Nelson pondered that—the cacophony within his head. Until coming to Kuwenezi, he had hardly been aware of it. He’d always believed there was just one Nelson Grayson. That core Nelson still existed. In fact, it felt stronger than ever. Still, at the same time, he had grown better at listening to the ferment just below the surface. He leaned forward. “We talked before about how—how the cells in my body compete and cooperate to make a whole person. And I been reading some of those theories ’bout how individual people could be looked at the same way … like, y’know, organs or cells cooperating and competing to make up societies? And how the same … metaphor—”
“How the same metaphor’s been applied to the role species play in Earth’s ecosphere, yes. Those are useful comparisons, so long as we remember that’s all they are. Just comparisons, similes, models of a much more complicated reality.”
He nodded. “But now you’re sayin’ even our minds are like that?”
“And why not?” Dr. Wolling laughed. “The same processes formed complexity in nature, in our bodies, and in cultures. Why shouldn’t they work in our minds as well?”
Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. “But then, why do we think we’re individuals? Why do we hide from ourselves the fact we’re so many inside? What’s the me that’s thinkin’ this, right now?”
Jen smiled, and sat back. “My boy. My dear boy. Has anyone ever told you that you have a rare and precious gift?”
At first Nelson thought she was referring to his unexpected talent with animals and in managing the ecology of ark four. But she corrected that impression. “You have a knack for asking the right questions, Nelson. Would it surprise you to learn the one you just posed is probably the deepest, most perplexing in psychology? Perhaps in all philosophy?”
Nelson shrugged. The way he felt whenever fen praised him was proof enough that he had many selves. While one part of him felt embarrassment each time she did this, another basked in the one thing he wanted most, her approval.
“Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness for centuries,” she went on. “Julian Jaynes called it the ‘analog I.’ The power to name some central locus ‘me’ seems to give intensity and focus to each individual human drama. Is this something totally unique to humanity? Or just a commodity? Something we only have a bit more of than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees?
“Is consciousness imbued in what some call the ‘soul’? Is it a sort of monarch of the mind? A higher-order creature, set there to rule over all the ‘lower’ elements?
“Or is it, as some suggest, no more than another illusion? Like a wave at the surface of the ocean, which seems ‘real’ enough but is never made of the same bits of water from one minute to the next?”
Nelson knew an assignment when he heard one. Sure enough, fen next reached into her pouch and took out a pair of small objects, which she slid across the table toward him. “Here are some things to study. One contains articles by scholars as far back as Ornstein and Minsky and Bukhorin. I think you’ll find them useful as you write up your own speculations for next time.”
He reached for the items, perplexed. One was a standard gigabyte infocell. But the other wasn’t even a chip. He recognized the disk as an old-style metal coin and read the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA imprinted around its rim.
“Take a look at the motto,” she suggested.
He didn’t know what that meant, so he searched for the most incomprehensible thing on it. “E … pluribus … unum?” he pronounced carefully.
“Mmm,” she confirmed, and said nothing more. Nelson sighed. Naturally, he was going to have to look it up for himself.
By all the numbers, it should have happened long ago.
Jen thought about consciousness, a topic once dear to her, but which she’d given little attention to for some time. Until all these new adventures overturned her pleasant, iconoclastic existence and threw her back to contemplating the basics again. Now she couldn’t help dwelling on the subject during her walk back to the Tangoparu digs.
It’s close to a century since they’ve been talking about giving machines “intelligence.” And still they run up against this barrier of self-awareness. Still they say, “It’s sure to come sometime in the next twenty years or so!” As if they really know.
Stars glittered over the dusty path as she made her way from Kuwenezi’s compact, squat, storm-proof ark four, past fields of newly sprouted winter wheat, toward the gaping entrance of the old gold mine. The quandary stayed with her as she rode the elevator deep into the Earth.
Simulation programs keep getting better. Now they mimic faces, hold conversations, pass Turing tests. Some may fool you up to an hour if you aren’t careful.
And yet you can always tell, if you pay attention. Simulations, that’s all they are.
Funny thing. According to theoreticians, big computers should have been able to perform human-level thought at least two decades ago. Something was missing, and as her conversations with Nelson brought her back to basics, Jen thought she knew what it was.
No single entity, all by itself, can ever be whole.
That was the paradox. It was delicious in a way, like the ancient teaser, “This sentence is a lie.” And yet, hadn’t Kurt Gödel shown, mathematically, that no closed system of logic can ever “prove” all its own implied theorems? Hadn’t Donne said, “No man is an island”?
We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That’s how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.
Or a mind.
Jen entered the well-lit chamber where the Tangoparu team had their resonator. She stopped by the main display to see where Beta was at present. A purple ellipse marked its current orbit—now rising at its highest point all the way past the outer core to the lower mantle, where quicksilver flashes seemed to spark and flare with every lingering apogee. Now Beta was losing mass at each apex—a true milestone—though it would be a while yet before its balance sheet went into debit full time and they could all draw a sigh of relief.
Jen watched the mantle’s flickerings of superconducting electricity, those pent-up energy stores Kenda’s people tapped to drive the gazer effect. One brief, titanic burst had taken place while she was visiting Nelson—triggered in tandem by the Greenland and New Guinea resonators. The next run, scheduled in ten minutes, would unite this African device with New Guinea in an effort to shift Beta’s orbital line of apsides slightly.
At first she and the others had been fearful of the news from headquarters—that the NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN alliances had seized two of the four resonators. Kenda worried that all their work would be in vain. Then came word from George Hutton. Everything was to go on as before. The only difference, apparently, was that new supplies and technicians would flood in to help the effort. Jen had been cynical; it sounded too good to be true.
Sure enough, George went on to add that there would be limits to cooperation with Colonel Spivey. Easter Island and South Africa were to remain independent. He was adamant about that. No newcomers would be allowed at those two sites. Kenda’s team reacted with a mixture of resigned fatigue and relief. They would have loved the help, but understood Hutton’s reasons.
“George isn’t so sure about this association, yet,” Kenda told them all at a meeting several days ago. “And that’s enough for me.”
Jen wondered why there was no word from Alex. Now that they were communicating over secure military bands, completely independent of the World Data Net, shouldn’t the boy feel free to talk openly? Something was wrong, she sensed. More was going on than anyone said.
With a sigh she went to her own station to plug in the subvocal. By now it was almost as easy to calibrate as her home unit, though she still had to do most of it “by hand.”
Only this time, after that conversation with Nelson, she paid a little more attention to the extraneous blips and images that popped in and out of the peripheral screens.
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At the upper left, several bars of musical score wrote themselves—an advertising jingle she hadn’t heard in years. Below that, poking from a corner, came the shy face of a young boy … Alex, as she remembered him at age eight or so. No mystery why that image crept in. She was worried about him, and so must have subvocalized unspoken words that the computer picked up. It, in turn, had gone into her personal archive and pulled out some old photo, feeding it then to an off-the-shelf enhancement program to be animated.
To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the computer had read her thoughts. In fact, it was only highlighting the surface bits, those which almost became words. It was like rummaging through your purse and coming up with an envelope of neglected pictures. Only now her “purse” consisted of terabyte sheets of optical memory, extrapolated by a tool kit of powerful subroutines. And you didn’t even have to intend in order to rummage. The mind “below” was doing it all the time.
Jen adjusted the sensitivity level, giving her associations more space to each side … it was a sort of visually amplified form of free association, she realized. Yet another type of feedback. And feedback was the way life-forms learned and avoided error. Gaia used feedback to maintain her delicate balance. Another word for feedback was “criticism.”
A pair of cartoon figures drifted toward each other from opposite screens. The first was her familiar tiger totem … a mascot that had been omnipresent, for some reason, ever since this adventure had begun. The other symbol looked like an envelope … the old-fashioned kind you used to send letters in. The two figures circled round each other, the tiger mewling lowly, the envelope snapping its flap at the cat.
Now why had these manifested when she thought the word “criticism”? As she reflected on the question, written words formed in the tank. The envelope said to the tiger, “YOUR ORANGE STRIPES ARE TOO BRIGHT TO CAMOUFLAGE YOU ON THIS SCREEN! I CAN SEE YOU TOO EASILY!”
“THANK YOU,” the tiger acknowledged, and switched at once to gray tones Jen found blurry and indistinct. “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the tiger asked the envelope in turn. “IT REALLY IS WRONG FOR ONE PART TO KEEP SECRETS FROM THE WHOLE.” And a slashing paw ripped open a corner, laying bare a bit of something that sparkled underneath. “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the great cat insisted.
Though amusing in its own way, Jen decided this was accomplishing nothing. “I’ll tell you what it contains,” she muttered, making the words official by saying them aloud. She wiped the screen with a simple tap of one tooth against another. “Just more bleeding metaphors.”
Gathering herself together, fen concentrated on the matter at hand. Getting ready for the next run of the gravity laser. She’d gotten to quite enjoy each firing, pretending it was she herself who sent beams of exploration deep into the living world.
Meanwhile, though, a ghostlike striped pattern, like a faint smile, lingered faintly in one corner of the screen, purring softly to itself, watching.
The International Space Treaty Authority today released its annual census of known man-made hazards to vehicles and satellites in outer space. Despite the stringent provisions of the Guiana Accords of 2021, the amount of dangerous debris larger than one millimeter has risen by yet another five percent, increasing the volume of low earth orbit unusable by spacecraft classes two through six. If this trend continues, it will force repositioning or replacement of weather, communications, and arms-control satellites, as well as the expensive armoring of manned research stations.
“People don’t think of this as pollution,” said ISTA director Sanjay Vendrajadan. “But Earth is more than just a ball of rock and air, you know. Its true boundaries extend beyond the moon. Anything happening inside that huge sphere eventually affects everything else. You can bet your life on it.”
• LITHOSPHERE
The face in the telephone screen seemed to be changing daily. Logan felt a pang, seeing how grown-up Claire was becoming.
“She doesn’t even think it worth hiding from me!” his daughter complained. Behind her, Logan saw the familiar cane fields and cypresses of Atchafalaya country, with its monumental dikes shading fish farms and lazy bayous. Claire looked frustrated and angry.
“I’m no great programmer, but she must think I’m a total baby not to be able to snoop through those pathetic screens between my unit and hers!”
Logan shook his head. “Honey, Daisy could hide data from God himself.” He smiled. “Heck, she could even fool Santa Claus if she put her mind to it.”
“I know that!” Claire answered with a furled brow, dismissing his attempt at levity. “Between the house and the outside world, she’s got watchdogs and griffins and the scariest cockatrice programs anyone’s ever seen. Which shows just how much contempt she must have for me, leaving it so easy for me to probe her puzzle palace from my little desk comp down the hail!”
Logan realized this was complicated. Part of Claire’s agitation had little to do with Daisy’s actual sins. “Your mother loves you,” he said.
But Claire only shrugged irritably, as if to say his statement was obvious, tendentious, and irrelevant. “I have a psycher program, Dad, thanks. I didn’t come all the way out here, beyond range of her local pickups, just to whine that my momma doesn’t understand me.”
That was sure what it had sounded like. But Logan held up both hands in surrender. “All right. Pipe me what you found. I’ll look it over.”
“Promise?”
“Hey,” he said, pausing to cross his heart. “Didn’t I pay off on the meteorite?”
That, at last, got a smile out of her. Claire brushed aside a lock of dark hair that had fallen over her eyes in her agitation. “Okay. Here it comes. I encrypted it inside a routine weather forecast, in case one of her ferrets happens across it on the way.”
If one of Daisy McClennon’s ferrets finds the blip, simple encryption won’t matter. But Logan kept the thought to himself. Almost as soon as she pressed a button, a thousand miles away, his own borrowed data plaque lit up.
INCOMING MAIL.
Logan thought he heard the sound of a copter’s engines. He looked up to scan the forest from this slight rise, but there was no sign yet of the pickup vehicle. There was still time to finish the conversation.
“I want to know if you thought about what I said last time,” he asked his daughter.
Claire frowned. “You mean about dragging Daisy with me on some sort of ‘vacation’? Daddy, have you any idea what my counselor in Oregon is like? I already missed one threshold exam this month because of the storm. Two more and I might have to go back to school. You know, high school?”
Logan was almost tempted to ask, What’s so bad about high school? I had some great times in high school.
But then, the mind has ways of locking out memories of pain and ennui, and recalling only the peaks. Prison for the crime of puberty—that was how secondary school had seemed, when he really thought back on it.
So how do I tell her I’m worried? Worried about things far worse than the off chance she might have to finish her diploma in some public warren? What’s six months of bored purgatory against saving her life?
One of Daisy’s surrogates might or might not at this moment be snooping the plaque he was using. But Logan knew for certain another force, even more powerful than his ex-wife, was listening to his every word. Glenn Spivey’s organization was fanatical about security, and its watch programs would parse all but the vaguest warnings he might offer Claire. Still, Logan had to take a chance.
“I … do you remember what Daisy snooped, last time? My paper?” He furrowed his forehead until his eyebrows nearly touched.
“You mean the one about—?” Then, miraculously, she seemed to read his expression. Her mouth went round, briefly. “Um, yeah. I remember what it was about.”
“Well, just so you do.” Logan pretended to lose interest in the topic. “Say, have you been up to Missouri, lately. I hear they’re having a pretty good state fair up around New Madrid, these days. You might pick up some nice
specimens for your collection there.”
Claire’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Um, Tony has to handle the fish harvest all alone since his uncle got laid up. So … I’m helping even on weekends. I probably won’t get to any fairs this year.”
He could see the wheels turning behind those blue eyes. Not even seventeen, and yet she knows how to read between the lines. Are the new schools doing this? Are teenagers really getting smarter? Or am I just lucky?
Obviously the reference to New Madrid was setting off alarm bells in Claire’s head. Now he had to pray Spivey’s spy software wouldn’t catch the same contextual cues. “Mm. Tony’s a good kid. Just remember, though, how we talked about boys, even the nice ones. Be sure you call the shots, kiddo. Don’t let anybody turn the ground to jello under you.”
With a show of irritation he could tell was calculated, Claire sniffed. “I can take care of my own footing, Dad.”
He grunted with fatherly curmudgeonliness. For the moment, that was all he could do. Let Claire evaluate his veiled warning, as he’d consider hers. What a team we’d make. That is, if we survive the next year.
From a distance, across the forested slopes, Logan now heard the real growl of the ’copter carrying the rest of his inspection team. He turned back to his daughter’s image. “Time to go, honey. I just … hope you know how very much I love you.”
He hadn’t intended getting so uncharacteristically mushy all of a sudden. But it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. Claire’s eyes widened momentarily, and he saw her swallow, realizing perhaps for the first time just how seriously he took all this.
“Take care of yourself, Daddy. Please.” She leaned forward and whispered. “I love you too.” Then her image vanished from the small display.
Fallen pine needles blew across his ankles. Logan looked up as the hybrid flying machine—half helicopter, half turboprop—rotated its engines to descend vertically toward a clearing a hundred meters away. Leaning out the side door was Joe Redpath, Logan’s sardonic Amerind assistant, whose bored, sullen expression was just his version of a friendly greeting. No doubt Redpath brought news of the colonel’s next assignment now that their survey here was finished.