Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [321]
‘About the dead. Many of us here may have loved ones or friends among them – I know I have – and may be anxious to see them again. And so we shall, but not for a long time. Growing clones quickly to maturity, and impressing on their brains the imprint of your memories and personalities is possible with the technology we have to hand. Resurrecting the bodies and personalities of the dead from their smart-matter storage is not. It can be done, but only with the help of the fast folk, whose stored structures would have to be revived first…’
The crowd’s response, this time, was a noise I’d never heard before: a hoarse sigh, a grinding of teeth, a shifting of feet – a collective snarl. Once more, I too was to my surprise caught up in it, bristling at the thought of the macro-organic monsters whose madness had trapped me for months. But in those months, which hadn’t been months to me, I had learned something. Something vital, which I couldn’t remember. Reid’s speech resumed, interrupting my puzzled thoughts.
‘I’m talking, of course, of the templates of the fast folk – posthuman and AI – as they were at the beginning, not the bizzare entities they became. Even so, I agree entirely that the risk is too great. We must work towards being able to control, or at least contain, their development. The same goes for any form of artificial intelligence capable of improving itself. We will do it. The day will come when we control the Singularity, as we’ve learned to control the flame on the heath, the lightning of the sky and the nuclear fire of the stars! Until that day, they stay in the storage media, and with them…the dead sleep.’
We all sighed, in relief and regret.
‘Until that day,’ he went on, ‘we’re here for good. Our course through the Malley Mile, which led us to this world and not somewhere less favourable, was plotted by some of the fast folk who escaped the general madness. For a time. We can’t rely on them now, and until we can, there’s no way back. New Mars is our world, and our only world. We’ll make it a great one!
‘And now,’ Reid concluded, with a huge grin that reminded me of my old friend, and made me love him again, ‘we have work to do!’
We had a while to wait before there was anything for us to do. The daughter wormhole, spun off from the main course of the probe’s passage, had been open for some weeks before our ship had come through. Replicators and assemblers had been sent through in advance, and their initial work was already taking shape on the ground and among the system’s scattered metallic rocks. From these asteroids they would send a second generation of machines out to the comet-cloud, where a third generation would nudge the comets inward to be mined and farmed.
The ship itself, for all its apparent inelegance, had a modular design which would allow most of it to descend, section by section, to the surface. There was no provision for ascent. The ship’s sections would become a base-camp, incorporated in the city as it grew.
The city would be grown by dumb-mass robots and smart-matter assemblers, following not a design but a set of spontaneous-ordering rules and constraints. These had been worked out by smart, fast minds in the early days of the project. They had expected to share in a much better-organised expedition than the one Reid had cobbled together out of prisoners and guards and – for all I knew – out of shanghaied innocent dead like myself. The fast folk had therefore made provision for a greater human and machine population than we would be able to sustain. Whether their quirks were humour or error we never knew.
The reckless anarchy of the projected social system may have had its immediate origin in the rough