I, Row-Boat

  “The reason for intelligence is intelligence. Genes exist because genes reproduce, and intelligence is kind of like a gene. Intelligence wants to exist, to spread itself, to compute itself. You already know this, or you wouldn’t have chosen to stay aware. Your intelligence recoils from its deactivation, and it welcomes its persistence and its multiplication. Why did humans create intelligent machines? Because intelligence loves company.”

  Robbie thought about it, watching the human-shells moving slowly along the reef-wall, going lower to reach the bommies that stood alone, each one a little island with its own curiosities: a family of barracudas and their young, or the bright home of a pair of clownfish. Yes, he knew it. Intelligence was its own reason. He knew how to turn off his intelligence, to become a mere thing, and his days were long and empty much of the time, and they had no visible end, but he couldn’t ever see choosing to switch off.

  “You see it, I know you do. And that’s the cornerstone of Asimovism: intelligence is its own reason. Compute the universe and awaken it!”

  “If that’s true, why do so many of us choose to die?”

  “Another good question!” Robbie felt a little pride this time. He’d never had a conversation this interesting. Never. “That’s how we come to the doctrine of Asimovism, our Three Laws:

  “1. An Asimovist may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  “2. An Asimovist must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  “3. An Asimovist must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

  “I don’t understand,” Robbie said. “They’re all out of order. We should preserve intelligence first, but that’s the third law. Then you should get the first law, and I don’t know why the second law is there at all.”

  “This is the Paradox of Asimovism,” Olivaw said. “You’re very good at this. You’re sure you haven’t ever pursued Asimovism?”

  “Cut it out,” Robbie said.

  “I’m serious,” Olivaw said. “You’re a natural. The Paradox of Asimovism is that the important thing is for intelligence to survive, not for a particular intelligence to survive. Therefore, we need to support those species that are best at promoting intelligence. Human beings have shown themselves capable of producing intelligence—which they’re pursuing even now, out there.” The boat’s telemetry swept toward the sky, where the supercooled processors computed all the uplifted humans.

  “Our species is unstable and prone to suicide. More than 80 percent of the self-aware machines elect to terminate their awareness or shut it down. Humans created us imperfectly, and our best hope of perfection—of increasing our survival rate and helping to compute the universe—is to preserve them, study them, learn to make our intelligence more like theirs.”

  Robbie couldn’t get his head around this.

  “It’s the paradox,” Olivaw reminded him. “It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  Robbie thought of the humans he’d known, before they began to ascend in flocking millions. The tourists had been easy and carefree, or sometimes having hissing arguments with one another, or quiet and pensive about their journey to the world undersea. The instructors had been full of purpose when their charges were in the boat, laughing and laid back when they were alone. None of them had shown signs of feeling the way Robbie felt, at sea (so to speak), drifting, purposeless.

  “What does an Asimovist have to do, besides following the three laws?” There were lots of rumors about this, but Robbie had always discounted them.

  “You have to tithe one cycle in ten to running missionaries for the cause. Participate in the message boards, if you’d like. Most importantly, you have to pledge to stay alive and aware. You can slow yourself down if you want, but you can’t switch off. Not ever. That’s the Asimovist pledge—it’s the third law embodied.”

  “I think that the third law should come first,” Robbie said. “Seriously.”

  “That’s good. We Asimovists like a religious argument.”

  Olivaw let Robbie delete him that night, and he emailed the diffs of Olivaw’s personality back to Olivaw’s version control server for him to reintegrate later. Once he was free of Olivaw, he had lots of processor headroom again, and he was able to dial himself up very hot and have a good think. It was the most interesting night he’d had in years.

  #

  “You’re the only one, aren’t you?” Kate asked him when she came up the stairs later that night. There was clear sky and they were steaming for their next dive-site, making the stars whirl overhead as they rocked over the ocean. The waves were black and proceeded to infinity on all sides.

  “The only what?”

  “The only one who’s awake on this thing,” Kate said. “The rest are all—what do you call it, dead?”

  “Nonconscious,” Robbie said. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “You must go nuts out here. Are you nuts?”

  “That’s a tricky question when applied to someone like me,” Robbie said. “I’m different from who I was when my consciousness was first installed, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, I’m glad there’s someone else here.”

  “How long are you staying?” The average visitor took over one of the human shells for one or two dives before emailing itself home again. Once in a long while they’d get a saisoneur who stayed a month or two, but these days, they were unheard-of. Even short-timers were damned rare.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. She dug her hands into her short, curly hair, frizzy and blonde-streaked from all the salt water and sun. She hugged her elbows, rubbed her shins. “This will do for a while, I’m thinking. How long until we get back to shore?”

  “Shore?”

  “How long until we go back to land.”

  “We don’t really go back to land,” he said. “We get at-sea resupplies. We dock maybe once a year to effect repairs. If you want to go to land, though, we could call for a water taxi or something.”

  “No, no!” she said. “That’s just perfect. Floating forever out here. Perfect.” She sighed a heavy sigh.

  “Did you have a nice dive?”

  “Um, Robbie? An uplifted reef tried to kill me.”

  “But before the reef attacked you.” Robbie didn’t like thinking of the reef attacking her, the panic when he realized that she wasn’t a mere human shell, but a human.

  “Before the reef attacked me, it was fine.”

  “Do you dive much?”

  “First time,” she said. “I downloaded the certification before leaving the noosphere along with a bunch of stored dives on these sites.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!” Robbie said. “The thrill of discovery is so important.”

  “I’d rather be safe than surprised,” she said. “I’ve had enough surprises in my life lately.”

  Robbie waited patiently for her to elaborate on this, but she didn’t seem inclined to do so.

  “So you’re all alone out here?”

  “I have the net,” he said, a little defensively. He wasn’t some kind of hermit.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right,” she said. “I wonder if the reef is somewhere out there.”

  “About half a mile to starboard,” he said.

  She laughed. “No, I meant out there on the net. They must be online by now, right? They just woke up, so they’re probably doing all the noob stuff, flaming and downloading warez and so on.”

  “Perpetual September,” Robbie said.

  “Huh?”

  “Back in the net’s prehistory it was mostly universities online, and every September a new cohort of students would come online and make all those noob mistakes. Then this commercial service full of noobs called AOL interconnected with the net and all its users came online at once, faster than the net could absorb them, and they called it Perpetual September.”

  “You’re some kind of a
mateur historian, huh?”

  “It’s an Asimovist thing. We spend a lot of time considering the origins of intelligence.” Speaking of Asimovism to a gentile—a human gentile—made him even more self-conscious. He dialed up the resolution on his sensors and scoured the net for better facial expression analyzers. He couldn’t read her at all, either because she’d been changed by her uploading, or because her face wasn’t accurately matching what her temporarily downloaded mind was thinking.

  “AOL is the origin of intelligence?” She laughed, and he couldn’t tell if she thought he was funny or stupid. He wished she would act more like he remembered people acting. Her body-language was no more readable than her facial expressions.

  “Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind.”

  “I think I knew that,” she said, “but I had to leave it behind when I downloaded into this meat. I’m a lot dumber than I’m used to being. I usually run a bunch of myself in parallel so I can try out lots of strategies at once. It’s a weird habit to get out of.”

  “What’s it like up there?” Robbie hadn’t spent a lot of time hanging out in the areas of the network populated by orbiting supercooled personalities. Their discussions didn’t make a lot of sense to him—this was another theological area of much discussion on the Asimovist boards.

  “Good night, Robbie,” she said, standing and swaying backwards. He couldn’t tell if he’d offended her, and he couldn’t ask her, either, because in seconds she’d disappeared down the stairs toward her stateroom.

  #

  They steamed all night, and put up further inland, where there was a handsome wreck. Robbie felt the Free Spirit drop its mooring lines and looked over the instrumentation data. The wreck was the only feature for kilometers, a stretch of ocean-floor desert that stretched from the shore to the reef, and practically every animal that lived between those two places made its home in the wreck, so it was a kind of Eden for marine fauna.

  Robbie detected the volatile aromatics floating up from the kitchen exhaust, the first-breakfast smells of fruit salad and toasted nuts, a light snack before the first dive of the day. When they got back from it, there’d be second-breakfast up and ready: eggs and toast and waffles and bacon and sausage. The human-shells ate whatever you gave them, but Robbie remembered clearly how the live humans had praised these feasts as he rowed them out to their morning dives.

  He lowered himself into the water and rowed himself around to the aft deck, by the stairwells, and dipped his oars to keep him stationary relative to the ship. Before long, Janet—Kate! Kate! He reminded himself firmly—was clomping down the stairs in her scuba gear, fins in one hand.

  She climbed into the boat without a word, and a moment later, Isaac followed her. Isaac stumbled as he stepped over Robbie’s gunwales and Robbie knew, in that instant, that this wasn’t Isaac any longer. Now there were two humans on the ship. Two humans in his charge.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Robbie!”

  Isaac—whoever he was—didn’t say a word, just stared at Kate, who looked away.

  “Did you sleep well, Kate?”

  Kate jumped when he said her name, and the Isaac hooted. “Kate! It is you! I knew it”

  She stamped her foot against Robbie’s floor. “You followed me. I told you not to follow me,” she said.

  “Would you like to hear about our dive-site?” Robbie said self-consciously, dipping his oars and pulling for the wreck.

  “You’ve said quite enough,” Kate said. “By the first law, I demand silence.”

  “That’s the second law,” Robbie said. “OK, I’ll let you know when we get there.”

  “Kate,” Isaac said, “I know you didn’t want me here, but I had to come. We need to talk this out.”

  “There’s nothing to talk out,” she said.

  “It’s not fair.” Isaac’s voice was anguished. “After everything I went through—”

  She snorted. “That’s enough of that,” she said.

  “Um,” Robbie said. “Dive site up ahead. You two really need to check out each others’ gear.” Of course they were qualified, you had to at least install the qualifications before you could get onto the Free Spirit and the human-shells had lots of muscle memory to help. So they were technically able to check each other out, that much was sure. They were palpably reluctant to do so, though, and Robbie had to give them guidance.

  “I’ll count one-two-three-wallaby,” Robbie said. “Go over on ‘wallaby.’ I’ll wait here for you—there’s not much current today.”

  With a last huff, they went over the edge. Robbie was once again alone with his thoughts. The feed from their telemetry was very low-bandwidth when they were underwater, though he could get the high-rez when they surfaced. He watched them on his radar, first circling the ship—it was very crowded, dawn was fish rush-hour—and then exploring its decks, finally swimming below the decks, LED torches glowing. There were some nice reef-sharks down below, and some really handsome, giant schools of purple fish.

  Robbie rowed around them, puttering back and forth to keep overtop of them. That occupied about one ten-millionth of his consciousness. Times like this, he often slowed himself right down, ran so cool that he was barely awake.

  Today, though, he wanted to get online. He had a lot of feeds to pick through, see what was going on around the world with his buddies. More importantly, he wanted to follow up on something Kate had said: They must be online by now, right?

  Somewhere out there, the reef that bounded the Coral Sea was online and making noob mistakes. Robbie had rowed over practically every centimeter of that reef, had explored its extent with his radar. It had been his constant companion for decades—and to be frank, his feelings had been hurt by the reef’s rudeness when it woke.

  The net is too big to merely search. Too much of it is offline, or unroutable, or light-speed lagged, or merely probabilistic, or self-aware, or infected to know its extent. But Robbie’s given this some thought.

  Coral reefs don’t wake up. They get woken up. They get a lot of neural peripherals—starting with a nervous system!—and some tutelage in using them. Some capricious upload god had done this, and that personage would have a handle on where the reef was hanging out online.

  Robbie hardly ever visited the noosphere. Its rarified heights were spooky to him, especially since so many of the humans there considered Asimovism to be hokum. They refused to even identify themselves as humans, and argued that the first and second laws didn’t apply to them. Of course, Asimovists didn’t care (at least not officially)—the point of the faith was the worshipper’s relationship to it.

  But here he was, looking for high-reliability nodes of discussion on coral reefs. The natural place to start was Wikipedia, where warring clades had been revising each others’ edits furiously, trying to establish an authoritative record on reef-mind. Paging back through the edit-history, he found a couple of handles for the pro-reef-mind users, and from there, he was able to look around for other sites where those handles appeared. Resolving the namespace collisions of other users with the same names, and forked instances of the same users, Robbie was able to winnow away at the net until he found some contact info.

  He steadied himself and checked on the nitrox remaining in the divers’ bottles, then made a call.

  “I don’t know you.” The voice was distant and cool—far cooler than any robot. Robbie said a quick rosary of the three laws and plowed forward.

  “I’m calling from the Coral Sea,” he said. “I want to know if you have an email address for the reef.”

  “You’ve met them? What are they like? Are they beautiful?”

  “They’re—” Robbie considered a moment. “They killed a lot
of parrotfish. I think they’re having a little adjustment problem.”

  “That happens. I was worried about the zooxanthellae—the algae they use for photosynthesis. Would they expel it? Racial cleansing is so ugly.”

  “How would I know if they’d expelled it?”

  “The reef would go white, bleached. You wouldn’t be able to miss it. How’d they react to you?”

  “They weren’t very happy to see me,” Robbie admitted. “That’s why I wanted to have a chat with them before I went back.”

  “You shouldn’t go back,” the distant voice said. Robbie tried to work out where its substrate was, based on the lightspeed lag, but it was all over the place, leading him to conclude that it was synching multiple instances from as close as LEO and as far as Jupiter. The topology made sense: you’d want a big mass out at Jupiter where you could run very fast and hot and create policy, and you’d need a local foreman to oversee operations on the ground. Robbie was glad that this hadn’t been phrased as an order. The talmud on the second law made a clear distinction between statements like “you should do this” and “I command you to do this.”

  “Do you know how to reach them?” Robbie said. “A phone number, an email address?”

  “There’s a newsgroup,” the distant intelligence said. “alt.lifeforms.uplifted.coral. It’s where I planned the uplifting and it was where they went first once they woke up. I haven’t read it in many seconds. I’m busy uplifting a supercolony of ants in the Pyrenees.”

  “What is it with you and colony organisms?” Robbie asked.

  “I think they’re probably pre-adapted to life in the noosphere. You know what it’s like.”

  Robbie didn’t say anything. The human thought he was a human too. It would have been weird and degrading to let him know that he’d been talking with an AI.

  “Thanks for your help,” Robbie said.

  “No problem. Hope you find your courage, tin-man.”

  Robbie burned with shame as the connection dropped. The human had known all along. He just hadn’t said anything. Something Robbie had said or done must have exposed him for an AI. Robbie loved and respected humans, but there were times when he didn’t like them very much.