-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
last desperate attempt to get word of the ship's plight to the outside galaxy
while the vessel's usurped systems did their damnedest to prevent it; by
destroying it if necessary. The long-agreed, carefully worked-out ruse using
itself and its twin and the preprogrammed independent Displacer unit had
worked, though only just, and even so, with considerable damage to the drone
that had been Sisela Ytheleus 2/2
and was now Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, with a kind of twisted remnant of Sisela
Ytheleus
2/2 lodged within it.
The drone had carried out the equivalent of pressing an ear to the wall of the
core with its twin's mind in it, carefully accessing a meaning-free abstract
of the activity inside the closed-off core to find out what was happening in
there. It was like listening to a furious argument going on in an adjoining
room; a chilling, frightening sound; the sort of bawling match that made you
expect the sound of screams and things breaking, any moment.
Page 59
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Its original self had probably died in the process of escape; instead of its
own body it now inhabited that of its twin, whose violated, defected
mind-state now raged helplessly within the core labelled 2/2.
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Excession.html (80 of 406)
[5/21/03 1:43:10 AM]
Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug
The drone, still tumbling through interstellar space at two hundred and eighty
kilometres a second, felt a kind of revulsion at the very idea of having a
treacherous, perverted version of its twin locked inside its own mind. Its
first reaction was to expunge it; it thought about just dumping the core into
the vacuum and wasting it with its laser, the one weapon which still seemed to
be working at close to normal capacity; or it could just shut off power to the
core, letting whatever was in it die for want of energy.
And yet it mustn't; like the two higher mind components, the ravaged version
of its twin's mind-state might contain clues to the nature of the artifact's
own mind-
type. It, the AI core and the photonic nucleus all had to be kept as
evidence;
retained, perhaps, as samples from which a kind of antidote to the artifact's
poisonous infectivity might be drawn. There was even a chance that something
of its twin's true personality might be retained in the rapacious mind-state
the two upper minds and the core contained.
Equally, there was a possibility that the ship's Mind had lost control but not
integrity; perhaps - like a small garrison quitting the undefendable curtain
wall of a great fortress to take refuge in an all-but-invulnerable central
keep - the Mind had been forced to dissociate itself from all its subsystems
and given up command to the invader, but succeeded in retaining its own
personality in a Mind core as invulnerable to infiltration as the electronic
core within the drone's mind (where what was left of its twin now seethed) was
proof against escape.
Elencher Minds had been in such dire situations before and survived; certainly
such a core could be destroyed (they could not have their power turned off, as
the drone's core could; Mind cores had their own internal energy sources) but
even the most brutal aggressor would far rather lay siege to that keep-core in
the knowledge that the information contained within must surely fall to it
eventually, than just destroy it.
There was always hope, the drone told itself; it must not give up hope.
According to the specifications it had, the Displacer which had catapulted it
out of the ill-fated ship had a range - with something the volume of Sisela
Ytheleus 1/2 - of nearly a light second. Surely that was far enough to put it
beyond range of detection? Certainly the
Peace Makes Plenty's sensors wouldn't have had a hope of spotting something so
small so far away; it just had to hope that neither could the artifact.
Excession; that was what the Culture called such things. It had become a
pejorative term and so the Elench didn't use it normally, except sometimes
informally, amongst themselves. Excession; something excessive. Excessively
aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such
things file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Excession.html (81 of
406) [5/21/03 1:43:10 AM]
Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug turned up or were
created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran
when you went a-wandering.
So, now it knew what had happened to it and what the core 2/2 contained, the
question was; what was to be done?
It had to get word to outside; that was the task it had been entrusted with by
the ship, that was what its whole life-mission had become the instant the ship
Page 60
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
came under such intensive attack.
But how? Its tiny warp unit had been destroyed, its bom-com unit likewise,
its HS
laser too. It had nothing that worked at translight speeds, no way of
unsticking itself or even a signal from the glutinous slowness that trapped
anything unable to step outside the skein of space-time. The drone felt as if
it was some quick, graceful flying insect, knocked down to a stagnant pond and
trapped there by surface tension, all grace abandoned in its bedraggled,
doomed struggle with a strange, cloyingly foreign medium.
It considered again the sub-core where its self-repair mechanisms waited. But
not its own repair systems; those of its turncoat twin. It was beyond belief
that those too had not been subverted by the invader. Worse than useless; a
temptation. Because there was a vanishingly small chance that in all the
excitement they had not been taken over.
Temptation& But no; it couldn't risk it. It would be folly.
It would have to make its own self-repair units. It was possible, but it
would take forever; a month. For a human a month was not that long; for a
drone - even one thinking at the shamefully slow speed of light on the skein -
it was like a sequence of life sentences. A month was not a long time to
wait;
drones were very good at waiting and had a whole suite of techniques to pass
the time pleas-antly or just side-
step it, but it was an abominably long time to have to concentrate on
anything, to have to work at a single task.
Even at the end of that month, it would just be the start. At the very least
there would be a lot of fine tuning to be done; the self-repair mechanisms
would need direction, amendment, tinkering with; some would doubtless
dismantle where they were supposed to build, others would duplicate what they
were meant to scour. It would be like releasing millions of potential cancer
cells into an already damaged animal body and trying to keep track of each
one. It could quite easily kill itself by mistake, or accidentally breach the
containment around the core of its corrupted
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Excession.html (82 of 406)
[5/21/03 1:43:10 AM]
Iain M. Banks - Excession (1996) v1.0: Scanned by HugHug twin or the original
self-repair mechanisms. Even if all went well, the whole process could take
years.
Despair!
It set the initial routines under way all the same - what else could it do? -
and thought on.
It had a few million particles of anti-matter stored, it had some
maniple-field capability left (somewhere between finger- and arm-strength, but
down-scalable to the point of being able to work at the micrometer scale, and
capable of slicing molecular bonds; it would need both capabilities when it
came to building the prototype self-repairer constructs), it possessed two
hundred. and forty one-
millimetre-long nanomissiles, also AM tipped, it could still put up a small [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- matkadziecka.xlx.pl