Providence - Max Barry Page 0,22
[Gilly]
THE PUZZLE
The same valve in the SPT-1 hydrate filters blew twice more in the next five days. After Gilly patched it and traced the fault back to a pressure imbalance at a junction, a different pipe two decks down that had nothing to do with any of that exploded, sending water cascading down a corridor, sloshing into chutes and falling like rain in the ladder shaft.
“I thought you fixed that,” Anders said. They had met to play ninja stars, but now this had happened.
“So did I.” He shook his head in frustration.
“Anyway,” Anders said. “We playing?”
“This invalidates my whole theory of the problem. I have to figure it out all over again.”
“It’s just water.”
“The symptom is water,” he said. “The cause is unknown.”
Anders just stared at him. “So we playing?”
He squinted at Anders. “This doesn’t bother you?”
“What?”
“Mysterious water. Shit going wrong for no reason.”
“You’re describing my life,” Anders said.
He had to fetch his tools. “We’ll play later.”
“Come on, Gilly. The crabs can fix it.”
“If they could fix it, it wouldn’t keep happening.”
“Unnh,” Anders said.
Gilly didn’t answer.
“So, later?” Anders said.
“Later,” he said.
* * *
—
But later he went to his cabin to study the latest attack pattern. He pulled up old footage of an early encounter at Moniris Outer, where Silver Bark, a destroyer, had come upon a salamander hive and begun hitting it with fusion missiles, which were what they used back then, before Providences. He watched the hive break apart and spill salamanders. At first, their movements were chaotic and random, all anger and no direction, like ants boiling from a disturbed nest. Some moved toward Silver Bark but most didn’t, and the destroyer picked them off leisurely with drones. That was their mistake: taking too long. Because one of the salamanders came close enough to huk a quark-gluon slug at the ship, and the instant that slug punctured the hull, the entire swarm turned and plunged toward it.
This was swarm behavior, Gilly knew: a bunch of relatively dumb creatures acting in ways that could appear coordinated. But there was no battlefield commander steering seven hundred salamanders into Silver Bark’s heart, just many individuals responding to the same environmental cues.
He paused the playback on Silver Bark taking fire. He’d seen the rest: the desperate retreat and escape. Their survival had been celebrated at the time, but the next encounter after this was Fornina Sirius, the greatest defeat of the war, where salamanders displayed none of this milling around but rather attacked with coordination and precision from the beginning. Ever since, it had been clear that they learned quickly and couldn’t be taken for an unintelligent enemy. It was just a different kind of intelligence. Service had a hard policy of total extermination in order to prevent the dissemination of any tactical feedback to the rest of the species.
He pulled up Fire of Montana’s combat log and paged through engagements. Montana had been out a long time, and Gilly had the idea that maybe they weren’t sticking strictly to policy. This was a silly idea—it was two silly ideas, actually: that Montana would be so careless, and that if they were, Gilly could detect it first. Service liked to promote the idea that the war was being won by human pluck and determination, but the truth was that every part of it was guided or directly driven by AI systems so effective that Gilly sometimes wondered if he needed to be here. Random pipe failures notwithstanding, the ship had performed well above his expectations, to the point where it seemed capable of going ahead and hunting down salamander hives without any human input.
But he liked a challenge. Beanfield was right about that: He was a puzzler. He had come out here partly because it was the most challenging thing you could do and partly because of the allure of discovery: of exploring places no one had ever been and answering questions about what they found there. Maybe that required a kind of creativity the AI didn’t possess. Maybe he could beat it to