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 said 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 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—