Godlike Machines (19 page)

They glanced at each other. “The final answers, we hope,” Michael Poole said.

Miriam said, “We’ve put off looking under there until we brought you round, Jovik.”

Poole said, “We’ve no idea what’s under there. We need everybody awake, ready to react. We might even need your help, Emry.” He looked at me with faint disgust. “And,” he said more practically, “it’s probably going to take three of us to open it. Come see.”

We all floated through the gloopy murk.

The hatch was a disc of some silvery metal, perhaps three meters across, set flush into the roughly flat rocky ground.

Spaced around its circumference were three identical grooves, each maybe ten centimeters deep. In the middle of each groove was a mechanism like a pair of levers, hinged at the top.

Michael said, “We think you operate it like this.” He knelt and put his gloved hands to either side of the levers, and mimed pressing them together. “We don’t know how heavy the mechanism will be. Hopefully each of us can handle one set of levers, with the help of our suits.”

“Three mechanisms,” I said. “This is a door meant to be operated by a spider, isn’t it? One handle for each of those three big claws.”

“We think so,” Miriam said. “The handles look about the right size. We think the handles must have to be worked simultaneously-one spider, or three humans.”

“I can’t believe that after a billion years all they have is a clunky mechanical door.”

Poole said, “It’s hard to imagine a technology however advanced that won’t have manual backups. We’ve seen that the spiders themselves aren’t perfect; they’re not immune to breakdown and damage.”

“As inflicted by us.” I gazed reluctantly at the hatch. “Must we do this? You’ve found what you wanted—or didn’t want. Why expose us to more risk? Can’t we just go home?”

Miriam and Michael just stared at me, bewildered. Miriam said, “You could walk away, without
knowing?”

Poole said, “Well, we’re not leaving here until we’ve done this, Emry, so you may as well get it done.” He crouched down by his handle, and Miriam did the same.

I had no choice but to join them.

Poole counted us down: “Three, two, one.”

I closed my gloved hands over the levers and pushed them together. It was awkward to reach down, and the mechanism felt heavy; my muscles worked, and I felt the reaction push me up from the floor. But the levers closed together.

The whole hatch began to vibrate.

I let go and moved back quickly. The others did the same. We stood in a circle, wafted by the currents of the ammonia sea, and watched that hatch slide up out of the ground.

It was like a piston, rising up one meter, two. Its sides were perfectly smooth, perfectly reflective, without a scuff or scratch. I wondered at how old it must be. Michael Poole, fool that he was, reached up a gloved monkey-curious hand to touch it, but Miriam restrained him. “I’d like to measure the tolerances on that thing,” he murmured.

Then the great slab, around three meters wide and two tall, slid sideways. Poole had to step out of the way. The scrape across the rough rock ground was audible, dimly. The shift revealed a hole in the ground, a circle—and at first I thought it was perfectly black. But then I saw elusive golden glimmers, sheets of light like soap bubbles; if I turned my head a little I lost it again.

“Woah,” Harry Poole said. “There’s some exotic radiation coming out of that hole. You should all back off. The suits have heavy shielding, but a few meters of water won’t hurt.”

I didn’t need telling twice. We moved away towards the GUT engine, taking the light with us. The hole in the ground, still just visible in the glow of our suit lamps, looked a little like one of the ethane lakes on the surface, with that metallic monolith beside it. But every so often I could make out that elusive golden-brown glimmer. I said, “It looks like a facet of one of your wormhole Interfaces, Poole.”

“Not a bad observation,” Poole said. “And I have a feeling that’s exactly what we’re looking at. Harry?”

“Yeah.” Harry was hesitating. “I wish you had a better sensor suite down there. I’m relying on instruments woven into your suits, internal diagnostic tools in the GUT engine, some stray neutrino leakage up here . .. Yes, I think we’re seeing products of stressed spacetime. There are some interesting optical effects too-light lensed by a distorted gravity field.”

“So it’s a wormhole interface?” Miriam asked.

“If it is,” Poole said, “it’s far beyond the clumsy monstrosities we construct in Jovian orbit. And whatever is on the other side of that barrier, my guess is it’s not on Titan .. .”

“Watch out,” Miriam said.

A spider came scuttling past us towards the hole. It paused at the lip, as if puzzled that the hole was open. Then it tipped forward, just as the spider we rode into the volcano had dipped into the caldera, and slid head first through that sheet of darkness. It was as if it had fallen into a pool of oil that closed over the spider without a ripple.

“I wouldn’t recommend following,” Harry said. “The radiations in there are deadly, suit or no suit; you couldn’t survive the passage.”

“Lethe,” Michael Poole said. He was actually disappointed.

“So are we done here?” I asked.

Poole snapped, “I’ll tell you something, Emry, I’m glad you’re here. Every time we come to an obstacle and you just want to give up, it just goads me into trying to find a way forward.”

“There
is
no way forward,” I said. “It’s lethal. Harry said so.”

“We can’t go on,” Miriam agreed. “But how about a probe? Something radiation-hardened, a controlling AI—with luck we could just drop it in there and let it report back.”

“That would work,” Poole said. Without hesitation the two of them walked over to the GUT engine, and began prying at it.

For redundancy the engine had two control units. Miriam and Poole detached one of these. Containing a sensor suite, processing capabilities, a memory store, it was a white-walled box the size of a suitcase. Within this unit and its twin sibling were stored the identity backups that had been taken of us before our ride into Titan’s atmosphere. The little box was even capable of projecting Virtuals; Harry’s sharp image was being projected right now by the GUT engine hardware, rather than through a pooling of our suits’ systems as before.

The box was small enough just to be dropped through the interface, and hardened against radiation. It would survive a passage through the wormhole—though none of us could say if it would survive what lay on the other side. And it had transmitting and receiving capabilities. Harry believed its signals would make it back through the interface, though probably scrambled by gravitational distortion and other effects, but he was confident he could construct decoding algorithms from a few test signals. The unit was perfectly equipped to serve as a probe through the hatch, save for one thing. What the control box didn’t have was intelligence.

Michael Poole stroked its surface with a gloved hand. “We’re sending it into an entirely unknown situation. It’s going to have to work autonomously, to figure out its environment, work out some kind of sensor sweep, before it can even figure out how to talk to us and ask us for direction. Running a GUT engine is a pretty simple and predictable job; the AI in there isn’t capable of handling an exploration like these.”

“But,” I said, “it carries in its store backups of four human intellects-mine, dead Bill, and you two geniuses. What a shame we can’t all ride along with it!”

My sarcasm failed to evoke the expected reaction. Poole and Miriam looked at each other, electrified. Miriam shook her head. “Jovik, you’re like some idiot savant. You keep on coming up with such ideas. I think you’re actually far smarter than you allow yourself to be.”

I said honestly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The idea you’ve suggested to them,” Harry said gently, “is to revive one of the dormant identity-backup copies in the unit’s store, and use
that
as the controlling intelligence.”

As always when they hit on some new idea Poole and Miriam were like two eager kids. Poole said, “It’s going to be a shock to wake up, to move straight from Titan entry to this point. It would be least disconcerting if we projected a full human animus.”

“You’re telling me,” said the head of Harry Poole.

“And some enclosing environment,” Miriam said. “Just a suit? No, to be adrift in space brings in problems with vertigo. I’d have trouble with that.”

“The lifedome of the
Crab
,” Poole said. “That would be straightforward enough to simulate to an adequate degree. And a good platform for observation. The power would be sufficient to sustain that for a few hours at least...”

“Yes.” Miriam grinned. “Our observer will feel safe. I’ll get to work on it...”

I asked, “So you’re planning to project a Virtual copy of one of us through the wormhole. And how will you get him or her back?”

They looked at me. “That won’t be possible,” Poole said. “The unit will be lost. It’s possible we could transmit back a copy of the memories the Virtual accrues on the other side-integrate them somehow with the backup in the GUT engine’s other store—”

“No,” Harry said regretfully. “The data rate through that interface would never allow even that. For the copy in there it’s a one way trip.”

“Well, that’s entirely against the sentience laws,” I put in. They ignored me.

Poole said, “That’s settled, then. The question is,
who?
Which of the four of us are you going to wake up from cyber-sleep and send into the unknown?”

I noticed that Harry’s disembodied floating head looked away, as if he were avoiding the question.

Poole and Miriam looked at each other. Miriam said, “Either of us would go. Right?”

“Of course.”

“But we should give it to Bill,” Miriam said firmly.

“Yeah. There’s no other choice. Bill’s gone, and we can’t bring his stored backup home with us ... We should let his backup have the privilege of doing this. It will make the sacrifice worthwhile.”

I stared at them. “This is the way you treat your friend? By killing him, then reviving a backup and sending it to another certain death?”

Poole glared at me. “Bill won’t see it that way, believe me. You and a man like Bill Dzik have nothing in common, Emry. Don’t judge him by your standards.”

“Fine. Just don’t send me.”

“Oh, I won’t. You don’t deserve it.”

It took them only a few more minutes to prepare for the experiment. The control pack didn’t need any physical modifications, and it didn’t take Miriam long to program instructions into its limited onboard intelligence. She provided it with a short orientation message, in the hope that Virtual Bill wouldn’t be left entirely bewildered at the sudden transition he would experience.

Poole picked up the pack with his gloved hands, and walked towards the interface, or as close as Harry advised him to get. Then Poole hefted the pack over his head. “Good luck, Bill.” He threw the pack towards the interface, or rather pushed it; its weight was low but its inertia was just as it would have been on Earth, and besides Poole had to fight against the resistance of the syrupy sea. For a while it looked as if the pack might fall short. “I should have practiced a couple of times,” Poole said ruefully. “Never was any use at physical sports.”

But he got it about right. The pack clipped the rim of the hole, then tumbled forward and fell slowly, dreamlike, through that black surface. As it disappeared autumn gold glimmered around it.

Then we had to wait, the three of us plus Harry. I began to wish that we had agreed some time limit; obsessives like Poole and Miriam were capable of standing there for hours before admitting failure.

In the event it was only minutes before a scratchy voice sounded in our suit helmets. “Harry? Can you hear me?”

“Yes!” Harry called, grinning. “Yes, I hear you. The reception ought to get better, the clean-up algorithms are still working. Are you all right?”

“Well, I’m sitting in the
Crab
lifedome. It’s kind of a shock to find myself here, after bracing my butt to enter Titan. Your little orientation show helped, Miriam.”

Poole asked, “What do you see?”

“The sky is ... strange.”

Miriam was looking puzzled. She turned and looked at Harry. “That’s not all that’s strange. That’s not Bill!”

“Indeed not,” came the voice from the other side of the hole. “I am Michael Poole.”

XIV

Virtual

So, while a suddenly revived Michael Poole floated around in other-space, the original Poole and his not-lover Miriam Berg engaged in a furious row with Harry.

Poole stormed over to the GUT engine’s remaining control pack, and checked the memory’s contents. It didn’t contain backup copies of the four of us; it contained only one ultra-high-fidelity copy of Michael Poole himself. I could not decide which scared me more: the idea that no copies of myself existed in that glistening white box, or the belief I had entertained previously that there had. I am prone to existential doubt, and am uncomfortable with such notions.

But such subtleties were beyond Michael Poole in his anger. “Miriam, I swear I knew nothing about this.”

“Oh, I believe you.”

They both turned on the older Poole. “Harry?” Michael snapped. “What in Lethe is this?”

Disembodied-head Harry looked shifty, but he was going to brazen it out. “As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing to apologize for. The storage available on the
Crab
was always limited, and it was worse in the gondola. Michael’s my son. Of course I’m going to protect him above others. What would you do? I’m sorry, Miriam, but—”

“You aren’t sorry at all,” Miriam snapped. “And you’re a cold-hearted bastard. You knowingly sent a backup of your son, who you say you’re trying to protect, through that worm-hole to die!”

Harry looked uncomfortable. “It’s just a copy. There are other backups, earlier copies—”

“Lethe, Dad,” Michael Poole said, and he walked away, bunching his fists. I wondered how many similar collisions with his father the man had had to suffer in the course of his life.