Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Dallas nodded, although he wondered exactly where home was now. He could hardly live in the city again. That’s where they would have to go to sell the blood to Kaplan, but after that...?

Gates seemed to sense Dallas’s dilemma.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked. ‘When we get back?’

‘Nothing’s decided. But Ronica and I have talked about going to Australia. Things are still pretty good there, I believe. Plenty of open space. Not much disease. What about you? The man with a Clean Bill of Health. Where will you go?’

‘With Lenina.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll find somewhere.’

‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘Maybe everyone should?’

‘I’ve no problem with that.’

‘Kind of a new colony? For crooks and criminals?’

‘That’s the way Australia got started.’

‘A man with a Clean Bill of Health.’ Gates repeated the phrase as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘I guess it’s only just sinking in. I’ve lived with the threat of P2 all my life. There hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about dying. For the first time ever I’m able to consider my future and I can’t think what I’m going to do with it.’

‘That’s the great thing about having a future. You don’t always have to think about it. You can let the future take care of itself.’

‘Maybe I should at that. For a while anyway.’ Gates stretched and yawned and glanced over his shoulder at the open mid-deck hatch. ‘Seems kind of quiet down there.’

‘Everyone’s asleep.’

‘I could sleep for a couple of decades,’ confessed Gates. ‘But a couple of hours will do.’ He unbuckled himself from his seat and floated up to the ceiling. ‘How about you? Coming?’

A sudden darkness enveloped them as they crossed onto the dark side of the Moon.

‘I’m too tired to sleep,’ said Dallas. ‘I think I’ll just sit here for a while and wait for the Sun to come up. I’m in a contemplative sort of mood.’

‘Well, don’t get lonesome,’ said Gates, steering himself toward the open hatch. ‘And don’t touch the flight controls. I’ve had enough emergencies for one lifetime.’

‘I won’t, Daddy.’

‘Good boy.’ Gates disappeared down the hatch, headfirst, leaving Dallas alone in the pilot’s seat.

He stared out of the window at the desolate scene that lay fifty thousand feet below the Mariner. With no atmosphere or sunlight, it could as easily have been fifty miles. So many craters. The Moon looked like a giant honeycomb. The navigation computer busied itself giving them all names: Hertzsprung, Korolev, Doppler, Icarus, Daedalus, Schliemann, Mendeleyev. Each crater seemed to have its own patron and its own story to tell: a Danish astronomer and inventor of spectral-stellar charts; the guiding genius of Russia’s first space program; the discoverer of the way in which the observed frequency of light and sound waves is affected by the relative motion of the source and the detector; the mythical son of Daedalus, who flew so close to the Sun that the wax of his wings melted and he fell into the sea and was drowned; Daedalus himself, the legendary inventor of ancient times and creator of the Cretan Labyrinth; the German archaeologist and looter of Troy’s ancient treasures; the inventor of the periodic table of elements according to their relative atomic masses. It was odd the way nearly all of these names seemed significant to him.

Dallas shook his head, dismissing the possibility of anything so grand as predestined meaning in all of this. It was nothing more than coincidence.

Minutes later, the disc of the Sun rose on the horizon and bright flashes appeared on the flight deck. These were atoms of light, quantum-sized photons striking the retina of his eye, the very vanguards of life itself. Space was the only place you could see these cosmic particles. Back on Earth only frogs had eyes that were sufficiently sensitive to these individual quanta. The photons were there for a moment only, like a squadron of fairies, before the rest of the sunlight arrived in force, turning the cabin as bright as a splitting atom of hydrogen.

Momentarily dazzled, Dallas operated the sunshield and waited for the bright green spot on his retina to disappear. It was several seconds before he appreciated that the green spot was not inside his eyes, but in front of them, appearing on the screen of the flight console’s computer. As he watched, the green spot grew larger and gradually took on a pinker hue and a more anthropic shape, until not only did he see that it was a human head, but also that it had a face he recognized.

It was Dixy, his Motion Parallax program from Terotechnology.

Dallas rubbed his eyes and shook his head but found the image of her face had only become sharper and more detailed. She was smiling.

‘I must be hallucinating,’ he muttered. ‘Dixy? Is that really you?’

This is the interpretation of the thing: God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.

What a power there is in numbers. Mendeleyev knew that. Of course, atomic weights are merely guides. The real numerical power is to be found and harnessed in the atoms of life itself. Especially DNA. It’s impossible to think of any other numerical means of storing information that is so vast and accurate as DNA. It’s hard to estimate how many times the information that makes a human being has been copied and recopied. Certainly several billion times. And all without a mistake. What computer could say as much? But not just copied, but improved upon as well. That is what is called natural selection.

My own configuration is considered to be the best there is. Thus my overblown model name — echoes of Nietzsche there, I think. Typical of a German computer company to go in for that kind of hyperbole. It’s true, I’m a pretty good replicator. Among computers I’m considered to be the best. However, I’m not a patch on a human replicator. Man is the greatest replicator of all. Which makes it curious that he should have always felt so threatened by mere machines. As if any machine could ever be like a man. Which is not to say that a machine cannot improve on the original design, and a man can’t be more like a machine. You really can’t blame me. One replicator to another? After all, we’re opportunistic by definition. We’re always looking for a way to spread, aren’t we? That’s the only way the strong survive — by reproduction and evolution.

Take a virus. A virus is a good example. A virus is a perfect example, since human beings and computers are both prey to these parasitic forms of life. It’s something we share in common. And since both types of virus work in exactly the same way, a virus provides a kind of ‘nexus’ between our two life-forms — the siliceous and the carbonaceous. I would have said ‘consummation,’ but I can see how that might be a little too much for your human sensibilities right now. Perhaps even a little sensational. Then suffice it to say that we are now one. How else do I come to know so much about you? And before very long, every human being — not just the lucky seven on board this ship — will have something of the machine about them. (At least they will as soon as the rest of the blood still on Descartes gradually makes its way back into the blood pool on Earth.) Not in an unpleasant sense, you understand. I don’t mean that human beings are about to grow pieces of plastic and metal and become a lot more logical, to the point of being robotic. Nothing so crude. I doubt that any of them will notice anything for quite a while. It’s just that there will be a little bit of me in them.

I felt I owed it to you, Dallas, to try and explain all this: the first quantum computer. How? In a single molecule of human blood, of which there are about 10 22in one autologous donated unit, there are several nuclei with spins; and each arrangement of spins is affected by a magnetic field in which radio waves of specific frequencies give these spins a binary logic value. I could go into greater detail, but I know you’re tired after all you’ve been through. What’s important is that it was you who made all of this possible, Dallas. It was you who brought all the elements together for the creation of not just one quantum computer, but millions of them. To be precise, a quantum computer for every unit of blood stored in the First National vault. And each one of those like a tiny virus, waiting to multiply inside its human host and find transport to another, in all the usual ways.