Caroline could hardly believe it when she saw the island. At first she thought it must be an illusion; she had nearly lost track of her purpose in taking up the Task, and in her ferocity of concentration had not really dared believe she might finish it. But here she was, the hull of her boat scraping solid ground. She rowed it ashore on a gentle sand beach, and sat there.
She sat for awhile, collecting herself. The myriad elements of her personality seemed to have scattered, and she had to look for them in dusty corners of her psyche. They had been unused for a long time and were a bit rusty. She hadn't found them all when the tall man came to meet her. He didn't seem happy; in fact, he seemed resigned. Although he looked middle-aged, he seemed old and weary. She looked up at him and her vision swam. The boat was grounded, but it still seemed to be going up and down.
"Caroline Frances Hubert I presume." The name sounded familiar, and it took her a moment to realize it was hers. "You certainly believe in doing things the hard way."
She hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about.
Lawrence guided her to the house, fed her, and let her collect herself. Everything was strictly pre-Prime Intellect. He cooked on a gas stove and used an electric coffee pot. There was even a TV set with a glass picture tube, a huge ancient Sony monitor. It was as if Lawrence had had himself encased in amber, and remained unchanged while the rest of the universe spun out of control.
"Feeling better?"
Caroline nodded.
"You want to talk now, or you want to rest some more?"
She cleared her throat. "We can talk now," she said, but it came out as a strangled yelp. She said it again, and got it right. It had been a long time since she had used her vocal cords.
"Then talk."
"There were hundreds of worlds with life on them at the time of the Change. You murdered them."
Lawrence blinked but did not flinch. He had expected something like this.
"First, I did not do anything. Prime Intellect did it, on its own initiative and against my wishes. Second, the worlds with alien life are not gone. They are simply inactive."
Caroline snorted. "And what are the chances of them becoming active again?"
"Not much."
"Then they're dead."
"Define it however you want. If you want me to admit I fucked up, then I admit it. It never occurred to me for one minute that Prime Intellect would collect the kind of power it now has. If I had suspected it I would have pulled the plug and smashed it before it got the chance."
"Bullshit."
"Completely true."
They glared at one another.
"Great. I spend a year getting here and you say 'I didn't know the computer was loaded.»
"Sometimes the truth is stupid."
This wasn't going quite as Caroline had wanted that long-ago day when she had accepted Lawrence's Task. She was trying to work up the proper tone of righteous rage and it just wouldn't come. It would start, and then she would look at Lawrence and see a pathetic, tired man who already knew how badly he had fucked up and was doing what he could, which was next to nothing, to put things right.
"Why don't you just make Prime Intellect start the aliens back up? Surely it listens to you."
"Not in things like that. It sees the aliens as a First Law threat to human society, because they might learn to do to us what we have already done to them. A very small risk of a very great harm. Add to this that I defined the word 'human' in such a way that it does not include animals or aliens, and the course of action is obvious. I have been unable to convince it otherwise. And believe me, I have tried."
"But you put the Laws of Robotics in it in the first place."
"And I can't take them out. It second-guessed me, on the Night of Miracles. It froze me out of the Debugger while it was working on you.
"Now it only lets me look, not change things. The night sky is a partial representation of Prime Intellect's mind. It's called the Global Association Table. The points or stars represent concepts, and the lines are the links between them. There are also registers I can call up for each concept which define its relationship to the Three Laws. This was a fairly simple system which I didn't really have time to test properly before it froze me out. In particular, I'm not sure how it will react to certain ethical paradoxes. That Death Jockey contract gave me some sleepless nights when you first used it, though it seems to have developed a stable response. It's never had a similar First Law conflict, thank God."
Caroline's eyes widened. "Are you telling me that Prime Intellect isn't stable?"
Lawrence shrugged. "I'm saying that I don't know whether it's stable or not. It's never been tested. The hardware at ChipTec was only online for about a month before it found you, froze me out, and started growing. And none of its predecessors were complex enough to even consider this kind of problem."
The situation was simply amazing. Caroline had come to dress Lawrence down for creating this thing, thinking he was exercising some godlike control over its direction, and instead she found out that he barely understood the situation himself. And that it was totally out of his hands.
He knew he had fucked up. He was sorry. He had spent his life trying to mend things. Suddenly he seemed tragic and noble, all the more so because he had readily admitted his mistake. And Caroline didn't want to feel that way at all. She hadn't come all this way to feel sorry for him.
"You can stay as long as you like," Lawrence was saying. "You can't communicate with Prime Intellect while you're here, but I won't kick you out or hurt you. After making you travel all that way I feel I have a responsibility to give you your money's worth."
"I'd like you to show me how Prime Intellect works."
Lawrence was stunned. "That…that's a tall order, Caroline. I don't understand all of it myself."
"Just as much as you understand."
"I don't want to. I think it could be dangerous."
Caroline looked at him as if to say: C'est pas vrai!
"You have been at the center of several terrible Second Law paradoxes. Prime Intellect pays an awful lot of attention to you. It considers you a kind of bellwether."
"My money's worth?"
"Let me think about it."
She could stay as long as she wanted, though, and she was very patient when necessary. In the end it was inevitable that he would teach her.
In the sky, the pole star represented the First Law of Robotics. The southern pole star was the Second Law. And all the other stars were other concepts. The sky represented only a small fraction of Prime Intellect's mind; Lawrence could change the emphasis to focus on different things.
"Display Caroline Frances Hubert," Lawrence said, and a whole network of bright lines lit up. Her star was blinking, and the lines radiating from it were all different colors.
Lawrence explained the color code in some detail. "As you can see, there is a whole body of tightly related concepts connecting you to the First and Second Laws. That constellation over there represents the negotiating process you used to develop the Death Jockey contract." Lawrence pointed out the different stars, and had Prime Intellect report the concepts they represented.
"What's that group over there?"
Lawrence knew, but he didn't want to tell her. "That…um. Well, it's AnneMarie Davis."
Caroline's jaw fell. "The gang's all here. There's a lot of static around that. Is that because I drove her crazy?"