by Ian Douglas
“Are you saying this culture might be unchanged after billions of years?”
“What we can see of it might be,” Dumont replied.
“I have a feeling,” St. Clair said, “that what we can see of it is the tip of the iceberg.”
The sky was filled with moving craft and silent, pastel-hued bubbles, and the twisting and soaring towers were unimaginably complex. Amorphous shapes shifted and moved between the towers, as if the towers themselves were in constant growth and motion. Those drifting orbs of light . . . were they alive, beings of pure energy? Or transport devices, or machines associated with the surrounding buildings, or something else entirely? Those shimmering masses of silver- and copper-like clouds of tiny leaves . . . were they biological, like trees planted in an Earthly park? Or slow-moving intelligent beings? Or were they part of the infrastructure?
St. Clair watched a diaphanous, iridescent shape, like a breath of translucent silk three meters long, swim past overhead, rippling before them on unfelt currents of air. Simply watching it, he couldn’t tell if that was its normal mode of travel, or if he was watching it use some invisible expression of technology. Indeed, he couldn’t decide if what he was seeing was an intelligent being, an animal, an artificial device, or something else entirely.
Twenty meters away, a crystalline archway rose from the transparent floor, three meters wide and eight high, its interior hazy with shifting rainbow hues. Other identical arches were scattered across the area. Each conveyed a strong feeling of being some sort of portal or entryway, but they could as easily have been public works of art . . . or public restrooms.
There was so much going on around them—and so little related to St. Clair’s normal experience—that he couldn’t take it all in. His brain was having difficulty interpreting what he was seeing. A Neanderthal hunter, he thought, plucked from the forests of Europe a thousand centuries before and dropped onto a slidewalk in the middle of New York City at night might feel the same sense of surreal detachment, terror, and bewilderment.
“So where are we?” St. Clair asked aloud. “And what are we supposed to do here?”
“I am informed,” Newton told him in-head, “that this is a Gateway District.”
“A gateway to what?” Mercer asked.
“Paradise.”
“Digital upload?” Natalia Yaramova asked. She was another AI tech, like Kiel.
St. Clair nodded. “That’s what I was wondering.” He was thinking about the Kroajid, the Guardians, who represented only a tiny fraction of their entire civilization. Most Kroajid had entered a digital virtual reality while those few left behind protected them and took care of their physical needs. Maybe those arches were portals to another, different reality.
“I believe so,” Newton told him. “This entire complex may serve as access to a vast number of separate nonphysical realities.”
St. Clair moved closer to one of the arches. Curious. No matter where he stood, he was looking into the thing full-on. That suggested that what he was seeing was some sort of illusion or projection, not a physical artifact.
But right now, he wouldn’t have sworn to whether any of what he was seeing was real or not.
“Why were we brought here?”
“You have been invited,” Newton told them, “to visit one of their digital realities.”
“Is that even possible?” Dumont asked.
“Apparently so,” Newton replied. “I am not yet certain of the exact mechanism however.”
“I’m more concerned about staying in touch with Ad Astra’s command center,” St. Clair said. He still harbored, he realized, worries that this was some kind of elaborate trap.
“If . . . if it’s a digital upload,” Kiel said, reflecting St. Clair’s fears, “how do we know it’s not . . . uh . . . permanent?”
“I am querying the AI that appears to run this section of digital reality,” Newton told them. “The upload protocol is not destructive, apparently, and short visits from this reality to a virtual reality are possible.”
“Meaning we could step into a virtual reality, and step right back.”
“Correct.”
“We could learn an awful lot,” Dumont said.
St. Clair was forced to agree. If their sources could be believed, the vast, vast majority of the citizens of the Galactic Cooperative were digital beings, existing as intricate and highly complex lines of code within a titanic computer. According to Newton, well over three-quarters of the mass of the Ki Ring was computronium—a term referring to matter optimized for computational use, a computer massing hundreds of billions of tons.
The philosophy of digital uploads had been debated on Earth for well over a century. With a powerful enough computer and extremely advanced scanning hardware, it might be possible to digitally encode a person’s consciousness and upload it to a machine; there was no question about that. But . . . was that upload the actual consciousness, the all-important “I” of the individual transferred from original to machine? Or was it merely a copy? This question took on critical importance if the scanning process itself destroyed the original; if it didn’t, how did the culture deal with steadily increasing numbers as individuals continued to copy themselves and send the copy into virtual reality?
“I wonder if it would work through the teleoperations link?” the Dumont robot said.
“Excellent question,” Yaramova replied. “Your organic body—and your brain—are back on board the Ad Astra. Only your robot’s circuitry would be scanned and processed here.”
“I don’t know about you,” Kiel added, “but it’s giving me a headache. . . .”
“I do recommend,” Newton said, “that you, Lord Commander, remain unscanned. I can remain linked to these others, record their experiences, and download the recordings for you later.”
“Why?” St. Clair demanded. “If it’s not safe, I’m not sending anyone else through there.”
“I have no reason to believe the experience is unsafe, Lord Commander. But it is an unknown technology . . . and we don’t know how long the experience will take in real time. If an emergency arose outside, it might take precious minutes to retrieve you so that you could deal with it.”
“They got us here physically in the blink of an eye, Newton. I think we can risk it.”
“There is another factor . . .”
“And that is?”
“If they perfectly record your brain activity, right down to the quantum states of its individual atoms, it stands to reason that they would be able to read your memories, including all of the data on Tellus Ad Astra that you possess.”
“Do we have reason to believe that they can read my neural patterns, and understand what they mean?”
“No. But we have no reason to suppose that they can’t, either.” Newton hesitated, as if framing a reply. “I would suggest erring on the side of caution.”
“I hear you, Newton. And normally I would come down heavily on the side of paranoia. But this time I’m going to suggest we err on the side of trust.”
“We do not understand the way these beings think, Lord Commander.”
“No. But I find it hard to believe that they would not see such a . . . such a gesture in a positive light. ExComm?”
“I’m here, Lord Commander.”
“Were you following that last discussion?”
“Yes, sir. And I must say that I agree with Newton. This situation is—”
“This situation has incredible potential,” St. Clair told her. “If we’re going to establish a friendly relationship with the Cooperative, we’re going to need to take a few risks.”
“Yes, my lord.” She did not sound convinced.
“You’re in charge. Monitor the situation through Newton. Pull out if anything happens to us.”
“But—”
“Those are my orders, ExComm.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The decision felt . . . not reckless, exactly, but certainly willful. St. Clair didn’t like overridin
g his command staff like that. But he did think it possible that a demonstration of trust might open new channels of communication with the Cooperative; at the very least, it was worth a try.
“Don’t worry, Vanessa,” St. Clair told the executive commander. “If these folks had wanted to kill me, they could have done so a dozen times over already without luring us into some kind of high-tech trap. I think they’re on the level.”
“Maybe it’s not a trap, my lord. Maybe it’s something they consider innocuous—like a garbage disposal.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I would remind you, my lord, that they are aliens. By definition they don’t think the same way we do.”
“Maybe that’s so, but that doesn’t mean the shortest line between two points is different for them than for us.”
“No, sir.”
“Besides, they brought us here for a reason.” He found that he was intensely curious about exactly what it was they wanted to show him.
“I believe,” Newton said slowly, “that they can be trusted.”
“Agreed,” Dumont added. “This could provide us with valuable insight into their civilization.”
“Okay, Newton,” St. Clair said, looking into the shifting rainbows within the nearest arch. “What do we do now?”
“Walk through,” Newton told them.
“As easy as that?” St. Clair asked.
But it wasn’t.
Not quite.
“I’ll go through first,” Dumont said. “I have nothing to lose, right?”
“Nothing except an extremely expensive teleoperational device,” Kiel pointed out.
“Ten for a credit,” Dumont said, dismissive, “with the appropriate nanoreplication technology.”
The android walked forward, stepped into the swirling color, and passed through. It stopped, turned, and stared back at the gateway with a completely human expression of surprise. “Nothing!”
“Maybe it can’t read the real you,” Yaramova said.
“My turn, then,” St. Clair said. He stepped through the archway, looked about, and suppressed a small twinge of disappointment. Nothing had changed. The others, too, filed through, gathering in a small group on the other side, looking about with almost comical expressions of confusion.
“Nothing happened!” Mercer exclaimed. “What the hell?”
“Indications are that all six of you have successfully been relocated to one of the local virtual worlds,” Newton told them.
“Two . . . four . . . six . . . eight,” St. Clair chanted, grinning. “Time for us to iterate!”
St. Clair stepped through the arch, as rainbow light flashed and flowed around him.
And as the light faded, he was . . . someplace else.
“This is virtual reality?” Yaramova asked. “I was expecting . . .”
“What?” Kiel asked her.
“I don’t know. Not this.”
St. Clair had to agree.
They were adrift in open space.
There was no discomfort, no sense of hot or cold or falling or anything else. The space around them was filled by the loom of the two galaxies—Andromeda and the Milky Way—the two vast disks interpenetrating in a titanic X-shape, their warm-hued cores intermingling as silver-white arms of stars and nebulae trailed off in far-flung arcs into emptiness. Somehow, he realized, he was seeing in all directions at once—up, down, and a full three-sixty around him. How his brain was interpreting the incoming data he had no idea, and he wondered if the aliens were somehow reaching into his head to make the scene intelligible.
St. Clair saw that he was bodiless. Five gleaming, sapphire stars floating nearby must, he decided, represent the points of view of the others. He could also see, in another direction, the ocher-and-white globe of Ki surrounded by its myriad rings, with the Tellus Ad Astra a minute ornament, a toy hanging close by. Beyond, the blue-hued orb of the gas giant with its cloud of moons in attendance.
But it was the galactic panorama that captured and held St. Clair’s attention. He found that by focusing his gaze on one aspect, he could create a kind of zoom-in effect to examine individual stars . . . or he could consciously manipulate the scene with his mind to alter the wavelengths of the light he was seeing, to see the stars in ultraviolet or X-ray or infrared, or in any combination. Individual stars showed subtle variations in their aural hues. Zooming in on these revealed the vast and enigmatic megastructures of technologies and science utterly beyond the human ken: Dyson swarms and matrioshka brains enveloping entire star systems, topopoli like tangled knots of spaghetti surrounding their stars, ringworlds and Alderson disks and Dyson spheres each providing a livable surface area millions of times greater than that of vanished Earth. At a guess, a tenth of the stars of the Galaxy . . . no, of two galaxies were host to megastructures of staggering size and complexity. St. Clair’s mind reeled at the sheer depth and breadth of galactic civilization as it was being revealed in virtuo.
Many of those artificial worlds, he sensed, were dead and empty . . . and he wondered why. That was a mystery that Tellus Ad Astra’s population had been pursuing for some weeks now, since two of the megastructures they’d already encountered had been empty of sentient life.
“Yes,” Newton whispered within St. Clair’s mind. “That is what the Cooperative wants you to see.”
The question, then, was why.
Focusing his attention in a different way, he found demographic information overlaying the galactic vista. He could see both galaxies highlighted in various colors, their interpretations emerging in his conscious thoughts. The Galactic Cooperative, he saw, spanned nearly all of the Milky Way, and perhaps a third of Andromeda as well, with outlying colonies and swaths of occupied stars far out into the merging galactic halos. With each, population densities, the percentages of populations living in virtual realities, even the extent of some thousands of separate ideologies were revealed, though the names appearing in his mind meant nothing to him. What the hell were “Heretics,” or “Mergers,” or “Neo-Reclamationists,” or “Atavists?” Newton was helping with the translations, of course, but even Ad Astra’s AI couldn’t convey what those translated concepts actually represented in terms of meaning, history, or culture.
Despite this, St. Clair had a vivid impression of a glittering and magnificent civilization, one spanning much of two galaxies, interspersed with the relics of fallen and long-forgotten cultures.
Another change of focus . . . and St. Clair became aware of the Dark.
In this projection within virtual reality, the entity called the Andromedan Dark appeared as an amorphous cloud filling the galaxy of Andromeda and spilling over into the Milky Way, interpenetrating both, embracing both with dark and murky pseudopods stretching across tens of thousands of light years. That glittering galactic civilization, he saw, was under relentless assault, and had been for eons.
The Kroajid had already told them that. Andromedan Dark was the translation for an alien term, Graal Tchotch. “Dark Mind” was another term for the thing, which appeared to be the mind of an SAI, a super AI, utterly inimical to organic life. Not that the Graal Tchotch didn’t include organic beings. The hostile Xam were mostly flesh and blood, though they appeared to be partly machine as well. But the vast majority of the alien Dark appeared to be robotic beings run by powerful artificial intelligences.
The puzzle was what the Galactic Cooperative expected the humans of Tellus Ad Astra to do about it. About a million people currently lived within the colony starship, while the Dark spanned two galaxies.
Further subtleties to the scene emerged within St. Clair’s consciousness. The two galaxies, he now realized, were imbedded in a kind of haze that itself was taking on finer and finer detail of shape and substance. He was reminded of 3-D scans he’d seen of the human circulatory system, a vast and intricately detailed tangle of fibers or tubes that seemed to pulse with a life of their own.
What was he seeing? The mystery of dark matter? Something alive? He had no
context, and no way to understand what he was seeing.
But St. Clair continued to explore the virtual reality within which he and the others found themselves. It was clear the aliens were trying to teach him something.
The paradox was as disturbing as it was impossible. Matter simply could not behave in such a fashion.
Mike Collins clung with a foothand to a portion of Ad Astra’s external scaffolding and stared out into masspace. The saps simply couldn’t understand this way of seeing. She was going to have to figure out a way of opening their distressingly blind optical receptors.
Despite her name, Mike was female, though like all vacuumorphs she was sterile. Homo caelestis had been genengineered from the eggs and sperm of Homo sapiens, her DNA extensively tweaked to let her lie and work in hard vacuum. Her squat torso was a meter long, with a tough, pebbly exterior encasing her soft tissue. She was four-limbed, but all four limbs were arms ending in large and delicately articulated hands. Her eyes, set deep behind thick, transparent shields, let her see from deep infrared to near ultraviolet, while artificial respirocytes in her bloodstream and an internal oxygen bladder let her hold her breath for days at a time between rechargings.
She was far more comfortable adrift in the magnificent vistas of open space than she was within the cramped and claustrophobically enveloping air pockets preferred by Homo-sap.
“Mike?” Story Musgrove called to her from a few dozen meters away, speaking over her in-head circuitry. “You okay?”
Decanted from the birthing vats with numbers rather than names, vacuumorphs chose their own names as they were growing up—usually those of astronauts and space explorers out of history. Michael Collins had been the command module pilot of Apollo 11, the first manned expedition to land on Earth’s moon.
Besides their genetically engineered senses, vacuumorphs possessed the cybernetic enhancements of Homo sapiens and then some, and among these was the ability to sense mass—useful in an organism that lived and worked in microgravity and needed to be aware both of mass and its inertia. Assuming an H-sap could process the information, he would “see” mass as a kind of amorphous, translucent haze in deep, microwave hues.
