by Ian Douglas
“Knock off the brain-poppers, Davies,” Jamison replied. “And the VR!”
There was nervous laughter, which she could sympathize with. She was still shaken by what she’d just glimpsed herself. Was it some sort of alien weapon? Or an attempt at communication?
Or something they couldn’t begin to comprehend?
The Lucas continued its morphing before finally settling down onto the surface and broadening into a squat, thick-walled structure nearly two hundred meters across. The dome on top separated from the rest of the structure and became a turret mounting a powerful particle cannon. At the same time, hatches around the rim opened to expose missile launch tubes and point-defense lasers. The Marines were already digging in, creating a perimeter some ten kilometers across strengthened by robot gun towers nanotechnically grown from the native rock.
In the dark violet sky overhead, the Rosette Aliens appeared indifferent . . .
. . . for now.
Bethesda Medical Center
Bethesda, Maryland
1512 hours, TFT
What is it you want?
Admiral Gray felt the words more than he heard them, felt them as a compelling surge of curiosity and command. The questioner was Konstantin, arguably the most powerful AI working now with humans, and certainly the one with the most experience in cracking alien languages and exposing alien motivations.
What is it you want?
Gray was a part of the interrogation partly because the object of Konstantin’s attention was the mass of alien bacteria still inhabiting his body . . . and because Konstantin, while remarkably human in many ways, was not human when it came to emotion. The super-AI could mimic emotion, certainly, but it probably couldn’t feel urges rooted in organic experience—anger, fear, love . . .
. . . or the need for self-preservation on anything deeper than a cold and rational sense of logic.
What is it you want?
To live . . .
Gray felt the response deep inside, a striving, desperate yearning for survival, for life. It was, he thought, quite possibly the one emotion common to all living beings.
Some part of his own brain, he realized, was attaching words to wordless feelings and concepts. He felt Konstantin moving inside his mind. I am adjusting the sensitivity of your implants.
“Go ahead,” he said out loud . . . then realized that Konstantin had not asked his permission, that the super-AI didn’t require his permission. The fine-tuning was ongoing as Konstantin continued to try to extract meaning from the super-organism inside him, and the Prim in him shuddered.
The relationship between Humankind and human technology—in particular with smarter-than-human artificial intelligences—was still poorly defined. Maybe, Gray thought, the ultimate destiny of humans was to serve as disposable but easily replaceable tools for work that didn’t require the highest grade of precision. . . .
Without your active and voluntary participation, Konstantin told him over a private channel, communication with the Symbionts would not be possible at all.
Well, that was nice to know, at least . . . though Gray wasn’t sure what the AI meant by “voluntary.” In any case, medical intervention by both Konstantin and Andre had saved his life and the lives of every infected member of the battlegroup’s crew. At the same time, though—according to the human doctors attending him—they’d left a sheet of the infecting organism still alive inside his body cavity, and a thick concentration still growing in the higher centers of his brain—especially in the regions associated with speech, meaning, and cognition.
What had Konstantin called the alien? Symbionts. The name, he realized, had been drawn from his own memory, but the choice had been guided by the bacteria. It was, he thought, a very strange kind of two-level communication.
We have sought communication with these hosts for over five thousand generations, the Symbiont said, using his own words within his head. Gray listened . . . and recorded everything in his implant RAM, where it could be directly accessed by Konstantin.
How long was the Symbionts’ generation? Terrestrial bacteria, some of them, could reproduce every six hours or so. He had the impression it took longer for Paramycoplasma subtilis, but the organism didn’t seem to measure time, not the way humans did, at any rate, so he couldn’t tell. The sense he got, though, was that the Symbiont was referring to the first human contact with the Sh’daar Collective. That would have been the meeting between human explorers and an Agletsch trading community at Zeta Doradus in 2312 . . . some 113 years ago. Gray routed the data through his implant’s math processor. Five thousand generations in 113 years worked out to eight days and a few hours. That matched well enough with how long it had taken him and the others to come down with symptoms.
The host’s advanced technologies posed a threat to wholeness.
Was that, Gray wondered, the aliens’ explanation of why the Sh’daar had attacked humanity? In the next heartbeat, he felt the reply, a distinct affirmation.
The proscribed technologies posed a threat to wholeness . . .
So it was about the GRIN tech. They had all assumed that, but he now—based on Konstantin’s suggestion—understood a bit more why they saw it as such a threat to them.
Human tacticians had noted that the Sh’daar appeared to be afraid of humans when they penetrated the N’gai Cluster eight hundred and some million years ago. Was that because humans with access to time travel were such a terrible threat? Or were the Sh’daar being influenced by the various strains of Symbiont bacteria inhabiting them, super-organisms peculiarly susceptible to human technologies?
That explained why a number of Sh’daar species used such proscribed technologies—nanotechnology, for example, and advanced computer systems. If the species in question were already solidly under the Symbionts’ control, they might not be as big a threat.
And what about the notorious Sh’daar terror of another technological singularity? That made more sense now too. The Singularity—what the Sh’daar called the Schjaa Hok, the Transcending—had affected different intelligent species in different ways. Some, such as the species called the Groth Hoj, had already made the transition from organic beings to purely robotic bodies a few at a time, their minds digitized and uploaded into mobile computers. Others, with organic or partly organic bodies like the Baondyeddi, had uploaded themselves to computer networks en masse, leaving their bodies behind to die. Each species, as it transcended, had left behind individuals who’d not embraced the relevant technologies and become Refusers.
And those Refusers all had been infected by the different species of Paramycoplasma, super-organisms that communicated with their hosts through very basic, very raw emotions.
Like terror.
One basic problem the xenosophontologists had faced since first contact with the Agletsch, Gray knew, was the difficulty in matching emotions between distinct sapient species. Did “fear” mean the same for humans as it did for, say, the Baondyeddi? Hell, emotions didn’t always map in a one-to-one correspondence between one human and another. When you began comparing what passed for emotions among mutually alien species, each with unique evolutionary histories, the whole question became all but meaningless.
But it felt like they’d just gained some measure, however thin, of understanding.
What is wholeness? Konstantin was asking.
Gray felt the answer within. Completion . . . perfection . . . balance . . . host and Symbiont existing together for the perfection of both . . .
Was it you who guided the Sh’daar Collective into war with Humankind?
The super-organism struggled with some of those concepts. War it seemed to understand as the natural struggle between invading bacteria and the immune system of an unwilling host. Both Sh’daar and humans, apparently, were “host,” though at different stages of “perfection.” Gray had to dig for synonyms for “guided,” however. The bacteria did not understand.
Led? . . . Instructed? . . . Urged? . . . Commanded? . . .
&nb
sp; At last, the bacteria appeared to comprehend, though the concept was alien to it. Symbionts do not guide the host, save in the most general and vague of ways. The decision to initiate the immune response was the choice of the host.
As the strange conversation continued, Gray began sensing a larger tapestry, a kind of story, part myth, part allegory set against a galaxy-spanning backdrop.
The Symbionts had evolved within the N’gai Cluster eons ago . . . a microbial organism, quite possibly a disease organism, infecting one of the hundreds of sentient species among the Cluster’s worlds. It didn’t know which of the species it had evolved with; it literally couldn’t tell the difference between one host species and another—not from the inside, at least—and, in fact, from its point of view, the differences were irrelevant. There were faint memories of a terrible struggle; perhaps the hosts had been stricken by a terrible plague as their bodies reacted to the invader.
Ultimately, the host species had used genegineering to change the deadly microbe, to make it benign, less destructive. It was probably an accident, one never realized, that the genetic tinkering had resulted in a super-organism with an unprecedented ability to interconnect, to develop long-term goals, to self-direct in new and startling directions.
The organism, like the terrestrial slime molds Gray had researched earlier, became huge and complex while retaining its essentially cellular lifestyle. Like terrestrial termites, they exhibited an emergent intelligence. Whether they were truly intelligent on their own was an interesting question. There were clues in what Gray was seeing here that suggested that the organism actually hijacked the nervous system of its hosts, using their existing brains and nerves to do some of their thinking. Memories were stored in specially bred cells; apparently, Paramycoplasma species had learned how to genegineer as well.
At some point in the remote past, the super-organism jumped from that first sapient species to another. To do so, it had to have genegineered itself, creating an offshoot with a different biochemistry to inhabit an alien biome. And a very long time after that, it made the jump again. And again. And yet again. It was likely that all of the ur-Sh’daar became infected.
And the evidence suggested that if the ur-Sh’daar were aware at all of their invisible passengers, they’d dismissed them as harmless internal flora.
The Transcendence had come as a terrible shock.
Billions, perhaps trillions, of organic beings had either died or vanished. By that time, the myriad Paramycoplasma species were at least tentatively in touch with one another, possibly by means of subtle airborne chemicals released by the hosts, possibly by means of clouds of memory cells shed from hosts’ skin or other bodily covering. Something well in excess of 90 percent of the sapient N’gai species had vanished, taking their Symbiont riders with them.
What was left very nearly became extinct.
The Symbionts held on, however, within the handful of surviving hosts, the Refusers left behind by the galaxy-wide collapse of civilization, the Schjaa Hok. Civilization was rebuilt, the lost technologies of star travel rediscovered, the lost libraries of ancient memories rebuilt. As this was happening, the N’gai Cluster was falling from the intergalactic Void and into a new galaxy. The Refusers feared the return of the ur-Sh’daar, the Transcended species; the Symbionts feared such a return even more . . . and they feared the technologies that would expose them, hunt them down, destroy them. . . .
And so the Sh’daar had sought refuge in the far future. There had been devices left by a vanished species that permitted travel both across vast stretches of space and across vast reaches of time. A few Sh’daar traveled into the future, discovered a new species . . .
. . . and introduced them to “wholeness.”
Now, if the Transcendent ur-Sh’daar returned to the N’gai Cluster, there would be Symbionts and hosts surviving in remote futurity.
Eventually, in another few tens of millions of years, N’gai tumbled into the giant spiral galaxy and was devoured. Shredded by tidal forces, it was absorbed, several billion suns stripped away from the N’gai’s central core and scattered across a far larger, vaster, and younger spiral of stars.
But the Symbionts, past and future, were safe . . . complete . . . whole.
There remained only a single problem. Shortly before N’gai merged with the spiral galaxy . . . shortly after Sh’daar probes had emerged in the future, a new species had been encountered, a species referring to itself as Humankind.
And these humans threatened to undo everything that the Symbiont species had accomplished . . . work that spanned much of the span of the universe since its beginnings.
And the Symbionts feared them, feared them almost as much as they feared the Transcendents.
Feared them enough to destroy them . . . somehow . . . somehow. . . .
Chapter Fifteen
12 December 2425
USMA Lander Lucas
Heimdall Station
1632 hours, TFT
“Keep it spread out, people. And watch your step!”
Gunnery Sergeant Roger Courtland led his section of twelve Marines across broken rock and ice, treacherous beneath their armored feet. Wearing the newly issued advanced Mark IV combat armor, the Marines were difficult to see. The suits’ outer nanoflage layers picked up and repeated the colors of light striking them, rendering the heavy suits . . . not invisible, exactly, but very hard to see, especially when they were motionless.
Courtland reached a massive section of broken pillar, an octagonal block of chipped and dirty glass three meters high, and leaned against it, catching his breath. Heimdall’s gravity was slightly less than a full Earth G, but combat power armor was heavy despite the actuators that translated human effort to movement and superhuman strength. He’d been out here only a few minutes, and he was already feeling the strain.
“Rainbow Devil, Heimdall Command,” sounded through his in-head. “Status update.”
Courtland heard Lieutenant Ogden’s response over the platoon Net. “Heimdall Command, Rainbow. We’re at the objective. Moving in for a closer look.”
“Watch your ass out there, people.”
“Copy that, Command.”
Fifty meters ahead, First Platoon’s gun walkers had already reached the objective. Similarly camouflaged, they showed against a violet skyline as three-meter-high fuzzy patches of movement and shadow shifting among the stumps of broken-off pillars. The structure humans called the Temple had at one time covered almost two hundred hectares—roughly two square kilometers—and had included some thousands of crystalline, eight-sided pillars around some sort of central structure of unknown shape and construction.
The ruins didn’t look all that prepossessing now, Courtland thought, and were startling only in their extent. The Confederation science teams exploring the site, though, had reported that the pillars were made of Q-carbon, an artificial diamond brighter and stronger than natural diamond, which, evidently, had been grown in place, each more than eight meters thick at the base and stretching some three hundred meters into the sky.
Courtland rubbed the surface of the block with a gloved hand, receptors in the fingertips transmitting the feel of the pitted and weathered surface to his brain. Gods . . . how long did it take for diamond to weather this much?
They must have been spectacular when they were whole and soaring into the thin red light of Kapteyn’s Star . . . but they’d fallen a very long time ago.
“Find anything, Gunny?”
He turned. The speaker was a spider, man high, a black basketball suspended from four thin and many-jointed legs. “Nah,” he replied. “Just wondering how fucking old this place is.”
“Very,” the spider replied in his head. It was a woman’s voice, and sexy as hell. “We think the Baondyeddi may have built it during the ur-Sh’daar period, before they transcended. That would have been more than eight hundred seventy-six million years ago . . . and it might have been as far back as one billion years. A long, long time.”
Th
e spider was, in fact, a telepresence body for Dr. Celia Carter. The senior member of the xenosophontological team assigned to the Lucas, she was safe and secure somewhere within the Lucas’s bowels right now, but linked in to the spider’s sensory suite so that she could explore the surface in relative comfort. He’d gotten to know her during the cramped journey in from Thrymheim.
Courtland had actually first met her a couple of years ago, at an exoplanetary conference in Houston. She was pretty and fun and very smart, and it turned out she had a thing for guys who’d actually been out there among the stars and met some of the critters whose psychology she studied for a living.
When he’d bumped into her on board the Lucas—literally so, in zero-G—it had been like old home week. It was damned tough to find any privacy at all in a transport as crowded as the Lucas . . . but senior Marine enlisted personnel could be very inventive when it came to playing the system to get their own way.
In this case, all it had taken was temporarily assigning four guys in a hab-pod to a different section and marking the quarters “occupied” on the battalion AI. The battAI had known what was going on, of course . . . but it didn’t care much about humans and their relationships, so long as the mission and the unit’s integrity weren’t compromised.
The rearrangement had worked out well. Those hab pods were just large enough to permit some experimentation with zero-G sex.
Courtland took a long look at the desolate stretch of ruins ahead. He shook his head—then remembered she couldn’t see the gesture. Mark IV suits didn’t have helmet visors, but relied on optical feeds directly to the wearer’s brain to reveal the terrain outside. “Damn,” he said. “Gives me the willies. . . .”
“The guys that built it are long gone,” she reminded him.
“I thought they were uploaded into the rock.” He gestured toward a low line of cliffs in the distance, gleaming gold in the weak sunlight.