these temporary bodies was the fact that, where real DalRiss rarely thought in terms of front or back, he retained a human preference for one direction which he still thought of as “forward.”
For some time now, » DEVCAMERON « had not been a corporeal entity; and wearing a body again, even a strange one in a strange and hostile environment, was a relief, as if it reminded him of an anchor he’d mislaid.
His original human brain had been destroyed with his body, of course, at Herakles, but its patterns, including all of its memories, its identity of self, its perceptions and knowledge, had been retained by small communications-trained Nagas occupying other living ships of the DalRiss fleet. When the ship holding his physical body had been incinerated, his mind—the set of software running on his wetware that constituted his thoughts, his memories, his sense of self —had been resident in those other ships, riding in a Naga copy of his brain. Aboard ship, his “body” was the ship itself, or any of the multiple ships of the fleet, wherever Nagas were resident; during the fleet’s rare planetfalls, one of the small Naga subsets that had patterned his brain flowed into a carefully designed niche inside his artificial and temporary skull. » DEVCAMERON « could not sense any real difference… save for the trouble he had navigating, or when he forgot and turned the radially symmetrical body without need.
There were other things as well, he was realizing. He missed intelligent human companionship. He missed conversations where he didn’t have to explain concepts like “poetry” or “names.” He missed specific people, individuals whose differences sparked and fired his own thoughts, generating new ideas that let him know that he was alive.
And, oh, God how he missed sex, despite the fact that he didn’t have a body. He was no longer aroused by hormones triggered by thoughts, of course… but the thoughts remained, and the habit patterns of desire remained closely linked with them. Even a decent ViRsex simulation would have helped, but for that a sophisticated AI was needed, an AI with a better understanding of what it was to be human than these Nagas and DalRiss had.
Hell, even just the sensation of another human’s touch, fingertip feather-light on skin, or hearty clap on the shoulder, or hand squeezing arm, with no thought of sex in the contact at all…
He’d lost so much. He’d thought that, given time enough, he would forget.
Resigned, he focused his attention on the task at hand. He was looking for some sign of intelligence.
Normally, such a search would have been doomed to failure, if only because a planet was immense, the indicators of intelligence tiny and scattered and, in the case of Frost, at least, flooded first by fire, then by ice. The DalRiss, even with the help of their Perceivers, still had trouble recognizing nonliving organization or artifacts; it had to be alive for them to understand it, to really know it in the sense that humans knew and understood something by seeing it.
But he had scanned the surface as they’d approached, absorbing the configurations of black rock and white ice, then feeding the patterns through a set of programs loaded onto his borrowed Naga brain that tested those shapes for fractals. In nature, most forms were either random, or they unfolded in repeating iterations that followed the mathematical language of fractal patterns. Shapes that showed order without the iterations of fractals were, most likely, artificial.
And he’d seen such. Even without the fractal detection routine, he’d seen certain regular spacings of rock on ice that had reminded him of photos of cities taken from orbit. There was no proof in that observation alone, of course. Lots of natural phenomena could mimic the regularity or the geometry of artificial structures.
But it was highly suspicious, and the fractal routine had agreed, returning a probability of eighty-two percent that
For some time now, » DEVCAMERON « had not been a corporeal entity; and wearing a body again, even a strange one in a strange and hostile environment, was a relief, as if it reminded him of an anchor he’d mislaid.
His original human brain had been destroyed with his body, of course, at Herakles, but its patterns, including all of its memories, its identity of self, its perceptions and knowledge, had been retained by small communications-trained Nagas occupying other living ships of the DalRiss fleet. When the ship holding his physical body had been incinerated, his mind—the set of software running on his wetware that constituted his thoughts, his memories, his sense of self —had been resident in those other ships, riding in a Naga copy of his brain. Aboard ship, his “body” was the ship itself, or any of the multiple ships of the fleet, wherever Nagas were resident; during the fleet’s rare planetfalls, one of the small Naga subsets that had patterned his brain flowed into a carefully designed niche inside his artificial and temporary skull. » DEVCAMERON « could not sense any real difference… save for the trouble he had navigating, or when he forgot and turned the radially symmetrical body without need.
There were other things as well, he was realizing. He missed intelligent human companionship. He missed conversations where he didn’t have to explain concepts like “poetry” or “names.” He missed specific people, individuals whose differences sparked and fired his own thoughts, generating new ideas that let him know that he was alive.
And, oh, God how he missed sex, despite the fact that he didn’t have a body. He was no longer aroused by hormones triggered by thoughts, of course… but the thoughts remained, and the habit patterns of desire remained closely linked with them. Even a decent ViRsex simulation would have helped, but for that a sophisticated AI was needed, an AI with a better understanding of what it was to be human than these Nagas and DalRiss had.
Hell, even just the sensation of another human’s touch, fingertip feather-light on skin, or hearty clap on the shoulder, or hand squeezing arm, with no thought of sex in the contact at all…
He’d lost so much. He’d thought that, given time enough, he would forget.
Resigned, he focused his attention on the task at hand. He was looking for some sign of intelligence.
Normally, such a search would have been doomed to failure, if only because a planet was immense, the indicators of intelligence tiny and scattered and, in the case of Frost, at least, flooded first by fire, then by ice. The DalRiss, even with the help of their Perceivers, still had trouble recognizing nonliving organization or artifacts; it had to be alive for them to understand it, to really know it in the sense that humans knew and understood something by seeing it.
But he had scanned the surface as they’d approached, absorbing the configurations of black rock and white ice, then feeding the patterns through a set of programs loaded onto his borrowed Naga brain that tested those shapes for fractals. In nature, most forms were either random, or they unfolded in repeating iterations that followed the mathematical language of fractal patterns. Shapes that showed order without the iterations of fractals were, most likely, artificial.
And he’d seen such. Even without the fractal detection routine, he’d seen certain regular spacings of rock on ice that had reminded him of photos of cities taken from orbit. There was no proof in that observation alone, of course. Lots of natural phenomena could mimic the regularity or the geometry of artificial structures.
But it was highly suspicious, and the fractal routine had agreed, returning a probability of eighty-two percent that
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