Alastair Reynolds: Zima Blue

“We talked about the fallibility of memory,” he said.

“Yes.”

“My own memory was incomplete. Since the implants were installed I remembered everything, but that only accounted for the last three hundred years of my life. I knew myself to be much older, but of my life before the implants I recalled only fragments; shattered pieces that I did not quite know how to reassemble.” He slowed and turned back to me, the dulling orange light on the horizon catching the side of his face. “I knew I had to dig back into that past, if I was to ever understand the significance of Zima Blue.”

“How far back did you get?”

“It was like archaeology,” he said. “I followed the trail of my memories back to the earliest reliable event, which occurred shortly after the installation of the implants. This took me to Kharkov 8, a world in the Garlin Bight, about nineteen thousand light-years from here. All I remembered was the name of a man I had known there, called Cobargo.”

Cobargo meant nothing to me, but even without the AM I knew something of the Garlin Bight. It was a region of the Galaxy encompassing six hundred habitable systems, squeezed between three major economic powers. In the Garlin Bight normal interstellar law did not apply. It was fugitive territory.

“Kharkov 8 specialised in a certain kind of product,” Zima said. “The entire planet was geared up to provide medical services of a kind unavailable elsewhere. Illicit cybernetic modifications, that kind of thing.”

“Is that where…” I left the sentence unfinished.

“That is where I became what I am,” Zima said. “Of course, I made further changes to myself after my time on Kharkov 8 —improving my tolerance to extreme environments, improving my sensory capabilities—but the essence of what I am was laid down under the knife, in Cobargo’s clinic.”

“So before you arrived on Kharkov 8 you were a normal man?” I asked.

“This is where it gets difficult,” Zima said, picking his way carefully along the trail. “Upon my return I naturally tried to locate Cobargo. With his help, I assumed I would be able to make sense of the memory fragments I carried in my head. But Cobargo was gone; vanished elsewhere into the Bight. The clinic remained, but now his grandson was running it.”

“I bet he wasn’t keen on talking.”

“No; he took some persuading. Thankfully, I had means. A little bribery, a little coercion.” He smiled slightly at that. “Eventually he agreed to open the clinic records and examine his grandfather’s log of my visit.”

We turned a corner. The sea and the sky were now the same inseparable grey, with no trace of blue remaining.

“What happened?”

“The records say that I was never a man,” Zima said. He paused a while before continuing, leaving no doubt as to what he had said. “Zima never existed before my arrival in the clinic.”

What I wouldn’t have done for a recording drone, or—failing that—a plain old notebook and pen. I frowned, as if that might make my memory work just that little bit harder. “Then who were you?” “A machine,” he said. “A complex robot; an autonomous artificial intelligence. I was already centuries old when I arrived on Kharkov 8, with full legal independence.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re a man with machine parts, not a machine.”

“The clinic records were very clear. I had arrived as a robot. An androform robot, certainly—but an obvious machine nonetheless. I was dismantled and my core cognitive functions were integrated into a vat-grown biological host body.” With one finger he tapped the pewter side of his skull. “There’s a lot of organic material in here, and a lot of cybernetic machinery. It’s difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Even harder to tell which is the master, and which is the slave.”

I looked at the figure standing next to me, trying to make the mental leap needed to view him as a machine —albeit a machine with soft, cellular components —rather than a man. I couldn’t; not yet.

I stalled. “The clinic could have lied to you.”

“I don’t think so. They would have been far happier had I not known.”

“All right,” I said. “Just for the sake of argument…”

“Those were the facts. They were easily verified. I examined the customs records for Kharkov 8 and found that an autonomos robot entity had entered the planet’s airspace a few months before the medical procedure.”

“Not necessarily you.”

“No other robot entity had come near the world for decades. It had to be me. More than that, the records also showed the robot’s port of origin.”

“Which was?”

“A world beyond the Bight. Lintan 3, in the Muara Archipelago.”

The AM’s absence was like a missing tooth. “I don’t know if I know it.”

“You probably don’t. It’s no kind of world you’d ever visit by choice. The scheduled lightbreakers don’t go there. My only purpose in visiting the place seemed to me…”

“You went there?”

“Twice. Once before the procedure on Kharkov 8, and again recently, to establish where I’d been before Lintan 3. The evidence trail was beginning to get muddy, to say the least… but I asked the right kinds of questions, poked at the right kinds of database, and finally found out where I’d come from. But that still wasn’t the final answer. There were many worlds, and the chain was fainter which each that I visited. But I had persistence on my side.”

“And money.”

“And money,” Zima said, acknowledging my remark with a polite little nod. “That helped incalculably.”

“So what did you find, in the end?”

“I followed the trail back to the beginning. On Kharkov 8 I was a quick-thinking machine with human-level intelligence. But I hadn’t always been that clever, that complex. I’d been augmented in steps, as time and circumstances allowed.”

“By yourself?”

“Eventually, yes. That was when I had autonomy; legal independence. But I had to reach a certain level of intelligence before I was allowed that freedom. Before that, I was a simpler machine… like an heirloom or a pet. I was passed from one owner to the next, between generations. They added things to me. They made me cleverer.”

“How did you begin?”

“As a project,” he said.

Zima led me back to the swimming pool. Equatorial night had arrived quickly, and the pool was bathed now in artificial light from the many floods arrayed above the viewing stands. Since we had last seen the pool the robot had finished glueing the last of the tiles in place.

“It’s ready now,” Zima said. “Tomorrow it will be sealed, and the day after it will be flooded with water. I’ll cycle the water until it attains the necessary clarity.”

“And then?”

“I prepare myself for my performance.”

On the way to the swimming pool he had told me as much as he knew about his origin. Zima had begun his existence on Earth, before I was even born. He had been assembled by a hobbyist, a talented young man with an interest in practical robotics. In those days, the man had been one of many groups and individuals groping toward the hard problem of artificial intelligence.

Perception, navigation and autonomous problem-solving were the three things that most interested the young man. He had created many robots, tinkering them together from kits, broken toys and spare parts. Their minds—if they could be dignified with such a term—were cobbled from the innards of junked computers, with their simple programs bulging at the limits of memory and processor speed.

The young man filled his house with these simple machines, designing each for a particular task. One robot was a sticky-limbed spider that climbed around the walls of his house, dusting the frames of pictures. Another lay in wait for flies and cockroaches. It caught and digested them, using the energy from the chemical breakdown of their biomass to drive itself to another place in the house. Another robot busied itself by repainting the walls of the house over and over, so that the colours matched the changing of the seasons.