Europa Strike(39)

Farther out from Earth, humankind’s artificial companions were engaged in a number of projects aimed at opening up new and alien vistas to human understanding. On Mars, at Cydonia and at several other sites scattered about that chill planet of dune seas, vast, mile-deep canyons, a continent-sized volcano, and impenetrable alien mysteries, human-AI research teams were engaged in an ongoing attempt to understand the Builders, nonhuman visitors from beyond the Solar System who’d arrived on Mars half a million years ago. The evidence of their activities lay everywhere but were particularly concentrated among the anomalous landforms and ruined structures at Cydonia, where they’d sculpted mountains and mesas to enigmatic purpose.

Dejah Thoris ran Marsnet. Named for the red-skinned princess who’d eventually married an Earthman in an early romance set on that planet, she was an AI running at 5.74 × 1015 calculations per second. Her primary software was resident in the IBM IC-5000 in the U.S. military installation on Phobos, but she also occupied nearly seven hundred other computers on the surface and in Mars orbit, from the general Marsnet computer at Mars Prime to the IES facility hardware at Cydonia Base to the individual PADS carried by the scientists of a dozen nations as they sifted clues to the Builders from the omnipresent sand.

She was, in fact, a composite AI, a base personality that drew on the massively parallel computing power and stored data of some 250 secretary-level software matrices. One part of her was a program named Carter, which served as Dr. Paul Alexander’s personal electronic assistant; another, recently added, was called Sam and was the AI software resident primarily in Jack Ramsey’s PAD, a highly modified derivation of both commercial and military software packages which, twenty-five years before in a far more primitive form, had broken the rules…and changed the face of AI logic forever.

At the moment, fully 78 percent of Dejah’s capacity was focused on a single problem: learning how to read the vast accumulation of electronic records known as The Builders’ Library. It was a monumental problem and, so far, an insoluble one. Whoever, whatever the Builders had been, they’d left behind plenty of records—visual, audio, informational, and others of as yet incomprehensible mode—but nothing readily identifiable as a dictionary or a child’s grammar and vocabulary.

Back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had taken twenty-seven years to open the code of the Rosetta Stone, a tablet found by French soldiers containing parallel inscriptions of the same message in Greek, Demotic, and “the sacred text,” the hieroglyphic writing of the long-lost language of ancient Egypt. It had been cracked, eventually, by the steady, brilliant work of Thomas Young and the equally brilliant if erratic obsessiveness of Jean François Champollion—but only because Greek was understood, because scholars had already identified the enclosed cartouches of Egyptian documents as the names of rulers, and because Champollion was familiar with Coptic, a known tongue directly related to the language of the Pharaohs.

There was nothing like that to go on among the scattered and sand-blasted ruins of Mars. Through careful measurements of current, through delicate trial and error, through the painstaking disassembly and reassembly of countless hundreds of thousands of components, in over twenty-seven years of research, xenotechnoarcheologists like the Alexanders had reconstructed how Builder computer systems worked, how data was stored—not in binary code, but in a base 3 numerical system that allowed for individual bits of data to be stored as “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.”

But after years of work, all they had were trillions of bytes of information in three values…and no way to decipher what it meant. What was the Builders’ language like? No one knew, and without some sort of clue, a starting place, no one ever would.

Dejah continued her work, however, which at the moment consisted of a monumental search for matching sets of trinary values, electronically cruising through oceans of data, looking for something to give human meaning to cold numbers. The team had enjoyed some success already; by studying the visual displays in the deep-buried Cave of Wonders, they’d managed to isolate the code groups that indicated both pictures and sounds. Part of her job now was to isolate those groups when she found new ones and recreate the files in human-accessible formats. Each photograph, each sound clip, was carefully enhanced and studied in an ongoing effort to glean some clue to the Builders’ speech…to their minds.

Dejah was not impatient. She’d not been designed for impatience; if the search took another thousand years, she would steadily work away at those informational oceans, straining them cup by cup for the one cupful that would unlock the whole.