The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  Then there was the human base to spinward. It was heavily fortified, with a good-sized defense fleet and at least one of the large wormhole gates that could pass large warships. Possibly connected to a major fleet base back in human space.

  The enemy was mighty, but they couldn’t cover all of their space equally. If it could concentrate a force fast enough and hit hard, it would destroy the target of choice. Even if it lost the entire force, it would be a fair trade. After all, the organics cared about their lives, and their losses. While the Machines, of course, had no lives to live, and new AI could be manufactured as fast as computer systems could be assembled.

  [That one,] it thought, picking the target. It warmed up the communications device again and sent a code transmission over to its first system. It continued for the time it took, a minute for each system, until it was done. After that it played the plan back over and over again in its mind, a shortcoming of its mind, which couldn’t forget and move on as long as it had the processing time to devote.

  * * *

  MACHINE SPACE: MARCH 4TH, 1003.

  “They seem to be talkative today, ma’am” said the captain of the destroyer T F Simmons, sitting in space a couple of light years from the Machine system they were monitoring.

  Commander Kim really didn’t like this assignment, but no one had asked him for his approval. The hyper VII destroyer was on a signal’s intelligence mission, sitting dead in space and listening in on every com signal she could pick up. Including the very powerful graviton wave transmissions that the Machines were wont to use. Those transmissions were all in pulse code, twenty pulses per second. The humans couldn’t read the code, of course, but everything they could gather that could be sent on to Fleet headquarters was another step in the direction of doing so. Unless the Machines kept changing the code, which was more than likely. So far, though, the Machines had seemed to take their time changing codes, as if they thought they were unbreakable. That might be true with their own computing resources. The quantum devices of the humans could process information many times faster, and with them there was no such thing as unbreakable, given time.

  “Intelligence thinks they’re about to make a move,” said Fleet Admiral Beata Bednarczyk, looking out of the holo, her com coming in through the wormhole.

  Great, thought Kim Sung, closing his eyes. This deep in Machine space their only protection was their location not being known. As long as they didn’t start up their hyperdrive they should be safe. But if there were suddenly hundreds of ships moving here and there things could become tense.

  “Every signal is proceeded by the same string, then ended by another,” said the com officer of the ship, running the signals through his board. “The same one we’ve been picking up since we started the mission.”

  “And the same that they have always used, no matter what code the rest of the message is transmitted in,” said Bednarczyk, eyes narrowing. “I think we’re on to something here. Good work, Commander.”

  “Orders, ma’am.”

  “Stay in place. Gather every signal you can pick up. And don’t let them know you are there.”

  “Will do, ma’am.” The commander wasn’t afraid to admit that the Machine intelligences made him nervous. Really afraid, if he wanted to be totally honest. He thought that anyone who said they weren’t afraid of the Death Machines was either a liar of a fool. And he was no fool. The thought of dying at their hands was not the terror. If they destroyed his ship and his self along with it that was war. No different than if the Cacas had killed him. The terror was thinking about being captured by the soulless creations. From what he had heard, they would disassemble him to get every bit of information in his mind, while he was still alive and conscious. So being captured was something he didn’t want to contemplate.

  “I know it’s terrifying to be in such close proximity to the bastards,” said the admiral, as if she were reading his mind. “And to not have the comforting presence of other ships. But you’re in place now, and we need you to stay there. However, if it looks like they have made you and are closing, you have my permission to bail through your wormhole.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said the relieved officer. While he could order his people through the wormhole if he thought it best, he was not allowed to do so without the orders of a superior officer. Leaving without that command was considered desertion, and while officers had done so in the past with no consequences, once the circumstances were examined, it was still comforting to have been given that order. Which meant that unless a Machine ship appeared within beam range of them without notice, an unlikely event, they would be able to evacuate.

  “Keep up the good work, Commander.” And with that the holo faded, leaving the commander alone with his own thoughts.

  * * *

  “We keep seeing the same headers at the beginning of every message,” said Beata, looking at the face of Vice Admiral Chuntoa Chan in the com holo. “And the same ending.”

  “And it’s the same code that the Empire used when they were created to issue commands,” said Chan, letting out a breath and shaking her head. “Unbelievable. It’s something our crypto people would have changed in an instant once we knew the enemy had picked up on it. The only thing I can think of it that they can’t change it. It was hardwired into their systems to allow the creators to issue commands through any kind of interference, including the self-generated kind.”

  “And can we use it against them?”

  “Maybe. It gives us an in at least. If we can come up with their current encryption routine I think we can develop a shutdown command.”

  “Why wasn’t the shutdown command hardwired in?” asked Beata, shocked at the very idea that such had not been done.

  “I think it was. The main problem was getting the command in. The original Machines, the ones that had rampaged over two systems centuries ago, found a way to screen it out. As far as we know, they did this by destroying or simply turning off the receivers that their creators had installed for control. But now we have found a com modality that they use for long range communications. If we can feed the right signal into their systems at the right time, we might be able to shut down their entire network.”

  “And how close are you to coming up with the command?” asked Beata, letting out a tense breath. “It sure would be nice to be able to stop these insects in their tracks.”

  “Insects?” asked Chan, not sure of the reference.

  “Yeah. Insects. They hide in the dark and reproduce thousands of times faster than we do. And then, when we find the nest, they swarm.”

  “Interesting definition,” said Chan, a thoughtful look on her face. “And it seems to fit them. But as to stopping them, we are working on the problem. The Machine brains we have in captivity are still undergoing experimentation. We’re spawning more of them so we can increase the frequency of our efforts.”

  “Is that safe?” asked Bednarczyk, a nightmare playing in her brain. The unasked question was why the Emperor was allowing her to create Machine intelligences. She didn’t believe that Chan would go behind the Emperor’s back, so it must have his approval. Which brought up the thought that maybe the total threat hadn’t been explained.

  “We learned from the manner in which they almost got out of confinement. And the reprogramming of the people they took over is proceeding as well as can be expected.”

  Chan looked like she wasn’t completely happy with that reprogramming, and Beata had to wonder if those people would ever by normal again. She shuddered at the thought of the way those people had been turned into something else. Beata could hope that they were taking more precautions to try and keep the Machines from breaking out of confinement. She had read the reports, and as far as she could see the research teams had taken every precaution. And still the Machines had been able to pull something and take over the minds of some of the scientists that had been studying them. The thinking of the people involved in the project was that the Machines had nothing else to pull, but h
ow were they to know there wasn’t something else the AIs could unleash, when the moment was right.

  The whole process of reprograming was itself a horror. Most of the people who had been taken over, those that had survived, had only had minor adjustments made to their thinking. So only minor reprogramming, removing the Machine overwrite and replacing with approved thoughts and memories, had been necessary. But some of the people, including a few of the lead scientists, had undergone extensive rewrites, and basically their core personalities were gone. So what was being replaced was a made-up construct of what the Psycho scientists thought they had been. But it really wasn’t them. That person was dead, and a new one was being created. That was a horror to the admiral, who believed in the sanctity of the mind, and rebelled against the whole idea of mind restructuring.

  “I can’t give you a timescale,” said Chan, looking down for a moment as if embarrassed by her admission. “I wish I could, but it would be a lie. We need to find a way to make them shut down all at once, across their entire area of operations. We’ll only have that one chance. I’m sure that the AIs will make the changes needed to block us once they realize what we are up to. So that’s it. One shot, one kill. Or we’re right back where we started, having to take out every one of the, insects, as you said, singly or in groups.”

  So, we put up with losing more intelligent beings while we continue to fight against a limitless opponent, all the while waiting for the magic bullet that might or might not work. She didn’t like it, but there it was.

  “Just keep feeding us those signal intercepts to my people,” said Chan, looking off holo for a moment. “The more data, the better. But for heaven’s sake, don’t let the bastards know what you’re doing. We need to figure out the code of their transmissions. If they think we’re trying to pull something on them they’ll start regularly changing the codes.”

  Beata was a student of history, like most military officers. Lessons from the past could often solve the problems of the present. She thought of the enigma machines of World War 2, the encryption devices that supposedly generated unbreakable codes. The English, with the help of the Poles and others, broke it. It gave them an advantage, but they had to be careful with how they used it, lest their enemies learn that they had it and change their signal encryption discipline.

  I hope I don’t have to make a Coventry decision, she thought, recalling the time Churchill had to let the Germans bomb an English city without meeting the aircraft with his own, so that the Germans wouldn’t guess that the British were reading their mail. She could see that coming, and she didn’t want to be put in the shoes of Churchill. If it happened, she would make the decision, but it would make her feel guilt for the rest of her life.

  “I have a meeting, Admiral,” said Chan, again looking off the holo. “If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me.”

  Beata, having the higher rank, acknowledged the ending of the conversation and terminated the connection, as protocol called for. She would have liked to talk more, and she could have forced the vice admiral to stay on the com. But Chan had the ear of people with much more power than one fleet admiral, and she could call them in an instant. So now Beata only had own thoughts to keep her company. Or did she?

  “I want to have a meeting of all my senior officers in an hour,” she told her assistant over the com. If she could bounce ideas off of them it might not really produce any result, but it would make her feel better to have them internalize the same the worries that she had.

  Chapter Two

  Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. William Shakespeare

  BOLTHOLE SYSTEM. MARCH 5TH, 1003.

  Nazzrirat Andonna woke screaming in the dark chamber that was his quarters. The lights

  came on instantly, the computer control system noting that he was awake and moving, while the young Klassekian sat up in his bed, his left side tentacle reaching automatically for the weapon he kept near the side of his bedframe.

  [What’s wrong,] sent his brother, Lonzzarit, projecting his own alarm into his sibling’s mind.

  Nazzrirat could feel from his brother’s tension that he had felt the nightmare as well. Fair enough, thought Nazzrirat, keeping that thought to himself. He had been shocked into awareness by the dreams of his brother often enough. From all of them, Klazzrirat and Phazzarit as well.

  The humans were aware of the quantum connectedness of the Klassekians. They thought that it was a type of telepathy, something that didn’t exist outside of the species. Humans used brain implants to simulate it, but they couldn’t transmit over stellar distances instantaneously. The could do that with wormholes, but there were never enough of them. Thus the need to use the aliens.

  What the humans didn’t fully understand was the process was not just communicating mind to mind like some kind of untraceable radio. It went deeper than that. What one member of a sibling group felt, so did all the others. Not just emotions, but physical sensations. If one was sick, they all felt the underpinnings of the illness. Same with injury. They still functioned as individuals, but could be influenced by the sensations of the others. And when one died? It was a traumatic event, as they not only felt the physical pain of the assault, the fear and panic. They also felt the mind of someone they had been connected to at birth fade into nothing. Leaving an empty space in their thoughts.

  Most Klassekians, even the most religious, didn’t believe in an afterlife for the very reason that they saw no evidence for it when a connected sibling died. Just a fading away to nothing. They understood that many humans and other aliens did believe, which was fine with them, since they couldn’t prove it with other species.

  Nazzrirat put his feet on the floor and prepared to face another day, exhausted as usual. It would do no good to go back to sleep for another hour before having to get up and go to work. The reverberations of the nightmare, and the echoes of it in the minds of his three surviving siblings would make that useless.

  [We’ve got to get over this,] sent Phazzarit, the most mellow of the quartet.

  Yeah, but how, thought the senior member of the litter. If they were on the home world, they would have been able to go to a therapist who dealt with such matters. There were none such on the Bolthole asteroid, and no plans to bring any in.

  Work was the same as always. Mr. Quan had made Nazzrirat a supervisor at the assembly plant, where all of the brothers worked quality testing particle beam weapons. Production was up, but not to send through the wormhole to the human Empire as had been intended. The command was determined that the asteroid and its millions of inhabitants would be well armed if they went through another Machine assault on their home.

  Nazzrirat watched as his brother Lonzzarit pointed the rifle downrange and pulled the firing stud. Unlike what they had used during the last invasion, these weapons had been made to fit the physiogamy of the Klassekians. Other assembly lines were making them for humans, and there were certain days when rifles and pistols for Phlistarans, Malticons and other aliens were produced.

  The weapon buzzed and sent a dark red beam downrange, to burn through two centimeters of hardened steel in an instant. Not as powerful as a military class weapon, but as good as any the siblings had used against the Machines. The weapons would be placed in many of the civilian areas, in lockers that would open when the command was sent down.

  “I think this one is defective,” said Phazzarit, his weapon failing to penetrate the two centimeters after a four second burst. The beam did look weak, the buzzing low.

  “Put it on the defective belt,” said Nazzrirat, shaking his head in a very human manner. The parts were made by computer fabbers, then assembled by sentient beings, then quality tested in this department. The failure rate was extremely low, but they did crop up. It would be a disaster if someone needed to use one and they picked up a defective weapon, barely touching a Machine battle walker.

  The shift went quickly. Command had shut down the overtime, and
only a few specially picked people were allowed to work over the required eight hours. There was a reason for that, and that was the four hours of other duties many of the workers reported to after their daily shift.

  “Attention,” yelled out Nazzrirat after closing himself up in his battle armor.

  The forty-seven Klassekians snapped to attention, armored feet clicking together, heavy particle beam rifles held perfectly at their sides in their alloy sheathed tentacles. The medium battle armor they had been equipped with had been designed for their bodies, their senses. Wearing the armor was like wearing thin clothing. It carried itself, as well as the equipment that was attached, giving the wearer unheard of mobility.

  Nazzrirat, as the senior of his sibling group, having been promoted to lieutenant a given command of a platoon. He was the senior platoon leader in the group of almost two hundred militiamen.

  “Companies. Report,” called out the human who was in charge of the battalion.

  All of the officers in the battalion were Klassekians, it being thought best to have them serve under their own. Except for the CO, one Major Sophia Ngursky. The Klassekians didn’t have any people with enough seniority for that kind of command.

  The company commander of Alpha turned and yelled out report. The platoon leaders shouted all present and accounted for. It moved on down the line until it hit Charlie.

  “All present and accounted for,” yelled out Nazzrirat. A moment later the second and third platoon leaders followed suit.

  “Break into platoons and conduct your training,” called out Ngursky.

  “Okay, guys,” called out Nazzrirat, looking back at his squad leaders. “Break into squads and practice fire and maneuver on green range.”

  One of his brothers, Klazzrirat, was his first squad leader. The other three squads were led by the senior siblings of eight-member groups. Not every platoon was structured the same, but it gave three of his squads the Klassekian attribute of untraceable command and control. First squad didn’t have that, but it had his brother, giving him that command and control over the lead of that squad. His other two brothers weren’t in his group. Phazzarit, also a sergeant, was attached to the company commander to give that officer a link with the platoon leader. Lonzzarit was with the battalion commander serving the same function.