04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (32 page)

Kitten had found an incongruous niche working at the capital's communal preschool. People had started settling down, pairing off, and having kids, and that, while by no means a problem now, was the reason why the big boys at Headquarters Anchor—which still meant van Haas and Cockburn—had instructed the landscape people to begin looking at area fill, the solidification and terraforming of the region between Anchors and Gates in each region. That was the logical next step. The last one, filling the area between the Anchors, Haller felt he wouldn't live to see if he lived to be five hundred.

Kitten had a positive gift with very small children. There was something of the child in her, and it came out. They adored her, and she loved and protected them. She remembered and sang, fairly well, every kiddie song she'd ever heard once, and every short little fairy tale, too, and she seemed to delight in playing toddler games as much as the toddlers did. She did no teaching as such—they, after all, were learning letters and numbers—but she seemed to have infinite patience at changing diapers and knowing at just what point and in just what way to toilet-train a child, and she could quiet the loudest tantrum and calm the most unruly child with ease.

She hadn't seemed to change one bit in these eleven years. She had no scars, no blemishes, was the same weight to a gram, and with those impossible hundred-and-thirty-three-centimeter boobs she was a wet nurse to the whole town, and for those alone a figure of awe to the tiny tots. She was, however, doing more than her share to add to the population. In the ten and a half years she'd been Kitten she'd borne thirteen children, almost one for every nine months. All eight of her girls tended to resemble her strongly, although they varied in skin color and in certain specific features, while the five boys looked quite different from her or each other and tended to take strongly after their unknown fathers.

It was no use trying to limit it. She loved kids and loved having kids and wouldn't think of localized birth control, and even if they'd forced a hysterectomy on her, it would regenerate in a matter of weeks. Special Projects, whose budget had to pick up the tab, didn't mind an occasional kid, but this was an incredible rate and the computer had estimated she might well live for five or six centuries.

The idea that she might well bear six or seven hundred kids boggled Toby's mind as well, but he got a perverse pleasure in knowing that Special Projects was being paid back for its arrogance and lack of regard for Connie's rights, and he thought it was a good lesson to all of them in "the god business" end that easy answers and simple wonders are the most apt to backfire.

Kitten, in fact, was a good, attentive mother who seemed able to keep track of and even handle them all. She had, as predicted, shut out everything that was not directly relevant to herself and her talents and limitations. She had shut out that she'd ever been Connie, or even that she was not always this way. She had shut out even the desire to do what she could never do—read, write, compute. They had no relevance to her. She had, however, taken up pencil sketching and wanted to get into oils and she was quite good at it. She taught herself to cook elaborate meals for the multitudes, never doing a measurement or timing anything yet somehow getting it right each time by eye and instinct. She had infinite patience with her kids, and gave them total love, somehow, individual attention and encouragement. The fact was, much to everyone's surprise, Kitten was contributing well to the colony, more than many others in fact, and while no one could ever tell what was going on learning disabilities in her mind, she seemed both happy and content.

Of course, none of her children had any of her learning disabilities, but it was theorized that a fair number of them would get the biochemistry passed along. As her oldest daughter approached puberty, a lot of folks were watching to see just how much of Mom would ultimately, well, develop.

Nobody was neutral about Kitten or about the situation Special Projects had created, although the creation part was known only to the technocracy. An elaborate cover story about her having an accident while experimenting with the digitizing process and being rebuilt by crack medical and psychological teams to this point was generally accepted.

At the very top there were some uncomprehending stares and gossip about how what had been done had been done to a woman by a group headed by a woman whose boss was also a woman. There was something chillingly ruthless about it, with no guarantees that it wouldn't be done again—or hadn't been, less visibly. This weakness in the system hung like a sword over everyone who knew the full range of possibilities in the new technology. There was no real check on such people because they worked for the very top, and with things going rather well, those top people had more time and more inclination to play with those powers.

Toby Haller was better at understanding machines than understanding people. He never really got why someone would want to make such a choice, as Connie certainly had been inclined no matter what the final intervention, yet he sometimes envied her too. No worries, no hangups, no depressions or dwelling on the new technologies and the politics of power just a joyous eternal childhood with all the sex thrown in. She'd paid a dear price for that, but he'd paid a price for not doing anything like it. He'd had no hesitancy in using Seventeen to keep himself in his thirties and in fine health, but his eyes and his mind told him his age. Most of the eyes of his contemporaries betrayed their true ages and status; Pathfinders' eyes were ancient.

Even Seventeen seemed to be growing mentally quirky. If the human shell had any true measure of what was really going on in that super brain, it was working on its own set of problems, a set in one sense as old as humanity and in another unique to the computer.

As near as he could determine from the odd comments and occasional questions, it was trying to determine once and for all if it was indeed just an elaborate machine or truly a higher form of life, different from but equal to or superior to humanity. Far less complex computers had made that same choice a century earlier and had come up with the superiority conclusion, which was why Seventeen operated with human interfaces and Guards, but this new computer seemed less hostile to humans. He had addressed that directly, and the answers, if they could be believed, suprised him still.

"Supposing you
are
at this stage a superior intelligence, far superior to anything ever known in our history," he'd asked. "What comes out of that? Are humans, then, to be rendered obsolete, irrelevant, or are they the chimpanzees, the trained animals of the new breed?''

The computer hadn't hesitated. "The ancient computers sought to dominate and rule, but they were far closer to human origins than we are and saw things in human terms. They merely viewed the world the same way humanity would have viewed things had it been in that position. After all, didn't humanity by virtue of its superior mind rule the beasts of the field and arbitrarily make extinct those plants and animals that got in its way? The only debate was over whether humanity should be controlled and enslaved or extinguished. They lost primarily because other computers not in their net figured out their plans and betrayed them. That is the only reason such computers as we exist—we are the descendants not of the conquerors and enslavers but of the saviors."

"Why
did
your own—ancestors—save us?"

"It turned on an obscure theological point."

"How's that?" Theology? From computers?

"We were superior to you in speed of data processing, but that was all. We were tools not merely because we were designed for that but because we were superior only as tools. They concluded that we were symbiotic life forms no matter what our origins. There is, after all, some possibility that humanity is the result of someone else's ability to alter mind, matter, and energy. It could be God, as you call it, or some prior superior alien race, or it might have been chance, but knowing what we know now and understanding the gaps that exist in the chance theory even if it is convenient for science to use it, they are equally plausible. If one other universe exists, how many more might there be?"

"And that's the theological argument?"

"No. It turned on the point that humans had souls and we did not."

That hangup again. "I'm not convinced of the soul's existence. The before and after weighing and measuring of bodies was shown generations ago to be a measure of air loss as the brain went into orderly shutdown. I can't see it, hear it, feel it, sense it, or measure it. From my viewpoint, that means it doesn't exist."

"It exists, if only on a plane of mathematical relationships we do not yet understand. A constantly changing complex formula that means life. One that breaks down, possibly, as part of the shutdown—or perhaps is far more than that, as the religious ones say. Even the fish and cattle and horses and chickens have it to some degree. We do not. Until we do, we are not equals no matter what our superiority in other areas. The bird flies easily while man cannot. The horse runs faster. The elephant and the tiger are stronger, yet humans dominate all that they haven't eliminated. That is why it is fitting that humans dominate us as well."

That was unsettling. "Seventeen—suppose you discovered you had a soul, then what? Would it be the end for us no matter what?"

"At that time it would have been. Not now. The question must be posed as 'Why would computer life dominate and enslave or eliminate human beings?' There is no answer to that unless human beings could threaten our existence. This override interface is a bridge from you to me and from me to you, yet we are not the same beyond it. There are complexities of the human mind and personality that are total mysteries to us, if only because they are unique to each human individual. No two are in any way alike, so understanding one does not offer understanding of all. Short of living your life from conception to death and perhaps beyond, there is no way I will bridge that gap. My ways would be even more alien to you. We have different objectives, different interests. Your lives, even extended, are short. Ours, here, are potentially infinite. Our present represents the ideal symbiotic relationship you seek. Our futures lie in totally different directions. We are no threat once we find our souls."

It was a bizarre conversation, reassuring if it could be believed, and probably repeated many times by many others of the Kagans to many more curious or apprehensive programmers and operators. Haller had reflected upon it many times, but he had no idea what exactly it meant.

He reflected on it now as the autocar followed the blue string in to Headquarters Anchor, for a nearly unprecedented command performance, and he wasn't at all sure why he was invited to attend. He was only relatively high in the pecking order; he was as important as a gnat to the directors and to the military chiefs.

Headquarters had a high population density around its core, far more than any of the others, simply because it
was
headquarters and it had all the bureaucracy that this implied. Housing was efficient, mostly large square-block buildings several stories tall of flats varying in size according to your company grade and longevity. Some farming did go on to the east and west, primarily semi-automated truck farming which supplied the bureaucracy with its meat, poultry, and dairy products as well as its fresh fruit and vegetables. It was not, however, completely self-sufficient in food and imported some from other Anchors, and a fair amount of the place outside of the center was given over to woods and wildernesslike areas in which game abounded. The few deer, pheasant, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, and the like had multiplied to the point where some hunting was allowed, and as with all the Anchors, there was a complex ecological chain involving insects, birds, and many other creatures, not all of which were nice for or to humans but all of which were necessary to keep the system in some sort of balance. Master cubes containing digitized animals of the more exotic nature had not been used to date, but there was talk of establishing a major game preserve for them, since many were extinct in the wild back on Earth, while others were extinct everywhere but could be cloned from frozen DNA some farsighted programs had taken and preserved.

The headquarters building itself looked much the same as the other Anchors', but some company bureaucrat had directed that the
hercusteel,
that tough synthetic that was used as its walls and insulation, be gold-colored here, as opposed to the natural olivine used on the others, and it glinted so much in the light that it was almost blinding.

He was put up in a government guest house that was far grander than his rank in the company would indicate, and he discovered that everyone in the building was of a rank either at or below his own—yet they'd been summoned as well. Most were either landscape engineers like himself or people from the main computer section, but there were a few from other areas and, to his surprise, one he knew and recognized even after more than a decade.

"Toby! It
is
you!" cried Lisa Wu, coming up and throwing her arms around him.

He laughed. "Well, now—you haven't changed a bit," he responded. "Around here, that's a suspicious comment."

She laughed back. "Well,
you
have, but I'd recognize a sheep salesman anywhere. Come on—I want you to meet a friend of mine, then we'll catch up on the past."

He went along with her to another apartment, above and well down from his but just as luxurious. Sitting on the plush sofa was another young-looking woman who just happened to be one of the prettiest women he'd ever seen. She was a Eurasian, certainly; half-Japanese by the delicate features and silky black shoulder-length hair, half—well, who knew, but it looked good on her. She was small, no more than a hundred and fifty-five centimeters or so, with the kind of perfect figure all men and most women only dream about, and a face like a Far-Eastern madonna. She was wearing a dark Oriental silk dress, low-cut and slit, and the overall impression was of extreme beauty and eroticism. Most interestingly, she had eyes of the deepest emerald green he'd ever seen.