The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  “Considering that clam-shaped ship’s technology was that much more advanced than ours, it’s a legitimate concern that I happen to share,” Natty said. “I have the Nautilus studying how it warps space inside the vessel now to prevent the Nautilus growing any bigger in size, which could well become problematic after a time.”

  “Mating my pragmatism with your idealism bred noteworthy results before; I figured this was as good a time as any to try our luck with that again.”

  Natty smiled wearily. “I enjoy our talks, Leon, I’m just not sure now’s the time.”

  Leon ignored the condescension. He knew if Natty felt overwhelmed, he retreated to work on things alone, not trusting that anyone’s mind could do anything but slow him down. Historically speaking, of course, he’d been right. Still, old habits were hard to break. Even he understood the value of recruiting the entire consortium of souls orchestrated under the Nautilus’s one roof, but just because a part of his brain had latched on to the idea, didn’t mean the rest of his brain shared the same sense of acceptance.

  Leon figured he’d see what avalanches he could trigger to get Natty’s resistance to cooperating more to yield to the gravity of the situation. “So far the two species we’ve encountered which couldn’t pass through the gate at all were both warrior species.”

  “You’re referring to the nanite swarm patrolling the perimeter of the gate whose alter ego was an avatar of a warrior from another world, and, whatever species raised hell with the Nouveau Vikings or Eresdrans so many eons ago. Yes, it boggles the mind that civilizations don’t all mature beyond their warmongering by the time they take to the heavens. I’ve always ascribed to the notion of transcendental logic, which states that at a certain point in a species evolution embracing diversity becomes far more valuable than conquering other lifeforms, which only limits one’s options come time to solve problems that those other species may well have solved millennia before one came along. A valuable lesson all too readily borne out by our last mission in the Amazon.”

  Natty realized he was rambling and stopped. “Sorry, Leon, you were saying?”

  “Lao Tzu understood that even commerce is little other than war conducted on another level. Space exploration—preparing your people to survive the hazards of space, might be described as a battle with the elements, with forces beyond our understanding.”

  Natty tensed. “Yes, but as our civilizations evolve, we come to understand advancement as a mix of competition and cooperation. You need both.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. We’ve run into two civilizations that make the Eresdrans look positively peace loving. They were both more advanced. So we need to ask ourselves in what way were they trying to elicit cooperation as much as competition?”

  Natty who was starting to get lost in his own head again, pulled along by trains of thought that could simply move faster than any train Leon could board, came out of his reverie to stare transfixed at Leon once more. “You mean these were like soldier drones in a hive mind, the nest itself isn’t about attacking other bees; it just wants to find more honey, but to survive long enough to do that, it needs its drones.”

  “What if at least two of these master races have already found a way through the gate, by way of their scouts, or drones, if you prefer? And they’re looking to solicit cooperation through initial aggressive competition that breeds greater compliance. But cooperation with what? If it was all about conquest and subjugation…”

  “They’d hardly need such a sequenced approach.”

  “And if the ones who built the star gates,” Leon continued, “were simply alternating carrots and sticks to provoke civilizations to accelerate their march to Singularity State…”

  “They’d hardly take things to the point of erasing thousands of years of evolution to reset the clock on their own agenda, as happened with the Eresdrans.” Natty had taken to scratching along the length of one of his forearms as he paced to help him think. Maybe he had a library of tics he relied on to keep from doing serious harm to himself by overusing any one coping strategy.

  Leon continued setting his explosives at strategic points in Natty’s mind. So far the minor avalanches hadn’t combined yet to create the snowballing reaction he was really going for. “But to get through the gates at all, by the logic of the cosmic-engineering race that designed them…”

  “The master races would have to have synthetic minds; they would have to be complexifiers, not simplifiers; in the final tally, they’d have to have hit on a formula for evolution that was at least viable.” Natty was now pulling at his gullet, the loose skin in front of his Adam’s apple.

  “And not just a formula for evolving warfare, but for evolving consciousness.”

  “Holy shit!” Natty approached the viewport in his chamber, stared out at the star gate. It seemed to mock his genius by its very imperviousness to every realization he could throw at it as to how it worked and how to get it to work for him. “These master-race bastards found a loophole the cosmic-scale geo-engineers didn’t foresee.”

  “Like?” Leon knew he just had to sit back now and let the gravity of Natty’s mind do the rest.

  “Like one way to evolve is to puncture the bubble that is this universe. All physical creation only exists along the periphery of the balloon, you know? It’s not the nothing it encloses that matters, but the membrane of the balloon itself. With “the balloon” out of the way, another universe would have room to keep expanding, keep creating more real estate for itself. Real estate that a master race might well need.”

  Natty turned away from the viewport to face Leon. “You’re familiar with the 5 Dyson stages for a civilization’s evolution, right? At stage zero, which is where mankind is at right now, we’ve yet to capture all the energy of our sun hitting the earth. A stage one civilization can do that. A stage 2 civilization can direct that solar energy to power a civilization spread across an entire solar system. At stage 3, the civilization has matured to where it can utilize the total energy of an entire galaxy. Although Dyson himself never saw beyond stage 3, others have since postulated stages 4 and 5. At stage 4, the total energy output of an entire universe—with none of it wasted—is harvested to drive a civilization’s evolution. At stage 5, the energy production of the entire multiverse becomes tappable. I, myself, have posited a stage 6 civilization—one that could tap the energy of multiple multiverses, and a stage 7, one that could tap all of them.”

  Natty returned to the viewport to give his mind room to expand. “One possibility is that some stage 4 civilizations, the ones that can harvest the energy of just one universe—including the two stage 4 civilizations that sent their drones through this star gate—are trying to mature to Stage 5. But they’re going about it the wrong way.”

  “Or they’re just trying to get enough super-computer power, enough distributed interlinked intelligence spread across an entire universe to be sufficient to allow them to take the leap to stage 5,” Leon said, playing another voice in Natty’s head. “Maybe they got stuck in a universe too small for the task, and this is just their stopgap solution.”

  “Hell, that might not even constitute a loophole to the plan that the makers of the star gates didn’t factor in,” Natty said. “If it’s the only civilization in this sector to come close to such a goal, the star gates would be technically doing their jobs by accommodating them over us. We’re still the termites in the equation, after all, eating rotten wood, by comparison. If you couldn’t save everyone and had to choose, of course, you’ll save the stage 4 civilization over a stage 0.”

  Natty turned his back on the viewport and slid down it, his knees buckling. The viewport filled the entire wall that was the outer hull on this side. It would have been several feet thick of smart-metal-glass, self-mending and every bit as impenetrable as the rest of the hull. But leaning against it the way Natty was, he looked like he was at risk of spilling into the depth of space by attempting to use it as a backrest. Maybe he did need to experience some sense of f
reefall in his own way to get his mind up to speed to tackle this problem, Leon thought.

  “That’s just one of any number of plausible scenarios, Natty, for what could be going on with these two master races that have gotten only their scout ships, or their warrior drones, across the gates. It’s possible the real reason they’re here is less dire, and more easily gotten around.”

  “I’ve already considered some of the other possibilities. A stage 4 civilization might well have enough mind power to open alternate timelines, and treat them like virtual reality games. In this “virtual reality” scenario, there are star gates that give the lifeforms in our universe an out—a way into Singularity State—a way to save themselves, even as their universe is overrun, or simply rewritten by the invading force. Call this the ‘guilty conscience of the first mover’ scenario as opposed to the one we just posited of the ‘guilt-free conscience of the first mover’.”

  Leon was starting to regret his brilliant strategy to open Natty’s mind up enough to reassure him that they finally had all the components in place they needed to ensure a safe passage through that star gate. Safe, anyway, until they got to the other side and had to deal with what was likely an even bigger mess of problems.

  He needed a way to talk Natty off the precipice he’d walked him on to. “My people are trained to turn negatives into positives, Natty. Sometimes on the battlefield we have no other choice but to turn a weakness into a strength, a catastrophic loss into the catapult we need to win the next round of fighting. It’s that or let defeatism take hold. It’s not over until it’s over.”

  Natty snorted dismissively. “That might work on the battlefield.”

  “What if moving through that gate gives us the clues on how to shepherd our own civilization not just to a stage one civilization, but to stage two, three, four, and five? You admit that every step along the way—at each crucial shift from one stage of civilization to another—a society is at the greatest risk of the house of cards collapsing in on itself. We may not be able to anticipate all the dangers at each level by playing this game out, but we might learn enough to greatly increase our chances for survival over time.”

  Natty shifted his weight into a position that looked less pained, and his expression softened, suggesting the rhetoric—and it really was just rhetoric from Leon’s end, because he had no idea how to get this notion to stand up logically—was taking hold.

  Leon should probably have known when to shut up, but he couldn’t stop himself. “So it’s a David and Goliath scenario. Yeah, it would be hard enough to fend off a stage one civilization. The last thing we needed to find out was that we might well be dealing with a stage four. But no giant expects to be felled by a pebble flung from the hand of a relative midget.”

  “Our greatest weaknesses might in fact be our greatest strengths.” Natty said the words as if he’d made the realization himself, and as he spoke them, he was pushing himself up the wall of metallic glass with his hands until he was standing again. He wiped the tears from his eyes and the snivels from his nose—indications that he was tapping his hurt inner child self-image that only wanted to play and felt frustrated when it was denied access to its toys and to playtime. Thank Techa Leon had boned up on Transactional Analysis to get his mind around this boy-man long before even venturing into the Amazon what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “We can do this,” Natty said with something more than false bravado. And then as if catching the echo of his own voice, “We can do this.”

  He finished coming back into the moment and dashed to Leon and grabbed him at his collar meaning to shake him. But Leon had a good hundred pounds on him; he just ended up shaking himself. “Leon, we’ve got to get across that gate—now! We don’t have a moment to lose.”

  Leon didn’t react. He was waiting for his gut check to weigh in on the situation. “As soon as you and Laney finish your end of things, we’ll go. How long?”

  Natty glanced back at his bank of monitors. “You tell me. I do my best work under pressure. Otherwise I’ll keep looking for a better way until the end of time.”

  “Two hours. You have two hours.” Leon wondered where the hell he had pulled that number from. But he’d seen Natty work under pressure before to do the impossible, when they had even tighter time constraints. Maybe he was being too generous.

  “Yeah, yeah, two hours will be fine.” Natty was staring at his monitors as he talked. He raced to his chair and keyed away at his virtual keyboard on his desktop monitor which merely projected the highlighted regions into the vertically rising curving wall of monitors above the desk.

  Leon was curious if his two-hour deadline jived with when the impact from those five exploding pulsars was meant to hit the star gate. Had his gut intuition struck again, or had it struck out this time? Until the Nautilus was finished with its calculations there was no way of knowing for sure. More curious still was how some civilization—possibly from billions of years ago—had calculated so precisely their arrival at the gate, and their need for it to open for them. The Nautilus, Leon presumed, would have trouble calculating that precisely the butterfly effects—the millions upon millions of little things that could affect one big colossal change even months or years out—far less billions of years in advance.

  Leon left Natty to do what he did best. He headed for the door. Two hours was going to be no joke of a time restraint for him to work under as well.

  ***

  As Leon headed down the hall from Natty’s chambers, he reflected on the first time he and Natty’d had one of their sit downs. Back then, Leon was trying to get his mind around how any of this was possible in the present day, far less the near-future. In his mind, space-operas like the one he’d gotten caught up in couldn’t possibly happen for another few hundred years. Certainly not in the early twenty-first century.

  They were inside Truman’s office back on Earth, the one-time CEO of a company holding numerous defense contracts with DARPA, all based on Natty’s inventions. When Natty decided to step into the CEO role himself, after the disaster of mismanagement that was Truman and his cronies set loose on the world, this was how the conversation had gone:

  “You understand that in my world view, none of this is possible for at least another hundred years, right?” Leon croaked out, his voice full of clicking sounds as if it had been hacked and someone was listening in.

  Natty, seated then behind Truman’s desk, smiled ruefully, allowing himself to feel Leon’s pain. They had become quite good friends by then, so while empathy wasn’t a strong suit, Natty had learned how to exude some in Leon’s direction. “Maybe if you were more of a transhumanist, or read more singularity sci-fi, you’d understand that we’ve been long approaching a point of runaway technology—when robots start building better robots than humans can design, when artificial intelligence starts evolving itself at the software and hardware level beyond what human code writers and engineers can even comprehend.

  “What my father did, in effect, was to contain the singularity in a bottle, in the Nautilus, in as much as it could be contained. Sooner rather than later the singularity will happen on Earth. Honestly, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. Reports were coming in almost daily in the late 20-teens of Google’s AI designing the first artificial intelligence that was simply better than any humans could design…”

  Natty stopped himself before his dissertation led into areas that didn’t interest Leon, and certainly wouldn’t have appeased him. “But if it makes you feel any better, Leon, no one is ever ready for this. No one is more dialed into the future than me, and I can’t wrap my mind around half this stuff, not really. The child in me that I get hammered for, because it dominates the adult and parental components of my psyche—not to go all Transactional Analysis on you—he keeps me sane. To him it’s just a game.

  “Take a page from your Alpha Unit teens—if the Singularity-in-a-bottle experiment we’re running with the Nautilus gets too real, find a way to make it less real until you can deal wi
th it. Think of things as happening in an augmented reality you’d be blind to without your nanites enhancing your senses… You won’t be lying to yourself, trust me, for, in a very real way, that is the truth. And it’s your out, a way for you to unplug after all this is through. Just flush the damn nanites out of your system.”

  That was in fact exactly what Leon and the rest of Omega Force and Alpha Unit had done after the Sentient Serpents campaign.

  With any luck he’d get to unplug after the Star Gate mission in the same fashion.

  Leon came out of his reverie to find himself walking amidst the newborns of the Nautilus. They looked more relaxed and mission-focused than the last time he’d seen them, less lost aboard the ship. Just what did the Nautilus have them up to exactly? Presumably she was covering some aspect of the mission that was above Leon’s and even Natty’s heads. Leon didn’t like going into battle without knowing what all his assets were capable of. But he’d long ago learned to trust his people to do what they did best; his fantasies of being in total control were just that. And his gut told him the Nautilus was not the problem, and she was as ready to jump through the portal now as the rest of them.

  Then again—she was powerful enough to have hacked his gut check that was based on that bacterial colony in his GI tract with enough working parts to outnumber all the cells in his entire body. The gut microbes collectively may have constituted a bigger brain than he could fit in his head—but the collective was certainly no match for the Nautilus. Maybe he should take solace in the Nautilus giving him the assurances that his regular gut check was no longer qualified to provide. Or maybe he should be damned worried.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE NOUVEAU VIKING PLANET, ERESDRA

  The Eresdrans in their late teens and the twenty-somethings—by Eresdran standards, by Earth standards, they were of course much older—had returned from the hunt to join up with Asger’s tribe. They far outnumbered the older Eresdrans, which said a lot for who actually survived this world, even today, long after invading forces had come and gone, suggesting that Eresdra was no picnic on a good day.