Defining an Elephant Read online

  Defining an Elephant

  By Peter Watts

  Originally published In Tales from the Wonder Zone: Odyssey, edited by Julie E. Czerneda. 2004

  CAPTAIN torched New Zealand today.

  It warmed up the orbital lasers and the particle-beam cannons and even a few old-fashioned nukes. We watched, helpless and horrified, as the targeting computers locked on and suddenly zap: the East Cape was gone. Zap: the Tasman Mountains, burned to the roots.

  The satellites dropped their nukes and Stewart Island slagged down to glass before our eyes.

  It took a little over thirteen hours. By the time CAPTAIN was finished, twenty-seven complete ecosystems were on fire. Half a million species, fifteen hundred found nowhere else in the world, reduced to ash.

  Not to mention the people we lost. Of course, people aren't exactly in short supply, even today. There's still a good six or seven billion of us. It'll be awhile before we land on the endangered species list.

  About ten months, in fact, according to the latest estimates.

  In the meantime CAPTAIN orbits overhead, raining death and destruction onto the world. Every now and then it sends us a report: Hi there. Thought you'd like to know: everything's going according to plan.

  According to our plan. That's the awful thing. It's only doing what we told it to.

  Come one, come all, step right up and see the Fight of the Century.

  In this corner, the Champion: Nature, twenty-four million species, from the smallest virus right up to giant redwoods and blue whales. In that corner, the Challenger: global warming, habitat destruction, sewage, smog, and UV strong enough to peel the tattoos off your butt in thirty seconds flat.

  At the sound of the bell, come out swinging.

  It was no contest, of course. Nature never had a chance. By the time anybody had reliable figures, almost four hundred species were disappearing every day. We couldn't even list them that fast, let alone haul them back from the brink. In thirty years there wasn't going to be much left of the place except rats, seagulls, and nine billion swarming Homo saps.

  We weren't just talking about losing parrots and poodles and things that looked cute on Wild Kingdom. We were talking life-support. Some of those species made the oxygen we breathed. Others ate our wastes and our dead, so we didn't have billions of corpses stinking up the landscape. A lot of them just ate each other, sort of a safety precaution to make sure no one species got out of hand. (Not that that little trick worked in our case, mind you...)

  We needed them all, like a scuba diver needs an air tank. It was a huge problem just getting anybody to believe that; it was an even bigger one getting them to do anything about it. By the time that finally happened — after all the arguments had been won, after everybody finally realised that it was their lives on the line — by then, there were only fifteen years left.

  How can you save the world in a measly fifteen years? How do you keep tabs on twenty-four million species — or even twelve million, assuming that we'd already killed half of them off? How to you protect all that habitat, keep people from sneaking in and burning the last hectare of forest, or poaching the last rhino?

  How do you even know they're doing it?

  Fortunately there was a system already in place; a veritable feast of hardware left over from fifty years of military-industrial bloat. No self-respecting country goes to war without being able to spy on their enemies. Everyone needs satellites to pick out the other guy's missile silos, listening posts on the seabed to hear hostile submarines on the prowl. They have to be able to snoop in on every square meter of the planet, and they can do it, too; some of those satellites can read the fine print on an insurance waiver from twenty-three thousand kilometers up.

  And of course, once the enemy's been found, it has to be dealt with; hence missiles and submarines, orbital lasers and particle-beam cannons.

  But by the time all that apocalyptic hardware was ready to go, the War on Dissent was ancient history. Terrorist and Rogue States had vanished along with most of the world's civil rights. Even those nasty little civil disputes in Canada and Africa had blown over. There just weren't any enemies left to try out the new toys on.

  This was a real bummer for the military, but it was manna from heaven for us. We swept in and scooped everything up at bargain-basement prices, almost new. Satellites built to spy on enemy airbases could just as easily snoop out poachers and oil spills. Instead of shooting down enemy warplanes and ICBMs, they'd take out illegal logging camps and pirate whaling vessels.

  It turned out that the NATO system even had a snazzy name: Cognitive Autonomous Planetary Threat-Assessment & Interdiction Network. CAPTAIN, for short.

  Naturally, with a name like that, we had to put it in charge. We reprogrammed it for good instead of evil and we let it loose with fifteen years left to save the planet.

  And it went on to set half the world on fire.

  A couple of months ago — before everything went so horribly wrong — Bergmann hauled me into his office. "Perhaps you could explain this," he said, pointing at his computer screen.

  Bergmann's your basic off-the-shelf military man; he hated it when CAPTAIN got snatched away from the Generals, and he hated having to deal with us tree-hugging environmental eggheads. He knew we were essential to the project — the army doesn't have any theoretical ecologists of its own — so he followed orders like any good soldier.

  He didn't like it much, though. He liked us even less.

  CAPTAIN was counting species on some test site, assessing biodiversity according to rules we'd programmed into it. The total climbed as I watched — forty species, seventy, a hundred. It levelled out at two hundred eighty three.

  "What's the problem?" I asked. "Isn't it picking up all the species?"

  Bergmann snorted. "It's picking up more than all of them, actually."

  "What do you mean? What's it looking at?"

  "You."

  "What?"

  He jerked his head at the ceiling. I looked up: directly overhead, one of CAPTAIN'S sensor clusters stared down at me. I took a step to the left. The cluster whirred softly, rotating to keep me in focus.

  Bergmann folded his arms. "So maybe you could explain to a simple jarhead like me why the system, using your rules, just defined one man as nearly three hundred different species."

  "Come on, Bergmann. People have a couple hundred kinds of bacteria living on their skin, for starters. A bunch more in the gut. That's all it's counting."

  He shook his head. "We already thought of that. The count's still too high."

  "Well, I

  "Fix it," he said. End of interview.

  So we fixed it. The problem was simple enough, as it turned out: CAPTAIN was looking within the cells of my own body, and seeing multitudes.

  A cell isn't just a cell. It's actually a colony of small cells inside a larger one. Some act like batteries, turning chemicals or sunlight into energy. Some keep the genes from getting all tangled up in each other. But it wasn't always thus: a few billion years ago, way before multicellular life evolved, the ancestors of those small cells lived free in the primordial goop. One day some larger cell tried to have them for lunch, only to find it couldn't finish the job: it engulfed its prey easily enough, but couldn't digest it afterward. The little cells found they could live quite comfortably inside the thing that had tried to eat them. In fact, both parties ultimately found themselves better off than they had been. The host cells could use the chemical energy the little cells put out, while the little cells were comfortably insulated from environmental changes — not to mention other predatory cells that might be a bit better at chewing once they'd swallowed. Everyone was a winner.

  They never
looked back. We don't even think of the little ones as "cells" any more — we think of them as parts, organelles, give them names like "nucleus" and "chloroplast" and "mitochondrion." But they've still got their own genes, left over from the days when they lived on their own. They still reproduce independently. In a way they are still individuals, living inside our cells like janitors in a high-rise.

  That's what CAPTAIN thought, anyway. It had been counting all those different parts in my cells as separate individuals, even separate species. It wasn't even wrong, strictly speaking, just about a billion years out-of-date.

  Bergmann wasn't impressed, though. This was the fifth time we'd had to go back and start from scratch.

  The problem is, you can't just tell a computer to "go out there and protect the diversity of life." You've got to tell it exactly what life is. It's the sort of thing that geek teachers bring up in grade seven biology classes to try and spark the students' interest. What is life? they ask, thinking the class is going to get all excited about this garbage. Is a salt crystal alive? No? Well, it grows, doesn't it? It "eats" ions from the surrounding solution, it incorporates them into its "body", it "grows" — if you break it, it repairs itself — it heals, get it? — and a fragment, chipped off the main crystal, will grow on its own, so you could say that's reproduction —

  Yeah, right. Whatever.

  Everybody knows that trees and people are alive. Everybody knows that salt crystals aren't. If that bozo at the front of the class thinks he's going to turn anybody's crank with his lame droning about "living" salt crystals, he's even dumber than he looks.

  But the old geezer has a point, you know. There's this list of features that gets trotted out every time you want to describe what "life" is: it breathes, it eats, it grows. It reproduces. The problem is, the list doesn't always work. Viruses can't reproduce on their own: they have to hijack the reproductive machinery of some other cell to do that for them. And common garden-variety Drano — the stuff you use to unplug toilets — that "breathes," if "breathing" is taking in one kind of gas and expelling another. For every rule, there's an exception — something that obviously is alive, even though it doesn't fit the list.

  Something else that obviously isn't, although it does.

  I had this teacher once. "I may not be able to define an elephant," she told me, "but I know one when I see one." Defining life is a lot like defining an elephant. You just sort of, well, know it when you see it.

  But try telling that to a machine. You can wave your hands and fudge all you want, but computers are dumb: they just won't get it unless you spell it out exactly.

  Actually, now that I think about it, there is one sure way to tell if something's alive: try to kill it. Only living things can die.

  CAPTAIN seems to have figured that much out, anyway.

  I’m checking CAPTAIN'S satellite feeds right now. I've got access to a million electronic eyes, I can watch the whole world in lovely shades of infrared and ultraviolet.

  I can see chlorophyll sparkling where plants brighten the landscape; I can see black voids where they've been wiped out.

  A lot of those, now. More every day.

  I watch as the nukes and the lasers touch down at precise intervals across the planet, turning the world into a piecemeal firestorm. CAPTAIN'S hitting eastern Africa today. I try talking to it. If CAPTAIN was human, I'd grab it by the throat and scream, "What in God's name are you doing? You're supposed to be saving the world!"

  But CAPTAIN isn't human. It doesn't understand rage, or frustration. My questions have to be precise, logical, framed in the language that software understands. So I type them at the keyboard, ask about biodiversity counts, species loss, remedial measures taken.

  The computer responds in kind, gives me statistics and diversity indices, estimates that it will achieve the goals we've set it in two years or less. If you translated that response into English, it would be saying "What are you complaining about? I'm doing exactly what you told me to do. I'm protecting the diversity of life."

  Another beam lances down from orbit, and Madagascar catches fire.

  Back in test mode CAPTAIN was an obedient lapdog. The moment we committed it to a real mission, though, we let it off the leash. It's a military system, after all. Oh, we came in at the last moment and gave it all sorts of nice new mission objectives, but at heart it was always a creature of the battlefield. It was designed to keep going under conditions of total warfare, to interpret any shutdown command as an enemy trick.

  Bergmann says there's no way to pull the plug. CAPTAIN'S body has a thousand disconnected parts, spread across land and sea and sky. The main components are in orbit, running off onboard reactors or solar power. What are we supposed to do, turn off the sun?

  No off switch. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Okay, so CAPTAIN thought that I was a few hundred different species. Obviously it had a problem with boundaries. It had drawn separate lines around each type of organelle when it should have just drawn a big one around me.

  So we went back to basics: many organelles, together, make up a cell; many cells, together, make tissues; tissues make organ systems; and organ systems, taken together, make one organism. One. Got that, CAPTAIN? It's the whole system that counts, not the crowd of subsystems inside it.

  Now do you understand?

  CAPTAIN said yes, it did. We gave it some test data to think about overnight, and went home.

  Bergmann called me in first thing the next morning. "Okay, what did you geniuses do this time? CAPTAIN'S claiming that there's only twenty-one species in all of South America."

  By the time I got in to work, CAPTAIN couldn't even find that many. It could only count nineteen.

  "Oh, man," I groaned. Two more species disappeared as I watched.

  "I've really had enough of this," Bergmann said.

  "I think I can figure this out. Just listen —"

  "You listen, mister. Do you have any idea how far this project has fallen behind? We've only got fifteen years to undo two centuries worth of damage, and you can't even get us past the first step. At this rate, by the time you figure out how to define life, there won't be any."

  "Look, I think I can —"

  "You're biologists, for crying out loud! How can you possibly not know what life is?"

  I tried again. "I think I might know —"

  "You're fired. You're all fired." He waved a fax under my nose: authorization from way up the food chain. "We'll do the rest of this ourselves, thank you very much."

  "You can't. You don't know how."

  Bergmann smiled grimly. "We can't screw up worse than you guys."

  He was wrong about that, of course.

  They brought us back into the loop fast enough when CAPTAIN started torching everything in sight. But now it's too late. The machine is dedicated: it's not going to back off until it's completed the mission.

  But I think I know what's going on, now. I know why CAPTAIN'S burning the planet down around our ears.

  It tried to define the elephant. Only there is no elephant.

  An elephant is no more "complete" than a cell nucleus, or a heart. So what if it breathes, and breeds, and carries on with all the traditional activities of life?

  So what if it even has its own genetic code? That means squat: take the nucleus out of the cell and it's toast. Rip the heart from the elephant and both will be dead

  before they hit the ground. Cut the elephant off from oceanic plankton a thousand miles away, from the oxygen they produce, and it suffocates. Take away the foliage it feeds upon; it starves.

  We told CAPTAIN that pieces weren't individuals because they weren't self-sufficient. Now, CAPTAIN is telling us that nothing is. It looks for boundaries, and all it finds are connections. If heart and kidneys are just different parts of one system, then elephants and plankton and bamboo must just be parts of a larger one. As is everything else that eats, and everything else that breathes, and s
o on, and so on.

  The longer CAPTAIN thought about it, the fewer individuals it saw. It couldn't tell where one ended and the next began, so it started lumping them all together.

  It just followed the rules we gave it, and those rules lead to one inevitable conclusion. Ultimately there's only one self-contained, independent living system with a definable edge, anywhere on earth.

  Everything. The whole biosphere. It's all just one big organism, as far as CAPTAIN can tell. And since there's only one organism on earth, there can hardly be more than one species, either.

  Looking back at the records, I can see exactly the point at which CAPTAIN declared war on the world. It fired its first laser when it thought that there were only thirty-two different species on Earth.

  I think it's trying to increase that number, the only way it knows how. By spreading fires.

  Fire breathes, you see. It consumes oxygen, it produces carbon dioxide. It eats too, it consumes everything from wood to flesh. It produces waste in the form of ash and soot. It even reproduces with little airborne spores — "sparks," we call them — that start whole new blazes, completely separate from the parent.

  And you know what else is interesting about fire? There are so many different kinds. There's the kind that feeds on dry wood. There's the oil-well fire, and the fireballs that consume flammable gases like methane.

  There are chemical fires, feeding on sodium and saltpeter. Nuclear fires. Electrical fires. Why, I'll bet there's at least — let's just take a wild guess here — I'll bet there's at least thirty-three different species of fire.

  CAPTAIN'S not trying to destroy life; it's trying to spread it. It's just that according to the rules we gave it, fire is alive.

  We've got to convince CAPTAIN that it's wrong about that.

  I'm not so sure that it is.

 

 

  Peter Watts, Defining an Elephant

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