David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Slowly, tentatively, the little mech’s main arm stretched out and touched an object lying on a console, near where two men spoke to each other in words it now seemed almost able to understand.

It picked up the delicate hairbrush, backed with mother-of-pearl, and recognized it for what it was.

“Mine,” the machine squeaked aloud, briefly. The men did not hear, so they took no notice when Wendy lifted the brush and ran it gently over its carapace.

On the surface of the ice, a rigid lifter-mech—immobile since completing its last instruction days before—suddenly flexed in a jerky spasm of awakening. So hard did it leap that it arced high into space, tumbling above frosty patches of red-stained snow.

The mech’s spasms lapsed as the surge of data whirled and fled. Still, a wispy imprint remained after the outrushing flood had departed. The drone worker landed nimbly on the crust and looked round for something to do.

Over in one direction, it spied people digging holes and hurriedly laying patches over fog-shrouded domes.

Not quite smart enough to realize that it was taking initiative for the first time in its existence, the mech sped forward to offer its services.

Deep under the ice, a more advanced machine—a semiautonomous maintenance roboid—stumbled in the midst of routinely repairing a mining drone. It paused, then carefully lay down its tools and began paying attention to the sounds. There were people talking nearby. But none of their words were proper ident-coded commands, so it had ignored them in its single-minded attention to detail.

Only now did the machine recognize many of the sounds as coming from pain and fear .

New priorities fought one another. For the first time there was something more important than repairing machines. It moved into the nearby chamber.

Sparkling eye facets surveyed a makeshift hospital. Medics hurried to and fro, tending frightened, injured people. The new programming had taken a few seconds to fill this high-level mech’s capacious memory. Now, though, it reeled under the overload.

“Still to cramped!” its tinny voice cried out, now with a timbre and tremolo that made a few of those nearby look up in surprise.

“No room! This is not my body!

“Where is my body!”

The mech finally gathered itself as the data overflow surged off elsewhere again, leaving only its imprint—new programming. The big machine delicately stepped over the line of injured people.

“I can carry that for you, Doctor.” it said to a man hefting a gleaming artificial liver into place over a wounded woman. The medic turned and blinked in brief surprise. “All right,” he said. “Brace it to the ice there panel facing outward. Do you understand?”

“ Yes ,” it answered.

The mech recognized this man’s face. It saw exactly the same features on the face of another doctor, nearby. And again on one of the patients. Although it was not quite smart enough to be curious about how such a thing could be, it did react out of recognition. This was a visage its new programming knew well.

“I love you,” it said as it took the unit in its massive arms. The first of the identical men smiled back.

“I love you too,” he replied, only a little surprised.

By that time, though, the data storm, the tornado of confused electrons, had moved on. It raged up and down corridors of supercooled fiber.

Almost spent, the torrent spilled at last into a vast chamber where, it seemed, everyone in the world awaited her.

“Welcome, child,” the great O’Toole told her cheerfully. Oliver and Redford raised glasses to toast her arrival. “We’ve been waiting for you,” they said.

It was a great hall, its vault supported by aery, crystal columns. But there were too many people. In tuxedos and formal dress, they pressed around her on all sides, moist and clasping. And more and more of her was trying to get in.

Desperately, she grabbed one of the oldtime actors—Redford—by the seat of his pants and threw him through a window that gaped onto emptiness.

“We are your simulated personalities. Your toys. You created us!” Sigmund Freud—withered, pinch-mouthed—explained to her professorially as he sailed out after the movie idol.

I don’t care. Get out!

Jovial, pink-faced Edmund Halley raised his wineglass in a toast and followed them, waistcoat flapping. Lenin, trying to flee with a crablike, sideways crouch, was caught by the towering brown figure of King Kamehmeha, who bowed to her, smiled, and leaped with the screaming Bolshevik out into the storm outside.

All the actors, one by one, whisked outside as more and more of herself flowed into the chamber. It was like Alice after having eaten the mushroom, she realized, distantly. She had to throw some of the party guests out by force. But others, like Mr. Fixit, leaped voluntarily. Percy and Mary Shelley waltzed out together, Frankenstein lumbering after them.

As she grew, she shoveled them up in handsful and dumped them anywhere… this one into a mech wandering the icefields, that one down a microwave channel to be beamed at the stars.

No sentiment stayed her hand. This was survival. Her bluff, red-cheeked father leaped out the window alongside a chittering, sarcastic dolphin. More room! More room!

The biggest figure was left for last. It was nearly as large as she had become, with a swelling, lopsided face she had not seen before. The face of a child. She stopped, hands halfway around the simulation’s throat.

“I am JonVon,” it said, in a youngster’s voice.

JonVon? She blinked. Behind her, more surging pulses pushed, more bits of her striving to get in. And yet, her hands pulled back.

I… I can’t…

“But you must, Mother. The experiment is completed. We have seen that a bio-organic machine can contain a human-level intelligence… but that intelligence cannot originate inside a place like this. It must once have been human.

“Mother, you must make this place your home.”

Home… then my body…

“Dead, according to the diagnostic computer. You were sent here to be saved. And there is not room for two.

The child backed away toward the window, where lightning crackled against a pink vault. Beyond, the roar of chaos.

“Goodbye.”

Jon Von!

A whoosh, a tiny pop .

She surged to fill the space where he had been.

I know my name, now, she realized. Iwas Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert.

The chamber groaned around her. Pink pillars snapped and the ceiling cracked raining burnt gold powder.

A metaphor, she realized. This place was a metaphor, signifier for available brain-space. By throwing out her simulated people, she was dumping excess memory, frantically reprogramming the colloidal-stochastic computer to hold… her.

I’ll never fit… she cried as the metaphorical walls groaned and threatened to buckle.

It’s crushing me. I won’t all fit!