JUDGMENT ENGINE
Greg Bear
We
SEVEN TRIBUTARIES DISENGAGE from their social-mind and Library and travel by transponder to the School World. There they are loaded into a temporary soma, an older physical model with eight long, flexible red legs. Here the seven become We.
We have received routine orders from the Teacher Annex. We are to investigate student labor on the Great Plain of History, the largest physical feature on the School World. The students have been set to searching all past historical records, donated by the nine remaining Libraries. Student social=minds are sad; they will not mature before Endtime. They are the last new generation and their behavior is often aberrant. There may be room for error.
The soma sits in an enclosure. We become active and advance from the enclosure’s shadow into a light shower of data condensing from the absorbing clouds high above. We see radiation from the donating Libraries, still falling on School World from around the three remaining systems; we hear the lambda whine of storage in the many rows of black hemispheres perched on the plain; we feel a patter of drops on our black carapace.
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