Convergence

by David M Henley

  ‘What about Citizenship?’

  ‘Miz Betts …’

  ‘We are all people on this planet. Even animals influence the Will.’

  ‘Perhaps. Say it is an option. Whatever you have to say to get their help, say it.’

  ‘What about Pierre Jnr?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘The psis must find a way to pacify him too.’

  ‘Prime? What if they can’t?’

  ‘No one else can, Charlotte.’

  ‘I assumed you had a plan.’

  ‘A plan? No. I don’t make plans.’ Pinter smiled. ‘There’s only one way to win a card game against a telepath.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Never look at your cards.’

  ‘How does that help?’

  ‘Then the game relies solely on luck. If their advantage is that they can read my mind and thus predict my actions, then I must remove that advantage. Neither they nor I know what will happen next, so they can predict my reactions as well as I can predict theirs.’

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You shut down the Weave.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pinter answered simply.

  ‘Why would you do that? Now?’

  ‘To introduce chaos.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Is this a trick?’ she asked, squinting at him.

  He looked back at her blankly.

  ‘You say no one is watching us? No one will hear us in here?’

  ‘That’s right. Why?’

  ‘Let me ask you something.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘How is Gretel Lang?’

  ‘Gretel? She’s fine. Why is that important now?’ he asked, seeming genuinely bewildered.

  Maybe he doesn’t know. Should I tell him? It didn’t sound right in her head. Oh, Prime, you do know your girlfriend is a telepath, don’t you?

  Then an opposite thought crossed her mind. If he doesn’t know, and he is not under the control of Gretel, how would he react? Would I be ruining her plans? Everyone seems to be calling for peace. Why am I the only one resisting?

  ‘It doesn’t matter. She just crossed my mind. Alright. I agree. I will go to the Cape.’

  Whoever you are, whoever’s words you are saying, you are for peace and so am I.

  What is an unknown?

  What does it require to be unknown? Are there levels of unknowingness? Where is that blurry boundary? The smudged borderline between known and unknown? What lies in that sweet ambiguity?

  What We Can See, Milawi Ortega

  Geof tried to tell himself that it was good to have gotten away from the psi problem and be able to concentrate on one thing: Kronos. Studying Shen’s legacy was now his only focus. He followed Egon’s schedule — as organised by Egon’s ‘handler’, Lys Foster, who coordinated every minute of his day so he didn’t waste time. At first it made Egon look like her pet, the way he responded to her instructions, but Geof quickly discovered the regimen to be extremely stimulating.

  He found Doctor Shelley was a lot like Shen Li. Not physically, not at all, but in the way their unique curiosity and imagination saw questions where Geof had only assumptions. Geof had held back on the first day — as he had when with Sensei Li — but Egon was much more open and encouraging. Egon always had a way of pulling Geof into the discussion, or of involving him in plotting the next experiment. He made use of Geof’s mind and Geof liked it.

  The only times they weren’t together were for the set rest periods and when Egon had to attend to other proprietary projects. Then Geof was left to run the lab with whatever shift was on rotation.

  They had made a lot of progress in combating the Kronos material, but kept hitting the same problem of their inability to scale-up. The ‘salt’ they had synthesised was very good at degenerating the mass, in active or inert phases. However, to decompose Kronos completely required a one-to-one ratio, which meant they needed a quantity that was impossible to produce. That was progress he could report, but they needed to find some sort of accelerant before it would be of any use.

  Doctor Shelley returned from elsewhere and everyone straightened up.

  ‘Is it working?’ he asked.

  ‘It doesn’t like it, but it doesn’t kill it,’ Doctor Medforth answered.

  ‘We’re just hurting it,’ Geof said.

  ‘If you want to see it that way. I hope this isn’t rude, but you do seem to like anthropomorphising things you know. It’s a little bit primitive,’ Aaron Medforth put in.

  ‘You don’t care if it is alive or not?’

  ‘That is not quite true. If it were sentient, then I would care. Of course I would,’ Aaron said. ‘I just don’t have reason to think it is.’

  ‘Let’s bypass this argument for now. Where are we up to?’

  ‘We are at the point where we know we can hurt it, but the sheer size of its masses makes that a non-starter,’ Juanita explained.

  ‘And it might force it to seed again,’ Aaron added.

  They were nowhere. Nowhere close to having any answers.

  They used their shift time to process and run batteries of experiments. Between shifts they argued — Egon encouraged it amongst his team — but their discussions only spiralled back in on themselves until everyone forgot how each conversation had begun.

  Doctor Shelley was not to be defeated. ‘The balance of understanding versus misunderstanding is like the immune system fending off an intruder. In this case, an unknown has introduced itself into our world and we are the immune defence response trying to use what we do know to repel the invader. What does the immune system do?’

  ‘Kronos is the unknown …?’ Medforth asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, an immune system tries to reject foreign bodies, or evolve until it can defeat them.’

  ‘We are trying both these things. What I’m driving at is the nature of all things unknown. Right up until the moment we can recognise and control a force, it is an unknown. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because we simply cannot understand it.’

  ‘And I simply cannot understand,’ Doctor Baker made a little joke.

  ‘Look, it’s a big data problem all over again. Big data is both a technical limitation and a philosophical challenge. It is essentially more data than one processor can parse. If our unknown is merely a big data problem, what do we do?’

  ‘Um, I dunno … data sets, clumping, clustering and compression are ways of making data loads manageable. But still — all the data can never be processed. At least not simultaneously,’ Juanita said as the topic stepped into her field of expertise. ‘I don’t see how that brings us closer to a solution.’

  ‘A solution? No. It is not something that requires a solution. It is a law of nature and as with all such laws we gradually find ways to defy them. Like gravity.’

  ‘Egon …’

  ‘Geof.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing really, I’m just saying everything is a data problem. Even Kronos.’

  ‘Okaaayyy,’ Juanita said, enjoying stretching the word out. ‘May I suggest we go back to basics. What do we know and what don’t we know?’

  ‘Do we even know what we don’t know?’ Egon asked, refusing to leave the philosophical aspect of the session alone. ‘We are on the edge of known fact here, that is all. We have been here before. We thrive here. But I agree, let’s start over and define what we do know.’

  They began listing off the certainties they had, accompanied by accuracy ratings; that is, the probability of their being fact.

  Kronos was made by Shen Li. 95%

  Kronos consumes all life forms and non-biological materials that it encounters. 99.9%

  Kronos can exist as information on the Weave. 91%

  Kronos can be replicated without a physical transmission vector. 98%

  Kronos can be contained in an active Faraday-V cage. 78%

  Kronos is damaged by conventional weaponry
. 87%

  Kronos can be destroyed by conventional weaponry. 48%

  ‘Why have you given conventional weaponry such generous scores?’ Geof asked. ‘We don’t have the resources to scale our weapons to what is required.’

  ‘Because there is a good probability that a terminus event might have a significant impact.’ Egon rolled over to face the weaver, peering at him through goggles.

  ‘But the Mexica Kronos is beyond the scale of even a terminus-style attack.’

  ‘A single attack, yes,’ Egon acknowledged.

  ‘You would risk a multiple terminus strike? The environmental impact would be devastating.’

  ‘Quite — but imagine if Kronos is seeded in Yantz or Seaboard? That would be a blow to the Union as well. We have to find a way to stop this thing, Geof. You do recognise that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course … I just believe that if Shen Li made this thing, he made it for a reason. He had to have had some purpose in mind.’

  ‘This is hardly your sensei’s masterwork, Oz. This isn’t his prize pet. You said yourself he kept it locked away like a shameful secret. You said he was afraid of it and we can see why.’

  ‘That doesn’t change the fact that he must have had some sort of aim.’

  ‘I’m sure he did,’ Egon said. ‘But whether his intentions are reflected in his creation has not been established. Shen was a genius, yes, but he never was good at follow-through. He built the original symbiotic sludge, but it was the rest of us who made the interface work. This is the same problem again.’ Egon waggled his finger in the air. ‘Framework without interface. Without the command level. The mad fucking genius.’

  There was a pause as everyone thought about it. Servitors cleared their plates away.

  ‘What if we tried communicating with it again?’ Geof asked.

  ‘Back to this again?’ Egon raised his eyebrows. ‘What would be different this time?’

  ‘I would be. I hadn’t spoken to it before. We understand its problem now.’

  ‘Some think they do. But it doesn’t matter anyway. I agree that it would be worth trying, but we can’t. The program you spoke to was on the Weave, which has now been shut down to purge the system.’

  ‘Are you saying …’

  ‘I’m saying that that version of Kronos is gone and our efforts to entice it to “infect” a new network have not been fruitful.’

  ‘It’s gone?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  The weaver thought for a moment. When he had met with Kronos in an isolated subnet, he had been in his lodgings in Seaboard. ‘My chaise might hold a copy …’

  ‘Geof Ozenbach. I don’t know whether to report you or kiss you.’

  ‘So if there is a copy, you’ll let me talk to it? You believe me that it had a consciousness?’

  ‘Probability fourteen per cent. What you interacted with was most likely a self-reiterating ARA. A canny one, yes, but hardly sophisticated.’

  ‘I spoke to something,’ Geof insisted.

  ‘Yes. You did, but you don’t know what it was.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Geof said. ‘I admit that. That’s my point. That’s what we don’t know. You said yourself the unknowns are what we should be focusing on.’

  ‘Spoken like a true scientist. Alright. Do you have a plan?’

  ‘I haven’t thought that far.’

  ‘The last time you spoke to it, all three of the masses began moving towards you.’

  ‘No need to remind me.’

  ‘If I had no sense of reality, how would you try to introduce the concept?’ Egon asked and then answered before anyone else had a chance. ‘With AI you form a mirror, or feedback loop. We need to associate its mental form with its physical one. How do we make it realise? How do we make it self-aware?’

  ‘Are we going about this the wrong way?’ Doctor Baker asked.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Let’s agree that Kronos is a symbiot, but are we saying that it is senseless — i.e. deaf, dumb and blind — or mindless? What would happen if we gave it a mind?’

  ‘Hasn’t it taken enough minds already?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘Not like that. If Kronos is a giant symbiot with no programming — it doesn’t have a command line, in other words — then it is senseless and stupid and operating with reflexes it is not even aware of.’

  ‘Can we give it sensory feedback?’ Geof wondered.

  ‘Or, more importantly, install a command layer? Or a protocol interface?’ Egon asked.

  They all looked at Naval Bhat, a logician who had joined the team for this debate. He made them wait a long time before he answered. His head rocked back and forth on his steepled fingers as he considered. ‘Theoretically. Though that means genetic resequencing, and everything we know about genetic resequencing comes from the Örjians. It has never been tried on symbiots because it is easier to dispose of defects and make a new base.’

  ‘But how could we do it anyway? We can’t even make contact. We can’t feed it information. We can’t even decipher its language yet,’ Aaron Medforth pointed out.

  ‘Mere problems,’ Egon said. ‘Let’s line up fourteen-millilitre drops of Kronos and then try everything we can think of.’

  ‘That is like resequencing a live animal.’

  ‘It’s been done before.’

  ‘I know, that’s what I’m afraid of.’

  ‘But how will we connect?’ Aaron asked again. ‘We can’t even get anything to touch it without it being absorbed.’

  ‘And isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that telling about its nature?’ Egon posed.

  ‘What does it tell you?’ Geof asked.

  ‘That it was impossible and Shen Li should have destroyed it while he could. When it was small.’

  ‘I don’t see how the two connect.’

  ‘They connect in that maybe Shen Li had it locked up because he couldn’t solve the problem; but he kept it because he hoped he would. He thought it was worth hoping for. He couldn’t bear to destroy it.’

  In the gap, as Egon’s words trailed off, Geof was taken back to his last visit to his sensei. He saw the room and Shen Li working at his bench and … ‘Wait. I …’ Geof said. ‘I have something on the cusp …’ There was a conception in his mind that was struggling to form itself into a logical structure. ‘When I was communicating with Kronos on the Weave, it was meant to be isolated … but it can’t have been, otherwise how did its other bodies know where I was?’

  ‘There must have been a leak. A hakka perhaps,’ Naval said.

  ‘Or it might have been me.’ Geof swallowed.

  ‘I’m afraid you might be right about that.’ Egon peered up towards the ceiling. ‘Or any one of the people who were watching the experiment. Morritz’s team all had access at that point.’

  ‘No. That’s not it. The Kronos bodies were connected even when we thought they weren’t. It must connect in a way we cannot recognise.’

  ‘There were three of them loose, and the samples. Maybe it triangulated your position,’ Medforth suggested.

  ‘So, it too has its own network. Are they therefore operating as one or as individual units?’ Naval asked.

  ‘Excellent question …’ Egon started a new thought room to follow the thread.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Geof said. ‘That’s not what I’m getting at.’ Everyone waited for him to go on. ‘We know they are communicating. That means there must be some kind of transmission between them. They are communicating remotely in a way we don’t recognise or comprehend.’ He stuck one finger up and lifted a second as he framed his next statement. ‘And we know that Shen was also building what we now understand to be a psionic amplifier. Is there any chance, any chance at all, that the two are connected?’

  ‘Mark one and mark two?’ Egon asked.

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

  Egon considered this for a moment. ‘It’s possible,’ he said and looked at the others. Jaunita nodded. Aaron shrugged.

  Naval was last, his lip
s praying on the church of his hands. ‘There is a connection.’

  Together they immersed and processed orders for their teams. Egon requisitioned the data from the campus he had studying the relays. They already had the information so they only needed to complete a compositional overlay with Kronos. The results came back instantly.

  ‘Well, they’re different. But in some ways they are also very, very similar.’

  ‘Then we have to ask ourselves … and I fear even to do so,’ Geof said, ‘but could it be that Kronos is psionic?’

  The team looked at each other.

  ‘There’s an easy way to find out.’

  Within hours, Ryu had to cede the battlefield of West. Too much of the city was now disconnected and he spent the last fifteen minutes destroying as many of the minifacs and supplies as he could before he entirely lost control.

  Abe didn’t even try to keep it from Gretel. He came wearily inside and said, ‘The conflict has stopped in West.’ He was tired. His head was collapsing. ‘We lost it to him.’

  La Gréle had mixed feelings about what had taken place in West. Such terrible violence, the extent of which she had only ever seen in historical documents … and yet the psis had won. Hadn’t they?

  ‘To who?’ Gretel asked.

  ‘Pierre Jnr.’

  She found Pinter’s thoughts hard to understand. La Gréle felt panicked, alarmed and nauseated at the lives that had been lost. For him it was not such a shock. He’d seen horror like this before and lived through worse for over thirty years. This was just one more such experience which reminded him of days gone by.

  Gretel kept her mind on him as she pretended to ‘read’ her books while he went for a walk around the camp to settle his thoughts.

  Services had never suffered such a defeat before. It had lost one of the major cities of the World Union. There was no fault in the strategy of Ryu Shima, but the logistics of a sustained operation were unfeasible from the beginning; Ryu must have seen that, but made the attempt nonetheless. But it is only his first life, Abercrombie reflected.

  Even before Ryu Shima had admitted defeat and withdrawn, Pinter was ordering his weavers to quietly reconnect what they could of the networks that remained functional in West.