Ingenious

By Michael McCloskey

Nine mysterious Spinners silently seize control of deep space stations millions of miles from Earth.

But what do they want? And will anyone be able to stop them?

Ingenious is the third book of the Synchronicity Trilogy. Its events are concurrent with events in Insidious and Industrious. I'd like to thank the many readers of Insidious and Industrious for following me through the trilogy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael McCloskey
• Release date: Jul 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9780615506463

Michael McCloskey

I am a software engineer in Silicon Valley who dreams of otherworldly creatures, mysterious alien planets, and fantastic adventures. I am also an indie author with over 140K paid sales plus another 118K free downloads.

Book preview

Ingenious

Michael McCloskey

Copyright 2011 Michael McCloskey

Published by Michael McCloskey at Smashwords

ISBN: 978-0615506463

Cover art by Brom

Special thanks to Kazó Csaba for many

suggestions which improved this edition.

Talent does what it can; Genius does what it must.

—Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Prologue

A beautiful blue planet hurtled through endless darkness. The light of a yellow star warmed the outer layers of its vast cloudy atmosphere, filtering ever deeper, growing ever feebler as the density steadily increased. The air surrounding the planet grew thicker layer after layer, finally blurring the lines between gas and liquid. At the center lay an iron-deficient core: this planet was notably less dense than most.

Countless simple creatures of the planet enjoyed the wide open sky and the star’s warmth. Tiny floaters with semi-transparent bodies rotated about, collecting food from the kilometer-long vines that grew in long ropy clusters floating in the sky. Slightly larger round creatures with long, thin legs and small wing membranes jumped about after the floaters. The jumpers had gaping mouths and single wide eyes to lead them to their food. Vast tentacled plants caught and ate what they could, propelled up and down through the layers on massive gasbags.

Millions of meter-wide spheres of metal and processed carbon floated gently among the long green vines and tiny creatures of the planet. Like their ancestors, they had eight thin flagella spaced around their equator, although they no longer needed such primitive means to propel them about in a rapid spinning motion.

Below most of the Spinners, sunken deep into the thick atmosphere below, floated vast elegant buildings of red and silver. There was no abrupt transition from gas to liquid, only a gradual increase in density all the way down. The buildings rested upon a heavier fluid layer covering the entire planet.

The Spinners seldom moved. There was little to interest them here in Reality0: the root existence. They had long ago moved on to live most of their lives in new virtual worlds.

The first of those virtual worlds was Reality1, a ruleset designed to painstakingly emulate Reality0. It mimicked the root reality to a fidelity that made the race feel completely at home. It had been designed as a perfect replacement for Reality0.

But the Spinners had quickly found what they really wanted was not a perfect replacement. The root existence held annoyances, mundanities, and flaws. Why recreate the nuisances and grinding dull aspects of the root existence?

Eventually the Reality1 ruleset fell from use as more and more Spinners realized it was not any more valid a ruleset than any other in virtual worlds. It was just for reliving past experiences that any of them ever entered a challenge using it. It even simulated archaic activities such as feeding, resting, and getting sick.

Other, more fantastic realities were constructed by artisan mathematicians specifically to avoid the restrictions that Reality1 forced upon their inhabitants. At first the new rulesets simply allowed residents to bend or break physical laws or avoid the discomforts of Reality1. Then, more complete rulesets emerged with their own comprehensive physical laws. Slowly, the new realities became so different they would have been incomprehensible by the Spinners’ ancestors.

Within a virtual world running on a recent ruleset called by a name no non-Spinner could understand, two long-time rivals faced off against each other. These were the two that would come to be called Captain and Slicer by the creatures of a different star system.

The ruleset was the point of some considerable debate. It contained random aspects which were not predictable by the inhabitants. The challenge rules were similarly troubling to most Spinners, because they contained rules which were not known to the players at the onset of the match. Furthermore, some of the rules known at the onset could turn out to be false.

Captain and Slicer found such matches suited them. They were the pioneers of a sliver of the society that believed rulesets and challenges did not have to be completely revealed to the players a priori. They relished the added element of discovery and surprises– even unpleasant surprises—that came with this paradigm.

The two Spinners had not played the challenge before. They were both thrust into it and forced to absorb the ramifications of their new world as they confronted each other in it. Thousands watched the two highly ranked Spinners as they started.

The challenge put before them consisted of an imaginary sphere, divided into thousands of discrete layers of gas, in many ways like their home planet, only even more fantastic in its atmospheric complexity. The ruleset wrapped around itself such that if one proceeded ever deeper through the layers, towards the center of the sphere, rather than reach the center, one would eventually come back to where one had started. Within this atmosphere, each player controlled a set of buoys in realtime.

The buoys could detect other buoys by sending out a ping, but the layers were opaque to the ping: each ping could only find those within their thin layer of the sphere, and only at great energy cost. Any buoy whose exact location was known could be destroyed by another buoy within range, even across the layers.

The buoys were given instantaneous communication with each other, so that a buoy location discovered by one was known to all its allies.

There were also neutral buoys, which seldom moved. These buoys did often ping as energy allowed, and they would fire on buoys they discovered.

Most buoys started with no energy. They slowly charged themselves up from background energy emitted in the ether. A buoy could only hold so much energy. By design, a buoy could hold exactly enough energy to enter a new layer, emit one ping, and fire one deadly blast of its weapon.

Upon shallow examination of these facts, both Slicer and Captain noted that a fully charged buoy could be used offensively with little chance of failure: it could enter a new level, then immediately ping its surroundings, detect another buoy within that layer, and destroy it. Thus if a player was the first to pounce upon an occupied layer, it could remove one of the enemy buoys without reprisal. A buoy holding its position in a layer could not ping very often. Its energy grew slowly and the infrequent ping would not often detect an attacker at just the right moment. It seemed unlikely that the non-moving neutral buoys could put up much of a fight.

The Spinners both set to moving their few energized buoys about in the hundreds of layers, searching and destroying other buoys. Switch layers and ping. Recharge. Move and ping.

A buoy had the energy to move across more than one layer at once, but to do so meant expending the larger amounts necessary to either ping or fire.

Thus began a game of cat and mouse through the layers. Each buoy became a tool of search and destroy. Neither side dared to let their buoys stay idle, since victory seemed slanted to the attacker, provided a buoy was fully charged.

First Slicer and then Captain found and killed one of the other’s buoys. Then Slicer found and killed another as well as a neutral buoy.

When Captain encountered and destroyed a neutral buoy, it discovered a hidden rule—if more than one buoy of a single player rested on the same level, then one buoy masked the others. Thus a trap could be set because the surviving buoy could kill the attacker. Captain lost its buoy to the counter of a second neutral buoy in the layer.

Captain began deploying its buoys in pairs. When Slicer came upon another of Captain’s buoys and destroyed it, Captain used its second to retaliate. Slicer thought it was simply another buoy in range that had retaliated, so Slicer did not immediately notice the rule.

Captain’s trap worked again. Then Slicer learned and countered with groups of three. The entire game became trade off of spread. Sparse deployment granted superior observation of the enemy’s distribution; clustering offered superior killing power.

Both Spinners altered their strategy thus: several lone probes to discover the enemy, and one kill group of all the rest to stamp the enemy out. They lost their scouts to the occasional neutral cluster, but they persisted.

When the inevitable confrontation came with two kill groups in a single layer, Captain had one more buoy and it wiped Slicer out in that layer. That left Captain with three buoys and Slicer with two.

Captain moved one buoy across many layers at once, discovering Slicer’s two remainders and destroying its own buoy for knowledge of Slicer’s position. Slicer moved one. Captain guessed which one and destroyed the other. Slicer was down to one buoy. The buoys kept moving. Slicer found one and killed it off, making the game even again. Captain then guessed where Slicer had moved from there, knowing Slicer had limited energy and limited options. Captain used energy to move a buoy across several layers without pinging, and then waited to gather energy long enough for the final ping and kill.

Captain was victorious. Synthetic pleasure rushed through its system. The win brought it one step closer to another replication.

What Captain did not know at that moment was that its victory brought a disastrous level of notoriety.

One

Ship approached the space station. Ship was not large, only a flattish dart the size of a small bus. It was dwarfed by the mass of the huge station. Nevertheless it closed the distance fearlessly.

Ship moved to within ten meters of the station’s surface. It had scanned the structure at great distance, and knew exactly where to go. It skirted the irregular skin of the station until a pair of large metal bay doors sat before it.

The primitive systems that controlled the bay doors were easily subverted by resetting their state using an EM effector. The doors opened. Ship slid gracefully inside, then shut the doors.

We have arrived, Ship told its unwilling passengers.

Nine spheres rested within tight compartments along the spine of the vessel. There were no empty compartments; the vessel had been designed by the Prime Intelligence to hold exactly nine. Each sphere was a little over a meter in diameter. They each had eight slender arms wrapped around the central mass.

Abruptly these arms unlimbered themselves. The spheres spun out of their berths like angry wasps emerging to answer an attack. But other than Ship, the bay was empty. Around the perimeter of the bay, smaller doors led deeper into the space station.

Captain shot toward the nearest alien portal. It spun effortlessly in the airless room, deforming the gravity field of its internal singularity to accelerate itself in any direction it wished. Its cybernetic body fed more mass into the microscopic singularity in its internal energy stirrup to cover the heavy energy cost of manipulating the gravitic field. The stirrup held the singularity in place and harvested energy from radiation emitted by superheated material as it neared the event horizon.

Captain’s dominant lobe, Captain-L3, assigned problems to several other lobes of its octolaterally symmetrical brain.

Captain-L1 scanned the structure of the tiny electronic blocks embedded in the material of the wall.

Captain-L6 analyzed the protocols being used by the blocks to communicate to each other.

Captain-L7 studied the hardware supporting the protocols, making special note of weaknesses that existed external to the protocols.

Captain-L8 started to listen to local transmissions, so it could translate them to learn more about this race and what occupied their time in Reality0.

Captain-L1: The fastest way to subvert these weak little modules is to remotely set them into a state favorable to us. Then I am instantly recognized and obeyed.

Captain-L3: At great energy cost. It will still be economical to develop a suite of tools to spread control using their own primitive communications system.

Captain-L1-8: Consensus.

Captain-L3 used a cybloc model provided by Captain-L7 to choose a state where it was recognized as a superuser. The state authorized all previous users on a temporary expiring basis, so that the native lifeforms wouldn’t notice any irregularities as long as they didn’t examine the cybloc carefully.

Then the Spinner used its field effector to remotely change the charges inside the cybloc to put it into the desired state. Services appeared in Captain’s link emulator. Captain asked the door to open.

It did.

A burst of air escaped into the bay. Captain found the pressurization control and equalized the pressure on both sides of the next lock door, then opened it as well.

We must demonstrate our superiority to the natives, Captain said. It used a small directional effector to communicate to the other Spinners without making any sound. Extra caution is advisable. This is, after all, Reality0.

I defer participation, one of the other Spinners said.

You cannot defer, Slicer said. You are truly so ignorant of your root reality?

Information began to flow from Ship to Captain about the civilization around this star. Captain attacked the data like a challenger studying a ruleset. As it started to take it in, one thing became very clear: The civilization before them was primitive, on the cusp of becoming fully automated. Thus by necessity, it operated mostly in Reality0.

Captain-L4: That is going to be a problem.

Captain-L2: <Despair analog>.

Captain-L4: Most Spinners cannot operate here. Already one of them balks. I will have to clarify.

Captain-L3: Forcefully. Reality0 is not a kind host.

Captain-L1-8: Consensus.

I will now demonstrate, Captain said. Lend me your full attention.

The reluctant Spinner wrapped its legs around itself and went dormant. Its mind was elsewhere.

It does not truly grasp our situation, Slicer transmitted. It is perhaps too young.

Agreed, Captain replied. And it’s not just that one. Others in the group will suffer as well.

Thus your demonstration?

That is my intention, Captain said.

Captain addressed the other Spinners.

Reality0 may be long derelict by our race, but some of us still remember it. I have experienced it. Two of my replicas have experienced it. And, long absent from root as I have been... I still hold its importance in mind.

Captain activated its particle emitter and composed a thousand cutter molecules. The material was like a thousand long slices of diamond one atom thick. Its emitter launched the