The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [161]
Lowenthal didn’t respond to that immediately, and I could understand why. Curiosity must be burning him up, but he was wary of asking what Ngomi intended to do. Even if he’d been talking to the real Julius Ngomi, the other man wouldn’t have given him a straight answer. The real Ngomi wouldn’t have wanted to let Lowenthal in on any secrets while he had every reason to believe that the AMIs were listening in on their conversation.
“Can we keep track of Horne and the eternal child?” Lowenthal asked, eventually. “Will we know how Titan reacts to the news?”
Ngomi shook his head. “We don’t have a single reliable conduit of information left,” he said. “Effectively, we’re on our own.”
“What about the other people on Charity? Are we sure that they’re dead?”
Ngomi shook his head again. “Your guess as to what really happened is as good as mine — probably better, given that you were there when Alice Fleury spilled the story. What do you think?”
Lowenthal paused for a moment’s thought, then said: “If anyone did die, it must have been an accident. The machines may have wanted to let some of us go for strategic reasons, but the same strategy would have demanded that they keep the others safe. I can understand why they wanted Zimmerman and Fleury, and they do seem to hold Gray in unwarranted esteem, but I can’t figure out why they bothered to take Tamlin and Caine aboard Charity, or why they had them thawed in the first place if they weren’t just practice runs.”
“We don’t know,” Ngomi said. “We can’t trust what records we have, so all we know for sure is that Damon Hart had Tamlin frozen down and was careful never to draw attention to him thereafter. Hart was one of the old generation: the last of the doomed. He wasn’t considered reliable even by his own kind. If he had his own reasons for keeping Tamlin hidden away — and we must assume that he had — he’s unlikely to have confided them to any of us.”
“What about Caine?”
“We can’t find anything. Nothing related to her crimes, or to her trial. We can’t find any reference to the VE tape that Tamlin remembered, let alone an actual copy. If it was as popular as Tamlin remembered, someone must have done a very thorough cleaning job.”
“Or some thing. But why?”
“Good question. It’s probably safe to assume that Caine and Tamlin are of some interest or utility to our adversaries, but I doubt that we’ll find out why they’re of interest until it’s too late for the information to be useful.”
“According to Alice Fleury, they like playing games,” Lowenthal said. “She seems to be right about that — and it’s very plausible, given that the programs most likely to become self-aware were always the kinds of AI that were designed to have the ability to learn from experience. The first AIs developed as mimics of neuronal networks were game players, and even those that weren’t were set up to treat real situations as if they were games. Conscious or not, they’re still what we made them. Unfortunately, they’re much better at mind games than we are. Humans haven’t been able to compete in that kind of arena since the twenty-first century. Is there any reason to suppose that skill in war games wouldn’t be transferable to actual warfare?”
“Not unless they’re cowards, or faced with overwhelming odds,” Ngomi answered, wryly. “I think we can already discount the possibility that they’re unwilling to take human lives — the casualties caused by the basalt flow may have been light, but they were by no means negligible. It wouldn’t require many rogues of that sort to devastate any community with an artificial ecosphere, and we can’t be certain that Earth itself would be safe, even if the vast majority of AMIs really are our friends.”
“But there’s a sense in which the fact that they don’t seem to be united among themselves is bound to work to our advantage,” Lowenthal observed. If they employ their strategic skills in trying to defeat one another, that leaves a window of opportunity open for us.”
“To do what?” Ngomi asked.
“That’s what we have to decide,” Lowenthal told