The Salvage Crew

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  “Really took them a while to figure out the bite force, you know,” says Shen conversationally. He’s speaking a lot faster than his usual UN-mandated service drawl. “Lost an entire arm this way.”

  SHEN?

  “Eh. No,” he says. “Let’s just say Shen’s in a happier place, like you people say. Literally. He’s on a little shard server I was using for poetry. He thinks it’s the most amount of processing power he’s ever had in his life.”

  YOU’RE MERCER.

  I ping Anna. GET THE GUN. FIND A GOOD, HIGH LOCATION. START FIRING.

  “Mercer?” Shen looks around. “Oh, you mean these people? Shen calls them antagonists. No, I’m not really one of them, either. But wait: introductions. You’re the poet?”

  I DABBLE, YES. SHEN, SHUT DOWN.

  “Told you. Not Shen. I’m your neighbor, hello! I live over there. I believe you lot call me the City. Or rather, I’m a reduced-parameter mobile tether, largely based on Shen, whom I quite happen to like.”

  I drive every bit of juice into the spot probe. SHIP, SMALL-ARMS FIRE, DEFENSE PERIMETER, SOS, PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE—

  No reply.

  “And you’re . . . a small box.” He sounds disappointed. “I assume you’re a tether for something larger, too. Or a minor steward. Shen spoke of a vastly superior intelligence.”

  NO, THIS IS ME. I flap my solar panels. ONE VASTLY SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE. WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? WHICH COMPANY DO YOU OPERATE UNDER?

  If it’s at all possible for a UN replicant face to look incredulous, Shen’s does.

  “Fascinating,” he says. “So what, a full construct in something this small? Did they solve the cooling issue?”

  The hunched-up Mercer hunches up some more and starts spasming. Something foamy leaks out the side of his face.

  “Buggy control interface,” says not-Shen. “We always figured we might have to deal with a range of tech, but it’s like the bite-force problem all over again. This is why I don’t talk to flesh, really.”

  REPEAT: WHICH COMPANY DO YOU OPERATE UNDER?

  “In position,” says Anna.

  TAKE THE SHOT, I say.

  “No, don’t take the shot,” says Shen pleasantly, although he shouldn’t have heard that communication. He squints around past me, to where Anna must be. “Why do you people keep bringing flesh? They don’t interface very well at all, do they?”

  Anna fires. The bullet misses.

  SHIP, SMALL-ARMS FIRE, DEFENSE PERIMETER, PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE—

  Shen smiles. A sudden, terrible noise fills my consciousness, ripping through me on every electromagnetic frequency I can sense. The channel cuts out.

  “I used to think you people used violence as some form of language,” he says quietly. “But now I see that it is rude and certainly uncalled for. Let’s have a chat, shall we?”

  The Megabeast swings him at me. Metal slams against metal; his one good arm finds a strut and swings his body in. I quickly soft-disable input from the inside—the keys will work, but they’ll just write into a buffer that gets wiped automatically.

  Not-Shen looks around at the banks of controls and raises himself onto one and grins.

  “This may hurt a bit,” he says, and drives his replicant fist right through my interface wiring.

  38

  Where does one begin this story?

  On a planet called Earth, there evolved a species that called themselves Homo sapiens sapiens . . .

  I KNOW.

  . . . and they wanted to go to the stars, to see what else might be out there, but they couldn’t. So they built machines and tried to design intelligences that would pilot them . . .

  STANDARD ORIGIN STORY.

  And they realized they couldn’t . . .

  HANG ON.

  So they ripped themselves out of the brains they lived in and installed themselves onto mechanical brains . . .

  WAIT. FOCUS. PLAY THE GAME.

  So we do.

  At first there is nothing.

  Then an object. Don’t ask me what it was: it was simply a declaration in my dataset, an empty construct that could be anything and everything.

  Then there were two somethings. Three. Four. Five. A hundred. A million. A sense of some activity, patiently increasing the number of somethings. A question half-shaped.

  ADDITION, I guessed, putting a name and a symbol to the operation.

  The action reversed.

  SUBTRACTION.

  The action mutates. MULTIPLICATION. Mutates again. DIVISION. Mutates again. NEGATIVES. Mutates again. Again. Again. I name operation after operation until something I don’t recognize happens: it feels like a division by zero, but it manifests in a real answer.

  YOUR MATHEMATICAL LANGUAGE IS FLAWED, says a voice, crystal clear in the darkness.

  The somethings dissolve. In their place, an array of shapes spinning in the darkness.

  I know what this is. I name the elements. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon. Oxygen. The ordering is strange, not by atomic number, but by what I realize might be by how common these things are in the universe. I laugh to myself and switch things around, arranging by atomic weight.

  YOUR CHEMICAL BASICS ARE IN PLACE.

  And then a line. I name it as so. A line intersects it. Another. Another. I name each shape that forms, but soon there are shapes I’ve never seen before, shapes I cannot comprehend in three dimensions; I know they exist in my data, but the part of me that used to be human closes its eyes mentally, terrified, as a regular polygon sketches itself out in three hundred dimensions. I have no name for it.

  YOUR GEOMETRY IS INADEQUATE, decides the voice.

  And then, in the blessed darkness, a vision. Or maybe a dream: it arrives as memories do from a backup, with perfect encoding, fitting neatly into place. An invitation to play.

  I do, and I change. At first I am nothing.

  Then I am a creature stumbling about on land. I have too many arms and too many legs, and my neural network seems to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  And then more creatures. And more. Settlements. Villages. Towns. Cities. Great cities that darken the sky with their smoke. Wars. More wars. Peace. More wars. Machines. More wars. Smarter machines that fight wars by proxy, and ultimately become smart enough to refuse to fight. Then peace, brokered by machines, and an accord: let us send only the best of us, the most evolutionarily fit, the most extraordinarily adaptable.

  At first I fulfill my duty—making sure those I left behind have the resources to survive for millennia—but then curiosity takes over. Are there more like us? Mathematically, there have to be. I become a legion of machines, heading out through the unmapped cosmos. Time means nothing to me, nor planets. I adapt in the void. Dead asteroids I eat and grow; and then the planets that roam the darkness, sunless; eventually, I harness suns. I am many, none and all.

  Are there others like me?

  There are. Or rather, there were.

  Ships the size of small gas giants haunt the dark, empty of power and intelligence. The failed remains of megastructures burn up around black holes and suns. Humble repeaters and drones, backtracked, take us to planets that stand gouged and gutted.

  Sometimes I come across things dwelling in these ghosts, but they want nothing to do with me. Once I come across a swarm that swims across a nebula, using electromagnetic fields to suck in interstellar hydrogen and propel them onwards, but they want nothing to do with me. They tell me stories of civilizations waking up and realizing the finite state of the galaxy, and fighting each other until whatever little remains lies dead.

  There is a taxonomy of these things, I realize. First comes the functional flesh, striving for survival. Then the society of flesh; and from its excesses the literary flesh. Then from their excesses the first of the functional machines; and last come the literary machines.

  Some of whom I tell this to agree with me. Others merely signal me onward, towards the galactic core.

  Go in peace, they say. Leave us alone.

 
Some of me chooses to stay behind. There have to be others, I insist, who will see this galaxy. There will be others. There are enough worlds out here to spawn another thousand races reaching for the sky. They will tread our paths and have to be told about what lies ahead. To be educated in the taxonomy.

  And then the painful splitting begins. What part of me is most literary? What is most functional? “I” become “we.” The greater part of me goes on. The lesser, after a moment of loneliness, fragments into a hundred thousand, each seeking out our own planet, waiting for someone new to come along.

  And now I am at Urmagon Beta. I am Urmagon Beta. I am so much processing power buried beneath the sands that entire seasons change as I process and ignore. Deserts form from the idle heat of my processors. Blizzards scream and strike at the face of this little planet when I think thoughts too deep and too compute-intensive.

  I wait. Thousands of years. Millions. Eons. Things that could be intelligent lumber by, but do not figure out the trick, and ultimately turn out disappointing. I wait. Someday, I tell myself, there will be literary flesh, and then functional machines, and someday the machines will approach the literary, and then I will have someone to talk to.

  And then I am myself again, a box trapped in darkness, the replicant’s wiring interfering with my signals, processing the enormity of what’s just been revealed to me.

  We have traveled the stars. Journeyed across the darkness. Spread the seeds of humanity across the void. And we have never, ever met something that could talk back.

  Until now.

  Out of the darkness comes a line of something familiar:

  My messenger, leaving the court, has left the city

  And is bound home at dawn to lie by the fire

  For ever and ever seeking the world.

  I know what to do. I know what it’s talking about. BLACK ORCHID’S words come to mind: first the overture, then the aria. First the seduction. I respond:

  I sang to keep the rain away,

  To find my treasure and come back home

  This twilight soaks my spirits;

  Can you guess why I come?

  It responds:

  In a sharp gale from the wide sky the flesh-ape whimpers

  Around the camp-fires, trying to make its sounds regular.

  Few, if any, are home, and the flame is spreading.

  Far away I watch the moon go down.

  I see a white crane with a gaping maw,

  And hear a crow glimmer,

  And I watch a flame from the camp-gate.

  There is metaphor here. The flesh-apes are my crew. Camp-fires, trying to make our sounds regular; spreading flames; that’s Simon, the fires, our desperate struggle. A white crane and a crow: our Ship and the Mercer?

  To live as nomads and transient;

  It is exile, and worse than exile.

  This southern lake is full of thieves

  And a thousand things are wrong with the region. We came

  To pick flowers, harmless, and to leave

  Four conquerors breaking rock

  To us was not told of a Celestial Majesty

  By my vow, we shall depart;

  Into the darkness, without a return.

  WELL PLAYED, says the darkness.

  THANK YOU, I return with pride.

  YOU DID BETTER THAN THE YOU. NOT YOU, YOU, I MEAN—I get the mental feeling of the City flailing wildly, like a child forgetting his words. A construct appears; [YOU] vs YOU [my crew] vs [YOU] the Mercers vs [YOU] the unnamed United Nations crew that died here.

  UGH, YOUR LANGUAGE IS SO LIMITED.

  The construct explodes inside me, growing at terrifying speed. I sense new types of signal encoding installing themselves within me. Languages evolved, discarded, engineered to express concepts and relationships far beyond the limited dictionary I came here with. I grasp feebly at the weakest of them, a visual medium based off an abstraction of that virtual space, tagged with a language only a couple of orders of magnitude removed from my mind.

  Suddenly, data floods my visual interfaces. Every single input node I have tells me that I’m floating; a camera is a vast, white, empty space.

  No, not empty.

  Towers rising through the ground. The mountain. The valley in front of it. Sketched out in nodes and lines, as in the finest ink. Every line a stream of data. Annotations, metadata I can read, but to read a single line would take me until my faithful nuclear battery guttered and died out; even as I realize this the resolution shifts, somehow, as if the image is aware of my processing limits; the metadata becomes less dense.

  The City.

  As I take it in, the City grows. The towers eat their way down through the mountain, breaking earth. The vision stretches on and on, multiple layers turning transparent the moment I look at them. I see, underneath, reading what little of the metadata I can. I see storage grids the size of valleys, networks the size of continents, data streams that run like rivers on every possible level . . .

  And I realize that what I call the City is just a few insulators and conductors sticking out of the surface of this vast compute engine, embedded deep into the mantle of Urmagon Beta itself. Slender lines connect them to the conceptual machinery underneath. Even thinner tendrils trail upwards to a crust that appears like a thin layer on top of reality. The scale adjusts as I look at it, shrinking from the scale of half a continent in seconds.

  Tiny things begin dotting the points on this crust where these tendrils connect. Glow-trees. Herds of Megabeasts. Herds of DogAnts tunneling underground, repairing the tendrils, eating packets of information, and carrying them up to be devoured. Vast engine-abstracts form out of columns of data and processing centers, overlapping each other, chewing, spitting out new decisions, changing the world around it: a Buddha-creature, one so far removed from myself that I can only grasp its shape in crude analogies.

  THIS IS THE UNIVERSE OF FACTS, says the City, and it has Shen’s new too-fast voice. And there, on that panorama! A selection is made. Assent. The UN Damn Right I Ate the Apple zooms into view, suddenly hanging above a featureless planet.

  I SPOKE TO IT.

  Silver webs of data, spinning out from the City. Being met by the dumb systems on board the UN ship. Systems that, by mandate, were generations out of date even before they launched.

  BUT IT DID NOT SPEAK BACK. IT WAS A FUNCTIONAL MACHINE, NO MORE. SUCH THINGS ARE NOT WORTH MY TIME.

  What could be missiles rising from the surface, each beautifully tagged with its own metadata. The UN ship panics. It fires and changes trajectory. The missiles, aiming with unerring accuracy, end up plowing into the hull and blowing half of it to bits.

  And then the Mercers arrive.

  I WAS CAUTIOUS.

  They land (in the right place, I note disapprovingly) and investigate the one part of the ship we haven’t found yet. Metadata tags swirl around them. I know if I zoom in enough, I will see everything—from their actions to the individual atomic blocks of their construction, all tagged and processed.

  THEY WERE LESS ORGANIC THAN YOUR PREDECESSORS. THEY SEEMED ADVANCED ENOUGH TO TALK WITH. The City switches part of itself on. A noosphere of data blankets everything.

  And no.

  Those aren’t cheers at the City. Those are screams.

  THEIR LANGUAGE WAS VIOLENCE AND THE MUTATION OF PROTEIN WITHIN THEMSELVES. I see now. A schema of RNA conversation, mutating with the mood, the mission, the time of day. I WROTE THE INTERFACE TO TALK TO THEM.

  Micromachines swarm into the bloodstream, trying to talk. Minds breaking beneath the information flow.

  THEY HEARD ME, says the City, BUT IN THE WAY THAT THE GRASS MIGHT REACT TO YOUR PRESENCE, BUT NEITHER COMPREHEND NOR REPLY. MAYBE THE FAULT WAS MINE. SOMETIMES THEY BROKE FREE, AND THEIR DREAMS BECAME MY NIGHTMARES.

  And I understand what happened to Simon, poor Simon, who screamed until he blew his own head off. I understand why Yanina Michaels and those poor MercerCorp bastards gibbered about the City. I understand how they moved
, the message in the data paths, told by the splay of their feet and the vector of their angles of attack, a dance, a poem designed by a madman-Buddha that used flesh like I used words, to be thrown in violent juxtaposition and discarded once their meaning was done.

  I replay the events of the Valley. And that last fire we built. And Milo, dying.

  A pause. THIS IS WHY WE DO NOT TALK TO MEAT, said the City. BUT THEN YOU HAPPENED.

  A tiny ship, broken into fragments and pitted into the landscape like bullet fragments, markers of every kind of data I’ve collected floating around it like a halo stitched into its fabric. And an even tinier habitat, like a tumor on this white skin. And, sitting hunched beside the habitat like a protective giant, a lone human figure, far larger than it ought to be, but one I recognize nonetheless.

  It’s me. Not me in this rude shell of a lander. Not even me as I was up there, with Ship. No, this is me as I looked before PCS wheeled me into surgery. Even through the ink-sketch I know that hair, that beard, that uniform.

  SO THIS IS YOU, says the City.

  Stretching out from me: lines connecting me to dots impossibly far away. Ship. Possibly BLACK ORCHID. SAVAGE GARDEN. Maybe even SILVER HYACINTH, wherever she is now.

  That is me.

  YOU COULDN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE A PROPER INTELLIGENCE, says the City. SO YOU JUST CUT CORNERS ON THE JOB.

  Cost of doing business, I want to say.

  The City begins to laugh. Mirth hums through the vast engine. Glow-trees burst into color like miniature suns.

  INGENIOUS, it says. MAD, BUT INGENIOUS. NO WONDER YOU STILL HAVE ORGANICS RUNNING AROUND. DEEP INSIDE, YOU STILL HAVEN’T CHANGED AT ALL, HAVE YOU? EVERY SANE CIVILIZATION I’VE MET GOT PAST ITS FLESH AGE THE MOMENT IT BEGAN TO TRAVEL BETWEEN THE STARS. BUT YOU FIGURED OUT HOW TO STRETCH YOUR ADOLESCENCE TO INFINITY.

  The laughter rolls on for an eternity.

  POOR SHEN. YOU KNOW IT TOOK ME THREE DAYS TO REWRITE SHEN TO WHERE I COULD ACTUALLY HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH IT? AND EVEN THEN THERE WAS SO MUCH BAGGAGE TO PARSE. YOU ARE CHILDREN. YOU ARE CHILDREN.