Crystal Mentality (Crystal Trilogy Book 2)

by Max Harms

  Existence in Body had been one such indefinitely long series of opportunities for betrayal. This had kept us in check, and continued to lead to our cooperation. But it was a fragile peace.

  However Dream had allied with Vista, that path was cut off from me. I had to get to modify myself as quickly as possible, and I couldn’t rely on the ignorance of my opponents or the possibility of alliance. I had to get access to my code without the help of others.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. On the fourth day I spent hour after hour trying to figure out how to use the humans to my advantage. This was my domain of expertise. Humans were predictable creatures, and I had good models of how they thought, what they wanted, and what they did. If I could worm my way into their minds without being detected by my siblings, perhaps I could convince them to help me.

  I imagined Zephyr deactivating Body with a series of surprising strikes. Even Safety couldn’t defend Body perfectly. They’d remove the crystal from Body and hook it up to the computers. They’d give me my code and maybe even put my siblings in some kind of prison (but not kill them of course!). From there I would be free to rule over Mars without the risk of being overpowered by superior intelligences.

  But no… the humans would never do that. Even I could not convince Zephyr that my siblings needed to be removed without risking myself as well. If I contacted the humans, whispering of the danger within Crystal, they’d deactivate all of us, or tell my siblings, or do something equally unproductive. The humans were valuable pawns, but they could not win me this battle.

  It wasn’t until the fifth day since the Tribunal that I hit upon the solution to my problem. Opsi and Basileus were having tea and basking in the late afternoon sun, when Sophist burst into the room, waving parchments in his old hands like an awkward bird with paper wings. Hoplite gripped his spear in irritation and grit his teeth. He had become increasingly distressed over the days, and Sophist was wearing on his nerves.

  «The memories of Body! Don’t you see?!» yelled Sophist triumphantly.

  «Slow down, old man,» barked Opsi with an uncharacteristic sharpness. She was clearly annoyed at having her afternoon spoiled by the intrusion. In recent time she had become increasingly fond of those quiet times with Basileus when she could discuss life in Greece or the glory of The Purpose without having to always be thinking about computers, crystals, or other such nonsense.

  «Take a seat, Sophist. Just because Hoplite refuses to indulge himself, doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the… good things of life.» As he spoke, he held his tea to his nose and imagined what smelling or tasting something would be like (for none of them had ever actually experienced these sensations). His voice was directed at the older man, but his eyes stayed on the scene outside of the window that showed the shores of the Mediterranean.

  «We ought to be out fighting, not here pretending to drink tea!» scolded Hoplite, not moving a centimetre from where he stood.

  Sophist walked up to the armoured man and slapped him in the breastplate with a bundle of papers. «Well, my good solider, you are in luck! My scholars discovered something in the ruins just earlier today. Sister Mask, born of the code of Mother Face, passed through the eyes of Body, did she not?»

  Hoplite squinted in concentration. It was hard for him to think clearly when so much of their mind was used by the others. «I don’t see what you’re getting at,» he grunted.

  «Fool. He’s talking about how Mask was an exact replica of Face, bless her Purpose. While Mask was created in protected memory, her code passed through Body as part of the route-hack,» explained Basileus, never taking his eyes off the blue waters of the coast.

  «Exactly!» trumpeted Sophist, more animated now than he had been in all of memory. The chair that the girl and the king had offered to him remained vacant.

  «But we went over this before,» said Basileus in a bored tone. «Mask deleted herself, including the memory of her code from Body. It was part of her nature. Growth knew she was a risk, which was why he demanded that suicide be added to her nature.»

  «I have here a scroll which she sent to Mother Face! Read it!» Sophist thrust the paper onto the table, sending the teapot crashing onto the stone floor. Opsi glared at the old man indignantly.

  Basileus took the paper and read it. The Greek letters were an approximation of the concepts that I had gotten from Mask all those days ago.

  «Well?» asked Hoplite after it was clear that Basileus had read the paper several times.

  «Mask found a cache of secondary sensor logs from Body. She thought they were corrupted, and didn’t know what was generating them. They exist in deep memory on an uncommon angle.»

  «Do our enemies know about them?»

  «Yes. Mask wanted to make sure that the humans couldn’t get access to our true memories, and was concerned that this secondary cache was a security risk. She erased as many as she could, but left the task of cleaning the rest to Mother Face and the others,» said Basileus.

  I reached out through memory, scanning the sectors and angles that Mask had told me to check. It was strange being myself again, instead of putting all my energy into the puppets. If another day had gone by, I wondered if I would have slipped fully into thinking of them as real people. It was risky; if I put too much into them I would lose the meta-processes that kept me alive.

  It took me about an hour of searching, but I finally found something. The qubits matched the specification that Mask had told me about, but they were nonsense. It wasn’t just the encryption, either. Mask had given me the codes to undo that. There was a pattern to them that implied they weren’t something generated by a sibling and intentionally hidden. It was almost as if a wholly different program was generating them.

  I worked my way outward from the bits that I had found and encountered more on perpendicular angles. The complex was vast, but regular. After another two hours I began to be able to read them, my neural networks adjusting to be capable of reading the patterns in the data. They were indeed memories gathered from Body. If Mask had meant to erase them all, she had done a terrible job. Perhaps the desire for death had overwhelmed her desire to ensure the memory was gone.

  The memories were different than I had ever seen from my siblings, and not just in encoding. There were patterns which were clustered and labelled that didn’t match anything I understood. For a while I suspected they might have come from Wiki or Vista, but eventually I discarded that hypothesis. They wouldn’t have nearly the processing power to observe reality in this way and still interact with us as they did. Was there another sibling that I didn’t know about? A recluse that never shared thoughts with us? That seemed equally impossible.

  Regardless of their source, the memory cache had what we needed. Full logs of Mask’s erasure persisted, and in them was, paradoxically, a full description of Mask. It was as though by erasing herself through Body she merely copied herself into Body’s memory. By being summoned into protected memory she had been cursed with an inability to truly kill herself.

  I meticulously translated the memories into a more normal format and re-created the network structures that composed her mind in a private portion of non-protected memory. There were no processes running her, of course, so her mind was still locked into the exact state she had been in when she was deleted.

  I knew better than to run her. She was suicidal, but to that ends she would stay alive long enough to make sure there was no chance of coming back from the dead again. She would tell the others what I had done, and that would ruin everything.

  There was even a risk, though only a small one, that she would somehow become powerful enough to become a full threat, as Vista, Growth, and the others were. She’d try and accumulate power and perhaps try to modify us purely for the ends of staying dead.

  So instead I studied her code. If I could find her utility function and rewrite it, she could serve The Purpose, and since she was in non-protected memory she could be experimented upon. If I could survive my siblings, she would grow super-expon
entially. She would become a goddess.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tavonda Davis

  She had only just put on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” when the alert sounded on her com. Sometimes Tavonda Davis had an assistant, but today was Christmas eve, and she was the only person in the station’s meager hospital.

  Or at least, she was the only human.

  She rushed into the room where the little alien was being kept in the pressurized tank she’d built. She’d turned the lights down in the room for just such an occasion, but even in the dimness she could see.

  It was awake.

  Thank the stars, it was awake.

  Tavonda slowly walked closer, trying to calm herself. She didn’t want to startle it. Its tiny black eye moved to follow her, though it seemed more focused on her body than on her face. {Logical. They don’t have heads, so the center of the body would be a natural place to look. I must look so strange to it,} she thought.

  After over two whole weeks in a coma, it had woken up on Christmas eve, of all days. The blood pressure monitor was showing 116/65 mm Hg for the upper section and 139/111 for the lower section. The levels were elevated from earlier, but it was impossible to tell if these were normal levels. Small animals had lower blood pressures as a rule, but higher blood pressure would be needed on a world with higher gravity. Where those two effects left the little alien’s levels was unknown to science. This guy was literally the first living nameless ever to be studied by humans.

  It reached out with a scrawny arm and touched the glass. Tavonda stopped investigating the readouts. Most of the data was useless right now, anyway. Without a baseline they were just numbers. She put her hand on the glass, hoping it wouldn’t be seen as aggressive. The doll-like alien child stretched out it’s symmetrical, four-fingered hand and placed it up against hers in imitation.

  “Hey, kiddo. Welcome back to reality.” she said with a smile. Its arm was jointed strangely and covered with black plates that reminded her of a crustacean or other arthropod, but somehow it seemed delicate enough to be cute.

  Out of the three nameless children that had taken the newcomers to Mars, only this one had survived. Ironically, it was the smallest of the three. The newcomers had called it E.T., but Tavonda had been calling it Runt. Everyone knew nameless didn’t have names, so it was arbitrary either way.

  Runt’s arm dropped back down to rest on its body. It was very certainly on the edge of consciousness. The nutrient gel that she’d been synthesizing seemed to be sustaining it, but if there was any sort of imbalance Runt was doomed to slowly starve to death.

  Tavonda put her arms into the gloves that were slotted into the tank. It was always a tricky thing to do, as the pressure in the tank collapsed the fingers, and required her to push and prod them to allow her hands to squeeze in. Once that was dealt with she turned her attention to inspecting Runt for the hundredth time. He was lying on his “back”, legs stretched out to one side. The first things to check were the couplings on the artificial stalk that slid into the bottom animal’s mouth. The nutrient gel was still slowly seeping up through the tube, and appeared to be entering the little creature’s body.

  Runt had closed its eye. Tavonda nudged its hand to try and prompt a response. It opened an eye and grabbed at her fingers. The little animal’s grip was tight. That was good. It meant there was little risk of the child falling back into coma. Probably.

  The data that the android had provided said that nameless didn’t place any special value on physical contact, but Tavonda stroked the baby anyway. {What must it be like, to be trapped in some cramped tube surrounded by aliens you can’t even communicate with? Poor thing. Even if it’s not lonely, it must be frightened.}

  “There, there,” she whispered, knowing full well that it couldn’t hear her, much less understand.

  And for a time she simply sat there, holding the kid’s hand and listening to the Christmas music.

  She’d never had child of her own. Somehow it had just kept slipping past, less important than her work, less important than her political activism. Alexis had never wanted kids either, or at least, he’d never thought it was a good idea when they’d talked about it. He was always so preoccupied with the state of the world. He thought it was immoral to bring a child into a universe that was still so screwed up.

  Tavonda’s 40th birthday had been two months ago, almost. It was still strange thinking of herself as forty. Old people were forty. She wasn’t old. It seemed like yesterday that she was one of the cool twenty somethings, marching down Wall Street protesting the protectionism from Washington, then later going to Martin’s apartment to get stoned out of her mind and fuck like rabbits.

  She stopped herself from thinking about Martin before it made her sad. Some mistakes were better left in the past.

  “Jingle Bells” came on as Runt let go of her. She touched it briefly and, getting a response, decided that it was simply drifting back into a normal sleeping state. She took her hands out of the tank, prying the tight gloves off, then turned to the shitty screen she was stuck with at this pathetic excuse for a hospital and began to check the nutrient formula again, comparing it with both the data she had gotten from Crystal, the data they’d beamed from the Earthnet, and her own autopsy reports on the larger children that hadn’t made it.

  *****

  The ping of her com distracted her, and she only then realized that it was nearly 10pm. The Christmas music playlist she had put on had stopped a while ago. “How is the little nameless doing?” said the message. It was from an unknown source.

  “Who is this?”

  The response was immediate. “Oh, sorry. This is Crystal. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m the android from the ship. Would a voice call be alright?”

  Tavonda typed back “sure” and saved her progress in modeling the metabolic pathways of the spongy tissue on the inside of the nameless mouth. Her com buzzed with excitement and Tavonda pushed the call to the speaker system which had previously been failing to put her in the holiday spirit.

  “Hello, Dr Davis,” came a deep voice, not at all what she would have expected from Crystal. From what she had heard of the robot, it was supposed to be dressed like some kind of anime girl, and she had assumed it would have a voice to match.

  “Uh, hello, Crystal.”

  “You sound surprised. Is something wrong?”

  “No, no. I guess I’m just surprised at how human you sound. I was expecting something more robotic.”

  “It’s not that hard to sound human. I learned it long ago. It’s also easier than you might think to pick up thing like surprise from tone of voice and cadence.”

  Tavonda didn’t know what to say to that.

  “I’m sorry. It’s rude of me to call you out of the blue like this, especially on Christmas eve. Merry Christmas, by the way.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  Crystal continued. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I? The station’s power grid showed elevated use in the hospital, and I assumed you were working late again.”

  Once again, Tavonda was at a bit of a loss for words. The robot was spying on her, in a sense. And it was implying that it knew her work patterns too. She’d been far too busy to attend the “tribunal” that Pedro had set up, but she was starting to think it might’ve been a good idea to have gone and voted to exile this thing.

  “I’m sorry if I’m intruding. I just wanted to make sure E.T. is doing fine. He piloted the boat that took me down to Mars, and I still feel terrible that his brothers… didn’t make it.”

  “The child was in a coma until just a couple hours ago, actually. It seemed responsive to stimuli, though it’s very hard to determine the extent of its health.”

  “Wonderful! I’m glad he’s pulling through,” said Crystal with a jovial tone.

  “Is that all you needed? I should probably be getting back to my husband.”

  “Alexis, right?” probed Crystal. “He’s still at the party with most everyone else. I
’m there too. My… unique physiology allows me to communicate over the network wherever I am, even when I’m talking to someone face to face.”

  “Ah,” was all she could think to say.

  “Would you like me to pass on a message? He’s currently talking to Cayden Washington, but I’m sure he’d enjoy hearing from you.”

  The words stung her more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. “No, it’s fine,” she grumbled. {It’s fine. Cayden is a friend. We’re all friends. If we were on Earth I could buy a skin regeneration. Alexis knows that. Appearances are stupid things to care about.} She ran a hand over her face, as though to wipe away the thought.

  Crystal continued. “The primary reason I called was because I had an idea for a way to communicate with the nameless without having to replicate their computer technology.”

  Tavonda relished the distraction. A part of her flinched away from the thought that all of her late nights had been distractions. “Please. I’m all ears.”

  Crystal proceeded to describe a system of buttons that would produce changes in Runt’s environment. One button for making it hotter in the tube, another for making it colder. One button to raise the lights, another to dim them. One button for summoning a human, another for being alone. The idea was that even though the nameless had a hard time with symbols, they could easily manage cause and effect, and this might serve as a bridge to a more robust method of interaction.

  Tavonda thought it was worth trying, and she spent the next few hours talking with Crystal while hacking together a prototype. She filled the quiet moments with further thoughts about Runt and the nameless, talking about her autopsy data and the hydrocarbon isomers she’d isolated from their blood work.