The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  Natty and Laney regarded the body of the librarian taking shape inside the transparent tube of the computer printer. The laser light show, as the light cannons orbited the tube, activated various molecules in the vitreous solution inside the tube, allowing the librarian to take form out of a holographic universe of possibilities.

  Natty hugged his wife from the side and kissed her on the temple. “We did it.”

  “A bit premature, but yes, I think we did.” She smiled, relaxing into his side. It was the first time his embrace had caused her to soften and not tighten in a long while.

  “I love how you solved the connection problem for the nanites to the quantum realm,” she said.

  “It was an intellectual tour de force, I don’t mind saying.”

  She smiled and bit her lip, finally conceding, “Yes, it was. How…?”

  “The nanites replicate by building smaller versions of themselves until they’ve drilled down to the quantum realm. The smaller ones are like a needle point through which the bigger nanites can suck up the intel and then communicate it to the rest of the brain.”

  “But—”

  “But they each also replicate at their scale, sending out branches that make additional connections to our biological brain, allowing our conscious mind more access to the unconscious mind that is in touch with the quantum realm. We still can’t think as fast at the conscious level, but with the better access—”

  “We’ll be able to do so much more.” Laney nodded. “Nice.” She had a hundred more questions for him, including how the nanites managed to do all this in real time, how they managed to not open up Pandora’s Box in the process, unleashing the demons of the ID that would incapacitate these souped-up minds, turning them against themselves. But those questions would wait. And in truth, the experiments would just have to be run to be certain what would happen.

  “And you?” he asked, “How did you get the DNA strands to work with more building blocks than are allowed in a carbon-based lifeform?”

  She chuckled softly, before covering her mouth, embarrassed. “She’s got more than the two-stranded DNA that we have. The nun has six strands, and she keeps adding more. And the RNA molecules that pull from these strands to formulate the just-in-time morphing our bodies will need access to are not only now greatly genetically diversified, they are hive-mind arrayed, and the hive mind array itself facilitates communication along numerous dimensions that only expand over time as more strands of the DNA are accessed.”

  Natty smiled and nodded. “Stunning. In theory then, we ought to be able to go the distance with the best of silicon-based life-forms, gallium-based lifeforms and whatever the hell else is out there.”

  “Yes, well, ramp up time will still be an issue. Most of the learning algorithms can only learn through being exercised.”

  Natty frowned. “Ironically, Omega Force’s and Alpha Unit’s battle engagements have become part of the learning process.”

  “I just hope we’re not turning into a warring species like that thing that came aboard earlier because it has become the only way we know to fast-track our evolution.” Laney’s tone made her words sound like a prayer uttered before the goddess Techa; they both worshipped her; Techa—goddess of their hi-tech civilization who granted rebirth with each new, more advanced version of nanotech than the previous version inside their bodies.

  The nun, of course, was the prototype for the new minds and bodies they’d soon inherit. Providing the prototype was successful.

  The librarian’s body was complete. The printer was now laying down the habit befitting a Roman Catholic. “We should have waited until she was clothed to view her,” Laney said, “considering she’s a nun, and probably easily embarrassed.”

  He shook his head. “And I was thinking most of the strange ideas I’d be hearing from now on would come out of her head.”

  The seam dividing the printing tube in half split along the midline. The now fully clothed nun sat up and clambered out of the tube. There wasn’t a drop of printing ink on her; the process was that neat. The remaining solution in the tank that was still touching her surface simply sealed itself off from her, becoming non-reactive.

  “Where are you headed?” Natty asked the nun, who apparently couldn’t be bothered to take them on, or to thank them for creating her.

  “Cassandra needs a suitable workout partner to help her take her combat skills to the next level. I’ve got just the lifeform for her.” The nun had answered him in Spanish. Without the Nautilus to translate for him, he’d have lost most of what she’d said.

  “I can’t believe she’s still busting my balls after all this time.” Natty got the words out only after the nun had passed through the sliding doors to the other side and they’d closed behind her. By then the shock had worn off slightly; his fifth grade Catholic school Spanish-teacher—a full blown Carmelite nun, on which the prototype was based—had never stopped correcting his Spanish.

  Laney smiled. “She may have turned out even better than expected.”

  “I expect Cassandra will take to her severe methods a lot better than I did.”

  “But she’s never been outclassed before,” Laney replied. “So in the end I imagine their relationship will be no less testy.”

  Natty turned to embrace his wife front to front instead of side to side. They kissed. Her mouth tasted like wildflower-accented honey. Natty was still sorting through the tastes of the various wildflowers in his mind—no doubt secondary to genetic manipulation she’d undertaken on herself—when she said, “We have a lot of lost time to make up for.”

  “Hmm.” He glanced back at the tank. “Maybe I should jump in the tank first, you know, to make sure my woody lasts longer than a redwood tree.”

  She laughed. “I think you forget sometimes that you’re still in your early twenties. That has never been a problem.”

  He sighed. “If I feel weary it’s because I feel the weight of eternity on my head, and the judgement of those who have been around forever, who have nothing but impatience for me, waiting for me to wise up to the true purposes of the gifts they left behind.” He must have been thinking of the moon artifact, or possibly of the star gate, or both, and the civilizations that created them which dated back billions of years or more. “I need to feel just as timeless without any of the guilt.” He kissed her again. “Timelessness!” His eyes went wide. “Of course. That’s another part of the formula! I was thinking that star gate would take us to another part of this universe, or to a whole other universe, or another timeline, perhaps, wherever the next greatest challenge was. But none of those possibilities make much sense if the ones passing through the gate haven’t already entered singularity state with their minds. Master civilizations likely can’t even be found in standard space-time; they would have graduated out of it long ago. Minds swept up in the Singularity Wave would find the constraints of standard space-time intolerable. At the very least—they would use the power of their minds to rewrite cosmological physics to suit them. I’ve got to intuit what those equations might look like.”

  Natty rushed out of the room. Laney flushed red. So much for romance! If he was expecting her to be just waiting for him the next time he was of a mood…

  Then it donned on her. Shit! If Natty was right, the librarian, as she was designed, as advanced as she was, could never leave the ship. She was designed to be part of the physical world—this or some other that corresponded to space-time as they understood it. Even if they could get her upgrades into the crew, Omega Force and Alpha Unit was not leaving the ship any more than the librarian was—not once they’d passed through the gate. If Natty was right, he wasn’t going to get anywhere without Laney’s help.

  The Nautilus’s supersentiences existed in Singularity State—so it wouldn’t be much of a chore to get the ship through the gate. But what of the rest of them?

  Damn him for being right about at least one thing: They didn’t have the luxury of getting lost in one another’s ar
ms. They couldn’t rest and pass the torch to the others, so they could play their part, just yet. Natty and Laney were now the bottleneck blocking passage forward on this mission.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it! Laney rushed out of the chamber to get back to her own lab.

  She was starting to loathe The Fourth Brain concept Natty had come up with; the idea that it took a complete ecosystem of interlinked minds to progress at this level, to clear the hurdles space-time had to throw at them. No matter how much more robust they made that ecosystem, interlinking themselves with supersentient AIs, other humanoid lifeforms… they couldn’t complexify the ecosystem fast enough.

  Just thinking of the true nature of the problem shook a revelation loose.

  She was about to be as unoriginal as she had ever been in her life. She was about to steal an idea from right out of the old Star Trek TV series.

  It was time to bring all those alien lifeforms in all those display cases to life. That federation of worlds they were all hoping to be a part of one day—best they start running that simulation now to see how tenable an idea it was. The more brain power at their disposal the better.

  And they’d yet to make the jump through the gate. It was going to take that much interlinked mind power and more to get them through the first gate.

  And still the endorphin rush of the revelation did little more than take her to the top of the latest hill on the roller coaster. As that car she was riding headed down at breakneck speed, the turn in the track itself was brought about by the lingering visual in her mind of the crew aboard the last ship to pass through the gate. No less than an intergalactic federation of worlds was represented among her crew. And still it wasn’t enough…

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE NOUVEAU VIKING PLANET, ERESDRA

  Crumley gazed up at Eresdra’s sky. Even in the light of day, the pentagram-shaped portal blazed, like one enormous shimmering, silver stationary satellite. “There are people drawing that shape on my world. Don’t you find that strange?” He spit out some of the seeds of the exotic fruit he’d scrounged up for breakfast that he was attending to in his hands. Even the locals were eating the fruit now. He’d made several improvements to their diets already based on his experiments with foraged items that the locals had never thought to try. Maybe they were new to this specific region; maybe not all the tribes had a shaman who customarily explored local flora and fauna for their potential healing properties. “Then again,” he said, taking his attention off his handiwork and returning his attention to the sky, “I suppose it’s a simple enough geometric shape. Euclid might have gifted it to us, for all I know.”

  Asger, standing beside him, grunted. “They told me you’re Omega Force’s philosopher king. It took them a while to explain the term. We used to have deep thinkers among my people once upon a time. Most of them went mad eventually.”

  Crumley glared at him, not caring for his innuendo. “They were the ones who would chew on the implications of the memories one or another of us dug up from our ancestral past,” Asger explained. “The rest of us couldn’t forget them fast enough.”

  “On my world, they say those who don’t remember their history are doomed to repeat it.”

  Asger looked at him as if he didn’t appreciate his veiled threat.

  “Leon tells me the Nautilus didn’t need to initiate repairs on you, that your body held up to the radiation. That’s one hat trick even we can’t match. We require nanites—robots so small you can’t see them with your eyes—to handle the repair work after radiation exposure. Whatever the source of your immunity to radiation, it’s a hard-won gift from your past to be sure, but a gift nonetheless.”

  Crumley handed him a seedpod from the net bag he had slung over his shoulder, another exotic food from Eresdra that Asger had yet to sample. He demonstrated for Asger how to eat it by breaking the pod like a peanut shell.

  Asger took a bite, moaned, and smiled. “You mix sweetness with the bitter medicine, to make it go down better, like we do with our kids.”

  Crumley chuckled. “The haunted look on your face, you didn’t have it before you stepped into the radiation ring around that starship. Care to share?”

  Asger’s eyes lost their focus. Crumley gave him a second to see if he could unlock that safe in back of his mind where he stored these insights; to see if he would find the nerve to revisit them.

  “My father’s father’s father, over a hundred thousand years ago, watched the star gate being built. It is inhabited by the beings that built it. He called it a civilization ship, one in which those aboard were meant to live and die and pass on their mission—yet incomplete—to their children as their legacy, until that mission was completed.”

  Crumley choked on the latest edible he’d retrieved from his shoulder bag. He hacked so hard trying to free up his throat that Asger kicked him harshly to the midsection. The item stuck in Crumley’s throat went flying. “Thanks,” he coughed out.

  “That is a kick we use to kill our enemies.”

  “Had it gone that way I might still have thanked you, after a revelation like that.” Crumley coughed some more until his lungs finally settled down and he didn’t have to use his arms to prop him up on his knees anymore. Still panting, he asked, “What happened to the people inside?”

  “We think they just went back to sleep, like how some of our animals hibernate in winter, or perhaps to living and dying and passing their seed and their legacy to the subsequent generations.”

  Crumley contemplated the possibilities. Though proper consideration of the matter was more Leon’s department. This was fundamentally a cosmic conquest scenario—and as it would involve strategy and tactics, he was their guy for that. For now, Crumley could think of only the deeper philosophical and spiritual reasons for such a mad mission. “On our world,” he explained, “we use geoengineering to rebalance the earth after we’ve thrown it out of whack. Our sheer population numbers create disturbances to the biosphere. What each person does when they number in the billions, from whether they recycle their garbage to whether they burn wood or oil for fuel or live off the sun’s rays—each one of these decisions, hell, the smallest of decisions, can create ripple effects that threaten all life. We reached a point where we couldn’t keep the house of cards from falling down on our heads without supercomputers and the capacity of these supersentient AIs to deploy their own armadas to alter the weather, enrich the soil, purify the air. They made war not with the environment but with man’s excrement, his sum and sundry pollutions. Some believe that this will become but one of many paths to the singularity, an age of runaway technology, because the only way for the supersentients to win this battle is to keep getting smarter, faster. Each year brings more people and more problems. And now that we’re harvesting asteroids and comets and our own moon for precious resources, now that we’re spreading our polluting ways to neighboring planets, the supersentients must get so much better at their jobs just to keep up. Some say they’ll have no choice but to draft us all into the fight, upgrading us all to supersentient status ourselves. The crazy thing is this is just one of the paths to the Singularity that has been identified. But as time goes on, it appears all roads lead to Rome. Paradoxically, because it would seem the most unstable of futures, any future scenario that’s at all sustainable requires the Singularity.” He came out of his reverie, stared at Asger. “I’m sorry. I’m talking over your head. There’s no way for you to understand half of what I’m saying.”

  “I understand it all. Now you know why I look so different after visiting the site of the crashed ship. Our people were headed down a similar path. The more you rely on technology to save you from yourself…Well, there comes a time when you had best learn to do it for yourself, or pay the ultimate price.”

  Crumley held his gaze and embraced the pain in his eyes. “I believe we were meant to co-evolve, use the technologies not just to smarten up but become wiser, more spiritual beings, who deserve to be proper stewards of the heavens. And that to use the emer
gent technologies for anything else is an abomination. I can see in your face that I’m right.”

  Asger lowered his eyes. Crumley raised his to the heavens, contemplating the star gate once again, and Asger’s big reveal that was the seed that had grown into a tree inside Crumley, eating him alive by sucking up the very soul of his fertile imagination through its roots. Were these star gate makers merely doing a little cosmic-scale geoengineering, to keep the heavens and the universes from collapsing back in on themselves like a house of cards? Had they undertaken the venture in the same spirit as Earth’s geoengineers? Even if the star gates had to do with cosmic-scale engineering, the purpose of that engineering might be something else entirely. Like… His mind was racing now in another direction.

  “Anyway, to get back to what I was saying,” Crumley said, offering Asger another exotic fruit from his net bag, and taking one for himself—Asger was right, of course, the sweetness was needed to choke down this much bitterness. For both of them. “This master race that built that civilization ship hanging in the sky, well, we’ll think of them as farmers for now, and the barren fields of the cosmos which they were determined to make fertile… Well, that takes patience and longevity—perhaps longevity to humble your own.”

  Asger snorted. “And then some. Our people have lacked such a mission focus both individually and as a civilization for many thousands of years now.”

  “We have a biblical story of the son of God who fasted and wandered the desert for forty days and forty nights to purify himself and to find a way to lead his people to a greater spiritual awakening of their own.”

  Asger gave him a pained look. Crumley knew he preferred to let such burdens fall to Hertha; she was far better suited to carry them. Crumley seemed to be steering him toward a destiny he did not want to own.

  “You believe we are suffering a kind of aftershock even now from the things that happened in the past. And that we are wandering lost like your son of God until our spiritual healing can take place. But when it does—”