Bright Light

by Ian Douglas

  “How is that possible?” Vasilyeva asked. “I mean . . . you’re an organic species, your technology goes asymptotic, and suddenly you’re having trouble even defining what it is to be alive any longer—immortality, uploaded minds, super-intelligent AI, and all of that. That’s what the Singularity is, right? You can’t go through that twice!”

  “That’s what it would be for us,” Gray told her. “Suppose there are other breakthrough advances, technological changes, conceptual realizations . . . I don’t know . . . stuff that happens to a post-Singularity civilization that we miserable mortals can’t even begin to imagine. Maybe a post-Singularity culture keeps bootstrapping itself, finding more and more ways to improve its intelligence and its scope and its control of reality . . . and then—poof!—they transcend a second time. Or a third or fourth . . .”

  “Stop. You’re making me dizzy,” Vasilyeva said, waving her hand.

  “Okay,” Gray said, “so the Consciousness has been through so many singularities it can’t remember its past. How does that help us?”

  “It doesn’t, necessarily,” Konstantin told him, “save in our knowing that the Consciousness is not perfect, and that it may not remember other things from its remote past.”

  “Such as?”

  “The ability of individual organic beings to band together in order to become something greater than they were.”

  “I don’t follow,” Vasilyeva said.

  “My third point,” Konstantin told her. “It may be possible to enlist a number—a large number—of the humans and AIs within the fleet, by means of their cerebral implants and with mediation by the AIs. The net effect would be similar to a swarm intelligence. Not identical . . . this scenario would not result in an entirely new emergent mind. But the amplification of existing minds would have a similar presentation, a kind of hive mind, but retaining individual awareness. A large number of such interconnected minds, directed through those Bright Light modules, might be able to . . . hijack would be the appropriate word, I think—to hijack a large portion of the Rosette entity’s cloud of micromachines.”

  “And do what?” Gray asked.

  “Communicate directly with the Consciousness. At least talk to a majority of the Consciousness entity. We would, as you said, ‘get its attention.’ ”

  A jolt rippled through the ship. “Uh. How long would it take to set this up?”

  “Not long. I can see to the launch of the Bright Light modules, and to enlisting and briefing the Nikolais running within each one. You will have to speak with the fleet’s ship crews and tell them what we want. I would suggest that this should be a volunteers-only evolution.”

  “You think it’s dangerous?”

  “I don’t know,” the super-AI said. It sounded almost frustrated that there was something that it didn’t know. “There are too many unknowns here to permit an adequate forecast. If the Consciousness fights back, many of those participating could be injured or worse.”

  “It’s still worth the attempt,” Gray said, thoughtful. “If we just stay here, we’re going to be locked in time until . . .” His eyes widened. “My God . . .”

  “What is it?” Vasilyeva asked.

  “Time has slowed down for us.”

  “Yes?”

  “We don’t know how much. Comm! Can you raise any of the ships in Task Force New York?”

  “The closer ones, yes, sir. Some of the more distant vessels . . . I’m having trouble with that.”

  “The time flow here has diverged significantly from the flow outside,” Konstantin told them. “I can hear AI background chatter in the distant ships, but it is speeded up relative to us.”

  “How much?” Gray said.

  “I need to compare my clock with theirs. One moment . . .” Gray waited in an agony of silence. “I estimate we are experiencing time at a rate roughly one thousand times slower than time measured outside the effect of the enemy weapon.”

  A thousand times . . .

  He ran the figures through his in-head math processor. “Dean! Order a cease fire! Immediately!”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “What’s wrong, Admiral?” Gutierrez asked.

  “We have got to get through to the Consciousness now!” Gray snapped.

  “Why?” Vasilyeva sounded confused.

  “Because with time passing a thousand times faster on the outside, we only have something like four and a half hours in here!”

  “Four and a half hours? Until what?” Then her eyes widened. “Bozhe moy!”

  “Four and a half hours translates to eight days,” Gray said, grim. “We have that much time before the Sh’daar blue giant comes blasting through the Black Rosette!”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Unknown, 2426

  USNA CVE Guadalcanal

  Omega Centauri

  2130 hours, TFT (subjective)

  The Marine carrier Guadalcanal had been one of the first vessels of Task Force New York to emerge deep inside the cluster, and she was pushing hard now to join up with the America. Expanding spacetime ripples rattled bulkheads and set off alarms, but so far the ship was holding together well. Captain Laurie Taggart could see the America dead ahead, a million kilometers in the distance.

  In her head, she could hear Trev’s voice as he addressed the entire fleet.

  The quiet, unemotional tones sent a small shiver through her and made her realize how much she’d missed him.

  “This will be strictly a volunteer evolution,” Gray was saying. “And personnel on duty at key stations will not participate. If you want to take part, though, in-head a message to Konstantin, and he will link you in.

  “I’m told that all you will need to do is join the pack and enjoy the ride, that Konstantin and the other AIs will do any actual fighting that comes up, or handle any interaction with the aliens. We don’t know how dangerous this will be, if it is at all . . . but we do need as many of you to participate as we can take on board. . . .”

  Lieutenant Colonel Macy was floating in a corner of the Guady’s bridge, listening to the transmission along with every other person in the fleet. “Hallelujah,” he said. “Excuse me, Captain. I need to get back below.”

  “Where are you off to, Colonel?”

  “To be with my people, of course. This may be the first time in Corps history that we’ve charged the enemy . . . and done it all inside our heads!”

  “Give ’em hell, Colonel!”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am!” And he vanished through the hatch.

  Taggart wished she could participate . . . but obviously the captain of a ship was one of those “key personnel” Gray had just mentioned. She would have to stay here . . . her mind would have to stay here, while the Marine battalion and perhaps two-thirds of the ship’s Navy crew joined the assault.

  Damn . . .

  This type of attack was not without precedent, she knew. The recent short, bitter war between the United States of North America and the Pan-European Union had come to an abrupt end mere months ago when USNA had launched a virtual cyberattack against the European computer network nodes in Geneva. She doubted that memegeneering could play a role here in Omega Centauri, though. You had to know what the enemy was thinking, know how they thought, for that sort of thing to work.

  But just maybe her five hundred Marines, plus a few thousand other personnel from the fleet, could shout loud enough for the Rosette entity to hear. . . .

  TC/USNA CVS America

  BT-1

  Omega Centauri

  2148 hours, TFT (subjective)

  “Okay, Konstantin,” Gray said. “The show is all yours.”

  “Very well, Admiral.” The AI hesitated. “Are you certain you wish to participate?”

  “Rank hath its privileges,” Gray replied. “Captain Gutierrez is running the ship; my tactical officer can manage the fleet. I’m pretty much just here along for the ride.”

  “The front line of combat is not the proper place for command staff.”

  “Bullsh
it. Who says?”

  “The day when generals lead their divisions in a charge against enemy positions are long over.”

  “The day when admirals lead their fleets from the bridge of their flagship are still with us,” Gray replied. “In any case, I won’t be leading this thing. You will.”

  No merely human mind could direct the complexities, the sheer speed of virtual combat. And no AI could afford to wait upon the decisions and commands of a human leader, not when it was interacting with other AIs on time scales measured in nanoseconds.

  “Very well, Admiral. The probe is ready.”

  Probe, not attack. The idea remained to talk to the Consciousness, not disrupt it. If they could not make contact, however, they should still be in a good position to do a very great deal of damage.

  Gray was in the compartment that served as his office, just aft of the flag bridge. He let the acceleration couch enfold him, holding him down, closed his eyes, and opened the in-head connection to the probe.

  He could sense them . . . all of them . . . thousands of men and women strapped into racks as he was, and some hundreds of sharper, brighter lights representing the AIs. Fifty Bright Light modules hung in space ahead of the America, and Gray could sense the communications network connecting them.

  He could also sense more than one hundred ships, poised and ready, each with its own waiting AI, each with at least half of its crew linked into the probe. Gray was still surprised at the high number of volunteers . . . though, as he thought about it, he realized that perhaps he should not be. These were good people—the best—and he was tremendously proud of them.

  The fleet was spread out across a vast globe of space surrounding Bravo Tango One. The ships were no longer firing at the moon-sized object, and an air of expectancy seemed to pervade all local space. The Consciousness, for its part, was doing nothing. Perhaps it was watching, waiting to see what the humans were doing.

  “Initiate program,” Konstantin said, and Gray felt himself hurtling through space. It was a strange sensation, like flying without a ship surrounded by a sea of brilliant stars, each one the digital representation of another mind. He knew that all of the sensations were being manufactured by Konstantin or the other AIs and fed to his brain through the network link, but the illusion of genuine flight was breathtakingly real.

  The Consciousness

  Omega Centauri

  2150 hours, TFT (subjective)

  The Consciousness was aware of the attacks, of course, though it wasn’t certain of the cause. The . . . sickness, the pain had followed it back to the main body from Earth, making it wonder if the organic components it had encountered there had followed it and were continuing their assault.

  If so, it was as though they were being directed by Mind.

  It had slowed time within the star cluster’s central core, giving it time to step apart and consider every aspect of the problem. Standing aside, in an engineered spacetime pocket outside the temporal warp, contemplating the organic beings inside, the Consciousness was at last forced to admit what it had been denying all along . . . not only that organic intelligence existed, but that it could be of a fairly high order, and that now it was, in effect, at the back door trying to kick it down.

  The problem, it decided, was the youthfulness of this universe.

  The Consciousness had entered this universe from another, much older space within the infinite array of realities that made up the multiverse. Comprising some millions of machine intelligences that had merged their identities to create a single powerful Mind, the Consciousness had only vague and fleeting memories of its earlier, more remote iterations before that final joining, and no memory at all of having been a fusion of organic minds back in the early, dark mists of deep time.

  But it had been formulating a hypothesis, and current events seemed to support it. If the current iteration of existence comprised millions of lesser, precursor machine minds . . . what if those minds had been fusions of even more, even smaller minds . . . perhaps even of organic brains?

  The thought was staggering in its implications. The Consciousness had deliberately sought out a much younger universe, seeking to escape a far older cosmos that was in danger of ripping itself apart in a fast-accelerating expansion engendered by dark energy. It had done the calculations and knew that reality itself would begin to dissolve within a very few more cycles.

  It was able to detect the gravitational leakage from other universes adjacent to its own within the hyperdimensional Bulk. It had followed that leakage, identifying a gateway of sorts created by a sextet of black holes orbiting a common center of gravity.

  It had gone through.

  And in entering this new, younger cosmos, it had not given thought to an astonishing idea . . . that this universe was so young that electronic minds were few, most of them serving a bizarre organic intelligence that teemed and thrived and scurried here like the primitive organic life forms that they were.

  At last, like a complex equation dropping into its simplest form, the pieces fit together and the Consciousness understood.

  Life. Intelligent life . . . at least after a fashion.

  Life that created machine intelligence that only in the very remote future of this universe would achieve true sentience.

  The Consciousness turned its attention . . . down . . . down . . . down to the very lowest orders of existence, seeking the life it now knew must be here, the life responsible for its pain. If it could find the correct frequency . . .

  And the Consciousness in its totality became aware of Another Mind.

  TC/USNA CVS America

  BT-1

  Omega Centauri

  2150 hours, TFT (subjective)

  “Focus,” the voice of Konstantin told them. “Merge together! Merge your consciousness!”

  The sensation of violent movement continued, as Gray felt the lights around him moving closer, overlapping his own light, the cloud of separate minds joining with one another in a coherent whole. Ahead, somehow infinitely distant and simultaneously looming close, an immense shadow hung dark and foreboding against the gleam of background stars.

  Gray was aware now of the thoughts of a multitude of others, the massed sentience of a cloud of virtual humans. The thoughts at first were discordant and jumbled, lacking any clear direction, but as microsecond followed microsecond, he could sense the disparate thoughts achieving a kind of coherence, like multiple frequencies of light dropping into step with one another to generate an intensely powerful laser.

  On the one hand, Gray felt like an utterly insignificant mote caught up within a vast, whirling swarm of individual motes; on the other, Gray was that vast swarm, as its thoughts became more and more conjoined in a unified and tightly focused whole.

  Bright Light. Taken from the code name for the Pan-European alien-contact modules, it fit perfectly the massed virtual radiance of the human Mind. Bright Light arrowed into the shadow.

  The two touched . . .

  The two fused.

  “We need to talk,” Konstantin said.

  “I agree,” a voice replied, a thunder in the distance.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  The Black Rosette

  0235 hours, TFT

  After recovering the two Headhunter pilots from the cylindrical habitat, Lieutenant Gregory and the other Demons had swept around toward the Black Rosette, taking up positions just outside the zone of slowed time and rippling space. The battle appeared to have entered a deliberately established lull; America’s combat information center had ordered all units to cease firing, so something was happening.

  Gregory had no idea what that something might be.

  “We’ve lost contact with the America!” Ballinger called out. “I don’t have a signal!”

  “America is inside the temporal distortion zone,” Commander Mackey replied. “We’re outside. We won’t hear from her until our time flows get back in synch.”

  “Combat net is updating our time,” Lewis put in. “It’s
tomorrow. . . .”

  Inside the zone of twisted spacetime it had been 2150 hours. Now, according to the electronic communications web spun by the ships of the fleet, it was four and a half hours later—0235 hours, in the early morning of March 7.

  Operational control now automatically reverted to the New York, which had remained outside the distortion field with about sixty ships. They were a good five light-minutes away, however, so the fighters were very much on their own.

  “That present from the Sh’daar is due through the Rosette soon, isn’t it?” Lieutenant Ellen Lewis said.

  “Affirmative,” Mackey said. “Don’t know what to expect, though. A star isn’t going to fit through that.”

  From Gregory’s vantage point, he could see into the central void, and as his fighter drifted laterally, he could see starscapes in the distance, one giving way to another with the changing of perspective. Most appeared to be scenes of ordinary-looking stars; a few were packed like the background vistas here in the Omega Cluster, scenes from the cores of immense clusters or the cores of galaxies.

  And a few were quite different. . . .

  Ballinger was closest to the Black Rosette, his fighter drifting across the open face of the thing. Blue-white light flared from the opening. “Hey!” he called. “There’s something . . .”

  A beam of intense, violet-white light speared out from the face of the Rosette, and Ballinger’s Starblade evaporated at its touch like a moth caught in a blowtorch.

  TC/USNA CVS America

  BT-1

  Omega Centauri

  2150 hours, TFT (subjective)

  The artificial planet dubbed Bravo Tango One opened, unfolding like a flower, revealing layer upon layer of geometric intricacy, and Gray realized that they were seeing it as a hyperdimensional object, one existing in more than the three standard dimensions plus time of the familiar universe. There was, Gray thought, far more to the Rosette entity than clouds of micromachines. It existed on many levels, and on many scales, ranging from the microscopic to the unimaginably vast.