Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “Whoa, dude. No one questions your awesomeness, especially not after that mission. Hey, we got out of that cavern, no harm done. And the Maxolhx still have no idea we were ever there. So, Skippy, what is the odd part?”

  “Joe, the odd part is where you arrived, when you finally showed up late for the party.”

  “Um,” I stared at the ceiling while my mind raced. “No,” I said slowly. “We jumped in close to the Dutchman, just like we were supposed to. What is odd about- oh. Shit. Wow.” My gasp was because I suddenly understood what had been puzzling him.

  “Egg-zactly, Joe. That star system is moving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at approximately eight hundred thirteen thousand kilometers per hour. The Dutchman was also orbiting the star, although that relative velocity was comparatively meaningless. In the time gap before you emerged from the jump, the Flying Dutchman drifted almost eight hundred seventy thousand kilometers from where it was when the jump was initiated. You should have emerged an hour later and almost nine hundred thousand klicks away, but instead you popped up right near the ship. You emerged where the ship was right then, not the location I aimed at six hours before. How the hell did that happen?”

  “Um, that was not a bonus bit of magnificence from you?”

  “Joe, you know I am all about taking credit for everything I do, and also things people might plausibly believe I did. Sadly, this time the answer is no, I didn’t do that. When I took control from the far end in mid-jump, I used every bit of processing capacity to first determine the condition of the inner wormhole, then to adjust it as I could. I did not even have a hint that the far endpoint had shifted into the future, that is why I thought you were dead and I was shocked when you four knuckleheads popped up right near the ship. Joe, somehow the jump process knew the far endpoint was shifted forward in time, and it adjusted the location accordingly.”

  “Huh. The jump navigation computer in the DeLorean did that by itself?” That surprised me, because that collection of spare parts had barely survived the jump into the cavern under the pixie factory, and had literally been on fire. Skippy told me he could not completely fix it, what was why he sort of had to try to catch us from the far end of our outbound jump. “Cool.”

  “Not cool, you ignorant flea-bitten ape,” he shook his head sadly. “No way could that nav system do something like that. That thing was barely able to handle the inbound jump to the cavern. Even if it hadn’t blown half its circuits and caught fire, it would have been a freakin’ miracle if that nav system could have successfully computed and managed the outbound jump. The calculations-”

  “Wait,” I held up a finger shaking with outrage. “That system could not have gotten us out of there, even if it hadn’t been damaged? You knew that, and let us jump in there anyway, you little shithead?”

  “Well, heh heh, in my defense Joe, I really did not expect the DeLorean to survive the inbound jump. Surprised the hell out of me when you emerged in that cavern instead of deep inside the planet somewhere. Truthfully, I figured the odds were the outer wormhole would go unstable and collapse as you transitioned. So, really, making preparations for a return jump was something I did just to make you feel better. I certainly never thought I would have to calculate an outbound jump. When you made it back to the Dragon with a box full of blank pixies, I kind of had to scramble to pull the math together.”

  His avatar tilted its head and stared at me. “Joe?” He asked after an awkward silence. “Come on, Joe, say something.”

  “I, I don’t know what to say, Skippy. Seriously, you allowed us to jump in there, even though you thought we could not return?”

  “Oh for- Did you not hear anything I said? I did not expect you to survive the inbound jump, you knucklehead. Jeez Louise, if you get upset about anything, it should be me feeding jump calculations into that shoddy navigation computer. I made that thing out of used pinball machine parts.”

  Through hands covering my face, I gritted my teeth and growled at him. “And you think that makes it better?”

  “Sure. Joe, remember, you were determined to break into that pixie factory, even though I explained, or tried to explain, how extremely risky it was. You were all like, ‘hold my beer’, so I knew there was no stopping you. Really, I should be angry at you, for making me participate in something so dangerous.”

  “You were never in danger!”

  “I meant,” he gave an exasperated sigh, “danger to my reputation for continued awesomeness. Did you think about that, huh? Did you consider my feelings at all, you big jerk?”

  “We can,” I ground my teeth together. “Talk about that later.” No, I told myself, we were never going to talk about it, because trying to get Skippy to take responsibility for his actions was a total waste of time. Worse, it was counterproductive. He had a sneaky way of turning things around and making me feel like I was at fault. “Can we get back to the subject? Maybe that nav unit wasn’t damaged as badly as you thought.”

  “It was damaged exactly like I thought, you dumdum. Joe, I am sorry. Listen, when you jumped into that cavern, I was guessing at some of the parameters to the calculations, that is the honest truth. The math to create a wormhole inside a wormhole didn’t exist until I invented it, and that math hints at stuff I still don’t understand. Once you survived the inbound jump, partly through my awesomeness but mostly by luck, I was able to get a better grasp of the math. It scared me, because I realized that my math was incomplete. So, even if that nav system was working perfectly, it could not have shifted the endpoint of the jump to compensate for the time differential, because my math did not anticipate that variable.”

  “Skippy, if you didn’t adjust the wormhole, and the DeLorean’s nav system didn’t do it, then we’re left with, what? Invisible elves?”

  “Hence why I described the event as an oddity, Joe. I have no answer. Does that monkey brain of yours have any idea how that could have happened?”

  “I don’t even understand the question, Skippy. Um, wait. The far endpoint of a wormhole is supposed to be backwards in time, right? Something about, uh, causality?”

  “Correct, Joe.”

  “Then how did we jump into the future?”

  “Technically, the far endpoint was backwards in time, relative to- UGH. How do I explain this? You emerged from the jump slightly before the amount of time the wormhole shifted you forward, because the endpoint was backwards in time, relative to your frame of reference. Do not try to think about that, or your primitive tiny monkey brain will explode. Listen, knucklehead, I now do sort of understand the math explaining how and why you jumped into the future. I should not have been surprised about that, really, it is called ‘space-time’. The question is how your endpoint was adjusted in space to compensate for your shift in time. And no, I do not believe invisible elves or unicorns were involved. Rather than continue this useless conversation, I will ponder the question by myself. Maybe I will ask Nagatha to check my math, although,” he grunted. “That would be a waste of time.”

  “Hey!” I protested. “Stop picking on Nagatha, you jerk.”

  “Oh, you do not need to defend me in this case, Joseph,” Nagatha’s voice was calm and soothing. “Skippy is correct that, if he does not understand the full implications of the horribly intricate mathematics he invented, then my own more limited resources are unlikely to provide insight. Skippy was not being an asshole by making that logical judgment.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Skippy responded happily.

  “He was being an asshole for saying it out loud,” Nagatha added with a giggle.

  “Hey!” The beer can retorted. “I, um- Oh, shut up.” With that, his avatar faded away.

  “Nagatha one, beer can zero,” she laughed, with a musical sound.

  “Thank you, Nagatha,” I leaned back in my chair. “Forget the math for a second. Do you have any guesses how our jump wormhole somehow knew to adjust itself, or whatever happened?”

  “Unfortunately no. Joseph, you do know that I occ
upy nearly all the capacity of this ship’s original Thuranin computer, plus computers we recovered from the junkyard in the Roach Motel?”

  “Yes, Skippy explained that is how you are able to control the ship without him.”

  “Mm hmm,” she made a sound like a teacher who did quite believe the dumb kid really understood the concept. “You have been studying physics, and mathematics, so you understand what a yottaflop is?”

  “Uh, I kind of know what a yottabyte is.”

  “Think of a yottaflop as the ability to process a yottabyte of data,” she explained patiently. “Floating-point operations are not truly applicable to AIs like myself, however I will use ‘FLOPS’ as a frame of reference. Joseph, just the portion of myself that merely controls the ship’s stealth field, commonly runs at one point three trillion yottaflops, and that is only one small system I am responsible for. By human standards, I am frightfully smart. Compared to Skippy, however, I am, well, you.”

  “Come on, Nagatha, you can’t be that dumb,” I knew she was trying to boost my self-esteem. I was wrong about that.

  “I am not dumb, dear. If Skippy’s intelligence is a stack of books one hundred feet high, then my own ability is somewhere around the first chapter of the lowest book in the stack.”

  “Ok, and I’m, what, the dust beneath the cover of the lowest book?”

  “Do not speak so poorly of yourself, dear,” she admonished.

  “Yeah, I guess I-”

  “Skippy already does that for you.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Crap. For a moment, I thought she would say something nice about me.

  “Joseph, as Skippy has told you often, there are many ways to measure ‘intelligence’. You are clever. Astonishingly clever at times. In fact, you are perplexingly clever.”

  That somehow did not sound like a compliment, but as it was Nagatha, I played it safe. “Uh, thank you?”

  “There is no need to thank me, dear, I am not attempting to flatter you. If you want someone to say nice empty words about you being smart and special, that is your parents’ job.”

  “Uh,” now I was certain she was not giving me a compliment.

  “Hush, dear. If you are seeking false praise, you will not get it from me. Joseph, Skippy once described me as the president of your fan club. That was before I had the opportunity to work with you, and observe you in action. I now admire you more than I could possibly have imagined. When I say your cleverness is perplexing, I mean that as a compliment. So, when you asked whether I had any idea how Skippy’s advanced jump calculations could explain what happened during your jump forward in time, the answer is no. For all my vast intelligence, even I am not truly capable of appreciating the full scope of Skippy’s awesomeness.”

  “Ah, damn. Well, it was worth a shot-”

  “If you tell Skippy I said that about him, I will deny everything,” she laughed.

  “Of course.”

  “Colonel Bishop,” the Stooge, I mean, the Commissioner from Japan said as she walked into my office. She hadn’t requested an appointment, and she hadn’t knocked either. That was rude, maybe she was doing that because she had learned being direct is the best way to deal with Americans. Of course, I had been rude by avoiding her, so it was payback time, I guess. She sat down before I could invite her to do so, and launched into a complaint before I could speak. “We are concerned, greatly concerned,” she added as if saying ‘greatly’ would make a difference to me. “That we have so far accomplished nothing toward the goal of this mission.”

  “I disagree,” I replied, with a smile that touched my lips but not my eyes.

  “I do not see what you would call an accomplishment, when-”

  Diplomats were supposed to be polite, to not interrupt other people. I was not a diplomat. “The goal of this mission is to safeguard the future of humanity. So far,” I continued before she could make a retort. “We have discovered that super-duty wormholes require a special type of controller module capability, to make connections beyond the galaxy. That information will be crucial to the UN’s selection of a beta site, because it makes any site outside this galaxy essentially untouchable, even if another species acquires the ability to manipulate wormholes. We have successfully and safely, landed on a Dead World, and acquired multiple items of Rindhalu technology that we did not previously have access to. Skippy is still limited in his ability to transfer technology to us, so scavenging technology when we can is a standing order for this ship and crew.” That part was entirely true. “We now also know that each super-duty wormhole can connect to only a limited set of locations beyond the galaxy. Whatever site we choose for a refuge, it will again be even more secure, because our enemies will need to identify which particular super-duty wormhole we used to get outside the galaxy.”

  She thought a minute, tilting her head and looking up at the ceiling. That stereotypical body language was probably something diplomats were trained to do, to slow down the pace of negotiations. Now that I thought about it, that was a useful technique. Maybe I should try it. Pausing to stare at the ceiling gives you time to calm down, when what you really want to do is choke the asshole on the other side of the table.

  I am not an expert, but I think choking would not be a good negotiating technique.

  When she finished thinking, or play-acting to make me nervous at the awkward silence, she looked at me. “What you said is true, Colonel Bishop. You must also consider the downside of your argument.” One corner of her mouth curled up slightly, like she was pleased to score a point in a debate. “If there are only a few, or one, wormholes to provide access to the beta site, our enemies could blockade it. We would be unable to bring additional people to our new refuge.”

  I shrugged. “Ma’am, that is not my problem.”

  That surprised her, because she jerked her head back. “Excuse me?”

  “The UN set the parameters of this mission as identifying potential beta sites. They will decide which site to set up as a refuge, and whether we are going to do this at all. Once the beta site has a sustainable population, and the colony is able to grow food, we will have accomplished the goal. We are not trying to evacuate the entire population of Earth.” In one of the many research papers churned out by the UN, some group of genetic scientists estimated we needed about four hundred people at a beta site, to make a viable population. The actual minimum number for genetic diversity was lower than that, they set four hundred as a safety margin above the minimum. In an extreme emergency, if all we could get to the beta site were four hundred people, they would all have to be carefully scanned for genetic diseases. Deciding which people were ineligible because of their genetic makeup was getting into uncomfortable Nazi-style eugenics, but the scientists had been unanimous that we could not afford such a small population to carry fatal diseases to the beta site.

  My thinking was we just needed to get enough people there, so the population was large enough to be diverse, without a whole lot of subjective decisions about who was and was not worthy to carry on humanity’s future.

  But, that also was not my problem.

  “I see,” she gave me a look like she was mentally crossing my name off a list.

  That pissed me off, so I defended myself. “Commissioner, the United Nations has made it clear that military commanders, and myself in particular, will not be allowed to make decisions for humanity. We have a specific mission, and we are not to exceed our authority.”

  “Of course, Colonel,” she nodded, and her expression softened somewhat. “You said that this mission is already successful. We will be bringing home news that the Rindhalu have an Elder AI. Are you concerned about the effect that potentially disastrous information will have on the decisions the UN might make about the beta site?”

  “No.” I again did the smile thing without involving my eyes. “I do not think you have considered the full impact of learning that the Rindhalu have a cooperative Elder AI. If the Rindhalu’s AI is able to manipulate wormholes the way Skippy does, then the spiders
will not be so desperate to acquire that ability from us. No doubt the Rindhalu will not be happy that we lowly humans possess such a powerful capability, but they might settle for us voluntarily agreeing to restrict our manipulation of wormholes. The important point is, the Rindhalu will not need to threaten Earth to acquire that capability, because they already have it. Also,” I held up a finger for emphasis. “Also, the spiders will be very eager to assure that the Maxolhx do not acquire the technology to control wormholes. The Maxolhx can only get that technology from us, so the Rindhalu will have a powerful incentive to prevent the Maxolhx from ransacking Earth.” I smiled, and that time it was genuine.

  I did not tell her that we had no evidence the Rindhalu’s AI could screw with wormholes the way Skippy did. Skippy had not developed that capability until I asked the ignorant question of whether it was even possible. Unless the Rindhalu had the same capability as the Merry Band of Pirates, they would very much want to take our technology

  I also did not mention that, regardless of whether the spiders could screw with wormholes, they would very much not want humans to have that ability. As long as humans could manipulate Elder wormholes, we were a potential threat to the oldest star-faring species in the galaxy. And as long as humans had that capability, other species would want to steal it from us. So, the best way for the spiders to assure no other species acquired the technology from us, was to assure we no longer have it. And the only way to make absolutely certain that no humans gave that knowledge to other species, was for there to be no humans left alive.

  Finally, I did not mention that in any battle between the two senior species, Earth would inevitably be caught in the crossfire and destroyed.