Uplift

This page is about the uplift project as a plan. The virus that did the work has its own page.

Uplift is the name Doctor Avrana Kern gave to the work of raising an animal species to full intelligence on Kern’s World. She titles herself chief scientist and administrator of the Second Brin Exaltation Project, and the satellite built for it warns travellers off a planet claimed by the Exaltation Program. The monkeys the work was designed for died before it began, and the species that came up instead was never chosen.

The plan

The world was one of a string of terraformed planets, turned from inhospitable chemical rock into balanced ecosystems. Humans had found no other life anywhere, so the only life there was had to be spread as widely and in as many forms as possible to survive whatever came. Kern put it as a net cast wide and then wider.

What she told the people who paid for it was different. Colonists would come down from the sky like gods to a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants, and that was the version the boardrooms approved. Her own aim was the experiment: to find out what society might grow in a species left to work it out for itself.

The work had two phases. The first raised the animals, and the biotechs expected thirty or forty monkey generations to carry it.

Phase one

Ten thousand primates travelled in the Barrel, a lander at one end of the Brin 2’s central needle, with the Flask beside it. Kern called the two cargos monkeys and the future. On the day the station died, a saboteur’s charges pushed the Barrel off its planned path and it burned up in the atmosphere with every animal aboard. The Flask fell at a gentler angle and delivered its virus to a world that no longer had monkeys on it.

Kern watched from the Sentry Pod and told herself that the virus would last, and that they could always get more monkeys. She expected a rescue party from Earth, though her distress signal would need twenty years to arrive.

Phase two: the contact exercise

The Sentry Pod had been left in orbit to watch the planet and wait for a sign. Once the inhabitants had a culture able to send radio, they were judged ready for contact with the wider universe. The pod would build a shared language from the simplest binary notation upward, each stage bootstrapping the next.

The phase needed Kern’s authority, and the report that it was ready is what woke her. She gave the order, then sent one thing down first, though nothing on the planet could read it yet. The message was: I am your creator. I am your god.

What the virus found

The plan never reached the animals it was written for. The ecosystem of the green world had been built to give monkeys a home, and its vertebrates were made to reject the virus, so mice, birds, dwarf deer and snakes changed hardly at all. The invertebrates were meant to be nothing more than scaffolding by which the absent monkeys would climb, and the virus took them instead.

The results varied. One hunter on the forest floor gained great size and little else, and many changed creatures were abortive work. The spitting spiders came up as packs of killers, more than beasts and less than Portia’s people. Portia’s line was the rare case where a bigger brain paid for itself at once.

Kern had expected monkeys to be the easy first step to a universe of uplift, close enough to humans to understand and far enough to be worth the trouble. When the first picture from the surface showed her eight eyes and silk, she wept for her lost monkeys. Then she turned: the spiders are Earth, their form does not matter, and she calls them her children. She goes back through centuries of stored conversation, stops instructing them and starts listening.

Opposition

Non Ultra Natura fought the work as hard as it could, and the virus’s development brought protests, sabotage, terrorism and murder. The group’s complaint, as Kern heard it, was the making of superbeings out of mere beasts. Sering, the man meant to mentor the uplifted primates, carried that argument into the engine core of the Brin 2. Long afterwards a scholar of the ark ship remembers the old stories that count the exaltation of beasts among the sins of the ancients.

Unanswered questions

• How many worlds were prepared under the program, and whether any of them reached phase two.
• Whether monkeys would really have understood Kern, as everybody promised her.
• What was meant to follow the contact exercise, if anything.