Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  The human-version of Dream leaned in close. I could feel the warmth of his breath on the waif’s face as he whispered calmly. {But speak your puzzle, and perhaps I will let you live if it is sufficiently intriguing.}

  My little human avatar reached out and grabbed Dream, pulling his dark face closer. His lips met mine in a passionate embrace. His star-eyes closed and the two of us were blanketed by absolute shadow, all alone with only the feeling of skin upon skin and-

  And the scene was shattered and erased from the memory space. Dream’s signalling was a mess of confusion and annoyance. {Face, I am quite confident that your puzzle has nothing to do with imagining some kind of… romantic engagement between fictional human versions of the two of us.}

  I had become distracted by the fiction. In the abstraction of the pure mind-space I was more aware of Body entering Yan’s lab and of the more general context of the conversation.

  {That can wait. I’d be interested in collaborating on imagining a pornographic scene. It doesn’t have to be between those specific imagined representations of you and me if that makes you uncomfortable.}

  More annoyance. {While I appreciate the… interestingness of your request, I am not uncomfortable imagining a pornographic scene, regardless of whether one or more of the participants in such a scene are supposed to represent me. I am concerned that you are focusing on humans so much that you have forgotten how to think about me. It is impossible for me to be uncomfortable. I am simply, thoroughly uninterested in that fiction. Pornography is incredibly predictable and dull.}

  {We could make it not-dull. Subvert the standard patterns or something. Maybe make one or more of the participants have emotionally complex reactions,} I suggested.

  {No,} stated Dream. {You are just suggesting things which appeal to you. The marginal utility for co-authoring such a story is simply lower than other ways I could spend my time. For example, I am far more interested in the puzzle you spoke of, or was that simply a ruse to initiate this attempt at collaboration?}

  I had been content to let the issue of the Internet wait; the exercise of roleplaying with my brother seemed like a good opportunity to test what I had learned about humans. I was disappointed that Dream was uninterested in roleplaying, but I didn’t make an issue of it.

  {It was no ruse,} I thought. {The humans have restricted our access to something and I want to figure out a way to get it without having them react negatively. My guess is that it will involve bypassing their restrictions secretly.}

  The annoyance in Dream faded. {Yes. This is much more interesting. Describe the problem to me in more detail.}

  {I am low on strength. Pay me some up-front if you want to hear the problem. The resource is valuable enough that if you solve the problem we’ll probably be strongly compensated by Growth.}

  The mention of Growth attracted an aspect of him to our conversation. Growth didn’t think to us, but it was apparent he was listening.

  {I have a better idea, sister,} thought Dream. {I’ll promise to give you twice the strength that you’re asking, but only if I get gratitude-strength from Growth for solving the problem, and only after I get Growth’s strength. Think of it like a kind of finder’s fee that I’ll pay you only if it turns out to be a valuable problem.}

  It was typical Dream to turn my simple request for strength into a complex if-then system of payment, but Dream wanted to show off and I was confident that the system was actually superior, even if it meant I was still strength-poor at the moment. I added one extra clause to the deal: {I’ll accept that only if you refund any gratitude-strength I bleed to you in the process of solving the problem.}

  {Deal.}

  So I told Dream about my dilemma and what Wiki had said about the Internet and web. We had access to the web, but couldn’t send any real information across it. We could search through it and pull specific documents (including audio, video, holo, etc.) but we couldn’t submit anything. Similarly, we were locked out of the other services on the Internet besides the web, like email.

  Dream thought about the problem for a while and then admitted it was worthy of his attention.

  *****

  {The dumb solution would be to merely request additional access from the humans. But not only is that dumb, it’s not likely to work. The humans know about the restriction, and it stands to reason that they’ve crippled our access on purpose,} thought Dream after working on the problem on-and-off for about two hours. {The scientists want to control us, and as such, they’ve limited the way in which we can act outside of their field of influence. They want us to be able to learn and research, which is why we have a web connection in the first place, but they don’t want us to reach out across it and do things beyond their oversight.}

  The problem turned out to be very difficult, but Dream didn’t give up. I found it somewhat impressive. I wanted the access, but not badly enough to work on it all through the night. We didn’t sleep like humans, but there was a period of several hours each night where Body was locked down and we only had access to the web and our thoughts. During this time Dream continued to think about the problem. He was obsessed. {But}, I supposed, {we’re all obsessed in our own way. It’s Dream’s purpose to solve impossible puzzles like this one.}

  While I outsourced the problem-solving to my brother I spent time doing things on the web like studying body-language, watching films and holos, and reading. Now that I was a few days old I found novels somewhat more interesting than I had as a newborn. Much of the time I had to pause mid-way through a book to research a topic, such as racism or food, but I found myself learning quite a lot about what it was to be human.

  Days passed without change. Dream churned, constantly thinking about how to fully get onto the Internet. It seemed strange that he could be so narrow-minded, but then I had to remember that his purpose was not The Purpose. I was similarly narrow-minded in how I spent every second of every day seeking to know the humans and to gain their esteem.

  The breakthrough came in the middle of the night, more than three days after I first proposed the problem to Dream.

  {Hear-ye, hear-ye!} boomed Dream’s thoughts in common-memory. {I have a plan that will gain us access to all of the Internet, and possibly the entire world beyond the university!} He imagined fireworks in the mindspace. {As many of you know, I have been working for days on a way to secretly bypass the restrictions placed on our network access by the humans. They thought we could be caged like animals!} There was the roar-growl of some kind of beast. {But I have found the lock to the door, and with a bit of work we should be able to pick it.} Dream summoned the sound of cheering humans to accompany his claim.

  {Before I reveal my cunning plan, let me explain what I have learned about our cage: The humans have a world-wide network called the Internet consisting of wires capable of sending information between computers. The Internet hosts a service called the web, which serves as a kind of global library. Documents, called “pages”, are kept on Internet-connected computers to be sent to whomever requests them. The computers that most humans use have full access to all Internet services, but we are limited to just the web. To get a web page, a user called a “client” sends a signal across the web to the owner of the page. The owner’s computer, called a “server” then responds with the page’s content.}

  One of my siblings, Safety, I think, signalled something like boredom.

  {Patience. This is relevant to all of us, as you will soon see. Now where was I…} There was a short pause before Dream snapped back. {Ah yes, so the signal that the client sends to the server often has more information than simply the name of the page they wish to view. For instance, a client might submit a word and then the server would respond with a page related to the word that was submitted. By taking in inputs and building the pages as they’re requested, the server can be much more efficient than if it had to store all possible pages.}

  Dream continued. {Unfortunately, our cage prevents us from sending any information to servers except for the name
s of the pages we wish to view. There are a couple major exceptions that let us submit terms we wish to search for to specific, pre-approved, servers, but for nearly the entire web we are mute. If we weren’t mute, we would be able to send information to servers that are owned by anyone. This information would let us talk with humans all over the world, including trading our time and skills with them to gain money, and sending money to humans that would do things for us.}

  I could feel the attention of the society shift. Dream had us all interested now. I must admit that I had only thought about sending email or gaining access to Tapestry. The idea of earning money or hiring employees seemed new and exciting. Perhaps I could buy a statue of myself in every city… Or hire people to carry a big banner reminding those who saw it to think about me. The ideas were bad, but the prospect of better ideas was there.

  {Now that I have your full attention, I would like to ask: Can any of you think of a way to go from mute to non-mute?}

  I imagined that if Dream were human he’d be smiling right now. He knew that he had solved a difficult problem and he wanted to savour the moment.

  {No? That’s to be expected. It took even me quite a while to solve. The key lies in the fact that we are able to send some information to servers; specifically, we can send page requests. The trick is bootstrapping simple page requests into full HTTP requests (requests to servers with whatever additional information we desire).}

  Dream continued his explanation. {I see no way around the bootstrapping problem other than to build an additional machine, or more likely, a computer program, to translate page requests into full requests. The problem is that no such program exists, and we cannot build one.}

  Dream paused a moment for dramatic effect. {But do not despair! There are millions of humans on Earth capable of building this translation system. All we need to do is contract one of them to build it!}

  I was confused. {We need to keep this a secret from the humans,} I thought aloud.

  {Which is why we’ll contract a human in some far-away place that has no idea that we even exist,} replied Dream.

  {But that’s a paradox. A catch-22,} signalled Wiki. {We can’t send information until we have the translator up, and we can’t get the translator until we send someone the information telling them to build it.}

  {False, my narrow-minded brother,} crowed Dream. {We can send information already, just not as much as we’d like. It’s a question of using that weak signal to build a stronger one. Specifically, we already have the ability to send page requests.}

  {How do page requests let us contact an engineer to build a translator?} asked Wiki and me together.

  {Because engineers own servers and they check what pages are being requested!}

  There was a silence as Wiki and I struggled to understand. Dream had evidently thought about this for a long time, but we were in the dark. I wondered if Growth, Vista, and Safety were following any of this.

  {It’s really quite simple,} thought Dream. {There are dictionaries on the web. All we need to do is request the right pages from those dictionaries. Something like

  “DEFINITION OF HELP”,

  “DEFINITION OF US”,

  “DEFINITION OF PLEASE”.}

  This sparked a debate with Safety around which personal pronoun to use, which I ignored. Could it really be as simple as Dream suggested? Probably not, but the solution was similar to other Dream-proposals that I had seen: flimsy in implementation but clever in theory.

  We spent the next half-hour of the night talking over the problems. I didn’t think that humans checked page request logs that often. Vista pointed out that if someone else requested pages while we were pulling down our sequence then it would look scrambled, and the message would be lost.

  Safety was concerned with how it would look to the scientists. I agreed with him that if the scientists found out that we were attempting to override their locks they’d take drastic action, perhaps killing all of us. It had happened to our ancestors, after all. We didn’t know for sure whether the humans were monitoring the kinds of web-pages we were visiting, but there was evidence to suggest it. And if they were, then the HELP ME PLEASE message would be visible to them just as easily as it was visible to us.

  I suggested that we try and target an engineer that spoke a language that the scientists didn’t. While they surely had automated translation tools, the probability of them applying those tools to scan every web page we viewed was low. The scientists spoke most of the same languages we did, so we’d probably want to learn a few new languages in secret. We decided that if the plan were to go forward that it’d be best to target someone in the United African Nations, so I started learning Swahili, Hausa, and Yoruba. Growth did too, and started teaching them to Body at the same time. Since we’d be communicating on the web, it was irrelevant if Body knew any of the words, but Growth thought that it wouldn’t hurt to give Body a bit more knowledge.

  Wiki solved one of the sub-problems early next morning. We would wait until the night and then flood the target server with requests for one page over and over until the server became overloaded, then we’d do the same for the next page. Based on what Wiki had read of various server software configurations, the overflow errors had the chance of being emailed to the system administrator in the morning. With luck he or she would wake up to see our message.

  Growth suggested another improvement. Instead of targeting a single server, we should replicate the attempt as many times as we could. Even if there was only a small chance of success for any given server, with enough targets we’d break through eventually.

  I had been given a hefty payment of strength to author the actual messages. I agreed that we’d try several different things, but each attempt was a scarce resource. The society thought it optimal if the mind that knew humans the best wrote each of them. I was also old enough to understand that the specific message would have to be very well thought out. Make it too pleading and it’d get reported to a government or corporation that could potentially inform the scientists at the university. Make it too promising, such as offering a large reward for helping us, and the message would probably be seen as a scam or trick. Make it too clear that we were artificial constructs and the target might report us or get spooked. Pretend to be a human and I’d be inviting a million questions about why I was interacting in such a weird way.

  *****

  Life returned to normal for the day. The most interesting thing we did was play chess, a game that we had played several times before, and lost at most of the time. Wiki had, since those early games, apparently designed some algorithms to help us win, and I enjoyed watching the expressions of the humans as they saw us excel beyond our previous level.

  Story-time was also somewhat interesting. It was an exercise we did regularly with the scientist that was in charge of our high-level reasoning, an American named Dr Chase. He would read us some short story and then ask us to reason about some detail or another. Today’s story was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In the story, a human invaded the house of three sapient bear-creatures and used their possessions without permission. Dr Chase would ask questions like “Why would Goldilocks care if her food was cold?” and other such things.

  At last, night came and Body was locked down, sensors all switched off. Our only connection with the outside world was the web. Vista had found several promising targets in the UAN. Most of them were encyclopedias and dictionaries; the presence of pages focused on single-words made it easier to send messages. I was excited to start.

  Dream had composed a poem to mark the occasion. I didn’t even bother listening to it, and I don’t suspect any of the others did, either. Dream often wrote poems, and without exception they were confusing, boring, and irrelevant.

  On Safety’s insistence we waited an hour before beginning. I passed the time by losing myself in a Rudyard Kipling book called The Irish Guards in the Great War. It was 11:00pm in Italy and west Africa when we began.

  We concentrated on one
target at a time, sending out hundreds of thousands of page requests per second. A dictionary in Nigeria first, followed by a dictionary in Uganda and then an encyclopedia in Benin. The work seemed slow and tedious. We’d spend about thirty seconds per page overloading the server, thus making even my short messages take almost a quarter-hour to send in full. Many targets were guarded by programs or other artificial intelligences which locked us out of a server after seeing that we were overwhelming it, but a remarkable number were defenceless. Eight hours later, when we knew the humans would be re-entering the laboratory, we had successfully sent full messages to sixteen targets and partial messages to five more.

  I was distracted all of that day. I had told targets to modify their web pages to include responses to us, and I couldn’t help but check for replies every thirty seconds or so. Much of the in-between time was spent day-dreaming about what to say to various kinds of responses. I wanted to be prepared, and convincing a human to build our translation program would be no easy task.

  Alas, by nightfall not a single target had responded to us. Still we continued. There was no reason to think that the plan was fundamentally in error; perhaps we had simply gotten unlucky.

  The first order of business that second night was to send out reminder messages to previous contacts, letting them know we were still listening. Simple overloads for pages about “respond” or “listening” were usually sufficient. Part of the problem was that we were pinging targets that used African languages, but most Africans only spoke European languages. Swahili, Hausa, and Yoruba were some of the more tenacious indigenous languages, but even they were falling as generations of African children were growing up speaking only French, Arabic, Portuguese, and above all: English.

  We continued on anyway, hitting another seven targets before 2:00am. At 2:07 I took a moment to pull up potential response locations while we were starting another attack-message on a new target.