The Adventures of Cosmic Joe

Cosmic Joe cut the space, easily overcoming parsek after parsek. He moved with such speed that the stars were stretched into threads, the threads curled up into balls, and the balls cleared away from Joe passing by at such a distance that they seemed like dots against the background of eternity.

Suddenly, the receptors signaled the presence of the object. The blue planet, covered with a cloud of unusually white color, promised pentabit valuable information. The organism automatically concentrated and adopted a polymorphic structure, which it always took before emergency braking.
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Cosmic Joe effortlessly pierced a weak planetary atmosphere and hovered over the surface for a while, choosing the best place to land, then swooped down. Clouds parted, the surface of the planet swung sideways and approached. Another moment, and Joe hovered over the surface in search of an information donor.

Information donor was not slow to show up. It was off-white and rather voluminous, a lot more space Joe. The creature grimly and, one might say, defiantly scanned the terrain in front of itself, then tilted the front part and tore out of the surface the tangled — apparently of biological origin — a shade of green.

Cosmic Joe didn't care. He released the pods and gently, in order to frighten off the donor, landed on its upper part, preparing for informational drilling in advance. The airlock opened, the drill slipped out of it, and for some time felt the surface, trying on a new reality, then began to be modified. Joe habitually waited for the restructuring of the body. Soon, based on the survey, the bur took an elongated shape corresponding to the intermolecular holes on the surface of the creature, and penetrated inside. Drilling has begun.

Information flowed continuously, Cosmic Joe's computational abilities began to be analyzed.

Of course, the object was biological - no one had doubted before. In relational relations, the donor's evolutionary history was easy to read: not out of curiosity — curiosity drowned during his wanderings — but for control purposes. In front of Cosmic Joe's inner eye, the sequence of ancestors of this dirty white creature reversed. Biological forms were simplified and simplified, until they were reduced to a unicellular level. No further information was provided in the analysis.

During the download, Joe found several turns, not regular in the general series of evolutionary transformations, and winced. His sensitive organism did not tolerate a lack of order and automatically structured the recorded data. It happened this time too: the structural errors in the evolution of the off-white creature were corrected upon recording.

Information drilling was successfully completed, the data was optimized and sent to the most reliable storage that you can imagine - the Star Cloud. Cosmic Joe was going to look for the next donor - for the only donor for such a rich planet in the informational sense, of course, when he noticed a competitor. The competitor was a bundle of moving antennas, some of which were clearly used to move, because they rotated at a breakneck speed, while the lower antennas were used for landing.

The competitor landed on the surface of the donor near the Cosmic Joe, chose a place to stroke it, waved one of the pointed antennas, and with all its scope drove under the surface. So, this antenna was used as a drill.

“Be-ee!” - Signaled the information donor, regardless of the new drilling, simply by virtue of behavioral standards.

Cosmic Joe rarely faced with competitors, so he enthusiastically watched the work of a colleague. There was something to see: a competitor used advanced technology. As information is being pumped out, one of its antennas, already thick, thickened more and more, while filling up with an internal red color. This technology was not familiar to Joe and greatly interested him. But when a competitor pulled a drill antenna with a bright red droplet at the end from the donor, Cosmic Joe realized that a bundle of moving antennas downloaded not biological information, but biological fluid. Hence the creature was not a competitor, but a local aborigine.

Angry at his own inconsistency, Cosmic Joe rushed to a competitor to use him as a donor. A competitor swung the top antennas, trying to hide, but could not escape from an experienced intergalactic information collector. In an instant, Joe overtook the fugitive and squeezed with a silicon beak - carefully, so as not to damage.

Further occurred at the level of reflexes. The borer slipped out of the airlock, adapted to the new conditions, and began to pump information. Since the competitor was overflowed with someone else's biological material, the information was shared when downloading: someone else's data was rejected as studied earlier, the new information was optimized, then recorded.

A bunch of moving antennas really turned out to be aboriginal. In evolutionary terms, he was far from the original donor, but Cosmic Joe easily found a common ancestor of both. Further deepening in evolution was useless due to what was studied.

Cosmic Joe was going to open his beak and release his competitor at will, when among the foreign biological material that was overflowing with a thick medium antenna, something curious was discovered. Very minor information fragments belonging to the essence of the highest order, although the same evolutionary branch. Before Cosmic Joe, the evolutionary history of a rational being, rather primitive, but unusual in that its relational relations did not end at the level of unicellular organisms, but continued as they did, unfolded. In other words, evolution did not originate at its inception, but somewhere in the middle of the path: relational relationships converged to the middle point, like a cobweb.

When Cosmic Joe reconstructed the midpoint in the infrared range and received a visual projection, he saw a creature wandering under the scorching light on the rocky surface. The creature dragged on itself the load, which was a cross of the correct form. Bright red drops rolled down from the former competitor's drilling antenna from the upper part of the body, spiked with spikes of biological origin. Some of the reconstructed creatures of the same kind silently accompanied the central soplanet, while others were on his sides, making scornful or triumphant sounds.

After receiving the information, Cosmic Joe released the former rival to freedom. He squeaked in delight, fluttered his battered motor antennas, and flew away, hardly carrying off the inflated red core in the middle of himself. Cosmic Joe did not follow him, as he did for the original dirty white donor, who continued to tear the tangled green pieces from the surface of the planet, but he soared high above both of them, trying to find creatures with such a curious evolution.

Soon, he drew attention to a colony of rocky parallelepipeds, thickly weaving the surface of the planet in one of the coordinates. The intuition developed over the centuries of cosmic wanderings prompted him to be on the right track. In fact, the parallelepipeds were inhabited by creatures akin to the one that, bent under the cruciform burden, trudged along the hot road. There were so many Aborigines that Cosmic Joe hesitated a little, trying on where to start. In the end, he rushed inside the parallelepiped, where, apparently, these strange in an evolutionary sense creatures lived.

When Cosmic Joe flew inward through a square-shaped hole, he discovered an intense exchange of information, and not only of a biological type. Installations of artificial origin and obviously of informational purpose were found between the biological creatures swarming in one of the sectors of biological creatures, and there were small bright yellow cubes placed in disarray. There is an informational exchange between all the named objects. The aborigines moved their spoons on installations of artificial origin, occasionally connecting to them something taken out of yellow cubes, but most importantly, they responded as part of the feedback to the signals of artificial installations - computers, as Cosmic Joe guessed.

Cosmic Joe was no longer interested in the private evolution of individual organisms, but in the planetary information base. Trying not to attract attention, the wanderer descended on the lifeless tentacle, stretched from one artificial computer to another, and opened the airlock chamber. From within Joe slipped the bur, gently touched the surface and, having received the information, began to transform. Soon contact with the information field was established, it did not even need to punch a hole.

Adapted drill earned. Information was difficult to structure. The body buzzed slightly, trying to bring the data in an acceptable form. Sensing a vague anxiety, Joe again tried to connect to the Central Star Processor and even sent a corresponding request, but the Star Processor, like the Star Cloud, was overloaded - such an unfortunate day today turned out.

“Nothing, we can handle it,” Cosmic Joe thought invigoratingly, although he already understood that it would be difficult to cope.

The further the information drill went, the more stress each pentabyte was downloaded, and no end-to-end optimization was foreseen. For the first time during its existence, Cosmic Joe sensed a light systemic environment. The body plunged into the unknown, worked for wear, - this also happened to Cosmic Joe for the first time.

Why so much unstructured information ?! And what if it cannot be optimized?

Thinking so, Cosmic Joe was really scared and stopped downloading. However, the organism, poisoned by the non-optimized downloaded data, was poorly obeyed by the commands - possibly frozen. Of the last of his strength, losing control over his own system, Joe issued an emergency command to stop any vigorous actions. The calculator buzzed, offended at the unsuccessful attempt to optimize that which exceeds its technical capabilities. Judging by the internal temperature, he braked on the limit - if the sensors did not haywire before, of course. The drill rotated for a while at idle speed, then stalled. Joe detached him from the donor tentacle and, almost losing his orientation in space, blindly crawled between the yellow boxes, hoping to crawl out of the cursed parallelepiped and lie down somewhere in the interplanetary orbit.

At this moment Cosmic Joe perceived the interrogative signal of one of the Aborigines, who continued to rummage around the devices of information exchange.

“What the hell is this?”

Cosmic Joe felt a stretch in his direction and took one of the aboriginal palms in his flesh.

“Hey, Kostyan, what the fuck is this, I ask?”

"Flash drive" - ​​signaled the second creature.

"I see that the flash drive, but some kind of it is strange," followed a surprised answer. Then a voice added. “And I don’t have her connector, I think.”

“And you check, programmer,” the second voice chuckled. “Find where to stick in?”

Cosmic Joe tried to free himself from the capture of the aboriginal pseudo-paws, but his organism, poisoned by overloads, finally froze and stopped responding to commands. Then Joe felt that his silicon beak was trying to be combined with a hole in an artificial device.

"I say, not yuesbish!"

"Come on, give me!"

Cosmic Joe's silicon beak was tried to be inserted into another device, this time it was pressed harder, and the attempt was successful. Under the influence of external influence, the beak changed, reflexively taking the required form. The proximity of information flowing in an artificial device caused Joe and another unconditioned reflex in the body: the airlock opened wide, a drill came out of it and automatically connected to the device. Downloading information was blocked earlier, so the drill started and began to work in the opposite direction, copying information to the device and further, not all devices connected to it, which turned out to be quite a significant amount.

“And you said, not yuesbishny! Hands to pull you.

At the edge of the receptors, the semi-unconscious Cosmic Joe watched as the natives bent over the device.

"Well, what is written there?"

"I do not understand yet."

“Whose flash drive is this?”

“Certainly not from ours. I have not seen such on sale. ”

“Yesterday, the chief drove the Japs around the office. The Japs dropped.

“Yeah. So the Japs. ”

"Wait, what's going on with the screen?"

Through the establishment of relational connections, the device, over which the natives bent, was transformed: from each character silver threads stretched deep into the common planetary base. One of the Aborigines, with the automatic movement of the palms, poked at the thread, following the link to the neighboring object. Since there were a lot of objects, and the movement of the aboriginal was sweeping, the transition to links was also multiple. Relational connections were a web and converged at one visualized point: at the point where their aboriginal tribesman pulls a very heavy cross over himself, and from the upper part of his body, twisted with biological thorns, roll down bright red drops.

“Zadolbal this Mel Gibson”, - heard Cosmic Joe through the fainting shroud.

“Format, and deal with the end. Virusnyak not enough. "

The aborigine, to whom they addressed, shoved with palms.

Cosmic Joe's body, in response to the intercepted hostile signal, made the last unconscious attempt to take the situation under control. An automatic command to structure any opposing data was thrown in the direction of the signal of destruction. The signal given by Cosmic Joe's body was extremely weak due to informational poisoning, but at that moment the request to connect to the Central Star Processor received satisfaction. As a result, Cosmic Joe’s oncoming signal intensified a billion times.

Aboriginal artificial information devices seemed to sigh and tense, coherent ripples ran through their screens. Here the Central Star Processor started working at full capacity.

"The server flew!" - Cosmic Joe heard someone screaming.

The aborigines jumped on their palms and, knocking over the yellow boxes on the way, swept between the devices. But it was too late: the information of the planetary network was inexorably optimized, in accordance with the laws of nature and reason.