Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

Darvin looked upwards, slowly enough to let Nollam track his gaze. The blimp glowed red above them.

“Can we not?” he said.

The summons had a priority override that lasered it through layer after layer of firewall: from the No-Trace on the recipient’s location, through the Do Not Disturb aura around his room and several subtler obstacles in his head, to finally penetrate the last barrier, sleep. Horrocks woke with heart pounding and eyes staring. In the dark a ghastly hallucination of the Oldest Man blazed in front of him, demanded his presence, and vanished.

The jolt of his awakening had disturbed Genome. She rolled, mumbling. Horrocks caressed her shoulders.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Conference call.”

“Talk quiet,” she said.

Her fingertips trailed across his back and thigh as he pushed away. He split the side of the permeable cocoon they’d shared and drifted across the still-dark room to the utility wall. The cocoon sealed itself again behind him. He docked with his clothes while sucking a hot-enough coffee. Its dim infrared lit his way to the hatch. The corridor’s daylight strip struck him like a rush, its wavelengths rebooting wakefulness faster than the black drug. He finger-thrust the wall and launched himself along; grabbed a handhold outside the first unoccupied nook, fifty metres along; swung in, braced himself against its curving walls like a child between the trunk and branch of a tree, and closed his eyes.

The summons’s track-back pulsed in front of him like a migraine. He tagged it and was yanked into a hasty telepresence. Constantine glowered from the far pole. Eleven other people were already there, of whom Horrocks recognised two by sight: Awlin Halegap, the speculator, and Amend Locke, the science-team boss for the Destiny II probe. A quick scan of their tags identified the others as team members or brokers in terrestrials. All science and finance, then; and all crew. All except himself were old hands.

“Jury is quorate,” said Constantine. “We thank the youngest member for his prompt arrival, all things considered.” The spark of humour faded as fast as Horrocks’s surge of alarm flared. A jury! And not one chosen by lot! Whatever this was, it was serious.

“We must proceed with all despatch,” Constantine continued. “Not fifteen minutes ago I learned, to my great displeasure and dismay, that the Destiny II probe has made contact with the inhabitants. More precisely, the inhabitants have made contact with it, and it has responded.”

Shouts rose all round; if it had been a real space, they would have echoed. Constantine ignored them and flashed a file into common view. The clamour died in a moment of silent study. The first picture was a white rectangle unequally divided by a jagged, curving black line with an isolated arrow-like shape well above it, somewhere about the middle. On to the rectangle, a second or two later, a coloured picture was overlain: a planetary survey photograph. Blue sea, green coast, brown desert. The jagged line fitted the coast, the arrow marked a spot in the desert. The image zoomed to the spot. Under maximum resolution it picked out a dusty polygon of low structures, which on enhancement resolved to buildings and ramps.

“The sketch-map was the signal, and the spot you’re looking at was the source,” said Constantine. The view pulled back from the first picture to include it, as a piece of white card or paper, in a raw bug’s-eye view of two of the bat people staring straight into camera. “The natives are using our own surveillance devices to communicate with us. The response from the orbiter was this…”

Horrocks almost laughed to see a prerecorded image of the Oldest Man himself in his best silk formals, announcing that the expedition came in peace and showing off a view of the interior of the sunliner, followed by a brief download of the ship’s specs and the latest news from the Red Sun system. That last was still running when Constantine flicked the view off.

“Who is responsible for this?” Constantine demanded.

“I am,” said Amend Locke. “You recorded the introduction for me about three hundred years ago. It’s the standard courtesy call to a claim-jumper or a data colony.”

“Yes, yes,” said Constantine. “I remember that. What I don’t remember is authorising its use here and now.”

“It’s a default,” said Amend Locke. “As soon as the probe detects a clear attempt to hail it, however obscure, it fires off the standard message.”

A flicker of corroborating data interchange accompanied the dialogue. Horrocks didn’t bother to do more than glance at it, but filed it for later.

“If there was a wall here,” said Constantine, “I swear I should now be banging my head against it. We knew by the time the probe went into orbit that we weren’t dealing with a claim-jump or a data colony. Why wasn’t that default… amended, Locke?”

“It was overlooked,” she said. “The responsibility is mine. The default is buried deep in the probe’s software and, well, with all the new information coming in we…”

“All right,” said Constantine, with a wave of the hand. “Next question. From a swift study of these latest pictures I see that the bugs are borne by some kind of beetle, big enough and common enough for the inhabitants to notice. How did that happen? And why didn’t we notice?”

“That’s straightforward,” said Hardcastle Wood, the biologist. “The bugs are adaptive and opportunistic. In all hitherto existing situations they’ve never had anything bigger to work with than single-celled organisms or slime moulds, and natural prominences — rocks, essentially — for their amplifiers. When the assemblers encountered a fast-breeding and ubiquitous insectoid they seized upon it. Likewise with trees. As for why we didn’t notice… the virtuality software is seamless independently of the quality of the incoming data, and, ah, the lay viewers just referred casually to ‘bugs,’ and we ourselves—”

“Defaults, defaults, everyone’s got defaults,” chanted Constantine. “Tell me about it. Don’t tell me about it. I know what fifteen thousand years of confirmed conjecture can do to harden paths and bury assumptions. And speaking of assumptions — I take it there is a size limit on these bugs? We are not talking about bat people, or even the little bat beasts, fluttering around with wires in their optics?”

“No,” said Wood. “Although if they were left long enough to mutate—” He looked thoughtful. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Good,” said Constantine. “Glad you’ve got that well in hand. Now: action?”

“We could cobble together a more comprehensible and apt message,” said Amend. “After all, now that we know they’ve detected us, we might as well talk back to them. There’s a standard CETI package somewhere deep in the vaults.”

“Riddled with defaults and assumptions, I’ll warrant,” said Constantine. “No, thank you. Let me remind you that the ship’s complement has yet to decide what we’re to do here. The matter is moot. I move that we terminate the message at once, and the surveillance.”

“The surveillance?” Hardcastle Wood asked, outraged.

“Yes. Burn out the bugs.” Constantine paused, frowning. “They do have a self-destruct mechanism?”

“Oh yes,” said Amend Locke. “It’s a default.” Constantine glared at her, but Horrocks could see in the interchange that Constantine had accepted the dig as payback for his earlier pun on her name.

“But why should we do it?” protested Wood. “Terminate the message, yes, but the surveillance?”

Emphatic nods all round, except from Horrocks and Constantine.

To Horrocks’s surprise, a prompt from Constantine flashed in front of his eyes: you tell them .