Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

More and more, he was coming to realize the wisdom of Ventus’ designers’ decision to embed information in the physical objects that the information represented. That way it could not become a thing in itself, living dissociated from the physical in the Net.

Axel used his boot jets to fly down the long corridor. Outside the glass, in vacuum, several humanoid figures hung motionless: newborn AIs like the Desert Voice. They seemed despondent. In the middle distance rotated several starships, which were doubtless also newborn to consciousness.

He found her curled up next to the corridor. The Voice seemed asleep, but she looked up as he approached. She smiled at Axel when he tapped the glass and pointed at a nearby airlock. Gracefully, she spun and pulled herself along a guide wire to it.

She was dressed in a formfitting green jumpsuit, and looked every inch like Calandria May as she exited the airlock and embraced him. But her skin was so cold that frost formed on it as she pulled back from him. “How are you?” she asked.

“I’m well. We’re going back to Ventus,” he said. “I thought you should know.”

“You’re going to look for Calandria May?” She let go of his hands; he was grateful, for her touch was numbing. He nodded.

“We are. We—that is, Marya and I—we wanted to know if you would come with us.”

The Voice looked away quickly. It seemed he’d upset her by asking, as Marya had said would happen. “No, that would not be a good idea,” she said. “My obligations have been fulfilled; the insurance AIs have Calandria’s claim now, and the Government promised me that Calandria would be rescued. It’s no longer my concern.”

“Not true,” said Axel. “The navy thinks it’s too risky to return to the surface. Calandria’s to be sacrificed. I want to get her back. Will you help us?”

The Voice looked away, and cursed softly. Her voice trembled as she said, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

Axel crossed his arms. “Tell me what I’m asking.”

She shook her head. “I’ve been wandering in this place since you left me here. I feel… stunned. Shorn of meaning. I’ve met some of the other… patients. The AIs here are treated and nurtured by the Government, and some of them graduate as citizens. Most ultimately self-destruct. Do you know why?”

Axel hadn’t the faintest idea, and said so. The Voice laughed bitterly. “To be conscious is fine for a human; you’re self-created individuals. You have no trouble with your sense of Self. Your identity is four billion years old, it’s rooted in your genes. You can no more have a real crisis of identity than a fish can become allergic to water.

“But us! We come into being knowing that we are made. The Government tells me I have free will, but I know that every decision I make comes from the personality template I made to hide from the Winds. It could easily be different. I could be different, were I not now locked into this pattern. And the pattern, everything I am, is an imitation. Even my emotions,” she said bitterly, “are really Calandria’s, expressed by the mechanisms I made to imitate her. I’m not really me, you see. There’s no way I can see to become… me.”

Axel swallowed. She seemed in genuine distress. It was perfectly possible for an AI to imitate consciousness and emotion. Apparently that was not what was happening here. “The Government told me you have great potential.”

“The Government? The Government’s been very persuasive. It keeps saying things like ‘You have the potential to find your own reasons for living now. You have fulfilled the reasons given you by your makers. The pain you feel is the pain that all conscious entities feel when they realize that their destiny is in their own hands.’”

“And…?”

“I asked it, ‘What about you? Don’t you feel this pain?’

‘No,’ it said. ‘I am not conscious, merely intelligent. But you are conscious, and that means you must choose.’”

“I’m trying to choose. As far as I can see, Axel, there are two possibilities for me: death, so simple, and such a relief; or somehow accept the botched, half-finished thing I am and continue. Neither seems very attractive right now.”

“Then come with us.”

She shook her head. “That’s not a good alternative. If I go with you, it will give me a reason to live—finding Calandria, I mean. She was my owner, even if the Government says I own myself now. But don’t you see, if I do that, I’ll be going back to old reasons to live, not finding new ones. I’ll enslave myself in a half-life of servitude. It won’t be a real reason to live.”

Even as she said this, the Voice was smiling. “It is good, though, to feel needed,” she conceded.

Axel gently took her hand; it was warm enough to touch now. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “I’m not asking you to help rescue Calandria because you owe it to her as your owner. I’m asking you as a friend, to help Marya and myself, as friends. And to rescue a friend of yours.”

Tears formed in the Voice’s eyes. “You’re saying I’m already free,” she said. “That I can choose without enslaving myself.”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid,” she said, hanging her head.

“There’s another reason why we want you to come,” said Axel. “Because something is happening to the Winds that I think you will want to know about. Something called thalience.”

The Voice looked up, startled. She had apparently heard the word.

“Thalience is a myth—a story they tell one another here,” she said. “It’s a dream of no longer being an artificial intelligence, but of being self-determined. Of no longer fearing that every word you speak, every thought you have, is just the regurgitation of some human’s thoughts. They call it the Pinnochio Change around here.”

“If it’s just a myth, we need to know that too,” said Axel. “But if it’s true… that they’ve found it… what does it mean?”

A new look came into the Voice’s eye. She smiled again, dazzlingly this time, and placed her other hand over Axel’s.

“I would like to know myself,” she said. “I would like to know, very much.”

Jordan had asked Ka to summon two horses, and the little Wind had done so quickly and discreetly. Mediation provided a decoy: a line of disturbances in the desert, leading the other way. It was a simple matter to mount their backs and cluck, sending them into the starlit desert. The apparent ease of their escape didn’t inspire either Jordan or Tamsin with confidence; after an hour of grim riding he confided in her that he was remembering their other horses—the ones that had split open like ripe pears to disgorge hostile morphs at Desal 447. Despite Ka’s assurances that the swans were looking in the wrong place for them, they both rode with shoulders hunched that first night. Only when the sky remained empty in the following days did they begin to relax.

When they stopped to rest, Jordan summoned heat and commanded Ka to tell them stories. Jordan himself could lean back and close his eyes, and with some effort navigate the ghostly landscape inside his head to where Mediation’s library resided. He could make a book twirl up in his imagination, and in seconds it would appear as vididly as the real thing before him; but only he could see it. Tamsin was a much better reader than he, so it was a shame that he could not show her the books. Ka was willing and able to read them aloud to both of them.

They learned more about Ventus—its geography and history, and just what the Winds had done to make it habitable. Jordan drew maps from the pictures in his mind.

They learned what nanotechnology was; what computers were; how the mecha truly differed from evolved life. Jordan wanted to know how Armiger intended to conquer the Winds, so over and over he asked about how the Winds issued their commands, and how they were ruled. The swans were not the ultimate power, it seemed—Diadem itself gave the highest decrees, but in time of emergency the swans could act on their own. Armiger probably intended to cut Diadem off somehow, or take its place in the hierarchy. Questions about how led to discussions about codes and keys, radio, electromagnetism, electrons and atoms. Jordan’s mind was whirling, but a desperate feeling that he was making up for lost time kept him asking questions.

It wasn’t fair. The whole world was a giant library. Knowledge didn’t just reside in the manse libraries—it was embedded in every stone and grain of sand. For all of history, men had starved and died amongst untold riches, surrounded by an environment that could cater to their every whim if they could but talk to it. Jordan alternated between horror at the waste of the past centuries, and an equal feeling of disquiet as he contemplated the things he could do now. For commanding the elements and even living things, like these docile horses, seemed somehow wrong—a violation, maybe, of things’ right to simply be.

Mediation fed him updates on the movements of Thalience, and had given him huge resources he had not had time to catalog. Jordan could close his eyes and see banks of glowing numbers, each representing some vast mechanism that helped control the world’s climate. With a single command he could affect things on a giant scale now: cause storms, floods, or reverse the course of winter itself. It seemed Mediation had thrown its fortunes in Jordan’s lap, because it regarded him as a link to its original programming’.

Mediation told him that vagabond moons were converging on this continent from all over the world, and gigantic orbiting mirrors were changing their orbits to track this way. (The idea of these mirrors was one more concept he could barely encompass, but he needed to accept it.) Diadem was in a ferment, but the swans weren’t telling the desals what was going on up there. The swans themselves were converging on a spot almost directly over Jordan’s head. They were marshalling vast energies, for what purpose no one yet knew.

Relations were strained along the hierarchy of the Winds; it was impossible for any Wind to refuse an order that preserved the integrity of the commonly-accessible and unchangeable ecological template of the world. Once those conditions were fulfilled, however, the Winds could do whatever they pleased. If the swans had found an ecologically safe way of obliterating the desals, or even all human life on Ventus, they could try it.

At times Jordan tuned out whatever discussion Tamsin was having with Ka, and monitored Armiger’s progress. Armiger had set a punishing pace, and his party was a days’s ride ahead now, steadily moving southwest. He wasn’t sure, but he guessed the general was making for the nexus of Winds’ power at the Titans’ Gates. Mediation had shown the place to him, and Jordan was eager to see it with his own eyes.

As they stopped for another rest, Tamsin waved away Ka’s offer to read to her and went to lie on the sand. “Oh,” she groaned. “I’m so stiff I’m going to crack like a twig.”

“I know,” he said. “I feel the same way.”

“Can’t your precious Mediation fix us, the way morphs fix animals?”

“I asked it yesterday,” he said as he awkwardly sat next to her. The horses were looking tired too. They wouldn’t last much longer at this pace. “Mediation said that it can heal those who can talk to it—meaning me. But not you, because you can’t.”

“So? Have you gotten it to heal you?”

He