Alastair Reynolds: Zima Blue

By now Zima was hugely famous, even to people who had no particular interest in art. He was the weird cyborg celebrity who made huge blue structures; the man who never gave interviews or hinted at the private significance of his art.

But that was a hundred years ago. Zima wasn’t even remotely done.

Eventually the structures became too unwieldy to be hosted on planets. Blithely Zima moved into interplanetary space, forging vast free-floating sheets of blue ten thousand kilometres across. Now he worked not with brushes and paint, but with fleets of mining robots, tearing apart asteroids to make the raw material for his creations. Now it was entire stellar economies that competed with each other to host Zima’s work.

That was about the time that I renewed my interest in Zima. I attended one of his “moonwrappings”: the enclosure of an entire celestial body in a lidded blue container, like a hat going into a box. Two months later he stained the entire equatorial belt of a gas giant blue, and I had a ringside seat for that as well. Six months later he altered the surface chemistry of a sun-grazing comet so that it daubed a Zima Blue tail across an entire solar system. But I was no closer to a story. I kept asking for an interview and kept being turned down. All I knew was that there had to be more to Zima’s obsession with blue than a mere artistic whim. Without an understanding of that obsession, there was no story: just anecdote.

I didn’t do anecdote.

So I waited, and waited. And then—like millions of others —I heard about Zima’s final work of art, and made my way to the fake Venice on Murjek. I wasn’t expecting an interview, or any new insights. I just had to be there.

We stepped through sliding glass doors out onto the balcony. Two simple white chairs sat either side of a white table. The table was set with drinks and a bowl of fruit. Beyond the unfenced balcony, arid land sloped steeply away, offering an uninterrupted view of the sea. The water was calm and inviting, with the lowering sun reflected like a silver coin.

Zima indicated that I should take one of the seats. His hand dithered over two bottles of wine.

“Red or white, Carrie?”

I opened my mouth as if to answer him, but nothing came. Normally, in that instant between the question and the response, the AM would have silently directed my choice to one of the two options. Not having the AM’s prompt felt like a mental stall in my thoughts.

“Red, I think,” Zima said. “Unless you have strong objections.”

“It’s not that I can’t decide these things for myself,” I said.

Zima poured me a glass of red, then held it up to the sky to inspect its clarity. “Of course not,” he said.

“It’s just that this is a little strange for me.”

“It shouldn’t be strange,” he said. “This is the way you’ve lived your life for hundreds of years.”

“The natural way, you mean?”

Zima poured himself a glass of the red wine, but instead of drinking it he merely sniffed the bouquet. “Yes.” “But there isn’t anything natural about being alive a thousand years after I was born,” I said. “My organic memory reached saturation point about seven hundred years ago. My head’s like a house with too much furniture. Move something in, you have to move something out.” “Let’s go back to the wine for a moment,” Zima said. “Normally, you’d have relied on the advice of the AM, wouldn’t you?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

“Would the AM always suggest one of the two possibilities? Always red wine, or always white wine, for instance?”

“It’s not that simplistic,” I said. “If I had a strong preference for one over the other, then, yes, the AM would always recommend one wine over the other. But I don’t. I like red wine sometimes and white wine other times. Sometimes I don’t want any kind of wine.” I hoped my frustration wasn’t obvious. But after the elaborate charade with the blue card, the robot and the conveyor, the last thing I wanted to be discussing with Zima was my own imperfect recall.

“Then it’s random?” he asked. “The AM would have been just as likely to say red as white?”

“No, it’s not like that either. The AM’s been following me around for hundreds of years. It’s seen me drink wine a few hundred thousand times, under a few hundred thousand different circumstances. It knows, with a high degree of reliability, what my best choice of wine would be given any set of parameters.”

“And you follow that advice unquestioningly?”

I sipped at the red. “Of course. Wouldn’t it be a little childish to go against it just to make a point about free will? After all, I’m more likely to be satisfied with the choice it suggests.”

“But unless you ignore that suggestion now and then, won’t your whole life become a set of predictable responses?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But is that so very bad? If I’m happy, what do I care?”

“I’m not criticising you,” Zima said. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, defusing some of the tension caused by his line of questioning. “Not many people have an AM these days, do they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“Less than one percent of the entire Galactic population.” Zima sniffed his wine and looked through the glass at the sky. “Almost everyone else out there has accepted the inevitable.”

“It takes machines to manage a thousand years of memory. So what?”

“But a different order of machine,” Zima said. “Neural implants; fully integrated into the participant’s sense of self. Indistinguishable from biological memory. You wouldn’t need to query the AM about your choice of wine; you wouldn’t need to wait for that confirmatory whisper. You’d just know it.”

“Where’s the difference? I allow my experiences to be recorded by a machine that accompanies me everywhere I go. The machine misses nothing, and it’s so efficient at anticipating my queries that I barely have to ask it anything.”

“The machine is vulnerable.”

“It’s backed up at regular intervals. And it’s no more vulnerable than a cluster of implants inside my head. Sorry, but that just isn’t a reasonable objection.” “You’re right, of course. But there’s a deeper argument against the AM. It’s too perfect. It doesn’t know how to distort or forget.” “Isn’t that the point?”

“Not exactly. When you recall something—this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now—there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance with reality. Yet you’d swear your recollection was accurate.”

“But if the AM had accompanied me, I’d have a flawless record of how things really were.”

“You would,” Zima said. “But that isn’t living memory. It’s photography; a mechanical recording process. It freezes out the imagination; leaves no scope for details to be selectively misremembered.” He paused long enough to top up my glass. “Imagine that on nearly every occasion when you had cause to sit outside on an afternoon like this you had chosen red wine over white, and generally had no reason to regret that choice. But on one occasion, for one reason or another, you were persuaded to choose white —against the judgement of the AM —and it was wonderful. Everything came together magically: the company, the conversation, the late afternoon ambience, the splendid view, the euphoric rush of being slightly drunk. A perfect afternoon turned into a perfect evening.”

“It might not have had anything to do with my choice of wine,” I said.