by Ian Douglas
He felt terribly small, pitifully weak . . . as insignificant as an insect confronting a human. The sheer scale of that revelation was a staggering shock—to ego, to his very concept of self. This was all he was, all he could ever be. . . .
For a moment, Dev struggled against the grasp of this monster, this consciousness so much vaster than his own. He was aware, on a very small scale, of just how intricate this organism was. Where Dev had a handful of senses, the Overmind possessed hundreds, possibly thousands . . . and a correspondingly vast and intricate system of expressing, sampling, and thinking about each. It saw stars, for instance, not as points of light, but as vibrant and extraordinarily informative entities rich in a cascade of energy and data ranging from low radio frequencies to high, hard X-rays.
Struggling was pointless. He tried to put into thoughts the need for humanity to triumph against the Web . . . and in the same moment that he expressed the thought, he knew that the Overmind had been well aware of the Web threat, had been fighting it, in fact, in the only way that it could, by paring away its numbers until the Net's own mobile nodes—how strange to think of starships and computer-directed weapons systems simply as nodes in a computer network—could handle them.
Dev was confused. Had human agencies, the Confederation Military Command and the Imperial Navy, planned and executed this battle against the Web invaders? Or had they simply been tools blindly carrying out the Overmind's instructions?
Probably, the answer lay somewhere between the two . . . and Dev doubted very much if he would ever understand exactly how such a mix of self-determination and puppetry was possible.
Then, with a suddenness that left Dev feeling weak and reeling, he was back in the Hachiman complex, the other Devs were gone, purged from the system, and he was alone once more with his thoughts.
What had happened? Gradually, he began picking up again the threads of incoming data, trying to see what was happening to the battle for Earth. It looked . . . yes! It was true! The Web assault was beginning to fall apart, individual ship-sized machines falling silent, their weapons dead, while the small nano-eaters let go their tenacious grip on hull armor or superstructure and drifted away, inert and lifeless. Laser and particle beam fire continued for several more minutes, until station by station, the defending forces began to realize that the Web was no longer pushing their assault.
In fact, Dev could sense the Web offensive crumbling in a broadening, three-dimensional wave that spread throughout first the Earth-centered cloud, then the one at Mercury's orbit, and finally the machines that had been hammering Mars. The collapse was remarkably similar to what he'd seen happen at the Battle of Nova Aquila, when the Overmind had managed to break the enemy's computer network and issue shut-down orders to most of the fleet. At first, some of the Web machines were actually firing on other kickers, as though they no longer recognized other Webbers as friends; then the pace of the advancing chaos quickened, as more and more Web devices simply ceased functioning.
Dev turned inward, studying the Net . . . and the Overmind he could still sense there. It was no longer paying any attention to him, and he could no longer sense the vast shadows of its thoughts, but he was certain that that enigmatic meta-intelligence was what had turned the tide . . . again. He could even sense now how it had happened, though the details were necessarily blurred or missing.
Recognizing that the Alphas they'd used at Nova Aquila both were too tempting a target and offered a clue as to how the Web coordinated its battle tactics and strategies, the enemy had found a way to run the same sort of program on a highly redundant and widely distributed network, one that had not five nodes, but many tens of thousands. The efficiency of such a system would necessarily be less than on the more compact network, since there was a lot more room for error, for one unit to get multiple orders, or even for portions of the fleet to be overlooked and forgotten.
It had stumped the Ovennind, however, since the communications protocol the Web intelligence was using was almost impossible to crack. Each time the human Net had tried to merge itself with the Web's network at one set of nodes, the entire Web system had simply shifted somewhere else. Likely, it had been shifting randomly and quickly, precisely so that the Overmind could never quite nail it down.
The solution, though, was obvious. The Overmind had continued whittling away at the Web forces, until there simply weren't enough enemy devices left to support the system necessary to give the Web force direction and purpose. For some minutes, now, the Web's coordination, its speed and aggressiveness, had been falling off; Dev recognized the fact now, though it hadn't been at all obvious at the time. Once the Web intelligence had fallen below a certain critical threshold, it must have easily succumbed to the Overmind's ongoing attempt to break through and subvert it.
Only then did Dev realize what a close-run thing that last battle had been. Much of the Imperial Fleet had been battered into wreckage, and at the defensive line in front of Sol, it had come horrifyingly close to being overwhelmed. Tenno Kyuden . . . God, it would be a long time before Man knew what had been lost there. There were no reports out on the Net, yet, about whether or not the Emperor lived. At the very least, though, damage to Imperial communications, to the headquarters of the Imperial Staff Command, to the very heart and soul of Dai Nihon had been savage and terrible.
The decision—taken by a number of battlefield commanders at widely separated points in the fight—to target only the larger Webber devices on the theory that the smallest ones would not be able to hurt Earth's Sun, had apparently been sound. There were no reports of enemy machines entering the Solar corona.
Thank God. . . .
The Battle for Earth was over. But now, Dev realized, it was time to carry the war to the Web . . . and to end it once and for all.
And, more clearly than ever, he saw what had to be done. . . .
Chapter 20
We aspire in vain to assign limits to the works of creation in space, whether we examine the starry heavens, or that world of minute animalcules which is revealed to us by the microscope. We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the universe lie beyond the reach of mortal ken.
—GEOLOGIST SIR CHARLES LYELL
nineteenth century C.E.
Kara felt leaden, scarcely alive at all. Since the Battle of Earth, as the conflict in Earth's Solar System was now officially called, had been won, she'd spent much of her time in the virtual world called Nirvana, visiting with Ran.
Somehow, she'd never expected that Ran, with his eagerness, his exuberance, his irrepressible self-confidence, would be the sort to succumb to Remote Death Transference Syndrome. Her, maybe, yes. She'd found she was terrified of the idea of being torn from her body, like Dev Cameron had been, and reduced to a pale twilight existence, neither wholly dead nor completely alive. Kara shared the ancient soldier's superstition that what you dreaded might happen would, in a universe that at times seemed infinitely perverse.
So her, yes. But not Ran. . . .
Best to concentrate on the here and now, try to blot out what had happened, or what might have been. . . .
Repercussions of the battle were still echoing throughout the Shichiju, and raising again in the Confederation the ominous specter of war with the Imperium. Despite the help Confed units had given, there apparently was a perception within the Imperial government that the Frontier breakaway states had somehow been at least partly responsible for the Web attack, because of their experiments at the Stargate, which the Empire had never totally approved of, and because of their continued close relationship with nonhumans like the DalRiss and—now—the Gr'tak. The Empire used the DalRiss because they had to, because ignoring the city-ships would have put their own navy at a severe disadvantage, but they wanted to limit contact with aliens on the grounds that humanity might become contaminated by alien ideas, contaminated to the point that what was considered human might change.
Not entirely rational, on the face of it . . . but the Emperor had
been reported killed when Hoshiryu crashed through Tenno Kyuden, and the Imperial government was now in the hands of the Kansai no Otoko, the military faction that had long been calling for the reunification of the Empire under a racially pure, ruling elite. Where the Men of Completion were concerned, almost anything was possible. The Confederation military was on full alert. With the departure of the Imperial contingent at Nova Aquila, the so-called Unified Fleet, back at Nova Aquila now, was strictly DalRiss and Confederation vessels, plus a couple of Gr'tak ships that had arrived with DalRiss carriers from High Frontier. Preparations for the upcoming expedition had moved into high gear with the fear that the Empire might soon move to shut down further experiments with the Stargate. Operation Gateway had been bumped up on the schedule . . . to tomorrow.
Tomorrow. . . .
Kara was standing in . . . a place. It was an imaginary place, a construct of AIs designed for the Operation Gateway briefing. Designed as a ViRsimulation where maps and diagrams could be easily projected and manipulated, it was as black as empty space, and borderless. Hanging at the center of that blackness was a three-dimensional image of the Nova Aquila Stargate, superimposed on a threespace color-coded pattern representing the literal warping of space close to the surface of the rotating cylinder. Beyond, in the distance, the twin white dwarf suns, still bleeding silver-bluestreams of plasma ripped from their equators, cast a chill, almost icy illumination over those gathered there.
Kara had been ordered to attend this briefing as company commander of the Phantoms, who would be accompanying the Gauss on Gateway. The others were the senior officers with the fleet that was now being styled the First Galactic Expeditionary Force, or One-GEF.
Her father was there, of course. He'd been chosen to lead the expedition. So, too, was an image of Dev . . . looking curiously shrunken, even subdued. What, she wondered, had happened to him in the Battle of Earth?
The others gathered there were a varied lot, a crowd of nearly fifty in a three-deep circle around Vic. She recognized only a few. Four of them, three men and a woman, were company commanders like herself off the Confederation carrier Karyu, which would be accompanying them as their "big gun" into tempus incognito. Karyu's skipper, Rear Admiral Barnes, was there, as well as Senior Captain Carol Latimer, the new CO of the Gauss. Dr. Cal Norris, Taki and Daren, and Lieutenant Tanya Coburn represented the science department. Captain Jorge Hernandez was CO of the cruiser Independence. Strangest in the group, perhaps, was a single nonhuman, the toweringly massive, hunched-over shape of Sholai of the Gr'tak. Representatives of the three DalRiss ships that would be going, Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shralghal, were in attendance, but invisibly. DalRiss rarely utilized analogue images of themselves, preferring the touch and smell of living organisms.
The rest were other senior department heads, chief aides, and the like. Kara, unconsciously seeking comfort perhaps, had moved her point of view through the crowd until she was watching from the inner ring, close by her father.
"Operation Gateway," Vic was saying to the assembly, "will commence at zero-nine-hundred hours, ship's time, tomorrow. One-GEF will move in single file toward the Stargate, following the precise vectors that have already been uploaded to our DalRiss friends."
As he spoke, a green line of light drew itself through empty space, angling toward the Gate near one end, the path flattening out, slowly curving until it was running parallel to the immense structure. At a range of just under one kilometer from the object's surface, the green line was nearly lost in the blue folds and twistings of intensely warped space.
"Our first destination will be Tovan-Doval, the home suns of the Gr'tak. The purpose of this is to verify that the Web does deliberately make double stars like the Gr'tak suns or stars like Nova Aquila explode, and then somehow use them to build stargates."
"Sir!" one of the company commanders off the Karyu said, raising his hand. His name was Odin Johanssen, and he'd emigrated to the Confederation from Loki.
"What is it, Johanssen?"
"Sir, scuttlebutt says . . . I mean, we heard we already knew there was a stargate at the 'Takker home star. So what is there to verify?"
"A fair question," Vic said. "We know there is a stargate in place there, because we've sent Naga-directed probes through our Gate to Tovan-Doval and had them turn around and return. We've also sent some probes through, giving them a timelike translation in addition to the translation through space. We know that there's a stargate at Tovan-Doval at least until about one thousand years in the future."
Vic's final words hung in the virtual chamber for a long moment. There were some initial sharp intakes of breath—mental gasps of astonishment rendered literally by the AI generating the image, and then complete silence.
Johanssen broke the silence at last. "Yeah, but, what I mean, sir, is if the probes have already found this stuff out, why are we going? What's the point?"
"We are going," Dev's image said, "because the further into the future we reach with our probes, the harder it is to get those probes back, and that's whether they go in under AI or if they're teleoperated from here. At a point just about one thousand years in the future—a thousand years give or take ten percent, in fact—we lose touch with them entirely, Teleoperators aboard the Gauss can't maintain contact through the Stargate. AI-guided drones simply . . . vanish."
This time, a murmur of conversation broke out, as a number of the people present began speaking in low, urgent whispers.
"What makes anyone think we'll get back?" Captain Lynn Deverest, another of Karyu's company commanders, asked sharply.
Dev's image moved out of the crowd and joined Vic at the center. "Maybe I should give a quick briefing on the physics involved," he said. A field of quantum hyperequations materialized in the air of the simulation.
"Be my guest," Vic said with a wry grin. He nodded at the equations. "I'm a soldier, not a mathematician. I can't follow this gotie." The word was an old soldier's slang term, evolved from the Nihongo gotagota, a tangle.
Dev moved to the center of the assembly, while Vic stepped over to stand at Kara's side.
"First of all," Dev said, "let me say that our jump into the future at Tovan-Doval is only our first step. Once we have scouted that system, with the help of our new Gr'tak allies, we plan to use that stargate to jump . . . a considerable distance into the remote future. The stated operational objective is to find possible allies against the Web . . . but more than that, we're to learn about future Web strategies, if possible. When we return to human space and our own present, we will, in effect, be using the information we have gained to change the future."
Another shocked silence followed. Several questions broke from the audience then, followed by a torrent of thoughts and exclamations.
"How can we do that?"
"That's crazy!"
"Isn't that like changing history? What happens to us?"
"Ah, paradoxes," Admiral Barnes said. "The heart and soul of every discussion of time travel."
"Well, it's something we need to look at," Taki said. "Somebody a thousand years from now isn't going to want to help us, if helping us ends their existence."
"Let me try to clarify this," Dev said, holding up his hands until the conversation died away. "Quantum physics, we know now, is the central key to how the universe works. We've known this since the early twentieth century. A lot of our technology today, including quantum power taps, I2C communications, multiphase computers, even electronics going all the way back to tunneling diodes six hundred years ago, all depend on quantum physics.
"Now, classical quantum mechanics tells us that we can't pin down both the location and the vector of any given quon, a quantum particle like an electron or a photon. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, you've all heard of that. An extension of that suggests that a particle, an electron, say, is somehow everywhere in a given probability zone and can't be pinned down until an observer comes in and looks at it. The Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment suggests that if a cat in a
box is either alive or dead, and its state is determined by a quantum effect—the decay of a radioactive isotope, say—then one way of looking at it is that the cat, which is represented by a quantum wave function, is somehow both alive and dead until the box is opened and someone looks inside. When it is, the Observer Effect takes over and the wave function collapses. You're left with either a dead cat or a live one."
"Which always struck me as being a bit hard on cats," Kara put in.
Her father, standing next to her, grinned. "Discussing quantum physics would be more enjoyable if Schroedinger had chosen . . . I don't know. Rats, maybe."
"Schroedinger's Rat," Admiral Barnes said, thoughtfully, from nearby. "I like it."
Dev pressed ahead. "The Observer Effect says, in very brief, that we somehow shape the universe by observing it. Which leads to all sorts of philosophical debate. What, exactly, constitutes an observer? Does he have to be conscious? To possess intelligence? Could a dog be an observer? How about a bacillus? What if the observation is done by a recording device, which is examined long after the event by humans?
"It gets even more gotied than that. There were some scientists back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including, incidentally, one of the men who first speculated about stargates like this one here, who used the Observer Effect to argue that Mankind was the only intelligence in the universe. The idea was that the universe is so narrowly tailored to our specifications that if it were only a little different—the gravitational constant was a little higher or lower, or the mass of a neutron was just a bit different, then life would never have evolved.
"Of course, we know now that that argument doesn't stand up. We've encountered four races thus far, the Naga, the DalRiss, the Web, and the Gr'tak. More if you count really strange things like the Communes or the Maians, organisms so different from us that we can't even tell if the critters are intelligent or not. In every case, their view of the universe is markedly different from ours. Sometimes, like with the Naga and probably the Web as well, it's so different that it's hard to tell if we have any common observational ground at all."