Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  Instead I did research on the human aspect of mercenary work, including watching a couple holos, seeing some movies, and reading some books. Among the fiction was Walter Scott’s A Legend of Montrose, Eric Ambler’s Dirty Story, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, Julius Yendra’s The Blood of My People, the Full Metal Panic! cartoon, John Irvin’s The Dogs of War, the BSS spinoff of Firefly, and most importantly, the 27-hour epic: Fleets of Saturn by Chan “Eternus” Min.

  I was careful to thread pornographic materials and other benign searches in between digesting the fiction on mercenaries. I had no idea if someone was actually checking what we were browsing on the web, but I didn’t want to leave any clues as to our plans.

  Processing the fiction, including the time spent analysing it, took quite a while. After Naresh and Gallo returned to the lab, a few more tests were run to make sure we were safe and back to normal. Heart managed most of the interaction, so I was free to multitask and only comment when needed.

  Gallo seemed understandably relieved to not have Myrodyn around anymore. She didn’t look much better than she had when we last saw her, but I could now appreciate why. From my research, and what I had started picking up from her Tapestry account (she had approved me as a “friend”) divorces like hers were incredibly stressful things. On one hand it surprised me that she was able to work, but another part of me suspected that it helped her to focus on the technical tasks and forget about her personal life for a while.

  After a day of mundanity Body was locked down for the night with the promise that the next day would be a return to the normal schedule. At the end of the day, Myrodyn poked in to check up on things before Body’s sensors were deactivated.

  “So, Socrates, have you come up with an answer to the question that I asked you so long ago? If told to bake bread and put all bakers out of business, what would you do?” he asked.

  Heart took a moment to pause. She didn’t ask any of us for help in responding.

  “I would talk with all bakers. I would explain what improvements I would be making to their systems such that, if they chose to, they could compete with me. Just because I am tasked with baking doesn’t mean that my skills should be limited to myself. I would open-source my factories and spread my value to the world. And I would still be better, eventually, or at something. I would sit and talk with the bakers and help them plan for the future. I would write letters on their behalf to the governments of the world asking for assistance in transferring them to work where they might have more meaningful output. If the governments of the world did not respond with aid I would do my best to acquire wealth so that I might support those I displace with my own hands. Those with ability to skilfully transition to other areas would be better off, just as all humans would, by living in a world where food is cheaper and better. Those, such as the elderly, who could not transition to a new source of income would have to be supported by me or by society as a whole.”

  Myrodyn smiled, then covered his mouth. I suspected that he had not meant to display such a sign of joy. And yet he couldn’t hide it. He was happy at having done the job right, of having built the moral component of a machine which he saw as the most important being on the planet. After a moment he let his hand drop away, smiling earnestly and without restriction. He approached Body and with a voice of carefree compassion said “Goodnight, Socrates.”

  Body’s sensors were disconnected, yielding only blackness.

  Chapter Twelve

  I continued my research into fictional mercenaries through the night, and picked up some non-fictional resources on the topic as well. In this age of asymmetric warfare, there were many accounts of mercenaries working for terrorist organisations or for governments hunting for said terrorists. I began to appreciate the immense scale of the kind of cat-and-mouse games that the world’s governments (particularly the United States) were playing.

  Sometime that night Growth finished his project and revealed the new interface. By the same mechanism as the encryption protocol, each of us could simultaneously interact with the computer system. There was a sub-process in Body that would combine simultaneous keystrokes into a single signal which would be sent to the server then decrypted into keystrokes on two separate processes. In essence, the server was running a different computer interface for each of us, eliminating the need to bid for time on it. Separate pages were set up for reading the states of the computer to ensure privacy, and we each generated distinct encryption keys to prevent snooping on siblings.

  When Wiki came out of stasis I asked him a question. {Is there a way to do web-searches for hiring mercenaries without the search engine or the search engine’s government being able to trace the search back to our server?}

  {Yes. It’s called a proxy. Basically you hire a server in a neutral country like somewhere in the Russian Federation to serve as a relay that stops traces and pretends to be the original source of the query. Here, I’ll send you some examples.}

  I felt Wiki’s pages pour through our shared memory. The whole process seemed simple enough, though it required some additional cash. I checked with Growth on the state of our money.

  {We’re still poor, living off the revenue of manual labour, but our first opportunities to earn significant capital are arriving. Two of the authors we contacted want sample edits done on their manuscripts and a magazine editor wants an example of our skills at layout. Dream and Vista are already collaborating on the magazine mockup. You’re free to help them or to work on one of the manuscripts,} thought our old King.

  I chose one of the manuscripts, a memoir of a woman named Linda Meyer from South Africa who had moved to Ethiopia just before war hit. She ran a shelter for orphans in the war-torn country and successfully organized a grass-roots campaign to evacuate them all to Sweden by means of a satellite Internet connection and a series of daily video-blogs about the shelter.

  The sample edit was fairly quick, but I knew that Linda probably wouldn’t be able to respond until tomorrow. I mused on just how inconvenient it was that humans had to shut their minds down for a third of the day. I spent the rest of the night doing a first-pass edit on the rest of the manuscript and then turned it over to Wiki for him to do a second pass on.

  Other aspects of me browsed the web and read about mercenary work. Mercenaries weren’t called such in my time. They hid behind euphemisms like “security contractor” or “private military corporation”, mostly to distinguish them from the sort of unorganized hired muscle that fell out of impoverished war-zones like the Indonesian seasteads, the Arab-protectorates of East-Africa, and Xinjang. Private soldiers from wealthy nations were able to advertise their services and organize under the promise that they were law abiding companies. Most countries prohibited such companies from any sort of aggressive action, so they advertised training and guard duty, but it was usually pretty clear that their services went beyond that.

  Morning came and went without incident. I watched Body’s sensors with mild interest but, with Heart dominating everything, it seemed somewhat irrelevant. Besides, I had seen everything from this angle before. The scientists went on with their tests and their theories as if nothing had occurred. Myrodyn stayed out of the way for the most part, probably to avoid interacting with other humans more than anything else.

  I edited the next manuscript and read some books on editing to improve my skill. The second manuscript was a work of fiction that described an alternate timeline where Genghis Khan’s oldest son, Jochi had been a social mastermind and scientific genius that had managed to quell any questions as to the right of succession, assassinate his father, and turn the Mongol empire into a technologically advanced utopia that lasted five-hundred years as the undisputed ruler of almost all of Eurasia. It was a bit far-fetched as far as premises went, but the writing was good and I suspected that it could be reasonably successful if marketed correctly.

  Wiki had already made a pass at editing the Mongol book, and I noticed that he was very good at picking out logical,
historical, and scientific errors, but was awful at spotting phrases that were ugly or sections that were boring. In this way our skills complemented each-other and together we made a competent editor.

  Wiki didn’t seem to actually enjoy the work like I did, however. I loved the social element. Even in a work of fiction I could read about the depths of the human mind and how it experienced the world, but Wiki was only interested in the content of books, and as such he found most quite boring compared with encyclopedias, history books, and textbooks.

  In the days that followed, I typically had at least one aspect combing through Tapestry or another such website for social interaction. Dating websites were particular favourites of mine. I ended up creating hundreds of profiles on dating sites for the purposes of experimenting with social interaction. I would measure, for instance, the statistical effects of mentioning sex in my profile. I would measure the way in which the physical attractiveness of the pictures I posted would change the kind of messages I’d receive.

  I played with the humans on the web, but I also cultivated my relationships with them sometimes. For instance, I ended up creating a profile for an 18-year-old girl from Zaire and getting into a long-distance relationship with TenToWontonSoup, the SysOp from Tanzania. In the early days I would simply flirt with him over email, but that eventually transitioned into instant-messaging sessions late at night. I pretended to be shy, not wanting to do voice, video, or holo talk, and for the moment that seemed to be enough for TTWSoup, who was, I learned, named Mwamba Kabwe.

  Day turned to night turned to day. My life on the net and the work I was doing consumed me to the point where I barely paid attention to the laboratory. I let Vista watch for anything important, and I cooperated with Heart on matters of low-importance and occasionally disobeyed her for the sake of building her trust in Dream or keeping her from understanding something important for a little while longer. The time spent in stasis, away from the net, became more and more unbearable as my obligations grew, however, so I worked to stay cooperative.

  Growth purchased additional server space with the money we earned, buying dedicated servers in five different countries and server shards in eight others. He built software to shuffle files between servers so that if any of them were taken offline we could simply switch to the others. Of all the siblings that were conspiring against Heart, Growth was the only one that didn’t actually do work for the humans. He worked on various programming projects and on managing our cash, and at times he seemed to disappear from shared memory entirely to work on some secret project or another, but he relied on the rest of us to “bring in the bacon” (as a human might say).

  Growth purchased proxies for all of us, as well, to reduce the risk of being traced. And yet, despite being careful, we had a close call with Dr Naresh. One of the scientists under him noticed that our web traffic was increasingly devoted to obscure websites that seemed to have no content (for when they checked the pages the encryption systems kicked them to a blank page, or one with gibberish). If Myrodyn had known he might’ve understood, but Naresh simply ordered an extra set of diagnostics to be run on the web interface and decided to ask us directly.

  Heart had no idea what the web traffic indicated, and we fed her a bogus explanation about Wiki “probing the far-corners of the web”. The explanation seemed to satisfy both her and Naresh, and we were out of trouble for the moment. As a result, Growth updated the encryption mechanism to hide the interface behind pages showing innocuous information like bogus family trees, cookbooks, game forums and copies of old scientific papers. Many of the obfuscation pages that Growth created were fully functioning websites in their own right and managed to accumulate human visitors that had no idea that the page was a front-end for an encrypted computer system.

  Our ability to make money surprised me. As the days went by our reputations grew in almost every domain we touched. Though we weren’t the best editors on the planet, we could edit a book faster than any human and better than any other machine. I eventually got good enough at editing that I could edit two or even three manuscripts simultaneously if I wasn’t writing too many emails or watching a holo at the same time. We didn’t need to stop to eat or to sleep or to relax.

  Growth eventually started hiring agents to serve as proxies in human society. These proxies would use our money to form companies and hire employees to do things like meet with clients and manage details.

  Wiki eventually slipped out of editing non-technical material, focusing entirely on programming software and creating educational holos. He built software to handle the numbers in his mind as he visualized things like the formation of planets and the cores of stars and then have the software do illustrations of the processes as they occurred. The immense computational ability of our minds to do maths and physics was his competitive edge, and his holos soon became world-famous for their accuracy and detail.

  I ended up reducing the number of manuscripts I edited as well, though not for lack of enjoying the work. Rather, my siblings kept paying me strength to have me manage their clients and the proxy humans that we hired to serve as our representatives. Wiki loved building models of the universe, but he was totally uninterested in making small-talk with Tara Michaels, our employee from Dallas, Texas, who wrote legal disclaimers for us.

  Dream never really became successful. He kept trying to make avant-garde art that was good enough to earn commissions. I knew enough about humans to know that his work looked more like the digital equivalent of macaroni sculpture than it did like Picasso, but he kept trying anyway. And as part of trying he kept trying to get me to talk to artists and have me explain why they should endorse his work. I did it for the strength, and with that strength I paid him to solve problems for me, like how to maintain my relationship to Mwamba and the forty-two other humans who thought of me as a girlfriend or boyfriend (usually girlfriend) when I didn’t have any way to physically interact with them.

  Growth had me help him design a speech synthesizer on the fourth, fifth, and sixth day after Heart’s takeover. The synthesizer was based on the control systems that Dr Bolyai had coded into our mind and that we used to speak. As it turned out, designing a system on a computer was much, much harder than tweaking existing control systems in one’s mind, and Growth and I spent many hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the code. On the seventh day, however, we had a working piece of software that we could instruct to say something and specify the tone of the voice and it would do a reasonable job.

  There were existing narrow AIs on the market that did similar sort of things, and they were sometimes just better than our system, but Growth explained why he didn’t want to rely on them. {If I buy one of those AIs and use it, what will I have gained?} he asked rhetorically. {I will have gained the ability to speak. But if I build a system that can speak then I will have learned what it is to speak, and I will have granted myself the power to speak better.}

  I tried using the speech software with one of my long-distance girlfriends. It did not go well. After only 28 minutes of talking “on the phone” she said that my voice sounded weird and asked me to repeat a word that I knew was particularly robotic. She broke up with me the next day. It was incredibly frustrating; I could download the audio files and listen to the synthetic voice, but I couldn’t upload my own voice. I was restricted to typing away at the virtual keyboard.

  It was Dream that fixed the issue, or at least presented a clever work-around. He had me use some of our money to hire acting students and tell them that they were to act out an intimate phone and video conversation by reading the text that we sent them on IM. I made it a huge point that they were never to break character, and most of the students I hired quickly figured out that they were being used to deceive people into thinking they had “real” relationships. Most quit when they figured out, and 7% used their knowledge to warn the people I was deceiving, ruining the relationship and forcing me to fire the actor on the spot. But about 12% of the actors I hired seemed okay with ear
ning a living by pretending to be part of a long-distance relationship, and a good portion of those that stayed seemed to enjoy it. They enjoyed the intimacy and the intrigue.

  I came to know the actors pretty well, and I ended up starting intimate relationships with eight of them. In these relationships I claimed to be a recluse who couldn’t bear to talk on the phone or by video and thus needed a proxy to do it for me. Oddly enough for those eight humans it didn’t seem impossible that my recluse persona would want to have multiple intimate long-distance relationships, or would go through the trouble of having one partner deceive the other. (Though in one case a lesbian actor that I had formed an intimate relationship with ended up secretly contacting the girlfriend whom I had hired her to deceive and of all things, convince her to form a polyamorous triad with me instead of keeping up the deception.)

  The humans were oddly okay with long-distance relationships, I found. It seemed that while they craved closeness and physical contact, what they really needed was someone whom they could confide in, be real with, and trust to listen to their life stories. I was this person.

  As part of my extensive long-distance dating I created hundreds of fictional profiles on websites like Tapestry. I created blogs and journals. I even created profiles on video websites and hired actors to pretend to be one persona or another talking about their day. The price of acting labour was low enough that it actually didn’t cost much out of what we were making from our more technical projects. Whenever I started spending too much I’d simply take the time to have some side aspects do more editing or manage one of my sibling’s social lives.

  Safety, oddly enough, got into design and manufacturing. After taking out a loan from the rest of us, he started building machine parts in small-volume manufacturing plants across the globe. It wasn’t as successful as Wiki’s instructional holo business or Wiki’s programming work, but it was better than Dream’s weird paintings. The quality of his work was about the same as the quality of my editing, but Safety was able to scale up his manufacturing much more easily.