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 millenniums 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: Theyre very fond of games and theyre determined to play this one to the end, despite the lack of time. Theyre very fond of stories too, so theyll 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. Whos got us, and why?
I watched Mortimer Gray hesitate. I could see as clearly as if Id been able to read his thoughts that he was on the point of coming over all pigheaded and saying I dont know for a second time but he didnt. 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 revolutions finally here. Its 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 wasnt quite as simple as that, of course. They all wanted to know how hed 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 wed been better able to believe in the alien invaders, simply because wed 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 Fortune had 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 shed said to him: You cant imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty and that silvers 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 hadnt 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 hadnt needed a Prometheus or a Messiah, and werent interested in emancipation, as such, but that wasnt 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.