It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.
“That’s me. Been looking me up?”
“You feature in the flow.” The ’face lifted one arm, and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in among it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.
“Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.”
It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT—he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.
“It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,” the blue figure said gravely. “Re-enabling a nanolevel artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.”
Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was, and the downpour of images ran on.
Carl gestured toward the display. “Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?”
“Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. The Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalized reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemeine called y—”
“Yeah, fine. You can stop there.” Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talking occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. “I came to ask you a couple of questions.”
The ’face waited.
“Do you recall Allen Merrin?”
“Yes.” Merrin’s gaunt, Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. “Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5, 2106, protocol code 55528187.”
“Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?”
“No. The system revived him at four hundred fourteen hours of trajectory time.”
“You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred seventy-eight hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.”
“Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.”
“And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?”
The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.
It took about twenty seconds.
“There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.”
“Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?”
“To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way; an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.”
“So you dreamed Merrin.”
“That is one way of describing it, yes.”
“And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?”
The confetti-streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really gotten the hang of human features.
“Talk to whom?”
Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. “To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.”
“If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.”
“Often?”
“I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two percent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine percent of his speech was apparently directed—”
“All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?”
“Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.”
“Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.”
“What referents do you wish employed for the curve?”
“Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links, they’re not what I’m after.” Carl wished suddenly that Matthew were here to handle this for him, to reach quicksilver-swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here—Carl felt clumsy by contrast. The terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. “Cross-reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.”
The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.
“This will take time,” it said.
Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.
“Better get me a chair then.”
He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neo-Nordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something—his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism—or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.
Instead he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.
The ’face had left him to his chair—a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him—and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place—at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three meters tall, two broad, and angled slightly backward at the base a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.