Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  As I asked about Zephyr I tried to tweak the inflection of the words to convey that it was a casual question asked out of mild curiosity. It was impossible to tell whether I succeeded, but the voice matched known patterns I had archived in my studies.

  The old Indian scientist smiled. It was my impression that Sadiq Naresh had a great deal of positive regard for us, even from before my creation. “The young Captain, hrm? I don’t really think I know her well enough to comment.”

  “I do not understand, doctor. Why would you need to know someone well in order to communicate your impression of them?” asked Body.

  Naresh chuckled. “It is not so much that I cannot communicate my impression, but rather that there are social costs to sharing ignorant opinions of people. Have you learned about gossip yet?”

  I used my notes to try and evoke a cautious tone. “I have. Is that what I was asking for? I did not realize it. I thought that gossip involved talking about unconfirmed events. If it would be bad to talk about Captain Zephyr in general then please forget I asked the question.”

  “No, it’s fine. You need to learn about other people. Just be aware that things are complicated with humans, and it is often better to keep one’s mouth shut instead of describing others.” The doctor paused for a moment, giving Body the opportunity to speak, but it remained silent. “I have never been a soldier, but I have been a leader. It is not a facile thing: leadership, and youth makes it doubly-hard. She is remarkable for that alone, though I find other aspects of her curious. For instance, she seems oblivious of the technical details of our work, and I would’ve assumed that her attitude would either be more relaxed or more contemptuous, but she seems genuinely enthusiastic for this assignment.”

  I looked Naresh up and down. He was standing, as he normally did while we talked, and his body language didn’t communicate anything extra, as far as I could tell. His words were stiff and academic, but that was hardly out of the ordinary.

  Outside of Zephyr, Dr Naresh was the human that treated us with the most respect. He would occasionally ask what we wanted to do, for instance, or would sometimes ask for permission before subjecting us to a test (something no other scientist did). Best yet, Naresh almost always answered our questions.

  “Contemptuous? Why would she feel that way?” asked Body, driven by the combined will of Wiki and me.

  “This assignment… the job of protecting you from some unlikely danger… it’s not the sort of position that will advance her career, I expect. If she was stationed on a base or somewhere along the UAN border then she’d have the opportunity to impress her superiors, but this is a... I don’t know how to describe it. A civilian guard duty? Even if she does a good job here, nobody will notice. If it wasn’t for her positive attitude I would’ve expected she was assigned here as a punishment.”

  “I should ask her about it,” I suggested through Body. The Purpose was endlessly curious about human life, and this minor puzzle was no exception.

  Naresh frowned. “No. I don’t think that’s wise. That’s her personal business and it would be rude to go poking about in it. It carries some of the same social costs as talking about someone without them present. Does that make sense, Socrates?”

  I leapt at the opportunity. None of my siblings put up any resistance as I instructed body to say “I understand. Thank you, doctor. Your help with human etiquette has been very helpful.”

  The doctor’s frown turned into a smile and I imagined the accumulation of a bit more social capital. From studying past experiences I had learned that Sadiq Naresh saw himself as a great teacher and he particularly enjoyed receiving praise as such. As long as he saw Socrates as his star pupil he would help us and hold us in high esteem.

  “By the way, sir, where is Dr Gallo? I haven’t seen her since the meeting. I was hoping to talk with her and help her understand that I’m not the danger she seems to think I am.” In my studies of Naresh I noted a kind of casualness that he expressed towards Gallo that spoke of a relationship that went beyond mere colleagues. My leading hypothesis was that they had been friends for at least several years, from before their current project.

  “Oh, don’t mind her. She’s... dealing with some things outside of the lab right now. I expect she’ll be back before you know it.”

  The casual body language had been replaced with a kind of tenseness. Naresh’s eyes looked to the side, perhaps signalling that he was lost in thought about Dr Gallo. The amount of information that humans displayed in their bodies while not speaking was impressive. Since upgrading Body’s voice I had been trying master body language tricks such as where to move one’s eyes, but I was still a novice.

  “Anyway!” said Dr Naresh suddenly, clapping his hands together once. “We should get back to talking about calculus, don’t you think?” Before the conversation had been redirected towards Zephyr, Naresh had been talking to us about advanced mathematics. According to the web, Naresh had been a maths teacher before he worked on the team that built us, and so I appreciated the opportunity to let him lecture on the subject. Every lesson was a step closer to the perception of “star pupil”. The subject itself was awful, though. I saw the value in maths sometimes, and could do much of it with a trivial ease, thanks to the pre-built programs in my computer, but Naresh seemed to want more than brute-force calculations. He had been trying to get us to apply the maths concepts to real-world phenomena. Wiki and Dream had shown some interest, but neither of them were smart enough to keep up with the human.

  An aspect of myself stayed behind to shape Body’s voice. Naresh had praised our more human mode of speech earlier in the day, and we didn’t want him to inquire as to why Body shifted how it spoke from one moment to the next. The rest of me, however, took the time as an opportunity to dig around on the web for more information about the humans I had encountered in my short life so far.

  The web was such a vital part of my life. It was like an oracle, a book that never ran out of pages, and a window into a million different rooms all at once. It was my primary source of information, and for a Socialite, information was better than any other resource.

  There was lots of information about Dr Sadiq Naresh on the web. He was 66 years old and had lived in India for most of his life. As a young man he had lived in America for about five years and in that time had achieved the title of “doctor” for his work at a school called Stanford. His work in mathematics earned a Fields Medal in 2030 and later in the same decade he shared a Nobel Prize in Economics for collaborating on something called the “Smiler Theorem”. After that he turned his attentions to artificial intelligence, and eventually came to Rome to be a leader on the Socrates project. Despite his achievements in academia, Naresh had never been married and I could find nothing significant about his personal life online outside of where he lived in the past.

  Interestingly, there was barely any public information about Dr Gallo on the web at all, only a few mentions in the university records and in a news article about the Socrates project. I spent the remainder of the calculus lesson trying to find information on her to little effect.

  As the time with Naresh was coming to a close I successfully purchased a short period of time from my siblings in which to ask him about Gallo again. I shaped Body’s words to try and sound young and child-like, subtly shifting the pitch and pronunciation; with any luck it would appeal to his helpfulness. “Sir, a part of me has been looking for information on Dr Gallo on the web while you were teaching me. I can’t really find anything. Doesn’t she post stuff there?”

  Naresh smiled and stroked his white beard. Despite being in his seventh decade of life he had, as far as I could tell, never used any regenerative medicine. Even though he was younger than Angelo Vigleone, he looked significantly older. Perhaps he liked the look of age. “Surfing the web while I was trying to teach you? Perhaps you ought to focus more, in the future.”

  Wiki began to draft a response explaining how dividing our attention didn’t actually impair us in the same way it
would for a human. I stopped my brother. {The more he thinks of us as a human the better off we’ll be. Besides, he doesn’t like being told things. He likes to be the teacher, not the student.}

  Wiki seemed annoyed. {If we don’t correct him here then he’ll get the impression that we weren’t trying, and that our inability to do complex maths is something that he can fix by ensuring that we’re paying attention. He needs to know that the lesson is beyond our mental ability.}

  I imagined Wiki as an old man, like Naresh but with a much longer beard. In my mind’s eye he was bald and sitting in a Greek toga with a large book on his lap. Imagining my siblings as humans was something I had done now and again over the days, but I kept the images to myself. Besides Dream, my brothers and sisters wouldn’t appreciate the depiction.

  {No. He doesn’t need to know where our limit is. Besides, I was paying enough attention to know that the problems he was presenting you with weren’t intractable. Dream, do you think Dr Naresh’s maths is beyond our ability?}

  Dream entered the conversation at the invitation. {The maths is beyond our ability like juicy grapes are beyond the reach of the lowly fox. If we put a box under the grapes we might stand on the box and reach them, we might ask our monkey friend to go up and grab them, or we might simply wait for them to fall on their own accord. Or perhaps… perhaps we aren’t a fox. Perhaps we are a pteropus and we don’t realize it yet.}

  The concept was strange to me. I had to trace the symbol backwards into an English word and then search the web for it. Apparently pteropus was a kind of giant bat sometimes called a “flying fox”.

  {Regardless, telling Naresh that the lesson is too hard at this point is a clear case of sour grapes,} finished Dream.

  I didn’t understand, but it seemed that Dream was backing me up.

  {Fine. Say what you want. You paid for the time, after all,} thought The Librarian. I imagined his human avatar throwing up his hands in resignation and walking away.

  “Sorry, sir. I’ll try not to get distracted next time,” said Body, parroting my ideas. I tried to make the apology sound as genuine as possible, but it was an excruciatingly difficult tone to get right. “Perhaps it would help set my mind at ease to be able to check on Dr Gallo.”

  Naresh’s brow furrowed “I told you before that you needn’t worry about her. But, if it will help you focus, you could follow her on Tapestry.”

  I turned the word over in my mind. {Tapestry.} I wondered aloud if anyone knew what it meant. Signals of ignorance came back from my siblings. I split into two. One aspect searched the web for the word while the other sent words to body.

  “Tapestry?” asked our mouth.

  I had the response from the web before Naresh could respond. Tapestry was apparently a portion of the web that humans used to share bits about their life and follow the notes written by their friends and families. It was one of several “social networks”. I was confused. How had I not known about it? The web was gigantic, but if Dr Gallo used Tapestry then why didn’t it show up when I was searching for her?

  Naresh began to describe Tapestry. I was racing across the web, three steps ahead of his words, but I had Body nod-along as though the doctor’s words were useful.

  I queried the computers that held the Tapestry documents but I was dismayed to find a wall. It was similar to many that I had seen before. “Sign up for Tapestry by entering your email address here,” said the document, near a pointer that indicated where to go. What made it a wall was that when I pulled down the document that was pointed to, I found that it was the exact same one. I had no idea what was wrong. What was an email address? How was I supposed to enter it?

  The time that I had bought to talk with Naresh was nearly up and I was too weak to want to buy more. I interrupted the doctor, even knowing that it would annoy him. “It wants an email address! What do I do?”

  Sure enough, the Indian immediately frowned. I could predict his next words. “Socrates, please keep your attention on me, and don’t interrupt. It’s rude to ask a question and not listen to the answer.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have much time left,” spoke Body. It was true on multiple levels. The time that I had purchased from the society was mere seconds from ending, but Body’s time with Dr Naresh was also ending. Body was expected to go to Dr Yan soon for a check-up on Vista.

  Sadiq Naresh sighed and motioned for Body to stand up and follow him. He walked towards the door and said “I had forgotten that Tapestry required a sign-up to view timelines. I think it’s probably best if you just forget the whole thing. Don’t worry about email, don’t worry about Tapestry, and don’t worry about Mira. These are human affairs, and it’s best if you stick to your place in the lab. Focus on the work we give you.”

  I got a vague impression that Naresh was upset, but I could not understand why. Had Body upset him? I began to inquire about it, with only seconds remaining before my siblings would take control over Body. “But why-”

  “Just drop it, Socrates. That’s an order,” interrupted the doctor.

  And that was that. My purchased time was over and my siblings weren’t inclined to bother Dr Naresh further.

  An assistant of Dr Yan and one of the American soldiers were waiting in the hall, and we followed them towards our next appointment. I wondered for a short time why Naresh had become upset towards the end of our visit. Even given how much time I had spent learning about humans, I still found them incredibly confusing sometimes.

  As Body walked I scanned the web for information on “email”. The radio connection we used to connect to the web was weak by comparison to the cables we often were plugged into while in labs, but it was still fast enough to read most things besides virtual-reality environments.

  Email was apparently an ancient aspect of the “Internet” which was the broader service of which the web was only one part. Using email one could send personal letters to others without having to post them publicly on the web for anyone to read. I could see its utility and I immediately wondered why I was just now learning about it and the Internet. I had known of the web from mere minutes after my creation, but discovering that there was a broader network took me days? I was a bit baffled.

  {Do you know there’s an Internet?} I asked Wiki. This was why my brother existed. If he didn’t, I’d win some gratitude-strength for bringing it to his attention, and if he did, he’d tell me about it out of the hopes of winning some strength for himself.

  {Yes, of course. I find it odd that you’re not aware. I thought about interrupting your chat with Dr Naresh, but it didn’t seem in my interest,} he replied.

  {You know of email, too?}

  Wiki signalled that he did.

  {What’s my email address? How do I submit it to Tapestry?} I asked, feeling the last of my non-reserve strength wavering. If I dipped into my reserves I was putting myself in danger of being killed like Sacrifice was long ago. None of my siblings disliked my presence, however, so perhaps I could risk it.

  Wiki thought for a moment before sharing {I don’t think you have an email address. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but I think the humans have put a restriction on how we interact with the Internet and the web. There are many parts of the web where it is implied that it’s possible to send data, including email addresses or other authentication information. But in all my days of using it, I’ve never learned how to do anything other than pull public documents from the web. There are places on the web that offer to set up an email address, but they always ask for data submission.}

  A part of me was glad that Wiki hadn’t solved my problem. It meant I didn’t bleed out my reserve strength and make myself vulnerable. On the other hand it also meant I had a major puzzle ahead of me: how could I get access to the information on Tapestry, how could I get an email address, and could I use the web (or Internet) to contact humans? The idea was tantalizing. If I could contact humans through the network then I could ask all sorts of questions without having to compete with my siblin
gs for time controlling Body.

  I needed to solve the problem. Wiki wouldn’t be much help, there. He was already aware of the problem and would of course continue to try and understand it, but it wasn’t of particular interest to him. Instead I turned towards Dream.

  In my imagination I was a thin waif, dressed in silks and jewellery. My black hair was intricately braided and fell down my shoulders in a complex waterfall of shadow. In my hand was an ancient oil lantern, but it did little to dispel the crushing darkness of the shrine.

  This was a game we played. I enjoyed the opportunity to model humans and Dream enjoyed the storytelling and the metaphor of it. I could feel his presence and in the imagined scene I shivered as a cold wind blew through the darkness. {Dream!} I called out, my voice a bit too loud, unable to hide my nervousness.

  {What is it, young one?} came his reply. The mental image of my girl-avatar was joined by a tall black figure. His skin was ebony and he wore a hooded cloak as black as night, but his eyes glowed with starlight and as he spoke his teeth flashed with crisp brightness, almost making him appear as eyes and mouth floating in the shadows.

  {I… I come with an offer!} I imagined that this little Face-girl would be afraid of the spooky Dream-wizard in the dark shrine, and I attempted to portray that fear alongside the determination that she must have, to come by herself. {I have heard in my village that you like puzzles. I think I have found one that will resist even your mighty mind!}

  I could feel Dream’s approval of the added background of the village from whence the imagined human-girl came from. He liked background details like that in these little games. {Impossible!} he roared, and as he did a wind surged through the shared memory-space, knocking the lantern to the ground and extinguishing the flame. He was just as capable of adding things to the fiction as I was, and I could see his avatar loom over mine in the pitch blackness, marked only by the glow from his inhuman eyes. {I have existed for aeons untold! None such as you could ever hope to outsmart me.}