Katya wondered if the machines’ mode of transmitting their blueprints from parent to offspring was as much fun as it was for humans.
“There’s a saying among AI techs,” she said. “ ‘Organic life is the universe’s way of making machines.’ ”
If Dev responded to the old joke, if he even recognized it as such, he gave no sign. “I couldn’t get any sense of organic life within the matrix of the thoughts I encountered. Did you?”
“No. It was all kind of… stiff. Direct. No flexibility.”
“Or flexible only within very narrow parameters.”
“Somebody had to build them, though. Who? And when?”
“I’m not entirely sure those questions have meaning anymore,” Dev replied. “The Web’s origins lie so far in the past that, well… my guess is billions of years. Maybe back to the formation of this galaxy. There must have been an organic race somewhere in their history.” He paused, thoughtful. “Did you get that one brief fragment in that flurry of alien thought… something like a galaxy, but with an intense, blinding white light at the center?”
“Yes,” Katya said. “I saw that. It reminded me of AI simulations of a quasar. Or a black hole spewing out intense polar jets.”
“Very good,” Dev said, nodding approval. “That was my impression too. I think what we saw was our own Galaxy, back when it was new.”
Katya felt a shiver at her spine. “But, my God! That would have been something like ten billion years ago!”
“I’ve said already that I think the Web stretches across large tracts of time as well as space. If so, it could be the Builders were around when our galaxy was very young, when the black hole at the core was first forming and gobbling down so many of the suns packed at the center that it was spewing the leftovers across the light years. A quasar…”
“I’m… not sure I can accept that,” Katya said. “I know there’s been some theorizing that maybe our Galaxy went through a quasar stage early in its history. But would life have been able to evolve in that kind of environment?”
“We don’t really know what conditions were like. Maybe the birth of a quasar in the neighborhood, the growing intensity of radiation, was what led them to develop a machine-based intelligence. If their technology developed at all like ours, they must have also experimented with rebuilding themselves.”
“Like our biotech interfaces, before the Companions,” Katya said. “With nano-implants, cephlinks, and sockets.”
“Or like me,” Dev said. “Possibly they learned to download the program that was their mind, their soul, if you will, into machine bodies. Bodies safe from radiation. From disease. Even from aging. Immortality.”
“Are you saying the Builders are still there inside their machines? Immortal? Unchanging?”
“I don’t think that has an easy answer,” Dev said.
Katya listened to Dev’s voice and heard a bleakness there. And a horror. It was as though he were being forced to look at things he really didn’t want to examine.
“Go on.”
“That kind of immortality could be more of a curse than a blessing. To live forever in a machine body…”
“Dev?” Katya said. She wanted to reach out and take him in her arms, to hold him close, and didn’t quite dare, couldn’t yet trust her own feelings. “Dev, are you okay?”
“I’m… fine.” He paused for a long moment, and Katya wondered if he was searching for the right words… or simply trying to control some powerful, hidden emotion. “You know, an interesting thing happened when I reassimilated the memories, the record made by my copy. I found out he didn’t like me very much.”
The thought struck Katya as so incongruous she almost laughed aloud. Somehow, she swallowed the reaction. Dev seemed so… vulnerable. “Why not?”
“You’re… aware, of course, of the DalRiss attitude toward Achievers.”
“Certainly,” Katya said. “Lots of people don’t like it. There was a time, not long after you left, when there was some talk about using DalRiss Achievers to replace K-T drives in human starcraft. If it hadn’t turned out that Achievers didn’t work with human technology, it probably would’ve caused another war. Whole movements formed in some places, calling for some kind of law to protect Achievers from exploitation.”
“Protecting DalRiss Achievers?” Dev asked.
She nodded. “Some of the more extreme groups were calling for a war against the DalRiss to free them.”
“I guess I really am out of date,” Dev said. “Anyway, a law to help the Achievers would be unenforceable. The DalRiss don’t think about them the way we do. Come to think of it, the Achievers don’t think about it the way we do either. You might say that the supreme moment of their existence is that moment when they complete the translation of a DalRiss ship from one point in space to another.”
“And die.”
“And die. From their point of view, dying is the whole point of being born.”
“The same could be said of us. What does all of this have to do with your copy disliking you?” She knew the answer, but she wanted Dev to say it for himself.
He didn’t answer for a long time. He was facing the sprawling color-smear of the nebula, as though studying the finely detailed traceries and soft-glowing sheets outstretched across space like wings. “When I reintegrated with it,” he said at last, “I realized that it felt… used. Like an Achiever. I’d not really thought one way or the other, when I started the download process, that a copy of myself might protest against a plan I myself had conceived. But its memories up to the point of copying were clear enough, detailed enough, that it didn’t understand at first that it was the copy. When it realized that it was the one being sent on what could easily be described as a suicide mission, it… became upset.”
“You keep referring to your duplicate as ‘it.’ ”
“Do I?” He thought about it. “You’re saying it should be ‘him’?”
“Shouldn’t it?”
“I guess… that’s part of the problem. To me, the download was just a tool. When I saw the process through its… through his eyes, later, I realized that I’d become a lot more like the DalRiss than, than like I used to be.” He turned, his eyes staring into Katya’s, the light of the nebula touching his skin with highlights of blue and violet. “Katya, I feel… I feel like I’m losing what I was.”
She did take him in her arms then, drawing him close. “If you can feel the hurt of losing your humanity,” she told him, “then you’re still human.”
Hours later, the senior-ranking military personnel on New America discussed what they’d just seen—“experienced” would have been the better word—in the record from the DalRiss expedition firsthand.
“I think what we’re seeing in there,” Vic said, “is a war. A war being carried on against entropy itself.”
“Never cared much for entropy myself,” General Aimes said with a wry smile. “Messy. Turns a perfectly neat and ordered desk into a disaster in less time than it takes to say ‘chaos’!”
“If we can trust these records Dev Cameron managed to bring us,” Vic said, “then we have evidence of an intelligence who hates the idea a lot more than you do.”
They had entered the simulation together, joining Katya and Dev in that surreal landscape of tortured suns and whirling black holes at the Galaxy’s center. They’d seen the machine attack, first against the probe, then against the DalRiss fleet waiting outside the Stargate at Nova Aquila, and finally, again, at the nebula, after the Sirghal’s escape.
That saga of Sirghal’s return across the light years alone, Vic reflected, would have been worth volumes had anyone been recording the trek as a history. According to Dev, Sirghal had been separated from the other DalRiss ships when it jumped to the vicinity of the nebula.
What followed was a long and harrowing journey indeed. The machines from the Galactic Core had not followed them beyond the nebula, fortunately, but they’d needed to make a number of careful, short-ranged jumps to determi
ne by parallax their position within the Galaxy, and the probable location of some part of space they were familiar with. Achievers worked by gaining an impression of a distant area of space, preferably an area they were familiar with in terms of magnetism, gravitational mass, and radiation of various wavelengths. They had a great deal of trouble jumping into unknown, unfamiliar space. Random jumps, such as the one that had taken Sirghal to the fringe of the nebula, could have unfortunate consequences.
It had taken over two months—part of that time spent while Sirghal stopped and literally grew and harvested another crop of Achievers in order to continue the journey—but at last they’d made it to a section of space where Dev had begun to recognize constellations. Orion, with its three-stars-in-a-row belt, had been his clue that they were nearing human-known space, and another jump in that direction had let them identify the twin Alyan suns, home system to the DalRiss.
With no other established rendezvous—the possibility that they would be so badly scattered seemed never to have occurred to the DalRiss—each of the lone city-ships must have come to the same conclusion, and the same destination. When Sirghal materialized inside the Alya B system and entered orbit over the DalRiss homeworld of GhegnuRish, they found twenty-two other cityships there ahead of them.
It was a logical rendezvous. With luck, more might eventually show up, though they were handicapped by not having Dev along to recognize star patterns. Since DalRiss without Perceivers could not see stars, they’d never developed, as either a science or an art, a way of identifying patterns of stars in their skies. The range of controlled Achiever-assisted jumps was limited by various factors; still, some of the DalRiss vessels, eventually, might be able to come close enough to known space that their Achievers could fold them back into the familiar territory of the homeworld’s system.
But Dev was still worried that the Web might be following them. There was no evidence that they’d been tracked beyond that first, wild jump away from the Stargate, true, but as Dev carefully explained to the Military Planning Board, there were no promises. In fact, it seemed probable that the Web now knew more about the human and DalRiss civilizations than they knew about the Web. Much information about Earth and the Shichiju would have been intact within the wreckage of the probe at the Galactic Core. A Naga could have absorbed and assimilated it; it seemed possible, even likely, that the Web could do the same. Too, fifty-two DalRiss cityships were missing, as yet unaccounted for. Some might yet reappear at GhegnuRish; some, perhaps most, were lost among the Cygnan star clouds and would never find their way back.
How many, though, had been pursued after they left the Nova Aquila system, how many had been disabled and their Naga communications centers plundered of all that they knew? The other cityships knew as much as did Sirghal; the various ships regularly shared their blocks of Naga patterns of memory, and within that stored data would be gigabyte upon gigabyte about DalRiss and human technologies. The Web might not be able to trace the location of Earth or the Alyan suns immediately, but it would be able to track them. All shared a knowledge of their carefully plotted track through space for the last twenty-five years. It had been a long and zigzagging journey, with countless stops along the way… but the record was there, broken only at the end by their emergency jump from Nova Aquila.
Dev had told them the entire story, allowing them to see and feel for themselves the impressions Katya had already experienced. They sat now at a conference table, in reality instead of ViRsimulation, discussing the next step. All were still somewhat stunned by the experience, a bit overwhelmed. Felicia Aimes’s jokes had for Vic the feel of a desperate, almost hysterical attempt to keep some measure of perspective after a deeply unsettling set of revelations.
The group gathered at the table included several high-ranking members of the ConMilCom Ops Planning staff. Besides Vic and Katya, there were Generals Aimes and Mendoza, Colonel Howell, and a half dozen other senior officers, all either with various ConMilCom departments or with the CMI. Also present, at Dev’s insistence, were two xenologists—Daren and Taki Oe. Both seemed entranced by the opportunity to examine records pertaining to a brand-new, unknown civilization. Both seemed a bit out of place among all of the military brass. The planning staff had grudgingly admitted Daren… but had nearly rebelled at the inclusion of Taki Oe. It had taken a threat by Katya to push through special legislation in the Senate to get them to include the Japanese-New American at the table, and there were still some ruffled feelings about the affair.
The Japanese, after all, were the enemy.
That was a feeling that was going to have to change, Vic thought.
Dev was standing by, too, though not actually present at the group’s deliberations. While his downloaded mind still occupied the AI system at the University of Jefferson, the AI had opened a voice channel for him, so that he could participate in the continued deliberations. At the moment, though, the group had switched him off. Vic thought that the officers sitting at that table were still having some trouble accepting Dev as a real person. Even when they’d been with him in the simulated reality of the Nova Aquila system or the Galactic Core, they’d sometimes referred to him in the third person, as though discussing someone absent.
They’re more comfortable thinking of him as a kind of AI, Vic thought. He remembered the old legal definition of AIs as “intelligent but of limited purview.”
That definition scarcely applied to Dev, though. Nor, for that matter, to those mechanical things swarming about the Galaxy’s core.
He glanced at Katya, worried about her. She’d seemed subdued ever since emerging from her private meeting with Dev, and he was pretty sure that there was more to her emotional state than the shock of the new and the very, very large.
A digitized image drawn from Sirghal’s Naga memory glowed above the holoprojector in the middle of the table, showing what had been found at Nova Aquila, two dwarf suns in miniature and the Device spinning at their center of gravity.
“So,” General Aimes said. “What do we have?” She palmed a control interface and the image they were watching changed, the camera angle zooming in to focus on the long, thin cylinder in as much detail as was available… a fast-spinning blur of quicksilver gray.
“We have an alien intelligence,” Colonel Howell said, “apparently very old, very advanced, and completely machine-based. It seems to be responsible for causing a nova in the star system we call Nova Aquila and, in the process, may have exterminated an intelligent race living on one of the planets in that system. They somehow manipulate matter on a scale so vast I’m still not sure I believe or understand it. They build stargates a thousand kilometers long with the mass of a fair-sized planet, use their rotation and gravitational mass to travel between the stars and to siphon away the substance of two exploded suns.
“This other information Cameron passed on… well, I’m not so sure what to think about it.”
“The interference patterns?” Aimes asked.
“That, and this whole concept of nested bubbles of light. I really can’t make out what he was saying about that. Anybody?”
“Cameron may be bringing his, ah, unusual point of view to this,” General Sergei Ulanov said. A brusque, bald man with a bushy mustache, Ulanov was, like Katya, originally from New America’s Ukrainian colony and tended to defer to her. “Senator? Can you elaborate on that?”
“Not very much. I don’t understand all of what he was saying either. Maybe, in time…”
“Could the fact that we don’t understand it all be a reflection of the advanced technology?” Taki Oe wondered.
Mendoza gave Taki a sour look. “More likely it means the message was garbled. Or incomplete.”
“I think we can trust the records,” Vic replied. He manipulated the controls from his tabletop interface. The Device hovering above the holoprojector vanished, replaced by a three-dimensional view of the granulated, glowing surface of one of the white dwarfs. A ship—they were thinking of them now as Starminers—emerged fro
m the surface, a minute black speck trailing an arrowhead-shaped wake of roiling stellar atmosphere. “This is what amazes me,” he said quietly. “Think of it! To plumb the depths of a star! The technology that implies. My God! The surface gravity of a white dwarf must be in the tens of thousands of Gs, and the pressures in there are unimaginable! What these people are capable of…”
“What they are capable of,” Katya said with an almost rude abruptness, “is genocide. Worse than genocide. They annihilated an entire civilization, and as far as Dev could tell, they weren’t even aware of what they were doing.”
“Ah! But wouldn’t a deliberate act be worse?” Mendoza wanted to know. “If it was an accident—”
“Scary thought,” Vic said. “Wiping out a whole civilization by accident.”
“We nearly did it ourselves a time or two,” Daren said. “I wonder, though. If this Web is significantly more advanced than we are, perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of either deliberate genocide or accident as it was, well, overlooking that other civilization. If they were as far beyond us as we are beyond, say, cockroaches…”
“I would expect a civilization as advanced as that to have some corresponding advancement in their moral perceptions,” Aimes said stiffly. “Certain civilized concepts, such as vegetarianism on moral grounds, cannot develop without highly advanced—”
“We don’t all have your refined moral sense, General,” Mendoza said sarcastically. “Even those of us who may be superintelligent. Or highly advanced.”
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