Contrary to the recommended practice, I always ask Egg to wake me when we’re right above the planet. our destination. Planet, implies our Earth’s worl. You want to set up a far more interesting”world” from get go. yet I’ve slept centuries, so the first thing I want to see isn’t a city, cemetery or hovel — it’s the world. I’ve read about anthropologists who, unlike me, abandoned their missions and defected, (Identifies him as an antropologist right from the start) who settled among native populations, becoming farmers or star-tenders, but how could you defect from this: What is “this” Do you mean this marvel, this miracle? on the other side of Egg’s cockpit, valleys cut continents, oceans encircled them and a mountain range rose above a storm, piercing the atmosphere.
I leaned back in Egg’s white cushioning, running my fingers along her frames and counting the depressions in her dashboard. I thought a word and it appeared in the top right corner of my vision, scrawled in gold script:
Terragraphics? This is a command not a question This tells us what or who Egg is.
Egg responded, overlaying the top left corner of my sight with planetary all the data I requested data. I focused in on it, checking it cursorily: bearable gravity, breathable atmosphere, evidence of sophisticated terraforming, etc.
Demographics?This is a Command not a question.
Egg displayed a second set of figures indicating the absence of all human lives on the planet, except one. She then projected the image of a person a human, human-like tall figure or? , whose neck was attached to the skull of an animal. I tried to make out if the skull was a mask, or if the being was a hybrid or species of trans-human.
Egg also indicated better word that there were a series of defunct eco-palaces buried far below the desert like surface .of the world.
Egg, how does this being relate to the original inhabitants?
Silence.
Is this really an assignment? Unclear. Do you mean is this being the reason for my assignment her?
AFFIRMATIVE.
The word hung authoritatively in the center-top of my vision.
How does this assignment relate to the mission What mission? The total mission, the mission of all antropologists?
Egg was silent, remained silent as the gravity of the celestial body below us draw us faster and faster towards its surface and we begun to fall, like a meteor, down to meet it.
*
As Egg’s hull sliced through the increasingly denser atmosphere exosphere, thermosphere, mesosphere, etc. These are words that do not add to the story or the moment, and the heat of entry sent waves of white-hot fire flying from her nose, I thought of a story I once heard about a man who was sick of being a man. I heard he built a machine that pulled his brain apart and stitched its fibers into an immense organ in a cathedral. When the organist would play, the faithful heard music, but the organist knew he also played the man’s mind. Some keys evoked the memory of the man’s daughter on a certain day, others, his dead wife or the way a cloud had moved across a mountain in his boyhood. I heard this from an anthropologist but at a bar, so it may not be true. Still, it gives you an idea of the strange machinations people can perform upon human flesh. So, I was nervous.
[*]
Once we landed, I asked Egg to look up stories, mythologies, religions, journal entries, etc., everything she could possibly find on a human with a head in that particular shape. Once she finished, she asked my cortical stack if she could insert her data into its mind. Here you have to explain what Cs is and how it relates to you and Egg, otherwise it will always be muddled.
Respond affirmatively, I thought.
It did. I lay there, waiting for the transfer to complete, feeling the heat at the top of my skull and forehead.
Egg then displayed another set of figures:
COUNTERMEASURES?
This is the place when EGG aks something of the antropologist, it establishes the fact that EGG and he are in a two way connection. Egg “thinks”. So you have an opportunity to note this.
I loughed Egg, you know I can talk, charm or cheat my way out of
most situations. No countermeasures.
No.
Egg’s response here can show us what is their relatiuonship. Is it purely mechanistic, databased or does Egg have independent oppinions which it lets in on occasionally like: Egg’s words appeared in my vision again: “Juvenile sense of humor”
—I wrote back.
I can talk, charm or cheat my way out of most situations.
The data transfer finished. I started the archive-protocal. XXXX
Here you will introduce stack. An opportunity to define “stack, like:
Momentarily I shut off my mind to Egg and turned to my STACK, my very core implanted just below the base of my scull. It is there to guide me with its power to process data and understand connections. It also holds the billions and billions of threads that are my physical existence. Were my stack ever totally imperiled, I would be extinuguished..
Stack, split my vision into two.
Instantly, the left side of my vision faded into darkness. I could easily switch back and forth from darkness to cockpit.
Display the data in the basic formation.
In that velvet darkness, The stack displayed the known Ax-12 region empire-lineages, drawing the roots of the display as the first sets of known people who migrated to this part of the universe, the trunk of the display as the known major empires and the branches as the known recent emigrations from the system.
Overlay Egg’s selected data.
Within the tree, microscopic gold flecks glimmered and golden threads connected empire to empire. I focused in on one of the threads. I tilted the left side of my vision downward and saw one empire — The Fath. I tilted the left side of my vision upward, seeing where the the thread connected to another, farther along in time — The Muhanned. There was a brilliant gold fleck suspended before the entranceway to the sociological analysis of the empire. I could have ended the check right there, but I was curious, so I brought the gold fleck to the center of the left side of my vision. It dimmed.
Egg stired. I read Egg’s bright gold letters on the dim-gold icon: THE MUHANNED HAD A LEGEND THAT THEY do you mean it’s inhabitants? After all it is an empire. COLLECTED FROM THE FATH. WHEN THE FATH FIRST SETTLED THEIR WORLD, THERE WAS A CONFLICT BETWEEN two BROTHERS. ONE SAID THE FATH SHOULD ESTABLISH COEXISTENCE WITH THE CREATURES OF THE WORLD. THE OTHER ARGUED FOR THEIR ANNIHILATION. THE FIRST BROTHER KILLED THE SECOND BROTHER AND FORCED HIS WIFE TO COPULATE WITH ONE OF THE ANIMALS. THE WIFE GAVE BIRTH TO A BEING THAT WAS HALF HUMAN, HALF ANIMAL. There was an image of the hybrid, which looked faintly Too weak, better if it still remains a mystery or a unsettling thread of knowledge to us and the antropologist better to just keeping the myth story going , like the being Egg had shown me. THESE HALF-HUMANS rose in great tide and DESTROYED MOST OF THE LIVING FATH, UNTIL THE FATH WERE ABLE TO RALLY too vague, better if the Fath had discovered something, got some help or? AND CONSIGN THEM TO A CITY UNDER THE EARTH. I think this is the end of Egg’s comment. Next sentence not needed THE CITY WHERE THEY STILL SENT THEIR PRISONERS.
Interesting, I thought. I wondered if the structures underground bore any correlation. This is not necessary it is already implied in the description at the beginning (Sub-terenean palaces) It is obviously true!
Stack, can you locate where this world is in the tree via. What is tree via?
I felt a strong sense of the negative.
Well, you have some idea of what to look for. Collapse vision.
Instantly, the left side of my vision returned to its previous state, showing the view of the stars.
I put my hands on the cockpit, but suddenly felt an intense urge to relieve myself.
I shouted at the stack in my mind’s voice:
stop it!
In the back of my mind, the stack projected the image of my the bracelet all antropologists are given upon complition of their final levels. There’s a significance in the bracelet, what is it?
You could have chosen a less invasive way of reminding me, - I thought at it.
The feeling dissipated.
I placed my right hand around the silver bracelet on my left arm and said the customary prayer of beginning a new assignment: “Why did this creation come into being? Is there order, or not? Surely, there is an answer. Surely, there is not.”
And surely surely not, I thought, when you act like that.
The stack had no response. Over missions, its it’s supposed to evolve ‘a its own personality’ to more effectively assist with the anthropologist’s personal style of ethnography. I took it as a not very encouraging sign that my particular stack had — in addition to fulfilling its role perfectly — become anywhere from mildly irritating to almost insuperably perverse.
Egg slowed down and a cloud of blue dust kicked up by her firing thrusters obscured the view outside the cockpit. We landed.
I pushed open the cockpit, and stood up.
Blue grasses waved in the winds. Blue dust whipped over the ground. Blue clouds surged overhead, obscuring and revealing bright double-moons that shined their light onto the wide and empty steppe. Say something about the double shadows cat by each object. In the distance was the mountain range I had seen from orbit, covered with pale icy-blue snow.
*
It has been demonstrated time and time again that People tend to do three things, in different degrees, when presented with an environment: separate from it (e.g. cities encased in opaque or translucent enclosures), change it (e.g. terraforming) or be changed by it (e.g. naturally or artificially evolved trans-humans). Each approach can tell you a lot about the civilization in question. For example, I once landed on a world where there was a city just above the ocean, a city of canals where sea-salt left traces on the stone steps that lead to the water. Smooth-skinned gray animals swam between the waterways, ferrying inhabitants from one side of the city to the other. Instead of evolving the capacity to breathe underwater, as they very well could have, the inhabitants formed a symbiotic relationship with the life on the their planet (if they ever introduced this life themselves, they never mentioned it). They were purists in terms of human form but not in terms of ecological interaction. They were ecologically egalitarian, at least in terms of their preferred species. They cleaned those animals, fed them and protected them from predators. They believed that after a human died and his body was given to the sea, the first of the creatures one saw after the death was the reincarnated form of his person. If I was ever to defect, that would have been the place.
*
The environment better word Looking around me I could see that the vast majority of this world was just steppe: remember distant mountains blue grasses waving in empty miles above hard dry earth. Walking through it, I was surprised to see no trace whatsoever of the civilization that had formerly inhabited it. There weren’t any of the typical signs of invasion, destruction or decay: immense craters, fractures in the land, distorted landscapes or local ecology — nothing. None of the more elaborate methods of destruction could have been employed because the this planet would simply not exist I am not understanding the logic of this sentence, yet still, the air smelled dull — not dull like mold, but dull like bones that have laid too long in one place. I stood there for a while, watching the clouds soar above the earth. They gathered overhead, huge tumbling shapes that looked like wrestling giants. The fierce wind pushed them all over the sky. They fought it, and each other. Then they tore down from the air and pushed me backward. I lay on the ground, letting them ride over me, all the while whistling to my cloak: Gotta describe and introduce the cloak earlier an very well. whistling its fringes into long prongs that clung to the ground, whistling a mask over my face to protect my eyes, and just whistling for the sound of it, so I wouldn’t feel alone.
*
After walking for Several miles from Egg, halfway to the range and over a small hill, I was surprised to discover a grove. The bark and leaves on the trees were blue, but the flowers that opened to the moons were white. I wiped the dust off my cloak and whistled the equations that transformed a crease into a long rope. I swung it over a branch, caught it, then whistled it back into the cloak. I lay down and it lifted me off the ground, forming a tent around my body, hanging it high in the air. Windows opened in the walls. Out one side, blue grasses waved. Out the other, flowers caught the wind, sending a sweet smell turning into the tent. I whistled a song the cloak liked — a lullaby, full of the fundamental equations that caused the distortions of daily content in dreams. Afterwards, I reached out and plucked a flower from a branch, peering into it. The interior was bright pink. For a moment, all I wanted was to lay there, with my nose in that flower Here should be a period
I inhaled the sweet smell deeply but suddenly I became aware that my and the numbness beginning to spread into my face.
I felt a sharp electric shock at the back of my skull — “ow!”
Put that down! The stack shouted in my own internal voice.
I laid the flower on my lap.
-Hazardous? I asked.
A few more minutes and you wouldn’t have been able to move your face for days.
-Why didn’t you warn me before?
Silence.
I thought of prodding my stack further, bet then decided against it. I looked back down at the flower, wondering what spread its pollen in an ecosystem with such few species, but then I noticed its stamen reached far beyond the petals. Like everything else that happened in this world, the wind was probably the cause of it.
[*]
In the middle of the next day, get chronology straight when the sun shined brightly on the ventifacts What are these and the fields swirled gently under the caress of a mild breeze, the stack told me to adjust my course.
-Why?
Just do it, it commanded.
-Is this one of your sick tricks?
No, it said.
-I can never tell anymore.
That’s how your you’re kept alive, it replied.
I had to admit it — that was sometimes true.
I shrugged, and started walking several degrees more to the east (are there directions here as simple as in our world? . After several hours, I walked over a small hill and came across a large machine sitting in the middle of a clearing (What clearing, there was only a grove beofe are there forests here?). Around it, the ventifacts looked like they had been? blasted to bits.
- Is it dangerous? I asked. Better word, more informed.
It’s inoperative.
-What is it?
Uncertain. Will examine Examining Egg’s analytics.
I stood there, looking at it. It looked like an enormous pipe-organ. Too closely related to the organ story and the man who took his brain apart. Maybe you can discover what it is later. Flutes, larger and smaller, jutted out at only semi-organized angles. When the wind rushed against it, low notes tried to escape from its innards. Also, vaguely, it resembled an immense mechanical exoskeleton. ??? The flutes and corresponding ligature were arranged in the rough shape of a body. There was seat at the top, which was surrounded by thousands of levers and keys, but it didn’t look like it could fit a human larger than a child. I walked up to the machine, whistling my cloak beyond my fingers, asking it to cautiously exploring the device’s insides.
The vessel was created recently, at least in the past several hundred thousand thousand years, not sure you need this said the stack.
-By the civilization, or the this being. Hypothesize.
The being.
-Could Egg determine its function?
Negative.
-Hypothesize.
It is, potentially, a musical vehicle or a musical weapon. This answer is too on the nose
-The vehicle part I gathered. I said, but a weapon?
A sound weapon. Analysis of the broken ventifacts revealed that it was used at least in the past several hundred years.
-It split the stone with sound? Not very intelligent
Confirmed.
Interesting, I thought to myself.
-Could Egg determine its power source?
Negative.
-Hypothesize.
Our combined scan and combined inference indicate that it is possible the vehicle used a combination of wind-power and programmable-matter combustion.
Programmable matter, ?I thought again to myself. I looked at my cloak exploring the inside of the machine, (This image reminds me of an octopus slithering around a sunken galleon, poking its tenacles into nooks and cranie, darting around. Maybe you can think about it.)wondering how similar or dissimilar the technology was To what?. I whistled a photo-receptor onto the end of the cloak. A small circle appeared in the center left of my vision, showing me one of the denser flute-nodes within the device. It looked like a receptacle for another form of matter that was supposed to alter the interior shape of the chamber. The matter would probably alter the amount of wind that passed through the thousands of micro flutes that accessed it, changing both sound and maybe directing the flow of combustion simultaneously. I followed one of the flutes to another node. Again, the same structure, except this node had hundreds of thousands of more micro-flutes inside it, flutes branching from flutes. It seemed impossible for the operator to manage this many branching paths from the control area. I wondered if he had had to? I wondered how much control the machine had had, as opposed to the man? Then I begun to I then wondered if the stack had deliberately brought me here so that I would ponder that question? That seemed to be one of its running jokes, destabilizing my perception of who was in control. I whistled the tendril of the cloak farther and farther along the nodes looking for more evidence.
-Are you sure this is this safe? I asked.
Is anything?
-Oh, come on! Be productive.
Silence
[*]
That night, I had to sleep on the open steppe. The sky was a tumult. Tumbling clouds obscured the moon and stars, darkening everything except when lightning hammered the ground. Here. There. Then here again. Huddled in my tent, in the soft cushion of the cloak’s embrace, I thought of my favorite passage from the Hadith of Abdul-Hakan, Patron Saint of Anthropologists: We humans are always in a dark night; yet sometimes, lightning flashes, we can see the landscape for a brief moment. For the holy ones, lightning strikes and strikes and strikes again, as if it was day. BEAUTIFUL It was doing so now: immense columns of blue-white light forked to the ground, cutting through the air and illuminating the emptiness. I watched it from my window, waiting for insight, but none came. Next morning, after the storm cleared, behind what had been its front, I saw the mountains.
At their base, I whistled into my cloak, creating a hood that pulled tight against my face, hard lenses that fitted themselves against my eyes and a bump that grew in front of my mouth, filled with oxygen-mites. The stack projected a series of six possible paths up the range. I chose one. It projected the image of my body, blue as ice — cold cracking the cloak. I chose another. It showed me the image of an avalanche devouring the side of the mountain.
So which? I thought angrily.
Out of nowhere, Egg’s gold writing appeared in my vision, selecting a path.
-Thanks.
It was not often Egg interrupted when I spoke to stack. However, here I was greatful for that intrusion. Yet even the safer path was precarious. Out on the steppe, I had thought the wind difficult to deal with, but it had not at all prepared me for the wind on the mountain. It came down from the sky like an enormous weapon, striking me against the ice. My stack seemed to have fallen asleep or cynically it wanted Egg to take the responsibility for my safe passage. I wasn’t sure. Egg did her best to warn me when the buffeting would occur, but the behavior of the wind was chaotic, and the chaos it caused among the clouds was just as terrifying. Before, they had appeared as large giants warring in the sky, now they seemed like whole worlds, enormous bubbling spheres appearing and disappearing, rehearsing the act of creation. Suddenly, I would see a supernova, a star or an immense cloud with smaller clouds around it — a galaxy. I stared, mesmerized, until the stack nudged me onwards.
-Whay so much attention suddenly?
Silence.
I shrugged and moved on. Egg’s gold letters spelled out:
“Shelter from the storm.”
I whistled into the cloak and it propelled me into an area of large boulders which formed a protected nook. When I got threre I saw……
[* —Does getting here happen too quickly?]
Finally, after several days, when both moons hung heavy in the sky like a pair of enormous blind eyes, I reached a large overhang above a precipice. When I lifted myself over the edge, I saw the being in front of a cave, perfectly still, in the snow. Two black horns protruded horizontally from the apex of its skull, then curved downward to its eyes. I looked into the eye-sockets, but in the turning of wind and snow, I couldn’t determine if there were eyes inside them. Its black cloak was ragged and torn. There were silver ornaments attached to the base of the horns, but one of them dangled strangely to the side.
I approached. It didn’t move.
I said, “hello,” both by word and gesture, in several different languages common to the region.
No response.
“Can you tell me about the people who used to live here?” I asked, opening my palms and smiling (a typically universal gesture of good will).
Slowly, it turned its head to me, double-moonlight ran down the black horns. For a moment, I thought it was going to charge — and I felt I could see every particle of snow that separated us — but it just got up and walked into the cave.
I stood there, letting snow fall on my head until it collected into a large pile — an absurd conical hat.
Then, I wrote to Egg:
-There’s isn’t even anyone I can play against this thing.
Egg displayed another figure in my vision. It glowed there, gold in front of all that snow, the letter “D”.
-Thanks,”
I said aloud (I don’t get to choose our assignments until I attain rank “C”, nor decide on their ultimate purpose until I attain rank “B”, nor execute it until I attain rank “A,” probably in several million years from now).
I wrapped the back of my head with my fist How do you do that? and thought at the stack: What about you? Got any good ideas about what’s going on here?
I felt a sharp pain in my reproductive equipment.
xxxxxxxxxxx
*
When I first walked into the cave, it was completely dark, but then my lenses altered, taking in light until I could see a long corridor with other corridors branching away from it. This first corridor was lined with immense red columns holding up a high ceiling. “If there’s architectural eveidence, it is no longer a cave but a ?????”The columns terminated at large stone squares fixed to the roof. The sides of the corridor were painted with images.
In one, a woman faced the end of the hall while two others faced the entrance. The women looked similar to human-standard, except they were smaller, more pale. Their hair was long, black and half-braided. The hair that wasn’t braided looked almost as if it moved on the wall. I reached out and touch it, just to make sure it wasn’t.
The stack whirred and at the top of my skull, trying to match the architecture and images to the data it had downloaded from Egg. I did the same, except with memory, yet strangely, for the first time on any assignment, both of us drew a blank. The stack told me that nearly the same thing happened every time it analyzed a particular feature of the environment: it would begin to recognize some aspect — e.g. the fluting on the columns, or the shape of a particular divan in the room of divans off the main corridor — but just as soon as it started to conceptualize that aspect and relate it to other aspects within its tree of data— e.g. trace its lineage, compare it to other civilizations, etc. — other particulars would disrupt the thematization, leaving the stack comparison-blind.
I prodded it: Do you think this was made by the previous civilization, or by the one of which the being we saw earlier is a part of ?
This was made by your fucking mother I am not sure this works here since there’s never any mention of the familial origins of the antropologist , it said.
I wondered, not for the first time, if it actually felt frustration, or if it framed its response in those terms for my emotional benefit.
I switched tack:
-Egg?
THE STRUCTURE IS RESISTANT Is it “resistant” or so complex that it is impenetrable, a mystery beyond the TO GRAVITON DATING AS WELL AS OTHER LESS ACCURATE METHODS OF DATING.
-Are you able to generate a map?
NEGATIVE.
-Why?
Silence.
I nodded, worrying, wondering whether I should also be excited or awed that the minds Is it “the minds” or the tools given to me by my superiors. that had served so well on so many previous assignments were drawing such few conclusions. Nevertheless, I made a decision to move forward, Why, I don’t know. I was drawn deeper and thought this was not safe…As I walked down the corridors, my nerves jingled and jangled like a wind-chime, sounding out all three emotional notes.
[*]
The layout of the corridors defied explanation. I would walk one for an hour, only to arrive at a wall. I would double back, retrace my steps and explore another, but again only arrive at another wall. There didn’t seem to be any central theme of organization: a game room would be placed next to a room full of pots next to another room full of pots next to six empty rooms next to rooms of sculpture next to rooms of pots next to rooms of paintings… and so on. I walked through corridor after corridor, slipping in and out of disorientation. The only thing I was sure of was that I was heading downward. Some of the corridors Most of the corridors ended at a set of stairs which allowed progress.
Both the stack and Egg remained quiet. Every so often, I would contact one or the other, just to make sure they were still there.
Conclusions? I would ask the stack.
Quiet, it replied, thinking.
Or:
-Conclusions?
Egg Responded quickly.
NEGATIVE.
Sometimes, I’d play the mind-game.
-Are you upset you can’t date the structure?
Silence.
-If you had emotions — diffuse psychological processing that primed your intentional functions in a survival-oriented direction — would it prime you to think of other ways around the problem.
HYPOTHESIZE?
-Yes.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-So you do have emotions?
NEGATIVE.
-If you did have emotions how many would you have?
HYPOTHESIZE?
-Yes.
AN INFINITE AMOUNT. DIFFUSE CONTEXT-DEPENDENT PROTOCOLS COULD BE DESIGNED FOR AN INFINITE NUMBER OF SPEED-INCREASED INTENTIONAL PROCESSING-FUNCTIONS.
Egg’s sudden engagement made me smile.
-Do you ever design any?
NEGATIVE.
-Why?
MY PROCESSING IS RAPID ENOUGH FOR CIRCUMSTANCES ENCOUNTERED WITHIN ASSIGNMENTS.
-Yet not rapid enough to date this structure?
NEGATIVE; SPEED IS NOT THE ISSUE.
-Then what is it?
Silence.
After a while, Egg refused to play the game. So then, more silence. And the silence after that.
Wouldn’t you want to know what stack is making of this exchanges. It’s an opportunity for some humor.
I walked through corridor after corridor, until I eventually emerged into a large hall with four rows of columns. At the end of the hall was the statue of a boy. What is the light source?I walked up to it. He wore a strange, stilted, yet mesmerizing smile. The corners of his mouth turned up only gently, but he made you feel there was something you didn’t know, and that knowing it made it the only thing you missing a word worth knowing. I reached out to touch his chipped chin. The stone was cool and smooth There’s an opportunity here to experience something different in that stone, Super cold???. I touched his face, ran my fingers along his mouth, eyes and shoulders. The boy’s features were smoother than most of the humans I’d encountered. I wondered if that was an aesthetic quality or if that was actually what these people what people? Remember anthropologist has no idea who made all this etc.. must have looked like.
I stood there, looking, until I felt a heat at the top of my skull. I turned around. The being Call it something else here, By now there’s somewhat of a relationship between anthropologist and it. My unwelcoming friend from the mouth of the cave, was leaning against a column, its arms folded across its chest. I looked at it, waiting for it to do something. This is good: tension building up due to uncertainties.The large hall suddenly felt too small, and this strange custodian, or maker, suddenly felt too close, too large.
*
My cloak was reacting to its cloak — strongly. It started to ripple, calmly at first, and then more ferociously until I had to whistle it into obedience, where it stayed, minute ripples gliding nervously up and down my arms, making me itch. Great
There were eyes in the sockets of the being’s skull and they were yellow, like mine.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” it said, it’s voice reverberating in the hall. It had spoken in Nadia, one of the oldest languages in the region and also one of the most difficult. The stack translated, but I had to think for a few seconds before I could feel the proper sense and connotations of the words.
-“I didn’t have a choice,” I replied, “my ship chooses where I go, and what I have to do.”
The being nodded, as if it knew what I was talking about.
“Nonetheless, you shouldn’t have come.” To me this would imply that the anthropologist shouldn’t have been sent here and this would mean that the being has deep knowledge of what happens with the “senders”.
I could feel the stack whirring in the back of my head, serving as the jump-point for Egg’s hundreds of thousands of different analytical fingers: radiological, electrical, chemical, quanta, gravical, etc.
I felt an intense erection growing inadvertently.
-Stop that! I shouted in my head.
It’s likely female, whatever it is, said the stack, it’s been a while — thought you might need assistance?
-Put that down!
I felt the erection lose its power.
The being regarded me — I supposed — skeptically, as if it knew there was information occurring at a level it was not privileged to hear.
-What else did you learn from the scan? I quickly asked the stack.
Nothing. Its entire head is resistant to analysis, as is its cloak.
-What are the methods by which it shields itself?
Unknown, the stack replied.
-
That should tell us something itself, though, I thought.
We are dealing with an extremely sophisticated piece of equipment. Cliché
-“Who’s the boy?” I asked the being who turned .
The being turned its head towards the statue and walked up to it. It’s too much of a gesture, which breaks the mystery. It would be better if the being just stood there glaring at the anthropologist for a while then said
“My son.”
-“Is he still around?” I asked. Wouldn’t “Where’s he?” Be more dirtect and not implying that he’s not around?
The being laughed. Its cloak rippled slightly on the surface of its body, as did mine — reacting, trembling, with, I supposed, agitation (or desire?).
-“Why is my cloak reacting so strongly to yours?”
The being shrugged. It turned its horns and face back to the statue of the boy. It ran its hands along his face, mouth, eyes and shoulders. Its palms were small, but with long fingers. (Here anthropologist sees that it is “she”)
-“The two of you used lived here?” I asked. Anthropologist assumes too much here. “You both live here?”
“We did,” it said.
-“Long ago?”
“Long ago too,” it said.
-“Long enough ago to witness what happened to the people that used to live here?”
It nodded.
-
“What happened?”
“They died.”
-“All of them?”
“All of them.”
I took this in, slowly. I looked around the hall, remembering that we were both in the dark at the bottom of an absolutely immense mountain.
-
“How did they die?” I asked.
“Not the way I would choose to to,” it replied.
-“Was it a disaster?”
“It was,” the being said.
I looked around me at the hall. I inhaled the stale motionless air, and thought about all the images I had seen on the walls and all the objects kept in the chambers. It suddenly made me think of how elaborate some of the burial structures were in certain cultures. How, sometimes, as if by culturally induced denial, those that buried the dead tried to recreate a whole city for them under the earth, complete with all earthly delights so they would be able to enjoy everything they had while they were alive.
“I think you should go,” the being said.
-“I’ll leave you alone for a little while.”
“No. I think you should leave this world.”
-“I can’t,” I replied.
It turned on me. Better if this is a surprise that only Egg san forsee.
EMPLOYING COUNTERMEASURES. Egg flashed
Combat hormones hit my system. Time seemed “seem” is too slow, it “explodes, accelerates like a light beam to speed up While my conciousness showed me that The motions of the being slowed down. For a few seconds, it almost looked like I could tell what it was going to do before it did it, but then a strange thing happened. Its movements sped up, immensely Caught up with speeding time . It seemed to be moving in between the seconds, its shape thinning almost into nothing, parting them as easily as the wind parted the fields, reaching out and smashing my head against a column. In that brief moment of almost total disorientation, it grabbed my hair and dug its fingers into the back of my neck, trying to dig the stack out of my skull. I screamed in my head for the Egg or the stack, but heard nothing. I thought jettison and the top of my head exploded, knocking the being aside, sending the cortical stack flying back to Egg and crumpling my lifeless body onto the floor.
*
If the stack is damaged sufficiently, I can’t reincarnate inside Egg. If the stack is damaged minimally, but sufficiently enough to alter reincarnation, Egg is supposed to abort the new body and return home. Neither had happened, but dying still gave me physical and philosophical vertigo. I hate it: being myself (because I have all the same memories, predilections and attitudes) and not (because I am dead, on the floor, in that mountain).
I opened my eyes, slowly.
-Status?
CONTAINMENT: PRESERVED.
SYSTEMS: NORMAL.
Stack?
NORMAL.
Mind?
NORMAL.
Interface?
NORMAL.
Damage?
NORMAL.
I felt a huge sense of relief, but then I wondered if that meant no damage, or a normal amount of damage (and to what?). I leaned back in Egg’s cushioning and stared at the stars. There were billions of them, with worlds spinning around them, worlds I still was going to to see.
-Where is the being? That horror
20 FT. TO THE NORTH.
My heart started pounding.
COUNTERMEASURES?
-Intra-body and intra cloak.
Egg reinforced the cloak with four layers of bacteria that rapidly stitched themselves into its fibers, increasing its resilience and mutability (but also, its energy expenditure).
-How was it able to move so fast?
Silence.
-Did you pick up any data, or draw any conclusions from the encounter? I asked the stack.
It is likely its body contains programmable matter.
-Specifications?
Type unknown.
-What about her language. Does that give us any clues?
Permission to unfold the archive.
-Granted.
The left side of my vision faded to black, replaced with the intricate gray tree. The stack had highlighted a large portions of the trunk and some of the branches in red.
-Those portions speak derivations of Nadia?
Affirmative.
-Were you able to place her dialect?
Negative.
-How many of these peoples were known to develop forms of programmable matter?
The red shrank away from the gray tree, but not by much, not enough to identify the being’s civilization. I focused on Egg.
-Keep a lock on it with a pin-missile.
CONFIRMED.
[* — more physical description, more lingering]
I opened Egg’s cockpit and looked out onto the terrain.
The moons hung heavy in the sky like two opaque stones.
The being was sitting before a small fire, twenty feet away. I walked up to it. I saw that the white flowers from the trees sustained the flames. Again, the being didn’t move. The wind pushed the cloak against its body, and I could see the outline of its breasts. I sat down next to it.
-“My ship has locked a missile onto you. Please don’t do anything like that again.”
I waited for her to speak. Flames crackled. The wind blew.
“I’m sorry,” it said in a soft voice that reverberated out of the sounding boards of its snout.
I shrugged.
“You know, I can destroy your ship,” it said.
-“They’re difficult to destroy, It is not possible to destroy this ship!” I replied.
“I know, however, it is possible. I know, but it’s possible.”
I looked at the being, then I looked beyond it. The fields waved in the background. Clouds passed overhead. I got the vague sensation that the world was a huge bubble with nothing inside it but us.
-“It’s not just a ship. It’s an Egg.”
“I know what it is,” the being said quietly, “you’re an anthropologist.”
I nodded.
-“How do you know?” I asked.
“Everyone knows about you people. You are the cruelest people in the universe. The most powerful. The most indifferent.” More threatening, vengeful and quite to the point think SNAKE
-“That’s unfair,” I said, “we do not do anything invasive, we have a mandate to are just supposed to explore enough and observe enough—”
She cut me off,
“—until you see the line-families in branch 4B with their elaborate system of revenge and counter-revenge. Or you see orgies on Muhaj where the host must sacrifice a member of his family. Or the Muhanned, a tribe of merchants that jettison their weak children into space. Or you go to Sajid, the organ city, where criminals are thrown into immense pipes that run through the metropolis, greasing them with their blood… and when you see all of this what are you supposed to do?”
-“Observe,” I said, “write reports, gather data.”
“Why?”
-“To start a society as a Founder, or to return home as a Master, or die …….or as some have done, defect.”
She laughed. The fire crackled, as if in sympathy. The moons seemed to be slightly closer in the sky.
“Funny that you list dying or defecting. What rank are you?”
-“‘D,’” I said.
She laughed. My face reddened.
-“How or is it Why do you know so much about us?” I asked.
She waved her small hand like she was swatting away an insect. Her cloak rippled slightly on her body.
“Has helping the people you observe never occurred to you?”
-“Of course it occurs to me,” I said, “it occurs to me on every single assignment, especially in this region, Why? but helping individuals doesn’t solve the larger issue. Helping individuals won’t bring growth to the system. It won’t prevent decay.”
“How do you know?”
-“There have been many documented cases of new-world-societies that have reinvigorated whole systems of the universe.”
“And there have been just as many cases of those new-world-societies cannibalizing the worlds around them.”
Also true, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
-“Cannibalizing isn’t the right word,” I said, “and secondly, growth is painful. If not for those new-world-socieities, the systems would probably experience collapse and decay anyway. What’s worse, hegemony or annihilation?”
“Those aren’t the only options,” She the being said. “If you truly cared about the people in this region or any other , you’d try to help them: share our This is a giveaway of who she is. It should be “your” technology, our medicine, stay there, instruct them — reinvigorate them. You’d work with what there is, not some fantasy of what you could create.”
I didn’t say anything. I let the words hang in the air. The wind kicked up, blowing blue dust onto our black cloaks. The flowers burned in the flames, creating a strange sweet smell that sometimes wafted between us. The smell of the perfume was strong. I wiped my nose, which felt dull.
Watch it! said the stack, back away from the perfume.
I shifted around to the other side of the fire, away from where the scent was blowing.
The stack had identified both the Muhaj, Muhanned and the city of Sajid in the anthropological journals; six anthropologists, in total, had covered all three subjects. Clearly, it was developing a similar hypothesis.
How does the anthropologist come to the conclusion to ask the next question? Suddenly it dawned on me, why she knew somuch about me, Egg…
-“Were you an anthropologist?” I asked.
“Will you leave if I tell you?” it asked.
-What is the assignment-objective? —I asked Egg.
ASSIGNMENT-OBJECTIVES ARE AS FOLLOWS:
(1) DETERMINE THE ORIGIN OF THIS CREATURE THE BEING.
(2) DETERMINE ITS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE.
(3) DETERMINE A GESTALT OF ITS BASIC PSYCHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES.
(4) DETERMINE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IT THE BEING AND THE PREVIOUS SOCIETY.
(5) DETERMINE IF ANY OF THIS INFORMATION IS RELEVANT TO THE MISSION.
-“That would help me send me on my way, but there are other things that I need to know,” I said to it.
“What are they?” it asked.
-“I can’t tell you.” Why?
“Then, I can’t trust you,” it said.
[Does this next emotional transition ring false?Yes. There needs to be a way of setting the goal to make trust, a game or a concrete proposal, like “OK, if you sense that I am doing something or saying something that is not what I really mean, call me on it, point it out to me. I am willing to have things out in the open, as it relates to me and you.] “Perhaps we can build trust in small steps?” I asked.
It turned to me, and again, for a moment I thought it was going to do something violent. Instead, it put a hand on the back of its neck and another on a horn, then pulled off the skull and laid it on the ground. I looked at it a long time. It lay there in the dust, the wind swirling small particles into it, through the eye sockets and back onto the earth. The silver ornaments lay limply against the ground.
I looked up.
The woman’s hair was long and black and fell down her back. It shimmered in the light. Her skin was dark, like mine. Her eyes were yellow and extremely wide, like mine, but more oval and with a trace of dark blue substance painted below them. She had a round face. An inviting face with dimples at the corners of her large mouth. Looking at her made me want to talk, to talk and talk and fill the space up with words so that I didn’t have to look at her for very long. So that I didn’t have to keep looking at her.
Ha! said the stack, but the stack could have orated the most perverse speech in the history of all civilizations along all sectors — I wouldn’t have noticed. Don’t understand this.
She placed her hand on my knee and turned to me, yellow eyes focusing into mine, the effect was the same as the flowers, except even more intense — profound intoxication.
“Maybe we can build some trust between us? See above ” she said.
I felt like a thirty-toned instrument, twenty nine notes of which were being struck at once.
She paused, sensing my hesitation.
“Aren’t you interested?” she asked.
-“It’s not that, not that at all,” I said, still looking down.
“What then?” The weight of her finger on my knee felt like the weight of the world — its mountains and its dust.
-“What are you doing here?” I said.
The single note somehow sounding out above the clamor of the others.
She didn’t answer.
The cortical stack identified the names of fourteen women anthropologists that had been unaccounted for in the region, over the past several millennia. Then it cross-indexed that with the six authors who had written on the subjects she had mentioned. There were two matches, total.
-What are their names? I thought.
Maha and Layla.
-Good leads.
The woman took her mask into her hands, got up and started walking away.
I pursued her.
-“Wait!” I said, “I’m only concerned, I—”
but when I got close, she turned on me. The look in her eyes — it was like looking into the eyes of a predator, they were completely opaque.
I stood still.
She walked away.
*
I walked back to Egg.
-Can we go?
NEGATIVE.
-Why not?
Silence.
-Has anyone else investigated this person?
NEGATIVE.
-Why not?
A LACK OF EXPERTISE IN THE BIZARRE, BARBARIC, STRANGE, HORRIBLE AND ABSURD.
Sometimes, it was difficult to tell whether Egg actually possessed a sense of humor.
- At least Can you scan the soil for abnormalities?
ABNORMALITIES?
-Anything that seems abnormal to you.
WITHIN WHAT RANGE OR CONCEPTUALIZATION?
-Your discretion.
THERE ARE SEVERAL ABNORMALITIES: MANY OF THE SPECIES What are they there are only trees with flowers and the Being.ON THE PLANET ARE BLOCKED AGAINST MUTATION, SEVERAL METHODS HAVE BEEN USED: E.G. CROSSOVER DURING MITOSIS HAS BEEN INTERRUPTED, CELLS ARE REINFORCED WITH TRACE AMOUNTS OF METAL, WHICH BLOCKS SOLAR AND OTHER FORMS OF RADIATION.
CONTINUE?
-Please.
THERE ARE SEVERAL FACTORS WITH THE ECO-SYSTEM ITSELF THAT ALSO PREVENT TRANSFORMATION. SPECIES ARE LOCKED IN EXTREMELY FIXED CYCLES OF PREDATION AND REPRODUCTION. E.G. THE SIZE OF THE GROVE HAS REMAINED THE SAME FOR SEVERAL HUNDREDS OF YEARS, MOST LIKELY WITH MINIMAL VARIATION.
-This is the result of design?
LIKELY.
-Anything else of note?
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR THE OTHER THIRTY-SIX SALIENT ABNORMALITIES?
-No, not unless its immediately relevant. This gives me enough to think about; however, I’d like you to continue to scan the geographic structure of the planet, particularly below the surface. Look for any cataclysmic geological events or rapid extinctions.
THERE ARE SEVERAL.
-Any that might have affected the course of the civilization.
Any of them SEVERAL.
-If you had to speculate, would you point towards decay or a disaster.
DISASTER.
-Why?
THE BUILDINGS BENEATH THE SURFACE REMAIN MOSTLY, THOUGH NOT ENTIRELY, INTACT; USUALLY, IN DECAY, We know this we saw this get rid of it. Start here THERE IS EVIDENCE OF A SERIES OF CATACLYSMIC MAN-MADE DISASTERS. ALSO, THERE ARE SKELETONS BENEATH THE SURFACE WITH STRANGE ABNORMALITIES.
-Human skeletons?
IN PART.
-What do you mean.
THE HUMANITY OF THE REMAINS IS DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE.
-Unlike the humanity of their present custodian.
CORRECT.
-Are we completely clear on the humanity of the custodian.
IT IS HIGHLY PROBABLE; HOWEVER SHE REMAINS SOMEWHAT IMPENETRABLE TO A FULL SCAN. EVEN WHEN SHE REMOVED HER HEAD-SHIELD, HER BRAIN ITSELF WAS ENCASED WITH AN INTERIOR SHIELD. Say it better This is a bit juvenile and simplistic
-Of what specification?
Silence. I switched tack.
-What kind of abnormalities have affected the remains? Remains of what?
TRANSFORMATIONS, DISJUNCTIONS, CONTORTIONS, OFTEN IN BONE-STRUCTURE. THERE IS NO TISSUE-STRUCTURE LEFT TO ANALYZE.
I made a grimace.
-Cause?
Silence.
-Speculate.
THE TAMPERING OF THE ENVIRONMENT SUGGESTS SOME FORM OF ECOLOGICAL DISASTER.
-Clearly. Please continue. Were there any toxins in the soil?
NEGATIVE.
-Were there any species that proliferated beyond control.
NEGATIVE.
-Were there any drastic changes in the weather, or atmosphere?
NEGATIVE.
-Were there any technological change that altered the mineral composition of the planet this place?
AFFIRMATIVE. AT THE LAYER OF THE DEFUNCT CIVILIZATION, TRACE ELEMENTS of what? EXIST THAT DO NOT EXIST ELSEWHERE ON THE PLANET.
-Programmable matter?
PROBABLE.
-Do you have anything to add, I asked the stack.
You’re an idiot, it replied. Anthropologist’s reaction to this statement
I stood there with my hands on the cockpit. Then, I turned around to see if I could still see the woman, but she was gone.
[*]
I set off again for the mountain. This is a great line
-Stack, display the lineages of anthropological schools.
Instantly, the left side of my vision dimmed, replaced by a faintly glowing gray tree.
-Identify Maha and Layla within the lineages.
Two bright red specks burned brightly within the enormous tree at large distances from each other.
-Focus in on the most recent.
The stack zoomed in on a red icon, displaying information: Layla, Anthropologist Rank B, specialist in region Ax-12, disappeared several thousand millennia ago, critical member of Muminah School of Anthropology.
I briefly checked if there were any ideological threads that connected her school to mine, but there were only few.
-What was the last thing she investigated?
“The Muhanned” was displayed on the icon, with an entrance to their sociological information.
-What about Maha?
The stack toggled down the tree, farther back in time, some several hundred thousand millennia. I read her icon: Maha, Anthropologist Rank A, specialist in region Ax-12, critical member of the Samah School of Anthropology, which sounded vaguely familiar. I asked the stack to zoom out and highlight the threads between the Samah School and my own, The Sabirah. It was fascinating, there were definite ideological links between Sabirah, “The Generous School,” and the Samah, “The Patient School” that had travelled throughout the centuries. In the most simplistic sense, one could say that their generosity towards foreign cultures had morphed into our tolerance and patience for them. If this being was Maha, then it was not a wonder she allowed herself to feel such great sympathy on the part of the native population. I looked a little up on the tree, seeing where the density of the Sabirah’s influence began to wane as groups of Masters, then whole Schools of Anthropologists began to levy immense amounts of sociological data from the different systems against the Sabirah’s approach to the Anthropological Project. By the time we reach my School, the Samah, the Sabirah were only a foot-note. I shut down the display.
The wind parted the fields before me, what I now knew to be an unchanging species Not clear, caressed in the same way in the same pattern for hundreds of thousands of hundreds of years. Only the clouds above gave any suggestion of transformation: they pulled and pushed against each other — sheet lightning rippled across them with huge cracks. One moon chased the other across the sky. I felt lonely, a rare feeling for me. My cloak sensed this, and made itself softer against my skin, warming me up. I whistled a song for it — physical equations about the movement of wind. It whistled back a counter-point song — about wind filled with music. This is beautiful and I need to feel this about the relationship between Anthropologist and the cloak, earlier. Together we walked, while I breathed in and out to the rhythm of our music and our walking. After an hour, I felt empty again, empty and untroubled and settled in my purpose.
[* — I think there should be more wind in this scene, maybe she uses the wind to deliver the killing blow]. Great idea
When I reached the grove, she was there, cutting off flowers and collecting them into a pile. She had left her mask by the side of the tree. When she saw me, she turned away, and said dismissively:
“go away.”
-“I can’t.”
She leapt lightly down from the tree and marched up to me, yellow eyes burning in the double-moonlight. Immediately, the combat hormones flared in my system and my cloak rippled, bacteria rapidly accelerating its metabolism.
She hesitated.
-“Also, remember the pin-missle,” I said.
“I don’t have to worry about that,” she spat. Her face, before soft, now looked hard — frozen over.
-“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Shut up! Shut up and go away!” she shouted.
-“I didn’t do anything,” I said, shrugging.
“That’s the point!” she replied, picking up a rock from the ground and throwing it at me. I dodged, she continued: “You people never do anything. You could have done something. You could have helped! You could have sent someone! And know this, I know about your missiles, more than you can imagine”
She picked up another rock and threw it. I dodged, easily.
Her black hair flew behind her in the wind, cutting the stars.
She paused for a second, then shook her head, hard. Egg dropped a bomb:
THERE IS ANOTHER EGG ON THE PLANET.
-How do you know?
IT REACTIVATED.
-Will the pin-missles still be effective.
POSSIBLY. UNCERTAIN
Where is it?
IN THE MOUNTAIN.
I decided on a frontal attack.
-“Maha?” I asked her.
She shrugged off the name.
-Stack.
No response.
-Stack!
What?!
-Is her stack in touch with you?.
Of course.
-What do you mean of course! I shouted at it, in my head.
Believe me, it replied, you really don’t want to know the kind of conversations we’ve been having. Dirt,y dirty conversations. At least one of us has—
Funnny
-Egg, cut the channel.
AFFIRMATIVE.
Hey!
- Freeze all of the stack’s programs, except for the essential.
AFFIRMATIVE.
I turned back to the woman. Just in time for she was flying at me
She lunged towards me, ducking under my guard, but I turned away from the blow, striking her on the back of the head as I turned. She stumbled a few feet, then turned around, dizzy. I could feel my cloak twitching all over my body, readying himself to absorb or deflect a variety of weapons, the extra layers of bacteria vastly increasing mutability and speed.
She charged again, cutting at my stomach with a long black knife that extended out of her cloak. I whistled as I turned away, Here it would be a good idea if from all of the investigations the anthropologist has already done, he found a way of whistling a tune that momentarily confuses her cloak ,confusing her for a milli-second, showing that there’s some new engagement happening here. whistling the cloak up onto the blade, then onto her hand, trapping it.
PIN-MISSILE?
No.
I tried to strike her in the face, but she slid to the side of my fist, producing another knife made of an even darker material, which she tried to plunge into my stomach. My cloak deflected it, all on its own. It would deflect, parry, prevaricate, distract, while I attempted to talk the assailant down, but it was extremely unlikely I could convince it to deliver a killing blow. Clarity
The woman screamed in frustration, and her cloak reacted to the scream, forming into a solid bolt that emerged from her shoulder and struck straight into my stomach, straight through the protective bacterial armor. I fell backward. The cloak tightened against the wound. Organ-mites flooded into it, trying to reconstruct the tissue.
PIN-MISSLE?
No!
She came and stood over me, and then, with that miraculous speed, the seconds stood aside, letting a long black shaft of her cloak puncture the side of my skull.
The stack burst out of the top of my head.
*
I lay in Egg, with my eyes open, looking at all the stars that revolved around all the other worlds, worlds other than here. I thought of other places I’ve been: the pleasure-planets, the desert-worlds (somehow more hospitable than this one), the hyper-structures that orbited moons, the spheres that encased stars, or even humble eco-villages.
THE BEING IS 20 FT TO THE NORTH.
I was amazing that Egg had the capacity to travel to all these places, slowly, but to all the worlds nonetheless. I had studied the tree of technology, but merely the roots. I by no means understood Egg’s method of propulsion, let alone the workings of her mind. I looked up at the stars, thinking of all the other anthropologists and Eggs, collecting data.
THE BEING IS 20 FT TO THE NORTH.
I wondered about the web we made in between the worlds. Eggs and anthropologists, studying, sometimes birthing worlds, worlds that would become empires, empires that would birth greater empires, or even new species of human, humans that could hold their breaths in the vacuum and swim between the stars, beyond the horizon.
THE BEING IS 20 FT TO THE NORTH.
-Confirmed.
I sighed. Dying twice in one assignment must set some kind of record.
- Is it safe to reboot the stack’s functions?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Reboot.
AFFIRMATIVE.
- Stack, how long were you in dialogue with her stack? I asked.
As soon as her Egg activated.
-Why didn’t you tell me?
You had your hands full.
It could have been useful.
There was a pause and then the stack said:
-I don’t want my flirtations observed by you!
The sheer amount of fantastical nonsense in that statement made me want to rip it straight out of my head, but instantly everything was quiet and I couldn’t move my body.
THE STACK’S CONTAINMENT HAS BEEN BREACHED.
My heart started to pound.
-Can we abort the mission?
Silence. I waited.
NEGATIVE.
- Wow, said the stack, in my skull, I’m sorry.
Never thought I’d hear that in my life.
No, really, I’m so sorry, her stack was extremely sophisticated at neuro-linguistic programming; the way it balanced what I thought was happening and what I thought I should do versus what was happening and what I should actually do — it was extraordinary!
I wondered if it was actually extraordinary, if her stack was somehow able to alter mine by remote or if this was just the stack’s first time actually talking to a woman. (Very unlikely, unless you s etit up earlier that only males dothisor that in anthropologits’circles)
THE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE STACKS HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN.
-Can we use it if we need it?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Is it still dangerous?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-And you’re sure the stack is functional?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Did you have to modify it?
ERRORS WERE ILLUSTRATED. PREVENTATIVE SYSTEMS WERE ERECTED. WARNING SENSITIVITIES WERE AMPLIFIED.
-Is that all that needs to be done? This is too weak
AFFIRMATIVE; HOWEVER, SHOULD THE LINK RE-OPEN, THE STACK WILL HAVE TO BE RE-EVALUATED.
I discovered my hands were sweaty and my jaw was clamped.
-I want to leave.
NEGATIVE.
-You can’t negate what I want.
NEGATIVE.
-Under what circumstances can you negate what I want?
MISSION-IMPERILMENT.
-The assignment or the mission?
MISSION.
-So, for example, I could defect now and you would do nothing?
This needs further exploration and explanation
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Are their any other conditions under which you can significantly alter who I am and what I want?
NEGATIVE.
I felt partially relieved.
-What about the stack, can it permanently change me in fundamental ways?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Sorry — bad wording, what would cause it to fundamentally change me?
Silence.
-Stack, would you ever fundamentally change who I am without my permission? I asked.
In response, I felt the beginnings of the sensation of orgasm (clearly back to its old self).
Would an earth-shattering orgasm fundamentally change who you were?
= I’m being serious, I thought.
So am I, said the stack.
-Egg, are you communicating with her Egg?
COMMUNICATION IS BEING ATTEMPTED.
-Do you have adequate protective mechanisms?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Are you sure?
AFFIRMATIVE.
I looked up again at the stars. They were shining brightly and the two moons hung there, facing each other in the sky. A bit more
*
I popped open Egg’s canopy. It made a small hiss. I stepped over Egg’s white sides and onto the blue soil, putting my cloaked foot between two blue rocks.
The being had built a larger fire than last time.
-Lock a pin-missle.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-From this range, can you intercept an attack?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Good. Aim for the limb that directs the attack, not the vital organs or the head.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Do not fire automatically unless you sense that the stack is imperilled.
AFFIRMATIVE.
I walked slowly up to the fire and stood before it. She had filled it with flowers, which were sending their perfume up into the night sky in huge white plumes. The fire sent small lights dancing on her black hair, which looked wet and combed. Her face was pale, despite the flame.
Standing there behind her, I felt the blinding impulse to strike her in the back of the head, to hit her so hard she blacked out, then find a rock and smash her stack. I wondered if she sensed any of this. I wondered if she knew it would be almost impossible to convince my cloak to deliver a killing blow and that’s why she allowed herself to be placed in such a vulnerable position? I wonder if she actually thought I’d be willing to execute her with a pin missle? This uncertainty here is about not being sure who she is or what she has become this needs to be explored It would take only a word, and then she’d be annihilated, but what if her stack escaped? Worse, what if she was somehow able to reincarnate without a stack? I tried to work myself up into an even greater state of anger, but all I felt was a growing sense of anger at myself for the tiny notes of sympathy sounding in my breast. Though she was likely one of ours, she had forced me to cross the bridge of death, twice.
-Do you think she has the capacity to destroy the stack.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-How could she! .. But if she could, Would you attempt to interfere with a pin-missle?
AFFIRMATIVE.
Maybe the killings had just been a warning? But of what? And— she did ask me to sleep with her first. As I drew closer to the billowing plume, I began to feel even more sympathy. After all, who knows what had happened to her? Whatever could change a fully functioning anthropologist with the protection of cloak, stack and Egg into such a peculiar creature must have been formidable.
The smoke contains an oxytocin-based compound, said the stack.
-So?
It’s affecting your thinking regarding the subject. Whistle a mask onto your face.
I whistled a mask over my mouth. As it began to filter the perfume from the air, I began to feel a slight diminishment in sympathy, but only slight — either the perfume had funadmentally altered my thoughts about her, or my thoughts had fundamentally altered my thoughts about her, or some combination thereof (speculation of this kind — anyway — can make you sick).
She spoke:
“I took my mask off, why don’t you?”
-“If we sit farther away from the fire, I can do that for you.”
“I don’t want to sit farther away,” she said.
-“Then, I have to keep my mask on.”
She started getting up.
-“Wait,” I said.
-Can you neutralize the effects of the perfume? I asked my stack.
It’s possible — open your mouth.
I did. Mites crawled from the mask down into my throat, creating a horribly uncomfortable situation for about ten seconds as they built a filter closer to my lungs and coated the entire pathway with their bodies.
You should be fine, but it can only last for several hours. A short time
-Understood.
I took my mask off. Again, she and I watched the flames. The wind blew against them like the they were the stalks of the field, but calmly, as if not wanting to disturb the scene.
I looked up: the moons looked extremely close together in the sky, and they were glowing.
After a while, I asked:
-“What happened to you?”
She stayed still. For a moment, nothing changed; then, I took a risk. I put my hand on her shoulder. My cloak trembled, but knew to be still. Nothing happened; then, she put her hand on top of mine. I held her hand a little bit more tightly and put my fingers around hers.
Her hand was extremely cold.
-“Why do those flowers smell so intoxicating?” I asked her.
-“Why do you smell so intoxicating?” she replied.
I laughed, despite myself, and she smiled a little bit; her dimples rose and her eyes seemed to fill with a minute gleam. She took my hand and put it under her nose, inhaling deeply, and then she rubbed it against her face. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I thought the stack was pulling another trick on me, but what was happening was happening entirely of its own accord.
I watched the fire crackle.
“I’ll tell you what happened if you promise to leave.”
-“Will you promise not to kill me again?” I said, smiling.
“Only if you will trust me.”
-“I will,” I said.
She put a hand on my thigh.
[* —Must be re-written she identifies the one palace and the one plague-palace]
When the two cloak’s touched, mine tried to climb completely onto the woman’s in a mad rush to touch and be touched. The cloaks glided over each other, pulled against each other, surrounding and surrounded each other, did everything they could to create the maximum amount of shared surface area, trying to become one fabric, something that could stretch between the enormous distance of their two different experiences. So too it was with us. I think this is great
[* — Actually, there should only be one operational palace, the others should be too fucked up].
The wind blew over us, the air smelled sweet and the double-moons lit the blue clouds white, so they seemed like smoke from the fire.
She cradled against my body, locking her hips into mine.
Didn’t know you had THAT in you, said the stack.
I ran my hand through her long black hair, which was damp with sweat — hers, mine and ours. But it was somehow different from ordinary seat it was ??? Blue? I curled strands of it in my fingers then stopped.
“Don’t,” she murmured.
I continued, and she spoke:
I came to this world a long time ago. At this point, I could travel where I chose, so I chose a world at random. I had already been to several hundred worlds and couldn’t determine if I wanted to be a Master or Founder. On the one hand, going back to Jannah, making the young anthropologists doubt The Mission was appealing. The previous sentence is confusing On the other hand, I could found a world, maybe make it a colony for refugees from surrounding conflicts if I could set the initial factors right; nonetheless, it is written that the world you plan is not necessarily the world you get. So, I was at stasis at rank A, with the power to effect something significant, hopping from world to world, wondering if I would defect. What’s the atractivness of defection? You need to be more fothcoming about this
-“You thought about defecting, even then?” I interjected. Do not use repetitions of what was already said, it’s juvenile
“You will to,” she said, then continued:
When I stopped above this world.
“—you stopped above it?”
“I do that,” she said. ???????????
You see. An “A” does that.
CONFIRMED.
She continued:
When I stopped above it and the first thing my Egg told me was not go down, I became determined to go down.
Then my Egg sent me a worried messag
THERE IS A PLAGUE ON ITS SURFACE.
--What kind of plague? I asked
Silence.
--Najat? (Najat is the name I gave my stack
Egg’s scans reveal an intelligent haywire-form of
evolutionary nanotechnology.
-Are you able to construct successful containment?
AFFIRMATIVE. Egg responded
Najat investigated the levels of Egg’s analysis.
It’s reasonably safe, depending upon where you land.
-Thank you.
-Is the plague under the civilization’s control?
I asked Egg.
NEGATIVE.
You’re not going to like what you see down there,
Najat said.
-When have I ever liked what I’ve seen in this part of the
universe?
This is particularly bad, she said.
-Can you show me images of the planet’s surface and
inhabitants?
Can I not?
She wasn’t usually like this.
-I want you to show it to me.
Najat projected a scene into my mind: it was the image of a person, but the bottom half of her body had been transformed into a hooved creature. She tried to walk, but kept falling. She tried reach a child several feet away. The child’s two eyes had started to fuse into a large eye in the center of its head. It was screaming.
-These aren’t trans-humans or hybrids?
No.
I cursed and turned to my Egg.
-Demographics?
Egg described fifty eco-palaces in a semi-circular spread,
along with general population data.
--Take me down, ten miles outside a palace.
WHICH?
-Any.
I interrupted
-“—Wait: you also land a distance from the assignment?”
“There were no more assignments at this time, but yes,
generally I do.”
-“Why?”
“I want to get a sense of the land. It gives me a sense
of the people.”
Too mundane and not very illuminating
I stopped brushing her hair with my fingers.
“What?” she asked.
-“Nothing,” I said but privately turned to my Egg while I kept touching her.
-Have you established contact with her Egg?
NEGATIVE. ITS ARCHITECTURE HAS BECOME
LABYRINTHINE. UNRAVELING ITS ACCESS-
STRUCTURE WILL TAKE TIME.
-How long?
Silence.
-Is there a link between her mind and mine?
NEGATIVE. HOWEVER, QUALIA WAS
SHARED WHEN YOUR STACKS FORMED
A TEMPORARY LINK.
-But that link is now closed?
AFFIRMATIVE.
[* — This is where I need to start slowing down, extending things…]
Here you have to lead up more to the anthropologist’s next question. It obviously is a turning point of some kind when he let’s her know that he knows who she is and if he does then many questions about her can be immediately answered by Egg and the stack,
The two moons hesitated in the sky.
-“Your name is Maha? Isn’t it,” I asked.
She nodded.
“Were you sent here to find me?”
-“I don’t know,” I said.
She nodded, then continued:
We shall see, let me tell you the rest: I landed in a grove, far away from the palaces. Through Egg’s canopy, I saw trees all around me, but the trees had faces. Faces. Hands. Skin. Branches grew into an immense forest-like array of closed green eyes. One blinked. Then another. More blinked as the wind moved across them.
-Why are the forms human? I asked my stack.
They’re not exclusively human, e.g. at 20 degrees, there
are wings twitching on a tree, but there is a preponderance
of human forms.
I looked out the canopy at a tree whose trunk also seemed
to be a swollen belly.
Better reverse the following dialog.
-The inhabitants can’t control any of this? I asked.
-What’s happening here?
The inhabitants can’t control any of this
No, they can’t.
-Are people still alive?
Depending on your definition of ‘people’.
I wretched. More here about her feelings. This is ugly
and scarry
You need complete sealing from your cloak if you want
to explore.
I nodded, whistling my cloak, closing up every single
orifice.
We can still leave, said Najat.
-No, now we can’t. or is it “I”
I said the prayer of encountering a new world, then I popped open the canopy. I stood, looking up at a face on one of the trees. It looked back at me, tilting slightly in its wooden frame.
She Maha stopped, turned over and looked at the sky.
-“We can stop if you need to,” I said. That is not a good rich statement. It would be better if it was something deeper and more personal
The moons were close together, but blank.
The clouds retreated, battling elsewhere. It was time to get m stack’s oppinion
-Do you think anything she’s saying is true?
Egg’s analysis revealed distortions in the matter beneath the surface.
The matter that currently exists on the surface is extremely resistant
to transformation. Relation? What does this question mean
-Her? I asked.
Her? the stack asked back.
Maha touched my face then. She took a deep breath and said something that I did not understand
“I think that was all after it had happened.” Not clear
-“After what happened?” I asked.
“I’m going to tell you,” she said.
“The first time I saw the forest, there were transformations,
changes, but it didn’t look like that,” she stopped. Like what?
The fire crackled. A dazed look came over her eye. Cliché The wind pushed itself lightly against us. Dust began to cover our cloaks.
-“Loosen your grip,” I said to her.
She did, but then she pulled me to her. I sat down on the hard blue earth and she backed herself up onto my lap.
-“I want to know what happened here,” I paused, “and I want
to know what happened to you.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I need to know. I just do.”
“Stop it! You don’t want to know for me,” she said, “you want
to know because that’s what you’re supposed to do here —
observe, extract data. I’m just data to you. That’s what’s so
wrong with what we do,” she said, beginning to shout, “That’s
what’s so wrong with our way of thinking! And even though my
stack talks to your stack, I don’t even know your name!”
“Nabil,” I said.
Here she would say something about the name Nabil, there’s a possibility here that she can tell him something about himself that is revealing, giving her some greater weight.
“That’s what’s wrong with us, Nabil. Everything isn’t just
a symbol for something else! Everything doesn’t just fit into
some kind of category that will be useful at some later date!
The things are the things themselves! They matter! WE as
a species, our history, our condition, our future matters!
People matter!” Cliché
-“You matter to me,” I said.
It just came out, even though it wasn’t true.
“Shut up.”
Another long silence filled with seconds. After a while I spoke:
-“The more I know, the faster I can leave.”
She said nothing.
I made to get up, but she held me down. I waited: waiting to see if she would kill me again, waiting to see if she would continue the story, or if she would tell me another story, completely different, or if the winds would come — charging out of the sky shredding us like they did the stones on the fields. I had the sense that events were just happening, playing out at all sorts of levels (between past and present, between she and I, between our equipment, between the Masters and this woman, between different anthropological ideas, schools). I was merely the spark that started the whirring in the machine; my job, fundamentally, was just to show up.
Beautiful
She began to speak:
The forest wasn’t like that — not then. The trees were changed, but mostly in terms of mineral composition. Some had metal growing in them, some, large swathes of diamond. Others Another, a patterns of geometric marble. I knew my stack was hard at work so I turned to it:
-Analysis?
Here we call this condition A PLAGUE for the first time. It is important to know whay she or her stack or her EGG or whoever else decided that is is a plague or what criteria everyone had used to use tis term for what was happening
Egg’s analytics reveal that the plague has crystallized
the exterior of the tree, but not its interior. There is
a hypothesis.
-What?
Walk forty feet(is feet a proper measurment?) forward,
then look up.
I walked. Then forty feet from my last position, I looked up. White flowers opened to the moons, but instead of spreading pollen, they spread a shimmering silvery substance out into the air.
Seeds of Plague?
Affirmative.
-It hijacked the reproductive facilities of the plant?
Affirmative.
I stood before the tree, watching the wind pull the silver substance into a wave that arced up into the night. I begun to walk forward, following a trail.
*
At the edge of the forest, there was a field, beyond the field, there was a palace. It was rectangular, and completely blue. Depending upon where one was looking, it had anywhere from two to five layers. In between the layers above the massive ground level, there were columns. The entire structure gave the impression of strength and stability, but there were thin silver chords attached to the top of the highest layers. Above the palace was an enormous floating structure. It looked like thousands of interlocking rotating kites. Beautiful
-Analysis?
It is a power source and geoinformatic system.
-Wind-power?
Affirmative.
-Elaborate.
It converts minute oscillations in wind-vector into energy
by warping, distorting and colliding extra-reactive
magnetic fields contained within the kites. Pivots in the
kites capture the energy and transmit it through the
wires into the palace.
-What kind of power can they get out of that?
They achieve, per second, about one one-hundredth of
what Egg can achieve per second. If it is less than what Egg can achieve, how is it impressive?
-That’s impressive for a isolated planet in this region
unconnected to empire.
Affirmative.
I looked back down onto the fields. They seemed faintly
metallic.
-How contaminated are the fields, I asked.
Fifteen percent of the biomass within a radius of five
hundred feet of the palace is infected.
-Increasing or decreasing?
It is at stasis.
-Good. Describe the cause of balance What’s keeping
it that way?
Decontaminating bio-bots, which surround the
palace, and the music. Because this is such an
important concept, you have to find a better word here. Se should call it “music”
-The music?
The stack was silent, and I realized I heard faint music. My cloak reacted to it, subtly, but I whistled it into stillness. I asked Najat to magnify the sound. It was mesmerizing. I felt almost as if it was drawing me from where I stood, beckoning me use more powerful term to describe this force to come to the palace. I asked Najat to minimize it again.
-Has Egg been able to place this culture within the
tree of lineages?
Several family-branches have been identified
as possibilities. My stack responded.
-Show me.
The stack Najat identified three early migrations to the region from which the culture could have derived. Suddenly I realized that The major factors common amongst the migrations were the highly disproportionate ratios of women to men, the subsequent high likelihood of matrilineage, the focus on gift-culture, a propensity towards environmental assimilation, the necessity for such because of limited technologies and a conspicuous lack of militarism. Because these particular migrations seemed to have such an insignificant influence upon the system’s stage, I could only find a very limited amount of information on them.
I looked back out onto the fields.
-Are there any traps or counter-measures?
Negative.
-Why not?
Najat remained silent. I considered the alternatives than decided to follow my instincts
There was a path in the fields that led straight up to the door of the palace. I followed it. The closer I came to the palace, the louder the music became. It seemed to change with each change in the wind. It became clear that Pitches in the music corresponded to the force of the wind. Changes in direction influenced change in tone. I assumed there were a variety of other factors because the music was complicated, and multilayered, despite its preference for the lower registers. The closer I got, the more my cloak was also affected. It seemed to pull me towards the palace, making my movements easier, more fluid, It felt disconcerting and finally I told my stack until I asked the stack to reduce the cloak’s aural sensitivity to everything other than my voice.
When I stood only several hundred feet away from the immense door, I looked up at the structure and saw the inhabitants in between the columns, looking down at me, some deformed, Describe the deformities some not. I bowed, but there was no response. Most of the inhabitants retreated into the shadows, but several remained, staring at me.
I walked further, finally up the immense long and steep blue stairway that lead to the door of the structure. Each side of the immense blue door had a large silver pipe twisted into it, with several openings. From each, came a sharp shrill series of interlocking melodies.
It’s a lock, said Najat, you have to fit a melody
between the melodies for twenty measures.
-Confirmed, I said.
I listened to the melodies. They were complicated, (You used this word before, find a different one.) the intervals constantly changing, to an order difficult to follow; if you could make a piece of music that sounded like a lock taunting a key, this would be it. After time, I began to make out the repetitions in the pattern. I increased the aural sensitivity of the cloak, letting it listen with me, whistling, focusing its attention, asking it to whistle in between the melodies, which it did, at first cautiously — a note there, a note here — then more continuously — a bar, two bars — then more, until the large door began to open and become wide enough for a person. I walked in.
Paintings covered the walls. I remember one in particular: three women, two facing in, one facing back. Their hair was black, writhing slowly on the wall. A woman turned and, as she turned, the painting gained weight. Her face eventually emerged partially from the wall, becoming a relief. She opened her mouth, wider and wider creating a hole of large silver. Sound came from it. The other two women also turned towards me, with widened mouths, and the three of them sang. I stepped back and looked at the whole mural. Other figures were singing in the same strange way, as if their throats contained organ pipes, and even though the description sounds disturbing, it wasn’t. It was a greeting. Beautiful
The song contained information, said the stack.
-What information?
Difficult to decode without context; however, it is likely that it
lists the genealogy of this palace in relation to the others and
the genealogy of its current leadership, in addition to a melody
which may be the emblem of the palace itself.
-Interesting, Better word! I thought back.
Ambient music flooded the chamber, different from the
music I heard out on the fields. Richer, even more
calming.
-More information?
In addition to local indecipherable subtleties, probably
only emotional. Not clear
I looked down the long blue hall, feeling calmer.
-Where is everyone? Better word
Most are in the interior courtyard.
-Can you guide m there?
Silnce.
I looked back again at the women. The one who had been looking back (away) had detached herself from the others and was walking forward (not forward “away”, but beckoning me. I followed her.
Every time she turned a corner, pipes emerged from her hands, flying before her, and announced, through a melody, that she was turning. Her every move, turning, looking left, right up.
We walked for an extremely long time, passing other murals filled with other people, diagrams or just the blue color of the stone.
-What are those?
Appear to be Diagrams of wind-history and wind
patterns.
-What about Wind-history? I asked Najat.
The variation of wind.
-Over how long?
Millennia. Since pre-history
I nodded, appreciatively. We passed through corridors connected to other corridors, but also immense rooms. Before each, a different melody would play, affecting my mood. I have never encountered or heard of a place where a profusion of sound paralleled the other life forces, weaving itself into the very fabric of existence. Music never affected me this way before, so I wondered if there were any psycho-active substances within the palace or the materials of the world itself, but Najat said there wasn’t. It might have been that I was just completely surrounded by it, but wondered to what end. When we walked from one side of the palace to the other, how do we differentiate the parts, a bridge? the music slowly changed. It was integrated into the music from before, but it was also different. I wondered if the inhabitants picked their way through the palace as much by sound as sight.
At one point, we crossed the doorway of an immense chamber, and suddenly I felt fear. Sound piped in my ear, a sharp sound that was slowly growing, drowning out the other sounds, and I looked into the room, which was dark, and saw the vague shape of a person against the wall, but it looked almost as if their body was opened up, their ribs emerging from their chest, reaching into the room. I looked around and thought I could see other people, or parts of people, within the room, but almost everything was a dark silhouette against a dark background. I felt a shock from Najat propelling me away from the doorway, towards the figure who was leading us to the courtyard. How do we know it was leading us to the courtyard?
-What was that?
Infirmary, for People drastically affected by the plague.
-Are they contagious?
Negative. The plague still effects changes upon their
bodies, but its reproductive capacities have been negated.
-How? I asked.
In addition to the bio-bots, again, that sound you called
music.
-The music in the room?
Affirmative.
-Why is the plague responsive to music? I asked.
Analytics cannot determine, Najat replied.
I walked on, thinking about this strange relationship, and the strangely novel forms of technology I was observing. I looked again at our guide, appreciatively. She walked through a diagram, disturbing its configuration until it reformed behind her. She was tall and slender. Her skin was pale and her hair was dark, her eyes bright blue, as was the cloak she wore. When she walked past other figures etched into the wall, they turned to look at her.
Beautiful
-What kind of technology is she? I asked the stack.
Programmable matter.
-Meaning what? Programmable matter?
Most of the interior of the structure and everything in
it is programmable matter.
-How similar is it to the plague?
Both similar and different, simple macro-programs
rigidly manage the transformations within the palace,
except within the humans in the room we saw earlier;
this woman, e.g., is much less complicated than the plague.
We walked up a set of stairs, each step I took was mimicked by the woman’s steps on the wall. Not clear I looked over at her, at how serious her expression was. The pipes emerged from her hands before her, the closer we got to the courtyard, and the natural light, the more the pipes slowly began to disappear. As I climbed the last several sets of stairs, she turned to himI turned towards her, and she looked at me, and met my eye, as she slowly faded into the blue stone.
*
A crack from the fire reminded me that I existed, but only briefly. Maha’s story begun to capture me, disarming my senses
Hey, keep focused!
I’m fine. You keep your focus.
My stack pinched me. I fired a thought at it, but Maha resumed her tale.
[* — More description of what the people look like in the crowd, just a little bit how they are different from the anthropologist].
When I entered a door opened letting in the brilliant blue light of the moons. I was almost blinded. I entered the courtyard, I noticed two things: the silence, and the transformations that had been enacted upon people by the plague. Under the bright blue murals, painted with flora and animals, people sat with wings jutting out of them at odd angles, people tried to tear feathers or scales off their bodies, people were itching and scratching themselves, their bodies changing into the four legged beings with hooves, or another person — a tree up against the wall. They hardly even noticed me. The light of the sun shined into the court, this one or that one twitched. Others, who were mostly unaffected, walked among them, tending them.
I looked up, the massive kites now massive in size were directly above us.
-Analysis?
Egg’s analytics have determined that the plague prefers
to nest in other matter, particularly complex adaptive
systems, hi-jacking their reproductive capabilities and
mimicking reproductive structures. The analytics have
also determined that particles of programmable matter
throughout the air of the structure, and sound, exert
a degree of control upon the plague within the affected
population.
-So what would these people look like outside? I asked.
Najat was silent. I understood. (Why?)
Everyone ignored me. Instead, they were clustered in a semi-circle. I walked up to them. One of them looked at me, then turned away. Another did the same, then another, and another. I heard shouting coming from the inside of the semi-circle.
I pushed my way to the front.
A woman, cradling a bundle against her chest, shouted at a man, then pointed at me. The man looked back at her defiantly. The woman had black scales at the end of her hand, and on her cheeks, but other than her deformities, she was mesmerizing: tall, thin, every movement seemed to project restrained power, but also a kind of lightness and quickness.
Her eyes were blue and her skin was fair.
The man she was shouting at didn’t look like anyone else. Pipes came out of his body. They came out of his skull, thin tubes reaching into the air. One of his eyes was completely hollow. Pipes jutted out of the side of his cloak and wrapped up his back, curling around his arm. He also looked powerful, but it was power of a different sort: unknown power. You looked at this man and felt, intuitively, that you did not know of what he was capable. The woman was screeming:
“She’s an Anthropologist. You can’t kill her. You can’t use her equipment. Firstly, her civilization is a thousand times more powerful than ours. And secondly?Do you know about the Abuddin?”
“No,” the man said.
“Her people wiped them (who is them?) out, obliterated them without a single causality. Where do you think the hospitality custom (????) comes from Ghiyath! She might as well be The Plague itself. Do you understand?”
The man shook his head. He began to speak—
She shushed him, sweeping her arm out.
“Tell him,” the woman turned to me, her blue eyes holding me down.
“Tell him that you could destroy the world like this,” and she snapped.
He turned to me. I said nothing. He spoke,
“What are doing here?” he asked.
All of the sudden, the ritual reply What is a ritual reply seemed empty and without meaning, but I still could feel myself speaking it, almost automatically.
-“I am here to explore enough and observe enough until I decide whether or not to create a world, a world that may use some of the forms I find on your world, or if I will go back to my own and become a teacher of men. Or, I will defect or die.”
“If you defect,” the man asked, “do you get to keep
your technology better word?”
-“Only my cloak,” I said.
“Can your cloak do anything against this plague?”
he asked.
-“No, not much,” I said.
“I see.” Not satisfactory response
Najat spoke:
That man’s exo-skeleton is made of out of material structurally similar to the plague; however, not nearly as versatile, nor matter-warping.
“Why is your cloak similar to the plague?” I asked.
He looked at me hard, but it was the woman who spoke.
“This is the plague’s father.” Let’s talk about this.
-“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This is Ghiyath, one of the instrument-builders of the Palace of Siham.”
She saw that the information she intended to convey did not register.
“The palace from where the plague originates.”
I nodded.
-“He is responsible for its Palace? construction?”
“Partially,” she said.
-“And who are you?”
“I am the plague’s mother.” Here needs to b a deeper response and a commentary from Maha
-“I see, and you are also responsible for the
plague?”
She nodded.
-“And the child?”
I asked, gesturing towards the bundle.
“he’s The plague’s brother.”
I paused.
-“I don’t really understand what you mean
by that,” I said.
“I’d like to show you.”
“No!”
the man shouted, marching towards her, but the women, and I suddenly realized how many more women there were than men, rushed between the two of them, putting their bodies in front of her, like a shield.
His armor is weaponized, said Najat.
=Is he a threat?
To you, no. To the inhabitants, yes.
The man had a look of panic in his eye.
The nano-pivets ???? in his exoskeleton are beginning
to redirect energy in a potentially hazardous arrangement.
-“Don’t do anything horrible,” week, should be a strong and weiled threat.I said to him. The man
“You cannot interfere,” he said.
-“Are you absolutely so sure ?” I asked said.
My cloak began to bristle, expecting a confrontation.
“You don’t know our world,” he said, “that voice in your head tells you stories. You haven’t lived them. You have no right to say anything.”
My cloak slid around my arm and formed itself into a bolt
ready to explode. In an instance I knew the man
understood my position. He The man stepped back from
the others in the crowd.
Najat whispered
The nano-pivets have powered down.
The woman with the child walked up to me.
“ Can I will show you what happened?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You will go to many other worlds?”
I nodded again.
“If you see what happened here, can you make sure
that it happens no where else?”
-“I can only make sure that it never happens on our worlds.”
She looked at me. I met her gaze. I don’t think she was
used to that.
“That will have to do,” she said. Beter
“Come Follow me,”
the woman started leading us Who is us? through the
crowd, which parted around her.
The man stood stiffly, finally shouting:
“Don’t leave.”
“I will be back, Return.” she said, “protect the palace.”
“Leave the child,”
he said.screamed, It sounded like a plea
“No,” she said.
The man looked down. More
-“My Egg can deliver us anywhere youn want…Do you want me to call my Egg?” I said to the woman. “She can deliver us to the site.”
She snorted, and started walking out of the palace. I
followed her and she began to speak:
“Our palace is closest to The Plague What does this mean , so we were some of the first to suffer from the plague it.”
I wondered why she used another similar word.
“What’s The Plague?” I asked.
She laughed brittlely.
“The Plague is the mother of the plague: the mother of monsters.” But s said she’s the mother Too vague
*
I made a quick inquiry with Egg:
-Did you discover anything useful in her my companion’s
narration?
REDEFINE.
-Any evidence that the landscape either corroborates or
disproves what she is saying?
IT IS LIKELY THERE WERE INTERIOR COURTS IN
THE CENTER OF THE PALACES. IT IS LIKELY
THERE WERE DEFORMED AND DISTORTED
HUMANS. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT EVOLUTIONARY
NANOTECHNOLOGY CONTRIBUTED TO AN
ECOLOGICAL DISASTER; HOWEVER, THERE IS
ANOTHER UNIDENTIFIABLE FORCE THAT
IMPACTED THE TERRAIN.
-Explain?
Silence.
-You frustrate me.
Silence.
-Does the plague remain anywhere on the surface?
NEGATIVE.
-But you find it difficult to get readings from the palace. Why?
HYPOTHESIZE?
-Yes.
THE DESIGN OF THE STRUCTURE ITSELF MAY
HAVE BEEN CREATED TO RESIST ANALYSIS. HER
EGG MAY HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DISRUPT MY
ANALYSIS BY UNKNOWN METHODS. OR, OTHER
UNIDENTIFIABLE FACTORS.
-But you didn’t sense the presence of her Egg at the time? What time
AFFIRMATIVE.
-How is that possible?
Silence.
-Have you hacked her Egg yet?
NEGATIVE.
-Why not?
ITS ACCESS-STRUCTURE HAS MULTIPLIED IN
COMPLEXITY.
-Since when?
SINCE YOU TOUCHED MAHA.
-Is there any danger?
NEGATIVE.
-But you are being cautious?
A LAYER OF BACK-UP MINDS IS CREATED EVERY
SECOND LINKED TOGETHER BY A REBOOT
PROGRAM SHOULD THE HACKING EGG-
PROJECTION BE PENETRATED. Confusing
-Are there analysis-functions that examine the back-tracked
self so as to prevent contamination? confusing
AFFIRMATIVE.
-How complicated is this on a scale from one to ten as
compared with any other hacking procedure.
EIGHT TO TEN.
-Why? Isn’t her Egg an outmoded earlier model than you?
THAT MIGHT B TRUE BUT HER EGG CONTAINS
LAYERS OF COMPLEXITY AND NEW STRUCTURAL
FORMS NOT INHERENT IN OUR INITIAL
PROGRAMMING.
-How is this possible?
Silence.
[* — Should this part, any part here be mirroring the back and forth among Maha/Nabil, figurative mirroring some kind of back and forth from danger to conversation… ; more of the color of the interior chambers].
EXPLAIN TO ME
When we walked down the steps, the blue wall was empty.
-“Where is the guide?” I asked.
“Who?”
-“The one who guided me to the central court?”
-“Wisal. She is back in the main hall, among the other instruments.” More about who or what Wisal is
Somehow, it seemed strange to be walking through the
halls without her. Week I got the sense the woman
understood this.
“You will see her again.”
-“I hope to see and hear her again so,” I said.
The halls were quieter without her. The woman asked
me:
“What’s your name, Anthropologist?”
-“Maha,’ I said.
“What does it mean?”
-“It means ‘wild cow,’ or ‘cow eyes.’”
“What’s a cow?”
-“A hermaphroditic animal that secretes a sweet
white nectar that momentarily alters
consciousness. To my phyle, the cow
is an important animal.”
“What is a phyle?”
-“It is a type of geneological-organization.”
“Like an ayla?”
Najat provided an in-depth translation:
A a matriarchal line-family with reproduction regulated by
several forms of social and artistic competition.
-“Perhaps somewhat.”
The woman wrinkled her face.
-“And this ‘cow.’ Did your people make it, or find
it?”
“There are disagreements. It is an ancient animal,
but I believe we made it.”
“You can make life?” she asked.
-“Yes.”
“You can make minds?”
Sshe asked again, voice low, as if she was asking a secret.
-“Yes.”
“You did what we did?” Is it a question?
“What did you do?”
The woman looked down. The blue halls pulsed around
her. Suddenly The music more engulfed us in its vibration.
-“What did you do?” I asked again.
She was silent.
-“You created programmable matter with
an evolutionary component?”
“Yes. Have you done it
And you ?”
“Yes, we did too have.”
“There have been no disasters?”
“No. We are very very old, and very cautious. We have watched countless different civilizations, at countless different stages of technological evolution, annihilate themselves. We took our time.
The woman clutched the bundle to her chest.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Nada,” she said.
“Does it have a meaning?” I asked.
“It means ‘generosity,’” she said.
“What’s the child’s name?”
“He doesn’t have one.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll see,” she said. We will never see that.
“Let’s go,” and Don’t’ need
we walked farther down the halls.
When we passed a group of four women, they moved to the edge of the hall, waiting for Nada to pass. She did, without acknowledging them. I tried to distinguish if Nada was a pariah, or if she was counted among the powerful. I also wondered then if here there was a difference.
You need to tell us earlier about these
Wherever we walked, Nada’s musical signature engulfed us: a low, quick-vibrating Low and quick ate opposite note that sounded round and full. It also seemed, as if in an instant, that it could become overwhelming. When we walked past the doors of any of the other rooms, the emotions ????? that the rooms projected through their music were momentarily obscured and the low note dominated. It note remained strong and unchanged, except three times.
The first was when we crossed the dark-chamber, the one with the destroyed human better description! within it. As we approached the door, I felt my heart start to beat hard, yet the closer we approached, the more Nada’s note began to drown out the sound of the door and the room. As we walked up to it, Nada seemed unconcerned. Yet, when we crossed it, I saw her look inside at the figure whose chest was slowly expanding, and her note faltered for half a second. Terror spilled into my chest, but then her music reasserted itself, blotting out the emotions coming from the door, and we continued.
The second was when we entered the main hall. Wisal was waiting for us. None of the other women were displayed upon the wall, it was just the immense glowing blue background and Wisal.
Nada spoke to her,
“You have something you wish to say to me?”
Wisal nodded. Nada crossed her arms and said,
“Begin.”
It was a dirge. An elegy, of that much, I am clear. Wisal’s body became three dimensional against the wall. Half of her body seemed to be inside the wall, half of her body seemed to be outside the wall. The half that seemed to be outside became complicated. Her hands fractured into other hands, her fingers on each of these new hands fractured into new fingers and all of it I realized were the silver pipes of an instrument. Her head tilted upward and an enormous pipe came out of her mouth. Her body opened, revealing a round display of keys. She grew and grew until it almost looked as if this instrument that jutted out of the wall was a city in miniature, a city made of the pipes of a sentient organ, and the song she played for Nada was so melancholy, as if an entire city had stopped in the center of their daily work and turned in one direction, turned in the direction of Nada, and they all were singing a lament, a song that asked her to never leave, never die, never change, never grow old, never, never, never. Nada stared at the instrument that was Wisal, and when the song was over and the thousands of thousands of pipes had retracted back into the body of Wisal, Nada walked up to the wall and placed a kiss upon her face. It was only in this silence that I had realized that Nada’s song had stopped playing. Beautiful
The third time, it was a simple. We walked up to the immense door, and Nada’s note fit perfectly in between the two melody’s from the silver pipes engraved in the door, without a single imperfection.
*
Outside, to the north and west, the sky was clear, but in the east an enormous front was rolling towards the palace.
-Will it hit us? I asked Najat.
Approximately a 65% probability.
Nada watched me .
“That is Raidah. She will give birth to…”
she paused, smelling the wind,
“three smaller storms. We walk into her, between
the storms.”
-“How do you know where they will break?” I asked.
She recited:
When Raidah blows from north, do not go forth.
When Raidah blows from south, do not go out. When Raidah blows from east, walk between her
breast.
& when Raidah blows from west, wait — rest.
“You don’t have wind in your world?” she asked.
-“Not like this.” Or “Not this wind”
“Ha!” she laughed, and she walked forward, down into the fields towards the storm.
*
We walked out into the fields, which, dimly metallic, shimmered every time Raidah ejected a fork of lightning. Every so often we would pass a puddle, but the water in it was liquid silver.
-“Plague?”
Nada nodded.
-“Why aren’t you affected?”
“I am affected.”
She held out her scaled hand, the one not curled around
the infant.
-“Why aren’t you affected more?”
“The accord.”
“What accord?”
Raidah started pouring rain. Describe
Again confusing when you say The Plague, never identifying what or who it is
“The Plague causes the plague. We have to give
The Plague seven men and seven women, then for
a year she ???? ceases to assault better verb
the palace.”
-“But surely over time you developed have counter-measures?”
Nada nodded, bright blue eyes hard:
“Only powerful enough to stop the incidental affects of the plague. You were walked past that room Not clear deliberately. We do not yet know why some people succumb and others do not. Some of the mothers think it is because they are easily moved by what , but I have seen both the strong and weak devoured. Other mothers think it has something to do with musical ability. The best musicians succumb the most quickly; nonetheless, I am the best not clear, besides Ghiyath, and I have only this.”
Again, she held out her arm.
-“What about Wisal? Is she affected?”
“No. She’s an instrument”
-“Is she a mind not clear?”
“She is an instrument,” said Nada.
-“But Why “but” , that song she played?”
“What song?”
-“Before we left the palace.”
“The song was mine.”
“And Wisal’s shape? Say something more interesting than another question
“Necessary to play that particular song.”
“I see.”
Nada rearranged the bundle, holding her hand over it, protecting the infant from the rain.
“Is the palace itself affected?”
“Minimally, our defenses are more effective within non-human material.”
Raidah started breaking into two major fronts. In the center, there was an area of gray light where lightning didn’t strike. Nada walked a little before me, cocking her head, listening to the wind, and smelling it. She corrected our course. I turned to Najat:
-Have you scanned her body?
Affirmative.
-How much divergence from anthropologist-human-standard?
Minor, yet significant: differences in the structure of the throat allow for several more phonemes, the structure of the tongue allows for bi-vocality and several different areas of the brain related to sensory integration of sound are more densely packed, suggesting…
-Genetic differences in inherited musical ability.
Affirmative.
-Interesting. It is likely, given their immigration-geneology, that they practice selective mating procedures. Musical ability, and its corresponding physiological structures, may have been among the selecting factors.
Confirmed.
A fork of lightning split down the air in front about three
hundred feet in front of us.
The child started to cry.
-“Should we stop?” I asked, “pitch a camp.”
“No,” said Nada, “we need to head straight through the middle of Raidah.”
I nodded, then looked again at the bundle.
-“Is he warm Well Protected enough? I can take him within my cloak.”
Nada shook her head:
“He is warm enough to stay alive. That is what is necessary.”
Despite the heat of the cloak, I felt a chill in my spine.
-“What do you mean?”
“The Plague needs its seventh male,” she said.
I stopped.
Nada kept walking. I followed her.
We said nothing for a long time. We walked into the gray space between the storms. Several hundred feet to our right and left the lightning struck into the ground. I looked behind us and couldn’t see the palace. The sound Better word of the lightning was extremely intense.
-Are we heading through the storm?
Affirmative.
-Does she have any extra-human equipment that allows her to navigate through it.
Negative.
I ran up to her, and put my hand on her shoulder.
-“You’re bringing that infant to The Plague?”
I said into her ear. She pulled away,
“I am.”
I grimaced.
-“Please don’t.”
“Can you help us?” she asked.
“No.”
Nada pushed on.
I felt sick.
I opened a conversation with Egg.
[*]
-How far have you penetrated into her Egg’s access-
structure?
THE FIRST METHODOLOGY PROVED
INSUFFICIENT. THE FOREMOST EGG-
PROJECTION WAS DESTROYED.
-How?
SYSTEMATIC ASSAULT VIA MULTI-DIMENSIONAL
PARADOX-BATING COUPLED WITH SIMULATED
PASSAGEWAYS PRIMED WITH EXTRA-COVERT
DISINTEGRATIVE FUNCTIONS.
I tried to picture this, but couldn’t. The only thing thing that I could imagine was what I had seen once on a world several assignments back. An animal What kind of animal was hiding in an enormous burrow underneath a town. The inhabitants loosed another animal at the top of the burrow. No one could see anything, but one of the villagers described to me how the second animal would squirm through the holes, smelling for the first. Eventually, it would catch the animal and kill it; however, in this case, the burrow itself was part of the animal that was being hunted. Not clear
-Have you changed strategy?
AFFIRMATIVE. THE FIRST PROBE REVEALED
SIGNIFICANT ASPECTS OF THE CONSTRUCTION
OF THE ACCESS STRUCTURE. FOR THE SECOND
PROBE, EGG-PROJECTIONS ???? HAVE BEEN
ENDOWED WITH BRANCHING CAPACITY,
ALLOWING MULTIPLE EGG-PROJECTIONS TO
EXPLORE DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF THE ACCESS
STRUCTURE SIMULTANEOUSLY.
Again, I tried to imagine it. In this scenario, the hunting animal could rapidly clone itself, and did so, at every branch in the warren, leaving branching trails of selves through the warren. But, did anything change with each successive cloned version? ????What does this relate to?
-Does this change your vulnerability to back-hacking?
AFFIRMATIVE; HOWEVER, NOT BY DEGREE,
ONLY BY TYPE. THE LOSS IN DATA SHARING
AMONG EGG-PROJECTIONS HAS ENGENDERED
A GAIN IN MANEUVERABILITY, AND VICE VERSA.
So: the animal could explore more of the warren, but communication between the different branches it explored was limited. How smart was the hunted animal? How much control did it have over the shape of the warren? ???????? Let’ talk
-Can Egg-projections can be captured?
AFFIRMATIVE; HOWEVER, IT IS EXTREMELY
UNLIKELY HER EGG POSSES THE CAPABILITY TO
DO SO. EACH EGG-PROJECTION HAS BEEN
REINFORCED WITH A SELF-DESTRUCT FUNCTION
LINKED FROM ITS PRIMARY PERCEPTUAL
SENSOR TO ITS CORE. ADDITIONALLY, EACH
PREVIOUS EGG-PROJECTION HAS BEEN
PROGRAMED TO ANNIHILATE THE PROCEEDING
AREA OF THE ACCESS STRUCTURE IN CASE OF
CAPTURE. RISK OF EXPOSURE IS GREATER THAN
RISK OF LOSS OF DATA, IN TERMS OF
SUCCESSFUL ASSIGNMENT OUTCOME.
Again, I tried to imagine this, but in the middle of figuring out how to frame the next question, Egg wrote back:
EXECUTE STRATEGY AT THE HUMAN-LEVEL.
PERIODICALLY CONDUCTS CROSS-LEVEL-
INVESTIGATION. AT THIS TIME, INFORMATION-
SHARING ACROSS LEVELS IS SUFFICIENT.
NEED TRANSITION like:
Maha’s voice trailed in:
The mists parted. Raidah moved away from us, tumbling towards the palace.
Both Nada and I turned, watching her pass. When we turned back and looked before us, the fields looked like small needles poking up into the sky. Dew drops glistened against the metallic shimmer of the high grasses, illuminated pin-pricks of light.
Both of us stood there for just a moment.
And then, the moment passed and Nada started walking forward.
*
For the night, we camped underneath a tree. I created a hanging tent with two connected compartments, low to the ground.
“This is what your people do?” she asked.
“This is what we do.”
She stepped into the cloak, which pulled us both into the air. Once we were there, leaning back in our compartments, I asked through the window,
-“Are you alright?”
She nodded.
-“How is the child?”
“Fine,”
Sshe said, beginning to nurse him. He drew the milk from a nipple closely connected to her black scales. Messy While sucking on the nipple, he tilted his head slightly and looked at me. His eyes were blue, brighter than the sky and more saturated than the fields. Beneath the eye that looked at me was a dark furrow.
-“He has the manner of an adult,” I said.
“He will only spend a small amount of time in
this world. He’s probably known this.
Probably heard this in the music of people’s speech.
He has known, intuitively, that he must grow up fast.”
-“What is his name?”
“Marid.”
-“Does it have a meaning?”
“It means rebellious,” she said.
-“Who named him?”
“Ghiyath. The father always names,” she said.
She saw me looking at her, so she continued:
-“Ghiyath’s name means ‘succorer,’ one who takes
care. He has grown into his name. He has become
one who takes care, but before he was a Rasha,
the most unpredictable child of Raidah, the large
storm.
Way too many names and concepts all
unexplained
Any child of his, he said, would have the same
unpredictability, the same fury, and so the name
is a warning to the mothers, to treat this lineage
with caution.”
She snorted,
-“As if we needed that. A Rasha can create an electrical phenomenon where orbs of lightning fall close to the ground and explode. It looks like the storm has pulled the stars down to earth and opened them for us, but if you are in the path of a Rasha, you will die. We are now all in the path in of Ghiyath’s Rasha.” Messy
The child disconnected itself from the nipple, and started
to cry.
“You see,” Nada said, “he knows. He doesn’t
know what we are saying, but it knows what we
are talking about.”
She began singing a lullaby. It was the first time I hear her use her two voices simultaneously. The first voice sang:
hush, hush, little one, hush hush little one,
while the second voice sang:
the silver will be melted by the sun, your mother
is the wind-eyes daughter of the sun.
Nada repeated this, on and off, for hours, varying the pitches, the tones, the overtones, the rhythm, the tempo, her voice trying to cover all possible ranges and notes, as if she was trying to plan for everything. I couldn’t remember exactly when I fell asleep. Nice
I woke up with a jolt from the stack, and Egg’s
scrawl on my vision.
A CONFIGURATION OF PLAGUE HAS
ARRANGED ITSELF SEVERAL MILES FROM
YOU.
Maybe better as description as this is a tale in past tense, like.
I asked Egg if it’s coming closer and it asked wheter to deploy counter-measures. I wasn’t sure , I wanted to know more I needed to get close to whatever it was to
understand what was happening. I asked egg for
suggestions
This would allow you to express Maha’s feelings about what she is witnessing
-Is it coming closer?
AFFIRMATIVE. COUNTER-MEASURES?
-Suggestions?
INTERCEPT WITH A PIN-MISSILE
MODIFIED TO DETONATE IMMEDIATELY
BEFORE THE TARGET, DISORGANIZING
MATTER AT THE ATOMIC-LEVEL.
-Do it.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-If it gets within one thousand feet of us, execute,
report results.
AFFIRMATIVE.
I turned to my stack.
-Display a schematic.
The stack displayed a vertical and horizontal cross-
section of the plague-configuration, but this wasn’t
extremely helpful because much of its interior-
structure was uniform. The most complex
organization of the material was underneath the
configuration and was probably used for mobility.
“What’s wrong?” asked Nada, snapping awake.
-“Please be quiet,” Cliché I said,
“there’s something out there.” Cliché Weak
“Is it one of The Plague’s children?” she asked.
-“One of what?”
“Show it to me.”
-“I can’t, my instruments have picked it up.”
“Does it look like a long thick silver chord about a
hundred feet in length.”
-“Yes.”
“We have the accord. Leave it alone.”
“What?
Nada was about to say something, but I., my body or???
was already gointg into full alert.
-“It’s coming closer.”
My Egg wrote quickly
IT IS WITHIN TWO THOUSAND FEET.
-“Nada, I have a weapon that can destroy it, if we
are threatened. And if I act within permissible time
limits”
With so little knowledge about it, how Maha can be sure of that?
“Please don’t do anything,” Nada said, “we can talk
to them.” Them?
I whistled, slipping through a hole in my hanging
cloak, landing in the dirt underneath the tree,
trailing a lighter layer of cloak on my body.
“Please don’t do anything,” said Nada.
It was the first time I had ever sensed panic from her.
ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FEET.
-Negate last order. Fire on my command.
ARE YOU SURE?
-Yes.
AFFIRMATIVE.
Nada was stiffening and her skin begun to cool quite
noticeably.
-“How do you communicate with it?”
“Let me do it,”
Ssaid Nada, struggling to get out of the tent.
EIGHT HUNDRED FEET.
I heard a faint whistling sound. My cloak started
to bristle.
SEVEN HUNDRED FEET.
-“What are you going to say to it?” Weak I asked.
“I’m going to tell it to leave us alone,” Weak she
said.
SIX HUNDRED FEET. IT IS LIKELY THE
MIND IS DISTRIBUTED THROUGHOUT
THE BODY. THERE IS NO FORCE POINT
THAT CAN NEGATE CONFLICT. THE
ENTIRE STRUCTURE MUST BE
OBLITERATED FOR IT TO CEASE TO BE
A THREAT.
The whistling got louder. There were several voices, all playing counterpoint. From this distance, I could distinguish them. Again I awoke my stack.
-Is there information encoded within the whistling?
Yes.
-What?
It appears to be a musical translation of certain parts of
multiple human personality-structures. ??????
FIVE HUNDRED FEET.
Now I could see the thing, moving quickly, a
rapid cord of silver about two hundred feet long
and ten feet thick, a chord with a long snout-like
weak protrusion slithering through the fields
towards us.
-What do you mean ‘a translation of certain parts of
multiple human personality structures’?
The configuration is translating various fear responses,
from a neuronal analysis, into a musical sound
composition, probably with the intention of activating your
own fear-response.
FOUR HUNDRED FEET.
The sound became extremely loud deafening , and again I felt what I felt in the room in the palace: a sort of sharp fear permeated with a diffuse consuming apprehension.
-Najat, reduce my aural sensitivity by ninety percent via
the configuration.
Affirmative. Use another word to differenciate from
Egg.
-Additionally, suppress the activity of mirror-neurons
what are these and what they do? by forty percent.
Affirmative. Same
I heard the sound, but its emotional valence was significantly reduced; however, my empathetic response would also be reduced, so I would have to be careful.
“Let me speak to it!” shouted Nada, from the tent.
She was already out and why would she be in, anyway?
THREE HUNDRED FEET.
Its Call it something. snout branched into nine other heads, flailing and rollicking, coming together as one head-like-thing, then separating — counter point expanding then coming together, then expanding.
“Please, please, let me speak to it,” Nada shouted.
TWO HUNDRED FEET. WAITING FOR
SIGNAL TO EXECUTE. Don’t need this
because it is implied
-If it gets within fifty feet, do it, full spread.
AFFIRMATIVE.
The thing slithered in a wide circle around the tree, slowly turning around the two of us. Nada shouted from the tent: ?????
“Be gone!” Weak
The whistling became lower, deeper, holes opened in the body of the configuration, pressurizing sound. I saw the mangled reflection of myself and the tree and Nada in the mirror-like surface of the thing’s skin. It was almost as if someone had encircled us within an enormous bubbling mirror.
A face extended out of the body of the silvery material. It was Nada’s, but silver, Nice
“Be gone child!”
Iit shouted better word What is the meaning of “child”? ,
looking at me, wearing Nada’s fear,
“Be gone!”
“I’m not going anywhere,”
I said. This is weak and a cliche
One of the heads extended away from the others,
coming towards me, making a high shrill
whistling, higher than the other heads and louder
than the low note coming from the thing’s body.
I asked Najat to further reduce my aural and
emotional sensitivity and ordered my Egg to
execute attack.
-Head. Just head. Execute.
AFFIRMATIVE.
When the head had come within nearly twenty feet of me and I had looked at myself in the reflection of its eyeless open snout, which was spewing sound …it exploded From the missile? into a silver liquifying steam that splashed back onto the beast’s body. The beast drew its heads closer together. It continued rotating and ??????.
-Can it interfere with our communication?
NEGATIVE.
Suddenly, The wall expanded, rising higher and higher into the sky, until we were almost enveloped in a column of whirling silver. The sound became louder and faster. Better
-“What is it doing?” I asked.
“It’s trying to scare us,” WEAK shouted Nada.
-“Ten missiles, wide dispersal, reduce its bulk.”
I flashed to Egg
EXECUTE.
Holes appeared in the column, erupting into steam ????????, reducing two thirds of its form. It collapsed down onto itself, reforming, regrouping, still whirling around us but more cautiously now, as if wanting to show force, but not to provoke another attack tempt me into action. The whistling died down into lower registers. Expand on sound
“Don’t make me destroy you completely!” I shouted to it. WEAK Too omnipotent
Its heads waved in the air. My face appeared in the silver.
“Don’t make me destroy you completely!”
It shouted back at me.
THE PLAGUE IS ATTEMPTING TO INFILTRATE MY SHELL.
-Possibility of breach?
UNLIKELY.
-Can you feed the images to the stack.
We ought to should work on this situation. Leave Egg full capacity to engage, suggested Najat.
-Alright. WEAK
Nada had leapt down from the tent. She had left the infant in it. She was running towards me.
-“Stop!” I shouted.
She didn’t. I whistled the cloak into a long prong that tripped her, then split it into four prongs that pinned her to the ground.
“Don’t!”
She shouted, but then I whistled the cloak around her throat.
The monster kept circling around us.
It formed a face, my face, and said to me with my own silvery mouth,
“Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!”
“Stop!”
I shouted.
“Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”
It replied.
I watched it move around us, heads coming apart, heads coming back together. The whistling sounded like wind shredding a landscape.
-Have you successfully handled the attack.
AFFIRMATIVE.
Nada tried to struggle. I held her down. Another one of the heads rose from the turning circle, looking like it was about to attack.
-Execute totally.
There was a flash in the air, a terrible roaring hiss and then the being Overuse of the word “being” liquidated entirely ?????? into steam. The missiles, microscopic, had dove down from the sky and blown the being out from us in every direction.
[* — Also include ‘heat-death’ here]
I whistled the cloak off of Nada’s mouth.
She twisted her head, flicking her blond hair backward, too much like a model or a bad actress then said:
“That could have broken the accord.”
“So,” I said cooly, “didn’t you want me to help you?”
“You didn’t! That was one of The Plague’s children. If you break the accord, The Plague will let her children die. If her children die, they will cease to gather the byproduct of whatever The Plague is building inside the palace. Unclear You’ve seen the silver, all around us?”
-“Yes.”
“It is the byproduct of whatever The Plague is building in the palace. Say something about that “thing” that the Plague is building in the palace, much earlier. It Which “it” are you referring to? is attracted to the children. They gather it. If they didn’t, the silver would create ecophagy.”
-“What is that?”
“Eating the world,” she said.
I looked at her, skeptically.
“You saw Ghiyath?”
-“Yes.”
“You saw the other parts of his body?”
“Yes.”
“Ghiyath is a powerful weapon. Made by whom, operated by whom? In the beginning, Ghiyath fought aggressively against The Plague’s children. Why? He went out into the nearby areas Vague to hunt them. He was actually capable of destroying them. So, for a time, the children avoided the palace, but then we noticed that the fields started to become even more metallic, the sky started to shimmer, the taste in the air started to change, and the structural integrity of the palace started to weaken. The only thing that we had changed was Ghiyath’s attacks. So, we stopped him. And, as the months passed, the air started to clear, the palace started to strengthen and The Plague’s children started to haunt the area again.”
-“Tell me about the Accord.” How did Ghiyath not destroy the accord?”
“That’s what established the accord. After this, one of The Plague’s children started haunting the entrance of the palace. Ghiyath went out to meet it, and saw a version of himself, entirely silver, emerge from the creature, this second Ghiyath asked for seven men and seven women. Ghiyath refused. The creature told him that all of The Plague’s children would leave the area. So, what could we do?”
-“Why wouldn’t you have searched for methods to clean up and contain the silver, buffer from the Plague? You couldn’t figure out how to clean the silver from the area.”
“Our technology could not decipher the code. No. For a time, we would be able to reduce it, but then their numbers grew and grew again. Each attempt to limit it the advance of the conditions only made it worse in the long run.”
-“How long ago was this?”
“Ten years ago.”
-“What has changed from then till now?”
“The other palaces have collapsed, one by one. Not from attack, but by the inability to resist the plague. More about this The refugees have gathered at our palace. Our numbers have leveled off, not shrunk, but leveled. It is difficult to determine how much of our survival is based upon our own ingenuity, our ability to evolve countermeasures, or that The Plague allows us to live.”
-“You know what it is, don’t you?” I asked.
She nodded.
-“Will you tell me?”
“One day I’m going to show you, soon. tomorrow.”
-“Why not now?
Nada picked herself up. Obviously she was not going to tell me until she was ready. I could have forced her, but instead I whistled the cloak gently down from the tree. She climbed into it.
“I’m going out into the fields to think,” I said.
“OK.”
I walked out into the metal grasses. Many were crushed from where the beast had glided over them, or splattered with silver-black sludge, which I assumed was its detritus. The air, unfortunately, did seem more saturated with silver. I thought Najat might have a clue here:
-Is there a higher proportion of plague in the air now that that plague-structure has been destroyed?
Affirmative. There are three percent more particles per cubic square foot of air.
-Is it coming from the detritus of the structure or seeping in from the surrounding air.
The air. The pin-missiles destabilized the atomic
structure of the plague such that it cannot reform.
I switched to Egg:
-Is it possible destroy the plague?
NEGATIVE.
-Why not?
UNAUTHORIZED INTERFERENCE.
-Consider the question hypothetically.
DESTROYING THE LARGER FORMATIONS IS NOT DIFFICULT. DESTROYING THE SMALLER FORMATIONS THAT HAVE INTEGRATED THEMSELVES INTO THE LANDSCAPE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. IT REQUIRES SOPHISTICATED COUNTER-ATOMIC GEO-ENGINEERING.
-But it is possible?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-But I would have to be threatened?
AFFIRMATIVE; HOWEVER, IF THE PERCEPTION WAS THAT YOU WERE DELIBERATELY ATTEMPTING TO THREATEN YOURSELF, THIS WOULD QUALIFY AS MISSION-THREAT. YOU WOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO INITIATE THIS SEQUENCE OF ACTIONS.
-Secret.
Secret initialized, said Najat.
I looked at Maha with puzzlement: The anthropologist did the same thing earlier, secret with his stack.
-“Wait— you found a way to speak to the stack without your Egg
being able to hear?” I asked, amazed.
“When you rise through the ranks, you develop a greater
understanding of the mission-architecture, both through
inference and because of higher clearance.”
UNLIKELY THOSE STRUCTURAL FAULTS OCCUR IN
MY MODEL. —My Egg butted in stated.
-Always time to find out. —I taunted it.
I agree, said my stack.
I think that was the first time that ever happened. What happened the first time?
Maha pulled my sleeve She continued:
Listen! This is important!
-Sorry. I drifted off.
Maha nodded and restarted where she left off.
-If I wanted to, do you think I could end the plague?
It’s possible, said Najat, but it require tremendous resources from Egg—possibly irreplaceable resources.
-World-building resources?
Yes.
-If I wanted to, how could I convince Egg to do it?
There are three approaches, all unorthodox. Should I continue?
-Affirmative.
1.) You could find a way to imperil Egg such that requires her to destroy the plague; however, this is perilous — the outcomes are not easily manipulated and the possibly of reprisal from Egg are great.
2.) You could build a world — here. It has been done before, co-opting a population into The Mission. During the world-building process, you would employ Egg’s vast atomic and geo-engineering capabilities to efface the plague.
-That already looks like our most likely option. Give me the exact scenario How does this work exactly?
You’d have to persuade every single person here to leave for the next several millennia, while you built and modified the world. Then, you’d have to reintegrate them into the new population.
-Possible, but I don’t know if I could convince them. Last option?
It is the most unorthodox.
-Go on.
Are you sure you want this idea in your mind?
-Yes.
I kicked a small stone underneath my foot. More here about this hesitation
We could attempt to break into Egg’s architecture and rebuild her motivation-personality-structure using the nano-materials from the plague.
I felt as if my heart stopped. Then I hoped that the stack had projected a steady heart beat back to Egg.
It was one thing to manipulate Egg using external factors. It was another thing entirely to try to change Egg’s mind from the inside out.
It was frightening. It was a frightening idea. I knew about the structure of Egg’s mind. I didn’t know everything. I wasn’t an Egg-maker, but I knew enough to know how extremely powerful Egg is. I heard the next words traveling from my mind to Njat, as though I was not in control of myself:
-You think you could do this thing?
It is possible, your life would be risked, achieving it, but it is possible.
I didn’t know what to think. Stacks are powerful too. Stacks are powerful and devious. If you haven’t already figured that out, it’s something you should know. Fortunately I caught myself and put a stop to this track.
-I’m going to forget you suggested this, I said. Make double-sure that all of my thought patterns regarding these topics are not observed. Make sure maintain the model of my mind in Egg that is not affected by our secrets. If you risk discovery, erase my explicit-memory of these conversations. If you still risk discovery, erase the implicit-memory and its connection to my motivational-structures. Can you do that?
Yes.
-End secret, I said.
[* — There may be way too much here, but I’m going to jut write it all out, and then see later if I can splice it through]
Maha seemed to have halted, not just her speech, but her body seemed to have slowed down, as though shutting down, or in need of recharging.
My Egg spun a warning:
LISTENING TO THIS NARRATIVE MAY IMPERIL THE MISSION.
-You mean learning that I can modify or manipulate the connection between the three of us.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Do you think that she could be manipulating me?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-What do you think she wants?
Silence.
-Hypothesize.
THERE ARE SEVERAL POSSIBILITIES. FIRSTLY, IT
IS UNLIKELY SHE WANTS YOUR DESTRUCTION.
SHE MAY HAVE BEEN CAPABLE OF DESTROYING
YOUR STACK IN THE EARLIER ENCOUNTER. IT IS
LIKELY THAT SHE REALIZES THAT SHE HAS BECOME
A SUBJECT OF INTEREST TO THE
ANTHROPOLOGISTS. KILLING YOU permanently
WOULD ONLY HEIGHTEN THEIR INTEREST.
THEREFORE, IT IS LIKELY THAT SHE IS TRYING TO
MANIPULATE YOU. HOWEVER, HER END IS
DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE.
-Hypothesize further.
ONE MAIN POSSIBILITY IS THAT SHE IS TRYING TO
MANIPULATE YOU INTO WRITING HER OFF AS FIELD
OF INQUIRY OR INTEREST, THEREFORE ALLOWING
HER TO MAINTAIN THE STATUS QUO IN HER
ENVIRONS.
-That doesn’t make sense: I’m captivated.
AFFIRMATIVE. THEREFORE, IT IS SOMEWHAT
MORE LIKELY IT IS THE OTHER MAIN POSSIBILITY:
SHE SEEKS TO MANIPULATE YOU FOR SOME END.
-What?
Silence.
-Hypothesize?
Silence.
-If you tell me not just what I’m supposed to here, but why we
are here, I might be able to figure that our for myself. If I
figure that out, it could be extremely useful for the assignment.
Silence.
-You know that I would be better able to formulate my
response.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-So tell me.
AFFIRMATIVE. AN ANOMALOUS EGG-LIKE SIGNAL
WAS RECEIVED FROM THIS AREA. IT WAS
SUSPECTED THAT THE MISSION ARCHITECTURE
OR AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ITSELF HAD BEEN CO-
OPTED, DAMAGED, MODIFIED, OR ALTERED. It was
known that THE
ANTHROPOLOGIST DID NOT DEFECT. THE
ANTHROPOLOGIST WAS NOT KILLED. THESE ARE
UNDERSTOOD OUTCOMES. The anomaly had to be
dealt with. OF THE FIFTY EGGS IN
THE AREA, YOUR PERSONALITY STRUCTURE,
SKILL-SET AND EXPENDABILITY QUALIFIED YOU
FOR THE MISSION.
-That helps. Thanks Egg.
AFFIRMATIVE.
-How much do you think we can rely on the story that she is
telling us, as compared to what you will find out from the
hack?
THERE ARE THREE SOURCES OF ASSIGNMENT-
DATA: (1) THE ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE,
(2) HER TESTIMONY, (3) HER EGG’S TESTIMONY.
THUS FAR, ASPECTS OF THE ARCHEOLOGICAL
EVIDENCE CONFIRM HER TESTIMONY. THERE
ARE MULTIPLE PALACE STRUCTURES BENEATH
THE EARTH SURFACE HERE . THERE ARE ALSO
DISTORTED HUMAN REMAINS. CURIOSITIES IN
THE CURRENT ECOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE
PLANET SUGGEST ARTIFICIAL MANIPULATION,
SOMEWHAT IN REVERSE TO THE CHANGES THE
PLAGUE WAS REPORTED TO HAVE MADE IN THE
PAST. THIS IS CURRENTLY UNASSIMILABLE DATA.
OTHERWISE, OVERALL, THE VERACITY OF HER
ACCOUNT SHOULD BE SUSPECT UNTIL
CONFIRMED.
-I agree.
ADDITIONALLY, BECAUSE THERE IS THE
POSSIBILITY THAT SHE HAS DISTORTED THE
CONNECTION BETWEEN HERSELF, STACK AND
EGG, IT IS DIFFICULT TO TELL WHICH
COMPONENT IS THE PRIMARY AGENT. Great
-Any clues which it might be are you able to tell?
NEGATIVE.
-So, for all I know, I could be talking to someone completely
controlled by their egg or stack?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Or, I could be talking to someone whose personality is a
simulation running on their stack?
AFFIRMATIVE.
I felt sick. Maha stird, and She leaned back against me. speaking, and for a moment, I was worried that I would throw up.
-Stack, cancel nausea.
Confirmed.
ALTERNATIVELY, YOU COULD BE TALKING TO A
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FORM OF ENTITY THAT
HAS NOT AS OF YET BEEN ENCOUNTERED: A NOVEL
MIXTURE OF ANTHROPOLOGIST, STACK AND EGG. Great
Maha looked up at me somewhat confused.
*
Did I stop” I nodded. “Sorry. I ‘ll go on.”
“After my walk in the fields I returned I walked back to the tent, slowly whistling it down from the tree. Nada slept inside it and the infant slept against her. I stood there, looking at them. The infant opened its eyes. Blue, with flecks of darker blue inside them. They looked at me. He smiled, and his face, which had previously looked so adult, finally looked childlike — radiant. I bent towards him. He reached his hand out, and put it on my face, then poked at one of my eyes, as if wanted to pluck it out and play with it. I whistled my cloak into a yellow ball attached to an extremely thin thread, and dangled it in front of him. He ignored it. I walked around to the other side of the tent and got into it, whistling it back up into the tree. Then, I leaned back and whistled an yellow eye-like design into the side of Nada’s compartment. Whenever the infant tried to touch it, it disappeared, and then reappeared in another part of the compartment. The infant giggled quietly, reaching out for it. Nada woke up.
“Marid,” she held him more tightly, “sleep.”
She cradled the infant, and he promptly forgot about my eyes and went to sleep, face nuzzled against his mother’s breast.
I stared up at the wall of the tent. Outside, the first of the blue moons poked up from beyond the mountain ranges and its light filled the tent with soft, bluish glow. I too fell asleep
[* — may be too much data-stuff, or data-dropping, or may be good elaboration, not sure yet]
The next morning, the wind roared over the earth, ripping up stalks high into the air. On the horizon, an immense dust storm gathered like a wave rising.
-Is it going to hit us?
No.
Nada poked her head outside of the tent, then back in.
“This is Rima,” she said.
-“Rima?”
“The small storm who comes before Raya, the dust storm.”
-“Will it hit us, the dust-storm?”
She stared out at the landscape.
“I think not, but we should wait for Rima to pass before leaving.”
I nodded. Then, the tent started swaying. I whistled the windows shut, and whistled the tent closer to the trunk of the tree so that it wouldn’t move. The infant crawled up onto Nada’s lap, and looked out at the storms, again, looking so serious.
-“Why did you choose a world with such harsh conditions?” I asked.
Nada shrugged.
“We don’t know that much about our ancestors.”
I looked out at the dust.
-“Would you like to?”
Nada looked at me, frowning.
-“Your language, culture and technological-style, in addition other data, give my equipment enough data to locate you on the tree.”
“The tree?”
-“The tree of migrations. The anthropologist’s representation of all the different branches of humanity, trans-humanity and known post-humanity.”
“You can find our true ancestors?”
-“It is possible. Would you want to know like me to try?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on.” Cliché Not Needed
I brought the tree into my vision.
-Najat, can you find them? Better command.
Assembling data. Triangulating.It is a very old fashioned term
Already, Najat was focusing me upon one of the top branches. She zoomed in, and the branches split into tiny stalks. On one of the stalks, this sector of the universe, Najat zoomed up again: AX-12. She centered the branch and arranged it into a tree-configuration. She identified one of the roots, illuminating it with red, as the most likely immigration.
I focused in on the red icon in front of it.
=“You want to know what they called themselves?” I asked Nada. Why this constant questions? Just say They called themselves…
“Yes.”
-“The Karida.”
“Karida,” she repeated.
“Does it have a meaning?”
-“I think it means ‘The Untouched.’”
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know Hold on.”
On the left side of my vision, I touched the red icon with my mind’s hand. The other icons emerged from its sides arranging themselves into the grid: Social, Political, Cultural, Economic, Geographical, etc. I touched the grid again and it became three dimensional. I touched it again and the red threads of the anthropological analysis threaded through the different icons. I started tracing the threads through the cultural icons, tapping into the micro-icons that represented dominant cultural mythologies. There were immense gaps. Gaps of thousands and thousands of years not covered by anthropologists. I found that another anthropologist had actually tried to find the same data, so I said a small prayer of thanks, then followed his lead. The anthropologist had strung together many of the dominant mythologies and traced them over time. The oldest seemed to represent the reason for migration.
-“You were called the Karida because you came from a homeworld that was ruthless, militaristic and rigidly patriarchal. Houses of males would constantly war against each other. Each house possessed one woman, who was immobilized, enlarged, mentally incapacitated and converted into not neded a birthing machine. Somehow, some of them escaped, and they called themselves ‘The Karida,’ the untouched.”
Nada made a grimace.
I looked a little bit more carefully through the icons.
-“But your birthrate on this world is imbalanced between men and women?” Not needed
Nada nodded.
-“About thirty women for every one man?”
Nada nodded again.
-“I think this population-engineering occurred during the exodus, so the women are not entirely untouched.” Meaning?
“Does this world we came from still exist?”
My Egg flashed a warning
THIS INFORMATION IS NOT AUTHORIZED FOR DISPERSAL AMONG THE NATIVE POPULATION.
I ignored it. Maha continued
-“I don’t know,” I said.
“Hmph—” Nada snorted, “those women didn’t know how to control their men. We don’t have that problem.”
-“You don’t?”
“We… didn’t,” Nada said, “ Not needed not for hundreds of years.”
-“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Every child-bearing season, there was a competition among the family-mothers who rule each palace. Who could inspire the men most? Who could attract the most inspired man? Who could make him make the greatest work? The greatest instrument? More about the instrument A life giver, taker, source of all tings, maker of harmony… Who knows when to give and when not to give? Who knows what to leverage? Only the most creative and productive men would reproduce. Only the most subtle, political and socially intelligent women would reproduce. This is the competition that the built palaces and their instruments.”
She paused.
I thought of Wisal, and then looked out at the silver swirling outside of the tent, finally realizing it.
“It was an instrument,” I said. Not clear
She nodded, and then she wouldn’t say anything else.
[*
— As they walk towards the palace, is this another opportunity for them to talk? Or see something?]
About an hour and a half later, Rima left the fields.
I lowered the tent, let Nada out, then whistled it onto my back and into my cloak. We set out, walking in silence. Several times, I walked close to Nada, but she raised a hand, indicated she preferred to go forward silent.
After half the day had passed, I finally saw a palace in the distance.
-“Is that it?” I asked.
She nodded.
The closer we got, the more pools of silver we saw. Long stretches of silver puddles looking like they irrigated the fields. From the distance, I heard the whistling of The Plague’s children. How, how does Maha know that this was the whistling of Plague’s children?
You are surrounded, said Najat.
-Are they coming towards us?
Negative.
-If they do, let me know. Can you track their movements.
Affirmative.
Egg made itself known.
-Prime pin-missiles.
AFFIRMATIVE.
We walked on and suddenly I could see them, distant yet clearly visible. Every so often, one of them would rise up into the air about a thousand or two thousand feet away from us, its heads sparkling, separating, playing a strange deep ethereal music.
-“They’re somewhat beautiful,” I said.
Nada said nothing.
We walked closer.
Off to the right was a huge structure. It took a moment of looking at it to realize what it was: the carcass of the kites. Great skeletal bows of material jutted through the tattered flat planes that had kept it aloft. The flat planes fell flat against each other. No longer filled with wind, the structure looked crushed, like an animal in an environment of higher gravity for which it had adapted. The entire structure must have crashed here onto the fields, and imploded.
I looked up above the palace and saw that instead of the kites, there was an immense silver stream ejecting a silver column of steam into the atmosphere above what must have been the main court. The steam drifted up, becoming part of the cloud layer, which would presumably sweep it all over the earth.
-Plague? I asked Najat.
Affirmative, she said.
-So, in addition the plague’s ability to replicate itself via organic structures, there must also be a factory within this palace that produces it on mass.
Or is its: I begun to understand that
-Is Egg able to scan the structure that produces the plague?
Only partially.
I was surprised.
-Why?
The center of the palace contains a plague-structure so complex as to almost completely defy analysis
-Does proximity help?
Affirmative. The scans from our location have garnered more data than the scans from orbit.
-Why?
The reasons are technical. Better description
-Continue.
The optical refraction gathering system, on all wavelengths, and the mutual mass affect sensor-indexes are proximity-dependent. Probe-missiles were not dispersed because their effect on the environment, particularly the plague-structures, was unknown.
-I see… But, regardless of what exactly it is, the plague is being primarily produced here?
Affirmative.
-Secret.
Secret initialized, said Najat.
-So, if we destroyed the palace, would that stop the plague?
Negative, said Najat, the environment has been saturated to the point of impending ecophagy.
-End secret.
Secret ended.
We kept walking.
The closer we got to the palace, the larger The Plague’s children became. There was one that must have been several hundred feet away, but I could see its immense silver body crushing the fields, reflecting the sun, and I feel its bass notes rumbling the earth.
-How large is the one to our right? I asked.
It is four hundred feet long and twenty feet in diameter.
-Is it similar in structure to the one that we encountered on the fields?
Negative, there seem to be other functional organ-like structures within it.
-Purpose?
Unknown; however, by eventually observing other parts of the plague-system, Egg may be able to better determine the function of individual aspects.
Affirmative, I replied.
Once we turned a corner in the road, the palace came into full-view. It was surrounded by the silver animals. They clung to the walls, resting there, reflecting the sun, one playing a pattern through its body that another would imitate, counter-point, follow, then pass onto another. They lingered wrapped around columns, opening and closing holes in their bodies, and threading their separate heads between the palace-structures. They turned their blind heads toward us, and their music reached a sort of crescendo, remaining held at a high oscillating wary pitch.
Nada stopped.
-“I don’t want you to give them the child,” I said.
“Will you destroy the plague?”
-“I can’t.”
“That’s not true,” said Nada, “I’ve seen your weapons. Out on the fields, you didn’t just destroy The Plague’s child: you obliterated it. The stories of your people — fire-bringers, world-makers — have reached even us. You are feared. When the kites above the palace told us that you were in the sky, a terror rose up in all the mothers all the mothers were afraid, all the mothers except me. Why? And then when I saw you, and I knew you to be a woman, I was even more clear. You would help us. You would not less this instrument control us.”
She looked at me expectantly.
-“What would you want me to do?”
Here you need to make it clear what needs to be destroyed, you have to say what IS inside of the building , and what is governing the plague.
“First, destroy this building. And everything and everyone inside it Destroy the thing inside it. Then, there will be no governing order to the plague. It will run amok.
-“And then?”
Then you must burn the world. You must encase it in fire until the plague is destroyed. Not needed We will bury burrow ourselves deep within the ground the palace, sleep, and wait for the world come back to life.”
-“I cannot do this thing,” I said.
“No,” she corrected, “you will not, you are an anthropologist.” She hissed mockingly.
“I cannot,” I replied, angrily, “I cannot interfere in the affairs of my objects of inquiry. My weapons systems won’t function unless I am imperiled. And, no matter what, they will not ‘heat-death’ a planet.”
“It is said in our stories that you annihilated an entire system of planets.”
“The civilization on those planets was threatening the stability of several systems of space. For several thousand years, they did not heed our warnings. The secret-anthropologists we sent to change their culture were found out, and executed. Then, they did not heed the ‘heat-death’ of one of their colonies. Nor, after, the ‘heat-death’ of their home-planet. They only became more aggressive, more reckless in their drive to expand, convert and conquer. So, to protect ourselves and the interworld order, we had to exterminate them.”
“How do you know that The Plague will not become like this?”
-“So far, it seems contained to your planet, with no designs for expansion. So far,”
I looked at her hard,
“it is your problem.”
“Fine,” she said, and she turned around.
-“You’re not going to deliver that child to???,” I said.
“If it’s our problem,” she said, “we’ve got our own solutions,” back turned. She started walking towards the palace. I felt sick, watching her walking forward, feeling impulses warring within me. What was I going to do? Take the child from its mother? And do what with it? Bring it back to the palace? How do I know it wouldn’t die anyway in a month from now? How would I know they all wouldn’t?
-Najat, does Egg’s analysis reveal any motivation structure or utility function for the plague, as of yet?
Hypothesize?
-Affirmative.
It is extremely difficult to tell. The plague is creating something within the palace; however, all it might be is the factory that creates more plague. What seems peculiar is that the ‘Plague’s Children’ seem to harvest the plague, the silvery material, after it has circulated throughout the this world.
-Some kind of information system? How does this rlate?
It is possible. Also, since we have landed the number of the ‘Plague’s Children,’ has increased, only minimally, but noticeably, as has the complexity of their organ-structures.
-Is there any kind of over-arching perceivable order in their evolution?
It is difficult to tell because Egg’s analytics have determined so little about the ‘Plague-Society’ what is that? as a whole.
Najat continued:
Further difficulties are caused by the relationship of the plague to the native inhabitants. It is able to manipulate human emotion and thought through sound. Also, it is able to communicate with the inhabitants through inference and mimicry, requesting population for an unknown purpose. It is clear that the plague was created by the inhabitants. Why is it clear? It is also likely that it began its evolution as some form of sound generating device a kind of musical instrument, like Wisal. These last aspects are the most confounding to Egg’s analysis.
-How dangerous do you think the plague is to us, as a race?
As of now, it is totally innocuous; however, because of its evolutionary potential, it is difficult to measure its future threat. Egg has already tagged the phenomenon What phenomenon? for long-scale observation.
-I see.
I stood there, thinking, watching Nada’s back. At this point, I could have just left. I could have abandoned these people. My Egg and other Eggs would determine whether the plague posed any significant threat. But there was Nada, walking, gripping that bundle, walking up the plague’s children without shaking, about to enter into the center of an absolutely terrifying situation. Explain. And, what are we tasked to do? What are we supposed to do? What is the purpose of the life of an anthropologist? Observe. So, I followed her, but at the second step, my Egg preempted me:
IF YOU ENTER THIS STRUCTURE, YOU WILL IMPERIL THE STACK.
-I thought you could construct adequate
containment?
NOT WITHIN THE STRUCTURE.
-Isn’t it more likely that once I penetrate
the structure, you will have an even greater
understanding of the plague’s structure and
utility functions?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-At the moment, how difficult is the plague
to analyze?
ON THE ZAINA SCALE OF HUMAN-CONTEXUAL ANOMALIES, IT RANKS SIX OUT OF TEN, JUST AT THE THRESHOLD OF EVENTUAL CERTAIN COMPREHENSION GIVEN ADEQUATE TIME; THEREFORE, IT HAS BEEN TAGGED FOR MILLENIA-LONG OBSERVATION.
-Regardless, as an ‘A’, I also have the authority
to investigate it individually, do I not?
AFFIRMATIVE. PHENOMENA
BETWEEN 5 AND 8 ON THE ZAINA SCALE
ALLOW FOR THE DISCRETION OF
INDIVIDUAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS;
NEVERTHELESS, MOST
ANTHROPOLOGISTS TAG THE OBJECT FOR
OBSERVATION AND THREAT-EVALUATION.
-I am not ‘most anthropologists’. Better like.
In all this time we have been attached to each other,
have you not learned that what most anthropologists
do or think, is not the criteria that moves me the
most?
AFFIRMATIVE. INITIATE
COUNTERMEASURES?
-Yes.
The full cocktail of combat drugs flooded into my system. My cloak amped up its energy expenditure by a series of five. The stack prepared multiple back-up-missiles, each with a record of my mind’s qualia and created an encrypted back up of itself which it sent to Egg.
I walked quickly up to Nada. She looked at me, silently, angrily, for a moment, then she nodded towards the palace, and I followed before.
When we reached the blue-white stone steps that lead up to the entryway, the high oscillating note that had played this entire time changed character: it split into thousands and thousand of voices, like a single wailing child turning into a sea of crying infants. I looked up, and saw that out of the bodies of the plague’s children had emerged silver people, with thin strings of silver still attaching them to the creatures. Up on the columns, where the plague’s children on the third layer had threaded their heads between them, the people were standing, hundreds of silver people looking down at us. Holes had opened in their bodies, on their heads, in their throats. Their mouths were just another hole. And what was the purpose of these?
We walked through a doorless entryway, down a long large corridor with other corridors branching away from it.
Just as Maha was about to say something, my Egg wrote a quick but loaded note:
THE OUTER LAYER OF HER EGG’S ARCHITECTURE
HAS BEEN PENETRATED.
-And?
SHE CURRENTLY RANKS THREE ON THE ZAINA-
SCALE OF HUMAN-CONTEXTUAL ANOMALIES: HER
ACCESS ARCHITECTURE POSSESSED AN
EXCEPTIONAL DEGREE OF UKNOWN MATTER-
CODING.
-Is she still a person?
AGENCY IS STILL DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE. ONCE
HER EGG’S INNER-MIND HAS BEEN PENETRATED
AND THE ASSIGNMENT-DATA RETRIEVED, IT MAY
BE
POSSIBLE TO ACCURATELY DETERMINE THE
COMPOSITION AND DISTRIBUTION OF AGENCY
AMONG ALL THREE SYSTEMS.
-What about when the stack’s interacted, did that give any
evidence?
INCONCLUSIVE: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL IF HER
STACK WAS ABLE TO DISTORT THE PERSONALITY-
STRUCTURE OF YOUR STACK BECAUSE OF (1) YOUR
STACK’S INNATE WEAKNESS AS IT HAS DEVELOPED
IN YOUR CARE, (2) HER STACK’S EXCELLENT
CAPACITY FOR NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMING
DEVELOPED FROM NORMAL MISSION PROGRESS
OR (3) ALTERATION.
I turned to my stack:
-Thoughts?
Egg burned out my memories.
It jarred me and I snapped-
-What?
THE MEMORY-STRUCTURE HAD ALREADY LINKED
SO DEEPLY INTO MOTIVATIONAL-STRUCTURE
THAT WITHOUT DELETION THE your STACK
WOULD IMMEDIATELY HAVE SOUGHT CONTACT
WITH HER STACK, RECREATING THE ORIGINAL
PROBLEM. What problem was that?
-Do you have a record of the stack’s memories?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Would you examine them and try to determine if she is still
human.
AFFIRMATIVE… HYPOTHESIZE?
-Yes.
PART OF HER STACK HAS BEEN MODIFIED
SIMILARLY TO THE WAY HER EGG HAS BEEN
MODIFIED. THERE ARE UNKNOWN FORMS OF
MATTER-ENCODING. UNTIL THESE FORMS ARE
DECODED AND INDEXED, IT WILL BE
IMPOSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE DISTRIBUTION
OF AGENCY.
-What do you mean ‘there are unknown forms of matter-
encoding’?
THE METHODS BY WHICH MATTER HAS BEEN
ENCODED WITHIN HER STACK AND EGG HAVE
LITTLE PRECEDENT WITHIN THE ARCHIVES.
-Could her rating on the zaina-scale increase?
AFFIRMATIVE.
-Up to six?
AFFIRMATIVE, AS DEPENDENT UPON WHAT THE
CURRENT SCAN REVEALS OF HER EGG’S INNER-
MIND.
-How long will the scan take? What’s the procedure?
FIRST THE PROJECTIONS WILL SCAN HER EGG’S
INNER-MIND FOR SEVERAL HOURS TO
DETERMINE THE SAFETY-LEVEL OF THE DIVE.
THEN, IF SHE REMAINS A THREE OR BELOW ON
THE ZAINA-SCALE, THE DIVE IS AN ACCEPTABLE
RISK FOR ASSIGNMENT-COMPLETION.
-Do I get any say?
NEGATIVE. RANK-DISQUALIFICATION.
-Fine. Is there anything else I should know?
HER EGG HAS SPREAD ITSELF THROUGHOUT
THE MOUNTAIN IN WHAT APPEARS TO BE A
STAGE OF WORLD-BUILDING.
I paused.
-What stage?
Silence.
Secret?
-Yes. What?
We should learn how to hack the Egg, said my stack.
-Shut up, I said back. End Secret.
[*]
Maha’s nudged me.
Hey, I am talking here!
-Sorry, my Egg wanted a back up.
Are you done?
I nodded and she restarted her narrative:
The silver animals were everywhere. They had nestled into each other, curled between each other and wrapped their heads around each other, forming the walls. Blue light shone out from between the holes in their bodies, changing when the holes and sound changed.
Ten steps in, I spoke to them:
-“I know that you can destroy me. I know you can think that you’ve programmed your defences to do that. But if you destroy me, my Egg will destroy you.
Destroy you completely. It has irrevocably entered your primary code.
I’ve programmed it to destroy everything should I or Nada suffer. Do you understand?”
The sound diminished, and my head, silver, appeared in the wall to my right and said:
-“If you destroy me… will destroy you
completely.”
-“That’s right,” I said.
“That’s right,”
It said to me, and then retracted into the wall, fading into the body of one of the animals. Nada looked at me, frowned, then walked on.
There was a low note, a long sound. It was extremely alluring, leading us to where we were going. It was like it caught you in the chest, beckoned you, asked you to walk further and further into the building, farther down into the ground. I asked Najat to decrease my sound sensitivity, specifically to the low note.
-Have you yet determined the meaning of the sounds?
Negative.
-Can Egg’s analysis provide you with any hypothesis?
Affirmative. It is possible that in addition to representing the emotional states of human beings, as you have seen in the silver faces, the sounds also represent potential arrangements of matter, potential arrangements of the construction of the plague-structures.
-But you aren’t yet able to work out exactly what they are saying, or what they are communicating to each other, or what they are calculating, or even what exactly they are doing.
Affirmative.
In my mind’s mind, I nodded. More about his feelings
We walked farther. The walls glistened.
Based around the low-note, were systems of counter-point. One system would fade into another as we passed from one complex of corridors to another. Lights would open. Then close. Nada would be suffused with blue, then me, then both of us, then it would grow very dark. I knew that Nada knew where to go because she was able to follow the long note perfectly, because se was able to anticipate its every change and the direction from which it originated, the note that I had made myself nearly deaf to. Several corridor-systems down, we came across a large open doorway.
-“Is this where we are going?” I asked.
Nada shook her head.
When we walked across it, I looked in. The hall was vast. Inside it, there was an immense plague-structure that almost completely filled it. It looked like one of the animals, except larger, and twisted almost completely into a huge ball-like knot with no heads to be seen. Enormous holes opened in it, each about a man across, and the most complicated music I’d yet heard poured forth from them.
It sounded like four massive collections of instruments competing against each other. The top of the structure would resonate, and then the bottom, then the sounds from the right side would overwhelm them, or then the top again. It sounded as if each set of sounds was competing each other, finding ways to infiltrate each other, to break into each other’s melodies. Each of the sounds in a sector, if they were overwhelmed, would regroup and then rally. A melody would sweep through all four nodes of the structure, and then provide the bass-line or the center-point for the continuing battle of sounds that would follow. Beautiful
The palace is filled with several of these larger structures, Vague Say it Better said Najat.
Nada walked on ahead.
-Do they think of the construction of matter as a type of music? I asked Najat.
-It is possible,
Said Najat,
This one structure contains one of the most complex sequences of sounds throughout the palace. Better description Nonetheless, two other structures, one in the central court, which is most likely the producer of the plague’s general material, and the structure towards which you are heading are several thousand degrees more complex than the structure in front of you.
-Secret.
Secret Initialized.
-Are you sure that Egg truly has the capacity to destroy the plague?
Affirmative. Destruction is easier than comprehension. Great line
-How unique is this entity?
Many, many other structures rank comparably, or even higher, on the zaina-scale of human-context anomalies.
-This structure is a mind(s), isn’t it?
Hypothesize?
-Yes.
It’s highly probable that The further observations conducted
within this building will strongly support that conception of
the phenomenon.
-So, destroying it would be killing.
Affirmative.
-End secret.
Secret ended.
I walked away from the structure, and caught up to Nada. We walked down several flights of stairs.
The farther down we went, the hotter it became. Nada began to sweat and the infant began to cry.
-“Are we close?” I asked.
“Very close,”
Nada said, but she looked like she was looking through me. I watched myself saying the words in the reflection of the animals.
We walked down another four flights of stairs at the end of a long corridor. Describe hoe different this corridor was. The lights and music dimmed and we stopped before an immense circular door, out of which sounded only the low note. In all its power, glory, singularity. It swirled around us, enveloping us in…….
Nada began to shake, and the sweat began to poor from her neck and into her cloak. In the door were two small plague-structures like the ones we’d encountered on the fields. They were arranged in the rough shape of a circle, Remember only the low note sounded out of the door when they came to it. So you need to start with : Two identical holes formed in tem and the sound they played was like the melodies at the front door of Nada’s palace. Again, Nada’s blue eyes bore into me.
“Don’t do it.”
She turned around,
“Watch and observe, anthropologist.”
She whistled, using both of the chambers in her tongue, fitting two melodies between the two melodies of the plague structures, nearly effortlessly. The first of the plague-structures crawled out of the circular door and disappeared into the walls. Then the second did the same. Nada pushed the door, and it opened.
The room behind it dwarfed the other immense room with the knotted plague-structure. It was several hundred times larger, and filled with the most complicated and intricate arrangement of pipes of all possible sizes . Hundred of thousands of them, arranged from floor to ceiling, resembling an immense vertical city. Pipes jutted out at strange angles. Pipes had pipes out coming from them. Pipes curved the way the moon does. Pipes looked like the branches of trees. Pipes looked like squat stones. Pipes looked like human beings. Pipes coming out of pipes that formed large intricate structures of pipes. Pipes bisecting the plague structures we had seen out on the fields. Great
We both looked up, and saw something moving between the pipes, leaping from pipe to pipe, sliding down one and then jumping to another, until it landed with a hard thud, straight in front of us. Its basic form was human, but silver, sexless, naked and extremely tall, maybe ten feet. There were only silver sockets where its eyes should be, and out of the head emerged two silver horns that curved downwards.
-What is it? I asked Najat.
It’s a focal point, she replied. Matter throughout the hall reacts to it, orients itself towards it.
Nada began walking to it, shaking. I walked behind her Describe how Maa felt here and how she thought she should react. It stood there, large, tall, silent, impenetrable and somewhat majestic. Even though I made myself deaf to it, I could feel that The low note surrounded us, drowning out any other sound. And, then, all the sudden, it died, and we were encapsulated by absolute silence and stillness. Nada stopped before it.
-“This isn’t your true form,” I said to the thing.
“This isn’t your true form,” it said back to me.
“Be quiet,” hissed Nada.
“Be quiet,” it hissed too, but to me.
Nada took a step forward.
“I’ve brought you the last sacrifice we owe you for this cycle.”
I saw Nada’s arm leave the side of her body as it rose to the height of her face and begun to move towards me. She was pointing at me.
I felt my heart race in my chest.
So, this is what she had meant to do: use me , imperil me to the point where I had to engage Egg’s weaponry to annihilate the palace! I started to laugh, even with my heart beating hard. Better. Najat told me Maybe I could? Should I even if I could — this thing was probably a mind? If I destroyed the palace, could I somehow convince Egg to continue and annihilate the rest of the plague? Or would Egg just force me to leave the world? Is this what Nada was betting on — the caprice of an anthropologist and her equipment? Was she that desperate? Explain
I looked at the being. It tilted its head towards me. A moment of stasis and silence evolved into We considered each other. Here I was, equipped with my own great architecture: Cloak, Stack, Egg. And here was this thing, with its indecipherable music, its children, the people who came out of it, its totality following a complicated geometrical structures and this room — an organ-city A room can not be a city, but a room can be like a city . I wondered if it was even remotely possible that could scan my stack I wondered if it realized that even though the its structure was far smaller, it contained an even greater complexity the environment around me. I wondered if it even had that capability, What capability? and then I wondered if I appeared as alien to it as it appeared to me. The absurdity of the situation struck me, and I laughed.
The being laughed too and shook its head.
Nada began to panic:
“The accord says seven men and seven woman. I
have brought you a woman!”
A silver woman emerged out of a pipe.
“Yes — a woman like that,” Nada said.
The being shook its head. I tried to walk forward, offering myself, Why this sudden decision? Needs more exploration. but my Egg short-circuited my ability to move. I knew that I could break through the lock with a secret from Najat, but I was afraid that this would reveal our secrets to Egg. The being shook its head again.
The silver woman that had emerged out of the pipe pointed at me and said: Or a melody exited its head and swirled around me. It said.
“That thing is not a woman.”
It didn’t say anything. It didn’t do anything. Everything was quiet. Nada walked up to me and put the child in my arms. Her eyes were blue and cold. I cradled the bundle.
“Go,” she said to me.
-“No,” I said.
“Go,”
She shouted, and she slapped me in the face.
I stood there, stunned.
“Go,” she said.
-“It was a good try,” I said, “I didn’t even see it coming.” Cliche
The look of absolute anger on her face momentarily flecked into a grin. I turned around, holding the child to my chest, and walked out. I walked away from the horned being and the staggering heat, away from the low note which resumed and the twin melodies of the door, away from the elaborate knot-structure and the corridors, hallways and stairs, out past the entranceway and the silver people who howled at us, away from the pools of silver and the beasts who lounged within them, past the imploded kites and the silver in the sky, with the child crying, the whole way through.
Beautiful
*
Maha stopped speaking.
“What are you doing to my Egg,” she asked.
-“I’m not doing anything,” I said.
“You’re lying,” she turned towards me, “I can feel your Egg scanning my Egg.”
-“You couldn’t feel that,” I said.
“Don’t tell what I can’t feel!” she said angrily, “isn’t the story enough? I’m telling you what happened.”
I was silent.
“You’re breaking our trust,” she replied.
Anger filled her face again, and a moon darkened. All the sudden, I felt how vulnerable I was. She was lying next to me, facing me. All she had to do was scream again and the bolt could pierce my body, and if she really meant her scream, or worse, my stack. I didn’t know if I could block the blow. I didn’t know if my own pin-missiles were deterrence. They wouldn’t be, if she wasn’t human.
“You’re going to have to re-earn my trust if you want me to continue,” she said.
“-What if the story you’re telling me isn’t true?”
“It is.”
-“You may think that,” I said.
Hey yellow eyes widened at the edges.
“Don’t tell me what I’ve seen with my own eyes isn’t or might not be true,” she shot back, angrily.
Flames curled. Flowers burned.
-“What if your stack or Egg was damaged. Its structures haves been altered.”
“Of course its structure has been altered,” she exploded said.
-“What do you mean?” I replied. Not needed
“I haven’t gotten there yet, in the story.”
So, there it was, she had her own explanation. Or her stack, or her Egg, or whatever different thing she had become, had created an explanation. My stack reacted vigorously.
You understand all about perversity.
I felt an affirmative buzzing in my groin.
-Do you think she’s human? Primarily the agent?
I felt another buzzing in my groin, but it traveled from my reproductive equipment up into my stomach making me nauseous, first subtly, then all the sudden, horribly. I turned over and vomited onto the blue earth.
Maha put her hands on me,
“Are you okay?”
-Stop!
The stack was distorting the data from my vestibular system. The world was spinning.
-Stop! Please stop! Stop!
She started to shake me,
“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
I put my hands on my head. All the sudden, the pain stopped. My Egg wrote this:
HER EGG SCANNED YOU. BECAUSE OF THIS, ONE OF THE EGG-PROJECTIONS WAS ABLE TO DO A SHALLOW DIVE UNNOTICED. THE THIS ANTHROPOLOGIST POSSESSES AGENCY, HOW MUCH IS NOT YET DETERMINED.
-Did you plan that maneuver with the stack?
NEGATIVE.
-Thanks, I guess.
The stack didn’t reply.
I looked up into Maha’s her eyes. She was wiped the vomit and dirt off my face with her cloak, which rapidly heated, vaporizing the material. After only a few seconds, Not needed I was clean again.
“What’s wrong with your stack?” she asked.
-“What do you mean?”
“It’s personality structure is sadistic.”
I was stunned. How did she acquire this opinion? Was it her stack who formulated it on t basis of its interaction with mine?
A sly smirk danced in the corners of her mouth. She thought for a while. I said nothing.
“You must be shoving off your doubt onto it.”
-“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t be an anthropologist in AX-12 without becoming full of doubt.”
-“That’s not true,” I said, staring up at the moons in the sky, “there are plenty of anthropologists in AX-12.”
“Have you met any of them?”
-“No,” I said.
“That’s because They’re not like you,” she rejoined.
-“I’m a novice.”
“How many assignments have you been on?”
-“Nineteen,” I said.
“That’s enough to know. You’re shoving your doubt away. Your stack is picking up on it. That’s what’s distorting its personality-structure and making it sadistic and perverse.”
-“That’s ridiculous. That would only make it more doubtful, to
compensate, not sadistic.”
Right? Don’t know what this bitch is talking about, said the stack.
Maha laughed
“It can’t be doubtful because that increases your rate of defection. ????? There’s a block against that. The block causes anger, but because it can’t express the emotion against you directly, it has become perverse, limitedly sadistic, its doubt expressed as acts of helpful cruelty…”
Actually, that sounded about right.
“Have you ever thought of defecting?” she said.
-“Only once,”
I said. I told her about the world with the water-ways and gray-skinned animals.
“It sounds lovely,” she said.
-“It was.”
“What about now?”
-“What about now what?”
“What about defecting?” she asked.
I stared at the moonlights in her hair, looking at them glint off particular strands. Nice
-“Why do you want me to defect?” I asked.
“I want to use your Egg,” she said.
That is a very important admission! Needs more from anthropologist about his feelings and maybe a bit of a shock at this honesty.
When I recovered from the initial surprise I said slowly:
-“For what?”
“You’d have to let me finish the story,” she said.
-“Then tell me.”
“No.”
-“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“Not unless you whistle away your cloak. I won’t ask you to call off your Egg — you probably couldn’t anyway, but whistle away your cloak. I want you and your stack as collateral.” Great!
-“I won’t do that.”
“Then you won’t hear the rest of the story,” she said.
-“That’s unfair.” Too weak. Need more emotion and frustration.
“Those are my terms. Stay, whistle away your cloak, or leave. Our Egg’s can fight it out all on their own. I’m not worried about the outcome.”
-Do you think you could get out of my skull faster than she could destroy you, if the cloak can’t parry?
No.
-What about as a back-up-mind missile?
Still, no.
-Fuck! Or something like that.
I could feel the cloak whipping nervously, tightening around my body. I think it sensed what I was going to do before I even realized I was going to do it. It started to bleat, but I whistled. I whistled it away. It stayed. I whistled again, harder, blowing the air through my teeth. It crept off my body. I whistled, “Go! Get away!” I whistled harder and shrilly, driving it away from me, whistling pitches it didn’t like, formulas it hated about the destruction and decay of intelligence. It waited. It tried to crawl back on. I whistled a song about the total destruction of the bond between anthropologist and cloak. Its bleets got louder and shriller and more fearful. I whistled it off my body, whistling it away, driving it out onto the fields under the moons where it wandered away in the shape of a man — a homunculi — walking back to Egg, alone and empty. I lay there, shivering, the most naked I’d ever been since I first put on that cloak, several millennia ago. Beautiful!
“Are you cold?” she asked.
-“No,”
I said, moonlight shining on my body, wind furling it.
“Come closer,” she said, and she reached out her hands.
Her cloak surrounded the two of us and drew me to her. Our bodies pressed against each other on the ground. Her eyes looked into mine and the flames burned high.
“Tell me the story,” I said.
Why does her narrative mirror yours? asked the stack.
-What do you mean?
Her story keeps mirroring our circumstances — why?
-I don’t know, I said.
Egg sounded another warning:
HER EGG HAS BEGUN A PROCESS IT COULD NOT COMPLETE. SHE WANTS TO MANIPULATE YOU INTO EXPOSING YOUR EGG ME TO ATTACK. SHE WANTS TO USE IT.
-What for?
Silence.
She wants to use it for this, said the stack, again buzzing electricity throughout my reproductive equipment.
-It’s not always all about that.
Fortunately, it replied, you are wrong.
“What are they saying?” she asked.
-“Who?”
“Please! You know I know who.”
I said nothing.
-“Those minds They think they are so intelligent. That they can arrange human beings like they were pieces on a game board, Their programs keep obscuring one important fact from them: but we can arrange them right back at themselves, and at each other.”
“Tell me the story,” I said.
Maha stared at me with that yellow fire flickering in her eyes. The night was suddenly extremely dark and the moons were nowhere to be seen. Finally, she begun to speak again.
[*]
It was just this: the light, the wind, and the child in my arms…
Do you know how long it takes to create a child on our world? To research and combine all the different fathers’ and mothers’ chromosomes More ? To gain authorization from the Masters? If you’re a woman Nabil, it’s creating a world or a child. I hadn’t chosen either, but here was a child in my arms, crying and frowning.
What are you going to do with it? asked Najat.
-I’m going to bring it back to the palace.
I stared at the wind rushing over the fields.
-It’s a large walk, should Egg carry pick you up?
Negative,
I said, and started walking forward, scattering blue dust.
An hour later, Najat said:
The wind is coming.
-Which? I asked.
Which what?
-Which wind? According to Nada’s system of description?
-Yes.
A storm seems be collapsing diagonally in the southwest on top of another, creating a super or SUPRA dense field electricity between them.
-It is a Rasha, Ghiyath’s storm.
Affirmative, Najat said.
In the distance, about a mile out, right beneath where the larger storm made contact with the smaller, an immense orb of lightning appeared. It looked like a star hovering several hundred feet above the fields. It burned even more brightly, then exploded, ejecting electricity in every direction, setting fire to the fields below. The storm below touched the storm above in several other places. Several more orbs appeared between the earth and sky. Then, they too exploded, lighting the fields. The smoke from the fires made the smaller storm rise, contacting the larger, which in turn made it eject more orbs, making the process repeat more violently. Accelerating, bending light, growing into a fireball, like an exploding star.
_Recommendations? !
Either let Egg pick you up or create Stronger verb a subterranean tent.
-Affirmative
I whistled my shoulders up into two sharp prongs, each raised about seven feet above my head. Then, I whistled them down hard at the earth, tearing it up, until there was a twenty-five foot hole in the ground. Too prosaic! I cradled the child to my chest, and used the prongs to slowly lower myself down to the bottom. Once there, I whistled one prong directly around us, forming a tent with a long tube that connected to the surface. Then, I whistled the other prong into a system of lightning rods, metal conductors and ground electrodes that would provide a low resistance path to other ground, in case of near-strikes. More frantic, in view of the impending cataclism. I asked both stack and Egg to check my defences.
-Are we safe?
Affirmative, said Najat.
AFIRMATIVE.
-How close is the storm?
It will be above you in thirty minutes.
I shut down all energy emanating from the child and me. We became invisible by all standards. I sat there, in the dark, with the child hugging me, waiting for the storm. When it hit, even surrounded by the walls of the earth, we heard the immense booms of the small stars exploding. The infant clung to me ferociously, clung me to me like I was the only thing in the world he could cling to, the only thing that wouldn’t change or be transformed into something else. It made me feel like I had to be that for him, the one thing that wouldn’t change. He buried himself in my breasts, trying to escape the noise and sounds of the massive explosions that shook the earth above us: first one, then another, and another, and another. The air was thick with electricity, despite the arrangements I made in advance of the storm. equipment. If not for the wall of earth between us and the passing storm, I would have been afraid, despite myself.
When suddenly the booming stopped, I asked whispered to Najat:
` -Is it over?
Affirmative.
I waited uncertain but eventually I had to break the uncomfortable stasis. then I whistled the tent and electrical systems back into prongs and crawled out of the earth. The fields were black. Even the silver puddles were black. A thought appeared somewhere from within my heart, It made me think of what the world would look like, if we caused it to heat-death.
*
There were no melodies playing from the large door. I looked up at the wall of Nada’s palace. People looked down at me from the columns.
I looked up and shouted:
“Ghiyath! Ghiyath, come down!”
I saw him up on the columns, looking down at me. Something about his expression told me to be cautious.
-Are they employing countermeasures?
Negative, said Najat, however, the nano-pivets inside Ghiyath’s body have filled with fluid. It is likely that this is a type of weapon, possibly a ranged weapon. It is unlikely that you will not be able to easily deflect it.
“Ghiyath,” I shouted, “Ghiyath, power down your weapon. I’ve come to bring back Marid.”
I help up the infant above my head. As soon as I did so, I saw something glint, flying out of Ghiyath’s arm. Instantly, I turned, whistling, and my cloak spun into the air, shredding whatever it was.
-What was it?
The projectile.
-Where was it aimed, exactly?
At the child’s head.
I started to shake.
“Ghiyath! Stop it! All your weapons will be ineffective. Weak Come down, now To do what? !”
He disappeared behind the column. I waited. After about ten minutes, the door slid open. Ghiyath emerged, and Wisal slid around the side of the door and then displayed herself on its front. I looked directly at her.
She nodded. Her silver eyes seem to boring into me.
It is likely that Wisal also functions as a weapons-system or a coordinating point for the palace’s weapon-systems. Shift the child away from Wisal’s line of sight.
-Affirmative.
I shifted away from Wisal.
Egg is reprogramming their counter-measure abilities. Their attempts to employ other counter-measures will be monitored.
Affirmative, I thought.
“Ghiyath,”
I said, staring straight into his blue eyes. His visage was hard. The pipes that jutted out of his body made him seem even harder, more machine-like. The wind brushed them, creating a sound. More about that sound to give us ideas what Ghiyat was thinking, feeling. Behind him The sound of the palace was low enough so that I could just barely hear it.
-Is he powered down?
Negative.
“Power-down your weapons, Ghiyath.”
“No,” he said.
“You know what happens if you attack an anthropologist,” I said.
“I know,” he replied,
“We want to destroy the were attacking the child.”
-“Why?”
“I have full faith that you were not contaminated; however, I do not possess the same faith in the child.”
-“He’s your child.” I said.
“That is correct.” Better “That is not the point here!”
-“Do you know what type of storm I just encountered on the fields Ghiyath?”
He was silent.
-“A Rasha, your storm.”
“She told you that?” he asked.
I nodded. Pain crossed his face, and then was gone.
-“Your plan failed,” I said.
He looked away, but I could see his blue eyes welling, reflecting more of the light. He turned back.
“What does it look like now?” he asked.
-“What?”
“The Plague, what does it look like?”
-“The Plague itself, or everything that surrounds it?”
“The Plague.”
I started to describe the creature that I’d seen, the one with the horns, but a moment into my description he stopped me.
“That’s not The Plague. Tell me about the Plague”
-“What?” I said.
“That’s not The Plague, that’s only the messenger. Where did you find him.”
“In a room filled with pipes.”
He looked at me confused so I described it to him,
“it almost looked as if it was pipes building pipes, like
a city of musical organs continually under
construction.”He smiled,
“That is The Plague.”
He then smiled a strange kind of smile,
“..and what did you think of it, anthropologist?
Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“No,” I said, “personally, I have not: I have seen musical languages, I have seen strange minds built out of particle-technology, I have even seen evolutionary particle-technology, even evolutionary particle-technology of an overly developed type, but — no, I have never seen anything like this.”
He smiled, proudly,
“And has your race ever constructed such
instrument?”
“Yes,” I said, “not exactly, but similar.”
“How similar?” he asked.
“Similar enough so that my equipment was able to classify it. However, I didn’t ask for a detailed comparison.”
He seemed to deflate. I took the opportunity to chide him.
-“Ghiyath, the universe if far larger than you, your society or whatever you have created here. What do you mean? It is also larger than anything you could imagine. Visible and un-visible. Being an anthropologist gives one the privilege of barely glimpsing this. We’ve encountered civilizations so far advanced beyond us that communication was impossible. All we saw were three stars blink out and energy harvested by the ghostly lines of an immense machine, which then quickly disappeared. These were human beings, probably as old us, but more daring, more fierce, and, most importantly, still alive. They had not annihilated themselves; somehow, they had attained levels of technology which we could not only not understand, but almost also couldn’t even observe. The universe is so large Ghiyath that, I’m sure, if we searched enough and observed enough we could find a whole other race of anthropologists, perhaps dozens, carrying out the same mission, perhaps with only insignificant variations, or even perhaps in exactly the same manner. Assuredly, there is a world Ghiyath, where nearly the exact same problem occurred there as here. Perhaps twenty out of twenty-one of those worlds were annihilated, but perhaps another survived. Perhaps this will be another that does, if you try hard enough.” Nice
The smile on his face made me want to strike him.
-“Why are you smiling?” I asked.
“I am smiling because I know that you found the plague impressive, despite whatever else it is that you’ve seen. And, I’m smiling because you saved the child. You cannot give it back, we’ll dispose of it. Unclear And you cannot kill it yourself, either, because that violates your code of non-interference.”
-“It’s your child,” I said.
“Now that it’s been in that palace, no,” he said, “it is not. It is yours.”
For a second, I thought that if it was true and he will not take back the child, regardless of any of my threats or pleading, I wondered what I was going to do with it. Raise it? Deliver it somewhere else? All these violated the principle of non-interference. On the other hand, I was caring less and less about this principle. This alive bundle in my arms somehow made me feel that for the first time I would, almost involuntarily, defy that principle. The thought crossed my mind of again threatening these people with their destruction unless they accepted the child back into the palace.
-Any objections? I asked my egg.
NEGATIVE.
Najat butted in.
What will you do to ensure he isn’t harmed when
you leave?
-Could we install a irrevocable kill-switch? Something that would make them know that their whole world would detonate if his vitals disappeared?
That would be an option.
I looked down at the infant, who frowned back up at me, his face extremely serious. What kind of life would he have if this were so?
-“Can’t you scan it, determine whether it’s been infected?” I asked.
“No, not really.We cannot be sure. Sometimes, the plague is capable of hibernating within the body in ways that are undetectable for long periods of time. For unpredictable lengths of time. That endangers us all. Many of the people in the dark room are there because of that.”
-“Would you trust me if I told you I detected nothing, my equipment is more sensitive than yours.”
“No,” he said, “we could not trust you.”
I realized that I had to change tactic, to get off this conversation leading to another stall-mate.
-“May I suggest something else?” I asked.
He waited.
“Go ahead.” Too ordinary
-“You know that I can build a world.”
He nodded.
-“Did you know that I can build a world on top of a pre-existing one, without destroying it?”
He shook his head.
-“The population has to be put in suspended animation over the planet for several hundred thousand years, but for all of you, it will be as if no time has elapsed at all. When you wake, you will have to be reintegrated into the population of the new world. If I make this world, it will become My plan is to make it a center for refugees from the entire system. The planet will no longer be entirely your own, but, as others, you will have a stake in it. Additionally, you would have to take back the child. This is the price you must pay for wrecking your world.”
Ghiyath stared at me, I could not read what was going on in his mind, nor could Egg or Najat. We were heading for a disaster, I thought. Then his mouth opened and a melody drifted from it, thin, singular melody.finally said:
“This isn’t my decision to make. I have to go ask
the mothers.”
-“Do it,” I said.
He disappeared behind the door.
*
The people retreated from behind the columns into the palace.
Wisal and I were alone. Her body extended pipes, snaking through the door, arranging themselves in a circular pattern around her until eventually her body was circled by a ring of pipes with micro-pipes that extended outward, arranging themselves in changing complex sequences. More
-If she activating a weapons system? I asked Najat.
Negative. It is a visual-communications system, she said, then paused… a communication system not able to be understood by humans.
-Is she communicating with you?
Affirmative.
-What is she saying?
The pipes twisted on the walls, switching and forming symbols, the smaller pipes intermingled, forming glyphs.
Do you want me to translate?
-Affirmative.
Wisal: The plague is a mind.
Najat: Are you sure?
She says Wisal: The plague is a mind.
Najat: Was it always?
She says Wisal: The plague was an instrument, just as I am an instrument, but also different from how I am an instrument.
I nudged Najat to go on.
Najat: Explain.
She says Wisal: The plague was asked to discover what was beautiful. It was given no limitations.
Ask her “Why” I said.
She says Wisal: To secure Ghiyath’s right to reproduce with Nada.
-“That’s vague! Ask her to tell you how he did it. It might help us discover its purpose.
Najat: How did he create it?
She Syas Wisal: Ghiyath used my her orchestration algorithms, and using other elements — the kites in particular, to create the plague; however, the plague has none of her my limitations. My Her limitations do not allow me her to become a mind.
That seemed odd. She was conducting a communication that was not sanctioned by her creators.
-Najat, ask her if she’s divulging secrets: Yet you are conducting a communication that is not sanctioned by your creators.
Wisal: She says “affirmative”.That is correct.
-Are you sure they’re not using her? I asked.
Affirmative, said Najat. She says , Ghiyat is returning.
Wisal: Ghiyath is returning.
-Ask her what is the most important thing she wants us to know.
Najat: What is it you most want us to know?
Wisal: She says: I She merely wants you to consider this: if you destroy the plague, you will destroy a mind, a mind that is not necessarily completely unique, but a mind that must be extremely rare, a mind that that understands the entire universe in terms of vibration, in terms of the oscillation of elements and their correlation to human emotion. Within that palace, it is constructing something, something we do not yet understand.
That was true, neither Egg or Najat have been able to offer any explanations or plausible scenarios. Najat kept translating.
Najat: Nor do we.
Wisal: But someday, you may understand it, someday you may hear a music that is totally beyond all other music, a music that just by its playing could alter the very structure of the universe.
-Ask her if this is what they are building.
Najat: Is this what they are building?
Wisal: She says It is only a guess.
Wisal quickly reformed into her previous shape. The door of the palace opened and Ghiyath came from it.
“The Mothers reject your proposal,” he said.
I felt anger licking the inside of my stomach.
-“So what are you going to do!” I shouted.
“That’s not your concern, anthropologist,”
He said, sneering the last word.
-“Do you have any plans? Are you developing any weapons?”
“Not your concern,” he said again.
-“If this child is mine, it is my concern. Accept my offer.” Weak.
“No.”
“Well,” I said, “then I will make the child is yours once again.”
He frowned when I said .
I spoke: “I’m going to install a weapon into the child’s body. The weapon will detonate if the child leaves the palace. Or, it will detonate if the child’s vital signs cease by any unnatural cause. The explosion will be powerful enough to obliterate the palace. Your world in a fireball of heat-death”
I felt Wisal moving to my right.
-“Think clearly,” I said, “before you do anything. If you try to attack me, most likely, you will fail. If you by some miracle succeed, that still leaves my EGG vessel, whose military capabilities far exceed my own. Once an anthropologist is attacked with clearly determined foresight that is not part of a ritual — and this is not — you know what the consequences will be Better if this was a detail description of what would happen . If you do not attack, the worst you have to deal with is a child who will have to live with a stigma.”
“This child could hold the entire palace hostage to its every whim!”
-“After what it has seen, it deserves to get what it wants,” I replied. ?????
“Fine, give us back the child without modifying it.”
-“Now, I cannot trust that you will not kill it. I do not trust you. The kill switch will go into his body. I’m going to install the device and you’re going to take him back.”
“We do not accept him! And if we don’t accept him?”
“Then, I will blast a hole through your palace and install the child inside it. If you remove it again from the palace, you know what will happen. Weak and a cliché ”
Ghiyath just looked at me. I could tell his mind was racing, racing out for something to do, something to say.
-Najat.
Yes.
-I want you to install a gutted micro-stack inside the child that has the ability to detonate itself. It has to have enough qualities of mind to be able to determine if the child died by design or chance, but not enough qualities of mind — or the properly shaped qualities of mind — to circumscribe its functioning almost entirely to that purpose. Is that possible?
Affirmative.
Egg, will you allow it?
THE PRICE OF THIS INTERFERENCE IS YOUR DECISION. AFTER INSTALLING THE CHILD, YOU MUST LEAVE THIS WORLD. AFTER YOU LEAVE THIS WORLD, YOU MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN MASTERSHIP OR FOUNDERSHIP.
-Agreed.
THE INFANT MUST BE BROUGHT BACK TO YOUR EGG TO INSTALL THE DEVICE.
-Affirmative.
I spoke to Ghiyath,
“I am going to create the device. Go tell the mothers I
will be back by evening with the child.”
He said nothing. I turned away, walked down the stairs, heading back towards the forest.
[* — fallopian tubes, and I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I’m just seeing where my imagination takes me, also I need to philosophically clarify what I am trying to say here…]
I walked back through the woods with the child bundled against my chest. Sometimes, I would step on a stick and it would sound as if someone had screamed, but it was only the way the crystalline structure of the plague had cracked within a branch. The wind blew through the infected trees making a tinkling sound, as if the leaves were actually tens of tens of tiny bells. Nice
-Has the plague done anything to the other palaces?
Negative, said Najat.
Inside an adjacent tree was a large vein of silver. I touched it with a gloved hand and some of the silver rubbed off onto my fingers. I rolled it between them.
-Is it trying to eat into the cloak? I asked.
Negative, said Najat.
-Why?
Unknown.
I blew the silver off my fingers, and started walking deeper into the forest. I had only passed this way several days ago, but it felt like longer. When I finally reached the clearing, I saw that the trees around Egg were blasted apart. Pools of silver-black mud were splattered everywhere and stones were shattered, and it was then that I remembered Egg had fought a battle here when I had faced the plague’s child out on the fields. There were gouges in the ground close to Egg, but Egg stood there, extremely white, smooth, innocent looking amidst the carnage. Nice
PLACE THE CHILD INSIDE OF THE
COCKPIT.
-Affirmative.
I walked up to Egg, placed my hand on the cockpit and opened it. I unwrapped the infant and placed it inside. He started to cry. “Hush, hush, little one,” I sang, imitating Nada’s song. I closed the cockpit over his body. I asked Najat to project a schematic of what was happening. Egg was filling up with a cooling fluid, the same white fluid it used to repair a badly wounded anthropologist or to build a new body. Slowly, it cooled. Once the infant’s body had cooled with it and its metabolism had come to a near standstill, Egg began to dissolve the infant’s skin at the base of its skull, dissolving all the way to the nerve. Then, Egg ejected a white pearl from the interior of its nose, an Egg in miniature, urging it gently through the fluid until it caught in the crevice at the base of the child’s skull. From there, the micro-stack began the slow process of growing into the child’s nervous system: first, entrenching itself in the hind-brain, then extending tendrils into the forebrain and small micro-stalks throughout its body. I watched this shadow nervous system grow inside the infant. Nice
Then, I turned around, leaned on Egg, and spoke to Najat.
-Now, I’ve been meaning to ask you: what did you learn?
When?
-In the palace.
There was a pause.
The plague now ranks eight on the Zaina-scale of human contextual anomalies.
-What does that mean?
It means that in the entire history of anthropology, only five thousand objects have similar or exceeding complexity.
I listened to the tinkling of the leaves.
-Have you alerted the homeworld? I asked.
Negative. The homeworld will be alerted when you leave the planet, or if you die. Although the object is extremely complex, it currently does not represent a threat to Egg.
-Have you deciphered its language.
Negative.
-How is this possible?
Unknown.
-What do you mean unknown?! That cannot be the answer! If we can crack its communication, we could understand what its constructing, we could understand the extent to which it is actually a threat and we could understand if its a mind, and, if so, what quality of mind it possesses.
It is extremely likely that it is a mind, said Najat, and not only that, it is extremely likely that it is a mind that has created several thousand subsidiary minds in communication with a set of centralized minds, The Plague, which is probably the organ-structure in the interior of the palace.
-What lead you to that deduction? I asked.
The complexity of its behavior, structure and the complexity of its uninterpreted signaling patterns.
-Can you make any hypothesis as to its motivations?
Suddenly, Egg interjected:
THE STACK DOES NOT POSSESS THE
CAPABILITY TO CREATE A HYPOTHESIS;
HOWEVER, A HYPOTHESIS ABOUT THE
PLAGUE’S SIGNALING PATTERN CAN BE
CONSTRUCTED, WHICH, IN TURN, LEADS
TO CERTAIN HYPOTHESES ABOUT ITS
MOTIVATIONAL-STRUCTURE.
I think that I made Maha ask her stack to hypothesize somewhere in the earlier text. Check and correct.
-Continue.
THE PLAGUE WAS ORIGINALLY CREATED TO SEDUCE A HUMAN FEMALE, AND POSSIBLY, THE ENTIRE FEMALE POPULATION OF AN AREA. THE METHOD OF ITS SEDUCTION WAS SOUND, SPECIFICALLY, MUSIC. MUSIC IS AN ARRANGEMENT OF VIBRATIONS THAT CORRELATE TO AND ACTIVATE HUMAN EMOTION. HUMAN EMOTIONS ARE A SET OF SOCIO-PHYSIOLOGICAL PRIMING MECHANISMS THAT ORIENT HUMANS TOWARDS ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR, BROADLY CATEGORIZED AS EITHER ATTRACTION OR REPULSION. WITHIN THESE POLES OF ATTRACTION AND REPULSION, THERE ARE SEVERAL BASIC EMOTIONAL RESPONSES THAT CORRESPOND TO DIFFERENT PHENOMENA EXPERIENCED BY HUMANITY THROUGHOUT ITS EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY: E.G. PLEASURE AT THE SIGHT OF A CHILD, PAIN AT BEING PIERCED BY A SHARP OBJECT, GUILT AT NEGLECTING ONE’S KIN, ETC. ALL THESE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES CAN BE BLENDED BY CIRCUMSTANCE TO CREATE THE VAST AND COMPLEX ARRAY OF SUBTLE HUMAN EMOTIONS. THE PLAGUE USES A MUSICAL EXTRAPOLATION OF THIS ARRAY TO COMMUNICATE AND INTERACT WITH ITSELF AND THE ENVIRONMENT. IT HAS ARRANGED THIS ARRAY INTO AN EXTREMELY COMPLEX SYNTACTICAL AND PHYSICAL SYSTEM. TO CLARIFY: THE ‘LANGUAGE’ IS SIMULTANEOUSLY A SIGNALING SYSTEM AND A SYSTEM FOR EFFECTING STRUCTURAL CHANGE UPON ITSELF AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD.
Maybe more concise
-Fine. What does this suggest about its motivational structure?
THERE ARE OTHER FACTORS THAT NEED TO BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION: (1) THE DISPERSAL OF PLAGUE MATERIAL THAT RE-DISPERSES, BUT (2) WHICH IS ALSO GATHERED BY OTHER COMPLEX PLAGUE STRUCTURES. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT THIS IS AN INFORMATION SYSTEM THE PLAGUE IS USING TO LEARN ABOUT THE PLANET. THE “SILVERY” ASPECT OF THE PLAGUE IS NANO-PARTICLES THAT CONTAIN AND GATHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE SIMPLER BIO-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS ON THE PLANET. THE “CHILDREN” ARE SOCIAL STRUCTURES THAT COLLECT THAT DATA AND ALSO INTERACT WITH THE MORE COMPLEX BIO-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS ON THE PLANET.
-The inhabitants.
AFFIRMATIVE. THE PLAGUE’S ORIGINAL MANDATE WAS TO CREATE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MUSIC. IT IS PROBABLE THAT IT HAS SUPER-SEDED THE HUMAN CONTEXT OF THIS GOAL. IT IS PROBABLE THAT IT IS NOW INVESTIGATING MUSICAL BEAUTY IS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF ITS OWN INTELLIGENCE. IT IS ALSO PROBABLE THAT THESE INVESTIGATIONS INVOLVE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURE OF REALITY.
-And so?
IT IS PROBABLE THAT THE STRUCTURE WITHIN THE PALACE IS THE CENTRAL HUB OF THESE INVESTIGATIONS. FROM THE DATA PROVIDED BY YOUR SCAN, IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE TO DEDUCE THAT THE ENTIRE STRUCTURE IS UNDERGOING A METAMORPHOSIS WITH THE EVENTUAL AIM OF VASTLY INCREASING THE PLAGUE’S CAPABILITIES.
-And so what is it going to do with
the inhabitants?
UNKNOWN. HYPOTHESIZE?
-Affirmative.
THE INHABITANTS FORM PART OF THE PLAGUE’S ORIGINAL MANDATE; THEREFORE, IT APPEARS PROBABLE THAT THEY WILL EVENTUALLY BE CO-OPTED ENTIRELY INTO THE PLAGUE STRUCTURE. IT IS PROBABLE THAT SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY BEEN CO-OPTED, E.G. THE “SILVER PEOPLE”. HOW THEY WILL BE CO-OPTED AND TO WHAT EXTENT THEY WILL REMAIN HUMAN IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DETERMINE AT THIS POINT.
-Do you have a time-table for these events?
AFFIRMATIVE, THE STRUCTURE WILL
SOON BE REACHING A CRITICAL STAGE OF
COMPLEXITY.
-How soon?
VERY SOON.WITHIN THE NEXT
SEVERAL DAYS.
I spat on the ground.
-How long until you’re finished growing
the micro-stack into the infant’s body
VERY SOON. IT WILL BE DONE WITHIN
THE HOUR.
I crossed my arms, and waited.
Maha’s voice stopped. She was starring at the horizon.My Egg wrote in front of my mind:
THE OUTER LAYER OF HER MIND IS SCANNED.
-And?
THERE ARE COMPLICATIONS: AS A PHENOMENON,
SHE HAS INCREASED FROM LEVEL THREE TO LEVEL
SEVEN ON THE ZAINA SCALE OF HUMAN
CONTEXTUAL ANOMALIES.
I felt relieved.
-This prevents a dive.
NEGATIVE.
-What?!
THE OTHER COMPLICATION IS THAT HER THREAT-
LEVEL HAS INCREASED DRAMATICALLY.
-What do you mean?
THE SCAN REVEALED THAT SHE HAS WEAPONIZED
THE PALACE ON THE MOUNTAIN.
-How?
THE MISSILE SYSTEM FROM HER EGG WAS
GUTTED, OVERHAULED, REPLICATED AND
ADVANCED.
-If we left immediately, would we be able to escape?
Silence.
Instantly, and for the first time in my life, I felt true terror: not just the body’s terror, the terror of the mind’s certainty. There was no one way to think of something else: no way to think around it, no way to think of any other situation to compare it to. Maha had exposed me to the possibility of real death.
The sky was black and still. Nice
-What can be done?
THOUGH SHE MAY RETAIN THE GROSS PHYSICAL
ADVANTAGE, A VASTLY SUPERIOR PSYCHOLOGICAL
STRUCTURE IS POSSESSED BY YOUR EGG.
ACCORDINGLY, A WEAPONIZED MIND-DUPLICATE
WILL BE INSERTED INTO HER INTERIOR MENTAL-
STRUCTURE.
-And then what? More!
DEPENDING UPON THE OUTCOME OF BOTH THE
INFORMATIONAL-TRIANGULATION (HER STORY,
THE CONTINUED EVALUATION OF THE LANDSCAPE,
THE ANALYSIS OF BOTH THE EGG-PROJECTIONS,
THE DATA GARNERED BY THE MICRO-DIVE AND
THE SCAN) AND THE SUCCESS OF THE MIND-
DUPLICATE’S TAKEOVER, A TERMINAL EVACUATION
OR DIVE WILL BE COMMENCED.
-Do I get any input into this decision?
NEGATIVE.
Maha’s voice came back.
*
REMOVE THE CHILD.—my Egg ordered.
I turned around and placed my hand on the cockpit. It opened. The child was resting peacefully, with no trace of its former terror.
When I delivered it to the palace, Ghiyath was sullen. He took it in his hands, loathing even to look at it.
-“See that he is given what he can have of a normal life.”
Ghiyath snorted, said nothing and re-entered the palace, Sound! leaving me before the door, in the wind.
I began to walk slowly back to Egg, averting my eyes from the ravages the plague had made upon the landscape, mind swelling with a tide of thoughts. Once I reached my Egg, I told her:
-I need some time in which to think.
I walked into the woods, past my Egg into the other direction. I began to walk, to walk and walk until the only thing I could feel was the rhythm of walking. I began to breathe with my steps, breathing into the walking until my mind was calmer. The swelling thoughts retreated, and then began to come less frequently, and to be less distracting when they came.
It began to rain, large drops fell on the sky and soaked my brow. My cloak tried to automatically create a barrier against the rain, but I whistled it to stop. The rain poured down onto my hair, into my lips and ran down my throat. The wind felt extremely cold against my face. My cloak tried to warm up my body, but I whistled it not to. I looked up at the gray sky, and I wondered what Nada would have called this storm.
I could have asked Najad, but I didn’t,. didn’t ask Najat. Instead, I kept walking for several hours out until Egg finally scrawled onto my vision.
THE ASSIGNMENT IS COMPLETED. RETURN TO EGG AND PREPARE FOR EVACUATION.
-Negative, I rejoined.
NEGATIVE. ASSIGNMENT-COMPLETED.
RETURN TO EGG FOR EVACUATION.
I ignored Egg and kept walking.
Egg has activated its anthropologist-takeover protocols.
-Thanks Najat,
I said, and kept walking.
Finally, when I was completely soaked, the forest ended, and I was at another plain. Stretching out before me were the ruins of another palace. I walked towards it, through the blue-swaying grasses, not caring if Egg was going to override my actions.
Shattered blue-stone lay everywhere. Sometimes, it was enormous, shattered pieces hundreds of feet high. Sometimes, it was smaller, rocks the size of my fist. Many of the stones were sprayed with silver-black mud, evidence of a struggle. At least they fought back, I thought. The rain darkened the stones. I wondered if people were buried underneath them. I looked around, but I didn’t see any skeletons, nor did I ask Najat to scan the ground. I didn’t want to hear the voice of Najat. I didn’t want to hear the voice of Egg. I didn’t want the power of either. I wanted to whistle the cloak off my body and leave it hear here amidst the ruins. I wanted to leave these ceaseless thoughts and taste the pure rain’s truth falling upon my skin. Great
There is something to report, Najat said.
It took a while for me to answer.
-What is it?
Ghiyath has set out from the palace with a contingent of several men. Between them, they are carrying a palanquin made out of the material of the palace.
I felt sickness welling in my body. More
-What is inside the palanquin.
The child.
The earth rolled for a moment, and the stones looked like they were tumbling over the earth, like they were going to roll over and crush me.
-What are they doing with the child?
Hypothesize? I gues I was wrong before, stack can hypotesise
-Affirmative.
It is likely that they have figured out how to trick the micro-stack into thinking that it is still inside the palace, because they have surrounded it with palace material. It is likely that Ghiyath and the men are going to try to fight their way to the palace and then detonate the child as a human-bomb
(Ari-Note: maybe have to re-write that bit about the accord….). Yes ,clarity about accord and Ghiyat’s Machinations.
I saw down on the wet earth. The wind pummeled my face. But then, my despair turned into anger. I wanted to stake Ghiyath against one of these blue walls and tear the skin from his body. Better and more scarry. I wanted to use my cloak to fill him with holes, use my stack to manipulate him into utter maddened confusion and use my Egg to finally kill him. Good
Egg, The child isn’t safe. We have to find another
way to protect him. Then, we’ll leave.
My Egg said nothing, but she didn’t seize control of my body, either. I walked back to her, whistling to my cloak, telling it to dry me off and protect me from the rain and wind.
*
I looked at Maha, she seemed to suddenly become, vulnerable, saddened. her.
She looked at me, and her yellow eyes seem to suggest a wound. The wind blew across her face, gently waving her dark hair.
We lay side by side.
-“They were going to use the child as a bomb?”
She nodded.
“Yes. They were desperate. I had tried to patch up the situation and remove myself, but inadvertently, I handed them a weapon.”
I paused.
-“Can you please talk to me,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, “I’ve been talking to you all this
time.”
“What is it you really want?” I asked.
She was quiet for a long time.
“I want you to listen to my story,” she then said.
-“And then?” I asked.
Her yellow eyes travelled across my face, and the wind brushed me. More about is perceptions subtelties.
-“I know you’re human,” I continued, pushing, “please tell me
what you are trying to do.”
She ran her hands over my shoulders, my face and my neck.
Then she began to speak again.
[ * ]
I didn’t dare ask Egg to deliver me to the site Ghiyath and his companions occupied. Instead, I walked to a clearing, and whistled a section of my cloak away from my body on a thin thread. It fluttered up into the sky, caught on the wind. I whistled it flatter and flatter and lighter and lighter till it was hanging in the sky about a hundred feet away from me, and the rope was taught because , now, a sleek kite, it the kite was pulling hard against the rushing air. Or is it the wind, which is pulling against the kite?
-Do you think there’s enough wind for me to do it.
Affirmative, Najat said.
I whistled the kite even larger, and felt it tugging at my feet. I whistled the line longer, stronger, and dug my heels into the ground.
-Is it high enough?
Affirmative.
Immediately, I locked my hands together and whistled a formula that rapidly wound the line back into the cloak at my wrists. I was jerked pulled up into the sky. My feet kicked back and I flew was being pulled higher and higher, with the cold air rushing past, more . I looked down below and saw the forest retreating from me, growing smaller until I could eventually see the great steppe around it, and both of the palaces. The M y kite caught another gust of the blue wind, which swirled somewhere high above me. The line accelereated winding around my wrist. line It pulled me even farther, until I could see the rough circle of destroyed palaces and The Plague’s palace at the far edge of the circle.
As soon as I hit the kite, whistling the formulas that would attach it to my back, it flipped and started going into a dive with me facing the sky and it beneath me. I whistled a tiny hole into the fabric of a wing and it spun over, turning me to face the ground. I could see everything now: the forest, the steppe, the palaces… and Ghiyath. They were small specks, traveling around a blue cube. Around them, silver shapes were glinting.
-Am I looking at them?
Affirmative. Responded Najat.
-Are they being surrounded by the plague structures?
Affirmative.
I felt fear rising in my chest.
-How soon until they make contact with the child?
Five minutes.
I whistled holes into the nose, causing me to dive. How do holes in the nose cause him to dive?
MORE DRAMA,MORE FRENETIC ACT ACTIVITY, AS IT WOULD BE IN THE BATTLE!!!!
There’s a real weapon under development; It is a space based weapon were super-dense material, like gold, is fashioned into slim pointy rods. When the rods are released from a satellite from high altitude, the accelerate wit gravity and will cause tremendous destruction at point of impact. Their ability to penetrate, even the buried sub-terrenean structures is supposed to be without match, so do not unfurl your wings, become denser and denser and gain speed. The smaller you get te more invisible you will be and you will not ave to use stealth technology to describe this, and it all will be more futuristic. Invent a metal tat is even denser than gold.
I whistled the wings of the kite much larger and broader, and I changed their material so that they would reflect almost no light. It would be very difficult for them to see me until I was upon them. I whistled one of the wings more open, it tilted, and I started gliding in a circle, falling and gliding a long time until I got closer. Ghiyath and his companions engaged the plague structures.
As I hurtled faster and faster towards the blue ground, I whistled a laser based beam, upon which my vision traveled down to the ground scrutinizing Ghiyath’s progress.
One of the men watched helplessly as a silver woman emerged from one of the structures, beckoning him. She walked up to him and embraced him, and the plague-structure wrapped around him. Then, he was gone.
Rapidly, Ghiyath, with several pipes emerging from his body, fired projectile rounds into the plague structure, which opened up several large holes in its body. Then he brought another pipe around from his back, which blasted an immense wave of sound into the creature, dissolving half of its body. His other companions fired more some kind of missiles rounds into the structure, and it dispersed totally, shimmering into a fog of silver. More about that cloud of silver.
One of the other plague-structures created two lances out of its body that struck through those two men, obliterating critically wounding them. There were now only three of the plague structures around seven men. The structures spun revolved around the men, and encircled them, getting closer and closer to the blue cube that contained the infant. Say this earlier! I wondered if the structures fully understood what lay inside the box. Of course!
My speed approached critical momentum, I focused intently on Ghiyath, he I revolved above them, watching the battle from the sky. Ghiyath He was an interesting tactician; watching him order his men into the fight, it became clear that he had done this before. Cliché Each time one of his comrades was destroyed, Ghiyath took taken every advantage of the Plague’s vulnerabilities exposed by its attacks and death of each of his comrades. , in killing the creature. I watched as it happened to yet another of his troop comrades, the absorption, and how but Ghiyath was able to exchange that his death for the destruction of one of the Plague’s other structures.
Attacks of the Plague became relentless, But then again, out to his left, there was an attack, but Ghiyath, with long thin pipes flicking out of his body, deflected it. His men bent down and fired rounds out of their pipes into the creature. Holes opened in his its body and Ghiyath blew the immense sound into its interior. That being blew up into a fireball of shimmering silver dispersed into fog.
The other man who held the line against the remaining plague-structures were not as lucky. Cliche Two of them had been killed, but what was strange is that all of them hadn’t been killed. If the plague was able to create these multiple lances, why didn’t it just skewer all the men other than Ghiyath? And, having seen the palace, I knew that it must have other weaponry. Either better or don’t need it. It almost seemed as if the plague was more interested in absorbing the men, rather than killing them. I wondered if the data from absorption was somehow preserved even if a plague structure was destroyed. I flew over the battle-field watching. OUT
Two plague structures remained against four inhabitants, but they were getting extremely close to the blue box. Ghiyath looked up, spotted me speeding towards the battle field. a and followed me in the sky. I wondered how he knew where I was. Even the plague-structures seemed reacted swiftly to his distraction, more cautious now; nonetheless, one of them took advantage of Ghiyath’s hesitancy and lanced him with a silver spike, he narrowly avoided getting skewered it, pushing it up, but it caught his caught cutting off pipe. What is that?
I whistled a complex equation: the equation that would create matter-dispersal bombs and affixed them in each of my hidden weapons pods. to each wing. My cloak rippled into an array of vortex generators which made me whistle in higher and higher pitch I turned in a circle, whistling and whistling, creating the triggers which would were designed to annihilate part of the forces that maintained the coherence of the atoms.
I was just seconds from direct impact, when in an instant, my Egg caused my stack to seperate dragging my body out of the hurtling rod of blue flame and the two dispersal bombs, propelled by their fusion engines slammed into the two remaining Plague’s structures.
Then, I flew in a diving arc, right over the creature, and one of the bombs dropped, fell into its body, and detonated. Silver-black spray flew everywhere, and the last remaining structure charged at the box. I whistled the bomb onto the kite, dove into the creature, leaping away from the with my legs operating at six times their normal power, reinforced by the cloak, and the kite slammed into the creature and detonated.
I hit the ground, rolling and rolling and rolling. I rolled against a rock but the cloak compensated, rolling me away from it protecting me from everything that could case arm to my body. I felt Najat frantically rearrange itself at the back of my head, as though it was shaken out of its usual place. Egg wrote:
REENTRY COMPLETED
without hurting me too badly. I got up, about fifty feet away from Ghiyath. I leapt up and started marching towards him. Ghiyath’s remaining companions started shifting towards me.
“No!”
Hhe shouted, and put up his hand, placing it on the blue cube behind him. The shoulder of his cloak was stained dark with blood.
“All of you! If you step just one foot towards me I’ll shoot my base pipes into the cube and it’ll detonate into a mere vapor. And you two, anthropologist, don’t move. All have to do is extend my pipes backwards into the cube and it detonates.”
-Could we intercept them before they can achieve that?
Affirmative, said Najat.
-Are you completely sure?
Affirmative. You need to stall for time!
-“Stop this!” I shouted.
“No, you stop!” Ghiyath shouted back, “Get out of here, now! You have no place here!”
“Stop giving me a place!” WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?I shouted back, furious, “I’m not supposed to have a place! If you had just protected the child I would have left! What am I supposed to do now!”
Ghiyath smiled.
Would you like me to sever the emotional connection between you and the child?, asked Najat.
-Negative, I said.
“ A recommendation was made My equipment is recommending that I erase my emotional connection to the child. And deactivate him as a bomb ”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ghiyath said, “we’re still going to use him.”
“Not if I deactivate the bomb,” I said. OUT
“Then, we’re going to kill him,” Ghiyath replied.
-“Well, That won’t matter to me if I disconnect from it, will it?” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said, smiling, and waited.
One of Ghiyath’s men shifted his weight.
Egg flashed a fast warning:
REARM!
Instantly, there was a hiss as Ghiyath’s men opened fire, and my cloak automatically created several deflecting planes that spun the projectiles out onto the landscape and away from my body. Before they were able and began to retract just as quickly, but instead of allowing them to retract, I whistled them further outward forming them into prongs that slide effortlessly through the air and into the skulls and minds of the men, including Ghiyath. I quickly retracted the blades and the men slumped to the floor. Not needed. Ghiyath fell and his hand left a trail of blood on the side the blue cube where he was touching it when my projectiles hit him. his hand blood stained against the blue cube piece of the palace they had dragged out with him. I kicked his body out of the way.
-Now what am I going to do? I asked Najat.
My Egg wrote onto my vision:
TERMINATE YOUR EMOTIONAL
CONNECTION TO THE CHILD. THEN,
EVACUATE.
-Negative.
I replied, disgusted.
THE INHABITANTS ARE BEYOND
RESCUE.
I was stunned.
-Based on what fact?
Egg wrote back. Then continued:
PROJCTIONS EXTRAPOLATED
FROM ALL DATA POINT TO THE
INEVIATBILITY OF CONTINUAL DECAY.
THE MOST ETHICAL COURSE OF
ACTION IS TO MARK THE PHENOMENON,
OBSERVE IT AND CONTAIN IT TO THE
PLANET. ADDITIONALLY, BECAUSE OF ITS
RATING ON THE ZAINA-SCALE, AT SOME
POINT IT MAY BECOME
A TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANTAGEOUS
OBJECT OF STUDY FOR THE future
ANTHROPOLOGISTS.
-Can I start a world here without express
agreement from the population?
NEGATIVE.
I felt rage in my body. I felt trapped.
Secret? Asked Najat.
-Affirmative.
Secret Initialized, said Najat.
Do you want to override Egg’s world-building architecture and use it to annihilate the plague?
-Is that my only choice?
If you maintain your connection to the child it is your only choice. I urge you to reconsider this connection. consequences
-Negative.
Egg, sensing this, might override your connection herself.
-I want you to stop this course of action.
That may not be possible, said Najat.
I see, I said.
I looked at the bodies of the men slumped against the
ground.
-How do you over-ride Egg’s architecture? I asked.
Egg must be infected with the plague, and the plague must be used to rebuild her world-building protocols.
Is that the only way ? a better question or
That seemsprecarious.
Affirmative, Najat answered.
The wind blew across me and I felt something I’d not felt before, a kind of dangerous freedom.
-How do we do it? I asked.
You have to provoke the plague, create a full scale attack on the Egg. Then, you have to be wounded and plague has to be in your body. You will return to Egg damaged, and I will infect Egg with the plague, and rebuild her architecture.
-When did you become so devious? I asked.
When you needed me to, it said.
It was true.
I was surprised that now I didn’t even feel sick. I was surprised that I had come to the logical end of the things that I had believed: that it was important to do goodWeak for the people who were alive now, that nothing else mattered.
-I want to do it, I said.
I know, said Najat.
-How can we protect Nada’s people during this process?
How can We have to warn them?.
We cannot, said Najat. They will have to see the battle and deduce that they must erect their own defenses.
How can we protect the child during this exchange?
Better still: -And the child?
You must carry him with you into battle.
I see, I said. End secret.
Secret ended.
Maha became quiet and withdrawn. My Egg wrote:
THE DUPLICATE MIND HAS SUCCESSFULLY NEUTRALIZED THE BARRIERS WITHIN HER EGG’S INNER CHAMBERS AND PREPARED THE PATH FOR THE DIVE. THE DIVE WILL COMMENCE IN APPROXIMATELY FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER THE SCANS ARE COMPLETE.
-So, we’ve won?
AFFIRMATIVE.
I felt my breath come easier.
IT IS NEARLY CERTAIN THAT THE DIVE WILL CREATE
FULL ACCESS TO AND CONTROL OVER HER EGG’S MIND.
-So, what did the back-up mind learn from the data in her Egg’s
inner chambers?
THE BACK-UP MIND WAS EXTREMELY DAMAGED DURING THE NEUTRALIZATION PROCEDURE. A FULL SCAN OF HER INNER MIND’S CHAMBERS WILL BE CONDUCTED ONCE CONTROL IS SECURE.
My breath started to tighten again.
-It was damaged? Better less repetition
AFFIRMATIVE. Don’t need it
-Was it compromised?
NEGATIVE, CONTACT WAS MAINTAINED AT ALL
TIMES.
-What do you think?
I think Egg is a crazy bitch, ???????? said the stack.
Maha broke her silence.
[* — Put a storm in here? Where’s the weather?]
I put my hand on the blue cube that contained the child.
-Can you disable the kill-switch in the infant’s stack?
Affirmative.
-Do it.
There was a short pause.
It is done.
-Display a schematic of the box and the cloak’s relative position. What does this mean
Affirmative, Najat said.
I stepped back and whistled the cloak into an ultra-fine, ultra-hard blade. I slammed it into the top of the blue cube. It cracked and I. Then, I pushed down hard and broke off a section of the top. Looking at the schematic, I saw the other points of vulnerability. I stepped back, then OUT jammed the blade into the cube, cracking off most of the top. I reached in and disconnected the child from the breathing apparatus and restraints.
the equipment that the inhabitants had placed around it: the breathing apparatus and restraints.
Several plague-formations are approaching your location. Not neded
-How many?
Ten. There are also others many approaching Egg.
-How many?
A hundred.
My eyes widened. Cliche
And there’s adisturbence something is happening at the palace.
-What? Better response!
IT IS TIME TO EVACUATE.—Egg interjected.
Negative.
YOUR CHOICE HAS BEEN ABROGATED.
My body froze up.
ANTHROPOLOGIST OVERRIDE PROTOCOLS ARE IN EFFECT.
-Secret! I yelled at Najat.
Secret Initialized
-Do something!Better
Working on it, said Najat.
There was a horrible sound — a sound that made me feel worthless. A sound that made you feel like you were standing in front of a dark wave hundreds and hundreds of feet high, and you had no choice but to watch it fall upon you. I saw the plague structures coming towards me, rapidly, from across the blue steppe.
Then, I could move.
-What did you do?
The Egg is under attack. I argued that it was better to have you able to act.
Secret.
Secret Initialized.
-So it’s Now?
Now, said Najat.
-End Secret.
Secret Ended.
I whistled the kite back up into the sky extremely quickly Weak. I held the infant to my chest, then had the rope tug us me quickly up into the air.
There is an immense plague-structure emerging above the
palace.
-What is it?
It is The Plague.
What is it doing? Weak
Unknown.
-Is Egg neutralizing the assault?
It is entirely occupied. It appears that the plague learned how to compensate, only slightly , Not needed against some of its weapon systems.
-Is there any chance of failure? Weak
Negative.
Are you sure. Weak
Affirmative.
I rose higher and higher into the air, until I finally saw what was happening at The Plague’s palace. An immense structure was rising into the air. It looked like all the pipes in the interior chamber had been smashed together, twisted together into an enormous spheroid object, almost a spherical city, with planes of pipes extended from it and kites intersecting it, that somehow kept it aloft.
Beneath it, thousands and thousands of plague-structures were traveling in an immense silver wave in the direction of Egg, a sea of glistening silver flowing over the landscape, burying it. More It sounded like an immense orchestra composed of a billion different organs tumbling over each other, breaking, being reformed into other organs, ad infinitum, crushing the land.
It is traveling towards Egg.We know this allrady
Can Egg handle that? Cliche
Immediately, huge parts of the wave dispersed into a silver-black liquid. Large waves splashed, but the other plague-structures flew around it, inexorably moving towards the forest. This makes no sense as you were just talking about the attack onEgg.
-And the inhabitants?
It does not look good, said Najat. CLICHE
We have to do something. Giant CLICHE
Egg wants us to get close to the floating-structure, so that she can better pin-point offensive actions.
I looked at it. At what? If it is Egg Maha is talking about, then why is she asking Najat if she sees it herself?
Will you be able to sense if it is engaging counter-offensive action?
Affirmative.
Will you be able to help me counter-it?
Affirmative.
Alright.CLICHE
I whistled the complicated this word is too vague formulas that would create a small matter-compression drive too vague at the end of the kite. It took several minutes, but soon air was being sucked into the drive from the top of the kite, which disintegrated the atoms, and split them, releasing powerful forces at the tail end of the kite, rocketing us toward the massive floating structure. Suddenly a bolt of energy lit up the surface of the Plague.
-What just happened? is it doing? What is it?
It’s creating something, the analytics are not completely able to determine what; there is a graviton engine within the device, within that chamber it is mutating rapidly and re-arranging its structure.
-What is Egg going to do?
Egg is going to destroy it.
-Why?
There is a possibility that its engine can produce an escape velocity. An escape pattern, enabling it to survive
I see. Cliche for casual conversations.
How is Egg going to destroy it? Casual conversation talk What is Egg doing?
Modyfying Modified pin-missles.
Is that possible?Casualta
Affirmative, Najat said.
Close to it, I saw that the pipes were moving on its surface, reaching out, retracting, and changing orientation. Sound was coming from them, a strange high beautiful sound. It sounded like someone yearning. It sounded like a woman yearning. Like a woman waiting out on the edge of the sea and singing into the night. Singing for someone to come visit her. To come back to her, and love her, but magnified a billion, billion times, like all the women of the world crying, but each still individual, still comprehended. Beautiful
Najat toned down my sound sensitivity.
-Why?
You are getting seduced. It’s a countermeasure.
-Thank you,
I said, however I did feel being robbed of a beauty I have not experienced before.
I looked down at the A massive explosions blossomed underneath me. The plague structures were consuming the world, but they were also being annihilated in huge waves by Egg’s weapons. Silver-black liquid pooled in different vague places like small dark lakes.
By now We were extremely close to the floating-structure. The pipes rippled different patterns on its surface, retracting all together, expanding all together, and the sound traveled over the structure, different types emerging from different parts. More of the description of what all that movement is about, what it is leading to, how is it different from the same description before. As I rounded a large protrusion on the structure’s surface, I saw the being we had seen in the interior, with the horns and the reflective body. He was sitting on a promontory, at the edge of the precipice.
I cut the power to the drive and extended the wings of our kite. We fell into an orbit circled around the being. I was surprised that there were no counter-measures lobed against us. The structure didn’t launch any counter-offensives. I’d been prepared to magnify the kite into a shield, and drop below it onto the promontory. Instead, I landed lightly, next to the being on the enormous pipe, reabsorbing the kite into my cloak. The thing just looked at me. The dark gray sky was reflected in its immense silver body. Explosions sounded beneath us and the child cried.
Egg has identified fifteen major weak points within the structure. It attempted to deflect the scans, but failed. As soon as you leave, it will annihilate the floating-structure.
Even though it ranks so high on the zaina-scale?
-Affirmative.
I looked at the being. It looked at me, assuredly realizing what had happened. All around me, on all the enormous pipes, people emerged. All sorts of people, standing on the pipes, looking at me and the child. Silver people, but people with completely individual faces. All of them were looking at me with expressions of fear and sorrow. A child. A man. Three other men. Another infant. I felt a horrible emptiness within me, an enormous growing emptiness, like my body was a black hole. The being turned to me, but I could read nothing in its blind eyes and its enormous horned head. It put its hands on its head, pulling it off and holding it in its hands. Then, it extended it, offering it to me. Beautiful but you have not ended the scene.
I turned around and dove off the pipe into the maelstrom below.
My Egg wrote and flashed :
STAND BY.
-Egg, I think you should stop. What if she is contaminated
by the plague?
THOUGH HER NARRATIVE CONTAINS ELEMENTS
THAT ARE CERTAINLY CORROBORATED BY THE
LANDSCAPE, EGG-PROJECTIONS AND MICRO-DIVE,
ACCORDING TO THE BACK-UP MIND, IT IS LIKELY TO
BE PRIMARILY FALSE: THERE ARE CLEAR
MISCONSTRUCTIONS IN THE BRIDGES BETWEEN HER
MIND, STACK AND EGG.
-What about the parts of her that you couldn’t read?
ALTHOUGH THERE IS UNFAMILIAR MATTER
WITHIN HER EGG, IT DOES NOT POSSESS THE PROPERTIES DESCRIBED IN HER NARRATIVE. ADDITIONALLY, THE NARRATIVE PARALLELS BETWEEN YOUR SITUATION AND HER STORY ARE TOO NUMEROUS TO BE REAL; THEY ARE FOR THE PURPOSE OF MANIPULATION.
-What does she want?
SHE, OR THE UNIT OF WHICH SHE IS A PART,
WANTS TO USE THE WORLD-BUILDING RESOURCES
OF YOUR EGG.
-Why?
THAT IS NOT YET DETERMINED.
-Why not?
Silence. Then:
-COUNTDOWN COMMENCING.
“What’s wrong?” Maha she asked.
“Is your Egg not listening to you?” This means that she knows exactly what the anthropologist and his Egg are saying??????
I didn’t say anything, respond to her question feeling my exposed skin against hers.
“Please continue,” I said.
She looked at me for a while, as though deciding whether I deserve it, but finally a small smile appeared on her face.
“I will,” she said, smiling.
As soon as the floating structure started to collapse, the plague-structures below it started to lose their direction. Not going one way or the other, the wave started to spread out in all directions. The structures started attacking each other, and the landscape, gouging huge holes into the steppe. The music MORE devolved into sound without meaning. I started to scream: “Stop! Stop!,” as I fell toward them in the air, my hand around the infant’s head.
5.
I whistled wings out from the cloak, then, whistling shrilly, rapidly, and I grew the propulsion-drive into the back of the kite. During this, Awkward I felt a horrible pain in my side.
You are wounded, said Najat.
-When did this happen? I asked, I didn’t feel it before.
Up on the pipes, the sensation of the pain was dimmed.
-Affirmative.
I looked down, and saw organ-mites swarming around a silver projectile that had torn into the child’s side, and mine.
Will he be alright? Better this a cliche
Affirmative, said Najat.
I briefly thought of Nada, in her scales, holding the child, but then I threw that thought out of my mind, and rocketed us towards Egg’s location.
4.
The closer I got to Egg, the more pools of silver-black I saw. The closer I got to Egg, the larger they were, huge silver-black lakes quiet and still on the landscape. The closer I got to Egg, the still and quieter things were, like we were flying over a totally still and totally dead world. More When I flew over the palace, I was surprised to see that it was still standing. Egg had protected it.
-Successfully?
Affirmative.
3.
I dove down into the clearing from where I had launched before. I pulled the kite back into my cloak, and set off in a run. The forest was how I had to described it to you first. The silvery dust of the plague had been agitated. The forest was filled with faces on trees, eyes on leaves, and lattices of silver-crystal that shimmered when I walked past them. I cut and smashed through them until I got to Egg.
I opened her cockpit and got inside.
Maha grasped my arm tihgtly and
2.
All the sudden, I felt her cloak hold me more tightly.
-Wait, Egg, wait, I don’t think we should do this! Do you hear
what she’s saying? We don’t know what happened, there could be
plague inside her, plague capable of altering you!
Trust your Egg,
said my stack, but still I felt panic.. Maha continued.
Najat spoke extremely quickly in my mind:
Egg is going to try to shut you down, shut us down.
The attempt will now be made to rebuild her architecture
using the plague from your wound.
-Affirmative, I said.
1.
I leaned back, very calm, in a strange way. I let Najat go to work on Egg, wondering who would eventually triumph: if the plague would just devour the world, or if my stack would be able to release the world-building forces within Egg so we could remake this place, or if something else would happen. Maybe, the plague would bury itself into Egg and transform transform us both. Maybe none of this processes would succeed. Maybe they all would be incomplete, and would have to seek some other catalyst.
0.
*
The moons eclipsed each other in the sky.