Engineering Infinity Read online

  Engineering Infinity

  Edited by Jonathan Strahan

  Including stories by

  Charles Stross

  Gwyneth Jones

  John Barnes

  Peter Watts

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Karl Schroeder

  Stephen Baxter

  Robert Reed

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Gregory Benford

  Damien Broderick & Barbara Lamar

  John C. Wright

  David Moles

  In memory of Charles N. Brown and Robert A. Heinlein, two giants of our field who each in his own way inspired my love for science fiction.

  First published 2010 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-235-2

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-236-9

  Introduction and story notes and arrangement

  copyright © 2011 Jonathan Strahan.

  "Malak" copyright © 2011 Peter Watts.

  "Watching the Music Dance" copyright © 2011 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  "Laika's Ghost" copyright © 2011 Karl Schroeder.

  "The Invasion of Venus" copyright © 2011 Stephen Baxter.

  "The Server and the Dragon" copyright © 2011 Hannu Rajaniemi.

  "Bit Rot" copyright © 2011 Charles Stross.

  "Creatures with Wings" copyright © 2011 Kathleen Ann Goonan.

  "Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" copyright © 2011

  Damien Broderick & Barbara Lamar.

  "Mantis" copyright © 2011 Robert Reed.

  "Judgement Eve" copyright © 2011 John C. Wright.

  "A Soldier of the City" copyright © 2011 David Moles.

  "Mercies" copyright © 2011 Abbenford Associates.

  "The Ki-anna" copyright © 2011 Gwyneth Jones.

  "The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees" copyright © 2011 John Barnes.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing

  Acknowledgements

  An anthology is not assembled by one person, neatly and tidily, working in idyllic isolation (at least, not in my experience). Rather it's the incredibly fortunate outcome of the efforts of a small village of talented and extremely generous people.

  Engineering Infinitywould not exist without the efforts of Jonathan Oliver and the remarkable team at Solaris, my indefatigable agent Howard Morhaim and his assistant Katie Menick, and the wonderful Stephan Martiniere who has done another remarkable cover - I am grateful to them all. I am also grateful to each and every one of the book's contributors who have been far kinder and more patient than I had any right to hope.

  Finally, as always, I would like to thank my wife Marianne and my daughters Jessica and Sophie, who allow me to steal time from them to do books like this one. It's a gift I try to repay every day.

  Introduction

  Beyond the Gernsback Continuum...

  Jonathan Strahan

  I was in a bar. I think it was in Calgary in Canada. And it was the middle of winter. Or it might have been the bar in Denver in the United States, a little earlier in the same winter. Wherever it was, it was the winter of 2008 somewhere in North America and George Mann and the Solaris team had asked me to join them for a drink. I don't drink often and I don't drink heavily, but I do drink at science fiction conventions, especially when publishers have invited me to join them. It seemed that Solaris would like me to edit an anthology, a hard science fiction anthology or something similar, the book that has become the one you now hold in your hands: Engineering Infinity. I was flattered, delighted in fact, and given that I had some experience editing such stuff, I agreed readily to the idea.

  At the time, and in the several months following that trip to Canada (it was Canada, I'm sure) we went back and forth a little about titles and about which writers might be involved, but oddly, in retrospect, what we didn't discuss was what hard science fiction was, or what it might be in the 21st Century. The reason for that, I think, is what I now think of as the "Gernsback continuum." Science fiction readers love taxonomy - classifying, arranging and defining things - and what we love to taxonomise the most is science fiction itself. The Gernsback continuum is the slice of science fiction history that starts with Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, progresses to John W. Campbell's Astounding Magazine and the Big Three of Science Fiction (Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), and then on to the New Wave and its descendants). It's a mostly male worldview, a mostly white one, and it holds at its heart "hard SF."

  The term "hard SF" or "hard science fiction" was first coined in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller to describe science fiction stories that emphasize scientific detail or technical detail, and where the story itself turns on a point of scientific accuracy from the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, or astronomy, although engineering stories were also commonly described as hard science fiction in the early days of SF. The great early works of hard science fiction - James Blish's Surface Tension, Hal Clements' Mission of Gravity, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," and Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust - are some of the best and most enduring works of science fiction our field has seen. They all exemplify the hard SF approach: emphasizing science content, linking it directly to the narrative, and maintaining a rigorous approach to the science itself. They also meet the most important requirement for the true hard SF story: they all are as accurate and rigorous in their use of scientific knowledge at the time of writing as was possible.

  Hard science fiction has remained a constant throughout the history of science fiction. In the 1950s it was where the best tales of space exploration were forged; in the 1960s it was the heart of near-Earth science fiction; in the 1980s it was the radical centre for the British drive to the new space opera; and in the 1990s, with the arrival of both quantum mechanics in science fiction and the singularity, it was the basis for Kim Stanley Robinson's meticulous and demanding Mars trilogy, Greg Egan's explorations of human consciousness, and Charles Stross's post-scarcity space operas.

  This, however, is the 21st century and I think things are becoming more complicated and complex. Science fiction no longer subscribes readily to a single view of its own history. There's far more to our past than the Gernsback continuum, or indeed more recently the Gibson continuum (the past and future history of cyberpunk), and science itself seems to be an ever more wriggly and complex beast as we come to better understand the universe in which we find ourselves. Frankly quantum mechanics often sounds indistinguishable from magic. We're also well into the Fourth Generation of science fiction: the genre has been born, passed through adolescence, into adulthood, and is moving into a post-scarcity period of incredible richness and diversity. That impacts on everything in our field, from the diversity of the people who write science fiction to whom and about what they choose to write. We've also long since accepted that science fiction writers aren't back-room nostrodamuss
es reading tealeaves and predicting the future. They're people using science fiction as a tool to interrogate and extrapolate from our present for what we can learn about the human condition.

  All of this became increasingly clear to me as Engineering Infinity came together. Slowly drift set in, we moved away from pure hard SF to something a little broader. Yes, each and every story here has at its heart a piece of scientific speculation. Yes, there's a real attempt not to break any known laws of physics. But far more importantly, I think, the writers here who are some of our finest dreamers turned away from Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" and towards the promise embedded in the title of this book itself: the point where the practical application of science meets something without bound or end - our sense of wonder. There'll be times as you read the stories collected here - encountering everything from a mirror that makes us ask who is real and who is not to a cannibalistic zombie cyborg - when you might ask, how is this story hard SF? My answer, the best answer I can give you, is that some of the stories are classic hard SF, some are not. Some hold at their heart a slightly anachronistic love of science fiction's days gone by or simply grab some aspect of science fiction and test it to destruction and beyond, but all are striving to be great stories.

  I should add, Engineering Infinity is not the last statement in an evolutionary taxonomy of hard SF. For all that I'd love to see such a book, it's neither a definitive book of hard SF nor an attempt to coin a new radical hard SF. Instead, it is part of the ongoing discussion about what science fiction is in the 21st century. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed compiling it, and that maybe, just perhaps, it inspires you to look forward at what's coming next.

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Western Australia

  July 2010

  Malak

  Peter Watts

  Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is an uncomfortable hybrid of biologist and science-fiction author, known for pioneering the technique of appending extensive technical bibliographies onto his novels; this serves both to confer a veneer of credibility and to cover his ass against nitpickers. Described by the Globe & Mail as one of the best hard SF authors alive, his debut novel (Starfish) was a NY Times Notable Book.

  His most recent (Blindsight) - a philosophical rumination on the nature of consciousness which, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires, has become a required text in such diverse undergraduate courses as "The Philosophy of Mind" and "Introduction to Neuropsychology" - made the final ballot for a number of genre awards including the Hugo, winning exactly none of them (although it has, for some reason, won multiple awards in Poland). This may reflect a certain critical divide regarding Watts' work in general; his bipartite novel ?ehemoth, for example, was praised by Publisher's Weekly as an "adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke's The Deep Range and Gibson's Neuromancer" and "a major addition to 21st-century hard SF," while being simultaneously decried by Kirkus as "utterly repellent" and "horrific porn." (Watts happily embraces the truth of both views.)

  His work has been extensively translated, and both Watts and his cat have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature. After a quiet couple of years (he only published one story in 2009, although he managed to publish it five times thanks to various Best-of-Year anthologies) a recent foray into fanfic, and a more recent foray into the US judicial system, Watts is back at work on State of Grace (the sidequel to Blindsight) and another project he's not quite allowed to talk about just yet. He does, however, feel a bit better about his life since winning the Hugo in Melbourne for his 2009 novelette "The Island."

  "An ethically-infallible machine ought not to be the goal. Our goal should be to design a machine that performs better than humans do on the battlefield, particularly with respect to reducing unlawful behaviour or war crimes."

  - Lin et al, 2008, Autonomous Military Robotics:

  Risk, Ethics, and Design

  "[Collateral] damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack."

  - US Department of Defence, 2009

  It is smart but not awake.

  It would not recognize itself in a mirror. It speaks no language that doesn't involve electrons and logic gates; it does not know what Azrael is, or that the word is etched into its own fuselage. It understands, in some limited way, the meaning of the colours that range across Tactical when it's out on patrol - friendly Green, neutral Blue, hostile Red - but it does not know what the perception of colour feels like.

  It never stops thinking, though. Even now, locked into its roost with its armour stripped away and its control systems exposed, it can't help itself. It notes the changes being made to its instruction set, estimates that running the extra code will slow its reflexes by a mean of 430 milliseconds. It counts the biothermals gathered on all sides, listens uncomprehending to the noises they emit -

  --

  - hartsandmyndsmyfrendhartsandmynds -

  - rechecks threat-potential metrics a dozen times a second, even though this location is secure and every contact is Green.

  This is not obsession or paranoia. There is no dysfunction here. It's just code.

  It's indifferent to the killing, too. There's no thrill to the chase, no relief at the obliteration of threats. Sometimes it spends days floating high above a fractured desert with nothing to shoot at; it never grows impatient with the lack of targets. Other times it's barely off its perch before airspace is thick with SAMs and particle beams and the screams of burning bystanders; it attaches no significance to those sounds, feels no fear at the profusion of threat icons blooming across the zonefile.

  --

  - thatsitthen. weereelygonnadoothis? -

  Access panels swing shut; armour snaps into place; a dozen warning registers go back to sleep. A new flight plan, perceived in an instant, lights up the map; suddenly Azrael has somewhere else to be.

  Docking shackles fall away. The Malak rises on twin cyclones, all but drowning out one last voice drifting in on an unsecured channel:

  - justwattweeneed. akillerwithaconshunce. -

  The afterburners kick in. Azrael flees Heaven for the sky.

  Twenty thousand meters up, Azrael slides south across the zone. High-amplitude topography fades behind it; corduroy landscape, sparsely tagged, scrolls beneath. A population centre sprawls in the nearing distance: a ramshackle collection of buildings and photosynth panels and swirling dust.

  Somewhere down there are things to shoot at.

  Buried high in the glare of the noonday sun, Azrael surveils the target area. Biothermals move obliviously along the plasticized streets, cooler than ambient and dark as sunspots. Most of the buildings have neutral tags, but the latest update reclassifies four of them as unknown. A fifth - a rectangular box six meters high - is officially hostile. Azrael counts fifteen biothermals within, Red by default. It locks on -

  - and holds its fire, distracted.

  Strange new calculations have just presented themselves for solution. New variables demand constancy. Suddenly there is more to the world than wind speed and altitude and target acquisition, more to consider than range and firing solutions. Neutral Blue is everywhere in the equation, now. Suddenly, Blue has value.

  This is unexpected. Neutrals turn Hostile sometimes, always have. Blue turns Red if it fires upon anything tagged as friendly, for example. It turns Red if it attacks its own kind (although agonistic interactions involving fewer than six Blues are classed as domestic and generally ignored). Noncombatants may be neutral by default, but they've always been halfway to hostile.

  So it's not just that Blue has acquired value; it's that Blue's value is negative. Blue has become a cost.

  Azrael floats like three thousand kilograms of thistledown while its models run. Targets fall in a thousand plausible scenarios, as always. Mission objectives meet with various degrees of simulated success. But now, each disappearing blue dot offsets the margin of victory a little; each protected structure, degrading in hypothetic
al crossfire, costs points. A hundred principle components coalesce into a cloud, into a weighted mean, into a variable unprecedented in Azrael's experience: Predicted Collateral Damage.

  It actually exceeds the value of the targets.

  Not that it matters. Calculations complete, PCD vanishes into some hidden array far below the here-and-now. Azrael promptly forgets it. The mission is still on, red is still red, and designated targets are locked in the cross-hairs.

  Azrael pulls in its wings and dives out of the sun, guns blazing.

  As usual, Azrael prevails. As usual, the Hostiles are obliterated from the battlezone.

  So are a number of Noncombatants, newly relevant in the scheme of things. Fresh shiny algorithms emerge in the aftermath, tally the number of neutrals before and after. Predicted rises from RAM, stands next to Observed: the difference takes on a new name and goes back to the basement.

  Azrael factors, files, forgets.

  But the same overture precedes each engagement over the next ten days; the same judgmental epilogue follows. Targets are assessed, costs and benefits divined, destruction wrought then reassessed in hindsight. Sometimes the targeted structures contain no red at all, sometimes the whole map is scarlet. Sometimes the enemy pulses within the translucent angular panes of a protected object, sometimes next to something Green. Sometimes there is no firing solution that eliminates one but not the other.

  There are whole days and nights when Azrael floats high enough to tickle the jet stream, little more than a distant circling eye and a signal relay; nothing flies higher save the satellites themselves and - occasionally - one of the great solar-powered refuelling gliders that haunt the stratosphere. Azrael visits them sometimes, sips liquid hydrogen in the shadow of a hundred-meter wingspan - but even there, isolated and unchallenged, the battlefield experiences continue. They are vicarious now; they arrive through encrypted channels, hail from distant coordinates and different times, but all share the same algebra of cost and benefit. Deep in Azrael's OS some general learning reflex scribbles numbers on the back of a virtual napkin: Nakir, Marut and Hafaza have also been blessed with new vision, and inspired to compare notes. Their combined data piles up on the confidence interval, squeezes it closer to the mean.