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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘We’re not sure,’ I said, ‘whether that was planned, the probe having reached some point where it could continue to accelerate without further input from base; or whether it was a result of the disaster that you saw unfolding there, or whether indeed it was a response to the escape of the labour force on that remarkable excuse for a starship.’
Suze was grinning from ear to ear.
‘It was quite a feat, that escape,’ she said.
‘It sure was,’ said Andrea. ‘I still shudder every time I look at it.’
‘Why didn’t they just head for home, for the Inner System?’ Malley asked.
I shrugged, hiding a moment of pain. ‘Partly because, ironically enough, they didn’t have the supplies for such a long journey in, uh,
real space
—it would have taken them years to get back to the nearest human settlement in
that
thing, and partly because their leaders—it wasn’t exactly a democratic setup, being an orbital labour camp—had decided they wanted to go to the stars.’
‘Also,’ Tony added, ‘I suspect the post-humans systematically misled them about what was going on in the Inner System. Wilde certainly thought we jammed their communications, which is more or less the opposite of the truth.’
‘OK,’ Malley said.
‘Right,’ I went on. ‘The next thing that happened, about a year later, was the beginning of a flood of disruptive radio-borne computer viruses from somewhere inside the Jovian atmosphere. It took us a long time to recover, and even longer to get out there ourselves. Within five years, however, our telescopes were picking up something with which most of you are by now so familiar that it’s hard to imagine how awesome it seemed at the time.’ I laughed briefly. ‘There must be kids today who think this appearance of Jupiter is
natural
.’
The planet’s image blurred, the orange banding known since Cassini himself dissolving briefly into chaos, then settling into the new configuration it had shown for the past couple of centuries: vast hexagonal upwellings, like Bernoulli convection cells in boiling water.
‘As you can see, they were able to affect their environment—deliberately or not, we can’t say. Bear in mind the speed the original post-humans worked at—if it was maintained, the entities we now call the Jovians must have done that over five or six thousand subjective years, so it could have been just a by-product of their activity. Every five years or so, these cells collapse and reform, and the radio output changes. We think this represents the repeated rise and fall of post-human cultures in virtual realities, though for all we know they could just as well have degenerated to pre-human levels of intelligence, and all this might have no more significance than the work of coral polyps or bees. The viral messages themselves could be simply a defensive reflex, the equivalent of a squid’s cloud of ink or a plant’s insecticides.’
Yeng raised her hand, exercising her chairperson’s right to interrupt. ‘That wouldn’t make it any less dangerous,’ she pointed out. ‘Biological diseases aren’t intelligent either, but they can still threaten us, and the computer viruses which something out there is generating are definitely a threat.’
I nodded emphatically. ‘Yes … which is why our communications are such a bind, and why our most important computers are such lumbering monsters, and
all
our computers, right down to the nano scale, are mechanical. But that’s only part of it. Now and again there’s some kind of attempt at launching things out of the atmosphere. These attempts have increased over time. Which is where we come in.’
What followed was basically a propaganda video for the Cassini Division, showing the constant vigilance of the orbital fleets patrolling just outside the Jovian atmosphere, zapping anything larger than a grain of sand that looked like heading the wrong way; and the long watch on the Gate. A voice-over carefully explained that the latter wasn’t the complete waste of time that it might seem, because we also spooled in the data sent back from the probe, which constantly deepened our knowledge of the far future of the universe. Malley shared with me a sceptical smile.
I paused the video. ‘All this is now, sadly, out of date,’ I said. ‘Because something new has happened.’ I bookmarked the place for later use and brought on some new footage.
‘This is recent,’ I said. ‘The last couple of months. We haven’t, uh, put it on general release yet.’
The huge upwellings died away, as they had two-score times in the past. When they were renewed, clusters of bubbles appeared within them, bobbing into visibility and then sinking back. Each time they returned to the
surface, the clusters had expanded and proliferated, linked up by long and (on this scale) thin black lines. I maxed the res, showing dark shapes shuttling within these black lines, moving in both directions.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Malley.
‘Quite,’ I said, running overflight scans. ‘It does definitely look like some kind of stable, organized form of life, with habitats, technology, transport. So far, that’s the best detail we’ve got. Perhaps most significant of all, there are narrow-cast beam messages passed between these clusters. We haven’t yet interpreted them, but they sure look like intelligent communication. There’s every possibility that what we’re seeing is evidence that the Jovians have finally got out of the recurrent traps of their inherited virtual realities, and have emerged as a new species. They are developing and changing fast—we’re getting traces of flight paths through the atmosphere, and the speed and frequency of these flights are increasing by the week.’
‘Wow,’ said Suze. ‘Aliens!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Post-humans—a superhuman, post-Singularity form of life, that may be as far above us as we are above the ants. Or will be, Real Soon Now.’
I looked around the circle. Malley and Suze seemed puzzled, but not worried; my crew were united in grim resolution.
‘Is this why you’re so keen to get through the wormhole?’ Suze asked.
‘So we can—you can—escape, if necessary?’
‘That’s part of it,’ I admitted. ‘And part of it is as I said to you—we don’t know what’s going on on the
other
side: If it’s anything like this, we want to know.’
‘There is something else,’ Boris said. ‘Something you should know.’ He nodded to me; I ran the standard spiel at the place where I’d stopped. It showed off our distant expeditions in the Kuiper Belt using lasers and tactical nukes to topple cometary orbits in towards the Inner System, sending them swinging around Jupiter and on to Mars or the Belt.
I stopped it and brought up the lights. We all sat back and looked at Malley and Suze. All of us, I suppose, felt as tense as I did; we had decided, in long debates on our journey to Earth, that Malley (or Wilde, if we’d got him on board) would have to know the full story, because it would be impossible to conceal it from him once he started work on the wormhole problem, and he was unlikely to take kindly to being duped.
Malley’s mouth opened, then closed. He swallowed hard and spoke.
‘You’re not serious,’ he said. ‘You can’t be—are you telling us you’re going to actually set up a cometary bombardment and destroy the new Jovians? ’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do. As soon as we saw this new development, we set things in motion—literally—out in the Kuiper
Belt. It took a lot of work, but it’s ready now. We’ve set up a train of massive comets, and they’re due to arrive in less than three weeks. We’ll give them a nudge at the last moment, and there’ll be a succession of impacts all around the planet. It should work—the new Jovians seem more vulnerable than whatever is making the upwellings. Those bubbles you see are just that, bubbles in the atmosphere. Most of their technology seems to be based on manipulation of electromagnetic fields, gas flows, and large-scale chemical reactions. We are going to direct a stream of fast, heavy comet nuclei into the Jovian atmosphere, hit them with a force greater than a million nuclear wars, and wipe them out for good.’
‘But we don’t even know if they’re hostile!’ Suze protested. ‘Have you tried to contact them?’
‘Of course not,’ Yeng said. ‘They’re still churning out the same old viruses. If we deliberately opened communication with them, who knows but they’d send even more destructive viruses back?’
‘You must be able to build in safeguards,’ Malley said. He rattled his unlit pipe between his teeth. ‘I don’t see the justification.’
‘They’re capable of supplanting us,’ Tony said. ‘At least, there’s a strong chance that they are. They present a threat to us just by existing. Isn’t that justification enough?’
Suze and Malley both shook their heads. ‘It’s a bad thing to do,’ Suze said. ‘We could learn from them. We could persuade them to stop the virus broadcasts. They might not be able to harm us. They might not even be aware we exist!’
‘Here’s hoping,’ said Andrea. ‘That way, they have no chance to fight back.’
We all laughed, except Suze and Malley.
‘What about the morality of it?’ Malley asked.
Most of us shrugged or smiled. Yeng frowned. ‘Morality?’ she said uncertainly. ‘What’s that?’
Some of us smiled; Malley barked a laugh.
‘It’s an ideology,’ Suze said. ‘People used to think that there was a very powerful intelligence that controlled the universe, and that it told them what to do. Later they found out there was no intelligence controlling the universe, but for about a century or so after that they thought the
universe
told them what to do. Some of them had doubts about that, but they thought that if people didn’t believe it they would start raping and killing and hurting each other.’ She grimaced. ‘I’ve never understood why they thought that, because some people were raping and killing and hurting other people all the time anyway. The reason most people weren’t doing that is because they didn’t want to in the first place, or because they knew they couldn’t get away with it. We know now that if we want other people to
stop doing bad things we have to
make
them stop and
not
let them get away with it. Which is why we have the Union!’ she concluded triumphantly, a little out of breath, but evidently pleased that her arcane studies had made some contribution.
‘OK,’ said Yeng, ‘I understand. It was something people believed before they had the true knowledge?’
‘That’s right!’ I said. ‘Exactly. So, Sam, you were saying?’
Malley glowered at me. Then his expression relaxed and he shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you see it, fine. I think all this “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law” crap is as satanic as the man who first said it, but let that pass.’
I nodded. It was easy enough to let that pass, because it made no kind of sense to me.
‘So to put it in your terms,’ Malley went on, ‘I don’t think it would be to our advantage to destroy the Jovians. They are a form of intelligent life, presumably they’re sentient, and disrespect for sentience is a dangerous thing. A bad precedent. And secondly, as Suze pointed out, we could benefit from some kind of peaceful interaction with them, if that’s at all possible.’
I stared at him, somewhat shaken. I had known he was old, and had been a non-cooperator most of his life, but for a genius he seemed remarkably obtuse.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘you’re right about sentience. We do have to respect it, each and every one of us, if only for our own peace of mind. But only humans are sentient. Those things out there are just jumped-up computer programs! They may give the appearance of sentience, but if they do, it’ll be a protective coloration. You can have a deep, meaningful conversation with your suit—hey, you can have a sexual relationship with it, if that’s your thing—but nobody thinks
suits
are sentient. It’s just something that suits have evolved, by a kind of natural selection, in order to get along with humans. The Jovians, if we communicate with them, will no doubt seem sensitive, but they can no more feel than the eye-spots on a butterfly’s wing can see.’
Malley tilted his head back and roared with laughter.
‘And you people sneer at ideology!’ he spluttered, when he’d calmed down a bit. ‘That’s the most airtight piece of dogmatic, closed-loop thinking I’ve ever heard! You really mean to say that no robots, no uploads, no artificial intelligences are truly sentient and worthy of our concern?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s self-evident.’
‘And even if you were right, what’s the
advantage
to you, or us, or anybody, in crushing those “butterflies’ wings”, blind though they may be? Eh?’
‘Let me explain,’ I said patiently. ‘There are no signs of intelligent life
anywhere else in the universe. The Outwarder probe has gone a long way, and none of the data coming back from it has shown a smidgin of a trace of a signal. We’re alone, apart from the Jovians. If they are superior to us, no matter how friendly they seem to be, we’ll always be at their mercy. I will not live at the mercy of anyone or anything. This our best, last, and only chance to have the universe to ourselves, and we’re going to take it.’
Malley stood up and looked around at all of us, not angry, not impatient; a bit sad, as though some of the aging damage he was beginning to slough off had settled back on him.
‘Not with my help, you’re not,’ he said.

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