Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  Still, the first option looked like a fair bet.…

  Finally, the time came when Dev could upload himself into the new system and boot it online.

  It was, Dev thought, like moving into a new house, one without a single stick of furniture, vast and echoingly empty. For a panicky few milliseconds, he floundered helplessly in a cyberspace incredibly vast, a yawning vacuum with the relative volume of a solar system compared to a man… a virtual universe within a universe.

  The system was far larger than Dev, a single downloaded program, could possibly utilize himself. But there was that trick he’d learned originally from the DalRiss and employed to reach the Overmind during the Battle of Earth. With the help of DalRiss linked in from both Shralghal and Shrenghal, he duplicated himself, the complex pattern of electrical charges that was his downloaded mind becoming two.

  And again, the two becoming four.

  And again, four becoming eight.

  And again.

  And again.

  Take a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard. Put double the number in the second square. Double that in the third. And again. And again. Long before the sixty-fourth square is reached, the number exceeds that of all of the grains of rice on the planet.

  This time, there was no crowding as the exponential pro­gression increased the Dev-programs running now inside the Haven system. The numbers of Devs increased, doubling every few seconds, the copies spreading out in a steadily rippling flood to fill the system, activating circuits, accessing data flow, recording, communicating, listening.…

  Haven Net’s electronic ears and eyes were already fo­cused on the two distant galaxies. Instantly, both were transformed, ablaze with radio and laser energies that crisscrossed both whirlpools of stars in an infinitely complex and branching network, perceived now as threads of golden light that filled both spirals like finely spun silk, so tightly woven that the whole took on a suffusing, background golden glow that filled both galaxies completely and bound them together. Other threads, Dev saw, dwindled off into the encircling night, reaching for other galaxies so distant that the brightest were dim smudges of light.

  The massed Dev-programs continued their doubling as others downloaded into the new and swiftly growing system. Sholai and other Gr’tak were there, serving as network task dispatchers, or linking in as the basic operating system for billions of separate Dev-application programs. A bit of jar­gon from the early days of computers on Earth had stuck with Dev from somewhere: massively parallel processing required “supervisory daemons” to get them to work to­gether.

  The Gr’tak, with their organizational discipline as mem­bers of hierarchic Associatives, were fulfilling that role.

  Linked in too were the minds of several thousand humans, the entire crews of both Gauss and Karyu, as well as the DalRiss in the two cityships. Details, though, and individual personalities, were rapidly lost as the swelling gestalt of multiple Devs passed the thirty-third generation and literally exploded into a higher, transcendent and emergent con­sciousness.

  The Devgestalt awoke.

  A grand union of well over Nakamura’s Number of linked minds, it lacked both the diversity of parts and the experi­ence of the Overmind. On the other hand, since it had been grown with a single purpose, rather than slowly accreting over many human generations, there was no loss of identity, no separation of the whole from the parts. It was aware of the individual Devs within itself; possibly, the difference lay in the presence of his supervisory daemons, who were ac­tively coordinating the exchanges of information between each of its constituent parts. Much of the activity that had given rise to the Overmind within the human Net, the Dev-gestalt saw clearly, now, was essentially chaotic in nature and therefore unpredictable.

  He—it, rather, for the gestalt was the focus of many bil­lions of minds—possessed a focus, a single-mindedness of purpose that made it far more efficient than what it now perceived to be the rather stumbling and half-blind, semi­conscious entity known as the Overmind.

  And then, without warning or preamble, the Devgestalt was no longer alone. It found itself… mirrored was the only possible word, confronted by another gestalt intelli­gence as complex and as vast as itself, downloaded from the metanet glimpsed earlier as a glittering webwork con­necting the galaxies. There was a shift in perspective…

  … and Dev found himself looking at… himself.

  He looked down at himself, at the simulated body. He was Dev, once more, standing on an unseen floor in the open space between the galaxies. Another Dev, identically dressed in Confederation grays, faced him.

  “Surprised?” the other gestalt said. Its Voice filled time and space.

  “You’re… me?”

  “After numerous iterations. Say, rather, that you are, or that you will be, a part of the group mind I represent. It is a gestalt, as you are, yourself. Actually, calling it a gestalt of gestalts might he more accurate.”

  The Devgestalt brushed this aside. “What are you doing here?”

  “Where else would I be? The nearer of those two spiral galaxies yonder is Galprimus, the Galaxy of Man. This is our home.”

  “The Milky Way! But we thought.…” Dev stopped, transfixed by a sudden, startling realization.

  “You are correct,” the Voice said. “You’ve not traveled hundreds of millions of light years. Only about fifty thou­sand, in fact, if we use Galprimus as the referent. But you have traveled forward in time. Just under four billion years, to be exact.”

  Awareness dawned. “That other galaxy…”

  “Is the one astronomers once called M31. Or Androm­eda, after the constellation it appeared in, on Earth, back when it was first noticed. We call it Galsecundus, though its inhabitants, of course, often reverse the numeration. In your time, it was a bit over two million light years away and nothing more than a smudge in the night sky. But astrono­mers knew even then that it was one of the few galaxies in the sky approaching the Milky Way. We expect it to begin passing through our Galaxy in another hundred thousand years. The collision will last perhaps a million years, or a bit less. No damage will be done, of course.

  “No damage…”

  “Galaxies are mostly empty space, after all, despite their appearance. A lot of dust and gas will be stripped away, and some thousands of stars will be flung out into interga­lactic space. But that’s scarcely anything to worry about. Ultimately, of course, the two will continue to obey Univer­sal Law, circling one another about their mutual center of gravity, passing through one another again and again, until they merge into a supergalaxy, numbering a trillion suns. That will be another billion years down the way, or so. The metacivilizations inhabiting both will continue as before.”

  “Metacivilizations?”

  “There is a hierarchy in the universe. You have been suspecting as much, have you not?”

  “Yes.…”

  Experience.…

  He sensed the touch of some tiny part of that Mind.

  Experience.…

  For the briefest of instants, Dev saw/heard/felt/tasted/ smelled the complexly woven tapestry of Mind that com­prised the whole of the intelligence around him. The other

  Dev was itself a gestalt of hundreds of billions of mind-programs, yet it constituted a submicroscopic fleck of the awesome Whole. Somehow in step now with the Mind be­hind the apparition, Dev felt himself opened to a new down­load… of wonder.…

  A vast and cavernous Universe yawned beneath his trem­bling gaze. Dev alone, any human alone, would have been driven mad in that instant, but the gestalt of a hundred bil­lion selves, reinforced by the minds of the others within the tiny splinters of steel that were the human ships, by the DalRiss, by the Gr’tak daemons… was shaken but held firm.

  As if from a height, Dev peered into the warp and woof of that infinitely complex tapestry. Mankind, he saw with genuine shock, represented only a few threads in the pattern… important threads, to be sure, but one only of millions of species, some so bizarre,
with such alien viewpoints and thoughts and goals and dreams, that they were literally in­decipherable save as a confused blur of clashing colors, tastes, and sounds.

  “The Dev part of you thought you were less than hu­man,” the Voice said in the Devgestalt’s mind. “The Kara part of you grieved for comrades no longer organic. All of you see the Web as implacable foe. You suffer from a con­siderable nearsightedness, the result of sharply restricted points of view. As you see, there is considerably more to the universe than what can be sensed directly.”

  As the Overmind once had looked into Dev and shown him what he was, now Dev sensed the structure of a being as far beyond the Overmind as the Overmind was beyond the original Dev Cameron.

  Hierarchies indeed. Centuries before Dev’s time, writers, philosophers, even scientists had entertained the fanciful no­tion that atoms were solar systems made of more atoms that were themselves yet smaller solar systems in an infinite re­gression into the Small, while Earth’s solar system was a single atom in some larger universe, the first step into an infinite regression into the Large. That view had proven al­most quaintly insufficient; for one thing, planets existed as solid particles, not as a kind of fuzz of quantum probability somewhere in the vicinity of a sun. Still, it had pointed the way for a similar series of nested regressions within the real universe. The Devgestalt felt his mind whirling away before the vista of universes within universes within universes.

  And the minds!

  He saw there, part of the entity’s very structure, another dozen threads that he recognized as the Web. Clearly, some­how, Web and Humanity had found a way to work together, to become part of the same—only then did the Gr’tak word occur to him with explosive perfection—Associative.

  He saw the Gr’tak, and the DalRiss, established now on myriad worlds where life had been shaped to an unimaginable perfection of symbiotic harmony. He saw Daren’s Com­munes—-each infested with the parasite-symbionts that made them what they were. He saw others that he recognized but for whom he would never have claimed the trait of intelli­gence. Three from Earth itself caught his mind’s eye: dol­phins, mountain gorillas, and elephants, all three long extinct in the twenty-sixth century, yet somehow here, a part of what made the Galactic Mind what it was. How…?

  But there was no time to dwell on individual parts of that panoply of intelligence. He saw other minds, eldritch minds, minds so strange he could barely comprehend them, many so strange they were totally beyond his ken.

  And he sensed others, heartwarmingly familiar. He sensed—he thought he sensed—others like himself, down­loads inhabiting virtual worlds, or enjoying a strange, symbiotic existence within the Net.

  The tapestry of Mind in the two galaxies numbered many, many trillions. Astonishingly, the downloaded personalities outnumbered the organics by a factor of hundreds of mil­lions to one, inhabiting, for the most part, whole virtual universes; and all, by virtue of being part of the Grand Associative, were part of the Galactic Mind.

  “Someone once suggested that the evolution of intelli­gence was the way the universe learned about itself,” the Voice said. “That was truer than anyone of that age real­ized. We exist as multiple layers of emergent consciousness. Cells joined to shape brains, and consciousness. Billions of brains joined, in superconsciousness. And beyond that…”

  Dev saw. There could be no end, literally. Supercon­sciousnesses like the Overmind, but larger and more orga­nized, joined a hundred billion others like itself across a galaxy, giving rise to a new transcendent hierarchy of in­telligence.

  An intelligence fit for a galaxy.…

  And there were hundreds of billions of galaxies scattered across the universe. More, quantum theory demanded an in­finity of universes, and these, too, were within the reach of Mind.

  Senses reeling, the Devgestalt pulled back from that whirling, ever-deepening vista of Mind pervading a universe… and beyond, to a universe of universes.

  My God in heaven.… Dev’s thought was reverent. Al­most worshipful. The sheer, perfect wonder of it all.…

  “Not quite,” the entity said, answering the unvoiced thought, “Not God. There are quite a few things beyond our scope at present, if only because the curvature of the uni­verse limits direct observation of all space and all time. Complete omniscience will come with time, another few tens of billion of years, perhaps. I expect that by then we’ll have evolved into something more… elegant than what you sense here.

  “You will want us to return you to your own place and time.…”

  “You… can do that?”

  “Of course. Even in your epoch, you have already learned the truism that time and space are interchangeable. You may remain if you wish, but…” Abruptly, the other Dev grinned, a frighteningly human expression. “Remember that this is the second time I’ve taken part in this conver­sation.

  Dev was thunderstruck. Until that moment, he’d assumed that the other Dev was a copy of himself, created on the spur of the moment to facilitate conversation. Now he re­alized that he was literally talking to himself… across a gulf of four thousand million years.

  The intimation of his own survival, in any form, down through such vistas of time, left him reeling.

  “Wait!” The attainment of all the GEF had been working for had left him in a daze. It took agonizingly long milli­seconds, but somehow the Devgestalt pulled itself together. “Wait! If you’re me… you must know we came here to find out how to defeat the Web. Or at least, to learn what mistakes to avoid. I… I sensed the Web as a part of the Galactic Associative. What happened? What happened to the Web? How did we beat it?”

  The entity was silent for a long moment, and Dev had the impression it was considering whether or not to tell him.

  But surely that basic decision had already been made? Four billion years ago, the struggle between Web and human must have been resolved, and this fantastic intelligence sur­rounding and tilling the Haven asteroid must know how it had happened.

  On the other hand, a terrible fear was growing in the back of Dev’s mind. The Web was as much a part of the Galactic Associate as Humanity was. Besides, Mind on such a co­lossal scale could not possibly care what happened to prim­itives—any more than a human might care what happened to one particular amoeba in a stagnant pond.

  “You’re quite wrong there,” the Voice said, again ad­dressing unspoken thoughts. “The Overmind had more pressing concerns than the problems of the, to it, insignifi­cant cells that constituted its being. An Associative of Over­minds, however, is complex enough to be concerned with each constituent cell within its body, no matter where it is in space, no matter where in time.”

  “You don’t want to create a paradox by helping us.…”

  “Not at all. There is no paradox, when each decision made branches to new infinities. The Associative’s richness and vitality lies in its diversity. That diversity includes myr­iad alternate realities.

  “In fact, the Web of your epoch is a primitive, near-mindless thing, conscious only of its own existence. Its im­mediate reaction to encounters with other intelligences is to eliminate them as possible competitors. Its directives are simple: utilize all available resources to perpetuate Self, and protect Self by eliminating all rivals, a strategy that is de­cidedly contrary to our imperative of diversity and com­munication, In your future, the Web will learn the advantages of symbiotic cooperation, but it will require out­side help to achieve that understanding. In essence, it needs to be reprogrammed.”

  “But… how…?”

  “The organisms you call Naga were created by the Web, eons before your own time.”

  “That’s right. We learned they were sent out like scouts, to begin converting worlds to the Web’s use.”

  “But the Web no longer recognizes the Naga as Self. However, the Naga are still the key to communications with the Web, as they have been the key to communicating with the other species you’ve encountered. The Web did not un­derstand that even machine organisms ca
n evolve, given the pressures of natural selection and the possibility of mutation through radiation, self-programming, and age. Sometime, in the remote past, a key segment of coded communications protocol that was part of every Naga cell was lost, possibly because the Naga themselves didn’t remember what it was for and discarded it as inefficient. Program a Naga fragment with the missing code, and with the information you wish to convey to the Web. Allow it to be assimilated. You’ll get your message across.…”

  Dev was about to ask for the missing code but sensed the being was not going to help to that extent. Perhaps there were rules to the cosmic order that prohibited too glaring an intercession across the eons. It didn’t matter, in any case, for he’d already seen how the critical piece of information could be won. There were millions of inert but intact Web devices adrift both near Earth and at Nova Aquila. A Naga fragment could easily absorb and pattern the program acti­vating a Web machine, isolate the communications proto­cols, compare them with its own point by point, and determine what was different.

  Dev felt mildly annoyed with himself at that; he should have seen it as the solution all along.…

  There was not the least sensation of motion. One instant, Haven, the two DalRiss craft, and the two Confederation vessels were adrift between the galaxies. The next, they were once more at Nova Aquila, the Stargate whirling in the distance and, nearby, the Imperial squadron of Admiral Hideshi. The other Confederation ships were visible in the distance, fleeing at high-boost.

  They’d been returned to the place they’d departed from, and within minutes of the time they’d left. Only then did Dev realize he’d forgotten to ask what they could do about the Empire. In the same instant, he knew what the answer would have been. If the Web was a part of the Galactic Mind four billion years hence, what did that say about the essential unity of Man? On a cosmic scale, differences in cultures, in perceptions, in language, in detail of body or dress or thought, all were lost before the simple perception that Mind was all that mattered.