Blind Lake

“Could there be something dangerous about the O/BEC platens? We hardly know enough to answer that question. What we do know is that the O/BEC processors are very powerful quantum computers of a novel kind and we’re using them to run self-evolving, self-replicating code.

“Those words by themselves ought to raise an alarm. In every other case in which we have attempted to exploit self-replicating evolutionary systems, we’ve been forced to proceed with utmost caution. I’m thinking of the near-disaster last year at the MIT nanotech lab — we all know how much worse that might have been — or the novel rice cultivars that caused so many histamine-reaction deaths in Asia in the early Twenty-twenties.”

Elaine scribbled furiously on a notepad. Sebastian Vogel sat in a state of calm attentiveness, a bearded Buddha.

“The obvious objection is that those events involved ‘real’ self-replicating systems in the ‘real’ world, not code in a machine. But this is shortsighted. The O/BEC virtual ecosystem may be contained, but it is also effectively enormous. Literally billions of generations of algorithms are iterated and harvested for utility in a single day. Periodically we select them for the results we desire, but they are breeding always. We assume that because we write the limiting conditions we have godlike power over our creations. Maybe that isn’t the case.

“Now, obviously we’ve never lost a researcher because he was ambushed by an algorithm.” More laughter: the lay audience seemed to like this, though the Observation and Interpretation people remained warily silent. “And that’s not what I’m suggesting. But there is some evidence — which I’m not yet at liberty to discuss — that the Crossbank installation was shut down hours before the quarantine was placed on Blind Lake, and that something dangerous did happen there, possibly involving their O/BEC machines.”

This was news. All around the auditorium, people literally sat up in their chairs. Chris glanced at Elaine, who shrugged: she hadn’t expected Ray to broach that subject.

Maybe Ray hadn’t intended to. He shuffled his papers and looked nonplussed for a long moment.

“This is, of course still under investigation…”

He set the written speech aside.

“But I want to return to the previous speaker’s claims for a moment…”

“He’s ad-libbing,” Elaine whispered. “Marguerite must have scored a point somewhere. Or else he had a couple of drinks before he showed up.”

“If I recall correctly… I believe it was Goethe who wrote that nature loves illusion. ‘Nature loves illusion, and those who will not partake of her illusions she punishes as a tyrant would punish.’ We talk glibly about a ‘sentient’ species as if sentience were a simple, easily quantifiable attribute. Of course it is not. Our perception of our own sentience is skewed and idiosyncratic. We contrast ourselves with the other primates as if we were rational and they were driven by purely animalistic impulses. But the ape, for instance, is almost wholly rational: he searches for food, he eats when he’s hungry, he sleeps when he’s weary, he mates when the urge and opportunity are both present. A philosophical ape might well ask which species is genuinely driven by reason.

“He might ask, ‘When are we most alike, men and apes?’ Not when we eat or sleep or defecate, because every animal does those things. Men exhibit their uniqueness when they make elaborate tools, compose operas, wage war for ideological reasons, or send robots to Mars — only human beings do that. We imagine our future and contemplate our past, personal or collective. But when does an ape review the events of his day or imagine an utterly different future? The obvious answer is, when he dreams.”

Chris looked at Marguerite onstage. She seemed as startled as everyone else. Ray was rattled now, but he had launched into a scenario that had some weighty internal momentum of its own.

“When he dreams. When the ape dreams. Asleep, he does not reason but he dreams the dreams that enable reason. Dreaming, the ape imagines he is chased or chasing, fed or hungry, frightened or safe. In reality he is none of those things. He’s ru

“Dreaming infuses our existence. Our earliest ancestors learned to throw a spear, not at a ru

“We did it so effectively, I would suggest, that we have forgotten the fundamental truth that we are dreaming. We confuse the dream with reason. But the ape reasons too. What the ape will not do is dream ideologies, dream terrorism, dream vengeful gods, dream slavery, dream gas chambers, dream lethal remedies for dreamlike problems. Dreams are commonly nightmares.”

The audience was lost. Ray seemed no longer to care. He was talking to himself now, chasing an idea down some labyrinth only he could see.

“But they are dreams from which, as a species, we ca

“But now we’ve done something new. We’ve built machines that dream. The pictures the O/BEC device generates are dreams. They are based, we tell ourselves, on the real world, but they aren’t telescopic images in any traditional sense. When we look through a telescope we see with the human eye and interpret with the human mind. When we look at an O/BEC image we see what a dreaming machine has learned to dream.

“Which is not to say that the images are valueless! Only that we ca

“The organisms we’re studying may not be the inhabitants of a rocky i

He stopped, picked up his water glass, and drained it. His face was flushed.

“I mean, how do you wake from a dream that enables your consciousness? By dying. Only by dying. And if the O/BEC entity — let’s call it that — has become a danger to us, maybe we need to kill it.”

Near the front, a small voice shouted, “You can’t do that!”

A child’s voice. Chris recognized Tess, standing now near the foot of the stage.

Ray looked down in obvious bewilderment. He seemed not to recognize her. When he did, he motioned her to sit down and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I apologize for the interruption. But we can’t afford to be sentimental. Our lives are at stake. We may be — as a species, we may be—” He wiped his forehead with his hand. The real Ray had punched through, Chris thought, and the real Ray was not a pleasant thing to behold. “We may be ungoverned dream-machines, capable of wreaking immense havoc, but we owe our loyalty to our genome. Our genome is what makes a tolerable dream out of the valueless, the rigorously precise mathematics of the universe we inhabit… What would we see, if we were truly awake? A universe that loves death far more than it loves life. It would be foolish, truly foolish to yield our primacy to yet another set of numbers, another nonlinear dissipative system alien to our way of life…”