Chapter 11: Digging In
“I wish I could use Appraise on what I’m seeing,” Yaniss grumped as she peered through the telescope. Or rather, the digital version of Yaniss did, controlling the abstraction of a light collector five miles in diameter.
“That would defeat the point,” Cato-Ikent told her with a laugh.
Cato’s mind-ripping algorithms turned out to be entirely necessary. There was no way that he could fully scan a Bismuth normally, and while there was a faint possibility that he could have brought in System-jamming biology to try, that would have been a risk on two fronts. One, that it might be incredibly harmful to a Bismuth, considering they were supposedly almost entirely a System construct, and two, Yaniss was clearly already being watched in some way given the hassling by the local Temple.
He'd prepared everything on an out-of-the-way world and Yaniss had spent a couple hours with a bunch of engineered biomass wrapped around her head. The mindripper algorithms had pulled information out of her brain, and that was why they were generally so restricted. None of the usual protections against foreign infiltration mattered, and like Roko’s basilisk he could create a full copy of her consciousness without her input at all.
Cato had also gotten genetic samples thanks to Yaniss literally spilling her own blood, along with gut biome – which turned out to be sterile – to try and avoid all the guesswork and testing he’d needed to do for Raine and Leese. Fortunately, even at Bismuth she was still biological, and not some sort of exotic System energy version of a frame. He wouldn’t have been that surprised if the System operated that way, with some central server from which all the high-rankers remotely piloted System-created bodies, but instead it seemed that the cells themselves operated without any apparent inputs and outputs. He didn’t know what to make of that, other than the obvious reliance on System exoticism.
In some strange quirk, perhaps an unfair one, Yaniss had absolutely no trouble not only with being digital, but with reconciling multiple versions of herself. More than Cato, even, and her tendency to shove her gestalt over his radio network was putting a serious strain on an already overloaded system. Still, her insight into the System was fascinating, especially since she was the closest thing to a researcher he could imagine. The usefulness of which was proven as one of the programs he had running in the background pinged him with a conclusion at a fairly high degree of certainty.
The Bismuth transition altered the fundamental nature of both people and items, according to Yaniss. So long as some amount of essence was paid, at Bismuth things simply didn’t decay. It wasn’t even as simple as being ultra-tough, but rather by examining her genetics and as he’d seen with her cellular activity, the regular rules of entropy didn’t apply. It was a situation that would have made Maxwell’s Demon proud, and not an approach that he would have immediately considered if it weren’t for her bringing up the phenomenon.
Given the crude nature of his toolset he couldn’t categorize it completely, but it wasn’t as simple as making things negative entropy, or even none — thermodynamics still needed to work for things to heat and cool, for energy to move at all. But all the functioning seemed to be done without flaw or loss, without the inevitable errors that piled up and had to be dealt with but never could be perfectly.
The System had a way to beat entropy.