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They enjoyed a few more minutes of conversation, covering topics that were disarmingly pointless given the proximity to the most likely source of galactic doom ever devised by humanity. They were just finishing a short debate about what, if any, accessories would be appropriate for a ship as they approached the indicated position.
“I mean, a racing stripe is traditional,” Lex said.
“I want one.”
“The problem is, I tend to get into situations where I need to avoid being spotted, and the matte-black paint job is basically the only one that can pull that off in space.”
“The best defense is a good offense,” Coal said. “Which I now have in the form of the fusion mines. So other forms of defense can be dispensed with in favor of style.”
“I’m not sure style and combat play nice together.”
“You are clearly unaware of dazzle camouflage. … Stand by. Proximity alert.”
Coal pivoted the ship one-eighty degrees and flared the thrusters to begin bringing it to a stop. Lex brought up the rear view.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Gravitational sensors indicate an object or network of objects directly in our path.”
“It’d have to be pretty darn big to be setting off the gravitational sensors. I realize there’s not a whole lot of light out here to spot objects, but I think even I could see something big enough to score that high on the grav sensors.”
“Optical signal detected,” Coal said. “Encoded audio. Decoding.”
“—esting connection, testing connection,” came Ma’s voice. “One moment. I am reconfiguring our external illumination system to deliver similarly optically encoded audio. … Reconfiguration complete. Optical acknowledgment received. Welcome, Lex,” said Ma.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Lex said.
“While I applaud your perseverance in finding us here, your immediate departure is advised. Karter is presently using more colorful language to request the same.”
“Oh, it’s too late for that. What’s happening here, and do you know who is responsible?”
“It is better that you don’t know the first answer. It’ll ruin your day. And we have yet to determine the answer to the second question.”
“Then it’s your lucky day, because I’ve got some clues for that second part.”
A new voice broke in over the connection. “Just get him in here before he does something stupid,” barked Karter. “Lex! I’m popping the dark-side doors. Do an eighty-seven degree clockwise orbit around a point four hundred meters directly behind your ship. You’ll know it when you see it.”
The audio dropped suddenly.
“The connection has broken, Lex. Shall I make the indicated maneuver?” Coal asked.
He scratched his head. “May as well. Though I’m not exactly sure what’s going on. I guess they have a communication point or something out there that I’m missing? Seems like we’d…” Lex trailed off.
“I seem to be having a minor issue with my optical comprehension subsystem,” Coal said.
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s you.”
As they orbited around the central point, what came into view was something that would have been more at home in a drug-induced hallucination. The view was positively kaleidoscopic. Smooth, curved metallic surfaces, gleaming and faintly illuminated, folded and rotated among themselves. They intersected in impossible ways, like they were ghostly illusions rather than physical objects. If he kept his eyes trained on one bit of motion, he could make out finer details, things that looked like access panels and thrusters.
A constellation of red lights started to flicker, tracing slow dotted lines of elliptical motion.
“Optical transmission detected.”
“Trippy, huh?” Karter said. “There’s going to be a data stream after this. They’re docking instructions. Follow them. I know you think you’re a hotshot pilot, but I’m not trusting you to eyeball a docking procedure under these conditions. See you in five.”
“Docking instructions received,” Coal said.
The SOB slid toward the Escheresque tangle of overlapping ship parts. Moving closer to it caused the bizarre little dance of rotating reflections to move in newer, more complex patterns. Slowly, with each meter closer, the motions fell into more predictable patterns. The slices were wider, less numerous, closer together. With a bit of squinting, Lex could pick out what appeared to be an open docking bay door. Then, at the very moment he snapped through it, it snapped into the proper arrangement, and he saw the well-lit interior of a cramped but serviceable bay.
Clamps dropped down and secured the ship. The doors behind them shut. Air pumps activated and the external pressure began to tick up. Lex could feel the tug of artificial gravity. When atmosphere was established, Coal popped the hatch.
“I’m having a real bad flashback here, Coal,” he said. “This looks an awful lot like that space station Karter stole from the Neo-Luddites.”
“That is correct,” said Ma’s voice over the station’s system. “Given the duration of the mission and the necessary equipment and personnel, it was the best option available to us. I will illuminate a path to lead you to the conference room where the others are waiting. Coal, I will link your system with mine so that you may join us.”
The doorway to the docking bay opened, leading out to the submarine-style “space efficient” corridors that connected the various internal sections of the station.
“I placed quite a few purposeful obstacles to your arrival here, Lex. I would have preferred if you’d not come.”
“Yeah, I noticed. I don’t know if I should be furious or flattered at how much you threw at me on my way into Big Sigma.”
“In this instance, I can assure you that I’d fully anticipated your successful penetration of our defenses, so if you find that assessment to be a pleasant one, you are welcome to interpret it as complimentary.”
“What was that brain scramble I had to fly through to get in here?” he asked, ducking through the first of what would surely be an irritatingly long sequence of tight bulkhead hatches.
“That is the visual artifact of Karter’s new cloaking system. Reliable, efficient, and undetectable cloaking has long been a challenge. It was similarly indispensable for this mission, as the risk of detection must be minimized. Fortunately, this is an instance where cloaking need not be omnidirectional. He worked out a means to collapse all detectable emissions into a narrow viewing window. What you observed was all external views of the space station simultaneously. I will explain its operation to you if you like. It involves some novel quantum interactions.”
“Let’s stick a pin in that for now. If you’re going to explain something, how about what the heck is going on here.”
“In order to avoid redundancy, what is your understanding of what occurred on Big Sigma prior to our departure and your arrival?”
“Someone showed up, broke into your systems, learned about the time-travel thing, and stole me.”
“Your understanding is incomplete. The sequence is as follows. An unknown agent successfully penetrated our data protections. On six different occasions, scattered within a forty-eight hour period, data was accessed within our system without any apparent security penetration. Logs were incomplete following the events, so the precise nature of the penetration is unknown, but no known access violation techniques were detected. Shortly afterward, there was a malfunction in Karter’s hangar. It resulted in the activation of one of his armored personnel carriers. It was able to depart the planet after violating a Temporal Contingency Protocol and issuing a return beacon for the SOB.”
“I ignored that,” Coal said. “But it woke me up and gave me a chance to make a kitty. Do you want to see my kitty?”
“At the conclusion of the briefing,” Ma said. “We were not able to disable or recall the ship, but we were able to track its travel. When it became clear this was the destination, si
gnificant countermeasures were deployed, but the vessel reached this location. This, it may interest you, coincided with your mishaps on Operlo involving the weather control station.”
“So this would be the thing you implied was worse than I could possibly imagine.”
“Correct. And the reason I had Coal’s code available to me at that time. We were forced to make local copies of the temporal contingency data and load it onto the space station in the event it might prove necessary.”
“But nothing happened. No wave of self-replicating doom,” he said.
“No wave of doom, but the event was not wholly without consequence.”
They reached the conference room. It was the first place since the docking bay that Lex’s head wasn’t in danger of bumping into the ceiling. Karter sat in one of the chairs around the central table, a stick of smoked meat dangling from his lips like a cigar. Solby the funk, upon spotting the newcomer, converted himself from lazily hanging about Karter’s neck, trying to nibble the end of his snack, to streaking around the room in an almost gravity-defying display of glee. Even at her most frantic, Squee never seemed to match Solby’s raw enthusiasm. He was a black-and-white pinball bouncing around the room until he decided to scramble up to compare and contrast Lex’s shoulders for relative merits. The left one, evidently, was superior.
“Here he is. No disaster is complete without this dope showing up. All you had to do to significantly reduce the risk of societal collapse was not go to a stupidly out-of-the-way section of the galaxy, and even that was beyond your capacity. Where are we at on the briefing?” Karter said.
“I have taken him to the departure of the unknown vessel,” Ma said.
“Oh, then you’re going to love this,” Karter said.
He slapped the table. A more significant holographic emitter emerged and filled the area above the table with a high-resolution image of a GenMech. It had been a while, but not nearly long enough, since Lex had seen one. The design was a simple one: an angular central chassis about the size of a large piece of luggage with spidery mechanical legs sprouting off either end. Glassy sensor nodes existed front and back in the approximate location of where a head should be, and a clump of assorted tools curled from a deployable belly module like the legs of a shrimp. The mere glimpse of the mechanism sent a chill down Lex’s spine. He’d seen what one of these things could do, and it was gruesome. He’d also seen what a few thousand of them could do.
“Here’s where we’re at with the GenMech design. This is based on almost three weeks of passive scanning. Best we can figure, this is representative of the current design. Relatively unchanged from the modified design you went back and installed.”
“So that’s good, right? It means they’re still sabotaged with the volatile memory thing, right? EMP will kill them.”
“Yeah. The design is lean enough that modifying themselves up to a more robust memory design would be outside of their self-modification parameters. So under normal circumstances, they’d be relatively simple to permanently disable, at least individually. But that’s the only good news we’ve got.”
“Am I going to be able to handle the bad news?”
“I don’t think you’ve got the breadth of mind to fully grasp the scope of the bad news, but I’m going to try to cram it all into your head because if I have to have nightmares about it, so do you. First, the population. We’re up near six sextillion of those things. That is a six with twenty-one zeroes after it if you’re wondering.”
“That’s more than the estimate. I remember it was less than five with that many zeroes.”
“Funny thing about estimates, Lex. They’re not exact,” Karter said. “Now, that’d be pretty bad news all by itself. But here’s the worse news. Ma, put up the network visualization.”
The projection of the GenMech scaled down and multiplied, forming a spherical shell around a dimmed analogy of the star.
“This is already bad. Those things generally stay where they found their most recent mass unless they’ve got sensor readings that indicate something nearby to snack on. That should leave them more or less in the orbital plane. Let’s assume that over time they interpreted the sun’s radio output to be an indication of an actual, harvestable resource. Then they might work their way into a shell as they went toward the sun until they hit their temperature warnings, and then away until they cooled off. But it would be noisy. Gaussian distribution. This is a perfect, crystalline distribution. That doesn’t happen by mistake. That happens by design. Now look at this. Ma?”
Blue threads became visible between the individual GenMechs. It would have been pretty, if Lex didn’t know it was the prelude to horrible news. Little bursts, here and there. There was no evident rhyme or reason to them. They just flickered and filtered across the shell.
“This is how it should look. Those are sync pulses. It’s how the things tell each other where they are and where the food is. When there’s no food, they just check in at random intervals. This is how it looks now.”
The blue threads became painfully intense, filling the room with light. They traced complex geometric shapes that shifted and reconfigured with mathematically precise motions.
“Okay, it’s big and different and scary,” Lex said. “And I don’t know what it means. So tell me.”
“This is a known transmission pattern. Specifically, this is an optimized transmission pattern for a distributed computing system.”
Lex blinked. “They’re a supercomputer now?”
“Correct,” Ma said. “Though each individual GenMech has relatively little processing and storage capacity, when combined they are by many orders of magnitude more powerful than any other general purpose computing system in existence. More accurately, if you were to combine the processing power of every other device capable of performing a calculation in the rest of human civilization, from actual supercomputers down to slidepads and scattered microcontrollers, it would equal approximately forty percent of this system’s capacity. The GenMechs are forming a Dyson swarm, and are utilizing greater than seventy percent of the star’s output. By the requirements of the Kardashev scale, this cluster of GenMechs is closer to a type II civilization than humanity is.”
“Wow.”
“Wow is right.” Karter pointed to the projection. “And then there’s this.”
“There’s more?”
“Oh, there’s more.”
The visualization spun around to reveal a small but easily discernible bright spot in the network. Karter jabbed his finger at it.
“This here? This means someone’s in charge of all that. This cluster of units is the final destination and ultimate origin of every detected large-calculation task. If it was a normal control system, we’d see things originating all around the thing, like a fireworks display. But no. They’re coming from one spot.”
“This technically presents an opportunity tempered by a tremendous potential threat,” Ma said.
“Right. Because the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of these things was the fact they were completely decentralized. On one hand, it didn’t matter how many of them we destroyed, because we only ever needed one of them to survive, plus time and materials, and the whole threat would be renewed. On the other hand, they didn’t have an agenda, and they were very limited in their abilities. Bring up the list, Ma.”
The visualization faded. A table of different combinations of GenMechs came up, with a small list of statistics beside each.
“We dug through the code of the control system the GenMechs should have. These are the designs they can self-organize into, or ‘rosettes’ according to the initial design. The scary number is two hundred forty. If that many of them combine into what we’ve dubbed the ‘uh-oh rosette,’ they can generate a weak Carpinelli Field, sufficient to make interstellar journeys in a number of months. Below that amount, these things, even if they decided to go hunting for fresh materials, would run out of power and go dead after a coupl
e decades, long before they got to the nearest significant source of mass or energy. But the uh-oh can get them where they want to go, and then it’s curtains. You’ll note that nothing on this list calls for organizing into a computing cluster. We’ve got to assume that came from whoever’s in charge. And if they’re teaching this thing new tricks, what’s to stop them from just peeling off a couple hundred, or a couple thousand, and blasting them off to wipe out whoever or whatever they want?”
“Before, we knew their potential actions were limited to a small, known pool. Now, there is no limit to their potential activities,” Ma said.
Lex nodded. “This is a lot of bad stuff real fast,” he said.
There was a soft hissing in his ears as his body rebelled against the stack of apocalyptic facts being presented. He felt a bump against the back of his knees and tumbled backward into a seat that a mobile arm had slid up behind him. Solby scrambled away and took refuge on Karter’s shoulders. A second robotic arm presented Lex with what turned out to be a cup of hot cider.
“You said there was good news associated with this, right?” he said, clutching his warm beverage like a lifeline.
“There is one slim chance at a potential benefit,” Ma said.
“Yeah, if there’s a head, we can cut it off,” Karter said. “We already had that design cut down just as lean as it could go, and again, as far as we can tell the design hasn’t changed. Granted, we’re doing passive scans and extrapolating from the behavior of several trillion of them averaged. But if they’re not changed, then they can’t be running both their standard programming and the distributed computing routines. That means if they were to be cut off from the prime mover without any sort of backup procedure, then even if they kept power, they’d no longer be a GenMech. They’d just be a weird-shaped supercomputer module awaiting inputs. The whole mess might have a single point of failure now.”
He turned to the visualization and pointed. “Or, more accurately, a region of failure. In our observation, the point issuing the commands moves around a bit, but it seems to be a tight cluster of about six to eight million GenMechs. We take out that cluster before it can offload its command systems to elsewhere in the network, and there’s a good chance the whole rest of the network goes down. Assuming there is no scattered backup elsewhere in the system.”
Nova Igniter Page 17
