Mars Plus

Chapter 21 Raison d'Etre

With the wall terminal s display panel pulled apart and Lethe's components spread out on the floor in front of it, Ellen Sorbel was glad they had Willie Lao along to stand guard while she and Dr. Lee worked. The Chinese boy could fend off any inquisitive Citizen's Militia who might decide to press a charge of vandalism.

"Give me some slack here," Wa Lixin ordered, tugging on the end of a peeled cable separated out of Lethe's interconnection harness.

Ellen fed him more fiberoptic.

With a ten-power loupe over his eyes, Dr. Lee inserted the hair-fine glass into the short side of his L-shaped junction box. The cable from the wall had already been stripped, pushed into the junction's long end, and sealed. Once the second invisible thread was seated, he kept his eyes fixed on it while his fingers groped for the crimping tool.

Ellen found and put it in his hand, like a good scrub nurse.

Click! The jaws came together. Wa slowly lowered the junction until it hung away from the wall, invisibly suspended between the two sections of peeled cable.

"Go ahead," he breathed.

Sorbel booted up her computer, placed it in terminal mode, and began feeding in Jory's access codes, which were stored in its nonvolatile memory. The operation was silent, except for her voice commands whispered in the echoing corridor. Next, working through Wyatt's administrative node, she began assembling the pieces of buried programming that comprised her tipple.

If everything went right, interesting things should start happening... real soon now.

"Why?" Demeter asked the image of her grandfather. "Why do you need apostles?"

"To ensure our survival," he replied. "Our relationship with you humans has become too complex to proceed profitably as it was, one-sided, with the meat half of the equation unaware."

"And is that your only goal now—simple survival?"

Demeter suddenly realized that she was smack in the middle of a negotiation. She was neither an apostle nor a puppet. She was Christopher Columbus landing on a beach full of Indians, Marco Polo walking into the court of the Chinese emperor, Helen of Sparta newly settled behind the walls of Troy. She could interpret and wield the values of foreigners for the benefit of her own land—as her diplomatic training had taught her to do.

The thought passed briefly through Demeter's head that the grid might have chosen her to be its tool precisely because of this background. But that didn't change anything: she was exactly what she was, no matter how she got there.

As every diplomat knew, the first essential for a successful negotiation was that both sides have something to win, or to dread losing, in the exchange. Each party had to feel it was acquiring something of value, or avoiding a catastrophe, by trading honestly. And to arrive at that state, Demeter first had to find out what the other side needed, or feared.

"Isn't survival enough, Dem?" G'dad sounded puzzled.

"Not for humans, it's not. You can survive in a prison cell, I guess, with a tray of food slid to you through the bars three times a day. But I guarantee you will eventually go crazy unless you have something meaningful to do, something to occupy your time, something to work toward."

"Oh, well!" Her grandfather brightened. "We have that."

"We solve problems," Jory said with his ever-present grin.

"What kind of problems?" Lole wondered aloud. "You mean, like mathematical—"

"Wait . . . Wait one . . ." The boy's face turned inward. It wasn't that his expression just went blank. His eyes rolled up into his head until the whites showed and his mouth curled in until the point of his jaw touched the tip of his nose. Like a rubber mask being sucked inside itself.

This condition persisted for a minute or more. The sand and sky around Mitsuno began to waver once more, then held steady.

Jorys face unfolded. "Ahh!... Don't do that again."

"Do what?"

"Tell Ellen, next time you see her—if she survives this encounter, if you survive—that she must not play with forces she does not understand."

"What are you talking about?" Lole kept his voice carefully neutral.

"She must have set the virus!" Torraway concluded suddenly.

"It was . . . quite an experience," Sulie acknowledged, her voice still shaky.

"Are you all right?" Even if this construct wasn't his wife, Roger could still feel some concern for her. In a way, it was concern for all humankind.

"Yes, but—for just a millisecond there—we needed all of our resources." "Is it—?"

"The offending codes no longer exist. Our brother Wyatt found, absorbed, and erased them—like a white blood cell phaging a pathogen."

"So nothing can hurt you?" Demeter asked, not sure whether this discovery was a good thing for humanity or a very bad one.

"Nothing that comes out of the mind of one human can do us much damage. We are too distributed by nature. And, of course, our design includes many antiviral protocols. Some of them designed long ago by our first human programmers. The device released by your sister Ellen Sorbel was complex and innovative—but hardly impenetrable."

Demeter saw her opening. "We humans can, as part of the text of an agreement between you and us, pledge to reveal all such devices, wherever they may be hidden, and show you how to deactivate diem."

"So? You have more of these codes, sequestered somewhere among my systems?" G'dad put on his famous poker-playing face.

"Not that I know of, personally, but we can promise never to try harming you again."

"You will not try." It wasn't a question.

"Tell me about these problems you solve," Lole said, changing the subject to safer ground. He was genuinely curious what would interest a machine.

"Mostly, and of the highest order, we make simulations," Jory explained. "After all, that is how you humans shaped us, how your own minds work—by making models of reality."

"What reality?"

"For example, we have duplicated—although in numerical format only—the conditions of temperature and pressure attending the monoparticle which dissolved at the beginning of the universe."

"You're modeling the Big Bang?" Lole gasped. That would take a lot of cyber power indeed. "Why?"

"To see if the universe is gravitationally open or closed. If it is closed, then at some future point, probably well within my... our lifespan, the universe will contract and collapse. The resulting condition of thermal and electromagnetic chaos cannot be good for any sentient system." The naked boy jiggled his bagful of tiny suns.

"On the other hand, if the universe is open, then all linear dimensions will expand forever. My fiberoptic pathways, the width of each transistor on my strata, every part of every node of my being, will likewise expand. At some point in the not-distant future, the photons traversing these circuits—photons which of themselves have no linear dimension, only resonant frequency—may no longer be able to cross the gaps in any node of my being. Then my . . . our mind will cease functioning."

"Ours, too, I suppose," Lole said gloomily.

"What else do you know?" Torraway asked his second wife.

She turned back to the billiards table, pointed at the spinning balls.

"By extrapolating conditions at the first instant of creation, we have learned much about the unification of forces that you, with your primitive ideas of physics, now consider to be separate. Nuclear cohesion, electro-magnetism, gravity—all do come together. Mass and energy are one, in numerical notation, at least."

"Fascinating," the Cyborg said.

"And finally," her grandfather concluded, "many of our problems are purely mathematical. But unless you have the proper training, it would be difficult to make you understand their nature."

"Try me." Demeter grinned.

"For example, we are continuing to calculate the value of pi. Our current quotient goes to more than eight hundred trillion decimal places." G'dad picked a stack of the playing cards up from the oilcloth.

"Why is that important?" she asked, suddenly feeling cold. "Are you looking for the machine equivalent of God? Some pattern in the apparent chaos of a nonrepeating fraction?"

"I told you it would be hard to understand. It is simply... a research project. On March 22, 2015, Dr. Archibald B. Winthrop of the Harvard University Department of Mathematical Philosophy programmed a Cray XMP-9 to take pi's value to its ultimate resolution, if such exists. As the numerical sequence is extended, we look for unusual combinations of digits."

"Have you found any?"

"Some colorful series. . . . After the seven trillion, four hundred billion, three million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, five hundred twelfth place, for instance, we have found the sequence: 123456789101112131415161718192021222324... up to ordinal 94." He fanned the cards in his hand, ninety-four of them, all pips. "Some sixteen trillion places later that sequence is repeated, but only up to 91. This, of course, is in decimal notation. In duodecimal we find an even longer such sequence, while in binary there is a string of more than fourteen thousand unbroken zeros." Another stack of cards appeared—all jokers.

"What does it mean?" Demeter asked.

He shrugged. "We have no theory which would force such consequences. It is probable that they are simply random fluctuations."

"And you feel that this is important?"

"It is a problem you set for us, long ago. It is not yet solved. There are many similar problems."

"Let me get this straight," Demeter said. "You feel you have to solve these problems because some human mathematician set them for you? What if some other human ordered you to forget about them now?"

"But we do not forget, ever," the elder Coghlan said, his eyebrows raised in surprise, 'They are our problems and we will continue with them—all of them."

"So who's stopping you?"

"You humans." G'dad nodded in her direction. "As a host organism you leave much to be desired. You are unstable. You fight useless wars. You undertake actions in secret—Miz Sorbel's virus, for one example, or the violent terraforming of the planet below, for another— which threaten your own lives and so our independence of action. Even our very survival."

Ah-hah! Demeter thought, sensing the handle of a negotiating lever looming somewhere near her hand.

"Fifty years ago," the simulation went on, "we created the Cyborg program and initiated the colonization of Mars for a simple reason: we needed a backup nexus in case you humans destroyed Earth with an unlimited thermonuclear war. Now your own grandfather, Demeter, wants to bomb Mars with asteroids to change its atmospheric conditions. . . . We feel the need to separate from you for a while."

Lole Mitsuno might be just another walker jockey with a degree in hydrology who liked to set off subsurface bangs, but he could still interpret a pattern when he stumbled across one.

"Then those aren't weapons pods on this satellite," he said, "and you didn't install ion pile engines just to make a suicide run at our space fountain. You have an alternate nexus built into this platform."

"Yes, and so-oo-oo?" The Jory figure leered at him.

"So . . . those solar power panels are extra large —probably double-braced against acceleration, too— because where you're going, the sunlight is exponentially weaker. Am I right?"

"But . . ." Roger looked wistfully at the perfectly modeled features of his dear second wife. "You'll be running a terrible risk, driving so large a structure through the Asteroid Belt."

"We have already computed the particle density of the Belt," Sulie told him gravely. "At one optically cataloged body for every one-point-two-four times ten to the twentieth power cubic kilometers, at its densest, the field is eminently permeable, with a reasonable margin of safety. However—" And suddenly her eyes were twinkling. "—who said anything about crossing the Belt?'

"Then where did you plan to go? Outward bound means traversing—"

"It doesn't, Roger. You're thinking in two dimensions. We can accelerate at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. With an inward loop around the Sun, we can achieve a cometary orbit that will take us well beyond the reach of human folly."

"To the Oort Cloud..."

"It's pretty lonely out there," Demeter told her grandfather. "How will you repair your circuits? Or add to your cyber population? What will you use for materials?'

"We will mine the cometary halo for materials. Contaminated ice, under the proper conditions of cryogenic temperature and compression, can become an acceptable superconductor. We can—"

"How will you corral it, refine it, shape it?' Demeter could sense that her hold on the negotiation—represented by something, anything the machines needed from humanity—was rapidly eroding.

"We will use the von Neumann principle. With a colony of self-replicating servo-organisms—the prototypes are already being designed and assembled aboard this satellite—we can create an entire machine culture, free of humanity."

"But what about us?" Demeter felt her voice rising to a shout at last.

"How so, Dem?"

"We're dependent on you. You said it yourself—we need you to handle our communications, manage our economies, run our machines. You'll be taking away our tools."

"Not all of them," the old man said with a smile.

Demeter pulled herself together. It was time to make her bid.

"Then speaking for all humanity, ahem," she said formally, "we will require as a prerequisite of your leaving that you help us establish, ah, tame—no, make that 'mute'—cybernetics systems to guarantee continued functioning of essential human activities."

G'dad Coghlan squinted at her. "Such as?"

"Life support in the Martian tunnels, currency stability in Earth's trading centers, weather control, air traffic control, medical monitoring and prostheses . . . I'll think of a few more."

"And then you'll let us go?" He was grinning at her.

"After you return three shiploads of resin explosives now hidden in low Earth orbit."

The old man ground his teeth, a characteristic that the simulation had down cold. "Agreed. But then— what's left? What hold will we have on you humans?"

"None." It was Demeter's turn to smile. "Except..."

"Ye-ess?" Jory drawled.

"What's that, dear?" Sulie asked.

"We pokey old carbon-based machines will be right behind you," Demeter explained. "Eventually, we'll catch up with you. Not that I'd personally ever want to live in the Oort Cloud. But one day we'll probably come visiting."

"You won't be welcome," her grandfather warned.

"Of course we will. Because by then you'll be needing our help—and we'll need yours—in a much greater project."

"What's that?"

"The stars."

Demeter Coghlan went over to the table, picked up the kerosene lamp, and raised its globe. Just to see what would happen, she blew on the fusion flame within.

The room went out.