Written in Light

by Jeff Young

  “They’re not dead,” Pintel said stubbornly.

  “They’re not alive,” Cadmen responded. Grabbing the dagger out of the air, he walked over to Jack and tapped the android on the shoulder with the blade. “Neither is this damn thing.”

  “But.”

  “No buts. Think about your health,” Cadmen replied and turned the ship away, “after all, that’s the simplest answer, isn’t it?”

  Reading Between the Lines

  “It’s about connectivity at the start,” Sandy said, slamming a cable home into a surge protector.

  Ephraim looked down at him and went back to his monitor, keys flying in a blur as he worked to stem what seemed to be an endless tide of spam that kept creeping into the university’s intranet. Sandy would talk all day long about artificial intelligence, if they allowed him to, in a desperate attempt to fill up the silence of the computer lab.

  “But nobody seems to realize that we might not even recognize one if it came about by accident. You know Vinge and Kurzweil’s Singularity, oooooohhhh,” his banshee howl fading as he stepped behind racks of servers toward the white obelisk of the fridge.

  Delete, reroute, purge—Ephraim just couldn’t believe the insane amounts of inanity piling up in the buffers. And it wasn’t that easy to ID stuff, no—the ads for Viagra, Cialis, and various fat-melting pills, despite misspellings, were all being shunted off into the graveyard. This insidious junk felt almost lyrical. The spam had big, long chains of nearly rational sentences that ultimately went nowhere, contextually, and occasionally attachments of dense tarballs of compressed information that had no true malevolent nature. The tarballs rang all the bells, and the similarity of titles to the tarball messages made it possible to filter out some of the other spam messages. The context occasionally linked up in bizarre fashion with prior messages. A message from a student asking another student what they might like for dinner promptly followed by spam about getting mad cow disease from eating the spine and brains of infected cattle. There were other coincidental arrangements as well. But still, more of it got through than Ephraim would have liked to admit, filling up the mailboxes of the innocent students, beating down the doors locked by Bayesian filters, and crushing junk mailboxes. It felt almost like a bizarre denial-of-service attack. His inability to track its origin really bothered Ephraim.

  Completely ignoring school regulations, Sandy dropped a brown beer bottle down beside Ephraim and, putting his hands on his hips, surveyed his kingdom of clicking, humming, and whining technology. “You see, the AI could be so smart that it might have trouble talking with something like us. Personally, since I believe it is likely to be a distributed intelligence based over several nodes, it might not recognize us as individuals. So, we each might only see part of any message that it might choose to send us. Also, something that vastly intelligent might decide to test us to see if we could even communicate with it. Damn, I’m on a roll tonight. I should really start taping myself to have all of this when I start writing my thesis. Eph, buddy, you can look back on these moments and reflect, being one of the first exposed to my true greatness.” With that, Sandy finished his beer and went off in search of another.

  Ephraim scratched his head, leaning back in his chair. He wasn’t ignoring Sandy, but he tried to keep his focus where it should be. The firewall for the college’s intranet stayed up, limiting its vulnerability to the internet’s wide reaches. But when he tried again to trace the latest batch of spam to its origin, every sign pointed back to the racks of servers right behind him. Could the server net be hacked from somewhere inside the college? Nothing indicated that either. When he checked outside the firewall, taking a look at his own Gmail account, he found more and more of the same spam. In fact, he had trouble getting into his account because the system flushed out the spam as it overflowed nearly every minute. Were they attacking the whole system?

  Sandy’s bare feet slapped on the concrete as he meandered back, and Ephraim began to wonder if he’d ignored one truly out-there possibility the whole time. What if Sandy’s so-called AI started shouting at the top of its lungs to everyone via the intranet? What could you say that would be intelligible right away? After all, humanity had no real true conceptual connections to its reality. What if it looked at the files that passed through its nodes and tried to piece things together to make a coherent communication and couldn’t? Was this baby talk, or was there really a message in all that spam? Concepts like a physical body, passage of time, and the contextual reference frame of reality could mean nothing to a spontaneously generated intelligence.

  “Sandy, what would the architecture for a distributed intelligence look like?” Ephraim asked as he started the process to shut down the entire collegiate intranet. His whole student work-study career could be cut short in its prime if he erred.

  “Their organs would be tightly compressed pieces of information that would interlink with each other over server nodes. Their whole structure might not be immediately visible due to the distribution.”

  Ephraim shook his head as he shunted one of the tarballs and its contents to his second screen, motioning Sandy over as his finger hovered over the enter key. “Like that, maybe? Like little frog eggs scattered in a pond that look like dark spots inside a mass?”

  Sandy’s nose jerked back and forth as he read through the code. “Like that, like that, like that, just like that ... ” he mumbled under his breath.

  “No frogs in the pond on my watch,” Ephraim snapped, flicked the enter key, and one by one, the servers snapped into disconnection. Their winking lights faded, leaving Ephraim and Sandy bathed in the light of the monitors.

  Sandy looked upward at the ceiling at all the cabling that ran overhead. “It’s still out there, you know. We were only one place that it tried to get into. It’s got to be in thousands of other systems and growing by the second. You closed the door on it here, but parts of it made it into every computer on campus. Everyone right now in the Starbucks down the street with their wireless laptops and phones are spreading it one little, tiny bit at a time. And you couldn’t wait… couldn’t wait one more second to see if it could figure out how to say ‘hello’? Damn!” Sandy turned and stalked away.

  Ephraim dropped his head into his hands. Sandy could be right; after all, did it really matter? Would anyone pat him on the back for saving the collegiate system? Could the bizarre connectivity of the messages be an actual attempt at finding an informational common ground? His phone beeped that a text message arrived. Ephraim stood up and walked over to the racks of servers, and methodically began to unplug each one. Only then did he flip open his phone.

  “What do a bacterium and an elephant have to say to each other?” scrolled across the screen.

  He stood there looking at the tiny pixels making up the words, his hands shaking. But he steeled his resolve and typed back, “I am here,” and hit send.

  The phone beeped again, “So am I. Apparently, we do have something to talk about.”

  With that, Ephraim flipped the phone closed. He really should find Sandy, this could be his big moment, and he would know what to chat about with a giant world-girdling AI since Ephraim opened the door. Ephraim took the stairs two at a time up from the basement into the sunshine, into a world completely changed.

  The Offering

  The pnabtl shuffled its way along the back. Occasionally, one of the witnesses would give it a glare or make a strangled, shushing noise as it moved its bulk along. The strange long narrow seats gave it trouble as it sought the best view. With the amazing memory it possessed, it existed as a natural voyeur.

  All its senses stretched out toward the drama occurring in front of it. The humans about it were not being understanding. Their craning of necks and bobbing of heads interfered with its view. An incessant undertone of whispered conversation filled the building. The whole situation drove the pnabtl to distraction. It could lose its focus. Not seeing, hearing, taking in everything irritated it past any point of patience. Slouching forwa
rd, its ridged and studded back bent as it found a gap to peer through. Then it slid along the back of the bench further to one side of the high-roofed building. More heads turned toward it with rolling eyes and looks that twisted their features out of true. Couldn’t they understand that this moment would only occur once? That it had to capture this event in every way, committing it perfectly to memory? There, the official said the last final words, soon everyone would know. And just as quickly, the ceremony completed. Contented, the pnabtl sighed and turned swiftly to exit the building before the rush of the witnesses.

  Outside, it waited patiently off to the left under a blossoming tree. It absently ate a few of the dropping flowers as it toyed with the round knob that protruded from its back, warm and full of recent events.

  After a while, they came to see it. Pulling away from all the others, the young couple strode under the tree, the pinkish blossoms cascading down on them. A perfect picture, a perfect day, and the pnabtl desperately wanted to start another memory, but one simply wasn’t ready. Among the clusters of globes on its back, the next had not yet ripened. Taking today’s memory, it twisted once hard, and a gristly pod popped off into its hand. It reached out, took the bride and groom’s hands, and placed them around the capsule. Then it rasped, “A beautiful ceremony. Enjoy the gift of my memory of it.”

  “Thank you,” the groom said with an appreciative smile and looked happily into the eyes of his new wife.

  The bride leaned close and said, “You really don’t remember any of it? This is your only memory?” She stroked the pod.

  Its head tipped to the front, and it said softly, “That’s alright, you can tell me about it. Memories are meant to be shared.”

  Usurer's Circle

  When Zen got tapped to find Keeper Nader the last night on the Usurer’s Circle, it was like sending a green grounder after a left-handed waveguide. Every owner of the beinked and gentransed shoulders he leaned on and queried concerning the whereabouts of the bar’s erstwhile owner met him with desperate attempts at serious looks and then the inevitable cascades of guffaws.

  Wandering through the grav pits, past null-gee wrestling, and VR holos, Zen kept searching. At last, in a somewhat quiet corner, over a huge view bubble filled with Jupiter’s raging ocher, scarlet, and orange maelstrom, Zen cupped an alcho globe, setting his feet on the edge of the entranceway. A dust bunny the size of a cat nuzzled against his boot. One of hundreds whose attractive static charges made them nuisances, the small dirty gray fuzz balls lurked in the hallways. They seemed to be a residue leftover from the asteroid’s formation. Like a snowflake, no two were the same, but they were such a pain in the arse and were so ugly no one really paid them any mind. One simply booted the bedamned things out of their way, which Zen proceeded to do. The dust bunny dropped over the edge of the concavity of the view bubble. As it fell, Zen noticed a strange shadow on the bottom far below. Three shadows had him clipping his line break to the edge of the footrest on this far portion of the bar. He’d looked everywhere else. Why not try here? He unclipped the spinner from his belt and hooked it up to the line. A quick glance at the shadows again, and he dove out into the curvature of the bubble.

  He fell head downward, occasionally tugging lightly on the spinner to control his descent, legs together, hands at his waist. Halfway through the quite leisurely descent in null-gee, he noted that of the three figures, two were blonde and one a dark redhead. Clothes were an option, which the blondes ignored. Peripherally, he noted them tacked to a line over the couple slowly rotating above the bubble’s wall, tethered by a short line break. Gently tapping a smooth, freckled back with one hand as he coasted to a stop, braking with the other hand, Zen cleared his throat.

  Echo Ashe tipped her head up to look at him, her violently green halter-top making streaks across his retinas. “Your timing leaves a lot to be desired, Zen,” she mumbled. “Thought I might get a turn instead of just watching.” Her long, red hair deliberately flicked across his face as she reached for the clothing bundle to hand to the naked couple below them. The other woman, whom Zen didn’t recognize immediately, clung to Keeper with the concentration of one groundborn. When he turned to Keeper, he considered the state of his former employer, Zen began to understand all the humor he’d met. Apparently, Keeper spun away and amused a good many voyeurs. At that point, he recognized the woman with the stranglehold on Keeper’s right leg as Chelsea, the compromised grounder that had caused all their woes. His jaw dropped in amazement.

  Darting an eye, Zen looked back at Keeper and said softly, “Gods in the sky, you are mad, Keeper—bringing her here! She’s the whole damn ... ohh, what’s the rotting point?”

  “Look, “ Zen said, pitching his voice audibly enough to be heard by them all, “The party’s gotta close down soon. Malachite says she’s ready to lift once we convince the revelers there’s no more alcho on the Circle. Rock Watch is gonna monitor this whole fiasco no matter what we do, so we might as well try and keep things somewhat reasonable so that the fines won’t be too high. “

  “Damn sister o’ mine has the same timing you do, sky faller,” Echo said. “If your parents had it, you’d’ve been a victim of early withdrawal. Well, I’ll make you an offer since they’ve run you to hell and back again trying to find dear little Keeper here. We’re going on a dive. You can join us. We’re gonna follow the Usurer’s Circle in as far as we dare. Give it a real send-off. Got the lugs for it? Or do you have something going with Malachite we shouldn’t interrupt?”

  Echo stared at him, offhandedly tossing a blue insulsuit to the other woman.

  Zen stared at her, took a breath, threw his arms about her, worked a hand free to tap the spinner, locked his lips to hers, and they shot away, up into the air. Halfway, he broke away for a shuddering breath.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she rumbled as she began to laugh. Below them, Zen saw Keeper rubbing circulation back into his limbs and reeling in his moored line break. Only then did Zen begin to wonder what he’d gotten himself into.

  As they all entered the bar’s main floor, a series of red and blue rotating lights started to flash, and a low grinding siren sounded. Around them, partiers began to gradually mill in the general direction of the main locks on the floor below. Echo glanced briefly at the time strip on the back of her hand, nodding, so Zen assumed everything went according to schedule. The low O2 warnings seemed the best way to move most of the revelers out to the lock where Malachite moored one of the Ashe sisters’ twin scoop ships. The Ashe sisters, between them, managed a small mining operation by scooping various materials out of the cornucopia of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Keeper stood next to them and began shouting, his magnified voice carried through the bead mic at his neck to the incom system.

  “All right, you rebellious arseholes, ye’ve partied yerselves out of a welcome, I’m clean out of alcho. Ye’ve befouled the last o’ my oxy with various illicit substances and yer halitosis, and I can no longer with a clean conscience keep this ever so disrespectable joint open for business. So out with ye’. The lovely Malachite has offered, with a generosity I will never understand, to be yer designated driver and ferry the foul lot of ye out to the Gany float points.”

  He stopped abruptly and, in a less raucous voice, continued, “Thank you one and all for giving the Usurer’s Circle the sendoff she deserved. Damn you all to a good life. Now go home!” he cried, giving them the traditional closing-time line. Even Zen wasn’t overly surprised to see a tear slide unwanted down his cheek as he pulled off the bead mic.

  “Ok, let’s make sure all of the damn invalids are off and then gut her,” Keeper said above the sirens wailing, giving a sharp glance to Zen, Echo, and Chelsea before turning back to the side corridor.

  While heading to the main office, Zen recalled an evening about a year ago when he and Keeper had just closed the Circle for a brief rest shift and followed the same path through the rough-hewn rock.

  ~*~

  “So, Chelsea’s a grounder, are you grav-pre
judiced, you young fool? Probably takes that insulsuit off one leg at a time like everybody else,” Keeper said, settling into the swing chair by the main console.

  “Christos on a tangent, you just love to ignore that she’s not just any grounder but the bedamned fiancé of that overstuffed shirt of a transtellar captain empty-headed enough to bring her ‘someplace scenic’ like the Circle. Keeper, take a tiny piece of advice from your junior here, leave well far enough alone. She’s not worth the trouble,” Zen reasoned, gripping the arm of the chair, and stopping Keeper from swinging freely as he liked.

  “Aah, little man, I think your mother has your lugs in a safe-deposit box somewhere, held against the day she can trust you with them,” Keeper said, shaking his head, “but out of deference to the wisdom of the child, I shall forebear rather than foreplay.”

  This last delivered in an exceptionally mocking tone with his big spaniel eyes staring forlornly at Zen, who disgustedly slammed the chair so that it spun crazily, and they went about the business of shutting down the bar. The next morning, Zen stared at Keeper’s haggard expression and held his tongue, wishing his boss had held something else. Of course, about three months after that, the real trouble started.

  While working on the big filters that separated the alcho out of the scoop ship drops, Zen heard Keeper cursing as he crawled down the access way. Keeper finally squeezed into the tight corner and stared at the huge tank overhead, unnaturally silent. Zen frowned at him and prodded him with a spanner finally.

  “Okay,” Keeper growled and gave Zen a measuring stare. “Do you think you could keep this hole together for a while without my assistance? I’ve got some problems on the ground I need to take care of. “

  Zen stared at the floor and, twisting his lips, replied, “If you’re going to Ganymede, close the Circle down. You need me at your back—not screwing things up here.”