“When you insisted on going out and risking your life, you claimed it was to save the data. They did prove to be important. However, what you really intended was to rescue your friend. Was it not?”
Christian sat silent.
Willem sighed. “Still, compared to the central intelligence here on Mercury, not to speak of the greater systems on Earth, Gimmick is very limited. And as I said, things are changing exponentially. Now I will soon be obsolete and retire to rusticate. Everybody like me will.
“Where will it end? Where does computational power leave off and actual consciousness begin? I don’t know, and this field has been my lifelong specialty. Nobody knows, and they’ve been wondering about it for two or three centuries.”
He leaned forward. His eyes sought Christian’s and held fast. “But I do know a few things that are not yet public. You have heard of uploading entire personalities into a computer?”
“Who hasn’t?” Christian retorted. “Isn’t that another notion they’ve kicked around ever since when? Last analysis I saw, the idea was unworkable. Entropy …” Confronting the sudden intensity across the table, he let his words trail off.
“That was then,” Willem said. “We’ve reached the truly steep part of the progress curve. Uploading should be possible within another ten or fifteen years. Scan the entire organism, transfer the informational matrix to a database in an advanced neural network, add sensors and effectors. Yes, a machine existence. But not like any ordinary or even extraordinary robot’s. And maybe later—Who knows what will become possible later?
“If, by then, you want it.”
Christian shivered. “Yes.” Willem nodded. “I have been watching you and your partner. You strike me as an excellent candidate for uploading.
“The first starships should be ready not long after the end of your mortal life expectancy. The expeditions will need an element of human judgment, human will and desire. Think about it. Barring mishaps such as you have lately courted, you have time to decide. How would you like a continuation of you to go to the stars?”
IV
No living man or woman ever went. Flesh is too frail.
Consider. Light in vacuo moves at the ultimate velocity, some three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Nothing can outrace it. For matter, that would require more than infinite energy; for information it would imply systems able to reach backward through time and alter the past that brought them into being.
In the era when the pioneer voyagers left Sol, light took four and a third years to traverse the distance to the next nearest sun. The average separation of stars in their outlying part of the galaxy was about twice that.
If an interplanetary mission was urgent, a spacecraft sometimes boosted to as high as a hundred kilometers per second. Thus it got from Earth to Mars in a minimum of ten days, to far Pluto in a year and a half. Such haste was extravagant of power, seldom used, and only by flyers of small mass. Otherwise robots fared at their leisure.
Given a speed like this, one could make the least of interstellar crossings in thirteen thousand years.
The central intelligence on Earth, linked to its subordinates and to its equals elsewhere in the Solar System, designed vessels more capable. It was scarcely necessary to test them once they were built—or, we might better say, grown. So profound was the intelligence’s understanding of natural law and physical reality, so potent its logic and mathematics. The Alpha Centauri expedition was only ten years under way. In due course it would be feasible to approach the speed of light.
Now, space is in fact not a vacuum. Hydrogen and helium gas pervade it, together with dust that here and there forms great clouds. Nowhere is this medium dense, except when a part falls in on itself and makes new stars. In Sol’s region at that time it ran to approximately one atom per cubic centimeter. Yet anything moving at any substantial fraction of the ultimate velocity encounters many of them every second. Each collision releases energy. The hard radiation would kill an organic creature well-nigh instantly.
It was difficult enough to protect the electronics and photonics of the machines, or even their metal. Material shielding did not suffice. Besides producing secondary radiation, as bad as the primary or worse, it would soon be ablated away. Magnetohydrodynamic force fields were required, closely controlled, ever changeable according to need, as subtle as they were powerful. They too were incompatible with carbon-based life—which, in any case, demanded absurdly elaborate and massive apparatus for its maintenance.
Consciousness went to the stars: machine consciousness.
Watched from outside, that inaugural departure was a sight beautiful but hardly spectacular. An arrowlike shape, ashine in the light of the distant sun, glided from orbit and dwindled into heaven. Later an aureole surrounded it and trailed it, like an incandescent comet, though this was mainly at wavelengths beyond the visible. When it reached its goal it transmitted its discoveries and experiences back to the central intelligence and to any humans who cared.
Many did, often because the starfarer was not altogether alien. A robot aboard carried the spirit of Christian Brannock.
V
The countryside rolled in gentle hills, intensely green, starred with wildflowers. Trees stood alone or in small, widely strewn groves, oak, beech, elm. A breeze tossed light and shadow through their crowns. Looking out, Laurinda Ashcroft could almost feel warmth and wind, hear birdsong, breathe odors of growth.
But the view was electronic, for her house and its few neighbors lay underground. Nor was the nature above them ancient. A century ago this had been a plantation, broken here and there by the ruins of an ugly industrial town. Not until the useful genetically engineered monstrosities became obsolete was everything razed and a preserve created.
Yet above a ridge to the east rose a steeple, as it had for more than a thousand years.
All this beauty can die again, she thought, crushed beneath ice, sickened and seared by radiation, or—who knows? Someday, somehow, by
