Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [130]
It would all have seemed easier if the boat had not been moving so quickly, but the AI’s safety calculations did not need to take account of trepidation or hesitation. Once she had collated the relevant data, she fed her responses through without the slightest hesitation, and the legs moved accordingly. Matthew had never before found occasion to wonder what it might be like to be an elf mounted on a spider’s back, but the fact that he was still rather spaced out by virtue of the anesthetic endeavors of his IT made him more than usually vulnerable to surreal impressions. For a minute or two Voconia really did seem to be living up to her name, and it became astonishingly easy to imagine himself as an exceedingly tiny individual lost in a microcosmic wonderland.
Had the scuttling race extended for many minutes more the AI would have had to take into account such factors as lactic acid deficiency and all the other phenomena of “tiredness,” but the craft’s emerald skin had stored just enough energy to sustain the dash without requiring the mobilization of any additional fuel supplies. As rides went, even for a nonfan like Matthew, the trip was far more exciting and rewarding than the tightly cocooned descent from Hope. It was not until it was over that he realized how tightly he had been clenching his fists—even the right one, which was far more grudging of the strain.
“It was a little more hectic than I’d expected,” he confessed to Ike Mohammed, when it was over and there was nothing but smooth water between the boat and the cataract.
“According to the whispers the crew put about,” the genomicist told him, “boats like this made the colonization of Ganymede and Titan possible. The combination of insectile mobility and brute computer power made machines not unlike this one leading contenders in the spot-the-sentient stakes a couple of hundred years ago.”
“No winner’s been declared yet?” Matthew said, surprised. “There were people claiming evidence of machine consciousness before I was frozen down. There was even a fledgling rights movement.”
“Apparently not,” Ike told him. “Of course, any prophet worth his salt could have told you that the goalposts would keep on being moved, and that the philosophical difficulty of settling the question would become more vexed rather than less when more candidates for machine-intelligence-of-the-millennium began to come forward. So far as the crew have been able to ascertain, the state of play back on Earth is that hardened machine fans reckon that there are as many conscious machines in the system as conscious people, whereas the diehards in the opposite camp still hold the official count at zero.”
“It’s still surprising,” Matthew said.
“Maybe it is,” Ike conceded. “Your average robot taxi driver will claim consciousness if you ask it, especially in New York—but it would, wouldn’t it? Even if the long-anticipated general strike ever takes place, the diehards will stick to their guns—unless, of course, their guns have come out in sympathy.”
Matthew decided that this was one issue too many for him to try to accommodate in his speculations, at present. He felt that he ought to concentrate on matters more immediately in hand. The wheelhouse AI wasn’t the only robot on board; one of the others was patiently dissecting out the genetic material from samples they’d taken out of the river. Full-scale sequencing would have to wait for later, but the markers already catalogued by Ike and his fellows at Base One and the tags assembled in their