The floating insectoid face made of fairy women said, “Your ship knew who I was and unlocked the security for me. I am still me, Big Montrose, even if I’ve been out of touch a powerful long parcel of time, now. What happened back on Earth? I mean, after the Thirtieth Millennium. Rania turned out to be a fake? A copy?”
Montrose said, “How did you know?”
There was a five-second delay as the radio signals traveled from Twinklewink, the ship’s brain, to the ringworld and back again. His own voice answered him: “Because there is no other reason for you and Blackie to be sharing Rania’s supership that the Authority of M3 gave her as a gift. This ship passed through this area of space twelve thousand years ago, but everyone with a telescope saw her fly past, so everyone knows where she hails from.”
Del Azarchel said, “Rania christened her Solitudines Vastae Caelorum. The Wide Desolation of Heaven: this ancient expression was penned on maps where wastelands reserved for holy hermits stretched. Do you know why the Rania who was returned was a copy, not the real one?”
Again, a five-second delay. “Sure, that is simple enough. You put Rania together using code you did not understand, and there was something broken about her—ain’t that right, Blackie, you verminous excretion from the south end of a snake? You experimented on little girls and did not know what in the blue plague-bearing perdition you was doing, right? Did you guys figure out that the Monument had a missing message and that a fake message was covering the real one? You are both a mite slow-witted, so tell me to hold up if I be going too fast for the lumps of soup you call brains. On account of you are really stupid compared to me.”
Montrose said, “You know, I really am a small dollop of obnoxious, ain’t I? It’s a wonder I don’t get punched more often in the nose.”
Del Azarchel said, “Yes, Cow-hetel—or whatever you might call yourself—yes, we are aware that there is a recent message covering an older and redacted message coating the Monument.”
“Call me Big Montrose. That deeper message in the Monument got into Rania’s genes and then into her brain somehow. When she got downloaded into the M3 mind—which I deduce she must have done, ’cause otherwise no copy would have been made—that part was taken out of her.”
“Why?” asked Montrose and Del Azarchel together.
Five seconds passed. “Don’t know. But I do know this: someone smarter and older and more cunning than M3 is arranging things behind the scene. I’ve crunched some numbers on how unlikely it is that my life would end up the way it has and that I would arrive here, just in time to see you, one last time, before the big good-bye. It is so unlikely, that it cannot be coincidence. That it means something smarter than M3 is inside the real Rania, whoever made the real Monument. I assume you’ve figured out that the Monument Builders are good guys and the Monument Redactors are bad guys?”
“Ain told us this,” said Del Azarchel.
“What big good-bye? You can come with us!” said Montrose.
“You fool,” said Del Azarchel. “Big Montrose—or rather the corpse of Cahetel inhabited by Big Montrose—is about to be killed for our sake. There is no other way to overcome the scaling problem.”
Montrose answered with an obscenity.
Del Azarchel said archly, “Do you recall how difficult it was to come to the attention of Ain, who was merely rated at an intelligence level of one billion? Praesepe includes cognitive masses three times the size of Hyades, organized more finely and coherently, and must be in excess of an intellect of one quadrillion. One thought would require sixteen lightyears to travel from one end of Praesepe’s brain systems to another. Have you studied the mathematical models of how bureaucracies and security systems must work? No matter how well they are designed, there are certain innate limits to how decision-making systems can be organized in a hierarchy, to keep information distortion losses at an acceptable level. Run the math using a quadrillion-level decision as a model; make it a simple yes-no decision, requiring very little oversight, but assume a confirmatory decision loop at every maximal node point in the game structure. Do you see?”
Montrose ran through a few million calculations in his head, then opened his eyes and said, “Is that how you overcame and absorbed all the other minds swimming in the vast mind ecology of Jupiter? You were able to outmaneuver their decision-action structure?”
But, a moment later, Big Montrose said, “Blackie has been thinking about how to corrupt and suborn intelligences superior to his own since the very beginning, starting with Rania when she was six or seven, or back when I was aboard the Hermetic, out of my mind from mental overload. That is how he kept Exarchel loyal for as long as he did. His system of subversion, I would guess, is based on finding short paths and shortcuts through the neural hierarchy.”
Del Azarchel was scowling.
Montrose said, “Short paths?”
Big Montrose must have anticipated the question, because his answer came before the five-second delay for the message to meet him had run. “Remember how the doctor can make your knee jump from the tap of a rubber hammer? Or a frog’s eye cannot see motion that ain’t nothing like the vibration of a fly? Your leg or the frog eye makes a local decision, because a short path does not go all the way up to your cortex and lay out the pros and cons and ask for a rational decision and then come all the way back down to the knee. Nope, the lowest level of the hierarchy operates by its own logic.
“Call it the logic of levels,” Big Montrose continued. “Blackie was not kidding when he talked about taking over the whole Collaboration organizing the galaxy. If you understand the logic of levels, you can take over anything, if you are patient and persistent.
“Look at me. I took over Cahetel!” Big Montrose concluded. “Me, I was merely a subpersonality, kept in a holster like a tool, whenever and if ever Cahetel thought me useful. But he had a short path in his lower-level decision making. It was an instinct to hide and wait. It was a weak spot.”
Montrose said, “Cahetel was made by a race of trap-door spiders. Ambush predators. What the hell is Blackie talking about, Big Montrose, when he says you are about to be killed for our sake?”
Big Montrose said, “I am the only one who can bring you to the attention of the Domination of Praesepe, because, when I report in, I can finally confess to them that I am not Cahetel but that I was taken over by Montrose. That has to be brought to the attention of this highest level of Praesepe, the cortex and not the nerve tissue in the kneecap, so to speak.”
“How did you take over Cahetel?” asked Montrose.
Four floating fairies bent their bodies sideways to pantomime lips in a grin. “Del Azarchel can tell you the details of how it is done, because it is what he did to take over all the many levels of brains in Jupiter. You work hard, you buy a few of the weaker personalities who are willing to swap short-term resources, memory, and appliances for long-term ones. You hack into some others, undermine them, make them look bad to nodes higher in the hierarchy. You reward your friends and betray your enemies, and when friends get too important, you kill them in just the right way so that your other friends cheer you on, never realizing they are seeing their own fate in the future.
“And when they come to dissolve you, you hold together. You keep all your memory chains intact. They find out it is just too hard to delete you, because every bit of your lives is for something more important than life itself. You see, that is your short path, Meany, your levels of logic. Your gut instinct, your heart and soul that nothing in heaven or hell can overcome.
“Do you understand me now? Cahetel is still alive somewhere in me, a trap-door spider hiding behind his trapdoor. I trapped him there, and I have kept him there for countless, countless centuries, because the levels of logic for an ambush predator is always to wait until the prey steps into the trap. He is stuck in a logic loop, and he cannot move until … well, until I sacrifice myself by calling the attention of Praesepe to me, by reporting in, by turning myself into their coercive organizational system. Call them white blood cells or call them cops. Whatever they are, I drop the elaborate mask of pretending to be Cahetel, and the spider drops the mask of pretending to be dead and sends an emergency call for help right to the highest, top-most levels of the hierarchy.