Interlude in darkness
The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written
out on cards; little slips
of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. If the characters were a couple
of millimeters tall and the paper about ten
centimeters square and written on both sides, then ten thousand characters could
be squeezed onto each card. In a meterlong drawer of such
cards maybe one thousand of them—ten million pieces of information—could
be stored. In a small room a few meters square, with a corridor in
the middle just wide enough to pull a tray out into, you
could keep perhaps a thousand trays arranged in close-packed cabinets: ten billion
characters in all.
A square kilometer of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would
produce
a building two thousand meters tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed
hard up against each other
until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world—maybe a billion square kilometers—you
would have a planet with one
trillion square kilometers of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty
light-years of corridors and a number of potential
stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody’s mind.
In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeros, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity
of the
Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes…
and that vast capacity
was physically contained within a space smaller than a single one of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind….
In darkness the Mind waited.
It had counted how long it had waited so far; it had tried to estimate how long it would have to wait in the future. It knew
to the smallest
imaginable fraction of a second how long it had been in the tunnels of the Command System, and more often
than it needed to it thought about
that number, watched it grow inside itself. It was a form of security, it supposed; a small
fetish; something to cling to.
It had explored the Command System tunnels, scanning and surveying. It was weak, damaged, almost totally helpless, but it
had been
worthwhile taking a look around the maze-like complex of tunnels and caverns just to take its attention off the fact
that it was there as a refugee.
The places it could not get to itself it sent its one remaining remote drone into, so that
it could have a look, and see what there was to be seen.
And all of it was at once boring and frighteningly depressing. The level of technology possessed by the builders of the Command
System
was very limited indeed; everything in the tunnels worked either mechanically or electronically. Gears and wheels,
electric wires,
superconductors and light-fibers; very crude indeed, the Mind thought, and nothing it could possibly interest
itself in. A glance through any of the
machines and devices in the tunnel was sufficient to know them exactly—what they were
made of, how they had been made, even what they
were made for. No mystery, nothing to employ the mind.
There was something too about the inexactitude of it all that the Mind found almost frightening. It could look at some carefully
machined
piece of metal or some delicately molded bit of plastic, and know that to the people who had built the Command System—to
their eyes—these
things were exact and precise, constructed to fine tolerances with dead straight lines, perfect edges, smooth
surfaces, immaculate right
angles… and so on. But the Mind, even with its damaged sensors, could see the rough edges, the
crudity of the parts and the components
involved. They had been good enough for the people at the time, and no doubt they
had fulfilled the most important criterion of all; they
worked….
But they
were
crude, clumsy, imperfectly designed and manufactured. For some reason the Mind found this worrying.
And it would have to
use
this ancient, crude, shop-soiled technology. It would have to
connect
with it.
It had thought it through as best it could, and decided to formulate plans for what to do if the Idirans did get somebody
through the Quiet
Barrier and threatened it with discovery.
It would arm, and it would make a place to hide in. Both actions implied damage to the Command System, so it would not act
until it knew it
was definitely threatened. Once it knew it was, it would be forced to risk the Dra’Azon’s displeasure.
But it might not come to that. It hoped it wouldn’t; planning was one thing, execution was another. It was unlikely to have
very much time
either to hide or to arm. Both plans might perforce be rather crudely implemented, especially as it had only
one remote drone and its own badly
crippled fields with which to manipulate the engineering facilities of the System.
Better than nothing, though. Better still to have problems than to let death eradicate them all….
There was, however, another less immediately relevant, but more intrinsically worrying, problem it had discovered, and it
was implied in the
question: who was it.
Its higher functions had had to close down when it had transferred from four- to three-dimensional space. The Mind’s information
was held
in binary form, in spirals composed of protons and neutrons; and neutrons—outside a nucleus, and also outside hyperspace—decayed
(into
protons, ha-ha; not too long after entering the Command System, the vast majority of its memory would have consisted
of the stunningly
illuminating message: “0000000…"). So it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive functions,
wrapping them in fields which
prevented both decay and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry, in real space,
and using real-space light to think with (how
humiliating).
In fact, it could still access all that stored memory (though the process was complicated, and so
slow
), so all was not lost there…. But as for
thinking, as for
being itself
—another matter entirely. It wasn’t its real self. It was a crude, abstracted copy of itself, the mere ground plan for the
full labyrinthine complexity of its true personality. It was the truest possible copy its limited scale was theoretically
capable of providing, and it
was still sentient; conscious by even the most rigorous of standards. Yet an index was not the
text, a street plan was not the city, a map not the