‘Sound plan,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking at the specs for the sluice-gates…what d’you call them, Sieve Plates? You’ve got plenty of deep caverns due to be cut out of the mountain behind them, for the machinery and stores.’
‘And you want to stash some other…machinery and stores?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nobody’ll ever go there, not when we’ve got the system set up. If the incoming ice isn’t enough of a deterrent, the whole area will be absolutely foul with unknown organics. Exaggerating how poisonous they might be should be easy enough.’
And so it proved.
The actual building of the canal and its associated machinery of pumps and locks took two years. I did it, of course, with the help of a fleet of automated machinery, and design software that took my scribbles and handwaves and turned out precise technical drawings. But co-ordinating them and making the fine decisions was down to me, and it was the most fun I’d had since the Third World War. When the Sieve Plate complex was complete, Reid flew in, alone, in an autopiloted helicopter with the crated components of the storage and retrieval mechanisms for millions of dead people, and the programs to re-launch thousands of uploaded people into a posthuman culture. The whole lot weighed about ten tonnes, slung beneath the Sikorski.
When we’d got the machinery and storage media stashed under the mountain, Meg and I invited Reid in for coffee. Reid, in physical reality, was wearing contacts. He saw us sitting on a verandah, and we saw him just outside, on the step of the helicopter. Anyone else watching – there wasn’t – would have seen Reid sitting on one machine, talking to another.
At some point I asked him how things were going with downloading the people in the robots to their cloned bodies.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. We’re about three-quarters through. We’re dealing with it more or less as people want it.’ He grinned quizzically. ‘Haven’t seen your application.’
I looked at Meg and laughed. ‘Never crossed my mind, to be honest. I’m having a good life, right here.’ She smiled back. Her beauty had increased with her intelligence, and her aesthetic sense with both. She was wearing a bias-cut green velvet dress lifted from a fashion-history site.
Reid stroked his chin. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He lit a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t leave it too long. There’s a bad attitude spreading about robots. The people who’ve been downloaded are the main instigators of it. They tend to draw a very sharp line between people and machines. In fact a lot of them will deny there’s such a thing as machine consciousness.’
A fly – how the hell did we bring them? – buzzed past him. The VR consistency rules picked it up when it flew ‘into’ the verandah, and a simulation seamlessly took its place and flew out again.
‘What?’ I said. ‘But they’ve experienced machine consciousness!’
Reid looked at me with a glint of his familiar devil’s advocacy. ‘No, they now have memories of experiencing it. Which doesn’t prove that they actually did experience it at the time. It could be an artifact of the consistency rules. That’s the sophisticated argument. The vulgar version is to insist that you were human all right, but artificial intelligences are missing some magic ingredient, which any goddam cleric or scholastic will cheerfully assure you is a soul.’
‘God,’ I said. ‘That’s disgusting.’
‘What about the succubi?’ Meg asked.
‘They’re the worst,’ Reid said.
Meg threw back her head and laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you just know it! No snobs worse than the new rich!’
I frowned at them both. ‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is how they relate to their own copies in the robots.’
Reid gave me an odd look. ‘You definitely don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Nobody leaves a copy of themselves in the robot. Everybody so far has been very insistent on that. The way they see it, they’re about to resume a normal human life, and if a copy stayed behind they’d have a 50–50 chance of waking up and finding themselves still there. It’s irrational, in a sense – why don’t they fear being the copy that’s destroyed?’
‘Because they don’t experience it,’ said Meg. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Presumably?’
‘Of course,’ Reid said hastily. ‘It’s simultaneous. You don’t, as they say, feel a thing.’
‘Ah,’ said Meg. ‘That’s the root of this idea you’re talking about. Because if people really saw their selves in the machines as…themselves, they’d feel guilty about it. So they don’t!’
‘Smart,’ Reid conceded. ‘But there’s more to it than that…shit, I feel the same way myself sometimes.’ He tilted his head, squinting at us as if to make the illusion of our presence go away. ‘That’s…I guess that’s why I never uploaded, never went into the macros. I knew lots of people who did, and they kept telling me it was wonderful, but I could never get over the suspicion that they were all flatlines.’ His tone was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘No more capacity for feeling than a weather simulation has for raining.’
‘You must’ve really bought into the old anti-AI arguments,’ I said. To me the whole thing sounded as stupid as solipsism.
‘Maybe,’ Reid wryly acknowledged. ‘Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using computers longer than anybody else alive.’
‘So you don’t think Jon’s human?’ Meg asked. ‘Or me?’
‘Hah!’ Reid said. He jumped up, and ground out his cigarette-butt. ‘Of course I do. I’d just like to meet you both – in real life.’
He climbed into the helicopter and turned to wave.
‘See you soon.’
‘Real soon now,’ I said.
That night I felt Meg’s tears on my shoulder.
‘What is it?’
She rolled away from me a little and caught me in her serious gaze.
‘Do you think like that?’ she asked.
‘Like what?’
‘Like Reid said. Like people do.’
‘Of course not.’ I snorted. ‘It’d be pretty bloody stupid of me to think I’m not thinking.’
‘And what about me?’
‘You?’ I pulled her close again. ‘I don’t think like that about you, either.’
‘You did once.’
‘That was different. I didn’t know any better.’
She laughed, unexpectedly reassured.
‘Neither did I.’
As well as the work on the canal, I was working on a problem which increasingly intrigued me: trying to understand what it was I had learned in my last encounter with the macro. It troubled my mind like a half-remembered dream. It intrigued Meg too; she had never been in the macro, and had an endless interest in anything I could tell her about it. She had a greater affinity than I for the posthuman world; not surprisingly, as she was far more a product of it than I was.
In our virtual valley we built a virtual machine. I would strive to recall some aspect of the puzzle, and Meg would scan our common operating-system for traces of the consequent processing. Then she’d reach in and extract a piece of machine code, and provide it with an interface. We’d then wander around clutching whatever resulted, looking for a place to slot it in. What was really – so to speak – going on was that my chaotic recollections were being put into order. When I experienced the robot’s body as my own (the mesh frame still stood in our front room) I increasingly felt what I’d learned as something I was about to understand, rather than something I almost remembered.