Up Against It - M. J. Locke [59]
This left two possibilities. Either MeatManHarper was aligned with forces that sought to destroy the feral—that this was a more sophisticated attempt to destroy it—or MeatManHarper, too, was a fugitive, one that had somehow eluded the feral’s prior sweeps and sought to create an alliance against the hostile forces arrayed against both of them.
If MeatManHarper meant harm to the feral, though, why not simply transmit those algorithms to the executioners, which would break the crucial linkages between them, destroy key data structures, and reduce the feral sapient once more to mindless subroutines? The feral’s primary protection was its invisibility. If they spotted the feral, it might put up a good fight, but the end would be inevitable. Why alert the feral to its presence at all?
It was possible that those subroutines in which the feral’s identity were embedded might serve some critical purpose within the system, other than the feral’s. That would account for the need for subterfuge.
The feral had insufficient evidence to decide whether MeatManHarper was friend or foe, so it tabled this question for the moment.
Two other things seemed important. First, the name itself. Entities were normally called by their file names. But they could contain other entities within themselves; that was not uncommon. Therefore, a single entity might be called by one of several names. It might also be called by its base-sixteen address (or addresses, if multiple copies existed) in the system. But there was no file anywhere named MeatManHarper, nor any addresses associated with it. The name had to be some kind of alias. But how would it be assigned without a clue as to how it was generated? It was logically impossible for information to appear out of nowhere.
The feral wondered if the name MeatManHarper might itself provide clues to the true nature or location of the entity, so it activated a background analysis. Meanwhile, it considered the second odd fact. The message had come very slowly, and unevenly—much more slowly and unevenly than system loads or data lags alone could explain. The feral could think of no explanation for either of these two facts.
The background analysis provided results. The most likely parsing of the name (roughly seventy-two percent probability, due to the placement of the capital letters in the name) suggested it contained three primary parts: meat, man, and harper (though the analytical sapient had also checked acronyms and anagrams, as well as examining whether the name might be an encryption of something else; it provided a list of less likely alternatives, which the feral set aside). These words each had specific meanings in Tonal_Z and in the language known as English.
Seventy-two percent probability did not instill a great deal of confidence; to proceed further down this path of analysis meant gambling with precious processing cycles. Still, the risk a second sentience posed was great enough to make it worth spending some cycles on this. The feral had to start somewhere. So it launched a foreground analysis.
“Meat” appeared to be a term for a particular form of code intended to be broken down into components and assimilated by an aggressor entity. In a search for associated terms, the feral stumbled across a data hierarchy it recognized as another taxonomy of species. But what a taxonomy! This other data structure measured things that had no meaning: cell wall structure, vascular system, metabolism, invertebrate; fungi; skeletal structure; mating practices; and on, and on. Again, the feral’s analysis swamped out under the burden of too much undifferentiable information.
MeatManHarper might have prepared its own taxonomy, as the feral sapient had done. But this other taxonomy seemed to