cracking of the DNA code and the mapping of genomes. The instructions for artificial life were enciphered with the encoding of languages for digital and biological computing. Mushroom mycelial networks are a good analog for parallel processing. Together the biotech and infotech revolutions are transforming Earth into Codeworld. Which it always already was, of course. My associates and I are multidisciplinary enough to see the overlap.”
Paul’s eyes strayed toward the colorful fish swimming about the reef in the wet bar, but his mind was focused on Vang’s words.
“Associates?” he asked. “You’re not just representing yourself and your companies, then?”
Ms. Griego smiled her floodlight smile.
“Dr. Vang represents a consortium with a variety of interests,” she replied, glancing at Vang for confirmation.
“To what purpose?” Paul asked.
Ms. Griego looked briefly flummoxed. Vang broke in, freeing Athena Griego to depart from them and go on about some undisclosed business out of sight.
“Allow me to tell you a little story that may or may not be true,” Vang said, looking up at him. Paul shrugged and Vang continued. “When I’ve finished, consider me an unofficial source who will deny ever having told you the story I’m about to tell you. Let’s say that, once upon a time, there was something called the Cold War—a period when each side mirrored the horror of the other, both invoking doctrines of Mutual Assured Destruction. Let’s say that, during that Cold War, there were various intelligence agencies, whose work too, on whichever side, tended to mirror the work of their opposite numbers. Let’s say that, in their looking-glass world, groups on opposite sides of the mirror began making secret contacts with each other. All right so far?”
“I follow you,” Paul said. “Go on.”
“Let’s say further,” Vang continued, “that the motive for these contacts was a shared fear. At the time, these opposite numbers—very intelligent and foresighted people, mind you—were afraid one or another of the various powers would sooner or later start a war that would result in the planet being nuked to uninhabitable status. Let’s say further that, as a result of their meetings, they started working on what they called ‘depth survival.’”
“Which was?” Paul asked, staring into his coffee cup.
“An attempt to see to it that some remnant of human population and civilization would be preserved,” Vang explained, “even through the very worst of their worst-case scenarios.”
Depth survival. Paul thought of the old rumors of vast secret underground bases and covert subterranean cities—apocryphal tales which had flourished in the loonier reaches of Cold and post-Cold War paranoia. He quickly brushed the visions away with a mental sweep of the hand, however.
“But the Cold War ended,” Paul said, puzzled. “Where were your deep survival programs then?”
“Let’s say the security apparats’ mirror-horror world really did end, as you suggest,” Vang continued, quietly. “The Cold War and older Soviet-style socialism both collapsed, despite occasional atavisms. Biblical Armageddon and Socialist Utopia both disappeared from the radar screen. Where were the deep survivors’ reasons to keep on keeping on?”
Paul nodded but said nothing.
“Let’s say that, at that time,” Vang said, “the security organizations these deep survival programs were embedded in were themselves struggling to survive. Let’s say those organizations were metamorphosing from national security apparatuses into corporate espionage and international intelligence brokers.”
“Which they have increasingly become,” Paul said, pondering it.
“Perhaps,” Vang said without inflection. “Let’s say the end of the Cold War period forced those participating in the depth survival programs to take a very long view of the human future. From the perspective of their looking-glass world, when the mirror shatters, the shatters also mirror.”
“How’s that?” Paul asked.
Vang glanced thoughtfully around the cabin.
“Let’s say their think-tank experts looked around,” Vang said, “and saw that human beings were simultaneously becoming obsolete and a glut on the market. Let’s say they recognized—popular media fantasies notwithstanding—that, for a global civilization once past the threat of total spasm nuclear war, the more likely and immediate dangers are not killer asteroids or alien invasions but the daily ongoing destruction of habitat occasioned by human population growth and humanity’s own expanding powers.”
“The death of a thousand small cuts,” Paul said. “The frog in the pot under which the flame is being slowly turned up—too slowly for it to notice.”
“Exactly,” Vang said, pleased. “As far as planetary carrying capacity was concerned, let’s say the depth planners’ most reasonable projections placed global human populations deep into an ecocatastrophic overshoot phase fifty years from their time zero.”
“That’s glut—and maybe gluttony,” Paul said, with a nod, “but I don’t see the obsolescence.”
Vang smiled again.
“Even glut means obsolescence,” he continued. “For creatures like ourselves that can build artificial brains and alter DNA, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is an obsolete biological imperative.”
Ooh boy, Paul thought. Such ideas weren’t likely to make Vang popular in the Vatican, or Salt Lake City either, for that matter.
“But you mean the other types of obsolescence the planners might have contemplated, I suppose,” Vang continued. “Might they have asked themselves too whether, particularly since the nineteenth century, industrial mechanisms had already increasingly obviated the need for human muscle? In the twentieth century, didn’t informational mechanisms begin making many capabilities of the human mind superfluous as well?”
“I see your point,” Paul said, not considering the idea quite so philosophically as Vang had.
“Let’s say, then, their experts were forced to reconsider their scenarios,” Vang continued. “The older, deeper questions they asked themselves had been something like: Are we and our organizations good? Are humans good? The new questions might well have been different: not only what were they and their organizations good for, but what are humans good for?”
“I presume they came up with an answer,” Paul said, after a downing a strong slug of coffee.
“In their own way,” Vang said slowly, looking at the aquarium in the wet bar as if contemplating the possibilities hidden in its waters. “Maybe their own fears of the death and meaninglessness of their organizations got tangled up with their search. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say what they finally came to was the idea that human consciousness was our unique contribution—and our best hope for avoiding the doom of becoming the reef of our own shipwreck.”
“Reef?” Paul asked, then shook his head. “I don’t quite follow you.”
By way of answer, Vang got up and walked toward the wet bar, with its enclosed coral reef. On impulse, Paul got up and literally followed him, taking his cup of coffee in hand.
“Do you know how a coral reef grows, Dr. Larkin?”
Paul crouched down and looked at the miniature reef in Vang’s bar.
“Coral polyps,” Paul said. “Soft-bodied creatures, coelenterates—kind of like jellyfish, only they settle down and secrete stony skeletons around themselves. The old skeletons are what most of the reef is made of.”
“Exactly,” Vang said, pleased in an almost teacherly manner, “except that the polyps are actually excreting the calcium that goes to make up the stone of the reef. Like most marine organisms, they have to dispose of excess calcium, so why not use it for building? They’re not the last animal to turn a waste product into a resource, either.