The Quiet Pools

“I went out to watch the salmon at Bonneville Dam this morning.”

“Oh? Were they helping each other?”

“I need to know why it’s happening. I need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Keith looked cross, distracted.

“Will you talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. His tone hardened the words to a no.

Christopher chose to ignore the subtext. “Friday in Chicago. I’ll call you.”

“No,” said Keith, shaking his head. “Don’t. Maybe I’ll call you. I have to think about it. Let’s leave it at that.”

There was nothing to be gained by pushing him. “All right. We’ll leave it at that.”

“Thank you.” Eyes lowered, Keith looked as though he were unhappy with himself. “I don’t know why I called you this time.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Sure. Chris—”

“Still here.”

Keith did not look up. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, you might ask DIANNA about von Neumann machines.”

He signed off before Christopher could reply.

CHAPTER 28 —GCC— “Sweet promises were made.”

After months of working on and with the Memphis hyper, it was hard to go back to DIANNA. The sluggish query engine, the restricted cross-citations, the lack of original source texts were all painfully obvious to Christopher. But he was reluctant to use his father’s specialty accounts, and besides, Keith had pointed him specifically in that direction.

The name of Johann von Neumann was one with which Christopher had at least a passing acquaintance. In fact, it was hard to pass through any sort of technical education and not brush up against the Hungarian savant at one or more points.

In quantum theory, there was Neumann algebra with its critical analytical tools—rings of operators and continuous geometry. In economics, political science, and military strategy, von Neumann’s game theory and minimax theorem still held center stage. In theoretical mathematics, there was the von Neumann who solved Hilbert’s fifth problem and offered a persuasive proof of the ergodic hypothesis.

In computer science, von Neumann was there at the stone knives and bearskins beginning, introducing stored programs and advancing logical design in the ENIAC era. In meteorology, he anticipated the greenhouse effect in his studies of planetary heat balance. And in the history of technology, there was “Johnny” of the Manhattan Project, designing implosion lenses and solving hydrodynamic problems for Fat Man, the first plutonium bomb.

But the lead which Keith had given Christopher pointed in a different direction, to a comparatively unheralded collection of papers published a decade after von Neumann’s death. Theory of Self-reproducing Automata was a speculation on a daunting engineering challenge—the design and construction of a “universal constructor.”

Von Neumann envisioned the universal constructor as an advanced cybernetic device capable of making any sort of artifact, including a copy of itself, from the specifications programmed within it and the raw materials found without. The pattern of cross-citations showed his influence on his contemporaries.

But the citations which interested Christopher were not from von Neumann’s century, but from Christopher’s own. Fifty years ago, as the elements which would lead to the construction of Tigris were starting to reach critical mass, a weak countermovement arose.

The amorphous opposition had no coordinating focus, no political center, no activist arm. All it had was a unifying argument—presented philosophically by some advocates, pragmatically by others. The first starships should be von Neumann machines, they argued. A crewed starship was too expensive, too complex, too premature, too risky. Send machines first— ship-sized robot probes which would pave the way for starships to follow, or even take their place entirely.

Some called for a few complex “prospector” probes, which could collect and relay information which could shape later decisions. Others wanted many expendable “pathfinder” probes, which could gauge the dangers of such a journey. The most ambitious proposed “caretaker” probes, which could oversee the terraforming of one planet while dispatching their clones to do the same for other worlds.

The proposals varied, but the message was the same: Let machines be our eyes, our hands. Let them go in our stead.

Christopher saw that there had never been any real chance that the machines-first movement would carry the day. Human ambitions must be satisfied in human time frames, and none of those on the point were willing to step aside in favor of a machine or an heir. But, just as clearly, contained within this largely forgotten debate was the intellectual genesis of the Homeworld movement. It was their Federalist, their Das Kapital. The seeds of revolution.

There was a time Christopher would have welcomed the discovery. But now it was the answer to the wrong question. I need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing. Daniel must have misunderstood or been deliberately obtuse. It was not the answer he needed. In fact, it didn’t seem to be about the same thing at all.

At dusk Friday, they met on the Burnham Park levee, near the children’s playground at Thirty-third Street. Between the restless waves of Lake Michigan, the howling Chicago wind, and the screamers climbing out of Meigs Island just to the north, they had all the privacy they could ask for.

“Are you here to talk me out of something, or are you ready to help me?” Christopher asked as they started off at a slow walk along the top of the concrete barrier, known locally as the Great Wall. With global warming, Lake Michigan had risen almost a meter in the last century, swallowing the city’s beaches and forcing construction of dikes all along the waterfront.

“Did you take my suggestion?”

“It wasn’t enough.”

Keith sighed, pushing his hands deeper into his coat pockets. “What do you want to know?”

“What are you really selecting for?” It came out in a half-shout as a commuter screamer passed overhead with a roar.

Shaking his head, Keith said, “We’re not doing the selecting. Not really.”

“Who is?”

They covered another thirty meters before Keith spoke. “There are a hundred thousand genes in a mammalian cell,” he said. “A hundred thousand genes, and enough unexpressed DNA between them for a hundred thousand more. Full of fragments, copies, oncogenes, nonsense sequences that code for no known proteins, programs for traits which haven’t been needed in ten million years. It’s where tails on babies and hind legs on whales come from. A chemical library that rivals the hyper. Not a bad analogy. The hyper is everything we know. The DNA is everything we are.”

“Not everything.”

“Everything. Why is one man addicted to alcohol and another never tempted by it? Look in his cells. It’s all there. All our weaknesses. All our predispositions. Biology is destiny, Christopher. Clinical depression? Homosexuality? Look in the cells. Genius? Madness? They’re there, too. An athlete’s muscles, a musician’s ears, the poet’s heart—just different little bits of clockwork chemistry. Love? A neurochemical cycle— runs about six and a half years. Ever hear of the seven-year itch?”

“I can’t argue physiology with you,” Christopher said. “But we’re learning from the first day we’re alive. That’s part of what we are, too.”