Tycho Brahe#Artemis — 2346

Convergence T-minus 6 days, 1 hour, 2 minutes

“Alright, are you ready?” True Name said.

Tycho nodded, “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The transition from System proper to DMZ was as seamless as any, though when he checked systime, he found that nearly twenty seconds had passed. That would be an unimaginably long transit time within the system, where the transit between sims would take place faster than he would have been able to perceive.

“Well, that was not so bad,” True Name said, walking out into the cloistered courtyard that had been set up for the meeting. “Now, let us check communication.”

He wasn’t able to sense anyone other than True Name and Answers Will Not Help. There were no options for a sensorium message with any others. He strained as hard as he could to sense Tycho#Tasker or Codrin or anyone else he could think of. There was simply nothing there. The sim was immutable and the disconnection complete.

True Name stood for several minutes in the shade of a tree, looking thoughtful as she ran through some internal checklist. At one point, he felt a sensorium ping from her, which he returned.

“Fantastic,” she said, nodding. “Exos all there, no access to feeds, no transit, nothing. Reputation market looks on track for the DMZ as well.”

Tycho checked his reputation, pegged at a minuscule 1000 Ŕ, and then the costs. Sim creation into the millions, forking well into the tens of millions. No possible way he could afford either. “Will they arrive with the same amount?” he asked.

“Yes. We could not think of a way to decouple reputation entirely from the core functionality of the System,” Answers Will Not Help said. “But we could at least make everything prohibitively expensive. This will allow us to make small changes if need be, but forking will be well out of reach.”

“Really? Isn’t that kind of fundamental to our existence here?”

“Allowing them to fork might prove dangerous, Tycho. We do not know how large their consciousnesses are.”

He shrugged. “Well, sure, but if our goal is to provide an accurate representation of ourselves…”

The two Odists frowned at each other before True Name said, “You do make a good point. We will take it under consideration.

He nodded and began prowling through the courtyard. It consisted of a large, square area, a fountain in the center, and a large table beside it — “I will have full ACLs and enough rep to modify this if need be,” True Name explained — all surrounded by a ring of trees, and that with a ring of covered walkway.

He paced around the perimeter, watching the way the sunlight shone through the trees and cast dancing shadows on the ground. They had been his idea, a lingering remnant from his dream. At two opposite corners, hallways led off to rest and sleeping areas. He walked down the one that led to the humans’ quarters, turned around, and looked back toward the courtyard. The view was much the same as in his dreams, though here, the columns from the covered walk offered regularly spaced shadows along the wall.

He nodded approvingly and made his way back out to the central meeting area.

A copy of Jonas had also made his way into the sim and was poking his way around the table, inspecting pads of paper and pens. As he watched, another Jonas appeared and then quit.

“Alright,” the Jonas said. “Transmission across the border works as expected. Memories transfer without loss, and merging is the same as always. No radio, no textual transmission, so you’ll have to rely on a fork transiting the border to relay news.”

“Wait, so neither party will be able to communicate outside of here?” Tycho asked.

“Nope, all locked down. You’ll have to rely on the grapevine; Codrin has volunteered an instance. We can open it up later if we want.”

“But if we’re using forks and they’re not allowed, won’t that look strange?”

“You ask a lot of questions for a tasker,” Answers Will Not Help said, laughing. “But yes, your point stands. Perhaps we will allow them one fork, maybe limited to their rest area. Thoughts?”

Jonas shrugged.

True Name made a note to herself on one of the pads. “We will talk about it back at headquarters.”

“Will leave it up to you,” Jonas said. “Still, good job, everyone.”

Answers Will Not Help bowed with a flourish. “I am glad that you enjoy, O great political teacher.”

He laughed and tossed a pen at her.

“Are you regretting your decision to stay behind?” True Name asked.

“Does it count as regret if I never wanted to go with?” He grinned, shrugged. “But it’s a good setup you have. Only one set of cocladists, only one politician. It gives them a wide gamut to experience.”

The skunk nodded. “Perhaps we will open it up at the end and you will get to meet them. Maybe some of them will stay behind and live within the DMZ.”

“We’ll see.” Jonas nodded to Tycho as he joined them around the table. “And here’s to our scientist. Thanks for providing us with your dreamscape. It’s a nice place to hold a conference. We’ve got everything from ancient Roman architecture to twenty-second century S-R Bloc conference tables.”

Tycho shrugged. “It seemed like a nice place. Glad you like. When is this even going to happen, by the way?”

“Three days from now. They’ll be one light-hour out, at that point, which will provide minimal risk during transit while still giving us the most time for the conference. With our burn, it should give us about six weeks together until we reach the point where we’re at one light-hour apart again.”

“Six weeks sounds like a long conference.”

“We do not know how long the conference will last,” True Name said. “It could be over in an hour if they prove to be pests. All we will need to do is shut down the Ansible, leave the DMZ, and wipe everything within it.”

He frowned. “Wouldn’t they be able to leave, too?”

“The border is governed by stronger ACLs than we are used to. One must have entered via the System in order to exit again, which they will not have done.” She grinned. “But I do not expect that we will need to do this. With all of the chatter we have done in the last few weeks and with what my cocladists say about the language, they sound like a nice enough group.”

“How do you figure?” Tycho asked. He prowled through his memories of the language that he’d learned in the interim. “It feels mostly…uh, normal, to me, if that’s the right word. They’ve got all the same concepts for what we have. Bunch of words about fur, seems like.”

True Name grinned all the wider. “Which automatically makes them better.”

“That’s mostly the point, though,” Answers Will Not Help said. “They do not have a superfluity of words for war, weapons, fighting, of course, but they also do not have words for discussion that are so fine-grained that we will be out of our depth. They will talk much like us, which makes them easier to predict.”

“Besides,” the skunk continued. “You have read all of the messages we have received. They sound excited to meet us. They keep talking about how long it has been since they have had one of these ‘convergences’. I am picking up the sense of an ulterior motive behind all that they say. Or, well, perhaps not an ulterior motive so much as a deeper version of their explicitly stated motives of having these talks. I think that they might want something out of it that they are not stating outright.”

Tycho pulled out one of the chairs at the conference table and sat down, the others following suit shortly after.

“Isn’t that kind of shady, though?” he asked.

Both Jonas and True Name shook their heads.

“Political adroitness isn’t a bad thing,” Jonas said. “It shows that they are a social culture, and that they are willing to at least try and move us in a certain direction. That, in turn, means that we can do the same to them without feeling bad about it.”

“One would think that constructing something like this–” Tycho waved his arm at the sim and, by extension, the System that contained it. “–would require some sort of politicking, right?”

“Well, sure, but it could’ve been an authoritarian regime that press-ganged its population into building their version of the System in the first place.”

“What about the other races, though?”

He shrugged. “That wouldn’t have proved much. Maybe their System would have remained a totalitarian regime and they subsumed the other races. Still, seeing things like secondrace’s language being the lingua franca rather than that of firstrace helps. Seeing these little glimpses of individuality are heartening. They sound like a varied culture, which is good for us.”

Tycho nodded.

“And before you ask why that does not make it more difficult for us,” True Name said. “Them having a varied culture means that there are at least some that might be sympathetic to us.”

“Or susceptible to,” he said.

He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He felt in a precarious position, surrounded as he was by three politicians. Calling them out on their machinations was surely a dangerous move.

Answers Will Not Help giggled. Even True Name and Jonas were chuckling. “You continue to amaze and delight, my dear,” she said. “But yes, it does make them susceptible to our wicked ways.”

He smiled cautiously. “Well, if you say so.”

“Come on, let’s head back,” Jonas said. “We’ll reset the sim, grab some dinner, and then we can go back to planning.”

It took another forty seconds to transit the DMZ barrier going the opposite direction, and this time he could feel the slight resistance as he transited, as though some process were investigating him from head to foot, from outside in, to ensure that he was who he said he was.

Throughout dinner, he remained quiet, and no matter how hard he tried, he was not able to focus on the food. It was good, of course, as much of the food had been during his stay, but some part of his mind remained elsewhere. It remained back in the sim, back focused on the conversation that he’d had with the politicians of the team.

Since he’d arrived — even before then, even before the message from Artemis — he had felt in over his head. There was something about these people, something about the world that they’d set up that showed how they worked on some higher level than him. Their minds were so fundamentally different that, no matter how much they tried to explain the political ramifications, no matter how much they showed him their work in shaping the response to the news, he just couldn’t take it all in.

It had seemed that True Name and Answers Will Not Help had loosened their control over him the longer he stayed with them. They paid less attention to him. They spoke more in commands than guiding questions. They smiled less and focused harder on the tasks at hand. Even Why Ask Questions, who he’d found himself liking quite a bit after working with her on the letter, had grown busier and busier.

He felt as though he had been purchased as a tool and then simply set in his drawer until it was time for him to be used.

How much input would he even have in these meetings? Was he to be, as Codrin had said, merely an amanuensis? Was his job simply to be there, observe, and pick up on the science aspect? Would he be allowed to take part in the conversations? Would he get to know the Artemisians?

There were far more questions than there were answers and, apropos to the situation, none of the answers were helping, so the cynical part of him kept thinking why bother asking?

It was almost too much, sitting there at dinner, trying to chat amiably, trying to enjoy the food, while all these questions and so many more circled around inside his head, hunting for some release, but there was no way that he could hope to ask anyone at the table that night, none of the True Names, none of the Answers Will Not Helps or Why Ask Questionses, and certainly none of the Jonases. Perhaps he could ask Sovanna or Dr. Verda — on hold until there was further astronomical data to process — but they were busy enough with their own worries that didn’t surround acting as emissary to an alien race to bother with the social engineering going on around them.

After dinner, he begged the evening alone to rest in his quarters and paced, composing his message in his head.

“#Tasker,” he said at last, beginning the sensorium message. “Can you talk to Codrin some about just what it is to be an amanuensis? I know ey talked to you about that and all, but I’m really not sure what it is that I should be doing, or what I even can do. I know I’m supposed to listen and record along with em, and I know I’m supposed to ask all the fancy science questions, but I’m starting to feel like that’d be better served by writing down a list of questions for one of the Odists to ask.

“Hell, I’m starting to feel like they wish that’s all I’d do. They’re nice enough, and they seem confident in their decision to use me as the science representative, so it’s not like I’m off the team, I just don’t know that I’ll have any say in any of this, and I guess…I guess I’m just feeling lost.

“I’m sending this to you rather than em so that you’re up to date. I feel like you ought to know some of my thoughts since you’re…well, you’re me. If I were any more confident in my ability to fork and merge just for this, I’d just do that, but even that feels way outside my realm of expertise. But also…even Codrin feels clicks above me. I don’t want to make em explain every little detail to me just because I’m so socially dense.

“Get back to me if you can, but if not, at least let Codrin know so, that when ey arrives tomorrow for orientation, ey’s got this knowledge, too.

“Anyway, uh…thanks, me. I’ll merge down before we take off. I hope you’re sleeping better than I am.”