Carbide Tipped Pens Part 21

Elaine was still on her feet. "Would you write a play for us, Will?"

"Of course. If you like."

"A cla.s.sic?"

"That would be someone else's call."

"Wonderful," she said. The cla.s.s applauded as the bell rang. "Could you do a comedy?"

"I think I can manage that."

"How long do you think it will take?"

"I'll have it for you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? You've already written one?"

"I'll do it this evening."

"I'm sorry, Lou, it won't happen." Dennis stood staring at the open door as the last of the students left the room.

"He's not really a Shakespeare clone."

"That's correct. It will try to put something together, but it'll be dreary stuff." He shook his head. "I thought he understood his limitations."

"Well, Dennis, anyhow he put on a great show." Students for the next cla.s.s were beginning to file in. "Have you tried to let him write something?"

"No point. It's not a true artificial intelligence. There's no such thing. Probably never will be."

"Then what is it?"

"It's a simulation." He picked up the pod, closed it, and slipped it into his pocket. "You know what the Turing test is for artificial intelligence?"

"Not really."

"When you put a computer and a person into a room and can't tell which is which just by talking. Will pa.s.ses that one easily. But it doesn't mean he can actually think."

The drama cla.s.s wouldn't meet again until Wednesday, but a couple of them showed up at my office to tell me how much they'd enjoyed meeting Will, and that they were looking forward to seeing whether he could actually produce a Shakespearean play. I told them not to get their hopes up.

That evening I got a call from Dennis. "I've got it," he said. "The t.i.tle is Light of the Moon."

"Have you looked at it?"

"More or less."

"What do you think?"

"I'll be interested in hearing your opinion."

"Can you send me a copy?"

The t.i.tle page read Light of the Moon by Dennis Colby. That of course was a joke of some sort, and warned me he probably did not have a high opinion of the play. I got some coffee and got started. The opening pages suggested that Babes at Moonbase might have been a more descriptive t.i.tle. Three young women arrive on the Moon to take up positions with the World s.p.a.ce Agency and, in their spare time, to find some quality males. Tanya is an astronaut who wants to qualify for the upcoming Jupiter flight; Gretchen, a physicist who hopes that the new orbiting Belcker Telescope Array will finally reveal signs of a living civilization somewhere; and Huian, a doctor who came to the Moon primarily to forget a former boyfriend.

It was a comedy, but in the Renaissance sense that it was simply not a tragedy. Laughs were there. Nonetheless it was for the most part pure drama. And, I realized, as the action moved forward, a powerhouse. Tanya has to sacrifice her chance for the Jupiter flight to help a guy she doesn't even like. Gretchen watches as the Belcker comes online and the five superscopes look out toward Beta Galatia and see moving lights! But she realizes that neither she nor anyone else would ever have the opportunity to talk with whoever is out there, because Beta Galatia is eleven thousand light years away. "They're already dead and gone," she says. "Like the pharaohs."

And Huian discovers that the lonely, graceful moonscapes only elevate her sense of loss.

"You really liked it that much?" Dennis said. He seemed surprised.

"It's magnificent."

"I thought it was pretty good, but-I mean, Will's not supposed to be able to perform at anything like this level."

"Have I permission to send it to my students?"

They loved it. All except Frank Adams, who said it was OK. "A little over the top, though." Frank never really approved of anything. He'd thought Our Town was slow.

In the spring, the Masque performed Light of the Moon to packed houses at the Dan Rodden Theater. It became the first show to leap directly from a collegiate stage to Broadway.

"Can he do anything else?" I asked Dennis. "Can he figure out how to go faster than light? Anything like that?"

He laughed. "He's not programmed for science."

"Has he written any other plays?"

"In fact, he has. JFK."

"Is it as good?"

"Kennedy sweats out the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that he was the one who caused it when he put missiles into Italy and Turkey."

"That sounds good," I said. "Does Will get the byline this time?"

"No. And I'd be grateful if you'd just let that part of the story go away."

"My students wondered what happened."

"Lou, we had the biggest cosmological breakthrough of all time seven years ago. After decades, we finally got the Grand Unified Theory. You've heard of it, right?"

"Sure."

"Do you know who figured it out?"

"Somebody named Winslow, wasn't it?"

"His name is Wharton."

"Oh, yes. Of course."

"He won the n.o.bel."

"OK."

"But you don't know him."

"Well, I'm not much into physics, Dennis. What's this have to do with...?"

"Lou, I have a chance to be immortal. We have a new Shakespeare."

"Oh," I said. "Except the name is different."

Dennis smiled. His eyes were focused on some faraway place.

EVERY HILL ENDS WITH SKY.

Robert Reed

We like to think of ourselves as creative, and point to the magnificent creations we humans have wrought. Michelangelo's David, Beethoven's symphonies, the Taj Mahal, Darwin, Einstein, Jefferson, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed. All creators. Yes, but there is also a dark destructive force in the human genome, its b.l.o.o.d.y record dating from before history was written to Hiros.h.i.+ma, Syria, and the mean streets of any city.

Today, in fact, we are living in the greatest time of dying that planet Earth has ever seen. All over the globe, species of plants and animals on land and in the sea are being wiped out, driven to extinction by our own heedless actions. Planet Earth is being denuded of life by its most successful species of living organism: humankind.

Will we destroy ourselves, along with every other life form on Earth? We certainly have the capability. Do we have the wisdom, the brains, and heart to avoid our blind rush to end all life on our world?

Robert Reed's tale says no-and, just maybe, yes.

A fine old farmhouse used to stand on the hilltop, but today nothing remains except a cavernous bas.e.m.e.nt and the splintered, water-soaked ground floor.

The hideout is nearly invisible from below.

People are living underground-five adults and two starving, unnaturally quiet babies. The group's youngest woman is in charge. n.o.body remembers the moment when she claimed the role, but she rules her tiny nation without fuss and very few doubts. The others will do whatever she wants, and more importantly, they will do nothing when she demands nothing-resisting sleep and ignoring pain, and never raiding their rations, for days if necessary. And most impressively, they will deny their own terrors, prepared to hide forever inside this one miserable place, defending their lives by remaining quiet and still.

Outside, morning brings a little less darkness but no end to the deep winter cold, and with the faint sunlight comes the possibility of monsters.

This is the history of the human species: scared animals clinging to one darkness, while the greater blackness rules all there is.

The Crypsis Project was an international response to a simple, irrefutable observation. Life on Earth was closely related. Every bacteria and jellyfish, oak and Baptist, shared one genetic alphabet. A few amino bricks built bodies immersed in salted water, and the base metabolism had been tweaked and elaborated upon but never forgotten. Life might take myriad forms throughout the universe, but a single flavor of biology ruled this planet. Perhaps one lucky cell evolved first, conquering the Earth before anything else had its chance to emerge. But what about neighboring worlds? Venus once wore an ocean. Mars was fertile in its youth. Asteroids plowed up each of those crusts, spreading debris and vagrant bacteria across the Solar System. In those circ.u.mstances, every bacterium was a potential pioneer, and that didn't include any bugs living on wet moons and large comets of the outer Solar System, plus the hypothetical rain of panspermian spores and viruses and lost bones and fully equipped alien stars.h.i.+ps that could well have pa.s.sed through the young Solar System. Surely some silent invasion would have left behind a prolific, deeply alien residue.

By rights, there should have been ten or twenty or even a thousand distinct creations, and some portion of those successes must have survived.

Crypsis chased that simple, delicious notion. Novel creatures were within arm's reach. They lived under the ocean floor or inside geyser throats, or maybe they thrived beneath that otherwise ordinary stone in the garden. Unless the beasts were everywhere, eating unusual foods, excreting unexpected s.h.i.+t. Biologists were experts, but only in the narrowest of fields. How could they recognize the strangers riding the wind?

Armed with speculations and a dose of grant money, the Crypsis team was a.s.sembled-biologists and chemists and other researchers trying to find what might well be everywhere.

No miracle bugs were discovered that first year. But then again, n.o.body expected easy work.

The false positive during the third year made headlines. The other world news was considerably less fun, what with sudden wars and slower tragedies. But here was a happy week where humanity convinced itself that an alien biosphere was living in salt domes kilometers beneath Louisiana.

Except in the end, those odd bugs proved to be everybody's cousin.

After six years, most of the original scientists had retired or gone elsewhere, fighting to resuscitate their careers.

But the purge freed up niches for fresh colonists, including one Brazilian graduate student. More a software guru than a biologist, the woman was nonetheless versed in natural selection, and she had a fearless interest in all kinds of connected specialties, like mathematics and cybernetics and fantastical fictions. And after a week spent reviewing everyone else's empty results, the newcomer decided on an entirely different test.

She resurrected the Solar System inside a null-heart computer, putting things where they stood four billion years ago. Here was the newborn Earth and an authentic Mars, the most likely Venus and the rest of the marquee characters, along with many more asteroids than existed today. Her model was unique, but not in large, overwrought ways. The worlds were laced with small a.s.sumptions that she never intended to defend. This was her game, she a.s.sumed. This was meant to be easy grant money while she pushed ahead with her doctorate. And because this wasn't her primary job, she let the scenario play out more than once, never hunting for the bugs, watching nothing work out as intended, and every time with the same ludicrous results.

There was a husband in the picture, an aeronautical engineer who kept hoping for a child or two, if their lives went well enough. He wasn't the most observant beast when it came to emotions, but one night, glancing at his wife, he realized that he had never seen that expression before. Was she scared? Was she angry? Maybe work was a problem, but he feared some kind of trouble with their little family.

"What is so wrong?" he whispered.

"Nothing," she said.

She never was much of a liar.

The young man tried waiting her out, and he tried coaxing. Neither strategy worked well. Only when she was ready did his wife explain, "These simulations keep giving odd results, the same results, and they want me to fix my mistakes."

"Who wants to fix this?"