* * *
“They know the music but not the words.”
We did it with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight. They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial insect wings across the void.
In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines looped and burned and took no obvious notice.
Rorschach fell around Ben barely fifteen hundred kilometers from atmosphere, a fast endless circle that took just under forty hours to complete. By the time it didn’t return to our sight, the mirrors were all outside the zone of total blindness. A closeup of Ben’s equatorial edge floated in ConSensus. Mirror icons sparkled around it like an exploding schematic, like the disconnected facets of some great expanding compound eye. None had brakes. Whatever high ground the mirrors held, they wouldn’t hold it for long.
“There,” Bates said.
A mirage wavered stage left, a tiny spot of swirling chaos perhaps half the size of a fingernail held at arms-length. It told us nothing, it was pure heat-shimmer — but light bounced towards us from dozens of distant relayers, and while each saw scarcely more than our last probe had — a patch of dark clouds set slightly awry by some invisible prism — each of those views refracted differently. The Captain sieved flashes from the heavens and stitched them into a composite view.
Details emerged.
First a faint sliver of shadow, a tiny dimple all but lost in the seething equatorial cloud bands. It had just barely rotated into view around the edge of the disk — a rock in the stream perhaps, an invisible finger stuck in the clouds, turbulence and shear stress shredding the boundary layers to either side.
Szpindel squinted. “Plage effect.” Subtitles said he was talking about a kind of sunspot, a knot in Ben’s magnetic field.
“Higher,” James said.
Something floated above that dimple in the clouds, the way a ground-effect ocean-liner floats above the depression it pushes into the water’s surface. I zoomed: next to an Oasa subdwarf with ten times the mass of Jupiter, Rorschach was tiny.
Next to Theseus, it was a colossus.
Not just a torus but a tangle, a city-sized chaos of spun glass, loops and bridges and attenuate spires. The surface texture was pure artifice, of course; ConSensus merely giftwrapped the enigma in refracted background. Still. In some dark, haunting way, it was almost beautiful. A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal spines.
“It’s talking again,” James reported.
“Talk back,” Sarasti said, and abandoned us.
* * *
So she did: and while the Gang spoke with the artefact, the others spied upon it. Their vision failed over time — mirrors fell away along their respective vectors, lines-of-sight degraded with each passing second — but ConSensus filled with things learned in the meantime. Rorschach massed 1.8·1010 kg within a total volume of 2.3·108 cubic meters. Its magnetic field, judging by radio squeals and its Plage Effect, was thousands of times stronger than the sun’s. Astonishingly, parts of the composite image were clear enough to discern fine spiral grooves twined around the structure. (“Fibonacci sequence,” Szpindel reported, one jiggling eye fixing me for a moment. “At least they’re not completely alien.”) Spheroid protuberances disfigured the tips of at least three of Rorschach’s innumerable spines; the grooves were more widely spaced in those areas, like skin grown tight and swollen with infection. Just before one vital mirror sailed out of range it glimpsed another spine, split a third of the way along its length. Torn material floated flaccid and unmoving in vacuum.
“Please,” Bates said softly. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.”
Szpindel grinned. “Sporangium? Seed pod? Why not?”
Rorschach may have been reproducing but beyond a doubt it was growing, fed by a steady trickle of infalling debris from Ben’s accretion belt. We were close enough now to get a clear view of that procession: rocks and mountains and pebbles fell like sediment swirling around a drain. Particles that collided with the artefact simply stuck; Rorschach engulfed prey like some vast metastatic amoeba. The acquired mass was apparently processed internally and shunted to apical growth zones; judging by infinitesimal changes in the artefact’s allometry, it grew from the tips of its branches.
The procession never stopped. Rorschach was insatiable.
It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell was precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian Black Belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical wind-up toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.
“Didn’t think that was possible,” Bates said.
Szpindel shrugged. “Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.”
“That doesn’t mean you can even predict them, let along set them up like that.” Luminous intel reflected off the major’s bald head. “You’d have to know the starting conditions of a million different variables to ten decimal places. Literally.”
“Yup.”
“Vampires can’t even do that. Quanticle computers can’t do that.”
Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.
All the while the Gang had been slipping in and out of character, dancing with some unseen partner that — despite their best efforts — told us little beyond endless permutations of You really wouldn’t like it here. Any interrogative it answered with another — yet somehow it always left the sense of questions answered.
“Did you send the Fireflies?” Sascha asked.
“We send many things many places,” Rorschach replied. “What do their specs show?”
“We do not know their specifications. The Fireflies burned up over Earth.”
“Then shouldn’t you be looking there? When our kids fly, they’re on their own.”
Sascha muted the channel. “You know who we’re talking to? Jesus of fucking Nazareth, that’s who.”
Szpindel looked at Bates. Bates shrugged, palms up.
“You didn’t get it?” Sascha shook her head. “That last exchange was the informational equivalent of Should we render taxes unto Caesar. Beat for beat.”
“Thanks for casting us as the Pharisees,” Szpindel grumbled.
“Hey, if the Jew fits…”
Szpindel rolled his eyes.
That was when I first noticed it: a tiny imperfection on Sascha’s topology, a flyspeck of doubt marring one of her facets. “We’re not getting anywhere,” she said. “Let’s try a side door.” She winked out: Michelle reopened the outgoing line. “Theseus to Rorschach. Open to requests for information.”
“Cultural exchange,” Rorschach said. “That works for me.”
Bates’s brow furrowed. “Is that wise?”
“If it’s not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks.”
“But—”
“Tell us about home,” Rorschach said.
Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say “Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers.”
The stain on the Gang’s topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn’t disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—
“We don’t all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats.”
“I see. That’s sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising.”
—the stain darkened and spread across his surface like an oil slick.
“Takes too much on faith,” Susan said a few moments later.
By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an insight, a dark little meme infecting each of that body’s minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren’t sure what.
I was.
“Tell me more about your cousins,” Rorschach sent.
“Our cousins lie about the family tree,” Sascha replied, “with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins.”
“We’d like to know about this tree.”
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”
“Well, it asked for clarification,” Bates pointed out.
“It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely.”
Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though…
Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.
And something else, behind him.
I couldn’t tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something out of place, somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn’t quite right. No, that wasn’t it; something nearer, something amiss somewhere along the drum’s axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see — just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and—
And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now — but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just concentrated.
Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and mother’s cousins twice removed. She’d been doing it for hours now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the half-perceived image teasing my memory. I’d seen something there, just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had — yes, too many joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not one of the pipes, I remembered: an extra pipe, an extra something anyway, something—
Boney.
That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light year from home talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and my eyes were playing tricks on me.
Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.
* * *
A lull in the background chatter brought me back. Sascha had stopped talking. Darkened facets hung around her like a thundercloud. I pulled back the last thing she had sent: “We usually find our nephews with telescopes. They are hard as Hobblinites.”
More calculated ambiguity. And Hobblinites wasn’t even a word.
Imminent decisions reflected in her eyes. Sascha was poised at the edge of a precipice, gauging the depth of dark waters below.
“You haven’t mentioned your father at all,” Rorschach remarked.
“That’s true, Rorschach,” Sascha admitted softly, taking a breath—
And stepping forward.
“So why don’t you just suck my big fat hairy dick?”
The drum fell instantly silent. Bates and Szpindel stared, open-mouthed. Sascha killed the channel and turned to face us, grinning so widely I thought the top of her head would fall off.
“Sascha,” Bates breathed. “Are you crazy?”
“So what if I am? Doesn’t matter to that thing. It doesn’t have a clue what I’m saying.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t even have a clue what it’s saying back,” she added.
“Wait a minute. You said — Susan said they weren’t parrots. They knew the rules.”
And there Susan was, melting to the fore: “I did, and they do. But pattern-matching doesn’t equal comprehension.”
Bates shook her head. “You’re saying whatever we’re talking to — it’s not even intelligent?”
“Oh, it could be intelligent, certainly. But we’re not talking to it in any meaningful sense.”
“So what is it? Voicemail?”
“Actually,” Szpindel said slowly, “I think they call it a Chinese Room…”
About bloody time, I thought.
* * *
I knew all about Chinese Rooms. I was one. I didn’t even keep it a secret, I told anyone who was interested enough to ask.
In hindsight, sometimes that was a mistake.
“How can you possibly tell the rest of us what your bleeding edge is up to if you don’t understand it yourself?” Chelsea demanded back when things were good between us. Before she got to know me.
I shrugged. “It’s not my job to understand them. If I could, they wouldn’t be very bleeding-edge in the first place. I’m just a, you know, a conduit.”
“Yeah, but how can you translate something if you don’t understand it?”
A common cry, outside the field. People simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just — comes along for the ride.
“You ever hear of the Chinese Room?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Only vaguely. Really old, right?”
“Hundred years at least. It’s a fallacy really, it’s an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot in the wall. He’s got access to this huge database of squiggles just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles together.”
“Grammar,” Chelsea said. “Syntax.”
I nodded. “The point is, though, he doesn’t have any idea what the squiggles are, or what information they might contain. He only knows that when he encounters squiggle delta, say, he’s supposed to extract the fifth and sixth squiggles from file theta and put them together with another squiggle from gamma. So he builds this response string, puts it on the sheet, slides it back out the slot and takes a nap until the next iteration. Repeat until the remains of the horse are well and thoroughly beaten.”
“So he’s carrying on a conversation,” Chelsea said. “In Chinese, I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you’re saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test. You can be a wit and raconteur in a language you don’t even speak.”
“That’s synthesis?”
“Only the part that involves downscaling semiotic protocols. And only in principle. And I’m actually getting my input in Cantonese and replying in German, because I’m more of a conduit than a conversant. But you get the idea.”
“How do you keep all the rules and protocols straight? There must be millions of them.”
“It’s like anything else. Once you learn the rules, you do it unconsciously. Like riding a bike, or pinging the noosphere. You don’t actively think about the protocols at all, you just — imagine how your targets behave.”
“Mmm.” A subtle half-smile played at the corner of her mouth. “But — the argument’s not really a fallacy then, is it? It’s spot-on: you really don’t understand Cantonese or German.”
“The system understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the scribbling is just one component. You wouldn’t expect a single neuron in your head to understand English, would you?”
“Sometimes one’s all I can spare.” Chelsea shook her head. She wasn’t going to let it go. I could see her sorting questions in order of priority; I could see them getting increasingly — personal…
“To get back to the matter at hand,” I said, preempting them all, “you were going to show me how to do that thing with the fingers…”
A wicked grin wiped the questions right off her face. “Oooh, that’s right…”
It’s risky, getting involved. Too many confounds. Every tool in the shed goes dull and rusty the moment you get entangled with the system you’re observing.
Still serviceable in a pinch, though.
* * *
“It hides now,” Sarasti said. “It’s vulnerable now.
“Now we go in.”
It wasn’t news so much as review: we’d been straight-lining towards Ben for days now. But perhaps the Chinese Room Hypothesis had strengthened his resolve. At any rate, with Rorschach in eclipse once more, we prepared to take intrusiveness to the next level.
Theseus was perpetually gravid; a generic probe incubated in her fabrication plant, its development arrested just short of birth in anticipation of unforeseen mission requirements. Sometime between briefings the Captain had brought it to parturition, customized for close contact and ground work. It burned down the well at high gee a good ten hours before Rorschach’s next scheduled appearance, inserted itself into the rock stream, and went to sleep. If our calculations were in order, it would not be smashed by some errant piece of debris before it woke up again. If all went well, an intelligence that had precisely orchestrated a cast of millions would not notice one extra dancer on the floor. If we were just plain lucky, the myriad high-divers that happened to be line-of-sight at the time were not programmed as tattletales.
Acceptable risks. If we hadn’t been up for them, we might as well have stayed home.
And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who’d opted to command us instead of eating us alive. We waited for Rorschach to come back around the bend. The probe fell smoothly around the well, an ambassador to the unwilling — or, if the Gang was right, maybe just a back-door artist set to B E an empty condo. Szpindel had named it Jack-in-the-box, after some antique child’s toy that didn’t even rate a listing in ConSensus; we fell in its wake, nearly ballistic now, momentum and inertia carefully precalculated to thread us through the chaotic minefield of Ben’s accretion belt.
Kepler couldn’t do it all, though; Theseus grumbled briefly now and then, the intermittent firing of her attitude jets rumbling softly up the spine as the Captain tweaked our descent into the Maelstrom.
No plan ever survives contact with the enemy I remembered, but I didn’t know from where.
“Got it,” Bates said. A speck appeared at Ben’s edge; the display zoomed instantly to closeup. “Proximity boot.”
Rorschach remained invisible to Theseus, close as we were, close as we were coming. But parallax stripped at least some of the scales from the probe’s eyes; it woke to spikes and spirals of smoky glass flickering in and out of view, Ben’s flat endless horizon semivisible through the intervening translucence. The view trembled; waveforms rippled across ConSensus.
“Quite the magnetic field,” Szpindel remarked.
“Braking,” Bates reported. Jack turned smoothly retrograde and fired its torch. On Tactical, delta-vee swung to red.
Sascha was driving the Gang’s body this shift. “Incoming signal,” she reported. “Same format.”
Sarasti clicked. “Pipe it.”
“Rorschach to Theseus. Hello again, Theseus.” The voice was female this time, and middle-aged.
Sascha grinned “See? She’s not offended at all. Big hairy dick notwithstanding.”
“Don’t answer,” Sarasti said.
“Burn complete,” Bates reported.
Coasting now, Jack — sneezed. Silver chaff shot into the void towards the target: millions of compass needles, brilliantly reflective, fast enough to make Theseus seem slow. They were gone in an instant. The probe watched them flee, swept laser eyes across every degree of arc, scanned its sky twice a second and took careful note of each and every reflective flash. Only at first did those needles shoot along anything approaching a straight line: then they swept abruptly into Lorentz spirals, twisted into sudden arcs and corkscrews, shot away along new and intricate trajectories bordering on the relativistic. The contours of Rorschach’s magnetic field resolved in ConSensus, at first glance like the nested layers of a glass onion.
“Sproinnnng,” Szpindel said.
At second glance the onion grew wormy. Invaginations appeared, long snaking tunnels of energy proliferating fractally at every scale.
“Rorschach to Theseus. Hello, Theseus. You there?”
A holographic inset beside the main display plotted the points of a triangle in flux: Theseus at the apex, Rorschach and Jack defining the narrow base.
“Rorschach to Theseus. I seeee you…”
“She’s got a more casual affect than he ever did.” Sascha glanced up at Sarasti, and did not add You sure about this? She was starting to wonder herself, though. Starting to dwell on the potential consequences of being wrong, now that we were committed. As far as sober second thought was concerned it was too little too late; but for Sascha, that was progress.
Besides, it had been Sarasti’s decision.
Great hoops were resolving in Rorschach’s magnetosphere. Invisible to human eyes, their outlines were vanishingly faint even on Tactical; the chaff had scattered so thinly across the sky that even the Captain was resorting to guesswork. The new macrostructures hovered in the magnetosphere like the nested gimbals of some great phantom gyroscope.
“I see you haven’t changed your vector,” Rorschach remarked. “We really wouldn’t advise continuing your approach. Seriously. For your own safety.”
Szpindel shook his head. “Hey, Mandy. Rorschach talking to Jack at all?”
“If it is, I’m not seeing it. No incident light, no directed EM of any kind.” She smiled grimly. “Seems to have snuck in under the radar. And don’t call me Mandy.”
Theseus groaned, twisting. I staggered in the low pseudograv, reached out to steady myself. “Course correction,” Bates reported. “Unplotted rock.”
“Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond. Your current heading is unacceptable, repeat, your current heading is unacceptable. Strongly advise you change course.”
By now the probe coasted just a few kilometers off Rorschach’s leading edge. That close it served up way more than magnetic fields: it presented Rorschach itself in bright, tactical color codes. Invisible curves and spikes iridesced in ConSensus across any number of on-demand pigment schemes: gravity, reflectivity, blackbody emissions. Massive electrical bolts erupting from the tips of thorns rendered in lemon pastels. User-friendly graphics had turned Rorschach into a cartoon.
“Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond.”
Theseus growled to stern, fishtailing. On tactical, another just-plotted piece of debris swept by a discreet six thousand meters to port.
“Rorschach to Theseus. If you are unable to respond, please — holy shit!”
The cartoon flickered and died.
I’d seen what had happened in that last instant, though: Jack passing near one of those great phantom hoops; a tongue of energy flicking out, quick as a frog’s; a dead feed.
“I see what you’re up to now, you cocksuckers. Do you think we’re fucking blind down here?”
Sascha clenched her teeth. “We—”
“No,” Sarasti said.
“But it fi—”
Sarasti hissed, from somewhere in the back of his throat. I had never heard a mammal make a noise quite like that before. Sascha fell immediately silent.
Bates negotiated with her controls. “I’ve still got — just a sec—”
“You pull that thing back right fucking now, you hear us? Right fucking now.”
“Got it.” Bates gritted as the feed came back up. “Just had to reacquire the laser.” The probe had been kicked wildly off-course — as if someone fording a river had been caught in sudden undertow and thrown over a waterfall — but it was still talking, and still mobile.
Barely. Bates struggled to stay the course. Jack staggered and wobbled uncontrollably though the tightly-wound folds of Rorschach’s magnetosphere. The artefact loomed huge in its eye. The feed strobed.
“Maintain approach,” Sarasti said calmly.
“Love to,” Bates gritted. “Trying.”
Theseus skidded again, corkscrewing. I could have sworn I heard the bearings in the drum grind for a moment. Another rock sailed past on Tactical.
“I thought you’d plotted those things,” Szpindel grumbled.
“You want to start a war, Theseus? Is that what you’re trying to do? You think you’re up for it?”
“It doesn’t attack,” Sarasti said.
“Maybe it does.” Bates kept her voice low; I could see the effort it took. “If Rorschach can control the trajectories of these—”
“Normal distribution. Insignificant corrections.” He must have meant statistically: the torque and grind of the ship’s hull felt pretty significant to the others.
“Oh, right,” Rorschach said suddenly. “We get it now. You don’t think there’s anyone here, do you? You’ve got some high-priced consultant telling you there’s nothing to worry about.”
Jack was deep in the forest. We’d lost most of the tactical overlays to reduced baud. In dim visible light Rorschach’s great ridged spines, each the size of a skyscraper, hashed a nightmare view on all sides. The feed stuttered as Bates struggled to keep the beam aligned. ConSensus painted walls and airspace with arcane telemetry. I had no idea what any of it meant.
“You think we’re nothing but a Chinese Room,” Rorschach sneered.
Jack stumbled towards collision, grasping for something to hang on to.
“Your mistake, Theseus.”
It hit something. It stuck.
And suddenly Rorschach snapped into view — no refractory composites, no profiles or simulations in false color. There it was at last, naked even to Human eyes.
Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.
Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can’t help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.
Now make it the size of a city.
It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful.
“Now it’s too late,” something said from deep inside. “Now every last one of you is dead. And Susan? You there, Susan?
“We’re taking you first.”