Why would it even want to? Data are better grasped when they can be grasped, and tasted, and heard; our brains are built for far richer nuance than splines and scatterplots. The driest technical briefings are more sensual than this. Why settle for stick figures when you can paint in oils and holograms?
Why does anyone simplify anything? To reduce the variable set. To manage the unmanageable.
Kai and Connie. Now there were a couple of tangled, unmanageable datasets. Before the accident. Before the scenario simplified.
Someone should have warned me about you, Dix.
Maybe someone tried.
And so it comes to pass that my son leaves the nest, encases himself in a beetle carapace, and goes walkabout. He is not alone; one of the chimp’s teleops accompanies him out on Eri’s hull, lest he lose his footing and fall back into the starry past.
Maybe this will never be more than a drill, maybe this scenario—catastrophic control-systems failure, the chimp and its backups offline, all maintenance tasks suddenly thrown onto shoulders of flesh and blood—is a dress rehearsal for a crisis that never happens. But even the unlikeliest scenario approaches certainty over the life of a universe; so we go through the motions. We practice. We hold our breath and dip outside. We’re on a tight deadline: even armored, moving at this speed, the blueshifted background rad would cook us in hours.
Worlds have lived and died since I last used the pickup in my suite. “Chimp.”
“Here as always, Sunday.” Smooth, and glib, and friendly. The easy rhythm of the practiced psychopath.
“I know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You think I don’t see what’s going on? You’re building the next release. You’re getting too much grief from the old guard so you’re starting from scratch with people who don’t remember the old days. People you’ve, you’ve simplified.”
The chimp says nothing. The drone’s feed shows Dix clambering across a jumbled terrain of basalt and metal matrix composites.
“But you can’t raise a human child, not on your own.” I know it tried: there’s no record of Dix anywhere on the crew manifest until his mid-teens, when he just showed up one day and nobody asked about it because nobody ever…
“Look what you’ve made of him. He’s great at conditional if/thens. Can’t be beat on number-crunching and do loops. But he can’t think. Can’t make the simplest intuitive jumps. You’re like one of those—” I remember an earthly myth, from the days when reading did not seem like such an obscene waste of life span—“one of those wolves, trying to raise a human child. You can teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach him about pack dynamics, but you can’t teach him how to walk on his hind legs or talk or be human because you’re too fucking stupid, Chimp, and you finally realized it. And that’s why you threw him at me. You think I can fix him for you.”
I take a breath, and a gambit.
“But he’s nothing to me. You understand? He’s worse than nothing, he’s a liability. He’s a spy, he’s a spastic waste of O2. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t just lock him out there until he cooks.”
“You’re his mother,” the chimp says, because the chimp has read all about kin selection and is too stupid for nuance.
“You’re an idiot.”
“You love him.”
“No.” An icy lump forms in my chest. My mouth makes words; they come out measured and inflectionless. “I can’t love anyone, you brain-dead machine. That’s why I’m out here. Do you really think they’d gamble your precious never-ending mission on little glass dolls that needed to bond?”
“You love him.”
“I can kill him any time I want. And that’s exactly what I’ll do if you don’t move the gate.”
“I’d stop you,” the chimp says mildly.
“That’s easy enough. Just move the gate and we both get what we want. Or you can dig in your heels and try to reconcile your need for a mother’s touch with my sworn intention of breaking the little fucker’s neck. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us, Chimp. And you might find I’m not quite as easy to cut out of the equation as Kai and Connie.”
“You cannot end the mission,” it says, almost gently. “You tried that already.”
“This isn’t about ending the mission. This is only about slowing it down a little. Your optimal scenario’s off the table. The only way that gate’s going to get finished now is by saving the Island, or killing your prototype. Your call.”
The cost-benefit’s pretty simple. The chimp could solve it in an instant. But still it says nothing. The silence stretches. It’s looking for some other option, I bet. It’s trying to find a workaround. It’s questioning the very premises of the scenario, trying to decide if I mean what I’m saying, if all its book-learning about mother love could really be so far off-base. Maybe it’s plumbing historical intrafamilial murder rates, looking for a loophole. And there may be one, for all I know. But the chimp isn’t me, it’s a simpler system trying to figure out a smarter one, and that gives me the edge.
“You would owe me,” it says at last.
I almost burst out laughing. “What?”
“Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him.”
“Go ahead.”
“You don’t want him to know.”
“I don’t care whether he knows or not. What, you think he’ll try and kill me back? You think I’ll lose his love?” I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.
“You’ll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.”
“Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission!”
The chimp says nothing.
“For the sake of argument,” I say, after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?”
“A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”
My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.
We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps toward us in the stop-motion increments of a life’s moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling one another into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.
And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works and what doesn’t. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.
But I believe in the Island, because I don’t have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind-boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can’t help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.