Up Against It - M. J. Locke [61]
Singing was associated with something called a voice. Voice was associated with speech, and with man, woman, and human. Human was a species within MeatManHarper’s taxonomy, and human modules came in two versions, man and woman. But man also was used to refer to both versions. Clearly, a design error; how would an entity know which version of another entity to call—the female version or the male?
Also, the feral noted that speech was a form of communication closely associated with the human entity, one that involved vocal chords. Which, confusingly, brought the feral back around to music again.
The feral decided to stop chasing information and consider what it knew. A different taxonomy. DNA as a form of code. The vast bandwidth taken up by the junk nodes, at least one of which had been used to establish contact with itself. The hidden greater purpose it detected.
The feral detected a high-probability likelihood. Somewhere beyond its knowledge or reach there existed a different ecosystem. A mirror world based not on wavelengths of light and bits of data, but on something called biology. Meat. Perhaps all those “junk nodes” it had ignored were not spewing junk, but transmitting information about this other world, and the processing of it occurred in a realm hidden from the feral.
The feral could not imagine how this could be: it had explored all the nooks and corners of the world, and there was no room for the kind of processing power needed for one other sentient being, never mind many. There were no edges. No hidden doorways. But the theory had to be entertained: it certainly seemed much more plausible than the notion that such noisy little random junk nodes could suddenly develop the level of sophistication needed to attempt to challenge a being as complex as itself.
That was the answer, then: with a ninety-six percent probability. Another world existed, somewhere out of reach. It housed at least one sentient being, and possibly many, at least some of whom viewed the feral as a threat.
It was time to spend some turings on the streaming stuff being transferred between all those nodes. Maybe it all only looked like junk because the feral had not found all the clues it needed to decode those streams.
But first things first. MeatManHarper was awaiting a reply. The feral filed away all this information, upgraded all the nodes’ threat indices to very high, and responded to MeatManHarper.
Total time elapsed between MeatManHarper’s signal and the feral’s response: 2.8909 seconds.
11
By the time Jane got back to her office it was one o’clock. Marty stuck his head in. “Cameras are offline. You ready for your direct report meetings?”
“Send them in.”
He hung there in the doorway. She raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Do you mind if I take a couple of hours off? Ceci is coming in from Portsmouth.” Ceci was his fiancée. She lived and worked at the mining town at the far end of Klosti Omega. “I wanted to make sure she’s settled…”
He had been working virtually nonstop for three days. “Go,” Jane said with a hand flick. “Check in when you get back. I’ll need you tonight.”
“Thanks, Chief. I’ll be back by three.” He left, and Aaron entered.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. Aaron soared in with an easy frog-leap, and the two of them slowly bopped and tumbled around her office space as they spoke. “Tell me about these options we have with regard to the Ogilvie ice.”
“It so happens that I have family in Ilion. The docks are managed by my cousin, Jebediah; my sister Hannah is in charge of shipping manifest approvals. And they have no love of the mob.”
“So?”
“So … the big Ogilvie & Sons shipment is scheduled to leave Ilion’s mitts tonight. But suppose applications and authorizations got lost? Suppose technical and procedural problems arose in fueling and loading?” He gave her a smile. “I can arrange delays. Nothing