* * *
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?
“The thing is,” Chelsea said, “this whole first-person thing takes effort. You have to care enough to try, you know? I’ve been working my ass off on this relationship, I’ve been working so hard, but you just don’t seem to care…”
She thought she was breaking the news. She thought I hadn’t seen it coming, because I hadn’t said anything. I’d probably seen it before she had. I hadn’t said anything because I’d been scared of giving her an opening.
I felt sick to my stomach.
“I care about you,” I said.
“As much as you could care about anything,” she admitted. “But you — I mean, sometimes you’re fine, Cygnus, sometimes you’re wonderful to be around but whenever anything gets the least bit intense you just go away and leave this, this battle computer running your body and I just can’t deal with it any more…”
I stared at the butterfly on the back of her hand. Its wings flexed and folded, lazy and iridescent. I wondered how many of those tattoos she had; I’d seen five of them on different body parts, albeit only one at a time. I thought about asking her, but this didn’t seem like the right moment.
“You can be so — so brutal sometimes,” she was saying. “I know you don’t mean to be, but… I don’t know. Maybe I’m your pressure-release valve, or something. Maybe you have to submerge yourself so much on the job that everything just, just builds up and you need some kind of punching bag. Maybe that’s why you say the things you do.”
She was waiting for me to say something now. “I’ve been honest,” I said.
“Yeah. Pathologically. Have you ever had a negative thought that you haven’t said out loud?” Her voice trembled but her eyes — for once — stayed dry. “I guess it’s as much my fault as yours. Maybe more. I could tell you were — disconnected, from the day we met. I guess on some level I always saw it coming.”
“Why even try, then? If you knew we were just going to crash and burn like this?”
“Oh, Cygnus. Aren’t you the one who says that everyone crashes and burns eventually? Aren’t you the one who says it never lasts?”
Mom and Dad lasted. Longer than this, anyway.
I frowned, astonished that I’d even let the thought form in my head. Chelse read the silence as a wounded one. “I guess — maybe I thought I could help, you know? Help fix whatever made you so — so angry all the time.”
The butterfly was starting to fade. I’d never seen that happen before.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked.
“Sure. I’m a fixer-upper.”
“Siri, you wouldn’t even get a tweak when I offered. You were so scared of being manipulated you wouldn’t even try a basic cascade. You’re the one guy I’ve met who might be truly, eternally unfixable. I dunno. Maybe that’s even something to be proud of.”
I opened my mouth, and closed it.
She gave me a sad smile. “Nothing, Siri? Nothing at all? There was a time you always knew exactly what to say.” She looked back at some earlier version of me. “Now I wonder if you ever actually meant any of it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No.” She pursed her lips. “No, it isn’t. That’s not really what I’m trying to say. I guess…it’s not so much that you don’t mean any of it. It’s more like you don’t know what any of it means.”
The color was gone from the wings. The butterfly was a delicate charcoal dusting, almost motionless.
“I’ll do it now,” I said. “I’ll get the tweaks. If it’s that important to you. I’ll do it now.”
“It’s too late, Siri. I’m used up.”
Maybe she wanted me to call her back. All these words ending in question marks, all these significant silences. Maybe she was giving me the opportunity to plead my case, to beg for another chance. Maybe she wanted a reason to change her mind.
I could have tried. Please don’t, I could have said. I’m begging you. I never meant to drive you away completely, just a little, just to a safer distance. Please. In thirty long years the only time I haven’t felt worthless was when we were together.
But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was she, taking all baggage with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was no one’s fault, that she’d tried as hard as she could, even that I had under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she didn’t even blame me, and I never even knew who’d made that final decision.
I was good at what I did. I was so damned good, I did it without even meaning to.
* * *
“My God! Did you hear that!?”
Susan James bounced around the drum like a pronking wildebeest in the half-gravity. I could see the whites of her eyes from ninety degrees away. “Check your feeds! Check your feeds! The pens!”
I checked. One scrambler afloat; the other still jammed into its corner.
James landed at my side with a two-footed thump, wobbling for balance. “Turn the sound up!”
The hissing of the air conditioners. The clank of distant machinery echoing along the spine; Theseus’ usual intestinal rumblings. Nothing else.
“Okay, they’re not doing it now.” James brought up a splitscreen window and threw it into reverse. “There,” she pronounced, replaying the record with the audio cranked and filtered.
In the right side of the window, the floating scrambler had drifted so that the tip of one outstretched arm brushed against the wall that adjoined the other pen. In the left side, the huddled scrambler remained unmoving.
I thought I heard something. Just for an instant: the brief buzz of an insect, perhaps, if the nearest insect hadn’t been five trillion kilometers away.
“Replay that. Slow it down.”
A buzz, definitely. A vibration.
“Way down.”
A click train, squirted from a dolphin’s forehead. Farting lips.
“No, let me.” James bulled into Cunningham’s headspace and yanked the slider to the left.
Tick tick…tick…tick tick tick…tick…tick tick tick…
Dopplered down near absolute zero, it went on for almost a minute. Total elapsed real time was about half a second.
Cunningham zoomed the splitscreen. The huddled scrambler had remained motionless, except for the rippling of its cuticle and the undulation of its free arms. But before I’d only seen eight arms — and now I could make out the bony spur of a ninth peeking from behind the central mass. A ninth arm, curled up and hidden from view, tick tick ticking while another creature casually leaned against the other side of the wall…
Now, there was nothing. The floating scrambler had drifted aimlessly back to the center of its enclosure.
James’s eyes shone. “We’ve got to check the rest of—”
But Theseus had been watching, and was way ahead of us. It had already searched the archives and served up the results: three similar exchanges over two days, ranging in duration from a tenth of a second to almost two.
“They’re talking,” James said.
Cunningham shrugged, a forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. “So do a lot of things. And at that rate of exchange they’re not exactly doing calculus. You could get as much information out of a dancing honeybee.”
“That’s nonsense and you know it, Robert.”
“What I know is that—”
“Honeybees don’t deliberately hide what they’re saying. Honeybees don’t develop whole new modes of communication configured specifically to confound observers. That’s flexible, Robert. That’s intelligent.”
“And what if it is, hmm? Forget for a moment the inconvenient fact that these things don’t even have brains. I really don’t think you’ve thought this through.”
“Of course I have.”
“Indeed? Then what are you so happy about? Don’t you know what this means?”
Sudden prickling on the back of my neck. I looked around; I looked up. Jukka Sarasti had appeared in the center of the drum, eyes gleaming, teeth bared, watching us.
Cunningham followed my gaze, and nodded. “I’d wager it does…”
* * *
There was no way to learn what they’d whispered across that wall. We could recover the audio easily enough, parse every tick and tap they’d exchanged, but you can’t decipher a code without some idea of content. We had patterns of sound that could have meant anything. We had creatures whose grammar and syntax — if their mode of communication even contained such attributes — were unknown and perhaps unknowable. We had creatures smart enough to talk, and smart enough to hide that fact. No matter how much we wanted to learn, they were obviously unwilling to teach us.
Not without — how had I put it? — negative reinforcement.
It was Jukka Sarasti who made the decision. We did it on his orders, as we did everything else. But after the word had come down — after Sarasti had disappeared in the night and Bates had retreated down the spine and Robert Cunningham had returned to his studies at the back of the drum — I was the one Susan James was left with. The first to speak the vile thought aloud, the official witness to posterity. I was the one she looked at, and looked away from, her surfaces hard and refractory.
And then she started.
* * *
This is how you break down the wall:
Start with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that’s hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves.
Separate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way.
Hurt them.
It may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.
You leave them an escape hatch, of course. That’s the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If — when — they trip the off switch, you’ll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you’ll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it.
When they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results.
This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.
Susan James — congenital optimist, high priestess of the Church of the Healing Word, was best qualified to design and execute the protocols. Now, at her command, the scramblers writhed. They pulled themselves around their cages in elliptical loops, desperately seeking any small corner free of stimulus. James had piped the feed into ConSensus, although there was no mission-critical reason for Theseus’ whole crew to bear witness to the interrogation.
“Let them block it at their ends,” she said quietly, “If they want to.”
For all his reluctance to accept that these were beings, intelligent and aware, Cunningham had named the prisoners. Stretch tended to float spread-eagled; Clench was the balled-up corner-hugger. Susan, playing her own part in this perverse role-reversal, had simply numbered them One and Two. It wasn’t that Cunningham’s choices were too cheesy for her to stomach, or that she objected to slave names on principal. She’d just fallen back on the oldest trick in the Torturer’s Handbook, the one that lets you go home to your family after work, and play with your children, and sleep at night: never humanize your victims.
It shouldn’t have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae. I guess every little bit helped.
Biotelemetry danced across the headspace beside each alien, luminous annotations shuddering through thin air. I had no idea what constituted normal readings for these creatures, but I couldn’t imagine those jagged spikes passing for anything but bad news. The creatures themselves seethed subtly with fine mosaics in blue and gray, fluid patterns rippling across their cuticles. Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction to the microwaves; for all we knew it was a mating display.
More likely they were screaming.
James killed the microwaves. In the left-hand enclosure, a yellow square dimmed; in the right, an identical icon nested among others had never lit.
The pigment flowed faster in the wake of the onslaught; the arms slowed but didn’t stop. They swept back and forth like listless, skeletal eels.
“Baseline exposure. Five seconds, two hundred fifty Watts.” She spoke for the record. Another affectation; Theseus recorded every breath on board, every trickle of current to five decimal places.
“Repeat.”
The icon lit up. More tile patterns, flash-flooding across alien skin. But this time, neither alien moved from where it was. Their arms continued to squirm slightly, a torqued trembling variation on the undulation they effected at rest. The telemetry was as harsh as ever, though.
They learned helplessness fast enough, I reflected.
I glanced at Susan. “Are you going to do this all yourself?”
Her eyes were bright and wet as she killed the current. Clench’s icon dimmed. Stretch’s remained dormant.
I cleared my throat. “I mean—”
“Who else is going to do this, Siri? Jukka? You?”
“The rest of the Gang. Sascha could—”
“Sascha?” She stared at me. “Siri, I created them. Do you think I did that so I could hide behind them when — so I could force them to do things like this?” She shook her head. “I’m not bringing them out. Not for this. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.”
She turned away from me. There were drugs she could have taken, neuroinhibitors to wash away the guilt, short-circuit it right down in the molecules. Sarasti had offered them up as if he were tempting some solitary messiah in the desert. James had refused him, and would not say why.
“Repeat,” she said.
The current flickered on, then off.
“Repeat,” she said again.
Not a twitch.
I pointed. “I see it,” she said.
Clench had pressed the tip of one arm against the touchpad. The icon there glowed like a candle flame.
* * *
Six and a half minutes later they’d graduated from yellow squares to time-lapsed four-dimensional polyhedrons. It took them as long to distinguish between two twenty-six-faceted shifting solids — differing by one facet in a single frame — as it took them to tell the difference between a yellow square and a red triangle. Intricate patterns played across their surfaces the whole time, dynamic needlepoint mosaics flickering almost too fast to see.
“Fuck,” James whispered.
“Could be splinter skills.” Cunningham had joined us in ConSensus, although his body remained halfway around BioMed.
“Splinter skills,” she repeated dully.
“Savantism. Hyperperformance at one kind of calculation doesn’t necessarily connote high intelligence.”
“I know what splinter skills are, Robert. I just think you’re wrong.”
“Prove it.”
So she gave up on geometry and told the scramblers that one plus one equaled two. Evidently they knew that already: ten minutes later they were predicting ten-digit prime numbers on demand.
She showed them a sequence of two-dimensional shapes; they picked the next one in the series from a menu of subtly-different alternatives. She denied them multiple choice, showed them the beginning of a whole new sequence and taught them to draw on the touch-sensitive interface with the tips of their arms. They finished that series in precise freehand, rendered a chain of logical descendants ending with a figure that led inexorably back to the starting point.
“These aren’t drones.” James’s voice caught in her throat.
“This is all just crunching,” Cunningham said. “Millions of computer programs do it without ever waking up.”
“They’re intelligent, Robert. They’re smarter than us. Maybe they’re smarter than Jukka. And we’re — why can’t you just admit it?”
I could see it all over her: Isaac would have admitted it.
“Because they don’t have the circuitry,” Cunningham insisted. “How could—”
“I don’t know how!” she cried. “That’s your job! All I know is that I’m torturing beings that can think rings around us…”
“Not for much longer, at least. Once you figure out the language—”
She shook her head. “Robert, I haven’t a clue about the language. We’ve been at it for — for hours, haven’t we? The Gang’s all here, language databases four thousand years thick, all the latest linguistic algorithms. And we know exactly what they’re saying, we’re watching every possible way they could be saying it. Right down to the Angstrom.”
“Precisely. So—”
“I’ve got nothing. I know they’re talking through pigment mosaics. There might even be something in the way they move those bristles. But I can’t find the pattern, I can’t even follow how they count, much less tell them I’m…sorry…”
Nobody spoke for a while. Bates watched us from the galley on our ceiling, but made no attempt to join the proceedings. On ConSensus the reprieved scramblers floated in their cages like multiarmed martyrs.
“Well,” Cunningham said at last, “since this seems to be the day for bad news, here’s mine. They’re dying.”
James put her face in her hand.
“It’s not your interrogation, for whatever that’s worth,” the biologist continued. “As far as I can determine, some of their metabolic pathways are just missing.”
“Obviously you just haven’t found them yet.” That was Bates, speaking up from across the drum.
“No,” Cunningham said, slowly and distinctly, “obviously those parts aren’t available to the organism. Because they’re falling apart pretty much the same way you’d expect one of us to, if — if all the mitotic spindles in our cells just vanished out of the cytoplasm, for example. As far as I can tell they started deteriorating the moment we took them off Rorschach.”
Susan looked up. “Are you saying they left part of their biochemistry behind?”
“Some essential nutrient?” Bates suggested. “They’re not eating—”
“Yes to the linguist. No to the major.” Cunningham fell silent; I glanced across the drum to see him sucking on a cigarette. “I think a lot of the cellular processes in these things are mediated externally. I think the reason I can’t find any genes in my biopsies is because they don’t have any.”
“So what do they have instead?” Bates asked.
“Turing morphogens.”
Blank looks, subtitling looks. Cunningham explained anyway: “A lot of biology doesn’t use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there’s no gene that codes for them; it’s all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo — the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You’d be surprised how much of life is like that.”
“But you still need genes,” Bates protested, walking around to join us.
“Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates afterwards doesn’t need specific instructions. It’s classic emergent complexity. We’ve known about it for over a century.” Another drag on the stick. “Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds.”
“Honeycomb,” Bates repeated.
“Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hardwired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn’t. It’s programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other — deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.”
Bates pounced: “But the bees are programmed. Genetically.”
“You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb.”
“Rorschach is the bees,” James murmured.
Cunningham nodded. “Rorschach is the bees. And I don’t think Rorschach’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we’ve got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can’t hold it forever.”
“How long?” James asked.
“How should I know? If I’m right, I’m not even dealing with complete organisms here.”
“Guess,” Bates said.
He shrugged. “A few days. Maybe.”