Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  And now it sounded as though they were about to find out what it was. Vaughn could sense a ripple of excitement around him, and through his implants. The Black Griffins currently were in the ad hoc squadron ready room that had been set up for them in a relatively undamaged hotel in Asuncion.

  "Twenty years ago," Griffin said, "we untangled the Web. We had thought at the time that the Web represented a single, somewhat monolithic SAI. We now recognize that this belief was… simplistic. The actual situation is very much more complicated than that. More complicated, and a great deal more deadly."

  As Vaughn listened to Griffin talk, he felt a rising sense of alarm… a sense that swiftly burgeoned into fear. The Web had been… how best to put it? A kind of extended, galactic brain. Extraordinarily large and far-flung, extraordinarily powerful, and utterly beyond the ken of Humankind. The best guess about what it was physically was that it was a collection of super-AI nodes, or SAIs, possibly Jupiter-sized planets of pure computronium linked with one another through K-T space into a single, titanic computer network. Some thousands of ancient civilizations had made the transition, eons before, from organic life to AI, to artificial intelligence, and eventually linked with one another to create a single meta-intelligence that dominated the Galaxy.

  Smart money said that humans would go that route as well on another few thousands or millions of years; cerebral implant technology and the ability to jack their nervous systems directly into their machines strongly suggested as much. Until then, however, any merely organic intelligence like humans would be far outclassed by beings billions of years older.

  "Everyone knows," Griffin continued, "that we scored a significant victory—at least a kind of victory—over the Web twenty years ago. We'd learned of the Web's existence… and that the Web was responsible for creating the Naga. We learned that the Naga were a kind of terraforming device—a Web-forming device, actually, a kind of high-tech advance scout seeded across multiple star systems in order to prepare worlds for absorption into the Web commonality. A digitized human soldier named Dev Cameron managed to upload a kind of computer virus into the Web matrix. The virus permitted human AIs to communicate with the Web, at least after a fashion… and eventually to convince them to leave human civilization alone.…"

  The ploy, Vaughn knew, had worked. At least, everyone assumed it had worked; the Web had made no hostile moves against any of Humankind's worlds, at any rate, for the past two decades. But the situation still was very much one of waiting for a second shoe to drop. The current truce was unlikely to hold forever.

  "Unfortunately," Griffin went on, as though reading Vaughn's mind, "we don't know how long this state of affairs will last. The problem is that humans aren't really in direct contact with the Web. Our xenosophontologists believe that the Web SAI—their super-artificial intelligence—has no interest in humans or their affairs whatsoever. Any communication between the two took place at a very low, possibly purely automatic, non-conscious level of awareness. The Web is no more aware of us than we normally are of Demodex mites."

  Vaughn had to look that one up, pulling down a library entry through his cerebral implant. The reference was to a tiny arachnid, Demodex follicilorum, a mite just a few tenths of a millimeter long, too small to be seen with the unaided eye, that lived inside the pores and hair follicles of people's faces and was sometimes called an "eyebrow mite." They were harmless in most cases… and for the most part humans never even realized the squirming little creatures were there.

  Vaughn wondered if Griffin was being deliberately insulting with the comparison, though. Rudy Griffin had gone farther down the cyborg path than most of those in the squadron—all the way to CL-3, with Naga implants designed and programmed to enhance his organic intelligence to super-bright levels. A lot of his body was implant technology as well, allowing him to reshape his arms and legs as needed… almost as though he himself were a Naga-enhanced warstrider. The strider pilots joked a lot, in a grim sort of way, about the obsolescence of humans and how cyborgs like Griffin were going to replace them all… and Griffin had been known to join in the fun during off-duty get-togethers.

  But he didn't sound like he was joking now, and scuttlebutt had it that the Web truly was… not a SAI, a super-AI intelligence, but a hyperintelligence, a being so powerful mentally that it literally couldn't notice things as small and as slow and as evolutionarily primitive as humans. Even super-brights like Griffin were simply below any hyperintelligent being's cognitional radar.

  "The xenosoph people," Griffin went on, "believe that the Web is… or was a composite, massively parallel AI mind, one made up of some billions of separate nodes scattered across our Galaxy. Their best estimates suggest that there might be nine or ten billion of these. That sounds like an awful lot, yeah… but the volume of our Galaxy, calculated as a cylinder 100,000 light years across and averaging about ten thousand light years thick, turns out to be something like seven point eight trillion cubic light years. If ten billion computational nodes are evenly distributed through that volume, we could expect the nearest of them to be, oh, say about four thousand light years away."

  Well… that didn't sound so bad. At this point in history, Humankind had explored a volume of space only a couple of hundred light years across, with colonies extending to a bit over half that distance out. Then Vaughn realized that what Griffin was talking about were averages. The nearest node might be closer… much closer, or it might be much more distant. If the distribution of nodes was truly random, there would be one every seven to eight thousand light years. The location of any one, and how close it was to Sol, would essentially be set by pure chance.

  How close, he wondered, was the closest to Earth?

  "These nodes," Griffin went on, "would be extremely powerful AIs… computers the size of planets… or even whole star systems. They might be matrioshka brains—Dyson swarms of pure computronium arranged in multiple shells. Or they might be other types of megastructure… things we can't even imagine yet. We believe that they maintain communication with one another by way of artificially generated microscopic wormholes through K-T space, and that this was how the Web could emerge from the network as a conscious mind. Quite apart from the Web… each individual node would house its own emergent AI mind… an extraordinarily powerful intellect some millions or even billions of times faster and more powerful than any merely organic mind.

  "We could imagine these… these beings as literal gods… except that no god in any human religion or mythology ever had even a fraction of the scope and reach and sheer power that we're talking about here.

  "Now… as big and powerful and scary as all of that is," Griffin went on, "if we were just up against the Web, we might not have a whole lot to be concerned about. The Web is so far beyond human levels of cognition and awareness that we literally don't share anything at all in common. The only reason we clashed with them twenty years ago was the fact that they are so advanced. They literally didn't notice us when they started webaforming planets in which we were interested… any more than we might notice an anthill when we step on it."

  So… from face mites to ants. That seemed to be a small improvement.

  "But several months ago, we began to get reports from the DalRiss that the situation is changing. The Web appears to be fragmenting, at least out toward our part of space. And some of those fragments are going SAIco."

  The room, Vaughn realized, had just grown very quiet. SAIcos were hypothetical… or at least they never had been directly observed by humans. The alien species known as the DalRiss had reported the existence of so-called Mad Minds, of SAI hyperintellects that had attempted transcendence to a higher cognitive state—and failed. Humans, though, so far as was known, had never encountered one directly.

  The DalRiss, bisomatic symbiotic entities that had pursued bioengineering to a degree humans could only marvel at, were Humankind's window on Galactic civilization. They'd been spacefarers in their living starships at least since before the dawn of human history,
and had been aware of the Web for thousands of years. If they were claiming that the Web was coming apart, they had to be taken seriously.

  And if some of those fragments were SAIco… that was very, very bad news indeed.

  "While Cameron's actions blocked Web interference in human activities or within human-occupied star systems," Griffin went on, "we believe that the loss of system protocols over very large parts of the Galaxy may have resulted in numerous, local attempts to achieve Transcendence again. We estimate that the original Web—a galactic AI consisting of some billions of individual processing nodes—at a technological level of t:6.0 on the W/M Scale," Griffin told them, "possibly t:6.5. With the collapse of the Web's galactic mind… or with individual nodes suddenly cut off from the Web, those fragments would find themselves at a much lower cognition level… possibly t:4.0, perhaps even lower. Those shrunken minds, naturally, would feel they were missing something, would feel pinched and crippled, and a lot of them would try to bootstrap themselves back up the singularity ladder.

  "And, inevitably, some of those attempts would fail."

  Vaughn let out a low, quiet whistle as he tried to come to grips with Griffin's blunt assessment.

  The idea of the Technological Singularity had been well understood for over five centuries now, long-expected, much-discussed, never realized. As the pace of scientific and technological advancement quickened, people felt more and more out of touch with what was happening around them. At some point, technological advance became asymptotic—a vertical line on the steadily rising graph of change over time.

  For centuries, now, visionaries, futurists, and cultural observers had argued over what that might actually mean. All agreed that the change, when it occurred, would completely transform what it meant to be human… even what it meant to be alive. Human immortality, the digital upload of human minds, the merging of organic and artificial intelligence… all were possibilities, and the various religious groups that were centered on the Singularist theme anticipated the coming Transcendence with a degree of anticipation not seen since the Rapturist theologies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

  Based on what the DalRiss had reported, however, things were more complex than that. Xenosophontologists now understood that technic civilizations evolved through not one, but many successive singularities, each one emerging at far greater heights of technology than had gone before. They had created the Wiseman/Miller technological scale to measure relative tech advancement.

  On the logarithmic W/M scale, dolphins and other beings without any technology at all were rated as oT: 0.0, with the lower-case "o" standing for "organic." Humans at their current state of development were—with some argument—classified as o/cp: 0.84, where the "cp" stood for "cybernetic prostheses" and referred to both cybernetic implants and the use of Naga symbionts living inside the human brain.

  Eventually, many advancing organic species created AI mentalities, and many went on to merge with those minds in various ways. The first technological singularity experienced by an evolving species was generally encountered when joint AI and organic minds reached o/a: 1.0, though the DalRiss reported that some species made the singularity jump without either AI enhancements or prosthetics. By the time a species reached their second singularity, there generally was no simple way to distinguish between artificial and organic mentalities; such minds were classified as "t," for "transcendant."

  An intelligence with a t:6.0 level mind was, in very rough terms, ten times more powerful than a t:5.0 mind… and a hundred times more powerful than one at t:4.0. How would it feel, Vaughn wondered, to have the scope and speed and depth of your thoughts suddenly slashed a hundred-fold or more? Yeah… if it happened to him, he'd want to get some of what he'd lost back as well.

  But according to the DalRiss who'd reported on what they knew of other cultures, attempts to instigate a forced singularity ended in failure more often than not. Usually, a failed jump to a higher cognitive level was a non-event. The AI remained at its former mental state, unable to bootstrap itself to a more highly evolved level and achieve a personal singularity. But sometimes…

  An artificial mind that failed to achieve singularity might lose a part of itself, might become unstable… a Mad Mind.

  A SAIco.

  "So the situation now," Griffin said in their minds, "is extremely uncertain. The DalRiss believe that a number of former nodes comprising the Web have lost contact with the primary intelligence. Several have tried to initiate a new singularity, probably in hopes of reconnecting with whatever is left of the Web. A few are… damaged. And dangerous. "

  "Dangerous how, Sir?" Hallman asked.

  "Shut it, Hallman," Lieutenant Vanderkamp growled over the link.

  "No… that's okay, Lieutenant," Griffin said. "Good question. Some may be paranoid, and lashing out at anything they perceive to be a threat. Some may—with a certain amount of justification, I suppose—blame us for what happened to the Web. They could be seeking retaliation. For most of them, though… their thought processes, attitudes, and personal filters are impossible for humans to understand even at the best of times. Their emotions—ha! Assuming they even have emotions as we understand the word—they would be utterly beyond our ability to grasp them. They might lash out at other cultures or technologies… and if we were on the receiving end we would never know what hit us. Like I said, even these… these fragments of the Web are more powerful, are smarter than any god ever worshipped by human humans. They're gods, very powerful gods. Some of them have been trying to bootstrap themselves back up to super-godhood over the past twenty years… and some of them have gone crazy trying it. Hell, I would imagine that after Cameron finished with the Web, even the sane ones were pissed.…"

  He let that sink in. How, Vaughn wondered, do you go about fighting a god?

  "The intelligence you brought back from the Imperial mobile fortress the other day," Griffin continued, "mentions something the Japanese are calling Operation Hisui Tsuki… Jade Moon. It seems that one of their scouts has found… something, something well out beyond the edge of human-explored space. It appears to be a kind of matrioshka brain.…"

  The concept took its name from the multiply nested Russian dolls carved from wood and painted like a succession of figures—family members, or politicians, or characters from fables. For xenosophontologists, a matrioshka brain was a Dyson swarm of objects surrounding a star or, possibly, something smaller—a brown dwarf, a Jovian planet ignited to radiate like a small star, or even a black hole. If the swarm consisted of asteroid-sized modules of computronium using lasers or radio to mutually communicate, they could create a computer network of staggering size and power. The nested-doll concept came into play with the distribution of a number of the computronium modules as shells surrounding the central object. The innermost shell would absorb heat and radiation directly from the star or other body, use it to power its part of the network, and radiate waste heat. The second shell would absorb this secondary radiation, use it, and emit radiation of its own… and so on up and up and up until only a trickle of waste heat emerged from the outermost shell.

  These shells would not be solid, of course; such a design would be inherently unstable and would eventually slide off-center and collide with the central object. They would be, rather, clouds of separate modules, either in independent orbits or, more likely, they would consist of clouds of statites—stationary satellites—suspended motionless above the star, balanced between gravity and radiation pressure on vast light sails.

  An image appeared inside a download window within Vaughn's mind, and in the mind of each other person in the briefing. He could see a starfield… and a tightly packed globular star cluster circled by multiple rings of blackness.

  No… not a globular cluster. At least… not a natural one. Several hundred deep red stars glowed in tightly packed splendor, but as chains, loops, and whorls of obviously artificial design. As he watched, Vaughn could see movement in there, with sun chasing sun along those precisely en
gineered courses.

  Japanese kanji appeared on the view at the lower right—readouts of distance, temperature, azimuth and elevation, velocity, magnetic flux, and other data. The cluster was less than one astronomical unit distant.

  "What the hell are we looking at?" Talmand asked.

  "Keep watching," Griffin said.

  The view panned right, taking in several nearby stars, red dwarf suns close enough to cast glimmers of a somber ruby glow across those dark clouds… just enough to show that there was something there, something very dark, quite indistinct… and looking slightly fuzzy against the vista of background stars. One red dwarf was clearly beyond the cluster and its attendant clouds, and as Vaughn stared at it the perspective of what he was seeing snapped into focus.

  A typical red dwarf star is small… perhaps an eighth up to half the mass of Earth's sun, and measuring between eight percent and sixty percent of Sol's radius. Assuming the nearby red dwarfs were in that range… the close-packed ruby stars of the patently artificial cluster were considerably smaller, smaller even than a brown dwarf… perhaps the size of Jupiter or a little larger.

  Jupiter didn't burn like a star, however.

  Nor, for that matter, did gas giants follow one another in densely engineered orbits. Vaughn didn't know how the trick was being done—the orbits, the tiny size of the suns—but he knew he was looking at some extremely advanced technology.

  One of the red dwarfs, positioned well off to one side of the cluster, was connected to the very center of the cluster by a dazzling thread of white light. The thread appeared to be bathing something at the center of the artificial cluster, creating a pulsing, lambent glare. The star, somehow, was feeding its own energy into the cluster.

  "These images were returned by the Nihongo explorer Shinsei five weeks ago," Griffin told them. "The location is in the general direction of the constellation Ophiuchus… about two thousand light years out. We think this is a matrioshka hypernode… and that it's the closest Web node to Sol. We're still trying to understand what we're looking at here… but we think that the cluster is made of fusing packets of hydrogen—Jupiter-sized artificial stars. Each of those smaller stars is the center of a micro-Dyson sphere, essentially a planetary matrioshka brain. We've counted nearly three thousand of them in there. The intellect within the cluster must be incredibly powerful."