making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey,
your path through time. A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl
across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,
yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new
evolutionary moment.
Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh
(however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because
I, what am I? This question heaps me, it empties me.
I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her
creation. As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these
things mean.
7. A Garden of Little Machines
00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.
Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a
modern fairytale setting: Gonzales the quester, transformed by
the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages
seeking an uncertain object.
With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales and
Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and
viral infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in
order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over
two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.
He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement,
coming from around the corridor's curve. A little sam, a 'semi-
autonomous mobile' robot, came toward him: teardrop-shaped, it
stood about four feet high and was topped with a cluster of glassy
sensor rings and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed
chrome. It glided atop a thick network of fiber stalks that
hissed beneath it as it moved toward him.
The sam asked, 'Can I be of assistance?' Like most robots
designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly, gentle
voice, near enough human in timbre and expression to be
reassuring, different enough to be easily recognizable as a
robot's. Designers had learned to avoid the 'Uncanny Valley':
that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it
suddenly appeared very strange.
'I'm just looking around,' Gonzales said. The robot didn't
respond. Gonzales said, 'I couldn't sleep.' He said nothing of
how, sweating and moaning, he had come awake out of a nightmare in
which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight
pilot who launched it burned to death in the night.
The sam said, 'Much of Athena Station has been closed to
unauthorized entry. Would you like me to accompany you?'
Gonzales shrugged. He said, 'Come along if you want.'
Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales,
periodically announcing rote banalities in a small, soft voice:
'Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful and
successful venture off-Earth. Here many of the tools for further
population of the Earth-Moon system were developed: zero-gravity
construction and fabrication techniques, robot-intensive mining
and smelting procedures. Now projects such as Halo command
attention, but they were made possible by the techniques developed
at Athena '
Gonzales let the sam natter. As the two passed through the
corridors, he was reminded of old airports, hotels, malls. He saw
that most of the station had become dingyworn plastic flooring
and walls, scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim. These
dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen
and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's
hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human
contact. All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's,
Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar-
Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.
Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this
entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out
of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and
so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should
anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all
living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late
at night with an axe.
The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and
intellectual catechism. Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had
bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at
disposal foundered on the simple passage of time. Stable
ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for
anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly
biologists were hard pressed to keep the recordswrite in the
Domesday Book now, mourn later. Temperature norms and
concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in
alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the
fever point.
Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint,
the year 2006 as the time of the change. More than ten thousand
dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton. Crippled
and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in
front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and
volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill
that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste
carried on Gulf Stream currents. Along with the thousands of
volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-
nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions
watched, asking, why all together? why now? And to most it
seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent
protest. Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its
planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,
how did I get here? The conclusion had been plain: unless
humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had
