The candelabra-shaped building branching upward into slender, bright-colored turrets didn't really exist, of course. But with their improving skills at manipulating their environment of code configurations and data structures, the Borijans could render it as anything they liked. It was something familiar in a world where nothing else was, bringing a flavor of home.
Sarvik One arrived on a synchronous transmission channel that projected him straight into the conference room, which was already crowded. The way the Borijans appeared to each other now bore more resemblance to the originals they remembered, but that was only a partial help to identification, since there were multiple copies of each of them. Worse, the copies had by now learned how to copy themselves, so there were more copies than ever. They had begun to use unique combinations of clothing color to differentiate themselves.
After getting off to a fine start, work on constructing factories at the original sites selected had bogged down and then come to a halt as more Borijans got in on the act and every decision arrived at by one group was overturned by dissent and counterproposals from others. One faction didn't like the main location because it was too close to centers of Terran activity and therefore prone to interference. Some didn't consider the area's power resources sufficient for projected expansion; others objected to the distances that some of the raw materials would need to be brought in from. In the end, it was abandoned and two alternative areas were chosen for development instead, both remote from Taloid populations and situated on opposite sides of Titan. But Sarvik One didn't think that this project would fare any better than the first.
"I say the Mark 3 body will lead to a dead end," Kalazin Four told the assembly. "You need active power distribution at least two levels farther down. It throws away the whole point of the design concept."
"But it complicates production, which will delay start-up," Indrigon Six said for the fifth time. "Why wait now for benefits that won't come until the next phase, anyway? I say we should go with Mark 5."
Now they had a dozen different teams of Robocon specialists all unable to agree which design of body to settle on, and of course all the other Borijans had ideas of their own to stir into the confusion.
"I agree with Kalazin Four," Alifrenz Eight declared. "That was how we conceived it on Turle."
"Things have changed a bit since Turleor haven't you noticed?" Dorn Nine said sarcastically.
"Getting out of here and into some real bodies on the surface has to be the main priority," Dorn Five agreed. The Dorns tended to side with the Indrigons, Sarvik One had noticed.
"So what's wrong with Mark 7?" Kalazin Six demanded. "One-level extension added modularly. A compromise. Should keep you all happy."
"What's the point of worrying about it at this stage when we still don't have the plan for the factory finished?" Greel Two asked.
"I thought it was finished," someone else responded. "Indrigon told us it was."
"No, I didn't," a chorus of Indrigons protested.
"Which Indrigon?" Gulaw Ten asked.
"How do I know?"
"It was the one who produced the layout proposal with Sarvik Four."
"That was Sarvik Five," Sarvik Four told them.
"That report is having to be revised," Sarvik Five said, looking pointedly at Sarvik Seven. "My illustrious alter ego ran an error in the simulation."
"Are you suggesting that you couldn't make the same mistake?" Sarvik Seven said, and cackled.
"It would have been ready now if we'd had the allocation figures," Leradil Jindriss Three said. She always defended Sarvik Five.
"Anyone can make an error," Leradil Jindriss One retorted. "It would have been different if whoever was supposed to have checked it had done so." This Leradil always sided with Sarvik Seven. The two pairs of Sarviks and Leradils glared at each other.
The problem was that Borijans weren't used to working like this, Sarvik One told himself. Because Turle was long gone and their new circumstances seemed suited to a changed way of doing things, they were all trying to cooperate as one group and be open with everybody. But none of them knew how. It just wasn't the Borijan style. Borijans did better conspiring in smaller numbers, where intrigue provided stimulus and the need for secrecy conserved energies and attention.
So Sarvik One went through the motions of participating in the proceedings for another hour without anybody's getting an inch closer to achieving anything, which was all as he had expected. When it was over, he returned to the private sanctuary that only he and his handful of chosen collaborators knew about. They called it Pygal, after the Turlean city of long ago. In fact, it formed an enlarged version of the assembly complex that Sarvik One had first found himself occupying out on the surface in the region the Terrans called Padua. It was situated away from the settled areas and the prying eyes of inquisitive natives, yet was in a densely mechanized region, obscuring the Borijan activity from Terran surveillance.
The progress of the small team concentrated there was very different from the circus he had just come from. Kalazin Seven, working just with Meyad Three, Creesh Eleven, and Leradil One, had come up with a body design that had gained acceptance fairly easily without other Kalazins, Meyads, Creeshes, and Leradils to complicate the issue. The factory was laid out, in the process of being equipped, and almost ready to start making parts.
There was the problem, though, Sarvik One had ascertained, of Alifrenz Ten and Greel Four communicating secretly with other enumerations of their kind elsewhere. He was pretty certain that they were dealing to trade Pygal's body design for some advantage in return, but he hadn't managed to figure out yet exactly what. He wasn't too worried, though, because to protect himself he had worked out a deal with Queezt Five that Alifrenz and Greel didn't know about whereby the Sarvik and Queezt bodies would have enhanced neural abilities, and so they would be able to better any offers based on the standard design, anyway.
Unless, of course, the redesigned outer brain Sarvik Fourteen had surreptitiously approached him with from the group working up north somewhere turned out to be better, in which case he'd be able to pull one over on Queeztmaybe.
A cuboid with a face materialized in the virtual space of his contemplations. "Getting used to life in the real world yet?" GENIUS asked. "A lot better than having to heave all that dead mass around against gravity and friction to do anything, eh?"
"Hmph. Doing anything is where your world leaves off," Sarvik retorted. "What do you want?"
For some time GENIUS had been mapping Titan's web of intertangled networks. By tracing the routings and constructing logic tables, it was trying to make sense of what the signals flying this way and that way through cables and optical fibers meant and what operations they seemed to correlate with. Unraveling Titan's labyrinth was necessarily the first step toward controlling it.
"I've made a discovery," GENIUS said. "There are radio sources operating out there. They're weak and scattered but potentially functionalprobably relics left over from the early days. But it seems that some of the Taloids still have a sensitivity to it. It could give a basis for a way of communicating with them."
"Interesting," Sarvik agreed. "That could be useful later. How's the rest of it doing meanwhile?"
"Slow. There's a lot of evolutionary redundancy, but the underlying scheme is starting to emerge. I think I've nailed the major node points that connect between regions."
"Good. I want you to try and find out where Sarvik Fourteen's hideout is, too. My instinct tells me he's up to something."
"Well, you should know."
The reason Sarvik had set GENIUS to mapping the net was to be able to secure his communications. He knew that there were other Pygal-like conspiracies scattered over Titan, and since most of them doubtless included Sarviks who thought the same way he did, he knew that he couldn't trust any of them. Why, only the day before, a probe that he'd sent out into the net to trace the source of the messages between Indrigon Nine and Queezt Fifteen had intercepted a feeler trying to tap into his own link to Alifrenz Seven!
But he knew he could trust GENIUS. His GENIUS, that was: the copy of GENIUS he had installed at Pygal. Obviously, he couldn't have trusted a generally accessible version of GENIUS, one that talked to all the other Sarviks, too. Why should it have chosen to be exclusively loyal to any one version of Sarvik over another? No reason at all. And so he had taken the obvious precaution and brought his own copy of GENIUS with him.
The point hadn't escaped him, of course, that exactly the same thought would have occurred to all the other Sarviks also.