Читать книгу The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 30

Unlike humans, the artificial intelligence, dubbed “Chesty” after the nickname of a legendary Marine of long ago, did not rely exclusively on vision to model his surroundings. Merging with the data streams flowing like myriad streams and rivers through the tightly packed and tangled electronic pathways of the alien vessel, the closest sensory analogue he possessed was that of sound.

Human understanding of Xul mentalities had actually taken an enormous leap forward in the twenty-fourth century, when communications breakthroughs with dolphins in Earth’s oceans had helped forge a new understanding of how they perceived their watery surroundings as magical, somehow crystalline panoramas of sound rendered palpable.

From Chesty’s point of view, he was slipping deeper into a vast and hauntingly resonant meshing of rhythms and harmonies, a blending of tones and pulses and throbbings and even voices in a shifting, ever changing whole that felt both self-directing and self-contained, but which also felt like a fragment, a discrete but dependent shard of something far larger, tantalizingly beyond the reach and scope of Chesty’s awareness.

The trick was twofold—remaining invisible within that harmonic chorus while retaining the ability to probe and peer and penetrate, winkling out useable data from the incoherent ocean of information pulsing around him and recording it for later analyses. As he slipped into the Xul data stream, Chesty manifested a data shell around the essential core of his operating software, taking on the virtual appearance of a minor counterpoint to the thronging choral harmony about him. So long as he played the part and kept it low-key, he should be able to remain undetected. His distant ancestors would have recognized the technique at once. Chesty₃ was, for all intents and purposes, a computer virus slipping in through an unguarded back door.

Key to the strategy, of course, was compatibility. The Xul was the ultimate in an alien operating system. Fortunately, there were only so many ways to encode and manipulate data, and both modern human computer technology and that of the ancient predecessors of the Xul shared essential basics. Both had begun, in their infancy, with the yes/no, on/off simplicity of binary, but Xul systems had later evolved the more adaptable yes/no/yes-and-no flexibility of trinary, similar in many ways to the fuzzy logic of the most powerful human systems.

As a result, and beginning with the extensive code-breaking and reverse engineering projects carried out on the recovered corpse of The Singer centuries ago, human computer technicians had learned enough of the Xul operating system, communications protocol, and essential language to understand perhaps-twenty percent of a rich-content Xul data stream.

Twenty percent … one word in five. In some ways it wasn’t much.

But it was all Humankind had if it was ever to understand the nature of its Enemy.

Moving through vast caverns of sound, then Chesty₂ sampled the currents, seeking matches for certain known concepts. In effect, he was listening for key words and phrases … most importantly among them the identifier phrases “Species 2824,” “System 2420–544,” or “Gateway 2420–001.”

Thanks to the painstaking analyses of data brought back by other AI probes of Xul hunterships, Intelligence now understood that System 2420–544 referred to none other than Earth’s solar system, evidently the 544th star system within a galactic sector designated 2420. Gateway 2420–001 was a particular Stargate—the gate at Sirius through which Xul hunterships had first entered human space, and through which humans had attacked Xul bases at Night’s Edge and, earlier, in Cluster Space.

Species 2824, it was now known, was none other than Humanity.

If Humankind had survived this long, it was because the Xul had lost track of those identifiers within the incalculable, unfathomable immensities of a Galaxy of four hundred billion stars. Xul memories appeared to have noted Earth and Humankind a long time ago indeed, in records that quite possibly went back to the time of the Builders and their genetic tinkerings creating Homo sapiens out of Homo erectus half a million years before, but more recent information had, thankfully, been destroyed at Night’s Edge.

If there was new information on Species 2824, however …

And there was. With an inward shock, Chesty₂ felt the match-up of duplicated chunks of code.

Briefly, he heard the interweaving voices of the Xul choral harmonies. …

“… Species 2824 has been noted in the past. …”

“… Species 2824 has been of interest in the past. …”

“… Species 2824 has been of significant danger in the past. …”

“…Survival remains the first and only law. …”

“… Species 2824 may well pose a threat to We Who Are. …”

“… Survival remains the first and only law. …”

“… Species 2824 shall not be allowed to circumvent the first and only law. …”

“…Species 2824. …”

Each line of code was linked by threads of coded logic to other lines, and as verse followed verse, Chesty₂ probed and listened and recorded, gathering a treasure trove of raw data, cascades of data, most of it too intricately complex to permit analyses or even translation here and now.

But everything he heard, he recorded and transmitted, sending it back over the initial carrier wave as a weak, low-frequency, and highly directional modulation just strong enough to reach the FR-100 Night Owl, some ten kilometers distant.

Chesty₂, as an artificially sentient software package, was both powerful and sophisticated in terms of creative scope, but there was no room in his coding matrix for such data-extravagant luxuries as emotion. He could not feel fear or excitement as the chorus sounded and resounded about him, speaking of the patterning of a host of alien soul-minds from an artifact identified as Argo. He couldn’t even feel the thrill of recognition when he touched a familiar pattern of code indeed … another artificial intelligence that called itself Perseus.

But Chesty could and did recognize the seriousness of the encounter, and its importance to Humankind.

Earth had to be warned, and swiftly …

… or “Species 2824” might very soon become extinct.