First Contact

Chapter 270: (The Black Box)

Chapter 270: (The Black Box)

Herod noticed that most of his coworkers were gathered in one of the surveillance rooms, watching the cameras. Even Flowerpatch had stopped whatever weird stuff she was doing and had moved over to the camera room. He shut down the projects he was working on that were largely going nowhere and rezzed out into the hallway. He saw more than a few clones moving around as he walked to the 'viewing lounge' and rezzed inside.

The lounge existed in both realspace and in digital space, overlapping one another so that the digital sentiences who preferred a physical form could interact with their purely digital brethren in a social setting. Herod noticed that almost everyone was there, staring at the screens. They had expanded the viewscreen of one set of cameras, watching a massive transport unload crates.

"Legion's bringing in more computers," Torturer said.

"There's already enough computer power in here to run a hash creche," Herod said, sitting down and looking at the screen. "Most of this stuff is state of the art."

"There he is again," San Diego Sunrise, a molycirc computer expert said, pointing at a bare bones android that had moved into the frame. It was wearing a basic jumpsuit, paper slippers, and looked slightly disheveled.

"Weird," Flowerpatch said, leaning forward. "That's a purrboi. What's an android doing with a purrboi?"

"I think he's avoiding the cameras," Vanishing Point said as the android changed course and vanished off the bottom edge of the screen.

"He's only been here a single day," Flowerpatch mused. "I didn't even see his name come up on the virtual directory."

"Who is he?" Herod asked, leaning forward. "There. There he is, checking the shipping label on that crate."

"Nobody's sure. He got here yesterday, met with Legion, and vanished," Delta said. He pointed at the screen, where the android had stepped back and vanished off the screen. "See, he did it again."

"Where did Legion find an android?" Herod asked. "Since the Human/Android War there hasn't been an android even manufacturered."

"He's not an android android," came Victor's voice from the doorway.

Herod, to his credit, didn't scream.

"He's not?" Flowerpatch asked. "With everything else you've managed to get your hands on I wouldn't have been surprised if you found some old android thinker."

Herod walked forward. "No, I wouldn't risk this facility or any of you by bringing an android into the Box. There's a reason that we don't make androids any more."

"The First Digital/Biological War," Herod guessed.

"Eh," Victor shrugged. "The Human/Android War and the First Biological/Digital War were two different things."

"They happened at the same time," Herod protested.

"So did many wars in humanity's history," Victor said. He shrugged again and started slowly stroking his beard. "You know, that kind of tells me something," he reached out and turned off the display before turning around.

"Most species, even you Digital Sentiences, make the same mistake. You view humanity as a homogeneous whole. That if humanity goes to war with humanity its a human civil war, when in reality its two separate human governments or ethos going to war. If part of humanity goes to war with, say, Species X, then all of humanity is at war with Species X, when in reality its just a small section of humanity."

"But what about the Crusade of Wrath, or the Human/Mantid War?" Delta asked.

Victor shook his head. "Different type of war, different types of wars," he sighed. "The Crusade of Wrath was Daxin and the Martial Orders going blood crazy on the Imperium. Ninety percent of humanity wasn't involved. The Human/Mantid War was a species wide fight for survival. Ninety percent of humanity was involved in the fight. Big difference."

Flowerpatch nodded. "I get it."

Herod thought about it quickly. He ran comparisons on human engagement with the different wars and found only in the Human/Mantid War did human engagement rise to above 30% of the entire species.

Sweet shook her head. "I just ran a cursory search of conflicts in human history, there appear to be many smaller wars wrapped up into one big war label."

"It makes it easier to teach, I guess," Victor said spreading his hands. "Makes us look a lot less... umm... bloodthirsty I guess."

"So who is he?" Torturer asked, bringing the topic back to the android.

"He's our newest member. He's a digital sentience, like all of you, but he prefers to live in a physical therapy frame at this time," Victor said.

"What's his specialty?" Flowerpatch asked.

"Computer security intrusion," Victor said.

"Makes sense," Sweet nodded. "We're trying to crack open SUDS."

"Isn't computer hardware and software Delta's area of expertise?" Vanishing Point asked.

Delta held up one hand. "Yes, but I'm not a security expert much less a security intrusion expert," the DS said.

"What's in the boxes?" Herod asked.

"Computers," Victor smiled. "Honest to God computers."

"I thought we had computers," Flowerpatch said.

"We do. But not these ones," Victor said. He turned and started walking toward the door. "There will be a meeting in two days."

-------

Herod was 'walking' down one of the corridors with Flowerpatch when they saw the wall had a new doorway in it that hadn't been there the last time they had walked down the hall. Flowerpatch raised an eyebrow and pointed at the door and Herod nodded.

They took two steps into the room and stopped.

Boxes lined the walls, half of them pulled open with wires hanging out, shelves had parts stacked by category, and huge metal boxes lined one wall. An android therapy frame was kneeling behind a desk, attaching a cable to a metal box beside the desk.

"Hello?" Flowerpatch said.

A purrboi looked up from the seat of the chair then put its head back down. The android looked up, its face was blank and without any distinguishing features, the hair was rough and black, the eyes had the obvious markings of an android.

"Oh, hi," the android said. He ducked back down. "Nicetameetchaimsam."

Flowerpatch waved her hand, trying to bring up a chair, and frowned when she realized the VR room overlaying the physical room was almost completely offline.

"Oh, yeah, hang on," the android said from behind the desk. He lifted up his hand, twisted his wrist, and two bare-bones chairs appeared, obviously virtually reality.

There was bootsteps and Victor walked into the room, leaning against one wall and watching with narrowed eyes, his hand running through his thick beard.

"What is that?" Flowerpatch asked.

"Computer," the android answered.

"Really?" Flowerpatch asked, leaning forward in the chair. She looked it up and down. "Heavy metal casing, direct power linkages, direct cable linkages," she gasped. "Is that a manual input device?"

"Mechanical keyboard," the android said. "And what was called a mouse."

"Nobody's used these in... in..." Flowerpatch said.

"Thousands of years," the android said. "There's a few almost modern things. Motion context sensors, the old crude ones, bare bones emitter hologram displays, real crude stuff," he sat back up and looked at everyone then at Victor. "I'm not sure how far back I'll have to go."

"Just do what you think will work," Victor said.

"Are you sure it works?" The android asked.

"Yes, Sam," Victor said.

Flowerpatch nodded to herself as she suddenly realized what the blurted together sentence had actually meant.

"Where did you get it? A museum?" Sam asked.

Victor shook his head. "No."

"Oh," Sam said, ducking back down. "The power's right. That took a minute, thankfully the label on the power supply was intact."

"I'll be back in a little bit, Sam," Victor said.

It was quiet, just Sam running cables to several different 'computers' and back.

"How old are these?" Flowerpatch asked once her curiosity index got too high.

"Pre-Glassing," Sam said. He slapped the side of a big black device with several different logos on it. "This is just the interface to interact with an early quantum computer that has nearly five hundred qubits and three logical qubits."

Herod snorted. "Victor's watch has more than that."

"But they didn't," Sam said, opening a panel and looking at the data. "OK, temperature of the server room is almost on target, almost at a vacuum," he said. He looked at Herod. "This thing's really sensitive to noise."

"Why do you even need it? I can have the creation engine run off a hand dataslate with more processing power," Herod said, frowning. It seemed like a waste of time and resources.

Sam sat down and sighed. "Let me explain it to you how I explained it to Legion."

"Go ahead," Flowerpatch said, her nanite body clearly defined. She laced her fingers together and set her chin on them.

"All right, to hack the system I have to be able to talk to it," Sam said.

"Which is why Delta is trying to figure out what hardware is needed," Herod said.

"Won't help him or me," Sam said.

Flowerpatch frowned. "Why not?"

"How much do you know about computers?" Sam asked.

"I can use one," Flowerpatch admitted. "I mean, I am, basically, a hyper-advanced self-aware sentient computer program."

Herod snorted. "I know a lot about them."

"Then you know that an operating system has several layers. The layer we need to be most concerned is the hardware abstraction layer," Sam said. He checked the temperature and atmospheric sensors again. "OK, the logical qubits are stable. That's good. Whew, this is primitive stuff."

"Hardware abstraction layer?" Herod said.

"It's the bottom of the of operating system. Down where most users never see it. It takes the input from the user interaction layer and translates it to instructions to the hardware," Sam said, glossing over most of the information. "It's the backbone of an OS, and what we're going to need to figure out to access the SUDS network. It also allows different manufacturers or types of hardware to be used with the operation system. Without it, the user can't talk to the hardware, which means, I might have to build or hack a virtual one up to get SUDSy to talk to me."

"Can't we just access the operating system?" Herod asked.

"Maybe. It might not help," Sam said. He moved over and sat down in front of the desk. "I wish it could have been original hardware but eight thousand or more years probably makes it impossible."

He put his fingers on the keys and tapped them for a moment, his eyes closed. "A QWERTY keyboard, obsolete for thousands of years. Actually designed to be slower to type from the research I did on the way here."

"Why use it then?" Herod asked.

"Because I need to use what works with this, not hack up a patch to get modern stuff to communicate with it," Sam sighed and rolled his neck, a biological habit that looked odd on an android. "The OS is bad enough. It's not the clean ones we have now, they were a lot more involved, a lot more cludgy to use their term."

"How so?" Flowerpatch asked.

"They used what was called a Seven Layer OSI Networking Model. It consisted of the hardware layers : Physical, Datalink, Network, Transport and the software layers : Session. Presentation. Application / user. It was designed to work with hardware and software that literally evolved on a day to day basis. Nowadays software patches happen once every few months, back then a typical regular user could expect at least one piece of software to have a minor or major update every day."

He smiled, a wan thing, and petted his purrboi. "It must have been an amazing time."

Flowerpatch watched with interest as the therapy frame wearing Sam pressed a physical button on the top of the computer and it beeped and began to whir. The screen, a simple 2D curved micro-LED screen, flashed several times, then showed a logo for a long moment before showing a login.

"That's odd," Sam said. He cocked his head and looked at it. "If this was all new stuff the system should be blank."

"Are you sure this is newly fabbed stuff?" Flowerpatch asked mildly.

"Of course it is. This old stuff uses magnetic media storage. Even the solid state drives should be dead within years of being unpowered," Sam said. "You'd get magnetic drift and corruption over time. With the solid state stuff, it used trapped electrons in a part of a transistor that's electrically insulated that got there through early quantum tunneling hardware, back then really cutting edge stuff that was actually put into civilian use before widespread military use."

"Nobody has used magnetic media in..." Herod said, then trailed off.

"Yeah, eight thousand years," Sam said, his voice missing any rebuke as he hit the password hint. "This isn't even molycirc, it's actually old complimentary metal-oxide silicon solid state semiconductors."

Next to my pen appeared on the screen as Flowerpatch hummed, thinking about the materials engineering requirements for such a thing.

"Naw, no way," Sam said. He pulled open the desk drawer and sneezed at the dust. He looked inside. "Really? No way."

He typed and the computer beeped, showing a simple 2D workspace.

"We'll leave you to it," Flowerpatch said, standing up.

Herod went to protest but Flowerpatch grabbed his hand in the virtual space and pulled him out of the room.

"Why's Victor having someone mess around with obsolete technology?" Herod asked.

Flowerpatch giggled. "Because it wasn't obsolete when the SUDS network, the SolNet, and the SoulNet were created."

Herod frowned then groaned when he realized it. "He's doing the same thing with the computers that we're having to do with our specialities."

"Exactly," Flowerpatch said. She giggled again. "Legion hired a hacker. It makes perfect sense. We don't have any authorized logins or passwords, he needs someone who can crack the system and get in."

"Computers are twice as fast as they were back then," Herod joked.

Flowerpatch giggled. "And the average voter is just as drunk and stupid as ever."

"I'll never understand the fleshies," Flowerpatch giggled. "Imagine cloning and mental engramming the clone to be an ancient ruler, putting his head on a giant robot combat chassis, and electing him to rule the Confederacy, all because it was funny."

"Fleshies are weird," Herod agreed. "It's almost grating that eighty-percent of the advancements come from some clump of barely functioning biomatter instead of us digital sentiences."

Flowerpatch shrugged and giggled again. "I can tell you why, but you won't believe me."

Herod stopped at his door. "Tell me."

Flowerpatch faced him then, weirdly enough, blew a spit bubble, stuck out her tongue so the bubble was on the tip, and stared at it cross-eyed for a moment. Herod could hear her nanites humming for a long moment before the bubble popped. He was about to ask what was going on when she spoke.

"We interact with the physical world when it suits us or we have need to," she said. She blew another spit bubble and waited till it popped. "They live in it."

"What does..." Herod started to say.

Flowerpatch puffed into black, purple, and dark green dust that whisked away down the hallway.

"Chromium Jesus, she's weird," he said, putting his hand on the panel and rezzing into his lab.

He stared at his board, which had molecular interactions of noble elements in a highly energized plasma field written on it. He thought about it for a long time, staring at those boards. Finally he pinged Delta and Torturer.

The two arrived simultaneously.

"What's up?" Delta asked, looking at the board. "Wow, that's... some equations."

"What do you need?" Torturer asked gruffly.

"I need you to fab me up a nanite body," Herod said. "Like Flowerpatch has."

"Easy enough," Delta shrugged. "You could have just requested a creation engine to fab you up the nanites for that."

"That's not all," Herod said. He pointed at the equations on the board. "This is going to sound crazy, but I need a custom reality interface."

Delta smiled at that.

"With pain and other tactile sensation," Herod finished.

Torturer smiled. "Easy enough."

"Not so fast," Herod said. He pointed at the board again. "I need to be able to be one of those particles, or the plasma stream, or the magnetic stress."

Delta nodded. "That's an interesting request. Why?"

"So I can understand these particles better. Know what it is to be them," Herod said.

"It could be dangerous, it could be painful," Delta warned.

Herod summoned up a stock picture of a Pre-Glassing scientist in his white coat, a pipe, glasses, and his lantern jaw.

"Would he have hesitated?"