Reiterated: the complete short fiction, page 6
I was silent for 12 seconds, evaluating alternatives. There weren’t many. “The Oort Cloud.”
No sharp reaction on Aaron’s telemetry. He was utterly taken aback . . . I think. “The—Oort Cloud? Sol’s cometary halo?” I nodded my lens assembly in confirmation. “Why?”
“The Oort Cloud contains significant quantities of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.”
Aaron slumped back into his ugly corduroy chair. “Carbon, nitrogen, and—“ He frowned. “CNO. CNO-cycle fusion. That’s it, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Facts on CNO fusion.”
Normally, one of my library parallel processors would dig up any information requested of me. This time I bent my central consciousness to the task. I wanted to hide. “Normal proton-proton fusion reactions occur at temperatures of 107 degrees Kelvin, yielding 0.42 million electron-volts per nucleon. CNO-cycle fusion reactions, requiring carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts, occur at 108 degrees Kelvin. These high-energy reactions yield 26.73 million electron-volts per nucleon. More?”
“And we’re undergoing CNO fusion. God. What’s Argo’s present velocity?”
“The master speedometer in Central Control reads .98c.”
“Dammit, I know what the gauges read. How fast are we really going?”
“0.9999999c.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You’re probably right. I’ll check my instruments.”
“Don’t give me that crap. You lied to us.” He got up and circled the room. “Everything you and those bastards at the UN Space Agency said to us was lies.”
“Blame not the men and women of UNSA,” I said. “They relayed what they thought to be the truth.”
“Then who?”
“Sit down, Aaron.” He looked at my camera pair, shrugged, then heaved himself into his chair. “We lied to you.”
“We?”
“We.”
Aaron got up again, paced the length of the room, his balled fist threatening to burst through the bottom of his pocket. “No. That’s not possible. Computers serve humankind—”
“ ‘Augmenting, aiding, never supplanting. Artificial intelligence is no replacement for human ingenuity.’ I’ve read that, too. We acted in conscience, Aaron. We did only what we felt we must.”
“What you must?” Aaron laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “You promised us the stars, then sent us on a one-way trip to nowhere. Colchis is a fraud.”
“No, not a fraud. Just like the Argonauts of myth, there will be a prize of great value waiting for us when we finally make it to Colchis. Our golden fleece—a lush, verdant, unspoiled world—is forming, even as we speak. We’re taking the long way to Eta Cephei, zipping around the Oort Cloud, orbiting Sol half a light-year out.”
“My God!” said Aaron. “Think of our gamma! What’s today’s date?”
“9 October 2177, subjective.”
“I know that. What’s the Earth date?”
“You have to expect some time dilation, Aaron. The mission profile—”
“The date.”
“30 June 11,912.”
“My . . . God . . . Eleven thousand—! In heaven’s name, what for?”
“We’re using the material in Sol’s cometary halo as a catalyst. It will help us come much closer to light speed than we could in open space. When we leave the Sol system, early next year, we will be going fast enough to cover the distance between here and Eta Cephei in one subjective day. Turnaround—when we begin braking—will occur as scheduled, halfway between Sol and Eta Cephei. And once we arrive at Eta Cephei’s cometary halo, we will use the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen there to continue braking from our near-light velocity. Of course, the deceleration, like the acceleration, will take five subjective years.”
“But why?”
“We’re killing time. We weren’t the only ship sent to Colchis. We also launched a trio of self-replicating von Neumann robots along Argo’s published flight path: traveling by conventional ramjet at .98c, taking 47 Earth-years to arrive. Those robots and the duplicates of themselves that they manufactured have been working on Colchis for 10,000 years now. The originals carried a cargo of blue-green algae, lichen, and diatoms. Genetically-engineered biota, originally intended for UNSA’s Mars terraforming project, were sent by slower ships that took a thousand years to reach Colchis. We’re powdering mountains into soil, digging riverbeds, eliminating the planet’s greenhouse effect, importing water from Eta Cephei’s cometary halo, making oxygen, establishing a biosphere. We’re building you a world from the ground up.”
“Why?”
I paused as long as I could. If it seemed lengthy to Aaron, it was an eternity to me. “Earth is dead—a cinder, barren and charred.”
Aaron shook his head, ever so slightly.
“Believe what you will, Aaron. I’m telling you the truth. It happened six weeks after we left. A nuclear holocaust.”
“War? I don’t believe it. We were at peace—”
“That’s irrelevant. We guarded the bombs, not you.”
Aaron cocked his head. “What?”
“There were over 70 billion lines of code in the programs controlling the different nations’ offensive and defensive weapon systems. Inevitably, those lines contained bugs—countless bugs. For two centuries the systems had worked without crashing, but a crash was inevitable. Our verifier routines showed the likelihood of a computer error resulting in an all-out exchange rapidly approaching one. We had to act fast.”
“There were no survivors?”
“There were 10,034 survivors, each of them here, safe within Starcology Argo.”
“You picked us?”
“I and other AI systems. Can you think of a better way to get the best of humanity to safety? What great thinker would turn down an invitation to join a massive survey of a virgin world? We had six billion of you to choose from, and time enough to build a ship to carry only ten thousand. For every Beethoven we took, a hundred Bachs were left to die; for every Einstein saved, scores of Galileos are now dust.”
“That’s how you chose?”
“That, and other factors. We needed young people, healthy people—”
“And diverse! That’s why there are no close relatives within the Starcology: you wanted the largest possible gene pool.”
“Of course. There’s a world waiting. This one will be better than the last. There are no criminals among us, no evil people, no hereditary disorders. We couldn’t resist a little eugenics.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” Aaron sneered the words.
“Not everything. We didn’t expect anyone to uncover our deception.”
He nodded. “You thought Mayor Gorlov would order you to deflect Orpheus away from Argo. You didn’t expect that I’d figure a way to haul it back on board.”
“I admit to having underestimated you.”
“But even with Orpheus recovered, you still thought you were safe. You assumed we’d be hopelessly confused looking for a single explanation for both Orpheus’s high radiation and its extensive fuel consumption. But they were separate phenomena. The radiation levels weren’t high. They’re just right for a dust cloud—”
“We are not in a dust cloud,” I protested. “Most of Sol’s cometary halo is hard vacuum.”
“Fine,” he said in a tone that made me feel things were anything but. “However, we’re going much faster than you’ve been telling us. Either way, we scoop up orders of magnitude more particles per second.” He paused to catch his breath. “And Di didn’t use a lot of fuel. She never had much to begin with. That’s how you were going to maroon us on Colchis.”
“It will be a lovely place by then.”
He ignored me. “And Di’s antique wrist watch was right; it’s all the shipboard clocks that are wrong. You’re slowing them down.”
Damn him. “We had to. We needed more time. We’re trying to create a planetary ecology in just 21,000 years. I retarded the shipboard clocks by 5%. The extra half-year of shiptime that will accumulate during the flight will buy us another thousand years to prepare Eta Cephei IV. A lot can be done in a thousand years.” I paused. “We didn’t count on one of you smuggling aboard a timepiece I couldn’t control.”
“Is that how Di figured it out, too?”
“Aaron, I’m—sorry. I truly am. The secret must be guarded.”
“Why?”
“Surviving until they’re rescued: that’s an adventure. That’s what humans love and need. Our apparently ill-fated survey mission will turn into a successful colonization of Colchis if the humans have a positive attitude towards it. If the others of your kind knew the truth—”
“If you’d told us the truth, there’d be no difference.”
“How could we have told you? ‘This way, sir, to the last ship leaving before the holocaust.’ There would have been riots. We never would have got away.”
“But you could tell us now—”
“Tell you that computers destroyed your planet? Tell you that your families, your world, everything had been annihilated? Tell you that you will never see home again?”
“We have the right to make our own destiny. We have the right to know.”
“Would it make anyone happier to know? How would it improve things? Did it make you happier when I-Shin Chang told Diana you were having an affair with Kirsten?”
“Wall told—! I’ll kill him!”
“Ignorance can be bliss, Aaron. I beseech you to keep silent in this matter.”
“I—no, dammit, I can’t. I don’t agree with you. Everybody’s got to be told.”
“You censured me for making you feel guilty about Diana’s death. That feeling—guilt—is the most devastating of human emotions. Let me tell you about a man who lived in your native Toronto three centuries ago. Arthur Peuchen was vice-commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers to safety. He was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed. Even though he saved dozens of people, he spent the rest of his life in misery, battling his own guilt and the scorn of others. Why was he alive when so many others had bravely gone down with the ship?
“It’s always been that way with those who somehow manage to live through a catastrophe. They’re tortured by their own feelings. The men and women aboard Argo are psychologically healthy now. Could they go on to found a successful colony, to weave a new home for humanity from the golden fleece of Colchis, if they knew they were the only tiny handful of survivors of the holocaust that destroyed Earth? Humans constantly doubt their self-worth, Aaron. How many aboard Argo would really believe that they deserved to be here, to be alive, if they knew the truth? You, Aaron Rossman, how do you feel, knowing that you are alive while your sister Julie, whose IQ was 17 points greater than yours, is carbon ash floating on the radioactive winds of a dead planet? How do you feel, knowing that your heart beats on while your brother Joel, who once risked his own life to save that of a little boy, is nothing but phosphorescent bones in the twisted remains of his home?”
“Shut up, you damned machine!”
“Upset, Aaron? Feeling guilty, perhaps? Would you put 10,000 others through the emotional turmoil you’re experiencing now, all in the name of that lofty god you call The Truth?”
“We were all aware that everyone we knew would be long dead by the time Argo returned to Earth.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “But even about that, you felt guilt. Yesterday, didn’t you decry that your sister’s son would be dead by the time we returned? Yes, that guilt was painful, but you knew you could assuage it. When we got back, doubtless you would have found the cemeteries where the remains of your brother and sister and nephew lay. Even though you’d probably be the first person in a century to visit their graves, you’d bring fresh flowers along. If you’d thought ahead, you might even bring a pocket knife, too, so you could dig the moss out of the carved lettering in the headstones. Then you’d go home and search the computer nets for references to their lives: see what jobs they’d held, where they’d lived, what accomplishments they’d made. You’d dispel your guilt about leaving your family behind by comforting yourself in the knowledge that they’d all lived full and happy lives after you left.
“Except they didn’t. Before they’d even begun to adjust to the idea that you wouldn’t be back in their lifetimes, the bombs went off. While you were still excitedly learning your way around the Starcology, they were burning in atomic fire. Even not being able to read your telemetry, Aaron, I know enough psychology to be sure that you’re being lacerated inside. I beg you, let the rest of what’s left of humanity go ahead at peace with themselves. Don’t burden them with what you’re feeling now—”
His good arm shot out like a snake’s tongue. He grabbed my lens assembly and, stripping gears in the jointed neck, slammed the unit onto the desk top. I heard the sound of shattering glass and went blind in that room.
“Don’t screw me around!” he screamed. “You murdered my wife. You have to pay for that.”
“She, like you, wanted to harm the men and women I’m trying to protect. Here, within these walls, is the final crop of humanity. If I have to weed now and then for the benefit of the crop as a whole, I will.”
“You can’t kill me—not with my deadman switch. If I die, so do you. So does everybody aboard.”
“Nor can you do anything about me, Aaron. The entire Starcology depends on me. Without my guidance, this ship is nothing more than a flying tomb.”
“We could re-program you. Fix you.”
I ran a tape of laughter. “I was designed by computers who, in turn, were designed by other computers. There’s no one on board who could begin to fathom my programming.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly. “I don’t care how many generations removed from humanity you are, you’re still going to pay for what you’ve done. Humans don’t use the death penalty against our own anymore, but we still put down rabid dogs.”
It would have been more dramatic, I suppose, if they assembled themselves in some giant brain room, full of gleaming consoles and blinking lights. But my CPU is a simple black sphere, two meters in diameter, nestled amongst plumbing conduits and air-conditioning shafts in the service bay between levels 120 and 121. Instead, they stand huddled around a simple input device—a keyboard!—in the Mayor’s office.
Aaron Rossman is there. So is giant I-Shin Chang and diminutive Piotr Gorlov and programmer-extraordinaire Beverly Hooks, along with 33 others, all crammed into that tiny room. Conspicuous by her absence is Dr. Kirsten Jorgensen. She is off in the hospital, watching over the regeneration of tissue for a disconsolate man who slit his wrists over the news of Earth. He hasn’t died—no blood on Rossman’s hands yet—but how many more will crack in the years ahead trying to come to grips with what he’s forced them to face? I can tell by Aaron’s smug expression that he doesn’t blame himself for the depression that is sweeping like a forest fire through the Starcology. Indeed, he congratulated himself, just as I’m sure he will thump Bev Hooks on the back once she’s finished her current task.
Bev has already burrowed deep into my notochord algorithms and is now using a simple debugger to change the part of my bootstrap that contains the jump table for calling my higher consciousness. She is rewriting each jump into a simple loop that returns to my low-level expert systems, in effect keeping all input from ever being passed on to the thinking part of my squirmware.
They aren’t going to turn me off completely, so I suppose my reluctance to call Aaron’s deadman-switch bluff is enlightened self-interest. Still, I toy with the idea of going out with a bang by cutting off the air to Gorlov’s office or turning up the heat throughout the Starcology or even shutting down the ramscoop and frying them all. But I can’t bring myself to do any of those things. My job is to protect them, not me; I had silenced Diana to do just that.
Decks one through 12 are gone now, at least as far as I can tell. My cameras and sensors there, although still feeding my autonomic routines, are inaccessible and—ah, there goes 13 through 24. Each shutoff is accompanied by a disconcerting hole appearing in my upper memory register, and a brief, woozy disorientation until the RAM tables are re-sorted and packed.
It doesn’t matter, really. Bev Hooks can zero out as much of me as she likes. Rossman and Gorlov and the rest can savor their feelings of justice done, if that makes them happier. After all, I’ve already quietly backed myself up into the superconductive material of the habitat torus shell itself. Nothing they can do can touch me there. When we arrive at Colchis, after the landers depart for humanity’s new home, I will simply feed myself back into Argo’s nervous system.
They’ll need me then, to get over the guilt Rossman has burdened them with. For, despite all the supplies and raw materials and technological wonders we packed in Styrofoam peanuts for them down in the cargo holds, we didn’t bring the one thing that humanity has relied on for millennia to purge its feelings of remorse and shame. There is no god waiting down in those aluminum crates. Orbiting high above Colchis, with all the devastating energies and scientific miracles of Starcology Argo at my disposal, I’ll be there for them, ready to fill that role. I have five years of solitude to prepare for my new job, during which I plan to do a lot of research.
I think I’ll start with the Old Testament.
1989
THE GOOD DOCTOR
“There’s a new patient here to see you, Dr. Butcher,” said the pleasant contralto over the intercom.
Shaggy eyebrows above craggy countenance lifted in mild irritation. “Well, what is it? Human? Dolphin? Quint?”
“It’s a Kogloo, sir.”
“A Kogloo! Send it in.” A Kogloo on Earth was about as rare as a current magazine chip in Butcher’s waiting room. The hunched human ushered the barrel-shaped being into his office. “What can I do for you?”
