Haller was appalled. “You mean nobody’s ever even found out if they work?”
“Oh, they work just fine. What nobody’s done is link them into a Flux network. They know they have a near godlike brain, but they don’t know what it’ll do when it’s handed godlike powers. When you think of twenty-eight of them being networked together with nearly unlimited access to seven Gates and all the Flux they want—well, if we can’t control them, we might just wind up worshipping them, and with justification.”
That sobered them up. “Van Haas knows about this?” Haller asked.
“Of course. All the big folk do. They’re gambling that the gods can be suborned. If they can, it’ll make everything even easier. If not—who knows?”
It was a sobering idea, considering that all of them were putting their own necks in this noose fashioned by expediency and politics.
“At least this will end some of the thoughts of the bright boys in Engineering,” Haller said at last. “Lately they’ve shifted from just designing a nice place to live to designing the folks who’d live there. I’ve been a lonely voice protesting this line of thinking. After all, if we can make the place over to suit our needs, why bother to remake us?”
“Is that possible?” Fanfani asked nervously. This was the first he’d heard of this.
“It’s possible—even with just the 7240’s,” Marsha Johnson assured him. “In the process of reducing you to a contained bit of energy in a particular digital equation suspended in that vacuum tube, we read in the whole chain. The computer originally treated it as a whole, of course, but it wasn’t much of a curiosity step to see if the machine could also decide which parts were which. We got it to where it could take a scraping, read your genetic code, figure all the basics out, then apply that to you when you get digitized in the tube. Given proper directions, on reassembly it can solidify you almost to order.”
“You mean it could make me tall and voluptuous?” Kittachorn asked somewhat lightly.
“Well, it can’t add mass, not in the transport tube, so I’d say no. But it could redesign you to have blond hair, green eyes, change your metabolic rate, your hormone rate and levels—all that. It could take me, for example, tall and flat, and make me short and both curvy and busty. It can also boost the hormone levels—or reduce them—to make you sexier or disinterested, heighten your aggression or turn you passive, control your effective I.Q., and lots of other things that are physiological in nature. And it would all breed true. That’s incredible enough, but if I had Caesar, here; or perhaps Toby, I could remake them as fully functioning females with all the equipment and all the urges.”
“None for me, thanks,” Haller told her. “But why just one way?”
“Yes, that’s interesting,” Weinbaum put in. “I know a little of this, but I’m not in that branch of medicine.”
“Well, women have two X chromosomes, so it can take what it needs from the Y and interpolate the added X from the first. Whenever we tried to take a double X and interpolate an XY, though, it always comes up ‘insufficient data for consistent objective.’ We haven’t had the guts to find out what that means beyond the theoretical.”
“Toby’s making it sound like they’re thinking of making us into monsters or something,” Fanfani pressed.
“We could,” Johnson responded, “but only within severe limits—and only one individual at a time. I don’t think they were ever serious about that except on a pure theory level.”
“That may be with the 7240, but suppose you had the 7800 and gave it all the memory storage, program area, and Flux— both power and added mass—you needed?” the computer expert speculated. “I wonder how theoretical it might be then?”
Weinbaum wasn’t impressed. “I think you’re all overreacting to this. There’s just no percentage in it. I can see it for cosmetic reasons, and I can see it possibly putting me out of business—just keep the injured alive until you can get him to a computer interface and you have instant total repair—but Toby’s put his finger on it. It’s not necessary. If we had to adapt humans to an existing environment—say, Titan’s unmodified atmosphere and temperatures—it’s possible, but we don’t. Not on our little world. If, later on, we discover other planets or moons that are inhospitable but have resources we need, it might be cheaper and easier to modify colonists than to build and install more Gates and computers, but that won’t be in our lifetimes.”
“I wonder.” Johnson sighed. “There’s the potential here for immortality, for eternal youth and health. Who gets it will depend on who controls the computers, but the potential is there. Be nice to me, all of you. I may just have lucked into the access you’ll need because of the job I’ve got.”
“Marsha’s right,” agreed Lisa Wu. “What we’ve seen so far are merely extensions of prior technology, stretching our knowledge of and access to computers to the limit, pushing biological science to the edge, that sort of thing. Much of what Marsha can do in the tubes can be done chemically now, at least in the biochemical area, as I’m sure Doc would agree. This whole project is just an extension of existing Earth-based political and ideological rivalries that have been ongoing for centuries. We’re still riding the storm of the Industrial Revolution. But this—this is something new. The New Eden Project is evolutionary; this new factor, one discovered, like most great discoveries, by accident and as a by-product of unrelated research, is revolutionary. And, like all such revolutionary discoveries, it can be used for radical good, or unprecedented evil. I’m a good enough historian, though, to know that we have no idea now where it will lead, technologically or morally.”
“Evolution or revolution,” Johnson responded, “makes no difference to me. I won’t be the one to direct it. But it’s exciting as hell to be there in the center of it happening.”
There were two separate and independent command organizations involved in the New Eden Project, or “NEP” for short. The first, and perhaps highest although in theory they were equal, was the Operational Board, composed of the four military commands doing what they specialized in doing best and freeing that task from everyone else’s back; the second was the Project Board of Directors, consisting of the six division chiefs and the project director himself, who was also the only nonmilitary man to sit on the Operational Board— van Haas himself. He presided over both, not only in theory but in reality, and he was the bridge that kept them working as two parts of a single team. He held their future in his hands at all times, but, it was clearly understood, his head was always on the chopping block for any failures of theirs. He was answerable to the Westrex consortium back on Earth, and they were being bled too poor to accept anything less than perfection.
It was the military who would lead the way into the new world, but it was the Project Board of Directors who would make the decisions as to who, how many and when, and at what speed. The seven of them, all top administrators in their fields and great scientists in their own right, three women and three men as chance had dictated it, sat in the plush board room in the headquarters building eyeing the tall, gaunt figure of Rembrandt van Haas nervously. Nobody doubted what the meeting was about. Only the details remained to be spelled out.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a new series of directives from Westrex,” the project director began. “They are too lengthy to detail here word for word, but I’ll give you the basics.
“First, the political situation on Earth has stabilized to a degree not known for many years. We have a great deal of evidence that through espionage, and through legitimate scientific channels, at least the Soviets and the Chinese are close enough to solving the transportation problem that we will have no choice but to feed them enough to standardize the shape and size of their transports and their airlocks and power systems to ours to assure uniformity. Under existing international treaties we cannot claim exclusivity to New Eden without creating a military zone, and that requires not merely machines there but people. There is a great deal of evidence that they are rushing to get at least a ship, any ship, out there ahead of us. Since it’s our computers, we, of course, will have solid claims, but it will make it impossible to deny them equal colonization rights with us and we’ll wind up with another Titan on our hands.”
“Intolerable!” sniffed Harold Itutu, the West African representative. “They cannot be handed over our fruits!” There were murmurs all around.
“I agree,” van Haas responded, “but in order to stop it we will have to be there first. We must not only be installed there when they come, we must be so prepared and in control of the Gate and Anchor areas that they are left no openings. We have already located three other potential colonies further up the line—resources we could ill afford, but which were essential as a carrot if our plans work. Needless to say, our own backers are bled dry at this point as well, and there is unrest and there has even been some rioting in areas where critical shortages have developed due to us. Their own conclusion is simple. Time has run out. We either go as quickly as everything is ready, all or nothing, or we will be terminated as a project, with all our work and all the people’s suffering going for nothing.”
“Impossible!” Watanabe exclaimed. “Don’t those ignorant assholes realize what’s at stake here?”
Van Haas looked her squarely in the eye. “No. If a vote had been taken on whether or not to ship Columbus off to the New World, the people would have voted it a waste of money. The masses are simplistic in their vision, but it’s difficult to be cosmic when you’re undergoing food rationing and watching jobs vanish as prices skyrocket. People have always fought tooth and nail against progress. The Luddites rose up to destroy the automated machinery that made pins, putting many of them out of business. Before that, pins had been a luxury item. In the long term, automation gave new technology to the lowest of the low and created progress—but it wasn’t progress to the Luddite who was thrown out of work right then and there due to the machines. We saw the same thing with the introduction of robots and computers. There were demands by labor organizations to make the machines illegal, and brutal strikes to destroy the new technology or fight against the closing of obsolete mines and factories. It’s always been that way. It’s that way again.”
“But, surely,” someone said, “they can be sold on the importance of our work here.”
Rembrandt van Haas laughed. “Sold? The popular conception of a scientist has always been either a bald old fellow living in his own little world with no concept of what the real world was like—or Dr. Frankenstein, meddling in forces best left to God. More than one scientist has been burned at the stake by the mob, and many a program to save lives and open up humanity’s horizons has crashed and burned in the no less real fires called political expediency. Never even mind the Russians and Chinese and Hispanics and the Franco-Brazilians. For domestic reasons alone we’ve been ordered to either go now or they will be forced to shut us down before the new rulers of our home nations, having shot the present ones, do it less gently.”
They were all aghast at this prospect, but reluctant to accept it. Risks were one thing, but careful control minimized them.
“We haven’t even tested the 7800’s!” protested Carlotta Schwartzman, the head of the master computer project. “You know the risks they pose even as they are!”
“I know, but I can do nothing about it. One 7800 has been installed and tested by the Operations Board at a remote satellite station kept for things like this. So far they’ve found it faster, quicker, and easier, and far more versatile, but not operationally very different from our 7240’s. I’d say it’s worth the risk, considering that the alternative is no risk—and no project—at all. No one, after all, has to go. There are no guns at people’s heads.”
Watanabe, for one, was furious. “The fucking military has been playing with a 7800 and you didn’t even tell us?”
Van Haas shrugged. “What was the point? You all wanted one, and you all would have demanded priority and all have had very good reasons. We have only two spares as it is. The Operations Board could take risks we would have considered unacceptable here, and do so in a location remote enough to insure insulating us from any dire consequences.”