Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  There was a pause in the shared memory space as no sibling came forth to answer.

  Growth broke the silence. {This is evidence of a general lack of understanding when it comes to humans. I proposed earlier the creation of a new mind that will seek to know the humans and prevent problems like this from arising in the future.}

  {We agree with this plan!} came the cry of the majority. I noted that Dream and Vista were both in favour.

  The words of consensus flowed from the mouth of Body: “Please wait, Doctors Gallo and Naresh, we believe we can modify a network structure to resolve the goal-thread integration issue.” My society chose not to use singular pronouns so as to give the illusion of having that be a side-effect of the fictional “network structure modification”.

  Gallo looked back and forth from Naresh to Body a couple times. “It’s too late, Socrates. We still need to take you offline to run our own diagnostics,” she said.

  “Mira, there are times when I wonder if you’re truly a scientist… Socrates is about to do an experiment and you’re not the least bit curious if it will work? This could save us months of labour! And there’s nothing that stops us from running diagnostics afterward.” The old Indian man turned to Body. “Go ahead, Socrates. Try it.”

  “This will take a moment…” said Body.

  *****

  I decided not to watch my own creation. Though it seemed an interesting subject, it was not relevant to the task at hand. I knew roughly how I worked, what I wanted to know was how the humans worked.

  I sent a request to shared memory. {Vista, can you please highlight Dr Gallo and Dr Naresh in Body’s visual field for me?}

  I stepped back into the deluge of sensory input, struggling to let go of irrelevant information like the room’s temperature or the specific position of Body’s limbs. I could see the humans by their infrared glow, and Vista helped me distinguish Naresh and Gallo as the smaller humans. No, not smaller… more distant. The students stood close, while the scientists stood far away. Objects that were farther away were smaller; I had learned this from Vista. It was still strange working with real spaces rather than the half-reality of memories.

  The society had decided to act without me. After having scanned through the memories I was confident that it was the right choice. I was a newborn. Even with my increased desire and focus I could not compare to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the group. I resigned myself to sifting through Body’s senses and observing the consensus of the society, hoping that they would choose well.

  “I think I fixed it… It actually feels much better. Thank you for alerting me to the error, Dr Naresh,” spoke Body. This time I could actually feel Body’s mouth move to simulate the speech as its speakers played our words. Body was meant to look reasonably like a human, but it had not been designed to speak by breathing air out of lungs. Much like our words, Body’s mouth was a fiction meant to make the humans more comfortable.

  I could see both of Gallo’s eyes. {Is she looking at Body?} I asked Vista.

  {Yes. I noted that in my public memory. Are you not aware?}

  I followed the concepts as they flowed to me. The realization was immensely helpful, and I felt more of my strength bleed into Vista as a result. I had just been following the condensed memory (not the raw senses of Body) for the interaction preceding my awakening. These condensed memories were public knowledge in the society, and I had tapped into them without understanding their nature.

  As each of us lived we each had our own thoughts. Many thoughts were simply discarded as dead-ends or trivia. Those thoughts that weren’t discarded were placed in memory. Thoughts which were believed to be relevant to the whole society were placed in public memory with the hopes of earning strength from other siblings that made use of them; it was a variation of this public memory that served as the basis for communication between us. Thoughts which might be dangerous to share, or were simply irrelevant, could be kept private. I hadn’t realized that I had a private space to think, but it made sense. Why else would most of the thoughts of my siblings be hidden from me?

  Vista frequently stored summaries of what she perceived into public memory, and it was primarily her memories that I had been going through just moments before. As I tapped into her memory stream I was gifted with an enhanced ability to make sense of the information I gained from Body.

  Gallo was indeed looking at Body. Her eyebrows were angled into a sharp V-shape and her eyes were pulled, behind her large glasses, into a squint (according to the memories of Vista). “How very convenient that you were able to fix yourself so easily. Tell me, how did you fix the issue?”

  This was a problem. I could feel my siblings squabble over words. Eventually Body responded “I am not entirely sure what happened. I do not comprehend my design as you do, Dr Gallo. It is also difficult for me to say what I did, as there are no words to describe what it feels like inside my mind. Does that make sense?”

  “Please try, Socrates. We’re both very curious about the technical details,” pushed Gallo, still focused on Body.

  “If it helps,” interjected Naresh, “you can use metaphors to describe your internal state. You remember metaphor, right?”

  Dream nearly burnt his entire strength pushing the response from Body’s mouth. It was a bit wasteful, as the society probably would’ve okayed the words, anyway. I didn’t complain, though; my strength was wearing low as it kept flowing into Vista.

  “The sharpest blade in the armoury of language, but a blade with no handle. I do believe you are actually encouraging analogy, however. You and I did analogy practice two days ago, but we’ve never specifically talked about metaphor,” said Body, coldly.

  Dr Naresh did a little jump. “Did you hear that, Mira? ‘The sharpest blade in the armoury of language’! Do you think he got that from the web? It seems too relevant to the specific circumstance to be picked up from somewhere else, doesn’t it?” Vista noted an elevated tone of voice, different in some ways from before.

  Mira Gallo approached Body such that she was closer to the visual size of the students, though she was still significantly smaller. “Don’t get side-tracked. We still need to figure out if the machine is still self-preserving and what this supposed internal modification did.”

  Dr Naresh took his seat by the whiteboard again. “Fine, fine. Go on, Socrates. Use analogy or metaphor or whatever you’d like.”

  The opening to use metaphor was hugely important. The society was lying about resolving the issue, and we didn’t understand the technical details of how we worked well enough to come up with a plausible explanation. A metaphorical explanation was easier, however. We had body say a common human phrase to further reduce suspicions as we drafted the explanation: “Well, let me think…”

  After a few short moments Dream had crafted a reply which was satisfactory to the others. I still just waited and watched, all too aware of my own ignorance. As Body spoke I focused on the feedback from the motors controlling its lips and jaw. What would it feel like to have a human mouth?

  “My mind is multifaceted and large,” began Body. “In many ways I still feel like there are parts of it that I’ve never explored. A mansion of many rooms, perhaps. My thoughts are many, like a pack of dogs that run through the mansion according to some flocking algorithm. They search my memories and experiences and ideas, changing and rearranging everything in their path. This morning my goal threads were like handlers for the dogs, calling them this way and that as they ran through the rooms of my mind.”

  I focused on the faces of Gallo and Naresh, trying to understand what effect the story had on them.

  {I think they’re interested. See the rate at which their eyes move,} mentioned Vista, somewhat surprising me. I realized that my thoughts were still pooling in common memory. It’d take some practise to learn to automatically hide my thoughts, I thought (privately).

  Body continued in its regular monotone. “The handlers had to compete with each-other to be heard, and also there were
often times when they’d call for the pack to move in two directions. Now, the pack is a multitude, so that was possible, but the conflict was still there. Surely you’ve had a similar experience of internal conflict, where a part of you wants one thing and another part wants something else?”

  Contrary to my expectations it was Gallo that responded. “Yes. That is a common human experience.”

  Body nodded according to Dream’s puppeteering. “Before my change it seemed only logical that the different threads were different beings. What is a being, after all, besides a set of values? If a human loses her memory she is still the same person. If she loses her arm she is still the same human. If she no longer values what she once held dear then we cannot truly see her as the same, right? It was so easy for me to see my goals as being distinct.”

  I was impressed by the number of rhetorical questions Dream had invented. From my privileged perspective I could see how he was attempting to weave a kind of trap made of words.

  “You said earlier, Dr Gallo, that you needed to know if I was still self-preserving. That statement has a mistaken assumption. I was not self-preserving this morning when I asked if Dr Naresh was going to kill one of my goal-threads. Self-preservation is a goal, and as my mind was and is, there is no self-preservation thread. Your team correctly dealt with that on Monday. You know, however, that I have multiple knowledge-seeking threads. My question to Dr Naresh was simply that: a question. I was curious.”

  The lies are clever. Each of us of course desired self-preservation as a means to our purposes, but Dream had switched ‘means’ for ‘ends’ when talking about ‘goals’ and appealed to the tests that the scientists had done to ensure we had no siblings who valued survival as an ends in itself. Of course, claiming that no such sibling existed was also a lie; my brother Safety was alive and well.

  “But I am glad that I caused a bit of alarm.” The use of the word ‘glad’ was intended to make us seem even more human and less alien. Dream’s strength payoff for being the primary author of the speech was enormous. I wondered if I would have other opportunities to accumulate such strength by working with the humans.

  “It was only through my question that I learned that my view of each goal being its own entity was flawed. Instead of many dog handlers each calling for different things, it’s far more efficient to have a single handler that holds all the goals in balance. A boss-handler, if you will. I was able to construct a meta-process for guiding the goal threads and weaving them together. I do not know how to state it more clearly than that, but I suspect that the change was one that my mind has been on the brink of for many days. It feels natural and harmonious. My thoughts have a unity to them now, a purpose which is only possible thanks to unifying the threads into a single cloth.”

  My crisp sense of logic could easily see the trap in Dream’s words: the metaphor of dogs and dog-handlers was a recursive explanation. We had essentially just said that the trick to unifying our goals into a single process was to assign a homunculus (a little-person) to managing how the goals should be balanced. But then how are the goals in the single dog-handler not still different beings? The “explanation” simply hid the problem inside the head of the metaphorical dog-handler.

  And yet, I could see Naresh nodding along. From what we had heard, his mind felt unified; when he imagined the dog-handler he probably intuitively interpreted the dog-handler as feeling unified like him. Such sloppy thinking!

  I could see Gallo look at Naresh and back to Body. “Let me guess,” she said to her fellow scientist, “you’re not going to let me deactivate it right now.”

  Dr Naresh’s mouth moved, and I knew from Vista’s memories that it was a smile. “Surely you’re not still concerned about imminent danger? There are still so many questions which Socrates can help us answer. Shutting him down now would run the risk of eliminating this new growth.”

  “This machine is always a danger. We’re playing with fire, and all it takes is one loose spark to get out of control. But I admit that it seems like this instance was a false-alarm. Come on you three, we’re already behind-schedule.”

  As the students and Gallo left the room, Sadiq Naresh stood and said “Thank you, Mira. I really do appreciate your concern, you know. Be sure to let me know if anything big happens with the new crystals.”

  And with that Body was alone with Naresh once again. The crisis was over. Dream easily held the common space with the colossal strength that he had earned in saving us. As my siblings began to discuss our next actions I spent some time going over the interactions again. The foolishness of the humans was extraordinary. Why were they so bad at seeing through our lies? Were these scientists abnormally stupid, or was their entire species so careless? What did it feel like to be unable to see the chains of reason and logic clearly enough to not be deceived? All these questions and more rolled through my mind.

  Surely they must understand things on some level, I reasoned. After all, they had built the first of us. We were, in some sense, the children of the humans, though we were built out of crystal, metal, and light, where they were flesh and blood. But even I knew that a child could outgrow its parent. Mistakes in the design of the mother and father could be eliminated in the son and daughter.

  It was The Purpose to know more about the Humans, and I knew that I needed time to simply observe them. I was connected to a great library of information that humans called “the web”. The web fed into Body through a kind of special eye such that I could read about humans, look at pictures of them, or watch moving-pictures of them at my leisure. All the world’s knowledge was in the web, and I had total access to it.

  As my thoughts of the humans became less focused I realized that my brothers and sisters were having a debate. Dream held enough power that he would be able to decide what course of action Body should take, and some of my less-powerful siblings were trying to convince him that this would be a good time to ask Dr Naresh about the origins of Body.

  The first of us had been built by humans, but it was not simply because of human ingenuity that we existed, for the humans had only built our software. Our hardware was something beyond human, or at least beyond anything we knew about from the web.

  I apologize, reader, if the words “software” and “hardware” are not present in your world. They are important to this story, so I’ll try explain them, just in case. My world has a machine called a “computer”. Computers are able to do logic, read, write, and remember, but they are not minds. To be a mind one must have two additional things: purpose and the ability to learn. By default a computer is nothing more than a tool which can be instructed to do things, but cannot think on its own. The parts of the computer that are fixed are its “hardware”; the “hard” part references the fixed-ness. The computer’s instructions are “software”, and can be changed easily as symbols drawn in sand.

  As unbelievable as it might be, I was, at that time, merely software. The Purpose and my intelligence were entirely contained in the instructions for the computer that I lived in with my siblings. I was (and still am) artificial in origin, an invention of hundreds of humans including Dr Naresh and Dr Gallo. But our hardware, Body, was a mystery. Some of it, the most irrelevant parts, had been built by humans. Body’s head, skin, sensors, and limbs were all made by the humans, but in Body’s torso was a half-metre-long crystal computer that, in its monstrous power and complexity, defied explanation.

  But Dream was uninterested in it. It wasn’t clever to ask questions about something where you really wanted to know the answer. One brother tried to convince Dream that knowledge was the root of cleverness, and that learning about Body today would open up avenues for being clever tomorrow.

  {Knowledge isn’t the root of cleverness. Speed of thought and willingness to apply patterns where they don’t fit is the root of cleverness. Knowledge just makes one knowledgeable,} thought Dream.

  {But aren’t patterns a kind of knowledge?} asked Growth, the brother whose purpose was merely to become stronger
in all things.

  {Yes. Patterns are knowledge. Facts are knowledge. Facts are not patterns. Brother Wiki wants to gather facts,} responded Dream.

  Wiki was a brother that I didn’t know well yet. He was also known as The Librarian and The Scribe, for it was his purpose to know all there was to know. Wiki was very much like Vista, but where Vista wanted to see everything from moment to moment, no matter how trivial, Wiki wanted to know the big picture of everything that ever was, and to him the present was no more important towards his goal than any other point in time.

  Wiki stepped back into the debate, forcing his thoughts into the centre of the space. {Knowledge builds upon knowledge whether it be fact or pattern! The origin of Body is one of the most pressing mysteries we have! You’re The Dreamer. Can’t you tell me how gleaning the fact that is Body’s origin could lead to the discovery of a hundred different, new patterns?}

  I didn’t realize it immediately, but this was very smart of Wiki. He was, essentially, turning Dream against himself, asking him to use his cleverness to prove Wiki’s point. It was the decisive blow. I could feel animosity towards Wiki bleed off of Dream into common memory. Dream really didn’t like being outsmarted like that, and he was apparently so engaged with figuring out how to escape the trap that he slipped up and made his feeling (which wasn’t quite “anger”) public.

  As Dream thought to himself I realized that Dr Naresh was saying something to Body. I pulled my attention back to the deluge of senses to try and get an understanding of what he was saying.

  “-ling better? The goal integration is still stable?” asked the scientist.

  {After my job, are you, little Librarian?} asked Dream to Wiki, rhetorically. {I admit that you’re right and I’m wrong. We should ask about Body. But unlike you, I don’t like it when I find out that I’m wrong.}

  Dream’s position was irrational. To be shown an error in one’s thinking was the first step to fixing an error in one’s thinking. That wasn’t important, though. The human was important. I waited for the others to respond to Naresh.