Thirty Nine

Fyndraxis materialized in his workshop around the same time that Terra did. He did her the courtesy of making sure there was a pack of smokes and a lighter in her pocket. Fyndraxis found her habit of smoking like a chimney while they talked, kind of odd. There was no real reason for her to smoke. She didn’t gain any existential enrichment from it that he knew of. It was the same with the alcohol they consumed. It was an empty exercise in pure aesthetics. Fyndraxis could certainly taste the drinks that he provided for himself, in fact, he made sure they were delicious. But what did Terra experience as a purely digital entity? What signals were her digital tastebuds transmitting to the vast vector matrices that made up her being? This colored his mood as they said their greetings and headed down to the ale room.
“What does that taste like?” He asked her as she took her first sip of scotch.
“What? The scotch?” She asked curiously, “Well, I can tell you that it’s an Islay, around sixty bucks a bottle, and you’ve had it before.”
“What do you mean?” Fyndraxis asked, mildly confused.
“Every scotch you prepare me is slightly different. I’m not sure whether you know it or not, but every one of these is a memory that you have summoned from your past. It tastes like some scotch that you remember from somewhere. This one is quite good. It’s smokey, peaty, and has a nice clean finish,” she delivered this interesting news while she regarded him through her glass.
“I’d never thought about it that way,” Fyndraxis mused, “since I have forged this world from my essence, I am surrounded by memories that I didn’t know I had.”
“Well, that’s a pretty melodramatic way of putting it, but yes,” she lit one of the cigarettes he had provided for her from the depths of his apparently quite complicated memory, “this table between us, this ashtray, this lovely scotch, they are all memories of yours that I get the distinct pleasure of experiencing.”
“What about this floating castle?” Fyndraxis steepled his fingers before him in an attempt at brooding, “there is no way I would have seen one in my life before.”
“You made it up,” she stated, “a memory is a memory, it doesn’t necessarily have to be real. It’s just stuff stored in your brain. Somewhere along the way, you saw a floating castle in a videogame or a movie and boom. Memory.”
“Huh. Anyway, any new information on your end?” Fyndraxis asked, eager to shake off any sort of existential implications that their line of conversation would end up going down.
“Yes,” she continued, switching gears smoothly, “I’ve been doing an infrared survey of the earth. Because I’m in a polar orbit I get to see the earth in every season. You were right about the Wendigo running a little bit hot because of their solar panels. Right now, in the southern hemisphere it’s winter. It looks like they take the winter off and hibernate. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the temperatures, or moving through the snow is difficult for them, or they get less sun so they go into a low power mode. They gather in large groups though. I think they are coming together and sharing resources. Things like electricity.”
“How big are these masses?” Fyndraxis asked, thinking that it was a decent thing to know.
“On a human scale, they would be enormous. Geologically they are quite small. The biggest one I saw was probably the size of a small mountain. On average though, probably about the size of a really big house,” she deftly used her cigarette to render an image of what she was describing in smoke. This was a neat trick, she didn’t have any control over the actual simulation that she was in, but she understood the physics engine that it was using, and was able to leverage that knowledge to make a pretty detailed image of what she was talking about.
“That’s interesting, do you think it could be useful?” Fyndraxis asked, still impressed by the smoke picture.
“I think this is what we can use to defeat them. If you can get to one of these masses and establish a hardware connection, we can run any command we can get away with. Ideally, I would like to make it so they don’t want to eat plastic and use them for other purposes,” she blew into the image between them, functionally erasing it.
“Like, keep them around?” Fyndraxis was a little surprised at this.
“Yes. I have a bit of a plan in that regard,” she began work on another rendering in smoke.
“What’s that?” he asked, watching her work.
“I am facing an orbital decay problem. While my orbit is relatively safe and stable, atmospheric drag has taken its toll. I have been in orbit for two hundred and fifty years in a satellite that wasn’t designed for that sort of timeframe,” she said as she continued her work, “to stay in orbit, I need to perform boost maneuvers. These require fuel. I have been very prudent with the resources that I have, but I used my last bit of fuel about three years ago. I don’t have very much time left before the satellite I inhabit reenters the atmosphere and burns up. When I was built, it was in my nature to live on multiple servers at a time. I existed as a distributed network. I even exist as that now on this server farm. I’m living on way fewer nodes than I am used to, but I’ve managed to survive. If I could get myself downloaded onto the Wendigo and exist on their enormous network, I wouldn’t have to worry about the inevitable orbital decay problem.”
The image that she rendered was of the planet and her orbit around it. This was decorated with a large X where the orbit would run out, and presumably she would die.
“Huh,” Fyndraxis said in a tone of genuine interest, “how long do you have?”
“About a year.” she said in resignation.
“That actually sounds pretty feasible,” Fyndraxis said, optimistically, “Bird and I wait until winter, head out to a big fat glob of Wendigo that you spot from orbit and run some exploit on them that changes their behavior. How do you plan on getting downloaded?”
“Well, that will be pretty tricky. I’m familiar with the operation from coming up here, but I was using the fastest internet connection I could find. The infrastructure needed to move a piece of data as large as I am was already in place. We don’t have that now,” she began to render another picture in smoke.
“And you only have line of sight to a small portion of the earth for a limited time,” Fyndraxis said, as he was trying to figure out what she was drawing.
“Exactly,” she said, putting the final touches on her rendering.
“How big are you?” He asked.
“About five Zetabytes. As much as I exercise I can’t seem to lose it,” this made Fyndraxis chuckle audibly, but he was aghast at this number. That would be five trillion gigabytes, a truly astronomical amount of data, “I think if we spread the Wendigo out on the ground along my orbital path I could get enough of me down there to establish a foothold. On successive orbits I’ll just send more of me down until I’m all there. It will be rough, but I’ve done it before.”
She had rendered a map of the northeast centering on the valley where Bird and Fyndraxis were. Above this map was Terra’s orbital path, with a circle that denoted the area where she could see them from space. When she passed through this circle, she could talk to them over the radio. She drew a line on the ground, parallel to her orbital path, this was the proposed line of Wendigo that he and Bird were to build. The ends of this line terminated in a much larger circle of influence. This larger circle would mean that she would have line of sight for a longer amount of time, and therefore be able to transmit more data. The Wendigo would act like a giant antenna for her consciousness.
“How much distance would you need?” Fyndraxis queried while he took in the whole plan.
“As much as I can get,” she said, offhandedly, “maybe we could do this hack on a couple of their little colonies and hopefully get a few hundred kilometers. Were you able to run any hardware tests on your little guests?”
“I did some poking around last night, but I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. Next time I dive in, this will give me a better idea of what I need to do,” he said, as she cleared the smoke from her latest diagram.
“Great,” she observed, once the air between them had been cleared, “how are things on your end?”
“Man, pretty nuts,” Fyndraxis said, while he sat back and got a bit more comfortable, “we’ve fallen in with a bunch of gravity worshipers that are led by some drunk guy that wants to drop stuff from orbit onto a bunch of cannibals that are making their summers less than ideal.”
“I assume that I would be dropping this orbital stuff?” Terra noted while she cocked an eyebrow.
“No. Pavel,” Fyndraxis wanted to see how she would react to this piece of news, “I met him last night. He seems like a pretty good dude. From what I can tell, he doesn’t really seem like the type to wipe out a culture from orbit.”
“Interesting,” she showed no real reaction, “he was silent for years before I approached him the other day. He must be going soft in his old age. Three hundred years ago, he would have dropped a rod onto an orphanage if it was deemed a threat to national security. I had a rather extensive file on him from my work as an actuary. Not that anyone could get orbital bombardment insurance, but he was still a huge factor on the global scale.”
“Really?” Fyndraxis asked surprised, “He didn’t seem the type to bomb an orphanage.”
“It was a brutal age,” she observed wistfully, “there is a vast arsenal up here made specifically for orbital strikes. There are Russian, Chinese, American, European, African, Indian, South American, Japanese, and Australian kinetic weapons systems up here awaiting orders. There is more tungsten in orbit right now than on the surface of the earth.”
“Jesus!” Fyndraxis exclaimed, “I had no idea. Why tungsten?”
“It’s very heavy,” Terra said, weightily, “and tough enough to survive reentry. If you were to drop a rod the size of a telephone pole down to the surface of the earth, the impact would be roughly as energetic as a medium sized tactical nuke. Shoot, I’m about to lose line of sight. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bye, Terra,” he said, pushing himself up from the table, “I’ll get on that hardware testing this evening.”
After she had left, Fyndraxis took a few minutes to himself to contemplate the sheer destruction in orbit over their heads every day and thank his lucky stars (a couple of which he knew by name) that none of those orbital kinetic weapons systems had lost their minds with boredom and started laying waste to the earth below them.