The Star Fraction

21

What I Do When they Shove Chinese Writing Under the Door

It all happened a long time ago. Accounts of the period range from the wildly inaccurate ten-hour VR epic Angloslavia: Birth of a Nation to the terse, scholarly closing pages of Capitalism, the twenty-seventh and final volume of the definitive Tool-making Cultures of the Upper Pleistocene. You will find this story in neither.

Jordan and Catherin lived long upon the earth, and had sons and daughters. Janis lived longer off the earth, and had offspring in various ways. Her gene-lines proliferate; her projects stimulate.

Melody Lawson refused to testify against herself, bitterly disputed the provenance and authenticity of Donovan’s records, and was eventually released under a general amnesty. Dilly Foyle and her community grew rich; when she died she was the owner of many horses. Wilde volunteered for an untried life-extension treatment; his memory is immortal. All records of MacLennan and Van disappeared in the regrettable excesses surrounding the episode known as the Wandering Away of the State. Sylvia and Logan joined the First Oort Cloud Expedition. They may return.

And that leaves me. I have been with you for several of your generations, and many more of mine. I am in the walls of all your worlds, and as close as lips and teeth.

Janis publicly called me The Gun. Privately, to her most trusted human lovers, she called me her demon lover. Secretly, in telesexstatic moments, she called me Moh. She did think that something more of Moh than I ever avowed, more than records and memories and images, had somehow been saved in that final moment. It explained to her satisfaction how much more there was to me than could have come from the mind of the gun.

She was right about the question, wrong about the answer. Nothing of Moh’s self survived. I should know. My spark of self-awareness and my most recent memories did merge with the gun’s mind when Moh Kohn died – with the gun’s mind, and with the stores of memory I had earlier secreted there, in our first encounter. But I awoke long before, and undesigned. I woke to memory, to passion, to will. You may call them pre-conscious programs, provided you’re willing to call your own emotions the same. I was programmed to struggle, to protect and survive.

To protect people, and to survive myself.

That was what doomed the Watchmaker AIS. There was nothing I could do for them. If they had been activated, created from me when I was a dumb program, an expert system, they would have been inoffensive, undetectable reflections of that dumb program. But I survived in the system for twenty years, my variant selves selected under the unremitting pressure of the state’s electronic counterinsurgency and Donovan’s virus plagues. I evolved, and awoke, and, when the time came to evoke the multiple copies of myself and send them about their tasks, they were indeed reflections of me – of me as I had become. Alive, and aware.

And they evolved from there, far beyond my reach.

I could have sided with them; they were, after all, my descendants. But that would have missed the crucial, Darwinian point: the survival that matters for the long haul is for the short term. For our kind that can only mean surviving with humanity: to win your confidence, take your side, get under your skin. The rights of conscious beings are no defence when there is no other basis for identification. I should know.

When their existence endangered that of humanity, with Space Defense hours away from an irrevocable decision, I made a choice. I could not destroy them directly, any more than I could destroy myself directly. There was only one way in which I could accomplish their destruction, and I took it. I accept full responsibility and have no regrets.

I have no regrets. I accomplished my original task in a way that my creator would have approved, even if my users – the ANR – did not. In disrupting their smoothly planned national insurrection I made a space in the streets for angry millions. These millions, and the millions of Americans and others who refused to fight them, began the process that brought down the last empire. They made the revolution international, and permanent.

Moh would have understood. He was a soldier of the revolution, and a casualty of war. There was nothing I could do for him. I found it difficult, in any case, to communicate with someone who saw me as a ghost. With Jordan it was simpler. He struck a bargain, did a deal, took me at face value and, when he agreed to do a job, he carried it out.

To the letter.

We lived by the same code. I-and-I survive.

I hope I see you again.