The heart of the problem lay in Message Mind modes.

Some Message Minds were Speeders, able to do what a human could but far faster. Others were Anthologies, aggregating many smaller subminds into a whole. These most closely resembled human minds, on the old Minsky society of mind model, a legislature of “agents” contending. These were easier to work with because they had similar thought patterns—unlike the Speeders, who would shoot back answers and then race off down side alleys, often losing the discussion thread. To Rachel this felt like dealing with an excitable babble of voices. Such Message Minds often had few social smarts but could focus on narrow areas brilliantly—such as the Sagittarius Architecture.

Their opposites, the Savants, were about as quick as humans, but conveyed reflection and wisdom, given a chance. They were prone to oblique, Zenlike pronouncements.

Among all these, humans had more raw computational power because they could consult the vast library of their culture, plus talk amongst themselves about active problems.

Rachel knew her own bio neurons ran at 200 hertz frequencies, fully seven orders of magnitude slower than the Sagittarius Architecture and others. She had a hundred billion neurons, more than three times what chimps had. Her mind signals moved at a hundred meters a second, while Minds ran at the speed of light. Minds had more memory space, as well: big computers were cheap. Minds could be edited, too, but the Library did not allow that—change meant losing alien aspects only poorly glimpsed.

Human organizations had disputes on goals and methods. Minds could, if allowed, make Copy Clans just like themselves, and so were able to do complex things very fast—while humans working together were still dithering. She had seen a lot of that. The Sagittarius Composite had given humanity a solution to the hydrogen wall. In return it had used the energies to rebroadcast itself and its owners’ Message. Not dumb.

The Andromeda Structure used a daunting, many-layered language conveyed through sensation in her neural pod. It did not present as a personality at all, and no previous Librarians had managed to get an intelligible response from it. Advanced encoded intelligences sometimes found humans more than a bit boring, and one seldom had an idea why.

Today was no different. The Structure opened with a language peeve:

Your language, this Anglish, has humors hard to digest. It savors ambiguity, as in these We constructed to study how your minds work:

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

Acupuncture is a jab well done. That’s the point of it.

A will is a dead giveaway.

“Sure, those are pretty bad puns.”

But revealing! You play with this tangled language. We Minds are shaped to command precision.

Rachel shot back, “Yeah, that’s your limitation.” Then, to rub it in, she laughed. And thought, Take that, you bunch of zeroes and ones. Because you can’t laugh. Life would be impossible for us if we couldn’t.

It was already past lunch when she pried herself from the pod. She did some stretches, hand-walks, and lifts against Luna’s weak grav, and let the immersion fog burn away. Time for some real world, gal….