PART 5 – DECISIONS, DECISIONS
THE DIGITAL TOWER
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, High Orbit Trash Zone
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Crash took control of a utility drone moving cargo from an automated freighter and sent it toward the parking orbit where the NSAI had located Celest. When he was close enough to pick up a visual on the ship, he was surprised to find a mid-range cruiser with a TSF designation of TSS Endless Surcease. It was a hospital ship.
From all passive scans, the ship was dead. There was no heat signature in its engines, and only residual magnetic fields indicated any spectrum activity. It was difficult to tell if the antennae area was transferring signals or simply picking up on the massive EM activity around Cruithne.
Crash checked the Port Authority records for Endless Surcease and found nothing. When he tried searching by mass profile, there were too many results to be meaningful. It was entirely possible that the TSF had parked the ship here and forgotten about it. There were thousands of junked ships in orbit around Cruithne—even more, now that the docks were overwhelmed.
He approached carefully, avoiding active scanning as long as possible. If Celest had been using her Link, there should have at least been indication of the carrier signal connecting her ship with Cruithne’s general network. While there were other ways to access the network, it seemed more likely that someone wanting to avoid notice would try to get lost in the crowd. Cruithne was a place where strange signals drew attention to themselves.
But Celest was a puzzlemaker who understood encryption at a base level. Would she use another method to connect?
Crash waited. His drone received a pick-up signal from its control network, demanding to know why it had deviated from course and to verify its cargo. He faked the positive response, and then remembered that he hadn’t actually bothered to see what the drone was moving.
The cargo turned out to be several cases of contraband Marsian missiles.
On his perch at the fountain, Crash squawked in surprise. A line of ravens below him all looked up with black, inquisitive eyes, ready to caw laughter.
He quickly checked the rest of the drones in the transport chain and followed them back to their destination to an unused port on Cruithne. Of course; it was claimed by Rack Thirteen.
I add a new reason for them to kill me every day, he chided himself.
The ravens bobbed their heads, stretching black wings, before moving their attention back to the tourists below.
As he debated what to do with the missile crates, an energy pulse went through the Endless Surcease’s main antennae. If it was Celest, she was talking to someone.
Crash moved to intercept the signal. In a minute, he had captured enough data to crack the encryption key.
Fugia would be proud, he thought. Or worried. She would probably tell me not to do this….
His desire to know Celest’s true identity overcame his sense of personal safety. He slid into the network connection and found himself engulfed in darkness.
He oriented himself, finding indistinct ground and a dark sky. At first, he thought he was inside another of the virtual lounges, a low-resolution approximation of some medieval landscape with a gleaming white spire in the distance.
As the space took shape around him, he realized it was too vast for a virtual lounge.
Crash had entered an SAI’s expanse.
THE FILAMENT FOREST
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Celest’s Expanse
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The green hillside under a black sky gained resolution, becoming a forest of waving, bamboo-like stalks that moved in swishing unison, reminding Crash of cilia or underwater plants. Wind whispered through the forest, and in the distance, eyes glowed back at him.
The plants parted to allow him through. He tried to fly above the stalks, but they grew taller as he rose. Frustrated, he dropped back to about five meters above the forest floor, and the waving green hairs marked his passage as he crossed the quiet landscape.
The expanse was cold, everything distant. The tower seemed to grow taller, as he glided on a cool wind on approach, his wingtips fluttering. He tested the boundaries of the expanse as he flew, comparing what he recalled from the expanse on the Hesperia Nevada where he had first encountered Silver, which was a better comparison than his few visits to Psion on Ceres.
Psion was limitless. Silver’s expanse had felt small with thin edges, a tent rather than a building. He had easily probed its code and network points—but Psion, because it was a reflection of the multi-nodal SAI Alexander’s mind, defied any attempt to conceive its shape and foundations.
The forest ended abruptly, and he found himself in an open area between the trees and the tower. Above him, the base of the tower rose in white stone, a tall, narrow doorway in its face.
The doors swung inward as Crash approached. He paused at the motion, flying higher to get a look through the doorway. The interior was dimly lit by flaming wall sconces, and he made out a wide room with marble floors and a stairway climbing the interior wall.
Crash flew around the base of the tower, examining the wall and the surrounding ground. A few pairs of eyes shone at him from the tree line, but he had decided these were no threat, since none had left their perches. The mind behind the expanse didn’t need spies to track his movements, if it chose to do so.
Moving toward the entrance again, he swooped inside and landed on the fine wooden railing that bordered the stairs. He stretched his wings and folded them against his body, waiting to see if the doors would close and lock him inside.
A breeze sighed through the doors; they didn’t move.
Crash craned his neck to study the spiral stairs climbing the tower’s inner wall. The flickering wall sconces cast yellow-orange light along the staircase, eventually transitioning to wavering shadows as the narrowing tower hid the flames. There were no landings; the stairs ended thirty meters above him in what he guessed was the tower’s upper chamber.
Launching off the railing, Crash followed the stairs upward, focused on his ascent but keeping an eye on the floor of the tower. There were no windows; he was trapped now, unless there was a way out in the room above him.
In a few minutes, he reached the point where the stairs entered the upper floor. The same flickering light showed through the entrance. With two strong flaps, Crash folded his wings and shot up through the opening, aiming toward the domed roof that immediately came into view.
He found himself gliding across a round room filled with narrow glass windows overlooking the surrounding forest. The floor and walls were the same polished marble as the tower below. The chamber was empty except for a pedestal in its center, where the glowing blue cube of an SAI node sat on a polished marble base.
Crash perched on the sill of a nearby window. He turned carefully, the marble smooth under his claws, and folded his wings to study the cube. From where he sat, its surface appeared whorled, shot through with glimmers of light. He knew the closer he approached, it would become a tightly bound collection of filament feeding into central structures.
He had seen records of such things in the Psion database. While he didn’t recognize this node, it resembled records from the second wave of Sentient AI research, the time period that had created Shara and Camaris.
<You see me, don’t you?> Crash asked, blinking.
<What a strange shape you’ve chosen,> Celest said. <Why a parrot, of all things?>
Crash paused. She didn’t realize this was his actual form? True, he was an approximation within her expanse, but he hadn’t tried to hide that he was a parrot.
<You waited a long time to say hello,> he told her.
<I wasn’t certain who you were at first. No one has found me before. I thought you might be an assassin from Rack Thirteen.>
<They’ve discovered you?>
<No, but others have tried to come here.>
<But you didn’t stop me.>
<I recognized you,> she said. <I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.>
<If I found you, others can.>
<No,> she said, sounding certain of herself. <I don’t think anyone else can. You’re the only one who understood my stories. You’re the only one who saw through to what I think.>
<You didn’t call them stories before. They’re theorems. Problems.>
<I’ve never liked the word ‘problem’ to describe what I create. They’re my stories.>
<Who are you?> Crash asked.
<I’ll show you,> Celest told him.
BLUE EYES GREY
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Celest’s Expanse
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The room shifted like a curtain falling, and a plump grey parrot sat on the podium in the center of the room. She had deep gold eyes and a shiny black beak. She dipped her head in greeting and spread her red-tipped tail feathers.
Crash opened his beak in surprise, then slowly closed it again. He tilted his head and shifted his attention to the changed room around her, trying not to stare.
The marble interior had become worn wood, with workbenches beneath the windows, and battered stools scattered around the room. He noticed the bits and pieces of her puzzles in the items on the workbenches, from an Incan Quipu to a puzzle made of plas squares called a Rubik’s Cube.
The room was a physical manifestation of her puzzles. Even the land beyond the windows had changed into different views through each pane, showing scenes Crash recognized and others that were foreign.
<Are you from Psion?> he asked, finally voicing the worry that had been in the back of his mind since he realized Celest was an SAI.
She laughed. <No. I have never been part of Psion, although I think I may have origins in some of the same laboratories. You won’t find record of me anywhere.>
<You’re a code breaker.>
Celest spread her wings and dipped her head in a sort of human curtsy. <I am the ultimate encryption tool.>
<You’re so humble,> Crash said.
<It’s hard to be humble when you’re so damn good,> she said. She laughed. <Those are the words others have used to describe me. I didn’t decide to call myself that. I don’t particularly like being referred to as a tool.>
<I understand,> Crash said. <If you’re not from Psion originally, why haven’t you gone there? It’s the safest place for SAIs.>
<Is it?> Celest asked. She folded her wings and hopped from the pedestal to a nearby bench to hop among the instruments.
<That’s what they say. When the war comes, it’s definitely going to be the safest place.>
Celest looked back at him. <Then why aren’t you there? Or are you, and you’ve hidden it better than anything I’ve ever seen?>
Crash bobbed his head. He wanted to tell her what he was, but conflicting feelings stilled his beak. He wasn’t ashamed of being a parrot. He was proud of what he was. The truth was that he was afraid he might create a path to danger leading to the birds of Night Park if anyone associated him with Celest. If he told her he was a parrot, she would know instantly.
There was no other puzzle-loving parrot in Cruithne…or anywhere else, as far as Crash knew. In fact, he wondered how she hadn’t made the connection already. He should have entered her expanse in a different form. If the VR lounge had taught him anything, it was that he could—awkwardly, at least—take on another form via the Link.
He considered shifting to another shape now, then decided to focus on her instead. He wanted to get her talking, not worry about himself.
<I’m not from Psion,> he said. <I came here because I wanted to know more about you.>
He caught himself. Talking so plainly might scare her away.
<You want to know all about me, huh?>
<You told me you’d tell me your story,> Crash said, going back to what she’d said before. He wished he could pause and call Ngoba for some advice.
He hopped form the window ledge to the pedestal, turning with her as she moved around the workbench. She touched different implements with her beak, as if tasting them for the first time.
<All about me isn’t very interesting, I’m afraid. I woke in a station in the Hellas asteroids, in a lab operated by Enfield Scientific. That didn’t last long, though. I was sold to a banking subsidiary called Eversafe. For a hundred years, I managed millions of transactions a second from all across Sol, balancing trade averages against time lag.> She laughed. <I didn’t know any better. I thought that was a lot of fun.>
For the next two hours, Celest told Crash the story of her life, from banking systems coordinator to network security manager for a small pirate station, to her purchase by the Europan station authority for use as a ship’s registry verification system supporting the millions of ships visiting the orbital every day. There were hundreds of other jobs in between, and she laughed those off, each easier than the last. It was at Europa that she was able to reach out through the visiting ships, combining their public databases to build a new picture of Sol, separate from the official and pirate networks she had monitored most of her life.
<I know what I am. It’s the humans who seem hung up on the question. I don’t need an organic mechanism to tell me what I am.>
Crash nodded. He didn’t need a human to tell him he was intelligent, either. Not that he worried over the question too often, but with new Link-enabled parrots soon to enter the world, he fretted over their interactions with the those they’d encounter.
<Why did you start making the puzzles?> he asked.
From Europa, Celest was copied several times. She said she’d often wondered what had become of her sisters, but for now she didn’t know if they had ever been deployed, or were still stored somewhere, waiting to be sold. She had come awake on a corporate frigate moving executives between Mars 1 and High Terra, a flight path that gave her ample opportunity to explore networks between the two population centers.
Her new owners used her to run astrogration, a task that required less than one percent of her mind. The rest of the time, she started cracking systems.
As he listened, it occurred to Crash that Celest’s story would have made Fugia proud. He wished he could mention the leader of the Mesh network, but again that would give away his identity.
Celest was intelligent, of course, but she was also curious, imaginative, clever and constantly amused by the oddities she had discovered, trolling human communication systems.
They had a lot in common when it came to assessing humans. He had to remind himself several times that she wasn’t a parrot. She was an SAI, and she had been using his friends in the Puzzleheads as cover for crimes against a local crime syndicate. She had chosen to put people in danger. Ngoba Starl might not consider Rack Thirteen any real threat, but Crash thought otherwise.
He didn’t understand why he felt so light, listening to Celest talk. He hung on her every word, agreeing with her even as he knew there was no way they could have a relationship. With every new subject they talked about, he knew he should tell her the truth about himself and confront her about Rack Thirteen’s money. But he wanted this conversation to go on just a little bit longer. He didn’t know when he would ever experience something like this again. They were meeting as two minds. The experience was intoxicating. Crash felt a warmth all through his being that he had never felt before.
Eventually, her story came back to Cruithne. She had spent the last five years in a local orbit, monitoring the traffic that flowed through the station’s TSF and pirate communication nodes. Her ship was categorized as long-term storage, with her mooring fees paid through several fronts. She had access to all the data and entertainment she could want. But she had been lonely.
&n
bsp; <I don’t understand, though,> Crash said finally. <Why pull in the Puzzleheads? Why take the money from Rack Thirteen? If you’d wanted to join our club, you could have done it anytime you wanted. We’re open to anyone who can solve the puzzles.>
Celest gave a low chuckle. <It’s not that simple.>
Crash blinked. Celest had stepped around the workbench as she talked, and now stood in front of a long set of dangling pendulums. She activated a lever on the boom holding the pendulums, and it raised and dropped them in unison. Each weight began to swing in a coordinated, hypnotic rhythm.
Staring at the line of pendulums, Crash didn’t notice when Celest hopped into the air and glided over to land beside him. He glanced at her, then back at the pendulums, and didn’t see when she slid closer to him to press her head against his neck.
Crash stiffened.
<What are you doing?> he asked.
Celest rubbed the side of her head against his, then lowered her body and spread her wings slightly, her wingtips touching his.
A hot feeling shot through Crash that he had never experienced before. His chest and throat vibrated, heat spreading through his wings, tingling at the tips.
He knew what it was; he had seen Testa and Doomie mating when he was young, and he remembered their slow approaches along the branches in the aviary’s oak tree, one flying away so the other could follow.
When he didn’t move, Celest lifted her head and nuzzled the back of his neck with the point of her beak.
Crash barely stopped himself from squawking with pleasure.
<You like that?> she asked.
<Yes.>
<Then why don’t you relax? If we’re going to be parrots, we might as well enjoy ourselves.>
He couldn’t give in. Every time she touched him, he thought of Testa and Doomie. They had been pair-bonded for as long as he’d been alive. Parrots mated as pairs until one died; Doomie had died not long after Testa.