Chapter 30 Chapter Twenty Nine

The storage room collapsed.Most of the dust is gone and seems to have been absorbed by the rubble somehow.However, no fresh air came in, and it was very hot inside.Sooner or later this will be a problem, Su Lian.Moai thought, and it was probably sooner rather than later.And now there's Diane.Dupree's body was a consideration, if she could bear such a consideration. She crawled along the remaining walls of the room again, feeling with her hands for anything that held promise, perhaps a spot of ventilation or a pile of loose debris.But still nothing was found. She began to believe that she might die in this dreadful place.There are Ash's ghosts lingering on this planet, that is to say, there are hypothetical intelligent creatures lingering here.

She doesn't believe in hypothetical intelligent beings, at least not like Avran.Duvaly's kind of believing.A hypothetical intelligent being is a network of self-replicating space machines.Some kind of long-extinct civilization must have planted the seeds of these facilities in the local environment, or this happened more than once, and there were many civilizations started over millions of years.Whatever the case, once the variable self-replication is introduced into the interplanetary and interstellar space medium, the process of evolution begins.The evolution of organic matter is different in every detail, but the principle is the same.Like the evolution of organic matter, this process induces strange and dizzying complexities.Even contraptions that are clearly engineered, such as the time-spin membrane that surrounds the Earth, or the arches that link distant planets, are not inherently smarter than biological constructs such as a coral reef or a termite mound.

The periodicity of the falling dust and the ephemeral grotesques it produced were enough proof of that, she thought.What was installed in Ash and Isaac was nothing more than a miserable inclination to alien things.Ash couldn't be a communicator because he had no one to communicate with. Evidence suggests that evolution did produce minds.She conjectures that hypothetical intelligent biological machines may also develop minds (partial, temporary) during the long interstellar evolution.But such a mind, if it exists, is a by-product, not a process.They only control themselves.It can't be the kind of hypothetical intelligent being imagined by Dr. Duvali.

However, the fact that Isaac can remember Ash who died many years before her birth still makes her shudder.If Ash becomes a kind of memory in the network ecology of imaginary intelligent creatures, can this kind of memory have will?And who or what is the rememberer? Su Lian This is Mrs. Rebuka, and she won't leave Isaac's side.Her voice came from the darkness of the sealed tomb, as if from far away.What's up? Did you hear it? Su Lian calmed down and listened carefully. It was an intermittent knocking sound.Da, da, da like something hard hitting a rock.Then came the erratic scratching sound.

Someone is digging us out.Mrs Rebuka said it must be Avran, they knew we were here! Drip card wipe drop.Yes, maybe, Suliane thought.But suddenly Isaac said in the clearest tone: No, Mrs. Rebuka.It's not that someone else is coming in, not people at all.It's them. Su Lian turned in the direction of Isaac's voice.She suppressed her fear.Isaac, do you really know what's going on? Yes.There was no excitement in his tone.I can see them. Hypothetically intelligent beings? Pause.You can call them that. So please explain it to me, Isaac.You are part of it now, aren't you?Ash never was.tell me what happened!

At this moment, there is only the sound of dripping, rattling, dripping beside the wall of the collapsed building. Then Isaac started talking.