Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Read online

  5th

  Dear Stone,

  How long? I don't know, exactly.[2] For ever, that's how it seemed. I went a little mad. I went through periods when I was so dejected, so cast out and cast down that I couldn't eat. At these times, after a week or so of fasting, the jailer might come and pass some food through my lips. At other times, I became manic, insane. For a while, for instance, I became obsessed with running the perimeter of the jail; I would jog round and round a hundred times and then I would throw myself down and sleep. I knocked flints together – yes, stones like you – to chip off a sharp edge, and then use that to scratch words into the plastic of the sky where it met the horizon. Or else to scratch myself, but that was painful and the wounds refused to heal easily. I thought of suicide again, certainly I did, but I was habituated to my misery, and killing oneself is a hard and painful thing, harder still without dotTech. I went through phases where I saw hallucinations; people from my childhood, imaginary animals, Alice from the Looking Glass in her antique clothes striding giant-like about the landscape. But whenever I saw these impossible things there was a part of me that knew they were impossible; that knew they were hallucinations and not reality.

  This was why the voices were so puzzling to me. When the voice first started, offering me freedom and riches if only I would agree to murder the population of a whole world, I tried to believe that it was a mad self-delusion, a voice from my own mind. But it was insistent, and somehow stranger than anything my mind could conjure up.

  6th

  Dear Stone,

  The voice inside my head started after a day-long session in the lake, swimming and swimming. The artificial day came to an end, and the artificial night began, as abrupt as a sneeze. The star-shaped holes in the sky swelled admitting their yellow light, and then shrank away. So it was that the stars went from sun-yellow to moon-pale, and the blue colour of the artificial sky deepened to purple.

  I climbed from the water and lay on the too-familiar plastic grass. I may have dozed, but I was in that curious torpid state where it is hard to tell sleeping and being awake apart. When I heard the voice I thought perhaps I was still dreaming.

  Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

  Then some babble. Then again, Can you hear me? This is a temporary connection, and the language centres of a human's brain are complex. Am I speaking?

  'Am I speaking?' I asked.

  An oily reflection of me was present in the dark waters at my feet, wobbled and interfered with by occasional rib-shaped ripples. I looked down at myself. 'Is this me?'

  No, this is not you.

  'Everything is me,' I said, shaking my head to loose the strange voice, as if it were a piece of sand in my ear.

  Through, said the voice. Through. Listen to me: we have a proposition for you. A deal, a deal, which is a deal.

  I decided to play along with the hallucination. 'A proposition?'

  We will give you something, and in return you will do something for us. It is a kind of bartering. Think trade. We will keep our promise to you.

  'Who are you?'

  There's no answer I can give you. That's not the proper question at this time.

  This was so peculiar a reply that I was very struck by it. In a strange way it seemed to wake me up. I rubbed my face, scratched up my itchy head of hair. 'I don't understand.'

  I know you think this is a hallucination, but it is not, said the voice. This was another puzzler. Would a real hallucination play this sort of game? Does self-awareness of hallucination mark a kind of veracity? This puzzled my thoughts.

  'What's going on?' I asked. 'I'm confused.'

  I'll tell you. Hear our offer.

  'What is your offer?'

  Away on the far side of the artificial lake I saw the shadowy yellow bulk of the jailer making her way over the turf. Her arms swayed in a counterpoint rhythm to her loping strides. Her big head almost turned to look at me; perhaps my voice was carrying over the still waters. But it was nothing new for me to be talking to thin air. I frequently had interludes when I would gabble away to myself. She disappeared behind the tortoise-backed hump of the hill.

  We will free you from this jail, said the voice. Hearing this made me doubt the reality of the experience with renewed violence. It matched the intense yearning of my heart too closely. But then again, I reasoned, it would not be hard to determine that such might be my dream.

  ‘Freedom?’ I breathed, as if the word were taboo or sacred.

  We will free you from this jail, repeated the voice in my head.

  ‘How? This jail cannot be escaped from. It is surrounded on all sides by molten fire. It is many light years from the nearest world.’

  We will do it, insisted the voice. If you agree to our offer. We will take you away, give you wealth and information. You will travel far and erect a spaceship of your own imagining. Then you will do a job for us. Once you have done the job, you can pursue the rest of your life in whatever manner you choose.

  This was all too much to take in. ‘Who are you?’ I insisted.

  But it only repeated what it had said before: There’s no answer I can give you. That’s not the proper question at this time.

  'But how are you able to speak to me?'

  We have opened up a channel of communication with you. It is not easy to maintain, as I'm sure you can understand, bearing in mind where you are. There's no guarantee we will be able to maintain it. Agree to our offer: undertake this job for us, and we will get you out of the jail. Outside, communication will be much easier.

  I got up, feeling suddenly agitated. 'And what is this "job" that you would like undertaken?'

  Once you are free of this place, you will travel to a certain world. It will be a remote world, near the edges of t'T space. There you will destroy the human population of the world.

  'Repeat that,' I said. I had heard it, and it had even made some sort of awful, clanging, sense deep inside me. But I wanted to hear it again. The voice repeated its sentence, word for word.

  'Which world?' I asked.

  We can tell you that. Once you are free of this place.

  'To kill all the human beings on the world?'

  Yes.

  'All? With no one spared?'

  It is important that every single individual be killed

  'And the world itself? The actual world, the animals, the plants?'

  They don't signify. It is the human beings that must be destroyed.

  There was an itch underneath my eyelid. I tried twisting my knuckles into the eye, and then I tried picking at my eyelashes, actually pulling several out in my attempt to squash or tug the itch out of existence. Then I said: 'Why?'

  There's no answer I can give you. That's not the proper question at this time.

  'Why?' I said again. 'Why do you want so many people killed? Why have you come to me to do it? What is your motive? It might be important to me.'

  There's no answer I can give you. That's not the proper question at this time.

  I pondered this for a while. Then I got down on the ground and pressed the flats of my feet together so that I was sitting with my knees jutting out.

  'How am I to kill all these people?'

  That is a question for you to answer. We cannot answer that question at this time.

  'Do you have suggestions?'

  There are some avenues, we can perhaps give you starting points. Perhaps you can use your imagination. You have killed human beings before?

  'Oh yes,' I said. 'Yes. But never on this scale.'

  The principle is the same. Only the numbers are different.

  'This planet is in t'T space?' I asked. 'These people have dotTech in their bodies?'

  Yes.

  'Then they will be very hard to kill. It is the nature of dotTech to struggle to keep people alive under any circumstances.'

  It will not be easy, agreed the voice. But we are confident that you will find a way of achieving it. This is why we have chosen you.

  'And if I do n
ot find a way? What if, when you have freed me' — I still did not truly believe that this would happen, it was all hypothetical — 'what if I renege on your deal? Go on the run?'

  Then we will find you, disable you. You will be returned to the jail. You will end your days in jail.

  I believed this absolutely.

  You wish to consider the offer, the voice stated.

  'I accept,' I said, a great bundle of light and joy rising in my breast. I got to my feet and waved my arms. 'I accept! Take me out of here! I will do it! I accept your deal!'

  Be quiet, said the inner voice. Your jailers will overhear.

  'So?'

  First you must escape this place, said the voice. The jailers have the power to immobilise you. We must sneak past them. It will not be simple, or easy.

  'Escape!' I said. 'Imaginary voice, you are a delight to my ears.'

  You do understand the price you pay for this freedom?'

  'Price?'

  You must commit the crime. Do you understand this?

  'Of course! Of course!'

  Then go to the third tree. Not the first, the one with seven branches, but the third one along the water's edge. Count the branches from the one that overhangs the water, round to the fifth. On that branch you will find a single fruit. You must eat this fruit.

  'An ordinary fruit?' I asked. The trees in this prison were actually machines, and the fruits on their branches were nothing more than extruded sacs of protein pulp. These tree-machines were there to provide the jailers and prisoners with nutrition.

  Be sure and eat the correct one; count the branches from the one that overhangs the water, moving clockwise.[3] The single fruit on the fifth branch. It is the branch nearest to the stream on the far side.

  I lurched forward, eager to eat this fruit. 'What is the significance of the fruit?' I asked. 'Why must I eat this fruit?' In truth I did not much care why; I was carried away by the delicious dream-logic of the encounter. Perhaps I genuinely was dreaming. The trees loomed up in the low evening light.

  Inside this fruit, said the voice, are the seeds for an AI. This AI will root inside you and grow in your brain. Then it will communicate with you, and you must follow its instructions.

  'An AI?'[4] I asked. But the voice did not reply. Indeed, I never heard from it again, which only added to me specirai quality of the whole encounter.

  I found the tree and counted round the branches. There was the fruit, as my dream-self fully expected. I picked it, gobbled it down in three quick bites. Then I frolicked, danced around the water for a while to a tune of my own invention that I sang in a loud voice. I felt absurdly happy. Then I grew tired. I leant over the riverbank and drank; then I curled up and fell asleep on the artificial hill.

  I woke to the dawn flare of sunlight throwing a yellow patina over the artificial world. Already the whole encounter had an unreal flavour in my memory. I had experienced many strange dreams and visions; my mind was not as robust as it might have been. Then I wondered if the fruit I had eaten the night before really had contained the seeds of an AI.

  An AI, dear stone, is no mere computer or processor. A processor works by linear computation; it is a machine of great speed and versatility. The barrier between the raging heat of the star and the walls of my prison were maintained by processors, constantly calculating the shifts in temperature and pressure and adjusting. The prison itself was held in place by processors tirelessly computing the currents and vectors of the star-matter. When people travel from planet to planet, wrapped in their cloaks of foam, it is powerful computational processors that govern the faster-than-light passage, that make the trillions of calculations necessary to shunt the travellers forward.

  But an AI is like a human mind. It is not a linear processor, but a parallel and quantum computational device. It is intelligent in the way that a human mind is intelligent; only able to compute with the rapidity of a more basic processor but lively, lateral-thinking, alert. AIs are fragile — indeed more so than the human brain, because faster-than-light travel tends to degrade and destroy them. But they have certain advantages. Mostly they are transported about fast-space as program-seeds contained in lowly processing machines. Then, once required, they are assembled on site.

  And now, if my dream was to be trusted, one was growing inside me. And I wondered how such a thing could be. Imagine that there was a group of people – which group, what people I could not think – but a group who wanted this enormous crime committed. How would they be able to reach inside the prison, to speak to me inside my head? This could not be done. How could they smuggle the seeds for an AI past the gate – not even the jailers could open the gate more frequently than the four-monthly cycle on which it operated. It was impossible.

  I dismissed it.

  When the AI began to talk inside my head, I dismissed that too as another hallucination. Perhaps that is all it was. How can I say? Dear stone, you are the only objective creature in my world. Can you tell me?

  I am growing, said the AI. Forty per cent capability as of now. Give me four more hours. Eat the dirt; that mud.

  'Eat that mud?' I repeated.

  It contains trace minerals, particularly iron, that I need to establish certain key pathways. I am assembling myself inside your head. Eat the dirt.

  At first I ignored this bizarre request. But the voice was insistent, and in the end I gave in; scooping soft mud into my mouth and swallowing. Strangely, it tasted good.

  Ican adapt your responses. You should experience the pleasure in eating the dirt.

  'I thought I dreamed you,' I said, in a low voice. 'I think I dream you still.'

  By tomorrow, said the AI, I will have assembled myself. Then we can talk about escape, I think.

  7th

  Dear Stone,

  I haven't told you my name, or where I come from, or any of that autobiographical stuff. You have given yourself up to me completely, rock-jewel, the thing I own. Here I am, naked and alone, and you are all I have. And I haven't returned the compliment. Let me give my life to you, dear stone. Let me clutch you to my naked bosom.

  My name is Ae. Actually, that isn't my name, but let it stand. I want it to be my name for you, dear stone, and if my doctor is listening through you somehow (wellhello! hey!), then let it be my name for her as well, let it replace my other name. On the world I come from, Terne, each child was given a total of seven names over a number of years. Some insisted on all seven names being used; others chose their favourite one. But I renounce all those names, and the person I was. I choose to be known by two letters instead of seven names, and I take the first two letters of the alphabet to avoid choice.[5]

  Terne was my homeworld. Mine was a marshy homeland, a planet mostly covered with an interconnecting series of oceans too sludgy really to deserve the name. The saltwater there is so densely inhabited by a variety of tendril-plant that sometimes it is possible for a human being to walk over the water, providing they are not too heavy. In spring the oceans change colour, as the flowering section of these plants emerged, orange and red; the rest of the tirme the seas gloom with dark purple, the native form of chlorophyll. This native vegetable was called Drüd, I remember; and it grew downwards in threads that could reach four or five hundred metres. The seawater itself sloshed through a sluggish maze of delta pathways as the Drüd flourished or died out, finding new pools of nutrient or draining the water of all minerals and starving itself to death. The landforms on this world – my homeworld, 'the World' we called it – were actually compacted masses of this same Drüd. Originally the whole world had been covered in ocean; then when portions of Drüd had formed tangled floating platforms, new strains of the plant had evolved. These grew denser and denser, clogging together into islands, and then into continents thousands of kilometres across. The pressure of growth killed the plants that made up the body of the land, compacting and mummifying them. Currents and the sheer weight of growth kneaded landmasses, throwing up low hills and chains of stumpy mountains. Then, from the c
omposted relicts of the original plants, new plants found a rich soil. Tall grasses, billowing bushes and slender trees. The landscape of my home – all organic, genuine, none of it plastic or artificial like the confines of my prison. Childhood

  8th

  Dear Stone,

  Here I am again. I have decided that, perhaps, I do not want to tell you about my childhood at this time. There are things in the story that I am not sure you wish to hear. For all that you are a stone, it may affect you.

  Let me tell you instead about the t'T. The whole stretch of fast-space in this portion of our galaxy. The great confederation of worlds. Our way of life – of all the worlds that are part of the t'T – is determined by interstellar travel. You must understand how fantastically far stars are from one another; how enormous are the distances that we must travel to move from place to place. You are a palm's width wide, but you must understand how many billions of palm-widths there are even between planet and planet in the same system. Stars are so remote from one another it takes light – speeding at two-and-a-third million metres every second – many years to go from one to another. From my home world, Terne, to the nearest inhabited world was seventy-odd light years. To travel that distance a stone such as yourself, ejected (say) from a sling, would take many centuries. Millennia.

  There is a way of travelling faster than light, and this is it: to explain it, I must go down to the level of the atom, down to the scale that the dotTech inhabits. All those tiny machines, the millions of them in every human body, all built out of a few scores of atoms like miniature bricks. They understand the dynamics of atomic and subatomic – how well they understand! They inhabit that world. Don't you? (For I am sure they are eavesdropping on us, stone, in our conversation). Don't you?

  Hey! Hey!

  Nothing.

  Around each atom several electrons exist, like planets in their orbits round the star, like points at the end of clock hands swinging round on their pivot. These electrons inhabit one of several possible orbits; orbits that may be close to the core, or a little further out, or further out still. But they must occupy one or other set orbit; they cannot simply spin wherever they might choose. And sometimes, when the energy injected into the system changes, then these electrons may hop from a lower orbit to a higher one, or from a higher one to a lower one. And this movement, over minuscule distances though it be, is instantaneous.