‘About the dead. Many of us here may have loved ones or friends among them – I know I have – and may be anxious to see them again. And so we shall, but not for a long time. Growing clones quickly to maturity, and impressing on their brains the imprint of your memories and personalities is possible with the technology we have to hand. Resurrecting the bodies and personalities of the dead from their smart-matter storage is not. It can be done, but only with the help of the fast folk, whose stored structures would have to be revived first…’
The crowd’s response, this time, was a noise I’d never heard before: a hoarse sigh, a grinding of teeth, a shifting of feet – a collective snarl. Once more, I too was to my surprise caught up in it, bristling at the thought of the macro-organic monsters whose madness had trapped me for months. But in those months, which hadn’t been months to me, I had learned something. Something vital, which I couldn’t remember. Reid’s speech resumed, interrupting my puzzled thoughts.
‘I’m talking, of course, of the templates of the fast folk – posthuman and AI – as they were at the beginning, not the bizzare entities they became. Even so, I agree entirely that the risk is too great. We must work towards being able to control, or at least contain, their development. The same goes for any form of artificial intelligence capable of improving itself. We will do it. The day will come when we control the Singularity, as we’ve learned to control the flame on the heath, the lightning of the sky and the nuclear fire of the stars! Until that day, they stay in the storage media, and with them…the dead sleep.’
We all sighed, in relief and regret.
‘Until that day,’ he went on, ‘we’re here for good. Our course through the Malley Mile, which led us to this world and not somewhere less favourable, was plotted by some of the fast folk who escaped the general madness. For a time. We can’t rely on them now, and until we can, there’s no way back. New Mars is our world, and our only world. We’ll make it a great one!
‘And now,’ Reid concluded, with a huge grin that reminded me of my old friend, and made me love him again, ‘we have work to do!’
We had a while to wait before there was anything for us to do. The daughter wormhole, spun off from the main course of the probe’s passage, had been open for some weeks before our ship had come through. Replicators and assemblers had been sent through in advance, and their initial work was already taking shape on the ground and among the system’s scattered metallic rocks. From these asteroids they would send a second generation of machines out to the comet-cloud, where a third generation would nudge the comets inward to be mined and farmed.
The ship itself, for all its apparent inelegance, had a modular design which would allow most of it to descend, section by section, to the surface. There was no provision for ascent. The ship’s sections would become a base-camp, incorporated in the city as it grew.
The city would be grown by dumb-mass robots and smart-matter assemblers, following not a design but a set of spontaneous-ordering rules and constraints. These had been worked out by smart, fast minds in the early days of the project. They had expected to share in a much better-organised expedition than the one Reid had cobbled together out of prisoners and guards and – for all I knew – out of shanghaied innocent dead like myself. The fast folk had therefore made provision for a greater human and machine population than we would be able to sustain. Whether their quirks were humour or error we never knew.
The reckless anarchy of the projected social system may have had its immediate origin in the rough justice of the Mutual Protection Company’s rule-book, but I suspect that Reid’s rules, in turn, were rooted in the libertarian texts with which I’d once tried to warp his mind.
But I anticipate.
Reid talked to me personally before we were all offered work contracts. He looked forward to meeting me again in my human form, explained reasonably enough that it wouldn’t be available for a year or two yet, and that in the meantime he wanted me to work – as an independent contractor, just like all the others – on an important project. I’d have lots of (genuinely) non-human robots and other machinery to supervise, loads of kudos and money to earn, and best of all a bigger computer to live in, with more scope for virtual recreation and freedom to communicate with others. We could set up shared worlds, enjoying a human equivalent of the macro trips…
‘Great,’ I said; and my CPU (the whole thing and its peripherals turned out to be, when removed from the robot, about the size of my first digital watch) was packed along with many others, drogue-dropped to the surface and plugged into a new, shiny and robust machine. Meg, whose increased intelligence never got in the way of her continued embarrassing devotion, selected a house and landscape and got to work editing them into an enjoyable place to live, while I got on with my work in what I was pleased to call the real world.
I built the Stone Canal.
The city’s other canals, ring and radial and capillary, were for transport. This one would be for more than that. It was to be the city’s main source of water (other than rain) and the water would come from space. Comets, broken up in advance, would be guided in to crash on the range we called the Madreporite Mountains, about a hundred kilometres from the city. Much of the water from the cometary ice would evaporate. This wasn’t a problem: we wanted it in the atmosphere. The runoff would flow into the Stone Canal. Its main significance wasn’t so much the water, however, as what could be extracted from it.
For tens of kilometres along and under its banks, beginning at the Sieve Plates – a system of dams – at the foot of the mountains, pipes and pumps and machinery were to extract from the cometary water all the minerals and organic molecules it contained. These would then be fed into what we called ‘plants’ – basically solar-powered, smart-matter chemical processing units, concentrating the useful material for subsequent harvesting. (You can see why we called them ‘plants’.)
The planning and exploration took me months, long before the first soil-moving machinery rolled out of the automatic factories on the edge of the city. Towards the end of those months I had a visit from Reid.
We lived, Meg and I, in a virtual valley. Our house was on the slope of one side, and down below was a small village, with a pub. The village and its inhabitants were, frankly, wallpaper, although the barman could be induced to respond to questioning about the day’s news. (I took a childish pleasure in measuring the difficulty of my questions by the depth of his frown, as somewhere a database search crunched away.)
I was alone when I entered the pub. The barman smiled, the regulars nodded, Reid ordered pints. Reid, of course, was only telepresent, but he assured me he really was drinking the same beer as he appeared to be drinking, and as I imagined I was drinking.
‘Wilde,’ he said after we’d each had a couple of pints, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask of you.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’
He looked around, as if with the impossible suspicion that someone else might be there.
‘It’s about the dead,’ he said. ‘And the fast folk. We’ve got all the data storage, all the smart-matter gunk, and the interface machinery for starting the revival process.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ve got the codes, without which they’re useless. Even so, I’d like to make sure they’re in a safe place for the long term. But also, a place where the organics are available should we ever need them in a hurry.’