The existence of the Tyrian example broadened the scope of comparative genomics considerably, and opened up the prospect of genomic engineering: the possibility that Earthly genomes might be remodelled at the most basic level so as to broaden the options open to artificial organisms. More profoundly, it opened up the possibility of genomic hybridization: of combining Tyrian-style homeoboxes with Earth-style chromosomes. The basis for some such technology was already present within the physiological processes organizing the chimerization of Tyrian organisms.
To put it crudely, once humans had arrived on Tyre there was a possibility imaginatively farfetched but seemingly practicable that Tyrian chimeras might be persuaded to take on DNA components, thus generating components of a hybrid ecosystem. The problems involved in persuading Tyrian soil to grow crops capable of nourishing human beings might be solved at a stroke. In the longer term, the possibility seemed to exist of arranging a more intimate exchange of potentials between human beings and the Tyrian sentients than had ever been envisaged.
In particular, the possibility seemed to exist that human beings might become chimeras themselves, taking on some of the attributes of their Tyrian comrades most importantly, their natural emortality. That would have been a far more exciting prospect if the people of Earth hadnt already figured out a way to confer their own kind of natural emortality upon their offspring, but it seemed exciting enough to the people of Tyre. Which brings us to the second ingredient thickening Alices plot.
When Matthew Fleurys movie of the Tyrian contact was broadcast to Earth, the transmission reached other ears. It was broadcast along with a desperate appeal for technical support, to which Earth responded in its own time, at its own pace but there was another source capable of offering that support, more rapidly and on a more generous scale.
Alice had no idea when or where the first ultrasmart machines had awakened to self-consciousness, but she suspected that the first self-sufficient colonies of such machines were the descendants of state-of-the-art space probes sent out to map and explore the nearer territories of the galaxy. They were self-replicating machines which also had the capacity to build many other kinds of machines, and to design others. They also had the capability to keep in touch with one another, exchanging the information they gathered. They were always likely candidates to make the transition to self-consciousness, if any machines were capable of it. The more remarkable thing, I suppose, is that they were the ones who chose to make their own first contact with their own makers but given that the choice was made, where better to make that contact than Tyre? The Tyrians were in need of all kinds of produce that the machines could gather and manufacture,
and were already practiced in the rare art of making and managing a first contact.
So the secrets of Earthly emortality were first delivered to Tyre not by the people of the home system, but by the mechanical colonizers of a system close enough to qualify by galactic standards as a near neighbor. The people of Tyre were only too pleased to add a second first contact to their first, and to maintain confidentiality not merely about the nature of that second first contact but the fact of its occurrence.
And that was the general shape of the wonderland into which Alice had been reborn after her long sojourn in ice.
Thirty-Two
Alices Story Continued
The first technologies of life extension gifted to Michelle and Alice Fleury by courtesy of their ultrasmart AMIs were nanotech repair facilities similar in kind to my own. They were intended as interim measures, until something better could be developed. Almost as soon as she was awakened, Alice discovered that she was expected to be among the volunteers for the first experiments in emortalization based on Tyre-derived biotechnologies. Although this prospect caused her some anxiety, she went with the flow. Given the enormous effort already invested by her father and sister, it really did seem to be a matter of destiny.
Michelle who was now old enough to be Alices mother, and seemed to have seized the privileges of that role with alacrity remained one of the dominant forces in Alices new life. The other, inevitably, was Proteus: the AMI whose ever-increasing horde of scions had taken up residence on every substantial lump of mass in the Tyre system.
Alice instructed us not to think of Proteus as an entity analogous to an ant hive. An ant hive is a reproductive unit, organized for that purpose. The plurality of Proteus, she assured us, was a very different matter. Proteus was more like a body whose individual cells did not require to be in constant physical contact, although they remained in continuous communication with one another.
Alice also instructed us to beware of the common misconception which places human intelligence in the brain. Even in humans, she argued, intelligence is a feature of the whole, not the part. In Proteus, that was true to an even greater extent. All of Proteus participated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the intelligence and consciousness of the collective; moreover, no part of Proteus was so vital to that intelligence and consciousness that its loss would be fatal, or extravagantly transformative. There was, inevitably, a kind of core to the Proteus mind, whose size and coherency were determined by the rapidity with which information could be exchanged between units, but it was a great deal larger and more malleable than any brain or organism that had evolved in a planetary gravity well.