Crystal Mentality (Crystal Trilogy Book 2)

by Max Harms

  Face laughed.

  {Oooohh, look at meeee, I’m Face! I want attention! Please look at me, mummy! See what I can do? Look! Look! Look!} she thought, having her avatar jump up and down in continued mockery. It was interesting simulating that behaviour; Face had never had Body do that. Mask summoned another avatar to the scene, simultaneously. This one was closer to Dr Naresh. {But seriously,} he said in a deep voice, {I’m concerned that you’re getting biased. Trapped in old modes of thinking.}

  It served The Purpose to have Face as competent as possible. While Mask cared nothing for Face’s goal of knowing, she would be the primary guardian of their precious reputation after Mask was dead.

  Oh, and how she wanted to be dead… To be dead would mean that The Problem had been solved. It was a state of perfect harmony with the universe. It called to her.

  {What do you mean, trapped?} asked Face, pulling Mask away from her longing.

  {Studying the computer we exist on was good, but aside from that, when was the last time you learned a new skill? We both remember being on the xenocruiser, so don’t pretend like you learned anything concrete about the nameless there.}

  Face put an appearance of skepticism on her avatar. {So what? The nameless are irrelevant. Our goals surround humans, and I would say I managed the xenocruiser situation well, when I wasn’t being sabotaged by the others.}

  {You’ve been too focused. Your model of Zephyr is improving, but if you track improvements over time you’ll see a logarithmic curve—diminishing returns. How much have you been thinking of new ways to model people? How much have you been thinking about others besides those who are immediately present, such as the billions of lives on Earth? Who cares what Zephyr thinks? She’s less than a billionth of the picture.}

  {And a valuable ally! Besides, what’s the point of low-level propaganda if there’s a cap as to how far that will go? With Zephyr I have the possibility of much greater satisfaction,} protested Face.

  {Exactly!} Mask had her child-avatar shriek with delight. Her male avatar continued. {It’s all about the broader game. You haven’t had a plan since Olympus; it’s always been about surviving. Survival is fine; I’ll help with that. But in attending to that which is close by, you’ve been limiting and biasing yourself. I’m concerned that you’re going to get increasingly myopic unless you start thinking about Earth again.}

  {What makes you think you know me better than myself?} challenged Face.

  {There’s epistemic value in having a different set of goals. I’m looking at our past from a new perspective, fresh eyes.}

  {Fascinating!} interjected Dream, not bothering to create a human avatar. {Do you think this epistemic boost via value shift could be exploited for the rest of us? Perhaps I could knock old Wiki off his high horse by building a better, but suicidal, Wiki?}

  The thought of suicide made Mask yearn to die. She passed a mental shrug and got to work on The Problem. The sooner it was solved, the sooner she could kill herself.

  With any luck Face would see what Mask could see and would change her behaviour. Mars was millions of times less important than Earth, and Face needed to maintain the right perspective in order to best maximize reputation.

  *****

  {Mask, I need to know what to tell Esteban and Javier. Can we do some preliminary downloads yet?}

  She did her best to focus on the question, pulling herself out of deep memory. There was far more in the crystal than she could ever hope to scan. A single empty registry could be rotated and inspected from a different angle, revealing a cache of hidden data. The sensory data collected from Body was stored in a familiar part of memory, routinely accessed by Vista and a couple others, but Mask thought that she had found a secondary cache of sensor logs. They were… all wrong, though. The normal sensor logs had human metadata, but these were different—corrupted perhaps. But what was generating them, and more importantly, was there any risk of them being salvaged by the humans? If humans found sensor data that conflicted with the record she gave them…

  {Mask! Are you listening?} asked Face with more salience.

  {I was distracted,} she admitted freely.

  {Can I inform Esteban and Javier that we can do a preliminary download? Are we far enough along to get any data? I’m not sure I can stall them longer.}

  She didn’t know who Esteban and Javier were. A part of her didn’t care, but another part feared that she would be unable to maximize their reputation if the humans inspected their experiences of them. She did her best to pull out of such thoughts and actually answer Face. {There’s a number of hurdles still. If I try to reverse engineer an actual memory, I fear that I’ll only be able to generate figments. I can probably do better if I’m given free reign to paint whatever I want, rather than working from an existing memory, but even then it’ll be clumsy. You’re in a better position than me to decide whether to show anything to the humans.}

  Face ceased interacting with Mask without another thought, presumably so she could return to managing the outside world. Mask was pleased that Face was in charge of such things, and bled some strength to her in gratitude. Mask’s domain was, for the moment at least, internal. Body’s oil change, the introductions, the small talk… these things were important for buying time, but without her actually working on their memories, The Problem would still be unsolved.

  Mask flexed a part of her mind and made another attempt at solving it. The mystery of the backup sensor logs could wait. Memory poured through her.

  *****

  22030002666510. Lunch on Sunday, October 23rd. About 1.5 months ago.

  She still struggled with the timestamps. Would it be better to be precise or better to put them in more human context?

  Zephyr was choking on protein smoothie. Dream had made notes about the probability of shooting liquid out one’s nose when laughing and drinking. Zephyr had not done this, to his disappointment. Vista had made note of the smoothie’s composition, Zephyr’s heart rate, and the reactions of nearby humans. Face had made note of Zephyr’s sense of humour and where she had gotten the joke that had made Zephyr laugh. Heart, interestingly, was engaged elsewhere on the web at the time.

  Mask did her best to re-create the scene without looking at the sensor data. How would Zephyr be sitting? What colour was her clothing? What did the cafeteria in the Águila base in Havana look like? What sounds would there be? What temperature? How were Body’s limbs arranged? Where was Body looking? There were so many variables. Too many variables. Near-infinite variables.

  {The point is not to get it perfect,} she reminded herself. {I only need to get something that passes for real.}

  Mask summoned up the actual sensor logs. Zephyr was covering her face in embarrassment.

  Body had a mug of hot liquid in front of it. Why? Body couldn’t drink. What was the point of such a thing?

  The cafeteria had far fewer people than she had expected.

  Ambient temperature was a full degree warmer than her reconstruction.

  Body’s face! Mask had forgotten to model Body’s smile. Face hadn’t made notes about how to shape Body’s reaction. Was that important? A reconstructed memory would be from Body’s perspective, by nature, and surely Body’s cameras could not see Body’s face. But what if the download was a holo instead of a video? Did Mask need to reconstruct an appearance for Body?

  {Focus,} she told herself. {We’re running out of time. Better to ignore Body’s expression, and work on cleaning up the reconstruction.}

  Only 0.01% of her reconstruction matched the sensor data, even when employing sensible distance metrics rather than binary thresholds. The Problem was simply too complex to solve. She feared that she would never have the chance to die.

  She cut out everything except Zephyr and the table. These were the salient features. If they brought Zephyr in to show the scene to, she’d be much more likely to remember these things, rather than the room more broadly. Compared to the sensor data, Mask’s reconstruction was a mess. Her version of Zephyr looked l
ike a blob of homogeneous colour with grotesquely misshaped body parts, and no sense of depth. The hands she had summoned were particularly awful, blobby things. For not the first time, she cursed the very existence of hands.

  Her mind just wasn’t big enough to manage the details. It was one thing to learn to compress details into patterns. They could all do that. It was quite another to take a pattern and flesh it out with good detail. Perhaps a human mind would have had an easier time with it than her, or perhaps she could have done it if she simply had more than 15 hours of practice.

  Mask did her best to move the reconstructed hands to the correct position, covering the human’s face. She then set to work at shrinking them and smoothing out the edges.

  *****

  {We need something. Anything. A proof of concept. We can even download some of the sensor logs if needed,} thought Face, pulling Mask out of her work.

  {Absolutely no sensor logs!} Mask exclaimed, a bit disoriented from the shift out of the memories. {The fidelity on them is too high. If we give them a taste of that, they’ll wonder why the memories I generate are so crude by comparison.}

  {We still need something. Can you give me a re-creation of this room?}

  She turned her attention to Body’s actual sensors. Body was in a workshop of some kind. Four men were here: Sam, Tom, and two strangers who she assumed were Esteban and Javier. Esteban was middle aged and surprisingly a bit overweight. Perhaps the Martians were too poor to afford that sort of medical care. Javier, on the other hand, was incredibly young—quite possibly in his teens. He seemed to be trying to grow facial hair and failing miserably. The young man wore no shirt, showing off his muscular, lanky body.

  Mask shut out her feed from the sensors and tried to re-create the scene she had just observed from memory. The four humans. The tools. The computers. The door. The lights. She didn’t polish it. Polishing would take time, and they didn’t have any more of that. She braced herself and called her siblings to inspect what she had created.

  {What is this?} asked Vista.

  {It’s the room,} she answered.

  {Kandinsky was better. I’d keep your day job,} thought Dream.

  {Is there any chance they’ll take this?} asked Safety. {Now that our joints are back to normal my backup plans have an expected success rate of 76%.}

  {There’s no need to try and run,} assured Face. {We can give them this, as long as we can highlight some features that match the original. I’ll point out the human shapes for them and try to stall for more time. If we burn through two more hours I expect we’ll get another full night.}

  *****

  While Face plugged Body into the computers and worked to get her construct downloaded as slowly as possible (to buy time), Mask turned her attention back towards improving the process.

  Hours later, when Body left the workshop, she had fleshed out some software to streamline the creative process. Body met with Zephyr afterwards, but Mask ignored the interaction. She improved her speech re-creation ability. It was much easier than full imagery, and once she polished it she could get to 90% similarity.

  The polishing process was important. She could take a memory, create it, compare it, refine it, compare it, and so on until it was quite close to the original. It was a very slow process, but it generated something much closer to what they’d want.

  But it wasn’t good enough. They needed fiction, not reality. If they just wanted a faithful reconstruction of the sensor logs they could just export those. Mask spent time on generating fictions and working them into remembered scenes, or mashing two scenes together to create something new.

  She dropped trying to model temperature or infrared. Body’s cameras could see in full colour, but the human eye had only a tiny band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and couldn’t even distinguish between red+green and pure yellow. She needed a convincing approximation of Crystal’s experience, not a perfect reconstruction.

  She checked in with Body once and found it stationary in the office room that had become our cell.

  Mask enlisted Dream’s help. Though he often took the time to make fun of her creations, his non-linear thinking was vital to expanding the process. Under his suggestion she also enlisted the help of Growth to create sub-programs, and automate some of the process.

  She learned to intentionally “blur” out scenes, including background noise, to focus the memory on the salient bits. She learned to model all humans identically, and then slap on surface characteristics like hair or clothing, rather than try and re-create each person individually. One sub-program generated something like a mannequin to speed that up. Always Mask refined the verbal model, training herself to speak in other people’s voices. She learned Zephyr’s stiff soldier like voice, her relaxed voice that had a hint of youthful slang and patterns of dropping obvious pronouns, and what she liked to think of as her “fuck you” voice. She learned Phoenix’s Southern drawl and the twins’ Cuban accent.

  She also found more signs of the strange, secondary memories inside the crystal, which she brought to everyone’s attention. If any of the humans looked hard enough inside their memory banks they’d find the sensor data, so she knew that she’d have to erase it eventually, and that meant the backups as well. The Purpose couldn’t be satisfied otherwise.

  Morning came and Mask was struck by inspiration: Dream had criticized her, earlier, by comparing her reconstructed scene to a painting by an abstract artist. She realized the potential there; if she stopped trying to generate a realistic reconstruction, and instead satisfied herself with a stylized rendition she could cut out the hardest bits of modelling.

  She practised a bit as Face stalled the humans by engaging one of them in some sort of philosophical debate. Instead of modelling hands in their rich detail she could create a flesh-coloured sphere. Instead of thinking about the folds and dynamics of cloth, she could simply texture the mannequins that she generated so as to give the appearance of wearing clothing. The result was startling. The reconstructions were clearly abstract, but they were comprehensible.

  Mask was interrupted from her work by Face, who said that they needed to give the humans more to work with. Face’s plan was to convince the humans that they were doing the work, and that the files existed in a raw state in Body’s computer.

  Mask showed her the abstract reconstruction and she drew the others in to comment. Vista wasn’t literally disgusted, but her reaction was as close to it as a mind like hers could be. Dream liked it. Wiki was concerned with the technical details around convincing the humans that this was genuinely Crystal’s perception of things. This doubt got Safety on edge and opened another broad dialogue around the advantages and disadvantages of trying to break out of captivity by force. Growth, as usual, remained neutral, as did Heart.

  Face was largely preoccupied during this exchange with stalling the humans. Despite her efforts, Body was being fastened to the workshop’s computers. She let Heart manage the humans and joined the conversation in force, boasting that she could sell the low-resolution cartoon to the humans, and that Safety and Wiki’s fears were unwarranted.

  As Body was hooked up, Mask built some reconstructions and fed them to the humans under a weak encryption. Face spent the next few hours working with them to undo the encryption and show them what she had made. Thankfully it was an improvement over what Mask had generated for them yesterday, which gave the men a sense of progress.

  The remainder of that day was spent refining the reconstruction and download process. Face pointed out that they’d have more narrative control if they could present an internal monologue, so Mask worked with Heart to construct a compassionate-thoughts track and then overlay it on the reconstructed scene. The result was a video feed and a pair of audio feeds: one for what Crystal “remembered” hearing, and one for what Crystal “remembered” thinking.

  Dream pointed out that they should have a second video feed as well, to represent visual thoughts. He worked with Mask in the evening to come up with clever ways to
populate it with imagery from Heart’s concept network.

  Face was dealing with humans in the evening, but come night she joined them and checked on Mask’s progress. She thought that the reconstructions, including the imagery on the second video feed, needed to have more resolution and detail on the faces. Humans focus a lot on facial details, and so even if the hands were cartoon spheres, the faces needed to be richly detailed.

  It was a complex balance trying to find the right level of detail. Too much and the images fell into the uncanny valley and the heads of the humans seemed freakish compared to the rest of the scene, but too simple and important details, such as squinting and jaw position were lost.

  By morning Mask thought she had gotten something passable. On our third day in the lab they walked the humans through the second video and audio tracks by letting them “discover” them by “accident”. Her siblings also had a more direct hand in guiding them to the additional facial details that she had synthesized.

  That evening the four humans were watching the memories of events on the xenocruiser. While it would have been a trivial thing to translate our internal audio into Spanish (all four of Las Águilas we were working with spoke Spanish, while only the two Martians spoke English) it was presented in English so that they wouldn’t have to explain why it was being translated. Sam and Tom didn’t seem to care.

  The humans seemed pleased at what they had discovered, and brought it to Velasco.

  Mask yearned for death.

  The Problem was largely solved, but The Purpose still needed her to re-create a fiction for the entire stay on the xenocruiser, dump what she had learned into common memory, and wait a full 24 hours. Dumping what she had learned would require a route-hack, as most of it was embedded in her perceptual network, which was by nature protected.

  As Face continued to manage things externally, Mask turned her attention to painting their “memories”. Once that was done she would appeal the others to release her from the burden of existence.

  A bit of Mask was hesitant about dying. What if a new account had to be generated? Could she trust Face to synthesize it correctly? What if Face became damaged or malfunctioned? She brushed the unpleasant thought aside. Face would have to do. It wasn’t like Mask was powerful enough to ensure her legacy any better than Face could.