Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“Cognition enables an arsenal of survival strategies inaccessible to simple evolutionary selection,” she said, the words of Duong Phireak. “Foresight, planning, abstract reasoning, technological development—we can confidently say that these strategies are strictly superior, on a computational level, at maximizing individual fitness. Cognition enables the cognitive to pursue global, rather than local, goals. A population of flatworms can’t cooperate to build a rocket unless the ‘build a rocket’ allele promotes individual fitness in each generation—an unlikely outcome, given the state of flatworm engineering.”

Memory of laughter, compressed by the bandwidth of the hippocampus. I reached out for Anyahera, and she looked up and only then, following her gaze, did I recognize the sky, the aurora of Jotunheim.

“But with cognition came consciousness—an exaptative accident, the byproduct of circuits in the brain that powered social reasoning, sensory integration, simulation theaters, and a host of other global functions. So much of our civilization derived in turn from consciousness, from the ability not just to enjoy an experience but to know that we enjoy it. Consciousness fostered a suite of behaviors without clear adaptive function, but with subjective, experiential value.”

I touched Anyahera’s shoulder. She turned toward me. On the slope of her bald brow glittered the circuitry of a Jotunheim slave shunt, bridging her pleasure centers into her social program.

Of course she was smiling.

“Consciousness is expensive,” she said. “This is a problem for totalitarian states. A human being with interest in leisure, art, agency—a human being who is aware of her own self-interest—cannot be worked to maximum potential. I speak of more than simple slave labor. I am sure that many of your professors wish you could devote yourselves more completely to your studies.”

Overhead, the aurora laughed in the voices of Lagos undergraduates, and when I looked up, the sky split open along a dozen fiery fractures, relativistic warheads moving in ludicrous slow-motion, burning their skins away as they made their last descent. Lachesis’s judgment. The end I’d withheld.

“Consciousness creates inefficient behavior,” Anyahera said, her smile broad, her golden-brown skin aflame with the light of the falling apocalypse. “A techno-tyranny might take the crude step of creating slave castes who derive conscious pleasure from their functions, but this system is fundamentally inadequate, unstable. The slave still expends caloric and behavioral resources on being conscious ; the slave seeks to maximize its own pleasure, not its social utility. A clever state will go one step further and eliminate the cause of these inefficiencies at the root. They will sever thought from awareness.

“This is what I call the Duong-Watts malignancy. The most efficient, survivable form of human civilization is a civilization of philosophical zombies. A nation of the unconscious, those who think without knowing they exist, who work with the brilliance of our finest without ever needing to ask why. Their cognitive abilities are unimpaired—enhanced, if anything—without constant interference. I see your skepticism; I ask you to consider the ano-sognosia literature, the disturbing information we have assembled on the architecture of the sociopathic mind, the vast body of evidence behind the deflationary position on the Hard Problem.

“We are already passengers on the ship of self. It is only a matter of time until some designer, pressed for time and resources, decides to jettison the hitchhiker. And the rewards will be enormous—in a strictly Darwinian sense.”

When I reached for her, I think I wanted to shield her, somehow, to put myself between her and the weapons. It was reflex, and I knew it was meaningless, but still… .

Usually in dreams you wake when you die. But I felt myself come apart.

Ten light-hours out from Mitanni’s star, falling through empty realms of ice and hydrogen, we slammed into a wall of light—the strobe of a lighthouse beacon orbiting Mitanni. “Pulse-compressed burst maser,” Lachesis told me, her voice clipped as she dissected the signal. “A fusion-pumped flashbulb.”

Lachesis’s forward shield reflected light like a wall of diamond—back toward the star, toward Mitanni. In ten hours they would see us.

We argued over what to do. Anyahera wanted to launch our relativistic kill vehicles now, so they’d strike Mitanni just minutes after the light of our approach, before the colonists could prepare any response. Thienne, of course, dissented. “Those weapons were meant to be used when we were certain! Only then!”

I voted with Thienne. I knew the capabilities of our doomsday payload with the surety of reflex. We had the safety of immense speed, and nothing the Mitanni could do, no matter how sophisticated, could stop our weapons—or us. We could afford to wait, and mull over our strategy.

After the vote, Anyahera brushed invisible lint from the arm of her couch. “Nervous?” I asked, probing where I probably shouldn’t have. We still hadn’t spoken in private.

She quirked her lips sardonically. “Procrastination,” she said, “makes me anxious.”

“You’re leaping to conclusions,” Thienne insisted, pacing the perimeter of the command commons. Her eyes were cast outward, into the blue-shifted stars off our bow. “We can’t know it’s a Duong-Watts malignant. Statistical correlation isn’t enough. We have to be sure. We have to understand the exact mechanism.”

It wasn’t the same argument she’d made to me.

“We don’t need to be sure.” Anyahera had finished with the invisible lint. “If there’s any reasonable chance this is a Duong-Watts, we are morally and strategically obligated to wipe them out. This is why we are here . It doesn’t matter how they did it—if they did it, they have to go.”

“Maybe we need to talk to them,” I said.

They both stared at me. I was the first one to laugh. We all felt the absurdity there, in the idea that we could, in a single conversation, achieve what millennia of philosophy had never managed—find some way to pin down the spark of consciousness by mere dialogue. Qualia existed in the first person.

But twenty hours later—nearly three days at the pace of Lachesis ’s racing simulation clock—that was suddenly no longer an abstract problem. Mitanni’s light found us again: not a blind, questing pulse, but a microwave needle, a long clattering encryption of something at once unimaginably intricate and completely familiar.

They didn’t waste time with prime numbers or queries of intent and origin. Mitanni sent us an uploaded mind, a digital ambassador.

Even Thienne agreed it would be hopelessly naïve to accept the gift at face value, but after Lachesis dissected the upload, ran its copies in a million solipsistic sandboxes, tested it for every conceivable virulence—we voted unanimously to speak with it, and see what it had to say.

Voting with Anyahera felt good. And after we voted, she started from her chair, arms upraised, eyes alight. “They’ve given us the proof,” she said. “We can—Thienne, Shinobu, do you see?”

Thienne lifted a hand to spider her fingers against an invisible pane. “You’re right,” she said, lips pursed. “We can.”

With access to an uploaded personality, the digital fact of a Mitanni brain, we could compare their minds to ours. It would be far from a simple arithmetic hunt for subtraction or addition, but it would give us an empirical angle on the Duong-Watts problem.

Anyahera took me aside, in a space as old as our friendship, the khaya mahogany panels and airy glass of our undergraduate dorm. “Shinobu,” she said. She fidgeted as she spoke, I think to jam her own desire to reach for me. “Have you seen what they’re building in orbit?”