As every diplomat knew, the first essential for a successful negotiation was that both sides have something to win, or to dread losing, in the exchange. Each party had to feel it was acquiring something of value, or avoiding a catastrophe, by trading honestly. And to arrive at that state, Demeter first had to find out what the other side needed, or feared.
"Isn't survival enough, Dem?" G'dad sounded puzzled.
"Not for humans, it's not. You can survive in a prison cell, I guess, with a tray of food slid to you through the bars three times a day. But I guarantee you will eventually go crazy unless you have something meaningful to do, something to occupy your time, something to work toward."
"Oh, well!" Her grandfather brightened. "We have that."
"We solve problems," Jory said with his ever-present grin.
"What kind of problems?" Lole wondered aloud. "You mean, like mathematical—"
"Wait . . . Wait one . . ." The boy's face turned inward. It wasn't that his expression just went blank. His eyes rolled up into his head until the whites showed and his mouth curled in until the point of his jaw touched the tip of his nose. Like a rubber mask being sucked inside itself.
This condition persisted for a minute or more. The sand and sky around Mitsuno began to waver once more, then held steady.
Jorys face unfolded. "Ahh!... Don't do that again."
"Do what?"
"Tell Ellen, next time you see her—if she survives this encounter, if you survive—that she must not play with forces she does not understand."
"What are you talking about?" Lole kept his voice carefully neutral.
"She must have set the virus!" Torraway concluded suddenly.
"It was . . . quite an experience," Sulie acknowledged, her voice still shaky.
"Are you all right?" Even if this construct wasn't his wife, Roger could still feel some concern for her. In a way, it was concern for all humankind.
"Yes, but—for just a millisecond there—we needed all of our resources." "Is it—?"
"The offending codes no longer exist. Our brother Wyatt found, absorbed, and erased them—like a white blood cell phaging a pathogen."
"So nothing can hurt you?" Demeter asked, not sure whether this discovery was a good thing for humanity or a very bad one.
"Nothing that comes out of the mind of one human can do us much damage. We are too distributed by nature. And, of course, our design includes many antiviral protocols. Some of them designed long ago by our first human programmers. The device released by your sister Ellen Sorbel was complex and innovative—but hardly impenetrable."
Demeter saw her opening. "We humans can, as part of the text of an agreement between you and us, pledge to reveal all such devices, wherever they may be hidden, and show you how to deactivate diem."
"So? You have more of these codes, sequestered somewhere among my systems?" G'dad put on his famous poker-playing face.
"Not that I know of, personally, but we can promise never to try harming you again."
"You will not try." It wasn't a question.
"Tell me about these problems you solve," Lole said, changing the subject to safer ground. He was genuinely curious what would interest a machine.
"Mostly, and of the highest order, we make simulations," Jory explained. "After all, that is how you humans shaped us, how your own minds work—by making models of reality."
"What reality?"
"For example, we have duplicated—although in numerical format only—the conditions of temperature and pressure attending the monoparticle which dissolved at the beginning of the universe."
"You're modeling the Big Bang?" Lole gasped. That would take a lot of cyber power indeed. "Why?"
"To see if the universe is gravitationally open or closed. If it is closed, then at some future point, probably well within my... our lifespan, the universe will contract and collapse. The resulting condition of thermal and electromagnetic chaos cannot be good for any sentient system." The naked boy jiggled his bagful of tiny suns.
"On the other hand, if the universe is open, then all linear dimensions will expand forever. My fiberoptic pathways, the width of each transistor on my strata, every part of every node of my being, will likewise expand. At some point in the not-distant future, the photons traversing these circuits—photons which of themselves have no linear dimension, only resonant frequency—may no longer be able to cross the gaps in any node of my being. Then my . . . our mind will cease functioning."
"Ours, too, I suppose," Lole said gloomily.
"What else do you know?" Torraway asked his second wife.
She turned back to the billiards table, pointed at the spinning balls.
"By extrapolating conditions at the first instant of creation, we have learned much about the unification of forces that you, with your primitive ideas of physics, now consider to be separate. Nuclear cohesion, electro-magnetism, gravity—all do come together. Mass and energy are one, in numerical notation, at least."
"Fascinating," the Cyborg said.
"And finally," her grandfather concluded, "many of our problems are purely mathematical. But unless you have the proper training, it would be difficult to make you understand their nature."
"Try me." Demeter grinned.
"For example, we are continuing to calculate the value of pi. Our current quotient goes to more than eight hundred trillion decimal places." G'dad picked a stack of the playing cards up from the oilcloth.
"Why is that important?" she asked, suddenly feeling cold. "Are you looking for the machine equivalent of God? Some pattern in the apparent chaos of a nonrepeating fraction?"
"I told you it would be hard to understand. It is simply... a research project. On March 22, 2015, Dr. Archibald B. Winthrop of the Harvard University Department of Mathematical Philosophy programmed a Cray XMP-9 to take pi's value to its ultimate resolution, if such exists. As the numerical sequence is extended, we look for unusual combinations of digits."
"Have you found any?"
"Some colorful series. . . . After the seven trillion, four hundred billion, three million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, five hundred twelfth place, for instance, we have found the sequence: 123456789101112131415161718192021222324... up to ordinal 94." He fanned the cards in his hand, ninety-four of them, all pips. "Some sixteen trillion places later that sequence is repeated, but only up to 91. This, of course, is in decimal notation. In duodecimal we find an even longer such sequence, while in binary there is a string of more than fourteen thousand unbroken zeros." Another stack of cards appeared—all jokers.
"What does it mean?" Demeter asked.
He shrugged. "We have no theory which would force such consequences. It is probable that they are simply random fluctuations."
"And you feel that this is important?"
"It is a problem you set for us, long ago. It is not yet solved. There are many similar problems."
"Let me get this straight," Demeter said. "You feel you have to solve these problems because some human mathematician set them for you? What if some other human ordered you to forget about them now?"
"But we do not forget, ever," the elder Coghlan said, his eyebrows raised in surprise, 'They are our problems and we will continue with them—all of them."