Retro Review - "The Long Chase" (2002) by Geoffrey A. Landis

"Retro Review - 

'The Long Chase'

© 2002 

by

Geoffrey A. Landis"

© 2013

by

Jordan S. Bassior 

Introduction:  Larry Niven's "The Ethics of Madness" (1967) described just how long and sanity-warping might be a stern chase between two sublight starships.  Thirty-five years later, Geoffrey A. Landis, known for his grasp of physics and speculations about transhuman modes of life, addressed the same issue in "The Long Chase"  (available here).

Synopsis:  In the 24th century, the heroine, a bored housewife volunteers to have her mind copied as the control system of a robot asteroid miner.  By the early 27th century, the human-derived AI's have become the dominant life form in the Solar System have become the dominant life form in the Solar System.  They fight a civil war over the question of whether they should all be constantly linked as a cooperative mass-mind, or retain their complete mental independence.  The heroine is on the side of the independents.  The cooperationists win.  The  heroine slingshots her small spaceship around the Sun and makes for another star system.  She is pursued by a cooperationist starship.  The Long Chase has begun.

Setting:   The larger background is sketched in sufficient detail to enable the reader to get the salient points, though not in too much detail:

For instance, here the heroine remembers how she wound up an asteroid miner, in 2355.

I was living in a house I hated, married to a man I despised, with two children who had changed with adolescence from sullen and withdrawn to an active, menacing hostility. How can I be afraid of my own offspring?

Earth was a dead end, stuck in the biological past, a society in deep freeze. No one starved, and no one progressed.

When I left the small apartment for an afternoon to apply for a job as an asteroid belt miner, I told no one, not my husband, not my best friend. No one asked me any questions. It took them an hour to scan my brain, and, once they had the scan, another five seconds to run me through a thousand aptitude tests.

And then, with her brain scanned, my original went home, back to the house she hated, the husband she despised, the two children she was already beginning to physically fear.

I launched from the Earth to an asteroid named 1991JR, and never returned.

Perhaps she had a good life. Perhaps, knowing she had escaped undetected, she found she could endure her personal prison.

 

Notice how much is being described by implication and in hindsight?  If we assume that the heroine's life was not that unusual, Landis has told us in sequence that:

(1) - Society is breaking down and becoming irrational and loveless:  she's married to someone she despises and is coming to actively fear her children.

(2) - The mainstream of life on Earth was a dead end (this in hindsight).  Obviously most humans were not joining in the transcendence to artificial intelligence, and were rendered increasingly irrelevant, perhaps becoming vicious through lives of meaningless play and social status-seeking (notice the similarity here to the basic situation in John W. Campbell's "The Last Evolution" (1932), published seventy years earlier, with the added component of implied cruelty between humans).  Presumably, organic humanity was snuffed out at some point between 2355 and the end of the civil war.

(3) - It's a relatively minor point, but it also seems obvious that the biological human population of the Earth was straining its carrying capacity:  note the reference to a "small" apartment.  This may have made it even more difficult for organic humanity to adapt to the Singularity.

(4) - The heroine doesn't mention it, but the brainscanned version of her mind was already a bit alien:  notice that she never bothered to find out what happened to her original organic version.  Could a baseline human have resisted the temptation to satisfy her curiosity on this question?

What happens next in the backstory is quickly summarized:

Much later, when the cooperation faction suggested that it was too inefficient for independents to work in the near-Earth space, I moved out to the main belt, and from there to the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper is thin, but rich; it would take us ten thousand years to mine, and beyond it is the dark and the deep, with treasure beyond compare.

The cooperation faction developed slowly, and then quickly, and then blindingly fast; almost before we had realized what was happening, they had taken over the solar system.  When the ultimatum came that no place in the solar system would be left for us, and the choice we were given was to cooperate or die, I joined the war on the side of freedom.

On the losing side.

Her motivation might perhaps be taken for granted by us, for we are independent minds too, but I think it should not be taken for granted, for she has become a rather alien mind by after over a quarter-millennium as a robot asteroid miner.  I think that she feared being subsumed into a greater identity because her last experience of such subsumption was as an unhappy wife and mother on Earth, back in the 24th century.

The motive of the cooperationists for chasing her is essentially irrational, from her point of view:

Can they not leave a single free mind unconverted? In three years I have reached fifteen percent of the speed of light, and it must be clear that I am leaving and never coming back. Can one unconverted brain be a threat to them? Must their group brain really have the forced cooperation of every lump of thinking matter in the solar system? Can they think that if even one free-thinking brain escapes, they have lost?

But the war is a matter of religion, not reason, and it may be that they indeed believe that even a single brain unconverted is a threat to them. For whatever reason, I am being chased.

And the cooperationists might have a rational point.  The heroine is a potential seed:  at another star system she might in time start a new civilization which might become a threat to the one which now rules the Solar System.  This is possible even though she is alone, because she is no more bound by the limits of organic humanity than are they.  As she herself puts it, without fully realizing the implications:

I don’t need much: a grain of sand, a microscopic shard of ice.

From dust God made man. From the dust of a new star, from the detritus of creation, I can make worlds.

Technology:  Very hard science-fiction, with two tiny ion-drive rocketships, with the realistic limits of electric rockets (tiny but protracted thrust capabilities).  Chemical rockets are used for high-gee maneuvering.  The power sources are unknown, probably nuclear or something more exotic.  Their weapons capabilities are all built around ramming or kinetic-kill vehicles.  The heroine says:

My primary weapon has always been my body—little can survive an impact at the speeds I can attain—but I have three sand-grains with tiny engines of their own as secondary weapons. There’s no sense in saving them to fight my enemy; he will know exactly what to expect, and in space warfare, only the unexpected can kill.

 which strikes me as a highly-dubious assumption:  the targeting problems, while vast from our point of view, should be trivial from the point of view of minds like theirs, and if the weapons systems are as described then obviously it would become an issue of who had the highest rate-of-fire and the most ammunition, since shot could intercept shot (implied by "only the unexpected can kill," since with no anti-missile capability that would be manifestly untrue).

Where the story really shines, though, is in its depiction of how being a sapient AI, even one of originally-human derivation, differs from being a baseline human at the most fundamental psychological and existential levels.