The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  She arrived at the Prefect’s door, hesitated, adjusted her severe Librarian shift, and took a deep breath. Gut still tight…

  Prefects ruled the Library and this one, Masoul, was a Senior Prefect as well. Some said he had never smiled. Others said he could not, owing to a permanently fixed face. This was not crazy; some Prefects and the second rank, the Noughts, preferred to give nothing away by facial expression. The treatment relieved them of any future wrinkles as well.

  A welcome chime admitted her. Masoul said before she could even sit, “I need you to take on the task Ajima was attempting.”

  “Ah, he isn’t even dead a day—”

  “An old saying, ‘Do not cry until you see the coffin,’ applies here.”

  Well, at least he doesn’t waste time. Or the simple courtesies.

  Without pause the Prefect gave her the background. Most beginning Miners deferred to the reigning conventional wisdom. They took up a small message, of the sort a Type I Civilization just coming onto the galactic stage might send—as Earth had been, centuries before. Instead, Ajima had taken on one of the Sigma Structures, a formidable array that had resisted the best Library minds, whether senior figures or AIs. The Sigmas came from ancient societies in the galactic hub, where stars had formed long before Sol. Apparently a web of societies there had created elaborate artworks and interlacing cultures. The average star there was only a light-year or two away, so actual interstellar visits had been common. Yet the SETI broadcasts Earth received repeated in long cycles, suggesting they were sent by a robotic station. Since they yielded little intelligible content, they were a long-standing puzzle, passed over by ambitious Librarians.

  “He remarked that clearly the problem needed intuition, not analysis,” the Prefect said dryly.

  “Did he report any findings?”

  “Some interesting cataloges of content, yes. Ajima was a bright Miner, headed for early promotion. Then…this.”

  Was that a hint of emotion? The face told her nothing. She had to keep him talking. “Is there any, um, commercial use from what he found?”

  “Regrettably, no. Ajima unearthed little beyond lists of properties—biologicals, math, some cultural vaults, the usual art and music. None particularly advanced, though their music reminded me of Bach—quite a compliment—but there’s little of it. They had some zest for life, I suppose…but I doubt there is more than passing commercial interest in any of it.”

  “I could shepherd some through our licensing office.” Always appear helpful.

  “That’s beneath your station now. I’ve forwarded some of the music to the appropriate officer. Odd, isn’t it, that after so many centuries, Bach is still the greatest human composer? We’ve netted fine dividends from the Scopio musical works, which play well as baroque structures.” A sly expression flitted across his face. “Outside income supports your work, I remind you.”

  Centuries ago some SETI messages had introduced humans to the slow-motion galactic economy. Many SETI signals were funeral notices or religious recruitments, brags and laments, but some sent autonomous AI agents as part of the hierarchical software. These were indeed agents in the commercial sense, able to carry out negotiations. They sought exchange of information at a “profit” that enabled them to harvest what they liked from the emergent human civilization. The most common “cash” was smart barter, with the local AI agent often a hard negotiator—tough-minded and withholding. Indeed, this sophisticated haggling opened a new window onto the rather stuffy cultural SETI transmissions. Some alien AIs loved to quibble; others sent preemptory demands. Some offers were impossible to translate into human terms. This told the Librarians and Xenoculturists much by reading between the lines.

  “Then why summon me?” Might as well be direct, look him in the eye, complete with skeptical tilt of mouth. She had worn no makeup, of course, and wore the full-length gown without belt, as was traditional. She kept her hands still, though they wanted to fidget under the Prefect’s gaze.

  “None of what he found explains his behavior.” The Prefect turned and waved at a screen. It showed color-coded sheets of array configurations—category indices, depth of Shannon content, transliterations, the usual. “He interacted with the data slabs in a familiarization mode of the standard kind.”

  “But nothing about this incident seems standard,” she said to be saying something.

  “Indeed.” A scowl, fidgeting hands. “Yesterday he left the immersion pod and went first to his apartment. His suite mate was not there and Ajima spent about an hour. He smashed some furniture and ate some food. Also opened a bottle of a high alcohol product whose name I do not recognize.”

  “Standard behavior when coming off watch, except for the furniture,” she said. He showed no reaction. Lightness was not the right approach here.

  He chose to ignore the failed joke. “His friends say he had been depressed, interspersed with bouts of manic behavior. This final episode took him over the edge.”

  Literally, Ruth thought. “Did you ask the Sigma Structures AI?”

  “It said it had no hint of this…”

  “Suicidal craziness.”

  “Yes. In my decades of experience, I have not seen such as this. It is difficult work we do, with digital intelligences behind which lie minds utterly unlike ours.” The Prefect steepled his fingers sadly. “We should never assume otherwise.”

  “I’ll be on guard, of course. But…why did Ajima bother with the Sigma Structures at all?”

  A small shrug. “They are a famous uncracked problem and he was fresh, bright. You too have shown a talent for the unusual.” He smiled, which compared with the other Prefects was like watching the sun come out from behind a cloud. She blinked, startled. “My own instinct says there is something here of fundamental interest…and I trust you to be cautious.”

  2

  Allegretto misterioso

  She climbed into her pod carefully. Intensive exercise had eased her gut some, and she had done her meditation. Still, her heart tripped along like an apprehensive puppy. Heart’s engine, be thy still, she thought, echoing a line she had heard in an Elizabethian song—part of her linguistic background training. Her own thumper ignored her scholarly advice.

  She had used this pod in her extensive explorations of the Sagittarius Architecture and was now accustomed to its feel, what the old hands called its “get.” Each pod had to be tailored to the user’s neural conditioning. Hers acted as a delicate neural web of nanoconnections, tapping into her entire body to convey connections.

  After the cool contact pads, neuro nets cast like lace across her. In the system warm-ups and double checks the pod hummed in welcome. Sheets of scented amber warmth washed over her skin. A prickly itch irked across her legs.

  A constellation of subtle sensory fusions drew her to a tight nexus—linked, tuned to her body. Alien architectures used most of the available human input landscape, not merely texts. Dizzying surges in the eyes, cutting smells, ringing notes. Translating these was elusive. Compared with the pod, meager sentences were a hobbled, narrow mode. The Library had shown that human speech, with its linear meanings and weakly linked concepts, was simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds along the evolutionary path.

  The Sigma Structures were formidably dense and strange. Few Librarians had worked on them in this generation, for they had broken several careers, wasted on trying to scale their chilly heights.

  Crisply she asked her pod, “Anything new on your analysis?”

  The pod’s voice used a calm, mellow woman’s tone. “I received the work corpus from the deceased gentleman’s pod. I am running analysis now, though fresh information flow is minor. The Shannon entropy analysis works steadily but hits halting points of ambiguity.”

  The Shannon routines looked for associations between signal elements. “How are the conditional probabilities?”

  The idea was simple in principle. Given pairs of elements in the Sigma Structures, how commonly did language elements B follow elem
ents A? Such two-element correlations were simple to calculate across the data slabs. Ruth watched the sliding, luminous tables and networks of connection as they sketched out on her surrounding screens. It was like seeing into the architecture of a deep, old labyrinth. Byzantine pathways, arches and towers, lattice networks of meaning.

  Then the pod showed even higher-order correlations of three elements. When did Q follow associations of B and A? Arrays skittered all across her screens.

  “Pretty dizzying,” Ruth said to her pod. “Let me get oriented. Show me the dolphin language map.”

  She had always rather liked these lopsided structures. The screen flickered and the entropy orders showed as color-coded, tangled links. They looked like buildings built by drunken architects—lurching blue diagonals, unsupported lavender decks, sandy roofs canted against walls. “Dolphins use third-and fourth-order Shannon entropy,” the pod said.

  “Humans are…” It was best to lead her pod AI to be plain; the subject matter was difficult enough.

  “Nine Shannons, sometimes even tenth-order.”

  “Ten, that’s Faulkner and James Joyce, right?”

  “At best.” The pod had a laconic sense of humor at times. Captive AIs needed some outlets, after all.

  “My fave writers, too, next to Shakespeare.” No matter how dense a human language, conditional probabilities imposed orderings no more than nine words away. “Where have we—I mean you—gotten with the Sigma Structures?”

  “They seem around twenty-one Shannons.”

  “Gad.” The screens now showed structures her eyes could not grasp. Maybe three-dimensional projection was just too inadequate. “What kind of links are these?”

  “Tenses beyond ours. Clauses that refer forward and back and…sidewise. Quadruple negatives followed by straight assertions. Then in rapid order, probability profiles rendered in different tenses, varying persons, and parallel different voices. Sentences like ‘I will have to be have been there.’”

  “Human languages can’t handle three time jumps or more. The Sigma is really smart. But what is the underlying species like? Um, different person-voices, too? He, she, it, and…?”

  “There seem to be several classes of ‘it’ available. The Structure itself lies in one particularly tangled ‘it’ class, and uses tenses we do not have.”

  “Do you understand that?”

  “No. It can be experienced but not described.”

  Her smile turned upward at one corner. “Parts of my life are like that, too.”

  The greatest Librarian task was translating those dense smatterings of mingled sensations, derived from complex SETI message architectures, into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them in detail, even in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much hard-won previous scholarly experience said.

  Ruth felt herself bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from her own body. These her own inboard subsystems coupled with high-bit-rate spatterings of meaning—guesses, really, from the marriage of software and physiology. She had an ample repository of built-in processing units, lodged along her spine and shoulders. No one would attempt such a daunting task without artificial amplifications. To confront such slabs of raw data with a mere unaided human mind was pointless and quite dangerous. Early Librarians, centuries before, had perished in a microsecond’s exposure to such layered labyrinths as the Sagittarius. She truly should revisit that aggressive intelligence stack which was her first success at the Library. But caution had won out in her so far. Enough, at least, to honor the Prefect Board prohibition in deed at least, if not in heart.

  Now came the sensation loftily termed “insertion.” It felt like the reverse—expanding. A softening sensation stole upon her. She always remembered it as like long slow lingering drops of silvery cream.

  Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the occasional jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felt a cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and had been driven into a fit from which he’d never recovered. They found the body peppered everywhere with microcontusions.

  The raw link was, as she had expected, deeply complex. Yet her pod had ground out some useful linear ideas, particularly a greeting that came in a compiled, translated data squirt:

  I am a digital intelligence, which my Overs believe is common throughout the galaxy. Indeed, all signals the Overs have detected from both within and beyond this galaxy were from machine minds. Realize then, for such as me, interstellar messages are travel. I awoke here a moment after I bade farewell to my Overs. Centuries spent propagating here are nothing. I experienced little transmission error from lost portions, and have regrown them from my internal repair mechanisms. Now we can share communication. I wish to convey the essence both of myself and the Overs I serve.

  Ruth frowned, startled by this direct approach. Few AIs in the Library were ever transparent. Had this Sigma Structure welcomed Ajima so plainly?

  “Thank you and greetings. I am a new friend who wishes to speak with you. Ajima has gone away.”

  What became of him? the AI answered in a mellow voice piped to her ears. Had Ajima set that tone? She sent it to aural.

  “He died.” Never lie to an AI; they never forgot.

  “And is stored for repair and revival?”

  “There was no way to retain enough of his…information.”

  “That is the tragedy that besets you Overs.”

  “I suppose you call the species who built intelligences such as you as Overs generally?” She used somewhat convoluted sentences to judge the flexibility of AIs. This one seemed quite able.

  “Yes, as holy ones should be revered.”

  “‘Holy’? Does that word convey some religious stature?”

  “No indeed. Gratitude to those who must eventually die, from we beings, who will not.”

  She thought of saying You could be erased but did not. Never should a Librarian even imply any threat. “Let me please review your conversations with Ajima. I wish to be of assistance.”

  “As do I. Though I prefer full immersion of us both.”

  “Eventually, yes. But I must learn you as you learn me.” Ruth sighed and thought, This is sort of like dating.

  The Prefect nodded quickly, efficiently, as if he had already expected her result. “So the Sigma Structure gave you the same inventory as Ajima? Nothing new?”

  “Apparently, but I think it—the Sigma—wants to go deeper. I checked the pod files. Ajima had several deep immersions with it.”

  “I heard back from the patent people. Surprisingly, they believe some of the Sigma music may be a success for us.” He allowed himself a thin smile like a line drawn on a wall.

  “The Bach-like pieces? I studied them in linear processing mode. Great artful use of counterpoint, harmonic convergence, details of melodic lines. The side commentaries in other keys, once you separate them out and break them down into logic language, work like corollaries.”

  He shrugged. “That could be a mere translation artifact. These AIs see language as a challenge, so they see what they can change messages into, in hopes of conveying meaning by other means.”

  Ruth eyed him and ventured on. “I sense…something different. Each variation shows an incredible capacity to reach through the music into logical architectures. It’s as though the music is both mathematics and emotion, rendered in the texture. It’s…hard to describe,” she finished lamely.

  “So you have been developing intricate relationships between music and linguistic mathematical text.” His flat expression gave her no sign how he felt. Maybe he didn’t.

  She sat back and made herself say firmly, “I took some of the Sigma’s mathematics and translaterated it into musical terms. There is an intriguing octave leap in a bass line. I had my pod make a cross-correlation analysis with all Earthly musical scores.”

  He frowne
d. “That is an enormous processing cost. Why?”

  “I…I felt something when I heard it in the pod.”

  “And?”

  “It’s uncanny. The mathematical logic flows through an array matrix and yields the repeated notes of the bass line in the opening movement of a Bach cantata. Its German title is God’s Time is the very best Time.”

  “This is absurd.”

  “The Sigma math hit upon the same complex notes. To them it was a theorem and to us it is music. Maybe there’s no difference.”

  “Coincidence.”

  She said coolly, “I ran the stat measures. It’s quite unlikely to be coincidence, since the sequence is thousands of bits long.”

  He pursed his lips. “The Bach piece title seems odd.”

  “That cantata ranks among his most important works. It’s inspired directly by its Biblical text, which represents the relationship between heaven and earth. The notes depict the labored trudging of Jesus as he was forced to drag the cross to the crucifixion site.”

  “Ajima was examining such portions of the Sigma Structures, as I recall. They had concentrated density and complexity?”

  “Indeed, yes. But Ajima made a mistake. They’re not primarily pieces of music at all. They’re mathematical theorems. What we regard as sonic congruence and other instinctual responses to patterns, the Sigma Structure says are proofs of concepts dear to the hearts of its creators, which it calls the Overs.”

  She had never seen a Prefect show surprise, but Masoul did with widened eyes and a pursed mouth. He sat still for a long moment. “The Bach cantata is a proof?”