Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

There were detailed modifications to her eyes, too. The optic nerve seemed to be attached to the retina more firmly, so that there was less chance of suffering a detached retina, and there were rings of tiny muscles around Alia’s pupils. “She seems to have a zoom facility,” Gea said dryly.

And Gea talked about Alia’s genome. Her existence was governed by DNA just as mine was, so we were both obviously products of the same lineage of life, both ultimately products of Earth. But Alia’s DNA showed divergences.

“Some of these changes appear to be the result of genetic drift, of natu-ral selection,” Gea said. “But others appeared to be engineered. We can only guess at the purpose of most of this. It may be she has a general regenerative ability, for instance. Cut off a finger, and another will grow in its place.”

John drew a softscreen toward him and made rapid notes. “Somebody ought to patent this stuff,” he said. “Just a thought.”

Tom sneered. “Uncle, how crass to be thinking of commercial gain at a time like this.”

John was unperturbed; he had endured such insults all his life. “Just doing my job. If there’s profit to be made, why not by us?”

Gea moved on to still stranger aspects of Alia’s anatomy. Much of what she had described so far had been extrapolations of the human. But there were signs of much more peculiar developments. Gea had imaged hard, impenetrable knots in Alia’s bloodstream, motes that might have been technological, remote descendants of the nanomachines of our age, perhaps.

And there even were traces of other life-forms in Alia’s body. For instance there was a kind of sheathing around portions of her nervous system, its function unknown — perhaps it was there for protection from deep-space radiation. It seemed obviously alive, and was based on an amino acid chemistry, just as Alia was. But it did not share Alia’s genome — indeed there was no trace of DNA to be found in it at all.

“Alien life,” I said slowly. “Not from Earth, because not based on DNA. She has a kind of symbiosis with alien life-forms.”

“So it seems.”

For long heartbeats we sat there, trying to digest this latest bit of news. I think I was the most imaginative of the three of us, the most open-minded. But even I was struggling with this. Here was not just a woman from the future, here was ET — and not sitting in a flying saucer looking back at me, but wrapped around the neurons of this remote descendant.

“All of this is evidence of advancement, in the broadest sense,” Gea said now. “Many past developments life’s capabilities have depended on symbiosis, the cooperation of one kind of life-form with another, or even the incorporation of one into the other.” Even complex cells were the result of one such merger, she said. Mitochondria, once independent creatures, were now used as miniature power plants within our own cells.

“And so what might come next,” I said, trying to follow her chain of thought, “is more mergers. Of our bodies with machines, and biology with technology. Or of our Earth-derived life-forms with life from another biosphere altogether, alien life.”

“Just as we see with Alia,” Gea said.

John scowled at the little robot. “I don’t think I like you telling me I’m inferior to that monkey woman.”

Gea said, “Then who would you like to tell you?”

Tom grinned, and I suppressed a laugh.

John leaned over the robot. “And what about you, sparky? If humanity is progressing onward and upward, what’s going to become of you?”

“I suspect we artificial types will play our part in your development,” Gea said, as unfazed as ever. “We know that Alia is actually far more intelligent than any modern human being. With all respect. We have the evidence of her speech for that, her ‘true speech,’ the accelerated gabble we recorded from Morag. I strongly suspect that she is also more conscious than any human alive today, in the truest sense. She has a deeper mind, and surely a deeper sense of herself. Some humans fear that artificial minds will make humans obsolescent. But Alia shows us that humans will not become obsolescent, any time soon. So what has happened? Perhaps there has been a competition with the machines, a selection pressure to become smarter.”

John said, “Or perhaps we just absorbed you. Perhaps you’re just another symbiote.”

“Perhaps. But we may have chosen not to participate in such a symbiosis. After all that is the great benefit of sentience — choice. And if that’s so, who knows what our destiny may be?” And she rolled back and forth, a half-kilogram of painted tin.

I spoke to Rosa later that day. She showed up in my hotel room, a small, dense, black figure. She listened patiently as I summarized what Gea had told us.

“Even what Alia told us of cosmology made sense,” I said. “Or at least it didn’t contradict what we know.”

I had been a cosmology fan all my life. I was encouraged by uncle George, who said I was lucky to be alive at a time when cosmology was moving out of the realm of philosophy and into hard science. There had been the emergence of quantum gravity, and the great astrophysical satellite studies of the first part of the century that had mapped the relics of universal birth in fine detail, all of which had enabled us to put together a firm biography of the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. Of course being a fan of all this stuff hadn’t helped me spot the approaching Higgs revolution, which had developed from all this.

But as part of the new understanding, we knew the universe was finite.

I said, “We haven’t mapped the topology of the universe yet — that is, its shape. But for sure, a finite, closed form of the kind Alia hinted at fits what we know.”

“Perhaps that finiteness is necessary for the development of life, of mind, in some way,” Rosa mused. “If the universe were infinite, just dissipating into the dark, perhaps mind would simply fizzle out, too. Perhaps everything is connected.”

“Maybe you should ask Alia about that.”

“It’s you she’s interested in, not me,” Rosa said. “And what of the human future she sketched — all these ‘Expansions’ across the Galaxy?”

“That seems all too plausible, too,” I said.

“Yes,” Rosa said. “We humans seem to have been an unstable lot from the beginning. Unlike other animals, even our hominid forebears, we aren’t content simply to find a role in the ecology. And in the future, it seems, that same restlessness will drive us on beyond the Earth. We will encounter others out there, and those others will go the way of the mammoth and the Neandertal, their last relics incorporated into the very bodies of their destroyers.”

“Umm,” I said. “Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox?” This was an old conundrum, dating back nearly a century. The universe is so old that there has been time for it to be colonized many times over, before humans even evolved — so if extraterrestrial aliens exist, why don’t we see any sign of them? “One candidate solution is that there is a killer species out there, a voracious predator that swoops down and assimilates any culture foolish enough to attract the notice of the bad guys. It’s a chastening thought that some day we may be the predators; we may be the instigator of a Fermi Paradox of our own…”

Rosa nodded. “But does it have to be that way? I grew up in a society which was quite different. The way we lived in the Order will always have its critics. But the Order was able to deliver very high population densities, very large numbers of human beings living orderly human lives, and all without harming anybody else. So I have firsthand experience of how humans can get along with each other without needing to trash the Galaxy to do it.”