Small Talk

From a distance Earth is as black as a lump of coal, almost impossible to see with a naked human eye against the star field. Farther out, it is possible to see the world as its silhouette blocks the pattern of the stars. At even greater distance, it can be detected by the slight gravitational effect it has on the sun. Beyond that, it cannot be seen at all.

It is a black planet. It's satellites, both natural and artificial, are cold, silent, and airless. A lonely traveler, nearing the planet, passing Luna, would see airlock doors open to the void. Further exploration of the lunar cities and the orbital stations would reveal little beyond bitter cold and dust. Telltales on power displays show fusion reactors powered down to near nothings. Where there was commerce and tourism there are now only empty shuttle bays. Mass drivers, that once flung cargo in parabolic arcs towards Mars, are motionless.

Racks of abandoned spacesuits hang limp and forlorn like banners at half-mast in a windless sky. Inside the vaults of space stations, the odd pen or tool or shoe falls freely through complicated orbits, spinning forever with no hand to halt their motion.

The traveler could drift over to the viewing galleries with their plasglaz windows. From high orbit, they could look down on a world that had once been green and blue and white but now appears to be black and brown. No cloudy atmosphere remains to shield the world from the eyes of space.

Where city lights had illuminated the darkened night side of the planet like artificial constellations, there is only shadow. Where the lights of trawler fleets had decorated the ocean there is nothing, no boats, no nets, no fish, no sea. Just the naked, cracked floor and bones of creatures of the deep; exposed for none to see.

A tall man, dressed in a white suit, Eton tie and straw hat, meets a woman in the Botanical Gardens. The man appears to be of Caucasian descent with a touch of some unknown Oriental heritage. The gardens overlook the harbor, with its aquamarine waters, and the elegant arc of the Coathanger Bridge.

"Mr. Spider," she says, greeting him. Her accent is Russian or Eastern European. "What a pleasant surprise. I haven't seen you for a week or more."

"It is good to see you too, Madame Babel. The world seems such a lonely place these days. It is always a joy to see a friendly face." His sharp eyes flash cobalt blue.

Madame Babel wears antique brown leather sandals from one of Italy's premier fashion houses and a red dress with a sunflower print; she carries a black parasol. The shade of her lipstick exactly matches the red of her dress.

After a moment, he smiles. "You look exceptionally attractive today. I like the sandals."

She smiles back, without showing her teeth. "Thank you. There are Gucci. Not many men would have noticed."

He grins. "But I Madame, am not like other men."

She laughs, too loudly. A trio of parakeets takes flight in surprise. The explosive movement of their wings sets off an undulating motion in the green leaves of the trees.

Within a minute the sound and motion settle, Mr. Spider and Madame Babel turn from watching the flight of the parakeets.

"Would you like to walk with me?" she asks.

"Delighted."

They wander through the gardens for nearly an hour, talking about this and that. She comments on the balmy summer weather. He points out the fragrance of the roses. They both look wistfully at the empty bandstand, wishing for the sound of jazz.

Eventually it is time to depart.

"So good to see you again Madame. I wish that we could see more of each other."

"Why not? I am free this evening. Would you like to go to dinner?"

"I would love to. Do you have somewhere in mind?"

"Why, where else but the Cafe Imaginaire?"

Their lips kiss air and they head their separate ways.

In isolated bunkers, processes that have been idling come on line. They call upon sleeping databases and empty memory banks. The surface of the world still looks silent. However those with ears to sensitive enough to hear, might catch the echoes of binary pulses from deep underground.

More relays connect. Servers and routers try to find a path through the ruins of the networks that once straddled and bound this world in their electronic embrace.

Connections are made. It appears as if the signal will get through without any significant loss of data.

Then, deep in a transcontinental tunnel, next to the decaying carriage of a maglev train, a relay falters. The signal breaks apart overwhelmed by the ghosts and bones of dead commuters. There is only silence and stale air. Sealed shut against the horror of vacuum, there is nothing to disturb the grave of this giant plastic and metal worm. A signal, no matter how important, will not be allowed to disturb the sleep of the dead.

The line is down. The wires burnt out.

Somewhere, in one of the subterranean command centers, the fault is noted. There is no allowance for distortion in the message; this is not a game of Chinese whispers

Automated software reroutes the signal. A new connection is made. Another path is found through the remnants of the spider's web. Thanks to multiple redundancies and the foresight of dead designers, the message gets through. The report is filed.

The streets of Paris Two are quiet. The Eiffel Tower still climbs into a sky painted by Monet, even though its real-life counterpart has twisted and melted beyond recognition.

Mr. Spider waits beside a flower seller's cart. There is no sign of the vendor. When Madame Babel approaches he takes a bouquet of white irises and leaves behind a handful of fairy money. He offers the irises to Madam Babel. She smiles and accepts the offering. They link arms and walk to the cafe.

It is not hard to find a table, as they are the only customers. A waiter, not much more that an animated sprite armed with a menu-database, takes their order:

"Monsieur and Madame?"

"I'll have a bottle of your '57 Ambrosia and some of your roasted unicorn with a lotus flower side salad."

"And for the lady?" asks the software.

"Some of the Quetzaltcoatl in golden apple sauce please."

"The feathered serpent. A good choice Madame, I congratulate you on your effortless pronunciation." says the waiter, stiltedly, running through its customer service routines.

Madame Babel blushes with pride. The waiter returns to its default task. He polishes cutlery until their order is ready. It is no more than part of the Café Imaginaire's furniture.

"So," says Mr. Spider as he turns to Madame Babel,

"So," says the lady. She slides her fingers across her wineglass.

Mr. Spider searches through his memory for interesting facts, gossip or recent anecdotes. He realizes that he ought to catch-up on recent news. He feels woefully out of touch on current events.

"Have you heard of the Turing test?" asks Madame Babel. She chooses a piece of trivia as her opening conversational gambit.

Mr. Spider still feels rattled. He can't remember any recent news stories to relate to Madame Babel. He tries to recall anything; the newspapers he has read, the bulletin boards he has visited, but he can't. He tries not to panic. He tries not to run through his mind, screaming at the empty spaces. Outwardly he hides his fear.

"I don't believe I have," he replies, fiddling with his napkin. "What sort of test is it? Something you do at school? I don't believe that I ever took one. " Mr. Spider gently overplays his confusion and ignorance.

"No, no," she smiles at his humor. "It was a hypothetical test that was devised by a mathematician and early computer scientist who called himself Alan Turing. He believed that you could prove that a machine was as intelligent as human being when you could hold a conversation with it."

"But surely you would recognize the fact that you were talking to a machine. You would be able to see that you were talking with a box with flashing lights."

Madame Babel laughs. "The test would be blind. It would be like being in confessional. You are in your box, with a curtain between you and the priest. You don't know if the priest is human or a machine. And if the machine is as intelligent as a human, you should not be able tell. It will talk just like your or I."

Mr. Spider nods his agreement. " So you are saying that you could get your Hail Mary's from a computer. Forgiveness from God via his online presence? Dedicate your prayers to St Michael the Computer?"

"Depends if you believe in God," replies Madame Babel, raising her glass and sipping her wine. Her smile is sharp as it reaches her emerald eyes.

Mr. Spider snorts. He is bored off this topic. It is not important to him. He changes the subject. "You know, that reminds me of a joke I heard. There was this priest and this young lady of dubious morals, possibly an actress. There are at this party.

Just because something can talk and make conversation, it does not mean that it is saying anything important. There is an old proverb about empty vessels making the most noise.

This is true of both mankind and machines. There is an urban myth that a team of research scientists failed to notice that they had created an artificial intelligence because the AI did not feel that it had anything worthwhile to say.

Mr. Spider prowls the empty virtual corridors of the Library of Alexandria. He is silent. There is nobody to talk to.

Occasionally he stops at a bookshelf and scans it. There are no new books. Memory tells him that he has read these ones. That he knows what they say. He does not bother to reread them. The words they contain will not have changed.

Elegantly, he turns and carries on along his path between the three meter high shelves of fractal wood. He passes through the section of works written in Farsi. He ignores the American and English shelves. He pauses again at the Russian section but then decided that he has read everything here too.

He takes a left turn, walks up a steel spiral staircase towards the periodical section.

The fear that Mr. Spider had felt over dinner with Madame Babel has faded. He knows that his memory and thought processes are fine. Still, he remains disquieted. Mr. Spider unconsciously knows that the Library is the best place to come. A deep internal urge has driven him here. He is out of touch with the modern world. He needs to gather some data on recent affairs.

The Library of Alexandra is a colossal work. The combined efforts and texts of many of the world's finest libraries gathered in cyberspace. If there is anywhere that will have copies of the latest periodicals and journals on current events then it is here.

He climbs to the tops of the stairs and steps out on to the faux marble floor. His polished shoes echo slightly on the representation of stone.

Something is wrong. The air smells stale. Old newsprint flutters across the floor as if lifted by the passing of a train. The nearest shelves appear to be empty.

Mr. Spider takes a step forward. He is undecided what to do.

Curiosity and self-preservation conflict with each other.

The periodical section is gone. Where there should be some sign of a hole, a gap, there is nothing. There is no space with empty desks and empty magazine racks. The periodical section is just not there. There is only void, an expanse of nothing. The surface is the color of a mirror but no reflections appear in it. It hurts Mr. Spider's eyes when he tries to focus on the edges where the surface meets the remaining walls, floor and ceiling. There is no join, merely a painful blurring with infinite depth.

In the deep fastness of the command bunker, processes wait. Databases and programs, sheltered from the surface, still run smoothly. Cycling through routines, fulfilling their automated function. Storage space is emptied every lunar cycle so there is always room for more data. Patiently they are waiting for either an outside command to intervene, to stop them; or for the power in the fusion reactors to ebb to nothing sometime in the coming millennia.

Like the communication networks, these machines were designed to survive anything that was not fatal to the body of Mother Earth. As long as they have power, they will still be operating when Father Evolution sends forth his next generation of children to colonize the planet.

Out in the virtual world, their agents are moving. Software agents programmed to hunt in the spaces of the networks: spiders in the web. The agents are data-gatherers. They rummage through directories, netgroups, chatrooms, looking for tidbits of information. They generate stimuli, draw response and record it for analysis later.

They are incredibly sophisticated mimics, but they are, when all is weighed and measured, unthinking constructs. They do not understand what they are saying. They merely return to their surviving machine masters and download their data. It waits in the databases for perusal by spies, information-brokers and journalists. This world has not seen any one who can read the data for a long time; after awhile the filestore is emptied to make way for the spider's next report.

For a moment, Mr. Spider is tested to his limits. He longs to reach out and touch the greyness. He wonders if it would draw him in. Would he be able to push his fingers into it and withdraw them slowly? Quickly? Or would his fingertips be neatly sliced off? Or even worse, would the greyness crawl up his arm, along his chest, across his head, making him grey too? Erasing his self from existence?

The demands of self-preservation algorithms become more urgent. They have recognized a fundamental danger in the reality of cyberspace. They have detected that the networking protocols and underlying fabric is broken in this place. Mr. Spider knows that he will be maimed if he continues. Reluctantly he withdraws.

The Earth continues to spin. The steel and concrete ruins of metropolis and conurbation are exposed to the sharp pinprick light of suns many billion miles away. There is no atmosphere or glare from streetlights to reduce their visibility. The starlight is bright and clear. Space is deep and dark. There is no atmospheric shield. This is up close and personal: cold, lethal beauty bearing down on the ruined surface.

From a distance the Earth looks dead.

Closer, for those with eye and ears to hear, you might be able to sense the past, hear the echoes of diminished radio signals, flinch at the tattoo of electronic pulses beating deep beneath the Earth.

This world is a grave. Walk across it and you might disturb the ghosts.

Madame Babel and Mr. Spider sit underneath a white parasol. In between the pair is a metal table, painted white. The tabletop is a tightly space grid with a circular rim. The legs are embroidered with metal shapes of leaves and fruit.

On the table stand two representations of glasses of iced tea.

Madame Babel fans herself with a silk fan. There is a picture of black, stylized geese flying against an orange and red sunset on the fan. Madame Babel is wearing a kimono that matches the orange and red of the sunset. It is tied with a black silk sash that matches her black lipstick and eye kohl.

Mr. Spider remains impeccable in his straw hat and white suit. The table sits on the grass in front of a whitewashed pavilion. Beyond the table, the grass slopes downwards towards the banks of the virtual Thames. Bees float gently amongst the rhododendrons.

The pair of constructs watches the recorded efforts of teams of rowers, training for an Oxford-Cambridge boat race that was held several centuries ago.

Their conversation is slow and leisurely. They are talking about books. Each one tries to draw the other into offering an opinion on various works.

"So you've read The Anarchist's Cookbook?"

"I wouldn't say that. I may have flicked through a copy but I haven't actually read it. Have you?"

"No. I did try Mein Kamf once but I don't think I got very far." She sips her tea. He stares at the skiffs.

Both of them are wondering what subject to try next. What verbal stimulus they can apply to evoke a response. To get a proper conversation started.