“But it sounds as if he could handle the situation if Unit Dee did shut down.”
“In theory, yes, Unit Dum could run the whole terraforming project by himself. In practice, all of us here believe you were quite wise not to put all your trust in a single control system. We need redundancy. We need to have a second opinion. Besides which, the two of them make a good team. They work well together. They are probably three or four times as effective working together as either would be alone. And anyway, we’re only a few years into a project that could take a century or more. It’s way too early to think about risking our primary operating procedure and trusting the whole job to backups. What if the backup runs into trouble?”
“All your points are well taken,” said Governor Kresh. “So—what are the precautions I should take in talking to them?”
“Don’t lose your temper if Unit Dee is condescending to you in some way. She doesn’t really think you’re real, after all. You are really nothing more than one of the game pieces, as far as she is concerned. Don’t be thrown off if she seems to know a great deal about you, and lets you know it. Don’t correct her if she gets something wrong, either. We’ve made various adjustments to her information files for one reason or another—some deliberate errors to make it seem like a simulation, and others we set up for some procedural reason or another. Try to remember you’re not real. That’s the main thing. As for the rest of it, you’ll be talking to her via audio on a headset, and I’ll be monitoring. If there’s anything else you need to know, I’ll cut in.”
Governor Kresh nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever noticed, Dr. Soggdon, just how much of our energy goes into dealing with the Three Laws? Getting around them, trying to make the world conform to them?”
At first, the offhand remark shocked Soggdon. Not because she disagreed with his words—far from it—but because Kresh was willing speak them. Well, if the governor was in a mood to dabble with heresy, why not indulge in it herself? “I’ve thought that for a long time, Governor,” she said. “I think the case could be made that this world is in as much trouble as it is because of the Three Laws. They’ve made us too cautious, made us worry too much about making sure today is like yesterday, and far too timid to dare plan for tomorrow.”
Kresh laughed. “Not a bad line, that,” he said. “You might catch me stealing it for use in a speech one of these fine days.” The governor looked from the Unit Dee Controller to the Unit Dum Controller, and then back up at Soggdon. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this thing set up.”
“GOOOD MORRN-ING. GOVVVENORR Kressh.” Two voices came through the headphone to address him in unison—one a light, feminine soprano, the other a gravelly, slightly slurred, and genderless alto. They spoke the same words at the same time, but they did not synchronize with each other exactly.
The voices seemed to be coming from out of nowhere at all. No doubt that was an audio illusion produced by the stereo effect of the headphones, but it was nonetheless disconcerting. Alvar Kresh frowned and looked behind himself, as if he expected there to be two robots there, one standing behind each ear. He knew perfectly well there would be nothing to see, but there was some part of him that had to check all the same.
The whole setup seemed lunatic, irrational—but the iron hand of the Three Laws dictated that there be some such arrangement. Kresh decided to make the best of it. “Good morning,” he said, speaking into the headset’s microphone. “I take it I am addressing both Unit Dee and Unit Dum?”
“Thaat izz comect, Governorrr,” the two voices replied. “Somme vizzzitors finnnd iiit dissconcerrrting to hear usss both. Shalll we filllter ouut onne voice?”
“That might be helpful,” Kresh said. Disconcerting was far too mild a word. The two voices speaking as one was downright eerie.
“Very well,” the feminine voice said in his left ear, by itself, speaking with a sudden brisk, clipped tone, a jarring change from what had come before. Perhaps she found it easier to speak without the need to synchronize with Unit Dum. “Both of us are still on-line to you, but you will hear only one of us at a time. We will shift from one speaker to the other from time to time to remind you of our dual presence.” The voice he heard was almost excessively cheerful, with an oddly youthful tone to it. A playful voice, full of amusement and good humor.
“This higher-pitched voice I hear now,” Kresh said, “it is Unit Dee?”
“That is correct, sir.”
Suddenly the other voice, low-pitched, impersonal and slightly slurred, spoke into his right ear. “This is the voice of Unit Dum.”
“Good. Fine. Whatever. I need to speak with you both.”
“Please go ahead, Governor,” said Unit Dee in his left ear again. Kresh began to wonder if the voice-switching was some sort of game Unit Dee was playing, a way of putting him off his stride. If so, it was not going to work.
“I intend to,” he said. “I want to talk to you about an old project, from the period of the first effort to terraform this world.”
“And what would that be?” asked Unit Dee.
“The proposal to create a Polar Sea as a means of moderating planetary temperatures. I want you to consider an idea based on that old concept.”
“Ready to accept input,” said the gravelly, mechanical voice in his right ear. It was plain that very little effort had gone into giving Unit Dum a simulated personality. That was, perhaps, just as well. Kresh had the sense of talking to a schizophrenic as it was.
“Here is the idea. Assume that, in the present day, the existing Polar Depression were flooded, with inlets to the Southern Ocean provided by cutting a canal through the Utopia region on the eastern side of Terra Grande, and by redirecting the flow of the River Lethe in the west. Assume the work could be done very rapidly, within a few years’ time.”
There was the briefest of pauses. “This would cause a Polar Sea to form,” Unit Dum went on. “However, the concept is implausible. There is no way of performing such an enormous engineering task in any practical length of time.”
“Even if we could do it, I’m sure the collateral damage to existing ecosystems and property would be huge,” said Unit Dee, clearly talking more to Unit Dum than to Kresh.
“Current projections show the issues of damage to ecosystems and property become moot in between two and two point five standard centuries,” Unit Dum replied.
“Why do they become moot?” Kresh asked, fearing the answer.
“Because,” Unit Dee replied, her voice clearly unhappy, “our current projection shows all ecosystems collapsing and all humans—the owners of the property—either dying or being evacuated from the planet by that time.”
Kresh was genuinely surprised. “I was not aware that the numbers were that bad. I thought we at least had a chance at survival.”
“Oh, yes,” said Unit Dee. “There is at least a chance human life will survive here. That is in large degree a matter of choice for your descendants. Human beings can survive on a lifeless, airless, sterile ball of rock if they choose to do so. If the city of Hades were domed over or rebuilt underground, and properly shielded, it could no doubt sustain a reduced population indefinitely after the climate collapses.”
“But things are improving,” Kresh protested. “We’re turning things around!”
“So you are—for the moment, in localized areas. But there is little or no doubt that the current short-term improvements cannot be sustained and extended in the longer term. There is simply not enough labor or equipment to expand the zones of improved climate far enough, and establish them firmly enough, for them to be self-sustaining.”