less sure of them than we are of us. So… it’s a problem.”
“Have you taken some of them apart to see?”
“Yes. But the results are ambiguous. It’s curiously similar to trying to study our own brains-it’s the moment of thought that you want to study, but even if you can find where in the thinking mechanism the thoughts are happening, you can’t be sure what exactly is causing those thoughts, or how they are experienced from the inside. In both cases they involve quantum effects that can’t easily be tracked to a physical source or action.”
“There’s some worry that we set a bad example by doing too much of this kind of thing,” Genette added. “What if they get the idea that it’s all right for them to study us in the same way?”
Swan nodded unhappily, recalling the look in the eyes of the lawn bowler-even in the eyes of the silly girls, now that she was reconsidering them. They had had a look that said they would do almost anything. Or that they didn’t understand what they were saying.
But people had that look all the time.
“So,” Wahram said. “You see our problem. And now it’s getting more urgent, because there’s solid evidence that these qube humanoids were ordered up by other qubes-qubes in boxes or robots, or asteroid frameworks, as was usual.”
“Why would they do that?” Swan asked.
Wahram shrugged.
“Is it bad?” Swan asked, thinking it over. “I mean, they can’t band together into some kind of hive mind creature, because of decoherence. And so ultimately they’re just people with qube minds.”
“People without emotions.”
“There have always been people like that. They get by.”
Wahram squinted. “Actually, they don’t. But look, there’s more.” He looked at Genette, who said to Swan, “The attacks we’ve been investigating, on Terminator and the Ygassdril, both had a qubical involvement. Also, I had that photo you gave me of your lawn bowler couriered to Wang, and he went through his unaffiliated files, and though he couldn’t ID the bowler, he had photos that show your person at a meeting Lakshmi organized in Cleopatra in the year 2302. That’s significant, because the reports of strange behaviors began to appear throughout the system in the years right after that. When all the sightings are correlated and analyzed, they converge back in time and space to that meeting on Venus. We also find that the organization in Los Angeles that ordered the pebble-launching ship is entirely qubical, with the only humans involved located in a kind of board of directors. We also found qubes involved with the construction of the launch mechanism, which we now suspect was built in an unaffiliated shipyard trailing the Vesta group. We found the print order. There are very few humans in those particular shipyards anymore; they’re almost entirely robotic. So it’s at least possible that all this has been done by qubes, with no humans involved at all.”
“Maybe so,” Swan said, “but I have to say right now, that lawn bowler had emotion. It was burning a hole in me with its look! It wanted me to know something. Otherwise why even approach me, why make those incredible shots? It wanted me to know it was there. And desire is definitely an emotion.”
The others there considered this.
Swan went on: “Why do you think it has to be that emotions are biochemical? Couldn’t you have emotions without hormones or blood or anything? Some new affect system that is electrical, or quantum?”
Genette raised a hand as if to stop her: “We don’t know. All we can say is we don’t know what kind of intentionality they have now, because their intentions were very limited when they started. Read the input, run it through algorithms, present the output-that was AI intention before this. So now that it appears that they are intending things, we have to be on our guard. Not only on general principles, as with any new unknown thing, but because some of them are acting bizarrely, while others have already made attacks on us.”
One of the group, a Dr. Tracy, Swan seemed to recall, said, “Maybe living in humanoid bodies has made these qubes emotional by definition. Embodied mind is emotional, let us say-and now they are embodied minds.”
A woman as small as Inspector Genette stood on her chair and said, “I’m still not convinced the qubes have any higher-order thinking, including things like intentionality and emotion, which derive from consciousness itself. Despite their incredible calculating speeds, they are still operating by algorithms we gave them, or else derivable subsequent algorithms. Recursive programming can only refine these. They are simple algorithms. Consciousness is so much more complex a field than that. They can’t build from algorithms to consciousness-”
“Are you sure?” Genette interjected.
The small woman tilted her head in just the way Swan had seen Genette do it. “I think so. I don’t see how the higher levels of complexity could evolve from the algorithms they have. They can’t make metaphors; they can barely understand them. They can’t read facial expressions. In skills like these a four-year-old is vastly ahead of them, and an adult human simply a different order of being altogether.”
“This is what we were taught when we were young,” Genette said. “And more importantly, when the qubes were young.”
“But also it’s what we have studied all our lives, and seen with our own two eyes,” the small woman replied somewhat sharply. “And programmed.”
Despite these truths, no one there looked particularly comforted.
“What about the facility where these humanoids are made, or decanted or whatnot?” Wahram asked Genette. “Can we shut it down?”
“When we find it,” the inspector said grumpily.
“Could we round up all the humanoids you’ve identified?”
“I think so,” Genette said. “We’ve had to do some scrambling there, because Alex was central to this effort, and we’ve had to reestablish our team by shaking the network pretty hard. So we managed that, and the team has relinked around her absence. They have identified and are following about four hundred of these things, as I said. Our scan of the system has been fine enough that we don’t think there are any more hiding in any settlement we have access to. I can’t be positive about the unaffiliateds, but we’re looking in all of them. While we do that, we’re keeping our distance from the humanoids we have under surveillance, and they don’t seem to know they’re tagged. Very few of them act as strange as those three in the Inner Mongolia, or the one that burned up on Io. They tend to try to blend in. I don’t know how to interpret that. It’s as if they’re waiting for something. It makes me feel like we’re not seeing the whole picture, and so I don’t want to wait much longer before we act. But it would be nice to think we understood the total situation before doing so.”
Genette had been walking around on the table while speaking, and now stopped before Swan, as if making a case specifically to her: “These organisms, these qubical humanoids, exist. And in some respects their pattern of behavior so far hasn’t been what I would call sane. Some have attacked us, and we don’t know why.”
After a silence Wahram added, “So we have to act.”
Lists (15)
health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are that’s all you need
Kim Stanley Robinson
EIDGENOSSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE MOBILE
The spaceliner ETH Mobile was not a hollowed asteroid but rather one of the very large manufactured ships built in lunar orbit in the previous century. Made by Swiss universities and engineering firms that continued to operate them, they were combinations of glassy metals, bioceramics, aerogels, and water both frozen and liquid. They were extremely fast; frequent small fission explosions firing behind a pusher plate at the rear of the ship
