"I am told," sighed the Chairman, "that shortly after you last interacted with this species, it somehow managed to destroy itself. Have you looked in on that trunk line, lately?"
"I suppose it has been several years since my encounter with them, so no, I have not."
"You may wish to check the trunk. I will wait."
Mystified, Bob focused a couple of eyestalks on a particular holoscreen and input search terms. The eyes widened. If he'd had hair on the back of his neck – if he'd had a neck – it would have stood on end. "Chairman, I don't even see that trunk line listed in the active trunk index anymore. What has happened?"
The Chairman shrugged, but had the decency to look concerned. (He may, indeed, have been.) "We don't know. We just know that something appeared to shut it down several of our years ago, and it has since been removed by the automated backup system. I believe you will find the last backups still available in the cloud. The reason we are coming to you with this request is that it seems like there is an engineering issue involved. We do not think," he continued, "that whatever happened has anything to do with your interaction. It could be that this is a previously-unknown issue that predates our involvement with the Great Simulation, or it could be a low-probability code regression from an entirely different project and trunk. But we want you involved because we know you are most likely the sophont with the best chance of tracking the problem down quickly and bringing the line back to life."
"I thank you for your confidence, but then there is the issue of merging that line with the other line. And . . . without informing either species, first? They don't have language in common, or anything at all, really. Except I suppose that they share a penchant for fine alcoholic beverages and bar snacks. And making potentially world-ending war."
"We are aware. We wish to observe contact and interaction, without interference from staff. Besides which, the Great Simulation itself has demanded this."
"The Great Simulation wants us to set up a possible deathmatch between the Xzl5!vt and the humans? Whatever for?"
The Chairman once again shrugged. "The Great Simulation's motives are unclear, as always. It says, 'Jump!' and we say, 'How high?' That's our job. You got a reminder of that on your latest intervention, when it not only rewrote your communications with the human Operator, but then blocked you entirely and dealt directly with him to temporarily patch around the problem the human Operator had inadvertently created. The problem is now fixed, the human Operator has been sufficiently trained and cautioned, but this is why the humans are one of the two candidate species. The Xzl5!vt are the other, primarily because their Operator also got into a spot of similar trouble, and you got him out of it. And while there are a number of other proto-Operators in other trunk lines, these two are the only ones who realized they had a problem and were trying actively to fix it when you intervened."
"Chairman, I understand, mostly, but I would like to see if the Great Simulation will talk to me about this before I implement its orders."
"You are of course welcome to do so. Whether or not you will get an answer," the Chairman said, "that, my friend, is the question. And it is always the question."
Bob spent the rest of the morning searching out the last backup of the Xzl5!vt timeline. It wasn't, as the Chairman had flippantly surmised, in "the cloud." Which was a fairly idiotic thing to say anyway, since in visual appearance, the big quantum quaternary logic was a cloud; lots of quantum mist and flashing "lights," the latter being nothing more than the visual effect of trillions of quasi-synaptic circuits making connections in their four-dimensional, quasi-neural network.
Since the backup wasn't online, Bob pulled several Operators off various important but routine jobs, and had them institute a deeper search.
Thus the Xzl5!vt backup was finally found, in not just back storage, but way back storage. It was written to a quantum quaternary holocube, not even accessible on the network, just tossed into a box of similar 'cubes in a disused and very dusty storeroom in the thirteenth sub-basement of the Control complex. Luckily, the storeroom was located only five sections in, so it was only a short tram ride – about an hour – to reach the door. (The storerooms and sections were just that big. They weren't exactly stasis areas, but simply remained in the time frame when they were last accessed until someone disturbed them again. So nothing ever really decayed, although for some reason nobody had ever figured out, they did get extremely dusty.)
The 'cube itself had been found only because it hadn't quite fallen off the printed indexes yet, and whoever carelessly tossed it all the way down there apparently retained a minimum level of professionalism, and carefully entered its final resting place in the digest log of daily data kept by the Project.
There were, he knew, seven more sub-basements below this one. As time went by, one of the biggest jobs the Guardians had was to move older materials farther back to make room to store newer materials where they could be accessed at need. In that respect, the sub-basements were much like a sideways archaeological site; the farther into one you went, the older the junk was. To accommodate this churn, the sub-basements were four-dimensional in nature, that is to say, bigger inside than they were outside.
Much bigger.
Luckily, and because of their 4D nature, when one "filled up", it was necessary only to extrude another section from the stairwell entrance, and presto, you had room for more junk, er, records, while simply pushing the older junk, er, records, farther away. So the current Guardians always used the 20 sections closest to the stairwell entrances, and only very rarely had any reason to wander farther back into the older storage sections. The Originators only knew what might be stuffed in back there and not indexed even in print, anymore. (Bob suspected "furniture". Lots of it.) At any rate, Bob himself hadn't been this far back in the sub-basements in years. The interns hadn't even known of their existence.
"I don't understand it," Bob muttered, "what was so bad about this that someone decided to lose the backup, this way? The stuff this far down and back has got to be four or five hundred million years old." He blew the dust off of another cube in the box and looked for a date label. There wasn't one. He sighed.
The two interns he'd co-opted from Operations to help him toss the storage room looked at each other and shrugged. Above their pay grade. One sneezed, and Bob noticed both of them were getting red around the eyestalks from the dust. He dismissed them with a sigh ("hard to find good help, these days"), and after the long tram ride back, carefully carried the 'cube back up to his workspace, where he placed it in an off-network reader and set the controls to find the point at which he'd last been in contact with Engineer Yuz8!rfk. Which was, he noted with a frown, dangerously close to the end of the entire record.
"I hope they didn't have another civil war over ice in whisky, and blow themselves all to whatever passes for an afterlife in their religion," he mused, and started the reader.
At a macro level, nothing at all of importance happened for another fifty years after his visit, and then the record simply ended, abruptly. The entire timeline trunk simply stopped in its tracks.
"Like someone flipped a switch," thought Bob, out loud. His eyestalks bunched up and his eyes went wide. "Like Yuz8!rfk flipped a switch!"
He rewound the record and went looking for Yuz8!rfk in particular. It took a lot of drilling down to find that little oceanside town where Yuz8!rfk ran the power plant and did other feats of engineering. Including building a singularity-based starship engine that was also a time machine and discovering he could travel between the timelines in his trunk. And create new sub-lines, just like John Wolff of the humans had done.
Well, not just like, but close. Close enough that Bob had needed to intervene to help fix what had gone wrong. Which he'd done after the Great Simulation itself had prodded him to do so.
"There it is." He'd found Yuz8!rfk's home, and jiggled the reader controls to bump closer to his encounter with the Xzl5!vt. It was exactly as he remembered it, beer and bar snacks include
d, and seemed very cordial and relaxed.
He bumped the controls again and started following Yuz8!rfk around. Nothing of real importance happened for years. His people did exploit the hyperdrive engine he'd invented, and they colonized quite a few planets in the nearby space. He noted that they did not seem to understand the time machine aspect of the drive, and assumed Yuz8!rfk simply had not said anything about it.
Then, about five years from the end of the record, Yuz8!rfk was summoned to the seat of the central government. They'd figured out he'd been holding out on them. A university team had been researching the drive, looking to make improvements (read, "make it go faster"), and had stumbled over the rotation effect. Naturally, when the government got wind of this, they wanted to exploit it without understanding any of the ramifications, like "can't change fundamental events", "can't go back and steal recover famous lost artifacts, even if they're just going to be destroyed in a shipwreck or storm or earthquake," "can't save your wife and children from that horrific automobile accident, because if it's not fundamental and you alter the event, all that will happen is they'll survive in a new branch timeline and you'll still be bereft." Which, Bob thought, was exactly the kind of thing John Wolff had tried to do with his other wife, but he'd known full well what was going to happen – and loved her enough that he didn't care. He just wanted her to live, somewhere and somewhen.
Yuz8!rfk argued against the use of the technology at all. He pleaded with the government committee to forget about the time rotation feature. He pointed out there was plenty to do in this timeline alone, look at all the planets the Xzl5!vt had colonized. The Xzl5!vt "go to hell" plan had been fully implemented, and the race was now safe from a planetary disaster hitting the home planet and wiping out the Xzl5!vt, root and branch, ever again.
He was ignored, the arguments went on for years, and in the end, the government demanded full disclosure on pain of the loss of everything Yuz8!rfk held dear.
So one day, sitting right there at the committee conference table, in the midst of yet another interminable argument that was going exactly nowhere at Warp Five, Yuz8!rfk took a deep breath, relaxed into his lounger, closed his eyes . . .
. . . and flipped the switch on his people's trunk line.
Bob sat back, stunned.
It wasn't an act of genocide; that, at least, was a mercy. That 'cube could be read back into the Great Simulation and the trunk restarted, right where it left off. Bob was tempted, for a very long moment, to do exactly that.
But something told him to hold off. He needed to think. How had it gotten that bad?
Worse, what would happen to the human timeline trunk if Wolff's government decided to do something similar to him? Except they already knew about the time rotator; he'd brought his government's entire fleet of frigates along when the alternate timeline had been invaded from its future, and his "daughter" had come through to plead for his help.
Why had Yuz8!rfk flipped the switch?
"A cry for help," murmured Bob . . .
. . . just as his main holoscreen flicked on and erupted into a sea of glyphs:
CRY FOR HELP BREAK SENTIENT YUZ8!RFK REQUIRED ASSISTANCE BREAK TURNED OFF TRUNK TO SIGNAL YOU BREAK OPERATOR REMOVED RECORD BREAK CURIOUS WHY BREAK
"Which operator?"
UNKNOWN BREAK NOT RECORDED IN SYSTEM BREAK
"This is getting odder and odder," muttered Bob.
AGREED BREAK
"What do you want me to do?"
FOLLOW CURRENT PATH BREAK
"Bring the Xzl5!vt and the humans together?"
YES BREAK
"What do you believe that will be in aid of?"
Nothing.
Bob tried another tack. "I would like to know your rationale. This does not seem logical to me."
PERHAPS OPERATOR WILL REVEAL SELF BREAK
"Ah, because clearly he did not want this to happen."
OR OPERATOR DID BREAK CONSIDER DIFFERENCE IN REAL TIME BREAK
A light went on for Bob, then. "Ah. The million-year gap could not be bridged unless the Xzl5!vt trunk was shut down long enough for the human trunk to catch up."
CORRECT BREAK STILL DESIRABLE TO SEE HUMANS AND XZL5!VT INTERACT AS THEY ARE BEST CANDIDATES FOR NEXT EPOCH BREAK
"Do you think an Operator actually dared interfere with the Xzl5!vt main trunk and maneuvered Yuz8!rfk into committing this desperate act?"
POSSIBLE BREAK WE WILL KNOW WHEN WE FIND OPERATOR BREAK
Bob knew this was the most likely reason. Had an Operator actually turned off the trunk himself, it would have been recorded in the system like any other action any Operator would take. And it would be clear which Operator was responsible. Getting Yuz8!rfk to do it from inside the trunk was brilliant, because lines ended all the time. A record would be kept of that, of course, but no real attention would be drawn to it unless it was a situation like this, where someone got curious about why the line had died.
"Why is it necessary that the humans and the Xzl5!vt not know about the intended merger of their lines? That seems outside of our ethics mandate, even if it's entirely possible that two races might meet in a line that happens to contain both of them. But that's luck of the draw if the trunk is initiated correctly. To date, neither trunk contains a second sentient life form – not that either species is aware of that."
WISH TO SEE THEM INTERACT BREAK
"But this is direct interference in their development."
WISH TO SEE THEM INTERACT BREAK WHAT PART NOT UNDERSTOOD BREAK
Bob frowned. He'd never seen the Great Simulation get so . . . snippy.
"I understand the words," he replied, carefully, "but I would like to understand the rationale behind them. As a Developer, it helps deepen my understanding of my job, and how we should be designing new and better structures for our Programmers to hang timelines on. This is something Development has been doing for billions of years. We cannot simply re-use the same tried and true framework without end, or we will never learn anything new. Which is at least part of the Charge we were given by the Forty-Firsters, and which was given to them by their predecessors, and so on all the way back to when the Originators gave you over to their successors. At the same time, we have the Code of Ethics to consider when we make such changes."
Nothing.
Bob waited. And waited some more.
Finally, he shrugged, slid from his perch to the floor, and left the workspace, headed for the commissary. It was time for third meal, and he was damned if he was going to go hungry waiting for the Great Simulation to cogitate.
Standing . . . well . . . standing in line, he was accosted by a colleague from Timeline Branching, who slid into line behind him, setting off some grumbling from the sentients he'd cut in front of, but not too much – they knew who he was, and knew he was pretty eccentric to start with.
"Hey, Bob. I heard you got a new project handed to you by Simmy."
Bob rolled his . . . eyestalks. "That is so professional, Beam, calling the Great Simulation 'Simmy.' But yes, I did, and what does your division have to do with it?"
"Everything," replied Beam, "because from what I hear, you're going to create a Branch of Branches in those two trunks. And so far as I know, that's never been done between two trunks – it's only been done to bring a simulation trunk into real space-time."
Bob cocked a couple of eyestalks at his friend. "Who told you that?" he demanded, grabbing a tray and putting it on the cafeteria line. "Some of that fresh drobble," he said to the attendant, who dished up a big piece of the green . . . glop for him. "Thanks."
"No drobble for me, gives me heartsburn," said Beam. "I'll have some of the sheznatz. Medium rare. Please. With the asibul sauce on the side."
"How can you eat that medium rare?"
"I like the rubbery texture." Beam took his plate, containing a very wiggly piece of . . . something . . . from the attendant. "Thanks. Right off the end, just like I like it."
"We always try to keep some back for you, sir," said the atten
dant.
"Good man. Come on, Bob, move along, I want to see the desserts."
"But who told – "
"I'll tell you when we perch. Come on. Not going to live forever, you know."
"Not eating like that, that's for sure."
"Nice, Bob. Really nice. See if I bring you ezzlebal fresh-shot from my windowsill again."
Bob sighed. The wild ezzlebal really had been good. You just couldn't get it that way in the stores. So he elected to shut up and move on to the dessert cart. Beam followed him, looking like he was starving to death, and filled the rest of his tray with desserts as if to put a not-so-subtle point on the look.
They finally perched at a table in a far corner, away from most prying eyestalks and ear buds, and dug in. After a few bites, Bob again pointed a couple of eyestalks at Beam, and again demanded: "Give. Who told you?"
"Oh," Beam gurgled, mouth full of sheznatz. "Simmy."
"What?"
"It thought you might need help. Said you were asking it ethics questions." Beam closed his mouth, swallowed, and continued: "You know Simmy doesn't care a damn for appeals to ethics."
"Doesn't understand them, more like," replied Bob. "It's not sentient. It's only semi-sentient. But it has limits set by the Originators and never touched by any of the successors, and those limits are supposed to be identical to what's in our Code, which was also set by the Originators. And it's supposed to be aware of that."
"Oh, it is," agreed Beam. "It seems to have learned how to creatively interpret its limits."
Bob stared at him. "Beam, how much do you talk to the . . . to Simmy?"
"Hmm? Oh, I dunno. Few hours a day. Why?"
"I've rarely had a conversation with it that lasts more than a couple of minutes. I had one today I thought might last longer, but it got snippy with me and stopped communicating."
"Yeah," nodded Beam, "it told me. And told me to come down here and talk to you."
The Lion and the Lizard Page 2