Synthesis - James Swallow [109]
It seemed to work. Vale sensed the churn of emotion around herself calming, becoming steady. “What I’m feeling, is this what it is like for you?” The question slipped out; she had barely formed the thought before it was uttered.
“Affirmative,” said White-Blue. “We exist in an analogous state. Intellects unbound by the limits of flesh.”
“But you still have bodies, even if they’re starships or remote drones. You just don’t… inhabit them the way we do. You might move from one to the other, but you can’t be free of them.”
“We are all data,” replied the AI. “But we cannot exist without a frame to support us. That can be said of you as well as me.”
Vale was going to add something more, but a wave of censure washed over her, and she fell silent as they moved through some invisible membrane and into the dataspace proper. She saw forms arranged around her, more virtual proxies that had to be the representations of the Governance Kernel.
The dreamy, hallucinatory texture of the images sharpened and grew solid.
Tuvok walked with his phaser holstered and his tricorder out, ready at a moment’s notice to reverse the arrangement if he deemed it necessary. The away team moved in a wary line through the innards of the metal pyramid, over bridges of roped cables that swayed beneath their footfalls. The makeshift connections spanned gaps that seemed to reach away to infinity, and regular pulses of warmed air belched past them, doubtless the output from some great heat-exchange mechanism deep in the machine moon’s core. The Vulcan peered over the lip of the cable bridge and saw walls made of massive glass cylinders, each filled with thin layers of dull gray metal and great gobs of mirror-bright solder the size of a shuttlecraft. If a tiny insect had crawled into the guts of a pre-atomicera computer, it might have seen what Tuvok and the others saw now. The sheer scale of the construct dwarfed any similar device he had ever come across. This was a thinking apparatus built without the science of transtator technology, duotronics, even silicon microcircuits. It was a ball of steel and brass operating on technological principles that dated back before Vulcan’s Time of Enlightenment or Earth’s Space Age. Given the radiometric dating figures he was able to draw from the construction, that fact was made all the more remarkable by the age of the construct. If the figures could be trusted, then this object was on the order of two millennia old.
He passed on his observations to the rest of the team. It was not necessary for him to do so, but Tuvok sensed the shift in the emotional spectra of his non-Vulcan crewmates and knew it was important to keep them focused on the matter at hand. In the corner of his visor, a repeater display showed biometric data from the group’s suit monitors. Air-replenishment capacity was not at optimal levels, and the shadow of fatigue could decrease team efficiency.
Despite his obvious emotional distress at his circumstances, Lieutenant Sethe was somewhat engaged by the idea of venturing inside a giant computer. Ensign Dakal remained morose and largely uncommunicative, however, while Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa listened carefully, watching every angle for potential danger.
The Cygnian pointed at the oddly angled walls of the narrow corridor chamber they found themselves in. Vertiginous lines ranged away, high and low, across annealblued metal. “There are patterns etched into the steel,” he noted. “Binary tensors. Fractal loops.” Sethe placed his helmet close to the wall. “Cut by the passage of acids or some sort of sharpened tool. At a distance, it resembles the Terran Byzantine style, but nearer… I think it could be a programming language.”
“Curious,” noted Tuvok. “The construction of this complex appears to be chaotic, and yet it operates with apparent efficiency.