by Barry Kirwan
The fleet was ready to leave. A Q’Roth High Commander was in charge, Louise was to be at the rear. The Nchkani bridge was smaller than she expected, but then everything was done by neural interface. She was about to cut connection with her own ship when it informed her of an inbound vessel in Transpace. She had been given some of Qorall’s tech to monitor Transpace, and had asked for notification of two signatures, the first the Alician flotilla led by Ash, the second, Shiva. It was the latter.
The Q’Roth/Nchkani fleet powered up.
Louise made up her mind, her adrenaline spiking as she did so. The third way. She’d received a visitor while in Transpace two days earlier: a Spider, and a Hohash. It was only then that she recalled clearly, for the first time, what had happened on her trip to Savange several weeks ago, how a Spider had interrupted her journey and stranded a Q’Roth ship in Quickspace, and in so doing, killed a number of her crew as well as Q’Roth. Qorall still didn’t know the Spiders’ capability, and she hadn’t told him.
She presumed the Spider and Hohash had been sent to kill her. Instead they’d made an offer. She hadn’t answered, and they’d left, and she’d woken up on arrival at Korakkara. She’d even wondered if she’d dreamt it, and had put it out of her mind while dealing with the Queen. Now, for the first time, she considered the offer, and Vince’s favourite adage.
It only matters what you do next.
She transmitted an encoded message to her former ship, and ordered it into Transpace, where it would detonate and send an information spurt to Shiva. At Level Fifteen, Shiva would be able to intercept it, though no Q’Roth vessel could. A short message, captain’s eyes only. She was convinced it would be Micah, despite the fact she had sent Toran to kill him.
Louise felt better than she had for days. She’d always believed in burning bridges behind her. As her vessel and all the others slipped into Transpace on the long journey to Hell’s End, the message echoed in her mind. It had been simple, and above all it had been clear.
Kill the Queen.
Pierre no longer knew where he was. His consciousness was distributed across eight hundred and forty-three sectors, wherever the Machines roved the galaxy, though nine-tenths had already assembled at the perimeter, awaiting the signal to depart. His thoughts were clear and pure. No more time spent self-guessing or worrying or considering the rights and wrongs of actions and decisions. No more self. Efficiency. Clarity. A larger perspective. But he could still speculate; that was one of his functions inside the Sublime Logic.
The Orbs were destroyed, and had nourished the Machines. Qorall’s tentacles reaching across the galaxy had been slashed. Indigenous inhabitants everywhere were returning to normal, though many had become vengeful, and a motley armada of ships of all manner of alien species was making its way to outer spiral N117-E2, colloquially known as Hell’s End, to do battle against Qorall.
The Machines had not interfered, simply eradicated the Orbs and aided in the distribution of the antigen, and so the local inhabitants did not fear the colossal black metal poly-structures sailing through their systems. Indeed, many alien infants had created toys mimicking the many forms of Machine city-ships traversing the galaxy.
It had not been like this the first time, Pierre knew. The Level Eighteen Machine race had been reviled, an object of terror and hatred, leading to a massive battle at N117-E2 two point zero three million years ago; which was how that region of space had gotten its name, where the last vestige of the once mighty Machines had been consigned to oblivion on the nameless tomb planet.
Things were different this time, and difference bred opportunity. The Machines were already spread too far and wide to be easily contained. Their closest rivals on the Intelligence scale, the Nchkani, had been obliterated. The Tla Beth were too few in number to resist, and only one Kalarash remained. The Machines could sit out the battle between Hellera and Qorall, then make their move and assert order. But there was a fluctuation in Pierre’s thoughts, an asymmetry. He had promised Hellera and Ukrull that the Machines would leave the galaxy. And there had been individual aliens, certain personalities – he had difficulty recalling their names and faces – whom he had sworn to protect.
But that was before. It was more logical to stay. Order was protection. The Kalarash idea of a hierarchy based on intelligence was flawed. Resentment built up at lower levels and led to unrest and wars, or else stagnation. Organic species inevitably hated any overlords precisely because they saw that they could one day be in their place, so why should they serve them? But if Machines were the overlords, the psychology would be different. A vastly superior intelligence – a benign one that demanded nothing more than harmonious order and commerce, one that stayed in the background except to quell any unrest and to protect respectable citizen races from extra-galactic influences – would be god-like. The toys would in time become religious artefacts. With a Machine citadel on every inhabited world, ensuring justice and order; the galaxy would thrive.
Another discordant asymmetry arose. What if, no matter how benign, they saw us as oppressors? What if one day a race matched our own intelligence, and sought to replace us? Pierre tried to find the origin of this disharmony, but knew it could only have come from his own self. He felt schizoid: part of him had fully embraced the Machine intelligence’s love of order and logic, its utter purity, but another part of him still clung to inchoate organic thinking patterns. It would be far easier all around if that smaller voice were silenced. My point exactly, the larger Pierre – the one distributed across half the galaxy – heard the smaller, less significant voice say.
Small Pierre continued. Why not play God more seriously? Eradicate all life in the galaxy and start again. Create life in the Machine image. A Machine galaxy. Though the larger Pierre knew this was being suggested more with irony than with sincerity, the thought had occurred. But the Machine race had always been designed to serve. It was written into their base code, their collective soul. It was who they were.
Code can be re-written, small Pierre said.
The distributed form of Pierre became aware of an external disruption. Contact with twenty Machine entities in sectors well inside the inner galactic rim had been lost. He had no idea why. The smaller Pierre seemed to know something.
I’ll get back to you, small Pierre said.
Pierre found himself in human form again, with normal flesh, not even silver-tinged as it had been before. But he knew it was an illusion, first because the environment was a depthless blue, a floor with no walls or ceiling, and second due to the three others present: Kat, a Hohash, and a Spider.
“Hello, Pierre,” Kat said. She looked worried. “How are you holding up?”
“Not too well, actually. Tell me, are you… real? I mean the real Kat here via node, or just another reflection of my mind?”
“Real. That is, I’m asleep back on Esperia, but the Hohash is by my bed. Anyway, it’s me.”
Surprising both himself and Kat, he rushed to her and embraced her, kissing her with a passion he’d rarely known during his physical life.
She gave him a crooked smile, her face flushed. “Wow, Pierre, being a Machine suits you. I feel a little embarrassed, knowing that back home I’m lying naked next to Antonia.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”
Her smile lingered. “Ah, there you are, that’s more like it. Don’t apologise. In any case, I think we have business to do.”
He glanced to the Hohash and then the Spider. “I gathered. First, how is Petra?”
“She’s strong, that’s what matters.” She winced, squeezed her eyes closed, and put her fingertips to her temples. She opened her eyes. “Okay, the meeting has started. The Spiders want to know why you haven’t left the galaxy.”
Pierre nodded. “I’m losing that one, I’m afraid. The Machines are re-evaluating. They’re in a strong position now.”
“Interesting you say ‘they’, not ‘we’.”
“It’s complicated. Part of me...” He didn�
�t know how to explain it.
“It’s alright. I know you’re not coming back. I’m guessing you have no body anymore, and I can’t exactly keep you hidden in a Hohash for an occasional secret midnight rendezvous.”
He checked to see if she was mocking him, but although she was smiling, her eyes were sad, as if that was exactly what she’d like to happen.
He blurted it out. “They want to take over the galaxy, become our and every species’ overlords.”
“Of course they do, Pierre. That’s why Kalaran got rid of them first time around, and why Hellera is terrified of them.” She shook her head. “Funny, no matter how intelligent you are, you always remain naïve. Quite endearing.”
She staggered forward a pace, as if someone had shoved her in the back, eyes squeezed shut, hands pressing her temples. She recovered. “Ouch. The Spider is getting impatient, and now I know why. Qorall has placed a device in the central core of the galaxy. Something about a super white hole, Transpace relays… Ah, this will be better. A Hohash scanned it so you can take a look.”
Pierre watched the Hohash’s mirror surface flash a set of detailed images in ever-increasing resolution, from macro to pico. The device was intricate, but with an elegance of design that was impressive, beyond the reach of his and the Machine’s own intelligence level; Pierre felt a tinge of admiration. Its defences were impregnable; any aggressive or insidious attack would trigger the device; there would be no way to stop it. Though Pierre wasn’t a physical being anymore, he felt like he needed to sit down.
“A doomsday device,” he said. “We have to act now.”
She frowned. “Why now? Surely Qorall will wait until the battle, and then decide whether or not to use it?”
Pierre paced up and down, thinking. “Not necessarily. We’ve been running data analyses on everything he has done since his arrival, gaining an insight into his psycho-pathology. But we didn’t know about this device. Now I do, there’s a ninety-eight per cent chance he will activate it now, but leave the relays open. That would start the white hole explosion, but without the Transpace relays the outpouring of radiation could only travel at lightspeed, and would take thousands of years to consume the galaxy.”
Kat shook her head. “Seems crazy to me. What if he can’t stop it? Thousands of years is the blink of an eye to Qorall.”
Pierre recalled his earlier conversation with the larger Machine persona. “I’m afraid we might have been too successful. The whole galaxy is turning against him. The Orbs won’t work again now that the antigen is everywhere.”
“You think he’ll cut and run?”
“He may yet try to capture Hellera during the battle, but if he is losing he will leave and burn the galaxy behind him. Even if he wins, he may quit this galaxy and start afresh somewhere else, incubating his young during the intergalactic voyage while all life here slowly roasts to death.”
Kat looked crestfallen. She turned to the Hohash and the Spider, closed her eyes.
Pierre watched and waited. Kat became very still. When she opened her eyes again they were black; not like Mannekhi eyes; Kat’s eyes were like holes in space. Pierre knew it wasn’t Kat anymore. He glanced at the Spider. Then he noticed the Hohash showing a very odd vista with iridescent, multi-coloured contours. It looked like a different kind of space, and he wondered if he was looking at a different galaxy, the original home of the Spiders. In it were many Spider vessels, sleek rainbow-sheened ellipsoids.
“One who was called Pierre, six of your Machine vessels that were travelling in Transpace have been diverted into the central core. They will emerge near the device. They must surround it. Do it now.”
Pierre was about to raise objections when he found that his mind was connected to those ships. The ‘larger’ Pierre, as he thought of him, wasn’t present, or else six ships were not enough to allow larger Pierre’s emergence. He morphed into the Machine ships’ local intelligence and saw through their scanners. The device was shaped like a star, six pearl prongs glistening against a background of pure white. The heat and radiation were at the limit of the known scale; his Machines would not last long, the outer edges already deteriorating, metal vaporising in the heat, sloughing off layers at a tremendous rate. Transpace had been deactivated, no doubt the Spiders’ doing. Under Pierre’s control the six Machine cities began to flatten, growing thinner, until they were like sheets, lamina a few tens of metres thick, eroding fast. He guided them to connect and enshroud the device. That was when he noticed another object in the white haze, a single Hohash, dwarfed by the device and the shroud. It, too, was melting, cracks on its mirror face. He suddenly realised that this Hohash was keeping his consciousness there, and was also his lifeline back to where he had been moments before, outside the core. If the Hohash broke…
Via minimal remaining sensors he completed the shroud. Mentally joined to their sensors, he noticed from their internal chronometers that time slowed dramatically, or rather, everything was happening at a much faster rate. He knew why. They now had only picoseconds in which to act, though he still did not see what they could do. As he’d predicted, the anti-tampering triggering system activated. In slow motion he saw the device begin to implode, like a balloon deflating.
“Switch off the Machine cities’ intelligence now,” the Spider said via Kat. “It will be more… humane.”
He didn’t question anymore, just complied, as if shooting a horse with a broken leg. He felt sadness, an emotion he’d almost forgotten.
The device had shrunk into a small pinprick of white. He knew what came next. It was as if the device had taken in a huge breath, and was about to explode outwards, endlessly, a silent scream that would engulf everything. The shroud was barely a metre thick.
But something happened. A slit in the brilliant white opened up, not quite dark, but a dim twilight that by comparison was almost night. The slit opened further, as if being peeled back, held apart by invisible hands against terrible pressure to close again. There was noise – though in space there shouldn’t have been – the sound of a hurricane rising in pitch to a banshee. Pierre glimpsed ships, four of the Spider ellipsoids he’d seen earlier, stretching open the skein between two space-times. The shroud and the device were sucked through the grim portal, and a picosecond later it snapped closed.
The pure bright white returned, rippling at first, then becoming uniform again. The scorched Hohash, with only one small mirror fragment remaining, winked out of normal space. Pierre found himself back in the wall-less room.
“Where?” he said. “Where did you send the device? The intergalactic void? Another galaxy?”
“Another universe.”
Pierre definitely needed a chair. One appeared, and without thinking, he sat down.
“How?”
“The Big Bang, as you call it, spawned multiple universes. There is one that is… darkness. It was stillborn, no stars, only gas clouds that failed to ignite, simmering at the low level of what you call the EM spectrum. The device can do no harm there, other than bring light.”
“The four Spider ships, can they return?”
“A necessary sacrifice.”
Pierre’s mind was reeling. Who were these Spiders? Until now, he’d believed they were from another galaxy.
Kat was back, her eyes returned to normal. “Hello,” she said. “That was a little weird. They had to take control, because the action was taking place too fast for my dumb little brain to keep up.” A chair appeared for her, too, and she took it, and gazed at the Spider. “They’re not from another galaxy. They’re from another universe.”
Pierre stared at her.
“One of the Kalarash found a way to cross over, Pierre. When he did, a Spider scout ship came through.”
Pierre shook his head. “All this time, I’ve been exploring the galaxy when the most interesting species there could ever be was living next door on Esperia.”
“There’s more.”
He looked into her eyes, and guessed it. “Kalaran. When he was in
his ship in Esperia’s underground oceans, he wasn’t sleeping for those half million years, was he?”
She smiled, a non-crooked one. “I still love that you’re smart.”
“He crossed over, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “Time runs differently there, so for him it was more like a year.”
He remembered the brief vista the Hohash had shown him of Spider ships, in what must be their home universe. “Transpace is natural to them, isn’t it?”
“Yep, that’s how they can manipulate it. That’s their last message to the Machines, by the way. If they don’t leave, the Spiders will deactivate Transpatial travel in this galaxy. They can do it, something about interfering with the subspace harmonics that open up Transpatial conduits, via super-excitation of some exotic particles I’ve never heard of, probably because they’re not from this universe… I couldn’t follow it all. Sorry. They would need cooperation from the Shrell who inhabit subspace, but they already have it.”
Pierre stared into the floor. “That would mean we – and anyone else – could only travel at sub-light speeds. Wormholes occasionally, but they’re unstable, unfit for organics, and they chew up subspace.”
“Exactly. It would kill trade and commerce, sending this galaxy back to an almost primeval state. But it would also negate the Machines’ pan-galactic plans for a Sublime Order.”
“This was Kalaran’s idea, wasn’t it?”
“Actually, it was theirs. And the Shrell’s. They’re pretty fed up with all of us invading their territory. Some of the Shrell are already defecting to the Spider universe.”
Pierre stood up. “The Machines will leave. Tell them that, Kat. There would be no point in them staying. There are other plenty of other galaxies…”
“You were right, Pierre. They should re-write their base code. Find an empty galaxy, and fill it with Machines.”
The Spider vanished.
