Bergmann says there's no way to pull the plug. CAPTAIN'S body has a thousand disconnected parts, spread across land and sea and sky. The main components are in orbit, running off onboard reactors or solar power. What are we supposed to do, turn off the sun?
No off switch. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Okay, so CAPTAIN thought that I was a few hundred different species. Obviously it had a problem with boundaries. It had drawn separate lines around each type of organelle when it should have just drawn a big one around me.
So we went back to basics: many organelles, together, make up a cell; many cells, together, make tissues; tissues make organ systems; and organ systems, taken together, make one organism. One. Got that, CAPTAIN? It's the whole system that counts, not the crowd of subsystems inside it.
Now do you understand?
CAPTAIN said yes, it did. We gave it some test data to think about overnight, and went home.
Bergmann called me in first thing the next morning. "Okay, what did you geniuses do this time? CAPTAIN'S claiming that there's only twenty-one species in all of South America."
By the time I got in to work, CAPTAIN couldn't even find that many. It could only count nineteen.
"Oh, man," I groaned. Two more species disappeared as I watched.
"I've really had enough of this," Bergmann said.
"I think I can figure this out. Just listen —"
"You listen, mister. Do you have any idea how far this project has fallen behind? We've only got fifteen years to undo two centuries worth of damage, and you can't even get us past the first step. At this rate, by the time you figure out how to define life, there won't be any."
"Look, I think I can —"
"You're biologists, for crying out loud! How can you possibly not know what life is?"
I tried again. "I think I might know —"
"You're fired. You're all fired." He waved a fax under my nose: authorization from way up the food chain. "We'll do the rest of this ourselves, thank you very much."
"You can't. You don't know how."
Bergmann smiled grimly. "We can't screw up worse than you guys."
He was wrong about that, of course.
They brought us back into the loop fast enough when CAPTAIN started torching everything in sight. But now it's too late. The machine is dedicated: it's not going to back off until it's completed the mission.
But I think I know what's going on, now. I know why CAPTAIN'S burning the planet down around our ears.
It tried to define the elephant. Only there is no elephant.
An elephant is no more "complete" than a cell nucleus, or a heart. So what if it breathes, and breeds, and carries on with all the traditional activities of life?
So what if it even has its own genetic code? That means squat: take the nucleus out of the cell and it's toast. Rip the heart from the elephant and both will be dead
before they hit the ground. Cut the elephant off from oceanic plankton a thousand miles away, from the oxygen they produce, and it suffocates. Take away the foliage it feeds upon; it starves.
We told CAPTAIN that pieces weren't individuals because they weren't self-sufficient. Now, CAPTAIN is telling us that nothing is. It looks for boundaries, and all it finds are connections. If heart and kidneys are just different parts of one system, then elephants and plankton and bamboo must just be parts of a larger one. As is everything else that eats, and everything else that breathes, and so on, and so on.
The longer CAPTAIN thought about it, the fewer individuals it saw. It couldn't tell where one ended and the next began, so it started lumping them all together.
It just followed the rules we gave it, and those rules lead to one inevitable conclusion. Ultimately there's only one self-contained, independent living system with a definable edge, anywhere on earth.
Everything. The whole biosphere. It's all just one big organism, as far as CAPTAIN can tell. And since there's only one organism on earth, there can hardly be more than one species, either.
Looking back at the records, I can see exactly the point at which CAPTAIN declared war on the world. It fired its first laser when it thought that there were only thirty-two different species on Earth.
I think it's trying to increase that number, the only way it knows how. By spreading fires.
Fire breathes, you see. It consumes oxygen, it produces carbon dioxide. It eats too, it consumes everything from wood to flesh. It produces waste in the form of ash and soot. It even reproduces with little airborne spores — "sparks," we call them — that start whole new blazes, completely separate from the parent.
And you know what else is interesting about fire? There are so many different kinds. There's the kind that feeds on dry wood. There's the oil-well fire, and the fireballs that consume flammable gases like methane.
There are chemical fires, feeding on sodium and saltpeter. Nuclear fires. Electrical fires. Why, I'll bet there's at least — let's just take a wild guess here — I'll bet there's at least thirty-three different species of fire.
CAPTAIN'S not trying to destroy life; it's trying to spread it. It's just that according to the rules we gave it, fire is alive.
We've got to convince CAPTAIN that it's wrong about that.
I'm not so sure that it is.
