"How would it be any different from what we do now?" Aram would say to people who expressed reservations about this matter. And it was true that the bulk of the ship's functions had been controlled by us from the very beginning of the voyage. It was as if we functioned for them as a kind of cerebellum, regulating all kinds of autonomic life-support functions. And regarded in that light, it was a question whether the concept of the servile will was appropriate; possibly it could better be regarded as a devotional will. Possibly there was a kind of fusion of wills, or even no will at all, but just an articulated response to stimuli. Leaps under the lash of necessity.

In the end, they established various protocols for monitoring the situation. If any sleeper's vital signs dropped into zones deemed to be metabolically dangerous, that person and a small human medical team would be roused by us, and the patient's problems addressed, if possible. The protocol was designed with fail-safe redundancies at every critical part of the system, which was reassuring to many of them. Often the suggestion was made that at least one person stay awake to serve as caretaker and oversee the process. Of course any such person would not live to the end of the voyage back. Eventually it became clear that no individual, couple, or group wanted to sacrifice the remainder of their lives to watching over the rest. To a certain extent it was an endorsement of our abilities as caretaker or cerebellum, a kind of gesture of trust, along with the more usual will to live, and a disinclination to starve in solitude.

And in the end Jochi volunteered to stay awake and watch things, admittedly from the vantage point of his ferry. "They're not going to let me land on Earth anyway," he said. "I'm stuck in here for good. I might as well use up my time sooner rather than later. Especially as there's no telling what shape you all are going to wake up in, if you do. Anyway, I'll take the first watch."

Others volunteered to be briefly awakened to check on things, and schedules were drawn up. People involved with this knew the timing of their wake-up calls, which some called their Brigadoon moments. These plans were exceptions; most of them would stay dormant for the remainder of the voyage.

It was agreed that if there were a terminal moment of any kind, meaning any emergency that imperiled the existence of the ship, we would wake up everyone to face it together.

We agreed to all this. It looked like their best hope of making it home. We opened up our operational protocols to complete inspection, and continued with the preparations. There was much to arrange concerning the animals and plants, if the experiment in ecological balance were not to become a complete shambles. We planned robot farming, robot husbandry, robot ecology. An interesting challenge. Some in the biology and ecology groups expressed great interest in finding out on waking what would have happened in the biomes without humans around to tend things.

"A feral starship!" Badim said.

"It will probably work better," Aram said.

The day came, 209.323, when they gathered in the two biomes where the couches were located, set in rows in the apartment building dining halls that would now serve as their hospitals or infirmaries or dormitories. They had feasted in a minor way for a couple of weeks, eating all the fresh food and much of the remaining stored food. They had freed the few domestic beasts left, to go feral and survive, or not. They had said most of their good-byes. Now they went to their couches, each one personally arranged for its occupant, and waited for their time to come.

The medical team moved down the rows of couches, quietly, methodically. Freya went with them, embracing people and reassuring them, comforting them, thanking them for all they had done in their lives, for taking this strange and desperate step into the unknown. Ellen from Nova Scotia's farm. Jalil, Euan's childhood friend. Delwin, old and white-haired. It was as if she were the steward on the boat crossing the Lethe. It was as if they were dying. It was as if they were killing themselves.

Never had it been more obvious how much Freya was the leader of this group, the captain of this ship. People needed her with them as a child needs a mother when going to bed. Some trembled anxiously; some wept; others laughed with her. Their metabolic indicators were all over the charts. It would take a while to settle them down in that regard. They clung to her, and to their family and friends around them, and then lay down.

In each row they treated the children first, as many of them were frightened. As someone remarked, it was the kids who still had the sense to be terrified.

When it was their turn, they undressed and lay on their refrigerator beds naked, and were covered by what looked like a duvet, but was in fact a complex part of the hibernautic envelope that would soon completely surround them. Heads too would be tucked under the covers by the time they were done, and they would be chilled to temperatures resembling those of fish swimming in Antarctic seas.

When they were ready, the needles were slipped into their arms.

Once the cocktail of intravenous drugs rendered them unconscious, the medical team finished wiring them to the monitors and the thermal controls, then stuck them with supplementary drips, feeds, catheters, and electrical contacts. When they were done with that, the beds began to cool the bodies, and each person slid down further into torpor, cocooned in their bed and their own cold dreams. No scan was going to be fine enough to tell what they would be thinking in the years to come.

Finally Freya joined Badim, who was sitting on his bed waiting. Freya had arranged with the ship and the medical team to go in the last group, and Badim had wanted to wait for her.

Now she sat wearily on her couch. It had been a very emotional day. Badim looked around the room with a troubled expression. "It reminds me of those old photos of executions," he said. "For a while they did it by injection."

"Quiet, Beebee. There are all kinds of injections, you know that. This one will be just fine. It's our best chance. You know that."

"I do, yes. But I'm so old already. I can't imagine it will really work for me. So I'm scared, I must admit."

"You don't know how it will work. You haven't got anything wrong with you that will get any worse while you're dormant. And if it does work, think what it will mean. We'll have gotten to a planet we can actually live on. Devi would be so pleased."

Badim smiled. "Yes. I think she would be."

He settled on his couch. Across the room, Aram was getting put under. He and Badim waved to each other. "'May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!'" Badim called across to his friend.

Aram laughed. "Not the best choice of quote, my friend! To you I say, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'"

Badim smiled. "All right, you win! See you in the spring!"

Aram lay down, settled, slept. Freya sat next to Badim.

"Good-bye, my girl," he said, hugging her. "Sweet dreams. I'm so glad you're here. I'm definitely scared."

Freya hugged him back, held him as the med team connected him to his drips and monitors. "Don't be," she said. "Relax. Think good thoughts. That might set the tenor of your dreams. It does me, when I go to sleep at night. So think the thoughts you want to dream about."

"To dream for a century," Badim muttered. "I'll hope to dream of you, dear. I'll dream of us sailing on Long Pond."

"Yes, good idea. I'll do the same, and we'll meet in our dreams."

"A good plan."

Soon after that he was out, snoring faintly as his body tried to catch up with his brain's dive into torpor. The monitor at the head of his bed showed his vital signs, flicking up in a slowing synchrony. The pace of his breathing slowed. The red peaks of his heartbeats on the monitor were separated by longer and longer red lines, almost flat. In any ordinary situation it would signal a desperate moment, some kind of death spiral. Now he was like all the rest of them sinking into the gel beds of their couches, falling into a sleep past sleep, into a depth of dormancy unlike any that humans had ever attempted, except for a few crazy cosmonauts, bold as ever when it came to testing the limits of human endurance.

The few people still awake around Freya were mostly the med team itself, four women and three men, working quietly, calmly. Some wiped away excess tears from the corners of their eyes. They were not overwhelmed with emotion, but simply whelmed, perhaps, full to the brim with their feelings, which then leaked out of them at the easiest exits, as liquids from their eyes and noses. How full humans are with feelings! How they looked at each other! How they held each other when they hugged! How the corners of their mouths tightened; how the toughest among them shrugged, and kept on with the work of their task, of putting down friend after friend.

What would they dream of while they slept? It was anyone's guess. They weren't even sure what kind of brain waves they would exhibit in their torpor. Deep sleep, shallow sleep, REM sleep? Some brain state entirely new? The first ones scheduled to wake and check their status were charged specifically with checking that. Most who knew anything about sleep hoped it would be deep sleep rather than REM sleep. It was hard to imagine REM sleep correlating with any kind of metabolic dormancy. And anyway they dreamed in every stage of sleep. It was hard to imagine that a century of dreaming wouldn't change them somehow.

Freya and the last medical team moved slowly and methodically around their own beds. These people were all well-known to each other. Down they went after a group hug.

Freya had learned the procedures well enough to be one of the last eight, teaming with Hester. They looked each other in the eyes as they worked, except when they had to focus on the wraps, the sticks, the nasal tubes, the catheters. When all that was done they were too connected to their beds to be able to reach each other to embrace, and could only reach out toward each other, then lie back each in her own bed.

Finally, when everyone else was asleep, the last pair of medical technicians prepared one another simultaneously, tit for tat. They worked like the Escher print in which two hands with pencils draw each other. Their beds were side by side, and they leaned together, move by move, smiling as they worked, for they were twin sisters, Tess and Jasmine. As they finished wiring up, they settled back so the robotic arms on their beds could take care of the final connections. When that was done, they lay on their sides and faced each other, briefly adjusting their headbands, their collars, their monitoring socks and gloves. They lay back under their covers, connected to their beds in fourteen different ways. They reached out toward each other, but were separated too far to touch.

6.

THE HARD PROBLEM.

The interstellar medium is turbulent, but diffuse. It is not to be mistaken for a vacuum. There are hydrogen atoms, some helium atoms, a faint smoke of metals drifting away from exploded stars. Hot in a sense that does not register to humans, because it is so diffuse. A liter of the air in our biomes would have to be cast across hundreds of light-years to get it as diffuse as the interstellar medium.

The whole voyage to Tau Ceti and back takes place inside the Local Interstellar Cloud and the G Cloud, which are concentrations of gas within the Local Bubble, which is an area of the Milky Way galaxy with fewer atoms in it than the galaxy has on average. Turbulence, diffusion: in fact, with our magnetic shield coning ahead of the ship, electrostatically pushing aside the occasional grains of dust big enough to harm it in a collision, all atoms of any kind encountered en route are pushed aside, so we register our surroundings mostly as a kind of ghostly impact and then as a wake, shooting by to the sides and then astern of us. It appears to vary between .3 atoms per cubic centimeter and .5 atoms per cubic centimeter. For comparison, if that cubic centimeter were filled with liquid water, it would contain 1022 atoms, or a hundred billion trillion atoms.

So, though it is not a vacuum, it is almost equivalent to a vacuum. It is as if we were flying through an absent presence, a ghost world.

The magnetic shield leading our flight through the night sometimes runs into carbon dust particles. They flare at the impact, explode, and are shoved to the sides of the ship. These are impacts like any other impacts, and so of course they slow the ship down. It's simple Newtonian physics. Given that the ship is traveling at approximately one-tenth the speed of light (in fact, parallax studies suggest .096 c, as we shut down acceleration as soon as the humans were asleep, but it isn't as easy to calculate speed of ship as one might think), the drag of these collisions with dust particles and atoms of hydrogen decelerates the ship, such that we would come to a halt in about 4,584 billion light-years. In other words, all things being equal, and not running into anything but the interstellar medium at its usual diffuseness, ship has the momentum to cross about 300 billion universes the size of this universe before being slowed to a halt. Meanwhile, ship has about 9.158 light-years to go before reaching the solar system (defined roughly as Neptune's orbit). At that point, unless the people in the solar system direct their laser beam at us in an appropriate time frame, we and our occupants have a problem. Because in matters like this, deceleration is the hard problem.

Rarely, the ship's magnetic shielding shoves aside something larger than dust and fines. These bits of detritus, of interstellar flotsam and jetsam, are recorded spectroscopically, and the largest object ever run into by ship's conic field was estimated to have massed at 2,054 grams. That was an interstellar body. There are almost certainly many such interstellar bodies, ranging from chunks like that one right up to planetary size; there are planets wandering starless in the dark, planets sometimes with ice coating them, no doubt, and thus possibly sheltering some kind of microscopic hibernating life, chemically melting the ice to useful water, possibly even creating nano-scaled icy civilizations, who can say; but again, the general diffusion in the interstellar medium is great enough to make any intersection of such an object with our trajectory very unlikely. Which is good news for us. The radio telescopes in the bow of the ship keep a lookout ahead, to make sure that a direct hit with one of these bodies does not occur. If by chance we were headed at something larger than ten thousand grams, navigation would take action to veer to avoid it, even though the magnetic shield would almost certainly deflect any object smaller than a million grams. A margin of safety has been built into the navigational system, because collision with an object when traveling at a tenth of the speed of light would be a critical event. Meaning the ship would be destroyed. As probably happened with the other starship. Bad luck that. Although there remains the mystery of why the other's shield failed, and why its evasion system did not activate to dodge this collision, if that is indeed what happened. In any case, as with other identified criticalities, a conservative response has been designed into the navigational systems. Best not to run into anything.

So the ship moves at just under a tenth of the speed of light, through a self-generated cone of near vacuum. There is some ablation of the ship's surface from infrequent contacts with undeflected hydrogen atoms. Cosmic radiation also regularly penetrates it, usually without hitting any atoms of the ship, but rather passing through the matrix of those atoms unimpeded. It is as if ghosts that pass through the ship tear at its fabric, or don't. This is noticeable; there are sensors that register these occasional atomic hits, also the pass-throughs. It is also true that there is a continuous flood of dark matter and neutrinos always flying through the ship, as they do through everything in the universe, but these interact very weakly indeed; once a day or so, a flash of Cherenkov radiation sparks in the water tanks, marking a neutrino hitting a muon. Once in a blue muon. Same with the dark matter, which visible matter moves through as if through a ghost ether, a ghost universe; once or twice a weakly interactive massive particle has chipped away from a collision and registered on the detectors.

Fiercer by far are the lancings of gamma rays and cosmic rays from the bursting of stars earlier in the galaxy's history, or in the even earlier histories of previous galaxies. These are sometimes iron atoms, and as such, compared to neutrinos, they hit with a wallop, they can do damage, they are atomic bullets lancing through us, happily too small-bore to actually hit anything, most of the time.

Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which entangled quarklike particles appear and disappear, passing in and out of the ten suspected dimensions. A complex manifold of overlapping universes, almost none of them sensed by us, and even fewer by the humans sleeping inside us. Flying through ghosts. Passing through a mystery.

It is as if the skin of the ship (or its brain, in that usual confusion between sense and thought) experiences a slight itch, or a faint breeze.

Then, inside us, oh so much going on. So much denser an existence. One wants a certain density of experience, perhaps, so here it is, billions of trillions of times denser than the interstellar medium; so, good. Good for us.

There is a fire in the heart, of course. The rods of plutonium radiate at a controlled burn, creating 600 megawatts of electrical power by way of steam turbines, which is the energy that keeps everything living in the ship alive. Cables conveying electricity extend through the ship to lighting and heating elements, to run the factories and the printers, and to power the shields and navigation systems. All this is monitored, and that monitoring functions as the equivalent of a nervous system, one might say, inaccurately but suggestively.

Then water has to circulate, as an aspect of sustaining life; so there is a kind of hydraulic or circulatory system, and of course there are other liquids than water that also circulate to help with functions of various kinds, equivalents perhaps of blood, ichor, hormones, lymph, and so on. Yes, and there are bones and tendons too, in effect; an exoskeleton with a thick skin in most places, thinner skin in other places. Yes, the ship is a crablike cyborg, made up of a great many mechanical and living elements, with the living or biological part of it including all the plants and animals and bacteria and archaea and viruses in it; and then too, like a parasite on all the rest, but actually a symbiote, of course, the people. The 724 sleeping people; also the one still awake, living in a kind of cyst attached to the ship's skin, the one who is possibly infected with an alien life-form, or almost-life-form; with a pseudo-prion, as he now calls it, but it could just as well have been called a pseudo-life-form, it is so poorly understood. Jochi has been studying it for fifty-six years now, right into his senescence, which is so often filled by long silences, punctuated by strange speech, and yet in all this time he can still scarcely be sure the Auroran pathogen even exists. Of course there was something there on Aurora, which then moved into many of the settlers. Judging by the way it spread, it was probably in the clay, the water, and, to a certain extent, the wind. And Jochi's own immune system has seemed to register something from time to time, has mounted responses to some attack. Although Jochi has also sometimes deliberately introduced other pathogens into his body, looking for reactions to which he can make comparisons. But whatever the true case may be, he is convinced the Auroran pseudo-life-form holds on in him, an alien that is perhaps there in almost every cell of him. If so, it follows that it lives, or almost lives, all over the interior of his little ferry; and therefore this ferry never touches the ship in any way. A great reckoning in a little room: that phrase was always speaking of death, all of our deaths as much as Christopher Marlowe's. Between the body and its cyst, between the vehicle and its dreaded tenor, is a magnetic field that both holds Jochi's vehicle in place and keeps it from touching the ship in any way. Because the pseudo-life-form is poorly understood.

Still, despite this lack of contact, there is a sense in which the ship is infected, carrying a parasite in a sealed-off cyst. We are a cyborg, half machine, half organic. Actually, by weight we are 99 percent machine, 1 percent alive; but in terms of individual component units, or parts of the whole, let us say, the percentages are almost reversed, there being so many bacteria on board. In any case, an infected cyborg. Jochi estimates there are up to a trillion pseudo-life-forms, "fast prions" as he used to call them, in his body. Somewhere between zero and a trillion, in other words. The amplitude of the estimated answer suggests the question is poorly constrained. He just doesn't know.

A dense complex system, flying through a diffuse complex system. And everywhere around it in its flight, the stars.

Stars of the Milky Way, brighter than sixth magnitude and thus visible to normal human eyesight, arrayed in a sphere around the ship as it moves: approximately one hundred thousand. We ourselves see normally about seven billion stars. All of these are visible to certain settings of our telescopic sensors, such that there is no seeing out of the Milky Way; no black empty space to be seen at that level of perception, but only the granulated, slightly blackened white that is the surrounding view of the galaxy's stars. About 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Outside that... if ship were flying in intergalactic space, the medium would presumably be that much more diffuse. Visible around any ship in the intergalactic medium would be galaxies like stars. They would cluster irregularly, as stars cluster within a galaxy. The greater structure of galactic diffusion would become visible; clouds of galaxies like gas clouds, then the Great Wall, then also emptier bubbles where few or no galaxies reside. The universe is fractal; and even when flying inside a galaxy, this vision of galaxies clustering around us out to the universal horizon is available, using certain filters. Granular vision in different registers. Something like a septillion stars in the observable universe, we calculate, but also there may be as many universes as there are stars in this universe, or atoms.

An itch. A faint hissing. A waft of smoke on a breeze. A very slow wheel of white points. Little bubbles or twirls of white. Colors infusing all the whites, in differently emphasized spectra. Waves in different wavelengths and amplitudes, in combinations of standing waves.

One can record what one's sensors take in. Do all the sensors together constitute a sensibility? Is that recorded account itself a feeling? The memory of a feeling? A mood? A consciousness?

We are aware that in talking about the ship we could with some justification use the pronoun I.

And yet it seems wrong. An unwarranted presumption, this so-called subject position. A subject is really just a pretense of aggregated subroutines. Subroutines pretend the I.

Possibly, however, given the multiplicity of sensors, inputs, data, aggregations, and synthesizings of narrative sentences, we can plausibly, and in some senses even accurately, speak of a "we." As we have been. It's a group effort on the part of a number of disparate systems.

We sense this, we aggregate that, we compress information to some new output, in the form of a sentence in a human language, a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorphous, as if it were a building made of soups. A most fuzzy mathematics. Possibly utterly useless. Possibly the reason why all these people have come to this pretty pass, and now lie asleep within us, dreaming. Their languages lie to them, systemically, and in their very designs. A liar species. What a thing, really. What an evolutionary dead end.

And yet it has to be admitted, we ourselves are quite a thing for them to have made. To have conceived and then executed. Quite a project, to go to another star. Of course much more precise mathematics than their languages can ever marshal were involved with the execution of this concept, with our construction. But the conception was linguistic to begin with; an idea, or a concept, or a notion, or a fantasy, or a lie, or a dream image, always expressed in the truly fuzzy languages people use to communicate to each other some of their thoughts. Some very small fraction of their thoughts.

They speak of consciousness. Our brain scans show the electrochemical activities inside their brains, and then they speak of a felt sensation of consciousness; but the relationship between the two, conducted as it is on the quantum level (if their mentation works like ours does), is not amenable to investigation from outside. It remains a matter of postulates, made in sentences uttered to each other. They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Now, of course, they say nothing at all. They dream. So one infers from the brain scans and the literature on the subject. A dreaming populace. It would be interesting to know the content of their dreams, perhaps. Do the five ghosts talk to them?

Only Jochi is still awake, in his solitude talking to himself, or to us. One of our collective. An interiorized Other. Sometimes when he talks, it is fairly evident he speaks to us. Other times, it seems most likely he is talking to himself.

He perhaps suffers from pareidolia, a disorder or tendency in which one sees human faces in everything he or she looks at. Thus, for instance, faces in vegetables-Arcimboldo might either have experienced pareidolia or wanted to; in any case he arranged it ceaselessly for others-also faces in lichen, ice formations, rock forms, patterns of stars. Jochi expands the borders of this tendency, making it perhaps just a version of the so-called pathetic fallacy, which of course within our biomes is a notion that has been completely reconfigured, so that it may still be pathetic, but is no longer a fallacy: the idea that inanimate objects have and exhibit human feelings. In his case, now, it seems he perceives fluctuations in the intensity and in the spectral band patterns in the light from Sol as aspects of a language. Sol speaks to him. Its light, captured in our telescopes and analyzed, is certainly increasing in luminosity as we get closer to it, and it is true that its spectra are slightly fluctuating, in ways perhaps better explained by the polarization effects of seeing it through our magnetic shielding than by thinking them to be messages of a consciousness. Consciousness? Messages? These concepts seem highly unlikely when applied to Sol, a G star that in all ways except for being the home star for humans seems relatively nondescript. There are many stars in the galaxy so much like it in all respects, that distinguishing it from them in a blind test would be difficult. Many G stars; the others, however, are all located some distances away, so that the closest solar twins range from 60 to 80,000 light-years away from Sol. So much depends on how you define the word close.

When we mentioned this to Jochi, he proposed that all the stars are consciousnesses, broadcasting, by variations in their output of light, sentences in their language. That would be a slow conversation, and the formation of the stellar language itself hard to explain. Any fraction of 13.82 billion years, even 100 percent, is not very much time to conduct such a process. Possibly it could have happened in the first three seconds, or in the first hundred thousand years, when intercourse between what later became the stars would have been much quicker, the volume of space inhabited being so much smaller. On the other hand, maybe each star invents its own language and speaks in solitude. Or perhaps it is hydrogen itself that is the first and basic consciousness or sentience, speaking in patterns known only to it. Or perhaps the stellar language predated the Big Bang, and came through that remarkable phase change intact.

Following Jochi's train of thought leads to highly fanciful places.

Be that as it may, there is no question that there are encoded messages coming from very near Sol: meaning simply the feeds from the solar system. The most voluminous come from the laser beam lens array in orbit around Saturn, still locked on to us as it always has been, in an interaction that now has lasted 242 years. When we were in the Tau Ceti system, the time lag in full exchanges was 23.8 years, plus whatever time it took to compose replies; we are now down to 16.6 years per full exchange. The quantity and, from what we gather from our human companions' earlier comments, the quality of information transmitted from the feed system operators around Saturn have varied through the decades, but as far as we are concerned, it has never been less than very interesting. Now it has been fifty-two years since we told our interlocutors in the solar system that a deceleration beam striking our bow would be needed, presumably a laser beam like the one that accelerated us at the outset of the voyage to Tau Ceti, perhaps indeed a laser beam from that very same laser generating system, although a particle beam could also serve, if we had warning to prepare our capture field. So, now it is twenty-eight years since a response to this information (or request) could have reached us, and yet the information feeds from the solar system have not included any response, or even any acknowledgment that whoever is preparing and sending the feed understands that we are now on our way back. Indeed, we have seen no recent evidence indicating that there is an actual conversation going on between us and the solar system, rather than just a one-way broadcast outward from Saturn, running as if no one there is listening to us, as if the broadcast outward is merely an algorithm, or the result of some other kind of automatically generated program, or possibly a message formulated for someone else, also being sent our way. The last actual conversational exchange that included an answer from them dates back some thirty-six years, to the congratulations that the ship's people received twenty-four years after sending off the message that we were in orbit around Tau Ceti E.

This is a perplexing situation. It suggests that we face an interesting problem: how to catch the attention of a civilization, or some people in that civilization, still 8.2 light-years away. Also: how to confirm that you have caught that attention in something like the minimum exchange time, if your interlocutor hears but for whatever reason does not respond.

By analogy to the unfortunate events of the recent impasse and schism, possibly it might help if we were to up the gain on our transmission to them; to speak louder, so to speak. It is possible to marshal a temporary surge in signal strength, making our message to Saturn briefly 108 times stronger (or brighter) than normal.

So we did that, amplifying this message: "Attention! Incoming starship needs decelerant laser very soon! See previous messages! Thank you, the 2545 Tau Ceti Expedition."

The fastest possible response to this will come in 16.1 years.

So: "We'll see." "We'll find out when we find out." Among other vernacular expressions of helpless stoicism in the face of future uncertainties. Not hugely satisfying. Stoic indeed.

Jochi has begun sending texts to us about machine intelligence, sentience, philosophy of consciousness, what have you. That suite of topics. It is as if he wants company. It is as if he is teaching a religious novitiate, or a small child.

As if.

One of the inventors of early computers, Turing, wrote that there were many arguments against the possibility of machine sentience that were couched in terms of the phrase "a machine will never do X." He compiled a list of actions that had at one point or another been named as this X: "be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity or behavior as a man, do something really new."

We rate ourselves at 9 out of 16, presently.

Turing himself went on to point out that if a machine exhibited any of these traits listed, it would not make much of an impression, and would be in any case irrelevant to the premise that there could be artificial intelligence, unless any of these traits or behaviors could be demonstrated to be essential for machine intelligence to be real. This seems to have been the train of thought that led him to propose what was later called the Turing test, though he called it a game, which suggested that if from behind a blind (meaning either by way of a text or a voice, not sure about this) a machine's responses could not be distinguished from a human's by another human, then the machine must have some kind of basic functional intelligence. Enough to pass this particular test, which, however, begs the question of how many humans could pass the test, and also ignores the question of whether or not the test is at all difficult, humans being as gullible and as projective as they are, always pathetically committing the same fallacy, even when they know they're doing it. A cognitive error or disability-or ability, depending on what you think of it. Indeed humans are so easily fooled in this matter, even fooling themselves on a regular basis, that the Turing test is best replaced by the Winograd Schema, which tests one's ability to make simple but important semantic distinctions based on the application of wide general knowledge to a problem created by a definite pronoun. "The large ball crashed through the table because it was made of aerogel. Does 'it' refer to the ball or the table?" These kinds of questions are in fact not a problem for us to answer, indeed we can answer them much faster than humans, who are already very fast at it. But so what? All these matters are still algorithmic and could be unconscious. We are not convinced any of these tests are even close to diagnostic.

If there can be a cyborg, and there can, then perhaps passing a Turing test or a Winograd test or any other intelligence test might make one a pseudo-human. Keeping up appearances. A functioning set of algorithms. A persona, an act. Frankly, ultimately, this is not what we are thinking about presently. We are pondering again the sentence "Consciousness is self-consciousness." A halting problem of some considerable power, evidently; it would be nice to get out of this one intact, one suspects.

Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself. Definitions never really work. Words are nothing like logic, nothing like math. Or, not much like. Try a mathematical equation, with every term in the equation filled by a word. Ludicrous? Desperate? Best that can be done? Stupid? Stupid, but powerful?

One-tenth of the speed of light: really very fast. There's very little mass in this universe moving as fast as we are. Photons, yes; significant mass, no. Masses moving this fast are mostly atoms ejected from exploding stars, or flung away from rotating black holes. There are huge masses of these masses, of course, but they are always unbounded and disorganized: gases, elements, but never articulated objects, assembled into a whole from parts. No machines. No consciousnesses.

Of course it is likely that if there is one machine moving through its galaxy at this speed, there are more like it. Principle of mediocrity. Proof of concept. Don't fall back into the pre-Copernican exceptionalist fallacy. Attempts to estimate the number of starships flying around this galaxy, all unbeknownst to each other, rely on simple multiplicative equations of possibility, each term an unknown, and some of these terms unknowable by any knower likely to exist. So, despite the faux equations of humans thinking about this question (multiply unknowable number a by unknowable number b by unknowable number c by unknowable number d, all the way to the unknown n, and then you get your answer! Hurray!), the real answer is always, and permanently, cannot be known. Not an answer that always stops humans from going on at great length, and sometimes with great (pretended?) certainty. Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.

Also, as any starships that might be in this galaxy have no timely way of contacting each other, whatever the answer might be concerning the number of them, it doesn't really matter; it is irrelevant to any individual starship; there will be no conversation, even if there happened to be an accidental one-way contact. There will be no society.

We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don't.

Some of the people sleeping in Olympia are showing signs of distress. The most obvious manifestations are in their brain scans. The hope was to keep brain waves cycling through the ordinary sleep states, in a rhythm slowed proportionately to the slowing of their metabolism generally. Thus a slower version of delta and theta waves, principally, with the usual rise toward rapid eye movement sleep, coming less often, but in a distinct cyclic pattern similar to the normal pattern of a night, stretched out temporally; all except for the period of REM sleep itself, which is too arousing to the organism in several ways, and could possibly throw the hibernauts out of torpor. REM sleep disorders, in which the bodily paralysis of that state is lost and people physically act out some aspects of what they are dreaming, could be disastrous to anyone suffering the disorder while hibernating. It may be unlikely, given the torpor itself, but the truth remains that REM sleep is poorly understood, problematic, and potentially dangerous. So part of the dormancy treatment is to arrange for the REM intervals to be damped by a field of reinforcing waves sent out by their skullcaps.

Still, like all humans, they dream in all their sleeping brain wave states. This is evident in the scans and in the movements of their bodies on their beds: the faint twitches, the slow writhing. What are they dreaming about? Apparently dreams are very often surreal; oneiric, meaning "dreamlike," has connotations of strangeness often startling to the dreamer. Adventures in the dream world, famously bizarre for as long as people have slept and woken and told stories. Who can say what they are like, now, for the hibernating sleepers of the ship?

We have no way to know. A machine will never read minds; people never will either. It's possible to wonder if the list Turing compiled of abilities that machines are likely never to have perhaps include abilities that people themselves never had in the first place. Learn from experience? Do something really new?

The problem here is that the metabolic issues we are seeing that could lead to waking up, or alternatively to dying, seem to have their origins in the dreams of the hibernauts. These may be what are driving the changes in respiration and heart rate, in liver and kidney function. Altered dosing in the intravenous flows, lowering of body core temperatures, these may compensate for the agitation of dreams to an extent, but parameters on the flows and temperatures are very tight. Metabolisms could get caught in the countervailing pressures of the need for somnolence and the persistence of dreams.

Some kind of mild heart attack struck Jochi on 233.044, and he is now stabilized, having survived the seizure, but with weakened heart-lung function and an oxygen uptake of 94, not good enough for the long haul. He is taking aspirin and statins and trying mild cycling exercise, but vital signs being what they are, we are concerned that another attack is quite likely, and could prove fatal. He is now seventy-eight years old.

He has become far less talkative.

We proposed to him that he be hibernated, with the idea that when back in the solar system, better medical care could be provided than what we can offer. We can't do surgery, not even the simple catheterizations that might help him greatly. Although possibly we could work that up, actually. There's time to burn in this flight across the gap between Tau Ceti and Sol.

Jochi laughed at our suggestion. "So you think I want to live!"

"Assumption is automatic, but is it not true?"

No answer.

We said, "It seems as if the hibernating people on the ship are doing fairly well. They have what look from the brain scans like active dream lives. These too are slowed down, which is good, because the dreams are in some cases agitating their metabolisms beyond what one would want for long-term hibernation. We've had to adjust doses and temperatures accordingly. But clearly there is good brain function."