The Lure

33 Rapunzel

Bull was taking time off for the Iraqi crisis and she had three hours at the most.

There was a harsh cry and she almost jumped with fright. A large, long-legged pink bird with a yellow head fluttered past at eye-level and settled on a palm frond about six feet away, eyeing her curiously. Hazel Baxendale began to wonder if the Baltimore aquarium, even in the depths of the Baltimore winter, had been such a good idea.

She stepped carefully past the bird and carried on through a winding path, surrounded by lush greenery. An emerald-green iguana blocked her way. She moved respectfully past it and, a little further on, sat down on a wooden bench.

The tropical house was hot. And humid. Hazel draped her synthetic fur coat over the back of the bench, but kept her sunglasses on. She waited.

The MIT engineer, Professor Gene Killman, was first to arrive. He was overweight, bald, with a gaudy yellow tie and dark glasses. He was licking his thin lips nervously, and looking around. He was almost comically furtive. The President’s Science Adviser rubbed her forehead in despair and groaned inwardly. The man spotted her, looked around again, and sidled up to the bench, sitting down without once looking at her.

Something rustled in a tree. A small creature with long golden fur peered at them. ‘What the hell is that?’ she said.

‘They call it a tamarin, ma’am. Cute, isn’t it? So many have been taken for pets that it’s now an endangered species.’

The Harvard philosopher, a small, cheerful, grey-haired woman in her forties, appeared a few minutes later and sat down on the other side of Hazel. The woman was dressed for the winter, in a heavy coat and scarf. It was ninety degrees hot and ninety per cent humid, but the philosopher kept her winter clothes wrapped round her. Just looking at her put the Science Adviser in a sweat.

Hazel said, ‘Rosa Clements, meet Gene Killman.’ There was an exchange of cautious nods. ‘I’d like to emphasise again that this discussion is off-the-record and highly confidential. You won’t understand what’s behind it and all I can tell you is that it involves a matter of national security. Don’t tell a living soul that I’ve approached you for advice, not even your partners. Especially not your partners.’

‘I’m between wives,’ Gene Killman volunteered.

‘You have my full attention, ma’am,’ said Rosa Clements.

‘Okay, here we go. I’m going to ask three questions and I need the best answers going. You mustn’t go jumping to any goddam conclusions; treat them as hypothetical. Number one. Is there life beyond the Earth? Or are we just a mega-fluke? Professor Killman.’

The MIT man replied. ‘In my opinion the Universe is teeming with life.’

‘I thought the odds against life forming by chance from simple molecules were super-astronomical. There are more ways to combine amino acids than there are atoms in the Universe, but only one way forms them into proteins.’

‘That’s a problem,’ Killman admitted. ‘I don’t have the answer except to say here we are, and life got established down here just as soon as the meteorites stopped smashing our crust. Take a walk over Slave Province in Canada and you’re walking over micro-organic sediments a hundred feet thick and two and a half billion years old. In bits of West Greenland you’re walking over iron-rich layers just as thick but four billion years old laid down by primitive microbes. If life was some sort of mega-fluke, how come we’re here and how come it got started so early?’

‘But what about intelligent life? I’ve been told that’s a quadrillion to one chance.’

Killman said, ‘Again, as soon as the conditions were right on Earth, there was a transition from single-celled life forms to multi-celled ones. Once you’ve done that, there are selective advantages all the way from the formation of nerves, then synapses, then cerebral ganglions and all the way to brains, intelligence and societies.’

Hazel studied the man closely through her dark glasses. ‘Are you saying intelligent life should be common out there?’

‘It should be everywhere.’

‘So why don’t we see it everywhere?’

‘That’s a problem too,’ Killman admitted frankly. ‘There have been lots of suggestions but I don’t believe any of them.’

But Hazel had stopped listening. The message had come home loud and clear: ET is on the cards.

‘Okay.’ She sensed that something was slithering in a branch above her. ‘Question number two. Say we receive an intelligent signal from space. Say that all sorts of information, including genetic recipes to improve ourselves and our children, is in this message. That’s all the information you have to work on. I need the answers to the following questions. What sort of creatures would send it? What are we dealing with? Could it be on the level, or some sort of trap?’

‘Ms Baxendale, at MIT we’ve developed a doll. We call her Rapunzel on account of her long hair. She uses sensors to pick up movement and sound. She feels heat and she has a sense of touch. We have a couple of hundred facial expressions programmed into her and a few billion sound combinations. Would you believe she has moods? That she needs attention? Rapunzel can fool a child into believing she’s a real baby.’

‘Call me Hazel. What’s your point, Gene?’

‘This, ma’am. Rapunzel is just a dumb machine made of plastic and wire, programmed by a few silicon chips. We’re still in the steam age.’ Killman leaned forward. His voice was beginning to carry a zealous edge. ‘But give it fifty years. A hundred at the outside. By then we’ll have molecular and even quantum computers a billion times faster than anything on the market today. We’ll have dolls that fool adults, not just kids. They’ll be more mobile, smarter, and more imaginative than us. We’re moving into the age of intelligent machines.’

‘But they’re still just machines. They can’t think.’

‘Ma’am, I’m a machine and I can think. What am I but a collection of atoms, every last one obeying the laws of physics? Same as the doll.’

‘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 nth 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.’