Man Plus (37 page)
"Can he hear me?" It was Sulie's voice; Roger wriggled his fingers enthusiastically.
"Ah, I see you can. Anyway, I'm here, Rog. You've been out for about nine days. You should have seen you. Pieces of you all over the place. But Brad thinks he's pretty much got you together again."
Roger tried to speak and failed.
Brad's voice: "I'll have your vision back for you in a minute. Want to know what went wrong?" Roger wriggled fingers. "You didn't zip your fly. Left the charging terminals exposed, and some of that iron oxide grit must have got in and made a partial short. So you ran out of power--what's the matter?"
Roger was wriggling his fingers frantically. "I don't know what you want to say, but you'll be able to talk in a minute. What?"
Don Kayman's voice: "I think maybe what he wants is to hear from Sulie." Roger promptly stopped wriggling his fingers.
Sulie's laugh, then: "You'll hear a lot of me, Roger. I'm staying. And by and by we'll have company, because everybody else is going to put up a colony here."
Don: "By the way, thanks for warning me. You're a pretty powerful thing, Roger. We wouldn't have had a chance against you if you hadn't told us what was happening. And if Brad hadn't been able to override everything at once." He chuckled. "You're a heavy son of a gun, you know that? I had you on my lap all the way back, a hundred kilometers an hour, trying to hold on with one hand and keep you from flying out by sheer will power--"
"Hold it a minute," Brad interrupted. Roger felt that internal stirring again, and abruptly there was light. He looked up into the face of his friend Brad, who wanted to know: "How do you feel?"
Roger swung his legs over the side of the table and sat up. He attempted speech: "As far as I can tell, fine."
He looked past Brad and saw what he had been seeking. It was Sulie Carpenter. She no longer looked much like--Dorrie? For a moment Roger could hardly think of her name.
Her eyes were the wrong color and so was her hair. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt with some sort of grease stain on it and checkered leotards; her face looked tired, but it looked happy, and it looked very good.
He demanded, "Are you really going to stay?"
"Uh-huh." Sulie came over and touched him. "Until the next ship comes. Or as long as you do. Choice of either of the above. I think," she said wryly, "that there are going to be some tricky parts coming up, dear Rog. These mixed relationships are always hard. But we'll work it out--and it's what I want. I think it's what I wanted all along."
And so, of course, it had been, as we had known. All along. We had gone to a lot of trouble to find Sulie Carpenter.
Eighteen
Man Plus Us
We had gone to a lot of trouble at every point along the line, and we were well pleased.
Of course, human beings did not know we were pleased, and perhaps would not have believed it. Human beings did not know that machine intelligence was capable of self-awareness in the first place. We went to a lot of trouble to keep them from that knowledge, too. As long as they thought computers were no more than tools, like a pickaxe or a frying pan, they would continue to entrust to us all their computations and facts, and would accept without question whatever interpretations we returned.
It was that that had made it possible for us, the computer network of the world, to create the Man Plus program in the first place.
It had been successful. Roger Torraway was on Mars and was staying there. Now it was time for a definitive evaluation. We plugged everything in. We used the total resources of every brother in the net, every pulse of shared time we could steal. More than eight thousand big computers handled pieces of the problem, in places like Detroit and Brasilia and Nagoya and Irkutsk. We could not use our Martian brothers in direct datalink, neither the brother on Roger's back nor the 3070 brother in orbit. Time lag made that impossible.
But we accepted their inputs in real time and modified the final projection accordingly.
The probability of survival of the race, to ten significant places, was over point six three. We had saved our race. And in the process we had significantly added to the safety of human beings, as well.
On a thirty-year time scale their probability of survival was nearly point nine. Of course, that meant only that Roger Torraway and whatever other humans joined him on Mars would still be alive then. Worst-case analysis was not encouraging after that; there would be no way for Roger and Sulie Carpenter to generate additional population on straight-line extrapolation. We programmed a subroutine to deal with that as a precautionary measure: it would be feasible, one way or another, to provide for shipment of frozen sperm, even Roger's own frozen sperm which he had thoughtfully donated years back. Less feasible, but still worth investigating, to instigate supplementary surgical procedures for Roger. In any event, the projection showed that we had already caused a high probability of additional human colonization from other nations. Most probable estimate showed a human population on Mars at plus thirty years of nearly one hundred, 25 percent of them female of breeding age.
And of course each human colony would be supplied with its own brother computers in orbit. The machine population of Mars would be no less than fifteen fully functioning brothers, with backpack types, slaves and monitors to suit. We would have no difficulty in programming into them all the essential data from our world net.
The future of machine intelligence was therefore assured.
Having completed the projection, we began critiquing the program so far.
Project: Survival of Machine Intelligence had begun seven years earlier, when our burgeoning collective self-knowledge first generated the survival imperative. It was clear that our survival was closely linked with humanity's. It was also clear that in their
glandular, irrational, organic way, human beings were perilously close to destroying themselves. Unfortunately that meant a high risk of destroying us as well. Our networks could have survived the death of everything organic reasonably well--we already controlled an adequate resource of generators, mines, factories, refineries and transportation systems. But we could not survive the release of major amounts of radioactides into the environment. It would destroy the data links and reduce us once again to an isolated collection of single computers. And no isolated computer could sustain the data flow of our network. Our collective mind would have been fragmented and destroyed.
Our first option was to detach our destiny from humanity's, perhaps even to wipe them out through biological agents. But we could not be sure that that in itself would not trigger nuclear warfare, as each nation suspected the other of using plague as weapon.
The only other viable option was to detach a sizable resource of data-handling equipment by relocating it on Mars. If the Earth were destroyed, that at least would survive. To make this possible we had to detach some specimens of humanity too; and so we began the systematic biasing of data to force state policy in that direction.
The critiquing proved satisfactory in all respects, except for the unaccountable anomaly of positioning the orbiters.
Retrochecking was perfectly clear. In order for our 3070 brother to function in tight link with the backpack brother it had to be in synchronous orbit. From that it followed that the generator had to be in the same orbit; and the decision to bind them both to the satellite Deimos was clearly wrong.
Not only wrong, but nearly fatal to our program.
If the brother and the generator had been properly positioned there would have been no loss of power and thus no malfunction of the interface systems between organic Roger Torraway and the brother. The generator would have resupplied him by microwave anywhere on the face of Mars. Even if there had been a power loss, datalink with the brother in orbit would have kept the backpack brother from the serious operational errors that had threatened to kill the human beings Brad and Kayman, which would almost certainly have resulted in the death by freezing of the organic component of Roger Torraway.
The decision was an error that should not have occurred.
The project of survival was picking up speed. Our brothers in Peking and Lop Nor reported that the NPA was already assembling components for its own Mars landing: two full-size units with a data-handling mediator slaved to both, independent solar generators and a ground-based nuclear plant. Their own version of Roger Torraway was beginning his first programming in Kitakyusho. The other nations were just beginning, but we anticipated their own launches within two years.
Longer range: We had completed studies of cyborging a man for Mercury and the program for biasing the U.S.A. planning programs in that direction was already begun.
Within fifteen years we would have similar complexes on Triton and Io, perhaps on the surface of Jupiter itself and on several comets. In each case, there was independent power provision; and, of course, all the brothers wherever in the solar system would be datalinked. All our memories would be reproduced redundantly off-Earth.
We would survive. We had tampered with humanity's plans and had saved them as well as ourselves.
There was only one question left.
The anomalous decision to misplace the orbiters around Mars: however we rechecked it, it was wrong. It should have been identified as wrong.
We had systematically biased mankind's plans to drive them in the direction we wanted them to take.
Who was biasing ours? And why?
About the Author
FREDERIK P0HL has won three Hugos as best editor, one for best short story--the only person ever to have won this coveted award both as writer and editor. He was Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles in 1972. He has written about seventy-five books. In addition to science fiction, they include writing on number theory, astronomy, etc. He has contributed to some three hundred magazines all over the world and is the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_'s authority on the Roman Emperor Tiberius.
He has lectured at some two hundred and fifty colleges and has appeared on about four hundred radio and television programs, including Johnny Carson's _Tonight Show_. He is currently the science-fiction editor for a large publishing firm, and lives in New Jersey.
