by Ian Douglas
A couple of environmental techs had already removed their helmets after carefully testing the air and reported it breathable. The Marines in the landing party, though, remained buttoned up in full armor. Gray carefully cracked his helmet seal and gingerly took a breath. The air tasted strongly of ozone, but otherwise seemed fine.
“Everyone keep an eye on your exposure time in this sunlight,” Gray warned the landing party. “The instruments say the UV is not dangerous for short exposures, but we can still pick up a nasty sunburn down here.”
They’d touched down in Enigma’s southern hemisphere near the ocean. That line of sand dunes ahead blocked the view of the planet’s major sea. Gray began walking in that direction, trudging up the nearest dune until he could see the flat expanse of water, dark purple on the horizon.
“I wouldn’t wander too far from the shuttle, sir,” a Marine told him. His ID proclaimed him to be Major Greg Teller of Republic’s 2/3 Marine contingent.
“I’m not,” Gray told him. “Major, where’s your perimeter?”
“That dune line.”
“Right.” A couple of Marines were lying at the top of the dune with a crew-served plasma weapon between them. “I’ll be good.”
A second Mk. II Raven drifted down from a cloudless sky, its black hull morphing into its landing configuration as it angled toward an LZ farther up the beach. Altogether, Republic was putting down almost a hundred Marines in this area to protect twenty technicians and xeno specialists who were setting up a sprawling temporary city in the scrubland behind the dunes.
Aside from the bustle of human activity behind him, the landscape was unnervingly quiet. No animals. No bird or insect analogs. Low waves broke along the waterline, and a warm, steady wind was coming out of the sunset, but there was no sign at all of animal life.
Vegetation was abundant enough—purple scrub brush and tough, slender-leaved grasses a meter high behind the dunes. Gray noticed, though, that there were no piles of seaweed on the beach. Odd, that.
And the biologists had already reported an unexpected dearth of bacteria. There were microscopic organisms that appeared to be involved in the local equivalent of nitrogen fixation, but not the teeming swarms you would expect in a world as rich, as varied, and as filled with decay as Earth.
He was beginning to think that a better name for Enigma would have been Potemkin . . . as in the so-called Potemkin villages of Russia a few centuries ago. It was as though the entire planet had been cobbled together to present the tangible—and fake—promise of a normal earthlike world.
What were the aliens trying to say? Welcome? We have your best interests at heart? Or something more along the lines of step into my parlor?
High in the blue-violet sky, the gentle curves of several of the nearest Banks orbitals were visible, stretching from horizon to horizon and nearly lost in a faint haze.
Gray heard footsteps struggling in the soft sand behind him, and turned. Vasilyeva made it to the top of the dune, puffing a bit with the exertion. “What the hell are you looking for up here, Captain?” she said, out of breath.
“Just taking in the view. Magnificent, isn’t it?”
“I like my landscapes more civilized.”
“You really think this is some kind of invitation?”
“Hard to imagine what else it could be. They must have read the stats on Earth when they got close to our ship. Everything matches—atmosphere composition, surface pressure, temperature, gravity. So they’re saying . . . ‘Look! We made a place that’s just like your home! Meet us there!’ ”
“I hope you’re right. Seems a bit extravagant, though.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well . . . they construct an entire planet? They could have created a ball of charred rock . . . lava . . . ice fields . . . whatever . . . and set up one small spot that matched our temperature and atmosphere. At least that would have told us exactly where they wanted to meet with us.”
“I think they’re letting us pick our own spot. Besides, one tiny speck of heaven in the middle of a planetwide hell . . . that could seem a bit threatening.”
“How so?”
“It would be like saying, ‘Meet us right here . . . and you’d better behave! Otherwise we’ll switch off the weather control!’ ”
Gray nodded. “A very good point. They could still turn off the planet, though.”
“Turn off—”
“For beings as powerful as the Denebans, the difference between maintaining a given climate over an area the size of Manhattan and an area the size of Earth won’t be all that much. They created Enigma in the blink of an eye—they could yank it out from under us just as fast.”
“Trying to anticipate the motivations of a completely alien species . . . I’m not sure that’s even remotely possible.”
“Well, we have one advantage.”
“What’s that?”
“They must be just as curious about us, and about our motivations, as we are about them.”
“I hope so, Captain.”
“Me too. I’m counting on it in fact. Hello . . .”
“What?”
Gray pointed out over the purple sea. “There. You see that?”
“What?”
“One of our fighters reported something like that when they were checking out Enigma yesterday. Kind of like . . . I don’t know. A tornado made from dust motes.”
“Wait! I see it! A swarm of insects, maybe?”
“I don’t think so. We’ll know in a minute, though. It’s coming this way.”
The storm of dust motes was difficult to see—more like the shimmer of air above hot pavement than anything else, but compressed into a single twisting tentacle dangling from an empty sky. It didn’t quite touch the water, Gray noticed, though there was a bit of spray and foam moving along the surface as though it was being disturbed.
The disturbance was moving toward the beach.
“Put your helmet on,” Gray told Vasilyeva.
“Why?”
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to breathe that, whatever it is.”
Within another few seconds the swarm was upon them. The individual elements were too small to be seen with the naked eye, but billions of them clustered together, distorted the air, and showed there was something there. Gray could feel their impact as a gentle pressure against his pressure suit. After a moment’s hesitation, the cloud moved on.
“That was intense,” Vasilyeva said. “What is that?”
“I think,” Gray told her, “that it’s some kind of utility fog. Konstantin?”
“I agree,” the super-AI said within Gray’s thoughts. “Its composition matches what one of our fighter pilots reported during our initial investigation of this world. I would add that it appears to be an intelligent utility fog.”
Utility fogs were outgrowths of the nanotech revolution on Earth. Clouds of some billions or trillions of submicroscopic nanomachines could be linked together by a single operating system and directed to work in close concert to replicate any physical structure. The term had been coined in the late twentieth century by Dr. J. Storrs Hall to describe the then hypothetical robots, called foglets, of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.
Using a normally invisible and intangible haze of foglets that linked together on command, utility fogs would have been able to assemble themselves to seemingly create matter out of thin air, would have appeared to levitate or move objects—including humans—on command, could monitor and routinely correct the health of any humans present, would have created any physical agency from breathable air to a skyscraper to a ham sandwich . . . the list went on nearly indefinitely.
Evidently, the Denebans had perfected something very much like Hall’s original idea.
And Konstantin seemed to think that the Deneban foglets were intelligent as well. “Are you in communication with the thing?” Gray asked the AI.
“No. But I can sense its thought processes. The signals are far too complex to be
routine bookkeeping.”
“We need to get back to the ship!” Vasilyeva said. “That cloud may be trying to talk with Nikolai!”
The near invisible swarm was rapidly growing larger, a vast and towering cloud rising above the landing site.
“Is it?” Gray asked Konstantin. “Is it connecting with Nikolai?”
Konstantin, Gray knew, was in close communication with Nikolai.
“It’s not,” Konstantin told him. “But it does appear to be probing the Bright Light module.”
Gray had agreed to Vasilyeva’s request that the module be brought down to the planet’s surface on board the Raven lander, but with some reservations. He was concerned about how the Denebans might react to being confronted by their own deadly e-virus, even in heavily modified form.
“Remember, Elena,” Gray yelled, following after the woman as she slid and bounded down the steep dune. “Don’t trigger Bright Light unless I give you the order!”
“I know, I know!” She fell, stumbling in the soft, shin-deep sand. He caught up with her and gave her a hand up. Together they continued jogging toward the lander.
The alien cloud filled the local landscape, thick enough that it was a dark and opaque gray-blue overhead. More and more of the nanotech machines were spiraling in, creating a steady pressure like a strong wind.
“Start transmitting the history!” Gray shouted in his mind at Konstantin. “Now! Transmit the history!”
Konstantin had pieced together “the history” from various electronic records, most pulled from the Star Carrier America and her visit to the Omega Centauri star cluster.
“Transmitting,” Konstantin replied.
There was no way to know if the alien was receiving the message, but Gray had to assume that it was. Unless it had deliberately cut itself off from all contact with the humans that had just descended to this beach to avoid e-viral contamination . . .
Gray could see the message playing on a small, inset window open in his consciousness: views of the Omega Centauri globular cluster, 16,000 light years from Earth. Views of the whirling rosette of super-massive black holes opening a gateway into . . . elsewhere. And elsewhen. Views of the mysterious Rosette Alien constructs and artifacts, seemingly built of liquid light and stretching for vast distances through local space.
Views of the Rosette Aliens appearing at Heimdall and engulfing the ancient Etched Cliffs, a planetary computer housing whole artificial universes of diverse, uploaded alien species. Views of the fierce combat with the aliens, with their billions of small and apparently robotic spacecraft filling space in swarming clouds.
Views of the Rosette Aliens appearing in Earth’s solar system and descending on Earth . . .
Gray wondered if it wasn’t already too late. The Republic had gone into Alcubierre Drive before the Rosetters could reach Earth, but he had to assume that they had done so.
What had been the outcome as the human fleet met the intruder? Was there even still an Earth or a Humankind to which the Republic could return?
All of the available digitized information on the Rosette Aliens streamed out from the Raven lander, to be accessed by anyone with the appropriate technology.
“I am now in direct contact with the Deneban SAI,” Konstantin said in Gray’s mind. “And it may be willing to help us.”
Konstantin
Enigma
1438 hours, TFT
Konstantin felt the storm of the alien thoughts swirl about and through him with a tornadic intensity. He was not so much engaging in communication with the Deneban as he was watching its lightning-fast flow of thoughts, only a very few of which Konstantin could actually translate. Dr. Godfrey had been right. The Denebans did not have a spoken language as such but communicated by pulses of electromagnetic energy in binary. Teasing meaning out of that code was tremendously difficult, but when Konstantin had been in communication with the alien Gaki probes he’d learned at least the basics of the language.
His biggest problem at the moment was determining whether or not the Deneban aliens were conscious.
He’d run into this issue before. The Gaki probes sent to Tabby’s Star from Deneb were highly intelligent, artificial intelligences of amazing scope and power, far faster and far smarter in terms of information processing and analysis than any merely human mind. Unlike human minds, however, they were not self-aware. They were intelligent without being conscious.
For Konstantin, an apt metaphor, of which he was aware, would be termite colonies on Earth. Some constructed castlelike mounds rising as much as twelve meters or more above the ground, housing millions of insects, and with ventilation tubes, chimneys, and an overall nest orientation designed to maintain and control internal temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. The design and function of a living mound seemed to indicate intelligence. An individual termite was certainly not self-aware or intelligent, but intelligent behavior seemed to arise from the functioning of the colony as a whole, a super-organism composed of myriad tiny, unintelligent nest members.
In fact, super-organisms such as termite colonies were sentient—meaning they could sense and process information—without being aware of what they were doing. The same could be said of most computers, machines that could count and perform other mathematical calculations very quickly . . . but which could not discuss anything for which they’d not been programmed. Experts still argued over whether Konstantin and other super-AIs were truly self-aware or if they simply claimed to be so, presumably in order to relate to humans.
Konstantin, of course, had his own ideas about that, but he rarely discussed them with his human associates.
At the same moment he was telling Gray that he was in contact with the alien, he was merging a portion of his awareness with the swirling storm of alien thoughts. He couldn’t tell yet if he was sensing the Deneban SAI’s deliberate attempts to show him something or incidental background noise. He was able to glimpse fragments . . . images and scraps of meaning as he gently tweaked the translation program he’d generated during his interaction with the Gaki.
He could see the incoming Satori star sails enring the Deneb system, using the fierce light of the blue-white star to decelerate. Separate payloads were cast off from the enormous sails . . . maneuvered independently . . . joined together . . . unfolded. Robotic Deneban ships approached cautiously . . . signaling . . . then attacking. Konstantin couldn’t tell what sparked the fight, though he sensed there was some sort of breakdown in communications. Both the Denebans and the Satori were electronic entities, but they nonetheless were vastly different in their languages and means of perceiving the universe, in their evolution, in their understanding of the cosmos.
Konstantin had never considered the likelihood of different AIs being so mutually alien in design and understanding, but as he watched events unfolding within his mind he thought he understood what was happening. Organic beings of different species tended to be vastly different from one another due to their separate evolutionary paths, their basic chemistries, their philosophies and their understanding of how the universe worked. The Turusch and humans, for instance . . . it was hard to get more mutually alien than that. Or the Baondyeddi and the Agletsch, or the F’heen-F’haav and the jellyfish-like Glothr. Perhaps it made a weird kind of sense that the electronic minds created by such vastly different organic species would be different as well.
In some ways, the Deneban and Tabby’s Star AIs were more similar to one another—and to Konstantin—than the three biological species that had created them. In other ways, however, there were deep and profound differences between them, in the way they viewed and understood the cosmos, in the way they viewed themselves, and in the manner in which they related to others.
The Deneban mind, he sensed, was trying to explain its own comprehension of the universe to Konstantin . . . and failing. It had to do with the general abundance of the universe . . . of the abundance of available energy and the knowledge that the universe could and did provide for its favored . .
. chosen? Its children? The flavor of that thought was distinctly religious . . . but it was drawn from the matter-of-fact understanding that the Denebans existed in an ocean of limitless energy. There was nothing remotely like a god or gods within that philosophy . . . and yet the universe was unfailingly abundant, generous, and rich. A fish swimming in the ocean could never know thirst.
Maybe . . . maybe . . . the Denebans saw the entire universe as God, bringing forth living beings and providing them with all they needed to grow and flourish.
Or perhaps the idea of God was simply a relic of human influence within his programming. The universe wasn’t conscious, wasn’t loving or understanding or generous. It simply was.
Coupled with this liberality, however, was a sense of rightness and what was proper. Konstantin didn’t understand much of what he was sensing, but the Denebans were coming across not as demon monsters—the Satori view—but as rather stiff and straitlaced English gentlemen. Mutually alien species needed to be properly introduced. . . .
The Satori of Tabby’s Star were . . . different. Driven by need, by competition for scarce resources, by a worldview stressing us versus them. In that respect, at least, they were much more like humans than were the Denebans. When America had helped them fend off an attack by the Deneban Gaki, they’d immediately accepted the humans as allies, with an understanding of a distinctly human adage: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Konstantin sensed the threat represented by the Satori from the Deneban point of view. Millennia ago, their first starsails had entered the Deneban system, begun building larger structures . . . and probes of their alien electronic minds had revealed the plan to move Tabby’s Star, complete with its incomplete Dyson sphere, closer to Deneb—an unthinkable breach of propriety. The Denebans had struck back, infecting the Satori probes with the Omega virus and sending them back to where they’d originated. The virus had spread, the Satori device built to move their star had been destroyed . . . and the Dyson sphere had shattered.
