by Linda Nagata
The group of spiders advanced erratically, hurrying forward only to stop, back up, exchange a few taps with one another, or with another group moving in the opposite direction, before scurrying forward again, so that it took several minutes to reach the first pond.
Here the group broke up. The original trio continued on across the flooding dikes, but Ela’s spider plunged into the water, disappearing beneath a surface boiling with rain.
“Ela!”
She jumped, startled by the distant shout. Turning, she peered through the rain and saw Ky Xuan Nguyen running toward her without hat or poncho, slipping as he dodged the toddling spiders that crowded the muddy road.
“Ela! What have you been doing?”
He skidded to a stop in front of her, grabbing her shoulders as if he expected her to run away. There was panic in his eyes. “Are you all right?”
“Let go of me!” She pushed his hands away. “Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Mother Tiger said you were—” He broke off, looking her up and down as if he hadn’t really seen her before.
“Yes?” She wondered if he had been dreaming of some unearthly vision that had driven him out into the rain.
He wiped at the droplets on his upper lip. “Mother Tiger suffered a failure,” he explained. “A temporary failure. Its resources were overtaxed—”
“Mother Tiger?” she interrupted, incredulous.
“Yes. During a communications project undertaken at your direction.”
“Oh.” Ela looked away, shivering a little as a thread of rainwater found its way down her neck.
“A communications project, Ela,” he said, stepping closer, one hand raised as if to touch her again. “What could I think? Your LOVs have expanded into a band across your forehead. Hundreds of them. I have heard how Virgil’s partner died. The woman—”
“Gabrielle.”
“Yes.”
She turned back, and was startled to see Virgil standing behind Ky, wrapped in a black poncho, the lens of his farsights gleaming green beneath his hood.
“I knew there was a danger,” Ela said, looking from one to the other. “But Mother Tiger was with me.”
“Then it was a cognitive circle?” Virgil asked. “With Mother Tiger translating?”
“Yes.”
“And it worked?”
“Yes. It went well.”
“You might have been lost,” Ky insisted. “Overwhelmed. Used up.”
“It didn’t happen.”
“Don’t do it again.”
She gazed at him sadly. “You can’t ask me that. Ky, you don’t even have LOVs.”
He flinched, but what could he say? She could see the fear on his face.
Virgil stepped closer. “What did you learn?” he asked her.
Ela smiled. “I learned we can talk to them. We can understand one another, at least on some basic level. They’re clever, but they’re not like us. They’re nothing like us. From their beginning, LOVs were selected to process information and solve problems. Right?”
Virgil nodded.
Ela felt her smile widen. “I gave them a problem to solve. The communications project that taxed Mother Tiger—that was her effort to translate my ideas.”
In a strained voice Ky asked, “What problem did you submit?”
“I asked if the same structural LOVs used to form a spider’s legs might be used to form something much larger—like a platform to keep my tent above the water.”
For a moment neither man spoke. Then Virgil blinked, stirred. “What answer did you get?”
“The answer was yes.”
Ky tipped his head back, letting the rain slide over his bare forehead, his smooth cheeks. “It goes too fast,” he said. “We do things, having no idea what their effects will be. Dr. Gabrielle Villanti is dead. Did she anticipate that? Did she anticipate that her actions would accelerate the cognitive development of E-3 and ultimately, drive it to destroy itself? There is a limit to how far we can see, but none of us are even looking anymore.”
Ela’s mood shifted. It was a LOV-amplified reaction, a flare of heat and fury. “Is that why you’re afraid of the LOVs, Ky? Do you tell yourself that if only you had left me on the beach your life would still be safe and predictable? If that’s what you wanted, Ky Xuan Nguyen, you should not have made yourself big-man uncle to the Roi Nuoc.”
“Ela, come on,” Virgil said. “It’s not a simple—”
“It is simple. You should not be afraid, Ky, because you are condemned already if we lose.”
Ky’s smile was cold and false. “Unless I cut a deal? It’s what you’re thinking.”
“Shouldn’t I think it?”
“You should think of other things. Like why you insist on rash behavior, always pushing the LOVs on to something more unsettling. More challenging. You refuse to give the world time to accept us. Instead you give them more reason to reject us.”
Ela shrugged, for she could not easily deny this, and still she knew Ky’s assessment was flawed. “You think to win official approval. But we are criminals, Ky. We are dangerous—”
“We are revolutionaries! Not criminals. Once we persuade the UN to recognize our petition—”
“You won’t persuade them! Wake up, Ky. Look around. Look what we have made.” Her own gaze lifted to the landscape beyond him. Under the night’s heavy clouds hundreds of ghost lights could be seen, riding on spider shapes that did not belong to this world. Her own brow glittered with alien thought. “Ky, you will never know what the LOVs truly are until they are part of you. You are a most excellent negotiator. You are the only reason we are still here. But at most you are buying us time. If we do nothing else, we will lose. Finally the UN and the IBC and the officials in Hanoi will stop squabbling and agree it is best—most humane—to be rid of us. We can’t let them do that. That’s why we have to push, and keep on pushing, until they cannot get rid of us. Only then will they accept our existence.”
“She’s right,” Virgil said.
All of Ela’s words had scarcely touched Ky, but those two words from Virgil—they hit him hard. She saw it in his eyes.
Virgil must have sensed it too. “You see it, Ky, don’t you?” he asked gently. “There’s no time to do things right.”
Ela nodded. “Really, we are so lucky. We are the first to know a nonhuman mind. An Earth alien. I want to know all I can of what that means, and I want to share it with everyone—whether they approve or not. I want to make it real for them.” Then she smiled as she finally realized her own truth. “And I want to scare the shit out of anyone who thinks we are all there ever will be. What do you want, Ky? Why are you here?”
Bitterly, he said, “Because there were a few things I failed to foresee.” But then he looked past her, his gaze following the spiders that still scuttled between the ponds and waded in the shallows. It was a bizarre vista, its meaning unreachably alien, but as he took it in, his face warmed with a cramped smile. “I never imagined anything like this. It goes to show … how poor we must be at prediction.”
“Too many variables,” Virgil said.
“And too little data.” He shook his head against the weight of raindrops clinging to his eyelashes and hair. “I am afraid for the Roi Nuoc. I thought they belonged to me. I thought they were my project, my social engineering experiment, but they don’t listen. They are exactly what I wanted them to be. Adventurers.”
“Alien,” Ela said.
Ky chuckled in bitter humor. “Yes, I said that, didn’t I? They are alien. Maybe all children are, born into a world so different from the one that welcomed their parents. They don’t fear change. They don’t see the LOVs as a threat to their future, but only as an interesting element among an infinite set of possible futures. An opportunity to be seized and ridden—”
“Oh shit,” Virgil interrupted. “That’s right.”
chapter
29
SURPRISE HAD FORCED his words. Now Virgil had to explain. He looked
from Ky to Ela. “The Roi Nuoc don’t pass up opportunities, do they?” He spoke over the steady sizzle of rain against his hood. “They’ll want to try a cognitive circle too.”
He watched Ela embrace the dilemma in a moment of flash-understanding. Her eyes went wide. Her chin dropped like a fighter’s so that the hood of her poncho shadowed her farsights and hid the LOVs that arched across her forehead. “Hush!” she commanded him. “They’ll hear you.”
“Yes exactly.”
Ky didn’t get it. Ela had unbalanced him. He wasn’t up to speed, and he knew it. Soaked and shivering, his skin unnaturally pale, he turned to Virgil with a resentful gaze—”What exactly are you saying?”
“Just that it took only one cognitive circle to freeze the ROSA,” Virgil said. “What will happen if a hundred sessions take off at once?”
It was possible. There were no secrets among the Roi Nuoc. What one saw and heard, all others might see and hear too, thanks to their web of farsights.
Ela was part of that web. Her activities must have commanded the attention of any Roi Nuoc who was awake. Even now, some among them would be watching, listening, looking for advantage. They were competitive and fearless. It might be no more than minutes before some decided to run the experiment themselves.
“Is there a way to ban these cognitive circles?” Virgil asked. “Ky?”
The fingers of his right hand were tapping furiously. “I’m trying!”
Virgil turned half-away, whispering for Mother Tiger’s apparition. The tiger shadow crawled, dreamlike and immense, up out of the saturated ground. “Show me a scan,” Virgil ordered. “A fast circuit of all active farsights.”
Images flashed past his gaze, scenes set in a darkness that everywhere seemed alive with weirdly glowing blue-green light, cast by the globes, but also by human faces whose eyes had been replaced by ribbons of virtual LOVs. “It’s too late,” Virgil said. “It’s begun. There are cognitive circles everywhere.”
As if to confirm it, his farsights went black. It was a state that lasted only a moment before a sigh whispered through the audio and the screen became clear: no frames, no lists, no icons, no input of any kind were left on the display. The power switch might have been toggled off.
Virgil held his breath, waiting for the system to come back up.
It did not.
Without his farsights, the night was very dark.
“Virgil,” Ky said, “can you contact your original ROSA?”
“I don’t know.” He started tapping a string of code. “Mother Tiger annexed it—”
“I can’t see a thing!” Ela said. “… except spiders. So many of them! Ky—”
Virgil turned. Without nightvision he could see no spiders at all. Only the globes were visible, floating like ghost lights a foot and a half above the ground, or blurred beneath the water.
“I’m going to follow them back,” Ela said, “and get my other farsights from the tent—”
“Shit,” Virgil swore, flinching back and almost losing his balance as his screen flooded with harsh green light. He blinked at Iris’s tiny Greek goddess icon. “Hey, I’m up. Iris is working.”
Ky nodded, his own lens glowing again. “I’m up too, with an outside ROSA.”
“I’m going,” Ela said, taking a half step away and sliding in the mud.
“Wait.” Virgil stepped after her. “Do you know what to do? We need to find each cognitive circle, and turn off whatever farsights are involved—”
“That will break Mother Tiger’s link,” Ky said. “But how can we search nine square miles of reservation?”
“The Roi Nuoc will search,” Ela said. “Alert everyone you see. They can alert others. Like a chain letter, but by voice. Now hurry! You know what happened to Gabrielle when she stayed too long in a circle.”
Virgil felt a cold trickle of rain against his back. He knew too well.
Ela took off along the little road, running in tiny, mincing, dancer’s steps as she darted from one wandering spider to the next, like a human pencil completing a dot-to-dot puzzle. Ky stared after her. “When the Roi Nuoc awake, they are going to panic.” He gestured at the road, in the direction opposite the one Ela had taken. “I’ll go this way. Be sure to tell everyone you see to spread out. Cover as much territory as we can.” He took a step. Then he hesitated, glancing over his shoulder at Virgil. “You’ve seen my mistake, haven’t you? I should never have made the Roi Nuoc dependent on a single system.”
KY AND Ela had taken the road, so Virgil decided to strike out between the ponds. He’d gone only a few steps when he started questioning his decision. The ground felt like it was dissolving under his feet. Hardly any separation remained between the ponds. He slogged through mud that clutched at his ankles, slipping and sliding in his sandals as he worked his way across the backs of eroded dikes. Alone in the dark, it was easy to imagine the river as a sentient thing, oozing up from the ground to meet the falling rain and the rising ocean in some sinister plot to swallow the world in a slow tide of water.
A tapping spider approached along the back of a narrow dike. Virgil stepped aside to give it room to pass, and the saturated ground gave way beneath him. He slid down, riding an underwater avalanche of fine-grained silt, until he stood thigh deep in the water. The spider scuttled past, taking no notice of him. He watched it go by, wondering how many cognitive circles Mother Tiger was engaged in. How much had the ROSA learned? More than he might ever know, Virgil realized. Unless it had been caught in a web of infinite calculation, striving to decode the meaning of every microsecond flash across a hundred million LOVs.
Did the ROSA have an error-correction system that would let it escape a near-infinite task? And if it did, what would it be like when it emerged? Mother Tiger was like no other ROSA Virgil had ever encountered. It was a complex entity existing on many servers. It already seemed to be eroding the barriers dividing ROSAs from sentient beings. Could its interaction with the LOVs push it all the way over?
He climbed up onto the dike again. It was tempting to retreat to the road, but a glance back showed that he had already come more than halfway through the pond complex. A grove of banana trees offered shelter on the other side, so he pushed on, head down as he watched the placement of every step.
He didn’t look up again until he was climbing a slight rise to the banana grove. He was startled to glimpse a petite figure moving among the trees, slender and shy, disappearing as soon as he saw it. Then another sprite, slightly taller, leaned into view.
“Hey!” Virgil called. “There’s been trouble. Mother Tiger’s in trouble!”
They peeked out again, two little girls clinging to each other, their eyes wide with confusion and terror. They watched him through their lifeless farsights as he tried to explain what had happened to Mother Tiger. Could they even see him in the dark? He told them what they must do, then asked if they understood.
One of the little girls answered—in Vietnamese.
“No English?” Virgil asked.
She shook her head.
Virgil thought for a moment. Then he tapped his fingers to open a link. “Ky.”
“Here.”
“They don’t speak English.”
Ky’s image scowled. Then he nodded shortly. “Lend your farsights. I’ll talk.”
It was a quick exchange, and then the girls vanished on separate paths, feeling their way like spiders. He listened to their shrill voices calling out ahead of them to their hidden friends.
Ela came on-line. “This can’t go on long,” she said in encouraging tones. “The globes have no way to store the nutrients they need. They can’t be out of the water for more than a few minutes.”
She should have been right, but minute after minute dripped past, and Mother Tiger still did not recover.
Virgil slogged on through the mud, up to his knees at times. His breath whistled in and out of his lungs. Every few steps he stopped and the rain, falling straight down, dripped off his hood in a sparkling curtain. “Ro
i Nuoc!” he would call into the night. “Roi Nuoc!” Then he would add the words Ky had given him: “Me Cop ðang gâp nguy hiȇm. Chúng mình phai giúp cúu Me Cop.” “Mother Tiger is in danger and we all need to help.” He searched groves of trees for hammocks. He rattled the tents pitched in pastures or on the margins of ponds and rice paddies. Many of the kids were still asleep and his shouting woke them so that he came upon them in their first moments of terror after they discovered the empty screens of their farsights. He would comfort them as he could. He would have them view Ky’s recorded spiel. Then he would move on.
Once Virgil heard the engine of a distant truck, grinding as it fought the mud. It was a welcome sound, for he guessed that Ky had persuaded the army to help.
Ky linked every ten minutes or so, to check Virgil’s status, and to relay reports of more and more cognitive circles uncovered. Dozens of the Roi Nuoc had imitated Ela, but as she had predicted, none of the circles lasted for long because the spiders could not survive more than a few minutes out of the water. As their nutrients were used up, they retired, breaking the circles long before any kids could come to harm.
“So why hasn’t Mother Tiger recovered?” Virgil asked as he paused for breath in the middle of a flooded pasture.
“Because something is still occupying its attention.” Ky looked grim, a little head-and-shoulders image caught in Virgil’s farsights. “I checked with the resident servers. There is nothing wrong with the platform or the software. The ROSA is busy. That’s all they can tell me.”