Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  A very, very large brain.

  The adult human brain has a volume, very roughly and on average, of 1,200 cubic centimeters. Twelve hundred ccs of neurons and glia and distinct organs like the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hippocampus, of cortex and neocortex, of tectum and tegmentum, of dendrites and synapses. Twelve hundred ccs of quivering jelly containing, roughly, 100 trillion—­that’s 1014—­neural connections.

  The brain of the Abyss Deep had a volume of over 900,000 cubic kilometers. Make that 1023 cubic centimeters . . . or about 700 quintillion times larger than the brain of a mere human like myself. A single brain . . .

  If its NCE, its Neural Connection Equivalence, was on anything like a human scale in terms of packaging, it contained 1020 more synapses than a human, something like 1034 neural connections in all . . .

  What the hell did that mean in terms of relative intelligence? If humans had 10 percent or so more synaptic connections than the Gykr, which made them a bit slower on the uptake than we were, what did that say for a comparison between my intelligence, say, and that of the Abyss Deep?

  In my mind, the word Deep had just shifted in meaning, from a general term for the extreme depths of the Abyss­world to the living being itself that by volume made up 76 percent of that entire planet.

  Vast . . . mysterious . . . unimaginably ancient. And unimaginably smart, a truly superhuman intelligence that embraced an entire world.

  And it was terrified of dying.

  I am the Abyssworld Deep. . . .

  Is Dr. Murdock correct? The Voice thundered in my mind. Is my world doomed, the ocean within which I exist to boil away so soon?

  “Well, your world will dry up eventually,” I said. “But that will still take a billion years, at least. Probably more.” I couldn’t be sure of the exact figure, and it might be considerably less—­a few hundred million years? But still, geological ages . . . eons. . . .

  I could feel it rummaging through my in-­head RAM, possibly trying to judge what I meant by the term years.

  I have existed for a billion years already. . . .

  I felt . . . dizzy. In shock. As though my brain was muzzily firing on only a fraction of its usual go-­juice. A being—­a potentially immortal being—­a billion years old, and as far beyond me in terms of neural processing power as I am above a single specimen of Staphylococcus aureus.

  Was communication even possible, I wondered, with a being, with an intellect that vast and that powerful? Most of the intelligent species we’ve encountered so far—­plus most of those explored through the agency of the Encyclopedia Galactica—­are, like the Gykr and the M’nangat and the Qesh and the Durga, all at very roughly the same level of intelligence, of consciousness, and of innate mental ability. There were a few oddballs out there that were tough to evaluate—­the Durga were a great example, with such an alien worldview that we hadn’t learned how to really communicate with them in almost a century.

  An ant runs across the bare toe of a human being, and causes the toe to twitch. Can that ant be said to be in communication with the human?

  The Deep represented, I knew, an entirely different order of intelligence than the merely human. Could I truly be said to be in communication with it now? Or was I in contact with some minute subset of that near infinitely vaster brain . . . as the ant might be in communication with the nerve impulses that cause the skin of the human’s toe to flutter in response to its touch?

  I found myself thinking of god.

  Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by that word. For me, the word god had always been a place marker for a rather vague, cultural concept, for something much larger, more powerful, more intelligent than me.

  Well, the Deep qualified on that count, didn’t it?

  Okay . . . try this instead. There was the traditional, monotheistic Creator, the capital-­G God, believed in by so many humans still as a kind of old, bearded father figure in the sky, all-­seeing, omnipotent, omniscient, ruler of His cosmos . . . and yet according to human thought, straightjacketed by a peculiarly narrow mind, a human mind concerned with concepts like prayer and worship and the salvation or punishment of those humans who one way or another fail to meet His standards.

  I had never been able to wrap my head around such a limited, pathetic notion of what a divine creator-­being might truly be. Surely, that image of God had more in common with the Zeus of the ancient Greeks than with any purely spiritual reality.

  In contrast, there were the multiple deities of Neo­pagans like my own family, of Wiccans and Dianics and the religious reconstructionists of Norse or Saxon or Greek traditions—­idealized deities that were human, easygoing and undemanding, Earth-­centered representations of fertility, sometimes contentious, often humorous, and perhaps best understood as the expressions or projections or facets of purely human psychologies. A popular theme in Neo­pagan religious thought was that we humans were evolving, through a succession of lifetimes, into gods ourselves.

  And now I was facing within my own mind the physical reality of a deity utterly unlike either of those concepts, a physical being so far beyond me in mental scope and power that I would never, ever be able to fully grasp or comprehend it.

  I felt . . . very small. Very slow. Very stupid. And very, very inconsequential.

  Save us.

  And it wanted my—­our—­help.

  What, I wondered, did a brain 700 quintillion times larger than a human brain think about? How did it pass the eons?

  What did it experience . . . especially when it evolved as a motionless layer ten thousand kilometers thick embracing the core of a world? The depths of the world Abyss didn’t exactly offer intellectual stimulation, did they? Very cold and very dark and eternally unchanging, save for upwelling currents carrying warmth from the core, and drifting flecks of life, and nothing, nothing more for age upon age upon measureless age.

  What had stimulated that sentience?

  Perhaps the Deep began as an . . . an awareness of change. Of plumes of heat bubbling up from cracks in the solid crust beneath it. Of the seep and flow of sulfur and metallic compounds emerging from volcanic vents and keeping the water above liquid.

  Perhaps it had evolved ways to affect this leakage somehow. Like predators developing intelligence in order to better hunt their prey, the Deep had developed intelligence to manipulate its deepest surroundings, finding new sources of heat and developing them, expanding them, making use of them. Without being told, I was aware that the Deep must be a true thermovore, deriving sustenance directly from heat.

  And after that . . .

  Had the unending boredom of existence generated within the Deep an interest in, even a fascination for, mathematics? Surely, though, there had to be intelligence before the boredom, for the boredom to be realized. A non-­sentient lump of ice could not be bored.

  Why was the Deep super-­intelligent?

  Did there have to be a reason? I felt that I was on the right track about controlling its environment—­that, after all, was a large part of what had led to human sentience. Perhaps, eons past, intelligence, sentience had appeared here on a very small scale . . . a simple curiosity about its surroundings, an awareness of cold and dark, and of plumes or currents of heat rising through its inner substance.

  And that had led to trying to control those currents . . . the gods alone know how. Had the Deep learned to change, to control, those incredible pressures within itself? Or to use those pressures to redirect warm currents to where they needed to be?

  Eventually, with the passage of enough time, perhaps that Mind had developed mathematics, simply as a means of measuring what it knew . . . depth, pressure, hot and cold, flow rate, distance.

  How it might have progressed from there to Gödel encoding was utterly beyond me. Its understanding of mathematics would have started with counting, and counting would have led to arithmetical manipulat
ions . . . and that to prime numbers, and that to factoring primes.

  Could intelligence bootstrap itself from simple awareness of physical events to higher mathematics, simply through introspection, through self-­aware mindfulness?

  Given the slow passage of enough millennia, perhaps . . .

  But now the universe of the Deep had suddenly expanded with the arrival of other intelligences from off world. It had for the first time seen the planet it inhabited from outside, heard the discussion of some of those alien intelligences, and realized that it was doomed.

  The sheer injustice had me on the verge of sobbing . . . or was I picking up some sort of emotional leakage from the Deep? It was hard to tell, so closely entwined at that moment were its thoughts with mine. But a life form as intellectually capable, as smart as the Deep was completely helpless in the face of its world’s inevitable doomsday.

  What could be done to help?

  Not evacuation, certainly. There was no way to load the Deep from GJ 1214 I into a spaceship and carry it to some other world. You might as well think about moving the entire planet. . . .

  And with that thought, I began to emerge from the dream.

  “Doc? Hey, Doc? You okay?”

  I opened my eyes. I was in one of the racks in the sunken base’s makeshift sick bay, staring at a dark and pressure-­crumpled overhead. “W-­what . . . ?”

  It was Staff Sergeant Thomason . . . but he’d been left up on the surface, hadn’t he? What was he doing down here?

  I sat up with a gasp. Gods . . . had that been real?

  “Whoa, easy there, Doc. You’ve been out of it for the better part of a day!”

  A day! “What . . . what happened? The brain . . . the Gykr . . .”

  I knew I wasn’t making any sense. I swung my legs off the bunk and leaned forward. I started to sag, dizzy, and Thomason caught me. “You stay put for a moment, Doc. Everything is okay. Everything is very okay.”

  “No it’s not,” I told him, still muzzy. “We’ve got to save the whole fucking planet. . . .”

  Chapter Twenty-­Three

  Okay, so I wasn’t thinking straight just then. But I meant well.

  A few hours later, I was back on the surface, entering our dome and receiving rounds of congratulations from Marines and scientists alike. They seemed to be of the impression that I had somehow saved the expedition.

  All four of the Gykr had reached the surface already. It turns out that the cuttlewhales had gotten involved—­the cuttlewhale express, we were calling it. The Walsh would move out into open water, a cuttlewhale would move up behind it and swallow it down, and a short time later the sub would be released at its destination, alongside the sunken base or beside the new base at the surface. Over the course of an afternoon, the Walsh had transported all four Gykr, the four M’nangat, and twenty-­some of the other survivors to the surface, and was now making her final trip.

  But the big news was that when the Walsh surfaced with that very first Gykr, it was to the discovery that the Gykr starship had returned during our absence . . . and, as expected, had brought along some friends. Space around GJ 1214 I was now occupied by eight orbiting alien starships, and they’d come loaded for bear.

  Or, in this case, human.

  The base we’d nanufactured on the ice had been well hidden and remained undiscovered. But when Walsh had surfaced, the Gykr aboard had immediately contacted his friends. He’d been released at the edge of the ice, and a ship had arrived shortly afterward to pick him up.

  That Gykr, though, had become a Chosen during the ascent; he’d been the only Gykr aboard, after all, and apparently it was being alone that triggered the greater sense of independence, the ability to give orders, among Gykr individuals. And apparently that Gykr Chosen had been impressed enough with the agreement I’d hammered out with them that he’d told his friends . . . and they’d been impressed as well. They’d not even demanded—­as our informal treaty had stated—­that they take over control of the rescue. They simply constructed a surface base of their own, and then watched closely as Walsh continued to shuttle personnel up and down.

  Exactly how the Gykr fleet was choosing to interpret that treaty, or our activities, was unknown as yet. Captain Summerlee felt, however, that anything other than an immediate attack counted as a positive step. She’d ordered the Haldane to land on the ice near the dome, and for several hours now, the two sides, human and Gykr, had been warily watching each other.

  Yes, the Skipper was back in command. Chief Garner had used the ship’s medical 3D printer to run off a batch of hESC—­human Embryonic Stem Cells—­and injected them into her brain to repair the damage there. Her in-­head implants were still down, and she would need to have partial replacements regrown when she got back to Earth. There was nothing to stop her from resuming command, however. After all, she had plenty of ­people on her command staff who could access AIs, navigational and engineering data, and ship’s departmental reports and handle them for her . . . and she could call up paperwork on her office viewall rather than within open mental windows. Her toughest problem would be remembering manual overrides for things like shipboard elevators and coffeemakers.

  She was waiting for me at the entrance to the Haldane’s mess deck when I walked in. “Captain Summerlee! Ma’am!”

  “Welcome back, Carlyle. I’m told that you’ve been busy.”

  “Busy enough, Captain. I’m afraid I may have committed Humankind to a new long-­term project.”

  “Well, it’ll have to be ratified by the Commonwealth Senate. They normally take a dim view of enlisted personnel forging diplomatic agreements with aliens. In this case, though, I think they’ll be willing to overlook the embarrassing details, in exchange for a solid peace treaty with the Gucks.”

  I blinked at her for a moment, not quite comprehending. “Actually, ma’am,” I managed after a slack-­jawed moment, “I wasn’t talking about the Gykr.”

  She gave me a Look. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and established diplomatic relations with someone else! First the Qesh . . . then the Gykr. Now who?”

  “The Abyss Deep,” I told her.

  “The what?”

  So I explained.

  It was actually a bit embarrassing, because once I actually started describing my exchange with the Deep, I realized that I didn’t have any actual proof that what I’d seen was . . . real. The whole exchange could so easily have been a hallucination, something I’d imagined in vivid detail, perhaps, while unconscious.

  “He’s right,” Gina Lloyd said, at least partially validating my wild story. “I could hear parts of the conversation in the Walsh. I couldn’t see anything, though.”

  “You were halfway back to the surface,” I told her.

  “And inside a cuttlewhale,” she agreed. “But I think we were . . . on the same wavelength? Like when it was asking about Dr. Murdock. And . . . when it said it was a billion years old, I had shivers going down my spine. I think maybe it has some kind of channel open in us, y’know?”

  “That’s as good a theory as anything else I’ve heard,” Summerlee said. “Come on. We’re going to have an emergency pow-­wow.”

  “Emergency?”

  “The Gykr have asked us to leave the system,” the captain said. “They did ask nicely . . . for them. But they want us out of here in one orbit of Abyssworld around its sun. That’s one day, fourteen hours, or thereabouts. And we have to decide how we’re going to respond.”

  The mess deck was crowded. Garner was there, and Doob and McKean. Gunny Hancock was there, looking wan and pinched, his stump wrapped in a surgical sealer that told me they’d already started working on growing him a new left arm. Kemmerer was present, and most of the other Marine officers, too, as were Haldane’s department heads. All seven Brocs—­our three, plus the four rescued from the sunken base, were occupying a far corner like a thick clump of small tree
s. It was a full crowd, and apparently no one cared to telecommute this time.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Summerlee said, taking her spot at the head of the longest mess table. “Before we get started, I know you’ll all join me in welcoming HM2 Carlyle back from the Murdock base. While there, Mr. Carlyle was instrumental in defusing what was potentially a very nasty situation with the Gykr, and got them to accept a scheme that allowed both our ­people and them to leave the sunken base.”

  There was applause from the audience, and a few shouts of “Go, Doc!” and similar sentiments.

  Summerlee held up her hands, motioning for silence. “In addition,” she said as the ruckus quieted, “I’m given to understand that Mr. Carlyle also, while inside the Murdock facility, made contact with an alien life form, an extremely large and extremely intelligent life form, native to this world. Mr. Carlyle has provisionally named this organism ‘the Deep.’ Mr. Carlyle? Perhaps you’d tell us all about this . . . this extraordinary being.”

  I stood, awkward and unsure of myself, and began talking. I described the Deep, my hallucinogenic impressions of it, and what I thought it actually was . . . an immense, sessile thermovore evolved from dirty exotic ice under inconceivable pressure.

  “The creatures we call cuttlewhales,” I concluded, “appear to be artificially fabricated somehow by the Deep inside the exotic ice mass. For probably some millions of years, it has been using the cuttlewhales as a kind of sensory system, letting it see itself from the inside. More recently, it has learned that there is an outside as well, and begun sending the cuttlewhales up to Abyssworld’s surface, as remote probes.

  “As a result—­and partly because of the Deep’s, ah, unexpected interface with me—­it has learned that this world is tidally locked in close orbit around its star . . . and that in a short time, cosmically speaking, the heat from that star is going to strip this planet of its ocean. When that happens, the Deep, which depends on both water and on intense pressures, will be killed.”