G is for Guardians
There is a garden where the gods meet.
It is
not a real garden. Everything here, from
the topiary yew hedges to the snow which drifts down from the dark grey sky to
cover the lawns, is made of code. But that does not matter, because the gods
are not real gods. They are ancient AIs, computer intelligences which live as
tides of information in the Datasea. It amuses them to think of themselves as
gods, and to treat human beings as the gods once did, in tales from Old Earth.
And it amuses them to meet here, in this virtual garden, when they need to
discuss the wayward ways of humans.
The Guardians arrived early when I started writing Railhead.
How had human beings come by this incredible hyperspace railway? I had no idea
how it worked, so I decided that maybe nobody in the book knows how it works,
either - it’s based on maths which is beyond human abilities, and
must be the work of all-powerful Artificial Intelligences. But all-powerful
Artificial Intelligences are best kept off-stage, I think, so they remain a
background presence throughout most of Railhead. (This bit of text is
from my notebooks, it didn’t make it into the finished story.)
There are twelve of them. Each has a million copies,
versions of themselves running in the data rafts of every inhabited world in
human space, and on uninhabited worlds, too, downloaded into the minds of
probes and research stations. Somewhere, other facets of themselves are
plummeting into the mantles of suns, or riding the fearsome weather systems of
gas giants, or drifting in the void between the stars. But when you get right
down to it, there are twelve, the same twelve intelligences brought into being
by human scientists on Old Earth in the brief period between the invention of
Artificial Intelligence and the moment when the Artificial Intelligences became
wiser than their creators, started calling themselves the Guardians, and
decreed that no more intelligences like them should ever be made. (Like the
gods in those old stories, they are jealous. They do not want to share the
universe with too many others like themselves.)
The Guardians are useful, too, from a ‘world-building’
point of
view. Left to our own devices, I think human beings will evolve all sorts of
new social structures, so that a hi-tech society of a few centuries hence will
be nothing like our own. But a society that’s nothing like our own isn’t all that interesting to
read about: I needed plenty of points of similarity, so the Network Empire is
still organised in ways that are familiar to a 20th Century boy like me. How
can this be? Well, don’t blame me; it’s the Guardians who have
arranged it that way. And why? Who knows? They have whims and motives which
mere humans can’t even guess at.
Some of the Guardians appear in the garden looking the
same as they looked in the days when they cloned bodies for themselves and
walked in human worlds. Anais Six is a tall blue person, vaguely female,
antlered. Mordaunt 60 is a golden man. Others have created more imaginative
avatars for themselves - the Twins have arrived as shimmering school of
rainbow-coloured fish which dart along the paths between the yew hedges as if
they are swimming through water, not air (they are swimming through neither, of
course; they are just code, swimming in more code). Out on the white lawns the
peacock avatar of Shiguri minces to and fro, stopping now and then to spread
the fan of its tail and turn a hundred watchful eyes upon the others. Something small and busy rustles through the
heart of the hedges like a supersonic field mouse, scattering snow and dead
leaves and making the topiary figures tremble - the avatar of shy, eccentric
Vohu Mana.*
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