The Lure (29 page)

‘So a hundred years down the line we’ll have robot slaves. I still don’t see what you’re driving at.’

‘Hazel, these slaves as you call them will be smarter than us. A lot smarter.’

Hazel Baxendale peered into the MIT man’s eyes. ‘Rapunzel will take over?’

‘As surely as night follows day. It goes further than smart robots, ma’am. We’ll have so many implants to boost us, neural circuits inside our heads, networked into grids, that we’ll be hybrids ourselves. The need to outstrip rival nations or even just rivals will drive this. Eventually the carbon-based part of us will be redundant. Organic life – carbon-based – is on the way out. This is inevitable whenever intelligence develops technology. Sooner or later the technology takes over, supplants the primitive organic life. Therefore the signal – this make-believe signal – hasn’t come from a life form like us. It’s been sent by a machine.’

Hazel puffed out her cheeks. She took a few seconds to assimilate this amazing new thought. ‘Humanity will disappear?’

The MIT engineer was scrutinising her. ‘It’ll merge with our smart machines. Not that there has been a signal, ma’am.’

Hazel blessed her upbringing with three brothers on a Montana farm: her poker face was impenetrable.

Rosa Clements broke the silence. ‘I think I can anticipate your third question, ma’am.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘You want to know what would motivate a machine to contact us. More to the point, whether it would go by a moral code and if so, would that code be malign.’

This is one bright cookie,
Hazel thought with some alarm. ‘As we keep telling each other, this is all hypothetical,’ she said. ‘But if it wasn’t, I’d say this goes far beyond anything any Administration has ever had to handle.’

Rosa nodded. ‘You know what Truman said when he became President? He said, “There must be a million men better qualified than me to take on this job.”’

‘Truman was wrong, Professor Clements. The American people didn’t elect a million highfliers, they elected Harry S. Truman. It’s the only qualification that counts.’

The woman acknowledged the rebuke with a slight bow.

Killman stabbed the air with a fat finger. ‘We couldn’t relate to machine aliens. There’s no reason to assume they’d have anything like human compassion built into them. They’d be programmed only to survive. Any philanthropy, any knowledge being fired at us, could be a mask. There’s no way to tell what’s really lying behind it. So don’t take a chance, don’t respond. Don’t even use the genetic recipes. There might be something hidden in them.’ He added, ‘But as you say, this is all hypothetical.’

Rosa smiled and said, ‘Hazel, this is the sort of ill-informed rubbish technocrats come away with from time to time. They think because they can make machines that are brighter than humans, therefore these machines are
conscious
beings. The technocrats don’t begin to grasp the subtleties. Will their dolls feel pain? No. Will they be conscious? No. They’ll never be more than mechanical zombies. I would say that no machine is
ever
motivated by philanthropy or malice or anything else. It just obeys a program. Any signal comes from a thinking, feeling intelligence. Or its proxy in the form of a tape recorder. Whatever, there will be an underlying moral code from a living creature. Intelligent machines will share the values of their creators. And these values will be benign.’

Benign? It was the crucial issue.
‘Convince me.’

‘As soon as Homo sapiens acquired intelligence we also got the concept of sin – in other words, a sense of right and wrong. The ability to make moral decisions emerged along with intelligence.’

‘Tell that to the victims of the Hitler gang, or the Bin Laden creeps,’ Hazel said.

‘Sure there’s moral failure everywhere you look. But that’s because we’re just out of the caves. Already we help others because we instinctively feel it’s the right thing to do, even if it’s of no advantage to us. A few thousand years down the line and it’ll be so ingrained in us we won’t know any other way to behave. Okay we’re still apes, but cultural evolution is directing us towards a complete moral altruism. The signallers must have arrived there long ago.’

‘So moral capacity comes with the central nervous system. I buy that, Rosa, I really do. But what morality? How can you be sure the signallers have the same moral outlook as us?’

‘Because of ruthless Darwinian evolution. It works on societies. And that’s why I believe the signal – this make-believe signal – is motivated by a genuine wish to help.’

Hazel looked bewildered. ‘You’re losing me.’

‘It’s simple. In Nature you have survival of the fittest. In a primitive tooth and claw society you have the same. But as technology progresses it makes the killer instinct so destructive that you eventually have survival of nobody at all, except maybe a few cave men. Either evolution weeds out the killer instinct or everyone ends up dead. Either moral evolution goes hand in hand with technological evolution or we’re doomed.’

Hazel was saying, ‘You mean, the meek will inherit the Galaxy?’

‘Precisely. What we’d get from the signallers would reflect the moral altruism they’d evolved into.’

It was precisely the answer Hazel had been praying for. She stood up. Her head was dizzy with unfamiliar concepts, or maybe it was just the jungle heat after Camp David. The pink bird flapped its wings and took off to a safe height.

‘Would you like to visit the sharks, ma’am?’

‘I’d have loved to, Gene, while you tried to persuade me that the human race is about to let itself be obliterated by a clever doll, and Rosa here told me that if it speaks and acts like a human to the
n
th degree it’s still just a doll with no feelings and no consciousness. But I have to get back.’ Hazel Baxendale gave a lopsided smile. ‘I’m swimming with bigger sharks.’

34

Wormhole

Freya’s upper half disappeared, followed by her soaking jeans and finally her boots. A little cascade of rock dust sparkled briefly in Petrie’s lamplight.

He took a last look at the Styx. The river had definitely risen, and its thundering was louder, but it was the lights which attracted his attention.

Two of them.

No, three.

Petrie switched off his helmet lamp, his feet wedged against the Madonna. He was breathing heavily and aware of his heart thumping in his chest.

Four. Moving in single file.

And now he was seeing black silhouettes, moving swiftly along the pathway: wild dogs hunting.

Five of them.

Six. Seven. They must be deploying the lot.

Petrie stopped counting. His mouth dry with fear, he edged himself towards the entrance, on his knees, seeing by Freya’s receding lamplight. A final glance: eight, at a minimum. He forced himself into the crack, his breath noisy in the confined space.

Freya was out of sight. There were three entrances, none of them more than two feet high. He kept his lamp off and sure enough, light was scattering from the wall of the left-hand tunnel.

On to his elbows. Petrie had never caved in his life. He quickly found himself sweating with exertion.

The light from Freya’s lamp was getting fainter. Of course. She was smaller, slimmer.

Along the phreatic tube to a high vertical chimney.

How far along? He experimented with different ways of crawling but none of them seemed any better than the others. Freya’s light was becoming a flicker, sometimes seen, sometimes not. He turned his own lamp on; the sight of the rock enclosing him accentuated his claustrophobia. He wanted to scream and push the walls away.

What the hell is a phreatic tube anyway?
It sounds Greek, he thought, trying to keep the panic demons out of his mind. Maybe to do with frenetic? Frantic? It made sense; the tube was round, as if it had been formed by water under pressure.

Water under pressure. Petrie thought about the melting snow half a mile overhead, percolating down through a million cracks and fissures in the limestone mountain. He wanted out of the phreatic tube more than he had ever wanted anything.

He pushed himself harder, fearful of losing his way in a subterranean labyrinth, of dying of cold and exhaustion, of stumbling into the enemy. After about five minutes, the roar of the Styx had vanished. The scrabbling of his boots and his own gasping breath cut into an unnatural silence, tomb-like.

The tunnel wall was closing in on him. A million tons of overhead rock were settling down. He was an insect, about to be crushed under the boot of the ancient Tatras. He found himself taking big, gulping, frightened breaths. The demons were now inside his brain, poking, grinning, gibbering.

Cut it out!

Twenty minutes into the climb, the tunnel was opening up and acquiring a steep upward slope. At last! A high vertical shaft:
Tyson’s chimney.

He looked up, gasping with exertion. The chimney was a narrow, smooth-sided shaft. It rose almost vertically and it was higher, much higher, than he had visualised from Svetlana’s sketch. He could barely make out the top with his torchlight. Water was trickling down its walls. And there was no sign of Freya, no light reflecting from her lamp.

He scrambled up a vertical face and then eased his head into the shaft. There would be no room to spread arms in the chimney, and he switched off his lamp. He inched himself up by holding himself in place with his elbows, bending his legs and thrusting against the shaft wall with his feet. A spray of cold water kept him soaked.

He slithered, lost about six feet, scraped his face, twisted his wrist, cursed aloud. After some minutes the chimney broadened marginally and he was able to grip its sides with icy fingers. He clambered up quickly, the iron taste of blood on his lip. There was a ridge; he waved his hands in the dark and found he could now hoist himself into a crouching position. He switched on his light and looked around.

He had reached a little chamber: the grotto, its floor covered with the white flowstone, a congealed river of rock. Three narrow tunnels led into it, discounting the one he had climbed up.

Freya, where are you?

Petrie remembered Svetlana’s scribbled sketch. He now had to take the left-hand tunnel. He wriggled into it, crawled frantically along. It rose gently but he was making good progress. The tunnel was dry, but it smelled of damp and ancient air. The cold was intense now, into his bones, and Petrie thought it might be slowing him down mentally.

A long, narrow crawl,
she had said.

A right turn and the tunnel narrowed to a mouth-shaped channel three feet wide and six inches high. Petrie stared. This wasn’t in the map.

Stay calm.

Back out, inching painfully; now the demons were attacking in force, claustrophobia washing over him like big waves. Back into the little grotto with the flowstone, half-expecting soldiers. He switched off his lamp once more.

Pitch black. Not just any pitch black, like a country lane on a dark night. Pitch black somewhere inside a mountain; and lost.

How long would the battery last? A couple of hours? One?

Switch on again. The light hurt his eyes for a few seconds. He looked at the tunnel entrances. Maybe ‘first left’ was ambiguous; there were two entrances sharing a larger one. He said, ‘Oh God!’ and crawled swiftly along this other tunnel, using his elbows to wriggle along like a lizard. Why not gamble when you have nothing to lose?

A random walk in two dimensions will eventually take you where you want. It may take a very long time, depending on the number of choices, and the distance to cover, and luck. But you will always, sooner or later, emerge from a maze, provided you haven’t died of cold or thirst in the meantime. In two dimensions, all roads lead to Rome.

This tunnel was even narrower than the last one. It went on for ever.

A random walk in three dimensions is different. In a three-dimensional maze, the probability that you’ll end up where you want is about – Petrie tried to remember the exact figure – 0.35, that’s it, one in three.

I’m going to die here, right inside one of my knots.

McCrea and Whipple, that was it.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1940.
The Nazis were about to invade Britain and these cool dudes were calculating random walks, like playing bowls with the Armada on its way.

After ten minutes he thought to give up, crawl – backwards! – back along its length. Something stupidly jumped into his head:

It may be proper likewise to mention to the benighted traveller, that when he falls in with bogles, whatever danger may be in his going forward, there is much more hazard in turning back.

R. Burns, footnote to
Tam O’Shanter,
1710

The tunnel curved slightly to the right, giving him a ten-metre line of sight. He would crawl that distance and then give up.

Ten metres on, the tunnel seemed to be opening out. He gave it another ten, and then twenty, and then the torchlight was showing a large chamber strewn with boulders. Reaching it, he found it was about nine feet high and adorned with thousands of little needle-like stalactites and stalagmites. He stood up and stretched.

Leading off from this chamber was a curving man-sized tunnel. If he wasn’t lost, and if Svetlana’s map was right, this would lead to Tyson’s Autobahn.

It did, and Petrie almost wept with relief. He shouted, ‘Yes!’ and,
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’
echoed back at him, fading into silence.

The Autobahn, an ancient bedding plane uplifted by whatever forces had created the Tatras, was a lot steeper than he had expected it to be. It was about twenty metres broad and ten high, patterned with stony icicles on floor and roof, many of them as thick as tree trunks. It stretched beyond the range of Petrie’s lamp.

Again he momentarily switched off; again, pitch black.
Freya! Where are you?

A kilometre, Svetlana had said. He set off smartly, his breath echoing in the long chamber. Gradually, as he climbed, the roof became lower. He thought he glimpsed …