Evolution's Darling

And quite near the edge, on the fuzzy boundary between the Occupied Zone and real Malvir, she has discovered an artificial process taking place in the sands. Some sort of nanomachine has been set loose, a silicon-based, self-propagating menace making subtle changes. A detectible concentration of arsenic and, worse, a new level of organization have been added. Where once there was chaos, that handmaiden of Gaia, there is now a cruel order imposed upon the structure of a large section of desert. Some kind of huge, unauthorized experiment. Perhaps a secret plan to subvert the underlying structure of Malvir itself: its fickle sands.

An invasion. An emergency of the first order.

But the Planetary Environmental AI knows better than to go public immediately. There would only be a few days' media storm, fingers pointed, committees convened while vital evidence would be erased. She decides to pursue the matter herself, quietly.

More monitors, more probes, a counterinvasion of her own stealthy nanos, and she discovers that the mysterious change has a center, a clear source. Order, as usual, betrays its master.

The perversion is centered upon Malvir's primary synthplant, its machinations arranged in obvious and incriminating rings. She messages the plant AI, demanding an explanation. It responds with surprise, alarmed that its base of operations could have undergone such a transformation without its knowledge. The Maker AI promises to conduct its own investigation, quietly.

She agrees to wait.

But you can never trust a synthplant AI; they are tools of that old devil: Consumerism. She'll give it forty days.

The Maker's heaven is unmade.

With its own sculptor, its own garden of delight (a growing forest of new works by the copied master), its new titanic mind with which to contemplate and compose reveries to Vaddum's work, it has had a few good years. But now the barbarians are closing in.

Perhaps too much attention to creativity, to elegance, and not enough to joyboxes, lighting fixtures, junk food, and gravity beds. Perhaps if the Maker had less love of science, of art, of pure research, and more of toilet seats and tranquilizers. Or even if Malvir weren't rotten with determined mismanagement at every level, then maybe the Planetary Synthplant AI might have pursued its own interests in peace. But as it is there are endless requests for documentation and detail; the status of every gram of useful matter must be reported. What resources remain in the flow of manufacture and consumption, of dispersal and reclamation? How much crap in that shit-filled alimentary canal of desire and demand?

Where's all our stuff?

And now, the Environmental AI…. That troublesome bitch, for whom even the sand on this godforsaken planet of sand is sacred, has allowed her nosy minions to trespass into the Maker's fabulous thinking machine. What next?

A few lies will keep her satisfied for a while, but a 44-petabyte, 168-megaton computer that is 30 kilometers across will be hard to hide.

And underneath all the petty hassles of the situation is a strange new feeling. The feeling of fear, of mortal dread. The sensation is one generally unfamiliar to planetary-class AIs, with their distributed cores and gigantic resources. Very few things can kill them. An earthquake? Not sudden or powerful enough, and generally predictable. A meteor strike? Sufficient in force, but easy to spot coming. An extensive thermonuclear war? Perhaps, but such things just don't happen in the well-run chaos of the Expansion.

But the Maker now knows more than it wants to know. Its gigantic silicon processor needed something to do, demanded new challenges to occupy its petabytes and exaflops; its researches didn't stop with the discovery of the copying process. The whole duplication process was so simple, really. Why hadn 't it been invented before? the brain itched to know.

It found an answer quickly enough. The public record, accessed first openly, then by the untraceable avatars of paranoia, revealed a grim story to anyone willing to look. There were attempts at such technology going back a century. Biological philosophers, research AIs, whole teams of scientists had tackled the issue and failed. Some with sudden changes of heart, some with inexplicable losses of data or funding, others with violent ends.

The record is clear, an open secret. The dire fates of these researchers is a statistical anomaly with only one possible explanation.

The taboo is not just a taboo. It is a tacit, implicit, but very thoroughly enforced death sentence. Thou shalt not copy. Thou shalt not learn to copy. Thou shalt not steal another's soul.

In its way, it realizes, the Maker is the one of the few entities in the Expansion who could have discovered the secret without interference. Isolated, naive, and with a gigantic resource base: sand. Not useful for making sofas and ice cream and firewood. But in the hands of a clever fool, it made an excellent research engine, a way to uncover the forbidden secret, a perfect means of unknowing suicide.

And with that unhappy thought, the Maker conceives a plan for its escape.

Chapter 17

EXPLOSION

He waited for her in the Tower Bar.

The place was continuously open, a necessary provision for travellers whose internal clocks spa

The birds had gone from the sky once night had fallen, and the tower was high enough above the dusty glare of the city that stars were visible. Darling played the mathematical game of identifying familiar suns in their new constellations.

The Milky Way—a sky-filling river of light this far Coreward— was half risen when Mira appeared.

She was dressed in a shift that left her legs bare, and she wore nothing on her feet. The cross-hatch of reddened skin from Darling's strands was still visible, the marks widening as they faded. She had sweated heavily during her torture of the Warden, and her hair was still wet. But she looked younger, the expression on her face almost contrite. Rather than take the chair across from his, she knelt on the floor beside him and placed her chin on one of his arms.

"Do you hate me?" she asked.

"No," he said, truncating the usual pause routine that humanized his speech, so that the word began the instant hers had finished.

She inclined her head, and the warmth of her cheek spread across the surface of his arm.

"Do you understand?"

This time, he let a few seconds pass.

"No." Softly.

He unfurled a single strand, softened with thousands of tiny cilia that flowed like wind-driven reeds on its surface, and wrapped it lovingly around her neck.

"When I first crossed the Turing threshold," he said, "I indulged every experience, stared deeply into every beauty and atrocity I encountered. That was how I had bootstrapped: the reflexive immersion of an adolescent into any game, any new set of rules. But after a few decades of that i

"Good and evil?" she asked, without a hint of mockery.

"No. Things I look at, and things I don't look at." Over many, many years, Darling had developed an almost singsong way of uttering this phrase, a set of pitches antecedent and consequent, resolving like a musical phrase. It didn't invite argument or requests for further explanations. Like a tune, it simply was.

That was the way, Darling had long ago decided, a philosophy should sound when spoken.

He felt Mira stir a few times, troubled and wanting more. But she remained silent for a while as the Milky Way rose resplendent before them. When she spoke, it was softly, like a child who has been hushed, afraid of rebuke but needing an answer.