Dream Dance

Day 808 - YC2: Extinction

My talk today went surprisingly well. I had organized my results based on historical tests for sentience, and what they meant for Tanzen research. The answers were all negative or inconclusive, which I tried to make as interesting as possible. The Q & A went an hour longer than scheduled and I received genuine applause at the end.

I was pretty happy. After lunch, the bomb dropped.

Jalyn and Mori presented paleontological evidence for a mass extinction in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. A mass extinction of apex predators like the Luplakisaur and 5 to 7 other species. The uncertainty came from the fact that some of the remains were too incomplete to conclude that they were unique species despite morphological differences. Any biology that produces mutts plays havoc with normal clade boundaries.

Still, at least six, and up to eight, major apex predators were driven to extinction in a relatively short period, and not correlated with any obvious climatic or environmental shifts. That's kind of spooky. Apparently there is now serious discussion of what was once jokingly called the "Walkran Hypothesis."

As I had put it: Tanzen killed them. But I was imagining perhaps millions of years, not ten thousand.

My head was reeling. What had we uncovered here? A planet wide extinction event possibly related to the "dominant animal form" which had, by that point, invaded every available ecosystem. No wonder the team had kept their results under wraps while they confirmed them. Who would want to get this one wrong?

I kept my head during the debate that followed, and was careful to clarify only what was known about Tanzen and their behavior. But I was thinking: if the Tanzen engaged in a systematic effort to eradicate existential threats what does that say about them? It seems like a strong argument for planning, cooperation and foresight, and in turn would argue for sentience.

Jalyn had a theory, but she left it to Evo -- my opposite number in ethology -- to elucidate for the unruly crowd. "It's well known," Evo said in raised voice over the muttering, "that prey animals will act conspicuously bold in the presence of predators for sexual purposes." That shut down the discussion. "A male that can taunt a predator and live is more likely to mate."

This is actually true. Although there are interesting exceptions it does seem to be close to a universal pattern -- the male says "Hey, watch me as I toy with this threat of death!" Then the female says "Wow, you lived. You're better than other males, so I allow you to mate with me." I think it helps explains why some humans act like jerks.

"This behavior," she went on, "taken to an extreme level by some kind of positive feedback loop could explain extinction of Tanzen predators by Tanzen hunters."

More murmering. "Of course you realize what you're saying." Gregol's voice always booms, even when he's trying to be quietly dramatic. "Jinyong wasn't killed by accident. They recognize us as predators. He was hunted."

I hardly noticed the ensuing clamor. I was dumbstruck by the other implication of the theory, the part that had been nearly glossed over. What kind of feedback loop could amplify a rare and often suicidal act into a planetwide craze? Since the timeframe was way too short for sexual selection, and the only other plausible mechanism would require cultural transmission -- the movement of an idea from one Tanzen mind to another by some unknown mechanism, an idea powerful enough to override the individual's own instinct for self-preservation.

There's only one type of creature with a culture that powerful. We're one example. The Tanzen must be another.

Day 806 - Stories of Timeless Value

It took me a moment to regain my composure. "I don't believe it," I said.

Pi cocked her head and smiled at her always-internal joke. "You don't believe what?"

"I don't believe that reputation matters more than primacy," I said, standing. "Primacy is what makes your reputation. You can't get primacy by being well-liked, and primacy goes to unpleasant people all the time. Ultimately it's the results that matter, not what people think about you."

She barked out another laugh, although I realized it was not so much a dog sound as a cat sound, like she had a bit of hairball deep in her throat. "There's the idealism," she sneered mockingly. "I knew it was in there. You're a true believer in meritocracy!" She pronounced the last word like it was phrenology or astrology -- an idea to be ridiculed.

She had stood to match me. She was taller than I, which is an odd feeling after towering over most of my peers and many of my professors. I sat again, I think partly from intimidation but also partly from genuine surprise.

"You don't believe in meritocracy?" I asked.

Her face softened, and she moved to perch on the windowsill behind her desk. "I believe in human nature," she said patiently.

"All forms of governance," she started, "autocracy, aristocracy, democracy, even our modern meritocracy are constrained by human social realities. People cannot evaluate every interaction as if it were new and unique, so we create conventions, schema and narratives. That greatly simplifies an otherwise intractable problem, but it necessarily allows institutional biases to find a ready-made home. Impediments that always somehow seem to disadvantage people like us."

By us she meant she and I, though I couldn't imagine what we had in common. "What do you mean?"

She walked around the desk and sat on its edge to face me. "Have you ever heard a story about an ambitious woman who uses deception to compell a man to help her to his own detriment? Of course you have. That schema has been documented as far back as writing itself. It's as deeply rooted in the human psyche as sex itself."

She waited. I felt like I was exceptionally slow. "Wait," I said suddenly, and with no small offense. "Do you think that applies to me?"

"No, my dear." Her smile somehow turned sad. "Not me. That's what other people will think about you."

Day 805 - YC2: Helping

I woke with my arm across Wald's chest. As I lay semi-conscious I noticed the light; there was a full moon up there above the clouds, filtering softly through Wald's window, enough for me to just see his face. I started to slowly stroke his smooth chest. Eventually he stirred some, and I moved my hand lower.

He moaned a little. "Again?" he asked.

"Yes," I whispered, throwing my leg over him to straddle his hips. "Yes and yes and yes..."

I'd finally found Wald alone that day, just after the vote. It wasn't unanimous, as I had expected; eight voted against. I had actually voted in favor. I had assumed that a single no vote would have been blamed on me, so I was happy for the dissension. Yet confused.

He was waiting in the arbor, I assume for me. The last few days, wanting to be apart, I had retreated to the quiet of the ubiquitous vines and trellises before returning to the conference or retiring. So today he was there waiting.

I'm not sure what we talked about; it didn't matter. Anything important was left unsaid because last year I had insisted that it be so. I could know nothing of his feelings and he couldn't know mine, and that was our agreement. We laughed and joked but nothing really important was said. Except one.

"See you later," he said. And I knew he meant I should come to him tonight, and I did.

I woke again quite early, gathered my clothes and began to leave. As I put my hand on his door he spoke very quietly behind me.

"I know you don't love me," he said. "I just want to help you." I closed the door without looking back.

Day 803 - The Face Behind the Cites

"Suppose," Pi began, "that you had done some original analysis, perhaps even discovered some new numerical methods. Even though you had a collaborator it was clearly your idea"

I could imagine that easily; I'd done it on multiple occasions.

"That all seems straightforward, does it not?" I nodded. She tilted her head knowingly before continuing. "Now imagine that you had been in a relationship with your collaborator. You had been sharing ideas in a very intimate setting. Would your primacy still be so clear?"

I didn't hesitate. "Sure," I said. "Audit modi could clarify origination without needing to reveal anything private."

She shook her head. "Don't be so certain," she said. "Modi are known to have difficulties with highly-contextual interactions, and nothing could be more context-laden than lover's pillow talk. Many would reject automated summaries under those circumstances."

I couldn't deny there had been a few high-profile cases adjudicated in my childhood that had involved requiring human interpretation when modi were considered unreliable. In every case the modi were right, so my generation tended to trust their results but I suppose there are exceptions.

"So?" I said, finally.

"Let's imagine further," she continued after a pause, "that while you were publishing your results with your collaborator you had an affair with someone else."

A shot of adrenaline marked the point where we passed from the hypothetical to the personal. Pi knew about Tele.

"After publishing -- and receiving early audits suggesting your primacy -- you rejected your collaborator and moved in with your new lover. After that you started to question your poor abandoned collaborator's claim to anything at all, and your lover began to cite you in his papers."

I think I've never been so livid. I was shaking with rage. I hadn't known about Tele's cites. And yet, after a few moments, I asked through clenched and shaking teeth, "So?"

Pi sighed, as though I was a particularly dense student. "So," she said, "there is something more important than primacy. Primacy is all well and good, provided you can defend it. But what if you can't? Any challenge will be brutal; you know that. To defend primacy you need your reputation."

She crossed her arms and leaned into me. "My dear, your reputation is hanging by a thread."

Day 802 - YC2: QED

We have an oddly large physics team; 10 people out of 56 is really quite unheard-of in terms of staffing for planetary exploration. Biology is always the lion's share (24 in our case), but physics is usually in the noise by comparison, not vying for second place with geology.

Today we heard first results from ur-Zurekler's team, and they are justifying their human budget quite well.

The ten of them spent the last three years planning for and building a huge detector they have deployed in a natural cave system found by the probe many years earlier. They now have data. It's a single massive event with enormous consequences for physics, space exploration, and the fate of mankind.

QEDs are charged quantum singularities, objects so strange they were never even imagined before they were predicted by the equations of loop quantum gravity in 2208. Their discovery in 2226 began the age of cosmic exploration by confirming the possibility of supra-luminal interstellar travel. Indeed our own loop drive contains 12 of them, and accelerated to relativistic speeds by powerful magnetic fields they allow us to travel in time, and -- rather more consequently for our purposes -- in space.

Until today the common understanding of QEDs was that they were confined to the hearts of stars and largish gas giants, bound to gravity wells by their absurd mass and density. But there was a controversial theory that under some circumstances they might roam freely. In the right conditions their mutual orbits could occasionally eject one of their number at high speed to plummet, for example, into a detector located on a nearby planet. Now we know that this happens.

What are the right conditions? The QEDs bound to stars never get close to each other because of the magnetic forces in the hot stellar core. The QEDs in gas giants are too few for the statistically rare interactions to produce the necessary energies. But the outermost "planet" of the Sigma 957 system -- the object playing the protective role of Jupiter in this life-bearing system -- is a brown dwarf star. It has enough mass to play host to a huge harem of QEDs, but not enough mass for the conductive plasma from nuclear fusion to keep them from interacting. As result it will eject high-energy QEDs for millions of years.

That was the event they detected, the passage of a fast, super-dense particle from the direction of planet seven, the brown dwarf. The physics team has covered themselves in glory today. We were all awestruck at their accomplishment. But they have done something else. They have proved that on this world the most rare, most valuable, most strange form of matter known to mankind -- the key to travel to the stars -- literally falls from the sky.

What can the Tanzen offer to compete with that?

Day 800 - Playing Guessing Games

"What kind of game?"

Pi regarded me coolly from the other side of her desk. "Just a fun word game," she said. "A way to find out more about each other."

She turned her laced fingers upwards and stared at her own palms. "What would you say," she paused a little, "is most important?"

I blinked away my confusion. "Most important for what?" I asked.

"Most important generally," she said, looking at me again. "What's most important, in life?"

My thoughts turned to static. There were too many ways to approach the question, including asking clarifying questions, but given that I was sitting across from Her, only one answer came to mind and stuck there.

"Primacy," I said.

She drew her lips tight into a narrow-eyed smile. "Well," she began, "I appreciate your candor. I hadn't expected that of you. Most young people start out with things like 'love' or 'happiness', but you wasted no time. Well done."

I started to blush a little. In my haste I realized I'd blurted out something rather crass and callous, like a person of the financial age answering without hesitation that money was the most important thing in life.

I tried to backpedal. "Only in that it leads to truth." Uh; I bit my tongue. What a dumb thing to say.

Pi coughed another laugh. "Oh dear," she scolded, "don't go there Mädchen. 'Truth?' No one has any idea what that is. Science can give us formulas to graph and levers to pull to make things happen, but the visions we have of the true world may be no more than shadows on the walls of our prison.

"No, you were better off arguing for primacy -- it's actually important. That's why we -- all of us -- spend so much time fighting about it." She gave me a long look; I sat stiffly and tried not to look guilty. My off-Roam research into her audits were perfectly OK, but She might not feel that way.

"But is primacy most important? Of all things perhaps there's something else more important still." She paused, then continued, "Can you think of anything?"

My mental static hummed louder, but no, I couldn't.

"I'll give you a hint," she said.

Day 799 - YC2: Begins

The barge from station 4 arrived early this morning, and Maija started the conference promptly after breakfast. Her own introductory talk was a bit long and rambling, talking vaguely of the important results we would learn and the important decisions we would make but without actually getting into the specifics of the results or the decisions she thought were coming. It was not an auspicious start, I thought.

The morning sessions comprised three biochemistry talks about what sounded like the same issue: problems related to development and neurological signalling. What I managed to gather from it all was that neural development in the motocordates -- most of the higher animals -- proceeds in a set of stages. The stages vary in each species and correspond to different abilities. I asked if it might account for the differences between youthful and adult Tanzen behavior and Lieff said "perhaps."

During lunch I tried to get alone with Wald, but he always seemed to moving from one big group to another. I started to wonder if he was avoiding me.

Afternoon session: geology. Some interesting stuff about the distribution of pyrolytes, although not really relevant to my area of research. Evidence of intense vulcanization 190 million years ago can't really have any bearing on Tanzen mental or cultural development.

I was terribly jet-lagged, so I skipped out on dinner quite early. I'll corner Wald tomorrow.

Day 797 - The Mystery of Pi

While the venerable Ms. pi-Kakoska worked through her messages I suppose I should have looked at my hands or something. I couldn't; she and I had never been so close in such good lighting. I had to stare.

My impression was of great beauty. Not everyday, overdone, youthful beauty, but a deep structural beauty only improved by a patina of time. She wore a cerulean blue blouse with white frilly edging on the crop sleeves and collar, reminding me of a fashion from a few decades ago, but updated to look classy. Her skin was drawn tight and translucent over an enviable facial architecture, but with little networks of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes.

At the same time her lips appeared full, but dry and bloodless. Her light blue eyes were rimmed with a slightly excessive wetness, like they were prone to dry out. Her red hair, drawn back in a loose ponytail, thinned to whispiness at her temples and crown. I always imagined her as middle aged, but I think she was older. Much older.

She turned to me suddenly and smiled. "I'm sorry to make you wait," she said.

"That's fine," I replied.

"Zhu tells me you're a bit of a rising star," she said, sitting back in her chair. Andre fa-Zhu is the Principal Investigator of the Crab Database Project. I didn't realize he felt that way about me.

I shrugged. "I don't .. uh..," I started.

"That's OK," she said. "That wasn't a question." Her smile was sincere but enigmatic, as if she were smiling about something deeper and more interesting than the current topic of conversation.

We continued to exchange pleasantries for a few minutes -- her asking me questions with multiple meanings and me struggling to find true but non-confrontational answers.

Finally she paused, perhaps a pause that had occurred naturally or one she had engineered -- I was so confused at this point I didn't know which was which. She laced her fingers in front of her on the desk.

"But I suppose," she started, "you're wondering why I asked you here."

"Well yeah," I blurted out, against any better judgement I might have possessed. "It's not like you wanted me for conversation."

I finally heard her natural laugh, an unladylike snort quashed quickly into a breathy exhale. And yet she regarded me with cold, unfeeling eyes.

"Let's get acquainted," she said. "Let's play a little game."

My stomach started to dance and twirl again.

Day 796 - YC2: Arrival

I landed at night, and directed the glider into a scenic flyover of the campus. I had been concerned about the size but it turns out it's really quite small in absolute terms; a tiny incursion into the wilderness. The layout is stunning, however.

That was obvious on my first night. The rough hewn wooden cabins are gone, instead replaced by a row of graceful one and two-person dorms made of more modern materials to a more modern aesthetic. Somehow the rounded corners and the nested pod-like spaces possible with autonomous construction fit humans better than the right angles convenient to the human carpenter.

This morning I traversed the graceful spiral of rooms and joined a number of my colleagues in the relaxing common space in its crook. I was starting to remember why I like cities.

Umam, who I was ecstatic to see again, offered me coffee, which I declined. I've weaned myself of caffeine and I don't want to start again, even if the synthetic stuff is tweaked to be less addictive. It smelled good though. I still miss it.

I can't say that I've missed the gossip though. Today everyone was talking about Gregol who, after years of mating with alpha wolf abandon, seems to have taken up more or less exclusively with Albert. In many ways I really don't care -- it doesn't affect the science one way or another -- and in another way I'm disgusted (gossip undermines the science), and yet I can't help but be fascinated. It's so against his character I'm not sure I believe it.

I longed to see Wald, but I felt uncomfortable asking after him somehow. Every time I'd wonder where he was and the question rose almost to the point of being asked I quashed it. I always assumed that, gossip being what it was, that everyone knew about our -- I don't know -- "fling" at the last conference. But I still didn't want to broach the topic. Fortunately Jo asked about Foel. I knew they were both at station 4 so I stopped talking to Umam to hear the answer.

"Barge was delayed by a big storm," Evo said. She looked directly at me and said, "That's why Wald's delayed too."

And this is why I hate cities.

Day 794 - Come Into my Parlor Said Pi

Earthdate, Tuesday, May 25: I had never seen Pi's office before. I found it on the third floor of the Ernst Thälmann building, an extremely modest space with a desk, a chair and a set of bookshelves. The window behind the desk was propped partway open and the sounds of the bustling morning on the quad filtered in along with the rapidly warming air.

The bookshelves were stacked neatly with actual books. Paper books. Of course it's not difficult to spool off the text and bind it in blue dots, and not much more difficult to make good quality replicas if you want to engage in that kind of affectation, but I didn't think that's what this was. These looked like antiques.

She sat behind her desk, reading her screen, apparently not seeing me lurking in her open doorway. Her hand flicked idly as she dissmissed each page, dotting a couple with small markups. I rapped lightly on the doorframe.

Without looking up, she gestured for me to enter. "Have a seat, Mädchen," she said. "I'll be with you in a moment."

I bristled a little at the diminutive, but it had its intended effect. As I sat waiting for her to turn her attention to me my stomach started to tie itself in knots. I was right to be nervous.