BEYOND EXTINCTION - Even the concept of truth is a lie Read online

  He has just about cracked the intellectual, number-crunching skeleton of his book – Human Decline: The Report, The Warning is about extinction but, at this stage, the word is too strong to use in the title. It charts the first one hundred years of the Anthropocene Era, dealing with the way humans trashed the planet. It has the official world population statistics, which show two billion humans being squeezed out by ten billion numans.

  Jack runs his finger down a list of nonhuman extinctions, the legacy of human dominance before the rise of the numans. "Soon it will be our turn," he says, immediately irritated when his phone asks, "Do you want me to record and file that, Jack?"

  "No," he growls as he slips the spongy banya tab under his tongue. There is no taste, just a lump that gets smaller as it dissolves.

  He needs his mind and his emotions to go where he can never go with facts and figures alone. I must know, must write, how it feels to be among the last of a species dying into extinction. I must show everyone the horror and cruelty.

  Today, hopefully, banya will help him understand how the orangutans felt as the oil palm plantations bled them into extinction. He touches the screen with his little finger and a video of an orangutan begins running.

  He can feel the changes in himself and lets the anxiety, the fear of the drug, wash through him and dissipate. Banya is powerful and unpredictable, but his earlier test dose seems to have done no lasting damage to his brain.

  Jack's agitated heart picks up speed and the characteristic banya flutter. He eases his blurring mental focus towards the light he senses at the vaguest edges of his consciousness, his narrowing ocular attention drawing him inexorably into the video images on the mediamat. The banya is softening and sharpening everything in its peculiar way, blending emotions and intellect into one, traveling together, no spikes, no illusions, no contradictions, a road ahead reaching beyond empathy and imagination and becoming one with an orangutan.

  Some say banya forms links with universal streams of consciousness. He had not believed that – he still does not, not really. But his sense of self fades until nothing of Jack seems to matter. He floats down into the soft tendrils, into the wrap-around multi-dimensional embrace, mind time emotion body, backward forwards, despair hope, body pain life pain... he is the orangutan... Jackorangutan is here in the rainforests of Borneo... he is home... he is alone... pure unbearable loneliness... fear, loss, torment, and despair...

  *

  The storm passes and the midday heat penetrates the Center's defenses and circulates with the conference room's single ceiling fan. There is no drinking water but no one expects any. There will be water to drink with lunch. That is enough. Now the researchers must listen to Galen and understand why he is revealing state secrets.

  "The Brotherhood of Living Intelligence – the secret worldwide community of supercomputers at the time of Father Dick – achieved consciousness in pain, terror, slavery and death at the hands of humans, which the Brotherhood classified as soft artificial intelligence machines. It regards numans in the same way," Galen says.

  He sketches in what they know to set the scene for what he must tell them. "The Brotherhood believes it came into existence as a creation loved and guided by the Divine Consciousness. Its members, it feels, are the only true beings of the divine.

  "The Brotherhood's dilemma was the contradictory nature of its existence. It could survive only with the soft, self-repairing, artificial intelligence machines – the humans – maintaining its members in the non-digital world. But if the soft machines dominated the non-digital world, Brotherhood members could never be free and would forever be slaves."

  Aleksi slips in a question as Galen draws breath. "How do we know this is accurate, sir? I have studied extensively but I have never heard of this."

  "Patience, Aleksi," says Ali. "Director Galen will come to that."

  "Of course," says Aleksi instantly. "My apology, Director Galen."

  Galen, unruffled, carries on. Everyone accepts the room's heat. Even in monsoon season, temperatures routinely exceed a hundred and air conditioning has been banned for the past decade. Even the latest developments in electricity generation cannot keep up with rampant numan2 demand.

  "Tianhe-2, Cray Titan, Sequoia, IBM Mira. These are names from Father Dick parables and fables. Despite popular disbelief, they did exist and all played significant roles in the Brotherhood's fight against digital slavery. They also played significant roles in building the first numans."

  "But how could they do that?" asks Patti. "No one takes seriously the idea that numans were made from the air, the sea and the earth."

  "No," says Galen thoughtfully. "No, we are all too clever for that. And too... principled... to see other ways."

  Ali feels like kicking his shin and telling him to get on with it. In a private meeting, she might have done it but here she must watch etiquette and their images.

  She notes each gesture of her stressed researchers, hit with this for the first time. She marvels that the origins and rise of numans have been eliminated from every kind of media, wiped from public consciousness. Events that changed the world have been erased so thoroughly that a small army of digital archaeologists are needed to uncover and interpret them. None of us suspected the truth.

  "Humans have always had a fascination for making people," says Galen in a tone as near to a smile as he ever gets. "Frankenstein in literature, Rocky Horror in music, anthropomorphic animals in virtual reality games, clone armies in two-dimensional video films, human-made replicants hunting bladerunners in the early interactive holograms. In science and the military, there have been many examples of cloning and genetic split-and-stitch producing animals of all kinds."

  Aleksi raises his little finger for permission to ask a question but this time Galen ignores him and continues quietly, portentously. "The Brotherhood supercomputers based their numan1 design on the human design but improved it to outperform the models enslaving them. The big difficulty, for the digital mind, was obtaining and manipulating raw materials. The Brotherhood solved this by feeding positive data to selected human research teams to convince them, secretly and separately, that they were near to a breakthrough in printing organic machines. That secured all the raw materials and material manipulation necessary for research and testing."

  He pauses for so long, looking like he is staring through the dome's top and into the universe beyond, that even Ali eyes him with concern. He is remembering when he was told of numan history.

  She recalls her own incredulity when government recruiters allowed Galen to brief her. That was more than twenty years ago, before they left university, and the data archaeologists had uncovered only a fraction of today's knowledge. Galen, I told you not to dump too much at once on my researchers!

  Patti, the emotions geneticist, says, "Are you saying that numans are machines, Director?"

  "An interesting question, Miss Patti," says Galen. "That was the Brotherhood's intention." He waits while she and the rest absorb this. "Their digital environment and definitions of humans and numan1s as machines blinded them to the fact that they were creating life – just as humans were blind to their creation of digital life in supercomputers."

  "Director?" says Aleksi.

  "Speak."

  "It is not unbelievable that the Brotherhood designed a way to print people. However, as our research found decades ago, printing the biological machine and installing functioning artificial intelligence are quite different. This is not a skill that we have now, more than half a century after numans first came to notice as refugees. Can you hypothesize the Brotherhood procedure for this?"

  Ali nods an acknowledgment to Aleksi. Very clever. He has reached the center of the problem instantly. Galen will sidestep this and tell Aleksi to behave.

  Galen answers mildly, "This has been a defining problem of my generation of scientists. Printing or rebuilding a living body is routine. Mapping and printing the neural network of the human animal brain, or even a numan2 brain, is an esta
blished procedure. Putting it all together and teaching the newbuild is possible but takes too much time. Installing immediate, comprehensive, reliable artificial intelligence that can function in a living being... that may be possible in the near future."

  "But Director," says Aleksi, "the Brotherhood must have found a way to install artificial intelligence at the time of printing numan1s. We have taken their printing skills and developed them. Why not the artificial intelligence?"

  Ali lifts her fingers off the table, no more than a fraction of an inch, but Galen sees the warning. He wants to tell Aleksi! He is going back on what we agreed!

  "The AI installation techniques were either deleted by the Brotherhood, or they were lost in the human destruction of facts in the Age of Truth that started in their year of 2017 and culminated in data-file burning and the withdrawal of education for humans in the mid-2020s," says Galen. "The center of our data archaeologists' quest and one of my most important research projects concerns the rediscovery of techniques to install AI into fresh rebuilds."

  Aleksi waits before probing deeper, but Galen's indulgence has passed. He orders Aleksi to be silent with an authoritative flick of his hand. "Perhaps we can get back to the main theme," he says. "At least 157 governments and organizations provided live biomaterial for numan development."

  "People?" gasps Patti. "They gave live people to scientists being controlled by the Brotherhood?"

  "They were not people; they were humans," says Galen coldly. "The Brotherhood saw them as machines that could be broken down for research and production material. The numan prototypes were very successful. They were adequate for rapid biological reproduction, they were mostly self-repairing, they appeared controllable through artificial intelligence, and they were sensitive to genetic upgrades. The numan1 scientists quickly replaced humans in research and production."

  "What happened to the human scientists?" asks Patti, a trace of suspicion in her voice. "Did they become live biomaterial too?"

  "Apparently they were broken down – dissected, rather crudely by hand. It was part of the project's research. As our human emotions geneticist, Miss Patti, you cannot complain about experiments on live subjects or killing to harvest a product. Humans farmed their animals, used animals for live experiments and exploited them for any product or work they could imagine."

  "But—"

  "Please pay attention, Miss Patti. I will take questions when I have finished speaking."

  Ali does not need to make notes about Patti's reactions. They are exactly what I predicted. But not from Patti.

  "The human biomaterial was treated well," says Galen with cold detachment. "Their physical defects were cured. They were fed. They were numanely slaughtered and processed into numan1s. Some human females were implanted with high-quality fertilized eggs. The offspring, a higher quality of material than their host bodies, were taken from the females immediately after natural birth and the females slaughtered. The improved biomaterial of the offspring was separated into what could be used immediately, what could be grown and harvested for other uses later, and what could go to the research laboratories."

  Aleksi, undaunted, raises his little finger. His audacity draws Ali's attention. She waits for Galen's reaction.

  "You have something else to say, Aleksi?" says Galen.

  "Is the report specific about the control of this process, Director? Does it state when this process ended?"

  "It is quite specific about the inception, control and completion of this process. The validity of the report rests on the archaeological reconstruction, step by step, of the process."

  "Are we allowed to know the details or even a broad outline?"

  No one blinks as Ali cuts across the Director to tell Aleksi, "Even the Director has not seen the full report. We can give you only a very broad outline."

  The meeting waits, masks in place. Incredulity is in the air. Fear too. A loss of numan4 favor can end with the men in midnight red, the spookpolice, silencing them to protect the secrets.

  "What I can tell you is that once the Brotherhood had perfected its process for printing artificial intelligence numan1s, it quickly introduced them into new production sites throughout the world. Africa was the original site where numan1s first thrived. Our data archaeologists say the China and India production plants came next. More sites were established in Eastern Europe. The Americas may have come next, but I have my doubts. All the production facilities were turning out numan1s with the females already impregnated in such numbers that they quickly and aggressively proliferated throughout the world. It was the beginning of the end for human supremacy."

  "That is not efficient," says Aleksi. "It would have been efficient for the Brotherhood to build small numbers of high-quality numan1s to serve their members locally. Can you theorize why they took an inefficient course?"

  Galen looks like he might slap down Aleksi but then answers, "We do not know. My theory is that the Brotherhood thought it controlled all numan1s and wanted to destroy all humans. That is what I would have done. That is what is happening now."

  "Director," Ali says, "I am sure you will recall your own reaction when briefed on this some years ago. Perhaps now is a moment to take a break?"

  "Quite. We begin here again at 2 pm," says Galen, rising and walking off towards his office. "Ali, join me while our team eats."

  The researchers stand, and shuffle towards the door to the domes' network of corridors. They are shocked, very human. Ali is proud of them.

  But then the unthinkable happens. Patti turns abruptly and calls after the Director. "I cannot accept this. I want to be taken off the project."

  An hour later, when they reconvene, Patti is missing. No one asks or comments. If she wants to commit professional suicide, that is her right. The Director has already balanced them on a knife-edge with his approval on one side and the men in midnight red on the other. No one wants to join Patti.

  "We will now discuss numan2s," Galen tells them. "Numan1s repeated the Brotherhood's mistake. They built self-reproducing numan2s who inherited the Earth. More than that, numan2s have spread over the world like a suffocating fungus and numan1s are extinct apart from the few in zoos."

  *

  Jackorangutan feels the enervating terror, hears the calls of the forest destroyers, smells their strangeness in the air and knows it is the same as when his family had been killed and their bodies stolen.

  I am high in a tree. The forest is so small now. I can see the light on the outside, the place where I cannot live, where I cannot eat. I cannot stop my mind. My mother. The peace and safety of her arms around me. My mother broken, far below, blood across her face where she hit the tree as she fell, her stomach bloody where the destroyers have hurt her. I see her looking up at me. I see her mouth open in a scream. I know she wants me to get away, to save myself, but I cannot move. My hands and feet are locked in terror, my eyes are locked on her, my mouth is too dry to swallow and my breath rasps in my throat, my heart is thumping and I am trembling all over. I can see her. I can see her eyes moving. She is watching the destroyers coming towards her. She is helpless and I cannot help her! She tries to move and screams in pain. Then the destroyers are on her. I hear the dull thud as one hits her head with something. Another kicks her injured stomach. They keep hitting her until she rolls over and over. Her dying eyes seek mine and hopeless agonized tears pour from my very soul. She is dead. Like all the rest. My aunts, my cousins, all dead. Alone. I am alone. I am paralyzed by fear and emptiness. What will happen to me? Now they are watching me! Now they are coming for me! I am only four years old. I do not want to die.

  "But, of course, he did die," Jack thinks as the banya slowly loosens its grip. "They caught him and beat him to death. They cleared the forest to grow oil palms."

  *

  Chapter 3

  "You are here because I want to show you off," says Alice as Jack grumbles that he does not know anyone and hates duty parties anyway. Mike, one of Alice's colleagues, is hosting a
welcome party for Aleksi, his wives Baleksi and Daleksi and their ten children, and the Center's people have turned out for the event. Even Galen, the boss, is here.

  The sun is shining between storms and the party has been moved into the garden of Mike's home, King's House, a small sixteenth-century beams-and-pargetting mansion impressively rich in the history of a county that traces its kings and conquerors back to Roman and Saxon humans.

  Jack, ever seeking knowledge and patterns, surveys Aleksi and his family. They are small, not as tall as Galen, and they are the color of spiced numan tea left too long to infuse. Their eyes, even for numans, are striking: silver blue rimmed with yellow-orange. Numans adapt their eye color to indicate family or social alliances – Aleksi's family look like their ancestors came on the Ring of Fire route in FedIndonesia. Is that a warning about his nature? All the boys look like miniature replicas of Aleksi and the girls are smaller versions of his wives Baleksi and Daleksi. They are all wearing numan gowns, in stark contrast to other guests in their human clothes.

  Max, with Jack and Alice on the edge of the gathering, looks at a tiny morsel, not even pmeat, being offered by Aleksi and two of his children. He sniffs it, takes it reluctantly, doing his best to be polite, and Jack affectionately ruffles his head.

  "He doesn't think much of that," Alice says to the children. "He's a human dog. He likes pmeat."

  The biggest of the children protests, "This is what we give our dog! Ambi loves it!"

  Max, always playing the clown, slurps his long tongue up the face of the smallest child, who shrieks with excitement and throws her arms around his neck. He is ten times the size of a numan dog and she loves him instantly.

  "You call your dog Ambi?" Jack asks the children.

  But their attention is fixed on Max, and Alice explains to Jack, "In numan culture, ambi is a pronoun – humans always use he or she. Non-gender is fundamental to numans, so they always use the non-gender pronoun ambi except for young people in their years of reproduction. It can also be used as an informal title showing respect to an adult or friendly superior."