“Not yet. Give it another twenty years. The industrial stations will have engulfed Bremble, at which point they won’t bother replicating themselves. They’ll just consume the remaining rock to build habitats. After another fifty years, there’ll be nothing left, and they’ll fly to new asteroids and begin again.”
“That seems almost…dangerous.”
“Not at all. It’s a triumph. We really are aiming for a genuine post-scarcity economy,” Oistad said earnestly. “The systems we’re developing out here will finally make it possible. Right now, everything is macro, too interdependent. The industrial stations have a multitude of separate specialist fabricators, all of which knit together to make self-replication of the whole possible.”
“Cells in an organism,” she murmured.
“Right. Emilja wants to take us to the next, final stage and achieve an order of magnitude reduction in our current level of mechanical complexity. Ultimately down to a single unit that can replicate itself
“And you smoothly replace it with an age of enlightenment?”
“Something like that,” Tyle said sardonically.
“Which, if someone is wrecking your industrial production capacity and advanced research in an ideological crusade…”
“Exactly.” Oistad gestured at the window. “What you see out there is the true beating heart of Utopialism.”
Tyle chuckled. “Make sure Kruse doesn’t hear you say that.”
“Oh?” Kandara was interested. “Why’s that?”
“There are two components to Utopial society being an unqualified success,” Jessika explained. “We have the physical aspect. That’s the technology being developed here which will make absolute post-scarcity possible by providing an overabundance of material items. And then there’s the philosophy, which will allow people to live fruitful, meaningful lives within such a physically rich environment. It’s something humans are unaccustomed to.”
“I get that,” Kandara said. “Why is Kruse upset by it?”
“Upset is the wrong word,” Oistad said. “You see, Jaru promotes the philosophy aspect. It’s hir belief that equality and human dignity are important above all else, even the material aspects of our culture.”
“Reasonable,” Kandara mused.
“Kruse is quite devout in her support of Jaru.”
“Wait. There’s a conflict inside the Utopial concept?”
“Conflict is a very strong word. There’s a question of assigning priorities and resources. You see, Kruse and her fellow travelers think omnias are just the first stage of human transformation. That if we truly reach an overabundant supply state for our physical requirements, ordinary human personalities won’t be able to cope, and we’ll collapse into decadence within a couple of generations.”
“The whole heaven-is-boring thesis,” Kandara ventured.
“Yes. Which our more radical colleagues are saying can only be solved if you gene-up basic human neurology.”
“Really? So if the people won’t fit the new perfect society, alter the people? That sounds rather fascistic.”
Oistad nodded wryly. “And yet, without Jaru’s original notions of how to achieve equality, I wouldn’t exist. And I am so very happy with what I am.”
“So you’re in favor of even more artificial evolution?”
Sie shrugged and glanced over at Tyle for support. “You have to solve the technological challenges first, and create the abundance problem for real, or the whole notion dissolves into debating how many angels can dance on a pinhead. And for all the progress the von Neumann teams have made here on Onysko, we haven’t got that close to single-unit self-replication yet. Humans still have to problem-solve. Not going out there with a screwdriver,”—she pointed at the constellation of half-built habitats—“but developing and enhancing what we have already. Some of us are concerned the systems are starting to plateau, even with G8Turing involvement.”
“All human technology is leveling out,” Kandara said. “But we’re a star-faring species now. It’s to be expected.”
“But we can go so much further. So many problems will simply vanish if we can build a proper von Neumann unit.”
“It never starts with jackboots and black uniforms,” Kandara said. “Just good intentions. But that’s how it always ends.”
“We’re not going to impose our vision of how to live on others. That’s not what we are at all.”
Kandara grinned at how earnest sie sounded. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Jessika squashing down her own amusement.
“What vision?” Kruse asked as sie walked into the conference room, followed by two other people.
“We’re just talking philosophy,” Kandara said. “As you do.” Then she paid attention to the woman behind Kruse. It was difficult to actually see anything with Zapata suddenly splashing so much personal data across her vision. “Emilja Jurich,” she blurted in surprise.