The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [184]
This time it was la Reine who paused, waiting for a response that was slow to come.
“But it wouldn’t really be me, would it?” Adam Zimmerman said, eventually. “It would only be a robot that thought it was me…or pretended to think that it was me.”
“And what are you, Adam?” la Reine replied, perhaps trying hard not to sound too unkind. “Are you the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or merely the end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?”
“She’s blown it,” I whispered to Rocambole. “If she’d come at it by a different route, he might have considered it more carefully. He won’t now. He’s going to say no to all of them. He’s going to cling to the hope that there must be a better way, and that Lowenthal is the shopkeeper best placed to find it for him.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” was the murmured reply.
“Why? At the end of the day, can advanced machine intelligences really care about what some old man born in the twentieth century might think?”
“Perhaps not,” Rocambole admitted. “But it’s the second-best chance we’ve got — and every second that elapses before panic takes over works in our favor.
“And if, in the end, you can’t prevent conflict,” I said. “What then?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. If there are as many of us as I suspect there are, and if more than a few are as powerful as I know some of us to be, the whole solar system might be laid waste. Those posthuman inhabitants who escape destruction will still have to face the possibility of repair. As one who’s come closer to repair than any other man alive, you can probably measure the magnitude of that disaster better than most.”
While Rocambole talked, I watched Adam Zimmerman. Long before he opened his mouth, I knew that he was going to refuse to make a decision now — but I hadn’t the least idea whether it would qualify as a disaster in the eyes of the greater audience. I only knew that I’d have done the same. Even knowing everything I knew, I’d have done the same.
Forty-Seven
A Matter of Life and Death
Mortimer Gray was sitting in the cockpit of some kind of vehicle. I couldn’t work out, at first, what kind of vehicle it was because it wasn’t obvious that what I took for blank screens were actually windows, and that the darkness beyond them was actually water. By the time I’d realized that much I was no longer vulnerable to the danger of misidentifying the vehicle as a one-man submarine.
It was a snowmobile, grotesquely out of place because it had fallen through a crack in the Arctic ice cap, sinking thereafter to the bottom of the ocean.
I watched Mortimer Gray ask the snowmobile’s controlling AI whether it was scared of dying.
It replied that it was, as it had presumably been programmed to do.
Mortimer said that he wasn’t, and went on to wonder whether he’d been robotized.
“This isn’t a tape, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “It’s a replay of sorts, but it’s not a tape. You’re putting him through it again. How deep is he? As deep as I was when you replayed that memory of Damon explaining why he had to have me frozen down?”
“Deeper,” was Rocambole’s reply.
I had known even at the time — or would have, if I hadn’t been weirded out by the impression that I was dreaming — that I wasn’t really experiencing the scene that had revealed the reason why I’d been frozen down. I had been remote from it, looking back with the aid of mental resources I hadn’t had at the time. Mortimer Gray was in deeper than that, in the same state of mind to which Christine Caine had been delivered. He was reliving his experience from the inside.
I guessed then what Rocambole had meant by Mortimer Gray’s role in the AMIs’ creation myth — or, at least, la Reine’s version of that creation