*Chapter Seven: In-Effable*
Tentacles. Why did it have to be tentacles?
Sorry, couldn't resist the line. Let me back up a tad.
--
Rain. Mud. Breathing hard. Pedaling as hard as I could. Trees, then slabs of metal. Trying not to think about what was going to happen to Laura; not succeeding. Body-warmth, from Joe riding behind me. Sniffing the air for hints of danger.
Shoreline. No deer. Canoe. Frantic moments loading it, packing AIs in water-tight bags, pulling on pull-cord life-belts, pushing it into the water, jumping in. Paddling - it had been over a year since my last canoe trip, by my memory, but the motions still familiar. Joe in front, using his own blade to push the water back. I sat in back, both paddling and steering. Quickly learning to work with the other, each of our paddles on opposite sides, switching at the same times.
Wasn't thinking especially clearly. Focusing on one pedal-push, one step, one paddle-sweep.
Shoreline on our right. Lake to our left - and, in the distance, Toronto. Maybe seven kilometers an hour. Maybe a hundred forty to Rochester - but all that was important was getting as far as we could, as fast as we could, before night fell.
Sun was hidden, but dropping behind us.
Sound under the boat - brushing against an obstacle.
Tumbling forward - boat suddenly stopped, I hadn't. Splashes. Joe missing. Pulled myself up on the slats.
Something else pulled itself up beside me.
--
I yanked a knife from a pocket and swept it sideways. The blade hit the writhing shape with a brief gouge, then a sharp clack, metal hitting metal.
More of them were wrapping around the fore half of the canoe, pulling it down, into the water.
No sign of Joe.
I dove into the water, with vague hopes of making it to shore.
Immediately, my legs were enwrapped, and I was pulled down - and down more, the glimmer of the surface light getting further and further out of reach above.
I started running through an inventory, of what I could use to free myself - the tape-bots couldn't tase the tentacles without also getting me, I didn't have anything sharp enough to cut off my own legs - and was pulling out a couple more knives for a last-ditch try at stabbing what had grabbed me, when another tentacle wrapped around my head. More specifically, around my mouth, forcing my jaw open.
And air started bubbling out of it.
I paused in my jabbing in surprise - at which time my arms were grabbed, too.
Since the only limbs I still had under my control were twitching my tail and wiggling my ears, I did the only things I could do: I breathed. And I watched.
--
The water wasn't especially clear, and the tentacles curled around; I couldn't even tell if they emerged from the same base, or multiple bases, or were independent snake-like things. The way my lapine jaw was constructed, if I turned my head, my lips broke their seal and I lost some air.
About the only reason I wasn't /completely/ panicking was that air - animals didn't need their prey to stay alive. But when I saw that several of the tentacles did have a base, surrounding a parrot-like beak, and my feet (or paw and hoof if you prefer) were being inexorably pulled towards it, I was quite willing to lose my air to start struggling again.
It didn't make much difference.
Like sliding into a sleeping bag, I was fed into the beast, my hands the last to be swallowed.
--
Somewhat to my surprise, as soon as I was completely swallowed, the cavity I was in ballooned with breathable air. 'Balloon' being a relative term, since I was compressed like the filling of a sausage. If it weren't for my shiny new lantern ring, I wouldn't have even been able to tell the whole cavity wasn't completely skin-tight.
There wasn't much for me to do; I couldn't bend my elbows, so I couldn't reach my vest. I could try giving Scorpia or one of the tape-bots an order, but... well, even if they /could/ do something to help me get myself up-chucked, I was near the bottom of a lake, probably getting deeper and further from shore with every wriggle and sway of my encasement... and whatever had me, seemed sufficiently uninterested in my demise to simply fill the space with nerve gas.
My best guess - I'd been herded. A broad sweep of dangerous toxins from the south, one or more traps waiting in the north.
I spared a few moments of thought for Joe, hoping he'd escaped, or at least been kept alive.
I checked the time on Scorpia, told her to give me a beep every five minutes, then turned off my ring to save its battery.
--
Twenty-five beeps and just over two hours later, the squid (or octopus, or nautiloid, or whatever) changed its regular motions, and I prepared myself for something to happen.
I wasn't exactly prepared to be forced out of the beak and into a beaker.
Well, more of a hamster tunnel. A cylinder, it looked to be clear but there didn't seem to be anything to see outside, bigger than the stomach but not big enough to turn around in. I could see behind me, the beak had already vanished, replaced by some sort of hemisphere end-cap.
I had no idea how fast squid could swim. I had even less idea how fast giant squid who could provide breathable air in their stomachs could swim. I tried running a Fermi estimate, trying to guess figures that would be too low or too high... but I had so little data to go on, my estimates were so broad that I could be anywhere in Lake Ontario.
I coughed and grunted, and my voice sounded normal, so the air I was breathing couldn't be too far from a standard mixture, which meant I wasn't in one of the deeper areas. Well, I'd seen some of the wunder-materials that had been available to random students shortly pre-Singularity - maybe there was a way to apply them to keep a low-pressure environment in high-pressure water. Though that probably wouldn't work inside the squishy insides of a living (or at least flexible) squid-thing. How deep did you have to get before nitrogen narcosis started? Fifty feet? A hundred? So if the water around me was muddy, I was probably reasonably close to shore; if I could get out, and I wasn't deep enough to get the bends going up, I just might be able to float face-up and do a back-stroke to get to shore.
Not that I'd be able to do any of that hanging out in this tube. So I crawled forwards.
After just a few body-lengths, I emerged into... well, 'a habitat' would be a fair description. A glass-ish hemisphere, maybe six of my body-lengths across (and three high), the flat bottom made of something spongy like cork. Calling the tunnel I came out of twelve o'clock, at three o'clock was a pool of clear water, at six o'clock a big pile of floppy moss (or some reasonable facsimile), and at nine o'clock was a short hill with a dent in the top and a certain whiff about it. Scattered throughout the place were blocks, about a meter across, of painted wood or multicolored plastic. I poked at one, and it wasn't especially heavy.
Dangling on a short cord from the middle of the ceiling, well out of reach, were a few apples tied together. I hadn't eaten since getting eaten myself, and was feeling hungry; it would be easy enough to stack enough of them to make a staircase.
I pushed at one block... and paused. I looked around at the dome I was in. I sat on the block, crossed my arms, and thought a bit; then I thought some more.
--
I questioned my conclusion that the squid-capturing thing was connected to the nerve gas launchers. The latter seemed to know I was an intelligent being; somehow, they'd figured out my plan to get from the nano-pool I'd gotten my hoof to the factory. (The people of the Great Peace weren't necessarily /bad/, even if they were quite foreign, and I hoped the intelligence-gathering hadn't been too harsh on them.) The squid and this environment were treating me more like I was some sort of critter. (Admittedly, I had the fur, ears, tail, facial structure, scent, paw and hoof that regular humans didn't...)
It was still possible they were linked - but I had to at least take seriously the possibility they weren't. This habitat looked like it was a basic intelligence test, to see if I was at least as smart as a chimp.
The trouble with that was that if I passed, then whoever was running the test would think I was at least as smart as a chimp.
And if whoever was in charge here knew so little about humanoids that they could mistake me for a chimp...
I took an inventory of the personal items I'd been left with, considered what I had available to me in the dome... and went to work.
--
Voyager's first-contact golden record was a nice inspiration - but I had different materials to work with, and a somewhat different goal in communication. With ten meter-sized blocks, I had somewhere between ten and sixty meter-across panels to work on, depending on how they were arranged, and I had plenty of knives in my pockets to scratch onto their surfaces with.
I started with simple numbers. A table that showed the numbers from zero to twelve, represented in different ways: a collection of dots; the number in binary; a hybrid symbol that was based on Arabic numerals but stylized so that each digit had that number of internal angles; Arabic digits; and the number written as an English word (though in the Toledo Free Press's one-letter-per-sound alphabet).
I stuck with the standard digits for basic math. Equality, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division (using the line-and-two-dots symbol instead of confusing the format with fractions), exponents, the decimal point, negative numbers, imaginary numbers. I listed out the numbers from one to one hundred forty-four, scratched out all the non-primes, and circled all the primes. I showed off approximations of the famous numbers pi, e, and phi, and some Pythagorean triples.
From math, I moved to physics. I stuck with Voyager's idea of the basic length and time unit being based on photons emitted from the 'hyperfine transition of the hydrogen atom' - a phrase I only knew /because/ of Voyager's use - which worked out to about twenty-one centimeters, which I titled a 'span', and zero point seven nanoseconds, which I called a 'tick'. (I reverse-engineered these numbers by recalling that the 'hydrogen line' was one point four two gigahertz, and the speed of light to three significant digits.) A rough diagram of myself showed that I was just over seven spans tall - eight, including my ears. One Earthly day was about one point two times ten to the fourteen ticks, and one year about four point four times ten to the sixteen ticks.
I threw in words for colors by converting their wavelengths into spans - green was about two and a half millionths of a span - and shapes.
In the physics part, I'd used a certain symbol for hydrogen - a one in the middle, surrounded by a circle, with a tick-mark at the top. Moving onto chemistry, oxygen was an eight, surrounded by a circle with two tick-marks, surrounded by another circle with six more. Putting those together, I was able to get water. (I even remembered that the angle between the hydrogens in H2O was more than ninety degrees - one hundred four, if I remembered right from an old Brin novel.) This also gave me a mass-unit; one cubic span of water, which, if my mental math was right, was about nine kilograms or twenty pounds, which I dubbed a 'stone'. (Another self-diagram indicated that I weighed about seven stones.) I listed the standard components of the atmosphere - seventy-eight parts nitrogen, twenty parts oxygen, one part argon, one part water, by volume.
Geology was a rough diagram of the continents, and Earth's mass of six point six times ten to the twenty-third stones. Biology showed the chemical formulas of sucrose, cellulose, and some nucleotides, a spiral of DNA, and a few more self-pictures with various parts labelled.
Now I was getting into the tricky parts. The previous stuff was easy enough to remember and work out, given my voracious pre-demise reading habits and triple-checking my math. But even in my own memory, it had been a couple of decades since I'd really thought about how to build the next parts up from their absolute basics. I started by drawing a half-picture, half-diagram of a simple electric circuit. Since I had symbols for chemistry, I was able to label the elemental components of a battery, wires, a switch, and an incandescent light-bulb (though I had to go back a few panels to describe vacuum). Then I had to pause and think for a while to get my memories as straight as possible about the components of a vacuum tube, which, depending on the details, could be a diode, or more importantly a triode; but I got that down. And once I had the triode, I had a logic gate, which gave me the symbols I needed to implement Boolean logic. I started with a half-adder, then re-derived a full-adder, and then from the name, worked out a flip-flop memory circuit. I didn't try working out a full computer system, just enough parts to show I understood the concept. (Though I did decide that if I was stuck there for a while, working that out would be a nice way to pass the time.)
All of which led up to what I considered the most important part of the message. I had math, and logic, and stored memory, and variables. Now I was carving out a description of computation. Specifically, I worked out how to describe a simple two-player game, with its inputs and outputs, one called the 'Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma'. I used a stick-figure of myself to indicate one player, and a stick-figure squid for the other. And I described the strategy that the stick-bunny used to play - "Tit-for-tat" - which, in short, meant that whatever the squid-player did on one turn, the bunny-player would do on the next turn.
--
Knives weren't the most elegant writing tools, and I didn't want to make too many assumptions about the visual acuity of whatever was watching me; so it took sixteen block-sides to get to that final statement, spread across eight blocks. I lined those eight blocks up, corner-to-corner, facing an empty part of the dome's window.
I sat on one of the remaining cubes, and waited a while.
After half an hour, I shrugged to myself, and started passing the time by trying to think of any other concepts I might have in common with a squid, and creating a picture dictionary of them.
After a couple more hours of that, I stretched out on the soft, mossy section, hid my eyes from the seemingly sourceless light in the inside of my elbow, and tried to get some sleep.
--
I woke to a slight scraping sound. Peeking out from under my elbow, I couldn't quite make out what was going on until I pulled my glasses out of my pocket.
A half-dozen tentacles were sliding in and out of the entry tunnel.
I tensed, but they weren't coming anywhere close to me. One had pulled the fruit from the top of the dome, another was carrying a bundle of more fruit to join it in the middle of the room. Some were carrying out the blocks I'd spend the previous day carving, and it looked like they were being set down just outside the dome. And some were bringing in new blocks... several of which had new carvings.
I waited for the back-and-forth to finish, and the tentacles to withdraw, before taking a closer look.
I was wrong, before, in calling the locals 'squids' - their self-portraits showed them with curled shells, like nautiluses. Unlike the nautiluses I recalled, their measurements in spans and stones made them several times bigger than I was.
I paused in my inspection to use the facilities, such as they were, and start munching on the apples as I examined the blocks.
The new carvings were a lot neater than my original ones. There were expansions to the initial systems I described - more complicated math, subatomic particles, a map of Lake Ontario, and more, most with label-arrows but blank labels I could fill in - but I only gave them a cursory glance. I soon found what I was looking for: the Prisoner's Dilemma section.
Their reply took up more than one block.
It took me a while to briefly through the 'program' they used to describe the nautiloid player's actions, a longer while to carefully read it, and even longer for me to work through the logic to gain an understanding. It was a /lot/ more complicated than 'tit-for-tat', that was for certain; and required a much more powerful imaginary computer to run on. It didn't help that the thing was recursive, and quite possibly required an /infinitely/ powerful computer to run.
Eventually, I decided I'd grasped the basic mechanisms well enough to explain them to myself in plain English. In short, for every turn of the game, the nautiloid program worked through every possible program the other player might run, and kept track of which such programs matched the other player's actions so far. It weighted the programs by how short they were - in binary terms, a nine-bit program was deemed to have half the score of an eight-bit program. Then the program generated every possible program, /again/, only this time it ran them against the programs that it had determined the other player might be using; determined what the program that generated the optimal scoring would be; and, finally, implemented that program's result for the current turn.
In much shorter, the nautiloid's approach wasn't just a single strategy, it was to test every possible strategy and choose the best one. Compared to that, my description of tit-for-tat was a child's scribble.
My goal with bringing up the Prisoner's Dilemma in the first place was, to whatever extent that the nautiloids' psychology was understandable by a human, was to try to make human psychology understandable to a nautiloid. In particular, that piece of human psychology which could be described as 'retaliation'; if they did something unpleasant to me, I'd do something unpleasant in return.
The trickier - and much, /much/ more important - part was, how much could I read into the reply? That they would choose the optimal course, regardless of any particular notions of justice, revenge, trust, or reciprocality? Could I interpret it as them implying that they had significant computational resources to figure out the optimal course for any strategy, or was that too much inference on too little data?
Neither Joe nor the rest of the Great Peace had given me any indication that these nautiloids existed; which might mean that they were completely unaware of them; or they thought that the nautiloids were simple animals; or that the nautiloids had been deliberately hiding their existence from the Great Peace, much like the Great Peace had been absorbing every person who wandered into their territory (at least, until I came along).
Were there more nautiloids in the other Great Lakes, or the oceans?
Was I going to spend the rest of my life - long or short - inside this bubble?
I realized that I had neglected to be very clear about my first message. Specifically, I hadn't described any real connection between the abstract scores of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and anything in the real world. For example, that I was unhappy that they'd limited my movement, split up me and Joe, deprived us of our possessions...
I needed to come up with a way to express the idea of possessions, of ownership, to a non-human species which, for all I knew, were completely communistic. Maybe they didn't mind if they lost a tentacle - but I wanted to make it abundantly clear that I had such a close connection to my own limbs that I'd vehemently object to their removal; and, if I was lucky, to use that to indicate the somewhat weaker connection between my self and my other possessions.
If I managed that, then I could try linking the loss of possessions to a negative score in a turn of the Prisoner's Dilemma game.
--
After taking a while to think, the best idea I had to work with such abstract concepts... was to use comics.
Of course, first I had to explain the very idea of a sequential series of images. Fortunately, we'd already established a time-unit, so the first few comics I drew were explicitly labelled about their timing. I also decided that in addition to panel borders, I'd also draw a border around each sequence, to make sure it was clearly separated from the others.
And thus I became the authour, artist, and for all I knew sole audience of 'The Adventures of Stick-Bunny'. The name only existed in my own head, and the 'Adventures' were exceedingly simple, even ignoring the fact that I tried to avoid using any significant changes of camera angle, abstract imagery, or other symbolism that might be hard to interpret. I did decide to include some words, since I was, after all, limited in my artistic tools.
One early script: 'Stick-Bunny saw an apple in a tree. The apple was too high. Stick-Bunny picked up a rock. Stick-Bunny threw the rock. The rock knocked down the apple. Stick-Bunny ate the apple.'
A slightly more advanced script: 'Stick-Bunny banged two rocks together. One rock became a knife. Stick-Bunny used the knife to do things she couldn't before. Stick-Monkey hit Stick-Bunny on the head with a stick. Stick-Bunny fell down. Stick-Monkey took the knife. Stick-Bunny got up. Stuck-Bunny got a vine. Stick-Bunny tied up Stick-Monkey. Stick-Bunny imagined/said a sub-comic strip: "Stick-Bunny untied Stick-Monkey. Stick-Monkey hit Stick-Bunny with another stick." Stick-Monkey imagined/said a sub-comic strip: "Stick-Bunny untied Stick-Monkey. Stick-Monkey gave Stick-Bunny an apple." Stick-Bunny imagined/said a sub-comic strip: "Stick-Monkey was tied up. Stick-Monkey was still tied up." Stick-Monkey imagined/said a sub-comic strip: "Stick-Bunny untied Stick-Monkey. Stick-Monkey ran far away." Stick-Bunny untied Stick-Monkey. Stick-Monkey ran far away.'
That was as far as I got before I ran out of empty block-sides to write on. I looked at the others, and debated with myself about filling in any of the blanks; but there were only a few that seemed relevant to the interaction between myself and the nautiloids, or which added useful vocabulary. I filled those in, then retired back to the moss-bed.
I rummaged through my pockets, and ended up pulling out a deck of cards that had survived reasonably intact, and a harmonica that was in perfect working order. My playing of the latter was as terrible as ever, but it passed the time as I dredged up memories of ways of playing with the former.
--
The next go-around, the nautiloids delivered piles of wooden tablets, which could simply have been disassembled blocks as far as I could tell.
The had some comics of their own, featuring Stick-Nautiloid and Stick-Cuttlefish interacting with rocks, edible fish, what I guessed was kelp, and other underwater features.
But more interestingly, they added an abstraction in their comics, in which Stick-Nautiloid and a particular object were drawn in circles connected by a dashed line; after which, Stick-Nautiloid would fight to keep that object out of Stick-Cuttlefish's tentacles, while ignoring Stick-Cuttlefish grabbing a nearly identical object. Whether that referred to ownership in any sense I understood it, or emotional attachment, or Stick-Nautiloid extending its sense of self to include those objects as well as its own body, I couldn't tell; but whatever the specific meaning might be, the general idea was there to see.
The next installment of the Adventures of Stick-Bunny were somewhat autobiographical, in that they showed Stick-Bunny acquiring, and getting the linking-circles with, various of the possessions I'd had as of the time of my first encounter with the tentacles: a tape-bot, my glasses, my cast, the canoe, and, after some hesitation about the variety of potential misinterpretations, Stick-Joe.
After some further consideration, I went back to a bit of basic science building, and drew up a basic Solar system. I didn't remember any of the other planets' masses, but did remember enough of Bode's Law to roughly estimate their orbital periods. And, for a few reasons, some of which were probably bad ones, I drew a pair of linking-circles between Stick-Bunny on Earth, and Mars' moon, Phobos.
After all, I wanted the nautiloids to understand me well enough to get them to let me go (and, if possible, work out any other beneficial arrangement that could be communicated); but if they thought they understood me /too/ well, they might take it into their minds to take hesitant conclusions as being too firmly proven, leading to difficulties all around. By throwing in the occasional unexpected surprise, such as claiming some sort of attachment to another planet's moon, that should, if I was thinking things through right, keep them from being too confident about their model of my future behaviour.
--
After those panels had been taken, and after about half an hour longer, I heard an actual sound at the entrance tunnel - and in just a few more moments, out of it crawled Joe. Behind him, the tentacles pushed the contents of the canoe into the dome - the canoe itself wouldn't have fit.
"Heya, Joe," I called out. "What've you been up to?"
"Climbing some stupid blocks to try to get enough fruit to eat. I see you've been doing something else. Is it your fault I got eaten again?"
"Probably. I told them that you're connected to me. Don't ask me yet if I told them that you're my friend, my pet, my husband, my employee, or what."
The byplay between Laura and Bunny is fun.
