Singularity, p.30
Singularity, page 30
Scare stories. Propaganda, taking advantage of the natural human tendency to fear the unknown, to focus on us against them. When he’d joined the Navy, Gray had actually begun a kind of late blossoming. A whole new world had opened up to him through downloads from the global Net. The Authority didn’t really watch all of its citizens all of the time . . . or if it did, you were never aware of it. Hell, even if they did, the advantages of universal health monitoring, instant in-head communication with anyone else within the network, access to any and all information about anything and everything with a simple thoughtclick . . .
It sure as hell beat grubbing around in rooftop gardens above the watery canyons of Manhattan, hoarding precious caches of nano for food, clean water, and clothing, or hunting rats in the labyrinthine ruins of the TriBeCa Tower. People on the Periphery tended to romanticize the so-called free life of the Ruins, but what that freedom generally meant was freezing in the winter, fighting off raids by rival clans, and dying of any of a ridiculous number of diseases or injuries because you didn’t have the medinano to treat them.
As Gray thought about it, it wasn’t the technology that had bothered him for these past few years so much as the isolation. His fellow TriBeCans had been his family, one of the most powerful independent clans in the Ruins. They were all gone now—God knew where. Some time after he’d left, joining the Confederation Navy in a desperate bid to get medical help for his wife, they’d been wiped out by a rival gang—probably before the tidal wave that had scoured the Ruins during the Defense of Earth.
Since coming on board the America he’d made a few close friends—Ben Donovan . . . Rissa Schiff . . . Shay Ryan, his fellow Prim in the squadron. Most of his squadron mates had kept their distance, though, or actively closed ranks against him. Worse, he’d even started keeping his own distance from Schiffie and from Shay, just because of the rumors and the snide comments about Gray and his monogie perversions.
Gray pulled himself up short. What the hell was he doing? Somehow, his memories, memories he generally kept tightly locked down, had started rising as if of their own volition.
“I think,” he heard his AI say, “that they are interested in your thoughts on technology.”
“They’re working through you somehow, aren’t they?”
“Unknown. I cannot detect their presence. However, it is distinctly possible that they are using me to access your mind, your memories, through your personal assistant. If they did indeed copy me without creating decoherence of my quantum storage matrices, they would have had ample time to examine my structure and operational algorithms, plan and initiate desired changes, and even test those changes within a virtual environment.”
“But what do they want?” It was a scream, piercing in the fighter’s cramped cockpit.
Gray realized that he was terrified, on the verge of panic. He was trying desperately not to think, wondering if the Sh’daar could read his mind through his PA, wondering how he could block them, how he could fight back, wishing he could somehow claw the nanochelated microcircuitry out of his skull now, before they peered any deeper into his memories, into his soul.
“I believe they want to communicate,” the AI replied.
“So where is that virtual Agletsch? We were doing okay with that approach.”
“As you point out, Thedreh’schul is a virtual Agletsch, meaning that she is an illusion created by a complex AI system. I have the impression that we are dealing with a very large, very powerful AI rather than organic sentients. Clearly, this intelligence understands human language, thanks to contact with the Agletsch. What it does not understand are the myriad points of attitude, belief, conditioning, and worldview inherent in human existence—human psychology, if you will.” The AI broke off suddenly, then added, “Someone wishes to link with you.”
“Who? What?”
“Unknown.”
Gray took several deep breaths, forcing himself to at least a ragged imitation of calm. If the Sh’daar had wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t have gone through all of this.
“Put them . . . put them through,” Gray said.
And his cockpit faded away, replaced almost at once by a place that Gray knew very well. . . .
Admiral’s Quarters
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
0250 hours, TFT
Rank doth have privileges beyond the ken of the lower ranks. Koenig’s private quarters were adjacent to his office and constituted a small apartment suite with separate living and sleeping areas. Unlike the stacked bulkhead occutubes used by junior officers and enlisted men, his bed was thought-responsive and mutable, capable of shifting from flat and open to womblike and close, with adjustable heating, pressure, and surface texture.
Nevertheless, Koenig couldn’t sleep.
He could have linked into the bed’s electronics through his personal assistant and allowed it to adjust his brainwave patterns, lowering him into unconsciousness, but he didn’t like the muzzy and incoherent feeling left when the program brought him back out. If he was awakened in the middle of the night watch for an emergency, he needed to be instantly alert. The medtechs all assured him that electronically enhanced sleep induction—eesie as it was popularly known—was completely natural and should leave no unpleasant side effects, that any side effects he was feeling must be purely psychological.
Koenig didn’t buy it. He’d resorted to eesie a time or two over the years when he’d been afflicted by particularly severe insomnia, but he much preferred to rely on his organic brain’s rhythms and chemistries.
He was, he realized, lonely, nothing more.
He had his bed unfolded to full-open, and was staring up at the viewall which ran from the deck toward the foot of the bed up the curve of the bulkhead to the gently ascending ceiling over his head. He often liked displaying scenes of Earth there, but at the moment it was linked to the ship’s astrogational sensors, showing the stars outside the ship.
Ten and a half hours into the acceleration phase of the jump, America and her consorts had traveled some three and a half billion kilometers from the TRGA tunnel. Their speed now was 189,000 kilometers per hour, some 63 percent of c. At that tremendous velocity, the stars outside were only just beginning their relativity-induced crawl toward the starbow effect, and were so tightly clustered across the entire sky that it was impossible to note with certainty any distortion at all. Had his eyes been more sensitive, he knew, he might have noticed that the stars in the direction of their travel were glowing just a bit brighter and a bit bluer. Now that he knew what to look for against that stellar backdrop, he could see the Six Suns directly ahead.
God, he missed Karyn. Eight months since her death, and the hole inside, if anything, gaped worse than ever.
He resisted the temptation to talk to her simulation, his PA.
Koenig’s sleeping quarters were equipped with some high-technology innovations common enough on Earth, but rare within the Spartan confines of military warships in space. Ginnie was one, sealed at the moment inside a storage compartment in the bulkhead nearby.
Ginnie the Gynoid, Mark XII, was a commercial sex surrogate. She had a respectable and long-established pedigree; a German firm had first marketed Andy the Android as far back as the early twenty-first century, a humanoid robot so lifelike that she’d actually managed to leap the barrier of the uncanny valley. The more expensive models had actually simulated breathing and pulse rates, both of which increased if you stimulated certain portions of their anatomy.
Ginnie was far more sophisticated than her precursor of four centuries before. She could talk, for one thing, using a link to the local network to acquire an AI personality human enough to beat even the toughest Turing Test. She could move with human smoothness and precision, her eyes would follow yours and blink in a lifelike manner, and microactuators gave her an incredible range of expressions and emotional simulations. A nanomatrix within the gynoid’s skin and facial bones allowed it to sculpt itself into a good double of any specific person.
And there was more. Through virtual links, it was even possible for a human partner to teleoperate Ginnie from a distance. Koenig and Karyn had used a Ginnie several times when he’d been stationed on Mars, she’d been up at Mars Synchorbit, and their schedules had precluded their getting together physically. There were male analogues available as well.
Koenig had never much cared for the surrogate, even when he knew that Karyn was looking at him through those lifelike gynoid eyes and her face, that when he touched the thing’s body Karyn felt the touch within her virtual simulation tens of thousands of kilometers overhead. Even though his brain couldn’t tell the difference, he knew the thing wasn’t real.
Within a world culture that valued sexual creativity, pleasure, and enhancement, devices like the Ginnie surrogates were common, fully accepted, and reasonably affordable. Koenig, though, had felt an attraction to one woman, Karyn Mendelson, that was almost monogie in its focus and intensity. Karyn had teased him once about his being as bad as a Prim.
As lifelike as Ginnie was, it could not replace the woman he loved. Without her, sex was just . . . sex, a physical release that did nothing for the ache in his soul.
“Karyn?” he said.
“I’m here,” her voice replied.
But the PA was as much a surrogate, he knew, as the lifelike doll in the storage compartment. And he was still unhappy about the emotional outburst earlier, when he’d angrily cut off Karyn’s voice. It was possible that he was allowing the simulation to affect the way he thought, the way he acted, even the way he made decisions . . . and that was not good, not when the lives of fifty thousand people depended on him and his clear thinking.
“Karyn . . . I’d like to have you revert to your base programming.”
“You want me to delete the Mendelson persona?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Your command has been executed.” The voice was not exactly flat, now, but it was neutral in tone, androgynous, and nothing at all like Karyn.
Perhaps now, Koenig thought, he could get to sleep. . . .
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
0254 hours, TFT
Trevor Gray was back in the Manhattan Ruins.
Clearly, whoever or whatever was running this simulation was doing so by tapping into his personal memories, using both his ship’s AI and his own personal in-head hardware.
He was riding his old broom, the Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle he’d found years before, overlooked in a burned-out shop in Old Harlem. Three meters long, with fore- and aft grav-impeller blocks, they were scarce in the Periphery, but not unknown. The locals called them “gimps,” for “grav-impellers,” or “pogo sticks” or “brooms,” and they operated in a fashion much like his Starhawk, projecting tiny knots of fiercely twisted spacetime that levitated the vehicle in a gentle hover or whipped it ahead at a couple of hundred kph. Too small to mount a quantum power tap, it relied on micro-fusion cells for power, and required periodic rechargings from a generator or a power grid, both a bit hard to come by in the Periphery. Gray had often snuck up to Haworth or west across the Jersey Bay to Newark Shore to tap into the power grid. It was illegal, of course, but there’d been citizens willing to exchange some of their grid juice for a string of fresh fish or a box of antique relics scavenged from the ruins of Old New York.
At the moment, within his mind’s eye, he was hovering at a slow drift above the waters of the lower Hudson. The ancient Statue of Liberty rose from her submerged island below, one armed and vigilant; the top six meters of her right arm long ago broken off and fallen into the dark waters of the bay below. Gray often, before he’d joined the Navy, had come here, parked his broom on the Lady’s head, and stared across the water at the Manhattan Ruins, vine-covered cliffs rising from the waters that had submerged the original island to a depth of more than fifteen meters.
Gray no longer felt like this was home. He’d come to grips a long time ago with the fact that everyone he’d known here was gone. Including Angela, living now in Haworth with someone named Fred and his extended family.
Damn them all, damn them all. . . .
“You feel some extremely strong emotions concerning your culture,” a voice said behind him.
Gray twisted on his broom, looking back. Thedreh’schul was there, standing on what looked like a dull silver circular platter hovering in midair. “Okay, Agletsch!” he said, angry. “What the hell is going on?”
“As I told you at our last encounter, the Sh’daar are curious about you, and the fact that you appear to have been abandoned by the technological facet of your culture. The Sh’daar have been investigating your personal store of memories. There is much, however, that they do not understand. And they do not know how to ask.”
“So what’s their hang-up with technology?” Gray demanded.
“We see within your memories reference to something you call the Vinge Singularity, yes-no?”
Every man and woman in the fleet knew the term. When the Sh’daar, through their Agletsch clients, had demanded that Humankind cease development of certain key technologies in 2367, the assumption had been that they feared a runaway growth in human technological development.
“Okay,” Gray said. “Some human philosophers have been expecting us to hit the Singularity any day now for the past four centuries. But we haven’t hit it yet.”
“The Sh’daar fear the same.”
“They’re about to hit the Singularity?”
“They fear you are about to do so.”
“Okay . . . why? That has nothing to do with them.”
“It has everything to do with them. The Sh’daar . . . the precursors of the Sh’daar, I should say, reached their equivalent of the Vinge Singularity some time ago.”
Gray nodded. Months ago, in Sarnelli’s, a restaurant in Earth’s synchorbital complex near the Quito space elevator, Gray and some fellow pilots had shared drinks with Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde, the two Agletsch who’d later come along with the carrier battlegroup as alien liaisons. Both had imbibed just a little too much acetic acid that evening, and one had confided that the Sh’daar had transcended.
“We knew that,” Gray said. “But I don’t think we understand it, even yet. I was told once that the Sh’daar had transcended. But why would they want to keep anyone else from doing the same?”
“The ones you know as the Sh’daar,” Thedreh’schul said with grave deliberation, “are not the original Sh’daar. They are the ones who were left behind when the original Sh’daar . . . transcended. Transformed. Went away. Yes-no?”
The revelation struck Gray like a solid blow to the gut. “Wait! You’re saying the Sh’daar, the ones who started this damned war, they were left behind by the ones who went through the Singularity?”
Thedreh’schul gestured with two of her forelegs, taking in the sweep of the Manhat Ruins across the bay. “I believe this is what brought you to the Masters’ attention,” she said. “You, personally, I mean, yes-no? You are a member of a space-faring, technologically advanced species, and yet you lived for a time under primitive conditions, without access to that technology. And you seem to have resented this.”
“I guess you could say that, sure.” Gray pointed north, off to the left, where the gleaming, clean towers of Haworth and the Palisades Eudaimonium rose above the horizon, tiny at this distance, but imposing in the realization that they were over forty kilometers away. “Up there, those were the tech-haves. Down here, we were the have-nots.”
“But why? Surely it is the responsibility of any technic culture to care for, to provide for all of its members, yes-no?”
“Maybe. But there’s not a whole lot they can do if some of those members want nothing to do with them, is there?”
The Agletsch hesitated, her eye stalks twitching in a manner that suggested agitation, or perhaps confusion. “Are you saying that you and those with you did not want to partake of that culture? That you isolated yourselves deliberately?”
Gray took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He wasn’t entirely sure of his own reasoning here. The circumstances had been . . . difficult.
“Look, I don’t know all of the details,” he said. “I know that the global ocean levels were rising all the way back in the twenty-first century . . . uh, about four hundred years ago. You know what a ‘year’ is?”
“Of course. One revolution of your homeworld around your star. We would call it—” The Agletsch gave an unpleasant and unpronounceable burp from the mouth located at its stomach. “One of our years is the same as roughly eleven-twelfths of one of yours.”
Gray was startled when Thedreh’schul volunteered this. He’d not known how long an Agletsch year was, wasn’t sure that anything was known about the Agletsch homeworld. The spiders were galactic traders in information, and some information they’d simply kept out of reach by putting too high a price on it.
Interesting that Thedreh’schul wasn’t dickering on prices or exchange rates here.
“Okay, so four hundred years ago, ocean levels were rising. They built a wall across this stretch of water, over there.” He pointed south, to the ruin of the Verrazano Dam. “There was another dam over there, too, at a place called Throg’s Neck, on the East River. You can’t see it from here.
