Eater

by Gregory Benford

  “Looks like a signature,” Arno commented to the Semiotics Group.

  “But what’s it mean?” a voice called, and others chimed in:

  “The ultimate?”

  “Should be singular.”

  “It says ‘my-selves,’ though.”

  “So it’s what? An anthology intelligence?”

  “Like Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?”

  “Don’t be humorous about that!”

  “About life and death? Laughing is best.”

  “Ultimate as in final? Fatal?”

  “Maybe it’s the plural of ultimatum.”

  This last from a University of Oklahoma professor sent a chill through the room.

  Later, secluded in his office, Arno asked the old working group of Martinez, Amy, Benjamin, and Kingsley if they thought these were reasonable readings. Amy said, “It knows dozens of languages by now. Choosing a name like that—well, it proves it’s learned how to pun.”

  “To underline that it wishes its demand for specific persons obeyed,” Kingsley said.

  Amy said, “There’s a Mesh story that says they’re reading the sections of Einstein’s brain that were in formaldehyde.”

  “Lots of luck deciphering that,” Benjamin said.

  Amy waved the Einstein matter away as a stunt, but then said earnestly, “There are thousands of specialists working on the whole uploading problem. They’re learning every day. If we have to give it all those people, the technology will be ready.”

  Arno asked her, “How many volunteers?”

  “Real ones? A few dozen.”

  Arno looked startled. “But the Mesh says there are already over ten thousand.”

  “That’s counting captive ‘volunteers’ from dictators.”

  “How about reading in the brains of those just dead?” Arno pressed. “There are eight billion people on Earth. Dying at a rate of better than a hundred thousand every day—”

  “Everybody’s resisting that,” Amy said briskly. “Most aren’t anywhere near a facility that has the equipment. And anyway, the magnetic sensing process takes several days, minimum. Dying patients aren’t up to it, and their readings get screwed up, too.”

  “The Eater doesn’t know that,” Arno said.

  Kingsley said, “Not so. It samples all our radio and TV. It can eavesdrop on a great welter of talk.”

  Amy seemed more energetic than the men here, and Kingsley marveled again at how she had become steadily stronger as this crisis developed. That had first drawn him to her, the sheer sense of untapped energy. She had an appetite for detail, for stitching together the innumerable Eater messages, then shopping them out to the working groups—all the while remaining a warm, insightful woman, not an office automaton, as did so many of both sexes in these fear-fraught days.

  “I…see.” Arno’s former spotless attire had eroded. His suit was unpressed, tie askew, shoes unpolished—all mirroring his wrecked face, which was not used to receiving a serving of unremitting bad news. No sleep and pressure from above had not been kind. “Well, at least we’ve solved the question of who was after Kingsley.”

  This made Kingsley brighten. “How is old buddy Herb?”

  “Conscious, finally. He’ll recover. He was from the China-option faction, I found out.”

  “Trying to silence opponents?” Kingsley guessed.

  “They wanted you in hand to control reactions and help with follow-up targeting,” Arno said.

  This startled them all. “They planned on failing?” Amy asked.

  “Any good general has a retreat in mind,” Arno said. “They wanted to hit it several times, overload it.”

  Kingsley guessed again, “But didn’t say so to the President.”

  “Seems so,” Arno said. “He overruled that, of course. If they’d had you to head up the advocates, maybe they’d have won, be slugging it out with the Eater right now.”

  Benjamin said angrily, “Inside our satellite belt? That would skragg all our communications.”

  “Yep,” Arno said blandly. “I’m getting so nothing surprises me, even from Washington.”

  “The pronuke faction is vanquished, then?” Kingsley asked.

  “Not at all.” Arno grinned cynically. “They just sit in the back of the room now.”

  “Ah, politics,” Amy said.

  Arno’s screen beeped and a priority message appeared, more from the Eater:

  IT IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE FOR A SEVERELY LIMITED, NATURALLY EMERGED BEING SUCH AS A HUMAN TO BE FULLY ACQUAINTED WITH THE DIVINE, OR WITH CREATED BEINGS OF HIGHER ORDERS.

  “Cryptic son of a bitch, isn’t it?” Arno prodded them.

  “Sounds ominous,” Benjamin said.

  “Think so? It hasn’t even taken notice of what we did.” Arno’s eyes darkened with worry.

  “All this time,” Benjamin asked, “it’s been carrying on dozens of conversations with specialists, as though nothing happened?”

  “Right.” Arno thumbed a control. “Here’s one that got booted to me. Goes to motives, maybe.”

  YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL BRIEF MUSIC, YOU THIRD ORDER CHIMPANZEES.

  “So it does know how to toss off a compliment,” Amy said sardonically.

  “At least that’s positive,” Arno said a touch defensively.

  “I think a bit of physics may be a better guide here than amateur psychoanalysis of an alien mind,” Kingsley said.

  “You mean its refueling problem,” Amy said.

  “Quite. It has shed so much energy to slow its prodigious velocity, to get into orbit just above us. Why we do not know, beyond its demands. Still, if it is ever to leave, it must gain mass.”

  “From where?” Arno asked. “The President wants a list of possibilities from us.”

  “And options for further action?” Kingsley asked dryly.

  “Yes—and right away.”

  “That’ll be due to the prodding of the Science Adviser.”

  Arno nodded. “It’ll be in a nearly circular orbit soon, the trajectory guys project. What will it do then? It can’t actually run right into the planet, you all say—”

  “Its capabilities are beyond our horizons,” Benjamin said.

  “The easiest mass to harvest,” Amy put in, “is our upper atmosphere. Nice and diffuse, ionized on contact.”

  This startled Arno. “It would do that? So close to us—”

  “It apparently believes itself of a vastly different and superior order, in the biological sense,” Kingsley observed distantly. “And probably of a different moral order, as well.”

  The next few hours proved this to be so.

  The Eater began to skate across the top of the atmosphere, skimming over two hundred kilometers high.

  Its braking had lit the sky with a many-colored glow rivaling the sun. Vast clouds fumed where its deceleration jet struck the air. It had knifed through the thin upper air in a virulent red firework—aerobraking on a scale vastly beyond the puny spacecraft that humanity had sent into the atmospheres of Mars and Jupiter.

  It was like a cannonball tens of miles across, Kingsley thought as he watched the seething display on the big screens. Devouring the air in its wake and using this grist to feed its braking jet. Tunneling through the sky.

  In its wake the air closed again. This sent monstrous bass thunderclaps rolling down across whole continents.

  The entire Center population emptied onto the surrounding hills to see the thing rise over the western Pacific. The security officers tried but could hardly contain them, over a thousand strong. In the slanting afternoon light, it was easily visible, a radiance that paled the sunlight.

  It was already supping of the rarefied gas at that altitude, steadily lowering further, circling the planet in under three hours now.

  It seemed to Kingsley like a great spiderweb of innumerable strands. Its looping, dipolar pattern was a brittle blue, laced with flickering orange and yellow spikes as electrodynamic forces worked through it. A snarl of angry purple
marked where the leading jet somehow sucked ionized air into the knotted muzzle of tight field lines.

  “Bet it’s hungry,” Amy said.

  “Ah, but for what?” Kingsley answered. It came off as more brittle Brit wit, but he meant it earnestly. It had not come here to sample the air, perhaps not even to sample humanity.

  He put an arm around her and she nuzzled him, body trembling. He was surprised to feel in her a quaking fear, expressed entirely in body language. So much for the sharp façade.

  He, on the other hand, was far better at the stiff-upper-lip act, in fact had done something like that façade—he now felt, suddenly—all through his life. Pretending to be meaner than he in fact was, for starters. He was thinking about this, intently, when he saw Benjamin standing nearby and regarding them with genuine surprise.

  Well, they hadn’t been secretive about it, just private. And what was a man to do at such a time, in any case?

  Benjamin came over and stood awkwardly, obviously not wanting to broach the subject of Amy and yet not wanting to let it go. Kingsley felt a burst of affection for this man, who had endured so much these last few months. But he was no good at expressing such emotions, either. They stood next to each other in the strange, sudden silence that had descended upon the hills all around.

  The Eater grew in scale as it passed overhead, unfolding more luminous blue field lines.

  These peeled off from the web, lit—or so a Center astrophysicist nearby speculated—by excited oxygen lines as already ionized atoms were caught and compressed by field tensions. It behaved precisely like a beast unfurling great magnetic wings.

  At its edge began a medley of glows—yellow, ivory, a satiny green. An atmospheric chemist nearby estimated that this came from its processing of nitrogen and oxygen, the air’s two principal gases, in different molecular states. The fretting of light gave the crowd a better view of the size of the thing and gasps came from the crowds. It revolved slowly, as though basking in this bath.

  “Thin gruel,” Kingsley said.

  Only then did he realize the sensation of heady lightness that had been building in him for several moments. An airy lifting.

  A creaking came from trees nearby. The crowd stirred like wheat blown by a wind. A shuddering started to come up through his feet. He felt uneasy, then comprehended—

  “It’s tide. The Eater’s mass is raising a tide on the surface of the Earth.”

  Amy gasped. The sense of lifting strengthened as the Eater neared the peak of the sky, drawing them toward it.

  “It’s the mass of a moon, orbiting just a few hundred kilometers away,” Amy said wonderingly.

  The crowd sighed. There was no other word for it. A collective easing as gravity ebbed for a moment. Kingsley felt a release from the burden of weight, stirring his blood at a fundamental level. How like a god…

  Then they all simply stood and felt.

  Awe, Kingsley recalled, was a mingling of fear and reverence. Probably few watching from the moist, warm slopes believed in God, but the press of foreboding wonder upon these people was palpable.

  The most unexpected aspect of the moment was the thing’s monstrous beauty. It rotated again, this time around a different axis. A spew of fire-red brilliance came suddenly from the very center of it, where lurked the accretion disk. The fine field lines of the new jet worked with amber light, extending itself out of the mesh of bruised brilliance. The slow rotation began bringing the jet to point toward the planet’s surface.

  The first atoms from Earth’s air have sputtered down onto the disk, Kingsley guessed. Can the jet be preparing to raise the orbit already? The disk was a mere bright scarlet dot. Hopeless to glimpse the black dot that was the cause of it all, but he tried anyway and failed.

  “‘Gruel’?” Benjamin said in a croak. “It can convert maybe ten percent of the mass-energy of what it grabs. Mc2 is a big number, even from thin air, if it’s getting spent in your own neighborhood.”

  Kingsley hoped that this remark would not be predictive, but he was proved wrong on this same orbit.

  The Eater’s jet rotated further as the Eater arced across the Pacific and the western United States. Its orbit was tilted with respect to the equatorial plane by about forty degrees, so that it rose to high latitudes as it crossed the twilight line.

  No one had foreseen what came next.

  The jet brimmed with pulsing ruby light at its core. Then a spike of hard blue light shot from it. Satellite spectral analysis showed this to be high-energy plasma, mostly ionized nitrogen.

  This fresh jet struck the upper layers of the atmosphere with a splash of fiery virulence, stripping atoms, heating them, depositing a fraction of the converted mc2 energy harvested from the tenuous reaches above.

  Such energy is restless, always moving. The illuminated spot expanded and reradiated in the infrared spectrum. This propagated downward. Within a minute, a tongue of heat radiation licked at the surface. Where it struck, scorching flames rose.

  The jet first forked down above the Midwest. Within minutes, it grew a hundredfold in power. The Eater’s central engine was the union of gravity, the fruit of its compacted mass. This coupled with exquisite dexterity to utterly weightless magnetic conduits and accelerators. Watching it function was a rebuke to humanity’s pride. This was engineering of a kind and scale to which not even the mad had aspired.

  Within moments, the torch was brighter than an early morning sun. It hung in the night air like a moving, radiant lance.

  By Ohio the infrared heating had become fierce. It wandered as the Eater rotated, bringing the focus above West Virginia.

  “It’s writing,” Amy whispered. “With a plasma pen.”

  Kingsley blinked. “On the forests.”

  “In a line miles wide.”

  The jet played with skill, tracing out a flowing script. Clearly in the loops and jots there was meaning, but—“No language we know,” an expert said nearby. “Something from its past?”

  “Cosmic graffiti,” Amy said.

  Benjamin murmured, “Not everything it does is an attempt at communication. Maybe it’s just writing its name.”

  A long silence fell over the crowd in the Center. They watched with a cold, gathering dread.

  Only when it had left the rugged mountains did the brutal heat begin to rise yet again. The entire Eater surged in brilliance, a cobweb prickly with ominous radiance. Millions watched it swell and blossom, its central, shining shaft now unbearably bright to the eye.

  Crowds turned from it in terror, but by then its target had become clear to the defensive forces that watched from myriad artificial eyes in orbit and on the ground.

  As the resplendent tongue plunged still farther down, into the moist clouds that shrouded the District of Columbia, steam burst where it licked.

  The cloud cover evaporated in seconds. Then the hammer blow of infrared struck the river and instantly vapor began to rise there.

  Tar bubbled on the roofs of tenements. Trees steamed, then erupted into flame. Within moments, the entire District smoked, then roared out an answer in flame.

  People standing in the streets and parks to watch felt their hair crisp and crackle as they ran for cover. Cloth smoked. Fabrics melted. The air hummed. Their homes followed suit, shake roofs flaming into pyres within seconds.

  The Eater pulsed, keeping its jet turned artfully toward the District even as it passed toward the horizon and out over Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. The jet ebbed. Orange lightning traced along its retreating shaft. Within a few more minutes, it was a mere kindled spire attached to the broadening web of spiderweb brilliance that dominated the black sky.

  A helicopter got a shot of the Eater setting on the horizon like a luminous insect scuttling after fresh prey.

  Fire alarms wailed in a chorus of thousands below.

  Behind it, the thing left a simmering record of ruin.

  “It makes its point well,” Kingsley said a while later, when the shock had begun to wear off. The old G
ang of Four, minus Channing, found itself in a seminar room, like the meetings they had held what seemed a thousand years before. “It was not fooled for a moment by the launches from China.”

  “But how?” Arno demanded. “The President—thank God, he was underground in the Catskills—demands to know.”

  “I imagine it is quite versed in our politics by this time. It has been freely dipping into our torrent of news for at least months now—and probably much longer.”

  “What can we do?” Benjamin asked.

  “I fear even the generals are stymied. I certainly am.” Kingsley felt he should be with Amy now, but he could not very well leave immediately. Her parents lived in Silver Spring, a suburb of the devastated area, and she had broken down as they viewed the aftermath. City-wide fires still raged.

  “Give it what it wants,” Benjamin said.

  “We can’t,” Arno said. “To force people, kill them—that violates every moral code.”

  Kingsley said, “I very much doubt that our notions of morality figure largely in this thing’s worldview.”

  “We have to take a stand,” Arno said, but without much conviction.

  “We are all making the same calculations from our own moral calculus, I suspect,” Kingsley said, “and I do not believe we much like the outcome.”

  “Let it have them!” Benjamin said wildly.

  Arno looked at Benjamin, then at Kingsley, who gave him no sign of help. Benjamin gulped, took a breath, then said in a ragged voice, “Look, the thing’s probably killed a hundred thousand already. What goddamned difference does it make if…if…”

  “I suggest we begin sending it what we have,” Kingsley said coolly.

  “Why?” Arno asked anxiously. “That’ll take maybe a few days and then it will want more.”

  “Right. But we will gain time.”

  “To do what? That’s what the President, what the U. goddamned N. wants to know.”

  “Kill it, if you want.”

  “How?” Arno demanded.