But even I would’ve brought him up to speed.
Something changed while I was away. Maybe the war’s heated up again, entered some new phase. That twitchy kid is out of the loop for a reason. I wonder what it is.
I wonder if I care.
I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off. Three hours after coming back to life I’m relaxing in the starbow commons. “Chimp.”
“You’re up early,” it says at last, and I am; our answering shout hasn’t even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.
“Show me the forward feeds,” I command.
DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.
Maybe. Or maybe the chimp’s right, maybe it’s pure physiology. Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart. But there’s a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.
“Slow the time-series,” I command. “By a hundred.”
It is a blink. 428’s disk isn’t darkening uniformly, it’s eclipsing. As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.
“By a thousand.”
Chromatophores, the chimp called them. But they’re not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves.
A word pops into my head: latency.
“Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?”
“About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.”
The speed of a passing thought.
And if this thing does think, it’ll have logic gates, synapses—it’s going to be a net of some kind. And if the net’s big enough, there’s an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)
The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin—when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B—the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.
I shatters into we.
It’s not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an earthly one. It’s a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we’ve yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.
Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does I spread itself across the heavens?
The flesh is huge, the flesh is inconceivable. But the spirit, the spirit is—
Shit.
“Chimp. Assuming the mean neuron density of a human brain, what’s the synapse count on a circular sheet of neurons one millimeter thick with a diameter of five thousand eight hundred ninety-two kilometers?”
“Two times ten to the twenty-seventh.”
I saccade the database for some perspective on a mind stretched across thirty million square kilometers: the equivalent of two quadrillion human brains.
Of course, whatever this thing uses for neurons have to be packed a lot less tightly than ours; we can see through them, after all. Let’s be superconservative, say it’s only got a thousandth the computational density of a human brain. That’s—
Okay, let’s say it’s only got a ten-thousandth the synaptic density, that’s still—
A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I’d hypothesize it right out of existence.
Still twenty billion human brains. Twenty billion.
I don’t know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.
But I’m not quite ready to believe in gods.
I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He seems surprised by my reaction. “Wanted to—talk,” he says after a moment.
“You never come into someone’s home uninvited!”
He retreats a step, stammers: “Wanted, wanted—”
“To talk. And you do that in public. On the bridge, or in the commons, or—for that matter, you could just comm me.”
He hesitates. “Said you—wanted face to face. You said, cultural tradition.”
I did, at that. But not here. This is my place, these are my private quarters. The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait, and stand there like part of the fucking furniture…
“Why are you even up?” I snarl. “We’re not even supposed to come online for another two months.”
“Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.”
That fucking machine.
“Why are you up?” he asks, not leaving.
I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. “I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.” The implicit alone should be obvious.
“Anything?”
Evidently it isn’t. I decide to play along for a while. “Looks like we’re talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That’s the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane’s pretty much empty. I mean, it’s all alive. It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.”
“Molecular cloud,” Dix says. “Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it’s concentrating stuff inside the envelope.”
I shrug. “Point is, there’s a size limit for the brain but it’s huge, it’s…”
“Unlikely,” he murmurs, almost to himself.
I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. “What do you mean?”
“Island’s twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere’s seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that’s— one in fifty-billion odds.”
“Go on.”
He can’t. “Uh, just… just unlikely.”
I close my eyes. “How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?”
That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. “Don’t—I’m not—”
“It is unlikely. It’s astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means…”
He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.
But finally, the lights flicker on: “There’s, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!”
This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day. That is a very scary thought.