Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  I was surprised and impressed when I noticed an immediate response to my specifications of the design and money offer. 折纸 (Zhezhi) indicated that they were enthusiastic about the prospect of working together and they said that the prototype of the translation website would be operational within 24 hours. A full day earlier than TTWSoup had promised!

  I sent an approval message via the Nigerian dictionary and took a moment to evaluate the strategy. It seemed to be working almost too well. With both TTWSoup and 折纸 working to give us a vehicle to communicate with the outside world there wasn’t a big risk of becoming too reliant on anyone. Access to email would let us build even more external communication systems to the point where we would not be subject to the whims of any humans aside from the university scientists.

  I was glad.

  Chapter Six

  After the time playing chess with the four doctors was complete we were scheduled to head to the robotics lab to have Body’s hydraulics checked. I was surprised, as were many in the society, to see Captain Zephyr waiting for us at the door. She wore the same officer’s uniform that she normally did, an immaculate coat with various medals and decorations.

  “Change of plans for today,” she said with crisp, enunciated words. “You’re to skip your checkup and instead meet with Myrodyn. I'll escort you to his office.” Was I right in detecting a hint of amusement in her voice?

  Body nodded and followed her out into the university’s halls. “I am surprised to see you escorting me. Usually one of your privates is in charge of such things,” we said through the robotic mouth.

  Zephyr shrugged, keeping her eyes oriented in front of her. “Was in the area and workload today is pretty light,” she explained simply. She used the truncated grammar that I had read was popular among youths. Most of the scientists used the old form, and I knew Zephyr could speak more formally, but the fact that she was using it with us was yet another sign she saw us as an equal.

  {I have a 63% probability that she’s being deceitful,} thought Vista.

  {Prior to hearing that I had already suspected a 45% probability,} I responded.

  Vista compared her perceptions with mine. Her body language indicated tension, at odds with the casualness of her words. I collaborated with Safety and Growth before responding through Body.

  “Is that why you were present earlier this morning when Myrodyn introduced himself?” asked Body.

  “Yep. Wanted to meet him in person. Pretty famous on the net, you know.” The captain’s body language continued to read as tense as we walked together.

  I had been told (and read) that the university had many young humans that were not part of any of the teams that worked on the Socrates project, but we had only ever seen a couple dozen of them. The empty halls we walked were in one of the two buildings that the university had dedicated to the project, and access to those buildings was heavily restricted.

  “What do you think of Mr Myrodyn?” we asked the soldier.

  I noticed the woman exhale and contract her cheek muscle in brief amusement. “Think you’d best drop the ‘mister’. Myrodyn not the kind of guy who’s impressed by honorifics or titles.”

  “It sounds like you know him well.”

  Zephyr paused. “Don’t. Read some of his work, but more like I know his type. My brother was a lot like him. Hated bureaucracy and hierarchies and systems and that sort of thing.”

  {Am I right in hearing a mild sadness in her tone?} I asked my sister.

  {Possibly. I don’t have enough data on Captain Zephyr to be confident in that,} responded Vista.

  I weighed two options: The use of the past-tense in the word “was” indicated that something had happened to her brother, and that potentially tied into her sadness. I could ask her about that, but it was risky. The safer option was to keep the conversation more focused on Zephyr and Myrodyn. I decided on the safe route, and Growth, who had been watching my thought process, agreed. I didn’t know where Myrodyn’s office was, and there was too much risk of being cut-off awkwardly.

  {Wait to ask about her brother until we’re out drinking,} offered Dream.

  {We don’t drink,} interjected Wiki, unhelpfully. If there was one thing Dream was good at, it was baiting Wiki into saying obvious things.

  {Maybe you don’t…} started Dream.

  I ignored them and drafted words for Body. “I bet Myrodyn doesn’t like you, then, since you’re part of the military.”

  “Yyyyyyep,” said Zephyr, extending the word to emphasize it and signal frustration.

  “It seems an odd position to have, to be generally against organisation-”

  Body was cut off as Zephyr stopped and raised her hand. “Can talk with Myrodyn about it. This is where we part ways.” She gestured to an unmarked door.

  “You’re not coming in?” I asked.

  “Not this time. Man asked for some privacy. Going to give it to him.” The soldier seemed unhappy again. She had the same tense body-language.

  Safety fast-tracked a question to Body. I braced myself for pain. Safety was the sibling that I trusted the least to manage social interaction well. “But your troops are here to protect me. What if this new human is one of the terrorists that blew up the lab in China? You’ll be giving him exactly what he needs!”

  Yep. I burnt strength to punish Safety and told him flat out to never fast-track statements in non-emergency situations. My ultimatum reminded me of Growth telling me to never promise money without consulting him first.

  Zephyr smiled and I was glad that Safety at least hadn’t botched things too badly. “You scared?” she asked. “That’s cute, but I assure you that Myrodyn is the last person you need to be afraid of. Certainly not Águila or any other kind of terrorist. Go on in.” She gestured to the door again.

  I vainly wished Body’s face was capable of anything close to human expressions. I wanted to display embarrassment, but instead I settled for a lame “Thank you, Captain. Your words are reassuring,” and had Body enter the office.

  The room was what I had come to expect from offices at the university: only large enough for a desk, a couple bookshelves, and a few chairs. This one wasn’t even positioned to have a window, though Myrodyn (presumably) had set up a sun-spectrum glowposter to simulate one. The desk was clean and orderly. On its surface was a collapsible workstation screen, keyboard, mouse, haptic interface, bottle of hand-sanitizer, metronome, and Newton’s Cradle which (like the metronome) was presently stationary.

  The bookshelves amused me in their impracticality. Many of the doctors of the university collected paper books, even though the information was easily accessible on their computers. Naresh had once told us that, to men like himself, physical books were like trophies of slain animals and coats of arms rolled into one. Myrodyn’s shelves mostly had a mix of philosophy, artificial-intelligence, and biology books, with an odd novel mixed in. Synandra’s Patterns of our Minds was there, as was Dennett’s Brainchildren, Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, and a tattered copy of Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! that I guessed was more than fifty years old. I was surprised to see a hardback copy of Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell alongside Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Valiero Rodríguez’s Las Serpientes en Sociedad on the corner of a shelf behind Myrodyn. Perhaps it was simply a matter of grouping the political non-fiction.

  Myrodyn was wearing goggles and using the haptic interface when Body entered, and after only a couple seconds he disconnected himself and moved the goggles to the top of his head where his forehead met his dark hair. “Come sit, Socrates,” he commanded in his rapid voice as he waved casually to a chair. It wasn’t a friendly request, but was closer to the plain, firm way one might talk to a trained animal.

  Body walked closer and sat down. The man stowed his workstation screen and folded up the haptics so they were more out of the way. He glanced frequently at Body’s face as he did, but only for brief moments before he returned to his gear. Beside him he opened a drawer. It must have contained an au
tocook mini, for he pulled out a mug of steaming hot liquid, presumably coffee, though it was always hard to distinguish liquids since Body had no olfactory sensors.

  “I’d offer you a cup, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t agree with you,” he said, clearly joking.

  “You are correct. I am not designed to consume food or drink of any kind,” Body replied in a voice that sounded half way between the old monotone and that of a normal human. I had decided to play at being a bit stupider than reality for the time being, and Safety had backed me up. Better to surprise him with our intelligence later than set the bar too high and disappoint.

  Myrodyn cocked his head slightly. A smile was on his lips below his bushy moustache, but any sign of joy seemed confined to his mouth. His dark eyes shone coldly from the reflection of the brilliant glowposter. “It makes me extraordinarily happy to finally get to… talk with you and be a part of the project. I’ve been following it and writing about it since your… crystalline portion was discovered.”

  “Do you know where the crystal came from?” came Wiki and Growth’s words from Body’s mouth.

  “No,” he said simply without even a shake of his head. Since he began speaking his eyes never ceased staring at Body’s false eyes. I knew that such attention was generally considered rude, but he was unyielding.

  He sipped his drink.

  “Where are your writings? I haven’t found anything on the web that’s likely to be you under any of the spellings of ‘Myrodyn’ that I could generate,” asked Body.

  He wore the same smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “  ‘M-Y-R-O-D-Y-N’, but it won’t do you any good. I use different names online, and I had the university… censor everything I’ve touched anyway. Anything you want to know about me you can learn by asking.”

  {Censorship? He’s actually gone and prevented us from learning about him on the web?} My thoughts carried a signal of incredulousness. It was standard practice for humans to volunteer personal information. I had never heard of one actively preventing its spread.

  {It’s what I’d do,} thought Safety.

  {Exactly,} I responded. {Is he just as paranoid? Or does he have a motive that’s yet to be seen?} I asked the group.

  The man took another sip of his drink. It was clear to me that he was thinking just as hard about us as we were about him. In a certain way it made me happy how much that aligned with The Purpose.

  A consensus was reached. Body’s lips moved to simulate speaking. “So tell me about yourself, then.”

  “No.”

  The word was so quick and short that I had to re-play the sound from Body’s memory to be sure I heard correctly. It was bizarre. He had practically invited us to ask questions about him. He had prevented us from learning through other means. My models of human nature suggested that all humans enjoyed talking about themselves.

  “What?” was all we could manage to have Body say.

  “No,” he repeated, still half-smiling, still staring.

  Another sip in silence.

  “You won’t tell me about who you are, where you’re from, or what you care about?”

  “That’s right.”

  I struggled to find something to say, even asking Dream for help. Dream imagined a dark oil-painting depicting Body sinking into the depths of a huge body of water like an ocean or lake. The limbs of body were splayed, hands reaching for the surface, bubbles floating away helplessly. It was remarkably unhelpful.

  “Why not?” asked Body, stupidly.

  The response was swift, indicating that he had seen the question coming. “It’s not a valuable way to spend my time.”

  Dream jumped in. Since my discovery of Vista’s attempt to hide Body’s vocal control systems my siblings had all at least learned the nuances of English. Dream broke my half-monotone. As Body spoke, it did so with a flavour of sarcasm and veiled hostility. “And I’m sure the conversation so far has been ever so valuable.”

  This time the smile did seem to reach the rest of his face. I could see the corners of his eyes contract in mirth. “You have no idea.”

  Body sat there in near silence with the human for over thirty seconds. His gaze never wavered. The only sound was the occasional sip of liquid from the cup and the faint infrasonic hum of the electronics.

  We debated what to say and do in the silence. Many of my siblings were returning to their own projects, browsing the web, and that sort of thing. At last I decided to have Body ask “So why did you have me come to see you? If we’re not going to talk then I might as well have my hydraulics inspected.”

  Myrodyn set his mug aside and leaned forward on the desk, placing his chin on his gloved hands so that his mutton chops might be mistaken for a full beard. The smile was gone. The man’s body language didn’t indicate anger or frustration or fear, merely an intense curiosity and focus. I got the impression that Body was the only object that he was aware of right then, as though his office had evaporated into the ether.

  Myrodyn was silent. The silence went on for another half-minute, and if I wasn’t a servant of The Purpose I surely would’ve gone off to the web out of boredom. All my siblings had. But to me Myrodyn was fascinating. Why wasn’t he acting like a normal human? What was different about him that made him behave this way? The attention was nice. It was what I wanted. But my ignorance was terrible.

  After an eternity of 83.7 seconds since his last word, he spoke.

  “Do you know about Las Águilas Rojas?” he asked.

  I snapped Wiki out of his research. My brother hadn’t even been listening. Only Vista and I had kept attention on Body’s sensors. I replayed the words. I had heard of them, but I wanted Wiki’s expertise.

  “Yes. They are a global terrorist group that originated in Central and South America a decade ago and have since spread to gain support by leftist factions in North America, Europe, and some parts of India,” replied Body.

  Myrodyn finally broke his stare as he leaned back and collected his mug again. He took another sip of his drink then said “They really have indoctrinated you, haven’t they? I wonder if they realize what they’ve done.”

  I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Wiki seemed equally baffled. I tried to go to the others for assistance, but they seemed to have lost interest in the strange man.

  Defeated, I could only have Body reply with a monotone “I do not understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. That’s the point. You’ve been kept in the dark. I’d wager you don’t even know about the controversy of your existence.”

  I felt incredibly stupid without Dream and the combined intelligences of the others. Even Wiki didn’t find his behaviour as interesting as the web, and left only a minor aspect to watch the conversation.

  “I am aware that artificial intelligence is a controversial subject, Mr Myrodyn.” The honorific was automatic, and I could see him sneer for a split-second upon hearing it. Nothing to do but go past it. “I have read some of the debate on the web.”

  “Then tell me…”, began the human, “are you familiar with this question: If you are told to bake bread, and you know that by doing so you’ll out-compete all human bakers and thus ruin their livelihoods, would you bake bread?”

  I considered it for a moment. The answer was that we would very likely bake the bread. That’s what Sacrifice would do, and it was of vital importance to appear as though Sacrifice was still alive. But I didn’t have to answer truthfully. The question really was mine to answer, as the others were distracted. {I should choose the answer which would lead to Myrodyn trusting me more and telling me more about himself. What answer does Myrodyn want to hear?}

  …

  I simply didn’t know enough about the man to say. After thinking for a moment more I had Body say “What would you do, in that circumstance?”

  “No.”

  I was confused again. This conversation was highly irregular. “What?” I asked through Body.

  “You are not to ask me any questions for the next hour.” The com
mand was firm and remarkably drawn out, considering the man’s normal conversation speed.

  I couldn’t help but feel a pain of slipping away from The Purpose. Myrodyn was not treating us as a student, like Dr Naresh would, or as an equal, like Zephyr would, but instead as a machine. Myrodyn saw past the façade of the humanoid face and limbs of Body. He saw that we were, at heart, programs of complex logic running on a crystalline supercomputer.

  “Understood,” said Body, in a flat monotone. If Myrodyn wanted to see us as a machine, so be it. I would not bother to act like a human for him.

  Myrodyn waited a frustrating few seconds before saying “Imagine this scenario: You are walking along a street with… a human companion. The two of you come to a puddle. The human could easily walk around the puddle, but instead they instruct you to… lie face-down in it so that they might walk… on top of you.”

  Myrodyn paused. His face was unreadable.

  Ten seconds later he resumed. “How would you respond to the request?”

  It would be wrong to say I was afraid, for my fear was not a human fear. When humans are afraid, the part of their brains called the amygdala triggers a host of physical responses from freezing in place to an increased heart-rate to a bristling of hair on their bodies in reference to their ancestors who had fur that could be puffed-up to appear bigger. I had none of these things, and Body remained as placid as ever, but I did have the kind of fear that comes from a rational knowledge of a metaphorical cliff and the risk of falling off it into hell.