by Ian Douglas
If, in fact, a human fleet could have any effect on them at all.
TC/USNA CVS America
Sick Bay
1346 hours, TFT
“Explain that,” Gray said. “You’re not making sense!”
“The bacteria,” Hoffman told him, “are intelligent. That is the only hypothesis that accounts for the facts.”
“Intelligent germs?” Gray snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Actually,” Hoffman told him, “we’ve known that it’s possible for some time now. A number of terrestrial microorganisms show . . . indications of intelligence, at least of a sort. And now it looks like we’ve met some who might be as smart as we are.”
“Look . . . that’s just not possible!” Gray had the feeling that Hoffman was trying to play some sort of pointless, ridiculous joke on him. “Bacteria are single-cell organisms, for Chrissakes! By definition, that means they have at most a single brain cell! No synapses, no neural network, no way to store memory. They can’t think!”
“Not as we use the word, no. But remember that even our kind of intelligence is an emergent property. A complex system arising out of a large collection of something much, much simpler.”
“You’re seriously telling me you’ve found intelligent bacteria. In me . . .”
“Not intelligent in the way you and I are, no,” Hoffman told him. “And each colonial swarm must comprehend the universe in a very, very different way than we do. And there probably is no way to directly compare our minds to theirs. But everything we’ve observed shows that they do perceive, they plan, and they influence the actions of their hosts in unanticipated ways.”
“That’s just crazy!”
“No,” Hoffman said calmly, “it just means that the universe is stranger than we’ve been giving it credit for.”
Gray sagged back on the sick-bay bed. He felt dizzy. A bit weak. The headache was still there, though it had faded now into the background. He honestly couldn’t tell if he was still feeling the effects of the bug he’d picked up in the N’gai Cluster, or simply feeling shock at what America’s senior human medical officer was telling him.
“I must insist,” the medical robot said, interrupting, “that Admiral Gray rest. Your philosophical investigations into microbial intelligence can wait.”
“Sorry, Admiral,” Hoffman said. “I have to go anyway. Check out ‘slime mold,’ ‘emergent intelligence,’ and ‘bacterial intelligence’ in the ship’s library . . . if your nanny here will let you. I’ll be back later, and we can continue this. Suffice to say, we think we know where we stand with the controlling intelligence behind the Sh’daar now. And that’s going to change everything.”
He turned and walked away. “Wait!” Gray said, raising his voice, almost shouting. “You can’t drop an orbital bomb like that and—”
But he was gone.
“I will, if necessary, administer a relaxant,” the robot told him.
“Not necessary,” Gray told the impassive machine. “I’ll be good.”
But once the robot glided away, Gray accessed America’s library, linked into the biological studies branch, and pulled down several thousand gigs of data on slime molds.
He’d heard of the things, but never seen one, nor had he paid any attention to them. The name was applied to several unrelated organisms, members of the domain Eukarya, which could live as single cells, very much like amoebae, but at times came together to form a unified mass. Unlike fungi or bacterial slimes or plants, but like amoebae, slime molds could move, crawling over the ground at a blistering pace of up to 1.3 millimeters per hour.
Their behavior, to say the least, was extraordinary. Plasmodial slime molds were essentially one very large, single cell—a supercell enclosing thousands of individual cell nuclei. Cellular slime molds, on the other hand, spent most of their existence as individual protists, like amoeba, but when conditions grew extreme or the organism needed to reproduce, the separate cells came together into a single mass that acted as one organism.
The trick was in how the slime mold “decided” to do anything. Clearly, chemical cues were involved . . . but somehow slime molds were able to all work together to move in a specific direction. They’d solved mazes in the lab, throwing out pseudopods to find food or light or moisture, and when they stopped to reproduce, different cells or cell components could change form and purpose to create spores and fruiting bodies. Perhaps strangest of all, each time the cell nuclei divided, they made numerous changes to the DNA, accurately and precisely, re-engineering the organism’s genome on the fly.
They started off as amorphous cells like amoebae; when they came together, however, they could demonstrate something like genuine animal intelligence, without brains or nervous systems. Besides solving mazes, they could mimic human transportation networks, avoid toxic chemicals or dry conditions, and choose the healthiest food from a smorgasbord of options. In some experiments, they even seemed to anticipate changing conditions over time; when subjected to drying conditions every thirty, sixty, or ninety minutes, the slime molds would thereafter slow their movement to conserve energy . . . at thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-minute intervals.
Slime molds were not intelligent in the way humans were, of course, but they did show a kind of intelligence more akin to that of animals than of plants or fungi.
Fascinated, Gray moved from slime molds to emergent intelligence. There were many organisms known that joined together into so-called superorganisms: beehives, ant nests, termite mounds, and the odd little colonial mycomyrmidians of New Earth. A single termite had a brain smaller than the head of a pin and could not in any way be considered intelligent . . . not as humans used the term. A termite colony, however, functioned essentially like a single organism, the individual termites taking on the role of cells in an animal’s body. Such a superorganism could monitor and control the temperature within the colony to within a fraction of a degree; could farm fungus in dank subterranean chambers; could perform astonishing feats of architecture, one bit of saliva-soaked dirt at a time; and could defend the nest with glue-squirting soldiers. Biologists referred to such feats as examples of swarm intelligence.
Indeed, individual human neurons were not intelligent and had no awareness of the big picture, no way of comprehending that they were part of a human organism. Yet millions of neurons working together generated their own form of swarm intelligence. Mind, intelligence, and society all were seen as emergent phenomena arising from the swarm.
All pretty standard stuff. But when Gray downloaded an article on bacterial intelligence, he was staggered by what was to him a completely new and unknown field of knowledge.
Just as a slime mold could exhibit what for all the world seemed to be an animal-like intelligence, just as a superorganism comprising millions of termites exhibited what seemed like truly intelligent behavior, bacteria and other microorganisms—protozoa and algae—showed remarkable abilities, including decision making, complex adaptive behavior, and even altruism. Amoebae built shells around themselves, showing manipulative skills and decision-making skills that seemed more in line with multicellular organisms than single-celled protozoa. The group known as Myxobacteria—“slime bacteria”—were unremarkable as individual cells, but, like slime molds, could come together in huge aggregates known as swarms or “wolf packs.” They stayed together by means of molecular signaling between cells; as aggregates they were far more efficient in finding and digesting food.
But what really shocked Gray was information about the ways that bacteria seemed to influence their animal hosts. Evidently, a person’s gut bacteria could influence how a person felt . . . and even what they wanted to eat.
Quite a lot of research had been carried out on the idea since the twentieth century. Only gradually did biologists come to see human beings not as a single, isolated organism, but as a swarm of trillions of cells working together. In fact, the human body was comprised of roughly ten trillion cells . . . and something like one hundred trillion bacteria.
And the bacteria traveling with their human hosts, it turned out, had an astonishing degree of interaction, cooperation, even communication of a sort with those hosts. Imbalances in the microflora biome could result in autism, a condition that could be reversed by transplanting healthy proportions of gut bacteria. Certain bacteria reduced stress or depression, and others were intimately interconnected with the human immune system. Certain bacteria even appeared to signal the brain in ways that created cravings for certain food—chocolate, for instance. The bacteria decided what they needed to improve their environment . . . and signaled the host’s brain for takeout.
The human organism, it turned out, was far more complex than anyone had imagined back in the closing years of the twentieth century. And an intimate part of that complexity turned out to be biochemical signals transmitted by the bacteria inhabiting the organism, bacteria literally outnumbering the cells of their hosts by a ratio of ten to one.
Bacteria that, through emergent behavior, acted in ways that could only be termed “intelligent.”
What that might have to do with the Sh’daar, however, or with the paramycoplasmid infection Gray had picked up in the N’gai Cluster, was completely beyond him.
He found that he very much wanted to continue his conversation with Dr. Hoffman.
Chapter Twelve
9 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS Lexington
Command Bridge
Thrymheim/Ace Orbit
1215 hours, TFT
“We are entering orbit around the singularity,” Lieutenant Milton reported.
“And no sign that we’re being tracked by the Rosetters,” Lexington’s tactical officer, Commander Eric Gower, added, satisfaction enlivening his voice.
“Oh, they’re tracking us, all right,” Captain Bigelow said. “I can feel the bastards out there, watching, like cats at a mouse hole.”
“There’s the monitor,” Taggart said, looking up. “Range eight hundred. Closing at five meters per second.”
“Nice and easy . . .” Bigelow said. “Let’s not screw things up now, at the very end.”
The Lexington and her escorts had crept slowly across the nine AUs from Planet I to Planet IV at a comparative snail’s pace and with a minimal expenditure of energy. They’d boosted at five thouand gravities for just a hundred seconds, skimming as close as they dared to Kapteyn’s Star both to pick up some free velocity and to mask their movement, using the sun’s glare, radiation, and magnetic fields. They’d drifted the rest of the way under zero-G, falling into Thrymheim’s gravitational field and slowing with another five thousand-gravity burst.
It had taken them almost three full days to make the trip, but they should have been a lot less obvious in their passage than they would have been had they made the voyage under constant acceleration.
Even so, the skipper was right. The aliens must have seen them, must have been watching them the entire time. But so long as the squadron didn’t make any threatening moves, the Rosette entities seemed content to continue their enigmatic activities with flowing, rippling light. What, she wondered, was the trigger? What line would the Lexington have to cross to provoke a response?
A final brief nudge, and Lexington came to a halt relative to the Himmelschloss. A few hundred meters to port, the Marine transport Marne took up station. On board were twelve hundred Marines who had a vital role to play in this deployment. . . .
If they could get past the Rosette Aliens.
TC/USNA CVS America
Sick Bay
1346 hours, TFT
“Are you ready to begin, Admiral?”
The voice was that of a fusion of medical AIs—of America’s medicAI integrated into Andre, the more powerful AI of the Andreas Vesalius.
“Yeah,” Gray told the artificial mind. He steeled himself . . . for what, he had no idea. But it seemed like the right thing to do. “Go ahead.”
He was lying on his back in a hospital bed, looking up into the glare of overhead lights. The light was partially blocked by heads—some human doctors, nurses, and technicians, some humanoid robots. Nearby machines peeped and warbled; a mask over Gray’s face fed him oxygen and smelled of plastic.
The internal view, visible when he closed his eyes, was more informative. In a window opened within his in-head awareness, Gray could see a computer-graphic representation of his own body, rendered in translucent hues to give a three-dimensional color-coded image: white for bone, dull maroon for muscle, brighter pink for internal organs . . . and sheets and knots of green for the bacterial infection he was fighting. Hundreds of billions of nanotechnic medical robots were moving throughout his body at this moment. They’d started out as a few tens of thousands of devices injected three days earlier, when they’d entered Lunar Orbit, but they’d been drawing elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorous, even aluminum and silica—from the food in his stomach and gut. He’d been put on a special diet to provide specific amounts of raw material, in fact, and with those available resources the tiny robots had doubled in number . . . then doubled again . . . and again.
He now had very nearly as many robots inside him as there were cells in his entire body. The robots were still outnumbered by the hundred trillion or so bacterial cells sharing him as host, but were roughly on a par with the numbers of one specific organism: Paramycoplasma subtilis. Guided by the medicAI minds, the nanobots had tracked down that alien bacteria, found where they were hiding, and monitored their activity. The paramycoplasmids, it turned out, had an affinity for the myelin sheaths around human nerve fibers. Slipping between the epithelial cells lining the walls of Gray’s arteries, veins, and capillaries, they’d formed thin sheets encapsulating various of his body cavities, but accumulating in and around his major nerve trunks. There were especially large knots within and around his brain, at his heart, and around his solar plexus.
Besides those hiding in his nervous system, though, lots of stray bacteria had been spotted in his circulatory system, in his intestines, and elsewhere. The fleet of nanobots had dispersed throughout his body, tracking the germs down.
“It will take a few moments to reprogram the machines,” a human technician told him.
“Sure.” Gray was more than nervous; he was terrified. Born and raised a Prim, he’d never been comfortable with nanotechnic medicine . . . though when his wife had gotten sick, that hadn’t stopped him from taking her across the USNA border to get her high-tech treatment.
And, after all, Angela’s cure had been less than optimal. The stroke and the nanosurgery required to save her life had changed what she’d felt for him, had caused her to leave him.
The human body—more, the human nervous system—was incredibly complex. And that was putting it mildly. Modern technology could hardwire into it with cerebral implants, could treat its illnesses and even old age itself with robots smaller than a red blood cell, could create electronic access to the sum total of all human knowledge . . . treatments that literally conferred superhumanity on their creators. But for all of that, the human organism still displayed an astonishing and only partially comprehensible complexity, and the results of that kind of technological meddling—physical, emotional, and intellectual—were not always completely predictable, even yet.
Something Gray had known to be true his entire life.
This fear was exacerbated by the human doctors warning him that there were a number of unknowns in the process before they’d wheeled him in for the procedure. The fact that masses of the alien organisms were so intimately interwoven with Gray’s brain and heart and nervous system meant that if something unexpected happened, the chances were good that Gray might suffer severe neurological damage.
Or he might die.
“We’re here for you, Admiral,” another voice said. “We’re looking over your electronic shoulder, as it were.”
“Who . . .” With a start, he recognized the voice. “Mr. President?”
Gray was aware of the briefest of hesitations—the two-and
-a-half-second time lag for the round trip between Earth and Luna. “The same. They told us about your condition. How are you feeling?”
“Not too bad, sir.” Which was the truth, at least in physical terms. The nano they’d loaded him with had been treating his symptoms, and he was actually feeling pretty good. The headache was a faint echo of its former self, and they’d brought a sudden spike in his blood pressure under control. What was left were vague complaints—body and joint aches, numbness, tingling, dizziness—and all of those were a lot better than they’d been.
“I’ve seen Hoffman’s report,” Koenig told him. “You appear to have encountered yet another new alien species. An intelligent bacterial slime.”
“Yeah, well . . . it’s the glamour of this job that keeps me at it,” Gray replied. “That and the exotic and interesting people you meet.”
Koenig chuckled in his thoughts. “The doctors tell me they expect to nail this thing pretty fast. You just hang tight, and know that a lot of us are here, pulling for you.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. Uh . . . who’s ‘us’?”
“My staff, of course. The Joint Chiefs. Although, interestingly, the one who is really interested in your situation is Konstantin.”
“I am on this channel as well, Admiral,” another voice added.
“Your, uh, kids have been really helpful, Konstantin.”
“If by ‘kids’ you mean the abbreviated clones of my software that you transported to the N’gai Cluster and DT-1, I am delighted. I have already reintegrated with the data and observations you brought back. Fascinating material.”
“You’ll have your work cut out for you, Konstantin,” Gray said. “How do you learn to talk to an aggregate of bacterial cells?”
“Everything,” the supercomputer replied, “will depend on the superorganism’s worldview, how it apprehends its surroundings, how it processes data from those surroundings, and how it interacts with them.”