by Ian Douglas
Right now, everything, everything hinged on trusting the super-AI. Gray took a deep breath. His mistrust of advanced technology, he knew perfectly well, stemmed from his childhood in the Manhatt Ruins. Gradually, he’d battered those demons back. He’d taken his sick wife up the river to get high-tech medical treatment, he’d joined the Navy to pay for it, he’d accepted the implants that let him interface with a world centuries ahead of what he’d known in the Ruins.
He’d worked with Konstantin more than once, and the Tsiolkovsky super-AI network had never failed him, never let him down.
It was just such a freaking big step. . . .
Trust did not come easily.
“Is it really as important as you say?”
“It may well be of existential import to the human species.”
“Then I guess there’s no choice, is there?”
“There is always choice. The question is whether a given choice will lead to a given preferred outcome.”
“Stopping the Rosetters.”
“The Rosette entity is too powerful, too far advanced for human technology to have any chance against it at all. Should they decide to, they could wipe out the species. With truly advanced technologies, or with an alliance with beings possessing such technologies, we have a chance.”
“But I don’t see how heading off to this Tabby’s Star could help. Sure . . . if we can make peaceful contact, if they have the appropriate technologies available, if they are willing to share those technologies, if we can figure out how to use them against the Rosetters . . . That’s one hell of a lot of ifs!”
“I agree. But the possible rewards are astonishing.”
“Like what?”
“Like Shkadov thrusters.”
And that captured Gray’s full attention.
Probewalker 1
Heimdall Temple Platform
2254 hours, TFT
Carter picked her spidery way across a vast, flat plain twenty meters beneath the surface of the Temple platform. The darkness around her was absolute, her surroundings so cold she was getting very little data from her infrared optics. She switched on her light, and the darkness ahead receded, but without showing any detail. The glare of her light was swallowed by the emptiness after only a few tens of meters.
Her escort was still with her, drifting along silently in a loose circle around her.
“Command, this is Probe One. Command, do you copy?”
Static hissed in reply. Either the rock surfaces above and around her were too thick, or the aliens were somehow blocking her communications channels. Her control channels, however, were still functioning fine. Odd . . .
She felt her in-head circuitry abruptly switch on with an incoming message.
“Adler Eins Zu Himmelschloss! Adler Eins Zu Himmelschloss.”
It was the voice she’d heard before. “Hello! This is Dr. Celia Carter, off the Lexington! Do you read?”
“Mein Gott im Himmel!”
Those guttural tones could only be German. She didn’t speak the language, but her in-head circuitry could translate. “Hello!” she called. “Who is this?”
“Captain-Lieutenant Martin Schmidt, Eagle Flight One. I hear you . . . did you say doctor? What are you doing here?”
“I’m a xenologist off the USNA star carrier Lexington.”
“Lexington? What is my position? Where am I?”
Carter opened the comm channel wide, pulling in a datastream from . . . she wasn’t sure where, but it was all around her, pulsing, flowing, a living thing. For a moment, she was out in space again, not moving through subheimdallan darkness, and the stars surrounded her. Bifrost, ringed and banded, loomed on her left, as gauzy shapes of light twisted and curtained and fluttered ahead like a spectacular display of golden auroras.
She gasped, felt the thunder of energies coursing through her brain . . .
. . . and then darkness closed in around her once more.
Chapter Eighteen
13 December 2425
Assault Lander Lucas
Heimdall Command
0204 hours, TFT
“Doctor Carter? Doctor Carter? Are you awake?”
Carter opened her eyes to see Commander Taggart’s worried features leaning over her. Behind Taggart, the lights in the overhead of Lucas’s sick bay glared, entirely too bright. “Yes, Commander,” she managed to say. Her throat was parched, her voice cracked. “What the hell happened?”
“That’s what we wanted to ask you. We had to kill the power on your teleop feed.”
“I was . . . talking with someone. . . .”
Taggart nodded. “Kapitanleutnant Schmidt, of Eagle Flight One. Yes, we know.”
“How? My comm channels were blocked.”
“RAM tap.”
“Ah. Of course.” When a human linked in with a teleoperated device, her experiences were automatically stored in her in-head circuitry. If something went wrong, her in-head RAM could be accessed—“tapped”—by an AI for analysis and troubleshooting. The fact that they’d done so suggested that Carter had been in pretty bad trouble. “What happened? How long was I out of it?”
“A few hours. Lucas’s AI is using the data you acquired to run a dialogue with Lieutenant Schmidt . . . with his ghost, rather.”
“His ghost?”
Taggart straightened up, nodding. “His squadron was—the term they used was ‘patterned.’ Lieutenant Schmidt and the others in his squadron were killed, probably because they strayed too close to a Rosetter construction project, though we’re not sure on that point. His mind, however, was patterned—perfectly replicated—by the Baondyeddi software in the Etched Cliffs on Heimdall. The AI down there is frantic. It’s lost its people.”
“Lost its . . . what?” Carter rubbed her eyes. “Sorry, Commander. I’m having trouble keeping up.”
“Until a few days ago, Heimdall was inhabited by approximately six billion intelligent entities. About half were conservative Baondyeddi who chose to upload themselves into the computer circuitry etched into the planetary bedrock . . . we think about eight hundred million years ago. The other half was made up of members of sixteen other sapient species from the Sh’daar polity who either uploaded themselves at the same time, or did it over the course of the next hundred million years or so.”
“Conservative Baondyeddi?” Carter said. “What’s that? A political party?”
“More like an ideology. One of a number of competing worldviews in the Sh’daar Collective at the time.”
Carter tried to imagine the worldview of one of those many-legged pancakes. From what she knew of the Sh’daar origins, most Sh’daar were horrified or shocked at the vanishing of most of the original ur-Sh’daar sophonts, a catastrophic technological rapture—to use the blatantly religious term—that they called the Schjaa Hok. Most Sh’daar had focused on the coming merging of their civilization with that of the Milky Way galaxy—which meant taking control of the newer, younger civilizations there. Some, though, had figuratively gone back to bed and pulled the covers over their heads. Virtual reality, it seemed, had been an attractive escape for those afraid of the Transcended ur-Sh’daar.
“Okay, so there were a few billion Beyondies playing in the virtual-reality banks. What happened to them?”
“The Dark Mind.”
The term was ominous but unfamiliar. “The what?”
“That seems to be what the local Beyondies were calling the Rosette Aliens. Their records refer to it as a collective, artificial consciousness of immense power and scope. It descended on Heimdall and apparently abducted the digital entities residing there.”
“What, all of them?”
“A clean sweep, apparently. The AI running the place was able to clone off a copy of itself, and left that behind, but that’s it.”
“And Lieutenant Schmidt?”
“The AI clone got him and the rest of his squadron. Or, rather, it copied the pilots’ minds and uploaded them just as the Rosetters wiped out the squadron.” Taggart
shrugged. “Maybe they got copied twice, once by Heimdall, once by the Rosetters.”
“Ah. So the original people—their bodies—are gone. Dead.”
“If we’re understanding the technology, yes.”
Carter thought about the ramifications. The idea of digitizing minds and uploading them into computer-based virtual realities had been around at least since the late twentieth century, though Humankind hadn’t managed the trick as yet. It took staggering amounts of computer power, both to scan and copy something as complex as a living brain—to say nothing of the entire body—and to create a realistic and richly complex world for the upload to inhabit.
The real problem, though, was one of identity. If you precisely copied every atom and the quantum state of every subatomic particle in a human brain, digitized the information, then replicated the pattern inside an artificial reality, you would have an uploaded copy that was potentially immortal . . . but the original, unless it had been destroyed by the copying process, would still be sitting back in its original body, hopefully twiddling its thumbs as it awaited the transfer. So far as the individual was concerned, nothing had happened, and the upload had not taken place, though, of course, he now could talk to a convincing copy of himself. When most people spoke of digitally uploading minds to virtual reality, they meant that the identity of the individual—some people still used the word “soul”—was transferred, not just the information.
Everything Carter knew about Sh’daar technology suggested that they had, indeed, figured out how to transfer the actual mind from organic body to machine; at least part of the Transcendence had involved just that, with the minds of hundreds of billions of beings vanishing and leaving behind nothing but dead, organic shells. But the Pan-European fighter pilots of Adler Flight, apparently, had been subjected to a more primitive form of the technology.
Or . . . was that necessarily true? Maybe there’d been nothing but empty, organic shells inside those fighters when the Rosetters had reached out and . . . done whatever the hell they’d done.
So many questions. And damned few answers.
“Lieutenant Schmidt seemed to think he was still alive,” Carter said, remembering. “We were conversing . . . exchanging information. . . .”
“I’m afraid that doesn’t mean much, Doctor,” Taggart told her. “A computer can be programmed to mimic a person’s thought processes. The Turing Test, remember? Non-sophont computers have been managing that trick since the twenty-first century.”
“I know. Still . . . if Schmidt and the others think they’re still alive, or if they really are . . . don’t we need to, I don’t know, rescue them or something?”
“We’re talking with them now,” Taggart said. She smiled. “Thanks to you. Or, rather, we’re talking to the Baondyeddi AI. We’ll need to see what exactly they—both the AI and the Pan-European pilots—really want.”
“How thanks to me?” Carter was confused. “All I did was pass out.”
“You got your spider down into the heart of the Baondyeddi planetary defense network, and made direct contact with the AI. Schmidt was able to link through your in-head circuitry, but once you had the connection he was able to tune himself—I guess that’s the best way to put it—to your spider’s comm gear. The AI lifted the communications interference you encountered . . . and we have an open channel.”
“Well, it wasn’t my doing.”
“Of course it was . . . and I’m saying so in my report.” Worry passed behind her eyes. “Assuming the Dark Mind doesn’t take an active interest in us. It hadn’t noticed us, not much, anyway, because of the RF interference from Heimdall. That’s gone, now. It’s probably listening to every word we transmit.”
Carter felt a chill at the back of her neck.
“Cheerful thought. Can it understand us, do you think? Understand our language?”
Taggart shrugged. “According to the Heimdall AI, there’s not a lot it can’t do, but our new friend may be prejudiced by its experiences with the Entity so far.”
“And that leaves us . . . where?” Carter asked.
“Stuck,” Taggart said. “Perched out here on the edge of something we can never hope to understand . . . hoping it doesn’t decide to swat us like a bug.”
Flag Bridge
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer Sol System
1920 hours, TFT
The Star Carrier America fell out-system, dropping into her own self-induced gravitational singularity projecting out in front of her shield cap thousands of times each second. She was boosting at a somewhat leisurely five thousand gravities, the top acceleration possible for the slowest ships accompanying her, and after an hour and a half at that acceleration she was pushing 99.7 percent of the speed of light. Time slowed, stretched by the surreal hand of relativity, and the skies around her had grown strangely compressed, a circle of rainbow-smeared light encircling her forward quarters. America was one of a massive fleet of thirty-eight vessels, a flotilla including the star carriers Declaration, Jiangsu, and Guangdong, and a dozen massive battleships and planetary bombardment vessels, the Marine carriers Nassau and Peleliu, and the Confederation heavy monitor Festung.
Gray considered the size and makeup of the fleet, and wondered if the scars of the recent civil war were truly healed. He dismissed the thought as soon as it rose. Of course there were still scars—that’s what scars were: reminders of old wounds. It was amusing to think that the TC/USNA star carriers America and Declaration both still bore the tc designation that stood for “Terran Confederation.” In fact, America had carried that designation throughout the entire course of the civil war, when, technically, the United States of North America had pulled out of the Confederation and was fighting for her independence. Politically, there was some question at the moment as to whether the USNA was officially back in the global family of nations; oh, the treaties had been signed, the alliances renewed . . . but the USNA continued to hold itself just a bit aloof from the Confederation. The president, Gray understood, was against a formal reunification, and the Senate currently was divided on the question. Some were calling for a full merger; others wanted the USNA to enjoy a “special relationship” with the Earth Confederation, one that preserved the nation’s political sovereignty. The question, likely, would be resolved in upcoming months with votes both in Washington, D.C., and in Geneva.
How, Gray wondered, did Konstantin feel about the question?
And even more important: would the current delicate situation change after Gray performed his small act of mutiny this evening? If there were USNA military officers who still didn’t trust the Confederation, it was equally true that there were Confed officers and politicians who didn’t trust the North Americans. And if a TC/USNA star carrier suddenly violated orders and ran off across the galaxy on a mission of its own, the little trust now existing might be weakened further, perhaps irreparably.
Gray hated the idea of being the one responsible for upsetting the carefully negotiated balance of powers on either side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he’d not thought about that side of things until after he’d let Konstantin talk him into this madness.
Ah, well. What was the old adage . . . something to the effect that you might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb? His career would be finished after this in any case. He couldn’t help but laugh internally.
How many times could they kick him out of the service?
Of course, there were other things that might happen to him. He might be facing prison time or, more likely, psychorevision. A major personality edit would leave him unaware of his current life, of who he was now. The idea horrified him. “Damn but Konstantin had better come through on his promise!”
“I beg your pardon, Admiral?” Captain Gutierrez said.
Gray looked up. He’d not realized he’d spoken aloud. “Nothing, Captain. Sorry.”
“We’ll be coming up to the transition in another three minutes, sir.”
“Very well. I . . . uh . . . have some s
pecial orders for you.”
“Sir?”
He opened a back channel in his internal circuitry. “Here you go. Do not discuss this with anyone but the helm and navigation officers.”
He felt Gutierrez running through the orders in her own thoughts. “Begging the Admiral’s pardon, but . . . Whiskey-Tango-Fox?”
“I am taking full responsibility. All I can tell you is that the change in mission is extremely important. The ship, the crew, and most particularly the bridge officers are in no way responsible for this. It’s entirely on me.”
“Bullshit. Sir.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who is really giving this order? The president? The Joint Chiefs?”
“Just assume that it is me . . . and that I know what I’m doing.”
“The order is coming from somewhere higher up the chain of command.”
“That is classified.” Easier to lie than to admit that the orders came from a supercomputer completely outside both the military and political chains of command. Besides, he wasn’t sure how Gutierrez felt about superbright AIs. If she mistrusted them half as much as he did . . .
But then, he was following Konstantin’s directions, wasn’t he? To the letter and all the way to the court-martial board.
“Sir . . . I really don’t—”
“Look, Captain. I know this is irregular. You’re right to question these orders. What I suggest is that you log these orders as ‘received under protest,’ and compose a report that you can squirt off to Mars HQMILCOM the moment we drop out of metaspace. I assure you that I will be sending a report as well, describing in full what I’ve done . . . and, incidentally, absolving you and the rest of the crew of any and all blame in this.”
“Admiral,” Gutierrez said, sounding somewhere between angry and embarrassed, “I trust you. I’ve trusted you since you came aboard as skipper of this bucket, and I was your XO. If you say we’re going to take America and tunnel into hell, I’m not going to question it, right? But this sounds like someone is pulling a sneaky work-around to evade legitimate orders, and this could put you, personally, in a world of severe hurt. I don’t want to see that happen. And I will not stand by and let it happen. If you’re making some kind of gallant last stand here, I am going to be standing there with you. Intiende?”