Eater

by Gregory Benford

  “Seems reasonable.” Kingsley moved deeper in among the heavily scented eucalyptus.

  Benjamin jibed, “Reasonable? Violating the remember-it’s-alien rule, aren’t you?”

  “Ah, but you see, it’s not stupid. Surely it’s playing by the same physics rule book as ourselves.”

  Amy said, “It made a remark about exactly that a few days ago, I saw. Something about our having the basics down, but missing the larger point. Irked the hell out of the physics guys when it wouldn’t tell them anything more, aside from some math nobody could recognize.”

  “I wonder if it has a cruel streak,” Benjamin murmured.

  “They begged it for details. It wouldn’t even answer.”

  “It prefers rather different modes of reply, I’ll wager,” Kingsley whispered.

  The tall eucalyptus trees rattled their branches in the sea breeze. The contrast of their moist aroma and the coolly descending luminosity above was striking. Benjamin moved to see the sky better. Kingsley called, “Stay well back. They’re searching.”

  But now the numerous Security men were craning up at the sky. The loop was inflating, filling the black bowl, dimming the stars. Its glow had shifted to an eerie, bile green. They could see elaborate structure now. Soundlessly the green strands coiled and flexed like strange, swelling snakes.

  Now one edge of the loop alone striped across their view. At its edges, a thin line of orange flared. “Shock boundary, I bet,” Amy mused.

  Filmy green filaments twisted above them, closing fast. There seemed to Benjamin no place to flee—and no reason to run, anyway. It would come and the whole matter was out of his hands. Beyond intellectual curiosity, none of this had moved him.

  Now they could see the full complexity of it as the emerald strands shaded into delicate lime structures. Apparently it was traveling faster than sound, for nothing disturbed the soft symphony of the wind. Palm fronds rattled and someone shouted in the distance. Life went on beneath an olive sky.

  Just before it hit, he heard a crackling from the Center. A power pole nearby burst into a yellow firework. Sizzling balls arced up in a blinding fountain.

  “Transformers blowing,” Kingsley said in a normal voice. “I do hope Arno thought to switch off the power.”

  Amy said, “The lights are still on in there.”

  “Damn.”

  The human body cannot perceive magnetic field except at enormous strengths. Still, Benjamin felt a pulse of electricity jitter through him as all the lights went out. Immediately afterward his skin itched in quick, darting waves. Then it was all over, the familiar night sky returning, constellations embodying human legends stretched across a comforting black. Yet as he gazed up, the distant fuzzy blue-white of the Eater hung like a threat among the myriad stars—one of them, celestial, not like anything a primate born in moist chemistry could comprehend.

  He breathed in the almost liquid density of tropical air and let it out with a sigh. Magnetic fields could not directly harm beings who were, after all, packages of long organic molecules in dilute solutions, capable of standing erect and studying stars.

  Maybe there was some small comfort in that bare fact.

  He walked down the hill toward the Center with Amy and Kingsley. Cries came up toward them. Somewhere a window shattered.

  It was a while before he noticed that the gray veils were gone for him. But he knew that they would return whenever he thought of her.

  5

  “Not overly surprising,” Kingsley said as he unwound into one of the massage chairs Benjamin had in his office. For Channing came the memory.

  “What?” Benjamin was still a bit foggy. Even Arno’s anger after the attack—“Why didn’t you guys warn me?”—had not shaken him into paying much attention. Understandable, even in an ordinary time. But in this on-rolling calamity, ordinary sensibilities had to be put aside. Kingsley firmly told himself that he could not take the time to be the sympathetic friend, letting time heal wounds. There was no time—not for anyone.

  “That she seems so like Channing,” Kingsley said as mildly as he could.

  “Oh. She…is Channing.”

  “An interesting philosophical issue, but not my point.”

  “All the Channing I’ve got left.”

  “Quite.” An emotional truth, and there was the nub of the problem. How to put this? Directly, perhaps? Always risky, but he owed Benjamin that. “The essential of this issue is whether she can be relied upon to perform as would the Channing we knew.”

  “Know,” Benjamin corrected without looking up from the floor.

  “Old friend, there are sophomore distinctions to be made here that have ramifications on policy.”

  Benjamin gave a dry chuckle. “I sense a lecture coming on.”

  “A short one, I hope. Asking for an objective understanding of an interior experience is a contradiction. Objectivity is a direction along which understanding can travel, starting with the utterly subjective, but there is no true, final destination along that axis.”

  “So we can’t know if she’s ‘really’ Channing?” Benjamin said caustically. “Fine. So be it. I’ll take what I can get.”

  “We can expect her to be a quite good…simulation.”

  “It’s all of her there is.”

  “Yes.” This was a damnable situation, but he had promised Arno that he would try to deal with the problem. Far better a friend than the team of mind managers Arno had recruited. How to proceed? Retreat to the technical? Perhaps. At least he would feel better himself on some safe ground for a moment.

  “The data-processing issue is no longer a major roadblock, after all,” Kingsley said, probably a bit too brightly. “Estimates I’ve seen hold that the total memory of a hundred-year-old person could be about 1015 bits—a pentabit, the experts label it. That may be transmitted by optical fiber in a few minutes. Microwaves, somewhat longer.”

  “Ah.” Benjamin’s lined face said quite eloquently that he did not like this way of thinking of the woman he loved. Quite right, but there it was.

  “So they may have—what was that awful word they used?—‘harvested’ quite a lot of her, even given the difficulties with her physical deterioration.”

  Benjamin said, “I never thought it could be like this. Maybe a thing like a computer program, accessing memory files, a robot…that’s what I imagined.”

  “The computer johnnies are advancing relentlessly. Quite left me behind long ago.”

  “Look.” He leaned forward earnestly. “She’s still the woman who was an astronaut. She’s reliable.”

  “I take your point. That is what Arno wishes to know and cannot properly ask. So an old friend gets to do the dirty work.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Well, they have contingency plans…” Best to let that one trail off, fraught with implication. Not that Kingsley knew all the possible options. Arno never showed all his cards.

  “They always do. Guys behind desks dreaming up stuff for other people to do.”

  “We have many such now, all around the globe. Not that we get all their input. The magnetic attack took out a great deal, but we’re getting most of the high-bit-rate equipment back online. ‘Crippled but defiant’ is, I think, the motto.”

  “The reason I asked, she wants to know what to expect.”

  “Ummm. Just what one would expect.”

  Alarm whitened Benjamin’s eyes. “She’s going in?”

  “She must. The Searchers go well ahead of her, of course. But she’s got to be near them, not on the other side of the planet.”

  “Look, keep her standing a long way off.”

  “I will, I assure you. But she may not do what we want.”

  “Why not?”

  “She has autonomous control of her propulsion. There are extras all over her Searcher module. Everything they could bolt on, it would seem.”

  “She used to talk about the free will problem. Here it is. Is a simulation unpredictable?”

  “No one knows
, not at this level of technical ability. We may not have the computational power to even decide the issue in a useful passage of time.” Kingsley grinned. “She always had a taste for paradoxes. This one is, no doubt, delicious to her.”

  “‘Delicious’?” Benjamin gazed off into space. “I hope so.”

  “I believe she wants us to anticipate.”

  “I see.” Benjamin sat up, brushing aside his reflections. “Say, what do you make of all this data we’re getting?”

  Benjamin’s open-faced entreaty was disarming. In the last few weeks, Kingsley had spent a great deal of his time trying to fathom what the people who thought about thinking made of the Eater’s structure. As usual with those most comfortable among abstractions, the gritty truths of a wholly new way of organizing a mind sent most of them packing. The few who remained dealt in analogy, and he could not blame them.

  To his relief, Amy came in and sat. Without a word, she somehow lifted the tension in the room—only one of her many admirable qualities. He filled her in on matters and she nodded. “Sorry I’m late. We’re getting stretched thin. Arno is bringing in more people and somebody has to integrate them with existing systems.”

  “We’re to be independent of NASA and the others, I gather,” Kingsley said.

  “In case we lose all the remaining satellites, yes.” She brushed back her hair, a gesture that usually meant she was thinking hard. “Do you think we could?”

  Benjamin said, “Easily. It has a large appetite.”

  “One should be grateful that it discovered the apparently more bountiful feast of our satellites,” Kingsley mused.

  “Is the damage from the tidal stresses still going on?” Amy asked.

  “Earthquakes and the like, yes. We’re spared the collapsing buildings and large tides,” Kingsley said.

  “Thank God. I hadn’t heard…” Benjamin’s subdued tone trailed off and he stared into space.

  “Makes one appreciate as never before the simple fact that tidal forces drop off as the cube of distance, not merely the square,” Kingsley said. “A ruthless tutelage in undergraduate mechanics.”

  This attempt to swerve the discussion into more abstract avenues failed; Benjamin did not react. He and Amy exchanged glances. She said, “We’ve got to get some idea of what Channing is going to confront if she goes in further.”

  This roused Benjamin to blinking awareness. He sat up and said with a hollow briskness, “The magnetic geometry, yeah. I’ve looked at some of the old models. Not much use. We’re skating on our own here.”

  Good, Kingsley thought, back on solid technical grounds. Best way to keep him sailing upright. “I think we have to follow analogies here. Alien this bastard may be, but its physics is the same as ours.”

  Amy came straight in with some material they had discussed in private. Her usual crisp delivery: “Human brains operate on direct current, like telephones. Radio and TV use alternating current and deliver information far faster than D.C. My guess is that the Eater uses electromagnetic waves to send signals across itself, so its natural flow rate is not the petty human scale of ten or twenty bits per second. Instead, the Eater can transmit data at about the same rate that the entire human body receives all its sense data and processes it. Maybe as much as ten billion bits per second.”

  Benjamin responded, “Okay, but to do that demands high, oscillating voltages. Which fits—it shorts out satellites, boils them off as plasma, grabs them with magnetic grapples, swallows them.”

  Kingsley said mordantly, “Reminds one of spiders. This picture means, though, that the bastard has to keep itself thoroughly clean.”

  Amy nodded. “Because impurities could short out its high voltages.”

  Benjamin joined in with sudden fervor, “And burn away its enormous energy stores into useless heat.”

  “Good,” Amy said. “I was thinking about what Channing might meet if she goes as far in as its magnetosphere. The D.C. voltages and speeds of human expression are imposed by our hopelessly slow, serial method of stringing words together. Luckily, human thinking is far faster than human talking or reading, which is why all the true mental heavy lifting is done by the nonconscious mind. All our data suggest that the Eater’s speed is essential, because it’s vastly different in mental organization. That’s what we have to attack, or at least understand.”

  When Kingsley first met Amy, it had been uncommon for her to deliver little lectures like this, but she had grown in confidence. After his failures with his wife, this small feat pleased him. He urged her along with: “If I follow your drift, the human mind can be visualized—by the cliché analogy to computers—as a great number of parallel processors, simultaneously filtering and analyzing the exterior world. On the other hand, the Eater’s mind—”

  “Which it described itself, when we asked it,” Amy put in.

  “—is something more like a standing whirlwind, with whorls of thought entering and diverging from the general rotation as needed. All that, interlaced in radial symmetries that follow the ceaseless cylindrical twirl of the disk and magnetic fields.”

  “How can that possibly work?” Benjamin asked.

  “Simply shows the limitations of analogies,” Kingsley said with a dry smile.

  “We don’t have to work out the whole mental process,” Amy said. “That’s impossible. Maybe we can get just enough to guide her through.”

  Kingsley tried to wrestle aloud with a vague set of ideas, an approach he usually tried only when desperate, as it opened his uncertainties to all. Surely this was the most desperate he had ever been. “As I recall, from the myriad messages the thing sent, the Eater had once remarked that humans were very nearly all alike, so their communications and styles of thinking were suited to that fact. The Eater is radically different, so translation between us is enormously harder.”

  “Is that why it just won’t talk about what it’s doing?” Amy asked.

  “Perhaps. I was just thinking aloud about a remark it made some weeks ago, concerning its physiology.”

  Amy said, “It’s so strange. We can’t be sure that even crude analogies mean anything.”

  “It still has to satisfy conservation of mass-energy,” Benjamin said. “But yeah, I agree.”

  Kingsley made a tent with his fingers. There was something here, he felt it, and talking was the best way to flush the game from the shrubbery of his mind. “The bastard said that it could experience pain if its equilibrium were disturbed, just as humans get indigestion, headaches, and soreness. The Eater’s indigestion came from disruption of the smooth rotation of its accretion disk, interrupting the trickle of mass that kept its inner edge a glaring violet. Upset, it said, came from snarls in the magnetic fields as they encountered vagrant fields from outside.”

  “That’s its version of Montezuma’s revenge?” Benjamin asked.

  “Apparently.” Kingsley worked his mouth around, puzzling out what this implied. “Based upon that, I should imagine that disruption could also come from radioactivity trapped into the disk, which could increase ionization locally. That might trigger something resembling pain.”

  “Pain, fine,” Benjamin said. “But we have to kill it.”

  Kingsley glanced at the hand-lettered sign he kept on his wall. His first act upon moving into any workplace was to visibly resurrect the advice he had received the first year he had come up to Oxford:

  SATURATION

  INCUBATION

  ILLUMINATION

  The great nineteenth-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had argued that these were the steps in having a new idea. You had to immerse yourself in the problem, concentrating, and then let the mass of thoughts simmer. Maybe all that happened during such incubation was the withering away of whatever bad ideas were blocking you. Then, often when you were doing something else, the answer would appear, as if delivered by some other agency of yourself.

  For the scientist, there was necessarily another stage: verification. You had to see if the bright idea actually worked.


  But with the Eater there would be only one chance.

  “I propose we try to use a one-two punch, then,” Kingsley said slowly. “Use its dislike of plasmas to move it, and then deliver a blow it cannot counter.”

  “Where? If nuclear weapons don’t work…” Amy shrugged.

  “Forget the magnetic structure, which it quite rightly defends as its mind. At the center of its mind lies the hole. Attack that, I’d guess.”

  Benjamin studied him as though he were quite lunatic. “Attack a singularity in space-time?”

  “The extreme curvature arises from the matter that once passed through the event horizon,” Kingsley said. “The steep gradient in gravitation is a ghost of mass that died there, passing who knows where. I propose that we consider giving the bastard not mass but its opposite.”

  6

  Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots.

  She had thought this state would be sublime, ghostly. Instead, she had hauled along her whole stinky, tangled neuroses-ridden self. Sure, she now flew in space in a way no astronaut could. But her mind was still tied to her body. Worse, knowing the body was a digital figment did no good.

  Tracking the beast demanded fresh navigation skills, fast movement, and her reward was sore “muscles.” The programmers, in her opinion, had left entirely too much of her mind-body link. If she overused her gorgeous ion jets, they ached. Turn too fast and the “knees” smarted, sharp and cutting.

  Simulation she might be, but why the body’s baggage? What next, callused feet?

  The illusion was good. Her breath whooshed and wheezed in and out. No oxygen at all here, but they had thought she needed the sensation to quiet her pseudo-nervous system, make it think she was breathing. In fact, it was breathing her.

  She took a deep nonbreath and fell into a shadowy space dotted by orbiting debris. This was a messy Eater, gobbling up satellites and leaving twinkling motes. She shepherded her Searchers through this in pursuit of the glowing archwork ahead. Or below; directions were free of gravity’s grip, here.