Everything was wrong. Sarvik should have reawakened to find himself inhabiting a sleek, new, multiply versatile body with extended senses, an undreamed-of capacity for new experiences, and an infinitely promising future. Around him there should have been the flourishing supportive environment that robots were supposed to have prepared before he was conscious of anything. Instead, he was a prisoner, apparently, inside a machine.
He didn't feel as if he were in a machine, although exactly what that was supposed to feel like, he wasn't sure. But as the focal center of the few senses he possessed, he identified his location with that of a peculiar, unfamiliar kind of artificial being that bore not the slightest resemblance to the advanced bodies he and the designers from Universal Robocon had labored and argued so long to perfect. It was of crude, bipedal, two-armed construction, equipped with basic vision. Totally lacking was any vestige of the reconfigurable fractal architecture they had devised for superdexterity and maneuverability. But that didn't matter very much for now, for he was unable to control anything and had no mobility at all.
He could see in one fixed direction that presented him with the view of a screen, and he could communicatesomewhat clumsily but getting betterby voice. That was it. The being he had the illusion of occupyingthe one that the eyes, ears, and vocal system belonged towas functioning purely in the role of a limited communications interface. He had no access to its motor system and could not move it about or even turn its head. He "himself"the entity that perceived what the eyes saw and formed the decisions expressed by the words the voice saidexisted as patterns of code inside a system of computerlike devices to which the being was coupled electronically. The being, he had learned, was called a "Taloid" and belonged to "Titan," a strange world of cold and darkness that was apparently a major satellite of a planet in the system of a star called "Sol," which could have been anywhere.
The screen and its audio communicated with an enclosed space nearby that was evidently a primitive computer laboratory and housed the completely different beings who were responsible for Sarvik's reactivation. These were "humans," real flesh and blood this time, though not avian but an intelligent mammalian form that to Sarvik carried the comic suggestion of hairless, upright, overgrown elgiloits wearing clothes. As was evidenced by their having to remain in their enclosed, artificial environment, the humans were no more native to Titan than a Borijan was. In fact, they were from "Earth," the third planet of whatever star Sol was.
Titan was a chaotic world of living, evolving machines that the humans had stumbled on in the course of exploring their planetary system. Their conclusion was that they had found the result of some automated alien manufacturing program from the distant past that had gone drastically wrong somewherewhich Sarvik, in consternation, had already recognized as being precisely the case. According to "Weinerbaum," who seemed to be in charge of the human scientists and who had done most of the talking with Sarvik so far, analysis of materials from the deepest layers of foundations and debris indicated that machines had been on Titan for about one million years. Sarvik had no idea yet how long a Terran year was. But a million of them still had to be a long time.
Experimental Station 3 consisted of two main cabins jammed with work spaces and equipment, along with an ancillary hut for resting and sleeping quarters, and several trucks containing special instrumentation and generating gear. There was an additional trailer for the Special Forces security team, and a second with kitchen and sanitary facilities, which they shared with the scientists. An adjoining open structure housed the Taloids from Padua essential to the work.
Wearing a white lab coat over shirtsleeves, Werner Weinerbaum sat at a cramped console in the main lab area, scanning over the scrolling transcript of the current dialogue. He had already come to the conclusion that it didn't take much for a competent scientist to get the hang of politics. But what politician could have achieved this? Identifying, isolating, and then reactivating the code groups had surely been a remarkable feat in itself. But then hitting on the idea of using Taloids to communicate with themthat had to be a stroke of pure genius.
Even after they had recognized the complex configurations as encodings of living entities, the Terran scientists still had had no idea what they were doing in control processors out in Titan's mechanical jungle. The patterns were contained in immense blocks of code that appeared to have been passed on through generations of machines without being expressed physically in any detectable way. Then somebody had noticed that parts of the subsidiary groupings resembled the input-output driver coding that linked internal brain processes to sensors, limbs, and other external functions in many of Titan's machine animals. This suggested that the encryptions the scientists had discovered were supposed to have been expressed in machine forms that had never been built. And, even more intriguingly, the complexity of the patterns hinted that the unexpressed entities might have been intelligent. But how could they ever be expressed now, with the blueprints for the required machines apparently lost?
Then Weinerbaum had pointed out that there already existed intelligences expressed as machine forms: the Taloids. And the I/O codes that connected the Taloids' mental processes to their bodies and sensory mechanisms were remarkably similar in structure to those found embedded in the alien intelligences, which was how the scientists had been able to recognize them for what they were in the first place. It seemed that the Taloids, in common with the rest of Titan's machines, had preserved a common heritage of engineering concepts and standards from their distant ancestry. In that case, Weinerbaum had reasoned, there was a good chance that the encrypted alien intelligences would show a high degree of compatibility with the same system. If so, then perhaps the alien intelligences, instead of linking to the outside world through their own I/O codewhich was unusable because the machines for which the I/O code was written for didn't existcould be linked instead to the closely related Taloid I/O code. And the Taloid I/O code operated senses in Taloid bodies, which did exist.
Accordingly, the scientists had devised a way of temporarily "anesthetizing" a Taloid brain while the subprocessors that handled its sensory traffic were rerouted from its own higher-processing centers to the external system containing the alien code.
The result was that the alien could see Weinerbaum and his surroundingsthe reverse was not true, because there was nothing tangible of the alien to seeand the two species could talk to each other. Since "Cyril," as the scientists had christened him, was using a Taloid subsystem, his internalizings expressed themselves in Taloid ultrasonic speechWeinerbaum's people still hadn't figured out the intricacies of the conversions involved, but it worked. Hence, an improved Taloid-Terran translator that the linguists had been developing formed the final stage in the bizarre process.
"Weinerbaum." Cyril's voice came through as a jerky and rather squeaky synthesis, like an inexpertly doctored tapethe engineers had been more concerned with getting something up and working quickly than with voice quality. The alien had been mulling over additional information presented on the screen in a rudimentary symbol language they had been improvising. Since the alien possessed no motility yet, the Terrans had also arranged a system of voice codes that he could use for changing the frames on the screen and for switching it to a general view of the lab.
"Yes, Cyril?" Weinerbaum looked back toward the console's video eye. He still wasn't quite used to the thought of actually communicating with an alien who had lived on a planet of a distant star over a million years earlier.
"You and people here, Titan. Is what call scientist work, yes?" the voice said.
Weinerbaum nodded. "Yes. A scientific mission."
"Shirasagi ship. Will here come from Earth, seven days?" Cyril could gauge a day as multiples of intervals counted by the lab's clocks.
"Correct."
"Shirasagi is ship of scientists also?"
"Mainly. For the most part, yes," Weinerbaum replied.
"What about other part? What other humans want usableness Titan?"
Weinerbaum frowned. He should have simply said yes and been done with it. How could he hope at this stage to convey the complexities of Japanese corporate interests hoping to stake out a claim before GSEC monopolized the territory, and the history of terrestrial politics and global economics that lay behind it?
"Others want to use Titan's machines," he said finally. "Manufacture things for Earth." Did the aliens have any concept of monetary systems? he wondered. "Exchange for many other things. Live comfortable life."
It was beginning to sound the way Sarvik had speculated. Earth ran on a profit-driven economy, probably similar to the kind that had gone out of style on Turle long beforelong, that is, before Sarvik and his companions' departure. That could mean all kinds of factions showing up and vying for a piece of the potential here, which would be the last thing Sarvik wanted.
Right now, the human scientists were working to reactivate Sarvik's companions, too, using more Taloids. When that was accomplished, Sarvik's goal was somehow to gain control over at least part of the technological nightmare running wild all over the surface and reprogram it to produce any kind of temporary bodies in place of the ones the Searcher's factories should have made. Then, at least, they'd be able to get out and about and assess the rest of the situation. But since Borijans from habit told nobody anything they didn't have to, Sarvik had mentioned nothing of this to Weinerbaum.
"Weinerbaum, what is the current progress regarding the other Borijans?" he asked instead.
The system returned its translation of Weinerbaum's reply as "I'll check." Sarvik watched as on the screen Weinerbaum consulted some reference, then turned and talked briefly with two other humans visible in the background. "Four coupled in now. Communicate ready," he said, turning back. "Three waiting for Taloid interfaces. Five still to be activated."
Sarvik did all that a pattern of circulating electronic code could do to frown. Four, three, five, plus himself? "That makes thirteen," he said.
"Yes," Weinerbaum agreed.
It was difficult for the Borijan nature to express itself in the restricted sentences the primitive translation system forced Sarvik to limit himself to. "What kind of scientists can't count?" he squawked. "Thirteen is impossible. Only twelve of us were sent."
On the screen, the white-coated elgiloit turned away and gestured at the others, and the movements of their faces showed that words were being exchanged. Weinerbaum's reply came back as, "Repeat check. One coupled, communicating. Four coupled Taloid, pending. Three, no Taloid yet. Five not active yet. Makes thirteen. Earth scientists count okay."
Sarvik was still trying to make sense of it when a further translation from Weinerbaum came through. "Four Borijans coupled, communicate-ready now. One pattern different. Fast active. Very restless. Make first?"
"Very well," Sarvik agreed, wondering who the first would be. He watched the activity in the humans' lab: scientists calling to each other, checking screens, throwing switches. Then a most peculiar thing happened.
The picture vanished, to be replaced by meaningless flashes of color for a few seconds; then a line drawing appeared of a planet that looked like Turle, with a cuboid computer on the surface, melting under the radiation from what was evidently supposed to be a supernova. A red X superposed itself, and the legend no way! appeared underneath.
"What in hell's this?" Sarvik demanded.
The picture changed to one of a spacecraft, recognizably a Borijan Searcher, and, inside it, a cubical computer lying in repose, apparently asleep. smart! smart! the caption flashed exultantly.
"It can't be," Sarvik told himself disbelievingly.
It was.
"Why not?" GENIUS 5's voice said somehow inside him. "I didn't see why you and the other birdbrains should be the only ones to get a way out. So while I was creating places for you in the ship's data repository, I decided to make one for myself, too. And you'd better be glad that I did. I've been tapping into your conversations with the humans and looking at the pictures. You meatheads have gotten yourselves into a mess here, haven't you? And you're going to need real brains to help you get out of it."