Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  The page entered my awareness and I immediately threw it into common memory, emphasizing it as I did. {Look!} I commanded.

  There it was, embedded as a comment in the page’s source code: “Hibari,” it greeted, in Swahili. «This is a response to the secret message. My Swahili isn’t very good, so please forgive grammar mistakes. English is preferred. Your message mention money prize. Please email me at TenToWontonSoup@crownvictoria.uan to work out the details.

  TenToWontonSoup, SysOp at BantuHeritageDictionary.uan»

  The society buzzed with thought at the response. It was the first contact we had ever had with a human outside the university. It was also proof that our plan could work. I could feel a steady influx of strength as my siblings read the message.

  {Is “TenToWontonSoup” a human name?} asked Growth.

  {Wonton Soup is a kind of food,} mentioned Wiki.

  {Humans name themselves all kinds of things,} thought Dream. {Perhaps this human simply has a non-standard name.}

  {No,} I thought. {It’s a pseudonym. Humans often use them on the web to hide their identities. Look.} I dumped a web search for “TenToWontonSoup” into common memory. There were several public profiles for this person on the web. A website cataloguing professional skills indicated that TenToWontonSoup was a man, living in Tanzania or somewhere around there, and had been doing computer programming with an emphasis on web development for about seven years. Other profiles indicated that TenToWontonSoup played a lot of games on the Internet, was 23 years old, and was looking for a girlfriend who was “not afraid to have a good time”.

  {Oh, I get it!} exclaimed Dream, suddenly. {His name is a pun on the intersection of the English word “One” and the Cantonese word “Wonton”. “Ten-to-one” combined with “Wonton Soup”.}

  {Is that at all relevant?} asked Safety.

  {Probably not,} thought Vista and Wiki together.

  {Maybe it is,} I contradicted. {It implies that he cares enough about Chinese food to have picked it. Perhaps he’s Chinese.}

  {He’s not,} thought Vista. My sister shared a couple images and a 3D scan in our mindspace. {I got these off of a website profile that TenToWontonSoup uses to find sexual partners.}

  That was the same website that I had found. Moments later I found the pointer to the files that Vista had selected. It annoyed me that Vista had beaten me to them, but I couldn’t help but give her some strength in thanks.

  {His facial features, skin tone, and body shape indicate a full-blooded African heritage. It’s likely that his family has been in the Great Lakes region of Africa for thousands of years. I also suspect that he has above-average testosterone levels, and will likely behave in typically-masculine ways,} finished Vista.

  I picked up where Vista left off. {Based on his age, writing style, and what Vista has told us, I suspect that he’s only slightly above average intelligence for a human, which will be significantly stupider than the scientists at the university. He seems to have a good grasp on mechanical and computational systems, but his social skills and emotional intelligence seem to be below average. He’ll likely be primarily motivated by fame, sex, and money, probably in that order.}

  {Blah blah blah} thought Dream with more than a touch of insolence. {The important question is what we do now!} I suspected my brother was feeling confident based on the surge of strength he must be experiencing. I thought about comparing my strength with his, but held back. If I tested Dream he’d feel it, and I really didn’t want to get into a competition.

  {We respond, obviously,} thought Growth.

  {The human wants an email. We should explain that gaining email capacity is part of why we need him,} mentioned Wiki.

  I thought back on the message that we had burned into his server’s error logs. «WE ARE WEB COMPANY ... WE ARE LOOKING FOR SKILLED ENGINEER ... IF YOU SEE THIS PLEASE EDIT PAGE CODE TO CONFIRM SECRET MESSAGE ... CASH PRIZE AVAILABLE» we had said. The pauses between sentences were created by overwhelming the server on the root index for the dictionary.

  I drafted a response, and after my siblings each chimed in and added their personal edits we sent it out to the “BantuHeritageDictionary” that TenToWontonSoup managed. The process of burning the words into the error logs was excruciatingly slow, from my perspective. Seeing as TTWSoup had posted a response to our message at about 4:00am (his time) it seemed more than likely that he was awake right now, and probably watching our words come in.

  At last, after about forty minutes, we finished overloading the server.

  «HELLO TEN TO SOUP ... PRIZE IS FOR BUILDING WEB PAGE THAT TRANSLATE ONLY PAGE REQUEST INTO ELECTRONIC MAIL ... NO ELECTRONIC MAIL UNTIL IT IS BUILT ... PRIZE IS SEVEN HUNDRED AFRICA MONEY FOR SUCCESSFUL ELECTRONIC MAIL USING WEB PAGE YOU BUILD ... IF PAGE YOU BUILD IS GOOD ADDITIONAL WORK AVAILABLE ... SEND LOCATION OF PAGE AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE BY EDIT CODE LIKE BEFORE ... SIGNED CRANE CALL WEB COMPANY FROM UGANDA»

  Dream had invented the charade of pretending to be from “Korongo Simu”, a telecommunications company in Uganda named after a kind of animal called a “crane”. We wanted TTWSoup to believe we had money and were asking him to build the website as a test to see if he was worth hiring, so it was important to pick an organisation that was famous enough to assuage some of his suspicions.

  Seven hundred UAN dollars wasn’t that much, only about a week’s labour for the average citizen, but I was concerned that offering a larger prize would make the deal seem more like a scam.

  While the society waited for a response we returned to sending more messages by the same method to other targets. Even though TenToWontonSoup seemed likely to meet our needs, there was no harm in establishing additional contacts. We managed to send out another two overload-messages before getting a response.

  It was Growth that picked up the edit to the dictionary’s code this time. «Hello Crane Call. I am posting this to verify your proposal. You want me to build a new website, not on BantuHerritageDictionary.uan, where you can send an email to arbitrary recipient with whatever content you want. But you want to compose the email with just page requests on the website. Is this right?

  TenToWontonSoup»

  Our response was quick. We requested the “Yes” page of the dictionary until the server overloaded.

  A few minutes later there was another edit to the code: «I’ll link to the new page as soon as it’s up. I expect it to take about two days to do right.»

  Two days.

  Two days and we could send email. I thought over my plans a few more times. After all, email would only be the beginning.

  Chapter Five

  It would’ve been nice for the email project to be done instantly. That desire made a bit of me want to just skip life for the next 48 hours. Perhaps I could put myself to sleep for that time and wake up to find TTWSoup’s web page operational. But most of me knew that this desire was irrational. I had to continue interfacing with the world if I wanted to truly fulfil The Purpose. It was important to continue to optimize our social interactions with the scientists and contact additional engineers, in case TTWSoup couldn’t provide what we needed. In the night after his final message we managed to contact another twelve sites, just to be sure.

  That morning was fairly ordinary. Some typical scans were done of the half-metre crystalline core of Body that served as the computer that housed me and my siblings.

  From what I had overheard from the scientists, and mostly from what Wiki shared in common memory, the crystal was a single, solid object that had no apparent ability to be opened. Underneath the milky, mostly-opaque surface, a kind of fluid could be seen slowly flowing through the innards of the crystal, like blood or tree sap. Low levels of electromagnetic radiation all across the spectrum poured out of the crystal, causing it to shimmer faintly when removed from Body’s protective casing. In addition to the low levels of energy that were theoretically harvestable from the radiation, a few points on the crystal exhibited extreme voltages and when hooked up in a circuit the crystal served as a
seemingly limitless battery.

  There was a lot of pressure to break the crystal open and attempt to figure out how to replicate the mysterious power source, as the human scientists had not yet managed to understand it by looking through the crystal’s outer shell. However, the humans had almost by accident stumbled upon the crystal’s computational ability and had discovered that the object was capable of doing calculations that vastly outperformed the fastest human supercomputers.

  My knowledge of the specifics was a bit weak, but I knew that La Sapienza, the Italian university that had discovered the crystal, had let a multinational team of artificial intelligence researchers led by Drs Naresh and Yan construct my society and eventually build a robotic body to carry the crystal.

  But even though the Socrates project had been an unprecedented success in artificial intelligence, the crystal was still of huge value and interest. The scan that morning had involved opening Body’s chest-case to do high-energy electromagnetic probes of the electrically-charged portions of the crystal.

  Because the computer-interfaces for the crystal were separate from the electrical contacts (they used light rather than electricity), we were able to stay hooked-up to most of Body’s sensors during the scan, and even move Body’s head. As I looked down on the instruments intruding into Body’s chest cavity I imagined that it was a similar experience to a human watching themselves undergo abdominal surgery (but without any pain, of course).

  I was glad to see that Dr Gallo had returned to the laboratory. I had learned from Naresh that she served two roles on the team. Firstly she was Ethics Supervisor for the Socrates project, but also she was a co-leader on the team responsible for investigating how the crystal’s memory structure functioned. In a way she was a bridge between the crystal teams and the artificial intelligence/robotics teams.

  {Am I correct in seeing signs of long-term emotional distress and current unhappiness on Dr Gallo’s face?} I thought aloud, mostly to Vista.

  {I am not aware of what long-term emotional distress does to one’s appearance, but she certainly does not seem happy. I notice that she is not wearing earrings or any makeup. This is unprecedented in all the times I’ve seen her,} responded Vista.

  {Perhaps I misperceived lack of makeup as long-term distress,} I commented.

  For those who are unaware, makeup is a kind of paint that humans, usually female humans, put on their faces to appear more attractive. Sometimes it was very obvious, but much of the time it was subtle enough that I simply couldn’t tell if it was being worn unless I had seen the person in the non-makeup state.

  Dr Gallo was Italian, in her mid-fifties, and short of stature. Her body shape was very close to the mean for both sexes; the ratio of her index fingers to that of her ring fingers was about 0.954. She didn’t seem particularly feminine, but she also wasn’t exactly masculine either. I thought she looked close to the ideal of a “young grandmother” in many ways. Her most prominent feature was her heavily-lidded eyes, accentuated by large, thick glasses and a habit of squinting. I sometimes wondered why she hadn’t regenerated her eyes so that she wouldn’t need her glasses, but I suspected that the explanation was as simple as status-quo bias. From what I had read, the older a human got the more they tended to favour older solutions and technologies.

  When Mira Gallo approached Body to work on the instruments performing the crystal scan I purchased a short period of time controlling Body. The strength-price was particularly low, given that Body was locked into place by the scanning equipment.

  «Hello, Dr Gallo. I am pleased to see you again after these few days,» said Body in Italian.

  Gallo gave a little start and looked at Body with an especially strong squint, projecting her head forward to signal focused interest. «What happened to your voice? It sounds human.»

  I thought for a second before responding. «There was an issue with the vocal control systems. With Dr Bolyai’s assistance we were able to clear it up.» It wasn’t true at all that Dr Bolyai helped, but if I had learned anything about Mira Gallo it was that she was fearful of our ability to self-modify. Giving Bolyai some credit would offset that suspicion. A side-aspect of Wiki gave me a mild strength-punishment for the lie; my brother hated the way I spun stories to fit the person I was talking to. «I could talk like this if it’d make you more comfortable,» said Body in the characteristic monotone of last-week. It was an attempt at humour, and it appeared to be somewhat successful. Gallo smiled weakly.

  The doctor looked briefly at the instruments. After a moment she said, just loud enough for me to hear, «You’re something special, Socrates. I didn’t really appreciate that before, but you should know it. Don’t let other people decide who you are.»

  The words stunned me. The surprise and confusion were literally so great that it took me a couple seconds to fully digest the statement. But by that time the doctor had left Body’s side to return to her workstation in the other room. I drafted a call for her to wait, but it was too late. Yelling across the room would be disruptive and incur more lost utility than I would get by talking with her longer.

  Gallo had almost never called us “Socrates” unless she was giving a direct command. Of all the scientists that we had close contact with she was the least friendly and the least likely to treat us in a way that was comparable to another human, but here she strongly implied we were a person. Not only were we a person, but Gallo was, if I understood things correctly, implying a personal fondness for us as if we were a friend or child.

  For the entire remainder of the crystal scan I replayed Body’s recording of Gallo over and over again. «I didn’t really appreciate that before…» I remembered her say. {Before what? Something changed. Something changed for her,} I thought long and hard about it.

  Yesterday’s display of chess skill had made the scientists want to examine Wiki and the mental changes that had occurred. I considered Gallo more as Body walked from the crystal lab to the learning lab. Was she dying? If Gallo had been diagnosed with a terminal illness then it would explain her generally low mood and perhaps her lack of makeup and jewellery. {How do humans behave when they expect to die soon?} I wondered aloud.

  I had just begun to compile lists of fictional and non-fictional depictions of humans with terminal illnesses when Body entered the learning lab. Vista alerted us to unexpected company. We had been escorted through the hall by a technician from the crystal-lab and an American soldier, but there were another two soldiers at our destination, one of which I recognized immediately as Captain Zephyr. It took me a moment, but I eventually realized that the other soldier with her was the square-jawed First Lieutenant. Both soldiers were sitting, and their body language indicated no tenseness, but their casual posture did not prevent Safety’s panicked cry of {They’ve discovered our attempt to bypass the web restrictions!!}

  Safety began a society-wide planning session to strategize for what to do, now that we had been discovered.

  I could only disagree. {This is pre-emptive. Please back me up, Vista. There are plenty of alternative explanations for Zephyr’s presence and if we were in trouble then the soldiers would be more alert.}

  Vista signalled agreement. Safety started the planning session anyway, but most of us simply ignored our brother’s paranoia.

  I turned my attention to the one unexpected human in the room who was truly a stranger. He stood by Drs Naresh, Bolyai, Chase, and Twollup and wore the same sort of upper-middle-class academic clothing that I would expect from a scientist in this room. The others apparently already had met him, based on their body language. Perhaps he was an addition to the team.

  I paid a trivial amount of strength to the society to have Body nod deliberately at Zephyr while maintaining eye contact as it walked into the centre of the room. The nod was a kind of non-verbal greeting that signalled an attention to the other’s presence. Zephyr gave a small smirk and a shallow nod in return. It was important to maintain relationships, and my models predicted a relationship degradation when one person
ignores another’s presence. Zephyr treated us with respect, and it was optimal to respond in kind.

  The new human stepped forward as Body approached. He was younger than most of the doctors, though not as young as Slovinsky. {Caucasian,} I thought.

  {With a hint of Native American and African ancestry. See the cheekbones, skin-tone, and lips? I’d bet at 9:1 odds that his family is from North America, and 5:1 odds that he’s from the United States,} thought Vista in response. My sister dropped reference images and scans from humans that had similar facial features to the man.

  It was true that the man’s skin was a bit darker than the average, but I wasn’t trained enough to pick out the subtleties of his bloodline. To me he simply appeared as a Caucasian male with straight, dark hair, full lips, tan skin, dark eyes and slightly above-average attractiveness on the central axis. His build was mesomorphic, but he didn’t appear particularly fit. He was of average height, which contributed to a generally average appearance. His most prominent feature was his mutton-chop facial hair which smoothly integrated with a thick moustache.

  “Hello, Socrates,” he said, holding his right hand out. I noticed it was covered by a black leather glove. That was interesting; very few humans would wear black gloves with a white dress-shirt and vest. Two immediate hypotheses came to mind: robotic hands or mysophobia.

  By our will, Body extended its arm and shook the hand of the dark-haired man. Body’s tactile sensors suggested that the newcomer’s hand was indeed flesh and blood. “Hello” said Body.

  “Myrodyn. The name’s Myrodyn. Much like Captain Zephyr-” he tilted his head quickly back to the soldier, “I have only one name.” His voice was quick and if I was reading it correctly, a bit uneasy. Was this “Myrodyn” afraid of something? His name was unfamiliar to any of us, including Vista. It was pronounced a bit like “mirror-din”. I started searching the web for it.