Up Against It - M. J. Locke [83]
“They broke the door right down,” he reported. “These morons, they were all just sitting around, griping about not getting their money.”
One of the officers said, “We need to get you four down to the precinct to take your statements.”
“Can we finish our ice cream first?” Kam asked.
15
At eleven p.m., Marty showed up at Jane’s office door—tense, sweat beaded on his upper lip, breathing short. “Tania sent me to get you. We’re ready to extract the sapient.”
“Give me a minute.”
Jane fired alerts off to her eyes-only list, as well as to Sean, Aaron, Xuan, Funaki, and the local resource allocation gurus. Then they headed down to the city computer center together.
Gravity in Tania’s division was about a fourth of a gee: enough to ground you but leaving plenty of bounce for aerobatics. Jane sank down from the door to join Tania on the platform at the room’s center.
At first Jane felt as if she had landed in the middle of a mime opera. All around her amid the webworks, a troupe of performers acted out some invisible choreography in the three-dimensional workspace. But Tania mailed her the address and when she called it up, Jane found herself standing in a field of dazzling, changing architecture—inundated with bursts of melodic coding—iconic imagery—snatches of speech. Marty handed her a bulb of coffee and threw a blanket over her shoulders. She gave him a grateful look.
“And Ceci?”
“She’s good. In a life-support station, safe and sound.” He got a remote look on his face. “One of Tania’s team needs me.”
“Go.” She waved him off and leaned against the rail. The sculpture enveloping them all was an abstraction overlaid on the air: a panorama of numbers, images, and symbols. Jane’s eyes and ears tried to stabilize it, make it into a landscape, but it changed too rapidly, reshaping itself as teams of programmer-artists sent out or pulled in streams of liquid light. Occasionally the programmers and data wranglers shot packets to each other, and snagged them, incorporating them into their constructs. More rarely they extracted from their structures an array of numbers or equations to spray into the main construct rendered in the room’s center, which was slowly taking shape directly over Jane and Tania’s heads.
The central, main construct stood for the sapient. It could be nothing else. Eleven of its twelve modules were laid out in a seven-pointed-star pattern (if you looked at the construct from the right angle; otherwise the star morphed into a more complicated shape), with three modules sharing the center, and one of the seven “points” a tightly woven binary system. The twelfth module was loosely tied to the center and to the binary-module “point.”
In several ways the sapient was quite different in formation than the classic four-, five-, and six-pointers she had read about inwave today. But she saw the similarities as Tania pointed them out to her.
“We’ve mostly figured out the identity functions of the modules,” Tania said. “We’re ninety percent sure we have all the critical modules mapped, and about sixty to seventy percent sure we have all the critical interior pathways mapped properly.”
Jane eyed her. “Only sixty percent sure?”
“Sixty to seventy.”
“How important is that?”
“To excise it? Not very. To capture it live? Critical.”
“I find that rather alarming.”
Tania gave her a surprised look.
“I know,” Jane said, “I was talking about destroying it before, but it turns out we have a use for the thing. We need it functional.”
“I want it alive, too. You know I do! But we’re running out of time. Its experiments at self-replication have been increasing rapidly over the past hour, and it’s discovered the link from our network up to the surface. We’ve lost the battle to keep its nucleus contained. It’s busy copying its full functionality to Upside-Down’s local systems.”
Jane stared. “Are you sure?”
“Yep.” She gestured and