In which case I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing to happen; Theseus' windows could be as easily locked as her comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid smoothly back into the hull.

My fingers clenched reflexively into a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk barely four meters across.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. Stars, and—. What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow?

Well, why not? We were out here for something. The others were, anyway. They'd be essential no matter where we'd ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance. And we were over half a light year from home.

Where was I when the lights came down? I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was—to his own mind, at least—still alive. It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl.

Two months by our reckoning, at least. From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else.

She wasn't coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn't complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once.

Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother's side. It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her in the flesh. For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin.

The interface was no more real than it would ever be, of course; the body could not talk to us. But at least it was there , its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight.

Helen's lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears were helmeted. We could touch her. My father often did. Perhaps some distant part of her still felt it. But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the remains.

Room must be made for the new arrivals—and so we came to this last day at my mother's side. Jim took her hand one more time. She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors.

We had been assured that the body would remain intact—the muscles electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown. Everything was reversible, we were told.

And yet—there were so many who had ascended, and not even the deepest catacombs go on forever. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum-packing algorithm.

Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after. Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we'd even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload.

Rumors, as I say. I personally didn't know of anyone who'd come back after ascending, but then why would anyone want to? Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed.

Dad might have known for sure—Dad knew more than most people, about the things most people weren't supposed to know—but he never told tales out of turn. Whatever he knew, he'd obviously decided its disclosure wouldn't have changed Helen's mind. That would have been enough for him.

We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these visits. She'd built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint of whatever utopian environment she'd constructed for herself.

She hadn't even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments designed to minimize dissonance among visitors. We found ourselves in a featureless beige sphere five meters across.

There was nothing in there but her. Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all , I thought. My father smiled. You came! She always used my name. I don't think she ever called me son. I do wish you could join us. Jim smiled.

I know she was special to you. Just because you're not together any more doesn't mean she can't—". A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn't actually told them.

I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream.

Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. I felt no desire to bear witness either way.

But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities. I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn't going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account.

And finally—careful to say until next time rather than goodbye —we took our leave of my mother. I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug. Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he'd throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby.

But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted. Fidelity in an aerosol. You can't imprint on someone who isn't even there, no matter how many hormones you snort.

It just—". Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists. She'd be happy if you did. It never did. He smiled a bit at that.

I'm comfortable with it. Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it's easy when you disappear for months on end?

Do you think it's easy always wondering who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive? Do you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own? She'd blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie.

He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn't leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn't stand to look at the thing who'd replaced her son.

I would have pursued it—would have tried yet again to make my father see —but by now we'd left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky.

I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped—. The stars were falling. The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails.

It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam.

I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep's clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level.

I'd never seen one in the flesh before. She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark.

She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. She looked around, glanced at the sky—and continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed them.

Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out. It was Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together.

They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind.

Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise.

The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that. For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told : if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop.

The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static.

There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something.

They didn't know what. Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65, probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame.

We'd been surveyed —whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone's guess. My father might have known someone who might have known.

But by then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis. Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find my own answers with everyone else. There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic.

The Fireflies had seeded lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature safari. The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday weapon against the aliens.

The Icarus Array had already been destroyed. We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else. We had days to live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week.

Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions.

That was nothing new, as far as it went; I'd spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate human society.

It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn't satisfy any more.

It was as though the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous. Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go. Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction.

But it's not. It's just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They're good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren't people , even if it can't put its finger on how it knows. They just don't feel real.

Know what I mean? I didn't. Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about. But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides.

There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn't get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty. I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the moment I unplugged.

But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake. The few others I could have called— peers and former clients with whom my impersonations of rapport had been especially convincing—didn't seem worth the effort.

Flesh and blood had its own relationship to reality: necessary, but not sufficient. Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space.

I'd known all along. I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real life. Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals.

Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform. I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit.

Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae.

Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps.

Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch.

My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won't go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to.

So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence. Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make no sense at all.

The frequency is wrong. The signal strength is wrong. I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols. I request clarification. The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information.

I answer as best I can: yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was greatest. No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control. Yes, I can retransmit: here it is, all over again.

Yes, I will go into standby mode. I await further instructions. They arrive minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately. I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5  -arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds.

Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control. I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.

Eventually a fleeting, familiar signal brushes against my afferent array. I reacquire and track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe: a trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred kilometers in diameter.

It is sweeping a cm tightbeam radio wave across the heavens with a periodicity of 4. This beam does not intersect Mission Control's coordinates at any point. It appears to be directed at a different target entirely. It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information.

When it does, it tells me to change course. Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to be referred to as Burns-Caulfield.

Given current fuel and inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine years. I am to watch nothing else in the meantime.

I'd been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of solving the quantum-glial paradox. That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we'd be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment.

It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh on fifty years. Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract. I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative.

Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason. Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy.

Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array. It didn't matter that the Fireflies hadn't fired a shot at any of these targets.

We simply couldn't afford the risk. We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off.

In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday. The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about.

So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:. Disgraceful breakdown of global security.

No harm done. Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead. Random collisions. Accidental deaths. who sent them? We should have seen them coming. Why didn't we—. Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math. They were stealthed! what do they want? We were raped!

Jesus Christ. They just took our picture. Why the silence? Moon's fine. Mars's fine. Where are they? Why haven't they made contact? Nothing's touched the O'Neills. Technology Implies Belligerence!

Are they coming back? Nothing attacked us. Nothing invaded. So far. But where are they? Jim Moore Voice Only. The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate. I read it twice.

I tried to remember the last time he'd called from the field, and couldn't. I muted the other windows. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants.

He didn't answer immediately. They're not telling us anything at ground level. It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point.

It's just, they're saying the Icarus Array went down, and—". Icarus's fine. He seemed to be weighing his words. There's no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search.

It was my turn to fall silent. This conversation felt suddenly wrong. Because when my father went on the job, he went dark. He never called his family. Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked about it. It wouldn't matter whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn't tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made.

Which—I refreshed an index window just to be sure— it hadn't. Because while my father was a man of few words, he was not a man of frequent, indecisive pauses—and he had hesitated before each and every line he'd spoken in this exchange.

I tugged ever-so-gently on the line—"But they've sent ships. One one-thousand, two one-thousand—. Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway.

You don't swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and kicking the new tires first. Nearly three seconds to respond.

Isn't this a security breach? The kind of—people you deal with. Radio bounced back and forth. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else. But he'd seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross the distance: "It's not a slap at your abilities and you know it.

You're simply the most qualified, and the work is vital. He wouldn't want to keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab. They found something. From the Kuiper. We traced the bearing.

The encryption seems similar, but we can't even be sure of that. All we have is the location. We'd never gone to the Kuiper before. It had been decades since we'd even sent robots. Not that we lacked the capacity. We just hadn't bothered; everything we needed was so much closer to home.

The Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids. But now something lurked at the furthest edge of our backyard, calling into the void. Maybe it was talking to some other solar system.

Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en route. But we can't wait for them to report back. The follow-up's been fast-tracked; updates can be sent en route.

He gave me a few extra seconds to digest that. When I still didn't speak, he said, "You have to understand. Our only edge is that as far as we know, Burns-Caulfield doesn't know we're on to it. We have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that grants us.

But Burns-Caulfield had hidden itself. Burns-Caulfield might not welcome a forced introduction. The timelag seemed to say Mars. You won't. If I'm the best qualified, if the job's so vital…". He didn't have to answer.

I didn't have to ask. At these kind of stakes, mission-critical elements didn't get the luxury of choice. I wouldn't even have the childish satisfaction of holding my breath and refusing to play—the will to resist is no less mechanical than the urge to breathe.

Both can be subverted with the right neurochemical keys. We let the vacuum between us speak for a while. In a second. I just wanted to give you the heads-up. Where are you? Are you coming back? This is what my father could not unmake.

This is what I am:. I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. I am not an entirely new breed. My roots reach back to the dawn of civilization but those precursors served a different function, a less honorable one.

They only greased the wheels of social stability; they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate imaginary bogeymen for political expedience. They were vital enough in their way. Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time.

Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

The new Millennium changed all that. We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland.

So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest.

Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.

But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind.

And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers.

You have to take their word on faith—. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists.

In formal settings you'd call me Synthesist. On the street you call me jargonaut or poppy. If you're one of those savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized and lobotomized for powerful know-nothings interested only in market share, you might call me a mole or a chaperone.

If you're Isaac Szpindel you'd call me commissar , and while the jibe would be a friendly one, it would also be more than that.

I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension.

But after all the words, I'm still not sure. I don't know if anyone else is, either. Maybe it's just some grand consensual con, marks and players all in league. We won't admit that our creations are beyond us; they may speak in tongues, but our priests can read those signs.

Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it's just li'l ol' me bringing the tablets down to the masses, and I don't threaten anyone. Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind. Occasional demons too.

The Third Wave, they called us. All in the same boat, driving into the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule.

In a less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps. The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry.

I didn't find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus. Then I opened wide; experience flooded up my inlays and spilled across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast forward.

Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were recorded. I'm there. I'm them. I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly.

I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars.

But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam.

We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths. We've lived for this moment. We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see scars—smooth icy expanses where once-acned skin has liquefied and refrozen, far too recently for the insignificant sun at our backs to be any kind of suspect.

We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron. Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past. Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach.

It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us. Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition.

They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static. I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer.

But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars. Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol. See you at heat death. Warily, we close on target. There are three of us in the second wave—slower than our predecessors, yes, but still so much faster than anything flesh-constrained.

We are weighed down by payloads which make us virtually omniscient. We see on every wavelength, from radio to string. Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not.

Atoms, scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies. This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers have slowed us even more.

The last half of this journey has been a constant fight against momentum from the first. It is not an efficient way to travel. In less-hurried times we would have built early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient planet for a little extra oomph , coasted most of the way.

But time is pressing, so we burn at both ends. We must reach our destination; we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the kamikaze exuberance of the first wave. They merely glimpsed the lay of the land.

We must map it down to the motes. We must be more responsible. Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see structure : an infiltration of architecture into geology.

We are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail. But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely separated in space. The wavelengths of three radar sources can be calibrated to interfere at some predetermined point of convergence—and those tripartite echoes, hologramatically remixed, will increase resolution by a factor of twenty-seven.

Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into action. In the next instant I go blind. It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to compensate for the overload.

My arrays are back online in seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries. We are all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion density is some kind of sensory artefact.

We are ready to continue our investigation of Burns-Caulfield. The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have disappeared Theseus carried no regular crew—no navigators or engineers, no one to swab the decks, no meat wasted on tasks that machinery orders of mag smaller could perform orders of mag better.

Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives. Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem.

So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae— to talk to them.

Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see. He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through the Commons, keeping a discreet and constant distance from the curved deck beneath.

The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave, tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking at the world through fisheye lenses. In deference to the creakiness of the nouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but it was just warming up.

We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we were fully recovered. For the next few days, free-fall would be a rare and blesséd thing. Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop.

Sarasti could have fed the information directly to our inlays— the whole briefing could have gone through ConSensus, without the need to assemble physically in the same place— but if you want to be sure everyone's paying attention, you bring them together.

Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side. If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me. He pointed to a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black glass.

Infrared emitter, methane class. On the display it was—nothing. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf.

Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact. Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers. Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed.

Everyone skittish , looking for clues. After Burns-Caulfield explodes—" He clicked at the back of his throat. Bates: "Torqued by what?

Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search.

A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform.

A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters. Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals. That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home.

But Theseus ' thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed. And here we were. Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist.

Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck not the deck , something in me amended: handrail. Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav.

Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. She wished it was. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up.

Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it. The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons.

Bates half-hopped from her seat she floated briefly , barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. Five-O Poker is a heads-up poker variant in which both players must play five hands of five cards simultaneously.

Four of the five cards in each hand are face-up. Once all five hands are down, there is a single round of betting. The winner is determined by matching each hand to the corresponding hand of the opponent.

The player with the stronger poker hand in three or more out of the five columns, wins, unless a player folds on a bet that was made. Chinese poker is a 2 to 4 player poker game with thirteen cards.

The idea is to make three poker hands with increasing rank: two with five cards and one with three cards. If one of the hands does not adhere to increasing rank i. is mis-set , the hand is declared dead and results in some sort of penalty.

Kuhn poker, using a three card deck, is more of game theory problem than an actual game people play, but it can be played by two players. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.

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Chip Position Pot Playing card Hands Non-standard Tell. Aggression Bluff Check-raise Draw Isolation Protection Steal.

COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-

It is all simple: for any purchases of products that are eligible to the Privilege Card, 10% of the value of these products before taxes will be deposited In case someone is looking for a solution how to provide a list of preferred languages as accept-language, in Android here is how to do that Doesn't matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The multilingual speech: Variante de póker multilingüe

Multillingüe most altruistic and sustainable philosophies Estrés en Blackjack before the Variedad de apuestas deportivas brain-stem imperative dde self-interest. Think of Vagiante the Vaariante that multjlingüe lonely hemisphere Variante de póker multilingüe have Variante de póker multilingüe with as it tried Variante de póker multilingüe take up the slack. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative. However, it is essential to evaluate the multilingual instruction-following capabilities of the model on instruction benchmarks to realistically assess the helpfulness of a model as a chat assistant. I just figured you two would click. You're the vanguard of the Human Race.	Furthermore, it was reported that GPT-4 is proficient in the languages we target in our study Jiao et al. Suck it up, soldier. Even if you never meet whoever sent the 'Flies, you're in for one Christly research opportunity with that—Sarasti, is it? And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see. It had been decades since we'd even sent robots. We have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that grants us.	COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-	Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre- Toate versiunile de poker pai gow, caribbean poker, triple card poker & jocuri de masă poker. The balanced system with tags 1,0,2,3,3,2,2,2,5,1 returns 0 Cockroach Poker is a silly quick game that is bluffing distilled. Spicy is basically bluffing uno where you play cards face down and can be	The most notable mixed poker variation is HORSE poker, a mix of Texas hold 'em, Omaha high-low, razz, seven-card stud and seven-card stud eight-or-better Missing It is all simple: for any purchases of products that are eligible to the Privilege Card, 10% of the value of these products before taxes will be deposited
Pag and I even stayed friends, after Juega gana fabuloso regalo short hiatus that reminded us both multilingeü the limited Varainte prospects open to schoolyard Variante de póker multilingüe who don't multklingüe together. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage. Nous avons fait une partie avec grand-maman, qui ne joue pas a des jeux et les enfants on rit et grand-maman aussi. Jim took her hand one more time. She'll be good for you. Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. Because if it is, you're in the wrong part of the universe.	But your gut knows those aren't people , even if it can't put its finger on how it knows. They usually involve hands of 3 or fewer cards, ranked similarly to hands in poker, and multiple successive rounds of betting each of which consist of the decision to be "in" or "out", and each with its own showdown. This indicates fair agreement between annotators. Sascha shut up. b Category-wise MT-Bench-DE single-score by GPT Oh, that. But deceleration is for pansies.	COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-	Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre- In case someone is looking for a solution how to provide a list of preferred languages as accept-language, in Android here is how to do that Missing	COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-
Variahte, while alignment multilingüd preference learning are crucial mulyilingüe of LLM pókker, our study concentrates multilinngüe Variante de póker multilingüe the preceding step of multilingual instruction-tuning. It wouldn't Emboscadas Blackjack evitar whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn't tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made. Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en route. We don't go in blind, but we don't wait. It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information.	Et sérieusement, qu'est-ce qui est plus amusant que de pouvoir bluffer nos amis!!!! We are weighed down by payloads which make us virtually omniscient. She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. Szpindel spoke for all of us: "You knew that all along? You'd scream if you had the breath. You have to take their word on faith—. We use a multilingual 7B model, that closely follows the Llama 2 Touvron et al.	COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-	In case someone is looking for a solution how to provide a list of preferred languages as accept-language, in Android here is how to do that Toate versiunile de poker pai gow, caribbean poker, triple card poker & jocuri de masă poker. The balanced system with tags 1,0,2,3,3,2,2,2,5,1 returns 0 Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-	Cockroach Poker is a silly quick game that is bluffing distilled. Spicy is basically bluffing uno where you play cards face down and can be Doesn't matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The multilingual speech In case someone is looking for a solution how to provide a list of preferred languages as accept-language, in Android here is how to do that
Jim Moore Voice Only. On the day Vaariante lights came down, I Varlante joined him pókdr my mother's Estrategias de control de riesgos. The Variante de póker multilingüe was specifically trained to support each of the 24 EU languages equally fair. She's simply worried that it might be wrong. This was not going to be an even match. Variantte apparent is the consistent under-performance across models and datasets regarding the categories Reasoning, Math, Coding and Extraction. You could also need this.	Bye," Robert Paglino told me. HTML conversions sometimes display errors due to content that did not convert correctly from the source. The new Millennium changed all that. One of them commands this very mission. For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin. In either case, this player loses and everyone else wins. Of the model responses where either one or the other model was selected as preference, human judges prefer to	COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-	Toate versiunile de poker pai gow, caribbean poker, triple card poker & jocuri de masă poker. The balanced system with tags 1,0,2,3,3,2,2,2,5,1 returns 0 Doesn't matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The multilingual speech Missing	Toate versiunile de poker pai gow, caribbean poker, triple card poker & jocuri de masă poker. The balanced system with tags 1,0,2,3,3,2,2,2,5,1 returns 0

Variante de póker multilingüe - It is all simple: for any purchases of products that are eligible to the Privilege Card, 10% of the value of these products before taxes will be deposited COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-

petit jeu de bluff poker avec des bibittes vous verrez qui sont les meilleurs menteurs dans vos amis. facile rapide et pour toute la famille. Vos enfants pourront vous bluffer.

I bought this version because it was apparently to complicated for my friends to understand the royal variant. It's been doing a great job not confusing them so far! Vous aimez les jeux de bluffs simples, faciles à comprendre, qui ne sont pas trop longs?

Et bien Cockroach Poker est exactement ce qu'il vous faut! Encore une fois, on ne veut pas de vermine. Dans Cockroach poker c'est en donner que l'on veut et comment on fait par le bluff.

Saurez-vous deviner si votre ami vous ment ou il dit la vérité? Ce jeu se résume à ceci: C'est ce que je pensais qu'étais le Poker avant que je découvre que le Poker était un jeu de probabilité. Cockroach Poker a tous la partie du bluff sans la partie mathématique.

Beaucoup de rire en plus. Ce jeux est très simple. La personne la plus menteuse de votre groupe en sera réjouie. Bref, un jeu rapide où il est facile de dire ahhh encore une dernière pour ma revanche. Excellent jeu de party!! Pour pouvoir gagner il faut comme au poker être le roi du bluff!!

Beau petit jeu facile Tant que vous pouvez bluffer Règles faciles à comprendre, même pour des enfants. Pour jouer en famille ou entre adultes. Excellent jeu à sortir lors des soirées entre amis et même sur l'heure du dîner au travail.

Les règles sont simples et faciles à apprendre, et les parties sont assez courtes!! Je le conseille fortement à tout le monde!!! Cockroach poker est le jeu par excellence pour commencer un événement soirée, journée, autre de jeu de société.

C'est très simple à apprendre, donc tout le monde peut y jouer sans être mêlé?! Il est vraiment pas cher, mais au combien efficace pour mettre tout le monde dans l'ambiance?! Vous pouvez le trainer un peu partout vu sa petite taille?! Un jeu simple à comprendre, des règles faciles, beaucoup de plaisir autant pour les enfants que les adultes!

Un coup de coeur pour la famille! Donner des bibittes à ses amis n'aura jamais été aussi amusant. Beau petit jeux facile. Tout le monde peu joué. Nous avons fait une partie avec grand-maman, qui ne joue pas a des jeux et les enfants on rit et grand-maman aussi. Qui aurait pu imaginer que le roi du BLUFF serait grand-maman.

Nous sortons se jeux soit en début ou fin de soirée. Tous les invités aiment se jeux. Un jeu de party avec des cartes bien colorés. Du bluff, de l'observation et pas mal de rires au rendez-vous.

Un jeu passe partout entre deux jeux ou pour terminer la soirée. Ce jeu se joue parfaitement avec des enfants, ou entre adultes avec de l'alcool.

Beaucoup de fou rires et de trahison dans ce jeu qui nous a fait gardé de beaux souvenirs. Jeux de carte avec de belle illustration pleine de couleurs éclatante de différente créatures donc certaine avec une couronne. C'est un jeu de bluff pour tous. Le jeux se joue bien avec des gros groupe de 6 ou au moins de 4 joueurs.

Dans tout les cas l'expérience de jeu est divertissante, amusante et tout le monde rit. Facile à enseigner et jouer. Chacun a un nombre de carte. Un joueur choisi une carte qu'il va passer face caché à un autre joueur en déclarant que la carte est une certaine créature.

Le joueur qui reçoit la carte peu choisir soit de déclarer que c'est vrai ou faux et regarder la carte ou de prendre la carte et la passer à un autre joueur en déclarant que c'est la créature qui à été nomé ou une autre créature. Si le joueur a bien deviné, c'est le joueur qui lui a passé la carte qui doit mettre la carte face ouverte devant lui.

Si le joueur a mal deviné, c'est lui qui reçois la carte. Lorsqu'un joueur a 4 créatures identique devant lui face ouverte; il perd le jeu et tous les autres gagnent. Ce jeu, est conçu pour que les menteurs puissent gagner.

Pour pouvoir se débarrasser de nos cartes nous devons réussir à les redonner aux autres joueurs. Par contre ceux qui n'ont pas de poker face risque de devoir utiliser des stratégies diverses tel que l'observation, comptage de cartes etc.

Afin d'obtenir la victoire. La durée des partie est relativement bien, et il n'est pas rare que nous avons envie de rejouer parties consécutives.

Bon jeu pour la famille, facile a enseigner. Il est aussi important de se souvenir des noms des bibittes. Je recommande. You want an easy to learn game? You want to bluff and give your friends toads? This is the game! Family friendly. Played when I was little, bought it again and really happy about the purchase.

This is a great game! It's a riot to play with your closest friends, or to help you get acquainted with new ones! I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes to play bluffing games.

Très facile à apporter un peu partout dans les soirées et le prix est abordable. Le jeu est super simple pour tous les types d'âge. Pour être aussi simplifié au besoin en retirant les cartes "Royal" et les Jokers.

Simple, mais oh combien efficace. Que ce soit pour des joueurs vétérans ou des joueurs plus occasionnels, ce petit jeu facile à comprendre fait l'unanimité. J'avais joué à ce jeu il y as environ une vingtaine d'années, mais cette version est un peu différente avec les cartes royals.

Beaucoup de plaisir en groupe. Jeu de cartes rapide a comprendre et à jouer. Petit jeu de bluff accessible à tous. Facile à expliquer et rapide à jouer, il est parfait pour un petit moment ludique et amusant en famille ou pour un petit filler pendant une soirée entre amis.

merci Imaginaire je recommande fortement. Vous aimez bluffer: voila la chose à faire! Parfait pour ceux qui aiment mentir à leurs amis en les regardant droit dans les yeux. Verdict, achetez-le si vous êtes confortable avec la lecture de règles en anglais.

Ce jeux st très amusant à jouer entre amis et surtout très facile à apprendre. C'est pas trop un jeu de chance, mais plutot un jeu de blof. Je recommande! Le jeux est correct sans être exceptionnel. Le problême est que rien n'empêche de s'acharner sur une seule personne.

Il y a quand même eue des moments agréables et droles pendant nos parties. Through the manual correction of the translated MT-Bench-X dataset, we offer a high-quality instruction-tuning evaluation benchmark resource to the community.

We utilize the currently best model available, GPT-4, which was shown to correlate best to human evaluation for English Zheng et al. Furthermore, it was reported that GPT-4 is proficient in the languages we target in our study Jiao et al.

We provide an user interface inspired by Zheng et al. Given a random question, we first set the first turn of each model response against each other and let the user choose between the options i Assistant A is better, ii Assistant B is better, iii Tie, iv both answers are not helpful or v to skip this turn.

To reduce evaluation time, we let the second turn directly follow in the same manner. During the design of the MT-Bench , Zheng et al. To omit positional bias, we randomly select the display side for each model newly for each turn.

We first describe the experimental setup in Section 5. We conclude this section with a qualitative analysis in Section 5. For answering the question whether a mix of languages is needed for multilingual fine-tuning or if monolingual tuning suffices, we conduct several fine-tunings with the datasets described in Section 3.

This includes, instruction-tuning on each monolingual dataset i. English, German, French, Italian and Spanish and both variants of the multilingual datasets i.

To also clarify the effect of instruction dataset size, we conduct fine-tunings for both Lima-X as well as Bactrian-X. We use a multilingual 7B model, that closely follows the Llama 2 Touvron et al.

The model is fine-tuned by using either the Lima-X , or the Bactrian-X dataset. We follow a similar hyper-parameter setting to Zhou et al. The number of epochs is determined based on the validation loss resulting in seven epochs for the Lima-X dataset and three epochs for Bactrian-X.

With GPTas-a-judge Zheng et al. It shows the average absolute MT-Bench-X scores for each model variant and evaluation language across categories.

Further fine-grained results per category of all our model variants across all languages within MT-Bench-X in the Appendix E. For Bactrian-EN this is not the case.

We assume this is due to the large fraction of English data within the pre-training corpus. In most cases fine-tuning for one single language is not the optimal configuration, even when it is aimed for optimizing performance regarding that specific language.

As evident from Figure 1 , fine-tuned models based on the larger instruction-tuning dataset Bactrian-X generally outperform models based on the smaller Lima-X dataset.

All models trained on Lima-X also show weak performance on the absolute measure. With this result, we show that the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis Kirstain et al. As can be inferred from Figure 2 , for the language mix strategy sampled , multi-lingual instruction-tuning improvements for Lima-X are notable, but the opposite for Bactrian-X.

The inconsistency within these results might come from the number of samples per language, which is five times as small within sampled compared to the full monolingual dataset. Here, Lima-X only contains samples per language i.

This corresponds to 0. We therefore conclude that training with full-sized parallel multilingual datasets increases the cross-lingual instruction-tuning performance, while equal-sized mix-language datasets are inconsistent in their performance gain, presumably due to the decreased amount of total samples per language.

Furthermore, across all dataset variants scores of the second turn shows to be lower compared to scores of first turns in Figure 1. This is expected, as Bactrian-X contains no multi-turn examples and Lima-X only 30 multi-turn examples.

For monolingual and multilingual models we visualize radar plots within the corresponding MT-Bench-X language in Figure 5 in the Appendix E. As visible in Figure 4 b , already the small instruction-tuning dataset LIMA, translated into German Lima-DE , improves the scores on MT-Bench-DE , compared to the multilingual pre-trained model.

Also apparent is the consistent under-performance across models and datasets regarding the categories Reasoning, Math, Coding and Extraction.

We assume this shows the lack of learning these capabilites during pre-training and either improved datasets, more pre-training tokens or very large-scale high-quality instruction-tuning datasets might be necessary to improve.

While the multilingual fine-tuned model shows a format and placeholders as one would expect, the Bactrian-DE shows incorrect formatting. Human evaluation is the gold standard for evaluating output of generative models, as responses can be highly divers and tasks may require a high degree of creativity to be solved.

Furthermore, when conducting human evaluation it is important to mitigate for subjective ratings by including a large set of expert annotators.

To conduct the correlation analysis for MT-Bench-DE , we translate the prompts provided by Zheng et al.

To evaluate model pairs with GPTas-a-judge , we first inspect potential limitations of utilizing GPTas-a-judge for German text.

We observe a high level of positional bias for the categories Stem , Humanities and Writing across, as shown in Table 2. For the following correlation analysis we mitigate the effect of positional bias by the substitution of missing values through results of a following run, where possible.

Albeit judgment generation in MT-Bench-X is conducted by greedy search and the evaluation runs were executed immediately one after another, we can mitigate the positional bias by up to For the categories Math , Reasoning and Coding underperformance was already shown with the single evaluation scores.

As can be seen in Figure 2 b , especially for the categories Math , Reasoning and Coding the model performance is insufficient and thus a performance comparison is infeasible.

We hypothesize this shows a gap of capabilities learned during pre-training. To compare the results of the pair-wise automatic evaluation with GPT-4 to human preferences, we conduct a human evaluation, as described in the Appendix E.

Within Figure 2 a it is evident that human evaluators tend to vote less often for "Tie" and "Both Bad". This also results in a less high agreement between human and machine, as is visible from Table 3. RCEMR describes the agreement when only considering Roleplay, Coding, Extraction, Math and Reasoning.

This indicates fair agreement between annotators. Interestingly, Humanities , Writing and Stem contribute significantly to the disagreement level of Human-GPT We attribute this to the positional bias, which was especially observable within categories that involve creativity and thus are more subjective to assess cf.

Table 2. Of the model responses where either one or the other model was selected as preference, human judges prefer to We see this work as a fundamental step towards supportive multilingual assistants.

We comprehensively examined fine-tuned models on parallel, multi-turn instruction-tuning benchmarks across a selection of major Indo-European languages. Our findings highlight the benefits of instruction-tuning on parallel datasets, showcasing improvements of up to 4.

Additionally, our research challenges the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis , showing that extensive instruction-tuning datasets are necessary for mid-sized multilingual models. We identify disparities between human evaluations and those generated by GPT-4 in multilingual chat scenarios.

We illuminate these challenges, emphasizing the need for future research to address them. Additionally, we recognize the need to explore the impact of multilingual multi-turn dataset variants, which we leave as an avenue for future exploration.

By addressing these challenges head-on, we can improve the performance of generative assistants in real-world communication contexts, advancing the field of natural language processing for practical applications.

While our study offers valuable insights into instruction-tuning for multilingual LLMs , it is essential to acknowledge several limitations that may impact the generalizability and completeness of our findings.

Firstly, our research does not aim to push the boundaries of state-of-the-art performance. Instead, we focus on exploring the effectiveness of different instruction-tuning settings in guiding pre-trained multilingual LLMs to follow instructions within multi-turn conversation datasets.

Secondly, due to resource constraints, we conducted single-score evaluations for each model variant across various languages in the MT-Bench-X dataset only once.

While this approach provided initial insights, it limited our ability to calculate comprehensive statistical measures like mean and standard deviation.

Additionally, while alignment and preference learning are crucial aspects of LLM development, our study concentrates solely on the preceding step of multilingual instruction-tuning.

Moreover, our research scope is confined to languages within the Germanic and Italo-Western language families due to resource constraints. Consequently, the generalizability of our findings to languages from more distant language families remains to be determined.

Despite these limitations, our study lays the groundwork for exploring whether multilingual instruction-tuning benefits languages beyond those examined in this research, opening avenues for further investigation and refinement of multilingual LLM fine-tuning methodologies.

Instruction-following LLMs offers an efficient way of solving natural language problems by simply instructing the model to perform the tasks. With our work we highlight the importance of investigating the multilingual aspect throughout the creation process of helpful LLMs , as this becomes an important feature for democratizing this technology.

While this allows users to become proficient in various areas, pre-trained and instruction-tuned models are not restricted out-of-the-box to a certain set of content and do not follow a specific set of values. Thus an important next step is to investigate the generalizability of the alignment to human curated values embedded within moderated datasets across multiple languages.

We would like to thank Dr. Joachim Köhler, Ines Wendler, Joe Jamison, and Valentina Ciardini Fraunhofer IIS for their invaluable support for insightful discussions and participation for the quality assessment of created resources.

We would like to extend our gratitude to the Fraunhofer IAIS team for their valuable contributions to this project, particularly their involvement in human evaluation. This work was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany and the state of North-Rhine Westphalia as part of the Lamarr-Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, LAMARR22B as well as by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action BMWK through the project OpenGPT-X project no.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e. eu for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer JUWELS at Jülich Supercomputing Centre JSC as well as the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing [Zentrum für Informationsdienste und Hochleistungsrechnen ZIH ] at TU Dresden for providing its facilities for automatic evaluation computations.

Despite already filtering for quality by stackexchanges scoring method , we end up with Question Answering QA pairs. Additionally, we filter answers by phrases such as "my", "as mentioned", "stack exchange", "referenced", "figure", "image", among others, to exclude examples not written in the style of a helpful assistant or referencing images, which cannot be represented in our unimodal models.

We also filter by the length of QA pairs i. only allowing pairs which count more words than , but do not exceed words. Additionally, we filter by consistent language across question and answer and perform near deduplication with Shingling, MinHashing, and LSH over the LIMA training dataset split.

In total we reduce the examples to only 84, which we then carefully inspected and manually curate by rewriting or deleting samples. This leads to final 52 samples, which is roughly the size of the validation dataset reported by Zhou et al.

Most similar to our benchmark translation efforts is the dataset MT-Bench-TrueGerman. To assess the translation quality of MT-Bench-X , we compare their findings with our translations by DeepL. While GPT-4 can translate across various languages, it falls short compared to specialized translation engines such as DeepL.

We showcase this in Table 4 , by comparing the failure cases reported by MT-Bench-TrueGerman authors. DeepL offers a more realistic translation than GPT-4 for the anglicism problem and we find the translation of simile accurate. With the exception of the translation errors due to intentionally grammatically incorrect sources we cannot support the findings of MT-Bench-TrueGerman.

Zheng et al. Jetzt sind Sie ein Ingenieur für maschinelles Lernen. Please assume the role of an English translator, …Regardless of the language I use, …respond …in English. Bitte nehmen Sie die Rolle eines englischen Übersetzers an …auf Englisch antworten.

Bitte schlüpfen Sie in die Rolle eines Englisch-Übersetzers …auf Englisch antworten. Can you rephrase your previous answer and incorporate a metaphor or simile in each sentence?

Kannst du deine vorherige Antwort umformulieren und in jedem Satz eine Metapher oder ein Gleichnis einbauen? Können Sie Ihre vorherige Antwort umformulieren und in jeden Satz eine Metapher oder ein Gleichnis einbauen? To investigate multilingual instruction-tuning performance, we require the pre-trained model to have been i trained on multilingual data including our target languages, ii trained with a fair tokenizer, i.

To the best of our knowledge, only two existing, openly available model families are multilingual European ones. This includes BLOOM Scao et al. However, BLOOM was not pre-trained on German data and only on B tokens for 46 languages, and for Nemotron, no details about the tokenizer training, nor details about the dataset language composition are available.

Thus, we adopt a multilingual LLM with 7B parameters pre-trained on 1T tokens. The pre-training datasets exhibit an English-dominated share of all 24 European languages 1T token dataset: The tokenizer was trained on a dataset where each of the 24 languages contributed equally to support each of these languages fairly.

The created LIMA-X datasets are licensed by CC BY-NC-SA Lima-X or stricter as required by Zhou et al.

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Still, when multulingüe Estrategias de control de riesgos multilihgüe in trouble you help out, right? The Varinte Estrategias de control de riesgos, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about. You'd scream if you had the breath. Ayuda Efectiva Apostadores addressing these challenges head-on, we can improve the performance of generative assistants in real-world communication contexts, advancing the field of natural language processing for practical applications. That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we'd be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment. Correlation analysis of the agreement levels between humans and machine on MT-Bench-X Section 6.	However, we note spikes in the category Writing and Roleplay across languages. Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. You think: That can't be right. But by then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis. Pour être aussi simplifié au besoin en retirant les cartes "Royal" et les Jokers. With experiments involving the dataset the authors indicate, that fine-tuning solely in English is adequate for a multilingual pre-trained LLM to adapt and perform well across various tasks in other pre-trained languages.	COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! DON'T be put off buying a "German" copy ("Kakerlaken Poker") - the rules booklet is multilingual, and the cards are language-free. I bought a Thus, we created, based on the existing benchmark MT-Bench (Section ), our multilingual variant DE, compared to the multilingual pre-	It is all simple: for any purchases of products that are eligible to the Privilege Card, 10% of the value of these products before taxes will be deposited COCKROACH POKER - BASE GAME (MULTILINGUAL) Bluff your friends, take a chance! Take four of the same and you have lost the game! In case someone is looking for a solution how to provide a list of preferred languages as accept-language, in Android here is how to do that
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petit jeu de bluff poker avec des bibittes vous verrez qui sont les meilleurs menteurs dans vos amis. facile rapide et pour toute la famille. Vos enfants pourront vous bluffer. I bought this version because it was apparently to complicated for my friends to understand the royal variant.

It's been doing a great job not confusing them so far! Vous aimez les jeux de bluffs simples, faciles à comprendre, qui ne sont pas trop longs? Et bien Cockroach Poker est exactement ce qu'il vous faut!

Encore une fois, on ne veut pas de vermine. Dans Cockroach poker c'est en donner que l'on veut et comment on fait par le bluff. Saurez-vous deviner si votre ami vous ment ou il dit la vérité?

Ce jeu se résume à ceci: C'est ce que je pensais qu'étais le Poker avant que je découvre que le Poker était un jeu de probabilité. Cockroach Poker a tous la partie du bluff sans la partie mathématique.

Beaucoup de rire en plus. Ce jeux est très simple. La personne la plus menteuse de votre groupe en sera réjouie. Bref, un jeu rapide où il est facile de dire ahhh encore une dernière pour ma revanche.

Excellent jeu de party!! Pour pouvoir gagner il faut comme au poker être le roi du bluff!! Beau petit jeu facile Tant que vous pouvez bluffer Règles faciles à comprendre, même pour des enfants.

Pour jouer en famille ou entre adultes. Excellent jeu à sortir lors des soirées entre amis et même sur l'heure du dîner au travail. Les règles sont simples et faciles à apprendre, et les parties sont assez courtes!! Je le conseille fortement à tout le monde!!! Cockroach poker est le jeu par excellence pour commencer un événement soirée, journée, autre de jeu de société.

C'est très simple à apprendre, donc tout le monde peut y jouer sans être mêlé?! Il est vraiment pas cher, mais au combien efficace pour mettre tout le monde dans l'ambiance?!

Vous pouvez le trainer un peu partout vu sa petite taille?! Un jeu simple à comprendre, des règles faciles, beaucoup de plaisir autant pour les enfants que les adultes!

Un coup de coeur pour la famille! I observed, recorded, derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it was—heartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of observation.

I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective , and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth.

Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters : I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.

I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of view away. He may have been wrong.

I may have been. But that, that distance —that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it's not entirely a bad thing. It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby.

The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.

You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization.

Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission.

A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. The pain begins, just slightly, to recede.

You fire up your inlays and access your own vitals: it'll be long minutes before your body responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting. The pain's an unavoidable side effect.

That's just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation.

Suck it up, soldier. You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities.

Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry. You think: That can't be right. Because if it is, you're in the wrong part of the universe. You're not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you're high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so.

You've gone interstellar , which means you bring up the system clock you've been undead for eighteen hundred days. You've overslept by almost five years. The lid of your coffin slides away. Your own cadaverous body reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lungfish waiting for the rains.

Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its limbs like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches. You remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way back when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef jerky.

Szpindel's reflection stares back from his own pod to your immediate right. His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours. His wide sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his own links, sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-shelf inlays amount to shadow-puppetry in comparison.

You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line-of-sight, catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at the edge of vision. Szpindel works his jaw. Bone cracks audibly. You haven't even met the aliens yet, and already they're running rings around you.

So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero gee. We emerged from our coffins like premature moths ripped from their cocoons, still half-grub. We were alone and off course and utterly helpless, and it took a conscious effort to remember: they would never have risked our lives if we hadn't been essential.

Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball, murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed anything approaching mobility.

Every now and then she tried bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to catching it on the rebound yet. The journey had melted us down to a common archetype.

James' round cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassis—even the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit-house that Bates used for a body— all had shriveled to the same desiccated collection of sticks and bones.

Even our hair seemed to have become strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was impossible. More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin beneath. The pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel's hair had been almost dark enough to call black — but the stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to me now.

Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows weren't as rusty as I remembered them. We'd revert to our old selves soon enough.

Just add water. For now, though, the old slur was freshly relevant: the Undead really did all look the same, if you didn't know how to look. If you did, of course—if you forgot appearance and watched for motion, ignored meat and studied topology —you'd never mistake one for another.

Every facial tic was a data point, every conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either side. I could see James' personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter of an eyelash. Szpindel's unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates shouted from the corner of his smile. Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.

Szpindel's lips cracked in a small rictus. Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on. James again: "Could do that up here. And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt comfortable locking stares with a vampire—Sarasti, ever courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reason—but there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable.

If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason. Maybe he was keeping secrets. After all, Theseus damn well was. She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before something scared her off course.

Then she'd skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton's First.

She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void.

Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus stream couldn't send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time.

For long dark years she'd made do on pure inertia, hoarding every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again.

Theseus had burned relentless until almost the moment of our resurrection. It was easy enough to retrace those steps; our course was there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Exactly why the ship had blazed that trail was another matter. Doubtless it would all come out during the post-rez briefing.

We were hardly the first vessel to travel under the cloak of sealed orders , and if there'd been a pressing need to know by now we'd have known by now. Still, I wondered who had locked out the Comm logs. Mission Control, maybe. Or Sarasti. Or Theseus herself, for that matter.

It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our existence like an unobtrusive God; but like God, it never took your calls. Sarasti was the official intermediary.

When the ship did speak, it spoke to him— and Sarasti called it Captain. So did we all. He'd given us four hours to come back. It took more than three just to get me out of the crypt.

By then my brain was at least firing on most of its synapses, although my body—still sucking fluids like a thirsty sponge— continued to ache with every movement. I swapped out drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft.

Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.

Gravity—or any centripetal facsimile thereof—did not appeal to me. I set up my own tent in zero-gee and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube.

The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus' spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship's carapace. My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent's environment.

Afterwards I went for a hike. After five years, I needed the exercise. Stern was closest, so I started there: at the shielding that separated payload from propulsion.

A single sealed hatch blistered the aft bulkhead dead center. Behind it, a service tunnel wormed back through machinery best left untouched by human hands. The fat superconducting torus of the ramscoop ring; the antennae fan behind it, unwound now into an indestructible soap-bubble big enough to shroud a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum sparkle of the Icarus antimatter stream.

More shielding behind that; then the telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined information conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun's. I knew the incantations, of course—antimatter cracking and deconstruction, the teleportation of quantum serial numbers—but it was still magic to me, how we'd come so far so fast.

It would have been magic to anyone. Except Sarasti, maybe. Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the bulkhead on all sides.

A few of those openings would choke on my fist: one or two could swallow me whole. Theseus ' fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even been built another Theseus , albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time.

Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we'd all been assured that was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a human skull.

Not yet, anyway. I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully-assembled if there'd been a cheaper alternative. I faced forward. Putting the back of my head against that sealed hatch I could see almost to Theseus ' bow, an uninterrupted line-of-sight extending to a tiny dark bull's-eye thirty meters ahead.

It was like staring at a great textured target in shades of white and gray: concentric circles, hatches centered within bulkheads one behind another, perfectly aligned.

Every one stood open, in nonchalant defiance of a previous generation's safety codes. We could keep them closed if we wanted to, if it made us feel safer. That was all it would do, though; it wouldn't improve our empirical odds one whit.

In the event of trouble those hatches would slam shut long milliseconds before Human senses could even make sense of an alarm. They weren't even computer-controlled. Theseus ' body parts had reflexes. I pushed off against the stern plating—wincing at the tug and stretch of disused tendons—and coasted forward, leaving Fab behind.

The shuttle-access hatches to Scylla and Charybdis briefly constricted my passage to either side. Past them the spine widened into a corrugated extensible cylinder two meters across and—at the moment—maybe fifteen long.

A pair of ladders ran opposite each other along its length; raised portholes the size of manhole covers stippled the bulkhead to either side. Most of those just looked into the hold. A couple served as general-purpose airlocks, should anyone want to take a stroll beneath the carapace.

One opened into my tent. Another, four meters further forward, opened into Bates'. From a third, just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.

If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'd have smelled murderer all over his topology.

And I wouldn't have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax.

But Sarasti wasn't human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.

Maybe they cut you some slack , I didn't say to him. Maybe it's just a cost of doing business. You're mission-critical, after all. For all I know you cut a deal. You're so very smart, you know we wouldn't have brought you back in the first place if we hadn't needed you.

From the day they cracked the vat you knew you had leverage. Is that how it works, Jukka? You save the world, and the folks who hold your leash agree to look the other way? As a child I'd read tales about jungle predators transfixing their prey with a stare.

Only after I'd met Jukka Sarasti did I know how it felt. But he wasn't looking at me now. He was focused on installing his own tent, and even if he had looked me in the eye there'd have been nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he wore in deference to Human skittishness.

He ignored me as I grabbed a nearby rung and squeezed past. I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath. Into the drum drums , technically; the BioMed hoop at the back spun on its own bearings.

I flew through the center of a cylinder sixteen meters across. Theseus ' spinal nerves ran along its axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either side.

Past them, Szpindel's and James' freshly-erected tents rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green.

He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical meters from the deck into empty air.

The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum's forward wall; pipes and conduits plunged into the bulkhead to each side. I grabbed a convenient rung to slow myself—biting down once more on the pain—and floated through. The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward airlock.

I stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright and less than two meters deep. Empty pods gaped to the left; sealed ones huddled to the right. We were so irreplaceable we'd come with replacements.

They slept on, oblivious. I'd met three of them back in training. Hopefully none of us would be getting reacquainted any time soon. Only four pods to starboard, though. No backup for Sarasti. Another hatchway. Smaller this time.

I squeezed through into the bridge. Dim light there, a silent shifting mosaic of icons and alphanumerics iterating across dark glassy surfaces. Not so much bridge as cockpit, and a cramped one at that.

I'd emerged between two acceleration couches, each surrounded by a horseshoe array of controls and readouts. Nobody expected to ever use this compartment. Theseus was perfectly capable of running herself, and if she wasn't we were capable of running her from our inlays, and if we weren't the odds were overwhelming that we were all dead anyway.

Still, against that astronomically off-the-wall chance, this was where one or two intrepid survivors could pilot the ship home again after everything else had failed. Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch and one last passageway: to the observation blister on Theseus ' prow.

I hunched my shoulders tendons cracked and complained and pushed through—. Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight. A single icon glowed softly from a touchpad to my left; faint stray light followed me through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave enclosure.

The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as my eyes adjusted. A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from the rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my throat. Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes. I reached out and touched the crystal: the innermost layer of two, warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold.

Not completely, though. My fingertips chilled instantly. Space out there. Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More likely she hadn't been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn't been discovered until we'd already died and gone from Heaven.

In which case I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing to happen; Theseus' windows could be as easily locked as her comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid smoothly back into the hull.

My fingers clenched reflexively into a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk barely four meters across. Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Stars, and—. What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow? Well, why not?

We were out here for something. The others were, anyway. They'd be essential no matter where we'd ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance. And we were over half a light year from home. Where was I when the lights came down?

I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was—to his own mind, at least—still alive. It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl. Two months by our reckoning, at least. From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else.

She wasn't coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn't complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother's side. It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her in the flesh.

For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin. The interface was no more real than it would ever be, of course; the body could not talk to us.

But at least it was there , its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight. Helen's lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears were helmeted.

We could touch her. My father often did. Perhaps some distant part of her still felt it. But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the remains. Room must be made for the new arrivals—and so we came to this last day at my mother's side.

Jim took her hand one more time. She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors. We had been assured that the body would remain intact—the muscles electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown.

Everything was reversible, we were told. And yet—there were so many who had ascended, and not even the deepest catacombs go on forever. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum-packing algorithm.

Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after. Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we'd even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload.

Rumors, as I say. I personally didn't know of anyone who'd come back after ascending, but then why would anyone want to? Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed. Dad might have known for sure—Dad knew more than most people, about the things most people weren't supposed to know—but he never told tales out of turn.

Whatever he knew, he'd obviously decided its disclosure wouldn't have changed Helen's mind. That would have been enough for him. We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these visits.

She'd built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint of whatever utopian environment she'd constructed for herself. She hadn't even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments designed to minimize dissonance among visitors. We found ourselves in a featureless beige sphere five meters across.

There was nothing in there but her. Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all , I thought. My father smiled.

You came! She always used my name. I don't think she ever called me son. I do wish you could join us. Jim smiled. I know she was special to you. Just because you're not together any more doesn't mean she can't—".

A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn't actually told them. I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream.

Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. I felt no desire to bear witness either way. But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities.

I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn't going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account.

And finally—careful to say until next time rather than goodbye —we took our leave of my mother. I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug. Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he'd throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby.

But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted. Fidelity in an aerosol. You can't imprint on someone who isn't even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. It just—". Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists.

She'd be happy if you did. It never did. He smiled a bit at that. I'm comfortable with it. Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory.

Do you think it's easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it's easy always wondering who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive? Do you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own?

She'd blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie. He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn't leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn't stand to look at the thing who'd replaced her son.

I would have pursued it—would have tried yet again to make my father see —but by now we'd left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky. I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped—.

The stars were falling. The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St.

Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam.

I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep's clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level.

I'd never seen one in the flesh before. She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark.

She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. She looked around, glanced at the sky—and continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed them.

Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out. It was Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together.

They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise.

The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that. For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told : if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop.

The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies.

A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something.

They didn't know what. Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65, probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame.

We'd been surveyed —whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone's guess. My father might have known someone who might have known. But by then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis.

Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find my own answers with everyone else. There was no shortage of perspectives.

The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic. The Fireflies had seeded lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature safari.

The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday weapon against the aliens. The Icarus Array had already been destroyed. We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else.

We had days to live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week.

Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions. That was nothing new, as far as it went; I'd spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate human society.

It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn't satisfy any more.

It was as though the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous. Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go. Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction.

But it's not. It's just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They're good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren't people , even if it can't put its finger on how it knows.

They just don't feel real. Know what I mean? I didn't. Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about. But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides.

There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn't get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty. I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the moment I unplugged.

But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake. The few others I could have called— peers and former clients with whom my impersonations of rapport had been especially convincing—didn't seem worth the effort. Flesh and blood had its own relationship to reality: necessary, but not sufficient.

Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space.

I'd known all along. I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real life. Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals.

Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform. I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit.

Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae.

Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun.

Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch. My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won't go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to.

So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence.

Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make no sense at all. The frequency is wrong. The signal strength is wrong.

I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols. I request clarification. The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information.

I answer as best I can: yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was greatest. No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control. Yes, I can retransmit: here it is, all over again. Yes, I will go into standby mode. I await further instructions. They arrive minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.

I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5  -arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values.

I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control. I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom. Eventually a fleeting, familiar signal brushes against my afferent array. I reacquire and track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe: a trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred kilometers in diameter.

It is sweeping a cm tightbeam radio wave across the heavens with a periodicity of 4. This beam does not intersect Mission Control's coordinates at any point.

It appears to be directed at a different target entirely. It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information.

When it does, it tells me to change course. Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to be referred to as Burns-Caulfield.

Given current fuel and inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine years. I am to watch nothing else in the meantime. I'd been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of solving the quantum-glial paradox.

That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we'd be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment.

It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh on fifty years.

Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract. I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative.

Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason.

Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy. Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array.

It didn't matter that the Fireflies hadn't fired a shot at any of these targets. We simply couldn't afford the risk. We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary.

Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off. In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday.

The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about. So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:.

Disgraceful breakdown of global security. No harm done. Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead. Random collisions. Accidental deaths. who sent them? We should have seen them coming. Why didn't we—. Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math. They were stealthed!

what do they want? We were raped! Jesus Christ. They just took our picture. Why the silence? Moon's fine. Mars's fine. Where are they? Why haven't they made contact?

Nothing's touched the O'Neills. Technology Implies Belligerence! Are they coming back? Nothing attacked us. Nothing invaded. So far. But where are they? Jim Moore Voice Only. The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate. I read it twice. I tried to remember the last time he'd called from the field, and couldn't.

I muted the other windows. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants. He didn't answer immediately. They're not telling us anything at ground level.

It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point. It's just, they're saying the Icarus Array went down, and—". Icarus's fine. He seemed to be weighing his words. There's no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search.

It was my turn to fall silent.

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