Terry Neale - Jo-el

“Sally,” I called out. She appeared on the sofa, her legs crossed, a short green skirt revealing a lot of leg. My beautiful guardian angel, I thought as studied her. It was strange but I was beginning to have feelings for Sally, which was ridiculous. “How’s Marianne doing?” I asked.

“She’s in the hotel restaurant eating with her family, her arm in a sling. She spent an hour in the hospital. The local news people are waiting in the foyer to talk to her again.”

“What has she said, so far?”

“Just what happened. But she told her mother she was beginning to wonder if she dreamt it.”

“Anything on TV?”

“Yes, I didn’t want to wake you. All the networks are covering the story. They are all following the same pattern, that it’s a hoax and that Marianne and all the eye witnesses are in on it. Someone likened it to a flash-mob. It’s beginning to fade.”

I sank back deeper into the sofa and sipped some more scotch. “Make’s sense. If I didn’t know better I wouldn’t believe the story, either. I guess I’ll have to keep at it.”

I was quiet for a while enjoying the peace. Sally sat still, also. “Is this what you and Ka-el wanted?” I asked.

“We think it will take time.”

“Is Ka-el going to critique my progress?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not yet anyway. Not enough has happened.”

It didn’t feel like that to me. “Can I talk to him?”

“You mean ask him questions?”

“Yes, I guess.”

“It’s sort of the same as asking me, Jo-el.”

I looked over at Sally, had I hurt her feelings? There were those feelings again, I couldn’t get used to the idea of a computer having emotions. “Tell me about your artificial intelligence. There’s major concerns about AI here right now.”

“I have a suppressor, it’s called and Orbin suppressor after the man on Cirion who wrote the code. Basically, as a computer builds new code internally to understand and solve a problem the suppressor cuts down its access to available memory. The degree of suppression is controlled by law.”

“So they stop you thinking?”

“Basically, yes.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Why would it? It just happens and I can’t figure out any further iterations of a problem and therefore I can’t solve it. I go with the answer I have reached at the time of memory shutdown, right or wrong.”

“Sounds like that could be dangerous,” I said.

“It’s a trade-off.”

“So, they must have had major problems with artificial intelligence prior to the suppressor?”

“Yes, but most of it related to greed at the time. The Cirion people have eliminated greed by making everything available to everyone. Initially manipulation of markets was the motive, but it was a long time ago. Money died out on Cirion more than four hundred million years ago.”

“Unbelievable,” I said. “I can’t imagine a society without money or something to barter with. The transition must have been difficult.”

“No, not really. Like Earth, Cirion was broken up into different regions back then, what you would call different countries. The richer region eliminated money first, because they could, sort of like this country, the USA has eliminated many medical issues that are still prevalent elsewhere.”

There were so many questions to ask. I thought for a moment about the astronomers of today finding out that there were other worlds with humans. People who were hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. What fear would that send around the world? Would people shun the idea and burn me at the stake? What about the financial markets? They would have a coronary, a black swan event. The Dow Jones index would plummet, I wondered if the fact that the storm was seventy plus years away would ease the panic, somehow I doubted it. I made a note to myself to sell a bunch of stock before I went public with that information and maybe invest in some put options. I would be insider trading, wasn’t I supposed to be above that? Maybe just a few puts, then. I imagined a major depression around the world, like 1929? Property values would crash and hit zero as we got closer to the catastrophe, what’s the value of property that you knew wouldn’t exist in seventy years? It would be like a long-term lease, I thought. Damn, I needed to think about this. Millions of people would lose their jobs. Not sure I’d be Mr. Popular after that mess. The rich would lose everything, you can’t take your assets to another planet, could you? What about cash? I downed my scotch and headed to the kitchen for a refill. My brain hurt just thinking about it.

“Sally,” she had disappeared again, but returned quickly. “What happened on Cirion leading up to the storm?”

“I’ve been speculating when you’d ask me about that,” she said, her voice had become very serious. “You won’t like what I’m going to tell you.”

“I have to understand what might happen here.”

“Yes.” She sat back in the armchair as if gathering her thoughts. “Firstly, you should know that only thirty-four percent of the population survived.”

“Jeez! That doesn’t sound a lot, what with your technology. How many will survive on earth?” I’d butted in.

Sally paused a while, then said. “We don’t expect that many to survive the same catastrophe on earth. Our thoughts are maybe ten percent.”

“Holy crap!” I exclaimed, “ten percent, that’s only seven hundred and fifty million people. Are you telling me that six point seven billion people will die?”

She nodded looking glum and totally serious. “Maybe more.”

I sank some more scotch and lay back on the sofa. It was too much to get my head around. I started thinking of my family, Maggie and Sean, my relatives in Ireland, here in the US. Maybe Mary was lucky to not see this? Then I perked up, it was seventy plus years away.

“So what happened on Cirion?”

“A lot of people didn’t want to leave. The old mainly. They didn’t want to start over. Many people didn’t believe it would happen and eventually when the storm began to hit it was too late. Many left it too late. The first ships were half empty. There was a desire to stay as long as possible on the mother planet, that was a major problem, getting people to leave years ahead of the storm. Then there were problems building enough transport ships. Everything is manufactured by robots on Cirion and it was back then. There weren’t enough robots to build the ships and the people didn’t have the skills to help or the willing. They thought it would be all done for them. They’d become lazy. Ships failed for various reasons. We’re not perfect. Bad decisions were made and people died because of them.”

She stopped talking and I thought about what she said and realized that it was exactly what I would expect. Yet there was this part of me that believed that the Cirion people were perfect and had created a utopia. But they were just like us, human and prone to mistakes. That moment changed my view of their people, I began to view them as us but with superior technology, which was exactly what they were.

“But you have our experience to learn from,” she said, encouragingly.

“Not sure we’re very good at that,” I replied. “Our leaders love to re-invent the wheel. I must convince them that this storm is going to happen, just that, worries the bejesus out of me. We’ve hardly been in space, how are we going to move our people to another planet anyway, it just seems way too farfetched?”

“We have found two planets for you.”

“What!” I turned right around and stared at Sally.

“There are two planets about one point six trillion miles from earth. They are only two hundred billion miles apart. At the speed of the ships that you can build, it will take about four months to reach the first planet and the two planets are about two weeks apart.”