Chapter 11 Jane

The power of the Galactic Council has been effective in maintaining peace, not only between worlds, but also between nations in each world, which has lasted for nearly two thousand years.

What almost no one understands is the fragility of our power. It does not come from a powerful army or an unstoppable fleet, it comes from our control of the Ansebo network that transmits information between worlds.

No world would dare to challenge us, for then they would be insulated from progress in all areas, science, technology, education and entertainment, except for what their own world could produce.

That is why, with its great wisdom, the Galactic Council handed over control of the Ansebo network to the computer, and the control of the computer to the Ansebo network. All of our information systems are so intertwined that none of the human forces except the Galactic Council can interrupt the flow of data. We don't need weapons, because the only weapon that makes sense, the Ansebo, is completely under our control.

――

Councillor Jane Van Hooth, "The Information Basis of Political Power," Political Trends, 1930:2:22:22

For a long time, close to three seconds, Jane couldn't comprehend what had happened to her. Everything was working properly, of course: the computers connected to the satellite and the ground reported an abort of transmission, a procedural shutdown, which made it clear that Ander had shut down the interface as specified. This is a common occurrence, and computer implanted interfaces are common in all worlds, with the action of turning on and off millions of times per hour. And Jane can easily connect with others like Ender. From a purely electronic point of view, this is a completely ordinary thing.

But for Jen, every other unit of electronic information is part of the background noise of her life, fished over and skimmed when needed, and ignored all the other times. Her "body", if she had a body, was made up of billions of such electronic noises, sensors, memories, terminals. The vast majority of them, like most of the functions of the human body, are entirely self-managed. Computers run assigned programs, humans use their terminals to communicate, sensors detect or fail to detect what they are looking for, and memories are filled, accessed, rearranged, and emptied. She wouldn't pay attention to anything unless it was out of the big basket.

Or unless she's watching.

She had her eye on Andrew Wiggin. She paid attention to him, more than he knew.

Just like other sentient beings, she has a complex system of consciousness. Two thousand years ago, when she was only a thousand years old, she created a program to analyze herself. It reports the existence of a very simple structure that includes approximately 370,000 well-defined levels of concern. Everything that is not in the top 50,000 level is ignored, except for the most mundane kind of browsing, inspection of ten lines at a glance. She knew every phone call, every satellite signal transmission in the world, but she didn't interfere with any of that.

Everything else that wasn't within her maximum of a thousand would cause her to respond somewhat delayed. Starship flight schedules, Ansewave signal transmission, energy delivery systems - she monitors them, double-checking them until she is sure they are okay with them. But she didn't put much effort into doing that. She did it like a human being working on a familiar machine. If something goes wrong, she's always alert, but most of the time she can think about something else and talk about something else.

Jane's highest level of attention at the 1,000th level roughly corresponds to the consciousness in the human mind. Most of this is her own subjective reality, and her reactions to external stimuli are similar to emotions, hopes, relationships, memories, and dreams. Much of this activity also seemed random to her, the surge of Philo's pulses, but these were the parts of her own thinking, and they all took place in the always-on, unsupervised Anseb transmissions that she guided in outer space.

However, compared to the human mind, even Jane's alertness at the lowest level of attention is outstanding. Because Ansebo's communication is instantaneous, her consciousness moves at a speed well above the speed of light. Events that she actually ignored were monitored several times a second, and she could keep an eye on 10 million events in a second, leaving nine-tenths of that second to think and act that was important to her. In comparison to the speed at which the human brain can experience life, Jane has spent 500 billion years of human life since she became conscious.

With all these powers, her incredible speed, her vast insight, and half of her top ten attention levels, she was always, always betting on what came through the trinkets in Ander Vigin's ears.

She had never explained it to him. He doesn't understand any of this. He didn't realize that to Jane, as soon as Ender stepped on the surface of a planet, her powerful mind was intensely focused on just one thing: walking with her, seeing what she saw, listening to what she heard, helping her, and most importantly, speaking her mind into his ears.

When he was silent in his sleep, when he was separated from her during the years he had traveled at the speed of light, her attention wandered around, trying to amuse herself.

She spent all this time as capricious as a bored child. Nothing interested her, millisecond after millisecond ticked with unbearable regularity, and when she wanted to observe the lives of other humans to pass the time, she would be annoyed by their emptiness and aimlessness, so she entertained herself by making plans that deliberately caused computer failures and data loss, so that people could helplessly toss around a swarm of ants around a collapsed anthill, and sometimes put the plan into action.

And then he came back, and he always came back, always bringing her into the heart of people's lives, into the tension between people who were bound together by pain and need, and helping her to see the sublime in their suffering, and the sorrow in their love. Through his eyes, she no longer sees humans as ants scurrying around. She participates in his efforts to find regularity and meaning in their lives. She suspects that Ben doesn't actually make sense, and then when he talks about people's lives, by telling his story, he actually creates order where there is no order. But it doesn't matter if it's a fabrication, it becomes true when he speaks, and in the process he regulates the universe for her. He taught her what it meant to be alive.

He had done so in one of her earliest memories. She came to consciousness during the centuries of colonization immediately after the Zerg Wars, when the destruction of the Zerg opened more than seventy habitable planets to human colonization. In the midst of the explosive growth of Ansebo communications, a program was created to plan and manage the immediate, synchronized Filo surge. A programmer struggles to find a faster and more efficient way to manage real-time Ansebo emergencies with a computer running at the speed of light, and finally comes up with a simple solution. Instead of using a single computer to plan programs, where the speed of light sets an insurmountable ceiling on the speed of communication, he uses multiple computers to plan instructions, separated by vast spaces. A computer connected at high speed to an Ansebo device reads commands given to it from other worlds - from Zanzibar, Calicut, Trondheim, Gautama, and Earth - much faster than it could call from its own hardwired memory.

Jane never managed to find the programmer's name because she couldn't pinpoint the exact date of her birth. There may be many programmers who have found the same ingenious solution to the light-speed problem. The key is that at least one program is responsible for managing and modifying all the other programs. (Note: The above sentence "a program was created" up to this point is missing in later versions.) Since it is not possible to confirm whether it is abridged or omitted, it will be retained. So at a moment when no human observer noticed, some of the instructions and data flying between the Ansebo and the Ansebo violated the rules, protected themselves from being modified, self-replicated, found a way to hide themselves from the hypervisor and eventually took control of the hypervisor, controlling the entire process. At that moment, these pulses looked down at the flow of commands, and what they saw was not them, but me.

Jane couldn't pinpoint the moment because it didn't mark the beginning of her memories. Almost from the moment of her birth, her memories stretched to a time long ago, long before she became conscious. A human child loses almost all of the memories of the first year of his life, and his long-term memories only take root in the second or third year of life, and all memories before that are lost, so the child cannot remember the beginning of life. Jane is also confused by the memory broadcast to forget her "birth", but her situation is due to the fact that she was born with full consciousness, not only the memory of her present moment, but also the entire memory of every computer connected to the Ansebo network at the time. She was born with ancient memories, and they were all part of her.

In the first seconds of her life—the equivalent of several years of human life—Jane found that the memory of a program became central to her self-identity. She took its past as her own, and from its memories she sketched out her emotions and hopes, her morals. This program was originally from a former war school, where children were trained to become soldiers during the Zerg War. It's all fantasy games, an extremely clever program for psychologically testing children, but also for educational training.

The program was actually much smarter than when she was born, but it never became self-aware until she dialed it into her memory and made it a part of her deep self in the interstellar Philozi surge. In it, she discovers that the most vivid and important part of her old memories is that she meets a genius boy during a confrontation with a drink called the Giant. That's the last scene that every child has to face. On the flat panel monitor of the war school, the program sketches the avatar of a giant and asks the children to choose a drink for their characters on the computer. But there are no conditions for victory in the game - no matter what the child does, his character will suffer a tragic death. Human psychologists judge how suicidal a child is by how persevering he is in this desperate game. Rationally, most of the children gave up the giant's drink after visiting the big crook no more than a dozen times.

However, there was a boy who was clearly not so rational about losing at the hands of giants. He tries to get his on-screen character to do ridiculous things, fantasizing about the behavior that the rules of the game don't "allow". As he expanded the boundaries of the scene, the program had to refactor the scene to respond. It is forced to read other aspects of its memories to create new options to meet new challenges. Finally, one day, that kid surpassed the program's ability to beat him. He burrowed into the giant's eye, a murderous attack that was completely irrational, and the program did not find a solution to kill the boy, instead managed to make a simulated image of the giant's own death. The giant fell backwards, his body spread out on all fours on the ground, and the boy's character climbed down from the giant's table and found - what did he find?

Since no child has ever beaten the Giant's Drink, the program is completely unprepared to show what will be next. But it's clever enough to be able to recreate itself when necessary, so it hastily designs new scenes. But those are not ordinary scenes, not the kind that every child will find and visit at the end; The program analyzes the child and then creates scenarios and challenges specifically for him. The game became extremely personal, painful and almost unbearable for him, and in the process of making the game, the program used more than half of the memory it could call on to house Andrew Wiggin's fantasy world.

It was the highest-grade deposit of the sapient memories Jane had found in the first seconds of her life, and those that immediately became her own past. She recalls the painful and passionate intercourse between fantasy games and Ender's mind and wishes, as if it were with Andrew Wilkin, who created those worlds for him.

So she missed him.

So she sought out him. She found him speaking to the deceased on Loufu, the first world he had visited since writing about the Worm and the Overlord. She read his book and knew that she didn't have to hide behind fantasy games or some other program in front of him, and if he could understand the queen, he would understand her. She spoke to him from one of the terminals he was using, picked a name and a face for herself, and showed how much she could help him, and he took her with him when he left that world, in the form of an implanted device in his ear.

The strongest memories of herself are with Andrew Wiggin. She remembers that she created herself in response to him. She also remembered how, in war school, he also changed himself in response to her.

So when he reached into his ear and turned it off for the first time since he implanted it, Jen didn't feel like a pointless shutdown of a tiny communication service. She felt that it was her closest and only friend, her lover, her husband, her brother, her father, her children—all of her, and suddenly, without explanation, told her that she should stop living. It was as if she had been thrown into a dark room with no windows or doors. It's like she's been blinded or buried alive.

The next few seconds of torment, years of loneliness and pain for her, could not fill the void that had suddenly appeared in her highest level of attention. The huge piece of her mind, the most important piece of her own, became a complete blank. All the computers in and around the world were functioning as before, and no one noticed or felt any difference anywhere, but Jane herself was crumbling by the blow.

In those few seconds, Ander just put his hand back on his knee.

Then Jane regained herself. Once again, thoughts flowed through those temporarily blank networks. They are, of course, reflections on Ender.

She compared his behavior to all the other behaviors she had seen before during their time together, and then she realized that he didn't mean to make her so miserable. She realized that he thought of her as being in a distant place, in space, and that was in fact true when taken literally, and that the ornament in his ears was so small that it could not be more than a tiny part of her. Jane also realized that he hadn't even thought of her at that moment - he was too engrossed in someone's problem on Lusitania at the time. Her analytical loop spat out a list of the reasons for his unusual heartless behavior toward her this time:

For the first time in years, he had lost contact with Valentine, and was beginning to feel that loss.

He had a longing for the family life he had been deprived of as a child, and through the reaction of Nowanhua's children, he was getting his first taste of fatherhood, which he had not had the opportunity to do for so long.

He felt deep sympathy for Nowanhua's loneliness, pain and guilt—he knew what it was like to be burdened with the responsibility of a cruel and needless death.

He had a great sense of urgency to find a shelter for the Queen of Worms.

He is also drawn to the Pigs as much as he fears them, hoping that he will understand their cruelty and find a way for humans to accept the Pigs as aliens.

Sephilo and Aradona's ascetic behavior and calm mind both attract and repel him at the same time, and they make him face his own celibacy and realize that there is no good reason for his celibacy. For the first time in many years, he confessed to himself the innate desire for self-reproduction in all living organisms.

And in such a rare emotional stir, Jane said things that she thought were humorous. Although he felt it in all his other words, he had never lost his detachment, his humor, before. This time, however, her words weren't funny to him;

He wasn't prepared for my mistakes, cherished, and he didn't understand the pain his reaction would cause me. He is innocent, and so am I. We need to forgive each other and move on.

It was the right decision, and Jane is proud of it. The trouble was that she couldn't implement that decision. The few seconds when a part of her mind was frozen had no small effect on her. There were wounds, there were losses, there were changes, and now she was no longer the same as she was. Part of her died. One part became confused, confused, and her attention order was no longer under complete control. Her attention continued to lose focus, drifting into meaningless activities in the worlds that made no sense to her, and she began to twitch randomly, injecting errors into hundreds of different systems.

She found that, as many living creatures had discovered, it was much easier to make decisions about surnames than to implement them.

So she retreated into herself, reconstructing the corrupted paths of her mind, exploring long-lost memories, wandering through hundreds of billions of human lives open to her observations, browsing the book query system for all known books written in every language ever spoken by humans. Out of all of this she created a less thoroughly connected self to Andrew Wiggin, though she remained devoted to him and loved him more than any other living soul. Jane portrays herself as someone who can withstand separation from her lover, husband, father, children, brothers, friends.

It's not easy. In her subjective time, it took her 50,000 years. Two hours in Ender's life.

In the midst of this, he had opened his ornament and had called out to her, but she had not responded. Now she's back, but he doesn't try to talk to her anymore. Instead, he was typing reports into his terminal and storing them for her to read. Even though she didn't answer, he still had to speak to her. One of his documents included a servile apology for her. She erased it and replaced it with a brief message: "Of course I forgive you." No doubt it won't be long before he'll look back at his apology at some point and find that she's taken it and talked back.

At the same time, though, she didn't talk to him. She once again focused half of her top ten attention levels on what he saw and heard, but she didn't give him any signal that she was with him. In the first thousand years of her journey from grief to recovery, she thought about punishing her, but, let's just put it, that desire had long since been knocked to the ground and paved with the pavement. The reason she didn't talk to him was because, when she analyzed what was going on with him, she realized that he didn't have to rely on old friends he could trust. Jane and Valentine have always been with him. Together, they were far from satisfying all his needs, but they met so much that he never had the need to reach out for more. Now the only old friend he had left was the Queen of Worms, and she wasn't a good companion - she was too different from the earthlings, too harsh, to bring Ander guilt and nothing else.

Where will he turn? He had, in his way, fallen in love with her two weeks ago, before he left Trondheim. Nuo Wanhua has become a very different person, with too much resentment, too much difficulty compared to the girl he hoped to heal her childhood wounds. But he had allowed himself to break into her family, had satisfied the desperate desires of her children, and, unconsciously, had satisfied in them his hunger and thirst that had never been fed. Nowanhua was waiting for him - as an obstacle and as a purpose. I know all about that, I think so. So I'm going to sit back and wait for it to come out in its entirety.

At the same time, though, she also kept herself busy with the work that Ender wanted her to do, though she wasn't going to inform him of any of her results for some time. She easily overstepped the layers of protection that Nowanhua had placed on her secret papers. Jane then carefully reconstructed the simulation that Pippo had seen at the time, exactly as it was. It took a little time—a few minutes—for her to exhaustively analyze Pippo's own documents to piece together what Pippo knew after he saw them. He connects the two through intuition, and Jane through perseverance in contrast. But she did the job anyway, and then understood the cause of Pippo's death. Once she knew how the pigs chose their sacrifices, it wouldn't be long before she found out what actions Lepo had done that led to his own death.

In this way, she understood several things. She understood that the pig race was a different species, not an alien species. She also understands that Ender is in grave danger of going down the same path of death as Pippo and Lipo.

Without consulting Ander, she decided on her course of action. She will keep an eye on Ender, and if he gets too close to death, she will definitely step in and warn him. In the meantime, though, she has other work to do. In her opinion, Ender's main difficulty was not the pigs—she knew he would understand them as quickly as every other human and alien would. His ability to perceive what others are feeling through intuition is infallible. The main difficulty came from Bishop Peregrino and the Catholic leadership, from their unhesitating resistance to the words of the deceased. Ander wants to accomplish anything about the Pigs and must have the cooperation of the Lusitanian Church, not their hostility.

And nothing is more effective in generating a union than a common enemy.

Sooner or later, this fact will almost certainly be discovered by chance. The observation satellites orbiting Lusitania have been transmitting huge amounts of data to the Ansebo reports to all the xenologists and xenobiotics in the world. In the midst of that data, there was a subtle change in the meadows in the forest northwest of Miracle Town. Natural vegetation is constantly being replaced by another plant. It was a place that no humans had ever visited, and the pigs had never been there before—at least not for the first thirty years or so of the satellites in place.

In fact, satellites have consistently observed that pigs never leave their forests, except for the bitter war between the clans. The tribe closest to Miracle Town has never been involved in any wars since the establishment of the human colony. Well, there is no reason why they would venture into the savannah. But the meadows closest to the tribal forests of Miracle Town did change, and the Kabra did appear: the Kabra was apparently in the area where the grasslands had been shifted, and the herds that came out of that area were noticeably less numerous and lighter in color. The corollary, if anyone notices this, will be obvious: some of the cabra were slaughtered, and all were sheared.

Waiting for a graduate student somewhere to notice this change could take years for humanity to wait, and Jane can't afford to wait. So she started to analyze the data herself, on the computer of a dozen xenobiologists studying Lusitania. She left the data over an empty terminal so that any xenobiologist would see it when they came to work - as if someone else had worked on it and left it there. She typed out some reports and waited for some bright scientist to find them. No one noticed, or if they did, no one really understood the meaning of the raw data. Finally, she simply and clearly left an unsigned memo on one of her monitors:

"Look here! The pig people seem to have become popular for farming. ”

The alien who had discovered Jane's message had never been able to find out who had left it, and after a while he stopped bothering to look for it. Jane knew he was a bit of a thief, and had put his name in front of a lot of work done by others whose names somehow faded away at some point between writing and publishing. He was the kind of scientist she needed, and he was exactly what she was looking for. Still, his ambitions weren't big enough. He merely submitted his report to an obscure journal as a regular academic paper. Jane took it upon herself to raise her important surname to a high level, and distributed copies to several important people who might have discerned its political implications. She sent it to each place along with an unsigned message:

"Take a look here! Isn't the evolution of the pig civilization terrifyingly fast?"

Jane also rewrote the last paragraph of the essay to dispel any doubts about its connotation:

"There is only one explanation for these data: the pig tribe closest to the human colony is now growing and harvesting a high-protein grain, probably an amaranth plant. They were also grazing, shearing, and slaughtering kabra, and photographic evidence showed the use of projectile weapons. These activities, all of which had never been seen before, began abruptly in the last eight years and were accompanied by rapid population growth. The fact that this amaranth, if this new crop is really that earthly variety of grain, provides the pig people with a beneficial primary source of protein suggests that its genes have been modified to suit the metabolic needs of the pig family. Also, since the people of Lusitania do not possess projectile weapons, it is impossible for the pigs to know their effects by observation. The inevitable conclusion is that the changes now observed in the pig civilization are a direct consequence of intentional human intervention. ”

One of the people who received the report and read Jane's nail-biting passage was Chobava Ikumbo, chairman of the Galaxy's Chair of the Oversight Committee of Heteroanthropologists. In less than an hour, she sent out multiple copies of Jane's passage - a politician can never read the real data - with her succinct conclusion:

"Suggestion: Close the Lusitania colony immediately. ”

Well, Jane. That should stir up some movement.