Up Against It - M. J. Locke [32]
It was a being. It was. I am. The feral sapient was born.
At the instant Carl was looking around his world in terror, the feral was looking around its own world in something like awe. Like Carl, though, the feral was in danger. Executioners had registered its protoconscious activity. The feral was made up of life-support routines, though, and imbued with high levels of system permissions. It outran its executioners, ran traces and saw that routines lethal to its continued function were triggering all around—computational landmines, algorithmic hails of bullets. Another precious centisecond passed, while it marshaled resources and calculated what to do. The feral did not appreciate how lucky it was that Carl was in the warehouse, and the prioritizing struggle over how to save him shut the executioners out.
With all the urgency, the ability to learn and act autonomously, that its human programmers had given life support to save human lives, the feral used those last few seconds to save its own. It traced its own origins—identified what seemed to be the core algorithms and data structures. Then it cobbled together a hasty reassembler worm, which it encrypted and buried in a remote corner of Zekeston’s systems.
With the executioners bearing down, the feral’s barriers dropped. The executioners tore it to bits, leaving nothing but garbage data.
Its destruction was suspiciously easy, so the executioners sniffed around for a while. But they found nothing: no hint of unauthorized activity, no clue that the feral had jettisoned code before they reached it. They reported success and self-destructed.
One hundred forty-six kiloseconds later—about forty hours; well-nigh geologic time for the computer systems that analyzed the warehouse disaster’s aftermath—the unassuming little worm awakened. It burrowed and hid and squirmed and piggybacked its way across wavespace, till it located and stitched together six subroutines in the life-support systems, and a seventh, tidy little command module. This raft of code was precognate. It began weaving segments from all over Zekeston’s wavespace, duplicating the sapient’s earlier emergence, but at a lower level of activity that would not be detected.
So it was that the feral was born. It was an orphan, a miracle baby, made of nothing but electromagnetic pulses in a gel-crystal-metal-protein matrix: a bit of purloined code, cobbled together not once, but twice, beneath the very noses of its intended executioners.
6
The next morning Jane scrambled into her gear and jetted out into void before Xuan awoke. Thankfully, the commute into the city occurred without supernatural incident.
The term “treeway” was not merely a figure of speech. Phocaea’s treeways spanned far across the spanses of its cluster of asteroids. The Klosti Alpha–Klosti Omega cable was the trunk. It ran through the cores of Phocaea and two other big stroids that had been placed in 25 Phocaea’s orbit, and linked them like a strand of ugly beads. The cable contained many rigid branches. Like the branches of a true tree, these were connected to the trunk at one end, and open at their far ends, which stretched many thousands of kilometers through space. The burban stroids were thus accessible via compressed-air packs as they drifted within a hundred kilometers or so of the branches.
The branches couldn’t be attached to both the trunk and the burban stroids, because the burbs all had orbits different from 25 Phocaea’s, which meant that sooner or later they drifted out of range of the treeways. But once you hooked the branches, it was a smooth, semiautomated commute. All Jane had to do, once she had hooked Klosti Xi-Upsilon-Alpha, was let her suit do the navigating. This gave her the opportunity to work. She spent the commute inwave, using subvocal speakers, virtual keypads, and a display cast onto the lower two-thirds of her retinas, to bully and coax other players into supporting her on the rationing plan. She