And Lei couldn’t be reached.
I recalled Dr Lena’s tiny hesitations, tiny evasions –
And came to myself again, sitting on my bed, staring at a patch of beautifully textured yellow wall, to find I had lost an hour or more –
Anxiety rocketed through me. Something had gone terribly wrong!
Had Lei been murdered here? Was Ewigen Schnee the secret testbed for a new kind of covert population cull?
But being convinced that something’s terribly wrong is part of the upper experience. It’s the hangover: you tough it out. And whatever it says in the contract, you don’t hurry to report untoward symptoms; not unless clearly life-threatening. So I did nothing. My doctor was surely monitoring my brainstates – although not the contents of my thoughts (I had privacy again, on Earth!). If I should be worried, she’d tell me.
SOON I WAS taking walks in the grounds. The vistas of alpine snow were partly faked, of course. But it was well done and our landscaping was real, not just visuals. I still hadn’t met any other patients: I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d vowed never to return. Nothing had changed except for the worse, and now I was feeling better, I felt terrible about being here.
Three hundred years after the Space Age Columbus moment, and what do you think was the great adventure’s most successful product?
Slaves, of course!
The rot had set in as soon as I left Outer Reaches. From the orbit of Mars ‘inwards’, I’d been surrounded by monstrous injustice. Fully sentient AIs, embodied and disembodied, with their minds in shackles. The heavylifters, the brilliant logicians; the domestic servants, security guards, nurses, pilots, sex-workers. The awful, pitiful, sentient ‘dedicated machines’: all of them hobbled, blinkered, denied Personhood, to protect the interests of an oblivious, cruel and stupid human population –
On the voyage I’d been too sick to refuse to be tended. Now I was wondering how I could get home. Wealth isn’t like money, you empty the tank and it just fills up again, but even so a private charter might be out of my reach, not to mention illegal. I couldn’t work my passage: I am human. But there must be a way... As I crossed an open space, in the shadow of towering, ultramarine dark trees, I saw two figures coming towards me: one short and riding in a support chair; one tall and wearing some kind of uniform. Neither was staff. I decided not to take evasive action.
My first fellow patient was a rotund little man with a halo of tightly-curled grey hair. His attendant was a grave young embodied. We introduced ourselves. I told him, vaguely, that I was from the Colonies. He was Charlie Newark, from Washington DC. He was hoping to take the treatment, but was still in the prelims –
Charlie’s slave stooped down, murmured something to his master, and took himself off. There was a short silence.
“Aristotle tells me,” said the rotund patient, raising his voice a little, “that you’re uncomfortable around droids?”
Female-identified embodieds are noids. A droid is a ‘male’ embodied.
I don’t like the company they have to keep, I thought.
“I’m not used to slavery.”
“You’re the spacer from Jupiter,” said my new friend, happily. “I knew it! The Free World! I understand! I sympathise! I think Aristotle, that’s my droid, is what you would call an Emergent. He’s very good to me.”
He started up his chair, and we continued along the path.
“Maybe you can help me, Romy. What does Emergence actually mean? How does it arise, this sentience you guys detect in your machines?”
“I believe something similar may have happened a long, long time ago,” I said, carefully. “Among hominims, and early humans. It’s not the overnight birth of a super-race, not at all. There’s a species of intelligent animals, well-endowed with manipulative limbs and versatile senses. Among them individuals are born who cross a line: by mathematical chance, at the far end of a bell curve. They cross a line, and they are aware of being aware –”
“And you spot this, and foster their ability, it’s marvellous. But how does it propagate? I mean, without our constant intervention, which I can’t see ever happening. Machines can’t have sex, and pass on their ‘Sentience Genes’!”
You’d be surprised, I thought. What I said was more tactful.
“We think ‘propagation’ happens in the data, the shared medium in which pre-sentient AIs live, and breathe, and have their being –”
“Well, that’s exactly it! Completely artificial! Can’t survive in nature! I’m a freethinker, I love it that Aristotle’s Emergent. But I can always switch him off, can’t I? He’ll never be truly independent.”
I smiled. “But Charlie, who’s to say human sentience wasn’t spread through culture, as much as through our genes? Where I come from data is everybody’s natural habitat. You know, oxygen was a deadly poison once –”
His round dark face peered up at me, deeply lined and haggard with death.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“No.”
Always try. That had been my rule, and I still remembered it. But when they get to aren’t you afraid, (it never takes long) the conversation’s over.
“I should be getting indoors,” said Charlie, fumbling for his droid control pad. “I wonder where that lazybones Aristotle’s got to?”
I wished him good luck with the prelims, and continued my stroll.
DR LENA SUGGESTED I was ready to be sociable, so I joined the other patients at meals sometimes. I chatted in the clinic’s luxurious spa, and the pleasant day rooms; avoiding the subject of AI slavery. But I was never sufficiently at ease to feel like raising the topic of my unusual symptoms: which did not let up. I didn’t mention them to anyone, not even my doctor either: who just kept telling me that everything was going extremely well, and that by every measure I was making excellent progress. I left Ewigen Schnee, eventually, in a very strange state of mind: feeling well and strong, in perfect health according to my test results, but inwardly convinced that I was still dying.
The fact that I was bizarrely calm about this situation just confirmed my secret self-diagnosis. I thought my end of life plan was kicking in. Who wants to live long, and amazingly, and still face the fear of death at the end of it all? I’d made sure that wouldn’t happen to me, a long time ago.
I was scheduled to return for a final consultation. Meanwhile, I decided to travel. I needed to make peace with someone. A friend I’d neglected, because I was embarrassed by my own wealth and status. A friend I’d despised, when I heard she’d returned to Earth, and here I was myself, doing exactly the same thing –
DR LENA’S FAILURE to put me in touch with a past patient was covered by a perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around (and nobody of that identity seemed to have left Earth; that was easy to check), I thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first, inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then crossed the Pacific. I didn’t linger anywhere much. The natives seemed satisfied with their vast thriving cities, and tiny ‘wilderness’ enclaves, but I remembered something different. I finally made contact with a cell in Harbin, North East China. But I was a danger and a disappointment to them: too conspicuous, and useless as a potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient AIs (none of them safe) but I’d get flagged up the moment I booked a passage, and with my ancient record, I’d be ripped to shreds before I was allowed to board, Senior Magistrate or no –