Michael Lowenthal was on the moon. At least, he was supposed to believe that he was on the moon. If he didnt believe it and I had to
presume that he didnt he was pretending to believe it.
Hed been put into some kind of containment facility, as he undoubtedly would have been if hed really been rescued from the AMIs. The facility was nowhere near as brutal as the one Damon Hart had put me in when PicoCon had tricked me out and sent me back, but his face was enclosed by some kind of transparent mask and the person he was talking to was wearing an extra layer of clear plastic over his own suitskin. It was difficult to be certain because the viewpoint la Reine had given me was Lowenthals own; his eyes had become her camera.
The man facing Lowenthal, separated from him by two layers of insulation, had the darkest skin Id ever seen; it set off the worried look in his eyes very nicely. He was a sim, of course, but I didnt doubt that he was a supremely competent sim. If la Reine des Neiges had got to know me well enough on very short acquaintance to write my opera, she must know the long-lived citizens of Earths New Utopia very well indeed.
Thats Julius Ngomi, Rocambole murmured. The Chairman of the Board. A great statesman, by anyones standards. Were hopeful that hell be reasonable, but we cant be sure. What he meant was that even if the sim they had constructed for the purpose of this dialog responded reasonably to every cue, no one could be absolutely certain that the real man would do likewise not because the sim wasnt accurate enough, but because the sim was responding to cues provided by Michael Lowenthal. It was impossible to know how differently Lowenthal would handle his own end of the discussion if he werent nursing the strong suspicion that all of this was a sham.
Im sorry, Michael, Ngomi was saying. We cant just flush you clean. Theres stuff inside you that weve never seen before. We need to examine it carefully in situ before we can begin dismantling it, let alone replacing it.
Its a mistake to leave the nanobots in, Lowenthals voice told him. We cant speak freely while Im carrying bugs. I dont care how thick the walls are the mere fact that they have embedded systems prevents us from being certain that this isnt being relayed all the way back to the other side. I couldnt count the layers of bluff and double bluff contained in that statement.
I know that, Michael, Ngomi said, but the brutal truth is that nobody will be speaking freely to or around you for a long time. You knew the risk when you volunteered to go. It always looked like a crooked deal.
It looked like Ahasuerus testing our apron strings, or Excelsior testing theirs, Lowenthal said, a trifle resentfully. Who could have imagined that an Outer System ship could go rogue? Who could have imagined that Hope s people could have progressed to the point of sending missionaries to the home system?
Its our job to imagine things, Ngomi replied. We cant afford to be taken by surprise. You know as well as anyone how easily things can get out of hand if theyre not properly supervised.
Not properly supervised? Lowenthal echoed. I know youve spent centuries perfecting your mastery of understatement, Julie, but were talking about Armageddon here. They tried to blow up the world, and we didnt even know they existed.
Thats not strictly true, Michael.
You did know they existed and you didnt tell me!
I mean that they didnt try to blow up the world, Michael. Whatever happened was the act of a rogue, and the explosion wasnt intended to destroy the planet. It wouldnt have done that even if the rogues rivals hadnt cushioned the blow. The incident should have tipped us off. The casualty figures were always unbelievably low, but we were so secure in our arrogance that we simply took the credit for that ourselves, complimenting ourselves on the efficacy of our own contingency plans. That was foolish. If wed only treated the lightness of the casualties as a suspicious circumstance, and hadnt been so hung up on the possibility that Titan or Umbriel might have been behind the explosionwell, its easy to be wise after the event. If its true that conscious machines have been around for several centuries, that might help us to make better sense of a lot of things.
I know. Thats what convinced me that it was true, and not some Outer System disinformation program. Unfortunately, all the vital questions remain unanswered. How many are there? Where are they? Can we identify them? How different are they from us? It might be unwise to take it for granted that theyre as many or as powerful as Alice Fleury implied. If they can turn an Outer System ship theres probably no way that Titan can hold out against them, but we might, if we could only
find a way of purging our systems.
Were probably ninety-nine years too late, Michael, Ngomi said, softly. They didnt blow up the world, but they certainly opened the doorway wide for the importation of a great deal of Outer System hardware. If we had some reliable way of testing for the presence of consciousness or free will, we might be able to judge the magnitude of the problem, but we dont even have a reliable means of testing one another. The idea of robotization wouldnt be such a bugbear if we did.