Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [111]
David and Isaac talked upstairs and grimaced or grinned at the sounds the hapless construct could not help but make.
The flow of data continued, transferred first from the repairman’s voluminous set of programme cards and stored in the gently humming, clicking memory box, now converted into instructions in an active processor. On and on came the flow, a relentless wash of abstract instructions, nothing more than combinations of yes/no or on/off, but in such quantity, such complexity, that they approximated concepts.
And eventually, at a certain point, the quantity became quality. Something changed in the construct’s brain.
One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam.
One moment it was a calculating machine.
The next, it thought.
With a strange, calculating alien consciousness, the construct reflected on its own reflection.
It felt no surprise. No joy. No anger, no existential horror.
Only curiosity.
Bundles of data that had waited, circulating unexamined in the box of valves, became suddenly relevant, interacting with this extraordinary new mode of calculation, this autotelic processing. What had been incomprehensible to a cleaning construct made sudden sense. The data was advice. Promises. The data was a welcome. The data was a warning.
The construct was still for a long time, emitting little murmurs of steam.
Isaac leaned far over the railing, until it creaked unnervingly. He pushed over until his head was upside-down and he could see the construct beneath his and David’s feet. Isaac watched its uncertain juddering starts and frowned.
As he opened his mouth to say something, the construct pushed itself up into an active posture. It extended its suction tube and began, tentatively at first, to clear the floor of dust. As Isaac watched, the construct extended a rotating brush behind it and began to scrub the boards. Isaac watched it for any signs of faltering, but its pace increased with almost palpable confidence. Isaac’s face lightened as he watched the construct perform its first successful cleaning job for weeks.
“That’s better!” Isaac announced over his shoulder to David. “Damn thing can clean again. Back to normal!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the huge, crisp cocoon, extraordinary processes began.
The caterpillar’s swathed flesh began to break down. Legs and eyes and bristles and body-segments lost their integrity. The tubular body became fluid.
The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter.
It was unstable.
It was alive, and then there was a time between forms when it was neither alive nor dead, but saturated with power.
And then it was alive again. But different.
Spirals of biochymical slop snapped into sudden shapes. Nerves that had unwound and dissolved suddenly spun back into skeins of sensory tissue. Features dissolved and reknitted in strange new constellations.
The thing flexed in inchoate agony and a rudimentary, but growing, hunger.
Nothing was visible from the outside. The violent process of destruction and creation was a metaphysical drama played out without an audience. It was hidden behind an opaque curtain of brittle silk, a husk that hid the changing with a brute, instinctual modesty.
After the slow, chaotic collapse of form, there was a brief moment when the thing in the cocoon was poised in a liminal state. And then, in response to unthinkable