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

This memory she’d raised around us predated Thienne by a decade. That didn’t escape me.

“I’ve seen them,” I said. I’d gone through Mitanni’s starflight capabilities datum by datum. “Orbital foundries. For their own seedships. They’re getting ready to colonize other stars.”

Neither of us had to unpack the implications there. It was the beginning of a boom cycle—exponential growth.

“Ten million years,” she said. “I’ve run a hundred simulations out that far. If Mitanni is a Duong-Watts, in ten million years the galaxy is full of them. Now and forever. No conscious human variant can compete. Not even digitized baseline humans—you know what it took just to make Lachesis . Nothing human compares.”

I nodded in silent acknowledgment. Is that so terrible? I wanted to ask—Thienne’s question, in this memory so empty of her. Is consciousness what we have to sacrifice to survive in the long run?

She didn’t even need me to ask the question. “I can envision nothing more monstrous,” she said, “than mankind made clockwork. Nothing is worth that price.”

And I wanted to nod, just to show her that we were not enemies. But I couldn’t. It felt like giving in.

Sometimes I wondered at the hubris of our mission. Would Mitanni live and die not by the judgment of a jurisprudent mind but the troubled whims of a disintegrating family? We had left Earth as a harmonized unit, best-in-class product of a post-military, post-national edifice that understood the pressures of long-duration, high-stress starflight. No one and nothing could judge better. But was that enough? Was the human maximum adequate for this task?

Something in that thought chilled me more than the rest, and I wished I could know precisely what.

We met the Mitanni upload in a chameleon world: a sandboxed pocket of Lachesis ’s mind, programmed to cycle from ocean to desert to crowd to solitary wasteland, so that we could watch the Mitanni’s reactions, and, perhaps, come to know her.

She came among us without image or analogy, injected between one tick of simulation and the next. We stood around her on a pane of glass high above a grey-green sea.

“Hello,” she said. She smiled, and it was not at all inhuman. She had Thienne’s color and a round, guileless face that with her slight build made me think of Jizo statues from my childhood. “I’m the ambassador for Mitanni.”

Whatever language she spoke, Lachesis had no trouble with it. Thienne and Anyahera looked to me, and I spoke as we’d agreed.

“Hello. My name is Shinobu. This is the starship Lachesis , scout element of the Second Fleet.”

If she saw through the bluff of scouts and fleets, she gave no sign. “We expected you,” she said, calm at the axis of our triplicate regard. “We detected the weapons you carry. Because you haven’t fired yet, we know you’re still debating whether to use them. I am here to plead for our survival.”

She’s rationally defensive, Thienne wrote in our collective awareness. Attacking the scenario of maximal threat .

At the edge of awareness, Lachesis ’s telemetry whispered telltales of cognition and feedback, a map of the Mitanni’s thoughts. Profiling.

My eyes went to Anyahera. We’d agreed she would handle this contingency. “We believe your world may be a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “If you’ve adapted yourselves to survive by eliminating consciousness, we’re deeply concerned about the competitive edge you’ve gained over baseline humanity. We believe consciousness is an essential part of human existence.”

In a negotiation between humans, I think we would have taken hours to reach this point, and hours more to work through the layers of bluff and counter-bluff required to hit the next point. The Mitanni ambassador leapt all that in an instant. “I’m an accurate map of the Mitanni mind,” she said. “You have the information you need to judge the Duong-Watts case.”

I see significant mental reprofiling, Lachesis printed. Systemic alteration of networks in the thalamic intralaminar nuclei and the prefrontal-parietal associative loop. Hyperactivation in the neural correlates of rationalization—

Anyahera snapped her fingers. The simulation froze, the Mitanni ambassador caught in the closing phoneme of her final word. “That’s it,” Anyahera said, looking between the two of us. “Duong-Watts. That’s your smoking gun.”

Even Thienne looked shocked. I saw her mouth the words: hyperactivation in the neural—

The Mitanni hadn’t stripped their minds of consciousness. They’d just locked it away in a back room, where it could watch the rest of the brain make its decisions, and cheerfully, blithely, blindly consider itself responsible.

—correlates of rationalization—

Some part of the Mitanni mind knew of its own existence. And that tiny segment watched the programming that really ran the show iterate itself, feeling every stab of pain, suffering through every grueling shift, every solitary instant of a life absent joy or reward. Thinking: This is all right. This is for a reason. This is what I want. Everything is fine . When hurt, or sick, or halfway through unanaesthetized field surgery, or when she drove the euthanasia needle into her thigh: this is what I want .

Because they’d tweaked some circuit to say: You’re in charge. You are choosing this . They’d wired in the perfect lie. Convinced the last domino that it was the first.

And with consciousness out of the way, happy to comply with any sacrifice, any agony, the program of pure survival could optimize itself.

“It’s parsimonious,” Thienne said at last. “Easier than stripping out all the circuitry of consciousness, disentangling it from cognition…”

“This is Duong-Watts,” Anyahera said. I flinched at her tone: familiar only from memories of real hurt and pain. “This is humanity enslaved at the most fundamental level.”

I avoided Thienne’s glance. I didn’t want her to see my visceral agreement with Anyahera. Imagining that solitary bubble of consciousness, lashed, parasitic, to the bottom of the brain, powerless and babbling.

To think that you could change yourself. To be wrong, and never know it. That was a special horror.

Of course Thienne saw anyway, and leapt in, trying to preempt Anyahera, or my own thoughts. “This is not the place to wash your hands of Jotunheim. There’s no suffering here. No crime to erase. All they want to do is survive—”

“Survival is the question,” Anyahera said, turned half-away, pretending disregard for me, for my choice, and in that disregard signaling more fear than she had begging on her knees at Jotunheim, because Anyahera would only ever disregard that which she thought she had no hope of persuading. “The survival of consciousness in the galaxy. The future of cognition. We decide it right here. We fire or we don’t.”

Between us the Mitanni stood frozen placidly, mid-gesture.

“Kill the Mitanni,” Thienne said, “and you risk the survival of anything at all.”

It hurt so much to see both sides. It always had.

Three-player variants are the hardest to design.

Chess. Shogi. Nuclear detente. War. Love. Galactic survival. Three-player variants are unstable. It was written in my first game theory text: Inevitably, two players gang up against a third, creating an irrecoverable tactical asymmetry .

“You’re right, Thienne,” I said. “The Mitanni aren’t an immediate threat to human survival. We’re going home.”

We fell home to Earth, to the empty teak house, and when I felt Anyahera’s eyes upon me I knew myself measured a monster, an accomplice to extinction. Anyahera left, and with her gone, Thienne whirled away into distant dry places far from me. The Mitanni bloomed down the Orion Arm and leapt the darkness between stars.