Bright Light

by Ian Douglas

His second was a possible answer. Is this something like Enigma, that made-to-order planet out at Deneb? Is this an artificial place where we can meet the aliens . . . and talk to them?

  His third was one of shocked realization. The Harvesters built an entire planet out of empty space. This thing is a lot smaller than a planet. Does that mean the Harvesters are more technologically advanced than the Rosetters?

  There was no answer to any of these questions . . . not yet, not without a lot more data.

  America gave a savage lurch. “What the hell?”

  “Sir!” Gutierrez said. “It’s Bravo Tango! They may be using their time weapon!”

  America shuddered again. “What is that?” he demanded.

  “Ripple in spacetime, sir,” Gutierrez replied.

  “Bravo Tango is causing that?”

  “It’s at the epicenter of the disturbances, Admiral.”

  “Okay. Alert the rest of the fleet. Have everyone keep their distance . . . but concentrate their fire on BT-1.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The Rosetter time weapon appeared to affect everything within a given target area. It wasn’t that the human ships would be trapped in slow time while the aliens buzzed around them at what seemed to be impossibly high speeds. If the aliens entered the time field, they would be slowed as well.

  But what the weapon’s deployment did mean was that the Rosetters could complete their plans outside the time field at their leisure—bring in reinforcements, reposition their forces, perhaps bring up more powerful weapons—before the trapped human forces would have a chance to respond.

  Or—maybe—they would just leave the humans locked in temporal amber, experiencing seconds while the eons rolled past outside.

  “Everyone move in closer to Bravo Romeo,” he ordered.

  “What’s the idea, Admiral Gray?”

  The voice was Admiral Reeve’s. Technically, he had seniority over Gray, and therefore outranked him. He would be in command of the united fleet once it was assembled. The first New York ships were entering America’s battlezone, but they hadn’t yet formally merged.

  So until then . . .

  “The closer we are to Romeo,” Gray told him, “the less they’ll be able to use their time weapon. We don’t know what Bravo Romeo One is, but it’s a Rosetter artifact and it’s probably important to them.”

  “Use it for a shield?”

  “I guess. Force them to break off their attack, anyway.”

  Gray scowled. Admiral Reeve’s voice, speaking inside his head, seemed faster, almost manic, as if he was speaking extremely fast. Gray’s reply, he thought, must have seemed like it was dragging. The Rosetters’ time weapon was in operation.

  “Everyone!” he yelled. “Target your fire on Bravo Tango One and pour it on!”

  VFA-211, Headhunters

  BR-1

  Omega Centauri

  2059 hours, TFT

  The monsters, Meier saw, were being joined by something else.

  Lots of something else. They looked like spheres of pure gold half a meter across, and they hovered and floated and zipped above the landscape with obvious purpose and intent. Meier raised his hand, palm out. We have no weapons, we come in peace. . . .

  Well, that was a lie, he thought. But he wanted to impress on these beings that he and Schaeffer posed no threat.

  Were they robots, he wondered? Teleoperates? Or artificial bodies for organic life forms?

  Whatever they were, they were guided by intelligence. They floated among the monstrous flesh mountains as though escorting them, and a ring of them swiftly gathered around Meier and Schaeffer as if observing them.

  “They’ve been wanting to talk with you for a long time,” a voice said in Meier’s head.

  “They?” Meier took a deep breath, trying to quell the shaking inside. He was ashamed of the scream, and wanted to redeem himself . . . in Schaeffer’s eyes, and in his own. “Who’s ‘they’? For that matter, who are you?”

  “You may call me Nikolai,” the voice replied.

  “Nik—as in Copernicus?”

  In answer, one of the giants brought a massive pod, an extension of its own body, down to the ground in front of the two humans. The glistening, necrotic-looking flesh peeled back . . . dissolved . . .

  And left an egg-shaped silvery pod on the ground, three meters long. Meier recognized the Pan-European Bright Light Module from various briefings. A number, he knew, had been fired into the Rosetter cloud at the Battle of Earth. The aliens must have recovered this one.

  “As to who these individuals are,” Nikolai went on, “you might think of them as Refusers. Rosette Consciousness Refusers. They call themselves a name that means, roughly, ‘we who survived.’ ”

  Meier knew the concept of Refusers well enough. In the N’gai Cloud hundreds of millions of years ago, the ur-Sh’daar had transcended—the concept seemed identical to the human idea of the technological singularity—and moved on. To a higher plane, to another dimension . . . exactly what had happened to them was still being debated. But a number of individuals had balked. For whatever reason, not every member of the N’gai Cooperative had wanted to give up their current life. Refusers . . .

  “So these . . . these ‘Survivors’ were beings who rejected transcending with the Rosetters?”

  “In very approximate terms, yes. The Consciousness, as you must have gathered by now, transcended to a higher state a very, very long time ago. In fact, they seem to have transcended numerous times, each time becoming more intelligent—incomprehensibly so—and more remote from their purely organic beginnings.”

  Lightning played along one of the flesh mountains, a sharp, crackling burst of electricity much closer and louder than the last. Meier and Schaeffer both jumped a bit, startled.

  “It says,” Nikolai told them, “that you must stop the attack that has been launched from the alternate temporal set. Trillions of lives will be destroyed if you do not.”

  “Alternate . . . what?” Then it hit him. “The N’gai Cloud! The blue-giant star . . .”

  “Not even the Survivors know for certain what will happen if the blue star comes through. There is a chance that the energy emerging from a hyperdimensional rift will widen that rift . . . drastically.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning . . . among myriad possibilities . . . the unraveling of reality throughout this universe.”

  “My God . . .”

  “Or, on a somewhat less apocalyptic scale, the eruption of that star into the heart of Omega Centauri could trigger a cascade of hypernovae, possibly resulting in the creation of a small quasar.”

  “A small quasar . . .”

  “. . . which would still be powerful enough to extinguish all life in this galaxy.”

  Meier’s mind reeled. He had to remind himself that it would take sixteen thousand years for the energy wavefront released by a hypernova to reach Earth from this star cluster. Once it got there, however, it would be powerful enough to irradiate the planet.

  “That . . .” he said slowly, “would be a very bad thing.”

  “To say the least.”

  “So . . . that lightning show,” Schaeffer said. “That’s how they talk?”

  “The discharge distorts the local magnetic field,” Nikolai explained. “They encode that as speech, yes.”

  “And the floating gold orbs?”

  “A different species,” Nikolai said. “They call themselves the Remnant, and they exist in close symbiosis with the Survivors. They are digital uploads into robotic bodies.”

  “Tell them,” Meier said, “that we cannot stop that star. They’ll have to have the Rosette entity slam the gateway shut.”

  Lightning crackled. Meier heard the hiss of static over his helmet radio.

  “They say,” Nikolai said, speaking in measured in-head tones, “that the God has not . . . I believe the term should be ‘answered their prayers’ . . . in many, many ages.”

  “ ‘The God?’ ” Schaeffer as
ked.

  “My translation is not precise,” Nikolai told them. “But my understanding is that both the Survivors and the Remnant were . . . cut off from the association of entities that transcended. They follow the Consciousness now, hoping to . . . I’m sorry. I can’t understand the concepts they are presenting.”

  “They want to rejoin the Consciousness?” Meier hazarded.

  “I believe,” Nikolai told him, “that they want to be noticed.”

  Meier drew a deep breath. “We’ll need to get back to the fleet, and quickly,” he said.

  “They tell me that they can arrange for this,” Nikolai replied. “I suggest that you re-enter your fighters.”

  They did so, climbing into the open cockpits and allowing the nano-augmented fuselage to flow closely around them, locking them into its embrace.

  “Tell them I don’t know if we can do anything,” Meier called to Nikolai.

  “They understand. They will escape. But they fear for . . . their god.”

  And an instant later, the two Starblades were drifting in open space, half a kilometer from the America.

  Meier could only shake his head. “How the hell do they do that?”

  TC/USNA CVS America

  BT-1

  Omega Centauri

  2115 hours, TFT

  “Did it sound like they were threatening you? ‘Do what we say, or we’ll destroy the universe?’ ”

  The statement was so off-the-bulkhead that Gray had to stifle a smile as he said it. Gutierrez and a dozen members of the bridge crew, including his intelligence staff, were linked in and watching.

  “No, Admiral,” Pam Schaeffer told him. “It was more like a simple statement of fact. Like a warning that we really didn’t understand what was going to happen.”

  “They never threatened us,” Meier added. “They seemed to want to talk. . . .”

  The two fighters had appeared abruptly out of nowhere—two Starblades belonging to VFA-211—and the ship’s physics people were already arguing about teleportation and how the aliens might have pulled it off. America’s intelligence department was more interested in why. Were the Rosetters really attempting to communicate?

  The pilots, Meier and Schaeffer, appeared shaken but unharmed as they reported their remarkable meeting with organic aliens on board that artificial-world habitat. The Survivors and the Remnant. How often, Gray wondered, did this sort of thing happen? An entire civilization transcends into super-intelligence but leaves behind . . . orphans.

  “I hate to break it to them,” Gray said, thoughtful, “but I don’t think there’s any way of stopping that star. The Sh’daar set it rolling and then bugged out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, people,” Gray told them. “I’ll turn you over to the CAG and see about bringing you back on board.”

  “Ah . . . negative on that, Admiral,” Meier said. “If it’s all the same to you we’d like to rejoin our squadron.”

  “That’s right, sir,” Schaeffer added. “We were in there shooting the breeze with giant aliens while everyone else was outside fighting. That’s just not right.”

  “Okay. We’ll pass the word to Commander Leystrom that you’re on your way.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.” And on the bridge display, the two fighters accelerated, vanishing from sight almost as suddenly as they’d appeared.

  And Gray reached a decision on a problem that he’d been wrestling with for some time.

  “Tactical Officer!”

  “Yes, sir!” Dean Mallory replied from his station a few meters away.

  “What’s our bombardment doing? Have we hurt them?”

  “We’ve degraded the enemy’s data nodes by . . . we estimate fifteen percent. Less effect on Tango One.”

  “How much less?”

  “Less than one percent, Admiral.” Mallory hesitated. “It is a freaking planet, for Chrissakes! Sir.”

  “I hear you.” He opened an in-head channel. “Ms. Vasilyeva. To the flag bridge, please.”

  “I’m here, Admiral.”

  “Ah.” He’d forgotten she was there, seated in the shadows of the aft part of the bridge. “Our pilots reported that the aliens on Bravo Romeo One have gotten hold of one of the Bright Light modules. They used it to successfully communicate with our people.”

  “Excellent!”

  “Yeah, but these aliens aren’t the ones we need to talk with. Somehow, we have to get the Consciousness itself to notice us.”

  America shuddered as another temporal wavefront rippled through local spacetime.

  “Seems to me they’ve noticed us. . . .”

  Gray shook his head. “This is just the Rosette entity’s immune system. We aren’t aware of the individual bacteria that might trigger an immune response. What we need to figure out is how those bacteria could signal, could communicate with the human’s mind.”

  “Maybe the paramycoplasmas could help.”

  He thought about this. The swarm intelligence of the widespread alien bacteria called Paramycoplasma was definitely intelligent, highly so. It was also extraordinarily alien . . . so much so that finding any common ground whatsoever with that mind would be a real problem.

  Besides, there weren’t any, so far as Gray was aware, with the fleet. Most were on the other side of the Black Rosette, among the billions of Sh’daar life forms from various species “now” fleeing the N’gai Cluster. Even if there were some here with the human fleets, getting them into contact with the Rosette Consciousness seemed like an insoluble problem.

  “I don’t think so,” he said at last, rejecting her last suggestion. “But it makes me wonder . . . how many of those Bright Light modules do we have available?”

  “Here? On America?”

  “And the other ships in the fleet.”

  “I’m not sure. Your nanoreplicators were turning out a bunch of them before we went to Deneb. Fifty maybe?”

  “Not nearly enough to create a swarm intelligence.” He’d been working at a half-formed idea . . . to link a number of Bright Lights together, along with as many iterations of the AI Nikolai. If the humans could create a swarm intelligence substantially more powerful than any one human mind, maybe the Consciousness would notice that.

  Besides, Gray no longer trusted the Nikolai AIs. “Just as well,” he said. “I wouldn’t want all of those modules committing mutiny.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Vasilyeva told him.

  “Eh? Why not? Why did that one Nikolai hijack that Raven and hare off to Enigma?”

  Vasilyeva hesitated, as though carefully considering her answer. “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought, Admiral,” she said. “When Nikolai launched himself back at Deneb, against orders . . . I think the reason for that was because he’d gone out there with orders—very firm orders—to make contact with the Harvesters, okay?”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And not just to contact them, which we’d already done. But to establish a meaningful dialogue with them.

  “But suddenly we were abandoning the mission. That was directly counter to those orders. He did the one thing he could to carry out those orders . . . any way he could. He took the Raven and went back to attempt to talk to the Harvesters.”

  “And thereby committing mutiny and potentially jeopardizing the entire expedition.” Gray shrugged. “But it’s possible he accomplished something. The Harvesters dropped us through time just enough for us to get back to Earth early, and maybe shift the tipping point in the Battle of Earth.

  “But if Nikolai wants to talk to aliens that much . . . I wish we could use him—them—to get through to the Consciousness. I was thinking in terms of an emergent AI mind . . . but fifty individuals just isn’t enough to create the kind of hive mentality we’re looking for.”

  “If I may, Admiral,” Konstantin said, “I may have some thoughts pertinent to the problem.”

  “By all means. Whatcha got?”

  “Several points. First, we have had exchanges with the Con
sciousness in the past, you’ll recall. They were not complete, and likely I was in communication with only a portion of the entity’s mind, but I do have patterns drawn from it.”

  Gray nodded. At Kapteyn’s Star, America had tried to infect the Consciousness—the Dark Mind—with a kind of electronic virus—an e-virus—derived from the Omega Code of the Harvesters of Deneb.

  The Omega Code itself was a form of electronic intelligence, a very sophisticated, very powerful mind. The Harvesters had dispatched it to destroy the civilization at Tabby’s Star and had come quite close to doing so.

  The attempt to attack the Consciousness with a re-engineered form of the Omega Code had failed . . . though Konstantin claimed it had been a success. The Consciousness had been stopped at Kapteyn’s Star, but it had not been crippled or destroyed. A few weeks later it had been at Earth.

  Clones of Konstantin had been incorporated into the new Omega Code virus. Some of those clones had brushed thoughts with the Consciousness and returned to the human fleet.

  So Konstantin was absolutely correct in saying he’d had communication, even limited communication, with the Rosetter Mind. Knowing the fact that the entity referred to itself as “the Consciousness” had been the product of those exchanges.

  “Next,” Konstantin continued, “we know that the Consciousness is trying to find other Minds here . . . but its definition of ‘mind’ is rather narrow. It doesn’t recognize organic beings as being capable of intelligence. It’s looking for other minds as complex as its own.”

  “How about the beings Schaeffer and Meier ran into on the Romeo habitat?” Gray asked. “According to them, those beings, the Remnants and the Survivors, were like the Sh’daar Refusers. If that’s true, they must be among the intelligences that created the Consciousness in the first place!”

  “I find it interesting,” Konstantin said, “that the organic intelligence remembers this, while the Consciousness itself does not. That suggests a willful amnesia.”

  Gray chuckled. “Maybe the Consciousness is embarrassed by its past. Terrible having that kind of family secret outed—having a history of being organic flesh and blood.”

  “I know you are joking,” Konstantin said, “but there may be more to what you say than you realize. It also appears that the Consciousness is not the product of a single technological singularity, but of many of them.”