The Way of Three
So this whole esty thing’s been designed for us?” Killeen asked.
“Humans?” Andro was still groggy from the Mantis’s little lesson.
“Planet-bound life, I mean.”
“I suppose so.”
“Planets are sure simple compared to this.” Killeen waved at the crusted desert they were crossing. “Water and wind and light—all’ve got to move just right. Otherwise you suffocate or starve.”
Andro nodded sluggishly. “It gave us . . . comfortable place to live.”
“Like the Citadel. People well off don’t think about how precarious it all is.”
“So?”
Killeen realized that Andro was the product of many generations tucked into the esty and had no direct knowledge of what things were like on the outside. It was as though he saw distant events as passing items of interest, no more. Maybe that was what happened to people everywhere. Nothing to gain from pointing it out to him, though. “How come there’s hardly anybody around?”
“You have to know where to look. In my office, I have esty cords of human areas. Alien ones, too. They keep shifting all the time so we have to keep updating them. Or . . . had to.” Andro blinked. “I guess that’s all gone now.”
Andro limped as they trudged over the smooth curvature of the crusty plain. They had walked and slept and walked again and the land was the same chalky soil, low scrub and washed-out basins. The esty curved up and over and through pale clouds Killeen could see that the land above was the same.
“How come people haven’t filled up the esty?” Killeen asked.
Andro stopped. “Huh. I never thought of that.”
“It’s made for planetary life, there’s been enough time—right?”
“People come through the portals, go farther in. Have been for a long time. Most we never see again.”
They looked at each other. Andro said, “We cannot really map the esty, but—”
“It sure looks empty. That measures how big it is.”
Andro said forlornly, “Maybe it’ll swallow up the mechs, too.”
Killeen shook his head. “They planned this a long time. Look at that sinkhole full of scrapped mechs back there. The Mantis set us up for that and it made the point. They’ve got plenty.”
Andro’s face textured with worry. “We found that pyramid, our own dead. Then their dead. I thought that was the point.”
“The Mantis never says just one thing. Maybe it can’t read our deep memories, or can’t figure them out.”
“We shouldn’t talk about it.”
“Prob’ly.” Mechs could seed an area with microscopic bugs, eavesdropping on anyone. What the Bishops had learned at the portal city’s Restorer, combined with the Argo’s Legacies, was dizzying, complex. “Sure strange, though.”
The Legacies could be read only in combination with information in the Restorer—ancient text-codes gotten from the Galactic Library. The story was snaky, convoluted, understandable only by combining a variety of sources. Stitching it together, Killeen had finally understood some of his own history.
The earliest intelligent life in the galaxy, who had produced the early mechs, knew the dangers inherent in the timeless conflict between the two forms. Mechs could redesign themselves, improve and sculpt their bodies and minds alike. The organic forms were slower, reluctant to wrench themselves away from the modes that evolution had wrought. They altered their culture, but not their substrate—brains and bodies.
Inevitably, they fell behind the rapid pace of their own creations. And they knew they were flagging. They wanted a trump card. The First Command.
Deep in the inner design codes of those early machines, the ancients embedded a First Command that could not even in principle be detected by the mechs themselves. The hiding of the First Command, so that each mech carried it as a deep operating system, yet could not access it, was the greatest creation of some unknown ancient scientist.
The effect was subtle. Activated, the First Command codes brought great pleasure. Then, death by ecstasy.
Mechs who turned against their Natural forebears could then be destroyed, by the trigger codes that activated the First Command.
That checked with what the Mantis chose to reveal. Killeen had warily listened to it, while carefully trying not to think about the unspoken.
What it had not said was that if another trigger code was activated from outside—the Second Command—the mech felt the impulse to convey its sublime joy to others. Then pleasure became a plague. Death came far faster.
But this method had failed in the far past. Information about how to activate the First Command was lost—by accident, perhaps. Or by a change of heart, or faltering will, among the early Naturals.
Except . . . some ancients had deliberately scattered the First Command. They stored it where organic intelligence could always carry information: their own genetic codes.
The Legacies had a bit of it. The rest resided in the coiled long molecules within every single cell of organic races. It must have seemed a perfect way to keep the crucial information available to all who might need it.
For long eras, mechanicals and organics lived in balance. The First Command was forgotten. It slumbered on in the genetic inventory, carried forward by serial arrangements of atoms. It had no impact on the life-forms themselves—
Retained in the genotype, unexpressed in the phenotype—
his Arthur Aspect intruded. Killeen let the Aspect mutter in his background, but didn’t let it interrupt his thoughts as he slogged across the plain.
—defended against genetic drift and copying error, quite deft indeed, and then—
