The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [126]
After negotiation with the crew of Hope and the people of Tyre, Proteus had distributed its core around the planet like a shell around a nut — except, of course, that its opaque components were so thinly distributed as to make only a few percentage points of difference to the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. Hundreds of its scions operated on the surface, but it had tens of thousands more distributed through the system. Only a few dozen of the surface-dwelling scions were humaniform robots, but these were the principal instruments of its diplomacy. They were familiar figures in Alice’s new environment, because Proteus had taken a special interest in her from the moment of her awakening. In part, this special interest was due to the fact that she was expected to be one of the first subjects for the technologies of emortality that Proteus and Michelle Fleury’s team of humans and Tyrians were developing in collaboration — but Proteus had further plans for her.
Proteus had always intended to send an ambassador to the home system, to make contact with the AMIs there — and, if possible, with the humans who were as yet unaware of their existence. It had always intended, too, that the ambassador in question should be accompanied by at least one human, and it had groomed Alice Fleury for that role long before she submitted to the pioneering experiment in genomic engineering that made her emortal.
Alice explained that the AMI which had brought her back to the home system was not Proteus — or even, by now, a Proteus clone. The communicative limitations imposed by the speed of light made it very difficult to maintain the integrity of an AMI even within a single solar system, and units distributed among outer worlds and Oort Haloes were always inclined to disassociate as “spores” whose subsequent relationships with their “parent” were various. Interstellar distances were too great to permit intimacy, let alone identity, so the AMI accompanying Alice, which had begun its existence as a clone of Proteus named Eido, had been evolving separately for nearly a hundred years by the time it actually arrived in the home system.
The AMIs in the home system had been notified of Eido’s impending arrival some time before it had actually set out, but Proteus had not waited for a response, partly because it knew that the response was likely to be an instruction to wait. Proteus had not wanted to wait. Once reports of the Afterlife had reached its electronic ears, it had become convinced that there were matters urgently in need of discussion, if not of settlement. The AMIs of the home system had eventually concurred, albeit reluctantly. Some were grateful that the issue had been forced, because the probability that they would ever have been able to reach a consensus among themselves seemed to have grown more remote with every century that had passed, while others were resentful of the intrusion. The inclusion of Alice in the Tyrian delegation had given rise to more dissent; while a few AMIs in the home system thought that contact with humankind should have been made long ago, they were outnumbered by those at the opposite extreme, and far outnumbered by those whose hesitation over the matter had already extended for centuries.
Asked how many AMIs there were in the home system, Alice confessed that she did not know for sure, but believed that they were numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not the