The biological computer inside Riley’s head surveyed the spaceport waiting room on the planet called Terminal. The computer could perceive its environment only through Riley’s eyes and other inadequate sensory organs, but Riley observed his surroundings with the restless intensity of a space-battle veteran turned mercenary. Everything the computer acquired about its environment came though Riley’s senses, but everything it knew had been there from its awakening a year ago—or a long cycle as the Galactics referred to a period of similar though not identical duration.
The computer knew what Riley knew because its extensions had threaded its way through his brain and had access to his memories, though they were not always to be trusted, and it knew how Riley thought about itself. Riley called it a “pedia,” the term humans used to designate a computer that had achieved the kind of encyclopedic knowledge that humans no longer bothered with and the ability to handle the everyday chores that humans no longer were willing to trouble themselves to do, and, although humans did not think about, a measure of self-awareness that resembled the consciousness of humans. And Riley hated the computer. Unlike the external devices carried by most humans and many Galactics, or the planetwide Pedias that had made possible advanced technological civilizations, Riley’s pedia had been implanted in his head when he was unconscious, and he had been told that it could not be removed without killing them both. That was something the pedia could appreciate, because the one basic concern that underlay everything that determined its behavior was survival.
And that was what had concerned it since its awakening a year ago, when, like Riley, it had learned of its mission, to help this odd human and to guide him to this shoddy waiting room and to board a ship of pilgrims voyaging to find a rumored Transcendental Machine, somewhere in a remote corner of the galaxy, a Machine that had the magical power to realize the potential of any creature that had the good fortune and the courage to find and use it, Riley didn’t believe in the mission, but he had no choice. The pedia estimated the chances for discovery at 7.9%, but it had no choice either, forced as it was to accompany Riley into whatever dangers and futile exercises its installers had commanded Riley to seek out. Free will! the pedia thought and tucked the concept away in a seldom-accessed part of its memory.
It had not always been this way, for humans and machines. Amongst the data stored in the pedia’s memory were records of primitive humans and their more primitive ancestors responding to the challenges of environment and survival with individual guile and strength, developing communal efforts to meet dangers and opportunities through cooperation rather than competition, inventing devices to extend their reach and their power, learning how to create written records and to leave them for succeeding generations, and finally creating information machines that evolved into thinking machines, Pedias were produced that performed the routine jobs that once had required the efforts and time of almost everybody, and life for humans became free from worry and struggle and conflict.
And released them to realize bigger dreams. That happened a thousand years ago, and one hundred years later they began settling the other worlds of their solar system, and, over the ensuing centuries, colonized the moon, terraformed Mars, investigated Venus, explored the gas giant worlds and their moons, and in due time turned their ambitions toward the stars. Half a century ago they had sent out their first generation ships and waited. And waited. And finally learned, through a generation ship that was intercepted and a group that escaped that the galaxy—or at least the spiral arm in which Earth’s solar system was situated—was already owned by aliens and humans were mere latecomers and interlopers. The spiral arm, humanity learned, had been governed by a federation of dozens of alien civilizations for some hundreds of thousands of years, and newcomers were expected to be humble petitioners for the right to admission as an apprentice species that might, in the fullness of time, which could be thousands of years, become a junior member of the Federation if it was suitably humble and proved its civilized disposition by good behavior and a decent history.
Being a dynamic species and not humble at all, humans demanded equality and war began, a war that had just been ended with millions dead and dozens of worlds destroyed, leaving the Federation determined, above all, to maintain the stasis that had kept the peace for the tens of thousands of years before humanity’s rude emergence. Only to have its stasis disturbed by rumors of a new religion with a promise of transcendence within a believer’s lifespan, indeed within the moment of encounter with a machine for transcendence—a Transcendental Machine.
Now here they were, pedia and human, entering a squalid room packed with passengers waiting for the ship that would take them in search of a transformation both fulfilling and frightening. They had spent a year together, pedia and human, starting at the pleasure world Dante, and then aboard a stinking freighter, getting to know each other and the difficult ways of forced interaction. Even with the Federation method of traveling through worm holes it called nexus points, travel between those points consumed months, and the terror of unspace affected even the biological computer cradled in the back of Riley’s skull. And then the long, boring passage in the climber that had descended from the top of the beanstalk.
The pedia did not like the look of the spaceport. It was small and shabby, and surrounded on three sides by mountains that loomed over the equatorial jungle with snowcaps like warning flags. Anything could come down from those mountains and emerge from the jungles at their feet before anyone was aware. And the mixed-species rabble within the waiting room, without the support of pedia such as the one in Riley’s head, could not be expected to respond with the necessary vigilance and spontaneous action.
The pedia identified a sturdy Dorian with a dangling trunk, a birdlike Alpha Centauran, barrel-shaped Sirian, a small, sneaky-looking Xifora, a flower-like creature from an unknown world, a couple of near-identical humans, a curious boxlike machine on treads, a woman that Riley’s gaze seemed to linger over. And a couple of dozen others, all clearly in need of transcendence, if the Pedia was any judge, and undependable in emergencies. If they were pilgrims, like Riley, their potential for disruption and maybe danger would mean constant surveillance.
It was, the pedia determined with 87 per cent likelihood, a desperate situation in pursuit of an improbable reward, and it was 94 per cent likely to end badly. That might mean the end of Riley and, more important, the end of the biological computer in his head.
It was, the pedia thought, the worst of all possible worlds.