Rich Man's Sky 03 Beggar's Sky, page 9
part #3 of Rich Man's Sky Series
Were I a more suspicious man I might opine: these Beings know more than they’re saying, and withhold for a purpose. Or perhaps my approach was simply rude to them, as if they had bombarded me with queries about noxious body fluids and their possible uses. In any case, theology seemed a subject that, for them, is easily exhausted, and perhaps obscene. Still, some of the most religious humans known to me are astronomers, and cosmologists in particular.
Michael: “Does the universe have an ending?”
Beings: “Yes!”
Michael: “Is it soon?”
Beings: “Definitely not.”
Michael: “Does the universe have a purpose?”
Beings: “Yes!”
Michael: “How do you know?”
Beings: “Difficult to explain.”
Michael: “Can you try?”
Beings: “The substrate is . . . marked.”
Michael: “Marked how?”
Beings: “Difficult to explain.”
Michael: “What is the purpose of the universe?”
Beings: “Disallowed.”
Michael: “Does that mean you don’t know?”
Beings: “Difficult to explain.”
Michael: “Is it like the future?
Beings: “Hello! This message is a transmission! We are so glad you made it.”
3.4
25 March
I.R.V. Intercession
Extra-Kuiper Space
370 A.U. from Earth
In the wake of the sandbar incident, the dangers of interstellar space had stopped being hypothetical.
Instead of weekly safety drills, Michael began running them two or three times every day, at random intervals, and with different scenarios every time. Power failure! Hull breach! Engine malfunction! A steering jet that was stuck in the “on” position! The crew, already technically adept at dealing with such things, became knee-jerk experts. Swap in the backup APUs! Get your suits on! Emergency engine shutdown sequence! Shut down power to the starboard ACS and prep for EVA!
Also, the mandatory philosophical discussions really had started to make a difference. Michael had observed enough of these to have a sense how they were going.
When Harv, the leathery Boulder academic, spoke with Dong, the leathery Vietnamese astro-handyman, they ended up talking about quantum mechanics, and its implications for consciousness and self-awareness.
“I don’t think Ptolemy’s self-aware,” Dong chattered. He and Harv and Michael were in the cargo deck, doing their daily hour of cleaning duty, and Dong was wiping antiseptic onto the railing that surrounded the ladder. Weird bacteria grew in space, and keeping them at bay was a constant job. “He got no body. He got no neurons, no Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He could run on a cell phone, right? Maybe slower, maybe some of his functions shut down. He’s clever, but he don’t know anything. Software, right? No soul. Now Deep Mind, that thing’s a hardware implementation.”
“So Deep Mind is sentient?”
“Might be.”
Deep Mind was a building-sized computer in Cleveland, Ohio, put together by IBMicrosoft in the middle of the Cuyahoga River. Not the fastest or most capable processor in the world but, in Michael’s opinion, one of the creepiest and, by corollary, most theologically troubling. It had forced him, more than once, to confront the question: What is a soul, and how do we know who has one?
“Human cells are full of quantum processors,” Harv acknowledged. “More than we ever could have guessed. But so are yeast cells, and fungi. Are you saying those are sentient, too?”
“More than Ptolemy.”
“Huh. Maybe.” Then, after a pause: “The Beings don’t have bodies, either.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Dong. He had moved around to the ladder itself, and presently sprayed and wiped it, hopefully murdering any organisms trying to take up residence. “I been thinking about that.”
“And?”
“I dunno. I don’t got enough information. But they contacted us, right?”
That conversation took many unexpected turns, and was just one of many, many conversations among the crew that Michael had the opportunity to witness.
Another time, Sandy spoke to Igbal in the gymnasium, wedged between the galley and the bathroom on the service deck. Michael “stood” on the floor outside, watching. They also talked about artificial intelligence, and its differences from natural intelligence, and whether that had any bearing on whatever sort of intelligence the Beings represented.
Igbal, the inventor of Deep Belief Network robotics, said: “If a robot thought the same way as a human, we wouldn’t need it.”
“Then why do robots steal people’s jobs?” Sandy asked.
They were both exercising with rubber bands, holding them under a foot and pulling the ends up with their arms.
“They don’t,” Igbal said, “any more than an airplane steals the jobs of mule drivers. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Then where are all the mule drivers? And what about robot lawyers? Robot journalists? Robot CEOs? Those don’t replace people? A robot could do your job, I’ll bet.”
“An AI was first listed as a co-inventor on a patent way back in 2021,” Igbal said. “And yet, here we are. Could a robot make all this happen?” He spread his arms to indicate not only the starship Intercession, but the Summit mission itself, and the vast infrastructure that had made it possible.
“Someday,” Sandy insisted.
“Nah,” he said. “By the time they’re that good, we’ll all be merging with ’em. And it’ll make sense for them as much as us, because we’re a different, complementary kind of processor.”
“Sounds awful.”
“Well,” Igbal said, “you can go live in a forest or something. Anyway, we have no idea what kind of substrate the Beings are running on, but it’s a safe bet their mental process is nothing like ours. Which means there are things we do better than they do.”
“We have hands,” Sandy said.
“We do,” he agreed. “And how amazing is that?”
When Thenbecca spoke to Hobie Prieto by the spacesuit lockers in the cargo deck, they talked (with surprising technical precision!) about the neurochemical similarities between near-death experiences and the deeper forms of induced hibernation. When the sleepers went back into their hibernation pods, after the Encounter, would the Beings speak to them again as their bodies froze and shut down?
“That was when I first heard them,” Hobie said, his dark face lighting up at the memory. “When Doc Pamela froze me, in the test coffin at ESL1 Shade Station. They sang to me! They invited us to meet them. That was when Igbal’s people started to actually believe the Beings were real, because I’m no bullshitter, and I don’t fall for no fairy tales.”
“Fehyrie tales,” he lilted, in that slow Jamaican way.
“What were they like?” Thenbecca asked.
“Oh, hard to say. Hard to say, my friend. Talking to them was like, I dunno, falling into a big pit full of balloons, and every balloon was a video display showing jagged patterns. They sounded like the crowd at a football stadium, maybe, singing chants down to the players.”
“Were you scared?”
“No. Before that, when Doc Pamela was injecting me with drugs and dropping my core temperature, that was skerry. Nobody knew for sure the procedure was going to work! But then I was shooting through a tunnel into this . . . place, and the Beings welcomed me with great excitement, and I felt like everything was going to be okay. And I kind of still feel that way. They don’t mean us harm; they just really want to meet us.”
And when Brother Michael Jablonski himself, once and future Prior of Saint Joseph’s Monastery, spoke to Flight Surgeon Rachael Lee, once and future Chief Medical Officer of Renz Ventures and ESL1 Shade Station, they talked about the mechanics of cryohibernation systems, and all the adjustments, large and small, that would need to be made—to the pods themselves, and to the ship’s entire life support system—just before and just after the sleepers awoke. This was an area where Michael’s duties overlapped heavily with Rachael’s, so perhaps it was technically shop talk rather than a philosophical discussion, per se. But little bits of philosophy crept in.
While checking the fluid and power connections to one of the hibernation coffins, Rachael said, “What if Thenbecca’s hypothesis is correct, and there really is something different about the way our brains work out here? It’s not such a crazy thought. We still don’t really understand the brain at a quantum level.”
She was a compact woman with a bright, piercing gaze, and when Michael had met her, she’d seemed perpetually alert. She was better grounded than the rest of the crew, with the possible exception of Igbal, but she generally looked like someone who’d had ten cups of coffee instead of sleeping.
“No,” said Michael, following behind her with a spray bottle and a rag, “it isn’t such a crazy idea. I might have thought so six months ago, but it’s different when you feel it. Spacetime is flatter out here. There are fewer photons and neutrinos. Fewer everything. We didn’t evolve for this.”
“So,” Rachael said, “it might affect the way people react to the unfreezing process. It might affect a lot of things. We’re going to have to be very nimble, and mindful, during the days when we’re populating the Encounter Bubble.”
“Agreed,” Michael said.
There was no real plan for any of this—just appropriately scaled hardware, and a schedule.
That was what happened when you let Igbal Renz work his magic: things appeared out of nowhere—big, amazing things!—and yet thousands of implementation details were left to the last minute, often jury-rigged by the people around him while he hovered by impatiently. Michael had visited ESL1 Shade Station, and found it much the same, with modules clicked together in the order they were constructed, in a 3D jumble with no master plan. Fittingly, the women of ESL1 had actually cut hatches into two of the station’s bulkheads and installed a flexible tunnel, connecting two points that should have been adjacent but weren’t, and never would be. Perhaps that wasn’t entirely Igbal’s fault—as Michael understood it, the modules had been added in order of their perceived urgency—but still.
The crew of Intercession would need that same brute creativity, to keep this whole affair from going to waste.
One thing that struck Michael, though, about these enforced conversations, was the way his crewmies strayed so readily outside the margins of their expertise. That might be a bad thing in bar arguments or rigorous academic dick-measuring, but in other contexts Michael considered it a good thing indeed. In his experience, creativity was blunted when people remained in their comfort zones, or strayed into areas where they genuinely didn’t know anything. But in the margins, in the interstitial spaces between ignorance and expertise, new ideas flourished like dandelions.
He’d often told the monks at Saint Joe’s, “If you know exactly what you’re doing, you’re underperforming.” Of course, that was a group of Earthmen tasked with building a lunar base that could plausibly last for centuries. Here, the mission was rather different.
And yet.
He was also warmed by the personal tidbits that slipped out here and there, like when Harv said, “Nobody seems to be fucking on this ship. In a crew of eight, doesn’t that seem unlikely? People are never happier than when they’re having good sex, and lots of it. The body knows.”
Or when Thenbecca said, “I came to cooking late in life. I was a data analyst for a bank, if you can believe it. A big bank, that did a lot of good in the world, like microlending to the Flood Nations, and just, you know, credit cards for regular people. But also a lot of morally gray stuff I can’t discuss, and a few things that were flat-out illegal, and wrong. I was in a position to see all of it. I couldn’t not! I figure that’s why Igbal made me Purser, in charge of ship’s stores. But most of the stores are food and other consumables, which makes Chef-Purser actually a very logical job.” She was in the galley as she spoke, tinkering with the CHON synthesizer’s programming interface, her feet in stirrups on the floor to keep her from floating away.
“Anyway, I learned to cook from a hundred-year-old book. Just in my spare time, for fun. I then started a restaurant, and that didn’t work, but I did end up with a large online following. So, this and that, and I ended up being accepted to live at ESL1 Shade Station, colonizing outer space. And now I’m here, in a place I don’t reckon any of us ever expected to be. But I’m good at feeding people, and I like it, so yeah.”
Michael had to agree; the food here was better than the synthetic CHON chow he was used to at Saint Joe’s, despite being woven from the same basic ingredients. Of course, they grew vegetables at Saint Joe’s, which wasn’t possible here, so the overall diet here was more limited. But Thenbecca did have a knack for spinning CHON—plus tiny amounts of precious salt, mustard, red pepper, and the vitamin-mineral powder called “foundation”—into culinary gold.
Michael, being responsible for the equipment that turned the crew’s waste back into component elements, had to appreciate that Intercession’s Chef-Purser had literally shit to work with.
Hobie said, “I once lived on board a sea plane for three years. Not really traveling very much; it’s just that dock fees were cheaper than apartments in Montego Bay. But it’s not much space. You get good at doing without things when you live in a plane! It’s good practice for being an astronaut.”
And Rachael, in a conversation with Dong Nguyen, said, “You and I both repair things that can’t be shut off. I had a professor once who said heart surgery was like repairing a car while it was running. I think he meant an internal combustion car, because the analogy doesn’t work so well with an electric.”
“I thought you were an obstetrician,” Dong said.
“Prenatal heart surgery,” she said.
Dong clucked at that, clearly impressed. “You build a ship in a bottle?”
Ignoring that, Rachael said, “If it’s a complex surgery, you have to cool the mother’s body way down. That’s how I got into hibernation technology.”
Everyone had an improbable story to tell about how, of the ten billion living humans, they alone had ended up here.
Even Igbal had some personal anecdotes to share. In his gravelly voice, he said, “I was a shitty student until I got to graduate school. That’s when things started to really click. I was asking, hey, why are deep learning neural networks limited to classical computers? Can’t we do the same thing with qubits? And the answer was yes. I got in cozy with the tech transfer department, so when I started figuring out how to churn out algorithms and gizmos that solved problems in the real world, I was making royalty income almost right away. By the time I left, I already had enough money to build my own lab and start hiring staff. People say I launched my career on Daddy’s money, but that old drunk didn’t even pay for college. It was all me.”
“You made the robot butlers, right?” Thenbecca asked him. “And waiters?”
“I made their brains,” Igbal agreed. “And the operating system, Quantum Von Neumann Complete. I wasn’t interested in robotics per se until I got into asteroid mining. RzVz had so much money at that point, we had to put it somewhere. So I started looking up.”
“Jesus,” Harv said.
“What?” Igbal said, shrugging almost nonchalantly. It wasn’t a humble brag; to his credit, despite the air of hubris that perpetually surrounded him, he genuinely didn’t seem to find his biography all that extraordinary. Perhaps just a bunch of stuff that happened while he was screwing around.
But when the conversation turned to quantum mechanics while Harv and Igbal were both in the same room, things got heavy quickly, and both men loudly lamented the lack of a screenboard to scribble drawings and equations on.
Harv would say things like, “Systems that stay coherent at room temperature, or body temperature, are a superposition of states that have collapsed. A million narrow spikes blended together to form a Gaussian. But that result is only coherent in Fourier space, which is why it took us so long to notice it, all around us. In our own cells.”
To which Igbal would say, “You’re getting carried away with the math. The analogy with thermodynamics gives you a better gut feel how the system is going to behave. Temperature, pressure, density. The energy in a lot of qubit designs behaves a lot like an ideal gas.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Harv finally said to him, one time when the two of them were on the service deck, doing sit-ups on the ladder instead of actually going into the gym.
“You . . . Mathematically it doesn’t, sure. The equations don’t line up. But look, if you heat up the pot, you’d better have a tight lid or you’re going to boil out the electrons. Which is where you get that collapse you’re talking about.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Ig.”
“No? Then why am I rich? Look, I’m not arguing. I’m actually agreeing with you, but the High Priests of Quantum Mechanics are always trying to make it more mysterious than it actually is.”
During one such conversation, in the dining room with most of the crew present, Michael injected a question of his own: “What kind of system do the Beings represent?”
Which stopped Harv and Igbal in their tracks for a moment, until Igbal finally said, “We don’t even know if they inhabit the same universe as us. When they speak to one person, the people nearby don’t see or hear anything. Either that communication is telepathic, or effectively telepathic, or it’s a physical interaction from outside our universe. Like, they’re right there with that person, but on a neighboring plane. Which might have different rules.”
“Are you sure?” Michael pressed. “As you say, they’re capable of interacting. Even if they’re on a different plane somewhere, there’s some . . . physical projection of them that’s cast into our dimension, to tickle the brains of DMT dreamers. Photons, perhaps? If that makes sense.”
“Almost,” Harv said.
