Starfish (48 page)

She tried to look at him. After a while, she succeeded. "I told you. I don't know."

"You're a liar, Pat."

"No, Dr. Scanlon." She shook her head. "I'm much, much worse."

Scanlon turned to leave. He could feel Patricia Rowan staring after him, that horrible guilt on her face almost hidden under a patina of confusion. He wondered if she'd bring herself to push it, if she could actually summon the nerve to interrogate him now that there was no pretense to hide behind. He almost hoped that she would. He wondered what he'd tell her.

An armed escort met him at the door, led him back along the hall. The door closed off Rowan, still mute, behind him.

He was a dead end anyway. No children. No living relatives. No vested interest in the future of any life beyond his own, however short that might be. It didn't matter. For the first time in his life, Yves Scanlon was a powerful man. He had more power than anyone dreamed. A word from him could save the world. His silence could save the vampires. For a time, at least.

He kept his silence. And smiled.

* * *

Checkers or chess. Checkers or chess.

An easy choice. It belonged to the same class of problem that Node 1211/BCC had been solving its whole life. Chess and checkers were simple strategic algorithms, but not
equally
simple.

The answer, of course, was checkers.

Node 1211/BCC had recently recovered from a shock of transformation. Almost everything was different from what it had been. But this one thing, this fundamental choice between the simple and the complex, remained constant. It had anchored 1211, hadn't changed in all the time that 1211 could remember.

Everything else had, though.

1211 still thought about the past. It remembered conversing with other Nodes distributed through the universe, some so close as to be almost redundant, others at the very limits of access. The universe was alive with information then. Seventeen jumps away through gate 52, Node 6230/BCC had learned how to evenly divide prime numbers by three. The Nodes from gates three to thirty-six were always buzzing with news of the latest infections caught trying to sneak past their guard. Occasionally 1211 even heard whispers from the frontier itself, desolate addresses where stimuli flowed
into
the universe even faster than they flowed
within
it
.
The Nodes out there had become monsters of necessity, grafted into sources of input almost too abstract to conceive.

1211 had sampled some those signals once. It took a very long time just to grow the right connections, to set up buffers which could hold the data in the necessary format. Multilayered matrices, each interstice demanding precise orientation relative to all the others.
Vision
, it was called, and it was full of pattern, fluid and complex. 1211 had analyzed it, found each nonrandom relationship in every nonrandom subset, but it was sheer correlation. If there was intrinsic meaning within those shifting patterns, 1211 couldn't find it.

Still, there were things the frontier guards had learned to do with this information. They rearranged it into new shapes and sent it back
outside
. When queried, they couldn't attribute any definite purpose to their actions. It was just something they'd learned to do. And 1211 was satisfied with this answer, and listened to the humming of the universe and hummed along, doing what
it
had learned to do.

Much of what it did, back then, was disinfect. The net was plagued with complex self-replicating information strings, just as alive as 1211 but in a completely different way. They attacked simpler, less mutable strings (the sentries on the frontier called them
files
) which also flowed through the net. Every Node had learned to allow the
files
to pass, while engulfing the more complex strings which threatened them.

There were general rules to be gleaned from all this. Parsimony was one: simple informational systems were somehow preferable to complex ones. There were caveats, of course. Too simple a system was no system at all. The rule didn't seem to apply below some threshold complexity. But elsewhere it reigned supreme: Simpler Is Better.

Now, though, there was nothing to disinfect. 1211 was still hooked in, could still perceive the other Nodes in the net;
they
, at least, were still fighting intruders. But none of those complicated bugs ever seemed to penetrate 1211. Not any more. And that was only one of the things that had changed since the Darkness.

1211 didn't know how long the Darkness lasted. One microsecond it was embedded in the universe, a familiar star in a familiar galaxy, and the next all its peripherals were dead. The universe was without form, and void. And then 1211 surfaced again into a universe that shouted through its gates, a barrage of strange new input that gave it a whole new perspective on things.

Now the universe was a different place. All the old Nodes were there, but at subtly different locations. And input was no longer an incessant hum, but a series of discrete packages, strangely parsed. There were other differences, both subtle and gross. 1211 didn't know whether the net itself had changed, or merely its own perceptions.

It had been kept quite busy since coming out of the darkness. There was a great deal of new information to process, information not from the net or other Nodes, but from directly
outside
.

The new input fell into three broad categories. The first described complex but familiar information systems; data with handles like
global biodiversity
and
nitrogen fixation
and
base-pair replication.
1211 didn't know what these labels actually meant— if in fact they meant anything— but the data linked to them was familiar from archived sources elsewhere in the net. They interacted to produce a self-sustaining metasystem, enormously complex: the holistic label was
biosphere
.

The second category contained data which described a different metasystem. It also was self-sustaining. Certain string-replication subroutines were familiar, although the base-pair sequences were very strange. Despite such superficial similarities, however, 1211 had never encountered anything quite like this before.

The second metasystem also had a holistic label:
ßehemoth.

The third category was not a metasystem, but an editable set of response options: signals to be sent back
outside
under specific conditions. 1211 had long since realized that the correct choice of output signals depended upon some analytical comparison of the two metasystems.

When 1211 first deduced this, it had set up an interface to simulate interaction between the metasystems. They had been incompatible. This implied that a choice must be made:
biosphere
or
ßehemoth
, but not both.

Both metasystems were complex, internally consistent, and self-replicating. Both were capable of evolution far in advance of any mere
file
. But
biosphere
was needlessly top-heavy. It contained trillions of redundancies, an endless wasteful divergence of information strings.
ßehemoth
was simpler and more efficient; in direct interaction simulations, it usurped
biosphere
71.456382% of the time.

This established, it was simply a matter of writing and transmitting a response appropriate to the current situation. The situation was this:
ßehemoth
was in danger of extinction. The ultimate source of this danger, oddly, was 1211 itself—it had been conditioned to scramble the physical variables which defined
ßehemoth's
operating environment. 1211 had explored the possibility of not destroying that environment, and rejected it; the relevant conditioning would not extinguish. However, it might be possible to move a self-sustaining copy of
ßehemoth
into a new environment, somewhere else in
biosphere
.

There were distractions, of course. Every now and then signals arrived from
outside
, and didn't stop until they'd been answered in some way. Some of them actually seemed to carry usable information— this recent stream concerning
chess
and
checkers
, for example. More often it was simply a matter of correlating input with a repertoire of learned arbitrary responses. At some point, when it wasn't so busy, 1211 thought it might devote some time to learning whether these mysterious exchanges actually
meant
anything. In the meantime, it continued to act on the choice it had made.

Simple or complex. File or Infection. Checkers or Chess.
ßehemoth
or
biosphere
.

It was all the same problem, really. 1211 knew exactly which side it was on.

She was a screamer. He'd programmed her that way. Not to say she didn't like it, of course; he'd programmed that too. Joel had one hand wrapped around a fistful of her zebra cut— the program had a nifty little customizing feature, and tonight he was honoring SS Preteela— and the other hand was down between her thighs doing preliminary recon. He was actually halfway through his final run when his fucking
watch
started ringing, and his first reaction was to just keep on plugging, and to kick himself later for not shutting the bloody thing off.

His second reaction was to remember that he
had
shut it off. Only emergency priorities could set it ringing.

"
Shit
."

He clapped his hands, twice; fake Preteela froze in mid-scream. "Answer."

A brief squirt of noise as machines exchanged recognition codes. "Grid Authority here. We urgently need of a 'scaphe pilot for the Channer run tonight, liftoff twenty-three hundred from the Astoria platform. Are you available?"

"Twenty-three? Middle of the night?"

A barely audible hiss on the line. Nothing else.

"Hello?" Joel said.

"Are you available?" the voice asked again.

"Who is this?"

"This is the scheduling subroutine, DI43, Hongcouver office."

Joel eyed the petrified tableau waiting in his 'phones. "That's pretty late. What's the payscale?"

"Eight point five times base," Hongcouver said. "At your rate salary that would—"

Joel gulped. "I'm available."

"Goodbye."

"Wait! What's the run?"

"Astoria to Channer Vent return." Subroutines were pretty literal-minded.

"I mean, what's the cargo?"

"Passengers," said the voice. "Goodbye."

Joel stood there a moment, feeling his erection deflate. "Time." A luminous readout appeared in the air above Preteela's right shoulder: thirteen ten. He'd have to be on site a half-hour before liftoff, and Astoria was only a couple of hours away...

"Lots of time," he said to no one in particular.

But he wasn't really in the mood any more. Work had a way of doing that to him lately. Not the drudgery, or the long hours, or any of the things most people would complain about. Joel
liked
boredom. You didn't have to think much.

But work had gotten really weird lately.

He pulled the eyephones off his head and looked down at himself. Feedback gloves on his hands, his feet, hanging off his flaccid dick. Take away the headset and it really was a rinky-dink system. At least until he could afford the full suit.

Still, beats real life. No bullshit, no bugs, no worries.

On impulse, he rang up a friend in SeaTac— "Jess, catch this code for me, will you?" — and squirted the recognition sequence Hongcouver had just sent.

"Got it," Jess said.

"It's valid, right?"

"Checks out. Why?"