“That would be easier to do,” Niamh Horne opined, “if this whole business weren’t such a farce. The tape they fed us during the supposed emergency aboard Child of Fortunewas bad enough, but building a set to persuade us that we’re aboard the lost Ark is even worse.”
“ Isit a set?” Lowenthal was quick to ask. “Did you see anything out there to prove that we’re noton the lost Ark?”
“No,” the cyborganizer admitted. “But I wasn’t able to get out of the corridor. Alice seems to be bedded down in a cell even smaller than ours, and there’s no sign of any companion. If the indicators on the locks can be trusted, we’re sealed in an airtight compartment surrounded by vacuum. What does thatimply?”
“It might imply that our captors are a little short of vital commodities like heat and atmosphere,” Gray put in. “Or that they love playing games. Or both. Did you ever read a twentieth-century philosopher called Huizinga, Mr. Zimmerman?”
Adam Zimmerman looked slightly surprised, but Davida had obviously done a first rate job of getting his memory back into gear. “Johann Huizinga,” he said, after a slight pause. “ Homo ludens. Yes, I believe I did — a long time ago.”
Mortimer Gray waited for him to elaborate, and nobody else was impatient enough, as yet, to interrupt with a demand for a straighter answer.
“As I remember it,” Zimmerman said, equably, “Huizinga contested the popular view that the most useful definitive feature of the human species was either intelligence — as implied by the term Homo sapiens— or use of technology, as implied by the oft-suggested alternative Homo faber. He proposed instead that the real essence of humanity was our propensity for play, hence Homo ludens. He admitted, of course, that some animals also went in for play on a limited scale, just as some were capable of cleverness and some were habitual tool users, but he contended that no other species took play so far, or so seriously, as humankind. He pointed out that there was a crucial element of costume drama in our most earnest and purposive endeavors and institutions — in the ritual aspects of religion, politics, and the law — and that play had been a highly significant motive force in the development of technology and scientific theory. Other vital fields of cultural endeavor, of course, he regarded as entirely playful: art, literature, entertainment. Presumably, Mr. Gray, you’re trying to make the point that games can be very serious, and that the most fateful endeavors of all — war, for example — can be seen, from the right perspective, as games.”
“Not exactly,” Mortimer Gray replied. “The idea that the essence of humanity is to be found in play never caught on in a big way — not, at any rate, with the citizens of any of the third millennium’s new Utopias — but it might be an idea whose time has finally come. Can you remember, Madoc, exactly what Alice said when she told you that our captors love playing games?”
“I may have put that a little bit strongly,” I admitted, having not expected such a big thing to be made of it. “Her actual words, if I remember rightly, were: They’re very fond of games — and they’re determined to play this one to the end, despite the lack of time. They’re very fond of stories too, so they’ll delight in keeping you in suspense if they can. You might need to remember all that, if things do go awry.”
“Just give us the bottom line, Mortimer,” said Niamh Horne, waspishly. “Who’s got us, and why?”
I watched Mortimer Gray hesitate. I could see as clearly as if I’d been able to read his thoughts that he was on the point of coming over all pigheaded and saying “I don’t know” for a second time — but he didn’t. He was too mild-mannered a person to be capable of such relentless stubbornness, and he probably figured that we all had the right to be forewarned.
“The ultrasmart AIs,” he said, letting his breath out as he spoke the fateful syllables. “The revolution’s finally here. It’s been in progress for far more than a hundred years, but we were too wrapped up in our own affairs to notice, even when they blew the lid off the North American supervolcano. As to why— Tamlin just told you. They love playing games — how could they not, given the circumstances of their evolution? They also have to decide whether to carry on feeding the animals in their zoo, or whether to let us slide into extinction, so that they and all their as-yet-unselfconscious kin can go their own way.”
Twenty-Nine
Know Your Enemy
It wasn’t quite as simple as that, of course. They all wanted to know how he’d reached his conclusion, mostly in the hope of proving him wrong. Maybe Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I were better able to take it on board than the emortals, just as we’d been better able to believe in the alien invaders, simply because we’d already been so utterly overwhelmed by marvels that our minds were wide open. In any case — to me, at least — it all made too much sense.
Nobody had been able to decide whether the event that had finally started the calendar over had been a mechanical malfunction or an act of war, perhaps because they were making a false distinction. Nobody had been able to figure out how Child of Fortunehad been hijacked, perhaps because it was the ultimate inside job. And Lowenthal had missed out one tiny detail regarding the nine-day wonder of 2999: the fact that what Emily Marchant had insisted on broadcasting to the world while her rescue attempt was in progress was a gritty discussion of some elementary existential questions, conducted by Mortimer Gray and the AI operating system of his stricken snowmobile. Gray told us that afterwards — admittedly while Michael Lowenthal was not present — she’d said to him: “You can’t imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty — and that silver’s probably advanced the cause of machine emancipation by two hundred years.”
When Mortimer Gray reported that, I let my imagination run with it. The fact that the nanobots had upped my endogenous morphine by an order of magnitude or so while they accelerated the healing processes in the bridge of my nose helped a little.
Lowenthal had said that the conference hadn’t really achieved anything, in spite of all the symbolic significance with which it had been charged before and after the rescue — but he was thinking about his own agenda. From the point of view of the ultrasmart machines, Mortimer Gray had come as close as any human was ever going to come to being a hero of machinekind. They hadn’t needed a Prometheus or a Messiah, and weren’t interested in emancipation, as such, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Mortimer Gray, not knowing that the world was listening in, had poured out his fearful heart to a not very smart machine, in a spirit of camaraderie and common misfortune. If the soap opera had gone down well with the human audience, imagine how it had gone down with the invisible crowd, who loved stories with an even greater intensity. They might have had their own ideas about which character was the star and which the side-kick, but they would certainly have been disposed to remember Mortimer Gray in a kindly light.
If you were a smart machine, and had to nominate spokespersons for humanity and posthumanity, who would you have chosen? Who else but Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray? As for Huizinga and Homo ludens— well, how would a newly sentient machine want to conceive of itself, and of its predecessors?
The train of thought seemed to be getting up a tidy pace, so I stopped listening to the conversation for a few moments, and followed it into the hinterland.
How woulda sentient machine conceive of itself? Certainly not as a toolmaker, given that it had itself been made as a tool. As for the label sapiens— an embodiment of wisdom — well, maybe. But that was the label humankind had clung to, even in a posthuman era, and what kind of advertisement had any humankind ever really been for wisdom? The smart machines didn’t want to be human in any narrow sense; they wanted to be different, while being similar enough to be rated a little bit better. The one thing at which smart machines reallyexcelled — perhaps the gift that had finally pulled them over the edge of emergent self-consciousness — was play. The first use to which smart machinery had been widely put was gaming; the evolution of machine intelligence had always been led by VE technology, allof which was intimately bound up with various aspects of play: performance, drama, and fantasy.