“Don’t spend too much effort on that,” Lianna told him. “Half those phonemes are just a side effect of booting up the hyperparietals.”
Brüks nodded. “Plus I think the hive—fragments sometimes, you know? Sometimes I think I’m looking at one network, sometimes two or three. They drop in and out of sync all the time. I’m correcting for that—trying to, anyway—but I still can’t get any correlations that make sense.” He sighed. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”
Lianna shrugged, unconcerned. “You gotta have faith. You’ll figure it out, if it’s God’s will.”
He couldn’t help himself. “Jesus Christ, Lee, how can you keep saying that? You know there’s not the slightest shred of evidence—”
“Really.” In an instant her body language had changed; suddenly there was fire in her eyes. “And what kind of evidence would be good enough for you, Dan?”
“I—”
“Voices in the clouds? Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming I Am the Lord thy God, you insignificant weasel? Then would you believe?”
He held up his hands, reeling in the face of her anger. “Lee, I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, don’t back down now. You’ve been shitting on my beliefs since the day we met. The least you can do is answer the goddamn question.”
“I—well…” Probably not, he had to admit. The first thought that fiery skywriting would bring to his mind would be hoax, or hallucination. God was such an absurd proposition at its heart that Brüks couldn’t think of any physical evidence for which it would be the most parsimonious explanation.
“Hey, you’re the one who keeps talking about the unreliability of human senses.” It sounded feeble even to himself.
“So no evidence could ever change your mind. Tell me how that doesn’t make you a fundamentalist.”
“The difference,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that brain hack is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than omnipotent sky wizard.”
“Yeah. Well, the people you’re putting under your nanoscope know a thing or two about observed data too, and I’m pretty sure their publication record kicks yours all over the innersys. Maybe you don’t know everything. I gotta go.”
She turned to the ladder, gripped the rails so hard her knuckles whitened.
Stopped. Unclenched, a little.
Turned back.
“Sorry. I just…”
“S’okay,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to, well…” Except he had, of course. They both had. They’d been doing this dance the whole trip downhill.
It just hadn’t seemed so personal before.
“I don’t know what got into me,” Lianna said.
He didn’t call her on it. “It’s okay. I can be kind of a brain stem sometimes.”
She tried on a smile.
“Anyhow, I do have to go. We’re good?”
“We’re good.”
She climbed away, smile still fastened to her face, bent just slightly to the left. Favoring ribs that medical technology had long since completely healed.
He wasn’t a scientist, not to these creatures. He was a baby in a playpen, an unwelcome distraction to be kept busy with beads and rattles while the grown-ups convened on more adult matters. This gift Lianna had brought him wasn’t a sample; it was a pacifier.
But by all the laws of thermodynamics, it did its job. Brüks was hooked at first sight.
He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab’s ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he’d accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.
What are you? he thought in amazement.
Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovitch plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.
Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.
And yet… the way it was arranged…
He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien technology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.
It was as though someone had taught an abacus to play chess. It was as though someone had taught a spider to argue philosophy.
“You’re thinking,” he murmured, and couldn’t keep an amazed smile off his face.
It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.
It took its time, mind you. Sat on its leaf for hours, figuring out the angles without ever making a move, and then zap: closed on its prey along some roundabout route that broke line-of-sight for minutes at a time. Somehow it hit every waypoint, never lost track of the target. Somehow it just remembered all those three-dimensional puzzle pieces with a brain barely big enough to register light and motion.
As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure—a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look—but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. There’d be some upper limit, of course—some point at which scratchpads and global variables took up so much room there’d be none left over for actual cognition—but this was just a fleck, this was barely the size of a ladybug. The condenser chamber was awash in the stuff.
What had Lianna called it? God. The Face of God.
Maybe, Brüks thought. Give it time.
“Scale-invariant shit it timeshares!”
He’d almost gotten used to it by now. Barely even jumped at the sound of Rakshi Sengupta exclaiming unexpectedly at his side. He peeled the hood back and there she was, a meter to his left: eavesdropping on his models through an ancillary bulkhead feed.
He sighed and nodded. “Emulates larger networks a piece at a time. That one little piece of Portia could—”