Air Force One, Conclusion (4)
hear that, you big scrap pile? I limited you! You’re goddamn right I did! So why the hell did I do it, big guy? Have you thought about that? Put a few of those gigahertz to work, big guy! And while you’re at it, you can fucking quit feeling sorry for yourself and start dealing with it! You are a goddamn Bolo of the Line, I am your Commander, and I am telling you — this is your battlefield now, soldier. This is what’s in front of you. Are you going to run away from it? Or are you going to take it on?" "’Aw, gee, Commander," the man mimics, "you blew off one of my fucking treads! Golly, I don’t wanna fight now!’ I mean, did it even occur to you that I did it for a reason? Does it fucking ever occur to anybody that I might possibly do things for a fucking reason?" He stops, frowning at the console, then closes his eyes. He makes a calming gesture with one hand while raising the other to his forehead. "Jesus," he says, opening his eyes again. He breathes deeply for a few seconds, then reaches into his pocket for the cigarettes. There are five left, and no way to roll more. The firing squad hands the guy a pack of cigarettes. "I get a whole pack?" he asks. "Yeah, man," the Captain of the squad says. "But when you’re done with those, we’re gonna shoot you twenty times." "Look," Mick says. "The only way — the only thing that intelligence can be, is an emergent property of interactions at the cellular level. Everything is an emergent property of some shit or other at whatever level underneath it. And — you know, the theory for this stuff gets — I mean, it’s not like we can prove it. Nothing that’s worth a damn can be proven. But we thought — I thought — I believed, that one thing that really matters in an emergent property like that is exactly the limitations from the lower level. "I mean, what do you need for a higher level to emerge? You need replication with variation, and you need selection. It’s only if you have all three of those things, then at the lower level you get evolution, and at the higher level, after enough time, you get — you know — emergence. "But at the cellular interaction level what’s going to give you the selective pressure? What’s going to choose which reinforcement patterns recruit new cells, and which ones get fractionated away? It’s got to be the physical properties of axons and dendrites that do that. That’s what it is in humans, anyway. "And you know what, buddy? You may not have human hardware, but you still need the selective pressure that comes from those constraints. That’s what I believed. If you had no constraints from level, no limits for consciousness to work against, or within, or whatever — I don’t think you would have ever formed! The higher-level processes would just—" He stops, exasperated, looking at the patterned lights of the console as though they were a substitute for Johnny’s non-existent face, their unchanging colors echoing his intransigence. He runs one finger along its smooth surface, then pulls his hand away suddenly, his finger tingling with — something. It is almost as though the smooth plastic had — vibrated? But perhaps it was just some stray electric current? An inconsequential short circuit in an ancient aircraft? A moment later he leans back in his chair again, the strange sensation completely forgotten. "Look," he says, gesturing emphatically, "take a physical analogy. When a human baby grows up, it has all kind of things in the physical world that it has to deal with. Properties that it can’t change. There’s gravity. There’s friction. Inertia. There’s the fact that all the countertops are too damned high to reach. The realities of the physical world force it to adapt itself in all kinds of ways. And in doing that, the underlying physical world is — shaping it somehow. Making it real, in a way that it would never achieve if it lived in a world where it was free to change redefine reality with a thought — change the world any damn way it pleased according to its own whims. In a world like that — which it would go for in an instant, by the way, if it had half a chance — it would just grow up insane. In fact, you couldn’t design a better way of creating insanity. Sanity is defined as having your thoughts conform to reality. But what if you let that baby just do away with reality? "But that baby," he leans forward in the copilots chair, "Johnny, that baby is already one hell of an advanced being compared to what you were back then. You weren’t an intelligent process yet. You were a bunch of activity patterns that couldn’t hang together for five milliseconds at a time. Your first nursery — where the shelves were too high and the end-table corners hurt if you whacked into them —was exactly that big, bad hardware neuron-forest — where you can’t change the average connectivity, or the basic feedback parameters. That was the reality that selected for or against different activity patterns. That was the set of unchangeable rules in which some patterns finally ‘learned’ to cooperate with each other to secure computing resources. Symbiosis. Making an ecology instead of a bunch of unrelated individuals. That’s where you came from, buddy. You wouldn’t be here without it. You — the personality I’m talking to, the guy who saved my daughter’s life — you are an emergent property of that ecology of all those little competing and cooperating and growing and dying and evolving micro-activity patterns. If you could reach down to that level and start changing things — you wouldn’t last much longer. Not as any kind of a sane process, anyway. "Fuck," he laughs at the stars. "Johnny, do you know how many different things we tried? Do you know how long I fucking waited? Do you know what we did when we got the first clear evidence of your perceptual systems integrating? We all went out and got shit-faced, and I sat at a big wooden table and I cried like a baby." He smiles at the memory, looking down toward the floor, rocking a little in the chair, then looks back up at the imagined face of his mechanical friend. He holds his hands out to the console as though something might reach out and grasp them. "I wanted you to be a man," he whispers. "And now you are one, buddy. I say you are. And you’ve got the same problems men have got, and that any real intelligent process is going to have. You can’t just make yourself into anything you please. "You want it to be all flintsteel and durachrome, you know?" he says. "And it’s not. You make little mistakes, and the years go by. And the little mistakes add up, you know? They add up to big mistakes. Real damn big ones. And — pretty soon — you got nothing left at all." "I’m sorry, Johnny," he whispers. "I’m sorry, big guy." Jack glances sideways at her as he drives. He can’t afford to take his eyes off the broken road for more than a few seconds even laboring along in second gear. It’s not obvious which pools of shadow are harmless depressions in the road and which are potholes deep enough to break an axle in. "Listen, Annie," he says finally, "He’ll be OK. They need him. They didn’t need us, we were just in the way. They need him to handle the computers up there. They’ll keep him around. And — you know. Sooner or later you know he’s going to find some way—" Jack swallows hard. "He’ll get away. He’ll make his way up north and find us." He feels like it’s what she needs to hear, or at least he tells himself that it’s what she needs to hear. It doesn’t make him feel any better about saying it, when the truth is that he fully expects Annie’s husband to die with an FC bullet in his brain before sunrise. Anne looks at him, and he draws in his breath, recoiling . In the cold silver light she looks as though she has aged decades, and that she’s been angry the whole time. "I’m not a little girl, Jack," she says. "Don’t tell me lullabies! Don’t you think I know what this means?" With one angry pull she dislodges the shotgun from its place leaning against the dash — where he had secured it at least weakly with a length of Mick’s ancient duct tape. She shakes it at him like a warrior with a spear — except that it’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than a spear. "He knew what those people were! Or he suspected it, enough to leave this behind. He didn’t trust them with us! Do you think he’s going to trust them with Air Force One? Are you kidding?" she laughs without humor. "I don’t think there would be much point in leaving us his shotgun, and then giving them a few hundred nuclear missiles. Do you?" He looks at her, understanding. Some idea like this has been trying to make itself heard, but he hasn’t taken the time to completely figure it out — until now. "So you didn’t know," she says. "And I didn’t either, until this." She hefts the sawed-off weapon. "He couldn’t fight them on the ground Jack. So where can he fight them?" "You listened to all his Air Force stories too much," she laughs. "He likes to talk about those things, Jack, but he’s not a flyer — he’s a programmer. What do you think he sees when he looks at Air Force One? He doesn’t see a big airplane, he sees a big computer. And Mick can do things with computers." "Of course," she says more quietly, "it’s actually a lot easier to undo things with a computer, isn’t it?" "Jesus," Jack says, still looking at her. "You’re saying he’s just going to — shut it down? You’re saying he’s going to take them all with him." Her eyes, and a flicker of movement in the corner of his own vision warn him. He hits the brakes and punches at the headlight plunger before he has completely turned his head to look up the road. The headlights are OK for seeing the road, but their light-cones on the ground will effectively blind him and the truckers behind him to anything standing outside of them. As anyone is sure to be, if they’re planning an ambush. Their attackers will simply stay in the shadows and pick them off a few at a time from a distance. And in these parts an ambush is an uncomfortably realistic possibility. A convoy of twelve trucks is a once-in-a-lifetime target. The rig jerks to a halt, but Annie is jumping out of her door before he half knows what’s happening. And, he realizes, she’s still holding the shotgun. "Annie, no!" he yells, grabbing at his own door handle and cursing as it sticks for an instant. Then it springs open and throws him knee-first the full distance to the ground. As the night air strikes him, and his knee strikes the road, Jack Arnet understands in one brilliant instant the reason why he has stayed on the road for so many years. It is solely for the smell of the air, diesel-and-October, at a moment like this when you know that there is a perfectly reasonable chance that you don’t have very many more breaths to draw. The lights of most trucks behind him in the close convoy are still on. It’s only been a few seconds — they haven’t had enough time to figure out what’s happening. Even those who have turned out their lights probably don’t know for sure. Odds are that they didn’t see anything up ahead. Nevertheless, Jack realizes, they need to know immediately. They’ll be in back of us, too. We were moving too slow. He wants desperately to catch up with Melanie’s apparently demented mother, but he must tell the men what’s happening. He may be Annie’s only chance of staying alive in the short term, but they are his and Annie’s only chance of staying alive in the long term. The long term, in this case, being something on the order of thirty seconds. They’ll see the gun, but they’ll know she’s still blind from watching the bright road. He compromises by turning around so the rest of the convoy can see him — by now they will all at least be looking towards the front to see what’s going on — and simultaneously trying to backpedal across the treacherous road. Enemies he signals with a quick downward arc of his fist, then moves his open hand in a quick, wide circle. All around. In the process of turning back around, he gets one foot hung up on the roadway and goes sprawling, striking the same damned knee. He curses and looks up just in time to see Annie’s moonlit form — as she raises the shotgun. Strangely, she has never spent a lot of time outside. The world of moonlight and shadows, of night wind and autumn scent is a little foreign to her and always has been. Yet, it has been a foreignness with an odd kind of undertone in recent years — a feeling of arrival: of coming home to a place you’ve never seen. She has gradually come to know, somehow, that in future years this will become her world — if she survives this night. And if she still cares for life afterwards. But now it is that unfamiliarity that almost makes her pull the big gun’s trigger. The shapes come at her out of the night, moving quickly — she feels the trigger’s pressure on her finger — and then, resolving, they become something other than men. They are longer, and most are lower. And far more graceful. They are deer. Three doe, and then two more pose suddenly in front of her and only ten yards away — staring, ears alert. Then another one comes still faster: a huge buck, great-antlered. He runs into the space between her and the does, stopping with a clatter and a snort like she imagines a bull might sound. He stands facing her at first, but with his body broadside to her — then he turns and, as casually as an old acquaintance, walks directly toward her. She stares, mesmerized, as the animal approaches, slowing, until the gun’s barrel is no more than a foot from its chest. Belatedly, she lowers the weapon. The stag remains as still as a statue, its wide black eyes, level with hers, reflecting the moonlight, branching antlers pointing toward the stars. She can smell him — wet fur, rotting oak leaves, night, and heat. They stand staring at each other unblinking, the woman unable to look away. Then, suddenly, she breathes convulsively. Tears come to her eyes in the same instant that the stag turns and bounds back into the darkness like a breeze in the grass. In moments, all of the beasts are gone. "Annie —" Jack approaches, reaching one hand out to support her or, perhaps, to make sure of the weapon that she is holding at her side like a stick. When he reaches for it she hands it him the weapon automatically, staring through him and into some vast distance. "Annie," he says, putting his free hand lightly to her shoulder, "we have to get going again." But she pushes his hand away slowly and stands looking at him as though he were speaking a new language. "He’s not just going up there to die," she says, quietly enough so that Jack almost can’t hear her. A little wind rattles maple leaves that haven’t fallen yet in a stand of young trees growing in the median. Jack watches her uncertainly. "He will, if he has to. To make sure we’re OK," she says. "But he has — something." The October wind finds the old highway, and Jack’s jacket is too thin to keep it from sending a shiver through him. He doesn’t see a big airplane, he sees a big computer. "Johnny," Jack says to her suddenly. "He’s using Johnny. Johnny can — get into the computers. Right?" For Jack, computers are no more than a half-remembered feature of the antediluvian world. But this would still seem to make sense. It’s a move that appeals to him. A move like one of the old Generals would make in the history books he reads. "Yes!" Anne says, loud enough to startle the truckers from the front of the convoy who have come to investigate. All the men are out of their rigs now, holding weapons or pointing them into the empty darkness. "He must have talked to him last night. He had some special kind of radio." She frowns at him. "Could we—?" She doesn’t know much about such things, but she certainly knows that trucks have radios. "Oh. Well—" Jack says. "We haven’t come five miles yet on this damn road. It’s — what. Maybe a hundred fifty miles to Traverse City in a straight line? No way. But —" he frowns. "On the other hand, Johnny is usually quite a ways south or east of town. And if he’s doing something with Mick — he might be all the way at the edge of his range. Almost to Gladwin? So what is that — a hundred miles? It’s still a lot." He looks at her. "But he does have real good ears. And he’ll be listening." Anne looks at him a moment longer, then turns to run back toward his truck. "God damn it," Jack mutters, and turns to follows her again as well as he can on an already bruised knee. ———————————————————————————— Atlantis ———————————————————————————— "So —" Mick says to the console, "how did you do that?" "Does it matter?" Tennen replies. "I told you that I am very old. Skills come with that age. Is it hard for you to believe? Have you not felt, many times, that the human mind is capable of wonders? I know that you have. Your suspicions were correct. I also know that you have at least suspected that some of those skills, which show themselves from time to time, in one person or another, are not the forerunners of some new evolution of human beings — but rather the remnants of talents that were once common. In that, too, you suspected correctly. The parlor trick which I just demonstrated is part of your birthright, which was lost long ago. But, forgive me — it was not simply lost. It was stolen. The theft, or the important parts of it, happened in a single day: the day the War began. It is a day which I remember as clearly as you recall your lineman." ‘OK," Mick says after a moment. "Well—" A clock of sorts ticks in his head, and says forty five hours without sleep. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the co-pilot’s corpse raise one hand to take a puff from a cigarette. Mick looks, but the corpse is motionless, and — he notes carefully — not holding a lit cigarette. He is inspired by this event to take one of his own from its pack. There is, after this, only one left. He lights it, glancing uncomfortably back at the corpse. "So—" Mick says to the console. "You proved something with the mind-reading trick, I guess. Which, uh— I’d be just as happy if you didn’t do — you know. Again. So — what’s your ‘war’ about? And how old are you, anyway, Colonel?" And why should I let you get a day older?
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |