“Come on,” Cantrell said. “You don’t expect us to believe the Anunnaki turned themselves into a bunch of worms?”
“Actually, that’s exactly what they did,” Tobias said. “Each individual added his DNA to the DNA of a group of worms. That way none of them was dependent on any single worm to be sure his DNA would be replicated down through the generations as the worms reproduced. Which meant that when the time to escape finally arrived, there were plenty of copies from which each of them could regenerate itself.”
“And their introns—” Liz said. “That’s how they recorded their memories, isn’t it?”
Tobias nodded. “There was too much data to fit into the DNA of a single worm, so they spread their memories across multiple worms, which is why they came together in bundles when they needed to access their higher neurological functions. Basically, they replicated their individual identities in a kind of distributed network. It wasn’t a solution nature ever came up with, but it worked for them. In fact, it’s probably the only solution that would have worked on Slag. DNA is the perfect mechanism for recording data and storing it down through the generations. In this case, it held all the information necessary to regenerate both the bodies and the memories of the entire Anunnaki crew.”
“And that’s why they had to modify Slag’s ecology, isn’t it?” Liz said. “Because hydrogen sulfide didn’t give the worms enough energy to communicate among themselves.”
“At least, not at the levels they needed,” Tobias said. “Not with the light signals they use.”
Cantrell grunted. “Yeah? Well, they weren’t all that smart. In case you forgot, they left a whole bunch of themselves back on Slag. All we have to do is go down, grab ourselves another handful, and wait for them to regenerate themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” Tobias said. “When we get back to Slag, I suspect we’re going to find that the remaining worms self-destructed just like those in the hold.”
“Right,” Cantrell laughed disparagingly. “Like they’d really all kill themselves just so a few of them could get away.”
Tobias shook his head. “It didn’t work that way. Like I said, the Anunnaki knew they couldn’t count on any single worm—or even any group of worms—to survive. So they generated lots of copies of themselves. My guess is that each individual Anunnaki duplicated both its genetic code and its memory code in the DNA of thousands, maybe even millions, of worms that then reproduced and migrated under the ice until they pretty much covered the entire moon. That’s why we found a few worms that had identical introns. They were duplicates, what you might call backups.”
“So if some of them got washed out from under the ice and were killed, there’d be others to take their places,” Liz said.
“Exactly,” Tobias said. “Only a few hundred had to come together to support the higher-level neurological functions of any single Anunnaki, which meant that any large sampling we put together would probably contain the functional DNA and the specific memories for all the original Anunnaki, given that they were evenly distributed across Slag’s surface.”
“But what about all the potential bundles we left behind?” Liz said. “Weren’t they… I don’t know… like clones?”
“I don’t think so,” Tobias said. “They would have been like clones if the very same worms came together each time a colony formed to perform the higher-level neurological functions of its particular Anunnaki. But it didn’t work that way. The worms were constantly on the move, constantly carrying newly learned information from one iteration of their specific Anunnaki to another. That’s how they kept themselves in synch, so to speak. Which means that it was really the pattern they created when they came together that constituted an Anunnaki, not the specific worms. Don’t think of the worms as physical pieces of an Anunnaki; think of them as memories. If the same memory exists in two different places, it’s still just one memory.”
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “Saying the Anunnaki were just patterns of memories…” She shook her head. “That’s kind of hard to swallow.”
“It was for me, too,” Tobias said. “At first, at least. I never subscribed to the notion that consciousness existed apart from the neurons that supported it. But think about it. If one of the superintendent’s neurons died and we replaced it with a synthetic neuron that had all the same synaptic connections, would he still be Superintendent Cantrell?”
They both looked at Cantrell, who blinked, not sure he liked the direction the conversation was taking.
“I guess it would still be him,” she said.
“And if we replaced ten of them, or twenty, or even half of all his neurons, it would still be him, right? As long as we still made the same connections, we’d still get the same responses.”
Liz nodded.
“So even though consciousness depends on something physical,” Tobias continued, “you don’t have to have the same physical neurons as long as you maintain the same connections. It’s really the connections, the pattern, that counts. That’s what our individual identities really are—patterns.”
“And you’re saying the Anunnaki took their individual patterns with them?” Liz said.
“I’m sure they left a few of their memories behind—all those that hadn’t migrated to the sample we sucked up into the transport ship—but they took enough to reconstitute each individual Anunnaki. After all, if you forget some of your memories, if some of your experiences don’t stick in your mind, you’re still you, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so…” she said.
“My guess is that that’s how the Anunnaki saw it—almost all of what they left behind were just duplicate memories. In any event, once we uploaded them, they reconstituted themselves in their original form, then they took over the ship and modified the engines to achieve the kinds of speeds we can only dream about.”
“You don’t know that,” Cantrell said. “You don’t know any of that for sure.”
“That’s true,” Tobias conceded. “I don’t know any of it for sure. The only way to know for sure is to ask them.” His gaze dropped away as he mulled over the problem. “Only we can’t do that, can we? Because someone…” he looked back up at Cantrell “…because someone let them all get away.”
Both Liz and Tobias smiled at the superintendent.
Cantrell glowered back at them as the color rose in his cheeks, but for the first time Liz could remember, there was absolutely nothing he could say.