Ventus

by Karl Schroeder

  They denied the connection—successfully, too. Their object, they claimed, was to actually create the metaphysical Categories, as real things. They said they were going to embed the official view of Science in nature itself on Ventus, so that no heresy such as thalience could ever occur there. Wolfgang Kreiger, the team leader, said, "Science has no way to show or access the metaphysical essences supposed to lie behind appearances. If these essences do not exist in themselves, we will create them." The understanding was that they would be creating them in the image of scientific truth.

  But what if, for whatever reason, the designers were to uncouple the nano from the requirement that it use human semantic categories? What if the real agenda was to let the Ventus intelligences develop their own conceptual languages? Theorists as early as Chomsky had suggested that languages can exist that humans cannot even in principle understand. Perhaps they didn't plan for it to happen, but the Winds seemed to have developed such a language.

  All it would take would be for one of the programmers to slip a thalience gene into the Winds' design. That would explain why the self-aware nanotech that blanketed the planet grew to fruition, then suddenly become incoherent and cut off all contact with their creators.

  Marya dismissed Cadille's paper and opened her eyes. Her theory must be right. She knew it on a deep level, and apprehension and excitement made her almost skip as she moved down the tunnel.

  The corridor ended in a huge metal valve door, which was currently open. A serling with the appearance of a kindly old man waited for her inside the archive itself. "May I help you?" it inquired; since it was part of inscape, and ultimately part of the Government, it already knew why she was here. Serlings had their ways, however.

  "I'm told this is where I can find original photos and papers of the thalience riots. Also some of the original Ventus Project papers."

  The Serling nodded. "I can let you examine them, but I don't know what good it will do. All this material is available in inscape."

  Marya had already had this very conversation with the Government. Had she not come directly from Ventus itself, she doubted the giant AI that ran the Archipelago would have let her in here. These papers were ancient and priceless, after all.

  "I want to see it for myself." She had pored over it all on the trip here, but all Marya had come up with was more puzzles. The word thalience, spoken by both Axel and the Desert Voice, had convinced her that some unguessed clue remained here at the source of it all. She had gleaned nothing from inscape; this was her last chance to crack the mystery.

  "Let me see the originals," she commanded. The serling scratched his balding head, shrugged, and gestured her to follow him.

  The archive consisted of thousands of climate-controlled safety-deposit boxes. Many had tiny windows showing frozen contents; others were surrounded by thick-walled radiation screens, because they preserved ancient compact disks and other fragile data storage media. Supposedly, all the information here had been scanned into inscape long ago. Marya was skeptical; she knew from her own experience scanning Ventusian artifacts just how sloppy technicians could be.

  The serling brought her into a room whose far wall was made of glass. Low lights came up revealing several deep chairs, and glove boxes built into the glass wall. "The papers are delicate, so we store them in an atmosphere of argon gas," said the serling. "The gloves in the glovebox have force-feedback built in; if you try to crush or tear anything they'll stop you."

  It sounded paranoid—but then, the serlings were charged with preserving this information indefinitely. Even an accumulation of small accidents over millennia could destroy these delicate objects.

  Another serling moved in the dimness behind the glass. Marya settled herself in one of the chairs, and after a few minutes the second serling emerged from the gloom carrying a metal hamper. Marya savored the moment. She had never before had a valid reason to be here, looking at such original documents. These would not be inscape copies, but primary documents.

  She put her hands in the glove box. She couldn't feel the material of the gloves; it transmitted perfectly the textures of whatever it touched. She rubbed her fingers together as the serling set the box down on a table on the other side of the glass.

  Marya closed her eyes and reached out. Her fingers touched... paper, yes it was definitely paper. She picked up the top document, let out her breath in a whoosh, and opened her eyes.

  For the next half hour she happily sifted through the few records of the Thalience Academy that had survived the assault. With increasing disappointment, she discovered that indeed everything in here had been scanned perfectly into inscape, other than data records that were encrypted using keys that were now lost. There were no clues here. And some of the ancient photos were disturbing—particularly some color 2D pictures taken at a riot just weeks before the rebels took over the city center. One showed police clubbing protestors on a street. The blurred outline of a vehicle obscured the foreground; in the background was a row of shops. A sign saying PHOTO glowed above one of them; another was probably a restaurant.

  Disappointed, Marya put the papers back. A second box held records of the Ventus project. It was obvious now she was on a fool's errand; there really was more to be learned in inscape. At least, though, she would be able to tell people back home that she had held these documents in her own hands (almost) and seen them with her own eyes (really).

  Here were photos of some of the team; she remembered their names intimately. Kreiger, the mastermind of the terraforming effort; he had come up with the idea of the nanotech-driven ecosphere. There was Larry Page, the geneticist. There were dozens of others at the height of the project, all driven by a shared vision of interstellar settlement on worlds terraformed before any human set foot on them. New Edens, by the thousands, of which Ventus would be the first.

  They did not command the wealth of nations, these researchers. Although their grants amounted to millions of Euros, they could never have funded a deep-space mission on their own, nor could they have built the giant machineries they conceived of. In order to achieve their dream, they built their prototypes only in computer simulation, and paid to have a commercial power satellite boost the Wind seeds to a fraction of light speed. The Wind seeds massed only twenty kilos, but it cost nearly all their remaining money to pay for the satellite's microwave power. They were famous—in the way that romantic dreamers and crackpots often are—but no one expected the Winds to bloom and grow the way they ultimately did.

  She held each photo and paper in turn, then put it reverently down. Finally, at the bottom of the box, Marya found an image she remembered well: the single existing group shot of the project team. She picked it up.

  It felt different from the other pictures. Heavier. Curious, she turned it over. While all the other photos had been digital images printed on ordinary paper, this one was done on some kind of stiff material, glossy on the image side and smooth and waxy on the other. The glossy surface was cracked in a couple of places.

  She turned it over. A kind of watermark or stamp ran across the back of the photo: Walther Photos.

  "Serling, why is this picture different from the others?"

  "Ah, an interesting question," said the serling. They always said that when they didn't know something; it was a way of buying time while their AI widened its search for the answer. After a barely perceptible pause, the serling said, "This image was created using a photochemical camera. Photochemical cameras predate digital technology. During this era they were often used along with a holographic stamping technology to record events in ways that could not be digitally forged. The person who took his photograph must have wanted a provably authentic record of the event."

  Marya turned the picture over again. Sixty smiling academics stood on a set of stone steps. Nothing exciting about that, unless you knew the faces. But her heart was pounding again.

  She put down the photo and reached for the other box. "Where is it..." There. Marya picked up one of the riot pictu
res.

  PHOTOS.

  "Serling, how many shops were there in Hamburg at the time that could make these chemical pictures?"

  "Oh, let's see... six. Quite a few, given the times."

  She held the riot picture up, squinting at it. It was too dim in here; she closed her eyes to view the inscape version in better light.

  Above the word PHOTOS were the bottom serifs of some other letters. She couldn't prove it, but the missing word could very well be WALTHER.

  "Serling, who took this group photo?"

  "Lawrence Pakin. He was the man in charge of the Winds' psycholinguistics."

  "What records do we have about him?"

  "There is very little about him personally. He left behind a very large library of writings. Some of it is encrypted, but I have the rest if you'd like to—"

  "Wait! Some is encrypted? How?"

  "Using primitive but effective trapdoor functions. The public-key method he used makes it prohibitive to crack the code using brute force. Since we never discovered the key—"

  "Did any of the thalience people use similar codes?"

  "Most groups at that time did, Ms Mounce."

  "Has anybody ever tried using one of the thalience keys to open Pakin's records?"

  "I have no record of that. They assumed..." The serling's voice changed. "We assumed it was Pakin's personal code. There is nothing linking him to the thalience movement."

  The serling's new voice was that of the Archipelagic Government. It must have been listening in. Marya was now talking to the oldest, most powerful human-based god in the galaxy. Unfazed, she asked, "Have you got any of the keys of the Hamburg thalience conspirators?"

  "Yes. I assume you want to apply them to Pakin's files and see what we get?"

  "Well, yeah."

  "I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Pakin was connected with the thalience movement, but here goes," said the Government. "If the key works, you'll see the file contents in inscape."

  Marya closed her eyes—

  —And opened them on a vista of text, diagrams and charts— hundreds of pages flooding out of ancient time and into her hands.

  Eyes closed, fists punching over her head, Marya danced about the room and sang a wordless song of triumph.

  §

  Axel hoped she was in the hotel. He took the steps three at a time, unable to wipe the grin off his face despite the way it alarmed the other tourists. He was going to savor this moment, he knew; this was the sort of discovery that made him feel like more than just a big dumb mercenary. He was more than hired muscle—ha!—and this would prove it to Marya.

  So when the door slid aside, and he caught sight of her in mid-pace in the center of the room, he opened his mouth quickly and—

  "I've got it!" they said simultaneously.

  He stopped. She stopped.

  "What?" he said.

  "Huh?" she said.

  "No really, I—" "I was right all along, you see, about the—"

  Both stopped again.

  This time, they watched each other warily for a moment, before Axel finally stepped inside, letting the door close, and said, "I know the secret of the Flaw!"

  Marya crossed her arms. "Me too. It's thalience."

  "No, it's DNA."

  Another wary look.

  "Ahem." Axel chose to be gracious. He found a deep couch and plunked himself on it. So she thought she'd found the secret, huh? Well, he'd hear her out then floor her with his revelation.

  "Shoot," he said, with a magnanimous wave of his hand.

  Marya retreated behind the suite's bar. She began to rummage in the cupboards there. "Well, this calls for champagne," she said. "The secret was staring us in the face all along. But nobody knew where to look!"

  As she told him about her discovery of Pakin's secret encryption key, Axel's confidence began to waver. He had been so sure... No, he was right. He had the facts in his inscape files.

  "...Pakin knew that the whole Ventus project was an attempt to actualize the semantic categories of the world as physical things. A tree knows it's a tree, a cloud that it's a cloud. This ran totally at odds to the way the Archipelagic Government was designed, of course; there, data is internalized in an inscape we all have mental access to. Ventus was an attempt to fulfill the Platonic-Pythagorean dream of essences behind appearances, right? But what Pakin realized was that doing this could limit the flexibility of the Winds. The terraforming might not succeed if the Winds limited themselves to a human-centric worldview. Since he was a convert to thalience already, it was a small step for him to introduce a new language-game to their programming—you see, that's why they became "advocates" for the physical objects they inhabit. The Ventus project was supposed to physically manifest a human-centric metaphysics, but what Pakin did was cause the Winds to create their own, inhuman metaphysic. In trying to terraform Ventus, they invented new ways of thought that worked better than the ones we'd given them. They stopped thinking like us. Which is why they won't talk to us!"

  She beamed in triumph as she slammed a glass of champagne down in front of him.

  "Well." He picked up the glass and regarded it. "They talked to Turcaret, though."

  "So he claimed."

  "Well." He rallied. "But they could talk to him; I found out how."

  She raised an eyebrow. "Do tell?"

  Ooh, there she went again—the smug academic amused at the antics of the soldier of fortune. Axel smiled brittley at her and took a swig of champagne without tasting it. He put the glass down, and said, "Turcaret's DNA is significantly different from the Ventus standard."

  "Really?" she indulged.

  "Well, first off, he has some sort of extra neural wiring in his auditory/visual lobes in pretty much the same places as Armiger put his into Jordan. It's a kind of biological radio. Secondly, in all other respects he's an archaic—his DNA matches the Human Genome Project norm established in 2013."

  "Meaning?"

  "You and I don't match that norm. Nobody does nowadays—not even Jordan. We all have DNA that matches the 2219 norm or later—with all the dangerous recessive traits removed. Ancient diseases like..." he groped for an example. "Well, I don't know what they were, but they were awful, and they were still there in the archaic norm. The point is, Turcaret matches that norm, while according to your institute's random studies of modern Ventusians, everybody else matches the 2219 norm—but none of the later iterations."

  Marya said nothing, but curled up in a chair opposite and sipped at her champagne. She tilted the glass to indicate he should continue.

  "Turcaret represents the DNA norm at the time that the first colony ship was sent to Ventus," said Axel. "It was sent out in 2095; that's just before the Hamburg insurrection, when most of the Ventus records were destroyed. But they knew the terraforming was working then, and a few of the original members of the project participated in the colony effort. I checked and there's records of "genetic surgery" being done on all the colonists before they went out. Everybody always assumed that was to remove genetic diseases and deficiencies; but Turcaret's DNA shows no alterations from the archaic except for this one neural enhancement. See what I'm saying?"

  She put down the glass. "The first colonists were genetically modified to be able to speak to the Winds."

  He nodded vigorously. "Whereas the next—and it was the last—wave of colonists didn't set out until a hundred years later, after most of the original Ventus project records had been lost and all its originators were dead. Those colonists had DNA that matched the 2219 norm, like Jordan and the majority of the population on Ventus now."

  "I've never heard of the biological radio thing," she said. "People have looked for such a thing, but they never found it..."

  "Not in the samples they took," said Axel. "Because it's a rare trait, limited to isolated populations—or inbred ones, like Turcaret's family.

  "Turcaret could talk to the Winds. So can Jordan. It's this biological radio that's the key. That's the Flaw."
He sat back, toasting her ironically with his glass.

  "No..." She hunched forward, scowling at the floor. "That's not the Flaw."

  Axel threw up his hands.

  "But neither is mine!" Marya hopped to her feet—her toes, actually—and began pacing.

  "By your account Turcaret couldn't get any useful information out of the Winds. My guess is all he had was limited contact with the mecha—which by your descriptions is exactly what Jordan has too.

  "So how about this scenario," she said, swirling her champagne. "The first colonists arrive, and they almost die out. They can speak to the Winds, but the Winds don't understand them. So they struggle for a hundred years, until the survivors have been knocked back to a hunter-gatherer existence. The second wave arrives and thrives, but only because the first has done all the rebuilding by the time they get there. The new arrivals can't talk to the Winds at all.

  "We know the first wave almost dies out, because the genes that have come down to us are almost exclusively from the second population. And yet, it was only the first wave that had the bioradio you found. Ergo..."

  "Ergo, the bioradio didn't work for some reason. Or it wasn't enough. And the second wave didn't have it at all." Now Axel was on his feet too. She was grinning, and he knew he was too.

  He took the opportunity to top up their champagne.

  "And that means..." She paused dramatically.

  "Say it! Say it!"

  "There are two Flaws!"

  "Yes!" He grabbed her arms and danced her in a circle. Since he was still holding his champagne, he spilled some; it vanished somewhere within the precincts of her holographic gown.

  "And that," he finished, "is why nobody's found the Flaw. In fact they may have found one or the other at various times, but never both."

  "Ventus has been studied by dozens of groups," she said. "They all gave up, and they didn't all share their data.