Blind Lake (28 page)

She had set aside some work to make her presence here seem plausible. Not that there was much in the way of real work. It was a fucking joke, these reports Ray insisted on putting together, documenting the daily trivia of Blind Lake site management. The reports went nowhere except into a file marked PENDING—pending what, the end of the world?—but they would serve as an alibi if it came down to the question of what Ray had been up to during the lockdown. It seemed to her that Ray spent a lot of time preparing to be questioned about things.

She kept an eye on her desktop clock. At 1:30, she made a show of shuffling through papers and digital files as if she had lost something. And therefore would go into Ray’s office to get it. This felt ludicrously unrealistic, like a high school play.

Or a bad movie. And in the movie, Sue thought, this would be the moment somebody walked in on her… probably Shulgin, or even Ray, Ray with a pistol in his hand…

“Sue?”

She bit her tongue, then managed an “Ow!” that might have passed as “Hello?”

It wasn’t Ray. It was only Gretchen Krueger from down in Archives.

“Didn’t expect you’d be in today,” Gretchen said. “I was just on my way to pick up some back-issue
JAEs
and I saw your door open. Is Ray here too?”

“No. I’m just finishing up some work. Except I keep losing things.” Establishing her alibi yet again.

“When I’m done here, I’m getting together at Sawyer’s with Jamal and Karen. Want to join us? You’d be more than welcome.”

“Thanks, but all I want this afternoon is a shower and a nap.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You have a good time, though, Gretch.”

“I will. Take it easy, Sue. You look tired.”

Gretchen ambled off down the corridor and Sue began to steel herself once more for the assault on Ray’s inner office. But first she pulled the door to the hallway all the way closed. Her hand was shaking, she discovered.

Then into Ray’s sanctuary and out of range of the security cameras.

First she pulled a sheaf of files out of the cabinet against the wall—any files, it didn’t matter, as long as she had something innocuous-looking to carry out again. Then she went to his desk, put her key in the master lock, and opened all five drawers one after the other.

The bundle of printouts was in the bottom-left drawer, where he used to keep his DingDongs before the supply ran out. He had probably vacuumed the drawer for crumbs, knowing Ray. Ray must be seriously jonesing, she thought. He must be in acute DingDong withdrawal.

She picked up the first sheet.

EX: Bo Xiang,
Crossbank National Laboratory
TO: Avery Fishbinder,
Blind Lake National Laboratory
TEXT:
Hi, Ave. As promised, here’s some heads-up on the material we’ll be presenting at this year’s conference. Sorry I can’t be more explicit (I know you don’t want to be blindsided) but we’ve been warned to keep this quiet until it’s all official. The long and short is that we’ve found evidence of a vanished sentient culture on HR8832/B. Screen shots to follow, but there is a region of basaltic uplift in the northern hemisphere, very shallow water and some exposed islands, superficially no different from hundreds of other such swampy regions, but with the remains of obviously very highly engineered structures, including a specific link or at least an architectural reference to the “coral floaters” dotting the equator. Still unsure how to reconcile this with the absence of motile animals: Gossard suggests an ancient mass extinction…

For God’s sake, Sue scolded herself, don’t
read
it. She cast a furtive glance at the doorway. She was alone, but that could change.

She took her server from her pocket, dialed her home node and activated the scan function. The server was a pencil-style model exactly as wide as a standard sheet of paper. Sue ran the photosensitive side down the document until it blipped a complete transfer. Then the next sheet. Then the next. But there were lots of sheets. She checked her watch. It was almost two o’clock. She might be another twenty minutes here. More.

Calm down
, she told herself, and scanned another printout.

From his aisle seat in the hall, Chris Carmody watched Ray stand up and walk to the podium.

Chris felt it was important to get some measure of this guy. There were a thousand ways he could walk into another confrontation with Ray Scutter. If that happened, he didn’t want to screw it up.

There were a thousand ways to screw it up.

Ray looked pretty slick today. He smiled at the audience and took the podium with an ease Marguerite hadn’t been able to muster. This was the “charm” she had talked about it, and maybe this was what she had seen in him when they first met—a plausible grin and some good-sounding words. Ray began:

“I’m going to depart from my prepared text here—and I know you asked us to keep it short, Ari, and I promise I’ll do my best—to address some of the remarks of the previous speaker.”

Marguerite squirmed visibly in her chair, though she must have expected this.

“As scientists,” Ray said, “one of the things we
must
keep in mind is that appearances can be deceptive. We’ve been talking about the O/BEC installation as if it were a superior optical telescope. I would remind you that it isn’t. At its most fundamental level, the Eye is a quantum computer functioning as an image generator. We assume the images it generates accurately represent past events on a distant planet. That may be true. It may not. If it
is
deriving real information, we don’t know how it’s doing so. The images it creates are consonant with our real knowledge of UMa47/E’s size, atmosphere, and distance from its parent star. Beyond that, however, we have no way of confirming what the Eye purports to see. Until we can more efficiently duplicate and understand the effect, our assumption that we’re seeing real events has to be provisional.

“And if we’re tentative about the conclusions we draw, it’s not because we’re timid. It’s because we don’t want to be deceived. For this reason—and many others—I believe our tight focus on the Subject and his culture has been misguided and disastrously premature.

“In contrast to the previous speaker, I would remind the audience that we have been making up stories—pardon me, ‘constructing narratives’—about extraterrestrial life for much of human history. Whether this constitutes genius or folly is an interesting question. In the name of science, we were once asked by Percival Lowell to believe in a Mars equipped with canals and civilization. That misconception was dispelled by twentieth-century science, only to be replaced by the wishful and ultimately falsified discovery of fossil bacteria in a Martian meteorite. Examined more closely, Mars has proven to be sterile of life. The widely imagined microbes inhabiting Europa’s subsurface ocean of lukewarm sludge have likewise turned out to be illusory. Our imagination outpaces us, it seems. It is intuitive, it leaps ahead, and it sees what it wishes for. A manifesto for imagination is hardly what we need, especially at this point in time.”

He sighed theatrically.

“Having said that—and I think it needed to be said—let me move on to a more pressing issue, one with particular relevance for all of us here at the Lake.

“It goes without saying that the lockdown, what some people have called the quarantine, is an unprecedented event and one we have all struggled to understand. Quarantine, I think, is an apt word. I think it’s become obvious that we have all been confined here, not for our own good, but for the protection of people on the outside.

“And yet it sounds absurd, ridiculous. What is there about us, about Blind Lake, that could possibly be considered threatening?

“Indeed, what? Some have suggested that the very images we’ve been studying might be dangerous, that they might contain a steganographic code or some other hidden message destructive to the human mind. But we have seen little evidence of that… unless you want to cite the previous speaker’s panegyric as an example.” Ray grinned lopsidedly, as if he had said something a little wicked but very clever, and there was uneasy laughter from the audience. He took a sip of water and carried on: “No, I think we ought to focus our suspicion on the process itself—on the O/BEC mechanism.

“Could there be something dangerous about the O/BEC platens? We hardly know enough to answer that question. What we do know is that the O/BEC processors are very powerful quantum computers of a novel kind and we’re using them to run self-evolving, self-replicating code.

“Those words by themselves ought to raise an alarm. In every other case in which we have attempted to exploit self-replicating evolutionary systems, we’ve been forced to proceed with utmost caution. I’m thinking of the near-disaster last year at the MIT nanotech lab—we all know how much worse that might have been—or the novel rice cultivars that caused so many histamine-reaction deaths in Asia in the early Twenty-twenties.”

Elaine scribbled furiously on a notepad. Sebastian Vogel sat in a state of calm attentiveness, a bearded Buddha.

“The obvious objection is that those events involved ‘real’ self-replicating systems in the ‘real’ world, not code in a machine. But this is shortsighted. The O/BEC virtual ecosystem may be contained, but it is also effectively enormous. Literally billions of generations of algorithms are iterated and harvested for utility in a single day. Periodically we select them for the results we desire, but they are breeding always. We assume that because we write the limiting conditions we have godlike power over our creations. Maybe that isn’t the case.

“Now, obviously we’ve never lost a researcher because he was ambushed by an algorithm.” More laughter: the lay audience seemed to like this, though the Observation and Interpretation people remained warily silent. “And that’s not what I’m suggesting. But there is some evidence—which I’m not yet at liberty to discuss—that the Crossbank installation was shut down hours before the quarantine was placed on Blind Lake, and that something dangerous
did
happen there, possibly involving their O/BEC machines.”

This was news. All around the auditorium, people literally sat up in their chairs. Chris glanced at Elaine, who shrugged: she hadn’t expected Ray to broach that subject.

Maybe Ray hadn’t intended to. He shuffled his papers and looked nonplussed for a long moment.

“This is, of course still under investigation…”

He set the written speech aside.

“But I want to return to the previous speaker’s claims for a moment…”

“He’s ad-libbing,” Elaine whispered. “Marguerite must have scored a point somewhere. Or else he had a couple of drinks before he showed up.”

“If I recall correctly… I believe it was Goethe who wrote that nature loves illusion. ‘Nature loves illusion, and those who will not partake of her illusions she punishes as a tyrant would punish.’ We talk glibly about a ‘sentient’ species as if sentience were a simple, easily quantifiable attribute. Of course it is not. Our perception of our own sentience is skewed and idiosyncratic. We contrast ourselves with the other primates as if we were rational and they were driven by purely animalistic impulses. But the ape, for instance, is almost wholly rational: he searches for food, he eats when he’s hungry, he sleeps when he’s weary, he mates when the urge and opportunity are both present. A philosophical ape might well ask which species is genuinely driven by reason.

“He might ask, ‘When are we most alike, men and apes?’ Not when we eat or sleep or defecate, because every animal does those things. Men exhibit their uniqueness when they make elaborate tools, compose operas, wage war for ideological reasons, or send robots to Mars—only human beings do that. We imagine our future and contemplate our past, personal or collective. But when does an ape review the events of his day or imagine an utterly different future? The obvious answer is, when he dreams.”

Chris looked at Marguerite onstage. She seemed as startled as everyone else. Ray was rattled now, but he had launched into a scenario that had some weighty internal momentum of its own.

“When he dreams. When the ape dreams. Asleep, he does not reason but he dreams the dreams that enable reason. Dreaming, the ape imagines he is chased or chasing, fed or hungry, frightened or safe. In reality he is none of those things. He’s running or starving in a fragmentary model world wholly of his own projection. How human! How completely human! You, this philosophical ape might say, are the hominids who dream by daylight. You don’t live in the world. You live in your dream of the world.

“Dreaming infuses our existence. Our earliest ancestors learned to throw a spear, not at a running animal, but at the place where the running animal would be when the spear had traveled through the air at a certain speed. Our ancestors did this not by calculation but by imagination. By dreaming, in other words. We dream the animal’s future and throw the spear at the dream. We dream images out of the past and use them to project and revise our own future action. And as an evolutionary stratagem our dreaming has been wildly successful. As a species, we have dreamed ourselves out of the cul-de-sac of instinct into a whole new universe of unexplored behaviors.

“We did it so effectively, I would suggest, that we have forgotten the fundamental truth that we
are
dreaming. We confuse the dream with reason. But the ape reasons too. What the ape will
not
do is dream ideologies, dream terrorism, dream vengeful gods, dream slavery, dream gas chambers, dream lethal remedies for dreamlike problems. Dreams are commonly nightmares.”

The audience was lost. Ray seemed no longer to care. He was talking to himself now, chasing an idea down some labyrinth only he could see.

“But they are dreams from which, as a species, we cannot wake. Our dreams are the dreams nature loves. Our dreams are epigenetic and they have served our genome remarkably well. In a few hundreds of thousands of years we have increased from a localized hominid subspecies to a planet-dominating population of eight or ten billion. If we reason within the boundaries of our daylight dreams, nature rewards us. If we reasoned as simply and straightforwardly as the apes we would be no more populous than the apes.