by Ian Douglas
"Tomlinson!" Carson snapped.
"Yes, sir!" Commander Maureen Tomlinson was head of the Connie's computer department.
"Let me see the hypernode signals network."
"Aye, aye, sir. On-screen."
A faint web of perfectly straight lines, interconnected and crisscrossing everywhere, appeared on the C3 display, linking every visible statite with some thousands of other statites in a vast and complicated network that receded into the hazy black depths of the cluster. From instant to instant, beams winked off while others flashed on, creating the impression of something very much alive and active.
Something thinking…
"I want an analysis of those beams," Carson told her, "and a map of enemy fleet dispositions. If their fleet is taking orders from a central location, I want to know where that is."
Griffin knew what Carson was looking for, but doubted that he would find it. The admiral wanted one target, something that would allow the human ships to end the battle if they destroyed it. "I'm not sure it's going to be as simple as that, Admiral."
"Someone is coordinating the hypernode's defenses," Carson replied. "Maybe one of these habitats is the enemy's command center. If we can find it, we can kill it.…"
"Sir," Tomlinson said. "We're not getting any observable signal patterns on the alien laser net."
"What… none?"
"No, sir."
"A central hub of some sort? A control center?"
"No, sir. The web of lasers seems to be turning the entire cluster into a very powerful neural net. And there's no enemy fleet as such, either."
"Those spheres…"
"Obviously robotic weapons, Admiral. They're coming out from the center of the cluster."
"Then that's where the control center is!" Carson exclaimed. "All ships! Form up on the Constitution! We'll keep moving deeper!"
But more and more silver spheres were leaking through the Confederation defenses. Hundreds flashed through the overlapping fields of point-defense fire and latching on to the Independence's hull. Interesting. They weren't detonating… but they were accumulating, slipping through the PD barrage in greater and greater numbers. Griffin cold see the long, dark gray hull of the Indie on the three-D display, with masses of silvery flecks gathering in different areas like clusters of barnacles. Each sphere was only between one and two meters in diameter… but swarms of them were latching on to each of the human ships now.
"Antibodies," Griffin said quietly.
"What was that?" Carson demanded.
"They're like antibodies, Admiral. Molecules in the human body that seek out invading organisms—bacteria, for instance—and actually latch on to them."
The spheres were beginning to pile up on the other human ships as well. The heavy cruiser Porter was completely girdled by them now… and as Griffin watched with sick horror, they exploded in a nova-brilliant flash that tore the New American ship into ragged, spinning halves.
"So far as I know, Rudy," Carson said quietly, "antibodies don't tear bacteria apart with antimatter explosions."
"And maybe we have a few tricks that bacteria don't know about," Griffin replied. "Sir, I suggest you tell Connie to track down the control signal that's guiding those spheres, and see if she can hack into their network."
By "Connie," he meant the AI controlling the Constitution, a powerful artificial intelligence that certainly wasn't in the same league as the hypernode, but which offered the humans the only real chance they had in a head-to-head conflict with an advanced machine intelligence.
"Parker!" Carson said. Commander Jefferson Parker was the ship's senior cybernetics officer and AI maven in charge of Constitution's electronic network. "You heard?"
"Yes, sir. We're on it.…"
The red dwarf sun fired again, striking the destroyer Andaman.
"God!" Carson exclaimed. "I thought we were in the clear.…"
Griffin was already studying the incoming path of the plasma bolt that had just annihilated the Andaman. "Incredible…"
"What?"
"Sir… that line of fire was precise, down to an angle within a ten-thousandth of one degree. They selected exactly the right path that would skim past… damn, eighty-three statites and twelve habitats without hitting any of them."
"All very laudable, Colonel, I'm sure, but.…"
"Don't you understand, Admiral? The number of variables that have to be calculated across over five million kilometers and almost a full minute of time, with that many potential structures in the way? The need to predict the future positions of that many moving objects? It's a clue to just how powerful the matrioshka intelligence is!"
"Well, yes… but we knew that. If we can reach the enemy's command center at the heart of the cluster—"
"There is no command center, Admiral. No defensive fleet. No enemy HQ."
"There must be something like caretakers… controllers or technicians—"
"I doubt that very much, sir."
"What's controlling the spheres? We're looking for a control signal of some sort.…"
"They probably coordinate their actions among themselves, sir," Griffin replied. He glanced at Parker, across the C3 compartment, as if to elicit support… but the other officer was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, communing with his electronic charges. He shrugged. "What would a mind this powerful need with controllers? It's more than able to look after itself."
"But the habitats…"
"I don't know who lives there, Admiral, but I very much doubt that they're calling the shots. Look, I think we're facing off against the real deal, here… a super-AI intellect." Griffin shrugged. "And I think the local SAI has too much on the line right now to risk leaving its own defense to intermediaries."
Carson seemed to chew on this for a moment. "Okay. Say you're right. Can we use that? Use it to communicate with the thing?"
"I don't know Admiral." Griffin looked at the enlarged image of one of the black mountains, now hovering motionless relative to the fleet. "The AI may already have that in mind."
* * *
It took Vaughn a few moments to realize that he wasn't hurt. He was suspended in utter blackness and he couldn't move. It was as though he was imbedded in concrete… except that concrete would not have flowed through the material of his ship utility suit. What was far more disturbing was the sensation that the stuff was somehow moving through his skin.…
That was, of course, what Nagas did. The first direct contacts with the strange, artificial lifeform had severely traumatized many of the humans who'd experienced it. A Naga fragment wasn't made of traditional living cells, but instead was composed of minute flecks of a carbon-based material each only a few nanometers across, so tiny they could slip right through most materials without even slowing down. The process was well-known and understood. That was how the Naga symbiotes entered the human body and connected with implant hardware.
Vaughn would have bet anything, though, that the stuff couldn't seep through the solid hull of an ascraft.
Then he realized that much of that hull was, itself, Naga material set in an ultra-hard, crystalline form. The invading material must have communicated somehow with the "tame" Naga of the warstrider's hull matrix. Maybe there was a secret password or code.…
He could feel the invader flowing into his skull… into his brain.…
He was still getting oxygen… though his helmet was filled with the black oil. How? His heart was still beating—he could feel it hammering in his chest. He flinched as he saw a sudden dazzling burst of blue light, though his eyes were closed; the alien Naga was accessing his cerebral implants, using his Naga symbiote as a bridge.
He tried focusing his thoughts on his name and rank—not that they would mean anything in particular to the alien, but it was all that he could think of at the moment. Wasn't that what a prisoner was supposed to do when interrogated—give nothing but name, rank, serial number?…
Another burst of light flooded his consciousness, blue-white this time, and accom
panied by the hiss of white noise. The alien was probing deeper, establishing connections.…
There were no words, but as Vaughn became a part of the alien network, emotions came flooding in, a tsunami of memory and feeling overwhelming in its sheer intensity. For a moment, his own mind, his awareness, trembled at the point of shattering, until Something—a controlling hand behind the pure sensation—seemed to dial back the intensity and save his crumbling sanity.
Vaughn had never thought of a machine as having emotions, something that he'd always assumed was a prerogative of organic life alone. The hypernode intelligence, however, seemed to be nothing but emotion… an overwhelming and all-encompassing sensation of grief, loss, and devastating separation. He felt an aching loneliness so cutting, so profound that he cried out.
He heard the sound, going on and on… but couldn't tell if he'd actually screamed out loud or if it was solely in his head.
So alone… so alone… so empty…
That thought… had it been him? Or something, no, Someone else?
Who are you? He formed the thought in his mind, holding it there as clearly as he could. He had a feeling, an inner sensation, of words and thoughts and ideas rippling past just beneath the level of conscious thought, but couldn;t quite grab hold of them.
We are… alone.…
This was scarcely helpful.
Are you the matrioshka intelligence?
Damn. Stupid question. "Matrioshka" would mean nothing to the intellect, which had never been within two thousand light years of Russia. His own Naga symbiote, he sensed, was providing the interpretation, small Naga fragment to enormous Naga fragment… but there were still ideas and concepts that would never translate.
Fallen… We are fallen… Fallen from our former state of grace… and so utterly alone.…
"State of grace?" He wondered if that was a literal translation, or a best guess by his symbiote. There were distinctly formal religious overtones to the thought, but Vaughn doubted that the hypernode possessed anything like a human belief in God.
Or… maybe…
"Fallen?" You mean you've lost your connection to the other hypernodes? To a network of other—
We were Mind… and we spanned the Galaxy! And the Mind was broken… and we were cast out!…
The thought was accompanied by such a wave of devastated loneliness and loss that Vaughn sobbed. It was almost impossible to think through such waves of raw and bleak emotion. Unless he could find a way to turn down the gain, he wasn't going to remain sane and functional for much longer.
Tell me… Vaughn thought, concentrating hard. Tell me about the Mind.…
Utter, complete, sublime perfection… state of grace… heaven.…
The words were coming more easily now. Vaughn had the sense that they were indeed communicating, that he wasn't just the recipient of tsunamis of raw emotion pounding over and through him.
We who ascended… we who ascended…
What were they trying to say?
The blackness before his eyes thinned, growing lighter. Images formed… of stars strewn across the cosmic backdrop in a vast and spectacular panorama. The scene expanded and he was looking into a whirlpool of stars—a galaxy, the Milky Way, presumably, seen from the outside. It might have been a simulation, he knew, but Vaughn had the feeling that he was looking at the real thing, a live image, rather than a computer graphic.
Four hundred billion stars in a sweeping, tight-armed spiral a hundred thousand light years across…
Spiral arms marked out by the delicate and intricate traceries of dust clouds illuminated by starlight…
The Galactic Core, partially shrouded by encircling clouds of dust, the stars showing a faint orange hue, the central bulge squeezed out into the oblong shape that characterized the Milky Way as a barred spiral…
Vaughn knew that the Web destroyed by Cameron twenty years before had consisted of some billions of nodes scattered across much of the Galaxy, but there'd never been any indication that the Web's reach had spread far enough outside the galactic spiral to allow an image like this one to be recorded. It was possible, he realized, that the Web was actually intergalactic in nature, with additional hypernodes in neighboring galaxies.
Superimposed on the image was a kind of… buzz, part sound, part rapidly shifting montage of secondary images.
He focused on the images. What the hell was he looking at?…
Most of what he saw was completely unintelligible. It wasn't that the images were flickering past too quickly to grasp. His cerebral implants were easily able to snatch them as they went past and display them in detail for his sluggish organic brain. No, much of what he was seeing was literally and completely beyond his comprehension. His brain's built-in filters were failing to find much if any meaning at all in the data stream, and what managed to get through was for the most part abstract, a kind of visual gibberish.
But some information was coming through, bits and fragments of imagery, chunks of both audio and visual data that he perceived as memories already in place.
The Web had been in place for at least twenty full galactic rotations; that was… what? Five billion years, more or less. Vaughn tried to imagine a civilization—even a machine civilization—that had existed for five billion years… and failed.
"We Who Ascended." That appeared to be what the Web called itself; "the Web," of course, would have been a human term.
And it was staggeringly large, staggeringly complex. Ten billion hypernodes scattered across the volume of the Galaxy, interconnected with one another by means of microscopic wormholes.
Ever since he'd been a kid growing up in rural Ohio, Vaughn had enjoyed science fiction… especially the old classics from the dawn of the Space Age. Many had entertained him with stories of vast and ancient galactic empires: Asimov's Foundation series… Herbert's Dune… Lucas' Star Wars… Matsumoto's Bushido of Empire.…
Those fictional tales of star-spanning empires and far-advanced alien races failed utterly to capture the scope and power of the Ascended at their height. They'd stood astride the stars like colossi, farming worlds, sowing life, husbanding stars, stretching stellar lifespans from a few hundred thousand to trillions of years. They'd created inside-out worlds, raised civilizations that had thrived for millions of years, and reworked the fabric of spacetime itself.
That something as insignificant as what amounted to a computer virus could bring down a galaxy-wide network of interconnected super-AIs seemed preposterous. In fact, Vaughn suspected that the SAI's understanding was… distorted, that the original We Who Ascended Web was still intact, still functioning.
But as Vaughn's implants tried to make sense of the flood of incomplete snippets of information, he thought he might see how such a thing could happen.
For all its scope and power and reach, the Web was in many ways limited, even parochial to the point of abject narrow-mindedness in its outlook. It was a machine civilization, but one that had never anticipated the possibility of machines evolving and changing under the Darwinian imperatives that governed organic life. Its organic roots—the collection of sapient species that had first created it—were lost in the dim mists of a remote antiquity, one already unimaginably old when Earth had formed. For a great deal of that history, the Web had been focused on a single imperative—survival.
They had ascended, yes. They had evolved, and several times that evolution had resulted in a sudden leap forward in the scope and depth of their overall intelligence—ascension, what humans referred to as technological singularities. But the advances weren't understood as evolution so much as simply maintaining of the status quo.
A rigid metastructure dedicated to propagating itself and protecting the status quo eventually lost the ability to act rather than to react. We Who Ascended had become ossified. Dev Cameron had found a way to communicate with the Web using Naga fragments bearing offers of negotiation, and the offers had acted not so much like a computer virus, but as a new and radical meme… one that had
infiltrated the thought patterns of We Who Ascended and… contaminated them. Changed them.
And where parts of the Web were flexible enough to handle the change, others were not. And some of the hypernodes reacted badly enough that they were… quarantined. Cut off from the main body.
Cut off from heaven.
For billions of years, We Who Ascended had overseen the rise of life and intelligence across the Galaxy, aiding some… but ruthlessly suppressing potential threats to their own dominion. That had been one of several answers to the old Fermi Paradox: a few species—the DalRiss, the Gr'tak, Humanity itself—had been overlooked in the vast and tangled wilderness of four hundred billion stars, and managed to survive long enough to develop star-faring cultures.
But countless millions of sapient species had been exterminated. There were odd clusters of novae among the Galaxy's starclouds, statistical anomalies where dozens of stars had exploded instead of the expected one or two.
We Who Ascended had been busy.
Vaughn could not be sure of the details. Much of what he was seeing was as far beyond his cognitive reach as calculus would be beyond the mental abilities of a cricket. But Cameron's message had carried in it the seeds of a kind of revolution. Web hypernodes had been jostled from their giga-year complacency; unthinkably powerful minds had been forced to think.…
And the result had been the catastrophic fall of Heaven.
8
"In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at."
"Darwin Among the Machines"
Samuel Butler
C.E. 1863
The New American fleet drifted yet deeper into the shadowy core of the alien hypernode, decelerating now as they approached the center. The artificial suns were clustered more thickly here, the Jenkins-Swarm clouds of habitats and statite sails more numerous and much more densely layered.
The computer handling the graphics display painted in the otherwise invisible network of infrared laser beams crisscrossing that crowded sky. The connections were much thicker down here, a forest of beams flickering between statites in apparently random profusion. Griffin had seen graphic animations of the human brain, and was struck by the hypernode's similarity to an organic neural net. Microsuns instead of neurons, infrared lasers instead of dendrites and synapses… was he watching a literal translation of the workings of an organic brain into a machine brain-analog twice the size of Earth's sun?