Noumenon Infinity

by Marina J. Lostetter

  Anatoly scanned the page. “Turn on the monitors,” he yelled, simultaneously crushing the sheet in his fist. “Now!”

  A bank of screens in the nearest wall sizzled to life, each projecting the same feed, but in different false-color spectrums.

  Six versions of the Web rotated in unison.

  Six versions of the Web appeared to blur.

  Six versions of the Web peeled away from LQ Pyx like the rind of an orange.

  Anatoly focused on a feed in the middle, and watched as the star shifted into a new life phase.

  The Seed—the largest of the nodes, different from all the rest—pushed itself away from the dying star, drawing the Web with it, the lifting completed, the star gouged.

  Gravitational waves rippled through the region as a star’s worth of mass rearranged itself, shifted. The convoy bobbed, and Anatoly reached for a handhold.

  “It moves?” someone screeched, echoing aloud the shouting in his own mind.

  The Web broke apart, forming into long tentacles that hubbed at the Seed.

  Ideas ordered themselves in Anatoly’s mind. They’d all been taken for fools. The Web wasn’t unfinished when they found it—it had been decommissioned.

  Because it moves.

  The Seed edged away slowly. Its pulsing varied, softly making course corrections while propelling it into dead space at a thirty-degree angle to where the convoy sat. Its speed was that of a starfish over rough terrain—at this distance, it seemed barely a crawl. Yet it felt like the stalking slink of a great beast. A calculated lumbering, like a carnivore sneaking up on its prey.

  All was still in the belly of Slicer, the people once again shocked into a frozen hush.

  Eventually Anatoly turned to the messenger. “I need to get over to Mira. I need to see the captain. Kaeden, will you—?” He signaled for his cycle partner to accompany him.

  The trip by shuttle was brief but agonizing for Anatoly. Every moment he spent stagnant in the shuttle, the Seed pulled their energy farther away.

  Joanna, notified of his arrival, met them at the docking bay. “In my ready room,” she indicated, pivoting with rigidity, hands clasped direly before her, leading them onward.

  Margarita Pavon, Donald Matheson, and Joanna’s first mate, Michael Nwosu, were already there when they arrived. It was a small gathering of board members—whomever Joanna had been able to summon on such short notice.

  Captain Straifer took her seat at the head of the table. “We need a plan of action,” she said immediately. “And we need to know what’s happening and why it’s happening.”

  “It’s delivering a payload, the energy,” Nwosu said confidently.

  “How do we stop it?” asked Matheson.

  “I don’t know that we can,” Anatoly said.

  “I don’t think that we need to,” said Kaeden.

  “What?” Anatoly asked, surprised.

  “We can follow it, harvest devices as we go. We can take enough of them away to make this endeavor worth our while before it reaches . . . well, wherever it’s going.”

  “And what if the recipients don’t like being shortchanged and come after us?” asked Pavon.

  “We did the work,” said Kaeden. “Sucks for them.”

  Anatoly, though, couldn’t help feel what they were implying didn’t make sense. “What if . . .”

  “Anatoly?” Joanna asked. He looked up at his sister, his eyes haunted. It wasn’t all clicking just yet, but the train of thought about the Nest and the gap . . . there was something about all this that still didn’t sit right.

  “I don’t think it’s heading back to the home world, to whoever designed it,” he finally said.

  That gave the room pause. “Where then,” Joanna entreated, “do you think it’s going?”

  He briefly outlined his shaky train of thought, laying out the dots, hoping the others would help him make the connections. “If . . . if . . . Okay, what do we know? The Nataré broke into the Seed, and it fried their ship, right? Killed the crew, maybe even vaporized them. We thought they were just trying to investigate its inner workings, but what if they weren’t? What if the frayed edges of the gap—what we’d long thought to be caused by collisions with space debris—what if that damage was consciously wrought?”

  “You think the Nataré came here and destroyed parts of the Web? Tried to harm the Seed?” Joanna asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. What if they originally came to build, just like we did. And when they turned it back on, they learned the truth.”

  “What truth is that?”

  “I don’t know, but why would they try to decommission it? Presuming they spent at least as many hours, as many resources, as we have, why then would they try to undo their work?”

  “Because it’s not a Dyson Sphere,” Matheson said, arms crossed firmly over his chest. His gaze was fixed on a shiny fleck of gold in the green tabletop. “It’s not something useful, it’s something dangerous.”

  Anatoly gulped dryly and palmed at his mouth. “There are two things we know about the Web for certain. It’s mobile, and it can kill stars.”

  “My god,” Joanna said, standing, turning away from the group for a moment. “Did we . . . Did we reactivate an ancient weapon?”

  Was it all for nothing?

  Worse than nothing—for the destruction of LQ Pyx’s system, and the next? And the next. On and on until . . . What?

  “It’s a star-killer. A system-destroyer. Maybe.” Joanna pinched the bridge of her nose, eyes shut in exasperation. “But why—why would someone build something like that?”

  No one had a good answer.

  Everything they’d ever believed had been turned on its head.

  Anatoly felt like he was rotten inside. Little bits of him were crumbling into black-and-green putridity. He’d been the man at the top: the head engineer who would see to the Web’s unity. The Revealer who would show the convoy the supreme power of ancient technology. The convoy member who would give all the lives in his continuum a renewed purpose. He was supposed to close chapters and open new ones: glorious, wondrous chapters in humanity’s history.

  But now? Now he was the man who had unleashed the monster.

  He wasn’t Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. He wasn’t even hapless Pandora, sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. No, he was some caricature of Narcissus, who’d been so enamored with his own glory that he let truths float down the river of time and over the falls of inevitability. He was Icarus, flying too close—perhaps literally—to a sun. The obviousness of the Web’s malign existence glared at him from the bottom of those falls, swallowing the hopes and dreams of his life.

  “The Revealer of Its Power knew,” he mumbled. He realized he was staring at his lap while the rest of the group stared at him. “Reginald Straifer the Fourth knew.” Yes, I.C.C. said he’d died of an aneurysm, that it had made him hallucinate. But these days, no one was sure it could trust such an old recollection. They understood things now, about the continuum, that they hadn’t before. Could Reginald have truly been visited by the consciousness of the Seed? Could he have known all those years ago that they were acting in service of a monster?

  “It’s a weapon,” Anatoly said vehemently. “It’s a brilliant construction. It destroys and gathers energy for the next kill at the same time.”

  “And you think someone put it out of commission before? The crew of the Nest?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly.

  “Do you think we can do it?”

  He shook his head yes, then no. “I don’t know. It turned on when we completed it, which would suggest it can be decommissioned with a few slices. But there were AUs of Web missing when we found it.”

  “I’m still not convinced it’s a weapon,” Joanna said. “Just because it doesn’t behave as we anticipated doesn’t mean its malevolent. I want to know what it’s trajectory is before we jump to any conclusions. I.C.C., get me an astronomer. Whoever’s fastest at calculating interstellar destinations. You’ve b
een monitoring the Web, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I want to know where this thing is pointed. That might give us a clue as to its mission—what its target might be, its . . . intent.”

  “Of course. And, if I may interject?” said I.C.C.

  “Please,” said Joanna, making a gesture that said you have the floor.

  “When the sphere activated, I detected extremely high bursts of uniform radiation. So uniform, I find it suspicious.”

  “You think it sent out a signal? Was it alerting someone?”

  “Perhaps. But the bursts were not aimed at a single point. I detected sixteen separate trajectories.”

  The board members let a pause build. Eventually, Joanna said, “Is that all?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but I do not have enough information to formulate any hypotheses for you. I have alerted Dr. Ka’uhane to your need, though, and she is currently on her way.”

  “Thank you,” Joanna said tersely.

  Twenty minutes later, a disheveled Dr. Ka’uhane stumbled into the room, several ‘flex-sheets pressed to her chest. “I did most of my work on the shuttle ride over,” she said immediately.

  The ‘flex-sheets fluttered as she shuffled between them. “Ah, here.” She squeezed in between the captain and first officer, smacking a sheet against the table. “At this trajectory, its nearest possible target is this system.” She jabbed at the data. “There isn’t so much as a wandering rock between here and there. But I don’t think that’s really its destination.”

  “Why not?” asked Joanna.

  “Because, at its current speed, it would take twelve thousand years for the Web to get there.”

  “I hardly think that rules it out,” Joanna said, crossing her arms. “How many trillions of man-hours went into building the thing in the first place? Twelve thousand years is nothing.”

  Anatoly explained the weapon theory to Ka’uhane. “Is there any reason you can infer—or, heck, take a wild stab at—for it to target that system?”

  The astronomer shook her head. “No. I mean, it’s the closest system to LQ Pyxidis, but that’s it. No planets that we’ve been able to detect, either. It’s just the next star over.”

  “So, it’s just random? What’s the point of killing the closest star?” Joanna sighed. “A weapon would have more intent.”

  “It could be strategic, we don’t know yet,” said Anatoly, sliding the ‘flex-sheet closer for a better look. “Or, maybe it’s MAD.”

  “The Web is angry?” Joanna asked skeptically.

  “No,” Anatoly shook his head. “I mean, what if it’s a true doomsday device? One created so that it would never be used because its activation would lead to Mutually Assured Destruction. I mean, as far as we can tell, the Web was designed to be perpetual. To exist forever. I think it might even have the capacity to make its own minor repairs. I found evidence of internal damage on one of the devices we harvested for replication. It had been fixed, and I assumed it had been fixed by previous builders, but now . . . I don’t know anymore. If it is a doomsday machine, then maybe eating everything in its path is the point.”

  “That’s so senseless,” said Nwosu.

  “We can’t expect all interchanges between civilizations to be jovial,” said Anatoly diplomatically. “Look at what happened when the convoy went back. Those were our own people, but the cultures were so far removed they couldn’t help but clash. Just imagine two alien cultures meeting for the first time—why should we assume everything would be all pinks and blues? I think it’s easy to see how one civilization could want to wipe out another. If you perceived someone as an ultimate threat to your way of life, you’d want to get rid of them. What’s better, then? A prolonged war, or one swift genocidal swoop?”

  “Not so swift,” someone mumbled.

  “But it should have stopped,” Pavon protested. “Any conflict it was built for has to be over. No one would really make a doomsday device that would go on forever. No one.”

  This felt so wrong. They’d devoted themselves to the Web for a thousand years. A thousand years of hope, gone because they’d failed to see the truth before activation. Silly children—pressing buttons and throwing levers when we don’t know what they do.

  Anatoly took a deep breath. “You’re right, it’s too extreme, too—” A morbid idea struck him. “Maybe it hasn’t destroyed the enemy yet.”

  The room had been fairly quiet before, their conversation subdued, but now a deafening silence swallowed everything up and refused to spit it back out again.

  Eventually, Joanna pried her voice free. “But we haven’t found any other civilizations, there’s no one within range except—No. Why? Not—”

  “Earth?” Anatoly said.

  Dr. Ka’uhane held up a finger. “But it’s not angled the right way, its trajectory—”

  “Might only suggest that the gun isn’t loaded yet,” said Anatoly, standing. “The Web isn’t from here. It didn’t start at LQ Pyx. Those beings who commanded the Nest followed it here and stopped it before it ate our star.”

  Something clicked for him. “Do you remember the stories about the dark planemo? Where we stopped and our convoy split? There was evidence of a staging ground, that they were building something. And their maps showed a gravity well worthy of a star—a star that wasn’t there when we arrived. What if that’s where the Web originated, or even just where the Nataré found it? Maybe that’s where they began working on it, and it ate that star, too.”

  Maybe that’s how they knew, why they came here and tore through its tentacles.

  He thought about the convoy splitting, about the reasons Infinitum and Ultra had gone their separate ways. One had wanted to build, and one had wanted to study. But the two paths weren’t at odds. If only Infinitum had listened to the Ultra crew—if only they’d truly understood the importance of the Nest and the Nataré—maybe they would have realized that to build was folly.

  The already-deep pit of despair in Anatoly’s belly grew deeper still.

  “Back up, what do you mean ‘the gun isn’t loaded yet’? Joanna waved her hands in front of her chest. “You don’t think the star-killing part is the weapon?”

  “Maybe it needs the energy to load the proverbial gun.”

  “And then what? A death ray comes shooting out of the Seed?”

  Anatoly shrugged.

  “Hold on,” said Nwosu. “Why would the Nataré care? I mean, if it’s coming after Earth? And I’m still not sure why we think it’s Earth at all? We were barely blips on the biological radar when this thing was built—less than blips, not even ghosts. There’s no way of knowing, and no reason to think, that anyone even knew there was life in the vicinity. It would have been dead space, silent around here.”

  “Silent? Like it is now?” Matheson said.

  “Well, sure. But, I mean, there’d be no reason to see Earth as a threat, presuming some advanced civilization even had the means to spot it.”

  Anatoly snapped his fingers. “What was that theory? An old theory. It was about a superadvanced civilization plotting out—”

  “Ultra Civilizations?” suggested Dr. Ka’uhane.

  “The concept of an Ultra Civilization was introduced in 2067 by Doctor Tia Dacascos,” I.C.C. offered.

  “Right.” Anatoly’s hands trembled as though he was sick with the shakes, but he wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement—the thoughts evolving in his mind evoked both. “A civilization so vast and advanced that it has calculated its needs for survival until the end of the universe. Every decision they make depends upon those calculations. What if the Web’s purpose is to take out potential competition? If their calculations indicated that the only way for them to live until the end was to destroy fledgling life-forms, they would do it. They would eradicate all other life to preserve their own. So the theory states, anyway.”

  He heard the words coming out of his own mouth, but could only think of them as an abstraction, as the intellectual dithering they were suppo
sed to be. An Ultra Civilization couldn’t exist, not really. Could it? Aliens that might be so hell-bent on preserving themselves until the end of time that they would kill all other life-forms at the drop of a hat?

  If the Web really was of such making, could the convoy have divined that years ago?

  Why, oh, why hadn’t the convoy studied more before it began building? Why was it more important to finish than to understand? Why hadn’t anyone seriously considered the thing as a potential danger?

  Did any of that really matter now? What’s done was done. What they were going to do, though . . .

  “We have to stop it,” he declared, finding new, sudden strength—strength that came from Nika Marov, his biological grandmother. He was familiar with the sensations that came with tapping into her portion of the continuum. This was the side of himself that refused to give up when situations seemed dire. The part that was afraid to fail, but at the same time refused to. “It doesn’t matter what its purpose is or who built it. We know it’s dangerous. It ate our star. LQ Pyx. Until we know more, we can’t let it continue.”

  “I’m detecting a change,” I.C.C. broke in at decibels far above the norm—the equivalent to a human’s panicked scream.

  The room’s main monitor flickered on. Within the frame the Web—now more like a living cephalopod than an artificial sphere—floated.

  The Seed’s new arms flexed, drawn toward it with dramatic curves, then uncurled and shot straight. The Web propelled itself away with new speed, like a squid blasting through the inky depths and out of sight. It left exhaust trails in the immediate vicinity, curls of haze expelled by each individual device, save the Seed. Though they could no longer see it, they could tell its trajectory had remained the same.

  Nothing the artifact did now could shock them—not anymore. So instead of adopting a new stony silence, the room erupted into action.

  “I.C.C., order the emergency landing of all shuttles, now,” Joanna demanded. “Dr. Ka’uhane, I want you to study that recording and calculate its speed. I’ll get you whatever personnel you need. We’ve got to drop into SD travel ASAP and follow the damn thing. Everybody go, now—make sure all areas and crew members are secured.”