The Critics watched, with their peculiar mixture of bemusement and morbid cynicism, while the soldiers of the First and Fourth Regiments shot their officers and deserted en masse to the black flag of Burya Rubenstein’s now-overt Traditional Extropian Revolutionary Front. (Many soldiers burned their uniforms and threw away their guns; others adopted new emblems and took up strange silvery arms churned out by the committee’s replicator farm.) The Critics looked on as peasants greedily demanded pigs, goats, and in one case, a goose that laid golden eggs from the Festival; their womenfolk quietly pleaded for medicinal cures, metal cutlery, and fabric. In the castle, shots were heard as the servants butchered the Duke’s menagerie for food. A rain of gold roubles ordered by some economic saboteur fell widely across the streets of Novy Petrograd, and was equally widely ignored: to that extent, the economic collapse brought about by the Festival’s advent was already complete.
“They are truly pathetic,” commented She Who Observes the First; she clashed her tusks over a somatic bench that depicted a scene below, some of the few remaining loyal grenadiers dragging a terrified cobbler toward the gates of the castle, followed by his screaming, pleading family. “Unregulated instincts, unable to assimilate reality, bereft of perspective.”
“Chew roots; dig deep.” Guard Man the Fifth champed lugubriously, demonstrating his usual level of insight (intelligence not being a particularly useful characteristic in tunnel-running warriors). “Tastes of blood and soil.”
“Everything tastes of soil to a warrior,” She Who Observes snorted. “Eat tubers, brother, while your sisters discuss matters beyond your ken.” She rolled sideways, butting up against Sister of Stratagems the Seventh, who nipped at her flank gently. “Sibling-litter-peer. Uncertainty flows?”
“A time of exponentiating changes is upon them.” Sister Seventh was much given to making such gnomic pronouncements, perhaps in the naive hope that it would gain her a reputation for vision (and, ultimately, support when she made her bid for queendom). “Perhaps they are disorganized surface-scrabblers, clutching at stems, but there is a certain grandeur to their struggle; a level of sincerity seldom approached by primitives.”
“Primitive they are: their internal discourse is crippled by a complete absence of intertextuality. I cringe in astonishment that Festival wastes its attention on them.”
“Hardly. They are Festival’s antithesis, do you not feel this in your whiskers?” Sister Seventh blinked redly at She Who Observes, pawing for the control tree of the somatic bench. “Here we see a nest-drone.” The scene slewed into an enclosed space, following the abducted cobbler into the walls of the castle, “Phenotypic dispersal leads to extended specialization, as ever, with the usual degree of free will found in human civilization. But this one is structured to prevent information surge, do you not see?”
“Information surge? Prevented? Life is information!” Sister Seventh farted smugly. “I have been monitoring the Festival. Not one of the indigines has asked it for information! Artifacts, yes. Food, yes. Machines, up to and including replicators, yes. But philosophy? Art? Mathematics? Ontology? We might be witnessing our first zombie civilization.” Zombies were a topic that fascinated Sister Seventh. An ancient hypothesis of the original preSingularity ur-civilization, a zombie was a non-self-conscious entity that acted just like a conscious one: it laughed, cried, talked, ate, and generally behaved just like a real person, and if questioned, would claim to be conscious — but behind its superficial behavior, there was nobody home, no internalized model of the universe it lived in.
The philosophers had hypothesized that no such zombies existed, and that everything that claimed personhood was actually a person. Sister Seventh was less convinced. Human beings— those rugose, endothermic anthropoids with their ridiculously small incisors and anarchic social arrangements — didn’t seem very real to her. So she was perpetually searching for evidence that, actually, they weren’t people at all.
She Who Observes was of the opinion that her littermate was chewing on the happy roots again, but then, unlike Sister Seventh, she wasn’t a practical critic: she was an observer.
“I think we really need to settle the zombie question here before we fix their other problems.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” asked She Who Observes. “It’s the subjectivity problem again.
I tell you, the only viable analytical mode is the intentional stance. If something claims to be conscious, take it at its own word and treat it as if it has conscious intentions.”
“Ah, but I can so easily program a meerkat to chirp ‘I think, therefore I am!’ No, sister, we need to tunnel nearer the surface to find the roots of sapience. A test is required, one that a zombie will stick in, but an actor will squeeze through.”
“Do you have such a test in mind?”.
Sister Seventh pawed air and champed her huge, yellow tusks. “Yes, I think I can construct one. The essential characteristic of conscious beings is that they adopt the intentional stance: that is, they model the intentions of other creatures, so that they can anticipate their behavior. When they apply such a model to others, they acquire the ability to respond to their intentions before they become obvious: when they apply it to themselves, they become self-conscious, because they acquire an understanding of their own motivations and the ability to modify them.
“But thus far, I have seen no evidence that their motivations are self-modifying, or indeed anything but hardwired reflexes. I want to test them, by introducing them to a situation where their own self-image is contradicted by their behavior. If they can adapt their self-image to the new circumstances, we will know that we are dealing with fellow sapients. Which will ultimately influence the nature of our review.”
“This sounds damaging or difficult, sister. I will have to think on it before submitting to Mother.” Seventh emitted a bubbling laugh and flopped forward onto her belly. “Oh, sibling! What did you think I have in mind?”
“I don’t know. But be it anything like your usual—” She Who Observes stopped, seeing the triumphant gleam in her sister’s eye.
“I merely propose to Criticize a handful of them a trifle more thoroughly than usual,” said Sister Seventh.
“And when I’m done, any who live will know they’ve been Criticized. This is my methodology …” Commander Krupin took nearly two hours to get around to seeing Vassily Muller: it wasn’t intentional on his part. Almost as soon as the main drive field was powered up and running, and the ship surfing smoothly away from the Klamovka beanstalk, his pager beeped: ALL OFFICERS TO BRIEFING ROOM D IMMEDIATELY
“Shit and corruption,” he muttered. Passing Pavel Grubor: “The old man wants me right now. Can you take care of the shipyard technician and find out how long he’s going to be in closing out the installation of the baseline compensator? Page me when you’ve got an answer.” He headed off without waiting for a response.
Mikhail Krupkin enjoyed his job, and didn’t particularly expect or want any further promotions; he’d been in shipboard systems for the past fourteen years and expected to serve out his career in them before enjoying a long and happy retirement working for some commercial space line. However, messages like this one completely destroyed his peace of mind. It meant that the boss was going to ask him questions about the availability of his systems, and with the strange patch boxes installed in the drive room, the Lord Vanek might be mobile, but he couldn’t in all honesty swear it was one hundred percent solid.