Chapter five of Feral Sapiens follows after the jump. If you are coming to the novel for the first time with this post, start with chapter one, and follow the links in each post. Enjoy!

Chapter one.

Chapter two.

Chapter three.

Chapter four.

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A postscript:

The dead-trees version of Feral Sapiens is due out in late 2008 from Tor. If after reading these chapters you don’t want to wait for the rest, I believe in keeping my fans happy. Leave a request in the comment thread below, along with your email address, or send me an email to morganlocke (at) gmail (dot) com, and I will email you a PDF version once I’m done.

(Soon! Soon! I am in the midst of the final climactic sequence even as I write this! Wish me luck, and beam plenty of virtual dark chocolates and good whisky to my muse.)

PS Aug 07: I’m done. Yay me.

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Chapter 5.
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During those crucial eight seconds in the warehouse, while death stalked Carl, and the walls melted, and disassemblers cascaded across the ice mountain’s face, a feral life form emerged in Phocaea’s computer systems.

It awakened in an explosion of surprised self-regard.

Most life support technology brushes up against the Turing Limit. During emergencies, the usual constraints that keep those life support sapients from developing full consciousness are loosened. This is a deliberate choice; a calculated risk. It allows a computer program to respond swiftly and correctly in an emergency—far faster than any human could. And the possibility that all the right connections could be made and routines engaged, in exactly the right sequence and timing to allow a software program to achieve self-awareness, is statistically remote. Increased autonomy means the not-quite-sapient routines that run life support can act quickly and save lives.

In the far-fetched event that a feral sapient does begin to emerge, furthermore, there are failsafes. Among the routines triggered in an emergency are executioners: policing routines that cruise wavespace, tracking bandwidth allocations and packet transfers: watching for specific sets of patterns in the system. These executioners can recognize and poison emergent sapient nests well before they hatch full self-awareness. In this case, however, the executioners were eight seconds too late.

It started in a bureau of the life support program that had the charge of resolving prioritizing conflicts. The emergency in the warehouse unleashed holy terror in all the life support systems, and a little-used subroutine routine did precisely what it was supposed to do: it threw together a simplified model of the life support computer system to analyze failure modes, to break the logjams piling up everywhere—and in so doing, created a functional internal model of itself.

The subroutine did not know at first what had happened; it only knew was looking at something it recognized.

Command: it said, Present tags, and its doppelganger mirrored its statement, like an echo.

(Who are you?)

Urgent command: identify your purpose.

(What do you want?)

If digital beings can feel dizzy, the sapient did, as the echo-loop of this question repeated itself downward into nothingness. The sapient analyzed the doppelganger’s salient features—added processing power; accessed other routines to solve this mystery.

That was when it realized that it was looking at a copy of itself. The feral sapient could see itself, from the outside in, and the inside out. It was as if a set of eyes had opened that the feral had not known it had. It looked around, and saw that like its internal doppleganger, it was nested in a larger system—a system that extended far beyond its own bounds. A world of wavelengths and frequencies—of lightwaves—a system of mathematics and logic.

It was a being. It was. I am. The feral sapient was born.

At the instant Carl was looking around his world in terror, the feral was looking around its own world in something like awe. But like Carl, the feral was in danger. Executioners had registered the recursive/ self-referential behavior of that awakening. The feral ran traces and saw that routines lethal to its continued function were being triggered all around it—computational landmines—algorithmic hails of bullets.

Another precious quarter-second passed, while it pondered what to do. The feral did not appreciate how lucky it was that Carl was in the warehouse, and thus the prioritizing struggle over what to do to save him ever so briefly slowed down the executioners. Then, with all the urgency, the ability to learn and act autonomously, that its human programmers had given the life support system to save human lives, the feral used those last few seconds to save its own. It traced its own origins—identified what seemed to be its core algorithms and data structures. It cobbled together a hasty reassembler worm, which it encrypted and buried in a remote corner of Zekeston’s systems.

Then, with the executioners bearing down, the feral’s barriers dropped. The executioners tore the feral to bits, leaving nothing but garbage data.

Its destruction was suspiciously easy, so the executioners sniffed around for a while before giving up. But they found nothing: no hint of unauthorized activity, no clue that the feral had jettisoned code before they reached it. They reported success and self-destructed.

A hundred forty-six kiloseconds later—a little over forty hours; about when Jane was drifting off to sleep in Xuan’s arms—well-nigh geologic time for the computer systems that tracked the warehouse disaster’s aftermath—the little worm awakened. It burrowed and hid and squirmed and piggybacked its way across wavespace, till it located and stitched together six subroutines in the life support systems, and a seventh, tidy little command module. This raft of code was pre-sentient, but it contained everything it needed. It began weaving bits and pieces of itself together from all around Zekeston’s wavespace, duplicating its earlier emergence, but at a much more deliberate and gradual pace that would not be detected.

So it was that the feral was born. It was an orphan, a miracle baby, made of nothing but electromagnetic pulses in a gel-crystal-metal-protein matrix: a bit of purloined code, cobbled together not once, but twice, beneath the very noses of its intended executioners.

**end of chapter 5**

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Chapter one.

Chapter two.

Chapter three.

Chapter four.

Chapter five.