"So he's carrying on a conversation," Chelsea said. "In Chinese, I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition."
"Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you're saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test. You can be a wit and raconteur in a language you don't even speak."
"That's synthesis?"
"Only the part that involves downscaling semiotic protocols. And only in principle. And I'm actually getting my input in Cantonese and replying in German, because I'm more of a conduit than a conversant. But you get the idea."
"How do you keep all the rules and protocols straight? There must be millions of them."
"It's like anything else. Once you learn the rules, you do it unconsciously. Like riding a bike, or pinging the noosphere. You don't actively think about the protocols at all, you just—imagine how your targets behave."
"Mmm." A subtle half-smile played at the corner of her mouth. "But—the argument's not really a fallacy then, is it? It's spot-on: you really don't understand Cantonese or German."
"The system understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the scribbling is just one component. You wouldn't expect a single neuron in your head to understand English, would you?"
"Sometimes one's all I can spare." Chelsea shook her head. She wasn't going to let it go. I could see her sorting questions in order of priority; I could see them getting increasingly—personal…
"To get back to the matter at hand," I said, preempting them all, "you were going to show me how to do that thing with the fingers…"
A wicked grin wiped the questions right off her face. "Oooh, that's right…"
It's risky, getting involved. Too many confounds. Every tool in the shed goes dull and rusty the moment you get entangled with the system you're observing.
Still serviceable in a pinch, though.
"It hides now," Sarasti said. "It's vulnerable now.
"Now we go in."
It wasn't news so much as review: we'd been straight-lining towards Ben for days now. But perhaps the Chinese Room Hypothesis had strengthened his resolve. At any rate, with Rorschach in eclipse once more, we prepared to take intrusiveness to the next level.
Theseus was perpetually gravid; a generic probe incubated in her fabrication plant, its development arrested just short of birth in anticipation of unforeseen mission requirements. Sometime between briefings the Captain had brought it to parturition, customized for close contact and ground work. It burned down the well at high gee a good ten hours before Rorschach's next scheduled appearance, inserted itself into the rock stream, and went to sleep. If our calculations were in order, it would not be smashed by some errant piece of debris before it woke up again. If all went well, an intelligence that had precisely orchestrated a cast of millions would not notice one extra dancer on the floor. If we were just plain lucky, the myriad high-divers that happened to be line-of-sight at the time were not programmed as tattletales.
Acceptable risks. If we hadn't been up for them, we might as well have stayed home.
And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who'd opted to command us instead of eating us alive. We waited for Rorschach to come back around the bend. The probe fell smoothly around the well, an ambassador to the unwilling—or, if the Gang was right, maybe just a back-door artist set to B&E an empty condo. Szpindel had named it Jack-in-the-box, after some antique child's toy that didn't even rate a listing in ConSensus; we fell in its wake, nearly ballistic now, momentum and inertia carefully precalculated to thread us through the chaotic minefield of Ben's accretion belt.
Kepler couldn't do it all, though; Theseus grumbled briefly now and then, the intermittent firing of her attitude jets rumbling softly up the spine as the Captain tweaked our descent into the Maelstrom.
No plan ever survives contact with the enemy I remembered, but I didn't know from where.
"Got it," Bates said. A speck appeared at Ben's edge; the display zoomed instantly to closeup. "Proximity boot."
Rorschach remained invisible to Theseus, close as we were, close as we were coming. But parallax stripped at least some of the scales from the probe's eyes; it woke to spikes and spirals of smoky glass flickering in and out of view, Ben's flat endless horizon semivisible through the intervening translucence. The view trembled; waveforms rippled across ConSensus.
"Quite the magnetic field," Szpindel remarked.
"Braking," Bates reported. Jack turned smoothly retrograde and fired its torch. On Tactical, delta-vee swung to red.
Sascha was driving the Gang's body this shift. "Incoming signal," she reported. "Same format."
Sarasti clicked. "Pipe it."
"Rorschach to Theseus. Hello again, Theseus." The voice was female this time, and middle-aged.
Sascha grinned "See? She's not offended at all. Big hairy dick notwithstanding."
"Don't answer," Sarasti said.
"Burn complete," Bates reported.
Coasting now, Jack—sneezed. Silver chaff shot into the void towards the target: millions of compass needles, brilliantly reflective, fast enough to make Theseus seem slow. They were gone in an instant. The probe watched them flee, swept laser eyes across every degree of arc, scanned its sky twice a second and took careful note of each and every reflective flash. Only at first did those needles shoot along anything approaching a straight line: then they swept abruptly into Lorentz spirals, twisted into sudden arcs and corkscrews, shot away along new and intricate trajectories bordering on the relativistic. The contours of Rorschach's magnetic field resolved in ConSensus, at first glance like the nested layers of a glass onion.
"Sproinnnng," Szpindel said.
At second glance the onion grew wormy. Invaginations appeared, long snaking tunnels of energy proliferating fractally at every scale.
"Rorschach to Theseus. Hello, Theseus. You there?"
A holographic inset beside the main display plotted the points of a triangle in flux: Theseus at the apex, Rorschach and Jack defining the narrow base.
"Rorschach to Theseus. I seeee you…."
"She's got a more casual affect than he ever did." Sascha glanced up at Sarasti, and did not add You sure about this? She was starting to wonder herself, though. Starting to dwell on the potential consequences of being wrong, now that we were committed. As far as sober second thought was concerned it was too little too late; but for Sascha, that was progress.
Besides, it had been Sarasti's decision.
Great hoops were resolving in Rorschach's magnetosphere. Invisible to human eyes, their outlines were vanishingly faint even on Tactical; the chaff had scattered so thinly across the sky that even the Captain was resorting to guesswork. The new macrostructures hovered in the magnetosphere like the nested gimbals of some great phantom gyroscope.
"I see you haven't changed your vector," Rorschach remarked. "We really wouldn't advise continuing your approach. Seriously. For your own safety."