Chaline.
She had accompanied him while on the planet Samarkand after a runcible disaster there—her job being to set up a new runcible. An alien bioconstruct called Dragon, consisting of four conjoined and living spheres each a nearly a mile across, subsequently arrived there to create mayhem—or rather just one of its spheres arrived. Dragon aimed to murder one of its own makers who had come to Polity space to seek it out. The destruction of the original runcible had been Dragon’s attempt to prevent that ‘Maker’ leaving Samarkand. To avenge the deaths it caused on that small cold world, Cormac killed that lone Dragon sphere with a contra-terrene bomb, whereupon the Polity took on the task of ferrying the Maker back to its home civilization. He had not known Chaline volunteered for that mission to the Small Magellanic Cloud, but was unsurprised. She would have relished the challenges of setting up a runcible so far from the Polity. Of course, a further complication, now he intended to interrogate her, was that for a brief time they had been lovers.
‘So what the hell happened?’ he asked, sitting down.
Also sitting down, Chaline crossed her legs and smiled. ‘As ever direct. Hello, Ian, how are you? I’m fine by the way, if a little tired.’
Cormac sat back and smiled as well. In a mild voice he observed, ‘You know how I have little time for the social niceties. I have lived a hectic life since we last spoke. I’ve lost friends and nearly lost my life. Your sarcasm might be acceptable if we were here meeting as old friends and exchanging pleasantries. The truth is that neither of us ever contacted the other after Samarkand, and there was nothing to stop me thinking that I would not be seeing you again for the best part of a millennium.’
‘A point.’ Chaline nodded. ‘A definite point.’
Cormac sat forward. ‘This is not about points, as you well know.’
‘Then why am I here talking to you?’
‘I want to hear your story.’
‘Then why not just download it.’ Chaline tapped a finger against her temple. ‘You know I’m gridlinked. I already uploaded recordings of my every relevant memory to Jerusalem. We don’t need to have this conversation.’
Cormac replied, ‘I prefer to hear everything directly, while I’m looking into the face of the speaker. Cerebral uploads can be tampered with. This meeting, though crude, can reveal so much more to the right observer.’
‘You don’t trust me? This will be compared to what I uploaded?’
‘It’s not that.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘In situations as serious as this it’s all about information: quantities of information to be processed, assessed. Jerusalem, like any major AI, can create extensions to itself: subminds, telefactors,’ he shrugged, ‘whatever, but they remain only extensions. It likes those humans working for it to do their own thing: that way something unforeseen by itself might be revealed. It has agreed that I should interview you directly.’
‘Kind of it to allow you such a free rein, but I doubt anything will be revealed here that the AI does not already know.’
‘But something might, and that’s the point.’
Chaline snorted. ‘Shall we get on with this then?’
‘Jerusalem did inform me that a time-inconsistent runcible connection was made—something I’d never even heard of until that moment—but why the hostile contact protocol?’ He studied her keenly. ‘Obviously it was to defend us against Jain technology, but how did Celedon know that?’
Chaline grimaced. ‘We sent an information package through to Celedon. You can’t just open an out-network runcible connection without the receiving runcible AI agreeing to it. It’s a security protocol. Surely you were already told this?’
‘I am to hear the story direct from you. If I were to already know all the facts Jerusalem knows, I would only be asking you questions that are utterly predictable to it.’
‘Ah, so you must approach this without the constraints of foreknowledge, like a Stone Age man trying to operate a personal computer.’
‘Not quite the analogy I’d choose.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Now, I’ve been allowed access to all the logs concerning the preparation for the voyage. The ship was called the Victoria, after an ancient sailing ship in Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet—apparently the one first to circumnavigate Earth. Tell me, other than at Samarkand, did you have any contact with the Maker before boarding that ship?’
‘None at all, as that’s not my province. I build runcibles… Cormac, you know that.’ She grimaced and looked sideways towards the floor. ‘Of course that changed when we got underway. It changed for all of us.’
‘Tell me about that. Tell me about the Maker.’
The sun seemed hatched from some cosmic egg, with pieces of its own shell orbiting it, glimpsed briefly in thick clouds lit from within by that solar orb. The Cassius gas giant, in its own orbit close enough around the sun for molten iron to rain from its skies, supplied those clouds as carefully positioned antimatter blasts gradually demolished it. Some of those eggshell fragments were a 100,000 miles across. The matter converters at their edges were the size of small moons; sucking in the miasma of the gas giant’s destruction, slowly laying mile-thick composite laced with a balancing web of gravmotors and superconducting cables. But this, after a century, was just the start: a scattering of bricks on a building site, a pile of sand, a sack of cement. The project downtime was estimated at a million years, give or take a few hundred thousand. You could think in those terms when you were an AI and immortal. The humans and haimans working the project just comforted themselves with the thought that they were part of something… numinous.
From within the cowling of her half-carapace, situated within her own interface sphere, Orlandine observed the scene with her multitude of senses, processed the continuous feed of data through her numerous augmentations, then focused on one of those scattered pieces. This particular fragment of the nascent, fully enclosing Dyson sphere was diamond-shaped, 160,000 miles long and 100,000 wide. She analysed stress data as the first matter converter—something resembling a squat ocean liner with a mile-wide slot cut into its stern—detached. She focused in closer, observing the swarm of surrounding ships, the Pseidon poised like a titanic crab’s claw, collapsing scaffolds of pseudomatter winking out. A storm of ionization glowed between converter and fragment, trying to draw it back, but the converter’s massive drive engaged, throwing a ten-mile-long fusion flame above the plain of composite, and it pulled away.
‘Are we within parameters?’ asked Shoala.
‘We are,’ Orlandine replied.
Shoala tended to verbalize when nervous, but being haiman for only twenty years he was yet to fully accept what the term implied. Perhaps they were all like that, else they would not so often sever their link with their carapaces for spells of ‘human time’. None of them yet accepted they were truly haiman—a combination of human and AI—and still believed the carapaces just complex tools rather than integral parts of themselves.
‘Then this is it,’ Shoala said, ‘another complete section of the sphere. We should celebrate.’
Ah, human time again, thought Orlandine. ‘And how should we celebrate?’ she asked.