The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [31]
“Did you, by any chance, take the trouble to manufacture any liquor for us?” I asked. “Adam Zimmerman’s probably going to expect champagne and cognac when he wakes up, but I could be content with a decent bourbon.”
“Adam Zimmerman only drank red wine,” she informed me.
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” I said. Tired of being polite, I pushed the plate away, although the effect of the gesture was ruined by the lack of available space on the flat ledge that the smart wall had extruded to serve as a dining table.
I ran my fingers over the surface of the wall, speculatively. “How clever is this stuff?” I asked.
“Not very,” was the unhelpful reply — but Davida repented of her surliness almost immediately. “It can mold itself to any purpose you might require,” she said. “If you need a cocoon in which to sleep, or to immerse yourself in VE…although you’ll probably find a hood appropriate to most purposes.”
“Not exactly a utility mist, then.” I said.
She didn’t recognise the term, so I elaborated. “PicoCon’s bolder admen used to look forward to a day when all the matter in the world except for humans would consist of a gray fog of nanomachines that would obligingly manufacture anything its masters desired, according to their command. At that point in future history the distinction between reality and Virtual Experience was expected to break down, because reality itself would be programmable. You don’t seem to have gone quite that far.”
“No,” she admitted. “There’s a sense in which the whole microworld is a single machine, of course, but most of its components are as functionally independent as the cells in your body, and as limited in their scope. Walls do what walls are equipped to do.”
“So there’s no central intelligence — no Microworld Mastermind?”
“There’s a hierarchy of managing AIs, culminating in a master supervisor, but there’s no central ego. The AIs aren’t authentically intelligent, individually or collectively. They don’t have self-conscious minds in the sense that you and I do.”
The silvery “artificial geniuses” of my day had seemed very smart to their users, and everyone had had an opinion as to whether they would one day make the evolutionary transition to self-consciousness and personality, but the real geniuses making and programming them had always assured us that it couldn’t and wouldn’t happen. Apparently, they’d been right. Excelsior might have a brain the size of a small planet, but if Davida could be believed it wasn’t home to a person.
“You might try something simpler,” I suggested, nodding toward the uneaten food. “Manna will do. There’s no need to try to make it more interesting. The culinary art is a lot more difficult than mere recipes imply.”
“I’m sorry,” Davida said, plaintively. “We’ll try to produce something more to your liking.”
“But not for my benefit,” I guessed, wryly. “This was another trial run, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t want Adam Zimmerman to react this way to his welcoming banquet, would you? I suppose you’ll want to let me try out a few more experimental meals before you set the menu for the big celebration. Or is the ship from Earth bringing supplies fit for a thousand-year-old messiah? Did you think to ask the UN to send a chef as well as an ambassador?”
“The ship that’s coming from Earth is a shuttle,” she told me, with just the slightest hint of resentment in her voice. “It has no cargo space, and only six cocoons. The ship from the outer system is much bigger, but the outer satellites produce their food in exactly the same way that we do, using artificial photosynthesis. We didn’t know that this problem would arise, and we’ll try to address it as best we can. We didn’t mean to cause you any distress.”
Having thought it over while she was speaking I pulled the plate back again and took another forkful. It still wasn’t good, but it was even less offensive than its predecessors.
“This fancy second skin you’ve fitted me with is already compensating, isn’t it?” I said. “All I have