Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Read Free Book Online Page B

pebbles at it, hoping to learn as much as possible in the short window while they slammed past. Probes that had been intended for Mars or Venus were hastily repurposed for the Matryoshka flyby, where time and physics made that possible. It was more like the mad scramble of some desperate, last-ditch war effort than anything seen in peacetime.
    There were, of course, dissenting voices. Some people thought the prudent thing would be to wait and see what the Matryoshka had in mind for us. By and large, they were ignored. The thing had arrived here, hadn’t it? The least it could expect was a welcome party.
    As it was, the machine appeared completely oblivious to the attention—as it had continued to do through the second apparition. The third apparition—that was different, of course. But then again our provocation had been of an entirely different nature.
    After the probes had gone by, there was data to analyze. Years of it. The Matryoshka had fallen out of each reach of our instruments and robots, but we had more than enough to keep busy until the next apparition. Plans were already being drawn up for missions to rendezvous with the object and penetrate that outer layer. Robots next time, but who knew what might be possible in the 24 years between the first and third apparitions?
    “The scientists who’d had their missions redirected wanted a first look at the Matryoshka data,” Nesha says. “The thinking was that they’d get exclusive access to it for six months.”
    “You can’t blame them for that.”
    “There was still an outcry. It was felt that an event of this magnitude demanded the immediate release of all the data to the community. To the whole world, in fact. Anyone who wanted it was welcome to it. Of course, unless they had a lightning fast internet connection, about ten million terabytes of memory, their own Cray... they couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. There were collaborative efforts, millions of people downloading a fragment of the data and analyzing it using spare CPU cycles, but they still couldn’t beat the resources of a single well-equipped academic department with a tame supercomputer in the basement. Above all else, we had all the analysis tools at hand, and we knew how to use them. But it was still a massive cake to eat in one bite.”
    “And did you?”
    “No—it made much more sense to focus on what we were good at. The data hinted that the elements of the outer layer-Shell 1—were bound together by some kind of force-field. The whole thing was breathing in and out, the components moving as if tied together by a complex web of elastic filaments. The thing is, stars breathe as well. The pulsation modes in a solar-type star aren’t the same as the pulsation modes in the Matryoshka. But we could still use the same methods, the same tools and tricks, to get a handle on them. And of course, there was a point to all of that. Map the pulsations in a star and you can probe the deep interior, in exactly the same way that earthquakes tell us about the structure of the Earth. There was every expectation that the Matryoshka’s pulsations might tell us something about the inside of that as well.”
    “I guess you didn’t have a clue what you’d actually find.”
    Nesha gives a brief, derisive laugh. “Of course not. I wasn’t thinking in those terms at all. I was just thinking of frequencies, harmonics, Fourier analysis, caustic surfaces. I wasn’t thinking of fucking music.”
    “Tell me how it felt.”
    “The first time I ran the analysis, and realized that the pulsations could be broken down into notes on the western chromatic scale? Like I was the victim of a bad practical joke, someone in the department messing with the data.”
    “And when you realized you weren’t being hoaxed?”
    “I still didn’t believe it-not to begin with. I thought I must have screwed up in my analysis somewhere, introduced harmonics that weren’t real. I stripped the tools down and put them