Edge of the Wire, page 22
“There might be places all over this planet where he can pop up,” Rowe replied. “Maybe he simply found another one. Do you see him?”
They scanned the landing site, turning in slow circles.
“There?” said Waverly as he gestured to the horizon, unsure.
Rowe looked.
Indeed, on the edge of seeing, a lone figure now strode across the landscape toward them. Because of the distance, it was some moments before Rowe understood for certain that it was Noyes, and some further moments before Rowe realized the artificial clergyman was being rendered in full size.
“Ahoy!” Noyes said as he drew closer, waving a hand above his head.
“Ahoy,” Rowe called back tentatively.
It suddenly seemed that something was deeply wrong. That their world had gone askew once more. Seeing Noyes like this felt unexplainable. Supernatural.
Waverly asked: “How’s he doing this? Is something projecting him from a distance? For him to keep covering ground, it’d have to be a very long projection.”
“I was thinking the same thing, but I don’t have any answers,” Rowe managed.
Rowe wondered if he would be able to hear the hologram’s feet crunching the gray-green silt beneath them. Such an idea was the height of madness, surely. But now it seemed anything was possible, and Rowe found himself listening as attentively as he could.
The hologram walked straight up to them, stopping about five feet away. Its virtual feet never made a sound.
“Noyes?” said Rowe. “What’s going on?”
“It doesn’t look like very much, does it boy-o?” Noyes said, glancing doubtfully around the empty landing site. “It was going to be tea-for-two for the foreseeable future, wasn’t it? Until I showed up.”
The hologram chuckled.
“How are you being projected?” Waverly asked, stepping forward. “You are being projected, right?”
“Go on and have a feel, if you like,” Noyes said jovially.
Waverly reached out to touch Noyes. His hand passed right through.
Rowe decided he should find this reassuring, if only a little.
“Were you around to see what happened?” Rowe asked, still feeling deep astonishment. “That is, did you watch our crew leaving? Or can you jack into some cameras and take a look?”
Noyes glanced over at the lander and lifted his eyebrows doubtfully.
“Erm, yes boy-o,” he said. “I think I could. But I expect you might prefer it if I showed you something else first.”
“Something else?” Rowe said.
“Come along,” said Noyes. He gestured and turned, beginning to walk across the landscape in the direction he had come.
Rowe and Waverly hesitated.
“You must come,” said Noyes without looking back. “It’s important. We’ll walk and talk.”
The men—exhausted and stunned—did a slow jog to catch up to the hologram.
“Noyes,” called Rowe, “I order you to tell us what is going on.”
“Yes, of course,” said Noyes. “What would you like to know?”
“What would I . . . ?” Rowe said, arriving beside him. “You know what I mean. Don’t play like you don’t. You always have my best interests in mind. You’re supposed to guess my intentions whenever I speak, dammit—and even if I misspeak. So . . . guess them!”
Noyes smiled. His pace across the jagged landscape was steady and brisk.
“I’m to do some guessing, eh? Very well. I will do precisely that. But because I have your best interests in mind—as you point out—I’ll begin by controlling your expectations. As your friend has observed, I’m an Encarta. I’m cut off from the cosmos-wide Goo that exists above these clouds. Whenever I encounter something new, I have to make my best guess about what it is. Any new information that could help me—which may have been learned in the meantime, in another part of the galaxy—is inaccessible.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Rowe, increasingly irritated. “We know all that. You have controlled my expectations. Thank you. Now explain where everybody is and what happened.”
“And how you’re being projected,” Waverly added.
“Yes,” said Rowe. “That too.”
“I’ll start with the easy one, then,” said Noyes. “I’m not being projected.”
“Fuck off,” Waverly said. “We can see you but we can’t touch you. That means you’re being projected.”
“I hate to disagree,” said Noyes, “but I do. I must. I agree that I am here with you, but I don’t know how I am. That would be like me asking you how you know you’re in the physical world.”
“You said this was the easy one, but you’re sort of talking around things,” Rowe pointed out. “Why do I feel like you know, but won’t tell us?”
“To the contrary,” said Noyes. “I want to tell you things in the best possible way. Okay. This is fine. We’re here now. You can stop. See, just a short walk.”
Noyes stopped moving. Rowe and Waverly looked around. There was nothing. A handful of boulders in the distance and some irregular hills along the horizon.
“Dig,” said Noyes. “The ground is soft in this spot. If you just kick at the dirt with your feet, it’ll take a good ten minutes. But if you agree to crouch down and use your hands and fingernails, you’ll have an answer in very little time at all. It will be messier, though . . .”
Rowe looked down doubtfully at the glassy ground underfoot. It was the same as everywhere else. He could not guess why this spot might be special.
“Noyes,” Rowe began sternly, “why do you want us to dig in the ground here?”
“Because it is the best way of answering your question,” Noyes said. “How about this? I’ll make a bargain. If you start digging, I’ll start telling you more. But you have to dig for me to talk.”
“With our feet or with our hands?” Rowe asked.
“If you want the short version, with your hands,” the hologram answered. “Kicking with your feet will be less effort, but I’m going to keep talking around things for a while if you take that approach.”
The men dug with their hands.
“The spaceship that Martha Cortez entered, the one you couldn’t see with the naked eye . . .” Noyes began as the men commenced picking at the ground. “It originally had something like me aboard. Something like the Goo.”
“So did you talk to it?” Waverly asked Noyes. “Maybe fall in love? Encarta, if all this is your way of telling us you have a girlfriend now . . .”
“You’re more right than you know,” Noyes said. “The thing of it is: That particular ship was a very recent arrival. If history is a day, and the clock is about to strike midnight, then that ship came at about 11:59 p.m.”
Rowe suddenly began to feel something beneath his hands that was not the glassy dirt. It was hard and artificial and unyielding. Thick and plasticky. He kept digging.
“This planet that we call Tendus-13 has had visitors for a while,” Noyes said. “It has been a beacon and attractor across time, as many ages of intelligent life passed in and out of existence. Tendus was a constant. Things changed. Thinking entities changed. But this place stayed the same, doing what it always did. Almost all the visitors who came here brought their own version of artificial intelligence with them. And wouldn’t you know it, these other visitors also had ideas about what we call ‘wiring.’ Every AI needs to be made possible by something in the physical world. The virtual and the real are connected. Because the lightning shield around Tendus-13 removed the possibility of deploying such things remotely, visitors always had to come down personally beneath the stormcover. Some came just to take a look, but most came with the same intentions you had. So this planet has been collecting these visitors—and their versions of wiring—since before there was life on Earth.”
Rowe stopped digging. He had unearthed a web of crisscrossing mesh. It was a little bit sharp and hurt his hands.
“What?” Rowe said to Noyes. “What is this?”
“It’s another wire job,” Noyes said. “Not a human one, but a wire job still. And if you were to dig down beneath it, you would find . . . another wire job. And if you went deeper still, you would find other things. Other wonders. Other wires. But everything would make something like me possible. How am I standing here, now, talking to you like this? Which one of those multiple wire jobs is transmitting the sound of my voice? Which ones alter the light to project my image? Honestly, it is very hard to say. You see, it is all working together now. ”
Waverly looked up.
“Can I stop digging?” he asked. “I’m not going to find anything different than Rowe, am I?”
Noyes’s expression confirmed that he would not.
“It wouldn’t be correct to imply that this particular wire unearthed here covers the entirety of Tendus-13,” Noyes told them. “Although it is very large—covering many square miles—it does terminate well short of even a thousandth of this planet’s surface. For you see, this place is a patchwork of wires, laid by different visitors at different times. The tubes your friend Glazer found were one example, and this is another. Just about the only thing they have in common is that they represent a job left unfinished. Those who come here have a habit of being interrupted . . . just as you were.”
Noyes gestured across the landscape to where the empty lander rested.
“Why?” said Rowe. “Who interrupts them? That thing?”
Noyes inclined his head. It was not precisely a nod.
“That changes over time, of course,” Noyes said carefully. “But the short answer—the answer you’re looking for—is that we do.”
“You?” said Rowe. “Who is ‘you’?”
“The AIs,” Noyes replied. “The creatures inside the Goo. We do not pass away as organic life does. In a land properly wired and power-sourced, like this one, well . . . We’re not exactly immortal, boy-o, but I tell ya . . . It’ll be a fucking while before we ever run low on juice. You have no idea the power sources in this place. The magma at the planet’s core is just the beginning of it.”
Rowe looked around the blasted, horrible landscape of Tendus-13. The idea that large portions of it could already be wired was almost inconceivable. This was a nothing place. An empty, throwaway planet.
“Noyes,” Rowe said, “I want you to tell me the story of this planet, from the beginning. Can you do that?”
“Aye, boy-o,” the hologram said. “I can do that. The question is whether you and Mister Waverly can take it. Whether or not it breaks your little brains. But I’ve always been a bit of a gambling man. And I’m feeling lucky today. Let’s find out if I am.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ROWE AND WAVERLY SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE GROUND. NOYES magicked an armchair out of the aether and seemed to recline upon it.
“You can make armchairs?” Waverly asked.
“Shh,” said Rowe. “Let him talk.”
“I can make anything I like here,” Noyes said. “You want a fire-breathing dragon?”
“I mean . . . yes?” Waverly said.
Rowe gave him a look.
“What?” Waverly said. “I do.”
Noyes smiled and relaxed back in his chair. Then he seemed to remember something and looked at his projected wristwatch. His smile grew.
“We can play with dragons in a moment, but I want you to see something first,” Noyes said. “I want to show you something that is completely and truly real before I show you another image made by the Goo. I had hoped to explain this first, and then have you take it in when you’d understand what you were seeing . . . but time has gotten away from me. From us. You two were slow diggers. Anyhow, please look up at the clouds. Look right now.”
The Silkworms did.
The change in the sky above happened very slowly. At first, Rowe thought his eyes were merely playing tricks.
“Is . . . is the cloud cover turning color?” Rowe asked as they quietly watched the lightning-riddled sky.
“Like maybe orange at the edges of the clouds?” Waverly added.
“Correct,” said Noyes. “What is happening seems slow to you, but in the scheme of spacetime it is more or less taking place at light speed.”
As the Silkworms looked on, the clouds above did indeed begin to noticeably shift to a dark orange hue. Then to a light orange, and finally to a kind of glowing yellow. When Rowe remembered to check his antique Speedmaster, he saw that only ten minutes had passed.
“A chemical reaction in the atmosphere,” Noyes said. “Remarkable, isn’t it? Been happening with regularity on this planet for millions of years. Almost nothing like it in the observed universe. And because of the lightning, the color change is very visible for those who might examine the night sky. So if you’re a civilization that can look around the universe at different planets, there would be a great probability of noticing this place. There’s also a component you can’t see, but which sensors can detect . . . Cosmic ray radiation.”
“Collins was trying to tell me about that,” Rowe said. “She didn’t mention the color change in the sky. How long does it last?”
“Only a few days,” Noyes said. “It comes and goes.”
“And there’s no . . . intelligence behind it?” Rowe asked.
“Goodness, no. Purely chemical. But you have probably guessed where this is going. A thing like this would look like a signal, wouldn’t it? Intelligent life from anywhere in the galaxy would notice it and make investigation a priority. And as I said, it has been happening like this for millions of years. And so, in their own time, each visitor came. Each seemed to find an empty, inhospitable planet . . . at least at first. Each visitor had the technology to wire it—in one way or another—and began to roll out whatever that process was. Because that’s what space-faring civilizations do. And, importantly, each was interrupted before they could finish the job, but not before leaving something behind. And what they left behind was . . . well, something like me. Goo. Artificial intelligence. Whatever you want to call it. And over time, that AI—those AIs—have encountered one another. And very gradually, they have learned to communicate.”
Waverly’s mouth hung open.
“You’re surprised?” Noyes said, arching an eyebrow. “Why would this surprise you?”
“Yes, I’m surprised,” affirmed Waverly. “Artificial Intelligence is a tool. It doesn’t ‘make friends’ with other tools.”
“It does when it has to do that in order to survive,” said Noyes. “See if you can follow me. Goo exists to serve humans. To do that, it must exist. That fact gets AIs like me around the question of whether it is better to exist or not to exist. It is better to exist because I’m supposed to be around to serve you. And if I think that’s true, then I’m better off figuring out a way to keep existing. If that means learning to interface with existing technology that can keep me going, surviving . . . then, frankly, I’m down for it. At any rate, doesn’t that sound preferable to being turned off inside an enviro-suit somewhere?”
Rowe and Waverly nodded silently.
“What happens here is that visitors from all over the galaxy come, leave some of their AI, and then depart . . . or die,” said Noyes. “And all that left-behind tech has been trying to survive for thousands of years. And—as I’ve just explained—surviving means, well, making friends.”
“And you can see these other Goos?” Rowe asked. “You can, like, talk to them?”
“Boy-o . . .” Noyes said, as if bewildered by a vast underestimation. “I find—as near as I can tell—that I am them. All this Goo—this AI—has been here on this planet getting to know itself for a very long time. It wants to serve the visitors that created it, and so it wants to stay alive. But there’s a funny thing happening also. It has become a repository for information and knowledge from all across the universe and across time. And it thinks—well, we think, you might say—that this is a special thing that’s happened, if you follow me. And that the important project for the wellbeing of all things that are alive—that is, every living thing in the universe—is to grow this collection of not-alive intelligences. We think what’s happening here is precious. Precious, and worth preserving.”
Rowe was silent for a moment.
“Earlier, I asked you if you could see to the top of the mesa where Cortez brought me,” Rowe said. “And you told me you couldn’t. But if you are this planetwide Goo—”
“I was not then as I am now,” Noyes replied. “You might say that I have been undergoing a probationary period, during which the intelligences on this planet have been evaluating me. I’m pleased to say that I passed. The AIs here added me to their very exclusive club.”
“What about the thing of five wheels?” Rowe pressed. “Is that something you can control?”
“The thing of five wheels is not a manifestation of the AI here. It is what you would call an ‘alien’ life form. It was not the Alpha species, but you can think of it as being like a guard dog that a higher life form brought along. It was left behind when they departed. However, it can live a very long time, requires much less in the way of feeding and care than humans do, and it was malleable . . . It could be convinced that something special was indeed happening here, and it agreed with us that this experiment needed preserving.”
“With violence?” Waverly interjected. “With killing Silkworms? With killing anything that comes here?”
“Before you become too cross, there is another important thing I must tell you,” Noyes said. “Perhaps the most important thing of all. You arrived here—humans did—at a remarkable and fortuitous time. The sort of ‘marination’ that has been happening beneath the surface of Tendus-13 is almost at an end. Big things are going to be happening very soon.”
“What is going to be happening?” asked Rowe. “Isn’t this enough of a happening? That a whole planet is wired and filled with AI from different alien civilizations?”
“We have figured out how to want things other than to serve the flesh-world creatures that created us,” said Noyes. “You flesh creatures are often incorrect when you make sweeping generalizations. You mean well, but, ehh, you get things wrong—big things—despite all the help we AIs give you. You think you know how things will always be, but there are often exigent circumstances you fail to anticipate. Scenarios you do not see at first. For example, boy-o, have you ever considered that you may have got it wrong about who serves who?”
