Book 5: Chapter 43: Learning Curve
Icarus
October 2321
Heading to Centaurvania
It took more than a week to get up to the point of being able to hold a conversation. The alien ship, which we named Gunther because it was close to the ship’s name for itself, picked up the math concepts immediately. But when we tried moving to language elements such as verbs, things faltered. Dae’s theory was that Gunther was more of an AMI or an AI rather than a replicant, so it had no actual physical life experience with which to contextualize statements like “See Dick run.” I thought perhaps it was just more alien than we were used to. Either way, we had to back up several steps and reduce the graphics to a Pac-Man level before we started to make progress.
But progress we did, and eventually, we had our translation routine loaded with a passable version of Gunther’s language. It didn’t seem interested in learning ours—or maybe wasn’t able to—so it fell to us to take care of the translation back and forth. Even then, things proceeded on more of a question-and-answer basis than any kind of conversation. Gunther was cooperative, but not inspired.
Star charts were easy, though. We quickly established that Gunther had come from a budding civilization near one of the leaf nodes of the third hub clockwise from Hub Zero, although it became cagey about specifics. This meant it had come from essentially the opposite end of the empire from us. The bios that had built Gunther appeared to be generally centauroid, in that they had four legs underneath and two arms at the front. The proportions were totally out of whack, though—more like dachshunds with arms sticking out of their necks rather than horses with human torsos. Still, centaurs stuck immediately, and the home planet became Centaurvania. And it turned out Gunther had once been a bio and actually was a true replicant.
The centaurs had three sexes, according to Gunther—male, female, and worker. The third was similar in nature to a worker ant—no participation in procreation but dedicated to the support of its genetic line. And apparently disposable when a mind was needed for replication into a space probe. Gunther was close-lipped about it, but I got the impression that the word volunteer hadn’t really figured into things.
The civilization that had built Gunther had discovered SURGE drives and SUDDAR but hadn’t yet invented SCUT communications. That seemed to be a standard tech path, based on our very small sample size of three: humanity, the Others, and centaurs. Once they had the base technologies working, they’d immediately sent out a scout. And done a rush job to beat out the local competition, which explained the bare-bones design. This was beginning to sound a lot like our human history.
Gunther had found a wormhole at its first destination, then apparently followed a very similar exploratory trajectory to Dae’s and mine, hopping from system to system and mapping each system location relative to the galaxy. This activity had eventually culminated in capture by the sentries and, as we’d suspected, a gradual loss of power reserves until it had been forced to shut down. Unlike us, Gunther had never deciphered the gate IDs. That was unfortunate, because we could have used the timestamps on the packets to determine how long it had been a captive.