by Tim Pratt
Another pulse of light. “I have fully inventoried everything within the reach of my senses. I admit I am curious about what happened in the wider world, regarding the war and the infestation, but it seems unlikely that curiosity will ever be satisfied, even if I remain. I can intuit certain things – the enemies from the tainted void intended to turn this planet into a zone of infection too, but the birds still come to and from this island, and the fish thrive. I suspect the forces fought each other to a draw, or else to mutual annihilation.
“I am alone, Zax and Minna. I have grown very weary of being alone. I was once a protector, but now I am a prisoner. I would like to join you, if you will permit it. I believe you will find me a congenial companion, and if not, you can at least take me to a place where I might find new data to examine.”
“Give us a moment?” I said.
“I will shut off my sensors until you tap on the glass.” The glass suddenly darkened, turning black, hiding the diamond inside.
I went to the railing of the circular walk that looped around the tower, and Minna stood beside me, the ocean breeze rustling my hair. “What do you think?”
“You are the traveler, Zax, and may travel with anyone you wish.”
I shook my head. “You’re my companion. Your voice matters. I’ve never taken two people with me at once before, because holding two people is too much – I can’t transport them both. But Vicki is a kind of person who’s more portable, so it’s an option. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, though, we can move on alone.”
“I feel strange,” Minna confessed. “I have a sense for life, as you have seen, but Victory-Three is not a kind of life that I can sense. He, she, they, it reminds me of the cullers and the other machines from the Farm, but they were not thinkers on their own, just the teeth and claws of the [unable to translate]. I am unsettled in the company of life that does not feel alive, but is feeling strange a reason to leave someone alone forever? Such a creature, made of crystal, could live forever, don’t you think?”
“It seems possible.”
Minna nodded. “No one should be alone forever. Living things live in systems. A thing alone is a thing that dies, and a thing alone that cannot die is a tragic thing. I say let them join us, and if they are not nice or good or do not fit, we can put them down on another beach.”
I smiled. “I’m really lucky I found you, Minna.” Her view of the world reminded me of my own training to be a harmonizer. Being hurled through the multiverse with no control over my destination meant being torn free of such systems of interconnection and interdependency, and that was painful for someone raised to think of himself in the context of a whole. Perhaps I could build a little ecosystem of my own, though.
We went back inside and Minna tapped on the glass. The panes lightened to transparency again. “We would be pleased to have you join us, friend Victory-Three,” Minna said.
“Oh, thank the unpoisoned core,” Vicki said. “I was terrified you’d decide to leave me. I am positively starved for new data, and that sounds like something we’ll have no shortage of on our journeys.”
“I don’t know how your senses work,” I said. “Practically speaking, you’re a fist-sized gem – will you be all right wrapped in cloth at the bottom of a bag, or will that blind or deafen you?”
“I interact with the world via light and air,” Vicki said. “If there’s some way I could be out in the open, at least most of the time…”
I considered. “I could try to hang you from some kind of string, to wear you like a necklace, but you look like you’d be a bit heavy…”
“Oh, if size is a problem, wait. Mind your ears.” A humming began, first low, then shifting up, becoming a whine, and finally a high-pitched sound right on the edge of my perception. The sound made my teeth hurt and my eyes water and my bones vibrate, and I winced and shuddered. Minna seemed unaffected, which was curious… until I realized that her level of bodily control probably allowed her to seal off her ears at will.
The diamond suddenly shattered, breaking into a hundred twinkling fragments. “There,” Vicki said, voice now a multi-part harmonic chorus with itself. “Each of these shards contains the entirety of my knowledge and self. Take any one, and it is the same as taking the whole of me.”
“Some of these pieces are small enough that we could set them in a ring,” I said.
“Let me.” Minna held out her hand, closed into a fist, and a small vine quested out between her knuckles, looping around to form a circle. She picked up a twinkling oval of Vicki’s body and pressed it to the top of the vine ring, and the chip sank into place, impossibly hair-thin tendrils wrapping around the gem chip to form a setting. Minna slid the ring off her finger and offered it to me. “Safer on your body than mine,” she said, “for purposes of traveling.”
I slid on the ring, which fit perfectly, of course; the vine probably adjusted as necessary. “How’s this, Vicki?”
“Oh, exquisite.” Just one voice now, from my finger, and I noticed the other shards had turned black. “When do we depart?”
I laughed. “Minna and I had planned to stay another day, but…” I looked at her and raised my eyebrow.
“Victory-Three is eager to begin exploring,” Minna said. “They have waited long enough, yes?”
Do You Sleep? • A Crystal World • An Interesting Hypothesis • A Voracious Reader • Weeds and Perennials • Unwelcome Arrivals
“There’s one thing that concerns me, Vicki.” We sat on the sand, packing the last of the useful things into our bags – cooked fish wrapped in broad leaves, some seeds Minna had harvested, the fishhooks we’d found. “Do you sleep?”
“I am capable of shutting down my systems for a predetermined time, or until a given stimulus occurs. I thrive on data, and it’s useful to shut down my consciousness during times when no new data is forthcoming. If I hadn’t been charting fish and bird populations and astronomical events, I would have been dormant when you arrived. That state is my closest analogue to sleep. Why?”
“I took a person with me to another world once, when I was asleep, and they were awake. Something about the experience destroyed her mind. When we landed in the new world she ran away, screaming. I don’t know what she saw, or felt, or what happened to her during the transition… I couldn’t find her before I fell asleep again. I don’t know if that kind of damage is something that would happen to everyone, or if it would even affect a crystal consciousness like yours, but I’ve never risked taking anyone with me again while they were awake.”
“I see. I can go dormant if you wish, though I am curious about what the transition entails… May I suggest a compromise?”
“We’re always open to compromise here.”
“I am capable of partitioning my consciousness, temporarily. I can create an isolated kernel of myself that will remain conscious and recording data, while the remainder of myself ‘sleeps.’ I can then run a diagnostic on that kernel when we reach our destination, and determine whether it is in good working order, without actually accessing its data in the process. If there is some madness-inducing stimulus present during the transition, at least we’ll know for sure, and I will purge the kernel rather than let it infect my consciousness. If not, or if the harmful information doesn’t prove detrimental to my non-biological consciousness, I can examine the data and perhaps even share it.”
“If you think it’s safe, it’s worth a try.” I didn’t want Vicki to go mad, but I trusted them to know their own capabilities. In the worst-case scenario, an insane chip of diamond was unlikely to cause harm to others at least, and, best case, perhaps I’d finally get some answers.
We settled down on the beach. Minna took her sedative, and Vicki shut most of their consciousness down. I swallowed my pill too, and just before I fell asleep, I heard Vicki’s conscious kernel say, quietly, “I am so happy.”
We awoke in a crystal world, number 1011. The sun was bright, but not so bright we couldn’t look upon it, with an intensity like that of
a powerful overhead lamp. The star was surrounded by a sphere of faceted crystal. We were in the heart of a city, but one where all the buildings had been encased in a glittering armor of translucent glass, in shades of green and blue and pink and yellow. Tiny crystals crunched under our feet, like sand.
“Nothing lives here, Zax.” Minna took deep, slow breaths, and her fingers interlaced with mine, gripping hard. I knew worlds without life were hard for her, but she was getting better at coping.
“Can you stand it here for a little while? We could look for supplies.”
Minna nodded, but she was chewing on her lip. I decided to be swift. I began walking, to put some distance between us and our point of origin, just in case we were still being followed. We’d have to tell Vicki about the Lector and Polly before long, but I wanted to let them get settled into this new life a little before I told them we had enemies.
“Are you all right, Vicki?” I kept one eye on the crystals at my feet, to make sure they wouldn’t start climbing up my boots and onto my body. I couldn’t tell if this crystalline strangeness was the aftermath of a weapon or some kind of pollution or even an alien life form, but it was better to take care.
“I am. I apologize for not speaking. There is a cascade of new data here, and I am still doing a first-level sort.”
“How’s your, what did you call it, your other kernel? Can you access whatever that part of you experienced when we traveled?”
“I… Hmm. The partitioned portion shut itself down, and purged itself. I can’t access the data, because there’s nothing to access. How peculiar.”
“I would have said ‘ominous.’”
“That as well. It is at least another data point, duly recorded. I am more interested in the data available in this world. As far as I can tell, these crystals are not conscious, or, at least, they do not communicate in any way that I can recognize. Still, I find it an interesting coincidence that we should appear in a world full of crystals immediately after I joined you.”
I nodded. “It’s strange. Sometimes there are… not patterns, but sort of, affinities? If I think of gardens just before I fall asleep, sometimes I appear on a garden world, and if I think of cities, sometimes there are cities… but it doesn’t always work. It doesn’t even usually work. Sometimes I concentrate ferociously and it doesn’t make any difference. I’ve imagined home with great vividness and fervor hundreds of times and never returned there, that’s for sure. I can’t tell if the phenomenon is real, if some part of my mind is helping me choose the next world, or if it’s just confirmation bias. Sometimes I try anyway, because it can’t hurt, but it’s frustrating, not knowing how any of this works, and the occasional sense that I can control my destination to some extent makes my total failure to control it even more disheartening.”
“Maybe you are just in the wrong part of the garden sometimes,” Minna said.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Yes, explicate,” Vicki said.
Minna got that thinking-hard line that appeared sometimes on her forehead and gestured vaguely with her hands. “Let us say you are in the garden, and you are hungry. You are hungry for many things and must decide which to pick. There is nothing in the part of the garden where you stand but blackberries and… tomatoes. If you say, ‘I want a bunch of blackberries,’ and reach out, you can pluck them and you are happy and have what you want. If instead you want tomatoes, you can have those, too. But let us say you want an apple. The apple trees are in another part of the garden. You can say, ‘I want an apple,’ and reach out all you want, but you cannot pluck one then and there. There are no apples there to be picked, only blackberries and tomatoes. You would have to walk down a long path and take many turnings to reach the apples. Do you see?”
“You are saying that each world may be, in some sense, adjacent to or coterminous with a number of other worlds,” Vicki said. “That there could be choice, but not infinite choice.”
“Is that what I am saying?” Minna asked.
Vicki went on. “Perhaps from here we could reach a desert world, or an ocean world, but not a city world – the nearest city world is, as Minna says, in another part of the garden. If Zax wants to go to an ocean or a desert, his wish will be granted. If he wishes for a city, though, the multiverse is unable to oblige, so instead he travels to a world at random, or the one that’s ‘closest’ to his desire, in some multiversal sense, perhaps. The same random process happens if he expresses no desire at all when he travels. Hmm. I will have to gather more data, but that is an interesting hypothesis.”
“Huh,” I said. “I never thought of that. It’s no more provable than any other idea I’ve come up with, but it does make me feel a little better about my various failures.” I kept walking, toward a building that looked like a shop of some kind. The door hung open, but the opening was covered by a crystal shell. I gave the crystal a kick, and it shattered into tiny coin-sized prisms. I ducked inside, sighing. “I had such wonderful lanterns a while back, and a glowing blade, but I lost them. Minna can glow, a little, but keep your eyes open for something brighter.”
“Let me be light.” Vicki glowed, shining out pure white light from their place on my hand. “I can widen or tighten the beam as desired.”
“You’re a useful gem to have along.” We were in a shop or a warehouse, with lots of shelves, sadly most empty. Whoever once lived here had done some panic-shopping or looting as their world changed to crystal.
Minna came in after us, glowing with bioluminescence herself, and moved off among the shelves to look for things worth salvaging. I investigated, too, moving carefully and quietly. I kept expecting to see dead bodies cocooned in crystals, but there were none, and while there was disarray, the place wasn’t a disaster. It had been some sort of general store, and I found bottles that seemed to be rubbing alcohol, and bandages, and needle and thread, and strong thin rope. There were cans with pictures of unfamiliar vegetables on them, and I took a couple of those as well.
I met up with Minna in the back, and she was wearing something different from before, a loose-fitting dress of pale blue she’d pulled on top of her overalls, and a lacy emerald-green scarf wrapped around her neck. “There are such colors!” she said, and led me to the back corner of the store, where a small section of clothes hung on racks and rested on shelves. The only thing in my size was a T-shirt with a picture of a grinning, pig-like creature on the front, beneath a few words in an alien script. I wished again that the linguistic virus worked with written language, though I supposed I was unlikely to encounter anyone else who could read the text, either. I did find some thick wool socks – they came in trios instead of pairs – and happily put those in my bag as well. “Do you see anything you want, Vicki?” I said. “Do you… eat, or anything?”
“I absorb solar energy. If I wish to grow in size, I must take in additional physical matter, usually liquid with silica in suspension, though other feedstocks are usable. Mostly I hunger for information, and you are already providing a feast. I wonder if the entire planet – based on the gravity, this seems to be a planet – is crystal. The shell around the local star certainly suggests it is a more than purely local phenomenon.”
“There’s no way to tell for sure,” I said. “I can never explore more of a given world than I can see in a day or two or three. Still, we can sit down for a while, eat our fish before it goes bad, and I can update my journal–”
“You keep a journal?” Vicki said.
We dragged a table and two chairs outside so we could enjoy the sparkling sunlight while we ate… though I didn’t eat anything myself until I’d taught Vicki enough of my language to begin devouring my data; it would have been cruel to make them wait when they were so excited. I began by reading aloud from the journal. Speaking deliberately in my own tongue, instead of letting the linguistic virus do its work for me, required a conscious effort. Then I translated what I’d read into Vicki’s native language, as best I could; fortunately, their tongue is a logical and c
onstructed one, too, with many structural commonalities. It turns out Vicki’s computational capabilities are almost as effective as the linguistic virus at processing speech, and since that processing power can also be turned toward comprehending written language, it’s superior in some ways. If I’d had someone who spoke my native language to converse with, Vicki said they would be able to learn it rapidly, just by listening to us and analyzing the patterns. “Language acquisition is akin to code-breaking, and that was one of my functions.”
I wrote down all thirty-four characters of the Realm’s alphabet and noted the sounds each letter corresponds to, though of course some of them make different sounds in different contexts. Vicki scanned the first few pages of my journal as I read them aloud and pointed at each word to indicate in which direction I was reading. Vicki queried various words and phrases and idioms as I read, but the questions diminished as they began picking things up from context: “I am an extrapolation engine,” they said, which seems like a useful thing to be.
After a couple of hours, Vicki said, “I have enough working knowledge to continue on my own.”
I’d expected this to be a multi-step process, perhaps taking weeks or months, so I just blinked down at the ring on my hand. “You learned to read that quickly?”
“I process information the way that you breathe, Zax,” Vicki said. “Data and patterns and systems are like air. May I read the rest of your journal?”
I resigned myself to swiping the digital screen a thousand times to turn the pages, but it turns out Vicki can run all sorts of machine peripherals – something to keep in mind if we reach a sufficiently advanced world, I suppose. Vicki figured out how to interface with the digital journal and send signals that would swipe the pages on their own. “I can’t just download all the data in a gulp,” Vicki said, “because you’re essentially drawing pictures of your alphabet on the screen. I could create an interface with a keyboard–”