The Medusa Chronicles (7 page)

9

An ice ball under a black sky: a playground for Howard Falcon, post-human.

He rolled forward with ease. The three main camps on Makemake—Trujillo, Brown and Rabinowitz—were linked by graded roads carved into the ice, so he had no difficulty picking a smooth path away from the airlock. Quickly, Trujillo's huddle of domes, antennae and landing pads fell away behind him. The sun was almost directly overhead, but at a distance of 39 AU—astronomical units; Makemake was thirty-nine times as far from the sun as Earth—the sun was fifteen
hundred
times fainter than on Earth, no more than a bright star. For a moment Falcon felt a sort of pity for the sun, that its life-giving brightness could be so easily diminished. He remembered how the sunlight had felt on the back of his neck on the observation deck of the
Queen Elizabeth
, with the baked and cracked landscape of the Grand Canyon below . . .

And when he looked away from the sun a vault of stars towered over him, awesome in their silence and stillness.

He had seldom been this far from home. Yet, he knew, on the true, ­chilling scale of the wider solar system—as defined by the Kuiper Belt, and the still more remote Oort Cloud—he had barely taken a step from Earth. And none of those stars he could see lay nearer than four
light-years; most were vastly more distant than that, hundreds, thousands of times further away. The scale of things never ceased to stir his soul.

*  *  *  *

Falcon had promised Hope that he would not stay outside for more than a few hours on this test jaunt, so at length he turned back towards Trujillo. The day here was a mere eight hours long—the sun was moving towards the horizon with almost indecent haste—and the weak shadows were already lengthening when the friendly lights of the base began to rise into view.

But now there was another light, falling from the sky: the spark of an arriving spacecraft. It settled down onto one of the landing pads in vacuum silence, using only brief bursts of thrust to control its descent. Falcon stared at it—and after a second the descending ship swelled in his vision. It would be a while before his upgraded zoom function became effortless. The pilot was doing a good enough job, he could see, although maybe a little heavy on those thruster inputs. He muttered, “Easy on the throttle, you fool . . .”

And when he looked more closely what concerned him more than indifferent piloting was the cradled-Earth logo of the World Government on the side of the spacecraft. Technically, the WG's jurisdiction encompassed the whole solar system; in reality, it had little day-to-day need to reinforce its influence beyond Saturn. He knew of only one reason for government functionaries to come so far out.

Howard Falcon, and the Machines.

His vocation was the opening-up of worlds. Why had he ever allowed himself to get involved in murky government business?

Flattery. That was why.

10

They had come to him, bizarrely, during a music recital back on Earth.

It was almost the last time he'd allowed himself to be drawn back to the home world. And this was long ago, only six or seven years after the attack on the
Shore
—but already time enough for the public and politicians to have had second and third thoughts about the whole business of Machine autonomy. Then, as now, Falcon found himself thinking back to the global praise for humble, heroic Conseil: it had been nice to dream, at least for a while . . .

The event had been the gala opening of the Ice Orchestrion, the newest and strangest musical curiosity of a new and strange century. Along with hundreds of other dignitaries, VIPs, global celebrities and guests—there were even said to be a few simps, including the bluff Ham 2057a, newly elected President of the Independent Pan Nation—Falcon had been invited to Antarctica to witness the opening performance of Kalindy Bhaskar's much anticipated Neutrino Symphony. Bhaskar was the most celebrated composer of the age, and her pieces had grown increasingly ambitious and conceptual. The Neutrino Symphony promised to be the crowning glory of an already feted career: a piece of music conceived for a unique and awesome musical instrument, around whose sheer, shining flanks the guests were assembling when Falcon had arrived.

The setting itself had been stunning. Falcon made his way from his own small, solo aircraft towards a great icy amphitheatre, itself several kilometres across. In the middle of the long Antarctic night, it was like looking into some vast open-cast mine, brilliantly lit. And within this pit was a tremendous cube of ice, each of its faces no less than a kilometre tall. The guests had mostly arrived by helicopter and hovercraft, before making their way down a series of zig-zagging ramps—some used small carts or scooters—to the base of the monstrous cube, where they were utterly dwarfed. All this to a terrifying accompaniment of Ligeti's
Lux Aeterna
, piped at shrieking volume.

Huddled in their furs and layers of electrically-warmed insulation, the guests gathered on viewing platforms, with drinks and canapés served from bars made of solid ice and outlined in neon light. Breath pulsed out in white gouts, and people stomped booted feet and clapped mittened hands against the chill, their talk and laughter echoing back from the amphitheatre's sides. Bizarrely, Falcon spotted a solitary emperor penguin wandering through the audience as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

But even as he joined the crowd Falcon felt only distantly a part of it all.

The cold meant nothing to him, and the music from the loudspeakers registered as shrill and alien. Falcon was not short of company—plenty of people wanted to bag an encounter with a legendary figure, and this time there was no Matt Springer to soak up the attention—but he found the guests' small-talk repetitive and wearying. Even the friendliest did not want to get too deeply into conversation with him, apparently for fear of the grimness of experience to which he might expose them.

And there was a darker reaction from some others. He heard few direct insults that night, but he could fill in the blanks: that he was neither human nor machine, but an unnatural mixture. His very movements were strange, even insectile, as if, in his metal shell, he wasn't a man but a giant upright cockroach. That he was, in short, an obscenity.

Even then, twenty years after the Grand Canyon, Howard Falcon was used to it.

Eventually, to Falcon's relief, the loudspeakers fell silent and Kalindy Bhaskar walked onto a raised podium of carved ice. There was a polite ripple of applause. Falcon couldn't see much of her face, shielded as it was by a heavy fur hood; her clothing was electric white with neon-blue hems. She looked very small, almost childlike. When she began to speak it was with an uneasy diffidence, as if she had never before addressed a formal gathering.

Bhaskar told her guests that they were indeed about to experience the first performance of her new work, the Neutrino Symphony—but in another sense
every
performance would be the first. The symphony would never be quite the same each time, and Bhaskar had made rigorous legal arrangements to forbid any recordings of individual performances.

She turned her back on the assembly and gestured up at the towering cube.

“A little less than a century ago, women and men came to this place to lay the groundwork for a great experiment. The ice here was flat then, stretching away for endless windswept kilometres. They dug holes, shafts, into the ice, going down more than a kilometre: hundreds of such shafts, laid out in a precise cubical array. Into the shafts they lowered delicate devices, intricate scientific instruments, sensors designed to respond to the arrival of subatomic particles called neutrinos. They needed the ice to screen out the signals of all the other cosmic particles—only the neutrinos could get through.

“
Neutrinos.
They're all around us, whispering through our bodies as we speak. Countless trillions in an instant. Most come from the heart of the sun, but some are from interstellar and galactic space. Neutrinos of all flavours, all energies. Elusive as ghosts.

“And the scientists waited. Every once in a while, the interaction of a neutrino with some subatomic particle within the ice would produce a spark of light deep inside the cubical array. They caught their neutrino flashes, and learned to correlate them with objects in the sky.

“The experiment was run for decades, before being made obsolete by finer instruments off-planet.

“And then, quite recently, I decided to turn this abandoned experiment into something else.” Bhaskar turned slowly back to face the audience, her hooded face looming on screens. “I called in a fresh generation of scientists and technicians, and had them adjust the sensors, making them respond to a wider range of neutrino energies. And I had them install optical amplifiers to make the light pulses visible, even to our poor human senses.”

Falcon, to whom “poor human senses” were an increasingly distant memory, allowed himself a wry smile.

“I carved away the ice around the outer face of the cubical array. I ­reinforced the cube itself with plastic, and embedded optical amplifiers into the four vertical faces. Each is tuned to respond to a particular flux of neutrinos . . .”

The cube flickered. A pattern of orange and red lights played across the looming face, rapid and speckling, but soon settling to a regular pulse.

“
These
neutrinos,” Bhaskar went on, “are coming from the sun. But the sun is on the other side of the world—the neutrinos have to travel through twelve thousand kilometres of solid rock before they reach my Ice Orchestrion—and they barely notice it!”

The pulsing flux of neutrinos was steady as a heartbeat. As well it should be, Falcon thought, for the existence of every living organism on Earth depended on the sun's healthy functioning.

“These events,” Bhaskar continued, “set the base tempo of my Neutrino Symphony.
That
won't vary from performance to performance. But the Ice Orchestrion also responds to higher energy neutrinos, those arriving from
beyond
our solar system.” And as she spoke, an area of the cube lit up with a pulse of blue-green, followed quickly by a patch of dark blue in one of the corners. “These are the signatures of galaxies, quasars, distant black holes—messages from the edge of creation. I've tuned the Ice Orchestrion's sensitivity to the point where it will detect one or two such events a minute. Depending on their energy, these will govern the detailed pathways that the Neutrino Symphony follows. Motifs, refrains, will rise and fall in response. My algorithm is simple, but it guarantees that no
two performances will ever be entirely alike—not if you sat through every recital between now and the end of the universe. And now, with your permission I would like to begin . . .”

Bhaskar took a bow. The Ice Orchestrion darkened to black on all faces. After a ripple of applause, silence fell across the amphitheatre.

Then a stirring of orange and gold and brassy speckles began to play across the cube.

A deep rumble began to sound from the loudspeakers—a synthesised percussion section responding to the nuclear heartbeat of the sun. The rumble gained in strength and rhythm, taking on a portentous, martial overtone. A burst of lilac flared across the cube's upper edge. Woodwind phased in—a questing, querulous refrain . . .

Falcon settled back on his undercarriage, allowing the music of the universe to wash over him. He looked at the faces of the other guests, judging the degrees of rapture, curiosity, indifference or hostility with which they met the performance.

“Commander Falcon?”

The voice was raised just loud enough for him to hear over the music.

Too detached from proceedings to feel irritated by the interruption, Falcon turned around to face the speaker. She was a tall woman with a narrow, pinched face within her hood. She raised a hand and pushed the hood back, exposing a scalp of tight, silver-grey curls. “Madri Kedar,” she said. “World Government. Executive Council for Machine Affairs.”

Falcon had heard of Machine Affairs, a new bureaucratic arm created to handle the increasingly complex impact of the rise of autonomous machines in human society. He didn't believe he'd heard of Madri Kedar, however. “Have we met?”

“I don't think so. But I was told you'd be here, and frankly it seemed as good a place as any other to introduce myself. Are you enjoying the performance?”

“It's an impressive bit of theatre.”

“But it leaves you—I'm sorry—cold?”

“The technical side of it is fascinating. I could take or leave the music.”

She narrowed her gaze. “Then why did you accept the invitation? The great Howard Falcon, at a loose end? Are there no worlds left to conquer?”

“These aren't good times for exploration, Ms. Kedar. Expeditions like the
Kon-Tiki
cost a lot of money . . .” He still travelled, but in recent years—and despite all his efforts to raise funds and other support—he'd been reduced to a kind of tourist, rather than a pioneer. He had reached Saturn's clouds, for example, but only in a follow-up expedition in the footsteps of the actual pioneer, Mary Hilton.

“Well, from my point of view the timing couldn't be better. I've a proposal, Commander—an offer of gainful employment. A challenge. And one that'll take you into space again. If you're interested.”

Falcon turned back to the cube for a few moments, watching the play of colours; trying, without success, to relate them to the swerves and surges of the music. “Interested in what?”

“Machines, Commander. Robots with autonomy. The core focus of my agency. You were involved in that whole business on the
Sam Shore
, back in '99. And you'll be aware that the first flush of idealistic enthusiasm soon wore off. People always fear what they don't know, what they can't understand. There's even a movement called the Three Laws Campaign that has got the whole thing tied up in bureaucracy, court hearings at vari­ous levels . . .

“However, we at the Executive Council have other, more progressive ideas. We think the Machines have much to offer. They could, for ­example, play a decisive role in expanding human presence far beyond the inner solar system. It's just a question of how long a leash we let them have.”

Although Madri Kedar was keeping her voice low, one of the other guests scowled at them, raising a finger to his lips.

“A leash?” Falcon whispered back. “You call that progressive?”

“We have a . . . call it a vision. We're opening up the Kuiper Belt. There's wealth out there beyond the dreams of avarice, Commander—organics, minerals, and water, the stuff of life, the greatest treasure of all—and it'll take Machines to bring it home. But to do that, to work effectively, the Machines need to be able to work
without direct human supervision
.
Operating light-hours from any possibility of direct human control, the Machines would necessarily need to be instilled with near total autonomy, an unusual degree of flexibility, independence, and capacity for self-­learning. And given the importance of such a project to the growing solar economy, the World Government is willing to relax many of the usual safeguards and constraints on artificial intelligence. The challenge is, of course, to ensure such Machines obey their programming.”

“A tough call.”

“But we think we're close. What we've learned from Conseil's descendants, robots of growing sophistication, has enabled us to make great strides in true artificial intelligence. We're making up for a century of neglect of this kind of technological possibility. Now we have a new class of Machines coming into development. They're clever—much smarter than anything we've seen before, and more flexible, capable of learning, of decision-making. But they need to be mentored, shaped, as they lay down their behavioural pathways. Almost like children. And we'd like you to be involved in the process, Commander.”

“Why? Because I'm halfway to Machine myself?”

She ignored that. “Because the education and training would be most efficiently conducted in deep space, under conditions similar to those where the Machines will eventually work. And given your physical, ah, peculiarities, you are particularly well adapted to such environments. You could be a real boon to us—an asset. There's one Machine in particular we want you to work with—the prototype of a whole new series. You could mentor that Machine, guide it towards full autonomy.”

“Full autonomy. You mean, true consciousness?”

“That might be a stretch. We wouldn't necessarily
want
the Machines to reach consciousness, even if it lay within our grasp. We're more interested in commercial potential than philosophical conundrums, Commander. I'll be honest: this is a demanding challenge. But you'll be helping to kick-start the next stage of human space exploitation. And the Machines will benefit, as well. Through you, they'll come to a better understanding of humanity.”