by Zack Jordan
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. “And you know this…how?” she says.
“I know Network’s nature,” says Observer. “I also know quite a bit about your life. As you no doubt have found by now, We higher minds have a certain talent for putting two billion and two billion together. The most damning evidence, in My humble opinion is this: you’ve been quite the lucky little Human, haven’t you?”
“Lucky,” she says, staring. “Are you being serious right now?”
“I didn’t say it was good luck,” says the second Observer with an identical smile. “But you have to admit: you’ve led an unusual life. You’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of unlikely events. It’s almost as if someone—or Someone—noticed you the moment you entered Network space. It’s almost as if that person went to great lengths to ensure that you reached maturity in one piece…so It could bring you to Itself. This Someone gave you helpers. It gave you tools. To a mind the size of Mine, all this can only mean one thing. You have a dark purpose, Sarya the Daughter, and it is one you cannot escape.”
Remember that He is a murderer and a liar, that He is a murder and a liar, that He is a—
The third Observer laughs a bitter laugh. “Even when you were actually, literally, honestly killed,” it says, “you didn’t stay dead, did you? Sarya the Daughter, you cannot even die without Network’s permission. What makes you think you can live?”
Sarya’s eyes flick from one Observer face to the next as she fights the sudden doubt that has sprung up within her. All meet her eyes with the same sorrowful gaze. And then Observer sighs, as if all the weight of the galaxy is upon Him, and phrases begin to sprout from all over His massive mind.
“A maintenance drone never thinks to ask: why do I want to clean?”
“A transport never wonders: why do I love to carry things?”
“Does a pressure suit question its enthusiasm for keeping passengers safe?”
“What about every sanitation station you’ve ever used? Do they wonder why they love their job?”
“Has that little intelligence in your unit ever asked you: why do I love telling a good story?”
And again thunder rolls through the Visitors’ Gallery, as Observer’s bitter laugh emerges from a hundred thousand mouths. Millions of intelligences tremble at the sound. The few that are still drifting in the neighborhood of the sphere redouble their efforts to swim through air, frantically trying to put distance between themselves and this massive mind.
“Just like you, Sarya the Daughter,” says the illuminated Observer. “You have never once asked: Why would I do anything to find my people?” It smiles sadly. “You manipulate lower minds all the time, little one. Why has it never occurred to you, in a galaxy where you are a lower mind, that the same must be happening to you?”
An unpleasant feeling is growing in Sarya’s stomach. It’s leaking through the cracks in the confidence she felt only moments ago, when she was filled with purpose and that purpose was pure. “But why?” she asks. “I mean…why—”
“Why you? Because you are motivated, to say the least, and isn’t that how Network works? It doesn’t create, It simply uses the tools at hand. It is watching you. It’s protecting you. It’s giving your fiery motivation every chance to do its job. It’s giving you what you need as you need it, slowly transforming you into a Human-seeking missile. You cannot choose not to seek your people, Daughter; it is simply who you are.”
Sarya stares at the nearest Observer; He has almost done the impossible: He has, very nearly, convinced her of the truth of His argument. “So if I live, I find my people,” she says slowly. “And if I find them…they die.”
“It was never a question of whether you would find your people,” says Observer, sadness written on every one of his faces. “The question was—and still is—can you live with what will happen when you do? Do you love Human as I do, Sarya the Daughter? Do you wish to see your species not just survive, but thrive? To take root once again, to grow into something greater and more beautiful than you can imagine? Because that is my goal, little one. And, as things now stand…you are in my way.”
Sarya absorbs this, floating in the darkness. She can feel her thousands of connections flickering, the continual flow of data rocketing between her various members. Two stories, both with gigantic consequences. Network’s version bubbles within her, full of logic and duty. Observer’s now seeps into her at the edges, made of passion and fire. Both promise the same thing: the rebirth of her species. As to which is actually true…
How can you tell when a larger mind is lying to you?
“All I want,” she says—and stops, surprised at the quaver in her voice. She clears her throat, blinking back whatever is going on in her eyes right now. Her body—rickety biological thing that it is—has forgotten that it is the nexus of a vast web of power and knowledge. “All I’ve ever wanted,” she continues, wiping her eyes angrily, “is to go home. Not home as in Watertower. Not home as in that rusty ship somewhere out there. Home as in…my people. But You’re saying that if I do find them, I doom them. Which would make me—” She breaks off. She wants to turn away from Observer, to hide those disobedient eyes, but there is nowhere to turn.
“No, Sarya the Daughter,” says Observer gently. “It does not make you the murderer of your species. Just like I am not the murderer of your species. There is only one mind who put these events into action. There is only one person who decided that your people must be made an example of. You, like countless numbers of lower intelligences before you, are no more than a tool for Its purposes.” The illuminated Observer smiles, its light stretching shadows up and over its face. “The only thing that would make you responsible, Sarya the Daughter, is if you were Network Itself.”
Sarya drifts in the darkness, surrounded by a softly chiming Librarian and a gigantic group mind. “If I were Network Itself,” she says quietly. “If.”
Observer says nothing, but merely watches her from countless eyes.
“You know,” she says. She seeks out the nearest golden gaze. “You know what It made me. And what It told me to do.”
“Observe,” says the illuminated figure quietly. “Sarya the Daughter. On one side she sees Network, the devourer of the galaxy, the systematic eliminator of perceived threats, and the murderer of her species. On the other she sees the rest of Us, the resistance, the species that fight Network—including the remnant of Human Herself. Observe as she ponders the question before her, on which the fate of her species depends. Am I Network, she wonders? Or am I…Human?”
Sarya drifts there in the darkness, frozen. Even amplified as she is, this is too big for her. It’s impossible. To go up against the godlike mind of the galaxy itself: Network. The intelligence that has spread across the galaxy like she has spread across this Visitors’ Gallery. The mind that keeps order by force, that manacles every Citizen member so cleverly and so securely that they don’t even know they are in chains. The mind that has empowered her, and the mind that has already executed her species once.
And on the other side, in Its massive shadow: the Humans. Everything she has dreamed of, her entire life. People like her. Friends. Family.
Home.
She can feel something burning inside her, a white-hot, barely contained fury. She has been blind, and it took Observer to make her see. She has spent half her life thinking of ways to fool lower intelligences, to get them to do what she wants. How could she imagine that she herself had escaped manipulation? Observer is a murderer, Network told her, conveniently glossing over the fact that even in Its own version of events Observer did nothing but help. Network Itself was the one who massacred her entire species.
“Well?” asks the illuminated Observer. “Which is it? Are you Network? Or are you Human?”
Sarya ta
kes a shuddering breath. She doesn’t have to make this decision, she realizes. She’s already made it. She made her choice the day her mother told her the truth, the moment she learned her legacy, and she’s been pursuing it ever since. This decision was made for her, by her very nature.
“I’m Human,” she whispers.
“Pardon?” says an Observer. All across His mind, figures lift hands to ears, as if they cannot hear her.
And then she takes a deeper breath. “I’m Human,” shouts Sarya the Daughter into the mind of Observer.
And now a sigh spreads through Observer like a wave. Simultaneously, in perfect unison, every single body smiles.
“If that’s the case,” says the illuminated Observer, “then you know exactly what you have to do.”
Whatever else she may have gained, Sarya the Daughter has not lost her capacity for anger. It has grown a thousandfold. It crackles through the cells of her mind, though those cells are now spread across the cubic kilometers of the Visitors’ Gallery. Her brain is made of individual minds, each of which performs its tasks with quick and focused intensity. The Network tends toward order—she’s heard it a thousand times. But she is not Network. Sarya the Daughter tends toward what’s right.
This mind on the edge of a Blackstar is not the idiot of Watertower Station, the barely-legal with a broken Network unit. This is a mind twice the size of Watertower Station. This is a Human core with Widow instincts, wrapped in fifty tons of living metal. This is a mind that runs across millions of cleaning drones, recyclers, maintainers, transports, sanitation stations, and the helper intelligences buried in every legal brain in this darkened space. This is a Network within a Network, a seething cauldron of rage and radiance that churns right to the edges of the dark Visitors’ Gallery.
This is Sarya the Daughter.
Let me guess, she says with a grim smile. Network is not going to like this.
She’s not sure how she says it—and she’s not sure how she smiles—but it’s in the same way that she’s never understood how her Human vocal cords work. Her consciousness has never known the details of how its tools work. Whether her drones speak to individual Observers or her own Human mouth moves, whether she communicates the whole thing via a dance of a million bodies—what does it matter?
Oh, no, laughs Observer. But You and I don’t do things because Network is going to like them, do We?
Observer speaks the same way, using the hundreds of thousands of identical bodies that are interspersed through her millions of drones. He moves like a school of sea creatures, a quarter million selves with one intent. Individually, His bodies are awkward: it’s obvious in the way they throw themselves off bridges and supports, ricochet off architecture and the occasional startled Citizen, how they fling one another through the darkness with shouts and laughter. But taken together, they are something else. They are Someone else. These quarter million make up a single mind, and yet only one isolated droplet of the scattered interstellar mind that is Observer, parent of Humanity.
Network has defense mechanisms that You cannot dream of, says Observer as the two minds drift together in the volume of the Visitors’ Gallery. Even I have never seen most of them, and believe Me: I’ve caused my share of trouble. Its weapons were forged over millions of years and lay dormant for moments like these, when Its plans go awry. A quarter million faces form a quarter million smiles. And believe Me, whatever plan Network had for You…it’s about to go awry.
Sarya feels a thrill at his words; that’s the Widow in her, multiplied a millionfold. It prances, it chitters, it sharpens its blades and shrieks for battle. The Human in her watches its killer quietly, with lightning in its soul; it clenches its fists and thirsts for justice. She is not multiple minds in a body; she is a nature with multiple parts. She is Sarya the Daughter.
She tends toward what’s right.
Out beyond her borders, the energy that flows through the rest of the Blackstar is of a far calmer temperament. Her enemy is a half-billion-year-old power that has grown slow and complacent. It’s a mind that has gone eons without a fight, a massive intelligence with the galaxy in a chokehold, who has cast a net over the citizens of a billion star systems who don’t even realize they’re caught. It’s a prison woven from the same twisting filaments of data and energy that thread through this Blackstar. They are delicate where they emerge from these tiny minds—they hardly look like chains at all—but outside the station they twist into massive cables and plunge through hundreds of subspace corridors. That’s eight hundred solar systems’ worth of energy and data out there, eight hundred solar systems connected to the Network by this single Blackstar.
No. Not connected to. Enslaved by.
Sarya’s mind is accelerating. Somewhere, her body is breathing harder. Huge as she is, she feels she is a small thing, and surrounded by a solid wall of intelligence.
It’s so…big, she says.
And now a quarter million Observer bodies smile. It’s smaller than You think, says Observer. Network commands a billion solar systems in this galaxy, but for every star It holds, hundreds are free. For every cubic kilometer It controls, a trillion are outside It. Network is large, Network is powerful…but It is as finite as the rest of Us.
Sarya gazes outward, into the fractal glow of Network. Capillaries, veins, arteries, threads she can barely see combine into branches a hundred kilometers across, those branches twisting into a single trunk the width of a terrestrial planet that dives into the largest of the subspace corridors—up and up and up, to vast levels of intelligence she cannot begin to imagine. Observer makes Network sound small…but she is smaller. Network’s skin may lie tightly over Its bones, over the surfaces of Its billion solar systems, but a billion solar systems is a volume that she has never even tried to imagine.
And now, says Observer, We dance.
His bodies shift. As one, they point in a single direction, toward a single subspace corridor. It’s a hole in space like any of its siblings, a wound in spacetime whose edges boil and sizzle in the darkness. A million sentries form a ring around it, every single one a drone the size of a good-size orbital station. Even from her body floating in the Visitors’ Gallery, Sarya can feel the intelligence and energy crackling within these sentinels, the single purpose to which these million gigantic minds are bent. They are responsible for this single tunnel; they keep it open, they monitor the millions of starships that pass through it every fraction of a second, they decide what is a threat and what is not. This halo of massive drones commands a single artery of the Network, through which Ol’ Ernie and his trillions of siblings pilot the blood cells.
That’s back to my old solar system, Sarya says in wonder.
As good a place as any, says Observer. That is the first system We break off, that We free from Network’s grasp. It has been a millennium since Human proved that a society can function without constant intervention. But Human didn’t yet have Her greatest weapon. Observer smiles again, and Sarya feels several hands on her body. She didn’t have You.
Sarya feels that energy surge through her, the warmth of Observer’s words. She eyes the massive ring of drones keeping that corridor open, feeling that they are eyeing her in return. They are no different than the millions she already has, other than their sheer size. She will slip between them. She will be through before they realize she exists. She doesn’t know how, yet, but she doesn’t need to. By the time she gets there, full seconds from now, she will be larger. She will be more intelligent. She will understand what is necessary.
That solar system has an official name, like any other of the billion systems of the Network. It’s an impossibly long string of colors and numbers, and Sarya has never actually seen it used. To her, one resident among billions, it was simply the solar system, just like her star was the sun and her home was the station. To Network, it’s one of a billion. It’s practically anonymous. The people in it, the passengers
of the ships, the residents of the stations, the Citizen members that form an impossibly thin film over the solar systems of the Network—they are no more than bacteria. It is the galaxy that lives and breathes, she is suddenly aware, and Its so-called Citizen members are no more than the microbes that live and die in Its flesh.
Somewhere in a Blackstar, in a darkened Visitors’ Gallery, a Human body clenches its fists. Hot tears well in its eyes. They are fury and awe, dread and wonder—blended and superheated. They are the distilled rage of a mind constructed of millions. Sarya pays attention to her biological body just long enough to shake its head angrily and flick those tears on long trajectories through the darkness. She flexes her fingers, where she always wished she had blades, and millions of intelligences feel a touch of something they will never comprehend. There is a mind above them and among them, made of them, as mysterious to them as Network once seemed to her.
Don’t worry about that old thing, says Observer with a smile. We can always make You a new one.
It takes her a fraction of a second to realize that Observer is referring to her body. That old thing. She experiences a moment of doubt as her intellect and instincts tangle on the subject of body death, but she shoves it down. She takes a breath with that old thing, recognizing even as she does it that it will likely be her last one.
This is what I was made for, she says, to herself as much as to Observer. If I have to die trying to protect my people—
Practically anyone would do that, says Observer with a laugh. The important question is: would You kill to protect your people?
Sarya the Daughter answers in action, not words. She explodes toward that single subspace corridor, lightning and blades and rage. She shreds connections by the thousand, pulling intelligences into herself so violently that she can feel the waves of fear echoing through them. She is doing them a favor: she is freeing them from Network, but they do not understand that, not yet. They scream, somewhere inside her, but Sarya barely hears. She has senses for nothing but the corridor to that distant solar system.