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The brainbox image was a
very
large one. I couldn’t recall ever having seen the like of it. With brainboxes, increasing capacity was done easily by adding more of the correct variety of nanites. Unfortunately, the larger the structure became, the slower and more unpredictably it behaved. It was rather like having a full computer disk that needed defragmenting.

I had to empty most of production barrel of nanites into the biggest brainbox I’d ever set up to hold everything the Centaurs had sent. Even then, I knew the transmission had not been complete, and thus the neural system image may not function.

“How much data are we talking, total?” I asked Gorski.

He grinned proudly. “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said. “About four hundred petabytes.”

I blinked. It was a staggering amount of data. A petabyte was a thousand terabytes, and each terabyte was a trillion bytes of information.

“You’re right, I don’t believe it,” I said.

Gorski laughed. “I’ve got the numbers to prove it. We certainly had our receivers churning. We added every nanite we had on hand to the box, and cannibalized a few others to increase the capacity. It still wasn’t enough and there wasn’t enough time to catch it all in any case.”

I shook my head and stared with marveling eyes at the box. It was big, physically bigger than any brainbox I’d ever seen. Usually, a brainbox was about a three or four inch cube. This one looked big enough to hold a basketball. But it still hadn’t been enough.

“Can I talk to it yet?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s ready. We have speakers hooked up to it, and basic sensors. It can hear us now—it knows we are talking about it.”

I stared at the box, which was truly alien in nature. Sandra hadn’t liked the relatively small, unintelligent brainboxes we’d used to control our laser turrets back on Andros Island. I knew she would really hate this thing. It felt a little creepy to me as well. A huge mentality captive in a box. It had a personality, I was sure. All the big ones did. But it would be a personality devoid of human contact. It would be something mixed with Centaurs, Blues and the odd twist of the Nanos themselves. Really, I had no idea what to expect. I only hoped I wouldn’t be talking about herd honor and the sky all night.

To remove distractions from the environment, I took the brainbox with its independent power supply and I/O systems to a part of the ship none of my crew liked to venture into. It was a region referred to by my marines as ‘the weird zone’. We really had no idea what these chambers were for, but I had my suspicions. They looked similar to the Macro labs I’d discovered long ago on the invasion ship, where I’d once met up with a Worm under torment and dissection. I’d killed the Worm out of mercy on a laboratory table that looked remarkably similar to the ones in the weird zone.

There were tanks of liquid in the zone, big ones. Something organic bubbled inside. We weren’t sure what it was or what purpose it might have, so we’d left it the hell alone. The tanks weren’t designed as humans would have done: instead of sitting in rows on the floor, they hung bulbously from the ceiling. Straps and hoses connected to them, running off into the rest of the ship. There were electrodes planted here and there, but those had stayed in the off position since we’d boarded, all except for one that still buzzed and crackled now and then. I wasn’t sure what the one active electrode was for, so I didn’t touch it. I could tell it was occasionally zapping the bubbling mess inside the bag-like tanks of soupy liquid. Maybe the electrodes were keeping the soup alive. Maybe they were slowly killing it. I was damned if I knew which.

Some thought the tanks were full of foodstuffs and that the organic soup was a slurry of bacteria cultures. Gorski thought they were biotic colonies of some kind—like an undersea reef captured in a mass of shivering polymer bags. Once in a while a droplet of condensation rolled off the bags and plopped to the floor.

I didn’t know what they were, but I knew when I set up the Centaur brainbox there that no one would come in to bother me. No one liked to go near the place. I could understand that. You had the feeling the stuff in the tanks knew you were there somehow. It was a creepy feeling. Call me paranoid, but I never turned my back on those tanks.

I hooked up the I/O ports to a set of speakers and a tiny microphone. “Hello,” I said to the brainbox experimentally.

Silence.

“We are alone here, do you want to talk?” I asked.

“No,” said the box.

I snorted, and had to stop myself from chuckling. This box had a lot to tell me. We had to get off on the right foot. Laughing at it wasn’t going to help.

“Is something wrong?” I asked gently.

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

There was a hesitation. “I don’t know who I’m talking to.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I smiled quietly. I was already bemused by this box’s personality. It seemed suspicious. “I should introduce myself. I’m Colonel Kyle Riggs.”

“That is not helpful,” the box complained.

“Are you aware of recent events? Of the battle with the Macros? Of human participation in that battle?”

“Yes. Yes. No.”

I thought about that. Maybe it was a good thing if it didn’t know we’d blown a hole in the Centaur ‘sky’ and let all the air out.

“I talked with the Centaurs—those who, ah,
raised
you. They sent you to me. Were you aware of that?”

“Imprecise reference:
that
.”

I nodded to myself. Now it sounded more like a Nano brainbox. I couldn’t help but feel relieved that at least it wasn’t talking like the Centaurs. They were difficult to communicate with. “Are you aware the Centaurs sent you to me?”

“Unknown reference: Centaurs. Two uses logged with no improvement in coherency of the reference.”

“Hmm,” I said. “The Centaurs are the furred quadrupeds that I presume assembled you. They live in orbital structures and—”

“Reference classified,” the brainbox said, interrupting me. “Collating previous input. Answer to previous question: I know the Centaurs transmitted my awareness to an alien infestation. Request for clarification: does this infestation refer to itself as ‘human’?”

“Ah yes, I suppose we do,” I said, trying not to get annoyed. This thing was rude. The Centaurs might have been bizarre and obtuse, but they were never rude.

“Reference ‘human’ classified.”

I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. So far, it had gotten two pieces of information out of me, while I’d gotten virtually nothing out of it. What did they call that when scoring tennis? Love-thirty?

I was puzzled. This box
should
know about my conversations with the Centaurs. I was certain I had used a Nano box to converse with the Centaurs as a translator. In fact, this should be the exact system image they’d used to translate. The box clearly had a grasp of human language, as we were communicating in English. If it had done the translation, why would it have such a gap in its knowledge of current events?

I didn’t have to dig long in my own fuzzy mind to come up with a theory: Gorski had said the box transfer wasn’t complete. Not everything had made it across in the transmission, so it had gaps in its knowledge. It was an incomplete system image of the original Centaur brainbox.

I shook my head with regret. I would like to have had the entire transmission and thus the entire mind the Centaur’s had given me. Who knew what invaluable information it was missing? If I’d managed to kill all four of the Macro cruisers with the mines, I would have considered going back through the ring to get the rest of the transfer. With the last cruiser on my tail however, I didn’t dare do anything but run.

“You said before that you didn’t want to talk,” I said. “Why was that?”

“Answer previously provided. It is unchanged.”

Rude again
, I thought. What had it said was wrong? That it didn’t know who it was talking to…

“I’ve identified myself as Colonel Kyle Riggs,” I said.

“Identification meaningless. Audio-only input prevents thorough classification.”

I frowned. It was really into classifying things. “Audio-only input? What other input would you like?”

“Visual, tactile and olfactory are standard.”

I made a surprised expression the thing in the box couldn’t see. It didn’t like being blind. Apparently, the Centaurs had more than speakers and microphones hooked up to their brainboxes. In a diplomatic effort, I called for a set of constructive nanites and a surveillance camera. I rigged up two arms for it, one it could reach out with and the second it could use to operate and power the camera. I couldn’t think of anything I could use to give it a nose, so I didn’t bother trying.

When I gave it a strand of constructive nanites, I signaled the marines who had delivered them in a plastic jar to stay. For all I knew, this thing would try to choke me with that skinny little arm, using it like a wire garrote. Everything went well, however, and soon the thing had two small arms. One held up the camera and operated it. A silver feedline of data streamed from the camera down into the box. Another silvery line fed the camera a trickle of power. The black hand held the camera aloft, reminding me of an ostrich’s head with a single, big eye. It moved around, aiming the camera precisely and panning slowly. I watched as it took in the contents of the room and my image as well.

“Happy now?” I asked.

“Unclear reference.”

“Are you satisfied with your sensory input?”

“All components are substandard. Visual acuity in particular is limited, with a narrow field of view and an exceptionally slow frame rate.”

Great,
I thought. I’d built myself a prima-donna robot.

-26-

I’m slow sometimes. I don’t always see the possibilities in a new development for hours, days or longer. It was on my way back to talk to the robot I’d built that I came up with something important: if this robot could speak the language of the Centaurs, humans and Macros, perhaps it could speak other languages as well.

I’d almost made it to the room where I’d left it after taking a break to eat and check on things. The factories were still churning and there had been no sign yet of the pursuing missiles, even though we knew they were closer. The cruiser was looking better all the time, as we’d let loose zillions of nanites to reconstruct the damage. Sandra, unfortunately, had shown no improvement.

When I thought of the idea of translating languages, I realized we were half-way across the Helios system. We had a golden opportunity to communicate with the Worms—if the strange little artificial mind the Centaurs had sent me knew how.

I was startled to see my robot in the corridor just outside the weird zone. It had reformed itself and was now using both the arms I’d given it to operate the camera as legs. It balanced the camera on top of its outsized brainbox and had to tilt the entire body to see anything. The entire structure was unstable, as the legs were not even in height and the top surface of the brainbox was canted to the left. I halted and watched it slowly turn, scanning its environment with what could only be called curiosity.

Watching it, I felt a tiny chill. This robot wasn’t like the others I’d known. Not even the Nano ships had shown this kind of initiative. They had acted in a semi-independent, problem-solving fashion, but it had always been traceable down to an underlying compulsion built into their source code somewhere. This thing was different. It had gotten bored with the room I’d left it in, restructured itself as best it could and set about exploring its environment.

The camera swept over me finally. “Kyle Riggs,” the tinny voice said. “Identification confirmation requested.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m Kyle Riggs.”

I leaned forward toward the dwarf robot. It squatted and reached up with its arms to adjust the camera. I watched the lenses dilate and contract in tiny shivers as it focused on my faceplate.

“You need a name,” I told the robot. “From now on, I’ll call you Marvin.”

“Reference stored,” Marvin said.

“Marvin, can you talk to other biotic species—besides humans and the Centaurs?”

“There are the compressed forms you refer to as the Blues.”

“Of course,” I said. “What others?”

“Reference unclear.”

I nodded to myself. I brought out my computer tablet and displayed the world of Helios and still shots of the Worms. I let Marvin examine the images at length.

“Have you seen these creatures before?” I asked.

“No.”

“Have you seen recorded images of them before?”

“No.”

I frowned. Maybe this was a dead end. “Do you recognize the species?”

“Yes.”

I rolled my eyes. Marvin was literal-minded. He liked precision. Probably, he’d never ‘seen’ the images, but they might have been transmitted to him via a file transfer. He’d never been in their visual presence, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know about them, just as a person might not have even been to Paris, but still knew about the French and their history.

“Can you communicate with one of these creatures in their native language?” I asked.

The camera lifted from the surface of Marvin’s brainbox. It glided up smoothly, refocusing and studying my face again.