SEQ_170 // STATUS: LINKED
Life's too short for chess.
— Byron
They never sealed the hatch behind them. It was too easy to get lost up there in the dome, naked infinite space stretching a hundred eighty degrees on every axis. They needed all that emptiness but they needed an anchor in its midst: soft stray light from astern, a gentle draft from the drum, the sounds of people and machinery close by. They needed to have it both ways.
I lay in wait. Reading a dozen blatant cues in their behavior, I was already squirreled away in the forward airlock when they passed. I gave them a few minutes and crept forward to the darkened bridge.
"Of course they called her by name," [Szpindel] was saying. "That was the only name they had. She told them, remember?"
"Yes." [Michelle] didn't seem reassured.
"Hey, it was you guys said we were talking to a Chinese Room. You saying you were wrong?"
"We—no. Of course not."
"Then it wasn't really threatening Suze at all, was it? It wasn't threatening any of us. It had no idea what it was saying."
"It's rule-based, Isaac. It was following some kind of flowchart it drew up by observing Human languages in action. And somehow those rules told it to respond with threats of violence."
"But if it doesn't even know what it was saying—"
"It doesn't. It can't. We parsed the phrasing nineteen different ways, tried out conceptual units of every different length..." A long, deep breath. "But it attacked the probe, Isaac."
"Jack just got too close to one of those electrode thingies is all. It just arced."
"So you don't think [Rorschach] is hostile?"
Long silence—long enough to make me wonder if I'd been detected.
"Hostile," Szpindel said at last. "Friendly. We learned those words for life on Earth, eh? I don't know if they even apply out here." His lips smacked faintly. "But I think it might be something like hostile."
Michelle sighed. "Isaac, there's no reason for—I mean, it just doesn't make sense that it would be. We can't have anything it wants."
"It says it wants to be left alone," Szpindel said. "Even if it doesn't mean it."
They floated quietly for a while, up there past the bulkhead.
"At least the shielding held," Szpindel said finally. "That's something." He wasn't just talking about Jack; our own carapace was coated with the same stuff now. It had depleted our substrate stockpiles by two thirds, but no one wanted to rely on the ship's usual magnetics in the face of anything that could play so easily with the electromagnetic spectrum.
"If they attack us, what do we do?" Michelle said.
"Learn what we can, while we can. Fight back. While we can."
"If we can. Look out there, Isaac. I don't care how embryonic that thing is. Tell me we're not hopelessly outmatched."
"Outmatched, for sure. Hopelessly, never."
"That's not what you said before."
"Still. There's always a way to win."
"If I said that, you'd call it wishful thinking."
"If you said that, it would be. But I'm saying it, so it's [game theory]."
"Game theory again. Jesus, Isaac."
"No, listen. You're thinking about the aliens like they were some kind of mammal. Something that cares, something that looks after its investments."
"How do you know they aren't?"
"Because you can't protect your kids when they're lightyears away. They're on their own, and it's a big cold dangerous universe so most of them aren't going to make it, eh? The most you can do is crank out millions of kids, take cold comfort in knowing that a few always luck out through random chance. It's not a mammal mind-set, Meesh. You want an earthbound simile, think of dandelion seeds. Or, or herring."
A soft sigh. "So they're interstellar herring. That hardly means they can't crush us."
"But they don't know about us, not in advance. Dandelion seed doesn't know what it's up against before it sprouts. Maybe nothing. Maybe some spastic weed that goes over like straw in the wind. Or maybe something that kicks its ass halfway to the Magellanic Clouds. It doesn't know, and there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy. Something that aces against one player blows goats against a different one. So the best you can do is mix up your strategies based on the odds. It's a weighted dice roll and it gives you the best mean payoff over the whole game, but you're bound to crap out and choose the wrong strategy at least some of the time. Price of doing business. And that means—that means—that weak players not only can win against stronger ones, but they're statistically bound to in some cases."
Michelle snorted. "That's your game theory? Rock Paper Scissors with statistics?"
Maybe Szpindel didn't know the reference. He didn't speak, long enough to call up a subtitle; then he brayed like a horse. "Rock Paper Scissors! Yes!"
Michelle digested that for a moment. "You're sweet for trying, but that only works if the other side is just blindly playing the odds, and they don't have to do that if they know who they're going up against in advance. And my dear, they have so very much information about us..."
They'd threatened [Susan]. By name.
"They don't know everything," Szpindel insisted. "And the principle works for any scenario involving incomplete information, not just the ignorant extreme."
"Not as well."
"But some, and that gives us a chance. Doesn't matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cards still deal out with the same odds."
"So that's what we're playing. Poker."
"Be thankful it's not chess. We wouldn't have a hope in hell."
"Hey. I'm supposed to be the optimist in this relationship."
"You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends."
"That's my Isaac. Master of the no-win scenario."
"You can win. Winner's the guy who makes the best guess on how it all comes out."
"So you are just guessing."
"Yup. And you can't make an informed guess without data, eh? And we could be the very first to find out what's gonna happen to the whole Human race. I'd say that puts us into the semifinals, easy."
Michelle didn't answer for a very long time. When she did, I couldn't hear her words.
Neither could Szpindel: "Sorry?"
"Covert to invulnerable, you said. Remember?"
"Uh huh. Rorschach's Graduation Day. "
"How soon, do you think?"
"No idea. But I don't think it's the kind of thing that's gonna slip by unnoticed. And that's why I don't think it attacked us."
She must have looked a question.
"Because when it does, it won't be some debatable candy-ass bitch slap," he told her. "When that fucker rises up, we're gonna know."
A sudden flicker from behind. I spun in the cramped passageway and bit down on a cry: something squirmed out of sight around the corner, something with arms, barely glimpsed, gone in an instant.
Never there. Couldn't be there. Impossible.
"Did you hear that?" Szpindel asked, but I'd fled to stern before Michelle could answer him.
We'd fallen so far that the naked eye didn't see a disk, barely even saw curvature any more. We were falling towards a wall, a vast roiling expanse of dark thunderclouds that extended in all directions to some new, infinitely-distant horizon. Ben filled half the universe.
And still we fell.
Far below, Jack clung to Rorschach's ridged surface with bristly gecko-feet fenders and set up camp. It sent x-rays and ultrasound into the ground, tapped enquiring fingers and listened to the echos, planted tiny explosive charges and measured the resonance of their detonations. It shed seeds like pollen: tiny probes and sensors by the thousands, self-powered, near-sighted, stupid and expendable. The vast majority were sacrificial offerings to random chance; only one in a hundred lasted long enough to return usable telemetry.
While our advance scout took measure of its local neighborhood, [Theseus] drew larger-scale birdseye maps from the closing sky. It spat out thousands of its own disposable probes, spread them across the heavens and collected stereoscopic data from a thousand simultaneous perspectives.
Patchwork insights assembled in the drum. Rorschach's skin was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach's guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure, seethed within it. In some places the radiation was intense enough to turn unshielded flesh to ash in an instant; calmer backwaters would merely kill in the same span of time. Charged particles raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.
Neither Jack below nor Theseus above could find any points of entry, beyond those impassable gaps that spat out streams of charged particles or swallowed them back down. No airlocks or hatches or viewports resolved with increasing proximity. The fact that we'd been threatened via laser beam implied some kind of optical antennae or tightcast array; we weren't even able to find that much.
A central hallmark of von Neumann machines was self-replication. Whether Rorschach would meet that criterion—whether it would germinate, or divide, or give birth when it passed some critical threshold—whether it had done so already—remained an open question.
One of a thousand. At the end of it all—after all the measurements, the theorizing and deduction and outright guesswork—we settled into orbit with a million trivial details and no answers. In terms of the big questions, there was only one thing we knew for sure.
So far, Rorschach was holding its fire.