First Contact
Chapter 5
Information Exchange
The exchange of information between sentient beings requires much more than being able to mutually send and receive compatible signals. A dog and a man can both generate and hear sound waves in overlapping frequencies, but the information they can exchange is very limited.
The second most important requirement is the formatting of the message. Barking and speaking are formats that are relatively incompatible, but a man with a cell phone and another with a CB radio are much less capable.
The third requirement is a common frame of reference. An ant with a life span of a week would find it nearly impossible to communicate with a redwood tree a thousand years old, even though they live in the same environment and witness the same night and day cycle. Time is far from the only basis for incompatible frames of reference.
In spite of the lack of the conditions for formal exchanges of information, life's ability to respond to changes in its environment has created a myriad of methods for exchanging warnings. A crushed plant stem can emit an odor warning a rabbit to the presence of a fox.
The swarm had developed one of these. It used an organic molecule as a quantum antenna to emit single photons tuned to a precise frequency. Each photon would radiate in all directions like the ripples on a pond until the wave front encountered a molecule tuned to the same frequency. The quantum receiver would collapse the probability of the wave to a particle and absorb it, even though the wave front was a long way from its source.
Obviously, the information being transmitted was in digital format, but the picosecond response time allowed the transfer of terabytes per second.
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When George left the jail after visiting Courtney, he relaxed, let go of his concentration and was immediately assaulted by a sensory overload. Courtney had pushed nearly a teaspoon of saliva into his mouth during her kiss and he had tried to deal with the choking astringency it produced by moving it to the pouches between his cheeks and teeth. As it leaked, he was constantly being assailed by its taste and smell.
But the visual and auditory assault didn't seem to be related to the same cause. Even though they had begun with the kiss, George couldn't imagine how his hearing and sight could be affected by a smell. It was as if he could see and hear a thousand times as much, like trying to pick out a single face and voice in a stadium packed with cheering fans. Still, he would have managed except for the jangling of nerves in his skin.
Although he knew of no cause, there was not a single spot on his body that wasn't reporting an itch, tickle or pin prick. Desperately, he struggled to filter out the pieces of information he needed to deal with the real world.
When he finally entered his motel room, he had no idea how he'd managed to find his pickup, drive a block and open the door. He simply flopped down on his bed in surrender. It was a wonder beyond his wildest imagining when his head hit the pillow and his senses were turned off as if by a switch.
There was absolutely nothing. No light, no sound, no taste or smell, he couldn't even feel his own body. The greatest surprise was the loss of something he'd never been consciously aware of. He didn't consider intuition to be a human sense, but whether or not it was, it too was gone.
Briefly, the complete absence of sensory input was a relief, like reaching shelter from the pounding of a driving rain. But the loss of intuition was equivalent to the loss of faith, so relief was short lived. It gradually turned to a feeling of vulnerability and then fear as despair took its place. Before the fear could grow into panic, his sight was turned back on. At least he thought it was. As he looked, it became apparent that what he was seeing was being perceived through eyes not his own. The images in his mind were just as clear as if they were being received by his eyes, but the perspective didn't have a focal point. He was seeing from points scattered in and through the scene producing a perspective from every conceivable point of view, including the interior of many objects. They were also as detailed as if he was looking through a microscope and a telescope simultaneously.
As he became more accustomed to the enhanced vision, he realized he was seeing the integrated view from millions of receptors. He didn't need to move his eyes or focus, the simple mental exercise of shifting his attention allowed him to see anything. As a test, he observed his own body. The most notable part of it was his beating heart until he shifted his attention to the blood being pumped.
To his amazement, he could see his heart and individual blood cells at the same time. His wonder was short lived when he became aware that there were millions upon millions of other things being carried in his blood. Again, he wasn't allowed time to wonder because of the return of sound.
Like his sight, the auditory data was not from his own ears. Though hearing was the closest experience he could compare it to, it could more precisely be described as the ability to sense vibrations. Sorting sounds from a myriad of vibrations was effortless. But after the brief period required to become accustomed to it, he discovered that the vibrations could also be assembled into shapes almost as well as his sight could manage. It was a form of sonar that didn't need reflected sound because he could sense ambient vibrations over a nearly infinite range of frequencies.
Before he had a chance to experiment with his new auditory senses, his sense of touch was restored. This time, it seemed to be his own, just radically enhanced. He could feel the movement of every one of the tens of thousands of skin mites, every current of air as it moved over the small hairs and even some of the vibrations transmitted through the bed and the air.
Finally taste and smell returned. The smells were each distinct with no masking of one by another, and they were numbered in the millions. He could smell, with equal clarity, the pheromones of a couple having sex a 100 yards away at the other end of the motel and the pollen of geranium blossoms a 1000 miles away on the California coast. And most astonishing of all, he recognized the source of each scent and knew its probable location.
And he could taste with any point on the surface of his skin. In passing, he was intrigued by the acid taste of enzymes applied to dead skin cells by skin mites to dissolve them before ingestion.
Then, just as he thought the return of his senses was complete, he felt the return of his intuition. For the first time in his life, the sensation of a guardian angel watching over him was palpable. The first insight it offered was the knowledge that the source of his intuition was also the source of the enhanced senses. The first thought that came to him was the worry that he was crazy.
In response to his concern, the idea popped into his head that they (a race of indistinct intangible beings he labeled "The Engineers") had been trying to communicate with humans for thousands of years. Pictures popped into his mind of Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini, Lincoln, Napoleon, Mao, and Lenin. They were only some the latest and most recognizable in a long string of catastrophic failures. He understood implicitly that contact had never been very good and that insanity of the contactees was always a very real danger.
He was assured without words that if he would accept their help and wait patiently for understanding, everything would turn out for the best. The assurance did little to dissipate his concern about their motivations and in spite of it, he was dismayed at the type of people and the evil karma of those who'd been recipients of The Engineers previous attempts.
As soon as the thought occurred, he knew that The Engineers were even more worried about his sanity than he was. They couldn't choose, they could only try with those who could receive. They needed him because the death and destruction that was coming soon for both humans and The Engineers could only be avoided with his help. He, George, was their last best hope. He was also the most receptive and mentally stable human they'd found in the last 2000 years. To avoid insanity, it was imperative that he learn about them in just the right way.
They wanted to show him their *******. George didn't have a word for it. The concept was so alien, he couldn't find anything he'd ever experienced that came close. City was sort of similar in that it and ****** were both a place where a large number of beings lived and died. Other terms that fit only a little less were ship, symbiont, protector, pilgrim, child and weapon. ****** was a combination of elements of all of them.
George decided he'd be more comfortable calling it a city. It didn't occur to him until much later that the name "city" would color his understanding as effectively as rose tinted glasses. To prevent him from realizing that, he was immediately made to understand that The Engineers were the designers and builders of the city. He wouldn't actually be allowed to see the city itself, but they were willing to show him the plans.
The plans were presented as blue prints and George didn't even have to wonder to know that they were being presented that way to make it easier for him to read. In spite of that and his engineering background, he could make sense of only a small fraction of the details shown. With increasing sympathy, he recognized the difficulty faced by ancient prophets given prophetic visions of modern technology. He felt like an Australian aborigine on a space station.
Still, his background allowed him to recognize that The Engineers were aquatic. They lived in salt-water and the city was designed to both contain and constantly renew the liquid medium they needed to survive. The aquatic environmental requirement and the complete absence of straight lines and corners, caused the city take on the semblance of a biological, rather than a mechanical construct. The first drawing was of a single dwelling with utilities. It was apparent that there was no provision for the occupant to leave. It would live and die, be disposed of and replaced by the services designed into the structure.
The next drawing gave a wider perspective by showing a thousand homes that fit together like a honeycomb. With more than the terminus of the utilities in evidence, George could see that the pipelines bringing food and carrying away the waste were also alive. The complexity and interaction of the city's residents was much greater than it had at first appeared. When it occurred to him to wonder what else was alive, he was made to understand that every part of the city was a living being. The entire structure was constructed using its creators themselves, modified and programmed to provide each of the required functions.
When the drawing's perspective pulled back again, it became apparent that large blocks of the city were dedicated to specific services. He realized without actually seeing them that there had to be some type of pump and somewhere, a control system. Since there was waste disposal, there also had to be a system for processing or dumping it. Almost certainly, there were chemical plants and a way to gather and process fuel.
As each of the implied systems occurred to him, the relevant drawings were shown. It didn't require more than a couple of these before George realized that the scale of the city was impossible for him to conceptualize.
