And one does: some dog-end of her interpretation programming abruptly accepted by the host system, recognized and identified, and she finds doors slamming open, archive contents spilling out until there is more than she can handle and she has to pull back layer after layer, further and further from the meat until she can get an idea of what she is actually looking at.
Everything is filed under a nested set of headings, and most of those are incomprehensible to her, data never meant for human cataloguing. Deep under those layers, though, she discovers a name, a recognizably human name: Disra Senkovi.
2.
Avrana Kern has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants. She considers: do the ants have emotional responses? Probably they are individually too simple for much more than primal fight/flight/pain responses. Their world is limited to the internal architecture of the colony, and the deeper architecture of the conditioning the Portiids have trained them to follow. They do not know they form the substrate for a grander mind, any more than the cells of a Portiid or Human body do.
She also wonders if the greater Kern instances can approximate a response beyond the purely intellectual. They are more complex than she is, after all, and have greater processing power available to them. However, if that is the case, she has no memory of it.
Unbidden, and from the deepest and most corrupted storage bins of her mind, a memory surfaces: the opinions of one Professor Douglev Haffmeier on whether the ancestral, living Avrana Kern was capable of emotional response. Irritated, she deletes it and any other reference to the jilted Haffmeier, even her own satisfaction at having so comprehensibly outlived him.
She has a record of what she experienced when she made free with Meshner’s implants and, inadvertently, the rest of his neurology. She cannot appreciate it: to run those recordings at any meaningful level would require access to the original architecture, vis, Meshner, and she has not utilized that connection again just yet. She is monitoring him carefully, and it is undeniable that he has undergone some cerebral changes that, were she not shunting more honest assessment off into a subroutine, she would characterize as ‘damage’. At the same time, Meshner himself appears substantially unchanged at a personality level. Even now he is conspiring with Fabian on what the male Portiid endearingly believes to be a closed channel through the Artifabian automaton. Their topic of conversation is, of course, the implants and their research. Kern intends to be a fly on the wall (an inner wall, of Meshner’s skull) when they reopen their investigations.
Kern’s problem is this: she does not know what she is missing, being unable to experience it on her own. Simultaneously she is very aware of the absence. Her world was broadened, and now it is in its familiar straightjacket again. She cannot even grow inured to the experience because it is so comprehensively denied her.
Viola and Zaine, being the crewmembers with the most authority and mental capacity, have been debating the pros and cons of the inner planet and its signal for some time, on and off. The idea that this human-made contact might serve as leverage against the octopus locals, and thereby a means of recovering what can be salvaged of Helena and Portia, is still the narrow front runner. Kern chips in occasionally to encourage them. She is aware that she is being duplicitous in doing so, not because she disagrees with such a sentiment but because she has parallel motivations she is not voicing. She wants to meet this signal-sender. She wants – or at least has constructed a hypothesis to which she is giving untoward weight – it to be something like her, or like she was. She is aware that she is stacking the deck of her own calculations to get the answer she wants. At the same time, it is the answer she wants, and so she agrees with herself to overlook her own fudging of the figures just this once.
Back in the day, when she was a melange of organic consciousness and artificial personality, she dealt with conflicting motivations by fragmenting her mind into entirely separate shards, each of them with sharp edges to grate against the others. Portiid entomological computing bestows a breadth of processing power ideal for managing simultaneous, even contradictory, calculations. She can run two opposing points of view without logical difficulty, right up to the point where she needs to take two conflicting courses of action at the same time, whereupon the waveform collapses and the ideological cat is either alive or dead. And she knows that, at that point, she would take the action that best served the ship and its crew. Yet to run the thought experiment is irresistible: what if I had the chance to do this for me? What if the odds so fell out that I could fulfil my personal goals without compromising the overall objectives? And the inevitable follow-on calculations of: How might those odds be nudged, precisely?
Hence her decisions here, which will doubtless have enormous ramifications for the crew if she has pushed things too far. At some level, Kern is aware that she has a problem. She is not damaged, despite the fighting, but her moments of expanded functionality within Meshner’s mindscape have left her feeling as though what she is left with now is incomplete, dysfunctional. Parts of her are constantly reaching out for the connections she remembers making. She wants that fuller being, she wants to connect to that distant signalwoman Erma Lante; two distinct ends now conflated by the circling subroutines she is filling her mind with. I want to be more.
Meshner is having another attack. Excusing herself under her general responsibility for crew safety, she links to his implants. This event is brief and non-threatening, but it gives her a momentary expansion of her capabilities, filled with alien sensoria. Kern will take anything she can get, at this point. Meshner could be reliving the worst traumas and she would lap it up greedily. Then it is gone, and once more she is left not only bereft, but unable to even appreciate what she had, knowing only that she no longer has it.
***
Fabian’s feet tap and scrape on the floor quietly, because Viola is nearby and would doubtless have some caustic sentiments for them about jeopardizing the mission with their foolish researches. Artifabian picks up on this, his voice coming out as a low murmur. ‘Meshner, respond please. What is your condition?’
Meshner stares the spider in its primary eyes. ‘I may need to disconnect some implant functions.’
Tok. Fabian’s irritated twitching suggests just how inadequate a response that is.
‘It was one of your Understandings. I experienced it. It translated over . . . adequately.’ And it is a breakthrough, make no mistake. All the many days they have raced for the inner planet, the pair of them have been working. Enforced idleness in a spaceship run by a self-sufficient and possessive computer system is a blessing for those with long-running experimentation to be getting on with. Even as Helena, unbeknownst to them, is slowly working her way through hundreds of hours of visual data with life and freedom as the stakes, Meshner and Fabian have been able to amble through the labyrinth of their own work, slowly homing in on a format of Portiid experience that Meshner’s poor Human mind can appreciate. And outside the mutable walls of the Lightfoot is a solar system of molluscs that want to kill them, but one can only spend so long gripped with fear before becoming jaded. The work of the experimenter, in contrast, goes on forever.
Until it actually generates results.
Meshner finds he is trembling. His limbs feel leaden and too few. The muscles of his face and thumbs tick randomly, and he wonders if they are trying to be palps and chelicerae and all of a Portiid’s intricate mandibular machinery.