Bloom by Wil McCarthy

Author:Wil McCarthy [McCarthy, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction; American, High Tech, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, Life on Other Planets, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345424655
Google: AWKxAAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1998-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Her tone put me on guard. Again, I wondered if I were the butt of some obscure joke. Certainly, she wasn't telling me everything. "You still haven't gotten to the messy part."

Her eyebrows went up. "Oh? And what part is that?"

I hunted for words, composed my answer carefully: "Constrained turbulent, uh, oscillation, I guess. A state where it doesn't expand or contract beyond a certain point, doesn't crystallize, doesn't extinguish itself, doesn't repeat."

"Like the Mycosystem," she said approvingly.

"Yes."

"The state exists, yes. Demonstrably."

"Have you got an example?"

She kept smiling that cryptic smile. "I'm afraid not. If you fiddle—"

"Conway's Game of Life isn't capable of achieving that state, is it?"

She shrugged. "There's no rigorous proof one way or the other. The permutations are infinite; maybe some small, needle-in-a-haystack fraction of them would settle into a chaotic attractor like that. There's certainly no theoretical barrier. Who knows, maybe you'll find one yourself."

"But probably not."

Her smile was vague now, burdened, as if the question reminded her of unhappy times. "No, probably not."

"But the real world and the Game of Life are not the same thing," I said, pressing some imagined advantage. "The cellular automaton is like a spreadsheet, right? The same equation over and over again in every box? So what would happen if I played around with the equation?"

Baucum brightened, the approval seeping back into her face like it had been there all along. "A modified rule-set for the express purpose of modeling the Mycosystem? That's a very interesting idea, John. Do that, yeah. Let me know what you come up with." She touched my arm then, leaned closer, shared her smile with me for a moment. And then she pulled back, danced away, and was gone before I could say a word.

What I would have said to her I'm not sure. She'd played me well, let me feel informed and clever while she led me once more into doing her bidding. Or was that unfair? Was she maybe genuinely interested in my opinion? Either way, her motive seemed, actually, to matter to me. What lesson she was trying to teach me I couldn't guess, but I wished she'd be less cryptic and circuitous. wished she'd just come out and say what was on her mind.

Then again, the project did sound sort of interesting, and we'd be another eight months on this ship, and I wasn't exactly hurting for time. I closed my cabin door, turned my lights out, and thought it over for the couple of minutes it took me to fall into exhausted slumber.

Organizing the mail that morning had been a bit of a problem, yes, and the resource allocation circuitry was the last stop between Louis Pasteur's data and communications systems, so once he'd explained the data rate problem to me and sorted things out with the appropriate Immunity officials, Wallich

"suggested" I tear down my console again, to "confirm that the laws of physics are being obeyed in there, ha ha."

Sarcasm aside, this would be my eighth such tear-down since the mission began.

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