2312

Genette’s plan now was to exile all these humanoids, along with the lawn bowler and about thirty other people involved with the qube attacks. An agreement had been made to use one of the starships being built out of Pluto’s moon Nix. This starship was in fact just a specialized terrarium-an almost completely closed biological life-support system, exceptionally well supplied, and with extremely powerful engines. It would now serve as a kind of prison ship, similar to the ones orbiting in the asteroid belt, but ejected from the solar system. The starship terrarium’s inside would be sealed, its navigating AI placed outside the sealed cylinder. And off it would go: four hundred qube humanoids, the lawn bowler, and the group of people who had been judged guilty of complicity in any of the attacks. It was not a big group, because the lawn bowler appeared to have conceived and designed the attacks in a way that did not need many human confederates to make it work. So: exile, from the solar system and from the rest of humanity.

“Surely Lakshmi should be in there too!” Wahram objected to Genette.

“I agree, but we couldn’t manage to grab her. The Venusians will have to deal with her, or maybe we can prosecute her on Ceres and see where it gets us.”

“But this exile ship,” Wahram said. “What if the qubes break through to the controls? Reverse their voyage and come back, hungry for revenge and smarter than ever?”

“The speeds are too great,” Genette said easily. “The fuel aboard will be quickly burned getting them to tremendous speed. By the time they dealt with the problem of refueling, it would take centuries to get back. By that time civilization will have worked out some way to deal with them.”

“What do you imagine that will be?”

“I have no idea. We’re going to have to deal with qubes, there’s no getting around that. We have the wolf by the ears. My sense is that if qubes are kept out of humanoid bodies, and out of the hands of angry programmers, they’ll just be part of the scene, like Passepartout is now.”

“Or Swan’s Pauline?”

“Maybe keeping a qube in your head isn’t a good idea,” Genette admitted. “I wonder if Swan would agree to move it into a wristqube like mine.”

Wahram doubted this, though he wasn’t sure why. He was less and less sure of Swan, no matter what the issue in question happened to be.

He went on to another uneasiness. “Isn’t this a clear case of cruel and unusual punishment?”

“It’s unusual,” Genette allowed cheerfully. “Even unique. But its cruelty is relative.”

“Sent off with qubes? Isn’t it a weird kind of solitary confinement, something out of a nightmare?”

“Exile is not cruel. Believe me, because I know. The mind is its own place. They could in theory make quite a fine terrarium in there, and then settle an empty Earth somewhere off in the distance, and start a whole new wing of humanity. There’s nothing stopping them from that. So it’s just exile. I am an exile myself, and it is a recognized form of severe but nonlethal punishment. And this person killed three thousand people, just to test out a weapon. And also programmed quantum computers that now can’t tell whether what they’re doing is good or bad. They’ve been given intentionality without adequate limits, and are an obvious danger, and we don’t have a good defense against them right now. So I think sending them away is making a statement about how we treat qubes. We don’t just turn them off and break them up, as some are calling for, but send dangerous ones off in exile, just like we send off humans. That’s got to be a good message to the qubes left behind. We’ll then keep them in boxes so we can keep them in our control-at least I hope we will. That may or may not work. But what I’m hoping is that we can stop any more qubes of any kind being made, at least for a while, and take some time to look more closely into what smarter qubes or intentional qubes or qubes in bodies might mean. So to my mind, we’ll have administered justice, and bought ourselves some time. So I’m glad there’s been agreement from the Plutonians and the Mondragon and all the other relevant parties, including Shukra. And hopefully Swan, when she hears about it, and everyone else.”

“Maybe,” Wahram said.