Part V
The central island of Thalassus divided itself to three parts, just as many philosophies divide man into threes.
The largest part was the center of the government, the civic buildings that huddled to the sides of the Monad like suckling young to their mother. The Protectory was buried underneath the mass of the government there.
Next largest was the Theopolis, the spiritual center of the city-state. A thousand recognized churches radiated from the obelisk known as the Arm of God. Within its hagiocracy, hives of theologists struggled to unify diverse faiths, from that of the Hylotheists, who worship all material life, to that of the Necrolaters, who pray only to the dead.
The smallest part was the Academy, whose buildings radiated from its own crumbling library. Unlike the Theopolis, the Academy of Thalassus had been giving ground for centuries. Doctor Bel was a member of the Academy, though his exact relationship to it was never clear to me. The place he took me was deep under the Academy. We reached it by traveling through the Library, an edifice as ancient—if not as imposing—as the Monad itself. The Library was a massive iron dome supported by marble columns five paces in diameter. The walls between the columns were made from slabs of every description, granite, marble, lapis, onyx, quartz, fossilized wood. What connected every panel was the fact that each piece was inscribed in an ancient language, hieroglyphs and dead scripts past translating. A few may not have been carved on Gaea. From the wooded plaza surrounding it, it seemed that the Library blotted out half the sky.
Doctor Bel led me down into the Library, down into levels that reached as deep as the Protectory. The stacks were mazelike and endless, their contents unmoved for centuries. Books hid behind glass hazed by dust, and the only light came from a lantern Doctor Bel had taken from the upper levels. Deep under the Library, we came to a massive room with an arched ceiling and marble walls. Great shelves reached above us, heavy carved wood inlaid with dark onyx that formed faint geometric patterns that could have been a language themselves. These shelves held more than books, scrolls and the engraved plaques that spoke to the Academy’s machines. Other objects sat covered by dusty glass jars or in dull metallic reliquaries.
One arcane object that still remains fresh in my memory was a metallic skull. Human in outline, it was formed of gray steel, etched with rectilinear grooves that sank deep beneath its surface. The teeth were white enamel, grayed only by a thin layer of dust. As Doctor Bel passed it, I caught sight of a complex nest of clockwork, wires and hoses behind the eye-sockets.
Then his lamp had passed, casting the interior of the skull back into darkness. I cannot account for why such an effigy would fill me with such dread. All I can say is that when I saw it, I remained frozen in place for so long that Doctor Bel came back and grabbed my arm to hurry me along.
Within the museum of unused objects, Doctor Bel had made his home. It amounted to a Spartan apartment in the midst of the stacks, framed by a series of long tables crowded with piles of papers cast around with no discernable pattern.
“You shall touch nothing,” he told me. He pointed to a cot that was set off from everything else by a single cloth screen. “You shall sleep there. On the bed are clothes appropriate for a student, something to replace those putrescent rags you’re wearing.”
I stared a moment at the bed behind the screen, a single thin mattress with a simple cloth blanket. It was the peak of opulence compared to the cell I had so recently left. Still, because of the odd defect of my deliberate memory, my old life as a courtesan was fresh in my mind and I was not as grateful as I should have been.
A gray uniform lay folded on the foot of the bed. The fibers shimmered slightly and felt soft to my hand. Looking at my hand, I saw the meaning of Doctor Bel’s use of the word “putrescent.” Filth crusted my skin forming a collage of black, brown and green.
“Doctor, is there a place I can wash?”
He stared at me long and stern, his hollowed face resembling a parchment cousin to the metal skull we had passed. I half-expected him to rebuke me for talking out of turn. Instead he gestured with his cane toward an elaborately decorated armoire set beyond the long tables. “You may use my cabinet.”
The device was unfamiliar, but I was unwilling to tempt Doctor Bel’s goodwill by asking further questions. I had learned long ago that men of authority are rarely willing to accommodate the idiosyncrasy of my memory. Easier for me to relearn some mistakenly discarded gram of knowledge than it was to admit my own defect to others.
The armoire was thick glass, embossed with basreliefs of extinct sea creatures. Behind the glass I saw water fill voids behind the transparent sculpture. When I touched it, the doors swung open, making me afraid that I would release a flood in Doctor Bel’s library.
There was no flood. The water I saw was between the glass and a flexible membrane that formed a man-sized cocoon within the cabinet. I hesitated a moment, and only stepped inside because I could feel Doctor Bel’s attention riveted on me.
I stepped into the folds of the membrane, and turned to face the doors as they closed on me. Once sealed inside I could only see a vague blur through the glass. The membrane rolled itself upward, like a stocking. The water spun in a vortex around my legs, spiraling up my body as the membrane rolled upwards.
The sensation was fascinating, the fluid tugged at my skin and clothes with a weight beyond its mass. Slick and heavy, it dragged across my body with increasing speed. It reached my face before I had time to truly fear what was happening.
But before unease became panic, a new membrane—or the same one, I could not tell—rolled up from the floor, pushing the vortex behind it. The doors opened before me and I stepped out.
“Next time,” Doctor Bel said, “You should remove your clothing.”
I looked down and saw that in addition to the filth that had encrusted my body, the doctor’s cabinet had removed the rags I had worn in the confine of the Protectory. I stood naked in front of Doctor Bel. Oddly, I felt uneasy and vulnerable. It was uncanny, the desire I felt to cover myself, when I had the fresh memory of standing uncovered and unconcerned before a pederast more completely loathsome than Doctor Bel could hope to be. The only account I had for my unease was the fact that the doctor did not look upon my nakedness as a man should. He observed me much as I imagined he might regard some dusty relic.
I turned away from him, toward the armoire. I saw no sign of my old clothing floating in its aqueous embrace.
The last signs of my confinement had been washed away.
Part VI
“I am a historian,” Doctor Bel told me the next morning. “You will assist me with my studies.”
I nodded. I understood my position and how to acquiesce to the desires of men. The fact that Doctor Bel’s desires were not of the physical realm did not change that, though I was concerned that the skills I had chosen to remember in my life were not ones appropriate to his particular interests. However, I was not prepared to question his choice of students.
I sat in the center of his museum of antique curiosities, wearing the strange gray coverall he had provided and an expression I hoped was appropriately studious.
“The theologists call this the twelfth age of man. Do you understand what that means?”
I shook my head. It was not a fact I had cared to remember.
“An age, a great turn in the cycle, represents how long it takes humanity to rise from barbarism, achieve civilization, and then return again to barbarism. How often this has happened on Gaea is unknown to anyone but the gods of the theologists.”
“How then do they know this is the twelfth age?”
“This is where theology differs from science, my student. It is so because the sacred writings say so. Questioning such revelations is a sin—as much a sin as questioning the Monad.”
Again, I was distressed at how casually he treated the authority of the Monad. However, I was able to conceal my discomfort as Doctor Bel expounded on the ages of man, such as were known by him. Many times, humanity had destroyed its own civilization. Doctor Bel talked of many great disasters; wars, plagues, great shifts in the skin of Gaea itself, he even talked of the skies themselves giving way. According to Doctor Bel, Gaea’s diadem, the great arch in the nighttime sky, was the remnant of a cosmic disaster that not only ended a human civilization, but came close to destroying Gaea itself. Before the catastrophe, Gaea had a partner in her dance through the cosmos, an orb that circled her as she circled the sun. This was the greatest age of knowledge, when men had crafted machines indistinguishable from themselves. Machines that thought, that bled, that loved, that hated. Machines that could replace man in every aspect. Machines that were too perfect. The wars razed much of the surface of Gaea, and tore her partner apart in the sky.
From the memory of this came one of the universal commandments of the theologists: “Do not bring life to the unliving.” A command common to all faiths, all gods.
Doctor Bel mourned at the knowledge that was lost. Men had conquered disease, hunger, even death itself. An idyll for millennia. A realm of order and understanding. He talked of this age as if it were a lost loved one. I thought I understood him now. His crimes against the Monad were not impulses of anarchism. They were the acts of someone who lived more in a past age then the one he inhabited. Surrounded by his artifacts, I thought he must feel as if he had lived through that past idyll, and longed to return.
“You know nothing of this past age, do you?” asked Doctor Bel.
The desire in Doctor Bel’s eyes, the only true emotion that breached his stoicism, would have been familiar to any courtesan. I was unsure if truth was the most appropriate response.
“Nothing beyond what you have just told me.”
He drew a sheaf of yellowed paper from his desk. On the pages, I could see the twisted sigils of the Monad’s engines, a record that only a mechanician or his engines could decipher. Doctor Bel scanned the page as if he could actually read the tiny holes.
“Do you know why you were confined?”
“I upset a bureaucrat.”
“The official record,” Doctor Bel looked down at the page in front of him. “ ‘The acquisition of knowledge forbidden by the state.’ ”
I furrowed my brow, quite unsure of what that meant.
“I found you because of your interest in relating tales of a prior age.”
Now, I understood. Somehow, Doctor Bel had found the transcription of the tale I had related to the pederast. My indiscretion continued to affect my fate. The doctor had uncovered my tale of the age when sodomites were put to death by stoning.
This made me uneasy, because I was unsure how Doctor Bel would react to me if he knew that that tale arose from the caprice of my self-fragmenting memory and not any particular interest in the past. Fortunately, I thought, he seemed unconcerned with how I came by the tale.
“After some years of research, I have determined that you are the only one who can assist me.”
I nodded, wondering to myself for the first time since my imprisonment, why I would have chosen to remember that particular tale. I looked up at Doctor Bel.
“May I ask you a question, Doctor?”
He nodded his assent.
“Why would my tale be knowledge forbidden by the state?”
“The past is dangerous,” he told me. “The Monad has decreed that there was no existence before the Monad itself existed. The only exception is the scriptures of the theologists, which are matters of faith. Should anyone else present as fact a history of events before the Monad, they are apostate and imprisoned. The only legal history is the history of the Monad.”
Again, I revised my opinion of Doctor Bel, he was an anarchist bent on an impossible revolt against law and the Monad.
Part VII
The next days, I chose to remember little; only simple facts that occupied little space in my crowded memory, just enough to convince Doctor Bel that I was actually listening to his forbidden tales of prior ages.
I now remember only one scene before the doctor’s expedition:
I was prostrate on a table in some deep part of the Library. Surrounding me was a mechanical cage that seemed to be some hellish cousin to the Doctor’s watery armoire. Water did not surround me, but the air between me and the cage was thick with potential. However, it was not the heavy air that prevented me from moving; it was a series of leather straps that held me motionless. Around me, the great metallic structure groaned and rotated like the engines of the Monad.
Beyond the grinding and banging of the machinery orbiting my body, I faintly heard Doctor Bel’s voice.
“Yes, you shall be perfect.”
Doctor Bel began the expedition with the simple declaration, “We shall go now.”
He took a lantern and led me into a series of narrow hallways gray from disuse. We walked through a maze of corridors until we came to a large circular iron door. Two small bags rested on the floor. Doctor Bel hung his lantern up on a rusty hook on the wall.
Doctor Bel picked the bags up and handed one to me. “From this point forward, you shall follow exactly in my steps.”
I nodded, shouldering my bag as he had his own.
From his bag he withdrew a functional lucernal pipe. It was the first antique relic I had seen him carry whose value I understood. The pipe was a solid cylinder of eternal cold metallic light that washed the lantern into insignificance. The pipe’s radiance was inherent in the matter of the pipe itself, and it could retain its character through any gross deformation. I had seen such lucernal metal drawn into wires as thin as a thread to be woven into the ancient ceremonial robes of the politarchs of the Monad, and pounded thinner than paper to illuminate the manuscripts of the theologists. The art of making such things was long lost, and the short heavy pipe that the doctor carried—which contained more of the lucernal metal than I ever remember seeing in one object—would command a price beyond counting. Doctor Bel found a lever, and the iron door rolled aside on gears I could not see. The stale air was blown aside by a cold damp gust that carried the sound of rushing water as well as the fetid smell of an abattoir.
Beyond the iron door, the lucernal pipe revealed a narrow stone pathway. Doctor Bel stepped out on the path without hesitation. I followed, taking heed of his admonition to follow in his steps. We walked, quite literally, into the bowels of Thalassus.
The path led to a great stone aqueduct that seemed to bear the great part of Thalassus’ waste. The effluent raced by us as a black, raging torrent. Even in a space that could comfortably fit the Arm of God, the confinement made the torrent feel as if it could swamp us at any minute, despite the fact the path was three times the height of a man above the boiling surface.
Doctor Bel followed the path, in the direction of the flowing sewer. We walked near an hour in silence before I raised a question, barely audible next to the raging torrent.
“Where are we going, Doctor?”
“The past.” He shouted back, his breath fogging the chill air. He gestured toward the vaults above us using his lucernal pipe, causing daemonic shadows to dance on the walls around us. “Perhaps you recognize your prior residence? Not from this angle, I suppose.”
I had been led even deeper than the lowest levels of the Protectory. He smiled, and I did not like it.
Within another few minutes, we reached the chthonian heart of Thalassus itself, beneath the Protectory, beneath the Monad, beneath all of Gaea herself.
Around us, the roaring of the waters had increased to an impossible volume. Doctor Bel’s lucernal pipe showed only a gray mist that hung over the torrent, and I could perceive only a couple of paces distance trough the choking fog.
Then, abruptly, we stepped out of the fog. We emerged into a vast space, possibly as wide as the Monad itself, and descending into the depths of Gaea. The sewer we had followed now became a great waterfall, spilling down into the endless shaft before us. Waters echoed endlessly around us. Our walkway ended on a stone platform hugging the side of the great shaft. The stones were slick with moisture, and no railing stood between us and the abyssal depths.
Shadows danced and twisted around us as Doctor Bel walked along the inner wall to a narrow stairway that descended from the platform along the inner wall of the great shaft. I followed, carefully placing my feet where Doctor Bel’s had first trod. As we slowly spiraled down the shaft, the torrent retreated behind us.
He spoke when the echoes of the water had receded.
“Man once could draw power and life from the heart of Gaea herself, before she grew cold.”
“How far?” The sense of apocalyptic depth I felt from the darkness next to us made me forget to address Doctor Bel properly.
He didn’t admonish me. “Far enough that the water falling here never reaches the bottom.”
We followed the narrow staircase, little more than a ridge projecting from the massive wall. The wall itself was layered, stone upon stone, forming bands of color that varied in height from no wider than my palm to taller than Doctor Bel. The stair we walked had been chipped free of the wall, I could see how that the edge of the path was even with the wall above, and we walked in a niche carved out of the wall just wide enough to preserve our balance.
The wounds in the old stone became fresher as we descended. The path became rougher, and the wall next to us showed tool marks. I wondered how old the path was; it seemed that it could easily have taken an age to complete in itself.
At seemingly random points along the path, holes had been chiseled into the stones of the wall. Often these portals were the size of a dinner plate, barely wide enough to allow Doctor Bel to insert his pipe to see what was beyond—an impulse he never indulged in, so I perceived nothing beyond the dark pits other than a sense of a wider, unseen space beyond.
Two holes we passed were large enough that, as Doctor Bel passed, I caught glimpses of what lay within.
Within the first, I could glimpse a giant metal sarcophagus, inlaid with gold and jewels. If it was a crypt, as it first appeared to me, it was one for someone twice the size of the largest man I had ever seen. What seemed to be the head, wrapped in abstract gold patterns, pointed down, at my feet, and the feet were lost above in the shadows of the Doctor’s lucernal pipe. It seemed to emerge from the stone itself, as if it was slowly sinking.
We walked on and I saw no more.
The second hole revealed a scene just as enigmatic. Beyond a hole as broad as I was, I could see a chamber a uniform gray in color. I saw pillars and arches of an unfamiliar design, mosaic floor in a twisted sun-burst pattern, the same monochrome gray, and windows and doorways that opened on gray ashy stone. Crouched on the floor in a position of supplication was the figure of a man, the same gray as the room.
We moved on before I decided if the figure was a statue or the remains of some ancient citizen of Thalassus.
We were so deep under the skin of Gaea now that I was unsure whether the remains I saw were from the great ancient city or from something even more ancient. Was he a contemporary of the men who dug this great shaft toward Gaea’s heart, or was he older?
Doctor Bel stopped, and I had the brief thought that perhaps we had reached the bottom of the great shaft. We had not. We had only reached the end of the carved stairway. He stood on a flat area where a void had been carved in the side of the wall three times the distance I could span with my outstretched arms. The sudden opening and certain footing made it feel as if we suddenly stood in a cathedral the size of the Monad itself.
When I walked into the space with him, Doctor Bel walked to the wall of the hand-carved chamber. He placed his hand on the rough-hewn wall, where the tool-marks were evident, and traced the bands of color. “Amazing, isn’t it? Each stratum its own lost century. A civilization’s rise and fall in a hand-span.”
He spread his fingers wide. “I hold a millennium in my hand.”
I wondered how many thousands of years we had descended.
I saw a pile of digging tools sitting in the corner of the open space. “Doctor? Did you carve this path?”
“My work is nearly complete.” He let go of his wall of time and turned toward me. “There is something you must see.”
He was smiling again, and I found myself filled with an unaccountable dread. He took my arm and drew me toward the rear of the chamber, where I saw that it did not end. A crevice opened into a deeper chamber.
For the first time, Doctor Bel had me lead the way.
I saw nothing but darkness at first. I knew that my feet left stone and touched metal. And from the echoes I heard, I knew that I walked within a large space. Not until Doctor Bel followed with his pipe did I understand how large.
As the lucernal metal washed its light by me, I could see a great ovoid dome supported by tapering gray-white ribs. The dome was made of faceted metal tiles that cast strange reflections. It was like nothing I had ever remembered seeing.
But somehow, I knew it.
“The destruction was so great, at first I believed nothing could survive.” Doctor Bel walked toward the center of the room. “Fragments of knowledge I found, written at five times remove, nothing . . . substantial.”
I walked with him toward a raised dais at the center of the dome.
“Is this familiar?” he asked.
I shook my head, staring at what the ancients had wrought. “I have never seen men build something like this.” The faceted metal was under my feet, tiny hexagonal tiles that seemed to shimmer when the light-pipe illuminated them. How old to survive without tarnish, or anything more than a layer of stone dust.
“Because men did not build it.” Doctor Bel climbed upon the dais, where a panel sat somewhere between a podium and an altar. “The greatest age man has seen created machines that thought, that lived, that built. This is their temple.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “What would a machine worship?”
Doctor Bel lifted something off of the panel in front of him. He held it so it caught the light. One of the small metallic hexagons shimmered in his hand like a solidus.
“This room is a ciborium of knowledge,” he said.
I took a step back.
“This wafer is a library unto itself, a thousand thousand volumes of ancient knowledge from when man and machine moved the heavens themselves.” He gestured to the curving metallic walls. “Surrounding us are a thousand thousand such libraries. This temple is consecrated to the preservation of all that was and could be known.”
“How can that be so?” I began to feel the weight of Gaea above me. The weight of Thalassus. The weight of uncounted centuries.
“Like any language. These words are written in the form of matter itself. Every particle within this wafer has meaning. It is solidified thought.” Doctor Bel looked at me as he stepped off the dais. He held the wafer toward me. “You remember nothing?”
I took another step back. The doctor’s cylinder of lucernal metal shone on the panel where Doctor Bel had stood, casting his form into shadow before me. His wafer glittered in the light from behind him. I gestured weakly at the walls around me. “How can you read such a thing? A script you cannot see?”
“This was not meant for human eyes. Like the tesserae of the Monad’s machinery, it is intended to be understood by a machine.” He held out the wafer. “Take it.”
I did not. I could not.
Instead, I shook my head and backed away from Doctor Bel in the direction of crevasse where we had entered. “I do not understand what you want from me.”
“This temple survived the ages because those that built it intended it to be eternal. It has waited for us, for you and me, for thousands of centuries.”
I shook my head. “Not me.”
“A lifetime it took to find. Another lifetime to discover its meaning. Another lifetime to find you—”
I turned and walked to the crevice. “You’re mistaken, Doctor. I am nothing, a courtesan, a madwoman. Such things are beyond me.”
“Why then do you remember tales of the distant past so clearly?”
I stopped on the threshold between metal and rock.
“Why are your memories so fragmented, Geva?”
“That is not my name.”
“Long ago, they created machines indistinguishable from men. But they were not the same as men. They were better. They did not age, and they did not die.”
“Stop it!”
“But they did not foresee how long. The capacity to remember is finite. No being was made to remember so many eons.”
I ran away from him, out toward the shaft. In the darkness I almost tumbled over the precipice. But my memory, fragmented as it was, was perfect in what it did recall. And I remembered how many steps it was before the floor fell away, and I stopped before my eyes adjusted to the faint light leaking from Doctor Bel’s ovoid temple.
Doctor Bel’s strides were longer than my own, and I had a bare moment to contemplate the depths before me when his hand rested on my shoulder. He turned me around to face him. I faced a blacker shadow in the darkness, but somehow his wafer still glinted in my eyes.
“You will listen to me!” The doctor’s voice was hard and cold now; the voice of the machines who had built the great temple. It was the voice of a soul that valued knowledge and nothing else. He pulled me away from the edge and held the wafer between us. “I brought you here to be the mother of a new age.”
I tried to back away, but his grip was strong.
“How else can one account for your survival? It is the will of what was known to become known again. History itself, all of past mankind, demands your presence here.”
I looked at the wafer. I saw it shimmer in the dim light. I did have a memory, incomplete, a fragment of knowledge. I could take it, and I would know what it contained. Its knowledge would be come my knowledge, its memory would become my memory. It would become part of me. It might even heal my fractious memory, allow me a whole, continuous existence.
Every one of those wafers, some ancient unnamed tutor had schooled me, held as much memory, or more, than was stored within my own mind.
But what would it cost me?
He pressed the wafer to my lips. “You were meant to consume this, understand it, make it speak again.”
I thought of taking it. Service so long a part of my being that it took a supreme will not to simply acquiesce to a direct command immediately. But I knew it was my decision to make, not Doctor Bel’s. My mouth remained closed.
What would it cost me?
I knew what I was, and I knew that Doctor Bel meant to have me become someone else— something else. If I took what he held, and it held as wide and deep a meaning as I did myself, what would happen but I become half of what I was and half something else?
And if I took another? Another? A thousand thousand? Would I become less a part of myself than a single brick was part of Thalassus itself?
Doctor Bel pressed harder, trying to force my jaws open and the wafer past my lips. I felt it cut my lip, and where he held my shoulder, I could feel my flesh begin to bruise. “You were created for this! What other meaning could your existence have? You are not a random courtesan; you are a living relic. The most important being on Gaea, and with this gesture you could also become the most powerful.”
What would I be, with all the knowledge of this past age? No longer a servant . . . a goddess, perhaps?
No longer subject to the whims of the bureaucrats of the Monad. Not even subject to Doctor Bel any longer. Free.
Free to be what?
Free to do what?
No longer me, what would I do with Doctor Bel’s knowledge? Would I create the idyll he dreamed of?
Or would I still remember all the ills done to me? Would I be driven to complete the ancient war that tore Gaea’s sister from the heavens, the war that marked me as an abomination?
“You will take this!” His voice had become shrill.
I raised my hand and struck Doctor Bel. I do not remember any other time I had ever struck a human
being. When my fist came down on his chest, I could feel bone give way. He staggered away, dropping his wafer and clutching himself where I had hit him. He gasped, an ugly liquid sound. There was enough light that I could see him stagger, but not enough that I could see his face. For that I was grateful.
“You cursed creature.” He coughed up fluid that I could hear splash on the ground between us. He fell to his knees on the edge of the precipice. “The theologists are right. Do not bring life to the unliving . . .”
He toppled over to the side, and I do not know if his strength failed or if he deliberately fell toward the darkness. But as I watched, still frozen in shock at the strength of the blow I had delivered, Doctor Bel tumbled silently into the pit.
I do not choose to remember how long I stood there, but eventually I returned to the temple to retrieve his lucernal pipe. During my long walk back to the surface I spared little time to worry what would become of me.
After all, in my long memory, there has always been a place in the world for madwomen and courtesans. Copyright © 2007 by Tekno Books.
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Introduction
By John Helfers
Given the theme of this anthology, I think it’s time to reveal what some—or many—in the SF community might think is a guilty pleasure: One of my all-time favorite films is Terminator 2:Judgment Day . Not only because it was and still is a stunning achievement in special effects, but also because of the heart of the story that James Cameron and William Wisher, Jr., came up with (ignoring any of the myriad time-travel paradox issues) to tell an even better story of Sarah Connor versus a killer robot from the future than the first time around. The interface between humanity and machine was examined on several levels, with some aspects answered, but, at least in Cameron’s vision, more questions raised were raised about natural and artificial consciousness and about the role that machines will play in our own future—the fate that we are making for ourselves every day.
The themes explored in T2 have been cropping up more frequently with today’s advances in computer technology. With computers becoming more powerful with each incarnation and robots doing more and more, such as piloting vehicles across remote, inhospitable terrain without any human oversight (such as the recent Grand Challenges sponsored by DARPA and the Pentagon), can true machine intelligence and automated robots be that far off in the future? And when that day arrives, what will machines have to say about their human creators? How will they interact with us? Will there ever come a day when they try to destroy us?
The debate over the pros and cons of artificial intelligence and creating self-guided robots has gone on ever since the first computer and the first functioning robot were invented. No one really knows what might happen, but at some point the questions above (except, hopefully, the last one) will have to be addressed.
While sitting in my office writing this introduction, I took a casual look around at the machines that surrounded me and provided me with so much that I take for granted every single day. From the amazingly complex computer I typed these words on to the relatively simple machines that provided light, heat, printed text on demand, kept drinks cold and preserved food, allowed me to talk to someone across the country instantaneously, to a small machine around my wrist that tamed and quantified an insubstantial concept like time, machines surrounded me. And the computer and the lamp and the refrigerator are all connected to much larger machines that give them power to operate, and those machines are connected in a grid to others all across the country and around the world. Meanwhile, billions of communications zip back and forth through fiber-optic lines and to and from satellites that circle the globe. It was a sobering thought to realize just how much we depend on machines to provide us with what we consider the basic comforts of life now—and it is even more sobering to consider that many of these things weren’t even invented a century ago.
If we look ahead another century—or perhaps even twenty to fifty years—will our machines grow more capable of serving us, or anticipating our needs and fulfilling them? Will we have true robots, à la Isaac Asimov’s vision, with the potential pleasures and perils that come with them?
When I came up with the idea for this anthology, I didn’t want it to be just “men versus robots,” and I made sure that the authors I had invited knew that. While I was very pleased to get some down-and-dirty science fiction combat stories, I was very surprised at the wide range of fiction, and the extremely wide interpretation that the authors contained herein took on what I considered a relatively simple theme. From military SF to historical fiction to humanist science fiction to what can only be categorized as slipstream in one instance, these sixteen authors all went beyond the simple definition of man versus machine and came up with stories that illustrate a mere sampling of what future conflicts might arise between mankind and technology.
So as you turn the page and explore both what might have been and what might be to come, take a look around your home, and give some thought to the machines that surround you and make your life more comfortable. And keep watching them. Because you never know, in this day and age, when the idea of man versus machine might turn from fiction . . . into fact.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Servant of Death
The Unplug War
Cold Dead Fingers
The Hum
Last of the Fourth
Moral Imperative
Partnership
Chasing Humanity
The Difference
Transformation
Killer App
Reiteration
Stalking Old John Bull
Engines of Desire & Despair
The Historian’s Apprentice
