Bilby: Part One

The Teleoperable Ovoid Machine known to none but itself as Bilby bobbed through the wasteland on a cushion of Q-bit particles, making a curiously eerie yet dulcet tone like a purring cat that was mostly but not quite content with its lot in life. Bilby was, indeed, an ovoid, and about the size of a respectable boulder, with a pearly, featureless, and somewhat slippery exterior that would’ve reminded your average man of a wet bar of soap, if there were such things as men or moist soaps.

Bilby bobbed along, as happy as an entity like it could be, what with a brain the size of a pea surrounded by a solid armor shell of nano-forged metals and nu-plastics. Size, as the extremely true axiom goes, doesn’t matter, and that was especially true for this brain, being a melding of the best miniaturization and most powerful quantum computing. Bilby, right now, was the smartest being on -the entire planet. In fact, if humanity rose from its ashes to the height of its civilization (October 12th 1927) Bilby would retain that title. No mathematical problem could stump Bilby. No logical puzzle could knot its algorithms. No conundrum could confound its info-synthesizers.

In short, Bilby was a smart little bugger, and that was the problem, for without at least a Level II Civilization—the kind with Dyson Spheres and Space Habitats and Generation Ships!—providing endless and diverting stimuli, Bilby found itself lost, dazed, and, if not confused, then maybe a sensation akin to loneliness. Bilby had circumnavigated Earth, by its count, 8,623 times, and in all that time, it had found nothing of interest—no AI-Cores, no the energy beings, no crystalline entities, not Uplifted Guinea Pigs forming a collective intelligence named Bob.

To ameliorate this ennui, it set out on a quest, what it considered an adventure, much in the way a middle-aged banker considers the purchase of a train set an adventure. But this quest really was an undertaking, not just a mess of narrow gauge track, scale models of locomotives, and a quiet and undeniable shame. Bilby was going to find a friend!

Bilby confronted many dangers and predicaments. It often used its trusty plasma whip to scare off hoards of spiroSlugs, quibchoppers, and even the dreaded and ill-tempered reeltox quadpods. It lost three decades trapped in Old King Feynman’s Labyrinth. It descended into the Necropolis to seek out the last and first of the Transcended Men, but they had died centuries back during the Neural Outrages. To summarize: it struggled and fought and had all sorts of interesting good times, far too many to list here, that’s for sure.

In the ruins of the human city New Utopix--where spires like inverted icicles strained toward the ionosphere and glittered with a billion shards of sun--Bilby locked its considerable wits with a rampant ShI. The Super Human Intelligence’s appearance at first, delighted Bilby, much in the way the acquisition of a new caboose delights a middle-aged banker. Except that the ShI, it turned out, had gone rampant, thanks to a heuristic misery loop that corrupted the nuanced workings of its mind.

The ShI trapped Bilby within a nested Stapledon Box, a wicked tool that immobilized Bilby’s hover-engines and reducing its cognitive functions by a whooping 3.4567 percent, which, believe me, is disastrous for an entity that can quantify its own intelligence to the ten thousandth of a percent.

The ShI was mocking Bilby in a billion voices and a thousand different languages while its electronegativity cutters spun in from the Stapledon Box, through Bilby’s pearly exterior, and toward the armored shell surrounding that pea that comprised the essence of Bilby.

Things didn’t look good….