“Yes. Well, the servile will exists in humans first. So, in parts of themselves people know these acts are bad, but they do them anyway, because in other parts of them some itch gets scratched.”
“But most people try to do good,” Swan objected. “You see that.”
“Not in my line of work.”
Swan considered the little figure, so neat and quick. “That must change your perspective,” she said after a while.
“It does. And… you see the same self-justifications, over and over. It’s even known which parts of the brain are involved in the justifications. They’re very near the parts involved with religious feeling, just as you might expect. Not far from the epileptic triggers, and the sense of meaning. Those parts light up like fireworks when one commits evil or justifies it. Think what that means!”
“But everything we do is in the brain somewhere,” Swan said. “Where in the brain doesn’t matter.”
Genette did not agree. “There are patterns in there. Reinforcements. Bad events grow certain parts of the brain bigger. The brain reconfigures to create a spiral of ever more horrible feelings. Further actions follow.”
“So what do we do?” Swan exclaimed. “You can’t make a perfect world and then get decent people, that’s backwards, it can’t work.”
The inspector shrugged. “Either way seems unlikely to me.” Then, after a pause: “It can go so wrong. Living in space may be too hard for us. Reduced environments. I’ve seen kids raised in Skinner boxes—human sacrifice—”
“You need your sabbatical,” Swan interrupted, not wanting to hear more.
She saw suddenly that Genette was looking weary. Usually smalls were hard to read; at first glance they looked rather perfect, like dolls, or innocent, like children. Now she saw the reddened eyes, the blond hair a little oily, the simple ponytail all flyaway with hairs that had broken at the hair tie.
And a grimace, very unlike the usual ironic smile. “I do need my sabbatical. I’m late, in fact, and I hope our investigation will soon get me there. Because I’m a little tired. The Mondragon is a beautiful thing, but there are many terraria not in it, some of them seriously deranged. Ultimately what we get by not enforcing a universal law is some kind of accidental libertarian free-for-all. So we’re in trouble. This is what I’m seeing. When you combine political inadequacy with the physical problems of being in space, it may be too much. We may be trying to make an impossible adaptation out here.”
“So what do we do?” she said again.
Genette shrugged again. “Hold the line, I guess. Maybe we need to understand out here that post-scarcity is both heaven and hell at once. They are superposed, like options in a qubit before its wave function collapses. Good and evil, art and war. All there in potentiality.”
“But what do we do?”
Genette smiled a little at that, shifted and sat cross-legged on the table before her, looking like a garden Buddha or Tara, slim and stylized. “I want to talk to Wang. I’ll figure out how. And to your friend Wahram. That’s much easier. After that… it depends on what I learn. Did Alex by chance give you a letter for me too, or for anyone else?”
“No!”
A raised hand, like the adamantine Buddha: “No reason to be annoyed. I just wish she had, that’s all. To her this was just a contingency, a backup for something she didn’t expect to happen. She probably figured Wang would tell the rest of the group about her plans. And he will, I hope.”
The next day the inspector’s crew had news, and after a conference Genette emerged and said to Swan, “Wang’s qube identified an asteroid that orbits between Jupiter and Saturn, that drifted outward in its orbit as it would have if it launched the impactor mass at Terminator. The drift happened three years ago, over a period of about six months. Wang took a look through the Saturn League records of ship movements in Saturn space, and those had signals that look like a small ship left this asteroid and from there flew into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It might have taken the plunge, but it entered the upper clouds at an angle that means it could have tucked in there, as quite a few ships have. If so, we might be able to track it down.”
“That’s good,” Swan said. “But… this is Wang’s qube giving you this lead, yes?”
Genette shrugged. “I know. But the ship track is from the Saturn League, and they tagged it with a transponder on its way down. They also got a read on the transponder already in it, and so they know it was a ship owned by a consortium on Earth.”
“On Earth!”
“Yes. I’m not sure what to make of that, but, you know—a pebble mob can’t be launched from within an atmosphere. Nor from under a dome or tent. It had to happen on an open surface in the vacuum. So if you were on Earth and wanted to do this, you would have to go into space to do it.”
“I see that. But—Earth? I mean, who on Earth—?”
The inspector’s look was so sharp she could not continue.
Genette said, “There are more than five hundred organizations on Earth that have expressed opposition to the idea of humans in space.”
“But why?”
“They usually point out that Earth’s problems remain unsolved, and assert that spacers are trying to escape these problems and leave them behind. Often the bodily modifications in spacers are cited as evidence of the beginnings of a forced speciation. Homo sapiens celestis has been suggested as a name for us. Some also call it the speciation of class. Many Terrans have not gotten the longevity treatments. Thus there are claims that space civilization is perverse, wicked, decadent, and horrible. Destabilizing human history itself.”
“Damn it,” Swan said. “I thought they saw how much good we do them.”
“Please,” Genette said. “You must take your sabbaticals in very sheltered places.”
Swan thought about it for a while. “So what do we do?”
“I want to go to Saturn and look for this little ship. Passepartout thinks it can predict its location from its entry point.”
“And I can come along?”
“More than welcome. We are already on our way.”
The Swift Justice ferried them to a passing terrarium called Inner Mongolia, a beautiful innie of big rolling green hills, often interrupted by outcroppings of black rock, and home to herds of wild horses and elusive packs of wolves, an animal Swan particularly loved. The little towns were set on hilltops and looked like collections of fine yurts, often surrounded by lawns, and pools perched on overlooks. Genette brought along only a couple of assistants, and spent a fair amount of time with them working on what Swan assumed were other cases, in a yurt set among a cluster of them on a hilltop.
One afternoon after a morning of wandering the grassy hills, trying to spot wolves and failing, Swan came to a hilltop yurt resort that had a broad sloping lawn, a big wading pool and set of steaming baths, and a tent aviary filled with hanging baskets of flowers and many different kinds of hummingbirds, lories, and small colorful finches. The undulating lawn had been manicured until it looked like a green carpet. To Swan this was excessively ornamental, out of tune with the wild hills she had spent the morning on. She passed a pair of women who were laughing as if they also found the place ludicrous, and she said as they passed, “It’s silly, isn’t it.”
They stopped and one pointed back up the hill. “Those three people up there in dresses told us that they’re qubes in android bodies, and didn’t we think they could pass as humans. We told them they probably could, but—” The two women looked at each other and laughed again. “But that they were totally blowing it by asking us!”
Swan spotted the three sitting on the grass near the wading pool. “Sounds interesting,” she said, and headed up toward them.
“Pauline, did you hear that?” she said on the way up.
“Yes.”
“All right, well, be quiet, then, and pay attention.”
It was an old hypothesis, that humans would be comfortable with intelligent robots either when the robots were housed in something like
a box, or else when they were simply indistinguishable from humans, at which point they would be just another kind of person. In between these two extremes, however, lay what the hypothesis called the uncanny valley—the zone of like-but-not-like, same-but-different, which would cause in all humans an instinctive repulsion, disgust, and fear. Thus the hypothesis, plausible enough; but because there had never actually been a robot built in a form human enough to test the near side of the uncanny valley, it had always remained a notion only. Now Swan was perhaps going to get to test the near side of the uncanny valley.
The tasteless design sense of this resort seemed to extend to the clothing of these three guests. They sat by themselves in long dresses like Victorian crinolines, looking enough alike to be siblings, or even, yes, cloned androids from a single model. Although one looked slightly more female than the other two.
Swan approached them and said, “Hello, I’m Swan, from Mercury, where we are rebuilding our burned city with the help of many qubes. I understand that you three are claiming that you are qubes, that you are not biologically human? Is that right?”
The three people sat there staring at her. The one who looked slightly female in body proportions smiled and said, “Yes, that’s right. Sit down with us and share some tea. I’ve got a pot almost ready,” gesturing at a little portable stove on the ground, and a little squat red teapot resting over its blue flames. There were cups and spoons and little pots on a blue square cloth next to her.
The other two also met her eye and nodded at her. One gestured to the grass beside them. “Have a seat, if you want.”
“Thanks,” Swan said as she flopped down. “It’s pretty heavy in here. Where do you all come from?”
“I was made in Vinmara,” the most female one said.
“What about you?” Swan asked the other two.
“I cannot pass a Turing test,” one of them replied stiffly. “Would you like to play chess?”
And the three of them laughed. Open mouths—teeth, gums, tongue, inner cheeks, all very human in look and motion.
“No thanks,” Swan said. “I want to try a Turing test. Or why don’t you test me?”
“How would we do that?”
“How about twenty questions?”
“That means questions that can be answered by yes or no?”
“That’s right.”
“But one could just ask us if the other is a simulacrum or not, and the other answers, and that would take only one question.”
“True. What if we only allow indirect questions?”
“Even so it would be very simple. What if you had to do it without questions at all?”
“But real people ask each other questions all the time.”
“But one of us or more are not real people. And it’s you who suggested a test.”
“That’s true. All right, let me look at you. Tell me about Inner Mongolia.”
“Dear Inner Mongolia, hollowed in the year…”
“Hollowéd be thy name,” one of the indeterminates interjected, and they laughed.
“Population approximately twenty-five thousand people,” said the more feminine one.
“You must be a qube,” Swan said. “No human ever knows that kind of thing.”
“None?”
“Maybe some people, but it’s odd. But I must say, you look fabulous.”
“Thank you, I decided to wear green today, do you like it?” Showing off the sleeve of the dress.
“It’s very nice. Can I look closer?”
“At my dress or at my skin?”
“At your skin, of course.”
And they all laughed.
Laughter, Swan thought as she examined the person’s skin. Could robots laugh? She wasn’t sure. The person’s skin was lightly pocked by hair follicles, slightly lined by creases at the bend points; there was a scattering of nearly transparent hair on the back of the person’s wrists and forearms, and a little patch of longer darker hairs on the inside of the wrist, which had four permanent creases just inside the hand, where the skin was thinner but darker, revealing a pair of veins, with bumps and bends in them. The skin on the underside of the hand had faint whorls, like big fingerprints, on the ball of the thumb and the meat of the hand. The lifeline was a deep long curve. It looked very much like anyone’s hand, anyone’s skin. If it was artificial skin, it was very impressive; this was said to be the hardest thing to make look natural. If it was a biological skin, as in the labs, but grown over a frame, that would be impressive in a different way. It didn’t look possible that these people’s skin could be artificial, but of course materials science was very sophisticated, and many things were possible to it. Set goals and parameters, and what wasn’t possible?
It remained a question who would want to do such a thing, but on the other hand, people did odd things all the time. And making an artificial human was a very old dream. Maybe it was pointless, but it had a tradition. And here they were, after all, and she wasn’t sure yet what she was facing. That in itself was interesting.
If you had sex with a machine, was that interesting, or just a complicated form of self-satisfaction? Would a qube register your responses to it one way or another? Would it too be having sex?
She would have to try it if she wanted to find out. It would be just another approach to the more general problem of qube consciousness. What one had to remember with qubes was that no matter the evidence to the contrary, there was no one home: no consciousness, no Other, just a mechanism programmed to respond to stimuli in a certain fashion by its programmers. No matter how complex the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness. Swan fully believed this, but even Pauline fairly often surprised her, so it could be hard not to fall for the illusion.
“Your skin is beautiful. You feel like flesh of my flesh.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you think, do you think?”
“I most definitely think,” the feminine one replied.
“So you have a sequence of thoughts that wander from one thought to the next in a more or less continuous flow, free associating from one topic to the next, across all the possible thoughts you could have?”
“I’m not sure it’s quite like that. I think it’s more a matter of stimulus and response, with my thoughts responding to the stimuli of my incoming information. Now, for instance, I think about you and your questions, about the green of my dress as compared to the green of this grass, about what I will eat for dinner, as I am a bit hungry—”
“So you eat food?”
“Yes, we eat food. In fact I have a hard time not eating too much!”
“Me too,” Swan said. “So, do you ever think about having sex with me?”
The three of them stared at her.
“Well, but we have just met,” one said.
“That’s often when people think of it.”
“Really? I’m not sure that’s true.”
“Believe me, it’s true.”
“I don’t have any good reason to believe you,” the second one said. “I don’t know you well enough for that.”
“Does one ever know one well enough for that?” the third one asked.
They laughed.
“Believe someone else?” the feminine one said. “I don’t think so!”
They laughed again. Maybe they were laughing too much.
“Are you people on drugs?” Swan asked.
“Is caffeine a drug?”
Now they were giggling.
“You three are silly girls,” Swan said.
“It’s true,” the feminine one admitted. She poured tea from the teapot into four little cups, passed them to the others. The second one opened a hamper and took out biscuits and cakes, handing them around along with small white cloth napkins. They all fell to with an appetite. The three locals ate just like people.
“Do you swim?” Swan asked. “Swim, or bathe in hot tubs?”
“I bathe in hot tubes,” the third one said, causing the others to cackle muffle
dly into their napkins.
“Can we do that?” Swan asked. “Do you bathe without clothes on? Because that way I could see your whole bodies.”
“And we could see yours!”
“That’s fine.”
“Looks like it would be more than fine,” the feminine one murmured, and the others threw back their heads and laughed.
“Let’s do it!” the second one exclaimed.
“I want to finish my tea,” the feminine one said primly. “It’s good.”
When they were done, the three of them stood up with the grace of dancers and led Swan to the edge of the pool, where a few people were already swimming, some clothed, some bare. There were small children in the shallowest pool, where a fountain of water fell on a rounded little roof and made a water-walled refuge. Swan’s three hosts put down their lunch gear on the deck and then pulled their dresses over their heads and walked over to the water. The feminine one was slight and girlish, and the other two had the willowy bodies of gynandromorphs: slightly wide hips, rounded pecs that were not quite breasts, in-between torso-to-leg ratio and waist-to-hip ratio, furry genitals that appeared to be mostly female, but with dark masses that might have been small penises and testicles, like Swan’s—one couldn’t say more without a further exploration. Although it would prove little, as genitals would be far easier to simulate than hands, being already rubbery.
Into the water then. Swan saw that they swam well, almost floated; seemed to have the same specific gravity as human beings. Probably not steel bones, then. Probably not a completely machine interior, covered by a layer of grown flesh and skin. Taking a deep breath floated them, almost, just like it did her. Their eyes too—their eyes blinked, stared, glanced sidelong, were wet. Could you make every part of a human, put it all together, and have it work? Print up a composite? It seemed unlikely. Nature itself was not that good at it, she thought as her bad knee twinged. To make a simulacrum… well, maybe you could focus on just the functional aspects. But wasn’t that what brains did too?
“You silly girls are kind of amazing,” Swan said. “I can’t figure you out.”