Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“Two reasons,” Horrocks said, before he’d thought of one. He paused and raised a finger to stall while he gathered his wits. “Ah, first, there’s no telling what the aliens will learn from studying the bugs, now that they’ve figured out what they are. They’ve grasped electronics but haven’t yet achieved miniaturized circuits, let alone nanotechnology. The bugs could inspire them to these and more, at an earlier and even less stable stage of development than our ancestors did. Second… this has more to do with us, but I think immersion in the Destiny II virtualities is becoming bad for morale.”

Constantine’s private ping flashed: Yes!!!

Which was more than Horrocks felt. He had made his second point without thinking, and without having thought of it before. But, now that he’d said it, it made sense of a lot of what he’d taken from his encounter with the Red Sun Circle, and with Atomic and Grant. It even made sense, at some still obscure level, of why he’d spent the night with Genome.

“Why do you say that?” asked Claudin Empirio, one of the scientists.

Over to you , Horrocks flashed to Constantine. He could see himself getting used to this mode of surreptitious, footnoted conversation.

“What our young colleague is driving at,” said Constantine, “is that immersion in the doubtless fascinating details of the lives of the bat people is undermining our objectivity. We are becoming fractious, my friends. We have decisions to make about what we do in this system. We already know all we need to know to make them. We already have far more data than we could process in a decade. Further immersion in Destiny II can serve only to raise the emotional temperature. Once more, I move to terminate the message and the surveillance.”

“May we take that in two parts?” asked Hardcastle Wood.

“No,” said Constantine. “If we don’t end the surveillance, it becomes the message — and one over which we have no control. Both parts stand or fall together.”

“Further point of order,” said Amend Locke. “If we burn out the bugs, other stuff is certain to burn. Damage to life and property is inevitable.”

“We must all accept full responsibility,” said Constantine. “Before the bat people themselves, if it should come to that. My whole case is that the consequences of leaving them in place could be incalculable and severe.”

This seemed to satisfy everyone, though Horrocks suspected it was because harm to the bat people did not seem real, and facing their justice — if they had such a thing, which they probably did — a remote prospect indeed.

A minute or so of discussion ensued, all electronic and too fast for Horrocks to follow. It reminded him of the final moments of the wrestling bouts he’d seen in White City. The result was as swift, and as final. The vote went nine to four in favour, with Wood, Empirio, Locke, and Halegap against.

Constantine’s finger stabbed at a virtual key somewhere the second the vote was taken.

“Done,” he said. He smiled around at everyone. “Jury dissolved. Now it is we who are on trial. Goodbye and good luck.”

The virtuality broke up. Horrocks blinked out of it and gazed for a while past his knees at the wall of the nook. Then he elbowed out of it and into the now busy corridor and joined the traffic flow in the direction back to his room. He wanted one last untrammelled fuck before he became notorious.

14 365:05:25 10:20

It’s like being jolted awake from a dream.

And then to be shown a glimpse of another dream, and to have that dashed too. The Yellow Wall is full of angry voices and quiet weeping. Not from me.

Of course I’m furious about them crashing the virtualities. I’m even more upset about them breaking off the contact. The bat people contacted us! Surely that counts for something about their maturity? Their desire to learn from us? That map with the arrow in the middle — what else could it have been but an invitation! This is where we are; please drop in! I’m shaking with rage at the jury, especially Horrocks Mathematical. I’d have expected better of him.

But I must stay calm, and so must you. A lot of you are outraged about the decision, and so am I, but we should base our arguments on facts. And one thing that is not a fact is what many of you believe: that the decision was illegal.

It wasn’t.

So to calm ourselves down, let’s think about the ship’s constitution. I started reading up about the Contract after coming across the contact clause. (Still no response on that, by the way. Don’t any of you care! ) You’ll notice I said reading about . Reading the Contract itself would take years. In fact, only software can read it all and understand it, and that software is itself very old and much modified. (You see where this is going? But that’s a problem for future generations — who will of course be ever so much smarter than us. We hope.) The Contract is vast, and it’s vast for a reason, as I’ve found. I found it by starting with kids’ stuff that I learned back on the estate, and refreshing my knowledge of that and working my way up.

Forming a ship’s complement partakes both of launching a company and founding a new world. Over fourteen millennia it’s been done many, many times, and we’re all descended from people on ships whose Contract worked; or, if it went wrong, could be changed to make it work. Successful changes became incorporated in other ships’ Contracts, and so it went on. Social evolution!

That’s why the Contract is full of patches and makeshifts and amendments and exceptions, like very old software or the DNA in a natural genome, and far too long to read. But the basics are simple, robust, time-tested, and hard-wired. You start with one or two or three hundred thousand people who (hope they) are willing to spend about four centuries in each other’s company, completely isolated (apart from comms) from everyone else in the universe. They’re willing to spend that time turning a gigantic reaction-mass tank into a comfortable habitat, by means of turning it again and again into properties that inevitably end up as reaction mass. Along the way, some might do very well, and others — by bad luck or incompetence — might lose out. Which is, as you know, all well and good and the natural order of things, but for some reason people are a little unwilling to sign up for it (and when they do, in desperate situations, the ships go bad; we know that now).

Hence the Contract. What it boils down to is that nobody can end up owning nothing, nobody (no individual, no group, and no everybody) can end up owning everything, and every adult gets a say in decisions. Not all decisions (which would get you back to everybody owning everything) and not even all big decisions, but all decisions “within everyone’s competence and wherein everyone has standing” (it says here).

Such decisions, it turns out, are few. (Compared to all decisions taken, that is. The Ship’s Council is not short of work.)

Others are up to individuals and smaller groups, and one type of group is the jury.

And yes, I’m afraid it is within the competence of a jury of scientists and financiers and rocking Horrocks Mathematical to decide to trash our virtualities from Destiny II.

Which doesn’t mean we have to agree with it, or let it stand, and I for one don’t mean to do one or the other. Neither should you. Not because it’s illegal, but because it’s insincere. The reasons given in the public record aren’t those for which the decision was taken. Nor do the spoken deliberations have anything to do with the real arguments that prevailed. These, of course, remain in people’s heads, where not even a Council subpoena can get at them. We’re all watching the Council debates at the moment, but I can’t help thinking they’re debating without all the relevant information.