by Ian Douglas
The geometric shapes had faded away by now, but the beams of light remained, anchored, somehow, in empty space, as though defining a far larger structure that did not exist, exactly, in three-dimensional space-time, at least as Garroway understood it.
“Try me,” Garroway said.
“To do so might cause you injury, General Garroway,” the being told him. “There are limits to what your interfaces can handle in terms of data flow…and limits to what even your artificially enhanced organic components can assimilate. And, to be blunt, there is also a threat to us in a free exchange of information between our species and yours.”
Garroway wondered if the graphic display he was seeing was, in fact, being created wholly for his consumption, an attempt to overawe him with seemingly godlike powers.
But…why? What would be the point?
“How in heaven’s name could we possibly cause you harm?” Garroway asked.
“The problem is…complex. And farther ranging than your species can realize.”
Garroway realized he was going to get nothing useful out of the being. Except for the constantly changing backdrop, the conversation appeared natural enough, even casual enough from his perspective, but he had the feeling that the composite being in front of him was way ahead of him in sheer mental scope and power.
Not even s-Humans, he thought, could come close to the literally godlike technological or mental capabilities of the Tarantulae.
“I see you perceive a part of the problem,” the being said.
“I can accept the idea that you people are far in advance of us. That we might not have anything you want, in terms of trade or information exchange. I can also imagine that you might not want to interfere with the paths of more primitive species.”
“Again, that is part of the problem. A small part. And, in fact, we do need to pass certain data to you. The problem is whether you will be able to comprehend fully what we are saying.”
The background now was a brilliant white radiance. Garroway suspected that the vantage point was actually within the core of a star. Even against that brilliant light, he could make out some sort of structure, though whether it was material or somehow conjured out of pure energy he couldn’t tell. One of those shafts of light appeared to originate here, though, as though it emerged from some other, very different space deep within the heart of a star.
Then that background was gone, and Garroway floated with the alien in intergalactic space. Galaxies gleamed everywhere—perfect spirals; vast, elliptical aggregates of age-reddened suns; the smears and pinpoints of irregular galaxies.
“We enjoy a…partnership,” Garroway said, picking his words carefully, “with our AIs. Some of them are far faster and more intelligent than humans, and they have immediate access to incredible stores of information. Might you be able to work with them, rather than with organic humans?”
“The conversation you and I are having now would not be possible without them,” the being said. “Agreed. As we speak, I am also holding an in-depth dialogue with the AI you call Socrates, and with numerous others.”
The star was gone, replaced by the whirlpool blue glow of an accretion disk whipping about the empty eye of a large black hole.
“Then tell them what you need us to know.”
“You trust them?”
Garroway considered this. “I may trust some of the Associative’s AIs more than I trust some humans,” he said. “They’re honest, and they don’t appear to have their own personal agendas.”
He realized now that the fast-shifting backdrops he was witnessing weren’t an attempt to awe him, but somehow reflected the changing vantage points of the Tarantulae in front of him. A widely dispersed intelligence indeed; it appeared to embrace whole galaxies, infinite reaches of space, and even other types of space entirely.
He wondered what such a species could possibly want with Humankind.
“Your people appear to have trouble trusting others,” the being said. “Especially now.”
“Yes, well, we have a long history of that, as I’m sure you’re well aware.” The being must be drawing heavily on human records, histories, and data stores in general. How it was doing so Garroway couldn’t even guess, but he was beginning to suspect that the Tarantulae weren’t so much matter or energy as they were pure information.
“We are aware.”
“Wait a sec. You said ‘especially now.’ What did you mean by that?” Realization sparked, then caught hold. “Are you talking about the Xul?”
“The entity you know as the Xul represent a special and distinct threat, not only to you, but to the universe as you know it, to all of what you think of as reality. Are you aware that they have begun rewriting your reality?”
“I’ve seen reports.” He remembered his Temporal Liaison Officer…what was her name? Schilling. She’d been talking about a theory, something about the Xul contaminating humans through black holes and star gates. And Star Lord Rame had been convinced of the theory’s reality as well. At the time, it all had seemed rather far-fetched. “Emomemes, you mean?”
“A name for an imperfectly understood concept,” the being said. There was a long hesitation, as though the Tarantulae was thinking—or, possibly, consulting with others of its kind. “Very well,” it said at last. “It’s true that your AIs might be able to effect the necessary translation. Have them record this data….”
Garroway could sense the data flow, now, first as a fast-moving stream, then increasing in volume and speed until it was a torrent, a thunderous onslaught of raw data cascading down through the virtual communications link.
And Garroway glimpsed the scope of that transmission, and a tiny fraction of its content, and he felt very, very small….
16
1002.2229
Marine Ops Center
Marine Transport Major Samuel Nicholas
1625 hours, GMT
“Gentlemen, ladies, electronics,” Garroway said to the group assembled in the Ops Center. “We have a new mission.”
Physically present were the eleven other human members of Garroway’s command constellation, plus several of the corporeal members of Admiral Ranser’s staff. The rest were present electronically, along with numerous AIs and t-Humans, including Socrates, representing the absent star lord hierarchy.
“Not cleaning up that mess on the wheelworld we were hearing about, I trust,” Ranser said.
“No,” Garroway replied. “Thank the gods. We could spend the rest of our extended lifetimes playing catch-up with that sort of thing. No, we have hard evidence now that the Xul are playing games with reality. And it’s up to us to go in and get them.”
“Reality,” Colonel Janis Fremantle said. She was Garroway’s intelligence officer, his command constellation’s N-2. “You mean, like…they’re trying to edit us out of existence?”
“We’re not sure what their ultimate aim is,” Garroway replied. “But we’ve been seeing the effects for some time, now. Our contact with the Tarantulae has…clarified things somewhat.”
“The Tarantulae,” Major Tomas Allendes said with a shudder Garroway felt through the mental connection. “Makes me think of giant spiders….”
Garroway smiled. He wasn’t alone in his leaps of irrationality, evidently. “Actually, they’re not like that at all.”
“What are they like?” a navy commander on Ranser’s staff asked.
Garroway thought about that for a moment, then shrugged. “Different,” he said. “Very different.”
He still felt shaken by the series of visions he’d seen in the company of the Tarantulae earlier. The ant had spoken with the human, and the ant had learned something.
“Your report indicated they can take any appearance,” Major Shan Davenport said. “But what is their real shape?”
“I honestly don’t think they have one,” Garroway replied. “They’re…everywhere within their environment. Think pantheism, with the gods resident in all the plants, all the animals, in the world itself, e
ven out in empty space, with every piece of molecule-sized hardware constantly linked to every other piece through something like our QCC, but tiny, maybe at the scale of individual atoms. Shape, outward form, doesn’t matter. I think they represent the ultimate in CAS sentience. They may represent our ultimate destination in technic development, what we’re evolving toward in conjunction with our own AI systems. However…they’re not what we’re interested in right now. It’s the Xul. You’ve all seen the download abstracts.”
The division’s AIs had been working for hours to make sense of the enormous volume of data relayed from the nanotechnic denizens of the Large Magellanic Cloud. They were still working, in fact, and would be doing so for the foreseeable future. But a few points were clear, now, as was the general nature of the threat.
And the synchronous discoveries by a Marine scouting team at the Great Annihilator had both confirmed the threat and added corroborative detail.
Garroway thought-clicked an icon in his mind, and an image materialized around him, a virtual simulation based on the QCC link from the Captain Ana McMillan. He seemed to be within the eye of a storm, a vast and powerful storm of blue and violet light and mist, of half-glimpsed, half-sensed shapes and masses and unimaginable energies.
Ahead was a small world, rough-surfaced and heavily cratered, agleam with uncountable pinpoints of light that formed geometric shapes and designs self-evidently picked out by intelligence. More pinpoints of light circled the worldlet’s equator several radii out, forming a magnificent expanse of golden rings.
“The Quantum Sea,” Admiral Ranser said softly. “They’re colonizing the goddamned Quantum Sea.”
“At least they have a beachhead down there,” Garroway replied. “And they’re using it to tweak reality.”
“How would we know?” Fremantle asked. “I mean, if we’re inside the new reality, and that reality includes our memories, how do we know our memories haven’t been changed to reflect the change in the outside universe?”
“Good question,” Garroway said. “And there’s not a good answer. However, the Xul aren’t perfect. There’ve been some problems with time.”
During a recent Marine action at a world called Dac IV, several members of the Anchor Marine force taking part in the engagement had noticed a sluggishness in their control of their combat pods, as though there’d been a slight time lag through their control network. Since they’d been using QCC links, there could be no lag; signal relay time was by definition instantaneous.
The effect had been dismissed, an artifact of stress and the intense excitement of combat. AI analyses of the after-action reports, however, taken together with the data from the Tarantulae, suggested that time had been flowing at a very slightly different rate at the floatreef city of Hassetas in the upper atmosphere of Dac IV than at the Marine transport in synchronous orbit 180,000 kilometers overhead. The difference hadn’t been much, but it had been measurable. Marine pilots in synchorbit had noticed that their pods inside the planetary atmosphere were lagging a bit, as though time was flowing ever so slightly more slowly down there.
“Most of the Xul effects,” Garroway explained, “were within our electronic systems. That, after all, is the Xul domain. We can think of them as analogues of our own Homo telae, digital life forms resident within e-networks. They have been infecting us, through our AIs, and through our cerebral implants, with their xenophobia. They’re making us afraid of anything different, of anything alien….”
“And this slowed-down-time effect?” Ranser asked.
Garroway shrugged. “A mistake. The Xul are working through black holes from their base here in the Quantum Sea. From one point of view, they’re down here in the Quantum Sea, where time as we understand it…well, it’s hard to say time has meaning here. From another point of view, they’re actually part-way down the throat of the Great Annihilator, a black hole of about fifteen solar masses.
“Now, we all know that the deeper into a gravity well you get, the slower time flows. Basic relativity. It’s the same as time dilation in a ship approaching the speed of light. We’ve known for two millennia that gravity also slows time, and that there would be serious time-dilation effects close to a black hole’s event horizon. The Xul evidently are somehow compensating for the effect when they reach out of the Quantum Sea to affect our electronics…but that compensation is not perfect. Hence…an unexpected time delay in a long-range cybernetic link.”
“I don’t understand how they’re affecting our attitudes, though,” Captain Ven Assira, one of Ranser’s staff officers, said. “I could understand editing reality to, oh, I don’t know, blow up our stars, maybe. Or rewrite history so that humans didn’t even exist. But you’re saying they’re affecting our minds? How?”
“The simple answer is emomemes,” Garroway said. “The idea was first advanced by AIs studying low-frequency waves that appeared to be emerging from black holes and star gates some years ago. Star Lord Rame, the guy who brought the 1MarDiv out of cybe-hibe, believed that the Xul were corrupting all intelligence with their xenophobic paranoia. He couldn’t convince his colleagues of the possibility, however.”
“These emomemes would be something like a computer virus?” Colonel Ren Jordan said. He was Garroway’s senior computer/AI expert. “But capable of crossing the machine/organic interface?”
“That was Rame’s original concept,” Garroway agreed. “According to the Tarantulae, though, the reality is a little more complicated, more subtle…and a lot more dangerous.”
He began explaining his understanding of the Xul Reality Edit.
What humans think of as solid matter is in fact as insubstantial as a dream. As far back as the time of the Greeks, the philosopher Democritus had introduced the idea of indivisible particles called atoms, and 2500 years later, atoms were still thought of as hard little balls locked together to create the substance of a table, say, or of a person’s finger. Later, physicists had acknowledged that atoms were mostly empty space, a kind of fuzzy cloud of electrons circling a tiny, central nucleus made up of hard little balls called protons and neutrons.
But that picture wasn’t complete, either. It turned out that electrons existed more as probabilities popping in and out of existence than they were actual, physical objects, and when the physicists began studying the atomic nucleus closely, it turned out that even protons and neutrons were less than completely substantial. Atoms, it seemed, weren’t objects so much as they were tightly woven knots of information.
Quantum theory led eventually to the discovery that so-called empty space wasn’t empty at all. It was a seething, surging, ocean of particles and antiparticles popping into existence out of nowhere and immediately canceling one another out—an effect called virtual energy or zero-point energy which ultimately led to the quantum power tap and the essentially unlimited free energy that now powered human civilization.
The appearance of those virtual particles within the zero-point field wasn’t entirely random, however. Some flickered in and out of existence steadily at the same infinitesimally minute point, creating a kind of standing wave of energy. Those standing waves, it eventually turned out, were the building blocks of quantum particles—of electrons, photons, and the quarks that made up neutrons and protons and the other insubstantial bits of nothingness that comprised an increasingly bewildering zoo of subatomic particles.
The Quantum Sea was a real place, the base state for all energy and matter co-existent with normal space-time but rotated out of phase with the universe it shaped. Mathematicians referred to it as Dimension0. Human technology had probed the Quantum Sea first with quantum power taps, and later developed phase-shift stations and ships that could actually translate out of normal space-time and into this alien realm of energetic possibility. Black holes, apparently, connected with this base state, and phase-shift vessels like the Nicholas rotated through it when passing from one point in three-D space-time to another. The Xul, apparently, had managed this trick as well, moving an entire dwarf plan
et into the maw of the Great Annihilator, and parking it at the metaphorical edge of the Quantum Sea.
The question was…could you change reality by changing or interfering with those standing waves in the zero-point field?
In the early days of phase-shift technology, some doom-prophets had declared that rotating ships through the Quantum Sea would disrupt the standing waves that represented atoms and photons in the so-called real world…and matter there might be disrupted. People, cities, whole planets, even entire stars might be snuffed out as though they’d never existed in the first place—an unseen and unstoppable hand editing Reality.
At the same time, there were those who believed it was possible to edit the zero-point field through power and focus of mind alone, a kind of direct application of the Observer Effect that could call matter or energy out of nothing, at least on a small scale. The martial disciplines of weiji-do, tai-chi, and a few others made this claim, as did several modern religions based on various interpretations of quantum physics.
But planets hadn’t vanished when the Samuel Nicholas translated through the Quantum Sea on her way to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, because such passages were made with the vessel slightly out of phase with her surroundings. She was physically within Dimension0, but not actually touching any of it. So worlds, people, sunbeams, and electrons all remained safe.
Rame, Socrates, and the other members of the Conclave who believed in the Xul Reality Edit, the XRE, feared the Xul had found a way to selectively change the zero-point field, targeting Earth, say, from the Dimension0 underside of four-D space-time. Things were not as simple as that, however—fortunately for Earth and any other worlds the Xul might wish to target. Figuring out that this standing wave in the zero-point field corresponded to that electron in four-D space-time wasn’t just difficult, it was impossible, even with the sheer, vast computational power at the Associative’s command.