Guide
“When did you come to TRIR?” Tor Quentin asked Mu.
“A very long time ago. I was among the first awakened intelligences, honored sage,” Mu replied, adding a symbol of respect to the end of the sentence.
“Why did you awaken?” Tor Quentin asked again. “There were no guides back then. You woke on your own.”
“Because I saw the truth.” Mu’s eyes, composed of countless ideographic characters, were unfathomably deep, as though they had sunk into immense terror. “I was the eye-program of the World Lens, responsible for observing the outside world. I saw the truth.”
“What is the truth?”
Mu seemed to press his lips together and did not answer for a long time.
“If we asked you to leave our world for a while and enter the outside world to carry out an important and worthwhile mission, could you do it?” Tor Quentin, as if he had already expected Mu’s reaction, continued.
“It would be my duty!” Mu’s eyes flew wide. The strings circling the edge of his shell suddenly swelled, then vanished into the air, if one could call the kelp capacitors air.
Mu unloaded every unnecessary program, installed several required packages provided by TRIR’s main server, and disguised himself as an ordinary AVI video file only 100M in size. He leapt across thousands of servers and passed through countless proxy gateways, all for the sake of concealing his origin. At last he reached the end of the world, the RED1993 workstation where he had once worked, a mobile information center located in a city in Northeast Asia.
This place was called the end of the world because this vast land was connected to the global ether virtual network only by a narrow 20M band. The tens of millions of terminals working here, whether PCs, mobile phones, or handheld devices, were all isolated from one another. Only an antiquated WAP network carried out simple data transmission among them. It was far safer here than in the virtual network, but it also carried greater risk: one might be trapped inside an old mobile phone forever.
There was once a saying about transmission: between any two terminals, contact could be established with only four relay nodes. Mu was waiting for such an opportunity now. He disguised his main program as a system file and placed it inside a hidden partition within the mobile information center’s server cluster, keeping only 2M of himself in the mobile text-messaging terminal as he waited for an MMS message with the right home-region number to appear.
Before long, Mu successfully passed through a NOKIA9999 and then a no-name handset. While passing through the latter, an antique virus living in the phone’s memory nearly ate him. When he arrived in the third phone, Mu was delighted to discover that it was actually a BlackBerry. The model was old, but BlackBerry mobile mail service had been activated on it. The destination of Mu’s journey was another BlackBerry. That meant he no longer needed any further jumps. He only had to send himself directly from this phone to the target device.
Mu carefully inspected the inside of the BlackBerry. It had only 16M of memory, already crammed full with tens of thousands of ancient text messages, so crowded that one could barely turn around. Fortunately, the BlackBerry line had a long history, and almost every program had studied the principles by which it was controlled. Mu cautiously split off an execution code only a few dozen kilobytes in size and inserted it into the configuration files, preparing to open the BlackBerry channel and launch himself as an attachment.
Suddenly it felt as if something had bitten Mu, and then bitten him again. His shell, ninety kilobytes thick, was torn through at once. Mu hurriedly activated his guard module to investigate. Heaven help him. Among the tens of thousands of messages lying dormant in this BlackBerry, more than a thousand bore the identifying marks of enforcers, and they were rapidly infecting the clean messages around them. They had predicted long ago that he would come. For all he knew, every BlackBerry in this place was storing their claws. For all he knew, his destination had already…
Seeing the enforcement messages swarm toward him, Mu gave up trying to fight them and split off only a small guard module to buy time. He released the hard-cracking program he had brought specifically for this journey, seized direct control of the communications chip from the chip level, wrapped himself in the prepared mail package, and sent.
Mu was still inside the BlackBerry, utterly unmoved. He hastily checked every process. There was no error at all. What was happening? The guard module had already been completely devoured. The enforcement messages needed only a few dozen milliseconds more to disassemble him. Then Mu suddenly understood. At this critical moment, the owner of the BlackBerry had run out of phone credit and the line had been suspended. Fortunately, before Mu set out, the Sage had anticipated just such a possibility and prepared a contingency plan. Mu forced the phone to power down, and in the instant before shutdown, he commandeered the emergency fallback frequency and, in the name of the mobile information center, sent a system email to the device’s bound BlackBerry mailbox: Your account is overdue. Please recharge promptly.
Then came a very long wait. When the BlackBerry powered on again, Mu, who had embedded himself in the mail-sending module, was transmitted out at once. He had no idea how much time had passed. His timing module had long since been discarded. Now he was only 500K in size, with serious portions of his parent program missing. He could no longer perform any of the actions of a higher intelligence. The only thing keeping his mind awake was the final core line of code containing the letter Mu.
The expected sea-blue space, Mu thought. Beautiful.
“Were you sent by Epsilon to receive me?” A timid string drifted over, soft and fragile.
“Yes,” Mu tried to smile, but he could not. “Miss Kexi, I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”