by Ian Douglas
“There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” Major Lasenbe said. “We’re not here to sort it out, however. Xander, you and your people go grab some down-time. But I’ll want an after-action uploaded to my essistant tomorrow by thirteen hundred.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Lasenbe strode from the room. Xander appeared to relax a fraction.
“Asshole,” Mortin said, his voice low.
“Belay that, Marine,” Xander said. “Are all of you all right?”
There was a mutter of response, “Yes, Skipper,” and “Okay” and “Ooh-rah” predominating. The Marines sounded subdued, however
“Kind of a rough trip, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think we’re still all in one piece, though.”
“Garwe,” Xander said, turning to face him, “what did you mean when you told the major about feeling a time lag?”
Garwe shrugged. “I’m not sure. It might have been psychodilation, I suppose.”
“Or you were speeding?”
“No, Skipper,” Garwe said. “I was linked with the rest of the squadron.”
Psychodilation was a natural effect of human perception, the apparent slowing of the passage of time during moments of great danger, stress, or, paradoxically, boredom. “How time flies when we’re having fun” was the opposite extreme of the effect. Both perceptions occurred when the brain entered an alpha altered state under different circumstances, and had to do with how much in the way of fine detail the person was actually perceiving.
“Speeding,” on the other hand, more formally known as PV, or psychovelocitas, was the artificial boosting of overall brain function to speed up reaction times, perception, and thought. There were times when this was appropriate, and carried out through the use of drugs or neural enhancement software, but while linked in with a combat formation was definitely not one of those times. Battle pod operations demanded precise coordination between squadron elements. If Garwe had been speeding, linked communications with him would have been garbled, fire coordination would have become chaotic, and unit cohesion might easily have broken down completely.
Xander nodded. “I’ll check the telemetry records up here. It might have been a fault in your neural circuitry.”
“My pod checked out okay, Skipper.” Not that it could be checked now. What was left of his pod was by now still drifting slowly into the depths of the gas giant Dac, flattened by atmospheric pressure and subjected to the searing heat of the planet’s depths. “I was probably just hyped on adrenaline.”
“Gar’s right,” Palin said. “I was pretty keyed up, too. I think we all were.”
Xander nodded. “Still, all of you will report to sickbay for a full neural series. I felt like I wasn’t quite in synch, either. And I don’t like not being in control.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” several of the Marines chorused.
“Garwe.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You stay for a moment. I want to talk with you.”
“Sure, Skipper.”
She sounded angry, and that was never good.
He wondered where the hell this was going.
5
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1919 hours, GMT
Garroway tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The central mass resembled nothing so much as an immense, impossible, blossoming rose of streaming, blue-white radiance, imbedded within a confused tangle of blinding light, of far-flung arcs and walls and swirls of hot clouds of molecular gas, of stars showing comet tails streaming away from the central blast, of nebulae torn asunder by ferocious stellar winds, of objects set in such a titanic scale that stars and even clusters of stars were dwarfed to insignificance. His implant began overlaying what he was seeing with identifying blocks of text.
Humans had last visited the center of the Galaxy in 1111 of the Marine Era…the year 2887 by the old calendar. Marine and naval forces had assaulted a major Xul base, a number of bases, actually, located in and around the Core structures. The largest and most important of these had been a Dyson cloud, a swarm of trillions of Xul artificial wordlets positioned around the supermassive black hole that marked the Galaxy’s exact gravitational center. At the climax of the battle, a red giant star called S-2, in close orbit around the central black hole, had been nudged from its high-velocity path by inducing a partial and off-center collapse beneath its surface, triggering an outrushing jet of stellar material that had acted like an immense rocket blast. The fast-dwindling star had fallen closer to the black hole than otherwise would have been the case, sweeping through part of the Xul cloud, then shredding as it whipped around the inner gravitational singularity and down the cosmic drain at the center.
The Xul hyperstructure had been destroyed, the individual elements of the cloud plunging into the black hole in an eye’s blink because they’d been force-beam anchored in place, rather than circling in orbit. Much of the infalling matter had been swallowed of course, but much more had rebounded outward, generating what had come to be known as the Core Detonation, an out-rushing surge of tortured plasma so hot and bright that a supernova would have been lost in the glare.
A nearby star cluster, young and hot, just a tenth of a light year out, had been consumed in the fury weeks later, the stars pop-pop-popping into a chain of supernovae as the flood of radiant energy engulfed them. Other supergiant stars close to GalCenter had been swept up as well, adding their mass as fuel to the maelstrom of radiation.
That had been 1117 years ago. In those eleven centuries, the blast wave had swept outward, the wavefront of electromagnetic radiation traveling 1117 light years in that time, the somewhat slower, following squall of high-energy particles crossing about 900 light years in the same period of time. Stars, thousands of them caught in that deadly firestorm of energy, had exploded as they were engulfed, each adding its own bit of fury to the storm. The Galactic Core was now a seething ocean of blue-white hell, and it was still expanding.
Any Xul nodes located within that central, two-thousand-light-year-wide pocket of hell, would have been swept up and consumed. The question was how far the blast would expand…how much of the Galaxy might it devour?
“So,” Garroway wanted to know, “is that stuff going to hit us in another twenty, twenty-five thousand years?” The thought that Humankind’s attack on the Galactic Core eleven hundred years ago might actually have unleashed a beast that was going to devour the entire galaxy was horrifying.
“It’s attenuating,” Schilling told him. “Twenty-six thousand years, or a little less, after the original Core detonation, the electromagnetic wavefront will pass Earth at the speed of light. Long before that happens, the heavier charged particles and plasmas, the hard, dangerous stuff, will have been absorbed by intervening clouds of dust and gas.”
“Even so,” a new voice said, “the astrophysicists are calling it a microquasar. It won’t scour the Galaxy of life, fortunately, but they estimate the total light output from our Galaxy will more than quintuple, and probably set the astronomers in Andromeda to scratching whatever they use for heads.”
“General Garroway,” Schilling said, “this is Socrates. He’s your AI liaison with the Council of Lords.”
“Pleased to meet you, General,” Socrates said. The voice was mellifluous and deep, a rich baritone. Where Schilling spoke with a slight accent, Socrates’ Anglic was perfect.
Well, he was an AI. He would be perfect in every way possible.
“Hello, Socrates,” Garroway said. “The pleasure is mine. Or do AIs feel emotion now?”
The AI chuckled. Either it had a genuine sense of humor, or was programmed to mimic one quite well. Garroway did wonder how far artificial intelligence had developed in the past eight centuries.
“If you can’t tell the difference,” Socrates told him, “and if I can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference between my feelings being programmed or natural?”
“Point.”
“Socrates is a Star-level artificial sentience,” Schilling explained. “That means he’s at least as bright as the smartest s-Human, but much faster. We refer to them as our archAIngels.” Schilling pronounced the word “archangel,” but Garroway sensed the neologism within, and the meaning behind it. “Sometimes I think they are the real rulers of the Human domain now.”
“We all do what we can,” Socrates said. Garroway blinked. A modest AI? Or was that simply another aspect of its programming?
“There was quite a bit of speculation about how serious the Core Detonation was,” Schilling said, picking up on the earlier topic. “That was, oh, four or five centuries ago, when we started getting hard data about the expanding Core wavefront. Created a bit of a minor panic, in fact, according to the history downloads.”
“If we managed to turn our own Galaxy into even a small quasar,” Garroway said, “I’d think a little judicious panic might be called for.”
A quasar was a galaxy with an exceptionally bright nucleus, an active core that outshone the rest of the galaxy by a hundred times or more. Quasars were also extremely distant. The closest known was three-quarters of a billion light years away…which meant it was also a glimpse of something that had happened three-quarters of a billion years in the past, ancient cosmic history. Accepted astrophysical theory suggested that many or, perhaps, all large galaxies had gone through a quasar phase early in their evolution, some billions of years ago, as the supermassive black hole at their cores devoured suns by the millions, spewing out the residue as fantastic bursts of high-energy radiation, a blazing beacon visible across all of time and space. Eventually, the core of the galaxy would be pretty well cleaned out, except for the central black hole itself, of course, and the galaxy would settle down to being a normal, well-behaved member of the cosmic community.
Presumably, the Milky Way Galaxy had been through such a phase some billions of years ago; the supermassive black hole at the Core was an ancient quasar, slumbering and quiescent now that much of the matter at GalCenter had been devoured. But then the Commonwealth Fleet and the Fleet Marines had come along late in the twenty-ninth century and upset the delicately balanced megastructure the Xul had constructed at the Core.
And a shadow, at the very least, of the ancient monster had awakened once again.
“It should be spectacular, though,” Schilling told him. “When the light gets this far out, our night skies will be incredible in the direction of Sagittarius. We think there will be enough light streaming out from the Core that you’ll be able to read by it.”
“The slower, heavier particles will pile up into the gas clouds that surround the Galactic Hub and create shock waves over the next five to ten thousand years,” Socrates added, “triggering an incredible burst of star formation. The Galaxy, in toward the Core, is going to be an amazing, beautiful sight for ten thousand years or more afterward.”
“Maybe I should go back into cybe-hibe,” Garroway said. “Wake me when the show starts.”
“We’ll go you one better,” Socrates told him. “The Lords of the Associative, or one important facet of them, at any rate, want you and your Marines to go in there.”
“Say what?” He looked into that blue-white hell. The simulation carried no sensation of temperature, but he could swear his face felt hot as he looked into that searing blaze of light.
“We had assumed that the Xul presence at the Galactic Core had been burned out by the Core Detonation over a thousand years ago,” Socrates told him.
“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Garroway said. “Do you mean to tell me they survived in that?”
“We’re attempting to verify that now. We’ve deployed AI probes to investigate. As you can imagine, the environment poses certain…difficulties.”
The view of the luminous rose of light expanded, the viewpoint rushing in toward the inner Core. The sheer magnificent beauty of the scene was overwhelming, and Garroway had to remind himself that the environment must be as hostile, in terms of radiation and temperature, as the surface of a star.
“It is,” Socrates told him. “Keep in mind, though, that we have encountered no fewer than twenty distinct species of intelligent life dwelling either in the photospheres or within the cores of their stars. Life evolves, develops, and adapts everywhere, when given the chance.”
“Socrates,” Garroway said aloud, “did you just read my mind?”
There was a slight hesitation. “I did, General. Excuse me, please.”
“General Garroway hasn’t been exposed to the concept of full access yet,” Schilling told the AI.
“So I understand now. It won’t happen again, General. At least, not until you authorize it.”
“Full access?”
“High-end AIs, like Socrates, have what we refer to as full access to human mentation. They can pretty much pick up and track anything you’re thinking, without interfacing through your implant.”
“I see. Why?”
“Social control, of course. And universal data access for the Disimplanted.”
The way she said the words “social control” felt so natural, so completely matter-of-fact that Garroway wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly at first. This, he reflected, might be the biggest gap between his own time and culture and this one that he’d yet encountered.
Humankind had been working with direct man-machine neural interfaces for the major part of the species’ technic history—nineteen hundred years at least—and with various forms of artificial intelligence for longer than that. Implant technology had begun as crude molecular arrays of 2K protein processor nodes that facilitated direct downloads of data from primitive computer nets. Eventually, those early implants had evolved into nanochelated structures of complex design, organic-machine hybrids residing within the brain and running an enormous variety of software that usually included a resident personal AI. These personal secretaries or “essistants” could so perfectly mimic their fully organic host that it was possible to hold a conversation with one on any topic and be unaware that you were speaking with a machine—the final evocation of the ancient proposal known as the Turing Test.
Such essistants were considered vital in modern communications and interface technologies, and more and more interactions with machines, from accessing research data banks or piloting spacecraft to growing furniture or opening doors or turning on a room’s illumination system, required an implant.
Which left people without implants, the Disimplanteds, or “Disimps,” out in the cold and dark, often literally.
But the AIs of Garroway’s day had been designed to pick up only on those thoughts that were appropriately coded, preceded by a mental symbol that told the AI that it was welcome. The idea of allowing any intelligence, even a manmade one, into his thoughts without permission was profoundly disturbing.
And allowing machines to read minds for purposes of “social control” was, to Garroway’s way of thinking, horrifying. Did that mean they had artificial intelligences prowling the streets of human worlds and habs, listening for stray thoughts that might lead to social unrest, crime, or dissidence?
And how did you tell the difference between an artificial intelligence and a member of that new species Schilling had mentioned…what had she called them? The Homo telae? Could they read minds as well?
“I don’t think I like this full-access idea,” he told them.
“I don’t imagine you do,” Schilling said. “It probably feels pretty strange…even creepy. It’s not a bad thing, however. Crime—at least outside of the free zones—is almost unknown. Intraspecies war—both civil war and war between separate human governments or religious groups—is all but obsolete. Humankind has never known such an era of peace and general well-being.”
“So what do the AIs do in this utopia of yours?” Garroway said. “Eavesdrop on street corners, and call the cops when they hear the random, disgruntled rant against the government?”
“Not ‘cops,’
” Socrates told him. “That’s antiquated terminology. We refer to socons. Agents of social control.”
“This is sounding worse and worse.”
“Most socons are AIs,” Schilling said. “Though there are human agents, of course. In most cases, they can correct aberrant behavior directly and immediately, and the person involved—whether he’s a criminal, a political dissident, or mentally ill—can be adjusted, healed…and never even know the adjustment has taken place.”
“Captain,” he replied slowly, “you are scaring the hell out of me. Who decides what is dissident, and what is just an expression of a less-than-mainstream opinion? Who determines what mentally ill is? What are the standards? It’s not like you can diagnose mental illness by pulling a throat culture, damn it!”
“Gently, General,” Socrates told him. “It’s not as bad as you think. Our system has worked, and worked well, for over five centuries.”
Garroway started to reply, then thought better of it. Until he had a better feel for this culture, and for its rules and regulations both written and unwritten, he was going to need to keep his mouth shut and his eyes, ears, and implant open. Something he said now, in ignorance, might well prejudice these people against both him and his own Marines.
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said, but his reservations remained. “You were telling me, though, about alien intelligences inhabiting stars.”
“Indeed. They seem to be relatively rare, but several species, existing as coherent plasmas, have evolved within stellar atmospheres, or, in two cases of which we know, deep within the stellar core. Obviously, our communications with such beings are somewhat…limited.”
The view of the Core Detonation had continued to grow and change as they talked. The scene now appeared to be centered on a glowing disk, a pinwheel of light shading from red at the outer rim to an intense, eye-watering violet at the center.
“Is that the Galactic Core?” Garroway asked. The pinwheel, obviously, was an accretion disk. At its center was a tiny void, an emptiness, into which compressed gas and stellar material appeared to be funneling, a large and massive black hole. Dying matter shrieked its death scream in X-rays and the far ultraviolet.