The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

"The rain lashed down on the cobblestones, a cold, insistent lullaby against the slick flagstones. Jacques huddled deeper into his threadbare overcoat, its collar a damp cage against a wind whispering secrets of the Seine. Beside him, the hulking silhouette of Pierre was an impassive monolith, the silence that clung to him as thick as the Parisian smog. Lutte Ouvrière's newest recruit was draped in shadows, shadows which whispered under flickering street lights - tonight the shadows seemed to writhe with a life of their own.

It all went to hell faster than a bar brawl on Bastille Day. One minute they were hauling crates into a grimy Parisian cellar, the musty air heavy with the ghosts of revolutions past, the next, the cobblestones were erupting in blue flashing strobes, steel claws of spotlights ripping through the night. Sirens wailed a mournful aria as armoured vans disgorged gendarmes, their faces like gargoyles in the harsh neon glare.

The interrogation suite was a slap in the face. Pastel walls, plush carpeting, armchairs that swallowed you whole like overstuffed confessionals. Jacques felt like a stray, an alley cat catapulted into Versailles, his knuckles white against the polished veneer of the interrogation table. The video screen on the wall flickered to life, displaying Pierre in all his granite-faced glory, shackled to a chair in a cell that wouldn't have looked out of place in a mediaeval oubliette. Yet, even under the harsh fluorescents, Pierre's eyes were unwavering, a stoic statue in a concrete landscape.

Then she walked in. Céline. A whisper of smoke and ink, wrapped in a dress the colour of midnight, her dark hair a cascading waterfall against skin like alabaster. She smiled, a flash of white teeth against crimson lips, and Jacques's pulse skipped a beat. This was no gendarme in sheep's clothing, no gruff inspector with a dossier smelling of stale Gauloises. This was a femme fatale straight out of a Simenon novel, and she was playing him like a Stradivarius.

She slid into the chair opposite him, the scent of vanilla and expensive perfume hanging in the air like a promise. Instead of barking orders, she spread documents on the table, the top his long-forgotten university thesis, "The Reconstruction of the Standard Model from Loop Quantum Gravity." Céline, a goddess of intelligence fluent in the arcane language of physics? It was enough to make a man question reality.

Her questions were velvet-coated barbs, her flirtations calculated manoeuvres. She spoke of his research, his dreams, her gaze lingering on his exposed chest. He found himself drowning in her eyes, those emerald depths promising secrets, his guard slowly dissolving like salt in seawater.

Then, the revelation, sharp and sudden. 

"You're on our side, Jacques," she purred, the controller in her hand a tiny silver sceptre. 

Memories, dammed for months, burst through the sluice gates of his mind. He wasn't Jacques, the idealistic firebrand of Lutte Ouvrière. He was Agent Duval, deep cover, tasked with monitoring Pierre, a viper in the folds of the French Left, a serpent working for a foreign intelligence service with his fangs already sunk into the nation's security.

The flood of memories was agonising, a kaleidoscope of clandestine meetings, whispered codewords, the ever-present fear of exposure. And Pierre, ever the stoic mask, his loyalty as impenetrable as the granite of the Alps.

Céline's smile was bittersweet. Relief, triumph, and a tinge of sadness that made her eyes even more luminous. Tonight, they would celebrate a stolen moment of normalcy in the quicksand of espionage. Tomorrow, Duval would vanish, another layer of memories carefully excised, leaving behind a bruised and bewildered Jacques, convinced he had withstood brutal interrogation by the very forces he secretly served.

But as they slipped into the Parisian night, hand in hand, Jacques couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere, beneath the fabricated memories, a shard of truth remained. A whisper in the dark, a ghost at the corner of his vision, reminding him of the man he once had been, the life he had led, and the choices he had made in the cold embrace of shadows. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that the shadows would always be there, waiting, ready to reclaim him the moment his guard slipped. For in the labyrinthine world of espionage, loyalty was a fickle flame, easily extinguished by the coldest of winds.”

---

The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Bard from this...

---

Bard Prompt: Write a short story of around 2,000 words in a breathless, pulp-noir style based on the following synopsis.

“The setting is the dark, rainy street in an ancient, run-down arrondissement of Paris. The hero is a young man, Jacques, who is a political activist. His left wing organisation, Lutte Ouvrière, has sent him out this late night with a new comrade, a large taciturn man whom Jacques has never met before. The comrade takes charge and directs Jacques to help set up a mysterious assignment. However, the mission is quickly interrupted: lights, police vans. The two of them are arrested.

“The scene shifts to an interview room, which to Jacques’s surprise is very pleasantly furnished with pastel walls and stuffed upholstery with sumptuous cushions. Jacques is seated at a small table in the centre of the room, expecting a rough interrogation to come. He notices a video screen on the wall to his right. It shows an image of his large comrade shackled to a steel chair in a filthy cell. The large man sits as impassively as ever.

“Jacques doesn't know it but he's in a special DGSI interrogation suite. The DGSI is France's interior intelligence agency.

“A charming, petite, dark haired woman about his own age enters the room. She introduces herself as Céline. She pulls a chair up beside him and puts some papers on the table. Jacques recognises the top paper as his university thesis, ‘The reconstruction of the Standard Model from Loop Quantum Gravity’.

“Céline’s manner is respectful and flirtatious. She seems to want to talk about his scientific research, not about his political activism. Jacques finds himself attracted to Céline, hé can't help noticing her bare arms, her enticing outfit. Soon he's letting her steer the conversation as she wishes. Suddenly he realises the truth: she's just flattering him, getting under his guard. ‘You’ll get nothing from me,’ he says, ‘I’m telling you nothing!’

“Céline smiles at him and tells him he is completely wrong. Jacques is actually on her side although he doesn't know it. His bulky companion, still visible on the wall screen, is an agent of a foreign intelligence service, infiltrated into the French Left. Jacques has been keeping him under surveillance. ‘Now do you remember?’ she asks, as she does something with a small controller in her hand. Jacques's memories come flooding back. He is a deep cover DGSI agent.

"Céline is really Jacques's girlfriend and tonight they are going to celebrate a brief but joyous reunion. Tomorrow though, Jacques will have all these memories erased and will be released with a cover story of a brutal police interrogation which he successfully resisted, believing he is a true revolutionary and a loyal member of Lutte Ouvrière.”

----------------------------

Coming along, isn’t it, this drafting of stories by LLMs? A fifty percent word count expansion here from my outline-prompt. The short-range narrative cohesion is good, the long-range story cohesion still not quite there for me. But for a pedestrian pulp tale, not bad at all. AC.

How Gmail broke the Internet

It all started so innocently.

Google developed Smart Reply, where its neural-net AI was able to comprehend emails sent to you and craft reply options (as above). All you had to do was to select a good option and your email reply would be automatically launched.

No typing.

Look at the image again. Those replies are good! And they're not just some random canned text from a small database of stereotypical small-talk. Those replies are crafted by a deep learning neural net trained on zillions of examples. Those replies are fresh.

After you've tried it a bit, it seems very natural - even obvious. How did we ever do without it? It became increasingly unnecessary to actually review the proposed replies. Over time the system learned your own choices and became better and better at anticipating. The Gmail equivalent of "I'm Feeling Lucky" worked so well that people took to just letting Gmail reply to incoming mail all by itself.

Well, that was great, except that soon pretty much all Gmail users were using Smart Reply and indeed, ceding it control of their inboxes. Since all messages received (courteous) replies, the volume of email on the Internet began to rise exponentially.

Smart Reply was smart all right, but not all that creative. As the proportion of emails on the Internet began to be dominated by AI-generated texts, the level of - well, literary excellence - began to fade, degrading the input into Smart Reply's response-crafting neural-net.

And then one day, the Internet finally seized up.

It failed trying to carry 10¹⁸ concurrent emails, all consisting of the single word: "Wow!".

Those bright, flickering webs

As a hopeless case, I was finally admitted to psychotherapy.

I lay on the couch, as relaxed as I ever get, and listened to the analyst.

"I see that your profession is neuroscientist. Now, I have your file here, but perhaps you could explain the problem to me in your own words?"

I sighed: repetition had become tedious in the extreme.

"In the streets, at work and at home, .. I am surrounded by systems. They're controlled by webs of neural tissue. They spin carefully-crafted, conformist and entirely-deceptive narratives .. purporting to explain to themselves and others just why they do what they do."

The analyst paused a moment to parse these rather abstract reflections,

"And when you see the people around you, your loved ones, what exactly do you see?"

"I see what my MRI scanner sees: heads filled with bright, flickering webs of neural activation. Enhanced glucose metabolism. I see protoplasmic circuitry doing what evolution has honed it to do. ... I see the laws of physics operating."

At this the analyst looked thoroughly alarmed. He stood up and walked across to his desk where he made a hushed and urgent call. I caught the term 'psychopath'.

Returning, he resumed speaking almost before he had sat down.

"You might have what we professionally call a framing issue. The answer is ..."

But I was no longer listening, I was focused instead on the intricate movements of his jaw, tongue and larynx, all controlled by that bright, flickering web I could almost see inside his skull.

Skubalon

This post in homage to wonderful AI systems such as IBM's Deep Blue, Google's DeepDream and the marvels emanating from DeepMind.

---

Alarms screamed, speakers blared, screens flared red. The nerve centre of US Western Command snapped to high alert. The indicators showed a missile launch from the Pacific, heading for San Francisco.

The new President's aggressive stance towards the Asian powers had already ratcheted tensions. New missile defense platforms had been rushed into service. Perhaps the key issue was real time sensor integration and classification.

With so much data pouring in, how could any one person figure what the hell was going on?

Skubtech inc had won the contract with its innovative deep learning platform. A highly-tuned convolutional neural network running on tens of thousands of cores, it was plugged into every radar, optical, thermal and human tactical asset of Western Command.

The OC called up his Skubtech chatbot interface.

"What the f***'s coming my way?" he demanded.

The chatbot murmured reassurance in its breathless Scarlett Johansson voice; the General began to relax, mentally preparing to stand down from DEFCON 1.

---

The missile wasn't at all accurate, it airburst five miles off the coast. It wasn't the EMP or the thermal flash which did the damage. The shock wave from the multi-kiloton fireball slammed onto the ocean surface: which triggered the San Andreas fault.

It was the big one.

---

Congressional investigators interviewed the CTO of Skubtech. He explained that the AI had been trained on hundreds of submarine missile launches.

"The North Koreans really haven't mastered submarine launches," he told the committee.

"The missile emerged from the sea and promptly set off towards North Korea. Eventually it veered around and took a circuitous path towards the American shoreline. Really, the CNN had never experienced anything like it."

The investigators had been thorough, and were not about to accept this bland reassurance as any kind of answer. They had their whistleblowers inside the company.

"This is not the first time your AI has misclassified. In internal trials, we've been led to believe that your product systematically overfits.

"Isn't it true that the development team call it .. DeepSh*t?"

A visit to Newquay

We had visited Newquay in Cornwall back in 2012; I remember taking my wife, Clare, my sister-in-law and her husband to the Roman Catholic Church there for Mass one Saturday evening. The roads were convoluted - thank God for the sat nav! - and afterwards, the route back to our cottage took us past Sainsbury's.

Now I'm back here again.

It's a warm evening, the sunset fading behind me as I stare at the lit-up spaceport. The Government had resolved to build this facility back in 2016, with Virgin Galactic's space tourism as the 'anchor tenant'. That dream was long gone; what I would be seeing tonight would be the first UK 'heavy lift' launch for the new orbital laser platform.

Our contribution to future interstellar missions.

Thousands of us, mostly young, lithe men and women, crowd together here this evening. We didn't need to be here, but there is something tactile, sensual, about our presence in this moment.

Turning around, I see the ranks of synth trucks parked on the layby.

The loudspeakers speak the countdown, redundant as the main boosters ignite. A wall of ambient sound compresses my very body as the vast machine lifts on its plume of smoke and fire.

I watch it dwindle into the sky, its plume beginning to tip for orbital insertion.

It's time to go.

I peel the induction cap off my scalp, pull up my duvet and in a creaky whisper, ask the care home AI to turn off the lights.

My automated PA (© Google Next)

Because I review science-fiction books on Amazon, new authors email me asking for a review of their latest work. It's a bit embarrassing knowing how to reply, but luckily I'm a beta-user of Google's next generation personal assistant (Google Next).

Since Google already knows so much about me, it has sensed my disquiet and has learned how to respond on my behalf, like a good PA should. I'm completely hands-off.

Here's an example of a (slightly anonymised) note I received yesterday, and the automated reply.
___


Hi Nigel,

I saw that you offer a lot of great reviews on Amazon. I'm the author of "V NZ FYRRCYRFF: FVZ 811", a newly released YA Science Fiction novel. I would love to send you a free copy of the ebook in exchange for your honest review.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/O017NVITZH

If you are interested in reading and reviewing my book, I can send you the ebook as a gift through Amazon, as a mobi or as a pdf file. You can also download it for free through the Kindle Unlimited program.

If you're like me, you have a backlog of books you want to read. I'm okay if it takes you months to get to my book and review it.

Thanks for your consideration,

Wbuna

Author Wbuna Gjvff

----  And here is Napa's reply ---

Dear Wbuna,

Thanks for your recent email. You asked if Nigel Seel would review your science fiction book in exchange for a free copy. Please note that Nigel Seel does not check any books in exchange for free copies because he believes that this puts him under an implicit obligation to be more pleasant than he is normally. If he likes the tone of the book, so he can buy it anyway and review it then. He is unlikely to tell you, but you can see it on Amazon.

Nigel compliments you. On your marketing skills and wishes you every success with your book. It's a crowded market and he knows that a successful author to be very hard work.

Best wishes,

Napa.
Nigel’s automated personal assistant
Powered by Google Next © 2018.

The Once and Future Kevin

Few things that Kevin did were unplanned. He thought he was the anchor to his flighty wife Suzanne, the person who smoothed the way, anticipated all of life’s little difficulties. But Kevin was aware that one day he would die. What would Suzanne do without his helpful guidance?

He had heard of email systems which would send a missive at a future date of your own choice. Why not send a note from beyond the grave, perhaps every year, on her birthday? Kevin immediately fired up Word and began to draft. But what could he write? Being dead, he would know nothing of the news, or Suzanne’s predicaments. Perhaps he should compose nostalgic text, recalling their life and times together?

Honestly, he couldn’t summon up the energy.

Instead, he downloaded the ‘Eliza’ program, renamed it ‘Kevin’, and began to improve it. After some months, ‘Kevin’, running on a Google server, could: - access Google News; apply Kevin’s unique take on the world (Kevin had coded himself into the rules engine); and could potentially send emails to Suzanne and even somewhat understand any replies (which was roughly Kevin’s own level of personal competence).

To be on the safe side, ‘Kevin’ sent monthly emails to Kevin, and if Kevin were to miss two replies in a row, ‘Kevin’ would presume him dead and immediately switch to sending timely and relevant messages to his grieving widow.

To his great surprise, Kevin died.

Suzanne was initially quite discombobulated by her husband’s demise. Freed from his smothering routines, she now had to think for herself. After a few weeks she pulled herself together and joined the local tennis club. There she met the handsome and charismatic coach with whom she rapidly developed a warm and affectionate relationship. Coincidentally, he was also called Kevin.

Suzanne never did look at her old email account, sharing her new partner’s instead. She had never got on with computers anyway. All is change in the world of the Internet and ‘Kevin’ was soon off-line in one of Google’s periodic efficiency drives, dumped into archival storage.

But Kevin had one consolation: at least Google never truly forgot him.

---

(c) Nigel Seel, 2015.

The Google fembot

The Times reported yesterday on Google's guiding principles.

Google rules

Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, while holding true to their unofficial slogan “don’t be evil”. They wrote this list of “ten things we know to be true” when Google was just a few years old.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. 
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. 
3. Fast is better than slow. 
4. Democracy on the web works. 
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. 
6. You can make money without doing evil. 
7. There’s always more information out there. 
8. The need for information crosses all borders. 
9. You can be serious without a suit. 
10. Great just isn't good enough. 

 ---

Once upon a time in the near-to-middle future, Peter was eating his organic, wholemeal muesli when his glance fell upon his wife, leaning over the sink. A soupçon of lust briefly possessed him - and in that moment a Google fembot appeared, slipping through the kitchen door (how did it - she - know?)

A Google fembot

A furtive Peter followed where she beckoned and his breakfast fantasies were sated. His long-suffering partner did her best to ignore the whole sorry proceedings, a part of her breathing a sigh of relief.

Walking down his drive to the Google car, which had appeared as if by magic as he left the house, Peter pondered on the fembot's last silky words, breathed in his ear as she prepared to vanish.

"I can recommend an excellent book on HyperJava for you. Would you like me to order it?"

How had she known?

In his cubicle at the regional Googleplex, Peter was code-hacking when his team leader breezed by. She smiled as she passed, leaving a trail of perfume, pheromones and charisma. Peter felt an unwanted stirring in his loins but before he could suppress it, a beautiful fembot shimmied across wearing little more than a tee-shirt. Peter had no real alternative; it was corporate policy that all extraneous impulses must be purged - nothing must be allowed to get in the way of concentration.

An exhausted Peter stumbled back to his terminal. The fembot's last words echoed in his head as he sat down and wondered - what on earth would he do ... with his spare copy of HyperJava?

Comments on for story feedback

Bombarded with comment spam, I long ago turned off comments for this blog. However, inspired by Andy Weir (below) I have now turned comments back on again - specifically to solicit feedback on stories I post here. Please feel free etc - they will be moderated and there's some kind of anti-spam word verification. Sorry about that.

"Andy Weir's road to publishing The Martian is a road many new writers would love to take. After writing as a hobby for many years and penning multiple short stories, which he published for free on his website, Weir set about writing a novel, The Martian. Originally releasing the book a chapter at a time on his website, again for free, he used reader feedback to fine-tune the work as he went along—and he only released it as an e-book because those same loyal readers wanted to download it to their e-readers.

The Martian went on to sell 35,000 copies in three months, so unsurprisingly it wasn't long before he'd signed with an agent and inked a print deal."

Excerpted from this review at Strange Horizons which seems to go out of its way to gratuitously find fault. I don't feel my destiny is to retrace Mr Weir's route to fame and fortune, but the approach seems to hold promise. So thanks in advance.

Phytocide

I still remember the excitement of my early teens when we established the first colony at Epsilon Indi A, a sun-like star about 12 light-years from Earth. They called the planet Hope: perhaps they thought we wouldn’t repeat the blood-sodden mistakes of old Earth.

Even then, I was intensely interested in the mechanics of the process. How could they get material and people across such immense distances? Naturally such an achievement ranked as the greatest engineering feat the human race had ever accomplished. The key was bootstrapping. Very powerful lasers delivered the first level nanoconstructor. It was a small device, and complex, but it only had to happen once.

The nanoconstructor was a basic fabricator, and the only thing it could do was create a better one. Soon we had devices which were remotely-programmable, and which could build macroscopic machines of general utility. You get the point: once started, there was no limit. Eventually we could send DNA codes and get adult clone bodies grown in a tank. You just had to know how to do it.

So here’s the macabre bit. We didn't grow brains in those copy-bodies. We didn't want new blank-slate individuals. Instead, we used a programmable neural substrate hosting a transmitted brain-state. (The opportunities for error were the subject of half-a-dozen plays and films). And so, with zero subjective time delay, Captain Vine, his assistant Commander Jung and I ended up in orbit around Hope, in a locally fabricated dreadnought with the encouraging name of Threat.

"Threat" in orbit around Hope

---

Bill Night met us in Threat’s conference room as we sat in a stationary orbit over New City, the first settlement on the new planet (when will people stop calling new things ‘new’?). Bill was the colony leader, and in theory responsible for all the hundreds of thousands of colonists who currently occupied the planet. There wasn't a single adult human brain in 12 light years and that wouldn’t change until the new kids grew up.

“Initially”, Night began, “things went well.”

“They always do,” Jung observed with a smile, “Simulation and reality always start in sync. But it’s like the weather; reality never stays properly on track.”

“We soon had a second group,” Night continued, “established on the next continent about a quarter way round the equator: security in diversity. We called it Fort 2. You understand that everything here is technology-driven. We need agriculture to kick-start the food chain; heavy equipment for construction. We have a lot of dual military-civilian stuff.”

We nodded, this was standard procedure.

“We knew there would be problems of course, we just didn't know where and when. So we weren't too surprised when the local vegetation started playing up.”

This was news to us, but of course we were years behind the game.

“There’s a kind of root system which tunnels quite rapidly underground; it seemed to take against us. Crops were disrupted and buildings began to collapse.”

“So what did you do?” asked Vine with interest. This was the kind of practical military problem which always engaged him.

“Flamethrowers were effective against the surface leaves and stems. Most of the action was below ground though, and here we tried several things. We had a microwave system, like ground-penetrating radar - that was good at frying the tubers. We also dug moats.”

Vine nodded genially, “And it worked?”

“For a while, but the wretched stuff proved astonishingly adaptable. It dug itself deeper and self-modified in its self-defence. It was then that the disagreement started with Fort 2. Don’t forget, everything we had, they had as well: same size population, same resources, same technologies and same skills. They were researching this plant, same as we were, and in their view it was showing some signs of sentience.”

“And your view?” asked Jung with a look hovering between concentration and consternation.

“It’s a plant. It’s a goddamn problem and it’s screwing up our operation. It it’s smart, that just makes it a bigger problem.”

I was watching Vine carefully. He gave little away but I sensed his pleasure.

“Our only concern was to remove the obstacle and our science team thought they had an answer:  a toxin which would basically just turn it off.”

“So what’s your problem?” asked Vine. “Just go with it.”

“The problem,” said Night with a scowl, “is Fort 2. This thing is so adaptive that we need to spray the entire planet to exterminate it. Anything less and we run the risk it will adapt away from the threat. Fort 2 won’t cooperate. Worse, they say it’s genocide, and that if we proceed they’ll actually fight to defend the wretched plant!”

Vine’s lip curled. “No doubt they offered their own solution?”

“Co-existence,” Night replied, “We clear some areas but leave others for the plant to live on. They want time for further research; they claim they may eventually even get some rudimentary communications going.”

“So what do you want us to do?” asked Commander Jung.

“Make them see sense: one way or another.”

---

After the meeting with Night, Vine kept Jung and myself behind to debrief. It was rare to see any sign of conflict between the two officers. I had once, in private, asked Jung whether he would see any problem getting Vine to approve some pet project of his. Jung had snorted in contempt: “Trust me, how hard could it be?”

As we waited on Vine in his executive office, it was obvious that Jung had been affected by the argument relayed so indirectly from Fort 2. The human race wasn't meant to be in the business of going around the Galaxy snuffing out other intelligent beings, no matter what we might have done back on Earth. It appeared that Jung was for caution.

“This is an irritating problem but not a crash priority – we need to be sure about what we’re doing here. My advice is to get some more research done and open up a line of communication with the people at Fort 2.”

Vine turned to me, a rare event in itself as the captain rarely felt need for science officer input. I hated to be put on the spot, particularly when I didn't feel we had enough data.

"Latimer?"

“I understand the mission here, but we still don’t know enough. I think, like Jung, we should restrain Night and learn more.”

“OK, thank you gentlemen. You’re dismissed.”

As we left Vine’s office, I saw that Night had not left, as I had imagined. He was being shown back in for a further meeting with Vine – alone this time.

---

In the Threat’s bar, I asked Jung what he thought Vine would do.

“He’ll talk big with Night, and they’ll agree that lawful authority needs to be maintained. Maybe we can use some of the big weaponry on the ship to cook an area around the two settlements so that the project can continue unhindered - until we can sort the bigger picture out.

“I’ll have a word with him later and straighten him out.”

---

On the ship we have a new and somewhat awesome system. I'm not even sure we would call it a weapon system. It’s a gravitational wave laser – inelegantly a Gaser. One consequence of being able to produce coherent Terawatt gravitational waves is light-year communication through the dustiest of regions. Another is truly astonishing destruction.

When Vine ordered the Gasar AI to ‘illuminate’ Fort 2, the effect was extraordinary. The beam was around 40 cm wide with a sub-kilohertz pulse rate. A gravitational wave produces a stretch-compress tidal force – in this case millions of Newtons. Anything in its way was literally shredded to fine powder, the absorbed energy ending up as heat.

The Gaser AI was instructed to deploy in fire-hose mode and with programmed obedience it traced a raster over the entire settlement. After ten minutes attention, Fort 2 and its entire population was transformed to thermally-incandescent dust down to the liquefying bedrock.

---

Afterwards, we were able to piece the story together. Vine and Night had called Fort 2 and given them an ultimatum: basically do as you’re told and eradicate the weed globally or face the consequences. The Fort 2 guys had had a bad attack of principles. They flatly refused, as I think Vine knew they would.  As the captain had carefully arranged, he now had no other option, so in the best traditions of empire he had the place slagged.

The Gaser had smashed a cone-shaped volume straight through the planet, but impressive as this was, it would not suffice to defeat the weed. Night and his team went right ahead with the sterilization programme and a few months later, the consensus was that they had succeeded: onwards to the new global colony!

---

Afterwards Vine tried to calm us – especially Jung, who seemed remarkably upset.

“C’mon guys. Earth has invested a major chunk of Gross World Product in getting this colony off the ground. There was never any way we were going to back off making this work for an indigent, highly-invasive plant species.”

Jung was smart enough not to make an issue of it, although you could see that something deep inside of him was burning. I didn't feel that good myself.

It turned out, much later, that the plant had had a kind of distributed intelligence. I don’t know whether we would ever have been able to communicate with it, but it seemed to know it existed, to have had fears and hopes and desires.

But then, you could say the same about cows.

---

When, 12 years later, Earth found out what had happened, Earth-Vine was commended, even though he personally had had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
___

Ⓒ Nigel Seel, March 2015.

I rather like the idea of a “Gravitational Laser”. Gravitational waves couple so weakly to matter that I can’t imagine a technology that would deliver the level of destruction described. Luckily it’s not my problem. You may detect some similarities in theme between this story and the recently-posted “Space Opera”.

---

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