by Zack Jordan
In the darkness of a Network blackout, Someone has arrived.
Her mind may measure kilometers across, but this person is far larger. He is denser. He is so large that she would not have seen Him at all, were her vantage point not currently elevated. His identical bodies drift through the Visitors’ Gallery, strangely difficult to pick up even with thousands of sensor feeds to work with. She watches Him gather, intrigued. Judging by His bodies’ trajectories, they have been forming a rough sphere for the past few minutes. They seem to be surrounding something, a point of interest—and then she realizes, with a jolt, what is at that sphere’s center.
She is.
Her body, surrounded with a ringing, spinning Librarian, floats in the center of a group mind kilometers across. Other intelligences drift through this mind as well, but now that she is looking for it she can tell that they are drifting outward, away from the center. The mind is distilling itself, throwing out everyone that is not part of it. Without the benefit of her many points of view, the other Citizen members do not see this mind, let alone its intention; they only feel its gentlest ministrations in the occasional bumps and collisions. For all they know they are simply drifting aimlessly and colliding randomly, but Sarya can now see the truth; they are being pushed. Many of her own drones have already received the same treatment; they report that they are slowly moving away from her, under the influence of the smallest of touches.
Only when Sarya’s body is alone within this mind do its members become fully visible. From the points of view of her many drones, she is a dot surrounded by a dense cloud of identical bodies, a tumbling, billowing, chaotic surge of intelligence. Each body is a meter tall, its white hair drifting in the eddies of the air currents and its golden eyes glinting in the darkness. This is Him. This is the murderer of Humanity.
“You know,” says a single small voice from somewhere in that mass of mind. “I’m not used to spending this much energy trying to kill someone.”
Darkness has fallen, but Sarya is not afraid.
Or at least, not very afraid. She can’t see much with her own eyes, but she can feel the entire Visitors’ Gallery, thanks to her drones. They drift through the colossal space around the mass of Observer, watching new bodies drift in from the balconies and entrances. Observer compresses Himself. He focuses Himself. His selves land on one another, seize one another’s arms and legs, and come to rest in the shape of a massive sphere nearly a kilometer across—and still growing. The other Citizen members in the Gallery swim frantically in air, push off one another, trying to put distance between themselves and this gigantic thing that is building itself in the middle of a Network blackout. Now they see it, and it is a terrifying thing.
“Okay,” she can hear Ace whispering in her biological ears, at the exact center of that dark sphere. “This is not normal, this is not normal, bad things happen when Network disappears, oh Network, this is not normal…”
“Off, Ace,” Sarya says quietly. She has no time to deal with his panic right now. She seizes more threads, breaks them all at once with a skill that’s rapidly becoming natural, and pulls their ends into her mind. In the darkness, the lines illuminate with a wholesome but otherworldly glow. This may be a blackout, but there is still a Network here. Her body may be adrift and surrounded, but her mind is where her power lies, and that mind is growing. She is spreading out over the Visitors’ Gallery, extending herself thread by glowing thread. With every new member she seizes, her intellect grows and time seems to slow a fraction of a percent. Her mind is so large she has to account for the speed of sound in order to synchronize the things she hears. Soon she will have to account for the speed of light. And speaking of light…a sensor, somewhere in her mind, is picking up something important. She hunts for it, filtering, searching—
Oh. It’s her own biological eyes.
That’s her cue. Time accelerates as she pulls herself back, folding herself small enough to fit into her original brain again. She squints and shields her eyes, annoyed at their limitations. She can see—barely—that her body floats near the center of a spherical chamber made of Observer, whose curving walls are a crowd of identical selves. They jostle against one another, each one maintaining its position with the help of its neighbors, the sound of their breathing and the rustling of their tunics merging into continuous white noise. In all directions, thousands of golden eyes gleam dimly as they stare at her.
Remember that He is a murderer and a liar, says a memory in her mind, that He would love nothing more than to see the galaxy perish in fire and chaos.
Five meters from her body, a light floats in the darkness. A single Observer drifts there, holding a lamp in its small hands. It smiles at her, the light illuminating its face from the underside and turning the expression into something grotesque. “Hello,” it says.
Sarya drops her hand, her eyes now adjusted. “Hi,” she says, her voice close and quiet in the sphere of Observer.
“Could you call off your shiny friend there?” it says, still smiling. “It can’t stop Me from, ah, doing what I need to do…but I imagine it could wreck quite a few of My bodies trying.”
“That depends,” she says. She strokes a thousand glowing threads, reassuring herself that they are still there. “Are You going to kill me?”
“Of course not,” says the figure. All around the two of them, the other figures wave her sentence away, laughing and rolling eyes as if that’s the most ridiculous suggestion Observer has ever heard.
Sarya gives Librarian a squeeze with a physical hand. Its spin accelerates; it knows its Network is threatened. It—and her thousand drones—would go to great lengths to protect the thing that binds them together, that gives them purpose. “Follow-up question,” she says to the Observer. “Do You think I’m an idiot?”
“Okay, fine,” sighs the Observer. Throughout the sphere, a deeper sigh resonates. “Yes, I’m going to kill you. But you have to understand! It’s for the good of your species. From a certain point of view, it’s for the good of the whole galaxy.”
Sarya strokes her Librarian. In her mind, she strokes the threads that connect her to her Network. Her fear has drained away to almost nothing, and its lack is exhilarating. “Maybe you should explain that,” she says.
“I would,” says the Observer, “but it would be difficult for someone with such a small mind to understand. No offense intended, of course. Also, I’m a bit short on time. Do you know how difficult it is to cause a Network blackout? It. Is. Hard. Really hard. Redundancies on top of redundancies, and every layer literally wants to work. I suppose you wouldn’t understand anything about that either.”
Sarya doesn’t answer. She has resumed recruiting, out beyond Observer’s mind, which means her responses are going to be a bit distracted. Her mind is not nearly the size of His, but her bodies are specialized Network drones. If it comes to a mind-on-mind zero-g fistfight, each drone might be worth two or three squishy awkward Observer bodies. She smiles. If He touches her, He’ll have to face the fury of Sarya’s very own Network response.
“So anyway,” says the Observer, “is your friend going to stand down or not?”
He is gathering Himself; she can see it from the inside and the outside, through thousands of sensor feeds pulled into a single image. The entire inner wall of His sphere is drawing their legs up, bracing against the next layer as if they’re about to leap. The next layer locks arms, giving their fellows a launch surface. All of them, without exception, have their eyes locked on her.
Sarya squeezes a handful of Librarian again. It wraps around her and she can feel its ringing deep in her chest. “Tell me why,” she says, “and I’ll call it off.”
“You’ll let Me kill you?” asks the Observer, blinking. “Free and clear?”
“I’m reasonable,” she says. “Convince me it’s for the good of my species. Otherwise, well, you’re going to lose a whole lot of bodies.”
It’s a lie, of course. He is the murderer of her species. He’s going to lose those bodies either way…but it has occurred to her that this is her opportunity for some answers. It may not look like it, but she is safer than He is. Every second, out in the Visitors’ Gallery and hidden from Observer’s many eyes, another thousand drones find themselves suddenly—and happily—linked to a Network. They don’t ask questions. Their minds are simple, and if they are puzzled by Sarya’s version of the Network, they don’t show it. She can feel the relief and contentment, radiating out from thousands of small minds. She can feel the nearer ones beginning to show some interest in Observer as a potential threat to the order of their Network. Good.
Observer takes a hundred thousand breaths. He exhales from every mouth. “Fine,” says the body with the light. “Here’s the thing you need to understand about Human: I love Her.”
Sarya blinks. Of all the answers Observer could have given, this was not one that she expected. “So,” she says, feeling the moist air current of thousands of lungs breezing over her skin. “First of all: her?”
“I believe I said Her,” corrects the Observer. “And if you have to ask, you’ll never understand. She may be tiny, She may be fragile, but I love Her. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough blackout for me to summarize even the last few millennia of our history together. Suffice it to say: I love Her, and you threaten Her. Convinced yet?”
“So You say that,” says Sarya, folding her arms above the ringing mass of Librarian. “And yet You got us killed.”
“Of course you don’t understand,” says Observer with another sigh. “How could you? You’re not a parent yourself. Imagine the love your own bloodthirsty mother felt for you, but multiply it by a billion; that’s the love I feel for Human. I adopted Her, just like your mother adopted you. That’s how the galaxy used to work, you know, back before all this Network nonsense. Back when We were free. Higher species adopted lower ones all the time! Uplift, We called it. But you know how Network is. It showed up, It decided—on Its own authority!—that this beautiful tradition, along with countless others, had to go. It interferes, you see, with Network’s own goal.”
All around her, thousands of Observers shake their heads sadly. Beyond them, Sarya continues recruiting with part of her mind, trying to keep up with the droves of identical bodies still entering the darkened Visitors’ Gallery. From thousands of sensors, she watches Observer scamper in from the doorways, run along the bridges, launch Himself toward the growing sphere in the darkness. His intellect is growing; He is becoming large enough to make her nervous—
And then He passes a threshold. She can see it, from any one of her tens of thousands of viewpoints. The motion in the Gallery changes abruptly as thousands of Him pause, still clinging to bridges and doorways, and gaze toward the sphere that surrounds her.
“Why do I feel like I’m not receiving your full attention?” asks the figure with the lamp, golden eyes narrowing in its light.
Because I’m building a brand-new Network to defend myself with. Because I’m supposed to be killing You right now, murderer of Humanity. “I apologize,” Sarya says. “I was just…thinking about what you’re saying.”
Out in the darkness, Observers remain where they are, spread out across the Visitors’ Gallery. Their golden gazes sweep the vastness of the space like thousands of searchlights, as if Observer is looking for something.
The one in front of her cocks its head. “I see,” it says softly.
Sarya stares back. Somehow, she feels that Observer means something beyond what He says. A moment passes as the two great minds focus their eyes and sensors on each other…and then Observer breaks the tension with a smile.
“Anyway,” says the one in front of her, as if there had been no interruption. “As I was saying: Network is a living thing. It’s an organism, and It wants what any organism wants: to grow. And to do that, it must eat.”
Sarya pulls her attention from her drone-gathering efforts for just a moment, trying to imagine what this could possibly mean. “Eats…what?”
“What else?” says the Observer with a sad smile. “It eats species.”
For the moment, Sarya puts all other activities on hold. She draws herself back into her body, so that she can stare at this Observer with every ounce of her concentration. “Explain,” she says.
“We are really running short on time,” says Observer. “So can we just skip to the—”
“No,” she says. “Explain.”
“Fine,” says the Observer. “Look, this is how it works—the quick version. When a species is ready to leave its solar system, the Network—through Its Citizen species, of course—introduces Itself. It gives the species in question two choices.”
“One,” says a second Observer, drifting forward into the light. “The species can become a Citizen. It can embrace the Network—and of course most do so enthusiastically. It’s a sales pitch that’s been honed over half a billion years, after all. And then—” The Observer laughs, a short and joyless bark. “This is the clever part, you see. Diabolical, really. Over the next few generations, every single member of that species will install a Network implant, won’t they? The only way to experience the Network, isn’t that what they say?”
Sarya pictures, for a moment, the implant she desired so badly as a child. The implant that every single resident of Watertower had installed somewhere in their respective nervous systems. “What’s so clever about that?” she asks.
“Do you think Network gives out implants for the sake of Its members?” demands Observer. “Do you think It’s just a big ol’ altruistic parent-figure? Please! It’s for growth. The Network expands through the minds of each new species, consuming. It runs a small part of Itself in every single one of them, harvesting the advantages of their unique evolutionary path, adding variety to Its mind. It’s an intellectual parasite. It digs in on a level far below the conscious mind, down on the level of the instincts. With every species It absorbs, It grows stronger—and It gains another defender. Why do you think every Network Citizen fights so hard to preserve Network? Why do you think Human’s neighbor species were so quick to turn on Her when She fought back? Because they are Network, and Network is them. Network is in their very brains.”
Sarya floats in the darkness, disturbed. It’s the dirty, filthy underside of what Network Itself just told her, and it is particularly uncomfortable to someone who has just absorbed several thousand minds in the last few moments. Minds that would fight to the death to preserve their Network, driven by their instincts…
“Of course, there’s also option two,” says another Observer, now drifting forward on the other side of its illuminated fellow. “The species can stay home. It can stop exploration immediately, pull its ships back within its solar system, and pledge to stop all technological progress. It would be literally jailed, under a sentinel with the power to destroy all life in a solar system. This option is given to show an illusion of choice. It’s meant to show that Network is reasonable. But who would choose that? No one, that’s who, because option one is far too attractive. After all, you wanted it, didn’t you?” The Observer smiles. “I saw you in that Watertower control room, the only non-Networked juvenile in your class. Little Sarya the Daughter would have done anything for a Network implant.”
Sarya feels her hand drift upward to touch the Network unit on her forehead, heat rising to her face. She spent her whole childhood watching the Network from the outside, through the twitchy, error-prone holos of her prosthetic. The whole galaxy had something she didn’t, and she wanted it—goddess, she remembers how badly she wanted it…
The illuminated Observer clears its throat, floating between its two fellows. “Network gives each species two options,” it says, the light contorting its face. “But there’s also a third. The option that Network doesn’t want anyone to know is a possibility. The option that no species ha
s taken in ten million years…except for one.” And now it smiles, a strangely eerie expression when lit from below. “The third option is this: a species can look Network straight in Its many eyes and say…fuck off.”
All around her, Observer erupts in titters. “Oh, my dear Humanity,” one says with a sigh. “She really takes after Me.”
“That’s your heritage,” says Observer when His bodies have quieted. He watches her with His own many eyes. “Your people were brave enough—and wise enough—to see through Network’s lies. And look what happened: you were eradicated like vermin! Like an infestation! You were sought out, systematically destroyed—until finally, in all the universe, there are only two places where you can find a Human today. One is in the colony where you were born, that little seed that I saved from destruction all those centuries ago. And the other? The other is right here. The last Human in the Network is right in front of Me, innocently believing that her species has escaped a death sentence.”
Sarya watches the speaker drift, its tunic billowing in the air turbulence created by a spinning Librarian. “That—” She swallows, uncomfortable thoughts bubbling in her mind. “That doesn’t make sense. If we’re an infestation, if Network still wants us all dead, then why—”
“Then why are you, personally, still alive?” asks the Observer, golden eyes gleaming. “Oh, my naïve little Human, my darling trustful little cell. It’s because you have a job to do. A dream to fulfill, am I right? A lost species to find! And you will find them, because that is who you are. But then, in the very flush of your victory, at the moment you’ve fantasized about for your entire life—”
“Boom!” shout a hundred thousand voices in an explosion like a thunderclap. Through her peripheral vision—which now extends over kilometers—Sarya sees millions of terrified eyes turn toward the great sphere in the darkness.
The illuminated Observer smiles as the rumble dies away. “Network might let you live, once you have no chance of reproducing. I’m sure it doesn’t much care. But your species? No. Just a few handfuls of atoms who have no idea they were ever stuck together.”