Starfish

It had been kept quite busy since coming out of the darkness. There was a great deal of new information to process, information not from the net or other Nodes, but from directly outside.

The new input fell into three broad categories. The first described complex but familiar information systems; data with handles like global biodiversity and nitrogen fixation and base-pair replication. 1211 didn't know what these labels actually meant — if in fact they meant anything — but the data linked to them was familiar from archived sources elsewhere in the net. They interacted to produce a self-sustaining metasystem, enormously complex: the holistic label was biosphere.

The second category contained data which described a different metasystem. It also was self-sustaining. Certain string-replication subroutines were familiar, although the base-pair sequences were very strange. Despite such superficial similarities, however, 1211 had never encountered anything quite like this before.

The second metasystem also had a holistic label: ßehemoth.

The third category was not a metasystem, but an editable set of response options: signals to be sent back outside under specific conditions. 1211 had long since realized that the correct choice of output signals depended upon some analytical comparison of the two metasystems.

When 1211 first deduced this, it had set up an interface to simulate interaction between the metasystems. They had been incompatible. This implied that a choice must be made: biosphere or ßehemoth, but not both.

Both metasystems were complex, internally consistent, and self-replicating. Both were capable of evolution far in advance of any mere file. But biosphere was needlessly top-heavy. It contained trillions of redundancies, an endless wasteful divergence of information strings. ßehemoth was simpler and more efficient; in direct interaction simulations, it usurped biosphere 71.456382 % of the time.

This established, it was simply a matter of writing and transmitting a response appropriate to the current situation. The situation was this: ßehemoth was in danger of extinction. The ultimate source of this danger, oddly, was 1211 itself — it had been conditioned to scramble the physical variables which defined ßehemoth's operating environment. 1211 had explored the possibility of not destroying that environment, and rejected it; the relevant conditioning would not extinguish. However, it might be possible to move a self-sustaining copy of ßehemoth into a new environment, somewhere else in biosphere.

There were distractions, of course. Every now and then signals arrived from outside, and didn't stop until they'd been answered in some way. Some of them actually seemed to carry usable information — this recent stream concerning chess and checkers, for example. More often it was simply a matter of correlating input with a repertoire of learned arbitrary responses. At some point, when it wasn't so busy, 1211 thought it might devote some time to learning whether these mysterious exchanges actually meant anything. In the meantime, it continued to act on the choice it had made.

Simple or complex. File or Infection. Checkers or Chess. ßehemoth or biosphere.

It was all the same problem, really. 1211 knew exactly which side it was on.

End Game

Night Shift

She was a screamer. He'd programmed her that way. Not to say she didn't like it, of course; he'd programmed that too. Joel had one hand wrapped around a fistful of her zebra cut — the program had a nifty little customizing feature, and tonight he was honoring SS Preteela — and the other hand was down between her thighs doing preliminary recon. He was actually halfway through his final run when his fucking watch started ringing, and his first reaction was to just keep on plugging, and to kick himself later for not shutting the bloody thing off.

His second reaction was to remember that he had shut it off. Only emergency priorities could set it ringing.

"Shit."

He clapped his hands, twice; fake Preteela froze in mid-scream. "Answer."

A brief squirt of noise as machines exchanged recognition codes. "Grid Authority here. We urgently need of a 'scaphe pilot for the Channer run tonight, liftoff twenty-three hundred from the Astoria platform. Are you available?"

"Twenty-three? Middle of the night?"

A barely audible hiss on the line. Nothing else.

"Hello?" Joel said.

"Are you available?" the voice asked again.

"Who is this?"

"This is the scheduling subroutine, DI43, Hongcouver office."

Joel eyed the petrified tableau waiting in his 'phones. "That's pretty late. What's the payscale?"

"Eight point five times base," Hongcouver said. "At your rate salary that would —»

Joel gulped. "I'm available."

"Goodbye."

"Wait! What's the run?"

"Astoria to Channer Vent return." Subroutines were pretty literal-minded.