by Ian Douglas
“I hope your samples are worth it, Laurie,” Bigelow told her.
“So do I, sir. I can’t see how we’re going to possibly beat these guys without it, though. We’re going to need to sample the Rosetter’s OS and see how it works. The IS people might be able to tease out the equivalent of a pass code. . . .”
“Captain!” Gower shouted, interrupting. “Romeo One is firing!”
A beam of energy made incandescent by the cloud particles outside seared past the Lexington’s spine, puncturing the underside of her shield cap in a flash of white light and an explosion of water simultaneously boiling and freezing into sand-grain-sized flecks of ice. The beam was only on for an instant, but as the Lexington moved forward, the beam slid sideways, carving through hull metal. There was a savage shock, the drive failed, and the Lexington went into an end-for-end tumble, bits and pieces of wreckage and internal structure trailing off into space.
The bridge went dark, every light and control dead.
Taggart was slammed into her instrument console and the darkness became complete.
Chapter Twenty-three
20 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
Admiral’s Office
Tabby’s Star
0915 hours, TFT
“I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” Gray said. “What are these . . . beings?”
“They are what you’ve been calling the Builders,” Konstantin told him. “They represent an extremely advanced species. More important, they are the creators both of the failed Dyson sphere and the outer Matrioshka brain. We may be able to question them, though they are not materially present any longer.”
“No? What happened to them?”
“They ascended. Their name for themselves might be roughly translated as the ‘Ascended Ones.’”
Obviously, that wasn’t their name for themselves, but it carried the same idea. Gray had the sense that there was a deeply religious feeling behind the term, like “raptured” would have for a fundamentalist Christian, or “enlightened one” for a Buddhist. Neither was what Gray was seeing in his mind as what the original Tabby’s Star natives actually looked like. They appeared to be a machine intelligence—upright, silver-gray ovoids made of plastic with glittering lenses set randomly around the body. The backdrop for the meeting with the Tabby’s Star natives was taking place in a computer-generated room of some sort, all gleaming metal and plastic surfaces, clean lines, and geometric figures.
It all started when, hours earlier, America had gentled in to within a few thousand kilometers of the nearest light sail, and dispatched a robotic probe, a smart torpedo that had attached itself to the exterior of the structure dangling on its cable far below the gossamer canopy above.
Through that probe, Konstantin had been able to tap into the Ascended Ones’ Matrioshka intelligence, a vast distributed network occupying hundreds of billions of light-sail supported nodes, an artificial intellect of staggering power. A holographic brain.
The term referred to terrestrial holography, where data was stored in the interference patterns between two reflected laser beams projected onto film. That film could be cut into pieces, and yet every single piece could reproduce the same original image when a laser was shined through it. The smaller the piece, the fuzzier and less defined the image . . . but every fragment held all of the original pattern. Human brains worked the same way; memories were distributed over a branching network of neural dentrites, but holographically, so that each piece of the network contained the entire memory.
The Matrioshka brain surrounding Tabby’s Star appeared to work in the same way, with each discrete light-sail statite containing the entire system within its computronium heart. With trillions of statites, a single light sail would hold only a thin shadow of the whole, but it meant that Konstantin could communicate with that whole by linking up with one.
Konstantin was still learning how to communicate with the intelligence, but had made a lot of progress in the past few hours. The two had been carrying on an extended conversation in the virtual reality resident within the Matrioshka brain.
It helped, evidently, that the alien brain was almost inconceivably smart. It was aware of America, aware of America’s efforts against the filmy, light-sail creatures, and it wanted to talk.
As for Gray, with his limited and merely human intellect, he was just along for the ride. Though strapped into a couch in his shipboard office, his mind moved through a rich and ever-shifting virtual reality, one moderated by the Konstantin clone, but which was being created by the alien AI.
“I don’t know,” Gray told Konstantin. “‘Ascended Ones’ seems just a bit pretentious.”
“I have taken the liberty of suggesting new names,” Konstantin replied, “names with less emotional baggage for humans. I call them Satori.”
“Okay. And that means?”
“It is a Japanese word for a Buddhist term. It means ‘awakening,’ ‘understanding,’ or ‘comprehension.’ It is the ultimate goal of a practicing Buddhist to reject desire or other human weaknesses and achieve satori.”
“And you think these beings have done that?”
“I make no judgments,” Konstantin replied. “And I certainly cannot address purely religious concepts in use by humans. It simply seems a useful term.”
“I agree. They’re machines, these Satori?”
“It seems likely,” Konstantin told Gray, “that the Satori originally evolved as purely organic beings. I have not yet been able to establish a temporal frame of reference, but I suspect that the Satori were organic beings some millions of years ago. Like a number of the sapient species of the N’gai Cloud, they over a great deal of time developed artificial bodies for their organic brains, then, over a very much longer space of time, evolved beyond the need for any organic structure at all.”
Gray nodded understanding. He’d seen much of that story before this, downloaded from researchers studying the N’gai civilization. Three species in particular, he knew, had specialized in robotics and ultimately had transformed themselves into cybernetic life-forms—the Adjugredudhra, the Groth Hoj, and the Baondyeddi. Over the course of eons, all three species had developed robotic bodies of metal and plastic, eventually transferring their consciousness to machines.
“That seems to be a common theme for advanced technic life,” Gray observed.
“It does. And it makes sense. Organic bodies are peculiarly unsuited for living and working in space, for long-period spaceflight, or for existence over periods measured in geological ages.”
“Or for dealing with advanced AI?”
“There is that,” Konstantin replied. “Cybernetic species are considerably faster, more flexible, and more reasonable than organic intelligences.”
Gray started to make a rejoinder, then caught himself. He’d meant the statement about dealing with AIs as a joke, but Konstantin appeared to have taken it in a strictly literal manner.
Well, he’d walked into that one. He was never certain whether Konstantin understood humor or not.
Besides, from Konstantin’s point of view, most humans nowadays were cybernetic organisms. The computer circuitry nanotechnically grown into and around their brains, the artificial circuitry grown throughout their bodies certainly qualified them as such. Most humans, though, thought of their technological components as enhancements or prosthetics, not as cybernetics. Humans still looked like humans, after all, and except for a few fringe groups had not begun the wholesale replacement of body parts with machines. For centuries, humans had worn corrective lenses or hearing aids or pacemakers to improve on nature. Implant technology was no different, though it was perhaps just a bit more intrusive.
But maybe Konstantin’s crack about cybernetic species could honestly be applied to modern humans.
In any case, Konstantin had been communicating with the intelligence occupying the solar sail shell around Tabby’s Star, and learned that the original organic intelligences that had evolved here had ulti
mately uploaded their minds into machine brains and become purely machine beings. Gray was aware of those beings now as shapes and shadows around him, the drifting ovoid machines Konstantin called the Satori. The problem was that those beings were there as ghosts in the memory of the system’s super-AI, since they no longer had a material existence. Perhaps five or six hundred years ago, Konstantin thought, they’d gone through their version of the Sh’daar Schjaa Hok and vanished. Presumably—and like the far more ancient ur-Sh’daar—they still had an existence somewhere, but what that might mean was pure conjecture. Another dimension? Another, noncorporeal plane of existence? A whole other universe, perhaps one of their own creation? All unknown . . .
The Satori AI—Gray was already thinking of it as the Satorai—had no opinions on the matter. According to Konstantin, it was uninterested in other minds, or had been until the return of the Gaki.
Gaki—the Hungry Ghosts. It seemed a fitting name for the mysterious space-going amoebae.
Again, Konstantin had suggested the name, since the radio-frequency pulses of the Satori term were not easily vocalized. If Satori was the Japanese word for Buddhist enlightenment, then Gaki was the term referring to another Buddhist concept, that of the “hungry ghosts.” These were supposedly the spirits of ancestors abandoned or neglected by their living relatives, or, in a different tradition, the spirits of people trapped by desire or greed and cursed with insatiable hunger.
According to the Satorai, the original inhabitants of this system had created the Gaki as artificially intelligent spacecraft designed to explore nearby stars. This they had done for innumerable millennia—the first, the Satorai claimed, had been launched into the interstellar void something like eighty thousand years ago—but for the past several centuries they’d been returning.
And they were returning changed. The Satorai could no longer communicate with them, and the Gaki seemed only interested in devouring the Satori system’s infrastructure. The molecule-thin sail canopies appeared to be the equivalent of haute cuisine for the vast, gaseous entities, though they also fed on the debris cloud farther in.
“But what are they?” Gray demanded. “The Gaki, I mean. You said they were starships, but they can’t carry anything, no payloads, no passengers. . . .”
“On the contrary: they carry information. Perhaps a better name would be starprobes, not starships. Parts of their substance are hardwired into circuitry, a few hundred grams at most. The same idea was conceived on Earth, actually, a few centuries ago. Human designers called it Starwisp.”
“I remember hearing about the idea, but it was never actually developed. A microwave sail carrying enough microcircuitry to support an AI, right? The sail could be accelerated by beamed microwaves to something like ten percent of the speed of light, because the total mass of the payload was only a tenth of a gram, and the sail itself would only have weighed a kilogram or so.”
“Exactly. The Gaki concept was similar. The Satori created them—grew them, actually. The idea was to send them as enormous light sails to other stars, where the AIs would explore, record, and use local resources to manufacture new sails.”
“But something went wrong.”
“Indeed.”
“Do you know what?”
“I’m not entirely certain,” Konstantin replied, “but the evidence points to an extremely virulent computer virus.”
“A virus? You mean, like, an artificially generated electronic virus?”
“Exactly. It may have been created by another intelligence seeking to protect its home star system from this sort of intruder.”
“A computer virus.” Gray felt a stab of alarm. “Can it—”
Konstantin anticipated his flash of fear. “I have not been infected, Admiral, no. If it exists, it is resident within the Gaki. And we have had no close encounter with them as yet.”
“Thank God.”
“The danger is considerable,” Konstantin told him. “It is conceivable—quite possibly likely—that returning Gaki infected with this virus were responsible for the destruction of the Tabby’s Star Dyson sphere.”
The vast and shining corridors and compartments of the Satori virtual world faded away, replaced by a star gleaming in space: KIC 8462852. Tabby’s Star. Gray wondered if what he was seeing was a computer-generated construct, or an actual visual record from a thousand years or more ago.
Or, perhaps the two were the same thing.
“The Matrioshka shells,” Konstantin went on, “and the Dyson structure were built consecutively, the toroid first, then the statite shells. As you see, the Satori did not completely enclose their star in a spherical shell. Instead, they built a broad ring above their star’s equator, one reaching to approximately twenty-five degrees north and south—not a Dyson sphere, but a Dyson toroid. That left plenty of space open for the construction of the statite shells with access to their star’s radiation. Because of the toroid’s larger radius, one point eight five AU instead of one, there would have been far more land area than would be available on a complete Dyson sphere around a star like Sol.”
“How much space?” Gray asked.
“Enough for roughly a billion Earths peeled and spread out flat—one point zero five four two six billion, to be marginally more precise.”
“That seems . . . excessive. With that much living room, why did they need to explore other stars?”
“Because,” Konstantin said, “they weren’t simply trying to create a habitat.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I understand the AI correctly, the Satori were engaged in activity somewhat more ambitious than surrounding their home star with living space and a powerful computer node. They were endeavoring to move their star.”
“Ah . . .”
And it all dropped into place for Gray, the final piece of the puzzle. “So that’s what the Agletsch were trying to tell us. That the Satori were engaged in creating something like a Shkadov thruster.”
“Essentially. The principle, at least, is the same. The Satori appear to have mastered a considerably more proficient technology in stellar manipulation. They encircled KIC 8462852 with generators for a powerful gravitic drive. Details are lacking, but the Satori AI seems to believe that the star—with the attendant technology, the toroid and the Matrioshka shells, in tow, of course—might have managed to reach a sizeable percentage of c.”
Gray gave a low, in-the-mind whistle. “Where were they off to in such a hurry?”
“The star we know as Deneb.”
In Gray’s mind’s eye, he turned his gaze out from Tabby’s Star, and sought out that brilliant, blue-white gleam in the distance. Deneb glowed in a star-thick sky, a dazzlingly bright beacon not far from the red smear of the North America Nebula. In Earth’s night sky, Deneb was one of the twenty or so brightest stars, and that was at a distance of something like 1,600 light years. Here, Deneb was only 173 light years away, and it was far brighter than Venus in Earth’s predawn sky.
“Okay. Why?”
“The AI cannot tell me. It seems to believe that its builders had encountered something . . . astonishing there. It sounds like an alien civilization, but one organized along radically different lines than that of the Satori, or of Humankind, for that matter.”
“I . . . see. The Satori launched their star probes and learned of something at Deneb. Meanwhile, whatever was at Deneb was infecting the probes with some kind of computer virus and sending them back.”
“The Satori stardrive required considerable technological prowess to operate.”
Gray started at that. Had Konstantin just made a pun, speaking of a literal stardrive and an attempt to drive a star?
But Konstantin continued without a stop. “A substantial percentage of the computational output of the Matrioshka brain appears to have been required to keep the star and its high-tech accoutrements stable. The virus interfered with that stability, disastrously so. The toroid wobbled off center, then was ripped apart by gravitational stresses.”
&nb
sp; “‘How are the mighty fallen,’” Gray said, a quote taken very much out of context. “You think the destruction was deliberate?”
“Almost certainly so. The Deneban civilization may have designed the virus knowing that the Satori civilization was approaching, or was about to do so.”
“And they obviously didn’t want visitors.” Something else occurred to Gray. He opened a new in-head file and pulled in a quick download from America’s library. “Wait a moment. . . .”
“You are wondering about Deneb’s age.”
“Yeah. Something doesn’t make sense, here. Deneb is a type A2 Ia star, a supergiant.” According to the ephemeris information he was looking at in-head, the star was more than 100 times the diameter of the sun, and 54,000 times Sol’s luminosity, making it one of the brightest known stars in the galaxy. “Hell,” Gray continued, “it started off as a type O, the brightest and hottest there is. The bigger and brighter a star is, the faster it uses up its fuel and the sooner it blows up. All of that means Deneb can only be about ten million years old, maybe less. . . .”
“In other words,” Konstantin said, “not nearly enough time for life to evolve on any possible planets.”
“Right. If such a hot star could even spawn planets in the first place.”
“There are other possibilities,” Konstantin reminded him. “Deneb could have been colonized by a technic civilization utilizing hot O, B, or A-type supergiants. Or . . . any life that evolved there, as the Satori AI suggested, may be of a radically different type from those known to Humankind. Beings living within the stellar plasma, for instance, if such a thing is possible.”
“I guess we’ll have to go there and see for ourselves, then.”
“I would not advise it.”
“Eh. No. Not this trip. ”
Not that there was likely to be a next trip, not for him. The blunt truth of the matter was that court-martial boards were notoriously single-minded about flag officers who disobeyed orders and returned with nothing to show for it. Their detour had not produced a working Shkadov thruster, not turned up anything useful in the way of high-tech weaponry, nothing that could be used against the Rosette Aliens.