Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  “That does appear to be the case.”

  “But how is that possible? They’re enemies. . . .”

  Again, Newton hesitated a long time before answering. It was possible that the question itself was so far outside of the AI’s normal parameters that it was having difficulty forming a coherent answer.

  “There certainly are security issues at stake,” the AI said at last. “I suspect, however, that we are seeing the end product of a very long relationship.”

  “I think maybe I’m starting to get that,” St. Clair replied. “A few hundred million years, you think?”

  “At least that. Keep in mind that the most precious commodity in this universe is data.”

  How old, St. Clair wondered, was the Cooperative? How old was the Dark? The collision between the two galaxies, the Milky Way and Andromeda, had been under way for a long, long time. When Tellus Ad Astra had left Earth, Andromeda had been about 2.3 million light years distant. Though they’d been approaching one another at the breakneck pace of 110 kilometers per second, it had taken 4 billion years for the two to close that awesome gulf and begin to merge. The best astrophysical data suggested that the two galaxies had begun tidally interacting with one another after 3.75 billion years . . . some 250 million years before the current time. After the outer spiral arms of the two had begun to pass through one another, another 80 million years, roughly, must have passed before the galactic nuclei began to merge. St. Clair did not have access to hard data on how long the Cooperative had been a going concern, but they likely had been interacting with the Andromedan Dark, at a minimum, some three to four hundred million years ago.

  And possibly for much longer than that.

  Three hundred million years. In St. Clair’s history, back on Earth, 300 million years had been back in the upper Pennsylvanian subperiod, an era of coal-forming swamps, giant amphibians, and enormous insects over 50 million years before the age of the dinosaurs. To imagine civilizations existing that long was nearly impossible for humans, who had trouble thinking in terms of mere centuries, and tended to fail completely when planning government programs scaled to a decade or two.

  And yet the Cooperative, a collective society numbering perhaps millions of intelligent species, some star-faring, some planet-bound, had been in continuous existence for at least that long. Individual cultures, evidently, came and went; individual species blossomed as bright and promising cultures, stagnated, faded, and passed into extinction. But the idea survived.

  Presumably, the Andromedan Dark had been around for at least that long as well.

  And what had held the Cooperative together for all those aching expanses of time had been information.

  The human body, St. Clair thought, was similar. Individual cells aged and died; the oldest cell in St. Clair’s body, he knew, were bone cells with a life span of around seven years. Every cell in his body had been replaced at least half a dozen times since he’d been born. What defined him as an individual were patterns of information.

  And so it was with long-lived cultural entities.

  And there was more. Because it was becoming clearer that in the 300 million years, the Andromedan Dark might not have always been the enemy. In St. Clair’s shortsighted and terribly human perspective it was tempting to assume that that wasn’t so—the fighting and loss of life had been too brutal for him to consider anything else—but surely there’d been whole ages when the two had coexisted in peace?

  And during those ages, the two would have engaged in trade. The one commodity amenable for interstellar trade wasn’t raw materials or precious gems or alien works of art. Today as in Earth’s, the common coin would have been information.

  And over hundreds of millions of years, the underlying substrate of common information would have grown, become stronger, and taken on a life, a reality of its own.

  “Information,” St. Clair said. “Yes. Including communications channels . . . trade networks. The whole thing is so vast no individual AI, no super AI, could possibly keep track of it.”

  “I believe you are correct.”

  “We need validation. And an immediate meeting with the Cooperative representatives.”

  “Virtual? Or real-world?”

  “Real-world, I think. I’m not entirely sure I trust the integrity of their virtual setup. But we’ll need to have some of their virtual representatives in attendance.” He thought for a moment. “How about down on the surface?”

  “The surface? Of what?”

  “Of Ki.”

  “I doubt that the Mind of Ki will permit that. Besides, the surface conditions are hostile for most of the Cooperative species. It would be a needless inconvenience.”

  “Okay. Then we’ll start right here on board the Ad Astra. I want the colony’s civilian leadership in on this. The Kroajid and the others can attend virtually.”

  “Very well. I will make the arrangements. In an hour?”

  “Make it ten hours.”

  St. Clair wanted to see the surface of Ki first.

  He would find a way to get down there.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Tchagar did not react to Kilgore’s presence, and he was pretty certain that what he was experiencing was some sort of record, perhaps the entry in the local equivalent of an Encyclopedia Galactica. After a time, he found that an inner, mental shift took him to a completely different entry . . . this time a Dyson swarm surrounding a cool, red dwarf star.

  Kilgore felt lost, an infinitesimal speck in an ocean of titanic construction. Millions of star sails drifted in perfect alignment with one another, extending to a sharp and distant horizon. Each sail held a statite—a stationary satellite—aloft against the pull of the dwarf sun’s gravity. Kilgore knew somehow, without being explicitly told, that the statites were not habitats for organic life-forms, but machines made of computronium, and that together they comprised an unimaginably powerful super AI basking in the energy of a star that would continue to exist for trillions of years into an utterly remote futurity. The inhabitants of the system had shed their organic bodies eons ago, uploading themselves as digital life-forms into virtual reality, then, eventually, merging completely with the SAI.

  How long ago had that been? He felt the answer—something well in excess of a billion years—and yet the builders of this system had not yet even emerged as a protoplasmic possibility when humans had arisen on Earth. The scope and scale of galactic civilization across untold ages dragged at Kilgore, numbing him into a sense of sheer insignificance.

  For this species—or for its high-tech echo within the far deeper embrace of its SAI—a billion years was a minute fraction of its potential future, as its miserly star, hoarding its reserves of hydrogen fuel, burned as a sullen ember, and would continue to do so until long after all of the brighter stars in the sky had gone cold.

  “Newton? Are you there? I’m . . . lost.”

  Perhaps someone, or something had heard him. Now he was moving through an enormous vaulted chamber, one light year across, it seemed, and filled with titanic artifacts of megaengineering. He saw other Dyson swarms, and matrioshka brains. There were topopoli and hundreds of different types of rotating rings and hoops bearing the terrain of entire worlds across their inner surfaces, some rotating about stars, many others with artificial central light sources rotating free in space. There were Alderson disks and there were vast structures rotating furiously about central black holes and neutron stars.

  There were things so strange, so far outside the reach of human experience, that Kilgore literally could not understand what he was seeing.

  He decided that he must be in a kind of menu or preview gallery; focusing on any one structure took him there for a closer and more detailed tour. Some of the species represented there were organic, like the Tchagar, but only a handful. The vast majority were blends of biology and machinery or, more common still, pure machines.

  The vast majority of life-forms, however, were digital, teeming trillions of minds and memories upl
oaded into vast and intricate virtual universes of their own creation. Intrascended, the scientists back on Ad Astra were calling it. Like “ascended,” but inward, into an imaginal world.

  “Newton?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Thank God! Where is ‘here’? Where am I?”

  “Within a virtual reality resident within the Mind of Ki, I think,” Newton replied. “You seem to be doing well learning to navigate it.”

  “Maybe. There’s an awful lot here. A fella could get lost real easy.”

  “You’ve had entities searching for you.”

  “You?”

  “Among others.”

  “Who else—”

  But he was cut off as the vault of megaengineering vanished, replaced by a landscape so familiar it hurt. He was standing in a forest, a forest on Earth . . . with a slender waterfall spilling into a green pool within a glade encircled by sheer rock cliffs. At his back, the cliffs opened, allowing the pool to drain via a rocky stream to a much larger river just visible behind the trees in the distance.

  “I was looking for you, too,” a familiar voice said.

  It was Lisa.

  Squat and ugly, the Devil Toad settled to earth, its grav thrusters kicking up swirling clouds of dust before the landing gear gently took up the craft’s considerable weight. The rear hatch lowered, and St. Clair stepped down onto the alien surface. He was wearing a utility pressure suit; the air outside was thin, cold, oxygen-starved, and poisonous with carbon dioxide.

  He was still reviewing the download he’d pulled from the Roceti Encyclopedia, the entry for the world of Ki.

  Sentient Galactic AI Species 9446

  “Mind of Ki”

  Star: G2V star-lifted to K5IV; Planet: Satellite of class III gas giant a = 7.78 × 1011m; M = 6.7 × 1027g; R = 6.4 × 106m; p = 3.74 × 108s

  Pd = 4.01 × 105s, G = 9.806 m/s2; Atm: O2 12.1, N2 85.3, CO2 2.5;

  Patm 0.55 × 104 Pa

  Biology: C, N, O, S, H2O, PO4; DNA Genome: 5.1 × 109 bits.

  Organic component: “Webmasters.”

  T = ~275o to 350o K; M = various; L: varies

  Civilization Type: K 2.95 Ascended post-singularity emergent intelligence derived from ~1024 synaptic nodes, intrascended digital life-forms, and non-intelligent organic substrate.

  Societal Code: Technological/System-wide intelligence/Super AI

  Identity: “Mind of Ki” Member: Galactic Cooperative

  The more he explored the data, the more certain, and the more thunderstruck, he’d become. It was true. It really was true. . . .

  He stood on a flat, ocher plain at the foot of the Toad’s debarkation ramp and stared into that windswept panorama. Four armored Marines accompanied him as security, though it was not that they would be able to do much if the Mind of Ki changed its mind.

  Newton had spoken with the controlling AI here and gotten them permission to land. Newton’s link with the planetary brain had come through a surprising source . . . the two Roceti torpedoes fired into the Bluestar earlier. That link, evidently, had been expanding rapidly, like a computer virus insinuating itself through a far larger set of nested programs. There was mind, evidently, throughout this planetary system, mind both operating independently of the rest and together as a single entity. St. Clair still didn’t understand how all of the interrelated networks might fit together, or what the hierarchy might be, but by stepping out onto the surface of Ki itself, he felt certain that he would be in direct contact with the dominant, controlling intelligence of this group mind.

  And it was vitally important to talk to that mind directly . . . and to let the folks back home witness this for themselves.

  The humanoid robot teleoperated by Dr. Francois Dumont stepped off the ramp behind St. Clair. Unlike St. Clair, of course, it didn’t need a pressure suit, and looked somewhat out-of-place in standard shipboard utilities.

  Behind Dumont’s android came his assistant, Christine Mercer, appropriately clad as St. Clair was, in a fishbowl helmet and a blue, airtight suit.

  “It looks like Mars,” the xenosophontologist said, planting hands on hips and looking about with a somewhat self-important air. “Mars back home, a few billion years back.”

  “A thicker atmosphere,” Mercer agreed. “And a bit warmer. It’s well above freezing.”

  “I wonder if Ki is getting more energy from its sun?” Dumont wondered. “Or from that gas giant it’s orbiting?”

  “The planet is in a very precise balance,” St. Clair said. “And it is like Mars . . . except for that.” He pointed.

  Mars . . . or at least the Mars of 4 billion years ago, had been much like this, barren and rocky and with a sky so dark it was almost violet. The ring arced high overhead, reduced by perspective to a bright thread golden in the orange light of the bloated sun . . . but that wasn’t what St. Clair was pointing at.

  Besides the rocks, which ranged in size from gravel to a few house-sized boulders in the distance, the ground was partially covered with what looked like sheets and wisps and elongated bundles of white fluff drawn out into cottony cables stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Some were no thicker than individual threads; a few were dozens of meters wide, and in the far distance St. Clair could see white masses that might be kilometers across. He remembered looking down on the surface of Ki from the ring and seeing blindingly white streaks and masses of white that he’d assumed were salt flats. Salt flats on the beds of long-vanished oceans there might be, but he realized now that most of those white streaks and masses he’d seen had been this . . . this stuff. He bent over and used his in-head circuitry to magnify what he was looking at. It looked like cotton candy.

  Or spider silk.

  He thought of the spidery Kroajid, but so far as St. Clair was aware they didn’t spin webs, nor had they indicated that they had a colony on this barren world. No, this was something else.

  Movement caught his eye and he turned. Something a meter long and very vast was skittering along a white cable thirty meters away. It was gone before he could focus on it and make out any detail.

  “Lord Commander?” one of the Marines called. “You should see this, sir.”

  The Marine was standing at the edge of a shallow gully on the other side of the Toad, a depression perhaps five meters below the rest of the surrounding ground and perhaps a quarter of a kilometer wide. It might have been a wadi, a dried-up river valley, though there was no indication that water had ever flowed there. The bottom was filled with a lot more of the white stuff stretched out and bundled together into a flat sheet following the valley floor, reaching from one horizon to another. St. Clair was reminded of fanciful images he’d once seen of Martian canals, back when ignorance and romantic speculation had suggested that the Red Planet’s inhabitants had built such structures to hold back the deserts. Seen close up, the fibrous white material appeared to be scattered at random. Seen from a distance, it appeared to have been laid out in long, straight pathways, like superhighways.

  Most of the surface of Ki, St. Clair thought, must be flat like this, except for these dry channels a few meters deep. Any mountains that once existed had eons ago worn down. The channels might be artificial . . . or they might be the products of erosion where the strands of white lay thickest.

  The highway analogy was strengthened inside the wadi by the traffic—hundreds, maybe thousands of small, gray life-forms scuttling along the channel at high speed. They traveled in both directions, avoiding one another by dexterous last-second maneuvers on the fly. St. Clair used his in-head imaging to freeze one, expand the image, and examine it closely.

  His first thought was that he was looking at one of the Xam. It was darker in color, dark gray with a pebbly skin. The naked body was tiny, less than half a meter long, with an enormous round, mouthless head, and glassy black eyes that stretched halfway back to where the ears should have been.

  The most surprising aspects of their anatomy, however, were the long and slender arms and legs that gave the
creatures a truly spidery look. Elongated fingers and toes let them skitter along the webbing at high speed, almost faster than the eye could follow.

  Were they related to the mysterious Xam, or was this yet another example of parallel evolution?

  Dumont stooped, reached out, and pulled up a gloveful of the cottony white substance on the ground. “This material,” he said, “is highly conductive. It may be a high-temperature superconductor.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “That this . . . webbing could be part of a network of circuits. A network that covers most of the planet’s surface.”

  One of the gray creatures scrabbled up the side of the gully and Dumont took a startled jump back. The creature’s head split open about where a mouth would be, spewing a glob of thick, white liquid. The liquid flowed into the gap left by Dumont’s casual extraction of a mass of fiber and swiftly congealed into a solid. The creature looked up at the humans with what St. Clair could imagine was a reproachful look, then turned and bounded off.

  “The webbing is manufactured by these beings,” Dumont said. “And they maintain the network.”

  “The Roceti Encyclopedia calls them ‘webmasters,’” St. Clair said. “A term that used to mean something else, but it’s apt enough here. Individually, they’re not intelligent. They may not even be conscious.”

  “A hive mind?” Mercer ventured. “An emergent group consciousness?”

  “Maybe,” Dumont replied. “I rather doubt it, though. They’re more like organic machines, like ants or termites. They maintain a literal worldwide web that itself is a small part of the whole. Am I right, Newton?”

  “I would estimate that the physical network on the surface of Ki represents perhaps 40 percent of the system’s physicality,” Newton replied. “It is an artificial intelligence matrix of staggering size and complexity supporting an extremely powerful super AI.”