by Jerry
The man nodded, feet absently tapping the granite path.
“I was working on a rather larger scale than this,” she continued, invoking that respectable technique of misdirecting the audience’s imagination.
“More than ten million years ago,” said the man.
“Yes.”
A smile emerged, and in his eyes, suspicion.
“This starship of yours,” she said.
Wet eyes grew larger. “It isn’t mine.”
“Yes, agreed. But human, tell me this: have you ever wondered how this marvel was built?”
Larger than worlds, the Great Ship was discovered outside the Milky Way. A cold, lifeless derelict racing at one-third light speed, it might be billions of years old, implying that it was cobbled together in some distant portion of a much younger universe.
“I’ve never asked myself how,” said the man. Then laughter emerged with the mocking words. “Not once. Not ever. No.”
“Well, I know how,” she said.
The laughter grew louder and angrier. Or happier. She was beginning to realize that this was a rather difficult creature to disassemble.
“Because you helped build the Ship,” he guessed.
Every limb pointed at their surroundings. “If my hands and feet had done any piece of this, I would remember. And I don’t have those recollections.”
“Too bad,” he said.
“I’m talking about my first job and a hundred thousand years of labor,” she said. “You see, my makers intended to build their own Great Ship. Long before humans existed. Ages before anyone realized that this kind of wonder already existed.”
“How long ago?”
“Ninety-three million years,” she said.
The human took a moment to frame his answer.
“Bullshit,” he said.
She offered her best contemptuous laugh.
Then he said, “I’m not a student of anything. But I don’t remember any history where any species was stupid enough to attempt construction on this scale.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Inside this galaxy.”
Big eyes grew small, the mouth clenched tight as could be.
“Do you want to hear my story, or don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes to both,” the human said. “I do, and I don’t. So you tell it, and let’s both discover what I think.”
THE CONTRACTOR WASN’T ancient, certainly not compared to the Great Ship or this well-traveled tool. But he was quite a lot older than he appeared to be. His born name was Pamir and he was an important captain serving the Great Ship, but certain troubles caused him to leave that life and the greatest profession. Hiding ever since, he had worn a wild variety of names and jobs, lives and passions. One of the galaxy’s great experts in wearing carefully contrived life stories, he earned what he could to thrive, and that included hoarding secret funds and prebuilt lives ready for the moment his present lies began to crumble.
Pamir leaned back, looking like a man who had nowhere else to be.
“I was built near the center of a different galaxy,” the tool began. “A satellite galaxy, but not to your Milky Way. No, this was a little sister to what you call Andromeda. My galaxy’s stars were predominantly ancient, metal-poor and unsuited for life. But a later bloom of young stars produced rock worlds and metal worlds, and biologies, and a few lasting civilizations.”
Remaining in character, the contractor offered a shrug and one vaguely interested gaze. But the genuine Pamir was interested enough to create a complete list of candidates, rating the likelihood of each while throwing none aside.
“I was born above a hot world,” the tool reported. “An almost nameless world of iron and baked rock orbiting a red dwarf sun. There was nothing remarkable about that solar system, except that the sun and its dozen planets weren’t native to my galaxy. Large events inside Andromeda had thrown them free. As a consequence, these interlopers were blessed with enormous momentum. And even better, their future course would carry them close to a massive local star and its black hole companion. Tailoring that flyby was possible. Barely. My makers had already spent thousands of years abusing the red dwarf. They struck its face with lasers, sank antimatter charges into its body. Towering flares rose up from the sun, punching the same piece of the sky, slowly changing the solar system’s trajectory.”
“To capture the interlopers,” the human said.
“And add to one body’s velocity, yes. One-eleventh the speed of light. That was the goal. Not as swift as your vessel, no. But it was a smaller galaxy, and our ship would wear engines large enough to let it maneuver. Shrouded in a hyperfiber envelope, that machine would drop close to suns and black holes, repeatedly surviving fire and gravity, always racing towards the next suitable target.”
The tool paused, for dramatic purposes, or perhaps to let her audience respond.
“’The next suitable target,’” the human repeated.
“Yes.”
“Just what were you building out there?”
“That should be self-evident,” she said. “A warship. Why else encase the world inside a thousand kilometers of high-grade hyperfiber? Armor is the most trusted line of defense in any weapon. Save for invisibility, of course.”
“Of course,” said the invisible man.
“It’s obvious that this Great Ship was designed to serve as someone’s flagship,” she said. “How can you think anything else? And I’ll admit that my ship would never be as quick or grand, and yours is the far older vessel, and everything around us is lovely and mysterious, and splendid too. But your ship is also far less massive than mine. Forty percent less, which places the name ‘Great’ into question.”
Pamir laughed. He laughed at the imagery and at the boast, and in secret, he weighed the words as well as the ideas behind them.
“I was one of an army,” the tool continued. “One among billions. I was produced by a factory that had already consumed much of the sun’s thin comet belt. Each one of my sisters was a simple and pure, easily duplicated device. Our mission demanded simplicity. My manufactured mind had passions, but those passions were narrowed to one subject: the nature of hyperfiber in all of its glories. And as I was born, as the first breath of electricity passed through me, my soul was filled with the image of a gray ocean of uncured hyperfiber spread across a world that wouldn’t earn its final name until it was officially launched.”
She offered another dramatic pause.
Pamir wasn’t laughing. Even a civilian contractor with zero interest in far galaxies would be intrigued with this story, and that’s why he could afford to show his feelings. Curiosity, doubt. A thousand pragmatic considerations colliding with one mighty beast of a question.
Why bother with this project?
He cleared his throat, started to laugh and then stopped himself. A thin smile turned scornful as he pointed out, “Some idiot had to pay for this.”
There was no point in denying that statement.
Or for that matter, agreeing with it. Because when facts were obvious, the tool saw zero reason to respond.
Contractors and captains led similar lives. Goals had to be fulfilled, timetables ruled, and nothing but small problems and giant conundrums stood between them and success.
“But what kind of money-rich idiot? That’s the first question.” Pamir dropped a hand on the cultivation chamber. “Obviously, an advanced society. But even more important, this kind of project demands a social biology, and a highly cooperative one. If not out-and-out authoritarian. Organic or mechanical. I can see either way working, or a marriage between the two. But with a million-year outlook, which excludes almost every species I know. Particularly humans.”
With the press of a thumb, he opened a minor valve, and the last surge of pressure brought out a bright gray bubble of uncured, left-behind hyperfiber.
“Yogurt,” Pamir said.
“A food,” said the tool.
“Built from billions of microbes doing only what nature tells them
to do. Which is what you were. Are. One bacterium working on the great yogurt.”
Laughing, she revealed a delightfully girlish voice.
Pamir continued. “Mass-produced machines, self-contained and self-repairing. That’s how you hide some of the costs. Worlds are rebuilt every minute with that kind of technology. But the smallest tool still has to drink power, and a single red dwarf star isn’t much of a nipple. Reactors linked in a nearby grid. That’s what I’d do. Which means hydrogen by the gigaton, and that means dismantling one or more gas giant worlds. Which must have been available inside the same solar system, sure. But that means you aren’t just rebuilding one world. You’re dismantling another much bigger body, which is a fresh goliath-styled project requiring machine armies and more local reactors. And now we’ve entered the realm where the yogurt model collapses under its own success.”
“And why is that?”
“You’re not a bacterium,” he offered. “A fleck of your skin is ten billion times more sophisticated than an ocean of yogurt. And worst still, you possess a full mind. A designed, standardized brain, but capable of learning and growing. You claim you were born with a passion for hyperfiber. But passion fades. Or worse, the target of your love shifts. Ten thousand years of determined labor, but there comes that treacherous nanosecond when you discover doubt, and after another ten thousand years of reflection and increasingly boring labor, you suddenly have to act on some long-ago inspiration.”
“And I’ll do what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Imagination isn’t my strength.”
She seemed to accept that judgment.
“I’m thinking like a contractor,” he said. “Keeping tight control over billions of powerful workers. That requires AI watchdogs and relentless purges of bad ideas. I’ve overheard enough history to appreciate the troubles. Hive-mind societies are surprisingly frail. That abiding faith in rules... that’s a damning strength. Some piece of the group will go mad, or lose focus, or fall behind in the work until it’s obvious that the goals won’t be reached and it’s best to do anything else, including nothing.”
She said nothing.
Pamir shrugged. “If I was painting the budget? The project’s second biggest expense would be internal security.”
“And the largest expense?”
“External security. Of course.” In a sloppy fashion, the hyperfiber bubble had cured. Pamir took hold of the gray ball, finger and thumb lifting it free from the valve, twirling it close to his eyes. “You’re building a warship. And because of the timescales and the very public nature of your work – a flaring star and an obvious trajectory, for example – you can’t hide what you’re doing. Your ultimate goals are going to be very visible. You’re building a warship to conquer the galaxy. There would be no other explanation for your frantic efforts. But when every other species and wise player notices this, even eternal enemies are going to make alliances. Even the most passive species are going to work like maniacs, trying to bring disaster to your scheme. And that’s why the construction site will have be armored and weaponized and filtered and controlled. A militarized sphere stretching out for tens of light-years. And now we’ve reached a level of expense that would bankrupt any civilization likely to arise in what still sounds like a small oxbow of a galaxy.”
The tool offered a long silence, and then, one question.
“What if bankruptcy was just another calculation?”
Pamir grinned, mulling over the possibilities.
“No second choices,” she said. “The empire abandons every inhabited world, colony and farflung base. Its entire population coalesces around that giant iron world and its dim sun and the flares and those trillion tools that needed to be managed with absolute precision. And building the hull is just one job. The world beneath has to be hollowed out, making ready for crews and sleeping fleets. My great ship needs rockets worthy of its mass, and future weapon systems have to be designed and deployed. AI banks are built for no reason other than to wage every war to come, in their minds. And as you say, while all of that happens, my masters are battling an entire galaxy of united enemies.”
She paused.
Pamir let the silence work on both of them. Or at least on him. Then he gave up, saying, “One of your solutions went wrong. I’m betting.”
“Are you offering a wager?”
“Never.”
“A wise inaction,” she said. “Because every problem was recognized before the start. Every solution worked well enough. There were no rebellions of will, no invasion of enemies. The venture should have been a wild success. In another few million years, my tool makers and myself, and my children, if I had any, would have embraced that entire realm of stars and worlds, time and promise.”
“Something else went wrong,” Pamir guessed.
Silence.
“Tell me,” he said. “Where did the dream lead?”
What weren’t toes reached for his hand, claiming that bright gray bubble.
“This is what went wrong,” she said.
“The hyperfiber?”
A long, painful sound emerged. Emotional, incoherent, purely miserable. Then the toes released the prize. And since the bubble was thin beyond thin, and because nothing but vacuum was inside it, the bubble shot into the air, rising out of reach and out of sight, neither of them watching after it.
THE UNIVERSE WAS built on weakness. Vacuum was one kind of weakness, vast and cold. Stars were feeble piles of sloppy fire. Atoms themselves were never more than temporary alliances between disloyal parts. The hardest object always broke, and every fine idea had to suffer until it died.
These were the first lessons fed to the tool, and they were learned long before the assembly line tossed her into the ranks.
Strength was possible, but only in special circumstances, and the tool was taught how genuine, enduring strength depended on cheating the universe. Not once, but constantly. Relentlessly. Black holes were cheats, and that’s why tiny black holes were valuable for cutting and twisting lesser kinds of matter. Time was another cheat. Slice time thinly enough and the unlikely became real, including moments where entropy ran backwards. And there was a third cheat involving pure atoms and particles pretending to be atoms that aligned in quasi-crystal patterns – a maze of bonds and vibrations that might look like polished pale metal but actually resembled nothing normal. That was hyperfiber. That was the reason for her existence and her only love. She was born to do nothing but prepare lakes of pure hyperfiber that were carefully cured, drop by lustrous drop, until the lake was ready to be poured across the lovely, half-built warship.
At its worst, cheap hyperfiber was stronger than diamond and equal to bioceramics. But there was one last cheat to employ. No patch of hyperfiber existed alone. Those magical bonds weren’t just here, but they also reached into parallel universes, into mirrors of themselves. Kick a shard of weak, low-grade fiber, and you were kicking ten million other shards at the same time. That’s why the substance didn’t break, melt or scream. And the higher grades were far more promiscuous. Billions of mirror universes shared power and stubbornness with one another, and that’s what a great warship needed for its armor, and nothing else mattered for the first thousand centuries of her enormously important life.
“Every resource was used or set aside to be used later,” she told the human. “The tool makers contrived and then spent every kind of currency. They stripped their home worlds of resources before converging around us, and they built factories and elaborate plans and fortifications that looked gigantic to every enemy and every former friend. Nothing mattered but finishing our great ship, on schedule and without flaw. And I was fortunate enough to have been swallowed by this venture. So consumed by the task that I never bothered imagining what would happen afterwards. To the galaxy. To myself. Even to the vessel whose hull belonged as much to me as to anyone. All that mattered was the next meter of fresh armor lying tight over every other strong layer.”
Pamir watched, listened
. And he nodded, understanding quite a lot more than his companion could have guessed.
Ten hands and feet moved, drawing round shapes in the air. “Mistakes were inevitable. Pico-crevices and tainted batches, mostly. I made those mistakes, and whenever I noticed flaws, I confessed. Sometimes others found my mistakes, and I confessed again. Just as my sisters welcomed the blame when I uncovered their blunders. That was our nature. That is the necessary attitude you cling to when you have considerable work and limited time, and particularly when your mistakes are being buried deeper and deeper inside the growing hull. We had to define the flaws early, and corrections were made, and sometimes the corrections were intricate and expensive... and this is where we doomed ourselves.”
She paused.
Pamir watched the limbs freeze, and when the silence seemed too thick, he made a guess.
“You let small mistakes stand.”
“No.” She said it instantly, and the word was important enough to repeat eleven more times. Then every arm and leg dropped to the ground, save for one. A single finger needed to touch the cultivation chamber, run itself along the ribs and pipes and embedded AIs. The gesture was loving or scornful, or it was habit. Or it meant something else entirely. There was no way to be certain about the emotions of an entity like this. But the voice that emerged sounded sorry. She sounded hurt and small and old and a little warm with rage, riding on a pain already ninety million years old.
“The grade was diluted,” she said.
“The fiber’s grade,” he guessed.
She offered a number. A detailed, thoroughly meaningful number. The hull that began being nearly the equal of the Great Ship’s hull was diminished by percentage points. Not many points, not in the expanse of what was possible. But it was obvious that she didn’t approve.
“That should have been plenty strong still,” Pamir said.
She said nothing.
“Enough to endure any war,” he added.
And in response, she touched his face. Poked it and ran the hard diamond finger along his fleshy nose and across his wet uncomfortable mouth, saying the one emphatic word, “Listen.”