‘I’m between wives,’ Gene Killman volunteered.
‘You have my full attention, ma’am,’ said Rosa Clements.
‘Okay, here we go. I’m going to ask three questions and I need the best answers going. You mustn’t go jumping to any goddam conclusions; treat them as hypothetical. Number one. Is there life beyond the Earth? Or are we just a mega-fluke? Professor Killman.’
The MIT man replied. ‘In my opinion the Universe is teeming with life.’
‘I thought the odds against life forming by chance from simple molecules were super-astronomical. There are more ways to combine amino acids than there are atoms in the Universe, but only one way forms them into proteins.’
‘That’s a problem,’ Killman admitted. ‘I don’t have the answer except to say here we are, and life got established down here just as soon as the meteorites stopped smashing our crust. Take a walk over Slave Province in Canada and you’re walking over micro-organic sediments a hundred feet thick and two and a half billion years old. In bits of West Greenland you’re walking over iron-rich layers just as thick but four billion years old laid down by primitive microbes. If life was some sort of mega-fluke, how come we’re here and how come it got started so early?’
‘But what about intelligent life? I’ve been told that’s a quadrillion to one chance.’
Killman said, ‘Again, as soon as the conditions were right on Earth, there was a transition from single-celled life forms to multi-celled ones. Once you’ve done that, there are selective advantages all the way from the formation of nerves, then synapses, then cerebral ganglions and all the way to brains, intelligence and societies.’
Hazel studied the man closely through her dark glasses. ‘Are you saying intelligent life should be common out there?’
‘It should be everywhere.’
‘So why don’t we see it everywhere?’
‘That’s a problem too,’ Killman admitted frankly. ‘There have been lots of suggestions but I don’t believe any of them.’
But Hazel had stopped listening. The message had come home loud and clear: ET is on the cards.
‘Okay.’ She sensed that something was slithering in a branch above her. ‘Question number two. Say we receive an intelligent signal from space. Say that all sorts of information, including genetic recipes to improve ourselves and our children, is in this message. That’s all the information you have to work on. I need the answers to the following questions. What sort of creatures would send it? What are we dealing with? Could it be on the level, or some sort of trap?’
‘Ms Baxendale, at MIT we’ve developed a doll. We call her Rapunzel on account of her long hair. She uses sensors to pick up movement and sound. She feels heat and she has a sense of touch. We have a couple of hundred facial expressions programmed into her and a few billion sound combinations. Would you believe she has moods? That she needs attention? Rapunzel can fool a child into believing she’s a real baby.’
‘Call me Hazel. What’s your point, Gene?’
‘This, ma’am. Rapunzel is just a dumb machine made of plastic and wire, programmed by a few silicon chips. We’re still in the steam age.’ Killman leaned forward. His voice was beginning to carry a zealous edge. ‘But give it fifty years. A hundred at the outside. By then we’ll have molecular and even quantum computers a billion times faster than anything on the market today. We’ll have dolls that fool adults, not just kids. They’ll be more mobile, smarter, and more imaginative than us. We’re moving into the age of intelligent machines.’
‘But they’re still just machines. They can’t think.’
‘Ma’am, I’m a machine and I can think. What am I but a collection of atoms, every last one obeying the laws of physics? Same as the doll.’
‘So a hundred years down the line we’ll have robot slaves. I still don’t see what you’re driving at.’
‘Hazel, these slaves as you call them will be smarter than us. A lot smarter.’
Hazel Baxendale peered into the MIT man’s eyes. ‘Rapunzel will take over?’
‘As surely as night follows day. It goes further than smart robots, ma’am. We’ll have so many implants to boost us, neural circuits inside our heads, networked into grids, that we’ll be hybrids ourselves. The need to outstrip rival nations or even just rivals will drive this. Eventually the carbon-based part of us will be redundant. Organic life — carbon-based — is on the way out. This is inevitable whenever intelligence develops technology. Sooner or later the technology takes over, supplants the primitive organic life. Therefore the signal — this make-believe signal — hasn’t come from a life form like us. It’s been sent by a machine.’
Hazel puffed out her cheeks. She took a few seconds to assimilate this amazing new thought. ‘Humanity will disappear?’
The MIT engineer was scrutinising her. ‘It’ll merge with our smart machines. Not that there has been a signal, ma’am.’
Hazel blessed her upbringing with three brothers on a Montana farm: her poker face was impenetrable.
Rosa Clements broke the silence. ‘I think I can anticipate your third question, ma’am.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘You want to know what would motivate a machine to contact us. More to the point, whether it would go by a moral code and if so, would that code be malign.’
This is one bright cookie, Hazel thought with some alarm. ‘As we keep telling each other, this is all hypothetical,’ she said. ‘But if it wasn’t, I’d say this goes far beyond anything any Administration has ever had to handle.’
Rosa nodded. ‘You know what Truman said when he became President? He said, “There must be a million men better qualified than me to take on this job.”’
‘Truman was wrong, Professor Clements. The American people didn’t elect a million highfliers, they elected Harry S. Truman. It’s the only qualification that counts.’
The woman acknowledged the rebuke with a slight bow.
Killman stabbed the air with a fat finger. ‘We couldn’t relate to machine aliens. There’s no reason to assume they’d have anything like human compassion built into them. They’d be programmed only to survive. Any philanthropy, any knowledge being fired at us, could be a mask. There’s no way to tell what’s really lying behind it. So don’t take a chance, don’t respond. Don’t even use the genetic recipes. There might be something hidden in them.’ He added, ‘But as you say, this is all hypothetical.’
Rosa smiled and said, ‘Hazel, this is the sort of ill-informed rubbish technocrats come away with from time to time. They think because they can make machines that are brighter than humans, therefore these machines are conscious beings. The technocrats don’t begin to grasp the subtleties. Will their dolls feel pain? No. Will they be conscious? No. They’ll never be more than mechanical zombies. I would say that no machine is ever motivated by philanthropy or malice or anything else. It just obeys a program. Any signal comes from a thinking, feeling intelligence. Or its proxy in the form of a tape recorder. Whatever, there will be an underlying moral code from a living creature. Intelligent machines will share the values of their creators. And these values will be benign.’
Benign? It was the crucial issue. ‘Convince me.’
‘As soon as Homo sapiens acquired intelligence we also got the concept of sin — in other words, a sense of right and wrong. The ability to make moral decisions emerged along with intelligence.’
‘Tell that to the victims of the Hitler gang, or the Bin Laden creeps,’ Hazel said.