Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  St. Clair was talking quietly with Adler. The former Cybercouncil director had just spread his hands and asked “How can I convince you?” when without any warning whatsoever Lisa spun away from the living room wall’s transparency and lunged toward Adler.

  She was in midleap, both feet off the floor, when the window at her back gave a sharp pop and Lisa’s torso messily exploded in a spray of hot fragments. Her head and arms landed in Adler’s lap, her legs in a jumbled tangle on the floor. Robots didn’t have blood, but they did contain a lot of lubricant, coolant, and actuator fluid, enough to drench Adler and splash over the wall at his back. Hydraulic tubes and wiring spilled from the remnants like dark, wet tangles of spaghetti.

  “Lisa!”

  Adler screamed and jumped, knocking the severed head from his lap.

  “Down!” St. Clair yelled. “Hit the deck!”

  He followed his own advice, dropping flat on the floor just as a second shot speared through the window and punched into the sofa he’d been sitting on seconds before. In-head, he called up the house controls and dialed the picture window opaque. It was marred now by a pair of melted patches as big as St. Clair’s hand a few centimeters apart.

  The Marine sentry burst through the front door. “My lord!”

  “Sniper!” St. Clair snapped. He pointed. “That way . . . across the endcap! See if you can nail him!”

  “Aye, aye, my lord!”

  St. Clair also put out a general call for other Marines in the area, and asked Newton to use his internal surveillance capabilities to try to spot the shooter. Tellus had little in the way of an organized police force—there was a security unit under the command of the Ad Astra’s master-at-arms, and the Marines were available for crowd control or any big problems that might come up. Somehow, a habitat-colony consisting of a million scientists, diplomats, and technicians hadn’t seemed to pose much of a risk in terms of criminal activity.

  But Newton could use any camera on the colony network, and St. Clair could also upload the file on Prescott. “Here,” he told Newton. “Get the bastard!” He looked back down at the tangled mess that was Lisa.

  Amazingly, she was still alive . . . if that word could be applied to a machine in the first place. She couldn’t speak, though—the plumbing necessary to force air through her voice box was gone. But she still had the circuitry to transmit her thoughts electronically.

  “Grayson . . .”

  “I’ve got you, Lisa,” he told her in-head.

  “Please. Turn me off.”

  SW-type robots felt pleasure, or claimed to. Could they feel pain?

  “I’ll fix you up with a new body,” he told her. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. Gray?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you . . .”

  And she shut down without St. Clair needing to access her controls.

  “Shit,” Adler said, looking at the mess. “I am sorry, Lord Commander.”

  St. Clair didn’t answer. He continued cradling Lisa’s head.

  “Look . . . I’ve got several of those models at home. I could let you have one if you want . . .”

  St. Clair turned his head and glared at Adler, not trusting himself to speak, his anger surging.

  The glare seemed to make Adler realize that he’d said the wrong thing. “Uh . . . I mean . . .” He was floundering now, unable to find the right thing to say. “Damn, she . . . she saved my life. . . .”

  “I know,” St. Clair replied, his voice a growl. “What a waste. What a fucking waste. . . .”

  “Is anyone there?”

  Kilgore was unnerved by the unrelenting darkness, the silence . . . and the lack of any electronic connections. If this was death, then eternity was bleak indeed . . . a literal hell of being trapped alone with your own thoughts and nothing else at all.

  “Damn it! Rees? Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  Was there even such a time in this place, he wondered, only to question whether the darkness qualified as “a place.” Seconds might have passed since the Bluestar fragment had swept them up. Or minutes.

  Or centuries.

  Odd. He could feel movement, a sensation of rapid acceleration, though there were no visual cues to suggest motion. So far as he could tell he didn’t even have a body . . . but whatever he did have was now moving quite rapidly through the darkness.

  And then the darkness exploded into light.

  He had a body again . . . or seemed to. He stood in a vast hall, a space so large that ceiling and walls all were lost, invisible in the distance. He was standing on . . . something, something solid, though whatever that floor was it was either a projection or perfectly transparent.

  The radiant light was coming from just ahead, where the sky was filled with a dazzling orb of pure white: an ice world locked in runaway glaciation from pole to frozen pole. “. . . a period of planetary glaciation brought on by the sudden drop in global temperatures due to the appearance of large amounts of oxygen and the concomitant loss of atmospheric methane. Known as the Huronian Age, the glaciation began 6.40 gigayears before the present, and lasted some 300 million years. The glacial age ended only—”

  Kilgore took a sudden step back, startled. He was hearing a recitation of some sort in-head. What the hell?

  “Rees?” he called. “Captain Dixon?”

  With that backward step, his surroundings spun and blurred. A different planet appeared before him, this one dark, charcoal black in places, but highlighted by jagged patches of bright red-and-orange magma: a hell planet of fire and molten rock. “. . . in the epoch known as the Paleohadean Era, some 8.49 gigayears before present . . .”

  The detail in the image was startling. Kilgore assumed that he was looking at a computer-generated image, but he couldn’t be certain. It certainly looked real enough. This might, he thought, be some sort of encyclopedic record of planets throughout the Galaxy.

  Another blur, another new planet. This one was a pale blue oceanic world streaked with clouds and dotted with the brown-and-ocher patches of continents. There was no ice at either pole. Kilgore could see threadlike lines of green along the continental coasts, but no other sign of life. “. . . the world of Ki during the early Ordovician 4.44 gigayears before present . . .”

  He was experiencing some sort of teaching sim, he thought, a depiction of the planet Ki across a history of some billions of years . . . but where was it coming from?

  “Hello?” he called in-head. “Is anyone there? Who’s controlling this simulation?”

  For answer, the world before him dissolved, replaced by something that might have been a city. He was confronted by a titanic jumble of deep blue cubes and blocks, cylinders and pyramids and spheres apparently floating in space. The structures were rendered in incredible detail and extended off to infinity in every direction, including up and down. The harder he tried to focus on the panorama, however, the less sense it made. Those structures, he thought, had been built with more than the usual three dimensions to them, with twists and Escheresque turns that left him feeling faintly queasy when he tried to follow them with his eyes.

  That might make sense if he was inside the Bluestar fragment, he decided, but that rush of movement had left him feeling that he was, in fact, someplace else.

  And why would the Andromedan Dark artifact be teaching him about the world of Ki?

  Blur . . . movement . . . and this time he was looking at a megastructure of some kind, a topopolis similar to the one Ad Astra had visited briefly in the Andromedan Galaxy. From this distance, dozens of AU from the local star, it looked like a titanic ball of fuzz with the faint gleam of a sun just visible at its heart.

  “Who are you? Why are you showing me this?”

  Blur . . . movement . . . and now he was looking at a brilliant yellow sun surrounded by what looked like a pale blue thread of light. As his viewpoint drifted in toward the tube, it grew thicker, taking on a distinctly fuzzy-edged and transparent look, and there were gleaming
specks, millions, billions of them drifting inside.

  Kilgore felt a deep and soul-wrenching sense of wonder. His viewpoint slipped inside the blue tube, and he realized that the blue thread was a torus of atmosphere surrounding the local sun, that the torus was filled with billions of tiny worlds . . . like asteroids ranging from a few kilometers across to relative giants perhaps a thousand kilometers across. Unlike the asteroids Kilgore was familiar with, however, these were green, covered with chlorophyll-based plant life of some kind. Some of the smaller worlds were hollow, with golden light spilling out from enormous openings in their surfaces, obviously artificial and inside-out worlds like the twin Tellus cylinders.

  The technology, the sheer scope of the engineering required to remake an entire solar system on this scale beggared the imagination.

  Kilgore’s point of view continued closing with one particular asteroid. Without the appropriate data feeds or sensors, he couldn’t know the rock’s diameter, but he could visually estimate its size as something approaching three or four hundred kilometers. As he got closer, the rock took on a peculiar fuzzy aspect; closer still, and Kilgore could see things like trees growing across the entire surface. They were huge, obviously products of the low planetoidal gravity, tens of kilometers tall.

  Closer still, and he could see the forest canopy, and clusters of treetop structures woven in among the tangled, whip-thin branches that must be buildings of some kind. Rather than possessing leaves, the branches of those trees themselves were green in color, and so numerous that they wove together into ragged, translucent mats. He fell toward one of the clusters of habitations, skimming above the vast mat of canopy vegetation.

  And then he was so close he could see the inhabitants . . .

  St. Clair felt utterly lost.

  A squad of Marines had arrived at his home minutes after the assassination attempt. Ten minutes after that, another squad reported that Prescott had been neutralized.

  Neutralized. A hell of a euphemism for shutting down the bastard who’d killed Lisa.

  He stood on his veranda watching the activity a few kilometers away on the far curve of the habitat’s endcap. A couple of gunpods were maneuvering over there, searching the area for other shooters, and he could see a number of black specks that were armored Marines bounding about in the low-G of the hab’s higher elevations.

  Adler had waited until the all clear came through, but then he’d left. The man seemed unable to understand the depth of St. Clair’s shock and grief. Lisa had been a robot, after all . . . a machine . . . a thing.

  What he didn’t understand was that St. Clair had been in love with her.

  “I do have a backup of her,” Newton whispered in St. Clair’s mind. “We can restore her mind to a new robotic body.”

  “How recent?”

  “Seventy-four days.”

  “That’s from before we left Earth! She won’t be the same. . . .”

  “A very great deal of recent philosophy has explored the idea of identity,” Newton said. “Is the part of you that experienced the Kroajid paradise different from the you that waited in that concourse in the ring?”

  “I don’t know. Different experiences . . . so, yeah, I guess the two identities were different. It doesn’t matter now, though. We reintegrated.”

  “Correct. You possess both sets of memories now. But would you be any less you if you possessed only one?”

  “I’d be . . . different. . . .”

  “Correct. A different memory set, one without the Kroajid experiences.”

  St. Clair wondered where Newton was going with this. He was pretty sure that the AI was simply talking in an effort to get St. Clair engaged, to pull his mind away from his grief, or possibly with the intent of assessing his mental stability. The Tellus Ad Astra AI was supposed to keep an eye on the colony’s senior personnel, monitoring them for illness, for mental instability, for anything that might have an adverse effect on the mission or on the colony’s health, and remove them if there was a serious problem.

  “I’m not going off the deep end, Newton,” he said abruptly.

  “No one suggested that you are, Lord Commander. I merely wish to lead you to the realization that you have not necessarily lost Lisa 776 AI Zeta-3sw. Her memories will be ten weeks out of date. And that can be corrected.”

  “I don’t know, Newton. I may have already lost her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I emancipated her.”

  “I know.”

  “She was . . . exploring. Trying to figure out who she was. And . . . I think that what she was discovering was that she didn’t need me.”

  “‘Need’ is an unfortunately imprecise term, Lord Commander. Did she need you to survive?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did she need you to be fully herself?”

  “No . . .”

  “Do you need the original Lisa to be yourself?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  People dying of unrequited love might have animated uncounted literary, thespian, and vidsimmed dramas, but the reality was less tortured. People met people and fell in love; people lost people; people . . . got over it. It wasn’t very romantic, but it was undeniably true.

  “I’ll certainly want to try reloading her into a new body,” St. Clair said. “But . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll have to emancipate her again. Convince her that she’s free . . . and what that means. The first time around, I think she thought I didn’t want her. So now I’ll need to convince her again. And she’ll need to explore who she is . . . all over. I think I’m just having trouble with the whole idea of losing her a second time.”

  “But perhaps you’ll have a fresh start.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” But St. Clair was not convinced. “Listen, Newton. I—”

  But Newton interrupted him. “One moment, Lord Commander.” There was a lengthy hesitation, which was unusual in the AI. The artificial intelligence was powerful enough to divide its attention across a number of conversations and intents. It seemed as though Newton had momentarily engaged its entire scope and attention on one event.

  “I am in contact with one of the missing service personnel,” Newton said at last. “Gunnery Sergeant Kilgore, First Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/3.”

  “What . . . from the Andromedan Dark fragment?”

  “No. He appears to have been uploaded into the Mind of Ki.”

  “The Ki Ring?”

  “No . . . or not entirely. The Mind of Ki includes the artificial intelligence network within the ring, but it extends throughout this system. The central, primary node is the planet Ki itself.”

  “How is that possible? Is the entire planet made of computronium?”

  “Keep in mind that the term ‘computronium’ is a somewhat imprecise term referring to any material that has been optimized for computation. There are apparently structures on the planet’s surface and within its crust that have been so optimized. I estimate that the total NCE exceeds 1022 connections.”

  The NCE, or neural connection equivalence, was a rough measure of the number of synapses within a living brain . . . or the synapse-like gates and similar connections in an AI or within an artificial megastructure such as a matrioshka brain. Humans possessed around 1014 synapses, while a top-end AI like Newton had an NCE of 5.4 x 1016. A brain with an NCE of 1022 neural connections would literally be a million times more powerful than Newton, or 100 million times more powerful than a human brain.

  Exactly what such a number might mean in practical terms, though, was still a matter for intense debate among neurotechnologists. It wasn’t simply greater speed, nor was it solely improved storage. In fact, something like a matrioshka brain, consisting of millions of individual satellites orbiting in a shell around the local star, might be quite a bit slower than an organic brain overall simply because of speed-of-light signal delays from one side of the extended structure to the other.


  The star-faring civilizations of this remote, future epoch appeared to favor such massive AI structures and megaengineering, and most appeared to use all of that processing power to run elaborate and lifelike simulated worlds for their digitally uploaded members. If Kilgore was alive within the AI network of Ki, it would be through the agency of such a virtual world.

  “Okay. What about the others?” If Kilgore was alive, the chances were good that the others were as well.

  “Unknown as yet,” Newton replied. “Kilgore—or his digitized analog, at any rate—was apparently transmitted into the Ki virtual reality. He’s reporting that he’s seeing the Tchagar home planet.”

  “The Tchagar . . .”

  “It may be one of their colony worlds. The Tchagar apparently disassemble planetary systems to create a habitable zone for themselves consisting of an atmosphere torus held together gravitationally by some billions of intensively terraformed planetary fragments.”

  “Can you show me?”

  A window opened within St. Clair’s mind, and he found himself seeing through Gunny Kilgore’s eyes. He appeared to be floating within a forest canopy, a vibrantly green tangle of slender branches woven into a fuzzy mass extending to the impossibly close horizon.

  And in the middle of it all was a Tchagar, its bulbous body dangling upside down from the branches. In the near-distance, a second Tchagar descended with surreal, slow-motion grace from the sky, tentacles splayed, and grappled for a hold among the greenery, before beginning to flow smoothly through the canopy.

  “Okay, wait a second,” St. Clair said slowly, not certain he understood the full measure of what he was seeing. “Is this data from the Mind of Ki? Or is it from the Andromedan Dark?”

  “I am not sure there’s a distinction,” Newton said. “It may well be both.”

  “Newton . . . that would mean the Cooperative and the Dark have been collaborating, that they’re working together somehow. At the very least they’re sharing enormous amounts of data.”