Existence (50 page)

Standing was too much to ask of his body. So, he scooted backward and up the next stair, bracing both arms to slide up the next one, and so on, till at last he sat on the deck surrounding the entry pool, and only his flippered feet remained immersed. For a couple of minutes he just sat, breathing heavily from just that much exertion.

Okay, let’s find …
he stopped.

Upon turning halfway around, Hacker found himself facing a large, hand-scrawled sign that had been propped up in front of the pool, sure to confront any new arrivals.

Project Uplift Suspended!

Court costs ate everything.

This structure is deeded to our finned friends.

May they someday join us as equals.

There followed, in smaller print, a WorldNet access number, and a legal-looking letter. Hacker had to squint and blink away drying salt to read a few lines. But it seemed to verify that queer statement—the little dolphin clan actually owned this building—which they now used to store their nets, some toys, and a few tools.

Hacker now understood the meaning of their plaintive calls, when they arrived to find no one home. The real reason they kept coming back. Each time, they hoped to find that their “hand-friends” had returned.

Project Uplift?
He pondered, while laboring to pull off the body-hugging suit, wincing as it dragged past sores and chafed spots.
The name is familiar. I … heard something about it.

One of the dolphins—old Yellowbelly—came over to eye Hacker, emitting a burst whose meaning seemed much less clear to Hacker, now that his jaw was out of the water.

“I’ll be back,” he assured the old-timer, holding up one hand in promise.

*   *   *

It took great effort to rise up to his knees. Then, leaning on the stair rail, he managed to rise onto both feet. It wasn’t so much lack of strength—he had been working his legs hard for quite some time and his thigh muscles bulged—as a problem of balance. No other species on Earth demanded such fine motor control as humans required, just to keep from toppling over. He would need some time to get the hang of it again.

Unsteady on rubbery legs, Hacker clung close to the walls and cabinets as he shuffled away from the pool, into a long corridor, stopping to look into each chamber along the way. They were laboratories, mostly. The first time he found a sink with a freshwater tap, he turned it on full blast and immersed his head, then drank greedily until he felt bloated. It took an act of forceful will to stop … to move away and resume exploring.

In the third room, he recognized a gene-splicing apparatus made by one of his own companies. And, all at once, his mind connected the dots.

Project Uplift. Oh yes. I remember.

A year or two ago—both professional and amateur media swarmed over a small cabal whose secret goal had been to
alter
several animal species, with the ultimate aim of giving them human-level intelligence.

Foes of all kinds had attacked the endeavor. Churches called it sacrilegious. Eco-zealots decried meddling in nature’s wisdom. Tolerance fetishists demanded that native “dolphin culture” be left alone, without cramming parochial human values down their throats, while others rifkined the proposal, predicting mutants would escape the labs to endanger humanity.

One problem with diversity in an age of amateurs was that your hobby might attract ire from a myriad others, especially from those with a particular passion of their own—indignant disapproval. And a bent for litigation.

This “uplift project” perished in the rough-and-tumble battle that ensued. A great many modern endeavors did.

Survival of the fittest,
he mused.
An enterprise this dramatic and controversial has to attract strong and determined support, or it’s doomed.

Exploring the next laboratory, Hacker at last found what he was looking for—a cheap
joymaker
multiphone that someone had left behind, tossed amid a pile of trash. Though it seemed broken at first, a simple cleaning of the battacitor pohls and it turned on! A simulated female face appeared on the pullout slide-screen, moving its mouth in a welcoming statement that Hacker could not hear, but whose meaning was obvious—offering basic service, even if the unit no longer linked to any personal or corporate accounts.

Ah, but was there a connection to the Mesh, under the sea? Certainly, Project Uplift must have had comm links, even from down here. But were they still active and accessible?

Laboriously, he fumbled across the screen, managing to tactile the right clickable and pull out an old-fashioned alphabetical touchpad. With fingers that felt like sausages, he typed:

CAN I CALL MAINLAND?

The kind-looking female face vanished, replaced by stark letters that scrolled by in harsh, 2-D fonts.

DIAGNOSTIC UNDERWAY …

… CABLE LINK TO TRINIDAD MAIN UNDERSEA TRUNK HAS BEEN SOFT-DISCONNECTED.

SHALL I PULSE A REQUEST FOR EMERGENCY RECONNECT?

Hacker answered with a simple “Y”—hoping the joymaker would take it to mean Yes.

PULSING.… THIS MAY TAKE SOME TIME

FROM FIVE MINUTES TO SEVERAL HOURS

PLEASE BE READY WITH PAYMENT

Hacker grunted wondering what to do, if and when a connection was established. It should be possible to craft a message, built from simple text characters, invoking emergency-Samaritan rules, along with a promise that the call’s recipient—his mother—would cover all charges. That seemed dreadfully archaic and convoluted, from using spelled-out letters to quibbling over payment. But the thing really giving Hacker pause was something else entirely.

A text emergency message … it gives an impression I need hurried rescue … when I’ve really rescued myself.

Well … the dolphins helped, a bit.

Still. Here he was, with food, water, comfortable quarters, and the option of simply heading for the nearby beach, if it came to that, and then walking to civilization. So, why send the equivalent of SOS smoke signals, or scrawling
“HELP”
in the sand? Maybe it was foolish pride, but that seemed wrong, somehow, after coming so far.

Better that I make a call that seems as normal as possible. All casual-like, paying charges by biomet ID. Make it seem like I’m in complete control. Hi. How you been? And oh, and by the way, could you send a copter-sub out this way?

He thought he knew how to do that. Use some of the tools in that last laboratory to create a tap from the joymaker to the sonic implant in his jaw. It shouldn’t be too hard. Just replicate the same circuit link he had used aboard the suborbital rocket. The most important parts were right in his helmet, back at the pool.

While I’m at it, why not get in some real food?
Even the canned stuff he had spied earlier, left on shelves in the galley, would be a welcome break from raw fish. Spitting out scales and bones.

And take a bath … maybe even a nap?

Hacker’s mood was so different from the frenzy he might have expected, from being so close to contact with human civilization. And yet, he felt this was right.

TAKE YOUR TIME
, he told the primitive, obsolete multiphone, typing carefully on the tactile screen.

I WILL CHECK AGAIN IN A FEW HOURS.

ENTROPY

Suppose the threat comes from human nature—some obstinate habit woven in our genes. Might science offer a way out, through deliberate self-improvement? First we’d have to admit that we
have
a nature.

Take the argument over
evolutionary psychology.
EP claims we all inherit patterns from prehistoric times—that long epoch when domineering males gained extra descendants because they were powerfully competitive, or jealous, or good at deception. Monarchy and feudalism heaped more rewards on any king who could talk thousands of virile men into marching and fighting to protect
his
seraglio. We’re all descended from the harems of fellows like Charlemagne and Genghis Khan, who mastered that trick.

Opponents of EP argue we’re more than the sum of our ancestors. They cite our vaunted flexibility, the way we learn and reprogram ourselves, as individuals and cultures. Each sex can do almost anything that the other does, and rules that limited opportunity because of caste, race, or gender have proved baseless. Indeed, our greatest trait is adapting to new circumstances, attaining improbable dreams.

Only, starting from this truth, critics puritanically claim that evolutionary psychology might be used to
excuse bad conduct,
letting rapists and oppressors cry “Darwin made me do it!” Hence, for political reasons, they claim people have
no
hardwired social patterns, or even leanings, at all.

What, none? No matter how contingent or flexible? Are we so perfectly
unlike
every other species on Earth? Isn’t that what religious fundamentalists claim? That we have nothing in common with nature?

Can we afford simpleminded exaggerations, in either direction? In order to survive, humanity must overcome so many old, bad habits. We must study those ancient patterns—not in order to make excuses, but to better understand the raw material of Homo sapiens.

Only then can we look in the mirror, at evolution’s greatest marvel, and say, “Okay, that’s the hand we’re dealt. Now let’s do better.”

—
Pandora’s Cornucopia

39.

TOUGH LOVE

Envoy to aliens.
It had more romantic appeal than his old job as a space garbage collector. Suddenly, Gerald was the hit of his affinity groups.

Cicada Lifeloggers already gave every astronaut free biograph-storage—geneticodes, petscans, q-slices, and all that—in exchange for wearing a recording jewel in orbit. Now they wanted him to put on their omni-crown, a hot-hat guaranteed to see what he saw, hear what he heard, and store his surface neuroflashes down to petabytes per second!

“So much data that future folk may craft brilliant Gerald Livingstone models. Hi-res versions of you—recreating this historic moment in resplendent detail!”
The Cicada rep apparently thought immortality consisted of being replayed at ultrafidelity by audiences in some far-off era.

But then,
Gerald pondered,
how can I tell I’m experiencing this for the first time? Wouldn’t any such future emulation think it’s me? Even these very thoughts—fretting over whether I’m an emulation? Even my memories of breakfast may be “boundary conditions.” The real world could be some amusement nexus in the ninety-third century … or a kid’s primitive ancestors report for her fifth-millennium kindergarten class … or else some god-machine’s passing daydream.

Yet, the Cicada guy expressed envy! As a “historical figure,” Gerald’s chance for this kind of resurrection—seemed rather high. But the reasoning could easily get circular, or collapse into sophistry. Was this like the depressing religious doctrine of predestination? Your fate already written by an all-powerful God?

Anyway, what if this First Contact episode goes horribly wrong? Suppose I’m remembered as the fool or Judas who opened the door for a new kind of evil. Might future folk create simulations in order for villains of the past to suffer … or seem to?
Worse, Gerald pictured the supercyborg equivalent of a future bored teenager, observing this capsule of make-believe reality, nudging his pals and saying:
“I love this part! This is where Livingstone actually tries to imagine us! Picturing us as callous, pimple-faced adolescents of his own era. What a pathetic software lump! Maybe next time, I’ll hack in and make him trip on the stairs.”

Gerald felt his thoughts veer away from such questions. Perhaps because they were futile. Or else maybe he was programmed not to dwell on them for long.
Ah well.
He turned Cicada down.

The Church of Gaia: Jesus-Lover Branch wanted Gerald to offer an online sermon for next Sunday’s prayoff against the CoG: Pure-Mother Branch. Some fresh insights could help tip the current standings. They especially wanted to know—from his contact with the Artifact entities—did any of the aliens still know a state of grace? Like Adam and Eve before the apple? Or, if they had fallen, like man, had they also received an emissary of deliverance—a race savior—of their own? If so, were their stories similar to the New Testaments? And if not …

… then what did Gerald think of the notion—spreading among Christians—that humanity must accept a new obligation? A proud duty to go forth and spread the Word?

In other words, now that we know they’re out there—trillions of souls wallowing in darkness—is it our solemn mission to head across the galaxy delivering
Good News
?
At least it was a more forward-looking dogma than his parents’ relished obsession—praying for a gruesome apocalypse and eternal torment for all fools who recite the wrong incantations. Still, he turned down the sermon, promising the CoG: JeLoB folks to ask the Artifact entities about such matters, when the right moment arose.

For all I know, “join us” could mean “enlist in our religion—or face an interstellar crusade.” I can’t wait to find out.

The list of requests was too long to cope with … unless the aliens offered some fantastic new way to copy yourself. Now
that
would be useful tech!

The proposal that rocked him back should have been good news. Suddenly, his spouses seemed interested in bedtime. All of them. Even Francesca, who had never liked Gerald very much. “We miss you,” they said, in messages and calls. More attention than he normally got from the group marriage. In fact, all seven offered to come visit him “in this time of stress.”

Joey, Jocelyn, and Hubert even volunteered to sign waivers and enter quarantine with him! The offer was flattering. Tempting. Especially since Gerald always felt an outsider, at the periphery of their little clan, long suspecting they proposed to him for the prestige of an astronaut husband. Perhaps the best sitch that a cool-blooded and off-kilter fellow like him could hope for.