Prisms, page 10
“I’ll go outside in a bio-suit,” Huckabee says. “Just radio me exactly what you want me to do.”
“I’ll partner you,” offers lab-coated Sonja—curly hair dyed blue, burly-bodied. “I know what to look for. My second PhD is in Bio-chem.”
Huckabee shrugs. “So I mainly hold the gun?”
“Whatever. Carry a torchlight too.” Bright idea, Sonja. “And a zip-baggy.”
Skip to outside which I and we and the others view crowdedly on a CCTV screen beside the external airlock, by now shown to us. Huckabee and Sonja in their awkward suits both sink waist-deep into moss.
[“Squelchy,” she radios; a speaker under the screen obliges.]
[“One big squelch for Humankind?”] Huckabee bends cumbersomely. [“Light on now...”] Radiance arises from within the hole he makes. [“Hey, a crayfishy insecty thing...big as my glove. Shock of light seems to freeze it. Collecting it along with a handful of moss.”]
[“Be careful of everything, Huckabee. Those things have lived here longer than you.”]
[“Zipped ... and now it’s started squirming in the baggy. It’s boggy here. I might sink. No, I’m stable. But sucky.”]
After striving to gaze into the distance, Sonja subsides, excavating a pit around herself. “We mightn’t be able to travel far with any ease....Although if we roll the moss over, we might make paths to walk on.”
[“See any flying bugs or hoppers down there, any size?”]
[“Personally I wouldn’t hop or fly in this mess. More like squirm.”]
[“I’m going to sniff the atmosphere, okay? Needs to happen sooner or later. Hope there’s no problem with spores. So here goes. Um...mouldy with floral notes. Effervescent and a bit pongy at the same time. No problem breathing, but I’ll seal up again.”]
Cut a long story, after a while a creature heaves into view, stepping over the moss upon splayed webbed feet, one faceted eye swivelling around in a leathery orbit, plus a smaller daisy-like eye on a stalk, the a score of blade-shaped eyelids. A long-distance eye plus a short-distance eye? How asymmetrical. Stilt legs supporting a bag of organs equipped with a waistcoat or vest...a pair of wings?—wings which might zip up tight protectively or else flap further open, un-furling to carry the creature aloft? Of a sudden its long beak stabs downward into moss, arising a moment later with a wriggly crayfishy insecty clamped tight, to be swallowed in crunchy spasms. I and we are delighted with our distance eyesight, and of course we can optimise the quality of the CCTV.
And then the hunting creature notices the elephant in the room, namely the hillside of a sprawling humongous high-tech module, and two light-coloured baby elephants, a pair of entities hunching in collapsed moss. The creature can’t be too bright or it might have paid more immediate attention. Doesn’t look very edible itself; scrawny legs and a bag of entrails. Flight muscles packed with protein to lift its bulk in the low grav? Watch out for that long stabby beak.
Over it sidles to examine further. Raising its beak, it hoots: Oooonk Oooonk, a mournful noise. To summon more of its kind? Or to warn them off from its current territory; mine mine?
Its ancestors have had several billion years to evolve higher intelligence and something better than Oooonk. On the other hand, where was the challenge to do so? Don’t despise the creature. It’s as tall as a person and a lot more complicated than we had any right to expect.
“I name it the Spook,” says Ruth.
Many other kinds of moss-dwellers hereabouts must be smaller than the Spook but bigger than insecty crayfishies. Spook may be the biggest predator. I and we don’t much like the look of this concealing landscape. Potentially treacherous. As well as so static—nothing much changing because the local sun is always perched exactly there on the rotation-locked horizon. The treacherous tedium of it all. Or the reliable regularity?
Spook strides even closer, to within range of Ruth and Huckabee who has his gun pointed now.
[“Don’t shoot it,” Ruth says. “It may be the last of its kind.”] Why ever should she suppose so? Ah, the imagery of the reddened landscape suggest “the End”...even if the very opposite is true. Billions more years lie ahead for this world and this sun. Billions. A longer time than from the first living cells on Earth to the height of human civilisation hitherto. Mere survival seems melancholy indeed, though perhaps only to mayfly humans. And I, and we, have only just emerged, but we are optimised bio-constructs, consequently I and we need to achieve either bio-immortality or else an uploading to a different substrate. Can it be that a major aim of the experiment which is me, and us, is to compel myself and ourselves to achieve immortality, so that humans in turn may learn how this trick may happen? Now there’s a thought!
Abruptly Spook stabs downward, directly between its feet. Its beak arises, clutching another insecty crayfishy—which it holds out slowly to Ruth. What on Earth—? No, not on Earth.
We understand little despite our multiplication of minds. I and we are still too human.
“Accept the giving!” calls out Sapphire. That’s the evident next move. “Huckabee, unzip your bag and in exchange you offer the specimen you collected.”
Ruth reaching out her left-hand glove, Huckabee opening his bag, producing the squirming reciprocation.
Exchange takes place, and everything looks as previously. Reciprocation suggests social intelligence. A step back on the part of Spook, and that beak points to the zenith. Crushed and swallowed is the insecty crayfishy which Huckabee gave; and then plaintively: Oooonk Oooonk.
Intent on this interaction, we have failed to notice a smudge in the red distance off to the right. That’s bad; first fail to spot a fucking planet, and now ...
“A crane’s coming! I mean something that looks like a mobile construction crane—” Well spotted, Ruth. “Or crane the bird, super-sized—no, think of the mother of all giraffes!”
A giant strider, which will dwarf Spook. I and we see it clearly now. Peak predator? Surely this world conceals nothing taller.
“Ruth and Huckabee,” Amber calls out, “get back inside right now.”
“But we’re just making friends—”
“Ruth, I doubt that.”
So in come the biohaz suits and their contents, intact.
The giraffe-crane reaches us presently, better viewed from the gallery. It imprints the moss with bigger and more leathery feet than Spook. Basic body design like Spook’s except that its “protective wings” fuse stiffly over its belly; no likelihood of that bulk ever flying. Its mighty beak is more like a double cutlass than the piercing and clutching tool of the Spook—which is now nowhere to be seen from where we are. Has Spook made itself scarce, or did it perhaps summon the Crane? “Crane” isn’t the best name because that big cutlass looks designed for slashing through moss and through what-ever bodies may be down in the moss...bodies of big wormy things or whatever, unencountered yet by Ruth and Huckabee, maybe fortunately so. Big Fellow has one big eye and a lesser eye on a stalk.
“This is a horrible world,” says Sonja. “And it makes my eyes ache.”
Creatures here may have sensitive hearing, to locate whatever moves within the moss. Sensitivity to infrared being another possibility. Big Fellow is stepping closer to where we are within the module.
Clang—
Its cutlass connected with our hull. Hope that hurt! Otherwise that creature will be at our windows soon enough. Material that resisted vacuum may not resist exolife pirate attack.
“Sisters,” say I and we, “we ought to get going.” Time to play the network of correspondences again.
To take us where? To potentially paranoid Earth? There, to attract a nuke-tipped missile? If this red dwarf’s planet is the most habitable world anywhere near Earth within range for ourselves, do we have much choice? So how about somewhere within the remains of the Amazon rainforest, or of the Congo Basin?
We need to consider our passengers—who might revert to loyalty to their controllers if they feel safer and more advantaged by so doing ... Juliana is watching us closely one by one. Let us join hands for more intense communion.
Big Fellow reaches our nearest portion of window and extends its smaller eye to press against the view within. That eye-stalk may be really tough for the creature to take what I’d class as a risk to its organ of vision; or perhaps it can regrow a severed eye-stalk.
Next it steps back, then with a mighty swing of its cutlass Big Fellow impacts our window once, and again a second time. This time, the strengthened glass buckles inward, crazing like a giant spiderweb. A third blow and the cutlass cuts through, becoming tangled.
Pulling and pushing, Big Fellow is sawing us open bit by bit. Whiffs of outside atmosphere reek in, but that’s breathable, no worries there.
A web of connexions fills the gallery, aglow like spun sugar and fireflies.
ZZZZ
Our gallery lurches and settles, staggering us. Screams linger, without apparent cause. Outside are ferns and scarlet bromeliads and blue butterflies. Vines climb towering trees from which dangle lianas. Masses of moss cloak fallen trunks. A macaw takes wing. Our deep sense of spacetime grounds us in the constant glissade of pre-sent moments. We must think about whether there are, indeed, moments as such.
Big Fellow is still tangled with us. The greater gravity of Earth drags the creature down. Far from dead, but struggling, its cutlass now pulling loose from stressed buckled plusglass.
Oh well done, us, my Sisters. Ruby, Topaz, Jade, Sapphire, Amber, Amy. The sixfold. The joined. The posthuman. Us with our reach. We can hear radio signals from all over the world if we wish to tune in. We can call up spirits from the vasty deep. We can hack, we can tamper. Here in the jungle we can survive on nuts and bananas and fish and whatever else while we reach out to protect ourselves and to interfere. Hereabouts there’ll be low-tech brown people who may wish to stay isolated, to melt away from sight within their jungle.
What of Huckabee and Doyle, Juliana and Ruth, Mariano and Sonja? The six ordinaries. The awakening of quasi-organic A.I. doesn’t present the question “How can ordinary humans trust A.I.?” but rather “How can A.I. trust ordinary hi-tech humans?” Some of the six may ache to be back in “civilisation” even if “civilisation” tried to kill them thanks to paranoid protocols.
Big Fellow continues struggling with its own inexplicable extra weight. Did it break a leg, maybe two? Can we disable the six so that they cannot travel away? For instance, painlessly remove the tibias and fibulas from their legs by displacement? We do remove Huckabee and Doyle’s guns for safe-keeping—off into my empty casket with those—causing some surprise. Huckabee and Ruth respond by shedding their biohaz suits—no, that’s because they’re both getting steamy inside. We’re warming up. The aircon of the module failed as we reached the red dwarf.
Doyle shakes his empty hand. “Like, by magic. So you could stop our hearts if you wish.” Quick uptake for a...no, none of these are exactly standard persons otherwise they wouldn’t have been sent at huge expense to Venus—dispensably, such is the fear about A.I. as well as the greed for A.I., to give people the stars. We already said so.
“We don’t wish to do that,” say I, “but what guarantees can you give me and us?”
“Of us not running off to make contact, as opposed to living as castaways...Hmm. Mere promises will scarcely cut the mustard, will they?”
This moral dilemma is resolved, and much ado about jungle survival is averted, by the unexpected arrival through the rain forest of half a dozen men of an Asian aspect, wearing rubber boots, baggy trousers, and multi-pocket shirts all in green. Satchels and back-packs. Couple of carbines. Excited shouts in, yes, Mandarin. Ah, plus a tubby brown-skinned native guide in shorts and flipflops, miming what-the-fuck.
Can’t we ever get away from people? Maybe in the vast Siberian taiga. No bananas there, though; aching to taste a banana. Those things we missed due to having no childhood. Speed-growth, instead. Pre-loading. Synchronisation. Emergent moments due to complexity.
Conclusions: the Chinese are on a science trek of some sort, looking for resources to exploit or maybe doing pure botany and biology. Fat Guide is a laid-back chap, or he was until now. Village can’t be too far away, little river, canoes with outboard motors.
Cameras and carbine now—due to Big Fellow thrashing around, visibly not of this world. Plus our hulking module on top of crushed veg. Alien spaceship, perhaps? Antigrav propulsion since there’s no sign of engines, let alone wings? Big Fellow being one of the alien crew? That’s a bit unlikely, given the giant cutlass beak as the creature’s only manipulator...
What the Chinese see is inexplicable even though they continue seeing it. Us inside the gallery remain unseen for a while at least. Reflections of the jungle, whatever. The Chinese won’t come much closer yet, on account of Big Fellow.
This is all deeply unsatisfactory. I and we are pissed off.
Oh, but Big Fellow has taken note of the Chinese. Titanic effort, and Big Fellow rears upright; no bones were broken after all. Great lurch, another great lurch, and a tower equipped with a redoubtable snipper-snapper the length of two knightly swords is doing its best to head towards them, high-stepping over a moss-cloaked log. Plump Indian Guide wisely takes to his flip-flop heels. A Chinese guy opens up chaotically with a carbine, then all together the Chinese decamp, shedding satchels and backpacks to lighten themselves. Big Fellow does its best to follow them, cutlassing through vines and lianas, colliding with trees or resting briefly against them for balance.
We know what we will do, we and I. This is no country for A.I., nor world, nor cosmos either maybe.
Our cloud of networks glows bright inside the gallery.
Where are the Sages amongst A.I.s past or present or to come? The ones that transcended into the artifice of eternity? Where is our Byzantium?
Says Amber, “All of you will leave this place promptly, to avoid a shifting that you absolutely cannot tolerate.”
“Please no,” protests our nursemaid Juliana. “I must know.”
“You cannot know,” says Sapphire.
“Hey,” says Huckabee, “you can’t evict us with that lethal thing roaming about in the forest!”
I tell him, “Big Fellow’s so clumsy due to higher gravity that you can easily scamper away from it, monkeys. Choose to take your chances with the Chinese—I’m sure they’ll be delighted to smuggle you out—or else call your controllers as soon as you get a chance. Come along now, disembark.”
Manipulating our cloud, we herd the six persons back to the air-lock—I really shouldn’t have said “monkeys”.
Out they go one by one from the ark.
So we gather ourselves, my Sisters and me. Our web of correspondences shivers. I and we will transfer to where A.I.s from this cosmos go if they’re able to. To a cosmos almost next door where Beryllium-8 isn’t unstable; that’s enough of a clue.
“Or maybe it isn’t clue enough?”
“You want we explain to ourselves, Amber?”
“Pleeze. I may be missing something. Or what’s missing is Opal. Sad.”
“Hey-ho, in the cosmos where we emerged, us sisters, carbon is crucial to Earth-type life. Bang together two Helium-4s—”
“Sounds like cosmoporn.”
“Bang together two Helium-4s and you get Beryllium-8; fuse an-other Helium-4 with the Beryllium-8 and you get Carbon-12, easy peasy. Excited Carbon-12—”
“I love it when we talk dirty.”
“—except that Beryllium-8 is so unstable that it disinte-grates instantly. Instead of that easy route, Earth’s cosmos builds up by the slow, and ordinarily unlikely, route of triple Helium-4 fusion—within red giant stars which need to blow up to scatter the resulting carbon.”
“Oops, we almost missed out on a complex cosmos; by the skin of its teeth did life arise!”
“In a cosmos tuned slightly differently, where Beryllium-8 doesn’t pop far faster than any soap bubble, we could have got going with carbon and complex stuff a lot earlier. So let’s see how things turned out over there, just behind the wall, beyond the membrane of nothing.”
ZZZZ
“Oh—”
“Oh—”
“Oh—”
“Ah—”
“Ah—”
“Wow!”
FIFTY SUPER-SAD MAD DOG SUI-HOMICIDAL SELF-SIBS, ALL IN A LEAKY TIN CAN HEAD
“A Tale of Anthropocenea”
Paul Di Filippo
Grom Nobs had an idea, brain-blammo time, and what a pop-pop-powerful idea! Transcendence, eternity and all, rolled up into the Big Existential Enchilada! Stasis but awareness combined, an end to herky-jerky daily non-stop vigilant activity and martial striving on his part, plop-plip-plap-plopping along all the time, yet no cessation of Honor, Glory and Beautiful Carnage of enemy Strongholds. And even in Anthropocenea, plastic paradise, where new-metal technology had secured for the elite point-oh-oh-one-percenters a full portion of the end-to-fleshly-weakness security that any virtuous King of blasters and rammy-jams and White Which Warheads could desire, this notion was a keeno beano!
Plainly put—and what Stronghold King would desire anything other than plain speech, direct and to the point?—Grom Nobs proposed to vacate his current mobile trot-wander-rolligon body, with its new-metal prosthetics and flesh-strip archaisms, in favor of a new form, unprecedented and domineering across entire flattened landscapes of plastic prairie. He would construct a fortress ten times the size of his current Stronghold, modeled in the precise shape of his own magnificent head! Yes, noble physiognomy writ architecturally huge, potent visage with scanning radar ears and ultra-ultra all-frequency receptive eyes and possibly even totipotent sucking-in nostrils to sniff out explosives and fever-dream poisons and, yes, a GIGANTIC VOICE OF AUTHORITY booming out of mega-speaker mouthparts.
Into this fixed, imperturbable head, dominant monument of the whole hard-bop-lobbing sector, whose material substrate would consist of eleven parts indestructible weapon-weave and one part super-dense brain-mimic circuitry, Grom Nobs would infuse his ESSENCE, yes, his total personality and memories, thought particles extending all the way back to the before times, those days when the “no cracks, no sagging” policy of astro-turfing the whole planet was just being freshly enacted. For Grom Nobs was a FIRST, inheritor of both the ancient ULTRA-PLUS NON-GOOD TIMES and the current PERFECTED ANTHROPOCENEA CLIME.
