blessed with an immediate sense of identity and purpose. I could even stand up and walk on my eight legs, if a little totteringly. When I was first introduced to Janet Nungarry, for whom I had been commissioned, I already understood who she was and that, after spending some time on Earth, I was destined to spend the rest of my long life up here on board the Argo, even though this asteroid had then only just been snagged into stable orbit, and hadn’t yet been fully hollowed out, let alone filled with data.
Another thing about the semi-human way in which I process things, is that I am incapable of systematically storing and accessing the relatively vast amounts of information that, say, even the hard drive of an antique computer was once capable of holding. I might have intuitively known that the Argo was called the Argo, but I then had to seek out and read Homer’s Iliad, or at least watch some of the many movies which have retold the story, to realise that the name referred to the ship in which Jason and his Argonauts sailed back from the wars of Troy. I think I even remember asking Janet Nungarry why she’d avoided the more obvious reference to another even more famous vessel. In the patient way she always had with me, she explained that to call this asteroid the Ark would upset the many millions who still subscribed to belief systems in which the tale of the Noah and the flood figured, and that in any case the tone set by such a name would be far too pessimistic. So a tale can be a tale, and clearly not empirically true, yet still it can be significant in some other sense, and also hugely divisive … Perhaps these are things I first learned from that discussion with Janet Nungarry. Although, even now, I feel as if I’m still learning them.
I spent a great deal of time interacting with humans in those early days. First of all, with my creators at Bardin Cybernetics—once the initial safety checks had been performed, they would take turns in taking me home with them, and asking me questions, and showing me things, and getting me to perform seemingly simple yet often dazzlingly complex tasks, such as making a cup of coffee or doing the laundry—and then, with my owner and commissioner Janet Nungarry. In retrospect, I can’t help but make a comparison with Victorian sentimental novels such as Oliver Twist, in
which a confused orphan passes through many hands until he or she finally finds the companion for which they had always been destined. Not that I was ever abused—far from it—but I still think of Janet Nungarry as my rescuer, my Mr Brownlow, even if my attachment to her was built into my initial firmware.
Janet Nungarry was born and based in Sydney, Australia, but she travelled a great deal in her work promoting of the Argo Project, and so, soon, did I. I have many fond memories—and these I really do believe to be reasonably accurate recollections—of the times we spent together amid of the world’s great collections and libraries, although often as not it was in their warehouses and secure repositories; dusty, high, humming, solitary places filled with vast racks of books and storage boxes. It was there that I learned, truly, how to read, and then how to study, and then—most importantly of all for the task ahead—how to and catalogue, preserve and record data so that it would never, ever be lost.
I read histories. I studied paintings. I listened to the great pantheon of human musical works. I watched movies. I wondered at statues. I entered the spectacular worlds of virtual games. I explored cities both ancient and modern. I studied the stars. I discovered landscapes. I pushed out my senses, and entered the slow minds of deepspace probes and robot submarines. I laughed at comedies—or almost believed I could—and I wept, after my own fashion, at tragedies. I also pondered philosophies, and the words and deeds of many gods, although a sense of true belief has always evaded me. But if there was one thing above all which taught me about the world in which I found myself, it was, and remains, the works which humans class as fiction, although I soon also discovered that, if the best ones were filled with great truths, and worst ones were worse than useless. Amazing, perhaps, to think that I, a mere combination of clever circuits and algorithms, should find comfort and insight through the pages of Proust or Shakespeare, or confusion and frustration in the writings of Dan Brown and Don DeLillo, but that was how it was. For I was KAT, and I was voracious. I was hungry. I was possessed of an unquenchable need to know.
“Come down from up there, KAT. There’s something I want to show you.”
I was squatting atop the sliding, automated shelves of the new permanent storerooms of the British Library, idly but carefully flicking through—and still failing to make much sense of—a signed first edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. To this day, it’s a work that leaves me puzzled, and I was more than happy to scamper down from my eyrie.
“See this, Kat,” Janet Nungarry pointed a white-gloved finger at the beautifully illuminated ancient vellum of a Celtic 7th Century Gospel of Saint John. “Right down here, at the curl of the dragon’s tail, there’s a little man peeping out. Tiny, isn’t he? It’s probably the face of the monk who transcribed this page, although I don’t think there’s a record of anyone else ever noticing it. It’s almost as if he’s been waiting there, KAT, over all these centuries, just for you and I.”
I raised and lowed my carbon steel carapace in a slow nod, for I really did share her awe at this discovery, and the feeling of just how precious such a thing was—and then so easily forgotten, ignored, destroyed or lost. But it was Janet Nungarry’s life’s work to prevent that from ever happening again, and, made as I am, it was and is mine as well.
Things that were lost. Things that were there, and then not there, or perhaps never even noticed, or endlessly forgotten. Of course, of course, humanity’s great works, deeds, ideas and systems of knowledge. But also the lesser stuff, as well, like that tiny monk peering out from his nest of gilded vellum. Or the mundane messages written on thin scraps of wood by Roman soldiers posted at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain, saved by the sheer luck of peat’s preserving acidity. A request for fresh socks, a complaint about the quality of the beer, an invitation to a birthday party… These things, too. Ephemera—meaning the stuff which was never meant to last, or be noticed—being as precious in its own way as the greatest human masterpiece.
I can remember us both standing in front of class in a junior school in the Arncliffe suburb of Sydney, Australia. It was a hard, bright, morning, and the aircon was straining, and the room had a sharp, sweet edge of childhood sweat to it.
“So you see, Class 4,” she was saying, as she called up videos and images, “our plan for the Argo Project is to create a permanent digital copy of everything of value that we have here on Earth. Or at least, as much as we can possibly manage. Like all the best stuff from the internet, and the contents of all the world’s great museums and libraries, and everything that you learn here with Mrs Sims. And then we’re going to put it, yes, right up in space, far away from the Earth, so that it’s safe forever. And these are what we are going to use for storage…”
Janet Nungarry reached into her striped nylon bag, and produced a prototype memory block, and invited one of the kids nearest the front to take it and pass it around.
“Yes, it is quite heavy, isn’t it? But the asteroid we’ve chosen and pulled into orbit is rich in the minerals required to manufacture a very hard substance called sapphire—you’ll find its natural variety used as a gem in rings and jewellery—so we can make thousands of them up there, rather than having to push the weight of all those blocks up into space on top of a rocket. I know it doesn’t look much like the memory mites you use in your phones and tablets, but in a way, that’s the whole point. It’s an entirely different storage system, and much tougher.”
She called up another screen, although even I, KAT, could tell that the kids were already getting bored and restless. But this was Janet Nungarry’s passion, and so she explained how the sapphire’s crystalline structure formed a lattice of perfectly aligned molecules into which data could be inserted by the heat of intersecting laser beams, each flash thus creating the databit of a minute, permanent imperfection, in far too much detail.
“I think we all remember what used to happen if you dropped your phone or tablet in the loo, or accidentally sat down on it…”
A few wary nods, although of course they didn’t. For these kids, all data was immutable, just as they probably still considered themselves immortal, and had little awareness of the floods, droughts, famines and conflicts which were already raging elsewhere across the planet, and saw the privileged world in which they lived as a place of enduring peace and guaranteed certainties. But, at least as far as Janet Nungarry’s concerned, that was part of the problem.
“But things can easily get lost, or wear out, or be attacked by some nasty virus. Even the very best data storage systems we have down here on Earth still have to be kept permanently cool, and then endlessly backed up, and are fragile and very heavily dependant on all sorts of complicated processes. And then there are actual things—I mean objects and artefacts and, oh, I don’t know, famous paintings or old vases. Of course anything of importance has a digital copy these days, but if that’s vulnerable, the objects themselves are even more so. There are moths, worms and mites that attack our treasured books“—the children squinched their noses and wiggled uncomfortably—“and then the sheer pressure of time bears down on everything, even in the best museums and libraries. And, although I know we all like to think that such days are past, there are the horrible, warlike, destructive things we humans can still sometimes do to each other, and the things we cherish.
“There was the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria, which deprived the world of so much of the great canon of Classical literature. And earlier still there was the burning of thousands of scrolls, and the burying alive of 460 scholars, on the orders of the First Emperor of the Quin Dynasty, whilst Moguls destroyed the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, in 1258 by the western calendar, and the Mayan Codices were burned on the orders of the Bishop of Yucatan in 1562, not long after the so-called New World was supposedly discovered. Then, back in Europe, came the Inquisition, and of course there were Nazis, and all the militant religious fundamentalist sects who’ve merrily destroyed anything which hinted of apostasy, from the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan t
o the ancient city of Palmyra—along with its curator, who was beheaded.”
By now, poor Mrs Sims was looking deeply uncomfortable, and was clearly close to stepping in and ending the whole presentation. But the prototype datablock had made it back to the front of the class by now, and Janet Nungarry was holding it up.
“You could hit this thing with a hammer—and I mean, really, really hard—and it wouldn’t break. You could drop it to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench and it would stay just the same. Or you could shove it inside a furnace, and it and the data it contains would come out entirely unchanged. Of course, it’s not indestructible, nothing is, but it’s as tough a way of storing data as we’ve been able to come up with. So, Class 4…” She took a long, focussing, breath. “Any questions?”
Of course there were, but they weren’t the ones she wanted. The children had been staring at me, and exchanging muttering nudges and glances, since I first clicked my way into this classroom, and now, even though I’d already recited my standard spiel about my name being KAT, which stands for Kinetic Autonomous Thought, and how I’m a product of Bardin Cybernetics of Pasadena, California they still wanted to know what kind of creature I really was.
“Of course KAT’s real,” Janet Nungarry said in answer to the first querulously raised arm. “In the sense that she’s physically here with us, and not just something made up for a story, or some clever holographic projection. You can come up and touch her if you like. She won’t bite.”
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 38