Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “But Master Faye isn’t insane,” Elyria said, sharply. “Self-interested, yes, but he isn’t insane...”

  “It is possible that the more powerful magicians manage to learn how to prevent further damage, without actually knowing what they’re doing,” the sphere said. “However, we are unable to repair the mental damage inflicted on Joshua. The operation would have almost no chance of success.”

  Joshua swallowed, hard. “Am I going to die?”

  A thought struck him. “Can’t you give me the same rejuvenation treatment you offered Master Faye?”

  “The damage is at the quantum level,” the sphere said. “It’s unlikely that rejuvenating your body will cure the damage. The simplest solution would be to copy your brain pattern and upload it into a clone body; however, reading your brain patterns might be difficult, given the level of damage inflicted on your cells.”

  “This makes no sense,” Elyria protested. “How can Master Faye be walking around seemingly sane when... this is happening to him?”

  “Quantum-level damage is often unpredictable,” the sphere said. There was a pause. “It is possible that the damage never really becomes dangerous, although we regard that as unlikely. The increasingly unpleasant behaviour of many Scions and Pillars may be a result of mental warping caused by their powers.”

  There was a pause. “Joshua,” the sphere asked, “how did you act when you first got your powers?”

  “Master Faye taught me spells,” Joshua said. “I practised with them; once I knew how to use them, he taught me more spells.”

  The sphere bobbled from side to side. Joshua was starting to realise that it was pretending to shake its head. “How did you behave?” it asked. “How did you act?”

  Joshua cringed. There were memories he wanted to forget, not share with outsiders. But if there was a problem with his body, they could help him...

  “I broke a number of rules,” he admitted, finally. “And I was beaten for it, just like any other apprentice.”

  Elyria gave him a droll look. “We have our own apprenticeships,” she said, dryly. “Which rules did you break?”

  “He taught me how to spy on people,” Joshua said, wondering if she would ever smile at him again. “I spied on a handful of girls I knew. And a bit later I cursed a boy who had picked a fight with me every week since I was nine. Master Faye whipped me until he drew blood for both actions.”

  “Curious,” Elyria said, after a moment. “There is no check on his power, yet he keeps yours firmly under control. Why?”

  “He said I needed to learn discipline,” Joshua explained. “And that as long as I was his apprentice, what I did reflected on him.”

  “It is possible that the discipline you learned helped to mitigate the damage you were doing to your body,” the sphere said. “It is also possible that your actions were driven by emotion rather than thought; the average human male, granted the ability to spy on his fellows, would certainly consider acting as you did. However, we are unable to be sure until we run Dacron through a quantum scan of his own. We would have a baseline to compare to his current status.”

  Joshua blinked. “Dacron is learning magic?”

  “And doing very well, apparently,” the sphere said. There was a long pause. “We can repair most of the damage to your body. Do you wish us to proceed?”

  “Please,” Joshua said. He held up his hand a moment later. “Will this prevent me from using magic?”

  “We do not believe so,” the sphere said. “However, it is impossible to be absolutely certain.”

  Joshua braced himself. “Do it,” he said. Healing spells always left him feeling uncomfortable, and he still had nightmares about a visit to the doctor when he’d been eight years old, before he’d come into his magic. “Get it over with.”

  There was a long buzzing sound. “Much of the damage has been repaired,” the sphere said, bare seconds later. “Customised nanotech has been inserted into your body to deal with the remaining damage. This will be followed by a standard rejuvenation package comparable to what we have offered your Master. We would advise you not to attempt to improve your body in future. It is unlikely to do you any favours.”

  Joshua stared at the sphere. “It is done?”

  “The majority of the damage has been repaired,” the sphere said, patiently. “We used manipulator fields to work on your body from the inside. The remaining damage will take a few minutes longer.”

  “Don’t ask for an explanation, or we’ll be here all day,” Elyria advised. “They love to show off.”

  “We learned it from you,” the sphere said. There was a faint hint of amusement in its tone. “You created us, after all.”

  Joshua blinked. “What are you?”

  The sphere seemed to bobble in the air before starting to explain the basic concept behind artificial intelligence. Joshua couldn’t follow half of the explanation, but it seemed clear that the spheres were operated by a single intelligence, one that humanity had created. And there was nothing like that on Darius, nothing at all.

  “Magic,” he said. The whole concept seemed insane. “Just... magic.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “The magic appears to cause technological glitching,” the AIs said. “The more complex the spell, the more extensive the glitch.”

  Dacron nodded. They’d set up the lab in the building Master Faye had offered to them, running tests from the dawn of the scientific age right up to the Confederation’s own scientific level. Once they were set up, Dacron had started to cast spells to see what stopped working. The snoops and other high technology failed almost at once. Some of the older tech lasted longer before starting to fail. The only thing that worked consistently was chemical-powered technology.

  “But none of the glitches make sense,” he said, crossly. “Why does the magic interfere with the flow of electric power, but not with the electric current in a person’s brain?”

  “Unknown,” the AIs said. He’d spent the last hour detailing the magic words he’d learned for them, a harder task than it seemed as even thinking of them tended to produce odd results. Dacron was starting to think that the real challenge for magicians was memorising them, and then not actually thinking of them when they weren’t trying to cast spells. “We assume that there is an intelligent agent behind the magic somehow.”

  Dacron nodded. At least the AIs had been able to suggest other possible magic words. The magical language didn’t seem to match anything in their databanks, but they were already analysing it and suggesting other possibilities. Each of the magic words was actually a combination of instructions to the magic, just like a primitive computer program. The real question was why something so advanced wasn’t self-aware. Or maybe it was and it was simply not interested in talking to the Confederation, or the AIs.

  That wasn’t uncommon among alien artefacts. The Knowledge of Sigma VIII was an AI, albeit one created by an advanced alien race, that had either died out or become an Elder race, rather than humanity, but it was reluctant to talk to the Confederation. It shared knowledge with those who asked for it, in exchange for additional data for its stores, yet it never discussed its own origins. Or maybe it just liked being mysterious. The AIs had wondered if the Knowledge’s creators had actually taken a different attitude to AI than had humanity, but there was no way to know. Its creators had never been identified.

  “It is possible that there is an effect on human minds,” the AIs said, and briefly ran through what they’d discovered through studying Joshua. “However, we are unable to account for the precise nature of the effects. The most likely conclusion is that they were caused by exposure to something comparable to a teleporter field, perhaps his observed self-fabrication capabilities.”

  Dacron nodded. A human would have been terrified at the prospect of damaging himself – although observed human behaviour suggested that this never actually stopped anyone – but he knew that he would return to the Gestalt. It didn’t really matter if his
clone body was badly damaged; after all, he could simply be re-embodied in a different body. Far better that he be risked than anyone else.

  “I have observed that fireballs do not burn me when I summon them,” he said, thoughtfully. “It is possible that magicians instinctively avoid hurting themselves with their own magic if they understand the danger.”

  “Fire is very understandable,” the AIs agreed. “That would also account for the damage inflicted on young Joshua through ignorance. It is possible that a more precise awareness of the human body would have allowed him to avoid damaging himself.”

  There was a pause. “We have other spells we wish you to try,” they added. “Listen carefully.”

  Dacron listened, and then cast the spells. They seemed to work very well, without problems, although the third spell prevented the radio implant from working for a chillingly long moment. Dacron watched in considerable awe as a small wooden stool became a chair, before the magic faded away and the radio came back to life. Carefully, he sat down on the chair and felt it creak under his weight. The stool had never been very large and – he assumed – it lacked the mass to make a solid chair.

  “If you alter certain variables, it doesn’t try to generate matter out of the magic field,” the AIs said, with a hint of heavy satisfaction. Dacron found it harder to understand how the spell had worked, even though he thought he understood all the variables. “We suspect that leaving those variables out would have led to the spell either taking energy from the magic field or simply scooping up matter from nearby sources.”

  “Which might be dangerous,” Dacron said, thoughtfully. The Scions were effectively isolated from the towns and cities, unless they chose to try to take over by force. It could be that Scions simply didn’t have the discipline to keep their magic under control and were forced out to learn it, or die well away from civilisation. “You could kill someone with such power.”

  “Or cripple them for life,” the AIs agreed. “We are still experimenting with the language matrix, but we believe that we understand it now. The user interface, of course, is still a puzzle.”

  “Even a silly RI can understand spoken instructions,” Dacron pointed out, dryly. RIs had processing power the earliest AIs couldn’t even imagine, but they could never make the jump into intelligence. “For all we know, the power behind magic picks its favourites and gives them access to the user interface.”

  “But what separates a magician from the rest of the population?” the AIs asked. “We have sampled thousands of humans over the last few hours; none of them were particularly different from Joshua, at least genetically. There does not seem to be a common DNA strand linking magicians together.”

  “It would be hard to be sure until we get the blood samples,” Dacron said. “Could it be that Joshua is Master Faye’s son? Or a distant relative?”

  “We do not believe so,” the AIs said. “Joshua was certain that children born to magicians developed magic at a very young age and went mad with power. He certainly didn’t go mad, although he acted poorly by our standards. We have also checked his genetic code against that of his parents and siblings, without isolating anything that makes him different from them. It is possible that the choice was completely random. An alternate possibility is that everyone can do magic, but only a handful succeed in tapping into the magic force.”

  Dacron listened absently as the AIs expounded on Joshua’s exploits as a young magician. It was hard to understand why he might have wanted to spy on girls, but then he was born to a more restrictive society than the Confederation. The Confederation asked that only consenting adults be involved; Darius had a complex network of social obligations that made it harder for young people to indulge themselves. Contraception was very limited, outside of magicians; they might not even have condoms. If they hadn’t had a high infant mortality rate, they might have suffered a major population explosion.

  “But I have no difficulty in controlling magic,” he said, finally. “Why did he have so many problems?”

  “We have questioned him about magic words, now that we have established that his powers do not work in high orbit,” the AIs said. They’d cross-checked everything Dacron had told them with Joshua, allowing them to build up a much greater dictionary of the magic language. “It seems evident that while he understands the words he uses, he does not understand the alphabet – the programming language – underneath them. Indeed, he isn’t even aware of its existence. The thought of respelling a word to produce a different effect was alien to him. That is... unusual.”

  Dacron nodded. English – which had been the basis for Standard, as well as the language spoken on Darius – had been remarkably flexible, unlike many other languages. It allowed for a certain degree of precision as well as rearranging the language and adopting words from other languages. Other, more restrictive, languages had actually impeded social development. It had been a trick commonly used by colony worlds that didn’t intend to allow technology to reappear after they destroyed their colony ship. Sometimes it worked, at least until the Confederation or someone more hostile arrived; sometimes it led to a bitter civil war years after the original landing.

  But it shouldn’t have happened to Darius. They certainly should have been capable of analysing their magic, even if modern science didn’t work on their world. Admittedly, the AIs were vastly smarter than any combination of humans, and they had plenty of other knowledge to draw on in their vast datafiles, but surely someone should have done more over a few thousand years. The more he looked at Darius, the more he thought that the whole planet had been carefully structured to prevent actual social development. It was quite likely that Warlock’s Bane, a highly-successful city, would be crushed when the next Pillar arrived.

  “That seems to be the pattern,” the AIs agreed. “And that leads to another question. Why is that the pattern?”

  They paused, significantly. “It is possible that the odd damage inflicted on Joshua’s mind might lead to paranoia, if not outright insanity,” they added. “That might explain why Scions cannot work together as a group.”

  Dacron nodded. “Humans are strange,” he said, “and to think that they created us.”

  He paused. “Do you think I should attend the meeting with the bookseller?”

  “We think it might be interesting,” the AIs said. “We will watch it for as long as we can.”

  “Good,” Dacron said. “And when do you want me back at the shuttle?”

  “Tomorrow you can work more magic there,” the AIs said. “And then your produce can be moved to the space station for analysis.”

  Dacron nodded and headed downstairs, towards where the food was being cooked by a pair of local servants. Master Faye had insisted on supplying them, probably intending to have them act as spies; Jorlem had insisted that nothing of importance was to be discussed aloud. A second problem was that they couldn’t ward the building against magical spying, even though Dacron thought he understood the theory. It would have also prevented Confederation technology from working at all.

  He took a bowl of stew and sat down to eat it, considering the problem. It was quite easy for equipment to be damaged by outside energies, but it should have been possible to analyse the energy, work out what it was and then build something to protect against it. Magic, however, seemed to be difficult to analyse. So far, nothing from a basic faraday cage to a focused force field provided any protection to modern technology. And there was no way to tell just what the magic was doing. The technology just... glitched.

  Adam had outlined a theory from studying the Ancient worlds. Reality itself didn’t work the same way on the dead worlds, he’d claimed, and then argued that technology that depended on a constant structure of physical laws would simply fail to work if those laws kept changing. It was possible that technology glitched every time the local structure of reality changed... which would tie in with the projected effects of manipulating the quantum foam. But it seemed too big for a human mind to comprehend. Could it be
possible that someone might alter a universal constant and destroy the entire universe?

  Dacron pushed the thought aside as he finished the stew and headed outside, picking up his hooded coat from behind the door. Hardly anyone walked out after dark unless they had a very good reason; there were certainly no streetlights or anything else to light the city. The shadows clung to the walls, almost as if they were alive, but Dacron had no difficulty seeing through them. They were nothing more than illusions caused by the darkness.

  High overhead, the skies blazed with twinkling stars. It was strange to realise that Darius’s population had managed to deduce that they lived on a sphere, but they had never managed to work out that the stars were other suns, just a long way away. But who knew what would have happened on Earth if there had been no moon, or asteroid belts to help bootstrap the human race into space? It was quite possible that humanity would never have been able to leave its homeworld, let alone build the Confederation. And then another alien race would have arrived and humanity would have found itself at their mercy.

  The market was closed up as he approached, the shops shut and carts moved away, or covered with sheets to protect them from overnight rain. Dacron heard the sound of snoring from one of the carts and realised that the owner was inside, either guarding his goods or simply too cheap to buy a room in an inn for the night. Or maybe he was just hiding from his wife. The bookseller’s cart was at the far end of the street, with a faint light showing from the window. Dacron muttered a quick update to the AIs and then stepped up to the cart, knocking on the door. A moment later, it opened and he was beckoned inside.

  Dacron hadn’t exactly believed the report that stated that the cart was bigger on the inside than on the outside. He had known better than to think that Elyria would lie, yet the report had been completely unbelievable. How could anyone believe it to be true? And yet the moment he stepped inside, he realised that Elyria had – if anything – understated the matter. The bookshelves ran into the distance, further than the eye could see. There were thousands of books in a cart smaller than a basic shuttlecraft.