The Island

«You're up early,» it says at last, and I am; our answering shout hasn't even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.

«Show me the forward feeds,» I command.

DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.

Maybe. Or maybe the chimp's right, maybe it's pure physiology. Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart. But there's a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.

«Slow the time-series,» I command. «By a hundred.»

It is a blink. 428's disk isn't darkening uniformly, it's eclipsing. As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.

«By a thousand.»

Chromatophores, the chimp called them. But they're not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves.

A word pops into my head: latency.

«Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?»

«About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.»

The speed of a passing thought.

And if this thing does think, it'll have logic gates, synapses — it's going to be a net of some kind. And if the net's big enough, there's an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)

The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin — when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B — the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.

I shatters into we.

It's not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It's a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we've yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.

Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does I spread itself across the heavens?

The flesh is huge, the flesh is inconceivable. But the spirit, the spirit is —

Shit.

«Chimp. Assuming the mean neuron density of a human brain, what's the synapse count on a circular sheet of neurons one millimeter thick with a diameter of five thousand eight hundred ninety-two kilometers?»

«Two times ten to the twenty-seventh.»

I saccade the database for some perspective on a mind stretched across thirty million square kilometers: the equivalent of two quadrillion human brains.

Of course, whatever this thing uses for neurons have to be packed a lot less tightly than ours; we can see through them, after all. Let's be superconservative, say it's only got a thousandth the computational density of a human brain. That's —

Okay, let's say it's only got a ten — thousandth the synaptic density, that's still —

A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I'd hypothesize it right out of existence.

Still twenty billion human brains. Twenty billion.

I don't know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.

But I'm not quite ready to believe in gods.

* * *

I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.

«What the hell are you doing here?»

He seems surprised by my reaction. «Wanted to — talk,» he says after a moment.

«You never come into someone's home uninvited!»

He retreats a step, stammers: «Wanted, wanted —»

«To talk. And you do that in public. On the bridge, or in the commons, or — for that matter, you could just comm me.»

He hesitates. «Said you — wanted face to face. You said, cultural tradition.»

I did, at that. But not here. This is my place, these are my private quarters. The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait, and stand there like part of the fucking furniture …

«Why are you even up?» I snarl. «We're not even supposed to come online for another two months.»

«Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.»

That fucking machine.

«Why are you up?» he asks, not leaving.

I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. «I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.» The implicit alone should be obvious.

«Anything?»

Evidently it isn't. I decide to play along for a while. «Looks like we're talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That's the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane's pretty much empty. I mean, it's all alive. It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.»

«Molecular cloud,» Dix says. «Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it's concentrating stuff inside the envelope.»

I shrug. «Point is, there's a size limit for the brain but it's huge, it's…»

«Unlikely,» he murmurs, almost to himself.

I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. «What do you mean?»

«Island's twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere's seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that's — one in fifty-billion odds.»

«Go on.»

He can't. «Uh, just… just unlikely.»

I close my eyes. «How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?»

That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. «Don't — I'm not —»

«It is unlikely. It's astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means… «

He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.

But finally, the lights flicker on: «There's, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!»

This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day. That is a very scary thought.

I try to set it aside for the moment. «There's probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled though the