Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  For a long moment, it seemed as though the battle had paused… near Earth, at any rate, where Imperial naval defenders by the tens of thousands must have been staring in stark horror at the destruction of the very symbol of the life and strength of their empire. The communications networks were suddenly silent, as silent as death; there was nothing to be said, nothing even to be shared but the silent agony of that moment.

  Still moving, the hulk of the shattered Hoshiryu kept falling, accelerating slowly under the drag of Earth’s gravity. In another few hours, it would have fallen across the gulf between the synchorbital and Earth, tumbling, burning as it hit Earth’s atmosphere. It was certain to cause nightmare devastation when it struck.

  Dev felt a momentary blurring of self and of personality that left him slightly dizzy, and adrift in space and time. He’d played a similar disaster through his mind so many times in the past that he felt as though he’d been here before. His father… God… his father.…

  Michal Cameron, Dev’s father, had many years before been one of the few gaijin to be given command in the Imperial Navy. He’d been skippering the Imperial destroyer Hatakaze, at the final battle for Chien IV, a Manchurian-colonized world known as Lung Chi, forty-five light years from Earth. The enemy had been the Naga, back in the days before peaceful contact had been established, when the Naga had been known instead as Xenophobes. Cameron had been assigned to protect the fleet of refugee ships at Lung Synch-orbital, high atop the sky-el, when the Naga had reached the sky-el’s base and begun swarming up from the planet’s equator, molecularly transforming the tower’s carbon-weave structure as they raced into the sky.

  Half a million colonists remained on the surface, awaiting their turn to evacuate up the tower. At synchorbit was the evacuation fleet—the presumed target of the Naga attack. Cameron had decided that his first duty was to protect the fleet… and to keep the Xenophobes from capturing ships that they might be able to use to spread their infection to other worlds of the Shichiju. He’d launched a single Star-hawk missile with a twenty-kiloton warhead, targeting the sky-el tower at the two-thousand-kilometer mark, just ahead of the advancing wave of transformation. He’d teleoped the missile himself, so that no one else would have to live with the decision he’d been forced to make.

  The detonation had severed the tower, sending the upper span, thousands of kilometers in length, whiplashing out into space, while the lower part fragmented and crashed back to the surface in a blazing, fiery reentry. Half a million Manchurians had died, either in the catastrophic collapse of the sky-el, or later, as the Xenophobes devoured them. Michal Cameron had been court-martialed and disgraced; he’d committed seppuku shortly after.

  The incident had burned itself into Dev’s mind long before; it was a scar he’d carried for years, a scar that had helped drive him eventually to betray the Empire, to join the revolution fighting for Confederation independence. As much as anything else, the death of Dev’s father—and what he’d done at Lung Chi—had made Dev what he was now.

  And as the Imperial naval carrier Hoshiryu fell toward Earth, Dev knew he was seeing a replay of that incident… not in an exact repetition of events, of course, but in spirit. The mathematics of the ryu were clear and concise. Hoshiryu was not in orbit; her vector was almost directly toward the planet. She would continue to fall, more or less paralleling the vertical sky-stab of the Singapore space elevator. So large a ship would not burn appreciably in the atmosphere before it reached the surface. It would strike somewhere within a few hundred kilometers of Singapore—and when it struck it would liberate those fourteen million billion joules of energy in an explosion that would be vaster and more devastating by far than anything to have struck the planet since the fall of the dinosaur killer sixty-five million years before.

  Earth would not die; the dinosaur killer had liberated energies at least a hundredfold greater. But the blast might well wreck the planet’s fragile ecosystem. The Shockwave would almost certainly rip the Singapore sky-el out of the sky, and its fall across half of the planet would add to the untold destruction and death that would visit Dev’s home-world.

  He’d felt nothing for the planet for a long time, no emotion, no sorrow for having left… but he couldn’t sit back and let such a titanic disaster, death on such a nightmare scale, take place.

  But how in the name of Chaos could an electronic ghost stop the fall of almost two million tons of inert starship?

  There might be a way. Swiftly, Dev shifted himself to the Hachiman communications center, then routed himself through an open I2C tactical link to the communications center aboard the Hoshiryu. The ship’s bridge, he could tell from the damage-control messages playing through the bridge readouts, was open to space, and air was venting from a dozen ruptures. There were still people alive; ryus carried crews numbering several thousand, and only a few hundred had actually been killed by the kicker strikes. He could sense the life pods launching as he searched for the access codes he needed.

  The Hoshiryu gave a violent lurch, and Dev sensed the tremor of major explosions. He would have to hurry.

  A secondary data feed trunk let him route through to main engineering. The carrier’s power tap was still running. What Dev needed to do was find the computer code that would let him access the QPT containment fields and feedback controls.

  Starships required colossal amounts of energy, far more than could be provided by any but the very largest fusion power plants. The Quantum Power Tap, first demonstrated by Nihonjin physicists in the mid-twenty-first century, used paired, mini-black holes to draw so-called “virtual energy,” energy arising spontaneously from hard vacuum through the workings of quantum physics. The energy that could be liberated from a small volume of “empty space” was large indeed; most physicists still disagreed on the exact magnitude, but it was energy enough to destroy a world easily.

  … or a starship, even one as large as Hoshiryu.

  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 Nukamura’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 Nukamura’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 radiation, 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 wer
e 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.