Poseidon's Wake

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‘Did she?’

‘Oh, yes. She was fulsome in her praise.’ Nissa was being quite brazen now. ‘Did Dakota have a problem with us viewing the recording originally, Memphis?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then, there won’t be a problem this time — and you’ll have shown useful initiative in decision-making.’

‘It won’t take long, Memphis,’ Kanu said.

He could almost feel the slow, clock-like deliberation of the elephant’s brain. Unfair to make that comparison, of course — he had judged Memphis to be a thing of wonder until Dakota offered him a new baseline — but he could not help it. Humans were cleverer than chimps, but a dull child was somehow more pitiable than any animal. Here was a talking elephant with only average intelligence.

‘You will see the recording.’

‘Thank you, Memphis,’ Nissa said.

Memphis brought them to the upright glass and once again summoned the image of Chiku Green. Kanu had seen it all before, but this time he could not dismiss a sense of furtiveness, knowing that he had ulterior reasons for watching the message again. True, they had a theoretical interest in the appended documents. But that was not the reason they were here.

Rather than worrying about concealing his guilt, though, Kanu was doing his best not to blink.

* * *

Back at the household, Kanu kept being drawn to the windows. The rooms only offered a limited view of the surrounding household, overlooking an area of open ground, some trees, and part of an adjoining wing. But he had seen no sign of activity since Memphis brought them back from the civic building. Feeling oddly foolish, he checked cupboards and looked under beds, just in case one of the dwarf elephants had squeezed away somewhere.

But they were alone.

‘Well, Swift?’ he asked finally. ‘You’ve had time to think about the recording, and I tried as hard as I could not to blink. What was the point of that particular exercise?’

‘I would have thought that was as blatant as one of your opening chess gambits, Kanu. The recording had been edited — rather crudely if I might say so.’

‘We both spotted that.’

‘Yes. But you may not have spotted that Chiku Green was ahead of her silencers.’

‘How so?’ Nissa said.

‘She must have prepared her statement ahead of time, reading from a script. She took the words she meant to speak and embedded them in the technical appendage, as a safeguard.’

‘It was too fast for me,’ Kanu said. ‘Just a blur of graphs and numbers.’

‘Fortunately, your visual system recorded rather more than your conscious mind was capable of processing. The words were encoded numerically — a very simple cyclic numerical cipher. Virtually hidden in plain sight. A child could have decoded the statement — but it would have needed to recognise what it was seeing in the first place. Chiku must have been confident that the Risen — the majority of the Risen, at least — would not be quite so perceptive.’

‘Can you show us these words?’ Nissa asked.

‘You forget that I have also seen Chiku and studied her patterns of speech. I can emulate her.’

Something made Kanu hesitate — some lingering notion that it was an act of disrespect to Chiku to have Swift animate her. But he forced himself to set aside that disquiet. It would be better to hear the words from her lips.

‘Do it. Show us the things she said that we didn’t get to hear.’

‘I suggest you simply ask me to explain the most germane points for now, and I will provide a transcript of the entire document at my leisure.’

‘I’m not sure—’

‘I am,’ Nissa said. ‘It makes sense. Do it, Swift.’

Swift’s form shifted to that of Chiku, exactly as she had looked in the glass, only sharper, more real, more suggestive of actual physical presence. And when she spoke, it was not a recording they were hearing, but the living voice of his third-mother.

‘What would you like to know?’

Kanu was frozen. He had no idea how to begin addressing her. The likeness was too striking, the similarity heartbreaking. He had known two iterations of Chiku back on Earth, neither of them this woman, but everything about her was a reminder of that past, the contentment of the good years they had barely known they were living. He saw her profile in sunlit doorways, standing like a figure in a Dutch interior, the angle of her averted face stroked with gold. He remembered the kindness of Chiku Yellow as she cared for Chiku Red, who had lost language and needed to be nursed back to it like a child. He remembered the smell of brine at the quayside, the mewl of seagulls, the clack of rigging, the drowsy warmth of a Lisbon evening.

He recalled the fortitude and patience of Chiku Red, who when the Mechanism fell had turned out to be the strongest of them all.

‘Let’s begin at the beginning,’ Nissa said, when his silence grew uncomfortable. ‘Why are you here? Why did you come here in the first place?’

‘They needed us,’ she said. ‘The Watchkeepers are old and immensely powerful, but there are things even they can’t discover for themselves. The M-builders were an older civilisation — vastly older. Something happened to them, and the Watchkeepers would like to be able to incorporate that data into their own strategic planning. This system is a key to understanding what became of the M-builders, but the Watchkeepers can’t use it.’

At last, Kanu forced himself to speak. ‘Why not?’

‘They’re wholly machine. That’s their strength, but also their limitation. The answers are on Poseidon, but they can’t get there. Poseidon is closed to investigation by machine intelligences — or at least, to machine intelligences like the Watchkeepers. It’s hard to explain, but it has something to do with them being too powerful, having too much processing power — they’ve slipped over the Gupta — Wing threshold.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Kanu said.

‘I wouldn’t expect it to — it’s quite arcane. But there’s something called integrated information theory — a model of consciousness — that was very interesting to a couple of mid-twenty-second-century cyberneticists called June Wing and Jitendra Gupta. The underlying theory’s much older than that, though — it’s a way of looking at neural networks and how information can be made to flow through them. In feed-forward networks, the flow is all one-way — like a river running downhill. The cerebellum is a feed-forward network. Meanwhile, your higher brain areas incorporate information-feedback properties — you’re gathering information and processing it in complex ways. That’s an integrated network, and it’s the key to conscious experience. Here’s the interesting thing, though. Under certain conditions, an integrated network can be functionally duplicated by a feed-forward network, but at the expense of greater computational resources. It’s not a particularly elegant or efficient mapping, but it is mathematically equivalent. Obviously you don’t have that option. You’re made out of meat. You’re conscious because you can’t afford to waste limited brain capacity on not being conscious.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘There are only so many neural pathways in that skull of yours, Kanu — you have to use them in the most efficient way, and your consciousness is just a by-product of that neural efficiency. But here’s the thing. If you had limitless processing capacity, you could supplant your integrated networks with feed-forward networks, and you’d be functionally indistinguishable to an external observer. But there’d be one difference.’

‘I wouldn’t be conscious.’

‘You’d be a computational zombie — giving all the appropriate external responses suggestive of consciousness, but with no conscious activity going on inside your head.’

‘Would I care?’

‘There wouldn’t be anything left of you to care. That’s the point of the Gupta — Wing theorem. It says that any conscious entity with unlimited computational resources runs the risk of remodelling itself as a series of feed-forward networks, thereby slipping over the horizon of consciousness. But it never notices, because at the precise moment it happens, there ceases to be a conscious “it” to detect the change. And after the transition, there’s no compulsion to reverse it. That’s what happened to the Watchkeepers. Collectively, they became too powerful — farmed out too much of their neural processing to feed-forward networks because they had the computational freedom to do so. Consequently they slipped over the Gupta — Wing threshold.’

‘They’re machine zombies,’ Nissa said.

‘At least partially. Maybe they’ve retained enough residual self-awareness to understand that they’ve lost something, especially after being rebuffed by the systems around Poseidon for so long. But from the point of view of those systems, of the M-builders, they’re hollow. They can process, interpret, deploy forms of intelligence, but they’re not conscious so they’re barred from Poseidon. The moons can tell — they can detect which side of the Gupta — Wing threshold the Watchkeepers now lie on. But it doesn’t stop them trying. They have almost limitless patience, an endless willingness to keep attacking the same problem. Maybe that in itself is a marker for the Gupta — Wing threshold — an inability to grow frustrated, bored, indifferent. The Watchkeepers have been throwing themselves against this knowledge barrier for millions of years — longer than we’ve been a species. But on a kind of glacial timescale their strategies can evolve. Lately they’ve begun to co-opt the assistance of other intelligences, creatures running on different cognitive substrates. Creatures like us — living organisms, like me or Dakota, or hybrid machine-human intelligences like Eunice. Individually, none of us is up to the task. But it was the Watchkeepers’ intention that the Trinity would be able to function as an investigative whole, a single information-gathering collective intelligence, one that would be able to slip through the barrier of the moons and reach Poseidon. And learn, and report back — give them the M-builders’ insights that they can’t reach for themselves.’