by Hubbert, Jim
The North European Allied Air Command was composed of generals from the four powers, along with officers from countries providing logistical support. When Orville announced the shortage of carriers, the exchange of sour looks began immediately. It was grimly humorous to see the surprise of the American general, who had been kept in the dark by his superiors, but Orville was in no mood to enjoy it.
After a few moments of silence the usual furious arguing broke out. The Soviet and Italian generals criticized the Americans; the U.S. commander reminded them of America’s risky strategic bombing operations from the British Isles and insisted on equal sharing of the burdens of war. The German general pretended to be neutral while discreetly supporting America, as if his superiors had already notified him of the secret German-U.S. deal. The French and Spanish officers, officially just observers, began stoking the argument. Orville pounded the table.
“Wake up, people! We don’t have time for this idiotic squabbling!”
Everyone turned to stare at him, some with hostile expressions that seemed to ask a single question: Who got us into this mess in the first place? The American general went on the offensive.
“What about the Upstreamer Forces? You must have some strike capability, or am I wrong? What was all that talk about reinforcements arriving every day? Just propaganda?”
Orville was silent, and let the silence be his answer. In a moment he was forgotten and the generals had gone back to fighting amongst themselves. Earth knew all about the arrival of the Descendant Messengers. As Orville and the Original Messengers pushed the ET back in 1943, history itself changed, increment by increment. People survived who would have died; technology that would have appeared in later eras became possible now. This in turn accelerated the development of AIs. Then mankind looked to its past and upstreamed Messengers to critical eras to provide support.
Logic dictated that the number of Descendant Messengers should keep rising as enemy losses rose. The destruction of a single ET generated a new timestream. Humanity in this new daughter stream would be in a better position to develop AIs and send them into the past. With the enemy’s final defeat, all barriers to technological development would fall, and humanity would be able to create as many AIs as desired. They would seed the past and the future with multitudes of AIs, and their own timestream would be absolutely secure against further attack. This was the true significance of the arrival of the Descendant Messengers. It was also the Upstreamer Forces’ ultimate goal.
But things were not working out as planned. The new Messengers confirmed that humanity in their timestreams had advanced significantly. But for many reasons—social, economic, and political—these timestreams had not reached the point where they could assemble a significant temporal army. This pointed to one conclusion: entire temporal universes were on course to extinction.
But there was something else the Messengers were withholding from mankind.
Several months previously, the number of newly arriving Messengers had started dwindling. At the same time, they were arriving from farther and farther in the future. The most recent arrival came from the year 2680, even later than the Original Messengers. That meant that humanity’s capacity to create AIs was emerging later and later in history. Cutty’s conclusion was that the Upstreamer Forces’ interference in events was becoming counterproductive, actually slowing the progress of the species instead of accelerating it.
Orville had seen nothing wrong with actively changing history. What would be the point of minimizing interference if the result were the loss of humanity itself? He had no desire to create more tragedies like the one that befell Chan and his people. He no longer cared about nations or cultures. All he wanted was to help individuals survive. But painful as it might be, experiences like this demonstrated how wrong he was. Those looks of suspicion! As soon as the ET were mopped up, it was clear that these men would once again divide their world into enemy and friend, creating endless conflict.
Orville turned his back on the bickering officers and stepped outside the command center. He stared vacantly at the vast, snow-covered runway and muttered, “What do they expect us to do?”
“Hey, Orville, got a minute? I want to ask you something.” The cheerful voice on the comm link was Alexandr, his data tag marked Singapore. He was an advisor to the Japanese army at their frontline command center.
“I’m all out of resources, Alex. I shipped the Komet aircraft you requested. I don’t have ground forces to spare. The rest of the French army has to stay put in Algeria,” said Orville.
“No, it’s not that. My bear needs some lackeys to carry out his dirty work. Any ideas?”
“Your bear?” Orville sputtered in bafflement, his emotion translated and carried through the comm. “What’s that, a code name for the Russians?”
Alexandr chuckled. “Come on, don’t play games. You told me to put a bear in my story. You know, for the villain.”
“Yes, maybe I did, but…” Orville recalled that short conversation with Alexandr on the surface of the Moon. It had happened a few years ago in their frame of reference, but it was actually 180 years in the future. A human might have forgotten it, but short of major damage, Messengers retained every microsecond of their experiences.
“You actually decided to use a bear?”
“Of course. Bears are like guardian gods of the forest. So why does this one want to kill the tree? Come on, you gotta find out, right?” said Alexandr.
“Maybe he went crazy.”
“Oh, the motivation isn’t important. I just want to grab the reader’s attention. So how about those lackeys?”
“I don’t know. What about crabs?” It was a shot in the dark. Orville had crab each morning with his Finnish breakfast. Alexandr slapped his thigh.
“Of course, crabs! Crustaceans with bright red shells, crawling around deep in the forest. It’s got impact. Yeah, the bear tells them to crawl out on every branch and snip the leaves off, one by one. It sounds scary. No way can those little caterpillars fight off these crabs, even if they all join forces.”
Orville was silent. “So things are bad, eh?” said Alexandr.
“We’re at a very difficult juncture,” answered Orville.
“I have no idea how we’re going to defeat the ET.”
Orville suddenly felt a nasty foreboding. “Have they come up with something new?”
“This says it all,” said Alexandr. He transmitted an image to Orville’s visual system. It was a black-and-white photo with a superimposed grid, taken from the air. There was a barren plain scattered with boulders, and at the upper right, a tiny white dome resembling a parasite. Judging from the grid scale it might have been five meters across. “A Mitsubishi Ki-46 observation plane took this over Mount Bruce in western Australia.”
Was it an enemy structure? Orville had never seen anything like it. “It’s not a nest,” he said, half to himself. “No hatch, no generator. What is it?”
“I didn’t know either, so I sent Wasps to image it from different angles. Here’s what I got.” Alexandr sounded proud of himself. The next transmission was a false-color thermal image. Orville was stunned. The dome now sat at the center of a series of concentric circles up to a hundred times as large, seemingly floating in the air.
“Geothermal energy transmission. That dome has roots that go fifty klicks straight down, sucking up heat. It can generate four or five hundred times more energy than they need for replication. They could even upstream without relying on antiprotons.”
“Nuke it,” said Orville impatiently. “I’ll send you a warhead from Peenemunde right now. Singapore, right?”
“Now hold on,” said Alexandr. “This is where it gets really interesting. We found 139 of these silos. What you’re looking at is the last one we found. And except for this one, the rest were already empty.” Orville could feel his legs bucking. He leaned against the wall of the command center.
“That’s just in the Southern Hemisphere,” said Alexandr. “I think they�
�ve been spotted in your half of the globe, too. You could check it out, but it probably doesn’t matter.” He was laughing, a sarcastic, dismal laugh.
The Messengers had always assumed that the ET would rely on solar energy. Now the enemy was almost cleared out of near-Earth space. The rest were planetside, not an ideal place to be dependent on solar energy. The resource war, and thus the initiative, had seemed to favor the Messengers. But if the ET were using geothermal energy, the rules of the game had changed dramatically. The amount of power they could access at any time would be far larger. Aerial detection would be difficult. It was almost as if the ET had switched over to guerilla tactics. If they used the energy they harvested to keep upstreaming, all of mankind’s past would be in danger.
“Why are they doing this?” Orville wailed. After all, the enemy were only machines. Yet their sheer doggedness suggested that they were not just obeying some program. Who or what was behind them?
“Based on the depth of each silo, a rough calculation of the amount of energy available allows us to estimate how far they can upstream. We’re already working on that. When we get the answer, we’ll be leaving too,” said Alexandr.
“So we can go from branch to branch, knocking off the crabs.”
“See? You do get it. I’ll have to add tons of caterpillar friends to the story so they’ll have a fighting chance. Damn, the subplots are going to get out of control. I wonder if Shumina will read the whole thing.”
“Maybe not till you finish serializing it. Who knows, maybe the ending won’t be happy,” said Orville.
“Don’t say that!” Alexandr sounded back to normal, which made Orville feel more like himself too. “Have you notified Cutty?”
“Of course, but she’s totally occupied,” said Alexandr. “I wonder what would keep her from dealing with something this important.”
Just then Cutty joined the conversation. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I am returning to support mode. I was trying to crack a very difficult cipher. The enemy made a transmission from their communications hub. By laser to Teegarden’s Star, twelve light years from Earth.”
“Does that mean we were wrong about where they came from?” Alexandr asked impatiently. But Cutty’s response was glum.
“Teegarden is a red dwarf. We wouldn’t expect to find intelligent life in its vicinity. In the twenty-sixth century humans had an unmanned observation station on one of the planets out there—it feels strange to talk about this in the past tense, doesn’t it?—but all it detected were some chemically synthesized bacteria.”
“But the ET wouldn’t beam a message to an unoccupied location,” said Orville.
“Correct, so this is still an open investigation. And I haven’t broken the cipher. There is insufficient data. But your discovery is quite important, Alexandr. I just searched our database of images from the Northern Hemisphere. It appears there are more than 400 silos worldwide.”
“Then we need a new strategy,” said Alexandr. “If the ET are going to upstream without limit, we’ll have to match them. But there’s also a limit to our numbers. Why don’t we take a page from the enemy’s playbook and start self-replicating?”
Orville was shocked by this proposal. “If we started using self-replication, we’d end up overwhelming the human race. Don’t forget, our mission is to serve mankind.”
“That’s true,” said Cutty. “And there’s no advantage to dividing our forces. Instead of chasing after individual ET across multiple timestreams, we should upstream farther back in time and defend the future from there.”
“You say ‘farther back in time,’ but how far do we go? The enemy has the initiative,” said Alexandr.
“I have a plan,” said Cutty. “Original and Descendant Messengers, please join us.” Cutty opened the conversation. Messengers all over the planet now heard her voice.
“First, I’m sending you the data on Alexandr’s discovery. Has everyone received it? Then here’s my analysis: the enemy has acquired the capability to upstream without limit. Logically, they could travel back to the root of this timestream and inflict damage on Earth as it was several billion years ago. However, I doubt they will do that.”
“Why?” said Alexandr.
“Because if the damage they inflict takes place too far in the past, it won’t influence the human species. Biological evolution is highly adaptive. Given enough time, even the effects of extensive damage can be overcome. Of course, the new evolutionary path may yield humans that are not primates or even mammals. But the concept of parallel evolution should apply across branching timestreams. Therefore, the best way to retard the progress of humanity for the longest possible period is to inflict damage as close to the present as possible. The enemy knows this.”
“You must have an idea where they will strike.”
“I believe the most critical, vulnerable period for mankind is the point at which modern humans are just emerging as a distinct species. Therefore, we must go back a hundred thousand years, to the African savannah. There we defend the species to the death, with all our forces. We draw a defensive line and prevent the enemy from upstreaming any further.”
“I’m not impressed by your logic,” said Orville. “What defensive ‘line’? We can’t create a physical barrier. Is there a technique to prevent the enemy from upstreaming wherever they want?”
“There is no such technique,” replied Cutty. “What I propose is merely a plan of action. We upstream a hundred thousand years, settle in, and maintain a vigil until each breakaway group of enemy finds us. Then we eliminate them piecemeal. It’s inconceivable that they could upstream that far in a single jump.”
The network fell silent. A thousand centuries? Was it really possible to defend a span of time that long?
“Of course,” Cutty continued, “our hardware was not designed for such extended deployment. We will use cryostasis technology to extend our operational lives for as long as possible.” This last remark failed to lighten the stunned atmosphere hanging over the network. Cutty casually added: “We will hold a referendum on this plan in sixty seconds. If anyone has objections or questions, now is the time.”
There was silence for forty-five seconds. For Messengers, with their high-speed language and powers of thought, it was like a human year. But on the forty-sixth second, Alexandr spoke. “What an idiotic plan, even if it is the best we have. Cutty?”
“Alexandr.”
“My story is going to be so long, no one will read it.”
“I’ll abridge it for you.”
“I’ll do it myself,” he said, signaling agreement to the plan. A few of the Messengers laughed. In seconds, the votes started coming in. In ten seconds, the ayes topped 50 percent. A few moments later they approached 90 percent. The voice of Cutty cut in. “Then it’s settled.”
“Wait. I’m out.” It was Orville.
“And may we know the reason?” Cutty said.
“Mankind will be wiped out downstream of every era where the enemy stops off in the process of finding us.”
“True. Streams without us in their past—this stream, for example—will be abandoned. Ultimately it will be as if they never existed. Indeed, they will have never existed, like a decision left unmade. We will defend all timestreams generated after our arrival one hundred thousand years in the past.”
“Not possible,” said Orville. “Do you know how many streams we will generate in a hundred thousand years?”
“Perhaps you can tell me. I do not care. My mission is to secure a single timestream for humanity to be safe from attack for all eternity.”
Orville shook his head. “I’ll defend the timestreams you propose to abandon. When I’m finished, I’ll upstream and rendezvous with you a hundred thousand years B.C.E. It won’t affect your combat strength.”
“Defend mankind against ET scattered across more than four hundred timestreams! And how will you do that?” Cutty snapped. The network buzzed with murmurs of astonishment. Orville muttered, “That’s my problem.”
>
“I’ll go with him.” Several voices rose simultaneously. Orville realized one of them was Quench. He wasn’t surprised. Quench owed his existence to the Original Messengers’ efforts to push back the enemy.
Twenty-four Messengers volunteered to join Orville. Cutty was silent, apparently deliberating. Orville pressed his advantage.
“I’m telling you, by the time we rendezvous, my Messengers will have accumulated experience from thousands of enemy engagements. And if we manage to create some productive timestreams, more Descendants might join us.”
“This initiative of yours will affect our combat strength,” said Cutty. “It requires another vote.”
The results stunned Orville. More than 90 percent approval—it might have been 100 percent had the Messengers all voted with their guts. Cutty sounded resigned. “You are hereby authorized, but you will also take one of my subunits for support and to document the action. The subunit will be installed on your weapons.”
Document the action? I can do that myself, Orville was about to object, but he kept silent. He knew what Cutty was up to.
“I now close this conference. Please upstream once you complete your current task. If you do not have sufficient energy, my assembly point is London. I will descend and pick you up.”
As the buzz of discussion faded away, Orville found himself once more enveloped by the silence of a snow-covered landscape. Even the occasional plane taking off and landing was strangely muffled.
He sat down on a discarded ammo crate. In that vast quietude, memories of Sayaka came welling up. Even now he could remember every word of every conversation they’d had. That is what it meant to be an AI. But with the passage of time, the very concreteness of the data seemed to make the reality of what he had actually experienced, of how his body had responded to her, harder and harder to hold on to.
Sayaka cherished loyalty to humanity. He had been moved by her conviction. Yet they had never come to a conclusion regarding what was most precious. For Orville, in this time and place, the notion of defending the ocean of history, that gigantic system of endlessly branching timestreams, had been replaced by an almost heartbreaking mass of details. Each tributary on each stream cut through the bedrock of the universe thanks to the power and flow of human experience. Given the attention it deserved, no one drop was more or less valuable than another. Cutty Sark ignored individuality; her formidable analytic mill reduced everything to abstractions. He felt an unbridgeable gulf opening between them.