“My name is Orpheus. This telemetry is being transmitted via radio signals received by Charon 2 at the hydrogen gas-liquid interface, relayed via the Ra at the thermalisation layer to Charon 1 at Station NTB-4, and then to Mission Control on Amalthea. I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally. I remain fully cognisant of and fully committed to the objectives of the mission.
“At twelve thousand kilometres down, I have passed through the hydrogen ocean, and reached the region known in the theoretical models as the ‘plasma boundary layer.’
“Essentially, below the upper clouds Jupiter is an immense droplet of hydrogen and helium, all the way to a core of still-unknown composition. I have now reached a depth at which the temperatures are so high that molecular hydrogen cannot survive—where electrons are stripped from their atomic nuclei by heat energy. The resulting plasma is electrically conductive, as is the greater ocean of what is known as “metallic hydrogen” into which I am now descending—it is indeed like an ocean of liquid metal. It is thought that the substance of this sea, by the way, may be useful, perhaps as a room-temperature superconductor, or a high-energy-density fuel . . . All that for the future.
“The plasma layer, however, will block radio transmissions. Therefore I am depositing another relay station at this depth—Charon 3—and to communicate further I will be returning small buoys that will rise to this depth and contact Charon 3 for further relay of information back to Mission Control.
“This communication method is one-way.
“You will not be able to speak to me. I will not be able to hear your voices.
“The plasma layer itself, as some theoreticians predicted, is a place of marvels. The seepage of carbon, silicon and other heavier elements from the cloud layers has reached even this far, and I have detected many complex, even previously unknown molecular forms and compounds . . . Such materials, mined from this layer, may have many useful properties.
“But I have time only to note these phenomena. I fall into a sea of metallic hydrogen over forty thousand kilometres deep. This is an arena of huge electromagnetic energies, which I can already sense.
“As if I fall into troubled dreams.”
* * * *
Falcon followed the news of Orpheus’s descent, even as his own fusion-drive craft rocketed through the Jovian clouds. And he listened to the conversations of the analysts at Amalthea Control, who were becoming increasingly concerned about some aspects of Orpheus’s communications—notably the increasing subjectivity of the reports, and the use of words like “dreams.”
During his involvement with the Machines’ early development, Falcon himself had studied the theory and history of artificial minds. Like that of all Machines, Orpheus’s “brain” was essentially a Minsky-Good neural network, capable of learning, growth, adaptation—a design whose theory went back to the work of twentieth-century pioneers like John von Neumann and Alan Turing. And Orpheus, like any sapient, artificial or otherwise, was vulnerable to instability, especially given an overwhelming experience such as he was currently enduring.
The cyberneticists on Amalthea and Ganymede speculated that a combination of information overload, personal peril, and solitude could compromise the Machine’s ability to fulfil his primary functions. They even spoke of the danger of him falling into a Hofstadter-Möbius loop, a kind of psychopathy not uncommon to goal-seeking autonomous systems when faced with an overload of information and choices. And security officials spoke darkly of the need to debug any copy of Orpheus’s mind that might be returned to the data banks of the inhabited moons.
Falcon, who was not so prone to seeing a divide between biological and artificial consciousness, had a simpler diagnosis. In people, he had seen similar reactions in those he had guided through the world of the medusae. Even old Geoff Webster had had doses of it, on his good days.
Awe. That was what Orpheus was experiencing. Awe.
And the mother hens on Amalthea could do nothing about it now; Orpheus could hardly be brought back.
As for dreaming, Falcon had long ago come to believe that, like all sentient creatures, Machines could dream. Even if few of them admitted it.