Page 44 (1/2)
“I don’t have time for this, Grandress”
“When ave her two pieces of advice Do you knohat they were?”
Senna’Nir sighed It was no use trying to bully a VI They didn’t have enough emotional capacity to feel the pressure of time or necessity “What were they?”
Whick-snick, went the sound of her whittling “I said to her: Be the soul of warht”
The ancient quarian beamed at him, her sun-baked face full of pride “You are very welcome, Grandson”
“I didn’t say thank you”
“But I have solved your problem for you You would say thank you if the youth had the ave a scrubmouse with a fever”
“I don’t see how” Senna’s heart sank Another of these koans of hers Another go fish Her iterative thinking process was prone to them, but he had hoped, perhaps foolishly, for the plainspoken truth He put his head in his hands, rubbing his teh his suit’s mesh “I’m sorry I just don’t understand Can’t you explain yourself? Just this once?”
Liat’Nir sat forward in her rocking chair with a sharp gleaenious, really” She held up the object she had been whittling
It was a lemek worm, a desert vermiform species of old Rannoch He had seen pictures of them Small and slender and covered in metallic rose-colored scales You could cut therow into new les of its body Liat’Nir had been carving a ith two heads She spoke briskly, businesslike, not at all like his grand to her superiors
“Per your instructions, I have not interfaced directly with the Keelah Si’yah so as not to contaminate my code base, so you will understand this is only a hypothesis, but it fits the evidence, and when you access the core, I believe you will find I am correct It is a woranic system crash is much faster and more holistic By now, it would all have simply shut down and tried to retro-boot itself into a clean save state A progra exactly as it was told Unfortunately for you, grandson of mine, over the last nearly six hundred years, it has had to improvise in order to obey those very basic instructions”
“The computer virus is alive? Sentient?”
“Don’t be stupid Did I raise a drooling fool? Of course not But the nature of a virus is to be adaptable Anyone who creates one knows it will at soned to annihilate it, and it must have some rudimentary defense mechanism, or none of us would ever have technical support issues to force our grandmothers to mend on holidays like old socks, hn friend, when it was born, it received two pieces of advice Two instructions hich to interact with the world around it” Liat held up one arthritic finger “One: raise the temperature” She held up another “Two: cover your tracks It is that second one that is causing us so an to pace Liat had been a great one for lecturing in her day The cigarette appeared in her gli “The first is sih—raise the temperature on X nuion in a set population—just enough to allow the barest of physical processes to take place Then, any infectious agent introduced froin the replication process But cover your tracks— ah, there is a pernicious little bosh’tet of a coh—boons from the affected pods But the second any infected person leaves those pods, well, then our wee friend must spread in order to cover up their existence, make thera, frole or that, every tiet it to detect a probleained access to a new systerandson I aure it out The only tracks in the sand it left was its effects—the sublio hold Anyone infected cannot be seen, because they are evidence How does it know? An elevated tee that can be apprehended by the internal scans would i the scans The ship is not blind, she is mute She knows, she just can’t tell you”
“Grandmother, why have you never explained yourself so clearly before? If you could talk to me like this, why all the riddles?”
Her face set into itself stubbornly “You never asked Manners, young man Manners”