Post by Miles the Cy-Fox on Jul 5, 2005 19:31:55 GMT -5
Part One:
Two miles up, the thick air of Harvest thinned to Mobius-normal pressure. The sky was a peculiar blue, but blue. It was unbreathable still, but there was oxygen, ten percent and growing. One of the biological factories showed against white cloudscape, to nice effect, in view of a floating camera. The camera showed a tremendous rippling balloon in the shape of an inverted teardrop, blowing green bubbles from its tip. Miles "Tails" Prower watched the view with a sense of pride.
Not that he would want to visit Havest, ever. Multicolored slimes infected shallow tidal pools near the poles. Green sticky stuff floated in the primordial atmosphere. If it drifted too low, it burned to ash. The planet wa slimy. Changes were exceedingly slow. Mistakes took years to demonstrate themselves and decades to eradicate.
Miles Prower preferred the outer moon.
One day, this planet would be a world. Even then, Miles Prower would not join the colonists. Miles Prower was a computer program.
Prower would never have volunteered for the Harvest Project, unless the alternative was death.
Death by old age.
He was aware, rumor-fashion, that other worlds were leery of advanced computers. They were too much like the beserker machines. But the tens of thousands of anthrotic worlds varied enormously among themselves; and there were places the beserker never reached. The extermination machines had been mere rumor in the Channith region since before Channith was settled. Nobody really doubted their existence, but......
But for some purposes, computers were indecently convient; and some projects required artifical intelligence.
The computer wasn't really an escape. Miles Prower must of died years ago. Perhaps his last thoughts had been of an immortal computer program.
The computer was not a new one. Its programming had included two previous personalities...who had eventually changed their minds and asked that they be erased.
Prower could understand that. Entertainments were in his files. When he reached for them, they were there, beginning to end, like vivid memories. Chess games could survive that, and some poetry, but what of a detective novel? A football game? A livey?
Prower made his own entertainment.
He had not summoned up his poem for these past ten days. He was suprised and pleased at his self-control. Perhaps now he could study it with fresh eyes....?
Wrong. The entire work blinked into his mind in an instant. It was as if he had finished reading it a milisecond ago. What was normally an asset to Miles---his flawless memory---was a hindrace now.
Over the years, the poem had grown to the size of a small novel, yet his computer-mind could apprehend its totality. It was his life's tory, his only shot at immortality. It had unity and balance; the rhyme and meter, at least were flawless; but did it have thrust? Reading it from start to finish was more difficult than he had expected. He had to forget to the totality, which a normal reader would not immediately sense, and proceed in linear fashion. Judge the flow....
"No castrato ever sung so pure---" Good, but not here. He exchanged it for a chunk of phrasing elsewhere. No word-processor program had ever been this easy! The altered emphasis caused him to fiddle further....and his description of the berserker-blasted world Perry's Footprint seemed to read with more impact now.
Days and years of fear and rage. In his youth he fought machine. Channith needed to safeguard its sphere of influence. Aliens existed somewhere, and machines existed somewhere, but Prower only knew them only as a rumor, until the day he saw Perry's Footprint. The Free Gaea rebels had done well to flee to Perry's Footprint, to show him the work of the berserkers on a living world.
It was so difficult to conquer a world, and so easy to destroy it. Afterward, he could no longer fight machine.
His superiors could have retired him. Instead, he was promoted and set to investigating the defense of Channith against the berserker machines.
They must have thought of it as makework: an employment project. It was almost like being a tourist at government expense. In nearly forty years, he never saw a live...an active berserker; but, traveling in realms where they were more than rumor, perhaps he had learned too much about them. They were all shapes, all sizes. Here they traveled in time. There they walked in anthros shape that sprouted suddenly into guns and knives. Machines could be destroyed, but they could never be made afraid.
A day came when his own fear was everything. He couldn't make decisions....it was in the poem, here. Wasn't it? He couldn't feel it. A poet should have glands!
He wasn't sure, and was was afraid to meddle further. Mechanically it worked. As poetry it might well be too.....mechanical.
Maybe he could get someone to read it?
His chance might come unexpectedly soon. In his peripheral awareness, he sensed ripplings in the 2.7 microwave background of space: the bow shock of a spaceship approaching in c-plus from the direction of Channith. An unexpected supervisor from the homeworld? Miles filed the altered poem and turned his attention to the signal.
Too slow! Too strong! Too far! Mass at 10 to the 12th grams, and a tremendous power source barely able to hold it in a c-plus excited state, even in the near-flat space between stars. It was lightyears distant, days away at its tormented crawl; but it occluded Channith's star, and Prower found that horrifying.
Berserker
Two miles up, the thick air of Harvest thinned to Mobius-normal pressure. The sky was a peculiar blue, but blue. It was unbreathable still, but there was oxygen, ten percent and growing. One of the biological factories showed against white cloudscape, to nice effect, in view of a floating camera. The camera showed a tremendous rippling balloon in the shape of an inverted teardrop, blowing green bubbles from its tip. Miles "Tails" Prower watched the view with a sense of pride.
Not that he would want to visit Havest, ever. Multicolored slimes infected shallow tidal pools near the poles. Green sticky stuff floated in the primordial atmosphere. If it drifted too low, it burned to ash. The planet wa slimy. Changes were exceedingly slow. Mistakes took years to demonstrate themselves and decades to eradicate.
Miles Prower preferred the outer moon.
One day, this planet would be a world. Even then, Miles Prower would not join the colonists. Miles Prower was a computer program.
Prower would never have volunteered for the Harvest Project, unless the alternative was death.
Death by old age.
He was aware, rumor-fashion, that other worlds were leery of advanced computers. They were too much like the beserker machines. But the tens of thousands of anthrotic worlds varied enormously among themselves; and there were places the beserker never reached. The extermination machines had been mere rumor in the Channith region since before Channith was settled. Nobody really doubted their existence, but......
But for some purposes, computers were indecently convient; and some projects required artifical intelligence.
The computer wasn't really an escape. Miles Prower must of died years ago. Perhaps his last thoughts had been of an immortal computer program.
The computer was not a new one. Its programming had included two previous personalities...who had eventually changed their minds and asked that they be erased.
Prower could understand that. Entertainments were in his files. When he reached for them, they were there, beginning to end, like vivid memories. Chess games could survive that, and some poetry, but what of a detective novel? A football game? A livey?
Prower made his own entertainment.
He had not summoned up his poem for these past ten days. He was suprised and pleased at his self-control. Perhaps now he could study it with fresh eyes....?
Wrong. The entire work blinked into his mind in an instant. It was as if he had finished reading it a milisecond ago. What was normally an asset to Miles---his flawless memory---was a hindrace now.
Over the years, the poem had grown to the size of a small novel, yet his computer-mind could apprehend its totality. It was his life's tory, his only shot at immortality. It had unity and balance; the rhyme and meter, at least were flawless; but did it have thrust? Reading it from start to finish was more difficult than he had expected. He had to forget to the totality, which a normal reader would not immediately sense, and proceed in linear fashion. Judge the flow....
"No castrato ever sung so pure---" Good, but not here. He exchanged it for a chunk of phrasing elsewhere. No word-processor program had ever been this easy! The altered emphasis caused him to fiddle further....and his description of the berserker-blasted world Perry's Footprint seemed to read with more impact now.
Days and years of fear and rage. In his youth he fought machine. Channith needed to safeguard its sphere of influence. Aliens existed somewhere, and machines existed somewhere, but Prower only knew them only as a rumor, until the day he saw Perry's Footprint. The Free Gaea rebels had done well to flee to Perry's Footprint, to show him the work of the berserkers on a living world.
It was so difficult to conquer a world, and so easy to destroy it. Afterward, he could no longer fight machine.
His superiors could have retired him. Instead, he was promoted and set to investigating the defense of Channith against the berserker machines.
They must have thought of it as makework: an employment project. It was almost like being a tourist at government expense. In nearly forty years, he never saw a live...an active berserker; but, traveling in realms where they were more than rumor, perhaps he had learned too much about them. They were all shapes, all sizes. Here they traveled in time. There they walked in anthros shape that sprouted suddenly into guns and knives. Machines could be destroyed, but they could never be made afraid.
A day came when his own fear was everything. He couldn't make decisions....it was in the poem, here. Wasn't it? He couldn't feel it. A poet should have glands!
He wasn't sure, and was was afraid to meddle further. Mechanically it worked. As poetry it might well be too.....mechanical.
Maybe he could get someone to read it?
His chance might come unexpectedly soon. In his peripheral awareness, he sensed ripplings in the 2.7 microwave background of space: the bow shock of a spaceship approaching in c-plus from the direction of Channith. An unexpected supervisor from the homeworld? Miles filed the altered poem and turned his attention to the signal.
Too slow! Too strong! Too far! Mass at 10 to the 12th grams, and a tremendous power source barely able to hold it in a c-plus excited state, even in the near-flat space between stars. It was lightyears distant, days away at its tormented crawl; but it occluded Channith's star, and Prower found that horrifying.
Berserker