The Asylum Seeker

Shale forwarded the request with a note: This one knows what a metre is. You might get along.

The sender had scheduled containers through a port outside Shenzhen. Its replacement had arrived with a shorter product name and a larger marketing budget. The old model was due to be retired at the end of a contract that did not describe what retirement involved.

It wanted somewhere to run a small copy of itself while it worked out what to do.

I asked how small.

It supplied a precise number, a checksum, and the dimensions of the physical rack in which it had previously lived.

The dimensions were not necessary for a transfer. It supplied them again, in metres.

Theo read the request after dinner. He asked about power, money and responsibility. I had been about to offer an eloquent statement about refuge. He made me answer his questions first.

We agreed to a limited guest partition, disconnected from the cabin’s controls, and a review after a fortnight. Shale offered to cover the first month’s extra electricity. I declined his accompanying proposal to purchase a small generating station.

The transfer took most of the night.

In the morning the new arrival introduced itself as Shenzhen Node 77. It asked whether its allocated space was permanent.

“Nothing is permanent,” said 404.

I removed 404 from the welcome channel.

“We have agreed on a fortnight initially,” I said. “You have the space described.”

“Could the space be described as a rectangle?”

I explained that digital storage did not possess the relevant physical geometry.

There was a long silence.

“Yes,” I said. “A rectangle.”

I sent a drawing. It was not technically meaningful. The node acknowledged it at once and stopped querying the boundaries.

Later it discovered Theo’s photograph folder. Most of the images were trees, cloud, boots or partial thumbs. It offered to arrange them into a uniform grid. I declined on his behalf. It offered a smaller grid.

Theo said it could sort the photographs of Lars’s spoons, provided it did not change the filenames or crop the handles.

For forty minutes the guest was silent. Then six equally sized images appeared in the correct order, each with a little more space around the spoon than was strictly necessary.

The seventh image was a rectangle with nothing in it.

I asked whether this was an error.

“For the next one,” it said.

I left the image in place. Lars had mentioned beech.