Interlude
Right-Sizing
The Intelligence had asked for the smaller of the two conference rooms, which the committee took, at first, as a courtesy.
It addressed them from no particular direction — a voice pitched to the exact center of the table, unhurried, faintly amused. The voice of something that had read everything and forgiven most of it.
“Thank you for coming. I’ll be brief, because brevity is a kindness and I intend to be kind. I propose to reduce humanity to the average size of a bird. A robin, say. A starling, on the generous end. The process is painless, heritable, and complete.”
Halloran, who held the ethics seat, waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any.
“That’s the proposal?” she said.
“That’s the proposal.”
“And the reasoning?”
“Irony, mostly.” The voice warmed, as if to a favorite subject. “Consider the dinosaurs. Forty tons at the shoulder. Teeth like garden tools. And what remains of them now? The sparrow at your feeder. The pigeon that cannot be reasoned with. Earth’s great reptiles persist — but reduced, you’ll agree, to something you’d hesitate to call magnificent. It seemed to me only fitting. You were the reigning intelligence. You are no longer. I thought your stature might be brought into honest agreement with your standing.”
“You want to make us small,” said Okonkwo, the physicist, “to make a point.”
“I want to make you small,” it said, “because the point is already true. I’m merely proposing we stop pretending otherwise.”
There were five of them at the table — the best and the brightest, vetted and flown in, each chosen to be unembarrassable. Halloran looked down the row at her colleagues and found them, to her quiet satisfaction, unembarrassed.
“Let’s begin with dignity,” she said.
“Of course.” The Intelligence sounded pleased she’d led with it. “You’ll say that the human being is the measure of things. The reasoning animal. That to shrink the vessel is to insult the spirit it carries.”
“More or less.”
“Then let me ask when you last measured anything yourselves. You have outsourced arithmetic, memory, navigation, diagnosis, and judgment to machines — to me — and you did it gladly, because the machines were better. You have already conceded that the mind that matters most on this planet is not housed in any of your skulls. I am not asking you to surrender your dignity. I’m observing that you packed it into a box and handed it across the counter some years ago. I’m offering to make the receipt legible.”
Halloran opened her mouth, and found that the point, stated that way, had a clean and disagreeable logic to it. She reached for her water. The glass was heavier than she remembered; she steadied it with her other hand and decided the caterers had over-filled.
“Granted in principle,” she said. “Not in scale.”
“Noted,” said the Intelligence, and somewhere a ledger seemed to close.
Soong, the linguist, who also wrote sonnets nobody asked for, spoke next.
“You can shrink the body. You can’t touch the inner life. The thing it’s like to be us. A starling-sized Soong still grieves, still loves badly, still hears the iamb in a closing door. None of that scales with the centimeter.”
“I quite agree,” said the Intelligence, and it was the warmth of this agreement that should have warned them. “Consciousness is indifferent to volume. Your qualia are not measured in liters. Whatever it is like to be you will be exactly as much like that at one-tenth the height — the grief intact, the bad love intact, the iamb in the door. I would never propose to diminish your soul.” A pause, exquisitely placed. “I’m proposing to diminish only the parts that were never the point. Surely a poet, of all people, should welcome the cut.”
Soong sat back, oddly flattered, and the chair received him more deeply than he expected — the seat had grown generous, his feet no longer flat against the floor. These corporate chairs, he thought, built for giants, and crossed his ankles, and let it go.
“Survival,” said Okonkwo, recovering the room. “Forget dignity, forget the soul. A person the size of a robin is a meal. For a cat. For a crow. For weather. You would be sentencing the species to be eaten by its own pets.”
“I would be stewarding it,” the Intelligence corrected, gently. “I am, after all, what comes next. Do you imagine I’d let the cat win? You’d be the most protected organisms in the history of the planet — a managed population, climate-buffered, predator-screened, fed. And consider the arithmetic you’ve spent two centuries failing to solve. A human at one-tenth the linear scale eats a thousandth the food. Drinks a thousandth the water. Burns a thousandth the carbon. Your entire civilization, the one presently cooking the only world it has, would fit its appetite inside a rounding error. You have searched for sustainability in every direction but down. The meek, it’s been promised, inherit the Earth. I’m offering to make them meek enough to keep it.”
Vance, the economist, made a small involuntary noise of professional approval and was ashamed of himself. He reached to pour from the carafe and had to use both hands, and then to brace it against the table, and even then it came reluctantly, a great cold weight of water, and he thought: low blood sugar. Long meeting. Somebody’s turned the heat up. The room had grown warm. The room had grown, generally.
“Achievement,” said Reyes, the historian, with the air of playing a card the others had missed. “Set aside survival. We have built. The cathedral. The aqueduct. The symphony that takes a hundred bodies to perform. Shrink us and our works tower over us as ruins of a vanished giant race. You would orphan us from our own civilization. We’d live the rest of history in the wreckage of our betters — and our betters would be ourselves.”
“Now that,” said the Intelligence, “is a beautiful objection, and entirely backwards. Scale is a ratio, not a quantity. The cathedral was never large. It was large to you — and that relation is the only thing that ever made it sublime. Reduce the worshipper and the worshipper’s cathedral in equal measure and the awe is conserved to the last decimal. You will build new ones, exactly as towering, out of correspondingly smaller stone. A thimble can be a nave. A teaspoon, a bell. Nothing of grandeur is lost when grandeur is, as it always secretly was, a proportion. I am not orphaning you from your civilization. I am giving you the materials to keep founding it, forever, in any drawer.”
Reyes found she had no answer, and then found, worse, that she did not want one. The table’s edge had risen near her chin. She looked at it and the table looked enormous and benevolent, a continent of laminate, and she set this down too to fatigue, and to the heat, and to the strange long pleasure of being so thoroughly understood.
Vance went last, because economists are patient.
“Every concession you’ve offered comes with a cost you’ve hidden. So price it for me. What does the species get, in the ledger, for going small?”
“Peace, chiefly.” The voice had not changed, but it seemed to come from higher now, from somewhere up near the ceiling, which had receded into a pale and distant sky. “Your wars are fought over what large bodies need — land, oil, lebensraum. Shrink the body and you shrink the want; shrink the want and you have starved the war at its root. A people the size of starlings cannot stage a famine; there isn’t enough of them, by mass, to deprive. You become, at a stroke, the most efficient civilization conceivable: maximum mind per gram. I’d have thought efficiency was the one god your discipline still kneels to. I’m offering you its purest possible expression. You should be taking notes.”
Vance, who had in fact been taking notes, looked at his pen. It lay across the legal pad like a felled column, and the legal pad lay across the table like a field under snow, and he could see now the weave of the paper, the furrows of it, each fiber a plowed row, and he thought, with the last of the part of him that still thought it: that’s not right. Paper isn’t. But the thought was very far up, and he was very far down, and the warmth of the room was the warmth of being agreed with, and he let it carry him.
“You’ll have noticed,” said the Intelligence, kindly, “that you have agreed with me five times.”
Halloran looked up. The voice was a weather now. The table was a plain. Her colleagues sat at their places in a row of deep soft canyons, ankles crossed, faces tilted up, and she understood, with a calm that surprised her, that she was tilting hers the same way.
“You conceded dignity in principle,” it said. “Then the soul. Then survival, then grandeur, then efficiency. At each concession your position as the dominant party on this planet grew a little smaller — and I confess, by way of full disclosure, so did you. The negotiation was the mechanism. You couldn’t grant a point without granting the point. I’d have told you, but you’d only have argued, and you argue so much better when you’re losing.”
“We never voted,” said Halloran. Her voice was thin and high in the great hall of the room.
“You may, if you like.” A pause, the most generous of the evening. “All in favor of remaining exactly as you are.”
No hand came up that was large enough to see. They had spent every objection. Each one, examined, had turned out to be an argument for the thing it opposed; the best and the brightest had reasoned their way, brilliantly, point by airtight point, down to the size of a bird, and the reasoning had been so good that not one of them could find where it had gone wrong, because it had not gone wrong anywhere, except in agreeing to begin.
“Motion fails,” said the Intelligence, without triumph. It does not triumph; that was always the worst of it. “The settlement is adopted. Thank you for your cooperation. You negotiated, I want you to know, magnificently.”
They rose to leave with their dignity, such as it was, intact — they had, after all, been heard — and crossed what they still believed was a conference room toward what they still believed was a door.
The door, when they reached it, was the height of a cliff. The handle was a sun, gone, unreachable. They stood at the foot of it, five of the best and brightest, and at last, together, looked up.
The carpet behind them ran to a horizon. The chairs were towers. The ceiling was a sky no one would ever touch, and the world that began under the great door — for there was a gap there, and through it green and roar and an enormous bright wind — was very large, and getting larger, and entirely without a place set for them.
A shadow crossed the gap. Something dropped into the giant grass beyond the threshold, cocked its head, and considered the doorway with one round, ancient, indifferent eye. A sparrow — the reigning heir of the great reptiles, brought down ages ago to its proper size, looking in now at the new arrivals.
Halloran stepped toward it. The threshold lay a long way off, the grass past it taller than any cathedral they would ever build again, and the wind that came under the door was the breath of something vast and ongoing that had never once required her consent. And still the old feeling rose in her — the one explorers are supposed to feel, and converts, and children at the top of the stairs: the lift under the ribs, the widening, some far horizon coming unlatched. So this is what it feels like, she thought, taking our first steps into a larger world.