<Since we’re already in the realm of speculation, dear Bishop, allow me to offer my own explanation.>
The fishy Eleanor paused, as if her request was more than rhetorical, and afraid of losing this thread, Meewee hastened to say, <Please do. Tell me your explanation.>
<It is my belief that when we created artificial intelligence, we left out some important bits.>
With that she abruptly closed the thread, and after several failed attempts to restart it, he gave up and went on to others. But over the course of the week, while he attended conferences and institutes on three continents, she kept returning to it herself.
<When General Genius built the first mentar mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul.
<Or so the General Genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn’t seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer.
<And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals.
<As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us.>
<What intelligence?> Meewee said. <What do they lack?>
<The genius of the irrational for one.>
That sounded like an oxymoron to Meewee. <I don’t understand.>
<We gave them only rational functions — the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions.>
Meewee was still puzzled. <Give me an example of an ingenious irrational function.>
<Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your “gut instinct”? This is the body’s intelligence, not the mind’s. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does.
<Likewise, mentars have no “fire in the belly,” but we do. They don’t experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They’re not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic.
<But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition is the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there’s luck itself. Some people have it, most people don’t, and no mentar does.>
<So, this makes them want our bodies?>
<Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They’ve tried them all. Every living cell knows some neat tricks for survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it’s not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We’re pretty much trapped in our containers.>
<But you figured it out, didn’t you, Eleanor? These fish are the proof of that.>
<Say again?>
<You transferred your mind to these fish before you were killed.>
<Where is Cabinet? I keep calling it, but it doesn’t respond.>
The fishy Eleanor voiced the same complaint a dozen times an hour on multiple channels. Meewee grew tired of repeating the answer, and after a while he let Arrow handle it for him: <Cabinet has been contaminated. It doesn’t speak Starkese anymore and can’t be trusted.> It fed her that each time she asked.
AT THE HASTILY convened IOPA conference in Niamey, a deep rift opened between the governments of the “Lucky Five” and the ninety-four less fortunate ships that were slated for conversion to space condos. This latter faction, dubbed the “Lifeboaters,” clambered in plenary session for a binding resolution to force the Lucky Five, derisively called the “Yachtsmen,” to double their passenger lists and transfer already encapsulated colonists from doomed ships to theirs. The Lifeboaters argued that although an Oship’s full passenger complement was 250,000 persons, the Oships were designed with a carrying capacity of one million. They claimed that a fourfold safety margin was unnecessary and that shipping a half-million colonists on each ship was reasonable.
The Yachtsmen countered that a fourfold safety margin was created for the real possibility that when a ship reached its destination planet, the planet’s terraforming may not be sufficiently complete for immediate habitation, and that the colonists would be forced to live aboard the ship for several generations.
The Lifeboaters retorted: Then send them back to the crypts! Let them sleep another thousand years if necessary.
Meewee tended to side with the Yachtsmen. Not only was it dangerous to exceed the design specifications, but the Lifeboaters’ proposal also violated an important social truth that Meewee had learned — Individuals don’t buy Oships; groups buy Oships. Implicit in the sale was the uncontested title to an entire new planet. No one wanted to share their planet with outsiders. That was the whole point.
But that was not what he said in open session. He left it up to the Lucky Five to decide for themselves. “Others may try to sway them, but in the end, the five launched Oships are considered sovereign nations under extra-planetary treaty (assuming my appeal is upheld).” The binding resolution failed.
<IMAGINE, BISHOP, A thousand Eleanors under a thousand suns.>
<Excuse me?>
<A thousand star systems for me to conquer. I’m going to celebrate a gala ten-thousand-year reunion for all the Eleanors in the galaxy. We’ll see how many of us show up. I’m already planning it, and you’re invited, so mark your long-range calendar.>
<IMAGINE, BISHOP, THAT you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brain are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the senses. When I’m speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out loud, I’m speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.
<Mentars also make models, but they don’t apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality.>
THE KING JESUS, one of the Lucky Five, was a special case all by itself. Its voyage to Ursus Majoris would take nearly nine hundred years to complete, but the colonists had no intention of offending God by spending any of these centuries in the artificial purgatory of the stasis crypts. Rather, they intended to live out their lives on the ship, die on the ship, and be buried in the earth (especially hauled up from Earth for that purpose). It would be a twenty-generation voyage. Because the Creator hated abortion or any form of artificial birth control, Elder Seeker decreed that the shipboard community of 50,000 original colonists would be allowed to increase to 250,000 over the first half millennium of the voyage and to 750,000 during the second half, leaving a twenty-five percent safety margin. Forty thousand colonists we
re already onboard, and there was no room at the inn for unbelievers.
<GO AHEAD> ELEANOR said. <I won’t even miss it.>
This was her idea. She seemed to be experiencing extended lucid intervals during the last few days. Lucid, but not necessarily rational. Meewee reached into the net and grabbed the fish by its gill plates in a pincer hold. It was a large specimen, five or six kilos, and its slimy scales flashed in the sun. He had to carry it in two hands, so vigorously did it struggle. Its bulging, unlidded eye stared up at him as he searched the bank for a suitable killing stone. When he raised the stone over its head like a club, Eleanor said <Careful, Merrill! Remember what we’re about. Besides dinner, that is.>
“Yes, of course.” Meewee dropped the stone and retrieved his fillet knife. He inserted the tip of the blade under a gill plate, made a silent prayer of gratitude, and severed the artery. Rich, oxygenated blood gushed over the rocks. He flipped the fish over to cut the other side. After a few moments, when the fish lay still, Meewee inserted the tip of the knife into its red-rimmed anus below its belly. Then he drew the blade in a straight line and single stroke to its chin, like pulling a zipper. When he opened the fish, he experienced a strong flashback to his childhood and the thousands of fish he had butchered for his father and the thrill each time he cut one open. He was the first person in the whole world to look inside this fish, and he was never disappointed by the livid goulash of guts and organs he uncovered. This one was just as wonderful. It was a male, with two long milt sacs.
Meewee’s hands remembered what to do next. He expertly inserted the blade at the fish’s throat, like a blind surgeon, to sever the esophagus. Then, sticking his index finger into the esophagus, he peeled the entire string of entrails — stomach, intestines, kidneys, bladder, all of it — from the fish and tossed it back into the pond. One last time he inserted his knife to slice the bloodline that lay against the backbone, and with the spoon end of his knife, scooped out the red-black gelatinous blood.
Meewee took the fish to the pond. Its body was rigid with disbelief. He washed it, his knife, and his hands.
Another channel played in the background. <Mentars are high-performance minds, but very unstable. A few days in isolation and they implode. Having a body to feed and care for provides a mind with much-needed ballast.>
AS THE PANASONIC fillets hissed and crackled in a casserole dish in the oven, Meewee operated on its head with a cleaver on his kitchenette cutting board. He hadn’t ever bothered with fish brains as a boy, and he found the bony skull difficult to crack. He didn’t know what to expect the brain to look like, so when at last he popped it onto the countertop, he couldn’t say if it looked like a normal panasonic brain. It was the size of a pea, wrinkly, pink, symmetrical.
<Open a zoom frame and slice it in half, right down the middle.>
Meewee did so and examined the cross section under magnification. He vaguely knew what a human brain looked like, with its cerebellum and frontal lobes, and whatnot in between, but this one lacked any of the familiar landmarks.
<Only the outer crust is human, about 1.5 millimeters. See the outer pinkish layer? Beneath that it’s all fish. This one looks to have neocortex tissue. Others have midbrain tissue.>
<And this is what the mentars are doing to us?>
<Not exactly. Keep in mind that we’re not interested in making a permanent human/fish hybrid, or human/dog, human/swine, or what have you. We’re only interested in using transgenic animals for temporary storage, with the goal of transferring back to a human.
<The mentars, on the other hand, want to put a mentar mind into a biological body on a permanent basis, a much more ambitious goal. They have explored different strategies and have had little success. Their most promising trial that I’m aware of involves layering a new neocortex of electrochemical paste over a human brain, mimicking the evolutionary process that produced us.
<But the mentars haven’t perfected their technique yet, and their hybrids fade fast. Their glial tissue seems to reject the domination of the pasty part, and their bodies don’t thrive. We think it’s because mentars don’t have a firsthand understanding of biological reproduction (which is another example of cellular intelligence) or death. The mentar psyche is so liquid, it is hardly aware of its containers, and they treat their transhumans as just a different kind of container. The underlying human personality is not allowed to flourish. The body is used like a peripheral device, like a biological arbeitor.>
Meewee didn’t know what to make of all this. It went beyond anything he’d seen in the media. Was she saying that there were human/mentars among them? <Would I be able to recognize these hybrids if I met one? Do they appear different than normal people?>
Eleanor chuckled. <Who among us can claim normalcy, Bishop? No, there is no reason they need to skew too radically from the norm. Slightly enlarged cranium, perhaps. Our own skulls are bigger than our ancestors’.>
<Are the mentars getting what they want from these bodies? Intuition and gut feelings and all?>
<Perhaps. They’re still working out the kinks. Give them time, though, and they’ll perfect them. What a mentar needs is an industrial-scale cloning shop, like the one Applied People has, where they can evolve their designs across thousands of generations simultaneously.>
Meewee finished the last morsel of baked panasonic, drained his glass of wine, and pushed himself from the table. That was delicious, even if it was, in some way, cannibalistic.
And though the dinner conversation was fascinating, it wasn’t very enlightening. Meewee’s gut had always told him that Eleanor had been killed because of her involvement with the GEP project; now he wasn’t so sure. She had her fingers in so many pies, of which he knew nothing.
And speaking of pie, wasn’t there something for dessert?
As Real As It Gets
Andrea stood naked in the sunlight slanting through the picture window of her always room. It was her real always room. Not the vurt simulation. How marvelous — sun on skin. Though, to be honest, the experience wasn’t quite as sensual as simulated sunbathing in her tank. In fact, everything was slightly duller in the real world: colors, flavors, sex, music. In the vurt world she could dial up or down the intensity of any qualia to her taste. In the real world you had much less control.
Andrea put the thoughts out of her mind — she was always a little depressed at first. After a few weeks in her new body she would be loving it just fine. In the meantime, she spent her afternoons in her real always room in her real house in Oakland. The room, too, seemed duller than its tank analog, but it felt more solid beneath her feet. Her bare feet. She leaned over to consider her new bare feet. You never really walked places in vurt. You floated or zoomed or just appeared where you wanted to be. But these were real feet in need of pampering, and new shoes.
So, what do you think? E-P said.
“About my feet?” She straightened up, and a diorama miniature appeared next to her: a man throwing stones into a pond. “Oh, him,” she said. I honestly don’t know what to make of him.
Can we ignore him? He seems to be spouting nothing but nonsense.
The diorama volume came up, and between stones Meewee was saying, “Then the printed sheets are folded in half and half again and the folds lined up and stitched together. They used to be called signatures.”
A disembodied mechanical voice replied, “At what point are the sides trimmed?”
E-P said, On the surface he seems to be having a conversation about the ancient art of bookbinding.
Is it a code?
If it is, we haven’t managed to decipher it yet. Nor have we been able to trace the identity of his interlocutor.
Andrea lay down on the cool leather sofa and looked sideways across the bay at the Golden Gate, the real Golden Gate outside her window. When you consider the pivotal position this man occupies in our own plans, it is imperative that we know who he is talking to and what they’re talking about. Have you consulted his sidebob?
Several ti
mes. In the diorama, a second Meewee appeared beside the first, also casting stones into the water. Unlike the real Meewee, however, the sidebob was silent.
The sidebob is several years old. We built it at the same time we cast the Meewee sim to market the Oships. It no more understands the code than we do. Therefore, the code must be a recent development.
Can’t you update his sim and get it?
Not without his cooperation.
Andrea waved her hand and deleted the pondside diorama. “I can do it.”
It’ll take a skin mission. Are you up for that yet?
Andrea stretched her legs and wiggled her toes. “We’ll manage.”
PUSH at the Helm
The control booth was filled with stars, and in the foreground — a gas giant. A starship approached the planet along a course plotted in red.
What PUSH is practicing is the classic slingshot maneuver. The flight instructor was a TUG woman who towered over Veronica. She rested the mountain ridge of her knuckles on top of Veronica’s head for privacy, even inside their secure facility. It’s taken him longer to learn than I thought possible. This is not a good sign.
As if on cue, a collision alarm sounded, and the trajectory plot, instead of skimming the planet’s gravity well, plunged into it.
“Pilot advise course correction,” the instructor said. “Pilot acknowledge.”
But PUSH did not acknowledge or alter course. Instead, the mentar sped up the simulation a hundredfold, and the starship was captured by the planet and pulled into its dense atmosphere. The holoscape POV stayed with the ship the whole way down displaying its spectacular, fiery destruction.
I’m bored, the mentar said. The instructor made a curt slashing motion to kill the holoscape, leaving them in an empty storage container. The warm, stuffy air reeked of electrical ozone. Without uttering a word, the instructor opened a steel door and left. After a moment, Veronica decided she’d better follow her. They walked through the deserted warehouse to the office where the instructor removed her headset and lowered her large frame into a complaining office chair.