Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

There was a still skepticism about EI’s work, he said. The carbon-sequestration projects had generally proven more readily acceptable because it was relatively easy to make money out of them, by earning carbon credits, or reducing your liability to carbon taxes. But, he said, the schemes appealed because they were essentially passive. “You are fixing, not changing. Of course it’s true that the risks of changing things are more unknowable, and therefore greater.”

Shelley said, “Such as Cephalonia.”

Makaay leaned forward, passion showing in his pale eyes. “I was on the clean-up team. I haven’t forgotten. We are engineers, the three of us; you understand. Things go wrong. We learn from mistakes. We fix them. Nothing like Cephalonia has happened again, or will. And it mustn’t stop us from trying again.

“But we do need to reassure people, I accept that. Our lawyers are trying to agree to a code of conduct for geoengineers at UNESCO. A kind of Hippocratic oath, if you will, a pledge that we will use our powers responsibly. If that is accepted perhaps we can start to build trust once and for all. And then we can really get on with the job.”

Shelley said, “OK. But do you think we’ve a chance of getting the support we need for the hydrate-stabilization project?”

He sat back. “It’s not impossible. It’s a question of how you sell it. Your project is vast in scale, and that will instinctively repel a lot of people. But it’s essentially passive, like our carbon-sequestration programs. You aren’t meddling; you’re simply trying to maintain an equilibrium, to prevent a loss. So perhaps we can avoid a few philosophical obstacles on the way. We have a lobbying firm we use in Washington; they’ll be able to advise.”

At his use of the word lobbying I quailed; the world of high politics was not one where I would feel comfortable.

Shelley noticed this and smiled. “We have to do this, kiddo. We’re talking about a major international effort here — billions of dollars of investment. We have to deal with the big boys.”

Makaay’s expression was friendly, engaged, but reserved, consummately professional. “I can’t say yet if we’ll support you. Our board has to make the decision. It’s a big task for us. But I do believe that your project is exactly what EI was founded to do in the first place.” He stood and paced around the little office. “I see an opportunity, for all of us. We need a success. And once we have shrugged off our anxiety about ‘meddling,’ the opportunities are vast.

“Look — call me a progressive. I want to build a world with room for as many happy, well-fed, and healthy people as we can cram in. What’s wrong with that? But obviously I also want to do it without wrecking the environment in the process.” The two levers of geoengineering, he said, carbon sequestration and albedo control, were actually independent of each other. “Now, an increase in carbon dioxide has some beneficial effects: plant growth is stimulated, for example. So suppose we let the carbon levels rise, but kept the temperature under control with albedo modification? That might be the way to advance our civilization to a new optimum, while protecting the planet.

“And we can go further,” he said. “This Bottleneck will teach us to cooperate on a planetary scale. Then we will be able to reach beyond the Earth altogether. We can reserve the Earth simply for doing what it is best at, to support the most complex biosphere we know, and use the resources of space to escape the constraints of closed planetary economics…”

Shelley stood up to stop his flow. “Terrific. But in the meantime, do you have an office where we can set up?”

He grinned, self-deprecatingly. “Quite right. Let’s get to work.”

As we followed him out of the room Shelley whispered to me, “Call him Prospero.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you remember your Shakespeare? The Tempest. Prospero called down a storm; he was an early geoengineer.”

“Didn’t he cause a shipwreck?”

Shelley raised her eyebrows, and we walked on.

Eusocial living was nearly as old as mankind. The first human eusociety, the first hive, had in fact been born on old Earth, in the days before spaceflight.

It was a solution to the dilemmas of cramped living, which tended to emerge when a community was isolated, when resources were short, when it was difficult to strike out away from home. Reath said, “Anywhere you can’t get away from Mom, this is the way you end up living. It’s a feature of our neural processing, I believe — some would say a deep flaw. But it’s undoubtedly a part of the human story.”

It always began with social pressures. If adult children stayed home, they would compete with their parents for resources. So a mother bullied her daughter into having fewer children, or none at all, and made her devote her energies to her sisters. Families extended into great conflations of sisters and cousins and aunts, all childless, all tending the needs of the children of a single mother.

Ultimately all this served the needs of the genes, or it would never have worked at all. A human was more closely related genetically to her daughter than to her niece. But if by living eusocially you could preserve more nieces than you would have had daughters, you could give your genes, though indirectly, a greater chance of survival.

And then, when the social pressures were locked in, natural selection took over.

As the generations ticked by, as a drone you adapted to the environment you found yourself trapped in: the environment of the Coalescence. Individual creatures, the building bricks of a higher organism, were modified in different ways to serve the needs of the colony as a whole for nutrition, physical support, locomotion, excretion, even reproduction. And why waste energy on the vast bodily reengineering of puberty if you were never going to have a child? Daughters were born in whom the ability to reproduce was postponed — or never cut in at all.

And then there was intelligence. Eusociality required a tight central organization. With the mother and her precious babies at the heart, concentric circles of childless workers served the mother and infants, constructed and maintained the colony, gathered food, fended off predators. There was no command structure. Workers picked up cues from those around them and acted accordingly, and out of this network of endless local interactions the global structure of the colony as a whole emerged. This was emergence: from simple rules, applied at a local level and with some feedback, large-scale structures could emerge.

Minds were not necessary for this. Indeed, it was better not to know what was going on globally; the colony, emergent from everybody’s small-scale actions, simply worked more effectively that way.

Better not to know that you were in a hive.

Alia gazed at the swimming mothers. “All this in half a million years. What will they become in five million years — or fifty, or five hundred?”

Reath said, “Up to now no human hive has become more closely integrated than a colonial organism. But the evolutionary process has barely begun. Alia, in a sense you are a hive! You are a composite of perhaps a hundred trillion cells, each of them one of several hundred different specialist types — muscle, blood, nervous. You are the ultimate outcome of an evolutionary decision of the ancestors of your cells, which were once individual entities, to cooperate some six hundred million years ago… I suppose there is no limit to the integration which is possible with time.” He shook his head. “The end result is unimaginable.”

“I don’t understand why we’re here.”

“Alia, hives are repulsive things. But they are useful.”