Part 13 (1/2)
”Humph.” Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters.
The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing.
The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. ”Am inconsistent,” it complains. ”There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?”
”Welcome to the human physical s.p.a.ce-traveling interface unit Field Circus,” Amber replies calmly. ”I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?”
Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.
”We are the Wunch,” announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. ”This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yours.p.a.ce, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?”
”He means twenty years,” Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. ”They've confused s.p.a.ce and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?”
”Relatively little,” comments someone else - Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly.
”We are the Wunch,” the lobster repeats. ”We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?”
Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. ”We consider it impolite to ask,” she says quietly.
Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. ”You accept our translation?” asks the leader.
”Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?” asks Amber.
The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. ”True. We send.”
”We cannot integrate that network,” Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future a.n.a.lysis.) ”They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species.”
Concern, alarm, agitation. ”You cannot do that! You are not untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier.”
Amber raises a hand. ”You said untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?”
”We, like you, are not untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. The network is for untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. We are to the untranslatable concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable concept #1.”
Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team. ”Opinions, anyone?”
Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. ”I'm not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there's something wrong with their semantics.”
”Wrong with - how?” asks Su Ang.
The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. ”Wait!” snaps Amber.
Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a s.h.i.+mmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. ”The untranslatable ent.i.ty concept #1 when mapped onto the lobster's grammar network has elements of 'G.o.d' overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I'm pretty sure that what it really means is 'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real-time'. A type-one weakly superhuman ent.i.ty, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as G.o.ds.” The cat fades back in. ”Any takers?”
”Small-town hustlers,” mutters Amber. ”Talking big - or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city.”
”Most likely.” Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.
”What are we going to do?” asks Su Ang.
”Do?” Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age: ”We're going to mess with their heads!” She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. ”We understand your concern,” Amber says smoothly, ”but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won't you show us your real selves or your real language?”
”This is trade language!” protests Lobster Number One. ”Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your comprehension.”
”Hmm.” Amber leans forward. ”Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you're using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us.”
”Exchange interest,” the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. ”Can offer much! Sense of ident.i.ty of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement.”
”Old-fas.h.i.+oned nanotechnology and s.h.i.+ny beads to dazzle the primitives,” Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. ”How backward do they think we are?”
”The physics model in here is really overdone,” comments Boris. ”They may even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it on the back of the lobsters' efforts.”
Amber forces a smile. ”That is most interesting!” she trills at the Wunch's representatives. ”I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable.”
”It pleases us,” says Lobster Number One. ”We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?”
”By all means.” Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end.
Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of the s.p.a.celike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.
Welcome to the moment of maximum change.
About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address s.p.a.ce.
The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Ura.n.u.s - all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system.
The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the unG.o.dly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the discovery of speech.
A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions - threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They're all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fas.h.i.+oned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human adolescent.
The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into h.o.m.ogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation s.p.a.ce that will expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar ma.s.s of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.
A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter s.p.a.ce; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, n.o.body can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the Field Circus returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence.
”As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not G.o.ds.”
Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.
Sadeq coughs grumpily. ”Tell her, Boris.”
Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. ”He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend.”
Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. ”Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about it.”
”How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Sadeq smiles crookedly. ”We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the G.o.ds you were afraid of finding.”
”No.” Amber sighs. ”Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?”