I’ve been here before, I thought, hoping to find some crumbs of comfort in the reminder. Last time, there was a frightened child with me; this time, I’ve got a complex but fearless set of subroutines to contend with. I was young then, but I’m old now. This is a perfect opportunity for me to find out whether Ziru Majumdar was right when he said that I wouldn’t understand the difference between what happened to him when he fell down that crevasse and what happened to me when I tried to pull him out until I spent a long time in the same kind of trap. There can be few men in the world as well prepared for this as I am. I can do this.
“All in all,” I said out loud, figuring that I could be forgiven for laboring the point, “we’re utterly and absolutely fucked, aren’t we? Cutting through all that bullshit about imponderables, the simple fact is that there’s nothing up top capable of taking us aboard—nothing, at any rate, that could possibly get to us before we spring another leak or run out of oxygen, whichever happens first. We’re going to die.”
“While there’s life, sir, there’s hope,” the silver insisted, with heroic stubbornness.
I suppose, given the circumstances, that it too could be forgiven for laboring the point. I could easily imagine Emily Marchant saying exactly the same thing, and meaning it.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Are you scared of dying?” I asked the silver, dispiritedly, when an admittedly brief silence became too oppressive. High-grade AIs often express emotion, but philosophers remain divided as to whether their words actually signify anything. I knew that the navigator’s answer couldn’t possibly settle the matter, but it seemed reasonable enough to ask the question.
“All in all, sir,” it said, copying my phraseology in order to promote a feeling of kinship, “I would rather not die. In fact, were it not for the philosophical difficulties that stand in the way of reaching a firm conclusion as to whether or not machines can be said to be authentically self-conscious, I would be quite prepared to say that I amscared—terrified, even.”
“I’m not,” I observed. “Do you think I ought to be?”
“It’s not for me to say, sir,” my ever-polite companion replied. “You are, of course, a world-renowned expert on the subject of death and the human fear of death. I daresay that helps a lot.”
“Perhaps it does,” I agreed. “Or perhaps I’ve simply lived so long that my mind is hardened against all novelty, all violent emotion, and all real possibility. Perhaps, in spite of all my self-protective protestations in The Marriage of Life and Death, I’ve become robotized. Perhaps, in spite of all their self-deluding protestations, all emortal men really are bound to kill off alternative pathways in the brain to the extent that they become mere machines, or at least something less than truly human. Perhaps I’ve become even more robotized than you.Perhaps all my mental activity during these last few hundred years has been little more than a desperate attempt to pretend that I’m more than I really am. What, after all, have I really accomplished?”
“If you think youhaven’t accomplished much,” the silver said—and this time it wasbeing sarcastic—”you should try navigating a snowmobile for a while. I think you might find your range of options uncomfortably cramped. Not that I’m complaining, of course. We machines are programmed neverto complain.”
“If they scrapped the snowmobile and re-sited you in a starship,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be youany more. You’d be someone else.”
“Right now, sir,” the machine replied, with devastating logic, “Pd be happy to risk those kinds of consequences. Wouldn’t you?”
“Somebody once told me that death was just a process of transcendence,” I commented, idly. “Her brain was incandescent with fever induced by some tailored recreational disease, and she wanted to infect me with it to show me the error of my life-bound ways.”
“Did you believe her, sir?” the silver enquired, politely.
“Certainly not. She was stark raving mad.”
“It’s perhaps as well,” the silver said, philosophically. “We don’t have any recreational diseases on board. I could put you to sleep though, if you wish.”
“I don’t. I’ll hang on to consciousness as long as possible, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t,” the silver said, punctiliously. “In fact, I’m rather glad of it. I don’t want to be alone, even if I am only an Artificial Intelligence. Am I going insane, do you think? Is all this emotional talk just a symptom of the pressure on the hull and the damage to my equipment?”
I knew what it was playing at, of course. It was trying to keep me from morbid thoughts. It was pretending to be human in order to build a bond of fellowship between us, so that I’d find it easier to carry on hoping in spite of the desperation of the situation.
“You’re quite sane,” I assured the silver, setting aside all thoughts of incongruity. “So am I. It would be much harder for both of us if we weren’t together. The last time I was in this kind of mess I had a child with me—a little girl. It made all the difference in the world, to both of us. In a way, every moment I’ve lived through since then has been borrowed time. At least I finished that damned book. Imagine leaving something like that incomplete.”
“Are you so certain it’s complete?” the cunning AI asked. It was making conversation according to some clever programming scheme. Its emergency subroutines had kicked in, and all the crap about it being afraid to die was some psychprogrammer’s idea of what Ineeded to hear. I knew it was all fake, all just macabre role-playing, but I knew that I had to play my part too by treating every remark and every question as if it were part of an authentic conversation, a genuine quest for knowledge. It was a crooked game, but it was the only game in town.
“It all depends what you mean by complete”I said, carefully. “In one sense, no history can ever be complete, because the world always goes on, always throwing up more events, always changing. In another sense, completion is a purely aesthetic matter, and in that sense Pm entirely confident that my history is complete. It has reached an authentic culmination, which is both true and—for me at least—satisfying. I can look back at it and say to myself: I did that. It’s finished. Nobody ever did anything like it before, and now nobody can, because it’s already been done. Someone else’s history might have been different, but mine is mine, and it is what it is, and it was well worth doing.Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes sir,” the machine said. “It makes very good sense.” The honest bastard was programmed to say that, of course. It was programmed to tell me any damn thing I seemed to want to hear, but I wasn’t going to let on that I knew what a vile hypocrite it was. I was feeling very tired, presumably because the composition of the air that I was breathing was worsening by slow degrees, but I needed to talk because I felt that talk was all that was left to me. Even though I had no one to talk to but the simulation of a listener, I needed to keep going. If I had been absolutely alone I would probably have formulated the words in the silence of my own skull, but I would have formulated them anyhow. They were my final act, in a dramatic as well as a literal sense: the last assertion of my personality upon the face of eternity.
“If I were to die now,” I told my companion, speaking slowly so that I would not exhaust the meager resources of my waning breath, “it would be an unwelcome intrusion in my affairs. I want to go on. I want to do more. I want to become a further and better version of myself. I want to evolve, not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams but in ways as yet unimaginable. But if that really is impossible, then I can die in the knowledge that my life and work does have a certain aesthetic roundness. It really is a human life.It really is an emortal human life, even though it has ended in death.