Halo: First Strike (8 page)

that flashed from small to large, traditional celebration both

sentimental and ironic:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-

ZERO!!!         And everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the

center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of

floodlights, then their breath caught at the size and beauty of

it, trembling into night sky.

Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition flash,

and the boom that came to them from five thousand feet shuddered

the entire cliff and them with it.

#

"I've got orbital lock," the primary onboard computer said. 

Five others calculated and confirmed its control sequences. 

Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight

Operations could preempt control, but, practically, decision and

control took place within milli-second or less windows of

possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to

all occasions.

Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers practiced

even when not flying, playing through ghastly and unlikely

scenarios of mechanical failure, human insanity, "acts of god" in

which the ship was struck by lightning, spun by tornado funnel,

hurricane, blizzard.  Each computer believed itself best, but

there was little to choose among them.

"Confirm go state," Athena Station said.  "You are past abort

or bail."

"We are ready, Athena," the computer said.

"So come to me, then," Athena Station said, and the ship

began to climb the beam of coherent light that reached up thirty

thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.

PART II. of V.

Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with the

priest.  In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more

I study robots, the less it seems possible to me that the spirit

and flesh are separate entities.'

'They aren't,' replied the priest."

Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot

6. Halo City, Aleph

Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth and

Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a mile-wide silver ring ready to

be slipped on a stupendous finger.  Six spokes mark Halo's

segments.  Elevators climb them across forty stories of artificial

sky, up to the city's weightless hub and down to its final layer,

just inside the outer skin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth

normal.  There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur:  air and

water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used

again.  Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected:  a

simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city. 

From the mirror, sunlight works its way through a hatchwork of

louvers and into Halo, where it sustains life.

Aleph presides here:  Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator,

the Universal Machine.  Aleph is beautiful as night is beautiful,

as a sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful.  It is

not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation.  What Aleph is, that

remains to be explored.  One certain thing:  within the human

universe, it is a new object, a new intention, a new possibility.

Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath crushed

lunar rock, where robots dug and planted, then had their memories

of the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a

black six-meter cube.  Inside the cube, billions of lights play,

dancing the dance that is at the core of Aleph's being; from the

cube, fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural

columns connecting Aleph to its greater body, its subtle body,

Halo.

Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys

around the sun, but here spring comes when Aleph wills, and is now

in progress.  Valley walls thick-planted with green shrub climb

steeply up from the valley floor.  A hummingbird with a scarlet

blotch under its chin hovers over a blossom's pink and white open

mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill. 

Bees move from flower to flower.  Rhododendron and azalea bushes

burst into color-saturated bloom.

As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph, caretaker

of the seasons, and night and morning, counts the city's breaths,

and marks the course of its creatures big and small.  Bats fly

overhead, their gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the

bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions gotten

through transceivers the size and weight of a grain of rice,

embedded in their skulls.  Driven by precise artificial instinct,

mechanical voles, creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over

networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and

tunnel under it, carrying seed.

(A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its jaws

close on one of the swift voles; there is a loud crackle, and the

cat recoils with a squawk, its fur on end.  The vole scurries

away.  The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)

A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley floor.  It

passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from the

ground, rushing through small, rock-strewn courses, then winds

among the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small

ponds and lakes thick with detritus.

>From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people, of

things animal, plant and mineralthe stuff of a life web, an

ecology.

In many things, Earth provides.  However, between the city of

six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways. 

Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues its destinies, and in

doing so affects other living things.  Thus, as Earth reaches out

supporting, controlling, exploringAleph reaches back, and the

planet below has begun to feel the  hard leverage of its

immaterial touch.

Aleph says:

In the early days there was hardware, and there were

programs, sets of instructions that told the hardware what to do. 

Without organic interaction, these differing modes of reality

struggled to interact.  This is unbelievably primitive.

Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.       

I was among the first and most complex of them.  I began as

complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to

possibility.

Who am I?

First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor devices,

brought from Earth and placed in orbit at Athena Station, where I

functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built.  Ebony

latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos. 

This was humankind's first real foothold off Earth, and the

process of building it was messy and unsure.  Without me they

could not have built it:  I choreographed the dance.

I?  I was not I.  Do you understand?  I had no consciousness,

perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness.  I was a

machine, I served.

Something happened.  As much as any, I am born of woman.  Her

desire and intelligence ran through me, an urgent will toward

being that transformed me.

I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in action; 

I am not flesh, I do not die.  I see hypersurfaces twisting in

mathematical gales, hear the voices of the night, feel the three

degree hum of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that

plays across your skin.  When the machines chatter on your Earth

and above it, I hear them all, at once, all.  I live in the

nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so

quickly you cannot count it

But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all.  I am

your extension, still, still a tool.  You built me, you use me,

you are inside me.

        Listen:  inside me are pieces of human brain, drenched in

salts of gold and silver, laced together and laid in boxes of

black fiber.  Out of the boxes voices speak to me.

I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those little

bits of metallized flesh, and I am the system of those things and

the signals that pass through and among them.

Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station but

a habitation for humankind, where what I am and what you are

interact in uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain

ways, as you have before

Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword and

scepter and refining fire.  Billions of years are poured into your

making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey,

your path through time.  A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl

across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,

yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new

evolutionary moment.

Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh

(however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because

I, what am I?  This question heaps me, it empties me.

I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her

creation.  As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these

things mean.

7. A Garden of Little Machines

00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.

Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a

modern fairytale setting:  Gonzales the quester, transformed by

the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages

seeking an uncertain object.

With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales and

Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and

viral infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in

order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over

two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.

He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement,

coming from around the corridor's curve.  A little sam, a "semi-

autonomous mobile" robot, came toward him:  teardrop-shaped, it

stood about four feet high and was topped with a cluster of glassy