No, Grelier decided. If he had learned one lesson from this whole sordid Quaiche business, it was to maintain his own standards. Jasmina would scold him for aborting a body, but in the long run she would respect his judgement, his stolid devotion to excellence.
He twisted the brass wheel shut, blocking saline. He knelt down and pushed in most of the nutrient valves.
‘Sorry,’ Grelier said, addressing the smooth, expressionless face behind the glass, ‘but I’m afraid you just didn’t cut it.’
He gave the body one last glance. In a few hours the processes of cellular deconstruction would be grotesquely obvious. The body would be dismantled, its constituent chemicals recycled for use elsewhere in the factory.
A voice buzzed in his earpiece. He touched a finger to the device.
‘Grelier… I was expecting you already.’
‘I’m on my way, ma’am.’
A red light started flashing on top of the vivification tank, synchronised to an alarm. Grelier cuffed the override, silencing the alarm and blanking the emergency signal. Calm returned to the body factory, a silence broken only by the occasional gurgle of nutrient flows or the muffled click of some distant valve regulator.
Grelier nodded, satisfied that all was in hand, and resumed his unhurried progress.
At the same instant that Grelier pushed in the last of the nutrient valves, an anomaly occurred in the sensor apparatus of the Gnostic Ascension. The anomaly was brief, lasting only a fraction over half a second, but it was sufficiently unusual that a flag was raised in the data stream: an exceptional event marker indicating that something merited attention.
As far as the sensor software was concerned that was the end of it: the anomaly had not continued, and all systems were now performing normally. The flag was a mere formality; whether it was to be acted on was the responsibility of an entirely separate and slightly more intelligent layer of monitoring software.
The second layer — dedicated to health-monitoring all shipwide sensor subsystems — detected the flag, along with several million others raised in the same cycle, and assigned it a schedule in its task profile. Less than two hundred thousandths of a second had lapsed since the end of the anomaly: an eternity in computational terms, but an inevitable consequence of the vast size of a lighthugger’s cybernetic nervous system. Communications between one end of the Gnostic Ascension and the other required three to four kilometres of main trunk cabling, six to seven for a round-trip signal.
Nothing happened quickly on a ship that large, but it made little practical difference. The ship’s huge mass meant that it responded sluggishly to external events: it had precisely the same need for lightning-fast reflexes as a brontosaurus.
The health-monitoring layer worked its way down the pile.
Most of the several million events it looked at were quite innocuous. Based on its grasp of the statistical expectation pattern of error events, it was able to de-assign most of the flags without hesitation. They were transient errors, not indicative of any deeper malaise in the ship’s hardware. Only a hundred thousand looked even remotely suspicious.
The second layer did what it always did at this point: it compiled the hundred thousand anomalous events into a single packet, appended its own comments and preliminary findings and offered the packet to the third layer of monitoring software.
The third layer spent most of its time doing nothing: it existed solely to examine those anomalies forwarded to it by duller layers. Quickened to alertness, it examined the dossier with as much actual interest as its borderline sentience allowed. By machine standards it was still somewhere below gamma-level intelligence, but it had been doing its job for such a long time that it had built up a huge hoard of heuristic expertise. It was insultingly clear to the third layer that more than half of the forwarded events in no way merited its attention, but the remaining cases were more interesting, and it took its time going through them. Two-thirds of those anomalies were repeat offenders: evidence of systems with some real but transient fault. None, however, were in critical areas of ship function, so they could be left alone until they became more serious.
One-third of the interesting cases were new. Of these, perhaps ninety per cent were the kind of failures that could be expected once in a while, based on the layer’s knowledge of the various hardware components and software elements involved. Only a handful were in possibly critical areas, and thankfully these faults could all be dealt with by routine repair methods. Almost without blinking, the layer dispatched instructions to those parts of the ship dedicated to the upkeep of its infrastructure.
At various points around the ship, servitors that were already engaged in other repair and overhaul jobs received new entries in their task buffers. It might take them weeks to get around to those chores, but eventually they would be performed.
That left a tiny core of errors that might potentially be of some concern. They were more difficult to explain, and it was not immediately clear how the servitors should be ordered to deal with them. The layer was not unduly worried, in so far as it was capable of worrying about anything: past experience had taught it that these gremlins generally turned out to be benign. But for now it had no choice but to forward the puzzling exceptions to an even higher stratum of shipboard automation.
The anomaly moved up like this, through another three layers of steadily increasing intelligence.
By the time the final layer was invoked, only one outstanding event remained in the packet: the original transient sensor anomaly, the one that had lasted just over half a second. None of the underlying layers could account for the error via the usual statistical patterns and look-up rules.
An event only filtered this high in the system once or twice a minute.
Now, for the first time, something with real intelligence was invoked. The gamma-level subpersona in charge of overseeing layer-six exceptions was part of the last line of defence between the cybernetics and the ship’s flesh crew. It was the subpersona that had the difficult role of deciding whether a given error merited the attention of its human stewards. Over the years it had learned not to cry wolf too often: if it did, its owners might decide that it needed upgrading. As a consequence, the subpersona agonised for many seconds before deciding what to do.
The anomaly was, it decided, one of the strangest it had ever encountered. A thorough examination of every logical path in the sensor system failed to explain how something so utterly, profoundly unusual could ever have happened.
In order to do its job effectively, the subpersona had to have an abstract understanding of the real world. Nothing too sophisticated, but enough that it could make sensible judgements about which kinds of external phenomena were likely to be encountered by the sensors, and which were so massively unlikely that they could only be interpreted as hallucinations introduced at a later stage of data processing. It had to grasp that the Gnostic Ascension was a physical object embedded in space. It also had to grasp that the events recorded by the ship’s web of sensors were caused by objects and quanta permeating that space: dust grains, magnetic fields, radar echoes from nearby bodies; and by the radiation from more distant phenomena: worlds, stars, galaxies, quasars, the cosmic background signal. In order to do this it had to be able to make accurate guesses about how the data returns from all these objects were supposed to behave. No one had ever given it these rules; it had formulated them for itself, over time, making corrections as it accumulated more information. It was a never-ending task, but at this late stage in the game it considered itself rather splendid at it.