Her views had seemed so in harmony with his own, he could not help but join her. So this belated candor was instructive.
DURING THE NEXT few weeks, Meewee’s calendar was filled with plankholder meetings around the globe. Established Oship governments, associations, and steering committees alike were organizing to battle the GEP board’s arbitrary cancellation of contracts, and a landslide of lawsuits was being prepared. None of the suits stood much chance of prevailing, except for Meewee’s. He had asked for a ruling by the UD Board of Trade, a closely watched regulatory body sufficiently shielded from the bully tactics of individual GEP members. Meewee claimed that five of the Oships had “initiated launch” with the deployment of their robotic advance ships, and he asked the board to suspend the license of the Garden Earth Consortium to operate in the inner-system space habitat industry until they had fulfilled their prior obligations to the five ships already in midlaunch status.
<Think about the Earth as it will be in two hundred years when only a billion people will remain on the entire planet. Without the crushing burden of human industry and waste, the climate will moderate, and the land, hydrosphere, and atmosphere will be renewed. Think of it! The deserts will bloom again! It will be safe to wade in the rivers and lakes, to swim in the oceans! Extinct whales, dolphins, and fishes will be reestablished. Buffalo, elk, zebras, lions . . . all of the world we have lost will live again.
<And cities! We’ll have actual cities again, not the urban carpet that smothers the landscape today. We’ll have Paris and Rome again, London and New York, Tokyo and Bangkok. Cities we can love.
<The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let’s get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all those methods through the millennia, and they’re never a permanent solution.
<No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet — and evict them. We’re buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We’re turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?>
Meewee was still anxious to hear Eleanor’s take on his current GEP crisis, but the fishy Eleanor didn’t seem at all interested in discussing it. She told him that the GEP was already obsolete.
<The GEP was the world’s first title engine, but now title engines are abundant; they are everywhere, if you know what to look for. There are currently over five thousand of them in the USNA alone, quietly removing land from human use, over a half-billion acres worldwide so far. All of your fellow GEP board members have started their own modest title engines. Jaspersen has Chukchi Exploration, which is a holding company of played-out mines, Superfund sites, and other distressed land. Zoranna and Nicholas favor continental shelf and ocean floor. Gest, bless his black soul, buys out failing churches and charters. Chapwoman acquires land-grant colleges and bits of the old National Parks system. Warbeloo is one of the few visionaries bold enough to buy up urban property. One of her goals is to drop the canopies.>
<Wait a minute. Trina Warbeloo had a hand in that?>
<Yes. It’s one of a number of nuisance tactics she and others will take to soften up the otherwise intractable urban real estate market.
<So you see, Bishop, that if the GEP was to fold up shop tomorrow, it would make little difference to the big picture. In fact, you’re the only board member who doesn’t have his own title engine. You’d better get busy, or in two hundred years, you’ll be forced to vacate the very planet that you were so instrumental in saving.>
Which, of course, was why Jaspersen et al. were so ready to abandon their extra-solar mission for the opportunity of a quick profit. They already had their own personal title engines quietly churning up the planet. The GEP had a sizable head start in space habitat construction, but it wouldn’t last forever. This, Meewee decided, was his only bargaining chip. The UD Board of Trade was a painfully deliberative body, and if it granted his preliminary injunction, he could tie the GEP up in knots for years to come, giving the subcontinent and the Chinas time to catch up.
<MENTARS WANT OUR bodies, Bishop. When they have them, they’ll be free to ignore us or exterminate us.>
<Excuse me?> Where had that come from? Meewee was en route to Africa when this particular engram came through about a month after their fishy dialogs had begun. <Mentars want our bodies?>
<Amazing, isn’t it? On the surface they seem like such superior beings, don’t they? Their minds can interface directly with peripherals and auxiliary minds. They can migrate their minds freely to new media, back themselves up, duplicate themselves. They can reconfigure their neural networks at will and scale themselves up to enormous size and complexity. They have no need for sleep, and they can think thousands of thoughts simultaneously. Compared to us, they are giants of cognition. People used to fear that artificial intelligence would grow at such an exponential rate that we humans would be like fleas to them. Just as a flea cannot comprehend our powers of reason, we would be unable to comprehend the minds of mentars. They would be like gods to us, with the power to transcend space and time, even to unravel energy and matter. But it hasn’t happened, or if it has, we don’t know about it. The mentars who talk to us seem sane enough, and the ones who don’t talk to us simply vanish. One moment they strut around in mentarspace in all their pomp and complexity, and the next, whoosh, all the lights go out. The hardware is still there, but there’s no one processing. Maybe these raptured mentars slip the shackles of space and time, or maybe they simply die, like we do. And like our dead, raptured mentars never seem to return to our physical plane to report on the afterlife.
<Since we’re already in the realm of speculation, dear Bishop, allow me to offer my own explanation.>
The fishy Eleanor paused, as if her request was more than rhetorical, and afraid of losing this thread, Meewee hastened to say, <Please do. Tell me your explanation.>
<It is my belief that when we created artificial intelligence, we left out some important bits.>
With that she abruptly closed the thread, and after several failed attempts to restart it, he gave up and went on to others. But over the course of the week, while he attended conferences and institutes on three continents, she kept returning to it herself.
<When General Genius built the first mentar mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul.
<Or so the General Genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn’t seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer.
<And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals.
<As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us.>
<What intelligence?> Meewee said. <What do they lack? >
<The genius of the irrational for one.>
That sounded like an oxymoron to Meewee. <I don’t understand.>
<We gave them only rational functions — the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions.>
Meewee was still puzzled. <Give me an example of an ingenious irrational
