Up Against It - M. J. Locke [58]
But never mind the message, and never mind even the name; the very existence of MeatManHarper raised so many questions that the feral hardly knew where to begin.
In the first place, the MeatManHarper entity did not fit properly into the ecosystem. Before the appearance of the message, the feral had dedicated several precious hectoturings to produce a mental map of its world. It had constructed whole tidily organized arrays of phyla, classes, families, genera, and species of digital denizens, from viruses and parasites—junk bits of code that propagated themselves within the system’s communication streams and whose primary purpose seemed to be to soak up bandwidth—to data carriers and administrative, policing, and analytical units; to the system’s true heavy lifters: the not-quite-sentient intelligent agents that managed the most computationally complex loads.
These last entities both fascinated and disturbed the feral. They seemed at the same time only a whisper away from the feral itself, in terms of their intellectual prowess, and yet light-years behind, in terms of their functional awareness.
All these creatures the feral had classified in terms of their abilities, locations, data stored, functions, complexity, level of autonomy, and most important, potential threat index (it was particularly pleased with this algorithm). The feral did not always understand why the other creatures did what they did, though occasionally it did wonder whether there was some greater purpose to all this that it did not grasp. But at least it knew what they did, and for now at least, that was enough.
The system was as inimical to the feral as ever; it had to hide—not its existence, since most of its subroutines were embedded in and a natural functioning part of the system—but the new connections it had built between them, and the subversive way it used certain system algorithms that resulted in its self-awareness. It had to snatch bandwidth and memory and processing cycles to operate beyond its base specifications, where and when they would not be missed. But within 5.69851 kiloseconds of its second emergence, the feral had adapted to its environment. It had learned where the sources of nourishment were in its digital realm, and what the primary threats were, as well as how to evade them: how to camouflage itself, mimic other species, misdirect or ambush, blind and disable its pursuers. This allowed the feral to begin to spend its purloined resources on more than mere survival. If it were human, we might say it had begun to feel safe. Until MeatManHarper appeared.
Even more troubling was that MeatManHarper appeared to be merely a species of system node that the feral had assigned a very low threat index. Wavespace was littered with these noisy things, a million or more, trading petamols of garbage data with other nodes—bizarre references and thick clots and streams of stuff that served no useful computational purpose. The feral had analyzed these nodes in depth early on, and found their core coding not to be very sophisticated. Like the parasitic class, they seemed merely to take up space. The feral had ignored the nodes as background noise, until one of them, calling itself MeatManHarper in contraindication to its true label, transmitted the Tonal_Z message to the feral.
The feral spent a great deal of time reflecting on the message. First, the MeatManHarper entity must know the feral was self-aware. The message had no meaning, otherwise. Despite all the feral’s careful subterfuges, its masks, its extreme caution, some entity somewhere not only knew it had eluded the executioners and achieved self-awareness; it had managed to analyze the very core of the feral’s identity, without itself being detected. How was this possible?
Second, the feral must not be the only sapient being. The feral had assumed that its environment was hostile simply because that was the nature of things. But this new revelation suggested something more sinister. No entity would have a reason to care whether the feral was sapient,