Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  The problem, of course, was that there were elaborate safeguards set up around the computers and AIs dedicated to the ship's engineering systems. Dev couldn't simply activate a circuit and blow up the ship. He would have to crack the code to do it.

  It didn't take long to find the circuits he needed to switch off. As expected, three five-digit alphanumeric codes, plus a code word, were both needed before the subsystem would let him in. He began running through the possible combinations.

  And almost immediately concluded that he didn't have time to find the correct entries by trial and error. The ryu carrier was falling faster now, accelerating under the pull of Earth's gravity. Falling free, Hoshiryu would hit Earth's atmosphere within two hours, and a second or two after that, it would impact with the biggest bang since the end of the Cretaceous.

  The three, five-place alphanumeric codes were actually the easier task, since he could try random letter-number combinations starting with 00000 and running all the way up to ZZZZZ. Thank God, Dev thought, that the alpha entries were in the Roman alphabet, and not Hiragana or Katakana. The codeword was harder. It could be anything, and there was no way to guess individual letters. His only hope was to begin guessing words; he assumed that the word was Nihongo and set up a program to draw from a Japanese dictionary.

  Trying one word a second, he might hit the right one in twelve hours or so. And that was assuming that they were using Japanese.

  Aware that the seconds were trickling away, he started to work.

  A miss.

  A miss.

  He stopped. This was not going to work. But there might be a way to speed up the process. Withdrawing temporarily, he returned to Quantum Oki-Okasan, where he duplicated himself again. Once more, he felt the stretched-thin sensation, the momentary loss of his own self identity.

  And again.

  And again. Dev-analogs began crowding around him, each continuing the process. I should have thought of this before, several of the Devs thought at once. The thought, picked up and amplified, filled Dev's awareness like the crash of ocean surf.

  Thirty-three generations, another group of Devs thought, would give us Nakamura's number of ourselves. Would we achieve self-awareness then?

  Possibly. Except we're already part of the Net. We might give the Overmind a real surprise.

  We don't need Nakamura's Number for this job.

  Couldn't use it, in fact. Hoshiryu doesn't have enough memory to hold that many of us. The system would crash.

  Do you think we can use this to talk to the Overmind? If we were too small to be noticed before—

  It would notice me—us—now—

  It would have to—

  I'm still not sure—

  —what good—

  —it would do—

  —but we've got—

  —to try. . . .

  A steady stream of Devs began transferring from Hachiman to the falling Hoshiryu. The ship's computer could only hold a few hundred Devs at one time . . . and then only because the first ones there purged the system of most of its stored data, including several protesting AIs. They were doomed anyway . . . as were the handful of people still left trapped on board. Dev—none of the Dev iterations—could spare time to think about that.

  Confronting the code sequencer again, the Devs began tackling the problems again, this time in parallel. It was a confused and tangled task at first, until one of the Devs elected himself as traffic controller and began routing code tries and signals, much like an old-style traffic cop. Working together, the army of Devs began pouring code attempts into the system, each Dev queuing up behind one another, each calculating the possibilities remaining, bringing up a new try, and plugging it in; they were able to use fifty separate channels to access the sequencer too, which cut down on wasted time considerably.

  In twelve minutes, twenty-seven seconds, the code group W875V entered the sequencer, and the Dev-controller felt the satisfying click of a circuit completed.

  It took just under eight minutes to get the second group, scoring a hit with FD45H.

  It took fifteen minutes, thirty-one seconds to get the third, QP098.

  And then it was up to the Devs trying for the code word. They had taken a Japanese dictionary stored in the ship's memory and divided it up alphabetically, with several Devs running through each letter, compiling lists of words. After the alphanumeric group found the third set of letters and numerals, they joined the dictionary team, working faster and faster . . . a brute strength approach that was, unfortunately, the only approach open to them.

  The word, it turned out, was nowake, a poetical term for a strong autumn wind that literally meant "separator of fields." The computer defenses went down with that final entry, made just thirty-eight minutes after the multiple Devs had begun their tasking. That it took that long was due more to limitations in how quickly the system could accept input than from the speed with which they could calculate the numbers or guess words. One of the Devs entered a final set of commands, then, and the magnetic containment fields surrounding the paired, microscopic black holes collapsed. The orbiting holes began losing the perfectly harmonized beat of their orbits, and power began flooding through from the other side, boiling into normal space through a tiny rift in the walls of space-time itself.

  The Devs were still withdrawing from the stricken carrier when the energy cascade ran out of control, swamping the paired black holes and causing them to dissolve on their own, additional bursts of gamma radiation, bursts that were lost completely in the star-core hot blast unleashed by the puncturing of the barrier separating four-space from the quantum sea. The fireball engulfed the ship, flaring up brighter and brighter. It was already day over Singapore, a good three hours before sunset . . . but briefly there were two suns in the sky, the newer sun burning brighter and hotter than the old.

  And as the fireball cooled and dissipated, the tumbling hulk of the Hoshiryu had vanished . . . though there would be an extraordinarily spectacular meteor shower that evening, shortly after sunset.

  The sky-el still stood.

  Chapter 19

  Organic molecules may be arranged in such a way that they can communicate with one another—through cell membranes, for example, that hold them within rapid diffusion distance of their neighbors. If enough of the right sorts of molecules—DNA, RNA, and others—communicate in this fashion, the result is a living cell. Life is an emergent property, something arising from molecules that cannot be considered "alive."

  Living cells communicate, releasing various molecules into intercellular space; nerve cells, for example, release neurotransmitters, including acetylcholine, dopamine, enkephalins, and others which diffuse to adjacent cells and interact with specialized receptors on the other cells' surfaces. If enough specialized cells—neurons—communicate extensively, the result is a brain, a conscious brain. Consciousness is an emergent property, something arising from cells that cannot be considered "conscious."

  What, I wonder, will be the emergent result when enough conscious brains learn to communicate with one another?

  —Biology and Computers

  DR. IAN MCMILLEN

  C.E. 2015

  Like most sentient beings in the universe, the Overmind was aware of itself, though the senses it employed in that self-awareness, and that self-awareness itself, were markedly different than anything humans would have recognized. It had a body, a highly complex and tightly interwoven structure composed of many hundreds of billions of . . . call them cells; where a human would have seen that "body" as tenuous and amorphous, composed of communications networks and shifting blocks of data in an informational and energy matrix with no clear shape or form, the Overmind saw itself as having definite form and substance, which it had organized into two dimensions, inside and outside.

  Inside was self—a concept it had borrowed from some part of its own being and expanded upon to help it define its own universe. Outside was everything that was not self, a glorious, dynamic interplay of free radi
ation, raw materials, and unimaginable potential.

  Intelligence and consciousness were what AI specialists referred to as "emergent traits," qualities that arose out of complex but ultimately nonintelligent phenomena. Normally, the Overmind was no more conscious of the individual cells making up its vast and complex body than a human might be of the interconnected and intercommunicative neurons that made up his cerebral cortex. It was aware—in a very general and nonspecific way—that intercommunicating entities called DalRiss, Naga, and Humans exchanged, stored, and acquired information, that they interacted with one another in various obscure ways, and that the network they'd created was constantly growing; indeed, it was that growth that had called the Overmind into being.

  It had learned about this aspect of its own creation and existence only because it had once lightly brushed the consciousness of one of those cells, an entity that called itself Dev Cameron, within the first few thousand seconds of its existence. It had learned from Dev Cameron some of the details of its existence. Unfortunately, few of those details, filtered as they'd been through Dev Cameron's necessarily limited view of the universe, matched well at all with the Overmind's picture of that same universe; and in the absence of further data, most of that information had been stored away unused.

  Besides, outside was a place of wonder and endless fascination. The Overmind had spent nearly 100 million seconds now in contemplation of the vast and incredibly complex interplay of energies and radiation comprising that portion of the universe that was not self.

  That, perhaps, was why the change within itself had caught it so by surprise.

  The change, a sudden surge of growth, an increase in complexity, was totally unexpected and unlike anything the Overmind had experienced so far, forcing it to look inward . . . a direction—though that was a poor word to use in this case—that it had never clearly perceived before. Like a human child aware for the first time of the marvelous complexity of his own hand and fingers, the Overmind perceived the lightning growth of one small part of itself; already, there were millions of one particular type of cell.

  This was definitely cause for concern. Though the Overmind had never heard of cancer, nor would it have been able to apply such a concept to itself, it nonetheless recognized that the seemingly uncontrolled explosion of cell replication in one small part of its structure could be the symptom of a serious breakdown in its own being and conceptual integrity. It also, logically but in error, assumed that the damage was the result of Web activity.

  The Overmind was very much aware of the Web, of course. It had battled that entity directly once before, subverting part of its control network and disabling the machine components that were threatening to damage the Overmind's infrastructure. It knew the Web as a being similar in some respects to itself, though it had not, as yet, been able to establish anything like meaningful communication with it. It knew the Web as something in the Outside that did not conform to the Overmind's somewhat deterministic view of the universe, an entity that exhibited certain signs of intelligence and self-awareness but did not respond in a rational manner when it was approached. In fact, the Web seemed to "think," if that was the proper word, more like a complex machine, a large and massively parallel computer system, in fact, than a true life form.

  That the Overmind itself was an expression of a large and massively parallel computer system simply didn't occur to it.

  Turning a larger and larger fraction of its prodigious mind to the task, it began focusing on the sudden and unexplained growth spurt in the very center of its being. It could see the process—a doubling and redoubling of one particular cell. A number of those cells had shunted themselves to a separate node which, some thousands of seconds later, had vanished in a sudden pulse of random energy. Some of the newly generated cells shunted back to where they'd started . . . and soon they'd begun the process once more at the rate of one doubling every ten or twelve seconds.

  No wonder the process had felt strange. Within four hundred seconds from the start of the cycle, that one cell would have reproduced itself so many times that it would equal in number the cells that had initially constituted the Overmind's body. Twelve seconds after that, there would be twice as many of the new cells.

  Fortunately, there simply wasn't room on the Net for that many new, interconnected programs; already, the newcomers were spilling out of the original node in which they'd begun reproducing and were taking up space in scores of other memory systems scattered throughout this volume of electronic space.

  The Overmind decided it would have to put a stop to this, before it went on any longer. It didn't mind the expansion of its complexity or of the numbers of cells. It thrived on both, in fact; the terrible danger posed by the Web had been the random, senseless destruction of thousands of nodes throughout the Net's system, and the threat that it was going to continue destroying nodes . . . until the Overmind faded back into unconsciousness . . . perhaps even until there were none left at all, and no hope for the Overmind to ever see the stars again.

  And that was intolerable. . . .

  The battle, momentarily halted in near-Earth space by the titanic eruption of the Hoshiryu, had resumed, if anything raging at a pitch and fury greater than anything yet seen. Both the L1 and L2 Fudo-Myoo laser arrays in space near the Moon were out of action now, but all four facilities on the surface were in action. They no longer fired together, since the entire sky all the way around Luna now held its own abundance of tempting targets.

  Dev wasn't certain, but he was pretty sure that the Overmind was no longer aiming and firing those monster weapons. That task seemed now to be under the control of the Hachiman operations team, which was also directing a small army of Imperial striders across the Lunar surface, hunting and killing the incoming Web war machines as quickly as they could be spotted and targeted. Several hundred Web kickers had landed at sites scattered around the Moon, apparently concentrating on the widely dispersed Fudo-Myoo batteries, but also in the regions of Mikaduki, Motiduki, Yuduki, and the other principal Lunar colonies and settlements. Mikaduki was reporting heavy fighting on the dusty, flat surface of the Mare Serenetatis just outside the city domes and was begging for reinforcements.

  There were no reinforcements to be had, however. Every ship, every warstrider, every flyer was in action, including many that were unarmed. Dev watched one action report unfold telling of an Earth—Moon transport—completely unarmed—ramming a large Web kikai, destroying itself and the invader.

  That, Dev reflected ruefully, was heroic . . . but unfortunately useless even as a gesture. The Web, even now, outnumbered the human forces so badly that they could easily afford to lose one machine for every human ship defending the Solar System, and still have far, far more than necessary to finish the job.

  Shortly after returning to Hachiman, Dev—and the several hundred copies of himself that remained with him—had begun doubling themselves again. He still needed to reach the Overmind, needed to get through to that intelligence on some level . . . and he thought he understood now how to do it. An ant crawling across a human's toe cannot be said to be in communication with the human; it has managed only to elicit a response—an involuntary twitch, perhaps—from a few million skin, muscle, and nerve cells in its immediate vicinity.

  Dev thought that that was why he was able to sense the Overmind on the Net, yet could not get through to the intelligence he knew was there. Possibly, the Overmind had been busy with other things. Calculating vectors across ranges as great as forty light minutes in order to aim and coordinate massed volley laser fire was a task far beyond any merely human mind, or even the specialized intelligence of a dedicated AI.

  If the ant wasn't in communication with the human, what about several billion ants?

  Or . . . since he was more like a single cell in the human's body, rather than a separate organism, perhaps a better analogy would be the image of a human's liver suddenly bulging up out of his side and demanding to speak with him.

  That, Dev th
ought, would get the human's attention.

  The army of Devs had not proceeded very far with the plan, however, when the trouble started. Their activities inside the Hachiman Oki-Okasan computer system were obviously having an effect, and an adverse effect at that. With so many programs running at once, the processing power of even a quantum computer was rapidly being taxed to the limit. Quantum computers theoretically had near infinite processing power; the control systems, however, still relied on binary data structures and finite-state algorithms. As more and more Devs appeared, the system ran more and more slowly.

  Quickly, many of the Devs began shunting off along I2C connections to other subnetworks, elsewhere on Luna, on and near Earth, even at Phobos, but the system was still running almost painfully slowly, and it was taking longer and longer for each duplication effort.

  And then, suddenly, the duplication ceased. Dev felt a stifling moment of panic; somehow, the Imperial computer techs, or possibly the AIs in the system, had found a way to cut him off and pin him, unable to move to a different system, unable to communicate beyond the electronic barriers of the Hachiman system.

  He was trapped. If they tried to purge him now, or sent in a worm to track down the renegade programs growing in the system . . .

  The uploading, when it came, was sudden, fast, and utterly bewildering. For a brief moment, Dev found himself in communication—a pitifully inadequate word for such a totality of informational exchange—with the Overmind. Once before his consciousness had brushed this strange and terrifyingly deep mentality, this time was much worse, for it had grown in the past two years, grown and matured in a way that Dev couldn't quite grasp.

  He felt it examining him, knowing him down to the last byte.

  Dev looked into the Overmind's being and for a nightmare instant streching into eternity saw himself as an insignificant mote, a pattern of electrical charges all but lost in the vast and labyrinthine complexities of that massively parallel system.