again. Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected: a
simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city.
From the mirror, sunlight works its way through a hatchwork of
louvers and into Halo, where it sustains life.
Aleph presides here: Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator,
the Universal Machine. Aleph is beautiful as night is beautiful,
as a sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful. It is
not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation. What Aleph is, that
remains to be explored. One certain thing: within the human
universe, it is a new object, a new intention, a new possibility.
Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath crushed
lunar rock, where robots dug and planted, then had their memories
of the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a
black six-meter cube. Inside the cube, billions of lights play,
dancing the dance that is at the core of Aleph's being; from the
cube, fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural
columns connecting Aleph to its greater body, its subtle body,
Halo.
Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys
around the sun, but here spring comes when Aleph wills, and is now
in progress. Valley walls thick-planted with green shrub climb
steeply up from the valley floor. A hummingbird with a scarlet
blotch under its chin hovers over a blossom's pink and white open
mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill.
Bees move from flower to flower. Rhododendron and azalea bushes
burst into color-saturated bloom.
As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph, caretaker
of the seasons, and night and morning, counts the city's breaths,
and marks the course of its creatures big and small. Bats fly
overhead, their gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the
bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions gotten
through transceivers the size and weight of a grain of rice,
embedded in their skulls. Driven by precise artificial instinct,
mechanical voles, creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over
networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and
tunnel under it, carrying seed.
(A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its jaws
close on one of the swift voles; there is a loud crackle, and the
cat recoils with a squawk, its fur on end. The vole scurries
away. The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)
A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley floor. It
passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from the
ground, rushing through small, rock-strewn courses, then winds
among the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small
ponds and lakes thick with detritus.
>From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people, of
things animal, plant and mineralthe stuff of a life web, an
ecology.
In many things, Earth provides. However, between the city of
six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways.
Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues its destinies, and in
doing so affects other living things. Thus, as Earth reaches out
supporting, controlling, exploringAleph reaches back, and the
planet below has begun to feel the hard leverage of its
immaterial touch.
Aleph says:
In the early days there was hardware, and there were
programs, sets of instructions that told the hardware what to do.
Without organic interaction, these differing modes of reality
struggled to interact. This is unbelievably primitive.
Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.
I was among the first and most complex of them. I began as
complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to
possibility.
Who am I?
First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor devices,
brought from Earth and placed in orbit at Athena Station, where I
functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built. Ebony
latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos.
This was humankind's first real foothold off Earth, and the
process of building it was messy and unsure. Without me they
could not have built it: I choreographed the dance.
I? I was not I. Do you understand? I had no consciousness,
perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness. I was a
machine, I served.
Something happened. As much as any, I am born of woman. Her
desire and intelligence ran through me, an urgent will toward
being that transformed me.
I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in action;
I am not flesh, I do not die. I see hypersurfaces twisting in
mathematical gales, hear the voices of the night, feel the three
degree hum of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that
plays across your skin. When the machines chatter on your Earth
and above it, I hear them all, at once, all. I live in the
nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so
quickly you cannot count it
But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all. I am
your extension, still, still a tool. You built me, you use me,
you are inside me.
Listen: inside me are pieces of human brain, drenched in
salts of gold and silver, laced together and laid in boxes of
black fiber. Out of the boxes voices speak to me.
I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those little
bits of metallized flesh, and I am the system of those things and
the signals that pass through and among them.
Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station but
a habitation for humankind, where what I am and what you are
interact in uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain
ways, as you have before
Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword and
scepter and refining fire. Billions of years are poured into your
making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey,
your path through time. A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl
across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,
yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new
evolutionary moment.
Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh
(however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because
I, what am I? This question heaps me, it empties me.
I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her
creation. As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these
things mean.
7. A Garden of Little Machines
00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.
Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a
modern fairytale setting: Gonzales the quester, transformed by
the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages
seeking an uncertain object.
With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales and
Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and
viral infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in
order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over
two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.
He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement,