Netlink

by William H. Keith

  “Understood. I wish we could have captured one of them.”

  “I am most sorry, honored Colonel.”

  “No, Iwata. The responsibility, the fault was mine.”

  “The watch officer monitoring the Net during the incursion—”

  “Lieutenant Ishimoto. It was not his fault either. It is easy to forget how vast the cyberspace of the Net truly is. We are lucky he got close enough to determine where the agent was operating from and to stop her, possibly, from doing even more serious damage to the network.” He nodded at the nude figure on his desk. She really was quite beautiful, for an Occidental, of course. “You may conduct your search, but I fear it will be useless.”

  “Perhaps, though,” Iwata said slowly, “this will help us in the future. If we can identify this person…”

  “I never cared much for vengeance, Major.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of vengeance, sir. I was thinking of knowledge. She must know much about the CMI, about the Confederation’s plans, about… who knows? If our people could locate her, even on New America or wherever she came from, we could have another chance. We should try to take her for interrogation.”

  “Perhaps we will, Major. Perhaps we will. I will certainly suggest the possibility in my report to the TJK. In the meantime, however, we must see what is to be done about containing the damage this woman and her friends have caused. And… we should prepare our reports for the Emperor’s Staff.”

  “The… the Emperor, sir?”

  “Of course. You know, don’t you, that this raid must lead us to war.”

  Iwata gaped for a moment before recovering his composure. “War…”

  “Of course.Exactly as we’d hoped.”

  That surprised Iwata even more. “This… was desired? Planned!”

  “Yes, Major. From the beginning. We didn’t know what form the provocation would take, nor did we anticipate that they would learn of the o-denwa. But the Imperial Staff has been looking for an excuse to move against the frontier provinces again, to bring them back into the Imperial fold.

  “And these raiders today have given us all the excuse we could possibly need to declare all-out war on the Confederation.”

  Chapter 16

  John von Neumann, best known, perhaps, as one of the great pioneers of computer technology, made a significant contribution to biological theory in the mid-twentieth century: metabolism and replication in any system, though seemingly inextricably linked, are in fact logically separable. It is possible to imagine organisms that are nothing but hardware, capable of metabolism without replication. It is also possible to imagine organisms that are pure software, replicating themselves without carrying out their own metabolic processes.

  Such organisms, perforce, would have a purely parasitical existence, depending on the metabolic processes of host hardware for survival.

  —Biology and Computers

  DR. IAN MCMILLEN

  C.E. 2015

  Dr. Daren Cameron regarded the Commune with something approaching a dark and malevolent fury. For the second time in his life, now, he’d encountered a Commune pseudopod that had reacted to his presence, the thousands of individual members interlinking themselves in a tightly packed and ordered mass, then heaving themselves erect, creating a shimmering, iridescent pillar about two meters tall. Sunlight winked and glinted from the myriad bodies, which were trembling slightly, probably with the sheer effort required to maintain its upright position.

  Damn it, he and Taki should be on Dante in fact, not in this illusory simulated reality. The creature confronting him was being animated by a powerful AI that had access to everything known about the Dantean Communes… everything known. No matter how detailed and subtle the simulation might be, there was no way to learn anything new from this illusion.

  “Gok!” he said, his shoulders slumping. “This is useless! Worthless make-work!”

  “Daren?” Taki’s voice called over his Companion’s communication circuit, her voice sounding inside his head. “Daren? What is it?”

  “There is no way we can learn anything new here!” He paused, then shouted it louder, directing it at the AI monitoring the sim. “You hear up there? There’s no way to learn anything new!”

  “That’s not entirely true, Dar,” Taki replied. “Chaos, remember…?”

  He scowled at the Commune pillar, still balanced there a few meters away as though trying to say something… to ask directions, possibly, to the nearest Commune tower. Taki was right, of course, though that didn’t help the way he was feeling. The idea of researching in simulation was not completely invalid, no matter how futile it might seem at the moment, because of the sheer complexity of the set of data being observed. Chaos theory—which among other things worked with large-scale results derived from small-scale variations in an unstable or extremely complex system—almost guaranteed that each encounter with the Commune in this ViReality would be unique, and as filled with the promise of some new revelation as an actual encounter on Dante would be. In a sense, it was like doing repeated computer simulations to test a theory or a set of engineering calculations, a time-hallowed concept that had been one of the earliest applications of computers, six centuries before.

  “The hell with chaos,” Daren decided. “We’re getting nowhere with this.”

  “I think we should keep working, Daren.” Taki’s voice carried warning, was almost cold. “We haven’t begun to exhaust the possibilities.”

  “Kuso, Tak! All we’re doing is recycling old data, round and round and round, and getting nowhere! Chaos or no chaos, there is no way to make a leap in understanding through a goking simulation, no way to formulate a major paradigm shift, because everything we’re seeing is based on the original data!”

  “Of course. Are you suggesting the original data were flawed?”

  “Maybe. Who knows? Use your imagination! Suppose the Commune creatures go through some sort of a long term cycle in intelligence, something never observed by the original researchers? Suppose they sit down to a formal tea ceremony every day at eighteen-thirty, holding sophisticated discussions about seventeenth-century Japanese ceramics? If the original field researchers missed it, then so do we! We’re only seeing a tiny part of the whole picture here!”

  “Daren, I think you might want that paradigm shift a little too much. Science, good science, is not always big discoveries or major new theories.”

  “I know that, Tak. You’ve told me.”

  “Then you know I’ve also told you we’re trying to flesh out our understanding of the Communes, not learn how to communicate with them. There are no breakthroughs here. Only understanding. And maybe not all of that understanding is of the Communes.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe these sessions help us learn something about ourselves as well, ne?”

  He sighed. She was right about that, too, and in any case he didn’t feel like arguing with her.

  Daren felt trapped. Right now, studying the Communes of Dante was the most important thing in his career. If it weren’t for the war scare, he and Taki could have been on Dante in another few weeks… well, maybe not on Dante. Most of the actual exploratory work nowadays was done through remotes, hubots, or comlinked crawlers teleoperated either from orbit or from one of the small surface facilities. With remote linking, your brain didn’t care whether the signals from optics and sensors were traveling a few centimeters from organic eyes or fingertips, or thousands of kilometers from the same sorts of input feeds that served warstriders.

  That chain of thought led to a wonderful daydream. If he could climb into a comm module here in Jefferson and teleoperate a hubot—a humanoid robot—on Dante, seventy-six light years away…

  Sheer fantasy, of course. With a time delay of over 150 years between action and feedback, you would get old just waiting for the initial “telepresence link confirmed” readout after you switched the damned thing on. No, the only way to study life on a world on the other side of the Shichi
ju was to go there.

  Damn all politos!

  He took a step closer to the pillar, which began trembling harder. Nearby, in the undergrowth, a pair of big, half-meter warriors shifted uneasily, their armored carapaces rattling. If he got too close, he knew, the pillar would collapse and the warriors would attack, a swarm of meter-long centipedes armed with razor-edged jaws and acid spit. He wouldn’t feel anything, of course, but his “death” would end the simulation and he would wake up in a com module back in the Jefferson University research lab, just as though he’d been teleoperating a remote.

  He didn’t want to go back yet.

  Daren’s overall impression was that the creatures were doing their best to communicate with him directly by mimicking his upright stance, possibly his attitude and body language as well. Damn it, if he were really on Dante, instead of inside a computer simulation in the University of Jefferson ViRsimulations research facility, he might be able to work with the thing, to get it to do something besides just… shivering.

  What else could he try, though, in order to initiate some untried play of chaotic events with the vast amount of data stored on the Communes in the computer’s memory?

  He couldn’t think of anything, short of an all-out attack… and that would bring immediate retaliation by the warriors and several millions of their comrades. The thought of a number made him pause. How many of the creatures were there in that stack, anyway?

  “Simulation monitor access,” he said.

  “ViRsimulation monitor is present,” a voice said in his head. It was a neutral, gray voice, neither overtly masculine or feminine.

  “Give me a count on the organisms comprising the pillar five meters in front of me.”

  “To what order of precision?”

  “Three decimals will do.”

  “The pillar itself consists of one point five three one times ten to the fifth separate organisms. Keep in mind, however, that your query is imprecise. The entire pseudopod, of which the pillar is but one small part, numbers six point zero four four times ten to the seventh organisms. The community of which the pseudopod is one small part numbers nine point five one eight times ten to the ninth organisms.”

  “Right.” That final number, he noted, was just shy of Nakamura’s Number. He wondered if that was significant.

  Dr. Tetsu Nakamura was a twenty-fourth century biological systems analyst who’d taken the conclusions of a number of earlier workers in the field and codified them into a series of equations. The end result was a number, Nakamura’s Number, which was at least as important in its field as Avogadro’s Number in chemistry or Planck’s Constant in quantum physics. The number—1.048576 x 1011—represented the critical value for what was known as “hierarchical staging” in biological systems.

  Simply stated, that number, a little over one hundred billion, represented a critical threshold. Nakamura’s Number of atoms organized as organic molecules working together within a single complex became a living cell, an organism that took an astonishing synergistic leap beyond the capabilities of any of the original atoms; atoms could not reproduce themselves, nor could they metabolize raw materials to create, store, or utilize energy. A living cell could do all of that.

  Nakamura’s Number of cells—when those cells were internally organized and interconnected as various types of neurons—made a brain with complexity enough to engage in creative thought and self-awareness. The number was not an absolute if only because the concept of self-awareness was not absolute, but it did seem to represent a threshold of complexity that allowed a line of sorts to be drawn. The division was not as blatant as this is intelligent, that is not, but it did say that a major discontinuity in how a structure was organized was created by that number of interlocking and interdependent parts.

  If a Commune was organized out of Nakamura’s Number of individual workers and warriors, would it become self-aware? Intelligent? Communicative? Or would it become something that wouldn’t even be recognizable as related to Architectus communis, the way it would be impossible to guess at the ability inherent in a human mind based on the gross examination of a single human neuron?

  Were there Communes that large? He felt his frustration at not being able to go to Dante himself returning. The data in the U of J AI’s stores was, no doubt, as complete as possible. But what if none of the Communes studied had possessed Nakamura’s Number of individuals? Suppose there were some that did? What might they be like? Damn all wars and damn all politos and damn all bureaucrats!

  Slowly, almost hesitantly, the pillar began to dissolve, as individual members of the community released their hold on the others and skittered down to the ground. In moments, all that was left was the pseudopod, a solid, throbbing mass of Commune individuals, flowing like a river toward the west. Though the feeling, Daren knew, was strictly subjective, he couldn’t help but get the impression that the creature, once again, had been trying to get his attention, trying to communicate… and had finally had given up in disgust.

  “Nothing in that direction but the mountains, fellas,” Daren told the living mass. It paid him no heed but continued its blind quest for food and construction materials.

  “Daren?” Taki’s voice called. “Were you talking to me?”

  “Taki? Where are you now?”

  “I’m, um, about twenty meters south of you. Behind some big rocks.”

  “I see them. You’re almost here. The pillar’s gone now.”

  “Damn! I wanted to see!” He’d called her when he’d first encountered the thing, and she’d been hurrying to reach him, forcing her way through the dense brush above the beach. The reality constraints of the simulation prevented her from simply flashing over.

  Daren snorted. What was the point, anyway? There was no reality here, none that mattered, anyway.

  “The hell with this,” Daren said. “Come on over here.”

  Taki appeared from behind a boulder a moment later, wearing her khaki coveralls. “Ah,” she said. “The ’pod is moving again.”

  Daren had turned away and found a soft, open spot on the beach. This time, he’d brought a simulated blanket in a simulated backpack… which was easier than trying to explain to the simulation’s AI monitor what he wanted, and why. Removing the pack, he opened it and pulled out the blanket.

  “Dar…” Taki began. “This isn’t getting any work done.…”

  Reaching out, with great deliberation he touched his fingertip to the base of Taki’s throat, just above the closure of her khakis, then moved it down slowly, unsealing the front of her jumper as he dragged his finger down the hollow between her small, perfect breasts, past her navel, and all the way to her crotch.

  “Well,” she said, shrugging her shoulders out of the garment and letting it fall to her hips, “I see you’re not planning on getting any science done today, either.”

  “Science?” Daren dropped to his knees, nuzzling close to plant a delicate kiss on the curve of her belly. “That depends on what kind of science you have in mind,” he told her, working the coveralls down off her hips and pulling them aside as she stepped lightly out of them. “I figure we can keep on counting bugs. That’s one kind of science.”

  “Or…?”

  He took a deep breath. “Or we could investigate the psychoneural properties of friction in mutually lubricating reciprocal systems, as demonstrated through repetitive piston action.”

  She drew his head closer as he kept kissing her, moving down her torso. “Mmm,” she said, eyes closed, “I like the mutually lubricating part.…”

  After a long moment, she pushed him away long enough to unseal his jumpsuit and pull it off. Then she drew him down to the blanket, pulling him over on top of her.

  Sometime later, Taki gasped, a sudden, sharp, intake of breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Daren asked her, concerned. “Did I hurt; you?”

  Her eyes were wide open, and she was staring at something past his shoulder. She shook her head and tried to point. “No! Daren! There
…!”

  He turned, trying to see what she was staring at. He didn’t see anything at first, but she kept pointing. “It’s right there!”

  Now he saw it… an uncertain wavering in the air a few meters away, as though the air itself were trying to become solid. Alarmed, he rolled off of Taki and stood up. There was definitely something there, as though a subroutine of some sort were trying to break through into the artificial reality that Daren and Taki were sharing. Such a thing was possible, of course. It could be someone else trying to enter the ViRsim in order to deliver a message… except that Daren had left specific instructions with the AI monitoring this sim, as he always did when sharing a rendezvous with Taki.

  “Simulation monitor access!” he called. “I said we were not to be disturbed!”

  “I have received conflicting directives,” the neutral voice said. “I am having some difficulty reconciling my directives.”

  The air in front of them took on a rippling, thick appearance, as though air were turning to water but in a tightly defined, man-sized space.

  It was a man-shaped space as well, Daren realized, as the figure grew more defined, more solid.

  There was no time to dress… but modesty could be maintained within a ViRsimulation by other, faster means. Hastily, Daren opened a subroutine within his persona, one that modeled his outward appearance in virtual reality as fully clothed. A second later, Taki’s nakedness blurred as well, then reformed itself into another tan jumpsuit. Together, they stood side by side and watched as the shimmering shape finally materialized into the image of a man.

  He was tall and young, no older, Daren thought, than he was… though the appearance of age didn’t necessarily reflect reality inside a simulation. He was wearing what appeared to be a uniform—a set of old-fashioned Confederation grays, perhaps twenty years out of date. He also looked oddly familiar, though Daren couldn’t place the face. Still, he was sure he’d seen the man before.