The Trilisk AI (8 page)

“Now
you’re moody,” she said.

“Sorry.
I’m thinking about the future.”

“You’re
worried about our new venture.”

“Okay.
I admit it. You had a point the other day. We’ve led charmed lives so far. I’m
waiting for something bad to happen.”

Telisa
gave him a mock laugh. “Ha! Charmed? Is that what you call losing our friends,
living as fugitives?”

“We’re
still alive and we have each other.”

“That’s
kind of sweet in a...grim sort of way,” Telisa said.

“You
sometimes mention the Five Entities. You’re not into that stuff for real, are
you?”

“No,
it’s just something Mom used to say.”

“I
don’t think Shiny is religious. But he was asking about it earlier,” he said.

“Really?
He’s probably just curious about our motivations and behavior.”

“I
got the feeling there was more to it than that. He asked me if our prayers were
answered. I said I didn’t think so. Then he asked me how long it had been since
they were.”

“How
long? Since your prayers were answered?” Telisa asked.

“No.
How long since humanity’s prayers had been answered. I said I didn’t know.”

Telisa
shrugged. “He’s an alien, Magnus. Of course it’s hard to get him completely. If
I had to guess, I would say he sees the prayer behavior and assumes it must
have worked at one time; otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Yeah,
you’re right. Just think, though. His people are so different, the idea of
entreating a higher power to help, even when they were primitive, must never
have occurred to them. No mysticism in their past? I wonder if he’s trying to
help us understand him, or if he’s hiding stuff from us?”

“Probably
both.”

Chapter 6

Kirizzo
stood very still, but his mind raced through a long planning phase. His
materials sat all around him in the cargo bay of the Terran vessel, the
Iridar
.
The first goal: find a way to assist Telisa and Magnus in the retrieval of his
artifact.

Openly
opposing the Bel Klaven would require more time and resources than Kirizzo had
available. It would be better to assist indirectly, Kirizzo decided. He wanted
to watch the enemy and learn. Kirizzo considered his inventory and that of the
Terrans. He settled on a plan for forty small probes that could detect enemy
movements and transmissions. Doubtless some of the probes would be lost, but
anything he could learn would help the Terrans on their mission.

Kirizzo
knew he needed a good hiding mechanism for the drones. They were small, which
would help when moving through the subterranean environment. But he needed
something more. He believed the Terrans would be unopposed by the Bel Klaven.
So his probes should be constructed as Terran devices.

His
legs ached a bit. He settled his thorax down onto the deck. The lack of
Gorgalan torso rests on the
Iridar
gave Kirizzo an idea. The homeworld
was riddled with a huge number of the Gorgalan versions of chairs: two low
columns of ceramic or plastic, spaced about a half meter apart. If the probes
could take such a shape, then shut down, that should be sufficient to fool any
Bel Klaven war machines that became suspicious.

The
planning phase moved on to details of execution.

Kirizzo
accessed the
Iridar
’s network to learn about Terran methods of automaton
design and construction. Some information came in, but something felt wrong,
over and above the annoyance of using a primitive alien information source.

The
Iridar
’s network connections exhibited very poor latency
characteristics, even for Terrans. Kirizzo compared it to his previous memories
of access on the ship—yes, they had degraded considerably. The link was being
maintained from a much smaller set of access points than before. In fact, the
vessel was configured to ignore closer and faster connection opportunities.
Kirizzo examined the current configuration of the ship’s network access. He
slowly came to the only obvious conclusion.

Telisa
and Magnus were hiding from someone or something.

Kirizzo
could reconfigure for optimal access. However, the possibility that whatever
his Terrans hid from posed a danger to himself as well gave him pause. Also, if
something found them, they could be killed. Then Kirizzo would have to
negotiate new terms with other parties. Kirizzo decided not to tamper with the
settings, but he had an idea to circumvent the obstacle.

There
was a word for this condition among Gorgalans—the annoying state of being in a
planning phase, dropping into a sub-planning phase, then realizing the
sub-planning phase required an execution section before the original planning
phase could continue. Kirizzo was there now—he had to speed up his connection
now in order to optimize the main planning phase. He thumped his last two legs
forcefully in the Gorgalan equivalent of a curse. At least the execution of
this sub-problem would not require physical action; that would have been an
order of magnitude more frustrating and would have involved more cursing.

Kirizzo
contacted his ship using his own communications gear. It trailed the
Iridar
by many light minutes. It would never approach the home planet, for fear of
getting the attention of the Bel Klaven. But it could connect to the Terran
networks and get him the superior network access he wanted. Kirizzo had to
pause and add a planning phase for accessing the Terran network without any of the
usual accounting infrastructure a normal citizen had for identification.

Finally,
Kirizzo returned to his previous task of cataloging Terran methods of design
and construction. He performed a review of materials commonly used, then
expanded it to everything the Terrans could do regardless of expense. He moved
on to design and control methods. Kirizzo entered all the information into his
own storage and created a set of restrictions within which his design optimizer
would have to work. The restrictions did reduce the problem space in which his
optimizer could work, but it wasn’t too bad. The laws of physics, his available
resources, and his end-product goals already formed a complicated maze to work
within, so more restrictions would reduce the quality of the result, but the
computation load didn’t increase that much.

The
planning phase came to an end, and Kirizzo shot into action.

He
constructed forty small devices, using methods and designs Terrans could have
achieved. The devices lay before him in an organized grid as he proceeded
component by component. He dared to improve things only a bit—perhaps five
percent here and there—so his devices wouldn’t attract the attention of his
enemies. Kirizzo didn’t know exactly how the Bel Klaven detected Gorgalans and
their machines, but he felt his approach was sound. Most likely his enemies had
fairly sophisticated methods, but given time and knowledge of the challenge, it
would be easy to circumvent the danger.

The
Terran methods were so primitive compared to his own. Gorgalan technology was
vastly superior, yet most of his race had been destroyed. Overwhelmed. They
hadn’t had time to devise countermeasures, even against machines as inflexible
as the ones the Bel Klaven had sent. Kirizzo was a Bel Klaven expert. He had
become one in his fight to survive the machines that had hunted him. He knew
that the secret to defeating the machines involved first understanding them,
then outsmarting them. He believed the Bel Klaven made their war machines this
way to prevent them from ever becoming a danger to their makers.

The
devices grew before him in ordered spurts. He fabricated the same pieces for
all of them in batches as he went, using his own portable fabricator configured
to emulate Terran materials and designs.

At
some point, Magnus came into the cargo bay and watched Kirizzo work. Kirizzo
noted the healthy curiosity exhibited by his ally. As he finished a phase of
the construction, adding power units to each of the forty devices, one of
Shiny’s sensors routed an alert into his mind: it had detected the atmospheric
vibrations of Terran speech. The message was diverted into the cognition layer
which coated his long neural keel.

“So,
Shiny, I could use your help with the walker here. I want to adapt its power
plant and these ingenious legs to my machine over here. I can’t interface with
either of them, though. They use your generic computation blocks, but I can’t
even tell if these blocks are working or broken. For all I know, I burned them
out or damaged them just trying to scan the insides.”

Kirizzo
listened to the request carefully, yet he found the desired outcome to be
largely unspecified. Kirizzo wondered how best to put power in the hands of
Magnus to forge his own solution. That way, Kirizzo couldn’t be blamed for any
failure in the outcome. He pondered how to reply; the Terrans seemed to prefer
verbal communication even though their link devices were more useful. Kirizzo
replied by vibrating one of its guardian spheres.

“What
is intended mission of the robot?”

“I’m
going to bring it with us on the next expedition. Telisa and I could use a
safer way to scout ahead, and some backup.”

Kirizzo
considered the oddity of the situation. He attempted to adapt Terran technology
in his drones, and Magnus was busy doing the opposite. He could understand the
motivation to improve the machine but, given the current objective, he had to
discourage the plan.

“Potential
disadvantage to using this technology: Homeworld destroyers will detect it,
neutralize it. Optimal to avoid usage of other technology for the upcoming
venture.”

“Crap.”

“Shiny
does not excrete in the same manner—”

“I’m
expressing irritation. And before you misinterpret that, I mean I’ve been
working hard to integrate this walker. Now you’re pointing out I shouldn’t do
that. And I asked for help as part of the deal.”

“Shiny
suggest modular construction. Shiny-technology components could be swapped out
for Terran ones as necessary.”

“Very
well. Help me out here. How should I interface with these legs? And this power
source is amazing. How long will it last?”

“Please
wait.”

Kirizzo
had just examined typical Terran methods of design and physical construction.
He now accessed several Terran robot manuals and examined their iconic methods
of presentation, interface, configuration, and control. This dovetailed nicely
with his own recent work on his probes. He simply had to expand his review into
the area of manuals and protocols the Terrans had designed for themselves.
Kirizzo created a model of the conventions used in the bulk of the manuals, fed
it to a translator, and created a Terran style manual for the hardware of the
walker.

The
Gorgalan computing blocks were harder. Their capabilities were so far beyond
the controller used by Magnus, it would stretch the Terran’s imagination to
understand. Kirizzo decided to simply provide a step-by-step guide for
implementing the interface Magnus had created for the Terran machine on a
generic Gorgalan computation cube.

This
took about fifty seconds, so at the conclusion of the work, Kirizzo simply
transferred the Terran manual and the guide over to Magnus.

The
man stood up and froze. He didn’t say anything for a minute or so.

“Thanks,
Shiny,” he finally said. “This is exactly what I need. Wow, I have a lot of
work to do, though.”

“I
will assist,” Kirizzo said. He assessed the materials nearby and entered
another long planning stage. Magnus stood by, doubtless confused by the alien’s
announcement in contrast to his sudden lack of activity. Some small segment of
Kirizzo’s long, thin brain noted that Terrans differed as much from Gorgalans
as the Bel Klaven did. He considered the notion that maybe their relationship
would end as tragically as the Bel Klaven one had. After a minute of planning,
Magnus stirred.

“Thanks
for that, but you’ve given me what I need,” Magnus said. “I’d rather fully
understand what I create, so better if I take it from here. Besides, I have
time to burn.”

Kirizzo
considered the words of the alien. The surface sentiment seemed reasonable;
still, the possibility of a switch to competitive mode by either side required
a model of hidden motives. Magnus probably feared the possibility that Kirizzo
would install hidden control mechanisms if he had a direct hand in the
construction of the device. But Terrans seemed to prefer extended periods of
cooperation or competition over rapid switching; witness the continued
cooperation between Telisa and Magnus. They were a mated pair, though; perhaps
their race had optimized for slower switching within a family unit. If the
Terrans did generally prefer extended periods of cooperation, why would Magnus
fear the possibility that Kirizzo could be trying to get access to the robot?
Probably because Kirizzo had revealed too much of his own race’s behavior
patterns already. The Terrans were intelligent and they saw the possibility
that Kirizzo would switch to competitive mode very soon, so they guarded
against it.

Could
the Terrans have better models of Kirizzo’s behavior than he had of theirs?