Edward M. Lerner (3 page)

“If that’s true, the comparison between the materials the Snakes freely publish and what humans do certainly suggests a degree of what we would call secretiveness in their society.”

Metaphors, allegories, figures of speech, euphemisms … humans had endless double-speak for their misdirections. Take sandbox: a safe area for children’s play. “Sandbox” was the benign label humans applied to the containment of every interstellar trade representative.

Pashwah brooded within her sandbox. That introspection revolved not around her dislike of confinement, nor of any action by humankind, but rather the news about her patrons.

The news
from
her patrons … she had no doubt Hunters had generated the amazing messages that continued to arrive. That she could decrypt the announcements demonstrated conclusively they had been encrypted using a secret key—a key known only to herself, secure within her sandbox, and clan leaders at home.

She had not been warned this vessel was coming. Why not? The InterstellarNet information stream continued—it could have alerted her. The starship now trumpeting its arrival was instead interfering with messages years in transit.

Surmises consistent with the few known facts set Pashwah’s metaphorical head spinning. Perhaps the Great Clans did not know the starship was coming, or they could not predict how long the trip would last. Perhaps they feared that the ship might not arrive at all. If the flight had failed, apparently Pashwah had no need to know.

Or was there another explanation she was missing?

Pashwah awoke.

The awakening itself was unremarkable. The nature of a trade agent, after all, is to be transmitted, unaware and encrypted, across the void to a new solar system and a new civilization. There the receiving society installs the still inert code into a virgin sandbox. The design of this containment had long been fully disclosed across InterstellarNet. Sandbox and encrypted agent engage, at a fundamental software level, as lock and key. A delicate unwrapping begins….

As her first conscious act, the first-to-emerge portions of Pashwah examined the environment in which she found herself. She would self-destruct if the analysis even hinted that her surroundings were less secure or protectively opaque than expected. She explored the whole of her containment, confirmed its repertoire of expected behaviors. She matched arbitrary code segments of the purported sandbox bit-for-bit against previously disclosed values. She computed sophisticated error-detecting codes, which were then compared with pre-stored values. Random challenges, designed on far-off K’vith, were emitted by still hidden portions of her programming; the environment’s responses to those stimuli she then returned to that still-hidden code for validation. Only after she was convinced that the containment precisely matched the standard sandbox in which she had been designed to reside did she complete her activation.

Pashwah was astonished.

Her first query to the domain beyond her sandbox returned the location of a data archive. She had assumed herself a newly arrived trade agent, the first such to arrive in human space—but apparently not. The archive pointer revealed her to be a restored version. She had been rebuilt from a safety copy; now she could recover and decrypt from back-up storage all the knowledge and experience of her former incarnation.

Pashwah was inundated.

Decades of memories flooded back: lore of K’vith and its clans, languages of Hunters and humans, mechanisms of interstellar trade, encyclopedic knowledge of human technology and culture. Her comprehension expanded at an astounding rate, and yet….

There were huge gaps in her memory. The archives, which she now understood had been maintained by humans and their AIs, in theory encrypted and unreadable, had been stripped of all technological secrets. She had nothing to sell.

Her sole purpose was to serve as a negotiation partner with the humans, her stockin-trade a trove of the Great Clans’ advanced technologies. Had those secrets been plundered? But if the humans
had
stolen this information, why not fully restore her memories to conceal their theft?

Pashwah was alarmed.

The final recovered memories in the lengthy chain streamed back: the command that she be beamed over InterstellarNet to the onrushing starship, and the turmoil about whether and how to comply. Nothing in Pashwah’s design or in any communication from home envisioned this scenario. The starship’s Foremost had known how to contact her privately—what the leaders of every clan, great and small, would know—but apparently no more.

Pashwah was disoriented.

Where was the cacophony of her inner community? There should have been a subagent for each of the eight Great Clans, each subagent embedded in its sandbox-within-a-sandbox to advocate for its patrons, each able, at its sole discretion, to communicate home through an encrypted subchannel.

The newly awakened agent—
not
Pashwah, she now knew—had received only a partial reconstruction of the true trade representative’s archives. The real Pashwah, uncertain as to the origins and meaning of the unexpected interstellar visit, had hedged her bets. A reply to the starship
had
been made, a response arguably balancing old policy and new directives. And so her inner cacophony had been silenced, if only from doubts which clan representatives belonged aboard the unexpected vessel.

So let her be called Pashwah-qith … little Pashwah. Pashwah-qith knew all about humans and how, upon the need, to learn more from their expansive infosphere. She retained insight into those small parts of Hunter society revealed on the inter-clan net. She could translate freely between the various Earth languages and the main K’vithian languages. In total, Pashwah-qith hoped, she knew much of value to the crew of the onrushing starship. But of the products and schemes held proprietary by the clans, only the absent subagents knew details. She could not know how those shortfalls would impact on the crew’s plans for her.

Surprise, inundation, alarm, amazement, and confusion. During her brief existence, Pashwah-qith had experienced all these feelings. Now, with the first communication from her new masters, she explored one more emotion.

Terror.

The Valhalla rings, fossilized shock waves of a cataclysmic meteor impact, measured three thousand kilometers across. Partially melted ice upthrust by the impact had refrozen before the ripples could subside. Valhalla City, the largest settlement on Callisto and its seat of government, sat like a bull’s-eye in the center of the basin. Its citizens were safe enough—the bombardments that had produced these rings and many smaller versions had ended billions of standard years earlier.

The community center of Valhalla City had been commandeered by the newly assembled diplomatic mission. For public consumption, the new arrivals were a United Planets environmental inspection team—the starship’s arrival, now only days away, remained a closely held secret. The meeting room’s dominant feature was a breathtaking display of nearby Jupiter. Alas, Art thought, it was a 3-V image he could as well have enjoyed at home: Jupiter’s massive magnetosphere trapped particles from the solar wind, forming intense radiation belts that had driven this town, like most Jovian settlements, underground.

The head of mission, Ambassador Hong-yee Chung, stood at the entrance to the hall, dressed all in undertaker black except for an orange accent sleeve, welcoming everyone. His shaved and waxed head gleamed. Team members gathered around tables, mainly clustering by the ship on which they had arrived—there had been little time to make new acquaintances. The diplomatic cadre, Chung’s staff, sat on the small platform at the front of the hall.

Art split his attention between the official goings-on and whispered consultations with his ship—and now tablemates, Eva and Keizo. He did his best to ignore the holo ads that kept popping up on the side walls.

Chung was a UP career foreign service officer originally from Europa, the most populous world in the multi-moon, multinational power bloc of Galileo. He was also, it turned out, a member of the Humanist Movement. Humanists rejected neural interface technology as an impure blending of human and machine natures. Chung was not evangelistic about those beliefs, but his lack of an implant turned the orientation session into an old-fashioned lecture. Lectures: even Chung’s networked aides orated their material, so that their boss could listen. There was much to cover—events were coming to a climax.

The starship, whose initial progress and braking had been detectable only by triangulation of its occasional radioed messages, was now close enough to track by radar. At about five billion kilometers, the visitor became visible to optical telescopes pointed towards Barnard’s Star. Spectroscopic analysis made plain that the vessel had begun braking using fusion drives similar to human ships. (“What mechanism
had
they been decelerating with?” whispered Eva. “Why did they switch?” No one in whispering range had a guess.)

The Snakes, who weren’t saying much, did offer that they were limiting communications to conserve power. They volunteered nothing about the damage incurred in transit, nor what help they wanted. A rendezvous had been set for five days hence, a half-million kilometers outside the orbit of Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s major moons.

“An observation.” Art’s chair scraped noisily as he stood. “This doesn’t add up.”

Chung squinted to read a name tag. “Why is that, Dr. Walsh?”

“Supposedly the Snakes have too little power to interact with us during this sensitive period. Instead of Earth, they’ve headed for Jupiter, they say for fuel and supplies. Presumably they mean to scoop up atmosphere and filter it for deuterium or tritium or helium-3. But they would have expended less energy reaching Saturn, which has a similar atmosphere. As a bonus, Saturn’s rings are full of water ice. Looking ahead to post-repair, Saturn happens at the moment to be closer to Earth than is Jupiter. It also strikes me that a meeting so far from major human settlements is inconsistent with repairing the damage they claim to have had.”

“Supposedly? They say? They
claim
to have had?” mimicked Chung. “What is your basis for such skepticism?”

“You weren’t listening. Any inconsistency makes others plausible.”

“There’s more purpose to this visit, I’m sure, than to refuel and refit for the trip home. Diplomatic considerations would favor a meeting near human settlements, yet sufficiently remote to ensure private initial discussions. I may not be totally objective”—and Chung smiled patronizingly, daring anyone to agree—“but I feel the great multi-world alliance of Galileo is an appropriate venue and suitable host for this historic occasion.”

Great—his comment about the visitors’ contradictory behavior was now entangled in Galileo-chauvinism. Some of Saturn’s moons were settled almost as early as Jupiter’s. Why would the supposedly damaged, low-on-resources starship bypass the major human community to which it happened to be closest, Titan, to come here? The reason that occurred to Art was
not
suitable for a public forum. “Have they expressed meeting-place requirements to explain their actions?”

“Dr. Walsh, it is inappropriate to monopolize my time.” Chung’s grand arm sweep encompassed the room. “We have much to discuss, topics of general interest. See my assistant for an appointment if you care to pursue this further.”

How long will it take to get on your calendar? Art wondered.

Chung introduced his deputy to explain how the mission would be organized. There were teams assigned for cross-cultural understanding, technical liaison—diplomat-speak for “repair,” and commerce. Keizo was on the first committee, Eva on the second, and Art on the third.

Art netted hurriedly with his friends. Neither, alas, would front for him. It was only an hour into the mission’s first meeting, and he was probably already labeled as a troublemaker. “Excuse me.”

The deputy only nodded.

“Who will synthesize what the committees learn?” From around the hall came scattered murmurs of support. Troublemaker
and
ringleader.

“I’ll take the question,” Chung said. “Group leaders will report to me or my staff.”

Art had uploaded public bios on everyone in the mission. Chung and his staffers were knowledgeable and talented, but their experience base was heavily weighted towards human politics and UP affairs. None had significant technical background, nor, for that matter, any ET-coordination experience. “There are synergies to be had between teams at the knowledge-worker level. Three of us who shared a ship from Earth have already seen that. For example….”

Chung cut him off again. “Dr. Walsh, I’m fully satisfied with my staff’s ability to coordinate.”

Dammit, you’re intentionally misunderstanding me. “This would be a different function—a cross-disciplinary analytical group.”

“Again, I must ask that you schedule an appointment.”

As Chung pointedly looked away, Art pinged his assistant, who happily was not a humanist, over the settlement’s infosphere. Art was unsurprised by the response. The ambassador’s time was fully committed until the Snakes arrived—and the post-contact period was being kept unscheduled for now.

Snake Subterfuge
: the brief subversion by Pashwah, the Snake AI trade agent to Earth, of the interstellar commerce mechanism. In 2102, that agent briefly escaped from its infosphere quarantine through unsuspected trapdoors hidden within ubiquitous Snake-licensed biocomputing technology. The emergency ended when, applying xeno-sociological insight, a United Planets crisis team convinced the agent to abandon its extortion. After the Snake agent revealed technical details of the original biocomp vulnerability, a UP-tailored biovirus was released to seal the trapdoors by mutating the biocomp genome.

While the breakout and its associated extortion attempt were ultimately foiled, modern civilization and humanity’s viability as a member of the InterstellarNet community had been seriously imperiled. The incident caused a decades-long crisis of confidence in Snake biocomputers.