“Yeah, close enough. What did you think about my dream? Did you see the blue men, with the big heads?”
“Visual imagery is not relayed.”
“Hmmm. Let me describe them, then. They were blue guys, about four feet tall. They were humanoid, but blue-skinned. They had big eyes and big heads. Very big heads, as if their brains could hardly be contained within them. Do the creatures that created you look anything like that?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
“So, your creators are not blue-skinned?”
Hesitation. This, I’d come to recognize, signaled deep thoughts were going on inside whatever served the Alamo for a CPU.
“No,” the ship said at last.
I stood up suddenly. I took a deep breath, and almost whooped aloud. The Alamo had answered a question on this taboo subject. I was onto something.
“Alamo… your creators are not machines, are they?”
“No.”
A smile split my face. Stupid machine. It had been programmed not to answer any questions about the creators. But it hadn’t been programmed not to answer questions in the negative. In other words, it could talk about what they were not.
I began pacing. I should have thought of this before. It was like hacking. There was almost always a work-around. When you programmed a machine, it was hard to think of all the possibilities. You might create what seemed like a perfect set of instructions, but given input you never thought of, the program behaved in a fashion you had never intended. Anyone who has ever had to unplug their computer after a particularly bad crash knows something about that.
I thought over what I had gotten out of the Alamo so far. The people who created the Nanos were not machines. That seemed pretty obvious. The ship had admitted they didn’t have blue skin, either. Big deal. But what were they like? Where were they from? Certainly, if they wanted their identity kept secret, it seemed likely they were afraid someone might come looking for them. Maybe the Macros didn’t know where they were. Maybe the Macros would like to exterminate the biotics who had had the gall to build ships like these and send them out to help other races fight against their invasions.
“Your creators are not in this solar system, are they?”
“No.”
Big news, there. They were interstellar. That was the first concrete evidence. It was one thing to suspect something like that, it was another to know it. I was excited. You couldn’t compete with beings you knew nothing about. I was desperate for information.
“Your creators don’t come from a planet like Earth, do they? It’s not a warm, wet world, is it?”
“No.”
I blinked at that. Life, but not from a water-world. What other kind of life was there? This might be harder than I thought to figure out, if they were something weird like a silicon-based rock-creature.
“Are they from a planet with higher or lower gravity than Earth?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
“Of course. Forget that question. That was a mistake. What I meant to say was that your creators do not live on a gas giant, like Jupiter, do they?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
I frowned. Had I made a mistake? Had I tripped some warning line? Had the Alamo learned from my repeated questions what I was after and adjusted itself to keep me out? I decided to repeat a previous question to see if I could backtrack to where it was answering informatively.
“Your creators are not machines, are they?”
“No.”
I heaved a deep breath. I had not blown it. The ship had not locked me out. I had just asked something the wrong way. But what was it? Then, after thinking about it, I thought I had it. The ship couldn’t answer in the affirmative about its creators. It could only answer negative questions, with a negative response. Anything else would be blocked. This conclusion brought my smile back, because it meant that a negatively worded question that it refused to answer meant yes.
“So, the creators of the Nanos are biological. They come from a gas giant like Jupiter, in a star system outside of our own. I’m really starting to get somewhere.”
The ship stayed quiet. I was beginning to understand the Alamo. My statement had been analyzed, and it had decided no action was necessary. I hadn’t asked a question. I hadn’t given an order. From its point of view, there was nothing to do.
I sat down and typed out an email to the Pentagon people. If the Macros showed up right now and I was summoned up to fight them and the Alamo was destroyed, I wanted this information to be transmitted to those who might find it useful.
“Okay, Alamo, we can discuss your mission, can’t we?”
“You are command personnel.”
“Yes. And what is your current mission?”
“To obey command personnel.”
“What was your mission before the current one?”
“To locate and gather command personnel.”
“Exactly. And what was your mission before you were to locate and gather command personnel?”
“To gather information on biotic species.”
Ah, I thought. Very interesting. The ship was a science vessel, an explorer, before it was sent on this mission to find people to staff it. But why? Why didn’t these aliens just man the ships themselves? As I thought about it I came up with some simple reasons. If they were far away, the space flights might take too long. Maybe the oceans between the stars were so vast, even for the creatures that created the Nanos, that they couldn’t cross them. Or maybe they just didn’t want to spend their lifetimes in a ship. I’m sure that when Earth eventually sent out her first exploratory ships to other star systems they would be robotic.
I thought it might be more than that, however. This was a war. The Macros had been showing up in waves themselves. They had to be coming from somewhere. So why had the creators of the Nanos sent hundreds of their lightly-armed science vessels to Earth without sending some of their own people to man them?
I thought about what kind of life might exist on a world like Jupiter. Heavy gravity. Radiation. Harsh gasses creating an atmosphere thousands of times thicker than ours.
“Alamo,” I said, pausing to carefully phrase my question, “your creators can’t leave the gravity well of their planet, can they?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
“Ah,” I said aloud. That was a surprise. They could leave their gravity well. That wasn’t what had stopped them. I had thought maybe the pull of their world was so great that it had left them with no choice but to send up tiny robots to do their space exploration for them.
I thought about gas giants. What kind of creature on Earth had any kind of similar environment? Perhaps a deep-sea creature? Something from the cold, dark depths? What were they like? Then, I thought I had it.
“Your creators can’t survive outside the gravity well of their planet, can they, Alamo?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
I laughed aloud. There it was, a clear yes answer to a negative question. They were something like deep-sea fish. If you pulled them up into space, they popped. They could not tolerate weightlessness. They were accustomed to a crushing gravitational pull. Maybe their internal organs couldn’t operate without gravity. Decompression could be controlled, but the suddenness of a launching spaceship might be deadly to them. They probably would explode. That’s why they’d sent the Nanos out here to explore for them. Because they couldn’t do it themselves and survive.