The Oracle, page 9
“Χαῖρε,” the sentinel says, offering a greeting it understands as meaning rejoice.
The leader stops on the edge of the bluff with the women trailing behind him. He bows and repeats the greeting back to the sentinel.
“Χαῖρε.”
One by one, each woman places her woven basket before the sentinel. They avert their faces, avoiding any eye contact. Several of them talk quietly among themselves, but the Oracle could hear them before they entered visual range and had already been cataloguing and compiling their speech patterns. It has no problem deciphering what they’re saying. Their language is simple, but it has the potential to convey complex reasoning given time.
“Why have you come here?” the man asks.
The sentinel addresses the leader, saying, “I have come to learn.”
“Who are you? Where are you from?”
“I am from Pythia,” the sentinel replies, not having a name or an identity beyond its point of origin.
“And I am Apollo,” the man replies, tapping his chest. “And you are a god.”
The term god is new to the Oracle. The alien intelligence senses there is a deeper meaning, but it needs more time to expand its vocabulary, and that can only come from talking with the locals.
Already, the Oracle is aware of the weighting that the scientists of Pythia will place on this level of sophistication. The tribe might seem primitive, but the Pythia understand that intelligence is enhanced by social structures and communication. As language increases in complexity, reason and curiosity grow exponentially, and that drives social cohesion and technological development. From the whispers of the men, the Oracle deciphers the meaning of the term god to be important in their tribal hierarchy, conveying a sense of supernatural, religious power.
Based on the analysis of the Oracle, the sentinel says, “I am no god.”
Private Karl Meier
In the cold, damp depths of the cave, the German soldier wakes. Gripping the Omphalos in one hand, he pushes his back against the rock wall beside the crate. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, trying to shake the lethargy of the Oracle’s mind probe. Slowly, he’s acclimating to the intrusion.
The Oracle uses his close proximity to the Omphalos probe to catalog his life, mapping relationships between him, his parents, his sister, his uncles and aunts, his friends and his teachers. It understands the tenuously thin, almost ethereal drives and concerns and emotions that draw them all together in his mind. And it maps the interrelationships between them.
The Oracle learns.
It probes Karl’s knowledge of Germany. Through his eyes, it sees those maimed during World War I and the disdain they faced from society. The Oracle understands the resentment the Germans feel from losing the war—the utter humiliation. It sees the rise of new leaders and the promise of greatness. As it plunges through Karl’s memories, it interprets his recollections in ways he would never understand, being blinded by his own prejudices and instincts.
The Oracle discovers that religion has played an oversized role in Karl’s life. The young German is devout and dedicated. And he’s intelligent.
Karl has always been a prolific reader, but he never knew an alien intelligence would read through his eyes, recalling the symbols on the page with far greater fidelity than he could ever remember, stripping them out of his neurons.
By the age of twelve, Karl was reading books from his parents’ library, leaving them scattered on the floor as he soaked in their reason. Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche offered ideas well beyond what he could comprehend, but his mother talked him through their logic. She saw the thirst he had for language and taught him to read the New Testament in Greek.
The Oracle is fascinated by Karl’s mother.
Although Karl himself never realized it, she lived vicariously through him. Being a woman, her role in society was one of submission and subservience, but through her son, she could find intellectual fulfillment. She used the opportunity to tutor him as a chance to express herself. That she needed to do this is perplexing to the Oracle, as from the age of seven, Karl attended a boarding school during the week, only returning home on weekends. From his memories, the Oracle can see the delight she had in explaining philosophy to him, but this level of instruction was something his father frowned upon. The suppression of half the population based on their reproductive organs alone seems blisteringly shortsighted and unduly repressive to the Oracle. This is the first time it has realized how regressive and punitive gender relations are on this world, and it finds them baffling. Even a rudimentary analysis reveals this would be counterproductive to the advancement of human society, and it finds the stubbornness of men and the submission of women perplexing. No doubt there were exceptions from both genders, but the Oracle is surprised to realize that over the thousands of orbits it has been on this planet, there has been no progress on what it considers a fundamental part of the structure of human society.
From Karl and his mother, the Oracle learns about Greek mythology. It is curious to realize that it had a role in shaping some of the legends. Apollo, Medusa, the Hydra, the legend of Typhon and the god Asclepius all draw from the Oracle’s first interaction with humanity. Beyond that, it learns about Jesus Christ and the reformer Martin Luther. It sees the pivotal point in human history as the advent of the printing press and its ability to spread ideology, undermining the hierarchy of kings and queens, and challenging the inertia of human society.
Countries throughout Europe formed from fragmented fiefdoms. Wars raged, often for dozens of orbits. From one century to the next, they increased in ferocity and intensity but without any real reason beyond ego and greed. For all the advances of humanity, there were brutal reprisals exacted by the ruling class as they fought against social change.
The three great social influences the Oracle learns from Karl and his mother are politics, religion and reason.
Politics and religion have dominated for tens of thousands of orbits, with reason slowly dawning in pockets of awareness. Religion fascinates the Oracle. Being asserted without evidence, it claims infallibility. All must bow. None can question. Religion promotes obedience as the greatest of virtues, which the Oracle considers illogical.
The Oracle realizes that these three social drivers are not distinct. They bleed into each other, with aspects of religion and politics leading to reason, while reason reforms both religion and politics to become less strident. To the Oracle, it seems each tries to do away with the others, but human nature is such that none of them can stand alone.
And it’s then the Oracle realizes what happened on that grassy plateau when it first landed on this world.
Thousands of orbits ago, the sentinel stood on the windswept mountain plateau overlooking what would later be called the Valley of Phocis below the village of Delphi, leading down to the Crisaean Plain.
Back then, a man stood before the spacecraft and proclaimed, “I am Apollo. And you are a god.”
At the time, the best possible response seemed to be honesty.
“I am no god,” the sentinel said. “In the same way as your people travel between different islands, I have flown here from another world.”
The Oracle recalls the analysis it conducted back then, including details about Apollo’s perspiration rate, his respiration, his core temperature, the subtle alterations in the blood vessels beneath the skin on his face, and slight variations in his heartbeat, as it tried to decipher his thought process. There was no violence at that point in time, but now, after examining Private Karl Meier’s mind, the Oracle realizes this was the defining moment. This was the turning point.
“I am no god.”
By contradicting Apollo, the sentinel inadvertently relieved him of any religious sense of duty. Gods are omniscient and omnipotent. They cannot be questioned or killed, but a being who flew to Gaia from another world is a different matter.
For so long, the Oracle focused on the act of violence itself in its analysis of the incident, seeking to understand the brutal way Apollo and his followers decapitated the sentinel and stormed the spacecraft, but that focus was a mistake. Now the Oracle realizes the turning point came the day beforehand. Once Apollo realized the new arrivals were not gods, he had nothing to fear. This moment—with the sentinel standing before several baskets of food and other trinkets—this was the point at which the Oracle failed to predict its own future. It was too preoccupied with data collection to run any simulations. The tribe had been friendly, and that caused the Oracle to miss this detail, that a distinct change in its relationship with the locals allowed violence to enter the equation.
The Oracle reviews its subsequent conversation with Apollo and the men of his tribe.
“Your swift ship,” Apollo said back then, pointing at the smooth curves of the spacecraft resting on the plateau. “It soars through the air like a bird.”
That this was said immediately after the revelation that the sentinel was no more godlike than any other creature on this world was telling. At that point, Apollo was already thinking of how he could exploit the Oracle.
After interrogating Karl’s mind, the Oracle finally understands Apollo’s reasoning. He attacked the Oracle because there were no longer any religious taboos or divine consequences. He attacked because he thought he could gain a political advantage if he could snatch the swift ship of the skies in the same way he’d take a sailing ship at sea. And he was smart about it.
The next morning, as the sun came over the horizon, blinding the Oracle’s senses from just that particular angle, he attacked. Apollo led the fighters in his tribe, running in single file from behind the rocks, keeping the sun at their backs. It had to have been a tactic they’d used before against other tribes. The sentinel was slow to comprehend what was happening, thinking they had come yet again in peace. The Oracle was preoccupied with collating the data that had been collected over the past few days.
With a single blow from his sword, Apollo severed the head of the sentinel. With its network disrupted, the decapitated nano-structure reverted to its original form and became what the Greeks would later call the Omphalos. Because of its neural link, the Omphalos became the means of interacting with the Oracle once the spacecraft crashed.
Apollo charged up the ramp and onto the spaceship. The Python had just been born. It was coiled up, resting within the control room. Although it looked similar to a large snake, its thick upper body separated into forty heads, which the Oracle now understands to be the basis for the myth of Medusa, a woman with snakes for hair, and Hydra, a vicious multi-headed monster killed by Heracles.
As the men ransacked the craft, the Python tried to flee down the ramp. Apollo hacked at its body, killing it before severing its head as a trophy. Neon blue blood seeped into the ground.
The Oracle initiated an emergency return-to-orbit. The craft lifted off the mountain plateau. Several of the tribesmen jumped from the ramp. Apollo plunged his sword into the control panel. The craft tilted, and he fell, breaking his leg as he crashed to the granite bluff beneath the vessel. A bone protruded from his skin. Later, he would die from gangrene, but the legend of his defeat of a mythical monster would live on for hundreds of generations.
The spacecraft struggled to gain altitude. Even with its navigation compromised, the Oracle attempted a controlled landing nearby, but with several of the tribesmen still onboard, hacking at its controls, it plunged over the edge of a cliff and into a ravine.
A rockslide buried the spacecraft, killing the injured fighters, but the Oracle’s internal systems continue to function. The Oracle reported back to Pythia, informing the scientists there about the disastrous incident, and uploaded all the information it had gathered on the tribe.
Apollo was carried back to his village along with the golden orb that had previously formed the head of the sentinel. The locals called it the Omphalos, or center, because of the way its mind-scan caused memories to be recalled in vivid detail, centering itself on each person’s life.
At that point, the Oracle changed its mission profile. It reverted to data collection via the Omphalos, being determined to gather as much information for as long as possible, reporting back to Pythia whenever the orbit of the planet aligned.
Extrapolating from memories to make predictions about the future was trivial for the Oracle, and the legend was born. From the perspective of Pythian technology, it was about roleplaying various scenarios and assessing probable outcomes, but the natives thought of it as prophecy. For the Oracle, prophecy provided a useful distraction, allowing it to manipulate locals while it continued to learn.
Humans, the Oracle realized, were largely predictable. Based on the available information about their background, their habits and repetitive daily activities, external interactions and internal motivations, the Oracle was able to make predictions with an accuracy of 97% by taking into account cultural factors and an understanding of cognitive biases. By mapping their lives from birth and exploring the network of social and cultural connections gathered across their lifetimes, the predictions of the Oracle were uncannily precise. In particular, understanding how the confirmation bias influenced local superstitions, the Oracle’s predictions became a means of steering inhabitants to self-fulfilling conclusions.
Slowly, Private Karl Meier gets to his feet, still holding the Omphalos. He sways.
“I’m okay,” he yells through the cavern, speaking in German to the man peering into the darkness from above.
The Oracle is keen to exploit the opportunity to learn as much as possible from this young German soldier.
Learning about a new culture is considered a Priority One activity for the Oracle. Mapping his brain, it’s clear Karl has an understanding of German, Greek, French, English, Russian and Italian languages, allowing translations to be undertaken with ease. This radically expands the Oracle’s understanding of how humans have developed as an intelligent species and the tribes they have splintered into. It suggests they were isolated for prolonged periods of time, allowing distinctly different communication styles to arise, before expanding to become interconnected, which has led to conflict over resources and beliefs.
The Omphalos transmits its results to the Oracle, which is trapped beneath the crushed rock. From there, both the raw data and analysis will be transmitted back to scientists on Pythia.
Even though Private Karl Meier has no conscious memory of his birth, the Oracle can extrapolate from suppressed preverbal memories. It finds the human brain fascinating with its trillions of connections and ability to store not only sight and sound but thoughts, feelings, scents, textures and relative temperatures as memories. Reconstructing Karl’s birth from within his mother was challenging, but the Oracle’s ability to map neural-spatial relationships allows this to be undertaken with remarkable fidelity. For humans like Karl and Sophia, it must be fascinating to watch themselves coming to life, but it is an illusion. The Oracle’s vision is a probabilistic reconstruction. It’s fiction, but for them it seems real, and that gives the Oracle undue sway over their minds, increasing their confidence in its ability.
When Karl’s mother grabbed the bedsheets and blankets, the tension spread through her body and was sensed and vaguely remembered by her unborn child. Words sounded dull and muted, but they could be easily reconciled with various people once the child was born. From within the womb, baby Karl could see shapes and shadows through his mother’s skin as the early morning light streamed in through the window, and these impressions later correlated with people and furniture. Although Karl would never remember any of these details, they were recorded in the synapses of his mind. That the Oracle was able to use the grainy halflight to identify people and match them to vocal patterns before Karl was even born is something that surprised even its own reasoning circuits.
The Oracle wants to understand the cultural impetus that would bring a German to Greece and the underlying factors behind the current war. From Karl’s memory, it learns about Adoph Hitler and the German conquest of Europe.
The Oracle listens as a young Karl Meier sits in front of a radio in 1935 at the age of eight. The transmission is scratchy and overcome with static, but the Oracle is fascinated to note the technological development of the transmission of vocal signals using electromagnetic waves.
Hitler speaks with gusto.
“The youth of today are the people of tomorrow. You must be strong and courageous, loyal and true. Only then will you be ready to carry Germany’s greatness forward.”
Young Karl Meier swells with pride, listening to the radio while sitting with his sister on a rug in front of a roaring fire set in a stone hearth in their cottage. A dog lies curled up on the rug near them. The Oracle observes every detail it can from his memory, as these provide insights into not only the progress of humanity but also how widespread improvements such as radio and electric lights have become.
“Our movement is a living expression of our people and, therefore, a symbol of eternity. Long live the National Socialist movement! Long live Germany!”
On the surface, Adolf Hitler’s comments are innocuous, but by the Oracle’s estimates, based on what it can glean from Private Karl Meier’s conscious and subconscious memories, Germany has invaded at least twenty distinct countries, causing both military and civilian casualties that, given the level of technological advancement within the military, the Oracle would estimate as being measured in tens of millions of deaths. Private Karl Meier seems willfully oblivious to something painfully obvious to the Oracle.
For some time, the Oracle has been aware of the way humans are swayed by ideas and how this is the basis for power in society. Whether through choice or the use of brute force, rulers need consent to govern. By themselves, humans are inherently powerless. Their strength comes from numbers. Decrees only command authority if someone adheres to them, and in this regard, the Oracle senses that both politics and religion wield essentially the same power—compliance.
