Звезда Пандоры

One by one they were subjected to detailed analysis. Three of the devices were for redirecting nerve impulses out into the complicated tracery of organic circuitry etched on the alien motile’s skin. One had a very low power electromagnetic transceiver built in. MorningLightMountain was pleased to find that it could well eliminate the need for a direct physical connection to the remaining alien motile. The final device was odd, an artificial crystal lattice that had conductive properties, with a small processor attached. It took the immotile a long time to understand its function. The crystal was a storage system, a highly sophisticated version of the ones it used to retain command instructions for the missiles. In this case, the theoretical information load was colossal; it could hold almost as many memories as an immotile brain. Unfortunately it was completely blank. As the alien motile died, it must have erased the information.

The adaptor arrived. MorningLightMountain worked quickly, connecting itself to the transceiver processor and feeding power into the tiny device. A deluge of binary pulses flooded into its mind. It used the thought routines it had developed to control its own processors, running the sequences through them, modifying them to handle the new mathematical arrangements. At the same time, it observed the device with the field resonance amplifier. The string of numbers made up from the binary sequences made little sense, but it did see where they originated from, which junctions they came from. It carefully began to return the sequences, seeing what the result was. Most had no effect, but occasionally a segment of the whole sequence would activate a portion of the processor. Slowly, it built up a set of crude control instructions. The processor seemed to have a lot of operation rules integrated into its design. When the immotile finally managed to switch the transceiver on, a list of possible transmission sequences flipped to semiactive status. By trial and error, MorningLightMountain learned how to order them to flow into the transceiver section for broadcast. Although the binary sequences themselves were horribly long and complex, there was an elegant logic behind the device that the immotile quite admired.

It used another adaptor to connect itself to a second processor. This one had even more inbuilt operational rules. Once again, MorningLightMountain patiently worked its way through the combinations, flipping functions to active status. It was rewarded by a deluge of output information. The most basic one was a steady signal that was repeated five hundred times a second. Other functions changed the signal minutely, although its main parameters remained constant.

The immotile flipped the additional signal functions off and considered the basic signal for a long while, working through possibilities before it realized what it might be. It constructed thought routines to run through all the prospective formats, to be rewarded by a simple cube of twelve billion specific points. At this moment over a thousand immotile unit brains were now devoted to interpreting the alien electronics and the binary number sequences they used. In all its history it had never devoted so much of itself to a single problem. It flipped the first additional function on, and was rewarded by a string of symbols appearing in the cube.

The remaining alien motile had become inert, lying on the floor of its pen. As MorningLightMountain worked through the transmission sequences, one made it twitch and raise its fat sensor stalk. The cell picked up a reply transmitted from its embedded transceiver processor that the one now attached to MorningLightMountain acknowledged automatically. The alien motile stood up and stared at the equipment that the motiles were operating. It noise-generated briefly, then turned to the immotiles. Its transceiver processor transmitted a long binary sequence, lasting several milliseconds. A whole series of inbuilt rules in MorningLightMountain’s device suddenly activated, opening up new junction connections and closing others. The immotile watched helplessly through the resonance amplifier as the processor unit effectively shut down. All the primary quantum wire routes making up the lattice of junctions were blocked out. Worse than that, the binary sequences used to accomplish the order were prime number based—those short enough for it to evaluate. Most of them were beyond its mental capacity to determine. It couldn’t reverse the instruction.

Over in its pen, the alien motile held one arm out level toward the immotile units sitting behind the crystal wall, and extended a single gripper vertically. MorningLightMountain knew defiance when it saw it, no matter how alien the species was. It used its own transmitter in the cell to replicate the sequence that had made the alien twitch and rouse itself. There was no response.