‘The challenge is,’ Fabian goes on, ‘to find something that you will know to be other, but isn’t so other that you simply cannot process the experience. We want to keep estrangement to a minimum.’ He pauses, confers with the automaton over just how his meaning had been communicated, and then adds, ‘By which, I mean—’
‘You don’t want to fry my brain,’ Meshner confirms.
‘Delicious as that concept is to the imagination,’ Fabian agrees, and Meshner can only wonder if this is some peculiar Portiid saying he’s never encountered, or if Fabian is making another venture into human humour.
‘Take what precautions you can, but we’re going to do this,’ he tells his colleague. ‘We’re not going to let them stop us.’
‘Of course.’ Fabian skitters over behind Meshner and begins checking over the node of the ship’s computer currently linked to the Human’s cranial implant.
Ants in my brain, Meshner thinks, though of course it is nothing of the sort; the ants don’t leave the confines of the ship’s network but their calculations create electrical inputs that feed into the chambers of his cybernetics, and thence to his brain. Human and Portiid technologies mesh more readily than their cultures or languages.
And it seems the technologies of these locals follow a similar pattern. The Old Empire is at the root of it all, meaning some common ground at least. If we had met something genuinely alien, we wouldn’t know where to start. Right now, in fact, the Lightfoot is waiting on word from the Voyager, where the language teams have made some sort of breakthrough with the inner system signals. Perhaps everyone will be talking to everyone else any moment, one big interstellar community.
All the comms are between Bianca on the scout and the command crew on the mothership, mediated by the various instances of Kern. The crew of the Lightfoot has nothing to do but wait for the news, which is why Meshner is getting on with his own work rather than just twiddling his thumbs. Theoretically, Artifabian could just have patched back into the network and spilled everything, being an instance of Kern. Meshner has discovered, to his surprise, that this is something the automaton is resistant to. It is its own little fragment of artificial intelligence, and to come too close to the intellectual pull of a larger instance like the Lightfoot’s operating system could see it merged and stripped of its individuality. It values being itself, and what it has become working with Fabian and himself, a unique intelligence. Which sounds terribly rebellious and impressive until Meshner considers that this drive to become separate is part of the initial programming trajectory Kern gave it.
‘All ready,’ Artifabian informs him, and a moment later he connects that with the tapping on his lower back that is Fabian himself giving the all-clear.
‘Go,’ he confirms but at the same time the automaton says, ‘Wait – receiving new information.’
Fabian raps irritably against Meshner’s back and he says, ‘Just go, start the process.’
The automaton raises its front legs partway, as though about to go into a threat display, but then freezes, apparently weighing its priorities. Meshner feels the familiar uncomfortable prickle at the inside of his skull as his implants begin parsing information. He has gone through their architecture since the last time, streamlining everything he could and adjusting the connections with his various sensory nodes. Now he finds a strange taste in his mouth, sharp and sweet, as though he is about to vomit. He clenches his stomach experimentally, but there is no other symptom.
Abruptly his fingers feel gritty, their skin coarse as he rubs them against his thumbs.
‘The Voyager has instructions. Bianca is addressing us,’ Artifabian says, momentarily nothing more than a mouthpiece for the wider nation of Kern.
‘Let her,’ Meshner grumbles. He hears Fabian’s palps tok behind him. A glance shows the spider keeping three feet and a couple of eyes on the instrumentation even as he cants his body to listen.
‘Avrana Kern has made a major breakthrough in respect of the communications from the inner system,’ the automaton says, translating the jittering of their mission commander. ‘Concealed within the visual data, which remains impenetrable, there is a second channel of mathematical information based solidly upon old human notation. This has now been at least partially decoded so that we can understand information such as coordinates, flight paths and some technical data, with more waiting to be interpreted. Armed with this knowledge and commonality, joint command sees fit to send us to make initial contact with the local civilization.’
Meshner tries to concentrate on the words, but there is a lot of white noise intruding on them and it seems to carry its own burden of impenetrable meaning. His skin strobes with stripes of heat and cold that pass up and down his spine. ‘How are my readings?’ he croaks.
Fabian sends over a brief report to a sub-screen. There is a riot of new information in Meshner’s sensory foci, especially the olfactory and gustatory regions of his brain. Curiously, Meshner isn’t tasting or smelling much of anything right now, but phantom touches jab at him all over his body. He hears a great ebb and flow like waves of the sea, and bright motes cluster around the edges of his vision.
‘This is no good,’ he tells Fabian. ‘It’s runaway synaesthesia. We’ve not synced the information.’ He feels frustration, because this is the core of the problem: are spider experience and human experience intrinsically incompatible? It is proving a hurdle that grows with each attempt to leap it.
Terminating, comes the acknowledgement on the sub-screen even as Artifabian continues to relay the mission brief. The Voyager is going into hiding and the Lightfoot is going to say hello to the warring natives, Meshner blearily gathers. It seems like a terrible idea to him. The scout vessel will be utterly without support, but then the locals might be so advanced that all the Voyager would be able to achieve would be to die on the same hill.
‘Given the reliance on bare technical detail, Avrana Kern believes there is a strong chance that this is a machine civilization that has outlived its creators,’ the automaton explains crisply. Meshner is having trouble processing the idea, but he feels strongly that any such artificial survivors would be less than delighted to find humans on their doorstep after so long.
‘Perhaps they’ll think we’re a travelling museum,’ he gets out, the physical sensation of lemons and sunlight and blue suffusing his skin, spider-life trying to force itself down all the wrong channels in his brain. Fabian skitters out some sort of message but, before Meshner can read or hear any translation, he feels himself slide sideways and loses consciousness.
***
Zaine takes it on herself to upbraid Meshner when he is finally back with them. Helena watches her tear into the man, while the spider crewmembers stand back and either ignore their Human fellows or badger the ship for translations.
He had been out for a couple of hours, the chief reason being informational overload. Helena knows what he is trying to achieve, and even supports the idea in principle, but Meshner is weirdly competitive, determined to make a breakthrough before some hypothetical rival eclipses him. He doesn’t want assistance from her or Portia. He wants to win, or that is how it comes across.
Zaine’s own Portiid liaison work is practical, working in narrow, task-focused situations and building a gestural code to communicate swift, limited chunks of information. That is as far as she cares to take matters, and Bianca and Viola, who work with her, seem equally happy to leave Human-spider relations to the field of just getting things done. Meshner wants to get inside their heads, or vice versa. Despite his prickly arrogance Helena feels she is more on his side of the argument.