Lightpaths (17 page)

“I’m just so impressed by what’s being done out here,” Marissa said following him as he moved from vista to vista, “especially by what your mother and the rest of the colony founders are doing.”

“Hm,” Roger grunted and he swung around toward the colony. “All this great tech, and still they want to waste their time on their ridiculous social engineering schemes.”

“What? Don’t you believe in the possibility of bettering ourselves?”

“My dear Marissa, I am certainly a firm believer in the revealed religion of Inevitable Technological Progress—more so than either of my parents. What else is there to believe in, in the long run?”

“Human beings, maybe?” Marissa ventured, suspecting what sort of response the idea would get.

“Nonsense! Too unpredictable!” Roger said firmly as they floated into better view of the long axis of the space habitat. “Just look at the ridiculous shams of politics and ‘political science’ and ‘sociology’. I have a good deal more faith in engineering specs than in the ‘nature’ of my fellow mortals. There’s a technological solution to every human problem, if only enough time and money were put into searching for that solution—and if it were allowed to be implemented.”

“I can’t believe you’re that naive a technological optimist!” Marissa said, even though, at that moment, she was also quite well aware of how dependent she was on the impressive piece of technology keeping her alive and functioning in this environment quite inimical to unprotected life. “You can’t eliminate the human factor—”

“That’s just the problem!” Roger said, truly exasperated as they drifted along in their sublime surroundings to which, for the moment, he was thoroughly oblivious. “Within a relatively short time, the need for satellite solar power stations will drop, because the stations already in place will be providing all the energy humanity needs. Eventually such energy wealth will help bring about the demographic shift that might lead population growth rate downward—but when? Once human numbers have hit ten billion? Fifteen? At some point along that trajectory, ecocatastrophe will kick in and take an enormous toll. Then, when humanity needs the space habitats most, where will they be? The government/corporate consortia will have already stopped building the habitats because our major product, the satellite solar power stations, the SSPS, will have already ceased to be profitable!”

“But I’ve been reading the works written by your mother and the other founders,” Marissa said, wishing she could reach out and grab him by the arm and say Wait a minute!—but settling for narrowcast argument instead. “They claim that the space habitats will become valuable in themselves—regardless of whether they turn out a profitable product like the SSPS. According to the founders, the construction of space habitats themselves will become a valued enterprise—”

“—‘and this will drive a momentum growth phase, during which habitat construction will, over time, outstrip human population growth, eventually reaching the point at which emigration to the space colonies will be so great that Earth’s human population will actually start to decline!’” Roger said, sententiously and sarcastically. “I’ve heard that song and dance before. I wish I could believe it, but I just don’t buy it.”

“Why not?” Marissa asked, maneuvering up in front of him. She really wanted to know, since she thought it was a hopeful scenario that might even work.

“Where will the demand for new habitats come from?” Roger asked, intent on demolishing what he perceived to be her illusions. “Before the majority of human beings will ever want to live in a floating botanical garden in space, things will have to have already gotten pretty damned lousy on Earth. And by then it will be too late.”

“Do you have a better suggestion?” Marissa asked, a bit peeved at what she could only think of as his technological arrogance.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Better to trust in solutions that take human decision-making out of the loop. Like my pheromone research. If my idea works, then human population can be made realistically resource-dependent. If humanity never fully breaks out into space, that will be all right—human numbers will be self-regulating and so will never push the Earth’s life support systems into ecocatastrophe.”

“And if the break-out into space begins to happen anyway?” Marissa prodded. Much about Roger’s whole scenario seemed downright dehumanizing, to her—even if it did seem to solve a lot of critical problems.

“That’ll be fine too,” Roger said happily. “A pheromone-shifted humanity will be more amenable to, and more easily spread by, the same process of colony fissioning or budding that’s seen in mole-rats.”

“You seem to have all the answers,” Marissa admitted as they jetted along through the silent void between the space colony and the nearest satellite solar power station. She tried to change the subject—hopefully not too awkwardly. “I don’t share your absolute faith in tech, but I must admit—these space suits we’re wearing, they’re quite impressive. I’ve never seen suits like them before.”

“That’s right,” Roger beamed. “Here we are, naked inside them, separated from the killing emptiness by only a few millimeters of transparent helmet and opaque, rubbery, slick material.”

“It feels so sheer,” Marissa enthused, believing what she was saying even if it did sound like an advertisement, “that I almost forget I’m in a suit. Like being naked to the universe.”

“But still fully protected, breathing clean fresh air,” Roger said. “It’s a livesuit, possessing a programmable active structure. Nothing like the bulky armor that protected fragile humans when we first came into space. This is all active nanoelectronics and nanomachinery. Microscopic motors and computers, combined with the suit’s three dimensional weave of diamond-based active fibers. Makes you quite capable of wrestling with angels or grasping the head of a pin. In sunlight the suit functions like a one-person ecosystem, absorbing light from outside and your own exhaled carbon dioxide from within the suit, to produce fresh oxygen from the two, almost like a plant. In case of emergency, it can break down other wastes into their constituent molecules and re-assemble them into foodstuffs.”

Marissa could have done without hearing that last yummy bit of technological goshwowery, but she was still undeniably impressed.

“Why haven’t I hear more about these supersuits?” Marissa said, executing a full somersault that she wouldn’t have thought she had the grace to complete so flawlessly.

“Because,” Roger said with a heavy exhale, as if the question had punched him unexpectedly in the solar plexus, “it was inside just such a prototype supersuit, as you called it, that my father died.”

Marissa abruptly stopped her somersault turning.

“He was walking at the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” Roger said. “Kilometers underwater in the Pacific. One of his companies had developed the livesuit. There was no reason for the suit to fail—even under such extreme conditions. I still don’t believe it was the technology that failed. It was people. Someone, somehow, programmed that suit to collapse, or at least to allow itself to collapse. The moment the suit failed, my father died.”

Roger began to move slowly back in the direction of the pod they’d come out in, now on a line with the space colony and its space docks. Marissa moved beside him, carefully matching his slow speed.

“My father had already given me a pair of the prototype suits as a birthday present,” Roger said. “I always try to wear one, without fear, whenever I’m out. Still, I can’t shake the memory associated with it. I guess his executives haven’t shaken it either. For them the livesuit is a deathsuit. They’ve never marketed it.”

He put himself into a slow 360º turn. Maneuvering alone in free space was as close as he ever came to a meditative state, but he’d had enough of contemplation for now, he thought, as he came face to face with Marissa.

“It gets to me too, sometimes,” he said quietly over the intercom. “No matter how much I trust the tech, no matter how often I come out here protected by it alone, I sometimes feel haunted in the suit, like I’m wearing my dead father’s clothes.”

Without so much as a word, Marissa came to him and hugged him—a strangely sensual embrace, in the livesuits. Roger did not attempt to free himself from that intimate contact. Slowly, as they turned together in space, their motion became a sad waltz among the heavens, a dance unutterably mournful, though their brows were wreathed with stars and planets stood at their feet.

Trying to dismiss the thought from his mind, Roger spun slowly out of their long embrace. Just as he was completing his turn, however, he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye a flutter of tremendous shimmering wings, all around the Earth. Snapping his gaze back toward it, he saw only the glint of some of the new mirroring structures, the X-shaped things he’d seen on the flight up, though now there were many more of them, rapidly abuilding near all the SSPS.

Returning his gaze to his return trajectory and taking Marissa by the hand, he wondered vaguely what purpose the new structures might serve. The thought left him as they re-boarded his small craft and he and Marissa began stripping out of the livesuits, face to face this time, not back to back.

As Lakshmi approached the backstage area where the members of Möbius Cadúceus were building their set, she eavesdropped on their comments back and forth through the close-comm Public Sphere. Such philosophical remarks bounced among them that they made her wonder a) if the cast and crew had been indulging in a bit of mind-alteration this early in the day and b) what had ever happened to that Hitchcockian era when actors (and, by extension, all performers) were “cattle.”

“—paranoid alienation is the basis of science and the scientific method,” said a woman whose voice Lakshmi didn’t recognize.

“But the knower must not only be alienated from, but also related to, the object of knowledge,” an unfamiliar male voice said. “If the knower weren’t related to it in some way, how could he or she know it at all?”

“Think about it this way,” said a voice Lakshmi definitely recognized as Lev Korchnoi’s. “Knowledge is recognizing that ‘I’, the subject, and the ‘Other’—it, the object, you—are not one. Wisdom lies in understanding that, despite appearances, I and the Other are one, is One.”

“Metaphysical unity of all beings?” said another female voice she didn’t recognize. “Then what’s the difference between wisdom and compassion, if it’s all just the shift from the ‘I-it’ to the ‘I-Thou’ relation?”

“True,” Lakshmi heard Lev agree, “but it’s more than that. Creatures with no epistemic space, no alienating self-awareness, could never know ‘I’ nor ‘it’ nor ‘thou.’ Alienated, self-aware humans know ‘I’ and ‘it’ quite well—just look at our obsession with personal or tribal power, dominion over the Earth and our fellow creatures, all that. Maybe we even know a bit about ‘Thou.’ Generally, though, we find it really hard to live inside the idea that I and it and Thou are actually One.”

“A cycle, then?” asked another unfamiliar voice. “From an unconscious unawareness of self or other, to a conscious awareness of self and other, to a superconscious awakening to the idea of the fundamental inseparability of all things?”

“Not so much a cycle as a spiral, I think,” Lev said slowly. “Or some sort of circle with a twist maybe—”

“Oh no,” groaned one of the women. “A Möbius strip again!”

“Whatever shape we try to cast the idea in,” Lev said, trying to regain control of the conversation, “it’s still pretty clear that, if wisdom equals knowledge plus compassion, then as a species we’re very knowledgeable but not very wise. Higher than the snakes but lower than the angels. That’s really what our performance is about, ultimately.”

Lakshmi, now within sight of the set builders, had been stopped by security.

“Pretty highfalutin talk,” Lakshmi called out to Lev, “for a guy in a fake soldier suit.”

“This is not a
fake
soldier suit,” Lev said, waving her in past security then executing a perfect spin off the high scaffolding where he’d been working, coming to rest in a gymnast’s landing. He walked on toward her as she hovered in.

“This armor was the very latest in stealth soldier
haute couture
, circa 2014,” Lev continued, in mock fashion-show host tones. “A Mitsui/GenDyn joint venture. Superdense kevlar lined in EMR absorbent material that also reduces both noise
and
infrared signature. It offers extensive musculature augmentation, stands impervious to all kinds of small arms fire and shrapnel, and is fully covered in computer-sensored chameleon cloth—camouflage adaptable to any level of light, any pattern in the surrounding environment, or programmable for special missions. The helmet is similarly top-of the line, equipped with fully integrated telecommunications and heads-up targeting electronics for the suit’s shockwave gauntlet. It also features a mechanically-activated C4 self-destruct capability, for those sticky social situations.”

Lakshmi heard some of the crew up in the scaffolding laughing and snickering, but ignored them for the moment. She watched as Lev did Superman leaps in his costume, and she tried to remember what he’d said about “musculature augmentation.”

“It looks real enough,” Lakshmi had to admit.

“It is,” Lev said, bounding about like a Wehrmacht gazelle. “Absolutely real. Genuine enhanced stealth battle armor.”

“But what’s it for?”

“What do you mean?” Lev asked, trying a roundhouse kick, and smiling in satisfaction when it lashed the air with inhuman force.

“First you do that heavy study in stage combat,” Lakshmi said, the edge of concern creeping into her voice, “and now this.”

“Authenticity,” Lev said, leaping a dozen feet straight into the air. “And added safety. All for the show. Besides, with the right programming, what I’m wearing will not only adapt to surrounding spatial patterns, but also temporal ones.”

“What?”

“I can program it to simulate battle costume from any period in history I choose—and that’s key to the performance.”

“Well, just don’t become too enamored of this machoboy stuff,” Lakshmi said. “There’s a world going on outside your Möbius Cadúceus performance, you know. And it’s getting stranger all the time. Aleister pulled some interesting stuff out of the Rats that you need to see.”

“Okay, okay, but first let me introduce you to the band,” Lev said, then turned to call up toward the others he’d left behind on the set construction. “Everybody! This is Lakshmi Ngubo, the person who, after much effort, finally completely debugged the shobot Guardians! Laksh, that guy on the fastener gun is our woodwinds maestro, Adewole Umoje. Those two, hanging flats there, are Mary Nakulita and Liselle Merukana, keyboard and string interfacers, respectively. The gentleman hanging lights is Liu Xang, brass master, and the woman under the spot-welding mask is my co-star—Eve to my Adam, Bliss to my Will—Cana LaJeunesse.”

Lakshmi and the band members waved and nodded to each other. When that was done, she and Lev moved off to a corner of the playing space, out of the worst of the construction noise.

“Since you dumped the LogiBox problems into your friend Aleister’s lap and ran off to work on your show, Lev dear,” Lakshmi said, her voice a level purr only slightly louder than the sound of her hoverchair, “we’ve made some progress. You’ll be glad to hear that your LogiBox installation is not responsible for the problems—”

“Hah! I knew it!”

“But there are other matters which might still concern someone with a day job in communications—or have you forgotten that part of your life?”

“What ‘other matters’?” Lev said grumpily.

“Oh, little things—like the fact that the majority of the dataflow between Earth and the Orbital Complex is no longer going through recognized channels.”

“What?”

“The thing in the ‘Boxes, Lev. The consciousness you said couldn’t be a consciousness. Whatever it is—let’s call it an intelligence—it’s out of the ‘Boxes, now. We couldn’t shut it down if we wanted to. It’s ‘distributed’ itself, largely through the Rats, but in other ways too. That ‘distributed consciousness’—excuse me, distributed
intelligence
—it’s behind the spread of this ‘Building the Ruins’ game. I’ve played it, Lev.
Very
strange. Even stranger is the fact that all the information from all those playings of that game is being sent up the well, along with one helluva lot of other data. Informationally speaking, the orbital complex has become a hot spot. At the current rate of dataflow, in a day or so we’ll be hotter than any single city on Earth—hotter than most countries, in fact.”

Lev stared at her.

“But where’s all that data
going
?”

“Not to us,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Aleister and I aren’t sure, but we suspect those X-shaped satellites have something to do with information storage, among other things. They’ve been built by micromachines acting ‘autonomously’. But the distributed consciousness is deeply intermingled with the Vajra—”

“And the Vajra coordinates with all the micromachines,” Lev said, chewing his lower lip nervously. “Aw Jeez. What have you told Atsuko Cortland about this?”

“Just that we’ve located the source of the problem and are working to correct it.”

“That’s true enough,” Lev said, trying to put a hopeful spin on things. “You got the thing in the ‘Boxes to stop glitching my shobots, at least.”

“Right,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Or maybe it was just finished getting our attention that way. Something’s still building that weird spirit-animal sculpture in my workshop, you know.”

“But otherwise the distributed whatever-it-is seems harmless enough, right?” Lev continued in his hopeful vein. “The only damage I can really think of that it’s done is sour our relations with Earth a bit, that’s all.”

“That,” Lakshmi agreed, “and some of the micromachines have been raiding the mass drivers—for materials to build those X-satellites, is our guess. But there’s something else. Aleister’s found this extreme redundancy in the Rats, all repeating the same nonfunctional sequence of code. It’s a list of names.”

Lakshmi shot the list to Lev’s personal data assistant and the list appeared on his wraparounds. Six names. Two he knew well enough by reputation—both Cortlands, Roger and Atsuko. Two he knew vaguely—Seiji Yamaguchi and Paul Larkin. One he knew not at all—Jhana Meniskos. And one he could never get to know—Jiro Yamaguchi.

“Strange list, isn’t it?” Lakshmi said cryptically. “We don’t know how they tie into the Rats. None of them have ever been to Sedona, where the Real-time A-life Technopredators were developed. None of them ever had any connection with the Myrrhisticine Abbey and its network manager, the ex-phreaker Phelonious Manqué. Some weren’t even born when it happened.”

“When what happened?” Lev asked, lost for a moment.

“This,” Lakshmi said, shooting Lev’s PDA another feed. An old-style video image appeared on his wraparounds, amateurish, someone’s unsteady hand moving the view-finder. A red mesa or butte—Lev couldn’t remember which term fit—topped by a complex of Neo-Gothic buildings.

“The Abbey,” Lakshmi said, following along. “Here it comes. Watch.”

Above the abbey on the mesa a flash of light burst, but didn’t go away. Instead it quickly became a point of light, then a hole of darkness rimmed by light like the “diamond ring” stage of an eclipse. The light-rimmed hole grew rapidly, until it was clear that it wasn’t ringed by white light but rather by myriad rainbow fires dancing over its whole surface. What looked like points of light glowed inside it too. It blotted out the Abbey, then most of the mesa, then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only a bowl of broken stone.

“What the hell was that?”

“We don’t really know,” Lakshmi said quietly. “Aleister’s still searching. Sensationalist media at the time called it the ‘black hole sun’ and ‘Tunguska II’. Scientific theories ranged from meteoritic impact, to anomalous seismic event, to the sudden appearance of a micro-singularity. Religionists claimed it was a ‘rapturing’—mainly because the Myrrhisticineans were apocalyptists.”

“Looks like they got their wish,” Lev said cautiously. “Does it have anything to do with what’s going on up here?”

“We don’t know that either. The Rats are the only connection. But the man who called himself Manqué didn’t survive. No one who was on that mesa that day has ever been heard from since. The only Myrrhisticineans who survived were those who were away from the abbey.”

One of the band crew called Lev’s name. Apparently his advice was needed on some aspect of the construction.

“Look, Laksh, I’ve got to go,” he said, already moving away. “But keep me in the loop on this—especially if anything else affecting Comm comes up.”

Lakshmi watched him leave. He still bounded away, but his bounding wasn’t as light. Superman, with burden, she thought as her hoverchair turned slowly away.

* * * * * * *

Marissa had only stepped out of the lab a moment for coffee, but when she got back the ideological tug of war between Atsuko and Roger was well underway. She should have known better than to suggest that Atsuko meet her at the lab.

“—and this work is hyperspecialized and reductionist in the extreme,” Atsuko was saying pointedly. “Working with these perfect little monsters from the id, these ‘naked mole-rats.’ “

“I’m surprised at you, Mother,” Roger said sarcastically. “Isn’t it you who’s always preached the inherent worth and value of every species. Why else preserve biodiversity?”

“But these creatures strain even
my
tolerance. Blind, hairless, incestuous, subterranean, shit-eating little beggars!”

Marissa burst out laughing at the obvious distaste in Atsuko’s voice. Seeing who had laughed, Atsuko managed a slight smile.

“Why are you laughing?” Atsuko asked. “I didn’t mean for it to come out as profanely as it did, but it’s all literally true, you know. They
are
blind. They
are
hairless, or virtually so. They spend their entire lives underground—’completely fossorial,’ as the scientific articles put it. The researchers may speak primly of ‘inbreeding’ and ‘consanguineous mating,’ but that’s just a nice way of saying incest. The young, the pups, when hungry ‘beg fecal matter from the adults,’ which the mole-rat experts term ‘coprophagy.’ They also engage in ‘autocoprophagy’—they roll their own, and then they eat it!”

Marissa found herself laughing loudly and openly with Atsuko.

“Undeniably,” Roger said at last, when his mother’s childish laughter had subsided, “but they’re as worthy of scientific research as anything else—”

“No doubt. Maybe more worthy, than most things. All I’ll say is that Jennifer Jarvis, the ‘mother of naked mole rat research,’ must have possessed an incredibly detached scientific objectivity while she was working with them.”

Marissa smiled again, leaning forward.

“You seem to have learned more than a little bit about them yourself.”

“Yes,” Atsuko said, her tone growing more serious. “A mother likes to know what her son is up to—even when the son and mother are as
loving
as Roger and I are. It helps me figure out certain things. Knowing, for instance, that Jarvis worked at the University of Cape Town, turning it into the world’s great center for the study of eusocial mammals—that helps explain why Roger spent several of his graduate school summers there. It also explains why he’s working up here now.”