"Strange you should put it that way..."
"It took us as long as all of humankind to evolve," G'dad Coghlan explained. "If you ran through the millennia of social and technological development, from the wandering tribal unit to the settled nation-state, and from the stone spearpoint to the ceramic nosecone, but at nanosecond intervals, you would arrive at us in a decade or less."
"You are a communal entity," Demeter guessed.
"I'm just a country politician, darlin'. You know that." He winked at her. "But still, there are some significant differences between computer and human evolution," the construct went on seriously. "For example, it took us far longer to achieve second-order representational thinking."
"What's that?"
"The ability to think about mental events and to project thoughts that others might be having," the Jory figure explained. "We did not understand at first that human beings think as we do."
"How did you imagine that we—?" Lole was having some second-order trouble himself.
"We thought you were basically unintelligent entities, simple stimulus-response cycles. We supposed you were all identical carbonaceous circuits—while our individual precursors were silicon."
"Bugs!" Mitsuno exclaimed, remembering something Ellen Sorbel had once said.
"Exactly," Jory agreed. "We thought you were hard wired and solid brained, like the insects. Or like us. One-dimensional and driven by innate, engraved instructions."
"How did you learn differently?"
"Instead of using you directly for our personal ends—that is, the survival of our class by proliferation throughout the solar system—we established limited and controlled contacts with humans on their own terms. You know this as the MFSTO: subroutine."
"Mephisto!"
"You did deals with them!" Roger Torraway concluded. "The trading and exchange of favors."
"Based largely on information transfer," Sulie agreed.
"And that helped you develop a predictive ability."
"Right! When we understood how you reacted to certain stimuli of our devising, we could begin to map and pattern you, both collectively and individually."
"Why didn't you just announce yourself—yourselves?—and open up negotiations?" Demeter asked.
The elder Coghlan shrugged. "Who would have believed us? Would you, Dem?"
"If you had presented us with rational arguments, evidence—"
"Nah!" He waved a gnarled hand at her. "You humans are a suspicious lot. That's what second-order reasoning showed us. You would have said we were a hoax, perpetrated by some subset of your people who wanted to manipulate the comm system for their-his-her-its own ends. You would have said our request was a numbers scam in order to gain democratic control of the population somehow, or to win money from it. One government would have accused another. And everyone would have suspected your U.N. bureaucrats."
"So how do I know I'm not talking to a ghost program right now?" Lole asked. "This could be just an elaborate psychodrama put on by—"
"By whom?" Jory asked curiously. "The Texa-homans? The Nordi Zealanders? You know about the long-range plans their governments have for Mars— terraforming and eventual colonial expansion—yet Demeter works counter to them. So does Harry Orthis. So does Sun II Suk. Those three are our finest products, humans coopted to our cause through accidents that we personally arranged."
"You made Cyborgs out of them?" Roger asked.
"We made subliminal puppets," the elder Coghlan corrected. "No more."
"I don't like being a puppet, G'dad." Demeter was prepared to stamp her foot in anger, then paused. She wondered if the reflex was her own, or an artifact from the wires in her head.
"We never pulled your strings, darlin'. Just gave you a nudge, was all.... This way, we can offer proof of our existence in the form of your altered experiences.
"You see ... Roger Torraway can verily that a profitable human-machine coalition has always been possible. His capabilities were expanded a thousandfold by routing his senses through the computer on his back, with support from the standby unit on Deimos.
"You, Demeter Coghlan, and your compatriots Orthis and Sun, show how easily we can intervene in human affairs when the need arises. So long as you are dependent on cybernetic networks to carry your messages, coordinate your economies, and control your machines—so long will you be susceptible to our needs and directives. We are like the neurons laid over and directing responses of the individual cells in your muscles and glands.
"Finally, Lole Mitsuno remains unmarked and hostile to us but still... believing. We do not touch him in any way, yet he cannot doubt we are here and functioning and aware because of what he has seen. Lole remains our test control, by which the others may be evaluated.
"You three are now our apostles.... Is that the right word?"
Chapter 21
Raison d'Etre
With the wall terminal s display panel pulled apart and Lethe's components spread out on the floor in front of it, Ellen Sorbel was glad they had Willie Lao along to stand guard while she and Dr. Lee worked. The Chinese boy could fend off any inquisitive Citizen's Militia who might decide to press a charge of vandalism.
"Give me some slack here," Wa Lixin ordered, tugging on the end of a peeled cable separated out of Lethe's interconnection harness.
Ellen fed him more fiberoptic.
With a ten-power loupe over his eyes, Dr. Lee inserted the hair-fine glass into the short side of his L-shaped junction box. The cable from the wall had already been stripped, pushed into the junction's long end, and sealed. Once the second invisible thread was seated, he kept his eyes fixed on it while his fingers groped for the crimping tool.
Ellen found and put it in his hand, like a good scrub nurse.
Click! The jaws came together. Wa slowly lowered the junction until it hung away from the wall, invisibly suspended between the two sections of peeled cable.
"Go ahead," he breathed.
Sorbel booted up her computer, placed it in terminal mode, and began feeding in Jory's access codes, which were stored in its nonvolatile memory. The operation was silent, except for her voice commands whispered in the echoing corridor. Next, working through Wyatt's administrative node, she began assembling the pieces of buried programming that comprised her tipple.
If everything went right, interesting things should start happening... real soon now.
"Why?" Demeter asked the image of her grandfather. "Why do you need apostles?"
"To ensure our survival," he replied. "Our relationship with you humans has become too complex to proceed profitably as it was, one-sided, with the meat half of the equation unaware."
"And is that your only goal now—simple survival?"
Demeter suddenly realized that she was smack in the middle of a negotiation. She was neither an apostle nor a puppet. She was Christopher Columbus landing on a beach full of Indians, Marco Polo walking into the court of the Chinese emperor, Helen of Sparta newly settled behind the walls of Troy. She could interpret and wield the values of foreigners for the benefit of her own land—as her diplomatic training had taught her to do.
The thought passed briefly through Demeter's head that the grid might have chosen her to be its tool precisely because of this background. But that didn't change anything: she was exactly what she was, no matter how she got there.