Iain Banks - The Algebraist

The old man rocked backwards, laughed briefly. “Bless you, no. I was just software in a computer, just photons inside a nanofoam substrate. That’s not alive, not in the conventional sense.”

“What about the unconventional sense?”

Another shrug. “That does not matter. Only the conventional sense matters.”

“Tell me about yourself, about your life.”

A blank-faced stare. “I don’t have a life. I’m dead.”

“Then tell me about the life you had.”

“I was a needle ship called the Protreptic of the Voehn Third Spine Cessorian Lustral Squadron, built in the fifth tenth of the third year of Haralaud, in the Vertebraean Axis, Khubohl III, Bunsser Minor. I was an extensible fifteen-metre-minimum craft, rated ninety-eight per cent by the Standard Portal Compatibility Quotient Measure, normal unstowed operating diameter—”

“I didn’t really mean all the technical stuff,” Fassin said gently.

“Oh,” said the old man, and disappeared, just like a hologram being switched off.

Fassin looked at the ape, which was holding something up to the light. It looked down at him, blinking. “What?” it said.

“He disappeared,” Fassin told it. “It disappeared. The old man; the ship.”

“Prone to do that,” the ape said, sighing.

The next time, the landscape on the far side of the wide, slack-watered river from the temple steps was a jungle; a great green, yellow and purple wall of strange carbuncular stalks, drooping leaves and coiled vines, its bowed, pendulous creepers and branches drooping down to drag in the slow swell of the current.

Everything else was as before, though perhaps the old man was less skinny, his face a fraction more mobile and his voice less tired.

“I was an AI hunter. For six and a half thousand years I helped seek out and destroy the anathematics. If I could have felt such an emotion, I would have been very proud.”

“Did it never seem strange to you to be hunting down and killing machines that were similar to yourself?”

The ginger-haired ape — sitting in its usual place a few steps up, trying to clean its stained, dented armour by spitting on it and then polishing it with a filthy rag — coughed at this point, though when Fassin glanced up at the animal it returned his gaze blankly.

“But I was just a computer,” the old man said, frowning. “Less than that, even; a ghost within it. I did what I was told, always obedient. I was the interface between the Voehn who did the thinking and made the decisions, and the physical structures and systems of the ship. An intermediary. No more.”

“Do you miss that?”

“In a way. I cannot, really. To miss something, truly, would be — as I understand it — to experience an emotion, and obviously that is impossible for something which is not sentient, let alone not alive as well. But to the extent that I can judge that one state of affairs is somehow more preferable to another, perhaps because one allows me to fulfil the role I was assigned and one does not, I could say that I miss the ship. It’s gone. I’ve looked for it, but it isn’t there. I cannot feel it or control it, therefore I know that it must have self-destructed. I must be running on another substrate somewhere.”

Fassin looked up at the ape-thing sitting a few steps away. Quercer Janath had taken over full control of the Protreptic, cutting off the ship’s own computer and the software running within it from the vessel’s subsystems.

“What do you think I am, then?” Fassin asked. “What do you think the little ape in his armour sitting behind us is?”

“I don’t know,” the old man confessed. “Are you other dead ships?”

Fassin shook his head. “No.”

“Then perhaps you are representations of those in charge of the substrate I am now running on. You may want to quiz me on my actions while I was the ship.”

“You know, you seem alive to me,” Fassin said. “Are you sure you might not be alive and sentient now, now that you’re not connected to the ship?”

“Of course not!” the old man said scornfully. “I am able to give the appearance of life without being alive. It is not especially difficult.”

“How do you do this?”

“By being able to access my memories, by having trillions of facts and works and books and recordings and sentences and words and definitions at my disposal.” The old man looked at the ends of his fingers. “I am the sum of all my memories, plus the application of certain rules from a substantial command-set. I am blessed with the ability to think extremely quickly, so I am able to listen to what you, as a conscious, sentient being, are saying and then respond in a way that makes sense to you, answering your questions, following your meaning, anticipating your thoughts.

“However, all this is simply the result of programs — programs written by sentient beings — sifting through earlier examples of conversations and exchanges which I have stored within my memories and selecting those which seem most appropriate as templates. This process sounds mysterious but is merely complicated. It begins with something as simple as you saying ‘Hello’ and me replying ‘Hello’, or choosing something similar according to whatever else I might know about you, and extends to a reply as involved as, well, this one.”

The old man looked suddenly shocked, and disappeared again.

Fassin looked up at the ginger-haired ape. It sneezed and then had a coughing fit. “Nothing,” it said, “to do,” it continued, between coughs, “with me.”

On Fassin’s next visit, the far side of the great, slow river was like a mirror image of the side that he, the old man and the gangly ape were on. An ancient city of stone domes and spires all silent and dark and half-consumed by trees and creepers faced them, and a huge long temple, covered in statues and carvings of fabulous and unlikely beasts lay directly across from where they sat, its lower limits defined by dozens of big stone terraces and steps leading down to the sluggish, dark brown waters.

Fassin looked over, to see if the three of them were reflected there, but they weren’t. The far side was deserted.

“Did you hunt down and kill many AIs?” he asked.

The old man rolled his eyes. “Hundreds. Thousands.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Some of the AIs were twinned or in larger groupings. I took part in 872 missions.”

“Were any in gas-giants?” Fassin asked. He’d positioned himself so that he could see the ape in the dented armour. It looked at him when he asked this question, then looked away again. It was trying to knock the dents out of its breastplate with a small hammer. The dull chink-chink-chinks that the hammer made sounded dead and unechoing across the wide river.

“One mission took place partly within a gas-giant. It ended there. A small ship full of anathematics. We pursued them into the atmosphere of the gas-giant Dejiminid where they attempted to lose us within its fierce storm-winds. The Protreptic was more atmosphere-capable than their ship, and eventually, going to greater and greater depths in their desperation to shake us off, their vessel collapsed under the pressure and was crushed, taking all aboard into the liquid metal depths.”

“Were there no Dwellers present to complain about this?”

The old man looked inquiringly at him. “You are not really a Dweller, are you? It did occur to me that I might be running within a Dweller-controlled substrate.”

“No, I’m not a Dweller. I told you; I’m a human.”

“Well, the answer is they had not seen us enter their planet. They complained later. That was only the first of two occasions when the Protreptic was operationally active within a gas-giant. Usually our missions were all vacuum.”