Permafrost(6)
Each Brother was a black cylinder two metres tall and about fifty centimetres in diameter, with a glossy outer casing. The floor around each cylinder was made up of grilled plates that could be lifted up for access. Beneath the Brothers was a glowing root-system of electronics, refrigeration circuits and fibre-optic connections, spreading invisibly far beneath our feet.
“Good morning,” Cho said.
“Good morning, Director,” responded Dmitri, the nearest of the machines. “We trust you slept well last night?”
“I did, besides being a little concerned about the welfare of our host.”
Pavel asked: “What was your specific concern, Director Cho?”
“Valentina—Miss Lidova—had a clear glimpse of a hospital corridor, leading to a radiological department. It may well be part of the Izhevsk facility, given what we know of time-probe eighteen’s history, but it’s a little too soon to rule out the other two possible locations. We’ll hope to have a better idea with a deeper immersion. Before I risk sending her back in again, though, I want a categorical assurance that the host has suffered no ill effects due to anything that might have happened in that radiology section.”
“We are detecting normal neural traffic, Director Cho.”
“I’ll need more than that, Ivan.”
The Brothers were artificial intelligences, each the most powerful and flexible such machine that could be provided by four of the main partners in the Permafrost enterprise. They all predated the Scouring—nothing like them could be made anymore—and although they might look identical now, each was based on a very different logical architecture. Once installed in the Admiral Nerva, and arranged to work as a committee, the machines had been shrouded in these anonymising casings and given new designations. They were Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei and Pavel, after The Brothers Karamazov.
It was the Brothers who listened to the time-probes, sensing their quantum states and histories, and deciding when a time injection was viable, as well as interpreting the flow of data coming upstream once an injection had been achieved. No human being could do that, nor any simple computer system, and the collective analysis was already pushing the Brothers to the limit of their processing ability.
“There is no sign of neurological impairment,” Alexei stated, with a definite firmness of tone. “We cannot model a complete sensorium-mapping for the downstream control structure, but all parameter states indicate that it is safe to reinstate Miss Lidova.”
This was the central difficulty with the control structures. They could grow in our heads, allowing neural traffic to flow from upstream to downstream, from pilot to host—and back again, for control and monitoring purposes. Or, in my case, be reprogrammed from an existing set of neural implants. But the way the structures adapted and modified themselves was inherently unpredictable. It took one human mind to make sense of the data flowing from another. The Brothers could eavesdrop on the data, they could optimise the signal and quantify it according to certain schemata, but we wouldn’t be able to tell what had really happened to my host until I was inside her skull, looking out through her eyes.
Cho looked at me. “I wish there could be better guarantees than that. I won’t force you back if you feel unprepared. Even after what happened to Christos, even if you were the last pilot, I would insist that this is voluntary.”
I remembered Christos going into convulsions two weeks after his control structure had been activated. We’d been in the canteen together, pilots and technical experts bonding over coffee and cards. Christos hadn’t had a glimpse at that point, but we all felt that he must be on the verge; that it could only be a matter of days before he went time-embedded. No hint, even then, that I was going to be the one to take his place.
Me, a seventy-one-year-old woman, a lame mathematician from Kogalym, a widow despised by half her community for trying to be a good teacher?
Me, the first person to travel in time?
“Send me back in,” I said.
*
After speaking to the Brothers we returned to the Vaymyr. Cho waited until I’d had breakfast with Vikram, Miguel and Antti, and then asked for the link to be reinstated. Then it was just a matter of time, waiting for our twinned control structures to mesh again, as they had during that brief flash in the corridor. It couldn’t be predicted or rushed.
Cho wanted to have me under close observation, so I was strapped into the dental chair while Dr. Abramik and the other technicians set up their monitoring gear. Margaret’s team was handling the signal acquisition and processing hardware; Abramik’s people the biomedical systems. There were lots of screens, lots of traces and graphs. They even had pen recorders running, twitching out traces onto paper, just in case there was a power-drop and the electronic data was lost or corrupted.
“We’ll hope for a deeper immersion,” Cho said. “Get what you can—any details, no matter how trivial. But the moment you feel like you’re not in control, or the situation is too complicated for you to act plausibly, issue the abort command. I’d rather pull you out early than run into paradox noise. Is that understood?”
“Understood.”
“Then good luck, Miss Lidova.”
*
I waited and waited. It wasn’t like trying to fall asleep, or drift into a trance. My internal mental state didn’t matter at all. Stillness was the only real prerequisite, to reduce the neural traffic burden to a manageable level during these early stages. Given that it had taken weeks for me to have the first glimpse, there was a strong chance that it might not happen at all today, or indeed for many days. But I felt confident that it would happen more readily the second time, and that with each occurrence it would become easier to induce the next.