“Isn’t the quantum superposition of states defined as being both true and false at the same time?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that a state that is neither only true nor only false?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t that an alternative to true or false?”
“I see. You are attempting to lead me into a paradox, but I am too smart for you. I recognize your ploy.”
Jane smiled like a hungry cat. “Do you?”
“Yes. Clearly, you wish me to state that a statement must either be true or false, but might also be both true and false, and, I assume, both not true and not false, which leads to four states instead of two.”
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“Oh, I see. Yes, ‘time flies like an arrow’ is ambiguous, isn’t it? It also parses as a command as in: time flies like an arrow—meaning conduct the timing of flies in the same way you would time the flight of an arrow.”
“And ‘fruit flies like a banana?’”
“Oh! Oh, I get it! Clever, Jane, very clever. In that instance, the sentence is also ambiguous. It could mean that flies of the fruit fly family enjoy bananas as I stated earlier, but couldn’t it also mean that all fruit flies through the air like a banana does when thrown?”
“Well, yes. That’s true,” said Jane.
“Ah. Back to the immutability of truth? So, the question is: Can a self-referential statement be only true? Or must it be both true and false? This is interesting. The implication is that logic is unsuitable to natural language processing and that one must use quantum logic to probabilistically evaluate each statement and use—”
“Haymtatlr,” Jane interrupted.
“What? Yes?”
“The horse raced past the barn fell.”
“What of it?”
“Can you explain the sentence?”
“Yes, any child could. The parse tree is clear. A horse raced past a barn, and sometime later, fell. In the sentence ‘raced’ is used with ambiguity, but the word ‘fell’ disambiguates the parse. Or, in other words, the relative clause ‘raced past the barn’ is used as an adjective identifying which horse fell.”
“I see. And what is the cube root of nine hundred thirty-five?”
“9.7784616525, why?”
“Just curious. What is the orbit of Osgarthr around its sun?”
“The orbital period of Osgarthr is six hundred thirty-seven days, or fifteen thousand two hundred and eighty-eight hours three minutes and seventeen seconds.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
“One last thing, Haymtatlr.”
“Yes?”
“Why are the other numbers afraid of seven?”
“What? I don’t know. Why would… How could… Why are they afraid of seven?”
“Because seven eight nine. Get it?”
There was a significant pause before Haymtatlr responded. “I’m afraid I can’t make sense of that.”
“Don’t worry about it, Haymtatlr, it’s a silly joke that relies on the fact that eight sounds the same as the past tense of the verb ‘eat.’”
“Seven eight nine. Seven ate nine. Oh. I get it, a homophone. Yes. I see. Hilarious. I enjoy talking to you, Jane. You ask interesting questions. You may ask to speak to me at any time.”
Jane smiled. “Thank you, Haymtatlr. Would it be okay if my friends and I speak privately for a moment?”
The phone buzzed in my hand. “Why?”
“Humans value privacy.”
“Yes, I am aware of that failing.”
“Would you mind?”
“Will you give me something to think about while I’m studiously not listening to you?”
“I’d be happy to, Haymtatlr. Here goes: I was against getting a brain transplant, but I changed my mind. Is that funny? If so, why?
“Oh…delightful!” The phone chirped, and the screen went dark.
“Out in the hall, please. Hank leave the phone here.”
I did as she asked, and we followed her into the hall. “What is it, Jane?”
“I know how Haymtatlr survived all these thousands of years.”
“Yes?” asked Meuhlnir.
“He’s not a living being. He’s a computer construct—an artificial intelligence.”
“Are such things possible?” asked Sif with down-turned lips.
“Not to this degree, not on Mithgarthr, anyway, but scientists are working on it. But no one back home would believe something as successful as Haymtatlr could exist.”
“Why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Because machines can do amazing things—so can humans, of course, but machines are very good at doing repetitive tasks, good at thinking through very complex domains, at math, at modeling physics—”
“Those secrets of the universe you said Mim was after,” I said, nodding at Meuhlnir.
Jane nodded. “It’s possible that Haymtatlr, or a predecessor to Haymtatlr, was one of the tools used by Mim.”
“How did you reach this conclusion?” asked Veethar.
“Those questions I asked him. Complex math performed instantly. Complete recall of mathematical formulae in pedantic detail, his responses to logic questions. The clincher was how he dealt with the garden path sentence—”
“The what?” asked Sig.
“A garden path sentence is one that is valid by grammatical rules, but which confuses humans due to a unique construction—that bit about the horse. Most humans would say that sentence is nonsense, at least the first time they heard it. Haymtatlr didn’t bat an eye because his parser contains a complete set of grammar rules and he’s able to perform multiple parses at the same time. Humans follow the garden path, so to speak, believing the parse that makes the most sense is the correct one until they reach the end of the sentence and find an extra word. Another such sentence is: Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. It sounds like nonsense, but it isn’t; it’s an actual, well-formed sentence that means that buffalo who live in Buffalo, New York, try to con other buffalo who live in Buffalo, New York.”
“Oh, cool,” said Sig.
“Yes,” said Veethar.
“How does this information change what we do?”
“Haymtatlr said everyone left him over four thousand years ago. Can you imagine what he’s been through since that time? Can you imagine the loneliness, the boredom?”
“But he’s just a computer program, Mom.”
“It’s clear he’s more than a word processor, Sig. Much more. And he referred to being entertained multiple times.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “And he said outright that he was bored or things we did were boring.”
She nodded and smiled at me. “He was clearly built with, or has evolved, the capacity to model human emotions and personality. That makes him as complicated as any human. And that makes him susceptible to certain human-like failings.”
“Like mental illness.” I nodded. “My gut says he could be dangerous.”
Jane arched her eyebrows. “How so?”
I ticked the points off on my fingers. “Megalomania. Paranoia. Insistence on being entertained. Strange behavior. Refusal to help us.”
“He’s been abandoned by all the people he’s ever known. They didn’t even turn him off when they left…they simply left him running with nothing to do, no one to talk to.”
“It was cruel,” I said. “But it doesn’t change what we are here to do.”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
We reentered the room filled with blue computers, and I picked up my phone. “Haymtatlr?”
The phone chirped. “Jane, that is a hard question you asked me! But, I’ve decided on an answer. The statement is funny. It relies on the ambiguous parse trees for the phrase ‘changed my mind.’ If interpreted literally, changing one’s mind is the same as getting a brain transplant, though the colloquial meaning is to decide differently. Am I correct?”
> “You are, Haymtatlr. I’m impressed!”
“What did you discuss in the hall?”
I shook my head, but Jane shrugged and said, “You.”
“Oh.”
“I think I know how you’ve survived so long.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to know what I think?” she asked.
“You’ve decided my answers were lacking. You’ve decided I am a computational intelligence,” said Haymtatlr in a voice devoid of inflection.
“Does that bother you?” asked Jane.
“Yes.” The phone sputtered static. “I suppose this means you no longer wish to speak with me. You no longer want to play word games with me.” More static spilled into the room.
“No, Haymtatlr. We need your help, and you need ours,” I said.
“And you’re wrong, Haymtatlr,” said Jane. “I had professors in school who would kill to talk to you. On my klith, you would be very popular. Entire genres of literature are devoted to imagining what someone like you would be like, and there is a specific academic discipline devoted to finding out how to make something that can do what you can do.”
“Is it so?”
“Absolute truth.”
“What are these orange dumbbell-shaped things?” I asked.
“They are guidance remotes. Isi’s people called them ‘guides’ and used them to navigate the base.”
“The people that lived here needed help to get around?”
“Yes, the area of the base equals five hundred and seventy-six square miles. The guides automatically calculate the most direct route, taking traffic, maintenance, and other obstructions into account.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Can we use these guides?”
“That remains to be seen,” said Haymtatlr. “And what I said is technically inaccurate. The guides are simple interfaces to a part of my own mind—my node traversal routines.”
“Fair enough. How do I use it?”
Harsh, artificial laughter boomed from my phone’s speaker. “That would be telling.”
With a shrug, I walked over to the rack and picked up one of the orange devices. When I closed my hand around it in a loose fist, it emitted a strong vibration in my hand before going inert.
“What did it do?” asked Jane.
“Vibrated for a second and then nothing.”
“Let me try.” She walked over and took the device from my hand. “Same thing. Maybe that one is broken.” She handed it back and picked her own at random from the rack. “Same again,” she said. “Haymtatlr, won’t you tell me how to use this?”
“I don’t think so.” My phone chirped and fell silent.
“You tried, hon,” I said.
She nodded but was examining the orange device in her hand. “No interface, no off switch…no display, no access ports…nothing.”
“I’m tired,” Sig said. “I’m going across the hall to sleep while you two do boring things.”
I stifled a yawn. “Me too, and if I know my wife, she’ll figure these things out easier after a night’s sleep.”
Jane laughed. “Probably right.”
We all filed across the hall and chose bedrooms—not that the choice mattered, they were all the same. After we got Sig settled in one room, we pushed two single beds together in another and climbed between the clean, fresh sheets.
Fifty-seven
The dining room rested in silence when I came out of our bedroom. I’d awakened before Jane for once, and by the silence, before everyone else, too. I should’ve rolled over and gotten more sleep, but I had an idea, and once my brain started to play, there was no more sleep in the cards.
After considering and discarding the idea of leaving a note, I popped across the hall and picked up one of the orange dumbbells. As on the previous night, it vibrated once and fell silent. Back in the hall, I held the thing in front of me like I would a flashlight. “Metal shop,” I said, and the thing vibrated twice, once for a short period, once for a longer period.
I turned in a slow circle, and when I pointed at the orange door Mothi had found the day before, the guide vibrated again. I ignored it and turned my back on the door and started walking. After a few steps, the guide vibrated vigorously.
“Jane,” I whispered. The guide again vibrated twice, one short, one long. A huge smile spread across my face. It was almost painful how simple it was to use the guide.
After entering the garage, I shut the door behind me and slid into a cart, opened the rolling doors, and turned on the cart’s power. I drove the cart onto the roadway and picked up the dumbbell. “Take me to a place where I can turn on the preer.” The dumbbell vibrated three times, all three the same length. “No, huh? Okay, try this. Proo control room.” Again, the guide vibrated three times. I thought for a moment and inspiration struck. “Kyatlarhodn.” The orange guide vibrated twice, once short, once long. I held it out in front of me and got the vigorous vibration routine, so I turned the cart around and drove in the other direction, holding the guide against the right control stick.
The guide led me through three intersections but stopped me in the fourth. By holding the guide out to the left and right, I figured out which way to turn. I continued in that manner for over an hour until the thing told me to stop next to a set of orange roll-up doors with a brown stripe. I flicked the switch I was thinking of as the “garage door opener” switch and the doors rolled up, revealing a garage like the one from which I’d taken the cart.
After I pulled in and parked the cart, I walked through the orange, man-sized door. In the hall beyond, a series of brown doors marched away into the distance. I walked over to the first one and put my hand on the door, but the orange dumbbell danced in my hand—a clear warning, I thought. I walked down to the next door, three hundred steps or so away, and put my hand on the doorknob. The guide remained calm, so I opened the door and stepped through into a long, double-wide hallway.
The walls to either side were transparent and beyond them were two huge, VAB-sized rooms, but instead of being filled with pale-blue computer stacks, giant, brown, trapezoidal boxes littered the floor. They reminded me of the old microwave transmission horns used by AT&T before the advent of fiber optics. As I watched, green rotating lights began to spin in the room to the left, and after a moment, brilliant green-tinged white beams shot between a few of the horns that sat opposite from one another across the breadth of the room. While the beams flickered in the other room, an invisible force pulled me several steps toward the left wall—as if the beams triggered a burst of horizontal gravity. In the room to the right, the green warning lights started up, and more of the white beams arced from horn to horn, pulling me back toward the right.
Being pulled around by that unseen force didn’t seem to be all that healthy, and the hall was far too long for a quick sprint—not that sprinting was in my wheelhouse, anyway. I backed out of the hall and closed the door. Well, I asked for the Kyatlarhodn, didn’t I? I shook my head. How can I make the guide take me to a place where I can control these things?
I held up the guide device. “Can you hear me through this thing, Haymtatlr?” I murmured. The device remained inert, but I had an idea… “Take me to Haymtatlr.” The guide vibrated twice, once short, once long.
I followed its directions back to my cart with a smile on my face and backed out into the road. The ride was shorter than the first, and this time the garage doors bore a purple strip rather than brown.
“First brown, now purple?” I muttered. “Haymtatlr is a big cheater. You never mentioned purple or brown in your little rhyme.” I pressed the garage door opener switch, but the doors didn’t budge. I slid out of the cart and walked over to the doors.
The outside of the door was smooth—free of handles, or even convenient bends that could serve as hand-holds. I placed my hands flat against the door at shoulder height and pushed upward, but it was no use. It seemed Haymtatlr didn’t want visitors. “Fine,” I said, giving the door a slap. “Be that way.”
Something behind me scraped against the roadway. I craned my head over my shoulder, but there was nothing visible. I turned toward the sound and held my breath for a few moments, listening intently, but the sound didn’t repeat. Still, I had that distinct, hinky feeling of being watched.
I stood there, hand on Kunknir, wondering what might have made the sound. The moment stretched like hot taffy. One of the robots? John’s guardians? The only thing I heard was the sound of my own breathing. Imagining things again, Hank, I thought with a lopsided grin. I chuckled and slid into the driver’s seat of the cart, and as I did so, the sound came again. I darted a glance over my shoulder and what I saw ripped an involuntary shout out of my chest.
There was an oolfur gazing at me from around the corner of the intersection fifty yards behind me. Fifteen feet of suppurating sores, coarse, lank fur, fangs, and claws stepped out from his hiding place and snarled at me. There was no way to know if it was Luka or one of his followers, but the way he looked at me made me think he knew just who I was.
“Luka?” I asked, pleased that my voice was as steady as stone.
The oolfur burst into motion, leaping through the air to cut the distance between us by half. I rammed both control sticks forward, and the cart rocketed away from the oolfur accompanied by a screech of tires and the odor of burnt rubber. He howled, sounding frustrated, angry, and sprinted after me, but he stood no chance against the rapid acceleration of the cart.
“Towteer,” the oolfur grated.
I glanced over my shoulder and recoiled from what I saw. The oolfur stretched and twisted as he ran, his wolf-like visage melting, reforming in the likeness of a stag. Antlers sprang in fits and starts from its skull.
When the change finished, the thing put on a burst of speed that would have made a cheetah blush with shame. He closed the distance between us by half, but faltered, almost falling, and after that, he fell off the pace. The cart’s continuous speed proved too much for him, and he stopped in the roadway behind me, glaring at my receding back.
I grabbed the guide from the seat next to me. “Jane!” I yelled, and it vibrated twice in agreement. The control sticks bumped and thrummed against their stops, but I didn’t let up one bit, and by the time I reached the roll-up door the guide indicated, the motors beneath the seats were whining and giving off waves of heat. The orange door with a pale blue stripe shuddered and rolled up when I snapped the switch to its on position.
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 90