The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [78]
Clausen turned round to look back at him, her expression telling him everything he needed to know about her opinion of his intellect.
"It isn't about immortality. It's about survival. It's about doing our bit for the war effort."
"What war?" Gaunt asked.
"The one going on all around us," Clausen said. "The one you made happen."
They came in to land on another rig, one of five that stood close enough to each other to be linked by cables and walkways. The sea was still heavy, huge waves dashing against the concrete piers on which the rigs were supported. Gaunt peered intently at the windows and decks but saw no sign of human activity on any of the structures. He thought back to what Clausen and Da Silva had told him, each time trying to find a reason why they might be lying to him, why they might be going to pathological lengths to hoax him about the nature of the world into which he had woken. Maybe there was a form of mass entertainment that involved waking sleepers such as himself and putting them through the emotional wringer, presenting them with the grimmest possible scenarios, ramping up the misery until they cracked, and only then pulling aside the grey curtains to reveal that, in marvellous point of fact, life in the twenty-third century really was every bit as blue-skied and Utopian as he had hoped. That didn't seem very likely, though.
Yet what kind of war required people to be put to sleep in their billions? And why was the caretaker force, the 400,000 waking individuals, stretched so ridiculously thin? Clearly the rigs were largely automated but it had still been necessary to pull him out of sleep because someone else had died in the Patagonia offshore sector. Why not just have more caretakers awake in the first place, so that the system was able to absorb some losses?
With the helicopter safely down on the pad, Clausen and Da Silva told him to follow them into the depths of the other rig. There was very little about it to distinguish it from the one where Gaunt had been woken, save for the fact that it was almost completely deserted, with the only activity coming from skulking repair robots. They were clearly very simple machines, not much smarter than automatic window-cleaners. Given the years of his life that he had given over to the dream of artificial intelligence, it was dismaying to see how little progress - if any - had been made.
"We need to get one thing straight," Gaunt said, when they were deep into the humming bowels of the rig. "I didn't start any wars. You've got the wrong guy here."
"You think we mixed up your records?" Clausen asked. "How did we know about your work on thinking machines?"
"Then you've got the wrong end of the stick. I had nothing do to with wars or the military."
"We know what you did," she said. "The years spent trying to build a true, Turing-compliant artificial intelligence. A thinking, conscious machine."
"Except it was a dead end."
"Still led to some useful spin-offs, didn't it?" she went on. "You cracked the hard problem of language comprehension. Your systems didn't just recognize speech. They were able to understand it on a level no computer system had ever achieved before. Metaphor, simile, sarcasm and understatement, even implication by omission. Of course, it had numerous civilian applications, but that isn't where you made your billions." She looked at him sharply.
"I created a product," Gaunt said. "I simply made it available to whoever could afford it."
"Yes, you did. Unfortunately, your system turned out to be the perfect instrument of mass surveillance for every despotic government left on the planet. Every basket-case totalitarian state still in existence couldn't get its hands on your product fast enough. And you had no qualms whatsoever about selling it, did you?"
Gaunt felt a well-rehearsed argument bubbling up from his subconscious. "No communication tool in history has