Echopraxia (32 page)

THE QUICKEST WAY OF ENDING A WAR IS TO LOSE IT.

—GEORGE ORWELL

TALKING
WAS GENEROUS:
the images that had begun crawling across
Portia
's skin were crude, chunky things, primitive mosaics built from pixels a centimeter on a side. There was no window per se, no distinct bounded area within which relevant information was neatly displayed. The mosaics simply faded into existence and out again, the oily gray of default epidermis stippling gradually into a roughly circular area of increasing contrast, a black-and-white scratchpad reminiscent of a crossword puzzle. Brüks's secular circuitry couldn't discern any pattern there.

Chromatophores,
he remembered.
This thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.
“What started it up?”

“Dunno don't bug me.” Sengupta had demoted the helmet-cam feeds to a line of thumbnails; her attention was fixed on Icarus's own stereocams, zoomed and focused on
Portia
's—what? Graphics interface? The same picture respawned in several iterations across the dome: sonar, infrared, ultrasound. The mosaic only showed up along visible wavelengths: infrared and ultraviolet filters showed nothing but plain old
Portia,
a monochrome porridge devoid of surface detail.

Smack-dab in the middle of the human visual range,
Brüks thought.
Wouldn't
that
be a coincidence …

“Ha!” Sengupta barked. “Z-contours the thing's talking in
terraces
…” She zoomed the view. Sure enough the white pixels were
elevated,
little square mesas raised a millimeter above their darker counterparts. Brüks spawned his own window and zoomed even closer: the surfaces of all that topography were
fracturing,
folding, each pixel splitting and resplitting into a mesh of ever finer pigeonholes.

“It's building
diffraction gratings
!” Sengupta brayed.

“And it's increasing pixel-res—”

“I said shut up!”

Brüks bit back a response and cycled through MonkCam. The Bicamerals had fallen silent around the object of their veneration, played with their instruments, passed bands of radiation invisible and otherwise over
Portia
's skin. Lianna was staying out of the way; her camera panned across the backs of helmets from the compartment hatch.

The resolution on that patchy window was improving by the second now; pixels the size of thumbnails shattered into spots the size of lentils, dissolved again into swirling clusters of pinheads that collapsed into shards below the resolving power of the camera. Steps became sawtooth lines became smooth, swirling curves that swept across the display and faded into flat gray oblivion. Now Brüks could almost recognize the patterns moving there—each new geometry seemed more familiar than the last, tugged a little harder at some half-forgotten memory before giving up and giving way to the next iteration. But nothing stuck. Nothing lasted long enough to sink his teeth into—until the patterns slowed, and Rakshi and Lianna spoke a single word, a shout and a whisper uttered in the same instant:

“Theseus.”

*   *   *

Eleven minutes was all it had taken. Eleven minutes for an anaerobic time-sharing slime mold to refine its pixels from the size of sugar cubes down to units that exceeded the resolving power of the human eye. Eleven minutes from coma to conversation.

First-contact protocols. Fibonacci sequences, golden ratios, periodic tables. The Bicamerals scribbled cryptic responses onto tacpads and held them up in turn; Brüks was not especially surprised to note that
Portia
's swirling communiqués were a lot more comprehensible than the Bicamerals' responses.

A shadow intruded subtly from the direction of the hatch, a hint of some presence beyond the lines of sight offered up by helmet feeds and onboard eyes. Icarus was full of blind spots; its cameras had not been installed with an eye to comprehensive surveillance. Brüks noticed, and tried not to.

Sudden surprised murmurs from the Bicamerals; a soft
oooh
from Lianna. Brüks scanned the feeds, where geometric primitives acted out some arcane theorem across
Portia
's skin. “Lianna. Talk to me.”

“The GUI,” she told him. “It's gone
three-D
.” Her feed circled the compartment, fixing
Portia
from every angle. “Some kind of lenticular diffraction effect. I'm seeing that whole display in three-D, we're
all
seeing it in three-D. Wherever we move. The thing's
tracking
us, it's tracking five—uh, six pairs of eyes and pointing a customized diffraction grid at each one of us
simultaneously
. A
single display surface
.”

“Doesn't look three-D to
me
,” Sengupta grumbled. “Too dumb to track the stereocam.”

Eleven minutes to derive the precise architecture of human eyesight. It seemed an impossibly short time to intuit a whole new sensory system from scratch, without invasion, without dissection. Except
Portia
hadn't done that at all, most likely. It had probably taken the tutorials long before it ever made the in-system jaunt. Wherever the place it called home, it had at the very least made a pit stop at
Theseus
. These probably weren't the first Humans it had encountered.

Maybe there'd been some dissection after all.

“Where's Jim?” Lianna said.

“Right here,” Moore called in from the depths of the
Crown
. He'd been off-shift but he was back in the game. “I'm on my way.”

“Uh, that's a negative, Jim. We'd rather you stay back for now. Give us your insights from there.”

“Why's that?”

“You know why. This thing's using
Theseus
's contact protocols. Your stock just went up.”

“That's ridiculous,” Moore said mildly. “I've been over there many times.”

“It was never
active
before.” The slightest hint of exasperation tinged Lianna's voice. “Come on, Jim, you know the rules about high-value assets better than anyone.”

“I do,” Moore agreed. “Which means my expert opinion should prevail. I'm coming over.”

No sound over comm. On the great surveilling compound eye, points of view shifted and bobbed.

“Fine,” Lianna said at last. “Don't forget to suit up.”

*   *   *

Brüks and Sengupta, the last of the daycare buddies. They watched through one camera eye as Moore, fore in the attic, slid into his suit. They watched through a half-dozen others as Ofoegbu et al returned to their rituals at the altar of First Contact, as
Portia
continued to iterate through stolen protocols; Sengupta grunted something about building a pidgin but all Brüks could see was plasma plots and dancing stick figures.

“Little warm in there,” Sengupta remarked. Brüks barely heard her.

Up in one corner of the compound eye, one of the Bicamerals—
AMINA
, according to the feed—panned away from the shrine and floated out of the sanctum;
EULALI
followed a moment later. The two began to trace a path back to the docking hatch. (Brüks felt a twinge of resentment on Moore's behalf—as though the poor dumb caveman might get lost without a couple of grown-ups to show him the way.)

Metal guts sailed past in Moore's feed: grilles, bulkheads, conduits and plumbing turning around his axis in constant lazy rotation. Landmarks passed in faster succession than Brüks had ever seen through Bicameral feeds: the radiator bus, the T-junction leading off to the LEAR hoop, that row of fluorescent pink high-pressure tanks he'd never been able to find on any schematic. Moore moved as if he'd been born to this place; he rounded one last corner like a dolphin twisting onto a new heading and he was
there
. Lianna and Ofoegbu moved aside to let him enter.

Somehow he'd missed Amina and Eulali.
Probably took a short cut,
Brüks thought, glancing up at the nondescript passageway floating past in their feeds.
That'll teach 'em
.

Soft ululations from the sanctum. On Lianna's feed Moore frowned stage left, evidently squeezing some kind of intelligence from those sounds.

“I think I see the problem,” he said after a moment.

Somewhere—else—Eulali and Amina had stopped moving. They hesitated for a moment, looming in each other's feeds; then Janused back-to-back, turning slowly. Signage and hazard striping adorned a hatch in the background:
VPR H2 STORAGE, THRUSTER ASSEMBLY. HARD VACUUM BEYOND
.

“It's as you said,” Moore was saying back in the sanctum. “These are
standard
protocols.” His helmet cam held a tight focus on
Portia
's paintings. Lianna's feed showed him from the side, visor raised, cheek eclipsed by his helmet, his profile visible past the forward edge of the seal. Just past him, the node called Ofoegbu wasn't looking at Moore
or Portia
: he was looking back through the open hatchway, into the corridor beyond—

Wait a second,
Brüks thought.
Shouldn't there be—

That shadow, hinting at an unseen presence by the hatch. Gone now.

Moore: “It's using the same protocols we are.”

Valerie had been there, just a few minutes ago. Now she was gone.

“It's reflecting our own protocols back at us. It's completely rote.”

Amina and Eulali. They weren't going to meet Jim at all,
Brüks realized.
I bet they're tracking
Valerie
 …

He foregrounded their feeds. They still faced in opposite directions, each presumably sharing in the wraparound vista of a conjoined visual field. Icarus drifted about them like a sharp-edged dream.

“We're not talking to an alien intelligence,” Moore continued. “We're talking to a mirror.”

Something caught Brüks's eye, a tiny bright sparkle in the upper-left corner of Amina's feed. A faint star drifting on the recycled breeze. He skimmed the stereocam menu, selected
27E—VAPOR CORE REACTOR—EXT. CORRIDOR.
Same corridor, dorsal view. Now he stared down at the tops of two open helmets; that floating star twinkled in the foreground. He zoomed the feed onto a sliver of glass—something like that, anyway—barely the size of a hangnail. A shard of something
broken
.

A big place, Icarus. It went on forever, breathed through more than a thousand kilometers of ductwork. This glass speck could have come from anywhere.

“You want to make any progress at all—” Moore said.

No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around.

…'Course you gotta go in there and check to be
sure
 …

“—you've got to
break
it.”

In the sanctum, Jim Moore extended his arm. Too late, Ofoegbu rushed to intervene. A bright little figurine sprang into existence on the palm of Moore's hand, a hologram, an offering in the shape of a man.

“This is my son.” Moore's voice carried soft and clear along the channel. “Do you know him?”

Portia
's interface imploded and disappeared.

Holy shit holy shit—
“Holy
shit
holy
shit holy—
” That was Sengupta beside him, locked in a loop, synced with another voice in Brüks's own head.

“
Shut up,
” Brüks said; amazingly, both obeyed.

Moore's hand didn't move. The offering on its palm glowed steadily.
Portia
lay silent on its shrine while every sapient being within a hundred million kilometers held its breath.

After an endless moment, a single bright eye opened in the middle of that surface. Light spilled from its pupil, fountained swirling across some canvas of melanin and magnetite, settled finally into an image with arms and legs. Siri Keeton looked back at himself, arms spread just slightly at his sides, palms out.

Brüks leaned forward. “Another mirror image.”

Sengupta clicked and ticked and shook her head. “Not a mirror look at the
hand
the right
hand
.” She zoomed the feed to make it easy: a ragged line there, from the heel of the palm right up to the webbing between the index and ring fingers. As if something had torn Keeton's hand apart, right down to the wrist, and glued it back together.

Brüks glanced at Sengupta, trying to remember: “That's not on Jim's—”

“Of course not that's the whole fucking
point
isn't—”

A sudden strangled sound from somewhere in the network: Bicameral sounds, a host of complex harmonics that probably held volumes. All Brüks could decipher there was surprise: over at
27E—EXT. CORRIDOR.
Eulali was charging up the passageway at full speed. Amina floated transfixed, staring straight at the camera—no, not at the camera. At that telltale shard floating in front of it.

Everywhere, suddenly: pandemonium.

The helmet feeds at the shrine were all in frantic motion, swinging like drunken pendulums and sweeping the scenery too fast to make out whatever had scared them. Off down 27E Eulali bounced off a bulkhead (Wait a second; had there even
been
a bulkhead there a moment ago?) and retreated back toward Amina; another instant and both were gone from third-person view, lost but for the frantic blurry sweep of their suit cams. Sengupta grabbed
AUX/RECOMP
and spread it front and center across the dome, a top-down view of the shrine and its resident deity and its misbegotten acolytes caroming off solid metal where an open hatchway had gaped only a few moments before.
Portia
lay quiet as clay along the condenser, its subtle mutilation of Siri Keeton glowing soft and steady as a child's nightlight: the oily gray tentacle that lashed out toward Chinedum Ofoegbu sprouted from the far bulkhead, and Moore barely had time to push the monk out of the way.