Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [15]
‘What is the Watchmaker?’
He already knew: he’d read the book. He still hoped she didn’t know he had.
‘You can read the book,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you clearance.’
Mrs Lawson fiddled with the coffee percolator, poured two cups and sat down. Jordan accepted a cup and remained standing. He wondered how secure the door would be against a good kick.
‘Dawkins, R. Nineteen eighty something. We’re not bothered by all the arguments about the evolution of life. We’ve got fallback interpretations if that theory’s ever absolutely proved. The thing which had many better minds worried was the idea that natural selection could happen, could irrefutably happen, in a computer system. Intelligence could evolve out of the bugs and viruses in software. Something not human, not angelic, possibly diabolic. The Blind Watchmaker. Life made the devil’s way – by evolution, not creation.’
She fell silent, looking at him as if she were watching something behind him. Jordan decided not to throw in a suspiciously knowledgeable comment on the semantic slippage which confused the process and the product, the creator and its creation. Just as the name of Frankenstein had become irremediably tagged to the monster, so the long-imagined, long-dreaded spontaneously evolved artificial intelligence was stamped with the name of the process that would give it birth. ‘When the Watchmaker comes…’ Another bit of the buzz he occasionally glimpsed in hastily scanned chatfiles the censorship hadn’t quite caught up with. Another urban legend.
He finished his coffee and said edgily, ‘Can we be sure?’
He felt he had just been initiated, if not baptised and confirmed, into some alternative theology, the real thinking of the real minds that ran the place – still orthodox, he could see that, though not the sort of thing they’d want to slot on a satellite for prime time – and all he could respond with was his own self-corroding scepticism.
‘Of course we can’t be sure,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Oh, Jordan, don’t you know anything?’
The system came back up, just as inexplicably, twenty minutes later. Melody Lawson sat in her office and looked at the monitor screens, frowning to herself as she watched Jordan logging on. She’d as good as invited him to move on from the naive fundamentals that were enough for the pew-ballast to the more sophisticated understanding necessary to protect that very simplicity, and he’d not risen to it at all. Any bright young Christian with a questioning mind would have been in like a ferret, eager to explore a legitimization of his more daring thoughts. There was no doubt Jordan was bright, but he sure as hell wasn’t a Christian. It galled her the kid was so transparent, and that nobody else saw through him. It galled her even more that whatever had undermined his belief in God had also diminished his belief in himself. Open irreligion could not be permitted, and she had no problem with that, but closet atheism was far more poisonous. There was no telling when such suppressed, turned-in hostility could lash out in a desperate act. For Jordan to leave Beulah City would be better for the community, and better for him.
It would even be better for his soul. He was becoming almost literally two-faced – the way he’d looked when he’d turned away from the screen! There had been only one moment when his mask had dropped, and that was when he’d mentioned the Black Planner…
Dear God, she thought. Suddenly frantic, she hit her door switch, keyed open the lock on a drawer and scrabbled for her VR glasses. She put them on and punched herself into the security net. The sensation of diving,