Netlink

by William H. Keith

She would have to kill their joint velocity outward first, before they could start heading back.

  “All warflyers!” the voice from the Gauss said again. “Emergency alert! We are pulling out! Everyone get back on board immediately.”

  “Wait!” Taki yelled. “I have a damaged warflyer out here! Its pilot is alive!”

  “Who is this?”

  “Dr. Taki Oe. I’m a xenologist off the Gauss, operating Remote Probe Five. I have a damaged warflyer at…” She hesitated, translating the coordinates on her view, then reading them off to the unseen listeners. “The pilot is alive!”

  “Wait one, Dr. Oe,” the voice said. “Okay, hang tight! We have some flyers coming to assist you!”

  “We’re decelerating,” she said. “Listen, don’t leave without us! The pilot is Lieutenant Hagan!”

  “I don’t care who it is,” another voice said. “We’re not leaving one of our own!”

  “Hagan!” another voice said. “Did you say Lieutenant Hagan?”

  “I’ve got her warflyer, the Kara’s Matic, right here,” Taki said. “I’m trying to stop her velocity, but I may not have enough reaction mass left to do it!”

  “Go ahead and burn every drop,” the new voice said. “This is Lieutenant Ran Ferris, and I’m going to be there before you know it! I’ll get her back!”

  “Hurry—” Taki said. She was looking now at something else, something beyond the still-dwindling shape of the Gauss. Her course outward had taken her away from the battle, and away, too, from the golden cloud that had so transfixed them all when they’d first arrived in this volume of space.

  Her new position gave her an excellent vantage point, looking inward toward the double sun, the Device, the glowing cloud. From here, it looked as though the cloud were slowly transforming itself, changing shape like an immense, space-borne amoeba.

  And like an amoeba, it was reaching out, spreading itself wide across three dimensions, sending long, almost liquid-looking pseudopods out and over and around the entire human-DalRiss fleet.

  In another few moments, the fleet would be engulfed completely in that glittering, deadly cloud.

  Dev once again felt himself losing his grip on his own humanity.

  For a time, after the incomplete merging with his downloaded self, and then later, while he’d been back on New America with Katya and Vic and other humans, he’d almost felt as though he’d recaptured much that had been lost, the caring for people, the knowledge of them as individuals instead of as abstractions, as sophisticated self-directing programs running in jellyware assemblies of chemicals picked and shaped by evolution. But all of that was slipping away now, lost in something, in an awareness much vaster than his own.

  The power, the despair, the sheer volume of the Net was waking up.

  And Dev was a part of it.

  On one level, he was still aware of himself as Dev Cameron; the memories were all intact, his ego, his awareness of self, all was still there. But on a much deeper and more profound level, he was… something else, something very else. A being, a supremely powerful being that was at one and the same time the sum and far more than the sum of all of those billions of human and AI minds riding the Net with him.

  It was almost trivially clear what had happened. Nakamura’s Number—and what a limited and simplistic concept that was!—suggested a transcendental change in complexity and in scope and in power when a parallel processing system surpassed just over one hundred billion individual sub-units. That number—and it was, he realized now, not the number itself but a kind of critical mass of information processing power—had been surpassed moments before, and the increase had just given birth to a new mind.

  Dev was not that mind, though by virtue of his position on the Net and the fact that he was feeling it happen as it took place, he could sense its dawning awareness… not mind only, but Mind. The new being was self-aware and intelligent, a pervasive and far-flung presence omnipresent and omniscient within the universe it occupied, a universe defined by the worlds and interlocking computer nets from which it arose. Dev could sense that being as an ant might dimly sense a human standing astride its anthill, vast beyond comprehension, so vast it could be perceived more as a natural force than anything alive. Indeed, Dev doubted that any other mind linked in on the Net was aware of the new birth… and he questioned at first whether the Mind was aware of anything so insignificant as humanity.

  Once, long ago, Dev had been a god. His linkage with a planetary Naga had given him physical and mental powers far beyond the ken of humanity, and memories of that time still could make him tremble inside. Commanding physical forces that could destroy ryu-class starships in planetary orbit, however, was nothing compared to this, an Overmind derived from the mental activities of a hundred billion individual intelligences, yet no more aware of or limited to the scope of its component parts than was a mind derived from a hundred billion nerve cells… or than a living cell with its complexities of DNA and mitochondria and golgi bodies and proteins was limited to the scope and reach and ability of individual atoms. An associative, a hive mentality, could be thought of, possibly, as the sum total of all of its separate parts. This, however, was something far more, a synergy that went immeasurably beyond any piecemeal assembly of separate consciousnesses.

  The Netlink Overmind cared nothing for the thoughts or despairs or hopes or needs of its individual components. It couldn’t even hear them.

  It had—it was—a Mind of its own.

  But at the same time, it clearly was aware of the current problem. Part of its being resided within the hundreds of starships now battling the alien Web, and that part of its being was threatened by the Web’s embrace.

  Dev tried calling to it… uselessly. It could hear his linked thoughts no more than it could hear any of the other teeming, chattering minds still oblivious to its presence.

  Perhaps, though it arose from those minds without being an associative or shared mind, it could draw on the totality of information stored by them. Dev felt something, a brushing against his consciousness, and knew without knowing how he knew that some part of his own memory had been tapped.

  And the Web associative stopped.

  It would not, Dev thought, have been possible without the human-DalRiss fleet that had so held the Web’s attention, focusing it on the physical rather than the immaterial, the interactive network of signals flickering from ship to ship throughout the fleet—and by way of the I2C back to all the populated worlds of the Shichiju.

  It might not have been possible, too, without the Combined Fleet’s massed firepower. Those five moon-sized Alpha-class craft, Dev realized now, had been more than communications centers, but powerful information processing nodes larger and faster and far more powerful than any single AI in human space. Two of the five were still processing data, but more slowly now, for large parts of their interiors had been reduced to molten slag by the bombardment of nuclear missiles and hurtling bits of magun-slung rock striking at relativistic speeds. The damage to this local expression of the Web had been more serious than was suggested by a simple analysis of numbers alone. It was reacting more slowly, and with less decision, a wounded giant limping from its wounds… but still powerful beyond belief.

  The Netlink Overmind penetrated the Web. Dev was not sure exactly how that happened, though he could imagine several possibilities. The Web must depend on the communicative interaction of its separate parts, as did the Netlink. Those communications were carried out through readily apparent and analyzed processes, through modulated radio and laser transmissions. Such transmissions could be tapped, analyzed, decoded, broken with a speed and an efficiency unthinkable to any merely human mind. Dev could sense the Overmind expanding—growing at the expense of the Web. One by one… then in tens… in hundreds… in thousands… in millions, the myriad craft that made up the physical expression of the Web went inert. Some turned their weapons on their fellows before they, in turn, were blasted out of existence; most simply went dead, their processors f
used by overloads, their data receptors switched off, rendering them blind and deaf to the increasingly urgent calls of the Web intelligence.

  Watching through the massed probes and sensors of the fleet, Dev could see everywhere the vast, glittering pseudopodia of the Web growing ragged at the edges… tattering just a little at first, then beginning to disintegrate with astonishing speed. Dimly, he was aware that he was witness to the power of exponents. An effect doubled, then doubled again, then doubled time after time can eventually and relentlessly overpower the most impossible of numbers.

  Dev watched as the monster, itself far more than Nakamura’s Number of component parts, began to disintegrate with bewildering speed.

  “What’s… what’s happening?” Kara staggered as they pulled her, nude and dripping, from the liquid embrace of her shattered warflyer. “I couldn’t see.…”

  Everywhere was total and complete and shrieking, wildly happy confusion. The spin gravity bay had been repressurized and was swarming now with men and women, some from the Phantoms, others from the ship’s crew, and even some of the scientists, all milling about in happy, joyful, madly exultant chaos. Ran Ferris helped her stand up, catching her as she almost fell.

  And then Katya was there, holding out a robe, tears streaming down her face. Everywhere in the bay there was jubilation, men and women cheering and hurling pieces of uniform and anything they could throw aloft. “I thought you were dead!” Katya yelled, her voice barely reaching above the roaring cheers around her.

  Kara took the robe and shrugged it on, grateful for its warmth in the chill of a compartment only recently open to vacuum.

  “Someone came out and got me,” Kara replied. “With a remote. Was it Daren?”

  And there was Daren, shoving his way through the celebrating crewmen. “Not me!” he yelled.

  “It was the Japanese woman,” Ran told her. “Dr. Oe. She stopped your spin with the probe and got you headed back toward the ship before her reaction mass ran dry. All I had to do was catch you and bring you in,”

  “Taki!” Daren cried. “She went back out again after we both got knocked off-line! I didn’t know she was chasing you, though!”

  Taki! Kara stared at Ran and her brother, then laughed, shaking her head. Little Taki, the woman she’d not even wanted to talk to!

  “What… what’s going on?” she asked again. “My commo was knocked out. I still had the AI and my visual sensors, but I couldn’t see much of anything until the probe grabbed me. What’s all the cheering?”

  Katya steered her aside, toward a marginally quieter part of the chamber, near an inner bulkhead. “We won!” she shouted.

  “We… won…?”

  It hardly seemed possible. They’d been losing, losing big right up to the moment when she’d been hit by a piece of Phil Dolan’s Philosopher.

  Poor Phil…

  “We still don’t know what’s happened,” Daren said. “But my father’s been on-line with us, and he says something happened with the grand Netlink. All of the people watching online. Somehow they were able to infiltrate the Web, make parts of it start attacking itself. Sounds like they broke the thing’s encoding somehow and started giving it conflicting orders. Right now, it’s all just individual machines drifting through space, with no control or coherence at all.”

  The battle—if not quite the war—was over.

  She hugged herself, shivering.

  “Let’s get you dried off and dressed,” her mother said.

  Kara shook her head. “No,” she said. “First things first. Where’s Taki?”

  She wanted to thank the woman who’d just saved her life.

  And in the cyberspace defined by the massed, interlinked computers and intelligences and jacked-in minds, a newborn intelligence stretched forth its… they were not hands, actually, since the being had no physical instrumentality, but “hands” would serve as an adequate descriptor for powers of manipulation that it was only beginning to be aware of.

  So much was possible now, undreamed of before.

  It looked out at the stars surrounding it, comprehending. There were vistas there of time and space… and of other intelligences now dimly sensed.

  So very much was possible.…

  Epilogue

  “The war isn’t over,” Kara said. “Not by about ten million light years. We still have the Web, the real Web, to contend with, at the Galactic Core.”

  “Well, that can’t be that hard, can it?” Daren asked. “We beat ’em at the Nova. And by the time we got to Alya, the machines that were left had all switched. Nothing left but floating junk.”

  They were seated on the raised patio at the back of Cascadia, overlooking the mountains on a glorious, crisp New American morning. Columbia was dimly seen behind a light haze in the east. Morninglories chirped and warbled at one another from a dancing golden cloud above the amberbushes below. Kara was sitting on a double seat next to Taki, her arm around the young woman’s shoulders. They’d become close friends since the Battle of Nova Aquila, somewhat to Daren’s irritation. He claimed that Taki didn’t have time for him anymore, because she was always talking with Kara.

  And Kara didn’t really care. She’d found a new friend in Taki, a woman with a mind as bright and as incisive as her own. She was enjoying getting to know her as a person, instead of as an oriental face. She looked across the patio and caught Ran’s eye; he grinned at her, and she wondered if he was thinking about that ViRsim they’d shared before the battle, when she’d admitted her distrust of all Nihonjin.

  She’d changed a lot since then.

  Katya stretched out in a couch that molded itself to her thought. “I doubt that it will pose that much of a problem. The last time we talked to Dev about it, he seemed to think the Netlink was more than a match for the Web. ‘Infinitely beyond it,’ he said. Because of its flexibility.”

  “But as I understand it,” Vic said, “this Overmind was a product of all those massed billions of human minds on the Net. They’re not there anymore. What happened to the Overmind? Did it just… blink out?”

  “It’s still there,” Katya told him. “At least Dev says it is, even if we’re not aware of it. I suppose we could think of it as being asleep… but there’s also an impression he got that that number… what did you call it, Daren?”

  “Nakamura’s Number.”

  “Right. There was an impression Dev had that the Overmind wasn’t completely reliant on that number. Maybe the number was responsible for its birth in the first place, but… it’s still there. And growing stronger.”

  “Scary,” Kara said with a small inner shudder.

  Taki patted her arm. “It seems we have need of large and powerful friends. The larger and more powerful, the better.”

  “I’d be happier if I could understand it better,” Ran said. “The scale of this thing is a little overwhelming.”

  “That’ll come,” Vic said. “With time. I guess with Dev as a kind of go-between, we should be able to learn more about it eventually, even if it doesn’t seem all that interested in communicating directly with us.”

  “How often do we stop to talk with insects?” Kara said. “That’s what scares me, that it’s so far beyond human comprehension that we don’t really have that much in common with it. Even though it sprang from us, somehow.”

  “What I want to know more about is the Web,” Daren said. “They’ve been analyzing the sample machines we brought back over at the University. They say the Naga link has been proven.”

  “God help us,” Katya said softly. “The Web created the Naga?”

  “Almost certainly. We think… we think that the Web collective began sending Naga seed pods out beyond the Galactic Core, oh, maybe seven, eight billion years ago. Understand, a lot of this is still guesswork.”

  “Go on,” Kara said.

  “The idea may have been to use them like von Neumann machines. Self-replicating. Exponentiating. A Naga seed pod would land on a planet with certain parameters of temperature, gravi
ty, and magnetic moment and begin preparing it. Like terraforming… but getting it ready for the Web, not humans. But something went wrong.”

  “What?” Ran said.

  “We’re really not sure,” Taki told him. “Some of us think that the process was taking so long—millions of years between one planet colonized and another—that a kind of evolution set in. Like genetic drift.”

  Kara had had to look that one up when Taki first mentioned it. In biology, genetic drift occurred when a species changed slightly to meet different conditions in a neighboring territory… and then that subspecies changed as it migrated again… and again…

  There were cases known of ten or twelve subspecies living in adjacent territories, each slightly different from its neighbors, each able to breed with its neighbors… and yet the subspecies on either end of that chain were so different from one another that they could be regarded as entirely separate species, unable even to interbreed.

  In this case, the genetic drift had been a subtle but constant shift in the organization of information, slight at first, but enough so that eventually the Naga were no longer recognized as part of the Web.

  And the Naga, by that time, was a self-sufficient life form, operating under its own set of programming.

  “We’re pretty sure the Naga were supposed to start turning planets into easily digestible chunks for the Web when it arrived,” Daren continued. “The Web apparently has the rather single-minded goal of turning all of the matter in the universe, stars, planets, rocks, us, whatever it can get its claws on, into more machines. Components of itself. Judging from the number of machines at Nova Aquila, it could do it, too.”

  “Sounds like a von Neumann machine run amuck,” Kara said.

  “In a way. From the Web’s point of view, the Naga have become a kind of cancer, cells, if you will, growing and evolving on their own, instead of according to the master plan.”

  “Lucky for us,” Ran said. “And to think we once thought the Naga were our enemies!”