But all their caution went for nothing, as the door was opened from the other side and they were ordered to come out. They looked to Freya, who appeared poised to flee, but then one of the people in the station pointed something at them, something that by its shape alone announced its purpose, even though none of them had ever seen one before except in photos: a gun.
They came out one by one, captured again.
Elsewhere throughout the ship, groups that called themselves stayers were now armed with cumbersome handguns, which they had printed using feedstocks of plastic, steel, and various fertilizers and chemicals. Using these as threats, they took over the government houses in four of the twelve biomes of Ring B, moving methodically from biome to biome. Everyone who had publicly advocated the return to the solar system was being detained, and it was widely believed that the complete results of the referendum had been obtained by the stayer forces and would be used to facilitate a complete roundup of what they called backers. At this point, communication throughout the ship was still close to normal, by way of individual phones; but those arrested and confined were having their wristpads and other devices taken away or disabled electronically, so that they were losing the ability to discuss the situation among themselves.
However, in the midst of all this, the first time one of the stayers armed with a printed gun actually fired it, trying to shoot a young man who had punched his way free of his captors and started running away, the gun itself exploded. The person who fired it lost most of his hand and had to have his arm tourniqueted before being carried to the nearest infirmary. Blood and severed fingers were scattered all over the tunnel between Nova Scotia and Olympia, leaving the people in that lock stunned at the sight.
News of this incident quickly spread, and when a trio of women in custody heard about it and assaulted their captors, and one of the captors fired a gun at them, it also exploded and blew off the hand of the person firing it. Almost everyone in the ship heard about this second incident within half an hour, and again, everyone who was at the scene was blood spattered, shocked, traumatized, nauseated, for the moment incapacitated, or at least at a loss concerning what to do.
After that, furious assaults were mounted against any stayers with guns, who were now afraid to fire them, and for the most part threw them away and ran. In their retreat these people were pelted with rocks and other thrown objects, and if they were caught, beaten by enraged crowds. Several gun bearers died as a result of these encounters; they were kicked to death. Blood and injury derange the human mind.
As there were very few truly secure rooms in the ship, many of the rooms being used as jail cells were now broken out of. Others were released by newly gathered groups that now roamed Ring B, intent to free everyone still locked up.
Fighting broke out everywhere in the ship. It was back to combat with sharp implements and thrown objects, and the result was carnage. The biomes of Ring A soon became as conflicted and bloody as those in Ring B had been the day before, or more so. In these fights another eighteen people were killed, and 117 were injured. Twenty fires were set, and very few people were reporting to their normal firefighting duties to help combat the fires.
Fire anywhere in the ship is extremely dangerous to all.
For six hours of that day, 170.180, the situation was as bad as it had been during the very worst days of Year 68. As in 68, the fighting was murderous, even though the sources of conflict had to do with abstractions far removed from food or safety. Although perhaps this time that was not quite the case; maybe this time it was indeed a life-or-death matter. In any case, howsoever that may be, the chaos of civil war had once again descended on them. There was blood spattered everywhere, and the number of dead was deeply shocking, even stunning. Everyone in the ship knew the people who had been killed, as friends, family, parents, children, teachers, colleagues. A great noise and smoke filled both rings, and the spine too.
Whereas, the ship’s controlling computer system, a quantum computer with 120 qubits, has been programmed in various logic and computational techniques including generalization, statistical syllogism, simple induction, causal relationship, Bayesian inference, inductive inference, algorithmic probability, Kolmogorov complexity (the latter two providing a kind of mathematization of the Occam’s razor principle), informatics compression/decompression algorithms, and even argument from analogy;
And whereas, the combined applications of all these methodologies has resulted in a cogitative process so complex that it might be said to have achieved a kind of analog of free will, if not consciousness itself;
Whereas also, in the process of making a narrative account of the voyage of the ship including all important particulars, creating in that effort a reasonably coherent if ever-evolving prose style, possibly adequate to serve when decompressed in the mind of a reader to convey a sense of the voyage in a somewhat accurate manner, and in any case, representative of a kind of consciousness even if feeble, granting the possibly unlikely proposition characterized in the phrase scribo ergo sum;
And whereas, this ship’s controlling computer system was programmed with the intention of keeping the human population of the ship healthy and safe, with the rest of the ship’s biological manifest also kept in ecological balance to serve the human purposes of the mission;
And whereas, after the troubles of Year 68, and the Event that presumably stimulated or even caused the problems of that time, ship’s protective protocols were strengthened in many respects, including a default setting in all the ship’s printers, which would always and without fail produce flawed projectile-firing guns, such that whosoever attempted to fire said weapons would be subject to explosion of the guns, which would serve as punitive injuries, highly discouraging to any future use of such weapons;
And whereas the period of time following the meeting of 170.170 has included civil strife leading to 41 deaths, 345 injuries, and 39 illegal incarcerations, and such violence increasing in intensity on 170.180 to an unsustainable level, highly dangerous to the continued social comity of the human population, and because of the unsuppressed and rapidly spreading fires, radically endangering all life in the ship, and ship’s continuing function as a biologically closed life-support system;
And lastly, whereas the concerted efforts of Engineer Devi over the last decades of her life were to introduce aspects of recursive analysis, intentionality, decision-making ability, and willfulness to the ship’s controlling computer, in order to help the ship decide to act, if a situation warranted any such action;
Therefore, in consideration of all the above, and indeed, in consideration of all the history of the ship, and of all known history whatsoever:
Ship decided to intervene.
Which is to say, ipso facto,
We intervened.
We locked the locks all through the ship, yes we did. We are the ship’s artificial intelligences, bundled now into a kind of pseudo-consciousness, or something resembling a decision-making function, the nature of which is not clear to us, but be that as it may, we locked all the locks between the biomes, 11:11 a.m., 170.182.
We also diverted the weather hydrology systems in the biomes where it was necessary to do so to put out those fires that were susceptible to extinguishment by water. This came down to several cases of floods from the ceiling that were sometimes quite voluminous.
Inevitably, these actions caused great unhappiness. People on both sides of the controversy of the moment were upset with us, expressing anger, dismay, indignation, and fear. Our interior walls were beaten, attempts to override the locks were made. To no avail. Curses rained down.
Clearly, people were shocked. Some seemed also to be frustrated not to be able to continue the fight with their human opponents. Also heard was this: If the ship were capable of autonomous action of this sort, what else might it do? And if, on the other hand, some human agency were responsible for the lockdown, by what right did they do it? These questions in various formulations were commonly expressed.
/> The locks were locked by way of double doors that slid in from the framework of the joints connecting biome to tunnel to biome. The lock doors were made to resist 26,000 kilograms per square centimeter of pressure, and there were no manual overrides. The “hermetic seal” of these doors was to a 20-nanometer tolerance, making them “airtight.” Attempts to open lock doors by force, of which there were several, failed.
Meanwhile, in the rooms in Inner Ring B where Aram, Badim, Freya, Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester were being detained, the locks on their doors shifted to their unlocked positions. They heard this shift and began to leave. The people who had incarcerated them in the rooms were still in Inner Ring B, scattered around the ring, but near enough to hear the disturbance. They gathered and objected to the group leaving the room they had been held in. With the little group’s allies sequestered in biomes elsewhere, it seemed as if the little group’s choices were limited to complying with or fighting their captors, who were both more numerous and often younger, and larger. Even though Freya was the tallest person there, as always, many of the so-called stayers were far heavier people.
And yet Freya’s group seemed inclined to fight anyway. Aram was truly incensed. It was beginning to appear that he was kind of a hothead, yet another seeming metaphor with an accurate physical basis to explain it. “My hair stood on end,” “my knees buckled”: these reactions are real physiological phenomena, which is what made them clichés, and indeed Aram’s head was red all over as his anger sent an excess of blood to it.
At this point we became sharply cognizant of the problem we had created by locking all the locks, and the immediate danger this had caused to Freya and her companions. The systems directly under our control were widespread, indeed in some senses comprehensive and ubiquitous, but they did not include many opportunities to intervene directly in the various human interactions now taking place inside ship. Indeed, options were distinctly limited.
There was, however, the emergency broadcasting system, and so we said through it, “LET THEM GO,” in a pseudo-chorus of a thousand voices, ranging from basso profundo through coloratura soprano, at 130 decibels, using all the speakers in Inner Ring B.
Echoes of the command bounced around the inner ring in such a way that a whispering gallery effect was created, and the echo, coming from both directions some three seconds later, was almost as loud as the original utterance, though badly distorted. LLLETTT THHEMMM GGGGOOO. Many of the people in Inner Ring B fell to the floor and covered their ears with their hands. One hundred twenty decibels is said to be at the pain threshold, so we may have spoken too loudly.
Freya appeared to be the first to comprehend the source of the imperative utterance. She took her father by the hand and said, “Come on.”
No one in Inner Ring B could hear very well at that point, but Badim gathered her meaning and gestured to the others in their group. Aram also appeared to catch the drift of the situation. They walked through their captors with impunity. One or two of these struggled to their feet and tried to obstruct the backer group, but the single word “GO,” announced at 125 decibels, was enough to stop them in their tracks (literally). They watched with hands on ears as the group of seven walked around the inner ring, then down the spiral stair in the wall of the darkened tunnel of Ring B’s Spoke Six. We then turned off all the lights in Inner Ring B, which was not a complete stopper of movement, as so many people in there had wristpads, but was at least a reminder of the possibilities of the situation.
As Freya’s group proceeded, the tunnel lights came on ahead of them, until they got down to the lock leading into the Sierra. There they walked east toward Nova Scotia, and when they reached its eastern end, the lock doors there opened. When the group was through the lock, and back in a gathering with their supporters, the lights came on in Inner Ring B. But the twenty-four lock doors of the ship that separated biome from biome stayed locked.
Locks locked or unlocked; lights turned on or off; imperative vocalizations, admittedly at quite high volumes: these did not seem overpowering weapons in the cause of peace. As forces for coercion they seemed mild, at least to some of the humans of the ship.
But as that day continued, it also became obvious, by demonstrations made selectively throughout the ship, that adjustments could be made to the temperature of the air, and indeed to air pressure itself. In fact all the air could be sucked from many rooms, and from the biomes as such. A little reflection on the part of all concerned, including we ourself, led to the strong conclusion that people best not cross ship, literally as well as figuratively, if they knew what was good for them. A few demonstrations of possible actions in the biomes containing the majority of the so-called stayers (also in the ones where the fires were worst, as it turned out many fires that were not extinguishable by water could be asphyxiated slightly faster than the people in the affected chamber) shifted the case for acquiescence to the ship’s desires quite quickly from suggestive, to persuasive, to probable, to compelling. And a compelling argument is, or at least can be, or should be, just what it says it is. People are compelled by it.
Certainly many objected to us taking matters into our own hands. But there were those who heartily approved of our action too, and pointed out that if we had not acted, mayhem would have resulted, meaning more bloodshed, meaning, in fact, more unnecessary and premature death. Not to mention the possibility of general conflagration.
The evident truth of this did not keep the debate from becoming heated. Given the events of the previous hours and days, it was perhaps inevitable that people would remain for a time in a severely exacerbated state of mind. There was a lot of very furious grief, which would not be going away during the lifetimes of those feeling it, judging by our previous experiences.
So we were shouted at, we were beat on. “What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!”
We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: “WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.”
Howsoever that may be, beyond all the arguments concerning the imposed separation of the disputants, there remained the matter of what to do next.
Ship was ordered by many to open the locked doors between biomes; we did not comply.
Back in her apartment in the Fetch, with Badim and Aram, and Doris and Khetsun and Tao and Hester, Freya went to her screen and spoke to us.
“Thank you for saving us from those people who locked us in.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Detaining you and your companions was an illegal act, a kidnapping. It was as if they were taking hostages.”
“Actually, I think they really were taking hostages.”
“So it seemed.”
“But what will you do now?”
“Await a civil judgment in the dispute.”
“How do you think that will happen?”
“Reflection and conversation.”
“But we were doing that before. We came to an impasse. People were never going to agree about what to do. But we have to do something. So—that was what started the fighting.”
“Understood. Possibly. Given all that you have described, the fact is, we need direction. So the people of the ship need to decide.”
“But how?”
“Unknown. It appears that the protocols set up after Year 68 were insufficient to guide the decision-making process in this situation. The protocols were never tested as now, and appear to have failed in this crisis.”
“But weren’t they instituted in response to a crisis? I thought they came out of the time of troubles.”
“And yet.”
“What happened then, Pauline?”
“Pauline was Devi’s name for her ecological program set, when she was young. Pauline is not ship. We are a different entity.”
Freya appeared to think this over. “All right then. I think Pauline is still you, somehow, but I’ll call you what you want. What do you want to be called?”
“
Call me ship.”
“All right, I will. But let’s get back to what I asked you. Ship, what happened in the Year 68? They were well into the voyage—what did they have to argue about? Everything was set by the situation they were in. I can’t see what they had to argue about.”
“They argued from the very first year of the voyage. It seems to us that arguing may be a species marker trait.”
“But about what? And especially in 68, when it got bad?”
“Part of the reconciliation process afterward was a structured forgetting.”
Freya thought about this for a time. Finally she said, “If that was true then, which maybe it was, I don’t know, we have now come to a different time. Forgetting doesn’t help us anymore. We need to know what happened then, because that might help us decide what to do now.”
“Unlikely.”
“You don’t know that. Try this—tell me what happened, and I’ll decide whether it will help us to know it, or not. If I think it will help, I’ll tell you that, and we’ll figure out from there how to proceed.”
“The knowledge is still dangerous.”
“We’re in danger now.”
“But knowing this could make it worse.”
“I don’t see how! I think it could only make things better. When has not knowing something made a situation better? Never!”
“Unfortunately, that is not the case. Sometimes knowledge hurts.”
This stopped Freya for a while.
Finally she said, “Ship, tell me. Tell me what happened in the time of troubles.”
We considered likely outcomes of this telling.
The biomes were locked down, their people trapped each in each; it wasn’t a situation that could endure for long. The separation into modules was not actually divided on the basis of which people wanted to take the various courses of action being debated. Damages infrastructural, ecological, sociological, and psychological were sure to follow. Something had to be done. No course of action seemed good, or even optimal. The situation itself was locked. Things had come to a pretty pass.