CU: Showdown

The hibernation chamber was shaped like the cylinder of a revolver, hollow in the middle. It held seven bullets: sleek black hibernation pods. Situated in the center of the ship, it had extra shielding and its own life support system, making it the place of last refuge. To conserve power, Arjun had cut life support and artificial gravity to the rest of the ship and instructed the crew to stand by for hibernation.

Looking like gearless scuba divers in their grav suits, Misuni, Stigel, MeiWei, and Sanjay floated free in the center of the chamber while Arjun was pancaked against a separating wall. The mission commander's visor was blacked out while he held conference with the ship personai.

"I'm so cold I could engrave glass with my nipples," Misuni said.

"Is something wrong with your suit's heating unit?" Stigel asked.

"I keep it at room ambient—or as close as I can bear. I find that a certain amount of physical discomfort heightens mental focus."

"If Arjun wanted to save energy, why not put us back in hibe?" Stigel asked. "What use are we just floating around like loose cargo?"

"It takes energy to initiate the hibernation sequence," MeiWei explained. "Besides, he'll need us once this parlor game has run its course. If the price for losing isn't annihilation, that is. Sanjay, any chance your gamemaster can pull a rabbit out of a hat?"

Sanjay shook his head. "I was feeling a bit optimistic after we won our first game, but then the artifact raised its play to a whole new level. It's like it was only on beginner mode before."

"Speaking of losing..." Arjun's visor turned transparent. "Sanjay is right. We need a new strategy. The gamemaster can't hope to beat this thing with its current resources. I've squeezed every last compu-flop out of the ship. Hell, even the coffee maker is in on the action."

"You didn't just drop in just to tell us we're hopelessly outclassed," MeiWei said.

"Indeed." Arjun paused. "There is still one untapped source of processing power."

"If you're thinking about our neural implants, it won't work," Sanjay said. "They augment the natural function of the human brain and are highly tailored to the individual. You can't just swap them out like compu-cores."

"I had another idea, one I got from you, actually," Arjun said. "Remember what you told me about the hybrid team event at the ultra-chess world championship? How did that work?"

"I don't see what an ultra-chess tournament has to do with this situation."

Like sandpaper, Arjun's abrasive, brown eyes had the power to wear down resistance. "Humor me."

With a sigh, Sanjay capitulated, "Each hybrid team is composed of three players. At least one player has to be human, and the personais can't be clones of each other. Since the individual event is more prestigious, the hybrid teams are usually made up of only second tier players. At the end of all the events, there is an exhibition match between the individual and team winners."

"With what results?"

"Despite having worse players overall, the hybrid teams perennially beat the top individuals, even personais with far greater skill and computational resources. About eighty percent of the time, the hybrid team will also beat the winners of the AI-only team event."

"Why do you think that is?" Arjun asked.

"Brains and compu-cores apply different representational models. When similar models are paired together, they exhibit the same blind spots and flaws, whereas different models are able to complement and correct each other."

"So what are you asking us to do, exactly?" MeiWei asked.

"I need to borrow your brains."

Xemesh: Logic Switches

For all their size and martial tactics, the Xemesh were slow.

After each skirmish, the Xemesh had to wait for the return of the raiders, wait for the news to be encoded in new mesh, wait for the information to be processed, wait for the network to reach a consensus on its next move, and wait for new instructions to be written out. On several occasions, Xant armies marched right to the edge of the enemy's core only to turn around and go home.

The smarts of the trail-mesh were hard-coded into its dendritic structure. While superficially similar to the design of the human brain, the use of macroscopic physical interactions in place of microscopic electro-chemical ones caused it to be vastly slower. Information storage (memories) required laying down new pathways at a snail's pace. Processing (thinking) took place through the directed traffic of the Xants. Consolidating logic (learning) involved a lengthy process of pruning and reinforcement. A Xemesh could be considered a genius if it hatched one new idea a week.

But what if the information patterns could be changed on the fly? This is exactly what a logic switch did.

The first type of logic switch to evolve was the trail-gate. It worked like a railway switch. A hairline fracture in a pathway allowed one side, the switch, to be knocked out of alignment to cut off or redirect the flow of traffic onto another path; a reverse blow would knock it back into place. The trail-gate was especially effective for contingent decision making. At the flip of a switch, it could invoke Plan A (attack) or Plan B (retreat).

But it wasn't until trail-gates were combined with another type of logic switch that their full potential was realized. The logic button, or bulit, was a blister of flexible membrane covering a small depression. Applying pressure to the center of a bulit inverted its position, converting it from a button to a divot or vice versa, like a bit or transistor. While trail-gates were good at branching logic, bulits were ideal for encoding it. They were durable, easy to construct, and could be strung together in limitless numbers. Data that once required miles of mesh could now be compacted down to a few feet.

Trail-gates and bulits occurred purely by accident as the result of compound dilution and temperature swings. Hot temperatures caused some compounds to crack, leading to trail-gates, and others to blister, resulting in bulits. These effects, usually detrimental, had been occurring for millions of years. The real innovation was the evolution of Xants that could create and exploit them for logic processing. Clipper and blister-blower Xants created the structures. Flipper Xants with club heads switched trail-gates between positions, and telegraph Xants with precision stingers tapped out dozens of bulits a second at a full run.

When these two mutations combined and propagated within a single Xemesh, the result was not just a smarter network, it was consciousness.