Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  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 thought, 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 stretching 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.

  He felt terribly small, pitifully weak… as insignificant as an insect confronting a human. The sheer scale of that revelation was a staggering shock—to ego, to his very concept of self. This was all he was, all he could ever be.…

  For a moment, Dev struggled against the grasp of this monster, this consciousness so much vaster than his own. He was aware, on a very small scale, of just how intricate this organism was. Where Dev had a handful of senses, the Overmind possessed hundreds, possibly thousands… and a correspondingly vast and intricate system of expressing, sampling, and thinking about each. It saw stars, for instance, not as points of light, but as vibrant and extraordinarily informative entities rich in a cascade of energy and data ranging from low radio frequencies to high, hard X-rays.

  Struggling was pointless. He tried to put into thoughts the need for humanity to triumph against the Web… and in the same moment that he expressed the thought, he knew that the Overmind had been well aware of the Web threat, had been fighting it, in fact, in the only way that it could, by paring away its numbers until the Net’s own mobile nodes—how strange to think of starships and computer-directed weapons systems simply as nodes in a computer network—could handle them.

  Dev was confused. Had human agencies, the Confederation Military Command and the Imperial Navy, planned and executed this battle against the Web invaders? Or had they simply been tools blindly carrying out the Overmind’s instructions?

  Probably, the answer lay somewhere between the two… and Dev doubted very much if he would ever understand exactly how such a mix of self-determination and puppetry was possible.

  Then, with a suddenness that left Dev feeling weak and reeling, he was back in the Hachiman complex, the other Devs were gone, purged from the system, and he was alone once more with his thoughts.

  What had happened? Gradually, he began picking up again the threads of incoming data, trying to see what was happening to the battle for Earth. It looked�
� yes! It was true! The Web assault was beginning to fall apart, individual ship-sized machines falling silent, their weapons dead, while the small nano-eaters let go their tenacious grip on hull armor or superstructure and drifted away, inert and lifeless. Laser and particle beam fire continued for several more minutes, until station by station, the defending forces began to realize that the Web was no longer pushing their assault.

  In fact, Dev could sense the Web offensive crumbling in a broadening, three-dimensional wave that spread throughout first the Earth-centered cloud, then the one at Mercury’s orbit, and finally the machines that had been hammering Mars. The collapse was remarkably similar to what he’d seen happen at the Battle of Nova Aquila, when the Over-mind had managed to break the enemy’s computer network and issue shut-down orders to most of the fleet. At first, some of the Web machines were actually firing on other kickers, as though they no longer recognized other Webbers as friends; then the pace of the advancing chaos quickened, as more and more Web devices simply ceased functioning.

  Dev turned inward, studying the Net… and the Over-mind he could still sense there. It was no longer paying any attention to him, and he could no longer sense the vast shadows of its thoughts, but he was certain that that enigmatic meta-intelligence was what had turned the tide… again. He could even sense now how it had happened, though the details were necessarily blurred or missing.

  Recognizing that the Alphas they’d used at Nova Aquila both were too tempting a target and offered a clue as to how the Web coordinated its battle tactics and strategies, the enemy had found a way to run the same sort of program on a highly redundant and widely distributed network, one that had not five nodes, but many tens of thousands. The efficiency of such a system would necessarily be less than on the more compact network, since there was a lot more room for error, for one unit to get multiple orders, or even for portions of the fleet to be overlooked and forgotten.

  It had stumped the Overmind, however, since the communications protocol the Web intelligence was using was almost impossible to crack. Each time the human Net had tried to merge itself with the Web’s network at one set of nodes, the entire Web system had simply shifted somewhere else. Likely, it had been shifting randomly and quickly, precisely so that the Overmind could never quite nail it down.

  The solution, though, was obvious. The Overmind had continued whittling away at the Web forces, until there simply weren’t enough enemy devices left to support the system necessary to give the Web force direction and purpose. For some minutes, now, the Web’s coordination, its speed and aggressiveness, had been falling off; Dev recognized the fact now, though it hadn’t been at all obvious at the time. Once the Web intelligence had fallen below a certain critical threshold, it must have easily succumbed to the Overmind’s ongoing attempt to break through and subvert it.

  Only then did Dev realize what a close-run thing that last battle had been. Much of the Imperial Fleet had been battered into wreckage, and at the defensive line in front of Sol, it had come horrifyingly close to being overwhelmed. Tenno Kyuden… God, it would be a long time before Man knew what had been lost there. There were no reports out on the Net, yet, about whether or not the Emperor lived. At the very least, though, damage to Imperial communications, to the headquarters of the Imperial Staff Command, to the very heart and soul of Dai Nihon had been savage and terrible.

  The decision—taken by a number of battlefield commanders at widely separated points in the fight—to target only the larger Webber devices on the theory that the smallest ones would not be able to hurt Earth’s Sun, had apparently been sound. There were no reports of enemy machines entering the Solar corona.

  Thank God.…

  The Battle for Earth was over. But now, Dev realized, it was time to carry the war to the Web… and to end it once and for all.

  And, more clearly than ever, he saw what had to be done.…

  Chapter 20

  We aspire in vain to assign limits to the works of creation in space, whether we examine the starry heavens, or that world of minute animalcules which is revealed to us by the microscope. We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the universe lie beyond the reach of mortal ken.

  —GEOLOGIST SIR CHARLES LYELL

  nineteenth century C.E.

  Kara felt leaden, scarcely alive at all. Since the Battle of Earth, as the conflict in Earth’s Solar System was now officially called, had been won, she’d spent much of her time in the virtual world called Nirvana, visiting with Ran.

  Somehow, she’d never expected that Ran, with his eagerness, his exuberance, his irrepressible self-confidence, would be the sort to succumb to Remote Death Transference Syndrome. Her, maybe, yes. She’d found she was terrified of the idea of being torn from her body, like Dev Cameron had been, and reduced to a pale twilight existence, neither wholly dead nor completely alive. Kara shared the ancient soldier’s superstition that what you dreaded might happen would, in a universe that at times seemed infinitely perverse.

  So her, yes. But not Ran.…

  Best to concentrate on the here and now, try to blot out what had happened, or what might have been.…

  Repercussions of the battle were still echoing throughout the Shichiju, and raising again in the Confederation the ominous specter of war with the Imperium. Despite the help Confed units had given, there apparently was a perception within the Imperial government that the Frontier breakaway states had somehow been at least partly responsible for the Web attack, because of their experiments at the Stargate, which the Empire had never totally approved of, and because of their continued close relationship with nonhumans like the DalRiss and—now—the Gr’tak. The Empire used the DalRiss because they had to, because ignoring the city-ships would have put their own navy at a severe disadvantage, but they wanted to limit contact with aliens on the grounds that humanity might become contaminated by alien ideas, contaminated to the point that what was considered human might change.

  Not entirely rational, on the face of it… but the Emperor had been reported killed when Hoshiryu crashed through Tenno Kyuden, and the Imperial government was now in the hands of the Kansai no Otoko, the military faction that had long been calling for the reunification of the Empire under a racially pure, ruling elite. Where the Men of Completion were concerned, almost anything was possible. The Confederation military was on full alert. With the departure of the Imperial contingent at Nova Aquila, the so-called Unified Fleet, back at Nova Aquila now, was strictly DalRiss and Confederation vessels, plus a couple of Gr’tak ships that had arrived with DalRiss carriers from High Frontier. Preparations for the upcoming expedition had moved into high gear with the fear that the Empire might soon move to shut down further experiments with the Stargate. Operation Gateway had been bumped up on the schedule… to tomorrow.

  Tomorrow.…

  Kara was standing in… a place. It was an imaginary place, a construct of AIs designed for the Operation Gateway briefing. Designed as a ViRsimulation where maps and diagrams could be easily projected and manipulated, it was as black as empty space, and borderless. Hanging at the center of that blackness was a three-dimensional image of the Nova Aquila Stargate, superimposed on a threespace color-coded pattern representing the literal warping of space close to the surface of the rotating cylinder. Beyond, in the distance, the twin white dwarf suns, still bleeding silver-blue streams of plasma ripped from their equators, cast a chill, almost icy illumination over those gathered there.

  Kara had been ordered to attend this briefing as company commander of the Phantoms, who would be accompanying the Gauss on Gateway. The others were the senior officers with the fleet that was now being styled the First Galactic Expeditionary Force, or One-GEF.

  Her father was there, of course. He’d been chosen to lead the expedition. So, too, was an image of Dev… looking curiously shrunken, even subdued. What, she wondered, had happened to him in the Battle of Earth?

  The others gathered there were a varied lot, a crowd of nearly fi
fty in a three-deep circle around Vic. She recognized only a few. Four of them, three men and a woman, were company commanders like herself off the Confederation carrier Karyu, which would be accompanying them as their “big gun” into tempus incognito. Karyu’s skipper, Rear Admiral Barnes, was there, as well as Senior Captain Carol Latimer, the new CO of the Gauss. Dr. Cal Norris, Taki and Daren, and Lieutenant Tanya Coburn represented the science department. Captain Jorge Hernandez was CO of the cruiser Independence. Strangest in the group, perhaps, was a single nonhuman, the toweringly massive, hunched-over shape of Sholai of the Gr’tak. Representatives of the three DalRiss ships that would be going, Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shralghal, were in attendance, but invisibly. DalRiss rarely utilized analogue images of themselves, preferring the touch and smell of living organisms.

  The rest were other senior department heads, chief aides, and the like. Kara, unconsciously seeking comfort perhaps, had moved her point of view through the crowd until she was watching from the inner ring, close by her father.

  “Operation Gateway,” Vic was saying to the assembly, “will commence at zero-nine-hundred hours, ship’s time, tomorrow. One-GEF will move in single file toward the Stargate, following the precise vectors that have already been uploaded to our DalRiss friends.”

  As he spoke, a green line of light drew itself through empty space, angling toward the Gate near one end, the path flattening out, slowly curving until it was running parallel to the immense structure. At a range of just under one kilometer from the object’s surface, the green line was nearly lost in the blue folds and twistings of intensely warped space.

  “Our first destination will be Tovan-Doval, the home suns of the Gr’tak. The purpose of this is to verify that the Web does deliberately make double stars like the Gr’tak suns or stars like Nova Aquila explode, and then somehow use them to build stargates.”