Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “The third oddity is the system itself,” Jorlem concluded. “Darius is a lone planet. The only other object in the system that is worth noting is a single comet on a very elliptical orbit, one that suggests that it might have been captured by the primary star. Single-planet systems are not unknown, but there are none that happen to include a habitable world. In fact, the level of space dust within the system is remarkably low.”

  “As if someone had swept it all away,” Adam said, thoughtfully. “The same has been said about most of the Ancient worlds.”

  “Except the Ancient worlds happen to be dead,” Gigot countered. “Darius is alive.”

  “And we still don’t understand the weirdness surrounding the Ancient worlds,” Adam reminded her. “They are completely dead, but they have a breathable atmosphere. They appear to have no technology, yet something interferes with our best sensor systems and research drones. Every so often, people report seeing things that never show up on records, or orbital observation... why couldn’t Darius be a living Ancient world?”

  “No one has ever succeeded in terraforming an Ancient world, restoring it to life,” Jorlem said, thoughtfully. “We certainly haven’t – and I find it hard to believe that a colony ship from the early days of space expansion could do something the Confederation can’t. Besides, we haven’t found any Ancient buildings on Darius.”

  “So far,” Adam pointed out. “Half of the sensor readings the original survey ship made appear to be unreliable.”

  Dacron scowled. The AIs had painstakingly analysed every last component of the records, only to discover that something down on the planet had been scrambling the sensors. Half of their results didn’t jibe with the other half, creating contradictions that the RIs had dismissed as sensor error. It had been believed impossible to fool optical sensors, but Darius seemed to manage it. The AIs had eventually concluded that they needed more data. Dacron’s briefings had admitted that the CSC hadn’t been very impressed with the result.

  “We will find our answers,” Elyria said. She stood up, ending the meeting. “I suggest that you spend the next three days settling in and reviewing the data, then we can start planning our operations. We will need considerably more intelligence to determine our precise course of action. Between us, we have considerable experience of operating in primitive societies, even without technological backup. We will succeed.”

  Dacron watched as the briefing room slowly emptied, leaving him alone with his thoughts. Outside the viewports, the eerie lights of hyperspace flickered past the starship, reminding him that he had once fully comprehended the functions of a hyperdrive. Right now, he couldn’t even remember the theory. Slowly, he stood up and walked over to the viewport, staring out into space. It made him feel...

  ... Insignificant. Hyperspace was a high-energy dimension. The higher a starship went, the greater the power – and the dangers. Even the AIs had to be careful when they tapped hyperspace for power. Used poorly, the results could be worse than the disaster that had exterminated the entire population of Polaris.

  And he felt useless. The humans could offer suggestions and ideas, no matter how insane, but it wasn’t something he could do. An AI who had been stripped down to fit into a human brain didn’t have imagination, just knowledge – and very little of that. What else was he good for? His thoughts seemed to crawl through the meat that made up his mind. He was stupid now.

  Shaking his head, a gesture he must have picked up from one of the humans he’d met on the AI ship, he turned and headed back to his quarters. Really, this body was most inefficient. How much time did humans waste sleeping? Surely something could be done about that.

  But all he could do was wait, and endure. Hopefully, there would be something for him to do on Darius. After all, they’d created him to visit the planet. No doubt they thought he’d fit right in.

  Privately, Dacron rather doubted it.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  “I really should have looked up Prometheus at once,” Elyria said, as she faced Jorlem over the dining table. “Prometheus was the man who stole fire from the gods...”

  “... And gave it to the human race,” Jorlem confirmed. “Prometheus exists to develop the technology to manipulate the quantum foam.”

  Elyria snorted, still annoyed with herself. It had taken her three days to think of simply looking up the name in the ship’s datafiles. She had spent too long trying to pull together the few hints she’d found into a coherent pattern and getting nowhere. There were very few secrets in the Confederation, but those the Peacekeepers and the AIs collaborated to hide were almost impossible to find. Any researcher trying to locate a secret Peacekeeper project would find themselves buried in billions of terabytes of useless information.

  She took a sip of her drink, composing herself. “And have you had any success?”

  “Nothing to speak of,” Jorlem admitted. “There are some hints that alien telepaths may actually gain their powers through the quantum foam, but there are no clear answers as to why and how. All of the proposed devices for interacting with the foam simply fail when constructed, assuming that they can be constructed. If it wasn’t for the fact that we know of at least nineteen Elder races, we might have given up by now.”

  “True,” Elyria said. It wasn’t in humanity’s nature to accept being second-best at anything. If there were races out there that were effectively all-powerful, humanity would struggle to match them – and the Confederation could pour vast resources into solving the mystery of the quantum foam. “Have you any theory as to why it doesn’t work?”

  “They range from the commonplace to the metaphysical,” Jorlem said. “One theory simply states that humanity is too young a race to master the quantum foam, that we have to evolve a great deal more before we can make the jump into becoming an Elder race. Another is that you have to be composed of energy to manipulate the foam; a third is that we have derailed the whole process of advancement by altering and improving our own bodies.”

  “That doesn’t sound reasonable,” Elyria pointed out. “Every known race has been improving itself since it developed the intelligence to work out that mating two healthy people was more likely to produce healthy children than mating two unhealthy people. I don’t think the Elders could have avoided engineering themselves.”

  “I rather doubt it,” Jorlem agreed. “The alternative to that theory is that we haven’t improved ourselves enough, that we should be working on enhancing the capabilities of the human mind. Research is still underway, but there are limits to what more we can do.”

  Elyria nodded. Even the ‘baseline’ humans in the Confederation were the recipients of a vast amount of genetic engineering. Her body might have looked little different to a pre-singularity human, but internally she was very different. She would never become ill; indeed, if injured, she would heal very quickly. Even without any other form of medical assistance, she would live for at least five hundred years – and that could be extended indefinitely with proper care and attention. Her memory was extremely good, her intelligence was high and her senses were perfect. The pre-singularity humans would have seen her as a superhuman.

  “Darius must upset your people,” she said, after a moment. “Humans manipulating the quantum foam so easily?”

  “It does,” Jorlem agreed. “Right now, there’s a split in opinion between those who think that Darius represents a mutation that we can splice into our own genetic code, and those who think that it’s a trick of some kind.”

  Elyria blinked. “A trick?”

  “There are too many oddities around the planet for us to assume that their abilities are just a matter of random chance,” Jorlem reminded her. “One theory is that the Elders gave them their abilities and then just stepped back to see what would happen.”

  “Experimenting on humans,” Elyria said. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  There were legends, of course; there always were, dating all the way back to humanity’s first tentative steps
into outer space. Humans who had been abducted by aliens for medical testing, or even judged to see if humanity was worthy of continued existence. There was no shortage of speculation that the legends had some basis in fact, but centuries of research had turned up no evidence to support those theories. The closest humans had come to being alien research subjects had been back during the First Interstellar War, and those aliens had operated on the same level as mankind.

  But the legends persisted, talking about strange encounters at the rim of explored space...

  “Anything is possible,” Jorlem said. “The Prometheus Project took a considerable interest in Shaman, a world that had legends about direct divine attention, and discovered that there were any number of oddities surrounding the planet, almost as many as Darius. Our best guess is that their legends had some basis in fact and an Elder race was looking after them, answering prayers and suchlike.”

  “I never looked outside human worlds,” Elyria said. “But that one sounds fascinating...”

  “Not for the inhabitants,” Jorlem said. “They don’t realise it, but whatever happened to them destroyed their capability for self-advancement. Everything they have came as a gift from their gods. They’re stuck in the First Age, without any real prospect of developing the technology needed to lift themselves into the Second Age. And there is nothing we can do about it unless we want to interfere openly.”

  Elyria scowled. The Confederation had no qualms about interfering in a primitive human society, but it preferred not to meddle with alien societies unless they posed a threat to the Confederation or their neighbours. She’d heard that the debate between the different factions had been going on for years, without any real solution. One side claimed that allowing aliens to wallow in the mud was racist, that aliens too deserved to share in the unlimited bounty of the Confederation. The other side pointed out that aliens needed to work their own way up from the mud, or they’d never become anything other than clones of humanity.

  “If Darius can really teach us how to manipulate the quantum foam,” Jorlem mused, “our society will be turned upside down.”

  Elyria lifted an eyebrow. “How so?”

  “You ought to understand,” he said, dryly. “What would a person from a pre-singularity society make of us?”

  “Culture shock, at the very least,” Elyria said. “And the leaders would want to stop their people from emigrating.”

  Pre-singularity societies – which were often scarcity societies – had real problems coming to terms with the Confederation. Their established modes of thought had been built in an environment where there were laws and limits and cultures that didn’t quite make sense. They concentrated on amassing vast sums of money... and then suffered terrible shock when they discovered the Confederation could literally turn lead into gold. And that was a comparatively minor issue. The discovery that some humans existed inside AI cores, where they could devise their own realities to their heart’s content, or had merged into the giant MassMind... primitive societies had real problems coming to terms with it.

  There were other issues, cultural ones. Most primitive worlds had marriage as a contract between two families, rather than between two people. It wasn’t uncommon to have one or both of the partners simply pushed into the match, and forced to wed if they were unwilling. There were strong economic reasons for that, none of which excused it in the eyes of the Confederation. And many primitive worlds treated various subsets of the population as second-class citizens, something that was equally inexcusable. Their first contact with the Confederation could be devastating to their worldview.

  “It would be harder than that,” Jorlem said. “What would they make of the MassMind? Or the Changed? Or, for that matter, the AIs? You and I are relatively normal by their standards, but if they cut us open they’d discover all sorts of little improvements. And then they’d discover the Elders and perhaps even start worshipping them.”

  He shook his head. “But our society is based on equality of opportunities, if not outcomes,” he added. “Everyone lucky enough to be born inside the Confederation has access to more wealth and opportunities than the average pre-singularity society can even dream of. But what will happen if we cannot splice the Darius DNA into our genetic code? What if only people who are descended from those born on Darius can use the ‘magic’?”

  Elyria scowled. “You’re talking about another Kahn, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Jorlem said. “And it could be worse for us...”

  There were few criminals in the Confederation, simply because most of the old motives for crime no longer existed, but there were a handful of people who were simply born wrong, without the basic empathy that allowed them to operate normally within human society. Kahn had been one of those, a sociopath who had fled the Confederation fifty years after his birth and eventually landed on a primitive world, where his enhanced DNA had given him a staggering advantage over the locals. Two hundred years later, when the world had been rediscovered by the Confederation, his descendants formed a ruling class that was literally superhuman, compared to its subjects. Why not? They were stronger, smarter and healthier than the locals.

  “The AIs are fantastically more intelligent than us,” Elyria said, finally. “We survived their development, didn’t we?”

  “The AIs aren’t human,” Jorlem pointed out. “How would we react if one group of humans was incontestably superior to another group of humans – and we couldn’t uplift the second group?”

  Elyria shook her head. “If they have somehow managed to develop the ability to... tune into the universe and change it, we can learn it too,” she said, firmly. “And if they have a unique trait in their genetic code, we can duplicate it and splice it into our own. I honestly can’t see how they can hope to remain unique for very much longer.”

  “I can’t see how a QCC link can be disrupted either,” Jorlem said. “They’re meant to be impossible to detect, let alone jam – and yet we see the links regularly disrupted on Ancient worlds. And Darius, of course.” He grinned. “The best theory anyone has been able to come up with is that reality itself is screwed up on the Ancient worlds.”

  His grin widened. “And if that is true,” he added, “what does it say about Darius?”

  ***

  Elyria mulled over the question as the voyage wore on, before eventually coming to the conclusion that there just wasn’t enough information to allow her to answer it properly. If manipulating the quantum foam was a way to hack reality itself – and all of the Confederation’s research indicated that this was the case – it was quite possible that reality might be a little hazy near the Ancient worlds. Technology might fail because it relied upon the universe working in a certain way at all times, but the universe was different near the Ancient worlds. Which sounded insane, and impossible, apart from the minor detail that advanced technology did glitch for no apparent reason. The Ancient worlds concealed their secrets well.

  “There is no way that they should have a breathable atmosphere,” Adam said, at an evening dinner. Elyria had started the tradition of inviting people to share regular meals, allowing them to socialise outside of actual work. It helped to break down barriers between the team members. “The worlds are dead. There’s nothing living at all, not even grass or anything else that might replenish the atmosphere. And yet we have no trouble living there without life support.”

  He grinned as he took a bite out of an oversized chicken leg. Like most of the other Changed, he’d had to start shifting back to baseline human so he could go down to Darius, something that had left him with a huge appetite as his body made the adjustments. There was another difference between the Confederation and a pre-singularity society right there; primitives might worry about their appearance, but anyone born in the Confederation could change it at will. What did appearance matter if someone could make themselves as pretty – or ugly – as they chose?

  “It gets even more surprising on Ancient-46,” he added, a moment later. “W
e’re not the only ones who have a research program there; the Puppies do as well. Thing is, their atmospheric requirements are different from ours; they find living on our worlds uncomfortable, to say the least. And we find their atmosphere... stinky. But they don’t have any problems on the Ancient worlds and neither do we.

  “The general theory is that the Ancients somehow determined that their worlds would always be suitable for outsiders to visit, even if they had radically different atmospheric requirements. But how did they do that when we and the Puppies have different requirements? Or, for that matter, us and the Ghosts? There is no way a Ghost can share a human atmosphere, yet they have no trouble on Ancient worlds.”

  Elyria shook her head in disbelief, wishing – for the first time – that she’d spent more time studying the Ancient worlds. “Like... they programmed them that way,” she said. “They just told the atmosphere to be breathable and it was breathable?”

  “Even when two different races share the world,” Adam agreed. “As for how they did it, we don’t have a clue.”

  It was impossible, Elyria knew. The Confederation had pushed baseline humanity to the point where an unsuitable atmosphere wouldn’t poison them, but there was no way that it could allow two radically different races to share the same atmosphere. They could give them life support fields to wear, something that would ensure the local atmosphere was reprocessed into something breathable, yet the Ancients seemed to have done the impossible and made their worlds habitable for everyone.

  “The word impossible is simply a reflection of the unknown,” Jorlem said, into the silence. He hadn’t said much about the Prometheus Project to the others, although he hadn’t asked Elyria to remain silent about it. “How much of what we do would be impossible to a pre-singularity society?”

  That started another debate. Elyria listened with some interest, paying close attention to the attempts to compare various different societies with computer simulations, or altered realities created within AI cores. Quite a few humans had uploaded themselves and then taken refuge in fantasy universes created by the Confederation’s designers, some operating according to laws that bore no resemblance to reality. Many of the Uploaded had slipped so far into their private worlds that they no longer remembered the Confederation outside. It would have been easy to believe that someone had designed a world like Darius for a game, if it hadn’t been real. But then, the pre-singularity societies they were discussing would have considered the Confederation no less extraordinary.