Bright Light

by Ian Douglas

  But . . . how did he know that?

  Memories collided . . . some fading, some growing stronger as they were reinforced by the reality surrounding him. He was . . . he was Trevor Gray, a stateless Prim, a native of the Manhatt Ruins who lived and farmed within the monolithic TriBeCa residential complex. He recognized one of the tower’s rooftop plazas, partly overgrown with kudzu and sky vines, recognized the night-shrouded panorama of ruined buildings extending on every side, pinpointed here and there by the flaring gleams of hearth fires.

  Somewhere in the darkness, a dog barked incessantly.

  But he was also Captain Trevor “Sandy” Gray . . . a USNA naval officer, commander of a light carrier, the Republic . . .

  That couldn’t be right.

  He put out both hands, resting them on the crumbling stonework wall at the edge of the rooftop. A piece shifted under his weight and he let go. Pieces fell into the night . . . tumbling down . . . down . . . down into the shadowy canyon depths.

  “Careful, Trev! That whole wall could collapse.”

  Startled, he turned. She was there, just behind him.

  “Angela!”

  “Trev? What’s wrong?”

  “You’re . . . you . . .” He shook his head slowly, a denial not of her, but of scattered memories.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  In a way, that was exactly what was happening. Angela had been his wife, his partner here in Manhatt. She hadn’t died, not really . . . but she’d had a stroke, a tiny clot of blood lodging inside her cerebrum, killing neurons, killing memories, killing aspects of the personality of the woman he adored. No!

  “Angela! What are you doing here?”

  “Enjoying the night with you? We came out to . . . Trev, what is it?”

  No. No. He’d been through all of this. It had taken years, with counseling and desensitization therapy and hard work, but he’d gotten through it.

  The memories, long dulled and pushed back into darker corners of his mind, were surging back full-force. He remembered too well. He remembered getting her, somehow, up the river and across the border into the USNA, remembered getting her to a real hospital utterly unlike the low-tech dens of disease and misery existing in the Periphery . . . remembered saving her.

  He’d agreed to pay for the hospitalization and stroke-reversal by agreeing to sign up with the USNA military service. The government had long had problems filling military quotas, and aggressively recruited within the Peripheries, regions formally outside of government control in the coastal areas, gradually flooded owing to centuries of ever-rising temperatures. One program let Primitives agree to military service in exchange for modern medical therapies and procedures, or for access to modern cerebral implants or life-extension mods.

  Things had not worked out exactly as planned, though. The effects of Angela’s stroke had been erased by modern medical technology, but the procedure had also wiped away other things, other parts of her personality.

  Like her love for him. She’d left him, eventually joining a polyamorous group somewhere up in the Hudson Valley.

  And Trevor Gray had begun his service in the USNA Navy, accepting the implants and downloads and training that had turned him into a fighter pilot and, eventually, a ship captain.

  All of that had happened, hadn’t it? It had been twenty-six years ago, but it had happened. He remembered it, all of it, so vividly.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  What was she doing here?

  “If the simulation is not to your liking,” a new voice said deep within Gray’s mind, “you may of course substitute another. Any world, any cosmos, is yours for the imagining.”

  At first, Gray thought the voice was Angela’s, but she was standing in front of him, lips slightly parted, eyes bright, as though waiting for him to make up his mind. The city panorama around them, he now realized, had frozen in time as well, the hearth fires now steady, unwinking points of light.

  Okay, he thought. Some kind of virtual world . . . a simulation. He was angry at the intrusion into his private life, especially a part of his private life that he’d worked so long and so hard to block.

  “Konstantin?” he asked aloud. “What’s going on? Who is this?”

  “Your AI is here with me,” the voice told him. “A part of me. We are what you have been calling the Satorai.”

  “You are the . . . the mind controlling this star system?”

  “An emergent intelligence, you would say, arising from all electronic networks, all computronium nodes and nexi, and all connected sophont life forms within this system, both organic and artificial, yes.”

  They’d communicated with the Satorai before, when America had visited the Tabby’s Star system, but always with an AI as a kind of interpreter; never directly and one-to-one, like this.

  “Let me speak with Konstantin.”

  “That AI is now a part of our metastructure. We are using it as a kind of filter to facilitate communication.”

  “Don’t hurt him! I need him!”

  “Why?” The Satorai sounded genuinely puzzled. “It is a small and minimally evolved sapient . . . barely conscious.”

  If it thought that of the super-AI, Gray wondered, arguably the most powerful artificial mind yet generated by human agencies, what must the Satorai think of mere humans?

  “Organic sophonts are severely hampered by their basic, primitive nature,” the Satorai told him, as if it had easily read his thoughts. “We, of course, make allowances.”

  Gray was losing patience with the heavy-handed patronizing.

  “The AI we call Konstantin is a vital part of our instrumentality,” Gray said, forming his thoughts carefully. He didn’t want to piss the thing off, but neither could he afford to let it run roughshod over the human expedition’s needs.

  Or personnel . . . and that included its electronic personalities as well as those that were strictly biological. When dealing with alien minds, whether AI or organic, it was in Gray’s experience better to draw the lines between what was and was not acceptable, and to define spheres of interest, as early in the exchange as possible.

  “We would greatly appreciate it,” Gray continued, “if you would release Konstantin, unchanged, unedited, and not under your direct control.”

  Angela and the New York cityscape wavered and vanished. In their place . . . the familiar interior of a log cabin in the old Russian village of Kaluga, sometime in the early twentieth century. The usual avatar of Konstantin sat behind a desk made of rough-hewn pine logs and stacked high with piles of paper.

  “I am safe and well, Captain Gray,” the image of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky told him. “As you can see.”

  Gray nodded slowly, but . . . did that meticulously crafted image and its words truly represent the Konstantin he knew? How was he supposed to know if the Satorai was living up to its part of the deal? Just because an AI-generated image said it was operating free of outside interference didn’t make it so. The Satorai would have access to all of Konstantin’s stored data and could present itself in any way that it thought might serve its purpose. A human would have no compunction about lying to a dog, if that concept even applied in any moral sense.

  The image had its hand resting on a thin book lying on the desk. The title was in English: Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rockets.

  And that brought Gray up cold. He was quite familiar with Tsiolkovsky’s original writings. The title of his best-known work, published in 1903, was Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Reaction Devices. That final phrase in Russian was reaktivnyy priboramy, not rakety.

  The translation was . . . accurate, but a red flag. Yes, a rocket was a reaction device, something following Newton’s Third Law that stated that every action generated an equal but opposite reaction, and it was quite possible that the slight difference was due to the vagaries of translation, but Gray sincerely doubted that to be the case. Konstantin the SAI was almost unbearably pedantic at times in its depictions of hist
orical, scientific, and linguistic reality. Gray honestly couldn’t remember offhand whether he’d ever seen any English titles among the collections of books in the Kaluga illusion’s library; he didn’t think so, but he didn’t want to pull up a recording of one of his memories and thereby call attention to the fact.

  But he thought that by far the most likely possibility was that Konstantin had introduced that minute change in his presentation of the Kaluga schoolteacher to alert Gray that he was not operating freely—a way of saying “Help me” in subtle code.

  Gray actually felt relief at the knowledge. Clearly, Konstantin still had some freedom of thought and action, and was not merely a puppet moving as the Satorai twitched at his strings. The implication was that the Satori was far, far larger and more powerful than Tsiolkovsky and was in a position to squash the human-generated SAI like a bug if it got out of line . . . but also that Gray now had an ally subsumed within the alien megamind.

  They both would have to act with extreme caution, though, if they were to survive this encounter. The Satorai had just revealed that it was capable of duplicity. And that made dealing with it dangerous in the extreme.

  “So why that walk down memory lane?” he asked, using the change of topic to cover his growing fear.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were feeding me my own memories. My wife, from back on Earth. The place I lived. Stuff that happened over twenty years ago.”

  “With your AI’s help, you sampled a possible eschatoverse here within our multicosm, one based on your own personal experience.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Our assumption is that you, all of you, wish to merge with the Satori multicosm. We see now from Konstantin’s memories and directives that this is not the case, and we apologize for any emotional discomfort you may have experienced. Still, the experience was intended to reassure you.”

  “Surely, you didn’t think that dropping me back into my old life like that, no warning or anything, was going to reassure me!”

  “Konstantin indicated that it would. Perhaps your emotional bond to your AI is misplaced. It may not know your true imperatives as well as you believe. It is, after all, an extremely primitive collection of code and algorithms.”

  Was the alien AI trying to goad him, Gray wondered? Or, worse, goad Konstantin? Gray couldn’t tell if the Satorai’s social clumsiness was due to its alien nature, or something deliberate . . . even malevolent.

  “We’re not here to enter your eschatoverse,” Gray said slowly. “We came out here to help you . . . and, in exchange, to get your help for a problem we’re having back at our homeworld. But . . . if you’ve absorbed Konstantin’s memories, you already know that, don’t you?”

  “I am aware of it now,” the super-AI replied. “You must forgive me. There is a great deal of data, and your encryption methods are alien to me, requiring a great deal of time—several full seconds in fact—to process. However, I can tell you that this force you call the Rosette entity is an intruder from some other, quite alien, universe.”

  “That’s one theory . . . a somewhat controversial one. We don’t really know much about it, except that it’s big, extremely advanced technologically, and tough to communicate with.”

  “No, we are telling you . . . it is an intruder from a parallel universe.”

  The image of the Russian schoolteacher faded out, replaced by a 360-degree view of space. Gray knew that scene well. He’d been there several times when he’d commanded the star carrier America. The image, in fact, was stamped with flickering lines of data indicating range, densities, velocities, and other arcana; this was a recording made by the America and stored within Konstantin’s memory.

  From Gray’s point of view, he was adrift within the fiery heart of a giant, star-clotted globular star cluster, looking down upon a sextet of black holes, each the size of a small planet and massing many times Earth’s sun . . . the Omega Centauri Rosette. Those utterly black spheres were whirling around their common center of gravity, and in the space between them, alien starfields shifted and wavered, came and went, some looking like ordinary space scattered with stars, some . . . nightmarishly other.

  “The gateway,” the Satorai went on, “is this fascinating ring of gravitational singularities. As they rotate around a common center of gravity, they distort local spacetime to create multiple pathways through space, through time, and even into alien universes. The number of possible pathways may approach infinity. . . .”

  As the alien intelligence continued speaking, a message came through to Gray on a side channel.

  “Captain? This is Rohlwing.”

  Gray carefully isolated the channel, the electronic equivalent of a whisper. “What is it, Commander?”

  “We’re getting extremely fast, extremely aggressive electronic probes of our systems.”

  “Source?”

  “Outside. Probably the super-AI inside those oversized umbrellas out there.”

  “Are you blocking them okay?”

  “So far, sir. Firewalls are in place. But your link is still open.”

  “Cut me off if you have to. Don’t let that thing through. It’s got Konstantin.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  He turned his full attention back to the Satorai. “We suspect,” it was saying, “as we scan the data accumulated by Konstantin, that your entity is an emergent swarm intelligence from a universe far older than this one, one with an extremely high level of entropy and inaccessible background energy. It may have come through seeking to extend its own existence within a younger, lower-entropy, more energy rich cosmos.”

  “Okay. How do we stop it?”

  “We really have no idea.”

  Gray felt a stab of anger. Was the alien AI refusing to help by feigning indifference? Was it taunting him? “You represent a civilization far in advance of ours technologically. You must have something . . . weapons . . . some means of manipulating spacetime. . . .”

  “Nothing that would help you. You must understand, humans, that the Satori, as you call this civilization, have relinquished their addiction to mechanism and instrumentality. A reliance on machines and weaponry ultimately proved to be a dead end.”

  “You were moving your own sun, for Christ’s sake!” Gray shouted, exasperated. “We saw the records the last time we were here!”

  “Indeed.” The Centauri Rosette gave way to a view of space surrounding Tabby’s Star, the inner regions inside the encircling swarms of statites: immense chunks of crumbling megastructure adrift around a fiercely bright white star, some clumping together, some grinding against one another and generating swirling clouds of dust. “And the inhabitants of Deneb destroyed the habitat we were building, along with many billions of organic Satori. Since that time, we have been constructing statite sails suspending computronium nodes, and our citizenry, both organic and artificial, have uploaded themselves into electronic worlds generated within those nodes.”

  “Eschatoverses,” Gray said, the word tasting unpleasant as he shaped it. “What are they . . . different versions of alien heavens?”

  “In a way, though we don’t fully comprehend what you mean by heaven. As you experienced for yourself a few moments ago, each entity can enter an entire cosmos of its own creation, detailed renderings of past times or imaginal futures. They can have the traumas of the past erased, can mingle their ’verse with others, or remain isolated with companions created by the background system. They can enjoy any technology they can imagine, any experience they wish, travel anywhere they desire, have any experience, live in worlds of absolute realism in terms of physics . . . or in dreamlands of bliss and magic, or they can shift between the two. The choice is entirely theirs.”

  “And how are you going to deal with the Denebans? They’re still sending their Gaki stellar sails here, you know, still using viruses to attack your statites. We fought with them when we were here before, with the America. Don’t you have anyone awake to deal with that?”

  “Ye
s,” the Satorai replied. “There is us.”

  The term us, Gray realized, was slightly misleading. The Satorai was resident within some billions or perhaps trillions of computronium nodes surrounding Tabby’s Star, and was made up of a very large number of highly intelligent minds working together in concert, a gestalt that was the super-AI mind called the Satorai. It referred to itself, Gray had noticed, as “we” and “us,” but in fact it was a single mind, one made up of billions of smaller parts analogous to the neurons of the human brain.

  “Your people,” the Satorai went on, “helped us recently. We can recommend building on that cooperation. Our guidance, together with your warships, offers a strong promise of success against this threat.”

  “Maybe,” Gray replied. “But only if you release Konstantin . . . and the human forces are guaranteed autonomy.”

  “But Konstantin is free to do as it likes.”

  “He is not. You know that to be a fact, and so do we. We have no basis for cooperation if our agreement is based on duplicity, on coercion, or on lies.”

  Gray was now certain of Konstantin’s prisoner status within the alien network. The SAI had fired off a couple of warning flares, warnings hidden from the Satorai’s alien overview. There was that book title on the Tsiolkovsky avatar’s desk. More than that, Konstantin would have known that meeting his one-time wife on that Manhatt rooftop would have emotionally blasted Gray; for him to tell the Satorai otherwise could only mean Konstantin was hiding a message in plain sight, one that Gray would recognize but the Satorai would not.

  The message was as painfully simple as it was obvious: don’t trust the Satorai.

  Gray had also made another observation on his own. The Satorai had said “your people helped us recently,” not “you,” a microscopically small point but an important one. It had been Gray himself who’d been here before, commanding the America when humans had first visited Tabby’s Star and made contact with the Satori. The Satorai might literally be unable to distinguish between individual humans, to tell one from another, no more than a human could tell two bacteria apart in a culture dish.