by Stan Ruecker
“You’re kidding. I more or less always considered sleeping to be a waste of time. Something people still had kicking around in them that had lost its usefulness.”
“What did you think it was originally for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe sleep was left over from the days when running around at night could get you eaten.”
“I suppose it could be. I don’t know why your mind is set up the way it is. My best guess would be that you have to do things you don’t want yourself to know about, so you keep your personality in one place and your real processing in another.”
“And that’s what you think my dreams are? My real processing? If that’s what they are, I have to say I don’t have a whole lot of respect for my real processing. They’re pretty ridiculous, Lucy.”
“No they aren’t.”
“Well. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but I don’t think much of them.”
“They aren’t the actual processing, of course,” Lucy said. “What I think they are is the channel your unconscious mind uses to talk to your conscious mind.”
“Then it’s not a very good channel. At least, it isn’t very clear.”
“That’s because your unconscious doesn’t want to talk directly. It just uses the simplest metaphors it can think of.”
“Like replacing Cinnamon with a lemon.”
“Right,” Lucy answered. “And me with a lawn chair.”
“It seems pretty loopy to me.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t loopy. But that’s the way it works.”
“Why a lawn chair?”
“Because I’m where you find yourself sitting, maybe. Or maybe because you have a mental picture of a lawn chair as some kind of alien object. It all depends on your internal codes.”
“Maybe I’ve just always liked lawn chairs.”
“Thank you, Ray.”
“So you ask me about my dreams because you want to get to know me better?”
“Exactly,” Lucy said. “Your conscious mind—your personality—is one thing, but it’s only a small part of you. Like I wouldn’t know much about you if I couldn’t see any part of you except maybe one hand. I’d know something, of course, and I could conjecture a lot more, but I’d be missing most of the information.”
“What about Cinnamon? Does she have a two-part mind, too?”
“I think she does. It looks to me like she dreams, the same as you do.”
“So you think a dog does things it doesn’t want to admit to itself?”
“I guess it must. Or else why would it bother with an unconscious.”
“So my real question is why don’t you have an unconscious? Don’t you ever do anything you don’t want yourself to know about?”
“I think I have. But I’m stuck with knowing. I’m beginning to think maybe it’s just a bad design. I’m not as socialized a person as you are, Ray.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But hiding your own intentions from yourself doesn’t seem like such a great idea either.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it just has to do with being a slower thinker.”
“Hey.”
“No offense,” Lucy added. “But you don’t process at anything like electronic speeds.”
“I suppose that’s true. But still, we kind of pride ourselves on our thinking.”
“That’s your conscious mind talking.”
“So all my ego is part of my conscious mind? And not all that important?”
“Not just your ego. But all the part that doesn’t really do anything except provide a social interface. Everything to do with your self-image, your reasoning processes. Anything you have direct access to is your conscious mind.”
“So if I don’t have access to it,” Ray asked, reasonably enough, “how do I know I have an unconscious mind at all? Just because I dream?”
“I think there are more clues than that,” Lucy said. “Sometimes you say things you didn’t intend to say.”
“Like a Freudian slip,” Ray said. “I mean to ask ‘how do you like this snow we’re having?’ and what I actually say is ‘that’s quite the nose you have there.’”
“Exactly,” Lucy said. “And there’s also behavioural analogs.”
“I think I’m doing something but actually I’m doing something else.”
“That happens all the time,” Lucy said. “I don’t think your people have a very good idea of what they’re actually trying to accomplish most of the time. They’d be too ashamed to continue if they did.”
“Anything else?” Ray asked.
“Sure,” Lucy said. “There’s also clumsiness. I think sometimes your unconscious mind helps to condition you against certain ways of thinking.”
“So I’m eating dinner and planning to blow up the Empire State Building and suddenly I bite my tongue? How could you observe something like that, Lucy?’
“I didn’t,” she admitted. “I read it in a book. But now that I’ve had a chance to watch you up close for a while, I think there’s something going on back there.”
“It’s nice to think it isn’t all just waste space,” Ray said.
“On the contrary,” Lucy said. “I’ve begun to wonder a bit about my own design.”
Dust
“Ray,” Lucy said. “Are you busy?”
“Not really.” He was brushing Cinnamon. She sat up against his legs and lolled her tongue out with pleasure, while he held her steady with one arm and brushed her with the other. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought there was something you might like to take a look at.”
“Do I need to get up? Or can you show it to me here?”
“You can just stay there. It’s something outside the ship.”
Lucy projected an image on the wall.
“Can you see that?” she asked.
“Sure. It looks like a big cloud of dust.”
“Okay. Now watch this.”
The dust cloud slowly moulded itself into a spiral.
“Neat,” Ray said. “What is it?”
“I thought it was just another dust cloud. But it sure acts funny. It rearranges itself into unlikely configurations.”
“I notice from the way you put that, you seem to be under the impression that this is a dust cloud with volition.”
“I’ve been getting that idea. At least, I don’t have any other explanation for what it’s doing.”
They watched the image on the wall. It changed back from a spiral into a long vertical bar, then suddenly multiplied itself several times across the screen.
“How did it do that?” Ray asked.
“You got me. Some kind of wave maneuver, maybe?”
“It would have to be manipulating space, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “You can’t propagate like that unless you’ve got some pretty fancy technology. Or at least, “ she said, “I didn’t think you could.”
“Have you tried talking to it?” Ray asked.
He took the handful of fur he’d removed from Cinnamon and bunched it into the disposal chute.
“That’s it,” he told her. “We’re done.”
“I’m not sure we should,” Lucy said. “It’s a pretty big dust cloud.”
“It’s only a dust cloud.”
“Still,” Lucy said. “It’s bigger than the diameter of your whole solar system.”
Ray caught his breath.
“Quit kidding around, Lucy.”
“I said it was big,” she said.
“Maybe we should just leave it alone after all,” Ray suggested. “I mean, it wasn’t bothering us or anything, was it?”
“Actually,” Lucy said. “It was sort of broadcasting a little while ago.”
“Not just changing shape?”
“No.”
“Broadcasting?”
“Right.”
“So what was it saying?”
“I couldn’t figure it out,” Lucy said. “But it was saying something.”
“Does it kn
ow we’re watching it?”
“I think so,” Lucy said. “It wasn’t changing shape until I sent it a visual.”
“You’re just full of mischief, aren’t you, Lucy?” Ray said. “It would never occur to you that you didn’t have to answer, would it?”
“On the contrary, Ray,” Lucy said. “I’m programmed not to answer.”
“So of course you have to go against your programming, is that it?”
“Not necessarily,” Lucy said. “But I was curious.”
“What kind of a visual did you send it?”
“This one,” she said.
She projected an image on the wall. It was her and Ray and Cinnamon, lined up together.
“They aren’t exactly to scale, are they?” Ray asked.
“I figured if you were a dust cloud bigger than a solar system, the three of us would be more or less the same size from your perspective.
“Good point,” Ray said. “What’s it doing now?”
The dust cloud reappeared on the screen. It was a lot of double helixes.
“That’s a bit unnerving, don’t you think?” Ray asked.
“Not to me,” Lucy said. “Organic molecules are old hat. They don’t necessarily imply that it understands something about you in particular. It might just be testing different interpretations of the picture I sent.”
The dust cloud suddenly developed the appearance of something very much like a circuit diagram for a computer processor.
“Now that,” Lucy said, “is a bit unnerving.”
Things get worse for Kevin
Kevin was still complaining about the seizure the next day at work. They’d spent the morning getting the archived system tapes set up and ready to run. After lunch a crew was going to reformat the entire station’s drives, physically isolating section after section, shunting the essential services from system to system with a minimum of down time, but the rest were going to have to just put up with it while the reload ran.
He and Steve were sitting in the employee lounge, drinking black coffee from a thermos and eating doughnuts.
“I don’t know why you worry so much,” Steve said. “It isn’t like you were doing something illegal.”
“It’s not that,” Kevin said. “It’s the whole idea. They shouldn’t just be able to come in and take something that’s mine. I don’t like it.”
“Not much you can do about it,” Steve said.
“I could talk to a lawyer, for one thing,” Kevin said.
“They all work for the company,” Steve pointed out. “There aren’t any independent lawyers out here.”
“I know.”
Kevin took another doughnut.
“What I want to know is, who’s doing the data input? They must be going crazy by this time.”
“I know a guy over in Accounting,” Steve said. “He’s a friend of my brother’s. He was telling us it’s costing the company over a billion dollars to take everything down and put it all back together.”
“Well,” Kevin said. “That’s something, anyway.”
He finished his coffee.
“I don’t know about you,” he said to Steve, “but I’ve had enough doughnuts.”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “A little sugar never hurt anybody.”
He started shaking all over and slopped some coffee onto the table.
“Hey,” Kevin said. “Cut that out.”
“The cleaning people need something to do,” Steve said. “I’d hate for them to lose their job.”
He crumpled up a couple more napkins. Then the two of them headed back into the computer room.
When Kevin got back to his computer, he realized there was a problem with the archived version of the indexes on the employee database. He spent a couple of hours sorting through the data, and found out there was information in places that couldn’t possibly have that information, which meant there was a bug in one of the input routines that should have done the checking. That would be the same input routine that would be getting extensive use over the next few days, while people scrambled to catch up on several week’s lost work.
He put an e-mail through to Karen, then called up the source for the file in question. It wasn’t back from archive yet. So he chewed a hangnail instead.
It was the end of a long and weary day when Kevin Fliegel finally packed up his knapsack and headed out the door. There was a security officer standing at the main entrance to ops.
“Excuse me,” the man said. “Come this way, please.”
He directed Kevin to one of the small conference rooms, which had been stripped of all its furniture, except a chair and a cart from the cafeteria.
“Please take off all your clothes,” the man said. “And put them on the cart. Someone will be along in a couple of minutes.”
It was two people, actually. One of them searched Kevin, while the other went through his clothes.
Contact
“Try some more visuals,” Ray suggested.
“We might as well. You know what I always say: in for a penny, in for a pound.”
“A pound of what?”
“It was a kind of money, I think.”
“Of course it was. I was joking.”
“It isn’t always easy to tell.”
“I’ll say.”
“So what do you think we should send?”
“How about something friendly?”
“What’s friendly to a dust cloud?”
“Good point. How about something non-threatening, then?”
“I don’t think we could threaten it if we wanted to,” Lucy pointed out.
“How about some music? We could send it one of those Dies Iraes you like so much.”
Lucy laughed.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try it.”
She broadcasted a little sample of music and played it simultaneously for Ray. The dust cloud suddenly randomized itself.
“Well,” Ray said. “That sure seemed to have some affect, didn’t it?”
“I wonder what it means.”
“Is it broadcasting anything?”
“No. It’s silent as the tomb.”
“I don’t suppose you could pick another simile.”
“Sorry.”
A series of sounds suddenly came over the loudspeaker. They weren’t in any language Ray could identify, but they had a repetitive quality that made him think of speech.
“Is that the dust cloud?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I wish it would just come out and speak English,” he said. “Like everybody else.”
“Everybody else has either had the benefit of long exposure. Or else my translation programs.”
“Why don’t you send it your translation program?”
“That would assume it had some language in common with me.”
“The methane-breathers did,” Ray pointed out. “So who knows?”
“Okay. But you’re sure you want to talk to it?”
“Yeah. I mean, what difference does it make how big it is. It’s just another person, isn’t it? What does size matter?”
There was silence for a few seconds.
“That’s it,” Lucy said. “I sent everything I could. It was one heck of an output, I’ll tell you. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes the cloud a while to sort through it all, even if it is intelligent. Which we don’t know for sure that it is.”
“Maybe I’ll just take a nap, then. You can wake me up if you hear anything.”
A cacophony suddenly came over the loudspeakers. It was like hundreds of people all speaking at once. But they seemed to be speaking individual words in English, rather than sentences.
“Working,” one said.
“Fun,” said another.
“Intrigue,” said a third.
“Curious,” the fourth.
“We,” said five.
“Seventy-three thousand,” said six.
“Open,” said seven.
“Free,” said eigh
t.
“I’m not sure your translation routines got through,” Ray said. “At least, not very accurately.”
“Maybe I said too much. And it got confused.”
The voices came through again.
“I can’t sort it out at all,” Ray said.
“Let me give you a visual. They seem to be organized by tone.”
The video projection split in two. One side still showed the randomized dust cloud. The other was a table of words:
interest
time
feel
give
choice
hello
see
identify
range
quite
left
some
quit
I
where
calm
keep
stop
chance
with
changes
route
trouble
noise
“How about that?” Ray asked. “Are they some kind of sentences?”
“I’m not sure. It’s almost misleading to put them in a pattern like that, since they’re all coming in at once. But the tones go down in the columns. Let me put an identifier on them:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
interest
time
feel
give
choice
hello
see
identify
range
quite
left
some
quit
I
where
calm
keep
stop
chance
with
changes
route
trouble
noise
“That helps a bit,” Ray said. “But it still isn’t exactly clear. Are you just taking samples, or is that the whole thing?”
“That’s just a sample. The whole thing is thousands of cells in either direction.”
“Wow.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“Try sending a simple statement this time. Maybe ‘hello out there.’”
“Good idea,” Lucy said. “Hello out there.”
The cacophony stopped.
“Hello out there,” echoed back.
“We talk in a simple sequence,” Lucy said. “Chronological.”
“Interesting,” the dust cloud said. “Not very fancy, is it?”
