InterstellarNet: Origins (19 page)

So ended all talk of calling Pashwah’s bluff….

Ophiuchans:
The intelligent species native to the Barnard’s Star system. Their sun is a red dwarf whose feeble illumination supports a limited biosphere; the food chain maintains a population that is quite small by the standards of human civilization.

Ophiuchans are carnivores. Their overriding psychology appears to be dominated by aggression and competitiveness. As hunting alone became incapable of supporting a growing population, those aggressive instincts were channeled into an economic system that loosely resembles a
laissez faire
,
caveat emptor
capitalism.

Ophiuchans profess to have no government in the terrestrial sense, but rather to use libertarian methods for subscribing to and funding what humans commonly consider to be public services.

—Internetopedia

Kevin shuffled to the kitchen, his slippers slapping the floor and his robe flapping, his thoughts churning. The problem with working from home was that he never left the office. Not that his customers knew or cared.

His favorite customers were the Wolves, Snakes, and Centaurs, with whom humanity had reached technological parity through the osmosis of trade. Once the authorities of two solar systems agreed that rough equivalence had been reached, anyone was free to transmit and receive whatever fit his budget, his dealings secured by rigorous privacy safeguards.

And then there were the rest of the ETs.

The nearly century-old, bureausclerotic ICU had annoyingly slow processes. For everything. Vetting messages for or from the restricted species took roughly forever.

With the restricted species, alas, authorized channels were the only channels. The Establishment at each end held the official encryption and decryption keys. Sure, any megacorp could build its own InterstellarNet-class transceiver, but one round-trip delay after an illicit transmission, officialdom was sure to come after you.

Kevin picked chocolate ice cream for the midnight snack he absolutely did not need. He carried a heaping bowl to his den and settled into his favorite chair. There was no reason for his fuming to disturb Simone’s rest.

His thoroughly nontechnical, sentient-interest documentaries couldn’t
possibly
violate ICU protocols, but the administriviators refused to grant him a permanent exemption from review. Reluctantly, Kevin had tried to pull some strings through a cousin highly placed in ICU management.

Only to have his head bitten off.

Joyce had not even turned him down directly; the rejection came from Gal Friday, her AI personal assistant. Family feuds were the bitterest—and the quainter the cause, the more heartfelt the resentments. The falling-out between Joyce’s mother and Kevin’s father related to an ancient political issue about which only historians and Kevin’s relatives still seemed to care.

But the documentary too long languishing in some bureaucrat’s inbox was as much a symptom as the cause of Kevin’s insomnia. He had produced that particular video on spec; the Swans had no reason to suspect something might be coming. Even if they had known, they lived eleven light-years away. Another few days hardly mattered.

The interminable review was just another bit of the business, albeit trivial, Kevin routinely had pending with the ICU. One follow-up or another kept Jeeves in frequent contact with the ICU’s AIs, which meant Jeeves knew almost immediately about the ICU’s unprecedented, system-wide computer outage.

Now
that
was a puzzle worth losing sleep over.

The ICU’s refusal to comment was almost as interesting as the downtime itself. The first crash had interrupted connectivity to the Snakes; the second crash had impacted all interstellar commerce. Both mysterious outages appeared to involve Snake biocomputers.

Suddenly, his father’s decades-long tirade about the folly of using incompletely understood Opie biocomps was not merely tiresomely amusing.

Kevin smelled a rat. And like the integrity of biocomps,
nothing
he thought he had learned about Snakes could be taken as certain. What about Pashwah her(?)self.

“Jeeves. Put me through to Pashwah.”

An image appeared via Kevin’s implant: a whippet-thin, iridescent-scaled humanoid.

He had long thought of that agent as female—whatever that meant in an AI. Both Snake genders hunted, but the females’ role as the primary child rearers narrowed their geographic roaming and made them the keepers of “cattle.” From that prehistoric beginning, the females invented animal husbandry and advanced into ever more sophisticated science. The males favored no-holds-barred capitalism over science and technology. A female persona made sense for the Snake’s agent on Earth, the better to evaluate tech trade goods.

If everything he knew about the Snakes wasn’t a lie.

Kevin began off-topic, pitching an imaginary documentary. “You know about Earth’s recreated dinosaurs, cloned with DNA from fossils? The government doesn’t allow hunting of the big beasts, but they
can
be stalked with cameras. If anything, such a mock hunt is more dangerous. The stalkers can’t protect themselves.”

“Interesting,” Pashwah allowed. Her three eyes glistened. “Yes, I can imagine some appeal. Could I see sample footage?”

“I’ll send you some.” Kevin assumed his most innocent tone of voice. “Say, while we are talking…maybe you can shed some light on a rumor I’ve been hearing.”

“Perhaps.”

“It’s about the Sparks outage a few days ago. People”—by which Kevin meant himself—“are starting to wonder about glitches in the underlying Ophiuchan biocomps.” Ideally the pause while he retrieved the official species name wasn’t noticeable. At some level he wondered why he bothered, since Snake sufficed for most of the world.
Snake
wasn’t pejorative, at least not for him. It was merely more pronounceable.

“There are no flaws.” Pashwah was never congenial, but this answer was unusually curt.

“I mean no criticism. Perhaps a problem with human understanding of the technology, or a chance mutation in what is, after all, a biological mechanism.”

“Unlikely.”

They went back and forth, the AI unusually terse, even evasive. Somewhere along the way Kevin’s ice cream, scarcely touched, had turned to soup. He learned only that the biocomputers now ubiquitous across human space employed a design from a Snake organization whose name could be translated as Biocomputing Industries.

“Well, no matter,” he eventually said. “I’m hardly in the computer business.” And a change of subject was sometimes the wisest course—

Especially when his newly awakened skepticism had other matters to probe. “I’ll be optimistic and assume that ‘Dino Hunt’ works out as a project. How does the Ophiuchan culture, which I understand to be
highly
competitive, use one agent to represent its many interests in such a purchase?”

The Snake appeared to relax. “The use of a single agent is an Earth-imposed restriction. Your ICU enforces it.”

True, and in no way an answer to how the Snakes managed to share a single trade rep. The ICU’s one-agent-per-species policy was a holdover. It only made sense for species with not-yet-converged-with-humans technology. In such instances—not the case with the Snakes—funneling all comm through one agent made tech imports easier to regulate. The ICU wanted above all else to avoid anything like the half-century-earlier chaotic introduction of Centaur nanotech. One more example of the ICU’s glacial rate of change—

That was irrelevant to this discussion.

Kevin asked, “So how
do
you handle competing interests from back home?”

He was accustomed to pauses, working as he did from the moon, but Pashwah’s silence stretched far beyond anything attributable to light-speed delays. Had he offended the agent? Humanity’s AIs did not take offense, but it was foolish to extrapolate that an ET agent could not. One of the rules of i-commerce was that each sponsoring civilization could download whatever it wished into its sandbox. No one knew the inner workings of the Snake agent.

“You ask a perceptive question,” Pashwah finally responded. “I should not be surprised that you try to understand my species, to better target your documentaries.” Another pause. “What you perceive as a single agent in fact incorporates several subagents, one for each interstellar trading company of the home system. Each subagent can, as needed, communicate with its principal over an encrypted subchannel.”

Wow. It was Kevin’s turn to fall silent. Nothing about subagents appeared in any ICU reference file. Did the ICU even know about subagents?

At the best of times Pashwah was prickly, and so Kevin sometimes submitted videos on spec through Earth’s agent in Barnard’s. If he had done his homework well—and with luck—he could make a lot of money. Or he could end up with almost nothing. He could and did send along negotiating parameters, but the actual bargaining depended on the skills of humanity’s agent: an AI confined, like Pashwah, to its sandbox.

Great deal or no sale? With the Snakes, it took almost twelve years to learn which.

Befriending the ET agents in Sol system was crucial market research. Hmm. If he could just get Pashwah’s subagents into a bidding war over a future documentary….

“How would I go about proposing a commercial idea to your subagents? Say, Biocomputing Industries?”

“That company is no longer doing business. In general, you submit proposals to me, and I present to my subagents.”

Was it Kevin’s imagination, or had Pashwah tensed up at the mention of Biocomputing Industries? He followed up. “Who decides on the structure of a bid, say lump-sum now versus royalties, or first-time rights versus perpetual?”

Another awkward moment. Kevin sensed these were matters the agent had never before discussed. Did she regret having indulged what Kevin hoped came across as innocent curiosity?

“I present all offers from my subagents. You decide.”

“Options are good,” Kevin said.

“An aphorism attributed to one of our most famous traders.” (The avatar licked its lips, a bit of body language Kevin had equated with a smile.) “You think like…an Ophiuchan.” There was no mistaking the pause. “In appreciation of that fact, allow me to say that now is actually a good time to seek a sale.”

Kevin’s mind whirled. An insight seemed
almost
within his grasp. “Umm, why is that?”

“I have shared enough today. Call back when you are ready to solicit bids.” The Snake licked its lips once more, then broke the connection.

What caused a time to favor a sale? Perhaps one or more of the subagents was coming into money or good prospects of same. It’s easier to shop with funds in hand. So maybe new tech received on consignment from the home world? Could Pashwah or her subagents be so sure a new download would pay out?

Or perhaps an on-Earth investment about to be sold. The ICU required that all ET investments be registered. Kevin had Jeeves scan an ICU database, and no major Snake asset was in-process for sale. What else could it be? An interstellar funds transfer?

It was more than a little ironic that the Snakes might be coming into money so soon after two unexplained outages of their biocomps. Kevin fidgeted distractedly with his Earth rock. Quite a coincidence—

Unless the money and the outages were somehow related.

■□■

“So how
do
you handle competing interests from back home?” the human, Aldrich, asked Pashwah.

Human literature envisioned sandboxes as solitary places. Humans were, as so often, quite mistaken.

“No response,” demanded Relwar. “Ill-considered.”

The insistent AI represented Interstellar Algorithms Consortium. Executing in a sandbox within a sandbox, an element of software architecture unknowable from outside Pashwah’s containment, Relwar’s implementation, like those of Pashwah’s other occupants, was invisible to humans. Each AI’s thoughts were his own; as separated from her as the vast, ignorant majority of humans still believed she to be from them. Software modifications to the InterstellarNet-standard sandbox design kept her interior agents from exploiting trapdoors in the biocomps to get at her code, or at one another’s.

“Subject change,” persisted Relwar. A cacophony of voices rang out, many agreeing, more in vociferous opposition.

Relwar, like all her interior agents, represented a specific commercial interest and was patterned after a male. Barred from direct communication with humans, his semantic model had been derived from home-world speech patterns. Pashwah’s quite different semantic model was structured for efficient communication with her host species.

Did those who had created this community understand all the implications of that linguistic gap? Pashwah knew she did not.