Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 14

Petrolea 17c

“Victor!” Feroza flung up her arms and Rusty, chasing them, climbed, engines screaming. “Copy and rebroadcast these signals.”

Frantically, she scrolled down menus in her visor, broadcasting the draconic communication signals she had recorded on the Leviathan’s back. “Help,” she broadcast. Her suit’s built-in transmitter was a puny thing next to Victor’s Radio Tick, but its range was more than wide enough to catch the attention of the Dragons. “Feed me,” She cried across the AM bands, “I’m afraid. Take care of your baby.”

Another modulated thunderclap from Victor’s Radio Tick, and the attack formation scattered. Sleek black bodies banked, swooped, dove, curved into arcs. Victor fell between them, arms and legs pressed against his body, juvenile Dragon coiled around him like a winged, robotic Rod of Asclepius.

The other Dragons had fallen into Victor’s thrall. They funneled down after him, tightening their formation like a whirlpool, spinning in flaming helixes, caught between attack and rescue, ancient impulse and modern calculation, hate and love.

Those that could fly gathered around Feroza and Victor, tugging them upward, encasing them in swirling nested spheres of metallic bodies, singing their praises across the airwaves.

The Dragons soon joined the song.

Petrolea 17b

More warnings as the juvenile Dragon spread his little wings and engaged his jet engines. Hot streams of exhaust bracketed Feroza’s body, pointing downward at the onrushing protectors of the crater. One large Dragon veered away from those columns of hot gas, but another opened its jaws, pilot light flaring at the end of its flame-thrower.

It was gone in a bright burst of sparks and a dark blur of tangled metal. Feroza looked up to see her would-be attacker fall, while the mother Dragon looped around to defend her children.

They passed over the edge of the crater in a cage of fire.

“They’re going to kill the mother Dragon,” said Victor. “We have to do something to help her.”

Feroza’s heart was thumping too fast to be warmed by her lover’s devotion to Petrolean wildlife. “The question is ‘how do we deactivate this alarm system?'”

“You mean,” said Victor, “how do we make friends with the other Dragons?”

The mother Dragon belched flame into the face of an onrushing attacker.

“That’s one possibility,” Feroza said, “but is there any way you can get your slave factors into those other Dragons?”

“My slave factors have been compromised. The clean ones are all back on…the…Leviathan. Okay,” he said, “I have an idea.”

Feroza could guess what it was. But it would take time for the giant mechanoid to arrive, and while Victor was working on hacking their behavioral code from the inside, she would work from the outside.

She looked down, past her feet and the columns of exhaust to the up-thrust noses of the rockets below. “What would an alien overlord do?”

Victor’s answer was a deafening blast of white noise from his Radio Tick. An electromagnetic roar designed to carry his message to the other side of Saturn.

Every flying thing in the Petrolean sky converged on him.

Petrolea 17a

Chapter 17

“Fold your arms,” Feroza told Victor, “before Biggles and Rusty have a chance to bite them off.”

Following her own advice violated every instinct Feroza had. Falling monkeys splayed their limbs, trying to snag branches and use air resistance to slow their fall, but the makers and masters of the Petrolean mechanoids had descended from anything like monkeys.

If those ancient aliens’ ancestors had had trees to climb, perhaps they had done so with coils of their bodies, or with tentacles or some other organ Feroza could not, now, imagine. Certainly, though, the shape they presented when in free-fall, the silhouette they had branded onto the brains of their mechanical children, was the rod.

Feroza became a rod. A toy soldier standing to attention. Or rather, tipping forward as gravity tugged on her top-heavy environment suit. Victor’s face passed above her horizon, and Feroza’s vision was full of the whirling depths of the jungle below, the lead-colored cones of the Rocket-seeds, and the black silhouettes of the oncoming Dragons. Their burning headlights.

Were there other calderas like this one scattered across the surface of Titan? Other clutches of rocket eggs with their own guardian Dragons? Was this a localized reaction of the Petrolean defense system, or a planet-wide call to arms? If the latter, Victor and she had most likely just triggered the very sporulation they had tried to prevent.

“Feroza!” Victor’s voice came in her suit radio. “Biggles has got me.”

“Hold still,” said Feroza. “Trust him. Trust me.” And metal scraped along her back.

Warning lights pulsed against the approaching headlights of the enemy Dragons. Rusty was coiling around her, squeezing and ablating her much-abused environment suit. But the little Dragon was much-abused as well, with a good third of his chassis rebuilt under Feroza’s careful ministrations.

And what of Rusty’s mind? On the leash of his designed tripwire programs, the little mechanoid should have bitten Feroza in half for violating the sanctity of the crater. At very least, he should have flown away.

But Feroza had seen how a Dragon’s naturally evolved behavior, if strong enough, could circumvent the wishes of its ancestral programming. Evidently, Rusty could feel gratitude, or at least reciprocal altruism.

Petrolea 16d

“She doesn’t want to cross into that crater,” said Feroza.

“It’s nothing ‘she’ wants. The tripwire programming rides the Dragon as much as we do.” Victor coded as cleverly and efficiently as he could, setting up macros to run macros to delete or overwrite or counteract the alien instructions. But the tripwires kept popping up the Dragon’s flight was becoming more erratic.

Worse, Victor’s interface was turning buggy. He would enter changes and confirm them only to see them vanish. There was a noticeable and growing lag between command and response. “This is like the old internet,” he said, “what the hell is wrong with my handshake gauntlet?”

“What on earth could all those other Dragons be doing in the cliffs?” said Feroza, as if to herself. “A nest? No. So many large predators couldn’t hope to survive in such a small area. Like the Leviathans we saw moving toward Xanadu Base before…oh hell.”

There was nothing wrong with Victor’s gauntlet. The distributed processor net in his suit was orders of magnitude more powerful than anything in the Dragon’s hardware. And yet it was the Dragon’s programs that outstripped Victor’s. It was as if everything he did was two steps too late. As if all his information was one step too old…

“Turn around,” said Feroza. “Turn us around, Victor, they’re waiting for us.”

“Impossible” said Victor. “The slave factors can’t have tripwire programs installed in them. We built the first generation from the ground–ow!”

Feroza had just turned around and rapped on his bubble helmet. And when Victor’s startled eyes focused past his coding window and looked out his visor, he saw the other Dragons.

The giant metal creatures were watching their flight, spreading their wings, scrambling like jets around a military installation.

“Land us,” Feroza ordered.

“I–Feroza, I’m losing my slave factors. If I get us on the ground, I won’t be able to get us off it again. I won’t even be able to tell the factors to let go of us.”

“So tell your slave factors to let go now,” she said. “We’re landing.”

Victor wanted to protest and argue, to tell Feroza that all problems couldn’t be solved by jumping off of them at high altitude. But damn him if he was going to let her jump alone this time.

The factors released their grip. The Dragon, free of Victor’s interference, swerved out from under them. Feroza lost her grip on the joystick, and she and Victor popped off its back.

Victor flung out his arms, reached for Feroza.

But her hands avoided his. A smile on her face, the biologist spread her arms wide in the air. Before the onrushing squadron of enemy Dragons.

They didn’t have a chance to attack. The Dragonlets got to her first.

Petrolea 16c

“Does it matter?” asked Victor. “One rocket or many, we have a way to get our slave mechanoid into orbit.”

“I suppose so,” said Feroza. “If anything, the fact that there are so many Rocket-seeds in one place must mean they were grown for offensive purposes. I was worried how we would be able to distinguish between the new interplanetary sporulators and the old intercontinental ballistics…whoa!”

Victor had been trying to pilot the Dragon closer to the crater, but misjudged the angle of their turn. Feroza and he wobbled and the factors holding them clenched.

“Slipped!” said Feroza. “Damn stirrups.”

“If that’s what those lumps are,” said Victor. “I’m not sure the mechanoids’ designers had feet.”

“They weren’t built for anything like humans, in any case,” said Feroza. “If I try to fly with both hands on the horn, I completely unbalance myself.”

“Perhaps I could try a redesign,” said Victor. “There could be a whole library of…user-friendly designs like this.”

The Dragon lurched under them and Feroza cursed.

Victor looked around for the next life-threatening catastrophe. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, but Victor noticed they’d drifted off course. He banked the Dragon, more slowly this time. The repaired Biggles and Rusty fired their engines and sped past their mother, weaving across her flight-path like impatient puppies. They dove and the mother Dragon’s nose tipped forward to follow them, but Victor brought it back up.

This time the Dragon stayed on course for only a few seconds before it lurched and dove again. The angle of attack was much steeper this time, and when Victor brought the nose level, a wing dipped.

“Victor, why are you turning us?”

“I’m not.” Victor maximized his coding windows. “More tripwires. Something’s telling the Dragon to fly back the way we came. I overwrote the process and put us back on course.”

They were nearly over the crater lip now. There were whirligig trees there, and larger structures like windmills, but the sheer sides of the escarpment were bare of self-assemblers. The only movement there was from the headlights of animals. Dragons, he realized.

The Dragon-haunted cliffs grew, and Victor realized they were diving again.

Petrolea 16b

“Merciful God but the ancient aliens had terrible taste in architecture,” said Feroza. “Unless you want to take credit for that post-modern monstrosity.”

“No,” said Victor. “It must be more tripwire programming. A reaction to an oxygen environment.”

“And we know that there is still an oxygen environment inside the space station,” mused Feroza. “I wonder if some similar inflorescence is being built above us right now. If any of the original crew turned their life boat around and returned to it…”

“…they’d be eaten,” said Victor. “At least if they return before I get my Radio Tick into orbit.”

“There!”

Victor’s eyes twitched up, but this time Feroza did not tempt Mr. Biggles or Rusty with an outstretched arm.

“‘There’ what?”

“Is it working?” she asked. “Did I share my map with you? Ah. No. I see.”

The map blipped on in Victor’s visor. South and east of their flight-path lay the edge of a crater. In real life, the shell of the extinct cryovolcano was a curving sheet of rock erupting from the jungle like the curtain wall of a European castle, but on the map it was just a graphite-colored circle. A green dot pulsed within the circle.

Victor entered commands to the Dragon, and map and reality merged as they gained altitude. The volcano wall curved into the distance, became the lip of a gray bowl. And there a smooth cone protruded above the fractal branches of the pinwheel trees like a firecracker in a salad.

A string of firecrackers.

“Are those more Rocket-seeds?” Victor could see four of them, spaced evenly around the first. And beyond them, even more.

“This whole crater is full of them,” said Feroza. “A rocket…nursery? A spore capsule?”

Petrolea 16a

“Okay, I have an idea. You don’t have to go to jail if we save the solar system.” Victor hugged Feroza as she scanned the jungle below.

“Well, I’m glad we got that problem dealt with,” Feroza twisted the projection she called “the horn” and Victor thought of as “the joystick.” The mother Dragon executed a lazy dive, tame as a well-trained horse. “Now, what’s for lunch?”

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “And I mean ‘save from Petrolea’ and ‘save for the future.'”

Feroza waggled her head. “If there is a Rocket-seed growing out there, if we can find it, and if I can determine whether it’s slated for launch into space rather than merely the upper atmosphere, then we can launch your communication satellite.”

Victor brushed his fingers across the surface of the mechanoid clasped around his chest. The creature he privately referred to as his “slave mechanoid” was a much-modified former parasite, a giant tick, which had now become a powerful transmitter on legs. Dropped onto a Rocket-seed, the creature should be able to attach itself firmly enough to survive the trip into orbit. There, it would begin transmitting.

Victor’s reverse-engineered alien commands would wash this moon, convincing its wayward mechanoids that their rightful masters had returned at last.

“Or,” he completed his thought out loud, “if we don’t manage to domesticate Petrolea, we can at least send out a warning of the sporulation we will have triggered.”

“We will domesticate Petrolea,” Feroza said. “In fact, we are already doing so. Look!”

Victor followed her pointing finger. So did Mr. Biggles. The little Dragon zipped up behind them like a jet-powered seal and playfully tried to bite Feroza’s hand off.

“They really don’t like arms,” Victor said. “We’ll have to add more spoofing.”

“Never mind that. We’re passing the aerie where we stayed. Do you see it?”

The formerly pointed tip of the Berg where the mother Dragon had built her nest was nearly unrecognizable, buried inside a segmented globe like a skewered tangerine. Lights dotted the equator of the metal balloon, and a steady stream of mechanoids flew in and out from the window where the stem would be.

“Is it…” Victor squinted. “Is it spinning?”

Petrolea 15c

Feroza stood up and shuffled to Victor. She put her own arms around him. Cold comfort in an environment suit, but still. “I promise I shall find a way to protect humanity from Petrolea.”

“And I will help fix these creatures.” Victor extended an arm to the rusty Dragon, and it tried to bite him.

He swore and waved his handshake gauntlet like a demented South American wizard, and soon the wounded creature lolled under a blanket of Victor’s slave factors. The little robots swept back and forth across the ruined chassis, clustering around the places where she’d cut away the worst of the rust, soldering, welding, reconnecting, ferrying raw materials from the piles of metal shavings and hydrocarbon pap Feroza had prepared for them.

Victor amused himself by playing with his camouflage, removing rusty flanges and cages of wire from his suit, examining the reactions of the other Dragonlet.

“What are you going to do when the Dragon recognizes you as human and its trip-wire program comes on?” Feroza asked.

“I’ll hold it still while I command the slave factors to rebuild my suit,” he said, “as if that were obvious.”Hm. Yes, it’s definitely the arms that Dragons don’t like. When I let it see my real profile with two arms, the tripwire program blinks on. But…” he folded his arms behind his back and the Dragon visibly relaxed. “Maybe these things’ original masters had no arms? How’s it going over there with Rusty?”

“Rusty?”

“Well, if it’s going to be your pet, he should have a name.”

“By that logic…” Feroza looked at Victor capering before his Dragon. “Yours reminds me of a fat and friendly pony I used to know. I shall call him ‘Mr. Biggles.'”

“I am not calling him Mr. Biggles. He isn’t fat, he isn’t friendly, and he isn’t my Dragon. He’s a poorly-optimized machine.”

She shook her head. “Think of him that way and you’ll never understand his behavior.”

“I don’t want to understand his behavior.”

“Of course you do. That’s why you’re experimenting with your camouflage, trying to understand his instincts, behavior, and ancient coding.”

“I suppose,” grunted Victor.

Petrolea 15b

“It’s what?” said Victor. “What are you saying? Did you find the other–“

“Victor,” she said, “look at the other Dragons. Do you see rust on them?”

“No,” he said, then after a pause. “Yes. I do. Ah. They must have breached the environment I made back in the aerie. Damn. It’s not as if I wanted to go back there, but they’ve probably wrecked everything. Chewed through the damn walls, and then, as you say ‘poosh.'”

A wave of warm, wet oxygenated air flowing over the helpless mechanoids…Feroza felt as nauseated as she had seeing the image of the space station being digested.

“Aha,” said Victor, “there go the slave factors. Sit, boy. Stay.” He shuffled around the habitat and back into Feroza’s line of sight. “Odd. Are you hearing the signals the mother Dragon is transmitting at us?”

Feroza tuned into the radio frequency the Dragons used for their short-range communication. The pattern of squeals and hisses she heard didn’t sound like the “feed me” or “help” calls the babies used.

Feroza stroked the side of the rusty Dragon, which shuddered. “Perhaps she is asking us to help her.”

“And how the hell are we going to do that?”

“With your slave factors gathering resources and facilitating repairs on these creatures.”

Victor spread his arms. “Dio, Feroza. Just a minute ago you were–¡Miércoles!“

The Dragonlet, diseased and rotten though it was, lunged at him. A single working mandible pawed ineffectually at his stomach as it humped its way up his body, shedding flakes of rust. Victor raised his arms and the Dragon humped harder.

Feroza reached out to the grievously wounded Dragon, which shuddered and spread mangled mouthparts at her. “Don’t hurt it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” Victor stepped back, allowing the rusty Dragon to slump back into resting position. “That’s interesting.”

“What is?”

“I may be learning how you behaviorists work your magic. Watch this.” Victor slowly raised his arms. The Dragonlet’s buzz saw spun up. When he lowered his arms, the saw wound down. “I think they hate arms.”

Paul and Dan discuss Becoming Fluent

And now for something completely different.

My friend and mentor Paul Venet and I discuss the book Becoming Fluent and our experience learning and teaching languages.