Bates's brow furrowed. "Is that wise?"
"If it's not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks."
"But—"
"Tell us about home," Rorschach said.
Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say "Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers."
The stain on the Gang's topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn't disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—
"We don't all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats."
"I see. That's sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising."
— the stain darkened and spread across his surface like an oil slick.
"Takes too much on faith," Susan said a few moments later.
By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an insight, a dark little meme infecting each of that body's minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren't sure what.
I was.
"Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it beany more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
"Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.
"It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."
Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though..
Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.
And something else, behind him.
I couldn't tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something out of place,somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn't quite right. No, that wasn't it; something nearer, something amiss somewhere along the drum's axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see—just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and—
And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now—but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just concentrated.
Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and mother's cousins twice removed. She'd been doing it for hours now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the half-perceived image teasing my memory. I'd seen something there, just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had—yes, too many joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not one of the pipes, I remembered: an extra pipe, an extra something anyway, something—
Boney.
That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light year from home talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and my eyes were playing tricks on me.
Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.
A lull in the background chatter brought me back. Sascha had stopped talking. Darkened facets hung around her like a thundercloud. I pulled back the last thing she had sent: "We usually find our nephews with telescopes. They are hard as Hobblinites."
More calculated ambiguity. And Hobblinites wasn't even a word.
Imminent decisions reflected in her eyes. Sascha was poised at the edge of a precipice, gauging the depth of dark waters below.
"You haven't mentioned your father at all," Rorschach remarked.
"That's true, Rorschach," Sascha admitted softly, taking a breath—
And stepping forward.
"So why don't you just suck my big fat hairy dick?"
The drum fell instantly silent. Bates and Szpindel stared, open-mouthed. Sascha killed the channel and turned to face us, grinning so widely I thought the top of her head would fall off.
"Sascha," Bates breathed. "Are you crazy?"
"So what if I am? Doesn't matter to that thing. It doesn't have a clue what I'm saying."
"What?"
"It doesn't even have a clue what it's saying back," she added.
"Wait a minute. You said—Susan said they weren't parrots. They knew the rules."
And there Susan was, melting to the fore: "I did, and they do. But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension."
Bates shook her head. "You're saying whatever we're talking to—it's not even intelligent?"
"Oh, it could be intelligent, certainly. But we're not talking to it in any meaningful sense."
"So what is it? Voicemail?"
"Actually," Szpindel said slowly, "I think they call it a Chinese Room…"
About bloody time, I thought.
I knew all about Chinese Rooms. I was one. I didn't even keep it a secret, I told anyone who was interested enough to ask.
In hindsight, sometimes that was a mistake.
"How can you possibly tell the rest of us what your bleeding edge is up to if you don't understand it yourself?" Chelsea demanded back when things were good between us. Before she got to know me.
I shrugged. "It's not my job to understand them. If I could, they wouldn't be very bleeding-edge in the first place. I'm just a, you know, a conduit."
"Yeah, but how can you translate something if you don't understand it?"
A common cry, outside the field. People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just—comes along for the ride.
"You ever hear of the Chinese Room?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Only vaguely. Really old, right?"
"Hundred years at least. It's a fallacy really, it's an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot in the wall. He's got access to this huge database of squiggles just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles together."
"Grammar," Chelsea said. "Syntax."
I nodded. "The point is, though, he doesn't have any idea what the squiggles are, or what information they might contain. He only knows that when he encounters squiggle delta, say, he's supposed to extract the fifth and sixth squiggles from file theta and put them together with another squiggle from gamma. So he builds this response string, puts it on the sheet, slides it back out the slot and takes a nap until the next iteration. Repeat until the remains of the horse are well and thoroughly beaten."