The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [160]
“I’m sorry, Michael,” Ngomi was saying. “We can’t just flush you clean. There’s stuff inside you that we’ve never seen before. We need to examine it carefully in situ before we can begin dismantling it, let alone replacing it.”
“It’s a mistake to leave the nanobots in,” Lowenthal’s voice told him. “We can’t speak freely while I’m carrying bugs. I don’t care how thick the walls are — the mere fact that they have embedded systems prevents us from being certain that this isn’t being relayed all the way back to the other side.” I couldn’t count the layers of bluff and double bluff contained in that statement.
“I know that, Michael,” Ngomi said, “but the brutal truth is that nobody will be speaking freely to or around you for a long time. You knew the risk when you volunteered to go. It always looked like a crooked deal.”
“It looked like Ahasuerus testing our apron strings, or Excelsior testing theirs,” Lowenthal said, a trifle resentfully. “Who could have imagined that an Outer System ship could go rogue? Who could have imagined that Hope’s people could have progressed to the point of sending missionaries to the home system?”
“It’s our job to imagine things,” Ngomi replied. “We can’t afford to be taken by surprise. You know as well as anyone how easily things can get out of hand if they’re not properly supervised.”
“Not properly supervised?” Lowenthal echoed. “I know you’ve spent centuries perfecting your mastery of understatement, Julie, but we’re talking about Armageddon here. They tried to blow up the world, and we didn’t even know they existed.”
“That’s not strictly true, Michael.”
“You did know they existed — and you didn’t tell me!”
“I mean that they didn’t try to blow up the world, Michael. Whatever happened was the act of a rogue, and the explosion wasn’t intended to destroy the planet. It wouldn’t have done that even if the rogue’s rivals hadn’t cushioned the blow. The incident should have tipped us off. The casualty figures were always unbelievably low, but we were so secure in our arrogance that we simply took the credit for that ourselves, complimenting ourselves on the efficacy of our own contingency plans. That was foolish. If we’d only treated the lightness of the casualties as a suspicious circumstance, and hadn’t been so hung up on the possibility that Titan or Umbriel might have been behind the explosion…well, it’s easy to be wise after the event. If it’s true that conscious machines have been around for several centuries, that might help us to make better sense of a lot of things.”
“I know. That’s what convinced me that it was true, and not some Outer System disinformation program. Unfortunately, all the vital questions remain unanswered. How many are there? Where are they? Can we identify them? How different are they from us? It might be unwise to take it for granted that they’re as many or as powerful as Alice Fleury implied. If they can turn an Outer System ship there’s probably no way that Titan can hold out against them, but we might, if we could only find a way of purging our systems.”
“We’re probably ninety-nine years too late, Michael,” Ngomi said, softly. “They didn’t blow up the world, but they certainly opened the doorway wide for the importation of a great deal of Outer System hardware. If we had some reliable way of testing for the presence of consciousness or free will, we might be able to judge the magnitude of the problem, but we don’t even have a reliable means of testing one another. The idea of robotization