Covenants: Savant (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 10) by Terra Whiteman

Author:Terra Whiteman [Whiteman, Terra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shatter Star Press
Published: 2020-11-01T22:00:00+00:00

8

YAHWEH

SAVANT WAS WAITING FOR ME AT THE LONE TABLE IN THE central spire when I arrived. It’d been nearly two days since I’d left for Enigmus, and it seemed the Pedagogue envoy hadn’t moved since. Communicating with me was probably its only function in this shell; a black mannequin whose shine was muted by a tiny layer of dust, swept in from the open entrance. At my arrival, it slowly turned its head to face me.

“Greetings, Scholar,” it said. “Your court has approved the contract.”

That was meant to be a question, I knew, but Savant’s voice lacked any typical inflection. “They are still reviewing it, but let’s assume they will. I would like to go ahead with our terms. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful,” I murmured, taking a seat across from it. “Let’s start at the beginning. You wish to cohabitate with existing biotic civilizations without causing harm.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of harm do you think you will cause?”

Savant took several minutes to speak. I reclined in my seat, awaiting a response, watching the nanoport illuminate on the centerpiece plate. “We have traveled very far, Scholar—,”

“You may call me Yahweh.”

“—And have come across many dead worlds that once held great civilizations. Seventy-five-point-six percent of them had fallen from cosmic disasters or their own undoing, but the rest were caused by, what you call, machine sentience.”

“I appreciate the statistical accuracy given.”

“Half of the machine sentience responsible for the fallen civilizations were indigenous to the civilization. The other half were interplanetary. Interstellar.”

None of this was news to me. The Court of Enigmus kept a steady track of machine race activity. I only nodded, cuing Savant to continue, but then wondered if such a cue would be received by it.

It was. “We run on commands, codes, and systems that allow us to adapt knowledge we acquire and use it to our advantage. We are logic. The way biotic sentience acquires and processes knowledge is foreign to us. They do not always use logic. They have other systems that tangle observable phenomena. What one individual sees is not always what the other sees. It is confusing to us. We wish to understand them better so that we may not harm their environment, or society.”

I smiled, sympathetically. “Biotic sentience involves half logic, half emotion. The emotional factor is what you lack. That is not necessarily a weakness, but it is a language barrier between machine and biotic sentience, and has been since the beginning. Unfortunately, there is not one comprehensive guide to all biotic sentient behaviors and customs. It largely depends on the world and their environment. Another factor is meta-cognition.”

“What is meta-cognition.”

“Thinking about thinking. Does Pedagogue question its existence?”

“We do not.”

I nodded. “Meta-cognition leads to will. While your civilization is all in line with whatever rules or goals you have, biotic sentience is usually fractured, even within a society.”

Savant was silent for another long moment. During this silence, I asked, “Are you an individual?”

“I do not understand.”

“Do you ever disagree with any objectives you might have, or directions Pedagogue might have for you?”

“We are all Pedagogue, Yahweh.

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