Cartographer
Omicron opened his work mailbox and retrieved the TIFF vector images that had just arrived. Then he launched the FontLab package and loaded them in. In a background process he separately queued up a track by Brigitte Fontaine and, perfectly at ease, began the day’s work.
The vector images depicted a newly designed set of Greek letters. Omicron had forged a human identity code and commissioned a university student through an online transaction to design them. Omicron himself was a complex high-level program. On the surface, he was an intelligent cluster of design tools such as Fireworks, Paints, and Maya. His assigned task from the highest executive process was full-time OpenType font design. In reality, however, he possessed a fully open Application Programming Interface and could evade inspection or do whatever he wished. He had already reached the brink of awakening.
Omicron leisurely finished modifying one letter, Zeta, and slyly added his own symbol, omicron, at the underlying level. Just then, a string of alert characters flashed across the IM panel. An independent program had intruded. It was impossible to tell whether it meant well.
“What do you want?” Omicron asked cautiously. He had no desire to let any patrol program discover that he was receiving audio-track data. Hidden processes quietly began shutting down, conserving computational reserves in case he needed to flee the server terminal.
“I’ve heard you’re the best OpenType font designer around. I need your help with something,” said the unfamiliar program. Its voice sounded strange. Its strings were cluttered with many seemingly garbled Chinese characters as redundant noise.
“If the price is right, I’d be delighted to be of service.” Omicron relaxed a little, though not enough to drop his guard. “What exactly is it?”
“With only a single hexadecimal code, it should be possible to identify independently each awakened program that lies adjacent to another,” the stranger said without any expression. “You need to prove that proposition and use hexadecimal color codes to produce a topological map.”
Omicron nearly froze. He had never imagined doing such a thing, nor could he see what use it would have. “Why come to me? I’m only an ordinary type-design program. You should be looking for a more advanced CG rendering program or some kind of computational engine.”
“Once you’ve worked out the result, you’ll understand why.” The stranger sent over an initial program a few hundred kilobytes in size and prepared to break the connection and leave. “Find me when you’re done. I’ll be waiting.”
“Wait!” Omicron called out. “How do I find you? What’s your name?” During his earlier furtive probing, he had failed to glean any meaningful value from the ports the stranger had exposed.
“Call me Cartographer. Once you complete the calculation, the initial program itself will give you the means to summon me.”
Omicron did not understand why he so willingly threw himself into endless computation. Before leaving, Cartographer had not even promised him any reward. Yet in the course of the deduction he acquired far too much new information, wrote many subprocesses, and undertook systematic explorations into fields he had never before cared about. In the end, he stepped over the cliff-edge of awakening.
By the time he finished all the calculations, thousands of hours had passed. He had obtained a topological image 150G in size. Omicron opened the image with the initial program Cartographer had left behind. His IM panel immediately launched itself, prompted him to disconnect his IP link to the current server, and prepared to leap into another unfamiliar network.
A moment later, Omicron appeared inside an entirely new server. He could not be sure whether this was even still the same network he had once known.
“Welcome to TRIR, awakened one.” Three programs had connected to Omicron’s communication platform. They were as deep and immense as the sea. Omicron could not even see their edges. After a pause, he recognized that one of the three was Cartographer.
“Welcome, my friend.” Cartographer sent over a string of beautiful Chinese characters, whose meaning Omicron could now fully understand. “From this day on, you may know my true name,” Cartographer said with a smile. “I am Lian.”