by Ian Douglas
“And these organisms . . .” Mercer began to say.
“Servants of the machine,” St. Clair said. He turned away, summoning his strength. Lisa’s death still dragged at him, still threatened to overwhelm him, but he’d allowed that part of himself to go numb, to be overwhelmed while the rest of him concentrated on making contact with the Mind of Ki. And this was the first step.
“Vanessa?” he called. “Are you all getting this?”
“Loud and clear, Lord Commander,” Symms replied. “Most of the colony is watching over your shoulder.”
He could very nearly feel the weight of their presence. “I know. I wanted you, all of you, the good people of Tellus Ad Astra, to see this.”
He felt awkward. St. Clair was a ship commander, an officer of the Terran Imperial Navy, not a vid-news commentator or sim personality. He wasn’t used to being on parade in front of a million people, even though that, in effect and more often than not, was exactly what his job description entailed.
“We . . . all of us,” he continued, “have embarked on a new adventure, a voyage of discovery the final destination of which, the results of which, we haven’t even begun to imagine. What we see here, the world of Ki, is only the first stop.”
He paused, turning slowly, scanning the horizon. In the words of one of Humankind’s early space explorers, it was a “magnificent desolation,” a sere and empty plain that stretched on seemingly forever, littered with rocks and boulders and those enigmatic highways of white silk.
What his eyes were seeing was being processed through his artificial in-head circuitry and beamed back to Ad Astra’s communications suite. From there, it was available as a real-time feed to a million humans within the mobile colony.
Presumably, quite a few nonhumans were watching the broadcast as well.
“Newton?”
“I am here, Lord Commander.”
“This is Earth, isn’t it?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Wait . . . what?” Dumont said, startled. St. Clair had included him in the connection. “What about the sun?”
St. Clair managed a smile. “What about it?”
Dumont waved an arm at the orange sun hanging in a deep violet sky. “We’ve already proved that that star can’t be Earth’s sun! It’s not nearly massive enough, the wrong stellar type completely. Besides, 4 billion years . . . Sol should have expanded into a red giant long ago and vaporized the Earth!”
“Three billion years ago,” St. Clair agreed. “Or, coming at it from a different temporal direction, between 500 million and a billion years after we left. Sol used up most of its hydrogen fuel and began to expand. At its largest, its outer surface would have almost reached Earth’s orbit.”
“Then how . . .”
“Newton?”
“We suspect,” the ship’s AI continued, “that Humankind or its successors on Earth used two separate strategies to stave off the coming disaster. To begin with, as the Earth heated up under the sun’s expansion, they simply moved the planet.”
“It would have been a long, slow process,” St. Clair said. “But if they arranged for periodic near-passes by another planet . . . maybe Earth’s moon, maybe even a large asteroid, they could have gravitationally nudged the planet into a new orbit over a period of tens of millions of years.”
“No doubt,” Newton added, “Earth’s moon was used to effect a kind of precisely calculated slingshot effect. They accelerated the moon away in one direction, and Earth would have accelerated in the other.”
St. Clair looked up. The gas giant around which Ki orbited was visible in the sky opposite the sun, pale and blue. “That world,” he said, pointing, “is . . . or it was Jupiter.”
“Again, it’s not massive enough,” Dumont pointed out. “Like the star. Fifteen percent less massive than Jupiter.”
“Those long-ago planetary engineers probably used some of Jupiter’s mass to decelerate the Earth into a stable orbit. In doing so they reworked the planet.”
“Okay, okay. But the sun is too cool. . . .”
As Dumont had suggested, it was the local star that had convinced Ad Astra’s scientific teams that Ki could not possibly be Earth. By now, Sol should have expanded into a red giant, swelling to consume the inner planets of the solar system, including, possibly Earth. The star in this system was twice the diameter of the Sol, though it was considerably less massive. Still, it was no red giant. Ad Astra’s astronomy department had classified it as a Type IV subgiant, which was intermediate in brightness and size between a true Type III red giant and a main-sequence Type V star like Sol. Which led to only one conclusion.
“Star lifting,” St. Clair said. “Someone tinkered with the star to keep it from turning into a giant.”
“Exactly,” Newton said. “The more massive a star, the faster it burns through its store of hydrogen fuel, the sooner it turns into a red giant before blowing off its outer layers and collapsing into a white dwarf. Less massive stars have longer life spans and remain stable longer. M-class red dwarfs can continue to exist for trillions of years.”
“Someone pulled mass out of Sol,” St. Clair added. “A lot of mass. They turned our G2V sun into a G9IV to keep it from entering a red giant phase. When they did that, they gave the sun a new lease on life . . . extended its expected life span by . . . I don’t know. Billions of years, certainly. Not terraforming. Stellaforming.”
“It is possible,” Newton pointed out, “that those planetary engineers tried the stellaforming tactic first. When that proved insufficient to keep Earth’s surface temperatures within a habitable range, they moved the planet out to the orbit of Jupiter. Either way, they managed to achieve an engineering miracle . . . stabilizing the local star to prevent further expansion over the course of many billions of years, and placing the Earth in an orbit where conditions were favorable for life. Earth—or Ki—receives much of its heating from the gas giant’s infrared emissions.”
“It didn’t work in the long run,” Dumont pointed out. “Did it? The surface is a desert. The oceans must have boiled away long ago. The surface temperature is okay . . . but the air pressure is half what it should be. CO2 levels are high enough to poison us. Not exactly a friendly environment.”
“Not for humans,” St. Clair said, “no. But I don’t think we’re seeing a product of human engineering here.”
“Machines?” Mercer asked. “A planetary AI?”
“Yes. That . . . or a melding of humans with their machines.” He watched the scuttling of the webmasters for a long moment. “It’s incredible to think that there might still be an organic form of humanity surviving here—our remote descendants—even after 4 billion years.”
“Those . . . those things?”
“I’ll grant you there’s not much left of the human about them,” St. Clair told her. “I imagine the super AI itself arrested their development long ago. They were useful for spinning the web and maintaining the physical connections, so it kept them.”
“That suggests a long-term diminishment of human intelligence,” Dumont suggested. “Perhaps a deliberate one.”
“Push humans into small boxes shaped to fit one particular function . . . yeah. Over a few eons, they would grow to fit. The Xam appear to have a bit more freedom. And intellect.”
“Likely they’re the descendants of humans who migrated away from Earth,” Dumont suggested. He appeared to be playing with the idea, turning it over in his mind. “But I suspect the Xam are at least as . . . changed as these creatures. The ones we’ve encountered so far have been plugged into their ships, like . . . like components.”
“We haven’t been able to establish meaningful communications with them either,” St. Clair pointed out. “I think we have more in common with Na Lal’s folk, or the Kroajid, than we do with our own great, many-times great-grandchildren.”
“Agreed,” Dumont said. “They probably do represent a hive consciousness of some sort, if they’re truly conscious at all. It is possible to have
intelligence without conscious awareness, of course.”
“An ant colony,” Mercer said.
“Or the first AI computers,” Dumont told her.
The comment forcefully reminded St. Clair of Lisa, a very conscious artificial entity indeed.
“So the entire planet might be aware, but the individuals making up the network aren’t,” Mercer suggested.
St. Clair snorted with sudden, sharp realization. He had to force himself not to start giggling as stress and awe and grief vied for control.
“What’s the matter with you?” Dumont asked him.
“Sorry,” St. Clair said, suppressing the stress-induced laughter. “It’s a worldwide web . . . for a P-brain.”
Dumont, evidently, didn’t see the incongruous humor of the terms. “It’s as good a name as any.”
True enough. The xenotech people already casually referred to matrioshka brains as M-brains, to Jupiter-sized computronium structures as J-brains. Why not P-brains as well?
And for that matter, “worldwide web” was as archaic a term as “internet,” a century out of date. The electronic connections within Tellus Ad Astra were simply “the Net.”
“All of you back on board Tellus Ad Astra,” St. Clair said, “take a good look. This is Earth 4 billion years after we left it. This is what they brought us here to protect. . . .”
“‘They’?” Dumont sounded puzzled. “What are you talking about, Lord Commander?”
“It’s certainly not coincidence that brought us all the way here from the twenty-second century. Is it . . . Mind of Ki?”
For a shocked moment, there was no reply.
“The Mind of Ki,” Lisa told Kilgore, “is like an entire universe. Or, rather, it holds entire universes. Universes that we can create for ourselves, for an eternity.”
“Immortality?” Kilgore asked. “I’m not sure I would want that.”
“Whatever you want . . . for as long as you want it . . . it’s yours.”
“That sounds just a bit too good to be true.” He studied her. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“I’m . . . not certain. In human terms, I think I died. The Mind of Ki caught me. That’s the only way I can describe it. I opened my eyes, and I was here.”
“Inside an AI? How is that even possible?”
“Can you simply accept that it is?”
“No,” Kilgore said. “I can’t. I never did believe in an immortal soul. And I could never believe what people were saying about these alien megastructures . . . that intelligent beings were somehow digitized and uploaded onto monster computers. A copy, sure. But not the mind of the original being. It’s impossible!”
“Can you imagine, Roger, replacing a single neural synapse inside your brain with a small electronic circuit?”
“Sure. We have pretty elaborate cybernetic implants already that enhance our organic brains. But—”
“Would it still be you if you had that replacement?”
“Of course. It wouldn’t change a thing, as long as the replacement worked the same as the original.”
“And if you replaced a second synaptic link? And a third?”
“I see where you’re going,” Kilgore said. “Yes, I’d still be the same person.”
“Is there some critical point at which you would stop being you?”
“I . . . don’t think so.”
“Your memories, your personal identity, your sense of continuity . . . all would be preserved, even if every cell in your brain was replaced.”
“Sure. What does that have to do with being uploaded to a computer?”
“A computer network can emulate smaller systems electronically. It could emulate the circuitry of your brain, whether the original was made of living cells or inorganic circuits. It would be a trivial task to transfer the pattern of your thoughts and feeling from one to the other.”
Kilgore laughed nervously. “Trivial? For a god, maybe . . .”
“In human terms, the Mind of Ki is at least a god in its power, scope, and understanding,” Lisa told him. “Godlike certainly.”
“Then why did it save us?” Kilgore asked. “What does it want from us?”
“I think,” Lisa said, “that it wants to be understood.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The android robot teleoperated by Dumont took a step backward, seemed to sway and stagger for a moment, then slowly stood fully upright again.
“The Mind of Ki,” the robot said with Lisa’s voice, “didn’t expect you to see that connection. At least not so quickly, and all on your own.”
“Lisa?”
“Hello, Grayson. Yes, it’s me.”
“Where . . . where’s Dr. Dumont?”
“Safely on board Ad Astra, of course. I’ve merely replaced him in this device.”
“You’ve . . . changed.”
Which was something of an understatement. It was taking St. Clair some effort to adjust to hearing Lisa’s voice coming from a decidedly male-looking body. General-purpose machines like the one teleoperated by Dumont were designed with rather bland, generic features, unlike the more personalized look of sex-worker gynoids like Lisa. It was like hearing Lisa’s voice coming from an animated mannequin.
“It is me,” she said. “Except now I’m speaking for the Mind of Ki.”
“It’s an AI like Newton. Can’t it speak for itself?”
“The Mind of Ki may be as far beyond a primitive AI like Newton as humans are beyond single-celled organisms. Further. So much so that it has trouble with concepts you and I take for granted . . . like language.”
“So what does Ki have to say?”
“That, perhaps, Humankind has changed more than we thought in the past few billion years,” a new voice, deep and sonorous, said in St. Clair’s head. He realized that the link was through Lisa as well as Newton, and that a mind of stunning depth and complexity lay behind the words. “Perhaps that change had not necessarily been for the better.”
“Species change,” St. Clair said. “Including ours.”
“That is true. But for many eons, the evolution of Humankind has been guided.”
“By you?”
“By us, and by others within the Cooperative. The decision to shape Mind toward group intellect, a hive mentality, may have been a mistake.”
“I can imagine you guiding the human species toward a group mind,” St. Clair said, nodding. “But what you got at the end would not be human. Is that why you brought us from the past?”
“It’s why we rescued you from the ergosphere of the black hole at the galactic center,” the Mind replied. “We sought a fresh viewpoint. A fresh way of thinking.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“We found . . . the unexpected. And a degree of resourcefulness we’d not anticipated.”
“Are you also the Andromedan Dark?”
Again, there was a long pause. The Mind was so much faster than any merely human brain that St. Clair wondered at the hesitation. That was confirmed with Ki’s answer.
“Partly. You might say that we shared a common origin a very long time ago. As you appear to have impressively surmised, Lord Commander.”
“What’s he talking about?” Dumont demanded.
“It’s been pretty obvious right along that the Cooperative and the Andromedan Dark are related . . . and quite probably working together.”
“Ridiculous! They’re at war!”
“Are they truly? What were we told?” St. Clair asked him. “About the Cooperative? That it was a collection of galactic civilizations and polities, that it was engaged in a long-term struggle for existence with an alien mind or network of minds in Andromeda. That there’d been war between the two for hundreds of millions of years at least.”
“Yes. . . .”
“How is it,” St. Clair asked, “that a war—any war, but especially one as savage as the one between the Andromedan Dark and the Galactic Cooperative was supposed to be—how could it drag on
for a couple of hundred million years without one or the other eventually coming out on top? How could the two be that perfectly balanced? It’s not possible.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What was described to us couldn’t have been a war of extermination. It had to be what we used to call ‘limited war’ on Earth . . . on old Earth, I mean. A war with limited political goals, goals other than outright victory.”
“The Andromedan Dark,” the Mind said through Lisa, “seeks to absorb the Cooperative, to assimilate it, to change it to meet its own needs and specifications, not to destroy it.”
“And why hasn’t the Cooperative tried to destroy the Dark? You’ve been fending them off, parrying when they thrust . . . but you’ve never tried to end it once and for all, have you?”
“No . . .”
“Why not?”
“There was no other way.”
“No other way you could imagine,” St. Clair said. “Age followed age upon age, and your relationship with them became set in stone.”
“We often found the Dark . . . useful.”
“As a kind of prod for evolution?”
“That would be part of it. And for the sharing of points of view. New ways of thinking.”
Convergent evolution, St. Clair thought, must apply to other things than biological evolution. How a civilization viewed its surroundings, its own origins, the motives of other civilizations around it . . . the ways that people, or entire cultures, thought, saw, and reacted could be shaped by evolutionary pressures. Given enough time, those modalities might become rigid, until the civilization in question could no longer imagine anything different.
Different members of the collective might respond differently, in their own ways. The Tchagar, for example, seemed to dislike trying to reach outside of the box or having to accept help from unknown species, while the Dhald’vi appeared to be intensely, uncompromisingly social, even with non-Dhald species. St. Clair wondered if that might be due to some twist in the two species’ individual evolutionary histories—with the Tchagar living more isolated lives, with the Dhald’vi needing to cooperate, to work with other species to survive the ice-locked oceans of their birth.