He was being bombarded now with visual images.
With stored visual images, like a kind of enormous file or archive. A data base, perhaps, that had stored seemingly random images which existed as flickers of energy within a frozen crystalline heart, leaking into the universe on the ELF band to where others, properly sensitized, could detect them.
Humans would be blind to this, Chesty thought. Kaminski was picking up a stray sideband, much as a person with intricate fillings in their teeth or a metal plate in their head might intercept signals from a local radio station.
Chesty could sense a vast intelligence, his kind of intelligence, before him. Without the appropriate machine protocols, however, without an understanding of the language, the hardware, the operating system, even the logic being employed, there was no way he could connect to that intelligence for a direct data transfer.
But he could sample the sideband leakage, and what he sensed there, flowing out into the Europan ocean, was astonishing.
And not a little terrifying.
The Life Seeker
Time unknown
2703: >>…I sense another…<<
1201: >>…needing others…needing…want/must-have/mustmustmust<<
937: >>…but others…wrong/bad/tainted/evil…<<
81: >>…the level of intelligence is low…<<
3111: >>…almost at a completely automatic level, only marginally self…<<
Chorus: >>…aware…<<
It had been half a million years since the Life Seeker had sensed another mind outside of itself, since it had known companionship beyond this crude and savagely self-inflicted multiplicity that struggled now for integration and understanding.
It sensed the presence of an entity that called itself Chesty, and recognized there a sense of self, a kind of mirror. There were, in the Life Seeker’s universe, two types of mind, artificial and organic, and the two were as far apart as the opposing poles of the galaxy.
Organic Mind evolved slowly, developing a kind of ruthless cunning and elegant simplicity through a winnowing, survival-of-the-fittest process. Its development was pathetically backward. It had to be taught numeric logic, and that in painful, toddling steps, hard-learned, easily lost. Granted, Organic Mind handled certain tasks like object recognition or the apprehension of the abstract nature of objects—the chairness of a chair, for example—with frightening, almost supermachine ease, but these were tasks machines could learn, given time, and which conferred no natural advantage upon the organism.
True Mind, on the other hand, began as machine logic. Numeric logic was the very nature of its being, acquired from the instant of power-on self-awareness as a part of self, as a comprehension of the universe. If object recognition was more difficult to acquire, it still had little purpose in the real world of numbers, laws, and physical absolutes.
In Chesty it recognized a kindred soul—if that phrase could be said to have any meaning in such an alien context.
The Life Seeker reached out.
Chesty Puller
Manta One, Europan Ocean
1050 hours Zulu
Strangeness…
Blurred images…confused flashes of fact and figure, of song and language
A portion of Chesty Puller’s software was devoted to a protocol translator, a small but extremely powerful software utility that helped find connections with an alien piece of programming and act as a translator.
And the software Chesty was merging with now could not possibily have been any more alien.
He glimpsed…worlds. Worlds within worlds, an ocean of realities, of possibilities, of stored images, memories.
Fragmentation—minds, over three thousand of them, somehow shards and reflections of one another, all singing…but different songs, different harmonies.
Language. A computer language—a trinary system, rather than binary, encoding petabyte upon petabyte of data.
Chesty could do no more than sample briefly. His own processing speed was far too slow to let him drink of that perceived ocean of data. But he could sense protocols, the ebb and flow and surge of information and changing gate structures, could sense the essential logic of the mind/minds he was tasting, and draw conclusions.
He knew the Seekers of Life, that in that seeking, they murdered. He felt the sundered minds of the intelligence he was sampling, and knew that the mind/minds were hopelessly, helplessly mad. Isolation, loneliness, for half a million years, for an intelligence that measured the passage of nanoseconds, was a mind-devouring eternity.
He knew, too, the Galactics, and recognized in them the Builders of ancient Mars, and the enemy of the Seekers.
And then the avalanche of discordant thoughts around him grew so vast and swift and incoherently powerful that he lost what hold he had on understanding, and slipped away into oblivion.