Peter Watts: The Island

I shatters into we.

It's not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It's a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we've yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.

Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does I spread itself across the heavens?

The flesh is huge, the flesh is inconceivable. But the spirit, the spirit is —

Shit.

«Chimp. Assuming the mean neuron density of a human brain, what's the synapse count on a circular sheet of neurons one millimeter thick with a diameter of five thousand eight hundred ninety-two kilometers?»

«Two times ten to the twenty-seventh.»

I saccade the database for some perspective on a mind stretched across thirty million square kilometers: the equivalent of two quadrillion human brains.

Of course, whatever this thing uses for neurons have to be packed a lot less tightly than ours; we can see through them, after all. Let's be superconservative, say it's only got a thousandth the computational density of a human brain. That's —

Okay, let's say it's only got a ten — thousandth the synaptic density, that's still —

A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I'd hypothesize it right out of existence.

Still twenty billion human brains. Twenty billion .

I don't know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.

But I'm not quite ready to believe in gods.

I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.

« What the hell are you doing here? »

He seems surprised by my reaction. «Wanted to — talk,» he says after a moment.

«You never come into someone's home uninvited!»

He retreats a step, stammers: «Wanted, wanted —»

«To talk. And you do that in public . On the bridge, or in the commons, or — for that matter, you could just comm me.»

He hesitates. «Said you — wanted face to face. You said, cultural tradition .»

I did, at that. But not here . This is my place, these are my private quarters . The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait , and stand there like part of the fucking furniture …

«Why are you even up ?» I snarl. «We're not even supposed to come online for another two months.»

«Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.»

That fucking machine.

«Why are you up?» he asks, not leaving.

I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. «I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.» The implicit alone should be obvious.

«Anything?»

Evidently it isn't. I decide to play along for a while. «Looks like we're talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That's the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane's pretty much empty. I mean, it's all alive . It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.»

«Molecular cloud,» Dix says. «Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it's concentrating stuff inside the envelope.»

I shrug. «Point is, there's a size limit for the brain but it's huge , it's…»

«Unlikely,» he murmurs, almost to himself.

I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. «What do you mean?»

«Island's twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere's seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that's — one in fifty-billion odds.»

«Go on.»

He can't. «Uh, just… just unlikely .»

I close my eyes. «How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?»

That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. «Don't — I'm not —»

«It is unlikely. It's astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means… «

He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.

But finally, the lights flicker on: «There's, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!»

This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day. That is a very scary thought.

I try to set it aside for the moment. «There's probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled though the membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn't know how many, but we're only picking up this one so far so they might be pretty sparse.»

There's a different kind of frown on his face now. «Why Chimp ?»

«What do you mean?»

«Why call him Chimp?»

«We call it the chimp.» Because the first step to humanising something is to give it a name.

«Looked it up. Short for chimpanzee . Stupid animal.»

«Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,» I remember.

«Not like us. Couldn't even talk . Chimp can talk. Way smarter than those things. That name — it's an insult.»

«What do you care?»

He just looks at me.

I spread my hands. «Okay, it's not a chimp. We just call it that because it's got roughly the same synapse count.»

«So gave him a small brain, then complain that he's stupid all the time.»

My patience is just about drained. «Do you have a point or are you just blowing CO2 in —»

«Why not make him smarter?»

«Because you can never predict the behavior of a system more complex than you. And if you want a project to stay on track after you're gone, you don't hand the reins to anything that's guaranteed to develop its own agenda.» Sweet smoking Jesus, you'd think someone would have told him about Ashby's Law.

«So they lobotomized him,» Dix says after a moment.

«No. They didn't turn it stupid, they built it stupid.»

«Maybe smarter than you think. You're so much smarter, got your agenda, how come he's still in control?»

«Don't flatter yourself,» I say.

«What?»

I let a grim smile peek through. «You're only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.» You've got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings.

«I don't — I'm following? —»

«I'm sorry, dear.» I smile sweetly at my idiot offspring. «I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the thing that's making all those sounds come out of your mouth.»

Dix turns whiter than my panties.

I drop all pretense. «What were you thinking, chimp? That you could send this sock-puppet to invade my home and I wouldn't notice?»

«Not — I'm not — it's me ,» Dix stammers. « Me talking.»

«It's coaching you. Do you even know what 'lobotomised' means ?» I shake my head, disgusted. «You think I've forgotten how the interface works just because we all burned ours out?» A caricature of surprise begins to form on his face. «Oh, don't even fucking try . You've been up for other builds, there's no way you couldn't have known. And you know we shut down our domestic links too. And there's nothing your lord and master can do about that because it needs us, and so we have reached what you might call an accommodation .»

I am not shouting. My tone is icy, but my voice is dead level. And yet Dix almost cringes before me.