A big bubble of air. Rising up from the middle of a savagely churning warm sea. Powerful wind shears all rolling surface-level air inward toward where the bubble rises … .
If the outflow jet moves quickly, so that the high-pressure area expands vertically fast enough, what you have is the model of hurricane formation. It doesn’t happen in ordinary hurricanes—there, when the outflow jet moves, the high-pressure spot is still close enough to the eye of the hurricane, and the released air just flows inward to the center, feeding the hurricane. But in something the size of Ctem—where the outflow jet can be coming down many hundreds of kilometers away … .
It takes her only about an hour to rough out a model and see that just maybe this could happen. As she’s finishing up—and why are her fingers always so clumsy, her brain always so slow, the right sources never to hand when she has a good idea?—she notices that she’s cold and realizes that she sort of forgot to towel off after her shower. At least this time she remembered to turn it off.
She’s also tied her back in knots. Well, no doubt there’s hot water in the shower again … so she gets her third shower, and this time she makes herself relax, and towels off, and gets dressed in something comfortable that she sort of likes (well, okay, Louie once told her she looked like a hot piece in it, and since then she’s lost a little weight so it’s loose and baggy, so now it’s just about her favorite jumpsuit. What’s not to like? And what’s wrong with some happy memories? She didn’t divorce the man because she didn’t
like him, she divorced him to keep liking him, as she explained to him at the time).
God, god, god, Louie on the brain and a real problem right here in front of her. Yes, it’s a plausible outcome, but no, it’s not the only plausible one. Clem might have kittens or might not, and no one will know till that outflow jet swings suddenly—which it may not do for a while.
But the outflow jet did swing suddenly, once—just before Clem ripped off toward Hawaii. Only a few hours ago. And come to think of it, Carla has been paying no attention to the news—she has no idea whether or not Clem is hitting Hawaii, or if he is, what is happening there.
MyBoat
surfaces just hours after sunset; it’s a beautiful starlit night, and her radar shows no ships within many kilometers, so Carla climbs up on the deck, taking a scalpnet and output plug with her to direct-access the data she needs. With a jet of high-pressure air, she dries the sunbathing deck and stretches out in the dark, lying on her back and looking up at the stars, counting the occasional meteors and enjoying the glory of a really dark, clear sky. Strange to think how many people never see this except via XV; stranger to think how many more stars there are for Louie. No wonder they can’t keep him out of the observation bubble despite all the warnings about radiation.
With a sigh, she pulls on her scalpnet and inserts the plug into the side of her head. Time to work, Carla.
The dark night, the blazing beauty of all the stars, and the gentle rock of
MyBoat
on the waves, felt as rhythmic shoving of the padded deck against her back, all become ghostly presences in the back of her brain, like the fragments of a dream just after waking. Instead, she senses lists of thousands of options, thinks of what she wants, plugs in to learn that Hawaii has been cut off from all but a few voice signals already, swings back into the public channels to get satellite data and raw weather station data … .
When the outflow jet from Clem swung hard around, it swung out over water that was just below 20 degrees Celsius in temperature. Too cold for a hurricane to start. Too cold even for one to be sustained.
Even so, there was a good-sized depression produced, which seems to have become an extratropical cyclone—a large storm, large in area, that is, though nothing like Clem for windspeed or rain, now moving toward British Columbia, which will be dumping loads of rain all over Pacificanada.
She notices a Japanese military satellite in a polar orbit might well have shot some pictures right in the critical eight minutes when the outflow jet switched off on one side of the hurricane, and a new outflow jet formed immediately ninety degrees away.
She quietly pops into several thousand software libraries, looking for
any old penetration software she can find; her vast storage and fast-system capabilities can assemble all the little pieces and bits into a sort of super gang-assault on the closed nodes around Tokyo. It’s only a matter of seconds, but she finds herself wriggling and stretching, back in ghostly “real” reality, as she notices how extended she is feeling, how much her consciousness seems to have spread out from her little submarine yacht.
The data are not terribly secure; the Japanese apparently assume this satellite feed is being tapped. It takes little time to break in, find what she wants, pop out.
They have some kind of a radar gadget that lets them shoot cross sections of the atmosphere, and it was turned on while they flew over. This is better data than she could have hoped for—she extrapolates from it instantly—
And finds the bad news. No question. If this had happened over warmer water, a fast-rising column of warm air would have been produced, in the middle of all those swirling waves, currents, winds, and thunderheads: the same kind of column that gave birth to Clem, or starts any other hurricane.
Louie is getting used to walking around on the moon in the silly robot; so used to it that more and more he lets the robot run on autopilot, until he needs to manipulate something himself. The first day was the worst; the manipulations involved in getting some of the “general assembler” machinery back up and running, getting it to make data busses and connector cables for all kinds of things that were never supposed to be hooked to each other, and so forth, were a major pain.
The second-and-a-half delay between him and the robot means the robot is useless for fine manipulations, except by letting it work independently—which means that every time something has to be screwed into place, but not too tightly, he has to take it partway down, then stop using direct interface, tell the robot how much force is allowable, wait to see if that did the job … taking six recessed Phillips screws out of one lousy plate, in order to get at two stupid switches, took him more than an hour.
He’s been quietly stealing all sorts of things from the French. If they don’t like it they can come up and arrest him; they’ve been cutting back too and he doubts they’ll even notice.
But after the systems were generally integrated and robots started up, matters moved pretty fast. The Pentagon zapped up all sorts of Computer Optimized Design software to him, and he’s had it running in the main system for a couple of days now. Later today, if all goes well, he’ll be able to launch a couple of small transport rockets, designed and built by himself and the machine right here on the moon, to bring some of the stored food
from the French supplies back to a rendezvous with the
Constitution
. He’s not yet in any danger of starving but it will be nice to have some variety, and as a test project it’s not too complicated.
He’s also begun to like walking around on the moon in the last few days. The little replicators are now all “slaved”—no longer running loose but under tight control—and they scurry about busily; the astonishing sharp shadows and black sky still delight him.
He wishes he could be back here in person, making his own bootprints in the lunar soil that has lain undisturbed for billions of years, and indeed he’s already dropped them a plan for that. Between the capabilities already on the moon and those he is building now, one of the things he can do is rig up a propulsion system to move all of
Constitution
—slowly, because the trusses that hold it together won’t take more than a twentieth of a g—out to orbit around the moon. Hell, out to anywhere, though he’s damned if he likes the idea of spending all his time in the Bank Vault, which he’d pretty much have to do for a long voyage.
But all the same …
Constitution
will be able to go anywhere, once he gets it equipped. He feels like he’s sixteen and modifying the old ’94 Geo for rally driving again.
The odd thing about every task up here—and he now realizes how conservative the French and Japanese were being in their approach—is that you need to work hard only at first. The machines learn, and once they learn they optimize, so that if you get one to do something right once, in a short while it will be doing it brilliantly and faster than you. On this little rocket project, it took the better part of a day to get the throat of the nozzle figured and optimized for the solid fuel … but then it took only an hour to finish the rest of the engine.
Well, time to get on with the work. He turns to the rocket design—
It is completely different. It doesn’t look remotely like what it did the last time he worked on it. Moreover, he knows intuitively it is better—and then, as he looks at it, he understands it completely. Of course that geometry doesn’t let heat build up as much in the throat; naturally if the struts are set up like that, they form strong, stable triangles everywhere—
It looks like he fixed everything in the back of his mind. Now that he doesn’t unhook very often, preferring to leave things running in background, it’s as if all the various tasks that are turning this into a new kind of facility are somehow thoughts in the back of his mind, and as if his mind is enlarging to take care of the additional load.
He has been unplugging only to sleep, and he’s been noticing lately that he doesn’t need to sleep much.
Not sleeping much is one of those unusual things he’s supposed to call
Dr. Wo about. It goes against all training and experience, but Louie calls the neurologist; something about it all is giving him the creeps.
Wo gets back to him in five minutes; obviously Louie is a valued guinea pig. In a few short sentences, Louie tells Dr. Wo about it all.
“And you were not aware of consciously thinking about this? The robots just modified it into this newer, better design, and when you came back you understood it?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And I haven’t been sleeping much. And lately, too, I notice that when I think of things from the past, my memory is clearer … is it the optimizers?”
“I’d say there’s no doubt.”
“So what happened? Did my subconscious design and build that rocket?”
Wo nods. “Good question. I think the answer is probably that you did, but not the ‘you’ I’m talking to. One way the optimizers work is that they copy valuable, effective code at one point, and then move it to other places where it’s needed. My best guess—and we’ll have to run some tests to confirm it, I know that’s a scary phrase but bear with it—my best guess is that what the optimizers are doing is copying parts of your mind into programs running on the other processors, including the ones on the moon. You’re sort of dispersing through the system. That’s why you understood it as soon as you looked at it—all those fragments of yourself ‘came home.’ Well, this is very interesting … it would appear that the net you are plugged into is not only optimizing you, it is
becoming
you. At the same time that you become optimized.”
Louie swallows hard and asks the question he really wants answered. “Doc, am I going to be the same guy?”
Wo sits down, the phone camera lurching as it tracks him, and scratches his head. This might be a major display of emotion; one problem with doctors in military research programs, given that part of their job is to study the patient to see why he’s still alive, is that they don’t have a very wide range of emotional expression. Though he’s known him for many years, Louie doubts that he has ever known what Wo felt about anything.
At last the neurologist speaks. “Well, that’s an interesting question. But it’s over toward philosophy rather than in science proper. Offhand I would say that none of us is exactly the same person we were before, but there’s a continuity, and at the least you will maintain continuity. Would you still be Louie Tynan if you trimmed your toenails and got a haircut? Surely. Would you be you with a heart transplant? You’d be different because the experience itself is traumatic, but you’d still be Louie Tynan. And with a brain transplant? How about half a brain? Are you the same guy if you have
a religious conversion? And is software the same program if you install an upgrade?”
Louie scratches his head, too—whichever organizations are bugging this must think they both have lice—and says, “I guess my answers to those questions would be maybe, maybe, and maybe.”
“One of our human test subjects, in the optimization work, discovered that he told the truth a lot more—apparently he’d always had a habit of white lies and flattery. His friends were able to notice the difference, but he and they agreed he was the same guy, just more truthful. In other words, telling the truth wasn’t part of him, it was peripheral, like having blue eyes or favoring white shirts. But suppose we infected the Pope with a program that made him a Mormon, or Medal of Honor winners with something that totally destroyed their courage, or gay men with something that turned them straight. Suppose in addition to that we put them in a whole new body, one that wasn’t human as we know it. Would they feel themselves to be the same person? Ever known an Alzheimer’s patient well, before and after, or a schizophrenic? Are they the same or aren’t they?”