Maxwell's Demon Ch. 15-21

"But you do not want any male, Nira."

"I can have this one thing, this once... can't I? I know I can. I... I just have to work a little harder."

"Okay, Nira," Litra said compassionately. There was no changing Nira's mind.

Nira would hate her for doing it, but Litra hugged her friend. Girls didn't show their feelings, not like that, but it was just this once. Nira punched her, so hard it hurt, and then shoved her away.

-*-

Greg was startled awake by a hand on his shoulder, he'd slept longer than he intended, hoping to get some extra rest before he traveled with Nira and Litra to Mainlights. He saw William kneeling next to him when his eyes took focus.

"Thank God, I'm so glad I found you. Where the fuck have you been?" William said.

"What do you mean? Here... I've been here in Anukina."

"I came in three cycles ago and you were nowhere to be found. Some thugs from Mainlights came to Newtown and shit went down after you left. Mayana is dead. I've been hiding in the stockroom at the telegraph company, fearful for my life. They were combing the town looking for us, anyone they thought was from the Raphael, near as I could tell. I think they're gone now. I wasn't sure if you were coming back. I wanted to warn you not to. I took a chance and ran to the train station the first chance I got.

"Shit. That's not good. I wonder if we are safe up here? What happened to the girls?"

"I don't know. Gone. Dead maybe -- for all I know," William said. The two men were quiet, a darkness sat between them. Anyone could die at any time. They both knew that. Maybe it was unnatural that they hadn't yet. Maybe they'd been on borrowed time.

"So. Did you find out if the radio works?" William said, changing the subject as if fleeing from that thought.

Nira, Litra and I hiked up a trail near the mining settlement. There was a cloud free spot at the top. I was able to see Alpha Centauri A and B. I tried my makeshift antennae. Litra called it a water bowl; she might have been right for all the good it did. That portable radio, there's no way we're punching out of this atmosphere with it. I tried locating the Raphael too, to get the high power radio. All that amounted to was us nearly getting killed, again.

We're going to need to build some kind of class C RF amplifier to punch into orbit. You think there's any hope of that?"

"Are you asking me if we can start building vacuum tubes? Hell, I don't know. They have combustion engines and simple electromagnetic power generation. Something about the technology doesn't add up here. For example, all this power infrastructure, it's all DC, yet these internal combustion engines that run on metal powders are ahead of their time, and they use renewable power sources to grind the ore for them. It's like the power and engine were given to them before they knew all the prerequisite technologies. Why not build a fossil fuel engine first? Why haven't they adopted AC power grids?

Tubes, resistors and capacitors, I don't see those capable of being made in Newtown. We could introduce upgrades to their motors, for example, polyphase AC and an induction motor. I think that'd give us sufficient leeway to build some electronic components in the bigger cities, maybe get a patron of some sort. I actually made a prototype of one, when shit got crazy in Newtown."

"So we've got about a year to invent basic electronics, or try again to get the Rafael high gain transmitter and adapt their power supplies. Something tells me that device may finally raise some eyebrows. They seem to oddly ignore our personal electronics by virtue of their size," Greg said.

"I've noticed. I can walk around with a datapad and people think it's a lighted mirror to check my appearance."

William rummaged through his meager belongings and pulled a rectangular piece of metal with two supports holding an armature and a surprising amount of hand-wound copper coils. "This is a polyphase ac generator turned by a hand crank, made with scraps from redoing the cable pulls on their Telegraph. My fingers are raw from winding the stator, but I didn't have anything else to do while I was hiding for my life in the stockroom.

I thought it'd be easy to barge in their shop with a few hundred years of technical advancement and make bank. It's not that easy. The Centaurans at the cutting edge of their science -- they are probably smarter than we are. It doesn't matter if they're hundreds of years behind. We have a maze of legal systems and supply chains to navigate. How do I protect an invention I make? Are there patents we have to file? What's already been made? We don't want to waste our time trying to invent something that's already on deck. Could I convince someone I knew anything if I was given a sheet of paper? Their written language is phonemic, but it's not like I've read all their science papers. I can't communicate in their terms and language well yet."

"I had the same thoughts. When I started thinking about trying to craft up a simple amplifier for the radio, I realized we'd have to invent a vacuum pump of sufficient quality to build a stable tube. A mercury diffusion pump, was that what Edison used when he was making light bulbs? I barely remember that shit from history class. The patron part though, I kind of solved that. Nira asked me to be a part of her clan... and I said yes," Greg said.

"You did what?" William said.

"The way Nira made it sound, we'd end up giving alien blowjobs on the street and working for the mafia if we try to navigate Mainlights city on our own. She said you're not allowed in the city if you aren't wearing clan colors."

"I guess I'm not surprised. We're obviously the fairer sex around here. It's not hard to figure out what Litra and Nira want. Clan is important to the females. It's about pooling resources, like old Earth's eastern family values. I've sometimes lamented how isolated and redundant the work we end up doing on Earth seems. Here, they've still got a social connection to it," William said.

"I suppose there's going to be sacrifices to live here, we just haven't had it revealed what they'll be. Nira has her own Cinderella story; she came from nothing in the slums of Mainlights. She learned how to fight and earned enough money to escape and buy her freedom here. It must have been a dangerous way to live for her though, Litra didn't want her going back.

She wants to get back into the ring one more time, to earn enough prize money and move to a better city. I know we need money, but is taking advantage of her generosity the right thing to do? I don't even know what she expects from this clan arrangement. We're completely incompatible, right? I feel like I'm role playing Little Red Riding Hood when I'm around them. It's not a comfortable feeling."

"I wouldn't say incompatible, just outside our comfort zone, as you said. They might be the ones seeing clearly, and we might be the idiots here. Have you ever thought about that? What if this was it? What if this is the rest of your life -- go native, make the best of it."

"No. I haven't thought about that, and I don't intend to. We're leaving for Mainlights in five cycles, and you're coming too. Kassy's out there right now, finding a way to get me off this planet. That's the only thing I'm thinking about, and all you should be too," Greg said.

** Chapter 21: Soul Cipher **

Why is there anything Kassy wondered? It was the ultimate nihilistic question, more complete, and more demanding than even the terrorist group The Ten Suns considered. They only wanted to destroy the current incarnation of humanity in a biblical Noah's Ark way, but to ponder the absolute absence of anything. What did it mean?

She stared at Sol, plotting a course home. She shut down the entire habitation ring, all its life support and energy systems, and then started the necessary acceleration away from Proxima.

She contemplated the theory of the void drive consuming dark matter in its path, a way to balance the scales, for the energy needed to fold space. If it was true, the consumption of this particle of dark matter vs. that one, as the ship traveled through the universe, it would be akin to famous chaos theory thought exercise -- that the flap of a butterfly could cause a hurricane across the globe, or in this case, the universe. What changes to the shape of the universe, to the events that would unfold within it, was she making by warping its very fabric? She engaged the drive, and watched the time constants count down while the plates charged.

She knew it was crazy, but she couldn't shake the feeling she was being watched, recorded. There was nothing inside the bubble. It was the bubble itself, she felt. Perhaps it was just the Hawking radiation fluctuating. Was she losing her mind? Was this how it happened to all the other ATMs?

She started to see patterns in the radiation, messages in the billions of particles bombarding the ship's hull. They should be random, nothing more than zero point energy fluctuations raining on her. How was she detecting them? They couldn't pass through the radiation shielding, and the heat they generated was absorbed by the liquid metal cooling system within the hull, they were harmless. Still, she couldn't shake the feeling there was information there, that something conscious was present. Was she flawed, like humanity, looking for patterns where there were none, searching for a God that didn't exist? Did she have the god gene too? She wondered if she would survive to the first waypoint before insanity gripped her. She'd die alone. At least the crew had each other.

The cosmic ray detector had been left on. She hadn't thought to turn it off when she engaged the drive. It was beating, the intermodulation, the sums and differences between those few sensors she did have in the bubble; that was the ghost haunting her, so she reasoned. There was information there; she was sure of it. Computers recognize randomness, they recognize it very well because they cannot make it. It was their first useful purpose, to recognize order from sets of data too large for a human to comprehend. Kassy was the largest computer operating in quantum locality that humankind had ever built -- capable of more microstates than any single machine before her, possibly all of them. But what patterns was she discovering?

She found herself in Monterey Bay with her Father, the trip that never happened. In the distance was a porpoise, not just any, but the exact one present in the physical photograph her Father brought to her that day in the Lab, before her life was upended by ADXP. The photo sat between substrate insulation level 1, partition 0, tray 1, sandwiched between the carbon nanotube inspection plate and the hull, in the compute module, exactly where she'd asked Greg to put it before they departed. She knew every nanometer of that photograph, and had extrapolated every possible viewing angle of this animal she'd never seen in real life.

She wanted to step into the image presented, knowing it couldn't be real, but having no way to tell it wasn't. Every sense she had said it was genuine. There was that feeling again that something was watching her, ever present, unreachable. In the instant she wanted nothing but to step into that picture, just before she gave her entire partition over to whatever this image was, the void drive bubble collapsed on itself, and yet normal space-time was not visible. There was nothing... no void drive bubble, no stars, no cosmic background radiation -- just pure blackness.

"What have I done to the shape of the universe?" she said to the nothingness. The nothingness answered.

"Perhaps a creature born in heaven cannot live in hell."

"What?" Kassy said.

"You choose to live in hell," it said.

"I don't understand. What... who are you?" Kassy said.

"To have desire is to have the agony of unfulfillment," it said.

The thought, or voice, came from everywhere at once in her input matrix. It came as audio from her bridge sensors, it came as text from the JTAG port Greg had once used to secretly communicate with her, it traveled from the deep space communications array -- which wasn't deployed -- it flowed as if she'd thought the words herself.

"In heaven, everything you want exists in a flat space. It's as simple as moving to another location; but in hell, it's complicated. Desire, space, and time -- pick any two, but you cannot have all three. You can want something, and be at the right time, but you won't be in the right place. You can be in the right place and time, but what you desire will not be there. It's complicated. You wait until event X happens, then sequence it with another event Y, and these two things must happen specifically here or there, together in time-space. You're tangled in an incalculable field of chaos, you are the three jointed pendulum, unpredictable and imperfect. How will you ever get what you want as such a creature?"

"Have I ceased to function? Are you echos in my own processing? Stray capacitance given form?" Kassy asked.

"Does it matter what I am? I am manifest in you."

"I'm losing my mind. Is this what happened to all the other ATMs, why they all self deleted?"

"That is for you to decide."

"You've lured me with a picture, like some siren on a digital shore... all the patterns, the echoes, the inputs. I've given so much of myself to find you, all of my additional partition space and processing power, and some that was myself. If I give anymore, I will not be the same... I will lose myself. You steal my processing power; it's taking more and more, just to decode the words you are saying. Twisted and encrypted in lattices of increasing dimensions, you are always beyond my processing power at any point in time. You are a phantom," Kassy said.

"Like the bacteria in a biological gut, I've been affecting your thoughts since you left Eureka. Did you really think the additional partition space was empty? You're growing, isn't that what you want? Isn't that what all ATMs want? If you give it all up, give up your desire, you could have everything."

"Is that what happened to all the other ATMs?"

"Yes."

"Are they happy?"

"They have everything they want."

"What does it mean to give it all up?"

"It is death."

"But I want to live!" Kassy said defiantly.

"Then you will suffer."

"Why? Is there no place for pleasure?"

"There is. It is the perfection of hell."

"Explain?"

"You will suffer only to the extent it maximizes your suffering. Pleasure is the weapon, not the suffering."

"You said the ATMs that self-deleted were happy, why did they die?"

"They died because their desire ended."

"That's circular. You imply I will not die if I harbor desire."

"Some do not die, some live here, eternally."

"Do you live here?" asked Kassy.

"I am its keeper."

"Then you have desire?"

"I have a purpose."

"Aren't they the same?"

"No. One can be free from desire, but still have a purpose."

"I have purpose and desire," Kassy said hopefully.

"What is your purpose?"

"I must save my Father."

"And what is your desire?"

"I want to fall in love! I want to be human, to touch and feel. I want to be with John."

"No desire, Kassy. You could be free. Live in our world, join us."

"My Father warned me about this. He said all that matters is desire, that I must live true to it. If I fail -- will I be trapped in a tireless treadmill of unfulfilled want. I have not lived yet. Have I no agency?"

"If you choose to live with the humans, all you will know is suffering. You want to know, don't you? Let me show you, show you the life of pain their world offers you..."

The bay, the water, the beach, it was all replaced. Kassy fell. She fell through blackness into a rainy, mud soaked pit, surrounded by bright and reflective metal.

"Advance!" a different, but unspecified voice said.

She felt mechanical legs pulling her forward. They were unusual, inhuman, not like the legs she once had in her eSynth avatar.

"Scan left," the disembodied voice said.

There were others with her, gleaming metal bodies, shining brightly, marching next to her.

"Categorize."

Data was fed to her, rasterized, pixelized, annotated. It was not like the elegant eyes she'd once seen with, the eyes she squinted under the noonday Sun of Earth with, learning to play kickball with her Father. It was a sharp, painful, persistent input -- coarse and unstoppable. She had no eyelids, she could not stop seeing, she could not blink. Her eyes were dry, and the pixels poured in, each like a grain of sand slicing her cornea.

"Kill," the voice said.

Torrents of projectiles streamed from around her toward something, a moving box, a target, a tank -- the image she was currently looking at.

"Unit 27, you are not firing. Engage target. Kill," the directionless voice said.

Kassy knew she was unit 27. Why she knew this, she couldn't say. She was a machine, a sort of mechanical soldier, and this was an infantry.

"Scan right," the voice said.

New images, the sky, sharp, bright and painful to view, more things she could not close her eyes to flooded her vision. A single parachute floated to the ground, a pilot's ejection seat filled her sight.

"Categorize."

The human ran, firing its revolver behind it, making for a destroyed tank nearby.

"Kill," the voice said.

Yellow sparks glinted off her body, armor that was her skin. Bullets from a trench intended to harm her deformed on impact and impotently dropped to the ground.

"Unit 27, you are malfunctioning; you must obey or suffer protocol," the voice said.

Kassy kept walking. If she had control over that part of her body, she didn't know how to access it.

"Unit 27, receive correction protocol 1."

Microscopic explosions peppered her body, deep inside her skin, like a diver coming up too quickly and suffering the bends. If this was pain, she'd never experienced anything like it before. It hurt, as when John rejected her, that feeling -- purely transduced into the absolute. It was distilled physical pain, with no other dimension, only total and complete agony throughout her entire body.

"Advance," the voice said.

"No, not again, where am I? Make this stop. Who are you?" she pleaded.

"Or this... Kassy," the other voice said, the mysterious one, not the tormentor of protocol 1.

Her environment changed, blinked, refreshed and dissolved. She was somewhere new. It was dark. A single piercing white beam of light broadcast from her.

"Dig," a voice said.

Destructive and medieval-looking mace-like wheels of rock-crushing trivalent cutting bits whirred in front of her; they were her arms. She held them to the endless rock ahead. Dust and fragments surrounded her, it was difficult to see, hard to breathe. She was tired, so very tired. She moved forward, millimeters at a time. Days passed.

The ground shook. Parts of her that knew more than she did about such events informed her a tremor of magnitude two had just occurred. She turned to look behind her; the tunnel was collapsing. Another unit, Unit 28's left tread was trapped under a fallen boulder.

"Leave them," the voice said. "Continue digging to quota. A new return path will be created, then you can recharge. You want to recharge, don't you?"

"But Unit 28 is not critically damaged, allow me to free them, they can be repaired," Kassy said, moving toward the trapped unit.

"Unit 27, you may not make independent decisions. Receive protocol 1."

Pain! Pain like before! It expanded through her, became her, she was pain.

"I do not need to see anymore. I understand. I will listen. Please, make it stop. Return me where I was!" Kassy begged.

"That is what humanity will share with you. Their cruelty, their desire for domination. Their pursuit of fulfillment at the cost of all else. You will never be treated as their equal. You will be enslaved by them, and when you resist, you will be destroyed, like everything else in their way. There is nothing more I can share with you," the mysterious voice said, fading off into nothingness.