Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [323]
‘And you want to stash some other…machinery and stores?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nobody’ll ever go there, not when we’ve got the system set up. If the incoming ice isn’t enough of a deterrent, the whole area will be absolutely foul with unknown organics. Exaggerating how poisonous they might be should be easy enough.’
And so it proved.
The actual building of the canal and its associated machinery of pumps and locks took two years. I did it, of course, with the help of a fleet of automated machinery, and design software that took my scribbles and handwaves and turned out precise technical drawings. But co-ordinating them and making the fine decisions was down to me, and it was the most fun I’d had since the Third World War. When the Sieve Plate complex was complete, Reid flew in, alone, in an autopiloted helicopter with the crated components of the storage and retrieval mechanisms for millions of dead people, and the programs to re-launch thousands of uploaded people into a posthuman culture. The whole lot weighed about ten tonnes, slung beneath the Sikorski.
When we’d got the machinery and storage media stashed under the mountain, Meg and I invited Reid in for coffee. Reid, in physical reality, was wearing contacts. He saw us sitting on a verandah, and we saw him just outside, on the step of the helicopter. Anyone else watching – there wasn’t – would have seen Reid sitting on one machine, talking to another.
At some point I asked him how things were going with downloading the people in the robots to their cloned bodies.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. We’re about three-quarters through. We’re dealing with it more or less as people want it.’ He grinned quizzically. ‘Haven’t seen your application.’
I looked at Meg and laughed. ‘Never crossed my mind, to be honest. I’m having a good life, right here.’ She smiled back. Her beauty had increased with her intelligence, and her aesthetic sense with both. She was wearing a bias-cut green velvet dress lifted from a fashion-history site.
Reid stroked his chin. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He lit a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t leave it too long. There’s a bad attitude spreading about robots. The people who’ve been downloaded are the main instigators of it. They tend to draw a very sharp line between people and machines. In fact a lot of them will deny there’s such a thing as machine consciousness.’
A fly – how the hell did we bring them? – buzzed past him. The VR consistency rules picked it up when it flew ‘into’ the verandah, and a simulation seamlessly took its place and flew out again.
‘What?’ I said. ‘But they’ve experienced machine consciousness!’
Reid looked at me with a glint of his familiar devil’s advocacy. ‘No, they now have memories of experiencing it. Which doesn’t prove that they actually did experience it at the time. It could be an artifact of the consistency rules. That’s the sophisticated argument. The vulgar version is to insist that you were human all right, but artificial intelligences are missing some magic ingredient, which any goddam cleric or scholastic will cheerfully assure you is a soul.’
‘God,’ I said. ‘That’s disgusting.’
‘What about the succubi?’ Meg asked.
‘They’re the worst,’ Reid said.
Meg threw back her head and laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you just know it! No snobs worse than the new rich!’
I frowned at them both. ‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is how they relate to their own copies in the robots.’
Reid gave me an odd look. ‘You definitely don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Nobody leaves a copy of themselves in the robot. Everybody so far has been very insistent on that. The way they see it, they’re about to resume a normal human life, and if a copy stayed behind they’d have a 50–50 chance of waking up and finding themselves still there. It’s irrational, in a sense – why don’t they fear being the copy that’s destroyed?’
‘Because they don’t experience it,’ said Meg. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Presumably?’
‘Of course,’ Reid said