Redemption Ark

But Felka was easily bored. The maze, for her, was just the start of things. She would run the maze in semi-darkness, with the UV lamp burning. The mice had genes that expressed a set of proteins that caused them to fluoresce under ultraviolet illumination. She could see them clearly through the glass, moving smudges of bright purple. Felka watched them with ardent, but perceptibly waning, fascination.

The maze was entirely her invention. She had designed it and fashioned its wooden mechanisms herself. She had even tinkered with the mice to make them glow, though that had been the easy bit compared with all the fettling and filing that had been needed to get the traps and levers to work properly. For a while she even thought it had been worth it.

One of the few things that could still interest Felka was emergence. On Diadem, the first world they had visited after leaving Mars in the very first near-light ship, Clavain, Galiana and she had studied a vast crystalline organism which took years to express anything resembling a single ‘thought’. Its synaptic messengers were mindless black worms, burrowing through a shifting neural network of capillary ice channels threading an ageless glacier.

Clavain and Galiana had wrenched her away from the proper study of the Diadem glacier, and she had never quite forgiven them for it. Ever since, she had been drawn to similar systems, anything in which complexity emerged in an unpredictable fashion from simple elements. She had assembled countless simulations in software, but had never convinced herself that she was really capturing the essence of the problem. If complexity sprung from her systems — and it often had — she could never quite shake the sense that she had unwittingly built it in from the outset. The mice were a different approach. She had discarded the digital and embraced the analogue.

The first machine she had tried building had run on water. She had been inspired by details of a prototype that she had discovered in the Mother Nest’s cybernetics archive. Centuries earlier, long before the Transenlightenment, someone had made an analogue computer which was designed to model the flow of money within an economy. The machine was all glass retorts and valves and delicately balanced see-saws. Tinted fluids represented different market pressures and financial parameters: interest rates, inflation, trade deficits. The machine sloshed and gurgled, computing ferociously difficult integral equations by the power of applied fluid mechanics.

It had enchanted her. She had remade the prototype, adding a few sly refinements of her own. But though the machine had provided some amusement, she had seen only glimpses of emergent behaviour. The machine was too ruthlessly deterministic to throw up any genuine surprises.

Hence the mice. They were random agents, chaos on legs. She had concocted the new machine to exploit them, using their unpredictable scurrying to nudge it from state to state. The complex systems of levers and switches, trapdoors and junctions ensured that the maze was constantly mutating, squirming through phase-space — the mind-wrenching higher-dimensional mathematical space of all possible configurations that the maze could be in. There were attractors in that phase-space, like planets and stars dimpling a sheet of space-time. When the maze fell towards one of them it would often go into a kind of orbit, oscillating around one state until something, either a build-up of instability or an external kick, sent it careering elsewhere. Usually all that was needed was to tip a new mouse into the maze.

Occasionally, the maze would fall towards an attractor that caused the mice to be rewarded with more than the usual amount of food. She had been curious as to whether the mice — acting blindly, unable to knowingly co-operate with each other — would nonetheless find a way to steer the maze into the vicinity of one of those attractors. That, if it happened, would surely be a sign of emergence.

It had happened, once. But that batch of mice had never repeated the trick since. Felka had tipped more mice into the system, but they had only clogged up the maze, locking it near another attractor where nothing very interesting happened.

She had not completely given up on it. There were still subtleties of the maze that she did not fully understand, and until she did it would not begin to bore her. But at the back of her mind the fear was already there. She knew, beyond any doubt, that the maze could not fascinate her for very much longer.

The maze clicked and clunked, like a grandfather clock winding up to strike the hour. She heard the shutterlike clicking of doors opening and closing. The details of the maze were difficult to see behind the glass, but the flow of the mice betrayed its shifting geometry well enough.

‘Felka?’