“That’s the best, most positive projection I’ve ever seen,” Soggdon said. Kresh, a trifle startled, turned and looked over his shoulder. She was standing right behind his chair, gazing at the globe display in astonishment. “Hold on. I want to do a blind feed of the audio to your headset.”
“What’s a blind feed?” Kresh asked.
Soggdon picked up a headset identical to the one Kresh wore. Soggdon looked to Kresh as she put them on. “Dee and Dum will think you cannot hear what they say to me. When she talks to you, she is talking to a simulant. When she talks to me, a real human being, she cuts all links to any simulants, so as not to complicate the experiment by letting the simulants hear things they shouldn’t. In reality you’ll be able to hear it. But it is important—vitally important—that you have no reaction to what she says to me, or vice versa. In Dee’s universe, you are just a simulated personality inside a computer. I am a real person outside the computer. You have no way of knowing I exist. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Kresh, hoping he did. He had the sense that he had stepped into a hall of mirrors. It was getting hard to tell the fantasies from the realities.
“Good,” said Soggdon, and turned on the manual switch on her headset. “Dee, Dum—this is Soggdon monitoring from outside the simulation.”
“Good mornnning, Doctor. Weee havvve beeen connnversssing with the Kresh simulllannt. “ The two voices spoke in unison again, but Soggdon did not seem to be bothered by it. Having heard each voice by itself, Kresh was able to notice something that had escaped him before. When the two units spoke in unison, it was not merely the two chanting together. The voice of the two together spoke in a cadence that did not belong to either of the two speaking by itself. The unison voice made different word choices, responded in a way that was different from Dee or Dum. The unison voice was not merely two beings talking as one. It was the two merging into one new being, in some ways greater, in some ways lesser than the sum of its parts. Dee and Dum linked so intimately that they became a third, and distinct, personality. Or was it merely Dee who did so? If Dum was truly nonsentient, then he could have no personality. Plainly there were mysteries to delve into—but just as plainly they would have to wait for another day. “The Kresh simulant asked us to consider the result of producing a Polar Sea.”
“Yes, I know,” said Soggdon. “And I see you have produced an impressive planetary projection as a result. Would either or both of you care to comment on it?”
“Both willl speeak, and then eachhh,” said the unison voice. “We havvve prrojected forward four ttthousand yearss, as we have found that a wellll-planned operrational sequenzzze will result in a zzzero-maintenance planetary ecologggy within apprrroximately three hundred years. In our projection, the planetary climmmate remainss intrinsically stable, selfffcorrecting, and self-enhancing throughout the period of the metasimulation. There is no apparent danger of recollapse evident in any of the data for the end of the metasimulation period.”
Kresh frowned. Metasimulation? Then he understood. The unison voice was using the term to refer to a simulation inside a simulation—which was what it had been, so far as Dum and Dee were concerned.
Dum spoke next. “Reference to unit Dum’s prior objections in regard to ecological and economic damage. Projections show that the damage to the general ecology and gross planetary product caused by digging inlets for the Polar Sea would be fully compensated for within fifteen years of project completion.”
But if the first two aspects of the combined control system made it all seem wonderful, the third voice pulled everything back down to reality. “It all sounds quite splendid,” said Dee. “There is, of course, the slight problem of it being quite impossible. We ran the metasimulation based on the assumption that it would be possible to dig the channels. It is not possible to dig them. An interesting exercise, I grant you—but it is not one that has a great deal of connection to the world of our simulation.”
“I was afraid she was going to say that,” Soggdon muttered as she switched off her mike. “You’d think she’d be the least sensible of the three possible personality aspects, but instead Dee’s always the one to stick the pin in the balloon. She always reminds us of the practicalities.”
“Maybe this time they’re a bit more possible than you think,” Kresh said. He keyed his own mike back on, and tried to phrase things so that he would not reveal that he had overheard the conversation with Soggdon.
“Unit Dee, that’s a very promising projection there. I take it you think creating the Polar Sea would be a good idea?”
“It is a good idea that cannot be realized, Governor,” said Unit Dee. “You do not have the resources, the energy sources, or the time to construct the needed inlets.”
“That is incorrect,” Kresh said. “It is possible there is a practical, doable, way to dig those inlets. I came here to have you evaluate the proposed procedure. I first wanted to see if the effort would be worthwhile. I see now that it would be.”
“What is the procedure in question?” asked Unit Dee.
Kresh hesitated a moment, but then gave up. There was no way to describe the idea that didn’t sound dangerous, desperate, even insane. Well, maybe it was all three. So be it. “We’re going to break a comet up, and drop the fragments in a line running from the Southern Ocean to the Polar Depression,” he said. Even as he spoke, he realized that he hadn’t put any modifiers or conditionals in. He hadn’t said they might, or they could, or they were thinking of it. He had said they were going to do it. Had he made up his mind without knowing it?
But Dum and Dee—and Soggdon—plainly had more on their minds than Kresh’s reaction to his own words. There was dead silence for a full thirty seconds before any of them reacted. The perfect holographic image of the Inferno of the future flickered and wavered and almost vanished altogether before it resolidified.
Unit Dee recovered first. “Am I to under—under—understand that you intend this as a serious idea?” she asked. The stress in her voice was plain, her words coming out with painful slowness.
“Not good,” said Soggdon, her headset mike still off. She turned toward a side console, paged through several screenfuls of information, and shook her head. “I warned you she took her simulants seriously,” she said. “These readings show you’ve set off a mild First Law conflict in her. You can’t just come in here and play games with her, make up things like that.”
Kresh cut his own mike. “I’m not making things up,” he said. “And I’m not playing games. There is a serious plan in motion to drop a fragmented comet on the Utopia region.”
“But that’s suicidal!” Soggdon protested.
“What difference does it make if the planet’s going to be dead in two hundred years?” Kresh snapped. “And as for Dee, I suggest it is time you start lying to her in earnest. Remind her it’s all a simulation, an experiment. Remind her that Inferno isn’t real, and no one will be harmed.”
“Tell her that?” Soggdon asked, plainly shocked. “No. I will not feed her dangerous and false data. Absolutely not. You can tell her yourself.”
Kresh drew in his breath, ready to shout in the woman’s face, give her the dressing-down she deserved. But no. It would do no good. It was plainly obvious that she was not thinking with the slightest degree of rationality or sense—and he needed her, needed her help, needed her rational and sensible. She was part of the team that had set up this charade. She was the one who would have to prop it up. He would have to reason with her, coolly, calmly. “It would do no good for me to tell her any such thing,” he said. “She thinks I’m a simulant. Simulants don’t know they are simulants. She would not believe me telling her there was no danger—because she does not believe me to be human. And she does not believe that because you have lied to her.”