Линда Нагата - Edges

A scheduled data transfer arrived. It brought a startling memory: She had witnessed a simulated battle in which a new line of Makers rapidly overwhelmed the best competitors submitted by Griffin ’s team of Apparatchiks.

This is a leap forward! Urban had said with a triumphant smile.

Enough to unravel the entity’s defenses? Clemantine had asked him.

He shook his head. Too soon to try. Better to push this line of research as far as we can. If we get this right, we can take it apart with no damage to the ship .

Clemantine immediately shifted her point of view to Griffin ’s library, summoning the Mathematician and the Bio-mechanic.

“Your thoughts on this latest competition?” she asked them.

The Bio-mechanic crossed his arms. “It demonstrates a… most remarkable advance,” he said, surprising Clemantine with the sour disapproval in his voice.

“The design path is unaccountable,” the Mathematician added. “It can’t have been derived from our libraries of Makers by any evolutionary process. It’s distinct. The equivalent of another phylum.”

“Maybe it’s an artifact out of Chenzeme memory?”

“Unlikely,” the Bio-mechanic said. “It’s not indicated in the report, and we received no data that could form the basis of such a breakthrough.”

“Then it’s a product of one of the nanotechnologists,” she concluded. “An inspired leap in design.”

The Mathematician looked at her as if she were an idiot.

She raised her eyebrows. “You don’t think that’s likely?”

He spoke crisply: “Not without a long succession of intermediary steps, and if those steps were taken, why weren’t they shared with us?”

She looked from one to the other, realizing their sour attitude was not jealousy or resentment. Trepidation touched her. “What are you suggesting?”

The Mathematician shrugged. The Bio-mechanic turned to regard him. Were words exchanged beyond her perception? The Bio-mechanic returned his attention to her, saying in a faux-sweet tone, “Ask them how they achieved this design. It’s such remarkable progress. Their method would be so useful for us to know.”

The explanation arrived with the next scheduled data transfer. The design originated with a newly discovered document in the library. Buried amid a long, thoughtful history of a particular celestial city that existed in Earth system before the cordon, Dragon ’s Scholar had found a discussion of a complex set of evolutionary algorithms. He shared the discovery with Dragon ’s Mathematician, who quickly perceived the revolutionary nature of the concepts.

Griffin ’s Scholar angrily rejected this explanation, “There is no such document in the library.”

“The library is immense,” Clemantine objected. “You can’t know everything that’s there.”

“I don’t need to. The document’s identity key was included in the transmission. I’ve run a search on it. No results.”

Clemantine considered this, aware of an automatic routine working to moderate her rising anxiety. “There is an explanation,” she insisted.

But when the explanation came, it did not satisfy the Scholar. “An ancient document from a private collection,” he scoffed, glaring at Clemantine as if, being the only representative of flawed humanity present, he meant to hold her responsible for this offensively implausible circumstance. “One handed down over generations, forgotten until now in the data cache of one of the ship’s company.”

“Rediscovered at a remarkably convenient time,” the Mathematician observed, trading a dark look with the Bio-mechanic.

The document had come from Naresh. As an adolescent, he’d been gifted the family library to carry within his atrium—history and records from places his ancestors had lived. But his interests had lain in physics and in the future, and he’d never done more than skim the cache. It had only recently occurred to him to share it to Dragon ’s library.

“Serendipity,” the Scholar observed acidly.

Clemantine struggled to understand why any of this was a problem. “So we got lucky,” she said. “Is that so bad?”

“It’s a cause for wonder,” the Scholar replied, his acid tone unchanged.

The Mathematician explained, “The odds against such a fortuitous coincidence are extreme.”

“It’s a discovery that will keep us quite busy,” the Bio-mechanic added. “It will be some years before we have explored all the avenues this new line of research will reveal.”

Years?

And how long would the entity lie dormant? Long enough for their teams to work out a means to evict it?

“Do you think this discovery will lead us to match the entity’s defenses?” she asked the Apparatchiks.

The Bio-mechanic’s eyes narrowed. “Only time will tell.”

“Is it waking?” Kona asked, the moment he manifested in the library.

A Dull Intelligence had summoned his dormant ghost from the archive, reporting a change in the status of the containment capsule: the intake and outflow of matter through the tendrils had ceased.

Urban and Vytet had arrived ahead of him; their ghosts were never dormant. The Bio-mechanic and the Engineer were on deck too in their frameless windows. Before anyone could answer his question, Shoran popped into existence beside him. They exchanged a surprised glance. Kona had instructed his DI to wake him on any change; Shoran must have done the same. This was the first time in eighteen years his DI had found cause.

“News?” she asked him.

“Not yet.”

Clemantine appeared. Then Riffan, Naresh, Pasha, and several more, all within a two-second span.

Urban eyed the sudden crowd, his lip curled in irritation. “ All of you have alerts set up?”

“Absolutely!” Riffan assured him, breathless with excitement, though as a ghost in the library he did not breathe. “Any change at all will get my ghost out of the archive. I imagine it’s the same all around.”

Kona asked again, “Is the entity waking?”

“It’s always been awake,” Urban answered tersely.

“That’s not what I mean. From our external perspective, the thing has been steady-state for eighteen years. There’s every reason to think this shift in resource consumption presages a significant change.”

“Agreed,” Naresh said. “If this is a prelude to an attempt at communication, we must be ready to respond both calmly and rationally.”

Kona stifled a groan. Was he deliberately needling Clemantine?

She must have thought so, because her response was sharp and quick: “Communication is trivial for a being with such abilities. If it wanted to communicate, it would have done so. It’s more likely the shift indicates hostile intent. It’s had time to study Dragon . It could be preparing to extend its control.”

Factionalism had been a problem from the day of the entity’s arrival, when Naresh and Clemantine had staked out opposite positions. Ever since, she considered the physicist dangerously optimistic, while Naresh regarded her as neither calm nor rational where the entity was concerned.

Naresh turned in exasperation to Vytet, where he often found support. “There’s no evidence of that, is there? No reason at all to assume the entity is hostile.”

Pasha answered him instead. “Those scuttled ships are a reason.”

Kona cut in, determined to keep the peace. “We can disagree on our interpretations, but all of us need to remain open to possibility, be prepared for either outcome.”

“Or for a return to baseline,” Urban said in a detached monotone, his gaze downcast, his focus elsewhere. “This may not be a significant event.”