Gods and Daemons
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The next few weeks simply flew by. During the day, I spent long hours working on the software for the Nano-suppressor detector application. Like all such projects, there were failures and dead-ends: code needing refactoring or, in extreme cases, rewriting when I discovered more efficient ways of doing things. I also decided on adding more features, such as the ability to record the characteristic signals from the Nano-suppressors, or the ability to send an alert message when active suppressors were detected. All-in-all, though, I made good progress on a piece of moderately complex software. At night, though, I spent much time in the company of Professor Maeve, to nobody's great surprise. We got along really well from our first date and, three or four nights a week, we squeezed ourselves into the single beds that the facility saw fit to provide in each room. She was enthusiastic and uninhibited in bed, willing to say what she did like and, very occasionally, what she did not. Afterwards, or more precisely, between times, we talked and talked; an eclectic mix of personal anecdotes, gossip, scientific topics, philosophy and general morality. Maeve spoke about growing up in the country in County Wexford, always getting into trouble with her staid and rather dull relatives with her restless energy and wild ideas. She described how her great-grandma - who died when Maeve was still a small child - repeatedly describing her great-granddaughter as a changeling: the real girl taken away by elves or leprechauns or daemons, and a imposter installed in her stead. Much to her family's surprise, and disappointment, she said, she secured a place at a local university, to study mathematics, of all things. She spoke of the strangeness of a farm girl going to university in 'the big city' - Cork's population, these days, is only 150,000 - although she agreed she had become significantly more worldly-wise, and well-travelled, since then. She also spoke of a rather strange experience in Schiphol airport of nearly encountering her doppelganger - a woman of identical appearance and very similar clothes - who somehow managed to disappear behind a concrete pillar before Maeve could catch up with her. I countered with tales of my teens and early twenties as a Hawaiian beach bum: days on the beach and in the surf, and nights in the bars and nightclubs, interspersed with mountain hikes through ancient forests - some say still haunted by ghosts - to high-points and famous lookouts. Somehow I managed to find the time to do some actual studying - fortunately I was a quick learner - and increasingly intrigued by the natural world around me. One particular midnight philosophical discussion stuck with me. "Why have these, these gods left us alive at all?" Maeve asked, almost as speaking to herself, "Surely, a group or society or system with such capabilities could have arranged for us all to die, if their objective was to avoid having a lot of undisciplined humans running amok in the galaxy." "Maybe they have a well-developed sense of morality," I answered sleepily, "I can imagine that they don't want us everywhere in the galaxy, getting into all kinds of mischief, no doubt, but they just can't bring themselves to kill us all." "A sense of morality, then?" "Yes, exactly. Like disciplining unruly children, for their own good, of course." "Possible," she agreed, "But there's another possibility, a darker possibility." "Go on," I said, suddenly much more wide awake. "Suppose they tried to exterminate us all," she suggested, "But didn't quite manage it. Remember there are hundreds of Expansionist ships out there, heading in a myriad of directions. Could they be sure that they had tracked down every last one? Humans might be hard to kill; even we might hide out in the asteroids, or the Oort Cloud, even if the Earth was turned into a ball of incinerated slag." "Well, what could a few isolated humans do, against an overwhelmingly advanced opponent?" "I guess the question would be," she mused, "How long would they remain overwhelmingly advanced. We absolutely know sophisticated nanotechnology is possible - you've seen in in action. I'm almost certain faster-then-light travel is possible. It's right there, in the maths. Perhaps, sooner or later, the remnants of human society mastered such technologies, and started travelling widely. We would uncover evidence of what they attempted, quite probably. We would be angry, furious, vindictive and looking for revenge." I was wide awake now. "I can see the thrust of your theory," I said, intrigued, "But then what?" "Then we would be a significant danger for them," she replied, adding enigmatically, "Especially if there are, actually, not very many of them." "What do you mean?" Maeve turned, pressing her naked body against mine and resting her head on my shoulder. "Our evolutionary development, our basic biology permits us to breed quickly, to create new individuals who are different from their parents, from any other human. Remember how hard it was to slow down population growth in the last century?" she said, "Perhaps they can't do that. They cannot, for some reason, develop new individuals, so even if an existing personality can live forever, perhaps in a variety of physical forms, there are never any new people, just the same ones, forever reincarnated." I thought for a moment. "So, you think that true AI is impossible?" "Perhaps. Or unreliable. Or unsafe. Or expensive. Much easier to create new intelligences using an age-old and well-tested approach." I snorted. But she had a point. With modern medicine, if there was a will, human population could double or more every twenty years. And what scientific and engineering miracles could we achieve in the same timeframe? An exponential growth, with the people and the technology to fill the galaxy with humans in, relatively speaking, the blink of an eye. "Do you think that's really likely?" But she did not answer; she had fallen asleep in my shoulder.
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Part 2