by Ian Douglas
Reluctantly, Garwe safed his weapons. Marine battlepods should be strong enough to protect them from anything this crowd could throw at them.
Starwraith design, actually, was based on the robotic combat machines developed by the Xul. Normally the outer surface was smooth and unadorned, marked only by a dozen or so randomly placed lenses of various optical and electronic scanners. At need, Garwe could extrude a number of manipulative tentacles, heavier graspers, or weapons, the members growing out of the pod’s surface through nanotechnic hull flow and controlled directly by his thoughts. The pod was actually extraordinarily plastic, capable of assuming a wide range of shapes limited only by its total mass of about two hundred kilos, and the need to maintain a roughly human-sized and-shaped inner capsule to protect the wearer/pilot.
Each pod also possessed a number of high-tech defense systems, and Marine training included long hours of practice in the pod-encased equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.
Again, Xander addressed the crowd. “You are trespassing on diplomatic territory!” she called, the translation going out as shrill chirps and whistles. “Leave this area at once! Return to your reef—”
And then the jostling, bumping mob surged forward, each Krysni launching itself on a jet of hot hydrogen.
And the Battle of Hassetas had begun.
3
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1858 hours, GMT
“According to this,” Garroway said aloud, “the Xul have been caught counterinfecting our nets. How long has that been going on?” He opened his eyes, emerging from the sensory and data immersion of his new implant.
“A couple of centuries at least,” Schilling told him. “It’s been exploratory stuff, mostly, as if they weren’t quite sure who or what we were.”
“Nonsense! The bastards were at war with us….”
“From our point of view, General, yes. But not from theirs.”
“Wait a sec, Captain. I’m missing something here. How could the bastards be waging an interstellar war and not be aware of it?”
Schilling cocked her head. “Just how much did your age know about the Xul, General?”
The bulkheads of the Memory Room were at the moment set to display a panorama of the Galaxy as viewed from somewhere just outside and above the main body. Garroway couldn’t tell if it was a high-resolution computer-generated image, or an actual camera view from out in the halo fringe, but either way it was breathtakingly beautiful. The soft glow of four hundred billion stars shone behind Schilling’s head, a radiant corona of stardust.
Watch yourself, Trevor, he told himself. You’ve just been hibed for way too long. A pretty girl, romantic lighting…
Then he wondered if he’d just transmitted that thought. This new hardware was going to take some getting used to.
If Schilling had mentally heard him, she gave no sign. She merely watched him, backlit by the eternal curves of the galactic spiral arms, waiting.
“The Xul?” he said. “Not a lot about their origins, really. Uploaded mentalities. They must have been a technic civilization like us, once, but at some point they embraced a kind of immortality by turning themselves into patterns of data—software, really—running on their computer networks. The xenosoph theory I was taught was that when they were biologicals, before they even achieved sentience, they evolved a hyper-Darwinian survival tactic—an extreme racial xenophobia that led them to wipe out anyone who might be or might become a threat. And when they uploaded themselves, they took with them their hardwired xenophobia. And that turned out to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”
Schilling nodded. “We know it as the ‘Galactic Null Set Problem.’ The Galaxy apparently empty of technic civilization.”
“Okay. Before we got off of our world, though, we didn’t know what the answer was. There were lots of possible explanations. Maybe civilizations routinely destroyed themselves as they developed bigger and badder weapons. Maybe the only way to survive for millions of years was to develop a completely static, non-expansive culture that stayed on the home planet contemplating its collective navel. Maybe all of the rest simply never developed technology as we understand it, or never moved out of the Stone Age. Or, just maybe, we humans were the first, the only civilization to make it to the stars.” He shrugged. “Somebody had to be the first.”
“And then we found out we weren’t the first.”
“Right. Ancient ruins on Earth’s moon, on Mars, on the earthlike worlds of nearby stars. And, buried beneath the ice covering one of Jupiter’s moons, we found The Singer. A Xul huntership, trapped in the Europan world-ocean for half a million years. And eventually we did encounter other civilizations. But apparently the Xul had been hovering over the entire Galaxy for…I don’t know. A million years?”
“We think at least ten million, General.”
“Okay, ten million years. So the Xul are sitting out there in their network nodes, just listening. When a radio signal suggestive of technic life comes in, they would trace it back to the source and smack the planet with a high-velocity asteroid.
“You people will be more up on this stuff than me. But we know a kind of Galactic Federation of beings we called the ‘Builders’ or the ‘Ancients’ were genegineering Homo sapiens and terraforming Mars half a million years ago, and had built planetwide cities on Chiron and a number of other extrasolar worlds. Along came the Xul and—” Garroway slapped the back of his hand, as though swatting a mosquito. “The Builders were wiped out. Then about ten thousand years ago, an enterprising interstellar empire had enslaved much of humankind and set themselves up as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Along came the Xul and—” He slapped his hand again. “And apparently the Xul have been doing this for most of their history, and across most of the Galaxy. Now tell me how they could do that and not be waging war against us and every other emergent technological civilization in the Galaxy.”
“When you hit your hand just now, General…like you were swatting a fly?”
“Yes.”
“When you swat a fly, are you at war with it?”
Garroway thought about this. “Oh. You’re saying they’re so advanced—”
“Not really,” she told him. “They might’ve been around for ten million years, but the Xul haven’t advanced technologically at anything like our pace. In fact, they’re actually not that far ahead of us in most respects today. We’ve begun uploading personalities into computers ourselves, did you know?”
He scanned quickly through some of the historical data he’d just downloaded. “Ah…I do now.” His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Shit! Humans who live on the Net. You’ve given them a species name of their own?”
“Homo telae,” she said, nodding. “‘Man of the Web,’ which in this case means the electronic web of the Galactic Net. Actually, we learned how to upload minds partly from the Xul, inferring parts of the process from what we knew about their technology, and doing some reverse engineering from captured hunterships. In any case, we can pattern a person now and upload her to a virtual electronic world. Her body can die, but the mind, the personality, everything that made her her is saved, and lives on.”
“If you call that living,” Garroway said.
“So far as the uploaded individuals are concerned, they’re alive,” she told him.
Almost, he asked her if the uploaded personality really was the same as the living mind. As he saw it, the original mind died with the body; what was saved was a back-up, a replica that, with a complete set of memories, would think it was the original…but if that was immortality, it was an immortality that did not in the least help the original, body-bound mind. There’s been a lot of speculation about the process, though, back in the thirty-second and thirty-third centuries, he recalled, and some people tended to get pretty animated in their insistence that if the backed-up personality was the same as the original in every respect, it was the original.
Garroway had never understood the fine points of the theory, though, and had little patience with philosophy. Evidently, though, speculation had become reality, and enough people had opted for the technique to justify inventing a new species of humanity to describe them. That made sense, he supposed, given that one definition of species was its inability to interbreed with other species. A member of Homo telae, living its noncorporeal existence up on the Net, certainly wasn’t going to be able to produce offspring by mating with Homo sapiens.
“The point is,” Schilling told him, “the Xul are barely aware of us. Certain parts of the entire Xul body react to us the way your toe might twitch when an ant walks across it, or the way you might swat that fly without really thinking about what you’re doing.”
“So the Xul are some kind of group mind, a metamind?” That had been a popular theory about them back in his day.
“Not quite. They seem to function as what we call a CAS, a Complex Adaptive System. That’s a very large organization made up of many participants, or agents…like termite communities in Earth, or a hurricane.”
“You’re saying they’re not intelligent? They build starships, for God’s sake!”
“There are different kinds of intelligence, remember. Individual Xul may be what we think of as intelligent beings, but for the most part they’re locked into their virtual worlds and unaware of what we would call real. The group-Xul presence, the meta-Xul, if you will, is more an expression of the original Xul instincts, their xenophobia in particular. Even their construction of starships is probably completely automated by now—we’ve never found a Xul shipyard, remember—or they may all be relics of a much earlier age.”
“But…we’ve eavesdropped on them, Captain. We know they have us catalogued as a threat. They know our home world…hell, they bombarded Earth in 2314. How can they not be aware of us?”
“We’ve been sending our AI probes into Xul nodes for almost two thousand years, now, and we’ve done a lot of listening. There are…call them different levels of awareness. One Xul node might learn about us, but they were always slow to share with the others. Together, they were still driven by their original xenophobia, but taken in isolation, individual nodes don’t seem to really be conscious. Most of their defenses are automated. We know that within one node, or aboard one starship, they arrive at decisions through a kind of chorus of thoughts and counterthoughts until they reach a consensus.”
“The Singer,” he put in. “Europa.”
“Exactly. But individual Xul nodes tend to be pretty isolated from one another—minimum internodal communication across a widely distributed net—and the Galaxy is too big to allow that kind of consensus on a specieswide scale. From the point of view of the species, of the CAS, they’re all blissfully living a near-eternal existence in their own virtual universe, and once in a while we run across their toe and make it twitch.”
“That…is a rather uncomfortable image,” Garroway said slowly. He’d been more comfortable thinking of the Xul as a conventional enemy, an interstellar empire seeking to exterminate Humankind. The mental picture Schilling invoked was of something much, much larger, more powerful, and potentially far more dangerous than a mere alien interstellar empire. The fact that the Xul as a Galaxy-wide CAS hadn’t yet put all the pieces together implied that some day they would.
If the Xul ever got their act together and thought and moved as a species, there might be little that Humankind could do to fight back.
“As we understand the Xul now,” Schilling told him, “most of their original uploaded mentalities, the governing choruses, are…aware of what goes on outside their virtual worlds, but not really a part of it, do you see? The minds that control their hunterships and probes, the minds we’ve been up against in combat, all of those are either copies of the original minds, or AI.”
“Artificial intelligence. What’s the difference between an uploaded electronic mind and an artificial one?”
“Good question. Maybe none. The two may be completely interchangeable within what passes for Xul society. Especially when the ability to upload a conscious mind brings with it the ability to copy a conscious mind, to replicate it as often as needed, and to tweak it, to change it from iteration to iteration.”
“So the original Xul minds form the basis of the AI infrastructure, but they fill in with copies and AIs.” He was still thinking about it in classical military terms. No matter how many casualties humans inflicted on the Xul, they could fill in the gaps in an eye’s blink, simply by running off more copies of themselves.
“We believe so.”
“How the hell do you fight an enemy like that?”
“Well, we’ve been using our own AI assault complexes to take down Xul nodes as we discover them. They’re programmed to integrate themselves with the Xul AI software within a target node and gradually take it over, substituting our own virtual reality for theirs.”
“Really?” The concept was intriguing.
“So far as the Xul minds within the target node are aware, everything’s going fine, they’ve stamped out all possible threats to their existence, and there’s nothing out there to upset their poor, xenophobic sensibilities. They get routine—and negative—reports from their probes and listening stations, routine comm traffic from other nodes, everything’s fine. And our AIs are in a position to intercept any incoming data that says otherwise, or be aware of any decision by the node’s chorus to go out looking for trouble. They could even shut the node down completely, if need be. Literally cut their power and turn them off.”
“Why don’t you? Turn them all off, I mean.”
She looked uncomfortable. “Genocide, you mean.”
“If it’s a matter of survival for Humankind…yes.”
“We can’t do that!”
“Why not? I’m not even sure electronic uploads qualify as life.”
“Members of Homo telae would object to that, General. So would most members of our AI communities.”
“But their survival is at stake, too, damn it!” He felt exasperation building up, threatening to emerge as raw fury. How could he make her understand? No Marine he knew liked the idea of wholesale genocide, but when your back was up against the wall, you did what you had to do to survive.
She sighed. “That…option is debated from time to time. It comes up from time to time as a possible strategy. But there’s a strong egalatist faction within the Associative government—”
“‘Egalatist?’”
“All intelligence is equally valid, no matter what the shape of the body that houses it. And many Associative species—many human religious factions, too—think the Xul are a legitimate sapient life form, and that wiping them out is the same as genocide.”
“Hell,” Garroway said. “The bastards have tried to pull the plug on humans often enough in the past few thousand years. Maybe we should pull the plug on them. This is war.”
“The concept of war may be out of date, General,” Schilling said. “If we can contain the Xul without switching them off…wouldn’t that be better? Especially if we can eventually find a way to reason with them? Cure their xenophobia, and bring them into the Associative?”
Garroway wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “Maybe….”
“The Xul aren’t evil,” Schilling said. “Very, very different, yes. And they have a worldview that makes it tough to reason with them on human terms. But they would have a lot to contribute to Associative culture.”
“Listen, if you people are so all-fired eager to make friends with those things, why’d you bring me out of cold storage?”
“Because the containment may be failing,” Schilling said. “We have intelligence from several sources that suggests that, just as we’ve been infiltrating their systems electronically, they’ve been infiltrating ours.
“And just the possibility that they’ve begun reacting to us coherently has scared the shit out of some of us….”
Hassetas, Dac IV
Star System 1727459<
br />
1901 hours, GMT
The Krysni mob, a wall of gas bags and writhing tentacles, lunged toward the Marine line. Garwe saw a telltale warning wink on within his in-head displays, and read the data un-scrolling beside it.
“I’m getting a power spike, Captain!” he shouted. “The bastards are armed!”
“Weapons free!” Xander called.
With a thunderclap, a searing, violet beam snapped in from the jungle wall to the left, washing across Lieutenant Wahrst’s strikepod in coruscating sheets and arcing forks of grounding energy. The smooth surface of her pod silvered, then seemed to flow like water as internal fields and nanotechnics shifted to shunt aside the charge.
The attacking wall of gas bags struck an instant later, carrying the Marines back a few steps by the sheer inertia of their rush. Garwe found himself grappling with half a dozen of the things. They appeared to be trying to grab his pod in their tentacles; he responded by growing tentacles of his own, silver-sheened whiplashes emerging from the active nano surface of his pod.
Odd. The pod’s response was a bit sluggish. Garwe’s neural interface with the pod’s AI and electronic circuitry was supposed to be essentially instantaneous, but either the connection was running slow, or his brain was running way fast. It wasn’t enough to cause major problems, but he was painfully aware of the way time seemed to stretch around him as more and more of the Krysni gas bags crowded in close. His hull sensors felt them, a dead weight clinging to his armor, growing more and more massive with each dragging second.
He sent a mental command to his pod’s defense system, and the outer surface crackled with electricity. Krysni floaters in contact with his pod shriveled and twisted, their blue-white skins crisping to brown and black in a second or two of arcing fury.
A second high-energy bolt fired from the jungle, catching Captain Xander’s pod as she tried to rise above the tangled melee. Her pod shrugged off the attack, but as it rotated away from the sniper, Garwe noticed that a dinner-plate-sized patch of her outer nano had been burned away, leaving a ragged, gray-white scar. If her pod couldn’t repair itself before another shot hit in the same spot, she was dead.
