Harvest of Stars (24 page)

“What is it?” Kyra inquired.

“A dinner party in Philadelphia. Our host will be George Washington. Our fellow guests are Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Join in the conversation by all means, but mind your manners. They’re illusions, yes, parts of a hypercomputer program, but they’re also the most careful replication of the personalities that scholarship has made possible. Me, for once I’d rather listen than talk.”

“God damn,” Guthrie said, “I have to sit and envy you.”

O
NCE, A GOOD
many years ago in Quito, he had declared: “We’re going to build ourselves something new here. The first machine that doesn’t, somewhere along the line, flunk the Turing test. But I must admit that’ll be because it cheats. You see, I’ll be in it.”

“I think before long they will have a system that will truly be conscious on its own,” Juan Santander Conde had replied. In those days he was no more than middle-aged, though old in friendship with Guthrie, and active as a top director of Fireball.

“Yeah, the Holy Grail of psychonetics. And just about as elusive, I think.”

“Already—”

“Sure, sure. Pretty good simulations. In fact, I don’t say the first-chop programs don’t have some awareness, same as I credit a lizard with a little bit, a dog with a fair amount, and a monkey with quite a lot. But basically, they’re like
idiots savants
. Superbrilliant in their narrow fields, otherwise there is no there there. Seems to me, if any of the approaches that’re being tried to make them more nearly comparable to humans, if any of those were right, we’d’ve reached the goal by now. … I know what you’re about to say. Don’t bother. Programs in those new dream palaces. People who’ve tried it swear it’s exactly like interacting with a real, live person. But it
is
a dream. The customer’s input is part of what goes on and his intuition acts like a feedback loop. If he brings more to the interaction—knowledge, imagination, whatever—if he brings more than the program’s geared to adapt to, he soon isn’t dealing with the pseudopersonality that was intended. It becomes something else, radically unlike what it was. It may disintegrate.”

“I know, and I had no intention of mentioning that.”

“Sorry. No offense, Juan. I am apt to talk too much. Sometimes it gets kind of lonesome where I am. Never
mind! What I want developed for Fireball is an entirely different breed of cat—anyhow, when I’m in it. You see, I want it able to include me in its works.”

As the robot made the attachments for new Guthrie, he started to ask, “Say, what about—” and braked himself.

“Have you a question?” purred the information screen.

“No, nothing. Proceed.”

When he was fully linked and integrated, he put his inquiry to the system. It was prudent to begin with a few simple, straightforward retrievals. Direct access to the whole, possession of its capabilities, could be overwhelming at first. Insofar as human language was able to describe what he now did, it felt as if he called some fact out of his ordinary memory, a date or an address or the color of a woman’s eyes.

The hypercomputer identified his desire by class and switched it through the appropriate circuits. If need be, retrieval could have scanned databases around the planet. Examination of every logical implication could have brought in other mainframes equally far-flung. As was, the information called for got back to Guthrie in a few milliseconds.

Yes, progress was being made in artificial intelligence, though news of it hadn’t been in the updatings he got in North America. He’d had too much else to learn, about everyday matters and how they had changed during the years in which he lay oblivious.

He found that the forefront of advance was no longer in Fireball’s laboratories. His idea of incorporating himself, as occasion warranted, in the core of his company’s cybernetics, had been so successful as to give him second thoughts. While he didn’t forbid further research along these lines, he stopped helping it out, and it languished.

Elsewhere, however, workers had been following his lead in earnest, notably at Technofutures in Europe and Hermes Communications in Astrebourg. They had made considerable progress. It would doubtless have been more if they also had had a download to work with. But neither of the two others who were still extant was interested.

Uwimana was entirely given over to his own scientific endeavors, he had become cosmophysics personified. Nguyen was lost in whatever the mysteries were on which she meditated.

As for making a new one, hardly anybody agreed to serve as the subject-original. “I wouldn’t like being a machine. Nor would a copy of my mind.” The few volunteers were judged unsuitable, on this or that account.

Still, the hardware that could handle a download was buildable, as witness what was already in existence. Could you and your computers write a program for it that would operate like a downloaded personality? If so, you would have reached the Holy Grail, artificial intelligence fully conscious and limited only by the capabilities of the systems to which it was coupled.

Algorithm after algorithm had been devised, tried, found wanting, revised, tried again, ultimately discarded. Lately, though, another idea had been gaining ground. The mind was partly algorithmic, true, but not totally. You must take quantum effects into account—especially, it seemed, Bell’s inequality and the energy of the vacuum. Nothing supernatural; yet the observer and the observed were one, the cause had roots in the effect, Ouroboros made of himself a ring. On that basis, you might be able to map onto a material configuration that which nature had done in the course of megayears of evolution.

Once you were on the right track, with the computer power you had nowadays, you should soon capture the prize. Then what?

Guthrie turned from that question. He had more urgent concerns. For a while he exercised, regaining the skills of godlike intellect. He constructed elaborate differential equations and solved them. He modeled three large organic molecules and let them react. He explored fractal realms of such dizzying beauty that it was a wrench to leave them.

But he must. After about half a real-time hour, two billion microseconds, he gave himself to his proper task. It was infinitely more difficult. In the course of a night he achieved a bare skeleton of completion.

However, it ought to serve. He had scanned every record of any event that had impinged on Anson Guthrie, which Anson Guthrie should directly or indirectly have been aware of, in the past twenty-three years. He had organized them, evaluated them, chosen among them. Some he put in his personal permanent memory, those that would naturally have stamped themselves there. They were comparatively few; his neural network didn’t have much more storage capacity than his living brain had had. A larger number he abstracted and made into general background; for instance, he’d have remembered who the most prominent figures were in the history of those decades, and something about what each one did, but not many details. The majority he rejected. They were the kind of thing you noticed and quickly forgot, and afterward retrieved from a notebook or a database if perchance you wanted to.

Throughout that effort he was conscious of nothing else. He was transcendent; he was process, ongoingness. When finally it was over, he must fight the urge to seek elsewhere, to enter anew into that cold ecstasy. Piece by piece, he disengaged his controlling consciousness from the net. He called for disconnection.

As always, an immediate feeling of immeasurable loss gave way to dullness. His merely humanlike mind needed to assimilate what had poured in. It needed rest, subactivation, the drowse and flickers of dream which answered to the sleep his living body had so often welcomed. But he’d better see if there was any business he must attend to first.

He went personally back to his sanctum. At least the robot body into which he had been transferred did not ache, was not tired. He could savor the smooth surge of strides, their soft fall upon carpeting, the susurrus and scents—piney at the moment—breezing from ventilator panels.

His private office here in the main building was large but otherwise unostentatious. Objects filled a case, souvenirs, trophies, gifts from friends now dead, the sort of clutter that even a ghost can accumulate. He noticed a few that
were not there when he returned from Alpha Centauri. He didn’t know anything about them, how they came to his other self or why they had seemed worth keeping. Trivia like that didn’t get into company records or news stories, and he had never kept a diary. One of them could easily trip him up, if somebody else knew about it. He must be careful to avoid mention of them, or evade any remark he heard.

The robot having no need to sit, he took stance behind his desk, which was itself an anachronism for the likes of him, and touched his phone. Message from Dolores Almeida Candamo, please call back as soon as possible, never mind the hour. “Damn,” he muttered, and instigated the search.

Fireball’s general director of Earthside operations was at home, already awake. He remembered her as a vivacious young communications engineer. She and her fiancé had advanced their wedding date so he could attend in person before he left; Fireball couldn’t spare both Guthries for that, but “It’s the same spirit,” she’d laughed. His review had told him of her subsequent career and prepared him for the gray hair and the face still comely. It had not told him how they normally spoke to one another. Given the psychodynamics, he had estimated the usage; into this calculation he vectored his intuition.

“Good morning!” she exclaimed in Spanish. “Welcome home, chief! I’m sorry I missed your arrival yesterday.”

“You didn’t miss much,” he answered in English, then changed over to her mother tongue. “Does something urgently need me?”

“Ay de mí, what doesn’t? You really should not have gone to North America. We were hideously anxious about you, and—”

“And you survived. Fireball did. How many times have you heard me say, any outfit that needs micromanagement from the top should be put out of its misery at once? What’s the matter?”

He saw that his curtness hurt. Well, he couldn’t risk a friendlier manner, not till he had felt his way around for a while and learned some of the nuances. She closed the
visor of practicality. “First, this entire business of cooperating with the Avantists, after everything they have done to us. I have been in the middle of an uproar, these past several days.”

“I expect you would have. They wonder if I have betrayed them, and why and just how. Please listen. You understand—don’t you?—I could not go into detail in any public announcement. That could have triggered the very horrors I want to prevent, or could at least have given the enemy warning enough that he could hide.

“We will have a conference of directors shortly, and I will lay out the facts for you. What happened is that my contacts with the Chaotics led me to the discovery that a fanatical underground exists, independent of the decent majority and not only in North America. I held my nose, figuratively speaking, and got in cautious touch, indirect at first, with the Sepo. Its members aren’t all monsters, you know. Most of them, too, are reasonably honorable people, doing a job they see as necessary. They had leads of their own. Everything pointed toward infiltration of Fireball and other private organizations. Not massive; we would harm only ourselves by a witch hunt; but in key positions—Think what a weapon a single spaceship is, simply by itself. Think of the consequences to us if something happens, maybe on a genocidal scale, that we might have prevented. I am making the best of a bad bargain.”

Almeida bit her lip. “Our spokespeople have been saying much the same things, at my orders. But in the absence of anything more definite, fear feeds on itself.”

“I know. We shall have our definite words and actions soon, I promise. Meanwhile, what else is important?”

“The mahatmas and their crowds, blockading Hyderabad Compound. You have heard. Trying to force us to subsidize their cult. Sub has an idea for persuading them to disperse peacefully, but he wants to discuss it with you first.”

“Uh, Sub?”

She gave him a quizzical look, as if seeking an expression on his turret. “Subrahmanyan.”

“Oh, yes.” Subrahmanyan Rao, chief of South Asian operations. Pause. Think. Make a sigh. “Pardon me. Dolores, I have had no rest since my return and precious little before then. I’m tired to the point of stupidity. Can you appreciate that an overload will exhaust any mind, even one that is a program? Give me some hours. Hold the fort for me that much longer. I know you can.”

Almeida’s countenance softened. “Yes. I will, somehow. Call me when you feel ready. Rest well, chief.” Her image disappeared.

Guthrie stood a moment alone. He need only command “No interruptions,” and time himself to rouse after a sufficient while. No. Not quite yet.

The system conveyed his call by untappable lines, northward around the curve of the planet to Futuro. The hour was equally early in that capital, but Sayre was in his office at Security Police national headquarters. It took a few minutes to make certain that communication was isolated. That it occurred should surprise nobody after the news of the past week. The content was what required secrecy.

“Logging in,” Guthrie said in English. “What’s new?”

The undistinguished features thrust forward in the screen. “How’s it going for you?”

“It goes, more or less. I’ll shortly have to make a full report on the conspiracy to my consortes.”

“It’s still under preparation for you, including evidence. Don’t worry, you’ll have it in time.”

“Evidence. … What’s any worth, in this electronic nanotech day and age?”

Sayre smiled. “That’s why we need you on the scene, Anson. Your personality, your convincingness.”

“It’s ‘Sr. Guthrie’ to you, Sayre.” The other stiffened, swallowed, and made no retort. “What I want to know is how things are at your end.”

“We are hard at work.” Excitement dissolved coldness, word by word. “I’ve just received a report that the program decided was worth my personal attention. Yesterday evening the Regent of the Homesteaders’ Association spent three hours in the quivira in Portland, West Coast. She hadn’t been to a quivira as far back as her dossier goes.