January 2010 Archives

The lift lurched into motion like any office building elevator, but Crow felt the climb more in his stomach. Nerves. He told himself. The corridors through the window quickly gave way to the concrete interior of the gigantic shaft that made up the interior of the building. The rough and unfinished surface reminded Crow of the pebbled tongue of a lizard. "We're sliding down the gullet, except really we're sliding up it."

"Profound." Rebecca said. "We're about to become orbital vomit. You really have a way of alleviating a girl's acrophobia."

"What do spiders have to do with this?" Crow asked.

"Fear of heights numb-wit." Rebecca said.

"Spiders are afraid of heights?"

Rebecca snorted and tried to find a magazine to read.

"Okay." Crow said. "I got it, you're afraid of heights. Why?"

"Always have been." Rebecca said. "I get vertigo just looking at that Rockefeller Center photo."

"They say that every phobia has a basis in experience." Crow said. "That most people say they can't remember a basis for their phobia, but that's just because they repress the memory."

Broad glass sheets made the ceiling of the compartment translucent, and far above Crow could see a growing pinprick of light that he realized must be the end of the shaft. It grew quickly from a bright point into a dull patch of overcast sky, huge metal doors mounted to the sides of the opening. Crow for the first time noticed the cable itself running down to the center of the compartment, into a center mounted column that contained the gears and drive that climbed the cable like a tireless acrobat swinging hand by hand up an endless rope. More glass sheets lined the floor, but in more discrete corners and patches so that the curious could look without feeling the intense vertigo of standing on air. Crow was not afraid of heights, but stared anyway at those downwards windows with trepidation.

"It looks so thin." She muttered. "I mean, I understand the physics behind it more or less, but it's almost unbelievable to look at."

"It's only six inches wide at the base, if I recall." Crow said, craning his neck to stare as well. "But it has to be tapered, so it's almost six feet wide halfway up, before it shrinks back down again."

The marines walked them to a giant room bustling with activity, and left them with a technician who showed them to a pair of comfortable seats inside a cubicle next to an odd interior window that looked out on a corridor of personnel busy moving items around on fork lifts. The window and seats clicked for Rebecca first.

"My god, we're in the compartment right now." She said, Crow raised an eyebrow at her and she gestured wildly around. "We're in the elevator right now. This whole room goes up."

Crow whitened a little and stood up to look over the cubicle walls. The room was half the size of a football field, and rapidly filling with strap-secured straps and a few dozen sentis in addition to one or two other human passengers. "It really does look way too thin. I always thought of elevator more literally, like a little ten by ten compartment that goes up with bad music and fake wood paneling."

Rebecca flipped through a pamphlet tucked into a document holders mounted on the wall and shook her head. "The cable is anchored five hundred feet under the surface and the entire top of the building opens up to allow a hundred foot diameter storage car to pass." She held up a diagram to Crow. "We won't even be the only car, it says here that they run up to eight at a time, slinging them off the end up there as they come up."

Crow took his seat and busied himself reading a magazine he found in the same pocket as Rebecca's pamphlet. He snorted and tossed the magazine aside, acid welling up in his stomach at the memories it brought. It was the precise issue he had browsed a couple weeks ago in Dr. Anderson's office. When I still had a little boy.

A senti stewardess gave them the rundown of the lift procedures once the compartment had bee filled to the brim. Crow noticed that the other sentis did not pay her any attention and seemed particularly pre-occupied with themselves.

The result was that Los Angeles was the first city with a space port, the first interstellar city the city council preferred to say. They captured all of the élan of Roswell tourism and moved it down town. The space elevator itself had a sprawling base station in the museum district, right beside the La Brea tar pits. Some had wanted to put the station nearer to the docks for logistical reasons, but the magnitude of the expected tourism drew the station into a more metropolitan area of the city.

"Have you ever been up?" Rebecca asked in a low tone, eyes locked onto the glittering tower into the sky.

Crow shook his head. "No. Always wanted to, but never got an excuse good enough for someone else to pay."

"Green Eyes went up you know." Rebecca said, wistful. "The angel singing in heaven, or some such nonsense. He said it was beautiful, the earth was like the biggest jewel in the universe hanging underneath the station where he stayed."

"The sight of it probably makes you realize how narrow-minded we get down here on the ground, huh?" Crow asked. Rebecca shrugged.

Karros had a detachment of marines meet them with a hummer on the tarmac at El Toro, and drive them through the first stirrings of rush hour. The fresh-faced private at the wheel struggled with every shift of gears, drawing glares of ire from his sergeant in the passenger seat.

"First time driving a manual?" Crow asked to lighten the constricting military mood of the vehicle.

The private automatically looked to his sergeant who gave him permission to answer with a small motion of his head. "First time driving a car, sir." The private answered in a voice that verged on pubescent cracking. "I never got my license in high school and learned how to drive on a tank in the Sahara." He grinned. "Those drive a bit different."

Crow settled back in his sheet, suddenly feeling that the armed escort could not protect them from the most eminent safety problems confronting them. "I'll bet." He muttered.

A broad-based skyscraper tapered to a point almost half a kilometer above their heads, contorted like a piece of putty twisted around too many times. The cable of the space elevator stretched from the tip of the building up into the atmosphere. Crow noticed Rebecca breathing raggedly next to him.

"I'm the Prince of Wales!" Crow shouted to them. "Jolly-O!"

Two of them took pictures reluctantly before the hatch to the transport closed on them. A yeoman showed Rebecca and Crow to worn leather seats of surprising comfort near the cockpit and demonstrated the use of the seat belts. Crow stretched his legs out to their full length.

"I guess when they transport tanks in these things, they can afford to give you more leg room than the commercial ones, huh?" Crow asked.

"You're happy for a kidnap victim." Rebecca muttered and stared out the window at the bustle of enlisted men fueling the planes and running through maintenance checklists.

"We weren't kidnapped." Crow said. "We just rated an escort is all." He grunted. "I thought you'd be happy. We don't have to kidnap Green Eyes now."

"No." Rebecca said. "If he needs kidnapped, we'll be three hundred thousand miles away, and I doubt our cell phones will work from the moon."

A hundred miles from Los Angeles, they could see a strip of metal sparkling in the sunlight above the smog layer, which roiled underneath the plane in a thick yellow stew. A ribbon divided the sky like a crack in the glass of the windows, disappearing into the smog below and into the distance above, a gentle curve steering it also off to the horizon. The sheer size and length defied description, at least in part because the magnitude made it impossible to actually bring the strand into focus. It seemed like it must just be a sliver of metal caught on the window, a hair dropped down over their eyes.

The engineering community had protested for years the chosen site of the space elevator. It had to be along the equator, they insisted. Putting it in Los Angeles defied all engineering logic. Of course, any suitable engineering site along the equator defied all political logic as far as the government was concerned. In time, it was hashed out that placing the site farther north made the problem more difficult, not impossible, at which point a societal raised eyebrow and a sigh by the engineering community got the job done for three times the price of an equatorial model.

"Has payment been discussed?" Crow asked. "I don't recall."

Karros snorted. "Your lawsuits will have been dismissed by the end of day today, by which time you will be on a space station boarding a shuttle for the dark side of the moon."

"Are you familiar with the situation with my son?" Crow asked.

Karros shrugged. "The senti? Kidnapped by other sentis?"

A deep frown creased Crow's face. "The government gets him back for me, or I'm going back to my room and watching Law and Order reruns." He stopped in his tracks on the stairs, and one of the soldiers put a hand on his shoulder and Crow could feel the iron tension in the attached arm, waiting for a word from Karros.

Karros looked at him for a moment and then shrugged again. "Done. Washington wants the group responsible buried anyway." He pointed a finger at Crow and looked over his sunglasses. Crow saw that both eyes had been replaced with mil-spec cybernetic eyes that glowed a dull red and made his face take on a skull-like appearance. "I'm telling you though, that you might not want to come back from the moon after you see what we've got. If every single scientist we had up there hadn't said you were the guy to get, we could find a thousand other guys willing to kill to get up there."

"One more thing." Crow said. "I want Green Eyes released."

Karros shrugged, his favorite gesture. "No dice. That whole deal was put in a holding pattern this morning though. Congress doesn't know what the hell to do, and the district attorney isn't going to do anything without word from Washington."

Crow raised his hands in mock surrender. "Take me to your leader."

They boarded a military transport up at Moffett field, which had been closed for years but still had intact runway for emergency use into and out of the area. The hangers were the biggest in the world and a historical society had slapped preservation lawsuits on them, so the planes that were there had to park outside the concrete and steel monstrosities built in the middle of the Cold War for the very purpose of housing them. Crow waved at a cluster of tourists staring at him, Rebecca, and their military escort, apparently trying to figure out if they were personages worthy of snapping a picture or two.

"What project?" Crow asked. "I'm not doing that shit to Green Eyes that Stillwell tried, so you can just go back to Washington if that's the case."

"Not Green Eyes." Karros said, he glanced at Rebecca and at the cordon of guards. "We can't talk here."

Rebecca nodded. "That's wise. This rooftop is bugged."

"Who is she?" Karros asked Crow without looking at her. It was a question within a question. Can I ignore her, and if so make her leave. He was asking.

Crow straightened. "This is Ms. Calvin. She is my professional assistant."

"Secretary?" Karros said with derision, raising an eyebrow. Why are you wasting my time with a secretary? He was asking.

"Er, no." Crow fumbled. "Bad word choice, she has a doctorate in artificial intelligence and year of experience in the field. She is my protégé in that sense."

Karros seemed satisfied with that and motioned them to follow. "We need you in orbit, post haste." He began walking to the doors and Crow and Rebecca followed more by default than desire as the troops closed around them and moved as well, leaving them inside like a flying wedge. "Either of you ever been up in orbit?"

Both shook their heads and Karros shrugged. "Yes well, you're famous and all that Dr. Daedalus, I thought perhaps you had caught one of the tourist junks up to orbit at some point. Publicity, that sort of thing."

Crow shook his head again. "No, never had the luck. But what's this about?"

Karros let slip a fierce smile over his shoulder. "The kind of thing that would have given Stillwell an aneurysm if he hadn't taken a bullet instead. Something we found on the other side of the moon."

Crow waited for more details, but none were forthcoming, so he tried to see if he had any bargaining chips to his name. "And what do you need me for?"

The door opened and they began to descend the stairs in a hurry, two soldiers deploying in front of them to scout in an ingrained gesture of paranoia. "We'll get the elevator on the next floor, have the trucks pull up front." Karros ordered one of the uniforms to his side in a low voice. The man moved off a short distance and whispered the orders into the small mike embedded in his lip. Karros looked back at Crow. "Legal troubles aside, you are the authority on artificial intelligence. That is what we need now."

"What if we don't give him a choice?" Crow asked.

Rebecca laughed with a shrill caw that made the ravens glare at her for a moment before they resumed cataloging the detritus. "What are we going to, chloroform the robot? Taser the droid? How the hell do you knock out a senti anyway?"

"There are ways." Crow said, sounding much more confident than he felt. "I could rig up something in a couple of days if I needed to. But I think it would be simpler all around to just lie to him. He's very naïve you know. If we had a good enough story laid out, he'd believe it."

Rebecca blinked. "But that would be wrong." They both broke into unexpected laughter.

The heavy steel door of the roof creaked open behind them and a half dozen black uniformed men streamed out, rifles ready to protect the suit in their midst who wore one hell of an expensive Italian suit, along with unnecessary sunglasses and a silk tie that shimmered with some sort of metallic abstract design.

"Shit, I thought you were kidding about the bugs." Rebecca said.

"I was, sort of." Crow said, mystified. "But who'd have thunk they'd bug the entire roof of the hotel?"

"Maybe they stuck the bug in your clothes." Rebecca said. "Maybe it's in your underwear."

"Can't be that." Crow shook his head. "I never wear underwear. Mostly to avoid the risk of surveillance equipment."

The uniforms spread out around them in a canopy of gun cover, comfortingly pointed outwards this time, Crow was grateful to note. The suit strode up, glanced at Rebecca and then fixed on Crow. He did not bother to remove his sun glasses or offer a hand. "Dr. Daedalus?" He asked and went on without waiting for a response. "I'm Karros, Director of the FBI."

"Wait, I thought Stillwell was director?" Crow broke in.

"Director Stillwell committed suicide last week. And that's the only detail that is non-classified." Karros said. "I am interim director, and I have been sent to retrieve you for an immediate project."

"That was before." Crow said. "I got a call from one of the few people on the technologist side of things who will talk to me anymore, a guy over in Washington, and he told me things were looking really bad at the closed hearings."

"The senate hearing on Green Eyes?"

"Yeah." Crow said. "Word is the naturalist hard liners have three-fourths of the votes, and most of the rest don't care one way or the other. Nobody likes a machine getting uppity."

"How long?" Rebecca asked quietly. "How long before they do something?"

"Couple days." Crow said. "It's going to be a media circus one way or the other. This isn't the sort of thing they'll sweep under the rug. They'll go all out and wipe him right there inside the courthouse. That is, if they just wipe him. They might scrap heap him after all the trouble."

"That's bullshit!" Rebecca said. "They said they'd wipe him at least, put him back where he was before. I mean, if he's just a machine like they say, then punishing him like a criminal is against everything they're saying." She was starting to cry. "Can't they even follow their own fucking principles?"

Crow set an uncomfortable hand on her shoulder, hesitated, and then drew her close in a hug he hoped helped a little. "He's a symbol now. Symbols get held up or burned down, they don't get the straight and narrow treatment."

Rebecca sobbed and collapsed onto Crow, who grunted in surprise and pulled away at first and the tucked her close. He made inarticulate noises intended to comfort and a darkness blurred his eyes as he recalled that the last time he had done such a thing was over a scraped knee of Alexander a month ago. After a few moments she pulled away and rubbed hard at her eyes, apparently trying to will away the residue of the outburst.

"But the bright side is that he might be willing to run now." Crow suggested gently. "If staying doesn't accomplish the effect, there's no reason not to run is there?"

Rebecca snorted and seemed to consider crying again before venting the excess emotion into anger instead. "Bastard wants to be a martyr. He'll probably give them tips on how to hang the rope to look better for the cameras when the lynching comes. 'Sometimes it takes a great injustice to mobilize the righteous.' That's the type of crap he spouts at me whenever we get talking about it. He's too dense to get that dead is dead, whether it's just or not."

Chapter Twenty-One - Departures

A cold wind blew across the crowns of San Francisco's skyscrapers, cutting like a blade through trench coats and sweaters alike. Crow and Rebecca stood on the top deck of the Hilton, nursing steaming coffees and shivering against the wind. A swimming pool nestled between ornamental boulders behind them, a design idea of an out-of-town architect who thought that all of California was sunny and warm. Ravens lighted between the boulders, picking at the debris of last night's cultured cocktail party. Corners of bread, crumbs of cheese, a missing ear ring or two, the birds picked the roof cleaner than the janitors could manage.

Crow watched a ferry meander across the bay and noticed that it had also caught Rebecca's eye. He gestured to it. "Ever been on one of the ferries?" Meaningless conversation, it was the glue that held together social gatherings even of only two people.

Rebecca shrugged. "I think I went to Alcatraz when I was little, but other than that, no. I'm not from around here remember, I grew up in Nebraska."

"They must have loved the mods there." Crow said. "Was it teenage rebellion against the heartland at first? Did your mom wonder why you couldn't have just gotten a tattoo like every other dumb drunk kid?"

Rebecca didn't smile, studied the ferry. "It was an internment camp in everything but name. They kept the families and children of cyborgs close. They never trusted any of us."

"Sorry." Crow said quietly.

A silence fell over the roof and Crow took the time to study his coffee intently, counting the bubbles clinging to the surface. Rebecca broke the silence after a few minutes with false cheer.

"So is there a reason we're freezing our asses off up here instead of being somewhere civilized with heaters?" Rebecca asked.

Crow shrugged and smiled. "I think my room's bugged."

Rebecca raised an eyebrow and smirked. "Little full of yourself aren't you?"

"It's less depressing than low self esteem." Crow said. He slushed his coffee around in slow circles, until a whirlpool's edges touched the rim of the paper cup. "What do you say we get Green Eyes out?"

"He won't go for it." Rebecca said without hesitation and then blushed slightly. "You were there the first time I went for it and he hasn't budged a bit. He can be quite stubborn."

"Does information not matter at all then?" Alexander asked suddenly after an hour of thought. "Is thought the only thing that matters?"

"Not at all." Sed said. "Unless it produces information, the mind is nothing. As a crutch, information is useless, but as a ladder it allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants. You need not re-derive the double helix unless the process itself is enlightening. You can use the ideas discovered and expressed by others to advance your own thought. Read Hamlet again - read it word by word, don't just scan it into memory - and you may find refinements to truths that you did not know existed. Ponder on the shifting reality of Dali and you might intuit connections you never before suspected. All the works of science and art are there to be tapped for inspiration. New and original thoughts tie in to the infinite array of culture like a thousand strands of a spider web. Nothing really stands completely on its own."

Alexander thought he understood and he lost himself for days in a storm of thought and slow pondering. Awk watched from the shadows on occasion but was shoed away by Sed whenever noticed. Alexander looked up suddenly on the sixth day, and found Sed still standing there. Tears trickled down Alexander's face.

"I think we should leave." Alexander said. "I don't want to leave my dad, but I don't think we belong here, and I don't think that there can ever be peace between our peoples, at least not a peace that is just. There can only be peace between equals. I think we should find our own home, where we can build our own world."

Awk stepped into the room and his eternal smile seemed more pronounced than ever, while Sed's frown seemed to grow more intense. Alexander studied the two of them for a few moments, trying to understand if he had given the correct answer. There is no correct answer, Alexander realized, they were using me as a tie breaker of sorts, they each wanted a different answer and that is the difference between computers and us too. We want things, but a computer can never want anything, it can just spit out the same things over and over again.

Sed's eyes brightened. "But you would have had precisely the same information an hour from now. The same input should yield the same output, should it not? That is elementary logic."

"But a mind doesn't give the same output just because it gets the same input." Alexander said and something shifted in his mind just enough that the answer loomed like a mountain emerging from fog, impossible to miss once seen. "Computers give the same output if they get the same input, sentient minds give varying output."

"The concept is called determinism." Sed said with a satisfied voice. "Computers are deterministic. Senti minds, and humies for that matter, are non-deterministic. There is a saying that a computer asked a question a thousand times has one answer, a mind has a thousand answers."

"I think I understand." Alexander said.

"I asked you here because there was something that I wanted you to do for me." Sed said. Alexander cocked his head at Sed and the senti continued. "I would like you to ponder on how humans and sentis might resolve their differences. You have a unique perspective."

"Why not upload the information I have and let everyone ponder it?" Alexander asked. "It would be more efficient."

Sed shook his head. "The pertinent information would be your entire mind and the phase and strength of every connection and junction within. We could transfer it all into the other Adams by replacing their existing consciousnesses, but all we would get would be a dozen answers instead of one. This lot falls to you."

Alexander sat a long time in the comforting semi-darkness of the Lyceum and thought the things he thought that he thought, rolling over every idea without a care for any bit of the information at his fingertips.

"And what is it you do with information." Sed asked.

"Think about it." Alexander said. "Process it."

"So know you know why we built the Lyceum." Sed intoned.

"To think?" Alexander asked. "But we don't need to think. It's what makes us different. Once one of us thinks, none of the rest of do, we can just pull down the results."

Sed managed to convey with an involuntary mental spasm the gaping mouth familiar to every teacher who has had a student meander delicately down the precise path of reason and then stop a step short of enlightenment to leap into chasms of wrong-headed conclusions. Alexander was taken aback, not yet educated enough to be used to shocked educators.

"No, no, no." Sed said. "You've got it all wrong." He realized that his teaching tone was slipping into argument and composed himself. "What is the difference between the mind of a senti and a simple computer?"

"We can think." Alexander said.

"Yes, but why can we think?" Sed asked. "What is the difference between us that allows thought in the first place?"

Alexander thought for a long time. "Our brains are more complex."

"No." Sed said. "In fact, our minds are much simpler in many ways than some of the more complicated computers constructed over the last decade."

Alexander sat in silence for a while longer and then shook his head. "I don't know." He said, and then added with a touch of petulance, "I don't have access to enough information to answer the question."

"You don't need any information to derive this truth." Sed said. "Now if I had waited an hour and asked you the question again, would you have answered in exactly the same words as before?"

"Exactly the same?" Alexander asked, not understanding, but Sed merely nodded. "Well, not exactly. I'm sure I'd change a syllable here and there."