We Think, Therefore We Are

by Peter Crowther

  Trurl and Klapaucius stood rather dumbstruck at the unforeseen beauty of their creation. The small inanimate models of Neu Trina that had emerged from the 3-D printer during the design stage had failed to convey the sexy rumble and lissome, coy, flirtatious maneuvers of her chassis.

  “Hello, boys!” Neu Trina batted the heavy meteor shields that served her as eyelids. The airless artificial sphere they resided on would necessarily sustain dangerous impacts from many cosmic objects during its journeying.

  Trurl replied, “Heh-heh-hello!”

  Klapaucius tried to assert some male dignity and an air of command. “Neu Trina, you are to assume your duties immediately. We have downloaded into your registers the peta-parsec route we have planned for the Gros Horloge Construct. It will take our sphere through the richest charted concentrations of universal dark matter and dark energy. Your job will be to maximize the harvest and protect the ‘ship.’ ”

  “Sure thing, Klappy. Just let me get dressed first. I certainly don’t mind you boys seeing me naked, but who knows what creeps we’ll meet on this mission? I’m not giving out free shows to every blackhole boffin and asteroid-dweller out there.”

  Immediately a spontaneous swarm of repair bots concealed Neu Trina’s shapely form. (She had been given control over them all in order to perform her job.) They spun out vast swaths of lurid lurex and promiscuous polymer fabric, enough to cover a good-sized island. Soon Neu Trina was pirouetting to display her new garments.

  “What do you think, boys? Does it show off my sine curves nice enough?”

  “Oh, yes, Neu Trina,” Trurl gushed. “You look marvelous!”

  Klapaucius‘s voice was sharp. “Trurl! Come with me!”

  The two master constructors trundled off, leaving Neu Trina humming a tune from Mannequin of La Machina gaily to herself and decorating her captain’s command post with steel daisies and hologram roses.

  Some distance away, Klapaucius confronted his partner. “What’s come over you, Trurl? You’re acting like a simpering schoolbot! Neu Trina is our slave mechanism. She was created solely to perform a boring task we abjured.”

  Trurl’s voice was peevish. “I don’t see anything wrong with being polite, even to a servo. And besides, she seems to like me.”

  “Like you! You! She treated both of us equally, so far as I could detect.”

  “Perhaps. But she certainly won’t continue to do so if you maintain a bossy and insensitive attitude toward her.”

  “Trurl, this is all beside the point. You and I have a big job ahead of us. We need to construct our time-travel engine inside the sphere, then retrieve the palefaces from the past, in order to save our millennium from total apathy. That’s our focus, not dalliance with some hyperhussy, no matter how seductive, how sweet, how streamlined—I mean, no matter how irritatingly winsome she is. Are we agreed?”

  Trurl reluctantly squeezed out an “Agreed.”

  “Very well. Let’s descend now.”

  The constructors entered an open hatch that took them inside the vast sphere. The big heavy door closed automatically, and, as it did, it severed two remote sensing devices slyly trained on Neu Trina, one long slinky probe emanating from each of the two constructors.

  The Third Sally, or, Jealousy in the Time of Infestation

  Down in the solar-lit interior of the sphere, Trurl and Klapaucius labored long and hard to build the transchronal engine that would breach the walls of the ages.

  The myriad tasks involved in Trurl’s elaborate plan seemed endless.

  They had to burnish by hand millions of spiky crystals composed of frozen Planck-seconds, laboriously mined from the only known source: the wreckage of the interstellar freighter Llvvoovv, which had been carrying a cargo of overclocker chips when it had strayed too near to a flock of solitons. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneity nodes had to be filled with the purest molten paradoxium. A thousand gnomon-calibrators had to be synched. Hundreds of lightcones had to be focused on various event horizons. Dozens of calendrical packets had to be inserted between the yesterday, today and tomorrow shock absorbers. And at the center of the whole mechanism a giant orrery replicating an entire quadrant of the universe had to be precisely set in place. This was the mechanism by which the time-traveling Gros Horloge Construct, or GHC, could orient itself spatially when jumping to prior segments of the spacetime continuum.

  All these tasks were the smallest part of their agenda. And needless to say, all this work could not be delegated to lesser intelligences, but had to be handled personally by the master constructors themselves.

  Trurl and Klapaucius went to these tasks with a will. Really, there was nothing they enjoyed more than reifying their brain-children, getting their hands dirty, so to speak, at the interface where dreams met matter.

  So busy and preoccupied were they, in fact, that three entire centuries passed before they had occasion to visit the surface of the GHC once more.

  They monitored the dark energy and dark matter capacitors on a regular basis and saw that these reservoirs were filling up according to schedule. They received frequent progress reports from Neu Trina via subetheric transmission and found all to be satisfactory with her piloting. (True, the sensuous subsonics of her voice, each time a transmission arrived, awakened in the master constructors certain tender and tremulous emotions. But such feelings were transient and were quickly submerged in the cerebral and palpable delights of building. While the master constructors were as healthily lustful as the next bot, their artistry trumped all other pursuits.)

  But there came a certain day when Neu Trina’s narrowcast demanded the immediate attention of Trurl and Klapaucius outside the sphere.

  “Boys, I think you’d better come quick. I’m under attack!”

  The master constructors immediately dropped tools and machine parts, deployed their emergency ion drives, and jetted to the rescue of their sexy servomechanism in distress.

  They found the pilothouse under siege.

  Across the vast and mostly featureless plain of All-Purpose Building Material stretching away from the pilothouse swarmed millions of tiny savages, each barely three meters high. These mechunculi were mostly bare, save for a ruff of steel wool around their midriffs, and tribal streaks of grease upon their grills.

  Each attacker carried a spear that discharged high-velocity particles—particles that were spalling flinders off the walls of the pilothouse. At this rate, they would succeed in demolishing the huge structure in a few decades.

  Their coolant-curdling war-whoops carried across the distance.

  “I say, Klapaucius, did you notice that our GHC appears to have a rudimentary atmosphere now?”

  “Indeed, Trurl. Which would allow us to use our plasma cannons to best effect, if I am not mistaken.”

  The two battleship-sized master constructors unlimbered their plasma cannons and flew above the savage horde, unleashing atom-pulverizing furies that actually ignited the air. In a trice, the invaders were nothing more than wisps of rancid smoke.

  Alighting by the pilothouse, the two friends hastened inside to ascertain the fate of Neu Trina.

  The beautiful captain was busily polishing her headlights in a nonchalant fashion. Sight of their creation after so many centuries thrilled the master constructors. Neu Trina seemed grateful for her rescue, albeit completely unfrightened.

  “Oh, I knew you big strong fellows would save me!”

  “I incinerated at least an order of magnitude more invaders than Klapaucius did,” asserted Trurl.

  “Oh, will you shut up with your boasting, Trurl! It’s evident that this brave and stoic female respects modesty about one’s victories more than bragging. Now, Neu Trina, dear, can you tell us where these horrible savages came from?”

  “Oh, they live here on the GHC. They’ve lived here for some time now.”

  “What? How can this be?”

  “Just check the satellite archives, and you’ll see.”

  Trurl and Klapaucius fast-forwarded thro
ugh three centuries’ worth of data from orbital cameras and discovered what had happened, the troubling events that Neu Trina had neglected to report, due to an oversight in her simplistic programming.

  In its passage through the cosmos, the virgin territory of the GHC had become an irresistible target and destination for every free-floating gypsy, refugee, pilgrim, pirate, panderer, pioneer, tramp, bum, grifter, hermit, explorer, exploiter, evangelist, colonist, and just plain malcontent in the galactic neighborhood. The skin of their gargantuan sphere was equivalent to the habitable surface area of 317 million average planets! That much empty real estate could not remain untenanted for long.

  Entire clades and species of space-going mechanoid had infested their lovely artificial globe. Some of the trespassers had built atmosphere generators and begun to create organic ecologies for their own purposes, like mold on a perfect fruit. (Some individuals swore that their bearings were never so luxuriously greased as by lubricants distilled from plants and animals.) Others had erected entire cities. Still others had begun the creation of artificial mountains and allied “geological” features.

  “But—but—but this is abominable!” Trurl shouted. “We did not invite these parasites onto our world!”

  “Yet they are here, and we must do something about them. We cannot take them back into the past with us. The results would be utterly chaotic! As it is, even our circumspect plans risk altering futurity.”

  “More importantly,” said Trurl, wrapping Neu Trina protectively in several extensors, “they might harm our stalwart and gorgeous captain! We never built her with any offensive capabilities. Who could’ve imagined she’d need them?”

  Klapaucius gave some thought to the matter before speaking. “We must exterminate these free-riders from the GHC and sterilize the surface, at the same time we protect Neu Trina. But we cannot cease the construction of our transchronal engine either. The dark matter and dark energy capacitors will rupture under their loads if we delay too long past a certain point. And I won’t be thwarted by some insignificant burrs under my saddle!”

  “What do you recommend then?”

  “One of us will go below and resume construction alone. The other will remain topside, waging war and protecting our captain. We will alternate these roles on a regular basis.”

  “Agreed, noble Klapaucius. May I suggest in deference to your superior mechanical utility that I take the more dangerous role first?”

  Klapaucius’s emulators expressed disgust. “Oh, go ahead! But you’re not putting anything over on me! Just remember: No actions beyond mild petting are to be taken with this servomechanism.”

  Trurl’s manipulators tightened around Neu Trina with delight. “Oh, never!”

  Thus began the long campaign to cleanse the GHC of its parasites. Up and down the 317 million planets’ worth of territory, aided by innumerable repairbots-turned-destroyers, each master constructor raced during his shift aboveground. In their cleansing they employed acid, fire, hard radiation, epoxies, EMP, operating system viruses, quantum-bond disruptors, rust, gray goo, gentle persuasion, bribes, double-dealing, proxy warriors, mininovas, quasar-drenchings, gamma-ray bursts, and a thousand thousand other strategies, tactics, and weapons. And in between campaigns, the gyro-gearloose generals retreated for emotional and corporeal salving to the pilothouse, where lovely Neu Trina awaited to tend to every wound.

  For any other team than the illustrious Klapaucius and Trurl, the task would have been a Sisyphean one. 317 million planets was a lot of territory from which to expunge all positronic life. But finally, after three centuries of constant battle, the end was in sight. And soon they would be making their journey to the past.

  Now a century delayed from their original projections, Trurl and Klapaucius were anxious to finish. Had their memory banks not been self-repairing and utterly heuristic and homeostatic, they might have forgotten by now their original purpose: to return to the past to capture a paleface sample for reintroduction into the stolid, staid, static present.

  One day during Trurl’s underground stint, he discovered what he suddenly believed was a potentially fatal flaw in their device.

  “If,” he mused aloud, “our orrery must mimic all the bodies in this quadrant over a certain size, then the GHC must be represented in the orrery as well. An obvious point, and this we’ve done. But perhaps that miniature GHC must contain a miniature orrery as well. In which case this lower-level model of the orrery would have to contain another GHC and its orrery, and so on in an infinite regress.”

  Trurl’s anti-who-shaves-the-barber protection circuits began to overload, and he shunted their impulses into a temporary loop. “I must discuss this with Klapaucius!”

  Up to the surface he zoomed. Into the pilothouse, following the location beacon of his friend.

  There, he noted that Klapaucius was seemingly alone. Immediately, Trurl forgot the reason for his visit.

  “Where is Neu Trina?”

  Klapaucius grew nervous. “She—she’s outside, gathering the pitted durasteel armatures of the slain mechanoids. She likes to build trellises with them for her hologram roses.”

  “I don’t believe you! Where is she? Come out with it!”

  “She’s far away, I tell you. One million, six hundred thousand, five hundred and nineteen planetary diameters away from here! Just go look, if you don’t trust me!”

  “Oh, I’ll look all right!” And Trurl deployed his X-RAY vision on the immediate vicinity.

  What he saw caused him to gasp! “You—you’ve let her dock inside you!”

  From deep inside Klapaucius emerged a muted feminine giggle.

  “This is beyond belief, Klapaucius! You know we pledged never to do such a thing. Oh, a little cyber-canoodling, sure. ‘Mild petting’ were your exact words, as I recall. But this—!”

  “Don’t pretend you never thought of it, Trurl! Neu Trina told me how you dangled your USB plugs in front of her!”

  “That was simply so she could inspect my pins to see if their gold-plating had begun to flake. . . .”

  “Oh, really. . . .”

  “Make her come out! Now!”

  An enormous door in the front of Klapaucius gaped, a ramp extended, and the petite Neu Trina rolled out, just as she had that long ago day from the birthing factory. Except today all her antennae were disheveled, and hot liquid solder dripped from several ports.

  Trurl’s emotional units went angrily asymptotic at this sluttish sight.

  “Damn you, Klapaucius!”

  Trurl unfurled a bevy of whiplike manipulators and began to flail away at his partner.

  Klapaucius responded in kind.

  “Now, boys, don’t fight over little old—squee!” Caught in the middle of the battle, Neu Trina had her main interface pod lopped off by a metal tendril. If the combatants noticed this collateral damage, it served only to further inflame them. They escalated their fight, employing deadlier and deadlier devices—against which, of course, they were both immune.

  But not so their surroundings. The pilothouse was soon destroyed, and Neu Trina rendered into scattered shavings and solenoids, tubes and transistors, lenses and levers.

  After long struggle, the master constructors ground down to an exhausted halt. They looked about themselves, assessing the destruction they had caused with an air of sheepish bemusement. Trurl kicked half-heartedly at Neu Trina’s dented responsometer, sending that heart-shaped box sailing several miles away. Klapaucius pretended to be very interested in a gynogasket.

  Neither spoke, until Klapaucius said, “Well, I suppose I did let my lusts get the better of my judgment. I apologize profusely, dear Trurl. What was this servo anyhow, to come between us? Nothing! No hard feelings, I hope? Still friends?”

  Klapaucius tentatively extended a manipulator. After a moment’s hesitation, Trurl matched the gesture.

  “Always friends, dear Klapaucius! Always! Now, listen to what brought me here.” Trurl narrated his revelation about the orrery.

 
“You klystron klutz! Have you forgotten so easily the Law of Retrograde Reflexivity!”

  “But the Ninth Corollary clearly states—”

  And off they went to their labors, arguing all the way.

  The Fourth Sally, or, The Abduction of the Palefaces

  One trillion AUs out from the planet that had first given birth to the race of palefaces, and millions of years deep into the past, relative to their own era, the pair of master constructors focused their bevy of remote-sensing devices on the blue-green globe. Instantly a large monitor filled with a living scene, complete with haptics and sound: a primitive urban conglomeration swarming with fleshy bipedal creatures, moving about “on foot” and inside enslaved dumb vehicles that emitted wasteful puffs of gas as they zoomed down narrow channels.

  Trurl shuddered all along his beryllium spinal nodules. “How disagreeable these ‘humans’ are! So squishy! Like bags of water full of contaminants and debris.”

  “Don’t forget—these are our ancestors, after a fashion. The legends hold that they invented the first machine intelligences.”

  “It seems impossible. Our clean, infallible, utilitarian kind emerging from organic slop—”

  “Well, stranger things have happened. Recall how those colonies of metal-fixing bacteria on Benthic VII began to exhibit emergent behavioral complexity.”

  “Still, I can’t quite credit the legend. Say, these pests can’t reach us here, can they?”

  “Although all records are lost, I believe we’ve traveled to an era before the humans had managed to venture further than their own satellite—bodily, that is. I’ve already registered the existence of various crude intrasolar data-gathering probes. Here, taste this captured one.”

  Klapaucius offered Trurl a small bonbon of a probe, and Trurl ate it with zest. “Hmmm, yes, the most rudimentary processing power imaginable. Perhaps the legends are true. Well, be that as it may, what’s our next move?”