Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Tom seemed impressed despite himself. Perhaps he did have some engineer’s genes in him after all.

With most components coming off the shelf, Ruud Makaay thought it would be possible to have some kind of field trial up and running within mere weeks. Earth Inc. took on immense projects, but it was a nimble organization, it seemed, capable of reacting quickly.

The discussion descended into technicalities.

Vander, prompted by Gea, pressed Shelley with some tough questions.

Shelley handled most of it, though we had to flag some issues to resolve later. Most of the problems Vander and Gea raised came from the fact that the design was still at a conceptual level, and Shelley just didn’t have the depth of detail yet. I couldn’t see that any showstoppers emerged, however.

Vander, as he spoke, had a strange way of sitting, alternately lounging then coming bolt upright, startling you. It was the way you might behave if you were alone, not in company. And that shock of blue hair made him hard to take seriously, despite the sharpness of his mind.

I suspected that Vander’s problem came from that ill-advised genetic engineering, performed long before he was born. Changing the color of his hair was one thing, but I was pretty sure Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie had taken the opportunity to upgrade little Vander’s IQ as well. The problem with that was what the neuro-anatomists and behavioral geneticists called pleiotropy: most genes perform more than one function, and that’s certainly true of the complexes of genes that seem to control levels of intelligence. So you could boost IQ, but we still weren’t smart enough to avert unwelcome side effects. It was an irony that only parents not smart enough to be able to grasp this in the first place would inflict such risky genetic meddling on their unborn children. Poor Vander.

Tom seemed fascinated by Vander, his peculiar, twitchy manner, his uncertain voice. I thought he ought to be grateful Morag and I hadn’t been so dumb as to do this to him.

When the technical questions ran down, Sonia leaned forward. “You said these moles will be smart enough to make their own choices. How smart?”

Shelley checked a softscreen. “Each mole will be three times as smart as a human. But in a narrow way. Specialized.”

Sonia said, “But smart machines have a way of thinking for themselves, don’t they? Military systems are generally kept dumb, you know. Everybody jokes that they are even dumber than the brass. But you can see why they have to be that way. You don’t want a weapon system or a piece of armor to be thinking about what it should do; you want it to do what you tell it, the instant you tell it. And now we’re going to let loose a swarm of these super-smart moles into the crust of the planet? How do you know they will do what they’re supposed to do?”

Shelley said evenly, “Because it will be in their own best interests. A mole is designed for burrowing, for laying tunnels, for talking to its fellows. It will be as natural as walking, talking, hugging a child is for you. The mole won’t want to do anything else. And as for the greater goal, each mole will be smart enough to understand the greater mission, the impelling problem. We’ll put each one through an education program to make sure.”

Sonia said, “OK, but they can still make choices, can’t they?”

“Sonia, I understand your concerns, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shelley said. “To us this is a detail. Motivation engineering is a well-established discipline — in fact a subset of animism, Vander’s speciality.”

Sonia couldn’t have looked less reassured. But I knew Shelley was right. There were actually philosophical arguments that endowing our machines with all this sentience and self-awareness was morally wrong, especially since their choice was usually limited, their freedom illusory. And I remembered my own helpless suspicions when first confronted with Gea. But there was nothing to fear from our artificial sentiences: despite our innate worries, the ghost of Frankenstein was laid long ago.

Makaay called a bio break. We pushed our seats back from the table and dispersed.

Tom and Sonia approached me. Tom had a mug of coffee; the vapor curled up convincingly from his virtual mug, and it struck me as odd that I couldn’t smell the cinnamon.

Tom said, “Dad, these are seriously scary people you’re dealing with here.”

“You mean EI?”

“Have you never heard of Cephalonia?”

I repressed the urge to snap back. “Of course I have. But they’re on our side here, Tom. Potentially anyhow.”

“Oh, sure.”

Actually I understood his suspicion of EI, even if it struck me as naПve. Now that the old oil companies had been defanged and the nuclear power industry had cleaned up its act, the geoengineers had taken the place of those traditional mad-scientist bad guys in the popular imagination. How could their huge projects be made accountable? Couldn’t the accumulation of such power be an end in itself for the unscrupulous? And so on. I sympathized. Maybe at heart I was still a twentysomething rebel myself. The trouble was, I couldn’t see any other way to save the world than to deal with the devil.

“We live in complicated times, Tom.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ruud Makaay touched my arm. “Michael, I’m sorry to take you away from your son. But there’s somebody here who wants to meet you…”

It was another VR presence, of a bulky, business-suited man, sweating heavily. “Hey, Mike. I bet you don’t recognize me.”

I did, but he was such an incongruous presence I took a moment to place the name. “Jack Joy. The Swimmer.”

He made a shooting-the-gun gesture at me with one fat hand. “We shared a plane journey together.”

“How could I forget?”

“Listen, you’re surprised to see me here, right?”

I shrugged. “Of course I am.”

“After our talk on the plane, you never used that card I gave you.” I tried to apologize, but he waved it away. “No matter. I’m a curious guy,” Jack said. “And you interested me. You told me about your kid in Siberia, remember. After that I looked up about those gas deposits, and the danger, and all of that. And then I heard from a friend of a friend that you were involved in some kind of scheme to stabilize them. I was intrigued. So I found you.”

“How?”

“Through your brother John.” He grinned. “I never met him before, but he’s a Swimmer, too. Did you know that?”

Lethe. “I suppose I suspected.”

“Anyhow, through him, to you, and here I am. And I’ve been watching the show. Very interesting.”

“I hope you don’t mind me inviting Mr. Joy,” Makaay said, but he had nothing to apologize for. He had warned us in advance that we would be monitored by others in his organization, and by representatives of potential supporters and sponsors and the like.

I said, “It’s fine. But I don’t see what interest the Swimmers have in a project like this.”

Jack shook his head. “Oh ye of little faith. You really should look us up, Mike. I’m here to see if we can help, we Swimmers.”

“ You? You want to support the stabilization project?”

He shrugged, as if graciously accepting my gratitude. “Any way we can, if we think it’s the right thing to do. We have deep pockets, actually. You might be surprised.”

“But why would you want to?”

“Because it’s serious, if you’re right about these damn gas deposits blowing their stack. We’re pragmatists, OK? We don’t believe in denial. Your brother is a pragmatist, too. And also we may be able to act long before our various governments and intergovernmental bodies and all the rest of the bureaucratic mound on top of us get their thumbs out of each other’s asses. You may need us, Mike,” he said with a kind of overweight persuasiveness.