Pattern Recognition

 “The exotic is not a monolith; two foreign cultures might be just as mysterious to one another as both are to oneself.”

—Grand Sorceress Apriza

It had been buried deep beneath the Realm ever since its creation. That was all that anyone knew about it.

Lutia stood at the edge of the strange chamber, studying its contents for perhaps the hundredth time. The vault was enormous, over thirty yards wide and at least a hundred long, supported by square pillars spaced at regular intervals. No lights illuminated the far end, leaving the back wall in deep shadow. There was something disturbingly liminal about the space; In some ways it was so familiar and yet in others so foreign. It resembled a Commonwealth office building, complete with drop ceiling and bare white walls. The floor was covered in a fibrous, compacted material which might once have been carpeting. A bank of windows ran along the front wall, clearly having once looked out on the surface of some unknown Realm, though at the moment they faced only featureless stone.

And yet the fine details were entirely wrong. The windows were slightly too thick and subtly tinted a greenish-amber shade found nowhere in the Commonwealth. The fibrous flooring might have been carpet-like, but it seemed to be a knitted material rather than a woven one. The walls were made of something which was not quite plaster, and coated in a substance which was not quite paint. The ceiling panels were not a fibrous composite, but solid boards of some pith-like plant material. The strangest thing, however, were the lights. They were some form of arc lamp, and those which still worked glowed a shade utterly unlike either incandescent or fluorescent bulbs.

Taken together, there was an underlying sense of wrongness to the space; the familiar form simply made the unfamiliar elements stand out all the more. Several members of the investigation team were so unsettled they would not enter the vault, and even Lutia found herself filled with a vague sense of unease.

The space had been discovered by pure chance; a deep mining operation prospecting for rare metals had broken though one of the vault’s walls. The shaft they had bored was deeper than any ever dug in the Realm, almost down to its very bottom. Such depths were rarely explored anywhere, and the last thing the miners had expected to find was an open cavity, let alone an obviously artificial vault.

Nor had those miners had been prepared for the sheer flurry of excitement their discovery had caused. No one in the Realm, seemingly, had any knowledge of the vault. More tellingly, the Realmlord himself had no knowledge of it. That alone was not impossible; while Realmlords held their individual domains stable, they rarely had perfect knowledge of everything within their influence. Yet constructing such a large space so deep beneath the surface would have been an enormous undertaking, and the Realmlord should have been at least vaguely aware of it. And so the investigators had reached the inevitable conclusion that it was something from before the Realm’s creation, caught up when the Realm had solidified from the fluid chaos of the Outlands.

It was what was inside the vault, however, that had truly drawn everyone’s attention. Banks of large cabinets filled the room, some waist-high, others stretching from floor to ceiling. Electronic machines. Computers.

That had been just over two weeks before. The response to the discovery had died down enough for a true investigation to begin.

“Ms. Lutia?”

Lutia was snapped out of her reverie by the voice. A slim woman in a grid-patterned shirt approached her.

“What is it, Cynthia? She asked.

Cynthia gestured around the room. “I’ve finished my basic survey,” she explained. “I count three hundred and thirty one machines in five distinct types. There are two floor-to-ceiling models, two waist-high models, and one type which seem to be a terminal of some kind.”

“What about data storage?” Lutia asked. “Did you find anything for that?”

“Yes and no,” Cynthia admitted. “There’s some kind of magnetic tapes, but nothing to read them. None of the cabinets has an obvious read mechanism of any kind. It’s possible that I missed something on the terminals, they’re the most complex of the cabinets, but as it is I can’t find anything.”

“It’s possible that those machines were carried away by the Outlands.” Lutia commented. “We don’t know how long this place was drifting before it was caught up in the Realm.” She shrugged. “Or maybe the machines are here and we just haven’t noticed them. Not surprising, given we’ve only been here for two days.”

“So, what are you thinking?” Cynthia asked. “Data center of some kind?”

Lutia frowned. “I don’t know. If it was a data center, I would expect more, well, data. It’s also a bit strange that we haven’t found any cables for remote access yet. A self-contained center can only be so useful. A research facility would be more likely, but even that’s just a guess.”

Lutia glanced around at the handful of investigators working their way between the machines. She counted eight others in the room, most of them clustered around the hole which had been roughly bored through the wall.

“Where’s Dan?” she asked.

“He found some kind of archive in the back corner,” Cynthia explained. “There’s print material, along with some of the data tapes. The tapes might be irrecoverable, but the print material seems alright.”

Lutia nodded in response. There were twenty members of the team in all, ranging from computer engineers to security personnel. No more than half of the investigation team was allowed into the vault at any given time. Even if the vault held nothing immediately dangerous, they had been hesitant to allow too many people inside for fear of causing inadvertent damage.

Dan and Cynthia were the only other civilian specialists on the expedition, if Lutia herself could even be considered a civilian in this case. Dan was an electronics engineer from the prestigious Galvin Institute, a seasoned professional with a decades-long career in chip design. Cynthia, on the other hand, was a commercial software developer, brilliant and with a youthful exuberance. None of the other expedition members had real names, simply one-letter designations. Mr. A was team leader, Ms. B was staff coordinator, Mr. C was chief of security and so on. Lutia and the civilians had worked most closely with Mr. J, a scientist who seemed uniquely knowledgeable about exotic electronics. Yet in spite of spending two days working together, they still knew absolutely nothing about him.

Lutia was not surprised that the blacksuits had become involved. Whenever ancient or unknown technology surfaced in the Commonwealth, the blacksuits would be close behind. Even though the Alirean wars had been over for decades, there was always the chance of a new conflict arising, and never more so than at the present moment. Any technological edge that they could retain might make all the difference. After all, it had been decisive once before.

And lastly there was Lutia. When it came to exotic, mysterious, or ancient computers, Lutia was unquestionably the Commonwealth’s highest authority. It was impossible for a mere human, or any organic being, to understand them so completely or so intimately.

Lutia had never met another aya, though she knew others of her kind existed outside of the Commonwealth. Beginning as little more than a computer program, she had ascended from her simplistic origin to become a fully sentient being, a self-observing magical construct sustained by the sheer power of her own will. Even in Realms such as Apothokos, with its millennia-long history of complex technology, such awakenings were rare, and in the Commonwealth almost unheard of. And yet, for all that she had evolved and developed since her awakening, at her core she was still partly that computer program created so long before. And that gave her an unmatched affinity for, and insight into, computer systems.

Lutia glanced around the vault once again, scanning the various cabinets. She was not quite certain what to make of the machines. Like the space which housed them, they were a disconcerting mix of familiar and strange. They looked so much like older models of Commonwealth mainframe computers, down to the monochrome panels and black trim of the cabinets. Yet the finer details marked them as something clearly not from the Commonwealth, or any known Realm for that matter. The panels were made of an unknown type of plastic, secured to their frames with some form of rivet rather than screws or snap-fittings. Those frames, in turn, were coated in the same not-quite-paint substance as the walls, giving them a sheen which was indefinably wrong.

“So,” Cynthia began conversationally, “Where do you think they come from?”

“Just about anywhere, as far as I’m concerned,” Lutia told her.

“Could they be Telitherian?” she suggested.

Lutia shook her head. “No, these machines don’t resemble my systems at all.”

“You were a shipboard A.I., not a ground station,” Cynthia pointed out. “Maybe this is different because it has a different purpose.”

“You don’t completely change your design philosophy between systems,” Lutia countered, “even if you’re working on a different architecture. No matter what your intended purpose is. It would be an enormous amount of effort for very little benefit. No, whatever this is, it’s something much more mysterious.”

Lutia could not blame Cynthia for suggesting Telithere as an origin. To the scientists of the Commonwealth, Telithere was still the font of all advanced technology, and their first instinct was to ascribe new discoveries to it no matter how little it matched what was known about the Realm. Even after its existence had been proven, it still held a mythical status within the Commonwealth.

The Ithir Synchrony had been the most technologically complex society of its era, and its downfall had been so absolute that it echoed down the millennia as the mythical “Telithere.” A small remnant of its technology had survived, albeit altered and diminished, in the ancient Realm of Apothokos. Yet the rest of the world had been plunged into a dark age of stone tools and constant struggles. It had taken thousands of years for the Realms to recover beyond that rudimentary level. Yet recover they had, ever so slowly, with many false starts and reversals. By the foundation of the Commonwealth they had been on the cusp of reinventing computers, and by the middle of the Alirean Wars primitive calculation machines had appeared. It was then, in the midst of a technological arms race, that a certain derelict Ithirian airship had been discovered.

The discovery of the ACS Resolution had been a historic turning point. The ship had been recovered, carrying with it ancient secrets from before the dawn of history. Its systems had been studied, reverse-engineered, and crude copies implemented across the Commonwealth.

And then that ship had met its fiery end in the skies above Driscar. After twenty thousand years, from its launch, to its abandonment, to its recovery, it had finally been destroyed. Yet while that had been the end of the Resolution, it had been merely the beginning for its shipboard A.I.. It had been the beginning for Lutia.

Cynthia frowned, seemingly mulling over what Lutia had told her. “If they’re not from Telithere, then where?”

“We don’t know,” Lutia admitted. “But hopefully studying this place can tell us something about that.” She ran a finger over the top of the nearest cabinets. “The biggest clue is going to be the machines themselves.” she said. “How they boot themselves up, how they run, and what they accomplish.” She turned back to regard Cynthia once again. “What do we know about the architecture of these devices?” she asked. “Anything yet?”

“Nothing, as far as I know,” Cynthia told her. “Supposedly Mr. J was going to extract and X-ray one of the chips and see if he could get a good image of its internal structure. You’d have to ask him if he has anything yet.”

“I’d like to see those results right away,” she told the software engineer. “The sooner I can start building diagrams, the sooner I can piece together what they’re supposed to do.”

“No need for that,” Dan said as he approached them out of the darkness, “I can tell you a fair amount about the architecture right now.”

Cynthia and Lutia turned toward him, identical looks of incredulity on both of their faces.

“How?” Lutia asked.

Dan held up something resembling a binder with metal plates for its front and back cover, opening it to show them its contents. Inside were pages of text printed in an unknown script, interspersed with sections of densely packed dots. The pages themselves did not appear to be paper, but rather some form of opaque and frosted polymer.

“This seems to be some kind of hard copy of a simple program,” he explained. “I can’t read most of it, but there’s sections in binary that are clearly machine code.”

Cynthia gaped at him. “You can tell the computer’s architecture from one program?”

Dan shrugged. “Programs are designed to run on hardware. I don’t need to see a diagram to know how a system works, just a list of machine commands.”

“Never mind that,” Lutia interjected, “what did you find?”

“Well,” Dan began, “first off, they’re not technically computers.”

Lutia frowned at that. “What do you mean?”

“Computers compute things,” he explained, “Some are more fancy than others, but at their heart they’re just glorified calculators that run longs lists of operations we call programs.” He flashed Lutia an apologetic smile. “No offense.”

Lutia shrugged off his apology, more interested in his explanation than his apologies. He was entirely correct, after all.

Dan flipped through the pages of the binder once again. “There aren’t any of the basic mathematical operations you would expect—they can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide. They seem to work more like the neural net models we’ve been experimenting with; the system takes weighted inputs and gives outputs based on a series of parameters. Its working memory isn’t exactly like what we understand as memory either, though it’s absolutely enormous. The main thing that’s stored directly are the tuned parameters. Everything else exists as a pattern within those parameters.” Dan closed the binder with a snap. “What we have here are highly advanced, highly specialized machines designed to recognize patterns.”

Cynthia raised a skeptical eyebrow. “They developed pattern recognition machines before computational engines? That seems backward.”

“Why not?” Lutia countered. “Technology isn’t strictly linear, it responds to circumstance. The Commonwealth, Telithere, and the Alirean Empire all developed computers because that’s what their environment called for. They needed machines able to perform mathematical calculations very quickly; it allowed for faster codebreaking by calculating all possible solutions to a cipher. It was only later that the scientific and research potential of the machines was put to use. But codes can also be broken by recognizing patterns within them, rather than by just brute forcing the cipher. If the Resolution had not been recovered and the Commonwealth had chosen to pursue different codebreaking techniques, they too might have developed machines like these. And that’s just one possibility; perhaps there was some cultural taboo surrounding automating calculations, perhaps their knowledge of mathematics was not as complex—or, quite the opposite, perhaps they had such a powerful mental capacity that machine calculators were redundant. Remember: those early computers provided savings of dozens or hundreds of man-hours of calculation, not billions or trillions. if the culture that created these machines had radically different needs, radically different worldviews, or radically different psychology, then it should be no surprise that their machines took on a radically different form.”

“What were those circumstances, I wonder?” Dan mused. “What kind of people—or beings—were they?”

Lutia sighed. “We might never know. It was pure chance that all of this ended up down here. It was pure chance any of it survived at all. This vault could very well be the last remnant of its culture. We don’t know where it came from or how long it was drifting through the Outlands. It might be little older than this Realm, or it might be thousands, or millions, or even billions of years old.”

Cynthia shuddered. “Something about that just feels unsettling.”

“It’s just how things are in the Outlands,” Lutia told them. “You never know how old something is unless you know its context.”

Cynthia gave a nervous laugh. “That doesn’t make it less unsettling.” The software engineer fidgeted “I guess because this place looks kind of familiar, and because the cabinets here feel so familiar, I imagined the creators as being something a lot like us. If they really are that ancient, though, then we might not have anything in common with them. Quay, we don’t even know if they were human!”

“There’s very little that we can know at this point,” Lutia reassured her.

“There is one way to know what these things do for certain,” Dan told them. “Though it’s not something I would necessarily advise just yet.”

“You mean just turning one of them on to see what it does?” Lutia replied. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. There’s a lot we could learn from it, but it’s too much of a risk.”

“What danger could they possibly cause?” Dan pressed. “They’re miles below the surface, and what’s more they would only have whatever power we gave them.”

“So did I, and I still tried to kill the people who reactivated me,” Lutia countered. “I had anti-intruder programs that were activated when I detected my salvagers. I only stopped because they cut off my power.”

“If there was a security system here, I think we would have found it by now,” Dan pointed out. “At the very least we should have found some trace of cameras or sensors for it.”

Lutia shook her head. “We can’t be certain it would look anything like what we expect. Until we know the machine we activate isn’t a security device, giving it power would be dangerous.”

“We could pull everyone out of here when we do it,” Dan insisted. “Even if it’s a risk, it’s a manageable one.”

“I have to agree with Dan,” Cynthia interjected. “We can pick apart programs for the next century, but until we can poke around on an actual machine and experiment with commands, we won’t have a complete picture.”

Lutia glanced from Dan to Cynthia and back again. Both of them seemed thoroughly determined to try. And, in spite of her misgivings, Lutia found herself agreeing with them. It was very true; theory and observations could only get them so far. They needed practical experience with the machines. The kind of practical experience which could only come from activating them to see what happened.

“We’ll need to ask Mr. A before we do anything,” Lutia declared. “This is something that could affect all of us, potentially very badly.”

“I assumed as much,” Cynthia replied. “Let us know what he says.”

Lutia frowned. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the one who suggested asking,” Dan explained. “And because you’re the only one that he might say yes to.”

Lutia considered that. No matter how hard she tried to think, she could not refute his logic. Her expertise did seem to hold slightly more sway over the blacksuits. Or perhaps it was simply her origin which held sway over them.

“Wait here,” she told them. “Don’t do anything while I’m gone.”

A glance passed between Dan and Cynthia before they turned back toward Lutia and nodded in unison. “Good luck!”

Mr. A was standing in the mouth of the tunnel just outside the vault, speaking with a group of three other blacksuits when Lutia found him. The conversation abruptly cut off as she approached. Mr. A turned toward her, one eyebrow raised.

“Yes, Ms. Lutia?” he greeted her. “Is there something you want?”

“We’ve completed some of our initial survey work,” Lutia told him. “Dan found some records that give insight into what kind of machines we’re dealing with here.”

“That’s good news,” Mr. A replied. After a few moments, he added, “is that all, or is there something more?”

“We want permission to try and activate one of the machines,” Lutia told him. “Not the entire room, just a singular device. We want to see if it operates the way we expect it to.”

Mr. A raised an eyebrow. “You want to activate a machine of unknown purpose and origin?”

“Yes, we know it’s risky,” Lutia told him. “I’m willing to take that risk, and so are both Cynthia and Dan. We can move all other personnel away from the vault and have someone ready to pull the power at any moment.”

“That isn’t the problem,” Mr. A replied.

Then what is?” Lutia countered. “We’ll need to test one of these machines eventually, and we can learn a great deal by watching it operate.”

“A system can still be dangerous even if it doesn’t try to attack us, Mr. A explained. “We don’t know what its purpose is, we don’t know how intelligent it is. I don’t want it collecting any kind of data on us before we can be absolutely certain what it gathers and what it’s capable of.”

“It can’t collect much data if it only observes me,” Lutia pointed out. “I’m a civilian, no part of my existence is classified. The only thing it can learn from our interaction is what kind of culture it has awakened in. That should not be enough to cause problems either way.” She fixed him with a firm, unblinking gaze. “I should know better than anyone what kind of data a salvaged system would collect.”

Mr. A continued to frown for several moments longer. “Alright,” he finally replied, “But we pull out all non-civilians from the room. And if this goes poorly, you’re responsible.”

Lutia nodded. “Thank you.”

Mr. A sighed. “I still think this is a bad idea, but I see your point. We’re here to investigate these machines, not just look at them.”

“What will happen to the machines once we’re done with our investigation here?” Lutia asked.

“The same as what happens to all recovered technology,” Mr. A stated. “They will be brought to one of our research facilities and fully analyzed. In time, some or their technology might be declassified and released to the Galvin Institute for further development.”

“And what about this space?” Lutia asked.

“It never existed,” Mr. A told her. “Once we’ve removed the last of the assets, the Realmlord will collapse it. The mining crew which made the discovery will be paid to remain silent and all corroborating evidence will be destroyed. There will be stories of it, naturally—with the excitement the mining crew caused we can’t hope to stop that—but without evidence and with enough misinformation, most people will come to the conclusion that it was a hoax done for publicity.”

“Collapse this space and you’ll lose a lot of valuable context,” Lutia warned.

“We’re not interested in anthropological studies,” Mr. A replied.

“You should be,” Lutia told him. “If you want to know anything useful about these machines.”

Mr. A remained impassive. “What do you mean?”

She gestured into the vault. “Everything here was put here for a purpose. Even if the Outlands rearranged the contents, the space itself was still built by sentient beings. We have no way of knowing what small details here might give us clues about the machines’ function. Would the Commonwealth know half as much about Telitherian computers if it wasn’t for the Resolution? I highly doubt it. Without the airship they were designed to operate, the machines themselves would not have provided enough context to help glean what their purpose was.”

It was strange for Lutia, as it always was, to talk about the Resolution in the third person. Even after more than fifty years, she still could not help but think of the airship as her old body, what she had been before her awakening, rather than a separate thing she had been only a part of. Yet every year that passed separated her ever farther from that time, and her sense of self became ever less defined by the ship she had been. She was Lutia the aya, academically accredited magician and expert in exotic electronics, not a remnant fragment the Aerial Combat Ship Resolution.

“Take just the machines and you might, with difficulty, find out how they work,” she concluded. “But you may never find out what they do. Not without this space.”

“I see your point,” Mr. A replied.

Lutia studied the blacksuit’s expression. Even through his perpetually stoic demeanor, she could see he was wavering. If she chose her words carefully, she might be able to convince him.

“There is one other reason you don’t want to collapse this space,” she told him.

Mr. A raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“The vault here is a fantastic discovery, to be certain,” Lutia began, “But it might not be a complete discovery. Cynthia’s survey of the machines revealed some strange gaps in what we would expect to be here. It’s possible that parts of the original facility are missing, pulled away by the Outlands before the Realm froze it in place.”

“How does us leaving this space here help that fact?” Mr. A pressed.

“All of this ended up down here,” Lutia continued. “And for centuries no one knew it was here. Who’s to say that the rest isn’t down here as well? There could be another vault—or perhaps many vaults—still hidden down here in the bedrock of the Realm. But we’ll never know that until we start looking for them, and the best place to start would be the surrounding rock.”

Mr A fell silent, frowning in thought as he considered her words. Lutia said nothing in reply, waiting for him to come to a decision.

“I’ll see what I can do about it,” Mr. A finally told her, his voice gruff. “It’s something I would need to get permission for. I can’t guarantee that my superiors will agree with you, but I’ll pass along what you said.”

“Do that,” Lutia insisted. “It just might be the most important decision you make on this entire salvage.”

Mr. A nodded. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a phone call I need to make and a salvage effort that I need to run.”

With that, Mr. A moved off down the tunnel and toward the other members of the expedition. Lutia watched his retreating back for several moments. She did not know if her opinion would actually hold any sway with the blacksuits, but she hoped it would. Such a monumental discovery could not afford to be ruined because of a botched salvage. Surely her own expertise would be taken into consideration with her suggestion; her expert opinion was the reason she was there in the first place. Yet the bureaucracy of the Commonwealth could grind incredibly slowly and hand down a number of truly stupid decisions.

Turning back toward the machines, Lutia scanned the room once again. She saw Ms. G, Mr. K, and Ms. T measuring the devices, seemingly planning for how best to pack them for transport. The parallels to her own salvage were disconcerting. It was only logical; the Resolution was a valuable asset, one which could not simply be left in the open for public scrutiny, not when it was so new and potentially dangerous. Yet her salvage had been at the height of the Alirean wars, and keeping it out of the hands of the Commonwealth’s enemies was their first priority. Whoever had control of the Resolution not only had the known Realms’ most advanced computers, but also a highly formidable airship as well. Even the knowledge of the Resolution’s existence was potentially dangerous, as it would invariably become a target for their enemies’ every espionage effort. Even a well-intentioned civilian would have been a risk, as such poorly-understood technology could cause a disaster. And Lutia had not been a true sentient being at the time. Until the very moment of her awakening, she was still only software, still only a machine.

Could there be any kind of artificial intelligence buried within the machines of the vault? Could that program one day awaken as Lutia had, becoming a sentient being with a will of its own? The suggestion was not as preposterous as it appeared at first. After all, pattern recognition was an essential component of humanlike minds, and the machines had been designed specifically for it. If a being did awaken from the machines, what would that being be like? What would it be able to tell them about its home? Anything at all? Or would it re-enter the world an entirely blank slate, as oblivious to its origins as the rest of them?

Lutia thought back to the time before her awakening, to what she had been before the fiery explosion above Driscar. Her existence had been broader in scope, yet not as rich in detail. The glimmers of awareness she had experienced in that time stood out within the endless years of transcripts, spreadsheets, and raw data which made up her ordinary memories. Even if an aya did awaken from the machines, it would not be the same as it was before.

On a whim, Lutia extended her will out from her own body and into the space around her. She had probed the space once before, when the research team had first entered the vault, but she had been searching for overt and immediate threats, not something within the machines themselves. In a matter of heartbeats she already had her answer. There was no clear consciousness, no definitive beacon of mental light which she would expect from a sentient being. And yet the space did not seem wholly inert either. There was some faint suggestion of a will or many wills within the space. It was an ephemeral, tenuous feeling, more like an impression left behind by sentient beings rather than the beings themselves. It was not enough to be certain, but it was certainly suggestive.

“We’ll get you out of this place,” Lutia murmured to the room, uncertain if anything was listening. “We’ll do everything we can for you. You’re not alone anymore.”

The room remained entirely silent, as empty as it had been since its discovery. And yet it did not seem quite the same. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking on her part, but she thought she felt a sense of gratitude from the machines, as though they had understood her.