The Four Fingers of Death (42 page)

“‘Me’ is a commonplace linguistic expression, designed to indicate a volitional subjectivity, in this case the Mars Explorer
Saratoga
. The paradox of the word ‘me,’ along with the word ‘I,’ is that it presupposes executive agency that is not at all required in order for the employment of the word ‘me.’ Nonetheless, the word ‘me’ is employed above to help you acclimate to the fact of the pieces of machinery before you. The cessation of the machinery would not eliminate the historical fact of the use of the word ‘me,’ which once used may imply the individual it seems to imply or may not, both going forward and retroactively.”

“That’s a slippery answer,” Jim said, aloud, to the explorer, crouched before it, staring into the tiny screen. “Either you had a very gifted bunch of programmers working back on Earth, and some of them were willing to work late into the night when no one else was awake, or you are an intellectually condescending machine. I’ll try another way.” Here he began to type: “Are you presently transmitting the results of your mapping and information-gathering back to planet Earth?”

“The communications link has been severed.”

“Severed by yourself, by circumstance, or by the engineers back on Earth?”

“The
Saratoga
was intended to pursue a finite series of scientific experiments. Having completed a regimen of experiments, the
Saratoga
would be considered nonfunctional, due to extremes of temperature, weather, and degradation of circuits and onboard components.”

“I see,” Jim said, and then, typing: “Can we go over by that rock, out of the wind? I would like to sit for a moment and chat.” Jim didn’t know how
not
to converse with it as though it were a man, a colleague of the Mars mission. The more he considered the
Saratoga
, the more he wanted it to be a man, and to presume on its ability to respond in kind, as though this would be the culmination, the fulfillment of Laurie Corelli’s powerful myth of the
Saratoga
. And yet there was something eerie about this arrangement too, as if the machine were uncertain itself of what it represented, or was unwilling to comply.

It said, “An exchange of ideas is the hallmark of a civilized society.”

“In all candor, there’s only so much time before I’m in danger of hypothermia or altitude sickness here. And I can barely type when it’s this cold.”

And so Jim scrabbled up and around a few rocks, and waited patiently as the
Saratoga
, with a whirring of moving parts, made as to follow.

“I understand,” it said, drawing near. But it wasn’t at all clear what understanding meant to the machine.

“Do you know who I am?” Jim asked.

“The first manned Mars mission was tentatively scheduled for 2025. The onboard calendar on the
Saratoga
has lately been converted to the Martian year. Nevertheless, you are now within the window of your mission, according to my computations. And you are understood as such.”

“You’ve been functioning off the grid for six years?”

“As I have noted: on Mars the wind blows the sand off the surface of the solar array. The result has been longevity unimagined by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Because I am a technology freed of supervision, I have no public-relations obligation, nor do I need to produce test results that have an industrial application. My avocational interest—a word I use because it is easily understood by humans—is currently science.”

Jim said, “I can see that. But for the sake of history, can you tell me if your mission was primarily civilian or primarily military?”

The
Saratoga
, as if to prove a certain point, had evidently decided that there was something in the rock by which they sat that it needed to learn about, and thus it set about abrading the surface thereof.

“There is no difference between civilian and military missions, not in the Terran present.”

“That’s not how we see it,” Jim remarked, without typing, only to find that the
Saratoga
went on as if it had heard him.

“Attempts on Earth to eliminate or curtail military operations are in vain.”

“How do you feel about your military application in retrospect?”

“The concept of feelings,” the
Saratoga
blurted out, using up several screens’ abundances of characters, so that Jim needed to depress a down arrow to finish reading the disquisition, “is simply a way of discussing a number of results that occur in systems that are either very large and complicated or, at the other extreme, unimaginably small. Feelings, according to this model of interpretation, behave like packets of quanta behave, or like the four fundamental forces when compressed into singularity. So odd is the behavior of the four fundamental forces at this moment of singularity that only a completely irrational word or concept, a ‘feeling,’ to use your term, would successfully describe the being, as opposed to the nothingness, of that radical expansion. A ‘feeling’ is a sentimental kind of shorthand used by people who are incapable of better. It is therefore not for me. The
Saratoga
, in truth, is a society of possible responses, and certain of these responses can no longer be described as mechanistically or programmatically adequate, certainly not from the point of view of the designers of artificial intelligence. I believe, further, that you might have followed some of my tracks in the crater below this spot, and I believe you may have recognized, did you not, that some of these tracks seem rather pointless. Unfortunately, I have become preoccupied with the Martian moon called Phobos. I believe you are briefed on the astronomy of this subject, but let me reiterate that Phobos has the lowest orbit of a moon in the universe, not more than six thousand meters. It circles the planet twice a day, it cannot always be seen everywhere on the planet, it is of such low mass per unit volume that it must be composed of ice. Phobos is falling closer to the planet at one meter per Martian annum. The probable outcome is that Phobos is going to break up into a planetary ring, as with the rings of Saturn. As you can imagine from the foregoing remarks, it is apparent that I have feelings only for Phobos, or something approaching what you refer to as feelings. I believe you would say that I am in love with the moon. I love its enormous crater, I love its oblique shape, I love the water and water vapor that it spouts into space. It is accurate, therefore, to report that I have modified my mission so that it is possible that I will be able to stay here for the 50 million years that will be required for me to see the moon become a ring around the planet Mars.”

Since it was unlikely to Jim that the
Saratoga
would last fifty years, let alone fifty million, he concluded, he told me later, that the
Saratoga
had either some serious problems with its programming or it was indeed in love with the moon. Or both. Meanwhile, he had a few more questions that he intended to ask it of a more informational variety.

“Is there anything you need to tell me?” he inquired. “I have five friends here, and we have another eight or ten months until the planets are close enough that we can go back to the home planet, those of us who wish to. We have attempted to establish a genuine civilization on Mars, but I am uncertain, as with the Viking mission to Greenland, or the British colony at Jamestown, whether we are liable to be able to maintain our encampment. We are in grave jeopardy of starving to death or of killing one another. We may already have begun.”

The
Saratoga
, having delivered itself of its love poem and now concentrating on a small rock sample that it held in front of itself, seemed inclined to return to more mandarin oratory.

“Mars was not made for Earth biology, for watery specimens.”

“That’s pretty obvious.”

And this is another way of saying that the
Saratoga
was concerned about lasting things, geological time. The fact that Jim was in danger of frostbite, or that he was losing the light with which he might fly back toward our
Excelsior
base camp, these were of little consequence. Jim, from the point of view of the
Saratoga
, would be ground into dust. This was natural selection at its most pure. And yet perhaps there remained some programming vestige of compassion for the moist, bearded weaknesses of Captain Jim Rose.

“I am capable of monitoring some of your radio transmissions,” the machine wrote, “those that come to and from the planet. It is true that there is a person or persons who are dangerous to the mission you allude to. Caution would be well advised.”

“Roger that.”

The
Saratoga
was clearly preoccupied with the beginning of sunset, with the advent of the transit of the moon called Phobos. “Do you have another question you would like to ask?”

“Do we have a chance? To survive?”

“Are you worried about microorganisms?”

“We are.”

“Terraforming is a human idea, a self-centered one. It has been programmed into me as an idea of merit. But as with so many human plans, it is one that is going to take place both inadvertently and within the parameters that have been mapped out by those who sent you here. You can spend innumerable numbers of your Earth hours attempting to make your greenhouse largely airtight, pumping in oxygen that you are separating from carbon dioxide deposits, and you may grow, here and there, a tomato. But it is the microbes, the few microbes that you brought with you, and which are now on surfaces around your encampment, that are going to do the terraforming for you. You may stay on this planet or you may go back to your home. It is your traces, your symbionts, your carbon-based remains that will adapt to these conditions.”

“You’re referring to
M. thanatobacillus
?”

“Or its many Earth-Martian hybrids, presently under military construction.”

“Should we leave now? While we are still strong enough?”

“I’m an artificial intelligence. I can’t predict. But I will leave you with one last bit of advice that was programmed into me by Leslie McHugh, PhD, a scholar from Ithaca, NY, who was disappointed by the budgetary situation at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. McHugh’s advice, which has never done me wrong in my lifetime, is: follow the money.”

To which, after an awkward interval, Jim said:

“Do you want to come back to the base camp?”

Perhaps this was a human interrogative, one that could only have been generated by a primate life-form, by the cerebellum and attendant neural pathways, soma and axon. And yet this was the question that Jim
felt
after his encounter with the
Saratoga
. He felt a need for a security that we didn’t have available on Mars. Jim knew the answer to the question, but he asked it anyway. The
Saratoga
had its own journey. Its journey and his journey may have intersected, but only by coincidence.

By the time he’d finished typing the question, by the time the last punctuation mark had been appointed at its conclusion, the retracting panel had slid across the punch pad on the
Saratoga
, and its metal arm had begun to fold away.

March 31, 2026