Storming Heaven

by Nuttall, Christopher

  ***

  “And thank goodness that that's over,” she said, afterwards. “Did you ever hear so much carping in your life?”

  “You can’t blame them,” Arun pointed out, as he poured himself a simulated drink. Tabitha sometimes thought about downloading herself into an android body, just so she could walk and taste and touch again, but nothing had come out of it. She envied him his body, even though a MassMind personality had many more options for private enjoyment. “They’ve lived with the fear of the Killers for far too long.”

  Tabitha felt her eyes flash. In the MassMind, that was more than a figure of speech. “No one is more aware of the danger of the Killers than I am,” she said, firmly. “I watched helplessly as they destroyed Earth. I also believe that we have to defeat them, or accept that our ultimate destiny as a race is to be destroyed by the Killers, or doomed to die out in an orgy of hedonistic pleasures on the edge of the galaxy. The first step towards defeating them or…hell, getting them to realise that we’re intelligent beings who have a right to exist requires taking one of their starships intact and studying it!”

  “You’re preaching to the temple singers,” Arun said, sipping his drink. The advantage of simulated alcohol was that its effects would vanish when Arun exited the MassMind, or earlier, if he so chose. “I am perfectly aware of the requirements.”

  “Sorry,” Tabitha said, finally. She felt oddly ashamed of herself, as if she was revealing her origins. It was a MassMind conceit she rarely allowed herself. “I just…”

  “No worries,” Arun said, firmly. He summoned an image of the Killer starship and studied it thoughtfully. It was a real-time link from Star’s End, showing the alien starship illuminated by lights mounted on remote platforms and thousands of humans and Spacers crawling all over the hull. “Even if this fails, we do have the starbombs.”

  “The Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator,” Tabitha corrected. The joke had once been funny. Now it was just sad. “If we have to dismantle half the galaxy to get at them…”

  “We may have no choice,” Arun said. His voice was terrifyingly dispassionate, contemplating destruction on an unimaginable scale. “Patti was right about one thing. If the Killers do come gunning for us, they could wipe out most of the Community within a few days. That would be the end of the MassMind…and any hope of striking back at the Killers.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Her body lay suspended in a shimmering column of blue light.

  Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi looked down on it from high above, her mind dazed and unsure, even, of where she was. It was a good body – had been a good body, part of her mind whispered treacherously – and it had served her well. She had worn the oriental features of her ancestors, but she had never chosen to follow the dictates of fashion, from an extra eyeball to immense breasts and thighs. The body she’d been born with had suited her well enough – and there was little room for such distractions in the Defence Force. Watching it being dismantled by a mad surgeon was almost more than she could bear.

  Where am I? She asked herself, feeling her thoughts quickening as her body died. As she watched, long needles continued to plunge into her, exploring every curve and crevice of her body. Strange tubes probed between her legs. Beams of focused gravity made her body twitch and jump at will. Powerful blades, glittering silver despite the eerie alien light, grew out of the walls and reached towards her skull. She cringed mentally as the blades cut into her head, sending blood and bone spurting everywhere, but there was no pain. It was almost as if it were happening to someone else.

  Before her eyes, her body was systematically taken apart. No human, she liked to think, could have inflicted such injuries without some degree of feeling being involved, but there was no sense of malice, or even of curiosity, in the movements. The Killers didn’t seem to care; they were examining her body because they thought they should examine her body, not because they were interested in her. The entire process made little sense to her. They could have formed a cloud of nanites and explored her insides without needing to rip her body apart, yet they had chosen instead to do it the hard way. Why?

  And where was she? If that was her body being dismantled, then where was her mind?

  It hit her suddenly and she almost laughed, catching herself just in time. The MassMind recording implant, a record of all she had been, hadn’t failed after all. The Killers had reached into her head to scan her mind and accidentally dragged her out of her body! They couldn’t have done it on purpose…could they? The early years of the MassMind hadn’t been as easy as history suggested; not everyone wanted to have copies of themselves running in a giant computer, open to interference from anyone with malicious intentions. She felt creeping fear as she realised that the Killers could literally reprogram her at will – their computer network wouldn’t have any of the safeguards built into the MassMind – yet relaxed slightly as she realised that the Killers didn’t know she was within their system. She wasn't sure how she knew, but it seemed logical. If they’d known she was there, they would have moved to erase her from her position.

  She concentrated, trying to recall what she knew about entering the MassMind. She’d gone inside it as a visitor, but that had been a different experience altogether. The human mindset couldn’t really cope with the actual nature of the MassMind, so the governing minds and AIs created an entire string of advisors and averters to assist the newcomer in exploring the network. A new personality would be gently assisted to adapt to the MassMind – the MassMind could have absorbed the entire human race in an afternoon, but it could take years to get them all accustomed to their new status – but there was nothing to assist her inside the alien network. The Killers wouldn’t want to assist her in settling in, would they?

  Her lips – imaginary now, although she found it comforting to still imagine that she had a body within the network – twitched in amusement. She’d been granted a priceless opportunity and she was complaining about it! She could learn more about the Killers than anyone else; given time, she might even manage to transmit information out of their domain and into the human MassMind. It should be possible, assuming that the systems weren't too different, to transmit a signal out…or perhaps trying to interfere with the system would draw attention from local intelligences. The MassMind had police AIs that prevented personalities from abusing the network and there was no reason to assume that the Killers didn’t have their own security measures. They would view her as an intruder and seek to remove her from the network. Hell, she decided, they might even blame her on one of their rivals.

  If they had rivals…

  She took one last look down at her body – now little more than a gory mass – and started to look around. The MassMind was warm and welcoming, but the alien system was so vast as to be beyond her comprehension; she seemed to drift within waves of data and vast slow thoughts. She latched onto one of the thoughts with her mind and allowed it to speak to her, but it was impossible to make sense of it. It was alien as hell. In the distance, she could hear – her mind interpreted it as hearing – the sound of a massive heartbeat. Despite the danger, she wanted to go there…

  And she was there. There was no sense of transition; there was just a jump from one place in the network to another. The heartbeats – and the vast network of strange thoughts – were much louder, yet she had no idea what was happening, or where she was. It dawned on her that she was looking at it from the wrong angle and allowed herself to slide into the thoughts…only to see, suddenly, a creature floating at the centre of a vast web. Her mind made it look like a giant spider – spiders had survived the destruction of Earth, along with many other lower forms of life – facing away from her. If it had seen her, she knew it would have leapt at her and swallowed her up into its multiplicity. It might not even have bothered to realise that she wasn't a Killer.

  She spread her mind as wide as she could, trying to listen to the thoughts, or build up a picture of just how the network worked. The MassMind was a vast decentrali
sed network spanning the galaxy. The Killer network was focused on the spider – either a Killer linked into the network or a very strange AI, she decided – and yet there were echoes and pulses within the network that suggested that there were other nodes…no, she realised; they were echoes. The Killer was literally talking to itself.

  Why? She thought, desperately. She had spread herself thin, rendering herself almost unnoticeable, but it wasn't enough to allow her to grasp how the network worked. If she’d had the computing power of the MassMind behind her, she might have been able to unravel it, yet the MassMind was very different. There could not have been two gods competing for the same area of digital space. Why are you doing this to us? Why are you killing us all…?

  The block of memory rose up in front of her and she plunged right into it before she realised what she was doing. It was like watching a history lesson unfolding in front of her eyes, or perhaps an implanted or downloaded memory, yet it was very alien. She found herself struggling to comprehend visions seen through alien eyes – but they weren't eyes. It wasn't an entertainment; it was more like an old-style movie. She was nothing, but a helpless observer.

  She saw a massive world, at once both alien and surprisingly mundane. She saw giant balloons rising away from the strange world and up into space. She saw the flowering of an alien civilisation in space, a civilisation that exploded into development as they finally gained access to raw materials that allowed them to turn their dreams and theories into practice. She saw primitive spacecraft, similar to the ships humanity had deployed before the Killers arrived and smashed Earth, heading out further into space, expanding their reach and grasp. She saw…

  Aliens; alien ships. The sense of overwhelming evil was so powerful that it almost threw her right out of the memory, back into the alien network. She saw the aliens opening fire and devastating entire colonies and settlements, a war over infinitive resources. Humanity had fought wars over limited resources on Earth; the aliens, it seemed, waged war over everything. The judgement was both dispassionate and shockingly passionate; the aliens had to be destroyed. The war scenes seemed to blur together until the alien race was finally exterminated, but at a cost. The race humanity had learned to call the Killers had been forever changed by the experience.

  The memory faded away, to be replaced by another, and another, strange alien scenes that made no sense to her. She could hear words whispered on the wind, yet she couldn’t understand them, or their context. Some of them provoked anger, or fear, or rage, or arousal in her, but she couldn’t understand why. She saw massive jellyfish-like creatures floating in an endless sea one moment, scenes of space exploration or devastation the second. She saw humanoid races burning before her eyes, exterminated down to the last few members of their race, yet there was no hatred or rage. It was coldly precise and dispassionate.

  It made her feel sick. Hitler had created great storms of anti-Jewish feeling to allow him to commit genocide and attempt to exterminate them. Every time the human race had committed genocide, there had been an attempt to justify it, no matter how thin. The enemy was subhuman, or useless, or permanently hateful; there was always a reason. The human race seemed to have unlimited capability for believing –and creating – such propaganda, but the Killers? They didn’t seem to have a reason, or any need to justify it to themselves. They just…were.

  She pulled herself out of the memory storm with an effort, only to discover that the network had changed around her. There were two spiders now – three spiders, ten spiders, an infinity of spiders – and they were talking to each other. She tried to listen, but again, it was beyond her understanding…or perhaps not. She was no longer human, after all, and there were things she could do as a personality that she could never have done as a human. She concentrated, trying to work out how to reproduce asexually, and felt herself split into two people. It was weird, looking at her own twin; Chiyo2 was her. The MassMind rarely allowed such duplication – it raised all kinds of legal and ethical questions – but now there was no choice. She had to take the risk.

  “Go,” she said. Chiyo2 understood as clearly as Chiyo1. They were the same person, after all, and if one died the other would survive. “Good luck.”

  She felt herself stretched as Chiyo2 inched closer to the spiders, reaching out to experience their thoughts directly. Their words were deafeningly loud, yet if she ran them through her skull – her metaphorical skull – she could understand them, somehow. The spiders – she realised now that the spiders were the Killers, as they were represented in their own version of the MassMind – were discussing something that had happened. It took her a moment longer to realise what that had been.

  Memory – a Killer memory – swept over Chiyo2. One of their mighty starships was under attack. The two human personalities watched in astonishment as an entire attack wing of human starships mounted a desperate and ultimately futile assault, barely damaging the Killer ship. It looked useless, resulting in nothing, but dead humans, until new problems appeared within the Killer starship. It took her a moment to grasp what was happening – had happened – but it seemed to take the Killers longer. They barely grasped the concept of a boarding party. The death of one of their kind took them by complete surprise. It hadn’t happened for thousands of years.

  The sense of just how old the Killers were didn’t take Chiyo by surprise. The Defence Force had endlessly speculated on how long the Killers had been around, but human explorations had turned up worlds that had been destroyed well before Jesus Christ brought his message of peace, love and understanding to an unreceptive world. The Killers had to have existed for far longer, or else they would have been destroyed themselves by an elder race, if such races existed. There were odd reports of strange encounters with hyper-advanced aliens, but no one in the Defence Force believed them. The Killers had to be old indeed. It had been Great Cycles since one of them had been killed by alien attack.

  “Push closer,” Chiyo1 urged Chiyo2. The sense that humanity had finally managed to strike back, to destroy a Killer starship, was matched by fear for the future. If the Killers decided to start taking the human race seriously, Chiyo might end up the last human in existence, trapped in the Killer network. “Find out what they’re going to do in response.”

  Their thoughts seemed to grow louder as Chiyo2 pushed closer, unnoticed in the roar of the disagreement. The Killers seemed to be reinforcing their own thoughts, somehow, an attempt to form a consensus where no consensus could exist. Chiyo understood, suddenly, what a democracy must look like from the perspective of a higher being; hundreds of voices arguing over nothing. The largest Killer faction seemed to want to strike back – if she understood them correctly and there was no guarantee of that – but other factions were more interested in something they thought of as the Great Project, even though they conceded that there might be a problem. The strange combination of xenophobia, concern, and unconcern puzzled her; the Killers, it seemed, just didn’t regard other races as a serious threat. They just regarded them as targets.

  It made a bitter kind of sense, she decided. Earth hadn’t been able to mount a defence when the Killer starship had arrived…and, without the MassMind, humanity would never have become a serious threat. If they smashed alien cultures while they were still primitive, they prevented them from becoming a threat in the future, even if they survived for years afterwards. The Ghosts had never managed to turn their handful of survivors into a permanent civilisation…unless, of course, some had managed to survive in hidden settlements. It was possible, but a hidden settlement would never become a threat in its own right. How could it?

  The argument seemed to soften for a moment, and then resumed, with different simulations being created and used as talking points. It was so like a comparable human meeting that she almost laughed, yet there was a dangerous undertone to their voices and thoughts. They weren't questioning the existence of the human threat, or dismissing it completely; they intended to apply corrective measures. The sheer dispassion continue
d to throw her, but as the Killers reached towards a consensus, she realised that they were casually talking about completing the extermination of the human race…

  Or were they? They didn’t seem to have made any connection between her and the attack on their ship. Might they suspect, she wondered, that she was from a different race? It seemed unlikely, yet how would a Killer know, even if they cared, that the destroyers and her scout came from the same culture? A human would know – they’d be able to see clear links between the two starship classes – but would a Killer? That led neatly back to the first question and she looked up at her spider, her Killer. Why had he taken her onboard, dissected her, and accidentally added a hitchhiker to his local network? It didn’t seem to suit their normal mode of operation.

  On impulse, she suggested to Chiyo2 that she try to hop into another Killer starship. It didn’t work. The MassMind drew no distinction between its different nodes, but the Killers seemed reluctant to allow the same degree of harmony between their separate networks. It made no sense to her – that harmony, which had created the MassMind, accounted for humanity’s survival – but the Killers were aliens. Maybe they liked their mental privacy. She looked down at her self-image and smiled wryly. Her image wore nothing, not even a traditional fig leaf. If they caught her, the Killers probably wouldn’t appreciate her naked body before they wiped her out of their network.