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“What problem?”
“You don’t think it’ll be much of a problem manufacturing an artificial consciousness?”
“Well …”
“Your life depends on solving it,” Bickel said.
“I guess so.”
“You guess so! D’you have an alternative plan?”
“We could turn back.”
Bickel fought down a surge of anger. “None of you see it!”
“See what?”
“The Tin Egg’s almost totally dependent on computer function. The AAT system uses computer translation banks. All our ship sensors are sorted through the computer for priority of presentation on Com-central’s screens. Every living soul in the hyb tanks has an individual life-system program—through the computer. The drive is computer governed. The crew life systems, the shields, the fail-safe circuits, hull integrity, the radiation reflectors …”
“Because everything was supposed to be left under the control of an OMC.”
Bickel crossed the shop in one low-gravity step, slapped a hand onto the papers on the bench. The movement sent several papers fluttering to the deck, but he ignored them. “And all the brains on six—no, seven!—ships failed! I can feel it right in my guts. The OMCs failed … and we weren’t given one word of warning.”
Timberlake started to speak, thought better of it. He bent, collected the schematics from the deck, replaced them on the bench. Something about the force of Bickel’s words, some product of vehemence prevented argument.
He’s right, Timberlake thought.
Timberlake looked up at Bickel, noting the perspiration on the man’s forehead, the frown lines at the corners of his eyes. “We still could turn back,” Timberlake said.
“I don’t think we can. This is a one-way trip.”
“Why not? If we headed back …”
“And had a computer malfunction?”
“We’d still be headed home.”
“You call diving into the sun home?”
Timberlake wet his lips with his tongue.
“They used to teach kids to swim by tossing them into a lake,” Bickel said. “Well, we’ve been tossed into the lake. We’d better start swimming, or sure as hell we’re going to sink.”
“Project wouldn’t do that to us,” Timberlake whispered.
“Oh, wouldn’t they?”
“But … six ships … more than eighteen thousand people …”
“People? What people? The only losses I know about are ‘Gangers, fairly easy to replace if you have a cheap energy source.”
“We’re people,” Timberlake said, “not just Doppelgangers.”
“To us we’re people,” Bickel said. “Now, I’ve a real honey of a question for you—considering all those previous ship failures and the numerous possibilities of malfunction: Why didn’t Project give us a code for talking about failure of OMCs, ours … or any others?”
“These suspicions are … crazy,” Timberlake said.
“Yeah,” Bickel said. “We’re really on our way to Tau Ceti. Our lives are totally dependent on an all-or-nothing computer system—quite by the merest oversight. We’ve aimed ships like ours all over the sky—at Dubhe, at Schedar, at Hamal, at—”
“There was always the off chance those other six ships made it. You know that. They disappeared, sure, but—”
“Ahhhh, now we get down to the meat. Maybe they weren’t failures, eh? Maybe they—”
“It wouldn’t make sense to send two seeding ships to the same destination,” Timberlake pointed out. “Not if you weren’t sure what was happening to—”
“You really believe that, Tim?”
“Well …”
“I have a better suggestion, Tim. If some crazy bastard tossed you into a lake when you couldn’t swim, and you learned to swim like that”—Bickel snapped his fingers—”and you found then you could just keep on going, wouldn’t you swim like hell to get away from the crazy bastard?”
Chapter 12
DEMAND: Define God.
OMC: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
DEMAND: How can God contain the universe?
OMC: Study the hologram. The individual is both laser and target.
—Fragment from Message Capsule #4, thought to have originated with Flattery (#4B) model
In Com-central, the sounds were those the umbilicus crew had come to accept as normal—the creak of action couches in their gimbals, the click of an occasional relay as it called attention to a telltale on the big board.
“Has Bickel unburdened himself at all about the artificial consciousness project back at UMB?” Prudence asked.
She removed her attention momentarily from the master console, glanced at Flattery, her sole companion on the lonely watch. Flattery appeared a bit pale, his mouth drawn downward in a frown. She returned her attention to the console, noting on the time log that her shipwatch had a little more than an hour yet to run. The strain was beginning to drag at her energy reserves. Flattery was taking a hell of a long time to answer, she thought … but he was famous for the ponderous reply.
“He’s said a little,” Flattery said, and he glanced at the hatch to the computer maintenance shop where Bickel and Timberlake we’re working. “Prue, shouldn’t we be listening in on them, making sure they—”
“Not yet,” she said.
“They wouldn’t have to know we were listening.”
“You underestimate Bickel,” she said. “That’s about the worst mistake you can make. He’s fully capable of throwing a trace meter onto the communications—as I have—just on the off chance something interesting’ll turn up … like finding us listening.”
“D’you think he’s started … building?’
“Mostly preparation at this stage,” she said. “They’re collecting material. You can pretty well follow their movements by watching the power drain here on the board, the shifts in temperature sensors and the dosimeter repeaters and the drain on the robox cargo handlers.”
“They’ve been out into the cargo sections?”
“One of them has … probably Tim.”
“You know what Bickel said about the UMB attempt?” Flattery asked. He paused to scratch an itch under his chin. “Said the biggest failure was in attention—the experts wandering away, doing everything but keeping their a
ttention on the main line.”
“That’s a little too warm for comfort,” she said.
“He may suspect,” Flattery said, “but he can’t be certain.”
“There you go underestimating him again.”
“Well, at least he’s going to need our help,” Flattery said, “and we’ll be able to tell what’s going on from how he needs us.”
“Are you sure he needs us?”
“He’ll have to use you for his deeper math analysis,” Flattery said. “And me … well, he’s going to be plowing through the von Neumann problem before he gets much beyond the first steps. He may not’ve faced that yet, but he’ll have to when he realizes he has to get deterministic results from unreliable hardware.”
She turned to stare at him, noting the faraway look in his eyes. “How’s that again?”
“He has to build with nonliving matter.”
“So what?” She returned her attention to the board. “Nature makes do with the same stuff. Living systems aren’t living below the molecular level.”
“And you underestimate … life,” Flattery said. “The basic elements Bickel has to use are from our robot stores—reels of quasibiological neurons and solid-state devices, nerex wire and things like that—all of it nonliving at a stage far above the molecular.”
“But their fine structure’s as relevant to their function as any living matter’s is.”
“Perhaps you’re beginning to see the essential hubris in even approaching this problem,” Flattery said.
“Oh, come off that, Chaplain. We’re not back in the eighteenth century making Vaucanson’s wonderful duck.”
“We’re tackling something much more complex than primitive automata, but our intention’s the same as Vaucanson’s.”
“That’s absolutely not true,” Prudence said. “If we succeeded and took our machine back to Vaucanson’s time and showed it to him, he’d just marvel at our mechanical ability.”
“You miss the mark. Poor Vaucanson would run for the nearest priest and volunteer for the lynch mob to do away with us. You see, he never intended to make anything that was really alive.”
