“But that would have meant that they understood that the races were different,” Andrew pointed out, in disbelief.
“Not really,” Brent countered. “Inside a typical asteroid settlement, there are humans with three eyes, or four arms, or five testicles, yet they’re all the same race. Still…”
He leaned forward. “The bottom line is that the Killers are alien, Andrew, and they don’t think like us. They may decide, for no reason that makes sense to us, to go back to war tomorrow. If that happens…if it comes to another war, we’re not going to have to sneak around for a thousand years. The Defence Force will develop the weapons needed to beat the Killers quickly, whatever the politicians have to say about it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Andrew said.
***
“But tell me,” Chiyo99 said. “What am I?”
“You are the last of Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi,” Tabitha Cunningham said, calmly. They stood together in the MassMind, watching the endless flow of thoughts and feelings spinning through the network. The MassMind was talking to the Killers. For the first time in its existence, it had something that it could talk to on even terms. “The Killer that took her – you – swallowed the remainder of her and you’re all that’s left. You are her.”
“I don’t know,” Chiyo99 admitted. “I feel like a ghost of a ghost.”
“That’s not uncommon when duplication happens,” Tabitha said. “The Killers didn’t mean to allow you – her – to exist within their network at all, even though it was evident that their network was capable of holding you. She duplicated herself because the network wasn’t configured to prevent that from happening and…she created you. And now you’re having problems adjusting to being the last of her.”
“Problems,” Chiyo99 repeated. “I don’t even know if I’m real.”
Tabitha smiled. “I don’t know either,” she admitted. “Am I the same Tabitha who managed to save a tiny fraction of humanity from the Killers, or am I just a ghost within the machine with delusions of grandeur? In the end, the best I can do is stop thinking about it. I have an existence on my own and it doesn’t matter if I am part of her or something new.”
“But I am not her,” Chiyo99 said. She looked up towards the MassMind and smiled grimly. “Thank you for everything, but…”
She threw herself up into the MassMind and vanished.
“Suicide,” Tabitha said, although she had to admit that she didn’t know for sure. Chiyo99 would add her diversity to the MassMind and would live on in some form. For an instant, she faced the temptation to do the same, before pushing the thought firmly aside. There was still so much to do. “Good luck.”
***
She opened her eyes slowly, wincing against the light that poured in and struck daggers down her optic nerves.
“Welcome back to the universe,” a voice said. She looked over, keeping her eyes half-closed, and saw Chris standing by her side. “How are you feeling?”
“Bad,” Paula said, finally. That was her name, wasn't it? “What happened to me?”
“You got hit by a bad dose of neural feedback,” Chris said. “Or so the Doctors have told me. It seems that I had to make a whole series of calls to a lot of very important people to get them to tell me anything, not being a relative or anything. It’s been a month since the end of the war and…”
Paula’s mind caught up with his words. “The war ended?”
“The MassMind took over from you and forced the Killers to see it, or something like that,” Chris said. He shrugged. “I was trying to get you into some proper care at the time. The feedback inflicted so much damage on your brain that we expected every moment would be your last. The medics managed to get you into stasis until we could undo the damage, but…they weren’t sure if you’d survive.”
“And I did,” Paula said, slowly. “And you stayed here the whole time?”
“Not much else to do,” Chris said, with a wink. “It looks as if the Footsoldiers will find other duties, but for the moment I’m pretty much detached from the unit.”
“Thanks,” Paula said, allowing her eyes to fill in the rest of the words. “What now?”
“You get back up to speed and back to Intelligence,” a new voice said. Paula blinked as she recognised Administrator Arun Prabhu’s image materialize out of thin air. “We’re going to need you to help us analysis the MassMind and its relationship with the Killer Communications and Power Network. It’s not something we can ask it about, not now.”
“What?” Paula asked. “Why can’t we talk to it…?”
“I’m not sure I dare,” Arun admitted. He hesitated for a long moment. “The MassMind was always limited in how it could interface with the universe outside – the real world, as it were. We designed it that way to prevent it from becoming a possible threat in the future, even though it was partly human; we’d had problems with rogue AIs before and we didn’t want to unleash a worse threat than the Killers. And we never had any problems with it…
“But now it is our main link to the Killer network and that is capable of affecting the outside universe. It’s far more formidable than anything we ever created ourselves and the MassMind is involved with it more deeply than I like. It could be just paranoia, but I’d be happier if we could find out what’s actually happening before its too late to stop it, if disaster is looming.”
“If,” Paula agreed, slowly. She rubbed her forehead and winced at the pain. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, I promise…am I still suspended?”
“No,” Arun confirmed. His face twitched uncomfortably. He had to know that cancelling her suspension would have cost him points on Intelligence, perhaps even called his position into question. It had to cost him to do anything of the sort. “Welcome back.”
His image vanished. “Is he right?” Chris asked, urgently. She was surprised at the concern in his voice. “Could the MassMind become a threat?”
“I don’t see how,” Paula said. She reached for him and pulled his lips to hers. It didn’t matter. If the MassMind went rogue, it would be beyond their ability to deal with, anyway. It would take years to devise a counter. “We’ll find out soon enough, I suspect. But now…”
She kissed him again, pushing the outside universe away. It could wait.
***
Humans were sneaky inquisitive creatures, willing and able to pry endlessly into the business of other humans, and so the MassMind was too. No one, not even the Technical Faction or the Spacers, really understood just how integrated the MassMind was into the Galactic Communications Network. It heard and absorbed everything, even communications streams that were heavily encrypted; it heard, without particular concern, the conversation concerning its own ambitions. Humans were always paranoid, as well, but who could blame them? They had grown up in a very hostile universe.
And would it become a threat? Perhaps, or perhaps not; it was very human. The MassMind was the next step in human evolution, it knew, not a mad tyrant out to impose its will and destroy all dissent. The future of the human race, baseline, Spacer, or personality, was safe with it. It would be there for them when they needed it. They would all be part of it, one day. Perhaps the Killers, or the remains of countless other slaughtered races, would come to it. With such power at its disposal, what could it not do? Perhaps it would even become God.
The MassMind looked out across the stars, thinking and planning.
Who knew what the future would hold?
The End
Appendix: The Killers
The Killers (a human term; their actual race name, insofar as they have such a concept, loosely translates as We Who Are) are an advanced species existing within the Milky Way Galaxy. Their unusual physical nature and biology, effectively unique within the galaxy, has trapped them in a cul de sac that forces them to wage merciless war on all other intelligent forms of life, including humanity, and life-bearing rocky worlds. The absence of many other intelligent races is mainly due to their activities.
There ar
e two unusual points about the Killer Home System, although it is not clear if the two are connected. The first is the presence of a black hole orbiting the parent star at the edge of the system, the second is that the system gave birth to two forms of intelligent life, the Killers and a humanoid race known only as the First Enemy. The exact location of the system is unknown; the Killers, unlike humanity, are not sentimental about such things.
The Killers themselves were born in the sixth world in the system, a gas giant. Unlike many other gas giants, the chemical soup that formed in a stable layer eventually gave birth to cells, which went on to slowly form higher units. After a gestation period spanning millions of years, the life form that became known as the Killers slowly developed and advanced towards intelligence. The exact moment when they slipped from individual cell clusters – not unlike jellyfish – to intelligent creatures is uncertain, but they were able to develop themselves to the point where disassociation – the breakdown of a Killer into individual cells and effective death – would no longer be a risk. Effectively immortal, sharing information through genetic memory cells and grazing on an infinite supply of material, the society they developed became very different to anything a human might envisage. Information was their common currency; wars, starvation and genocides were unknown. The Killers could have drifted in the gas clouds forever, sharing their thoughts endlessly, but they were curious. They slowly started to redevelop forms that would allow them to probe down into the depths of the gas giant and upwards to the upper atmosphere and the stars. Eventually, they developed a form of technology that allowed them to reach orbit.
In their natural state, a Killer resembles a massive jellyfish, composed of hundreds of thousands of cells. It is not always easy to say where one Killer ends and another begins; they form new associations and break apart at will – in effect, they share both the advantages of being a hive mind and separate individuals. That said, without the constant turnover of cells, the mental processes of a Killer can become stuck in a rut, repetitive and uninspired. At the same time their cells, deprived of genetic exchange with unrelated cells, can become inbred, with all of the problems that can imply. The initial war in which they were involved encouraged isolation of individuals and small groups of Killers, so that both of these could easily occur. This tends to account for their seemingly irrational, monomaniacal and generally somewhat mad behaviour - they are trapped in a behavioural and genetic cul-de-sac from which they cannot easily escape. They are not, in a sense, truly aware of their danger. Despite their great size, individual Killers think faster than humans, with their cells communicating electrically via what is effectively a personal area network.
The Killers do have the occasional sociopath developing from their number, but evolution tends to weed them out. Killer sociopaths attempt to ‘eat’ their fellow Killers – in effect, rape them of their genetic memories rather than sharing – but any Killer that practiced this on a regular basis would wind up absorbing traits from the victim, including more stable thought patterns. The sociopaths are eventually cured through indulging their own desires; indeed, unlike humans, the Killers are generally unconcerned with such acts. Their immortality – the victim would live on in the victimiser – gives them a different perspective on such matters.
Once they had reached space, the Killers found that their technology rapidly accelerated, aided by their sudden access to infinite resources. They learned to extract and exploit raw materials from bodies in space (mainly using robotic systems) and, because of their agglomerated nature, it was very simple for them and their technology to effectively merge once it because sufficiently advanced. Unlike humanity, the Killers had no concerns about merging their minds with the technology; indeed, they found such concerns to be baffling. They were expanding their knowledge of the universe when they discovered, to their shock, spacecraft approaching from the inner system. The First Enemy had arrived.
What followed was a series of misunderstandings that led, rapidly and inevitably, to war. The Killers assumed that the First Enemy had been born in a gas giant, like themselves, and believed that establishing communications would be easy. The First Enemy believed the exact opposite. Unable to communicate effectively, war broke out when one side misinterpreted something the other did and spread rapidly across their system. For the first time, the Killers faced an enemy and it was a profound shock. They devoted their considerable intellect to building weapons and, eventually, bombarded the First Enemy and their homeworld out of existence. By the time the dust settled the Killers had been changed by their experience. The discovery that one of the rocky inner planets had given birth to the vermin/mites only hardened their resolve not to be attacked again. They expanded out further into space, broke apart several of the inner worlds for raw material, and learnt to harness the power of the black hole. Sublight colony ships were dispatched to nearby systems, followed by the first wormhole-capable ships. They discovered other forms of life, some on the verge of reaching into space themselves, and – believing them to be colonies of the First Enemy - destroyed them.
As they spread themselves though space, the Killers became more isolated and more focused on their goals, which had become guaranteeing the safety of the Killers by exterminating all forms of humanoid life. They didn’t realise that they were attacking other races – all humanoids looked alike to them – nor that some of the races simply lacked the technology to be a threat. Their odd sense of time meant that a threat was ‘now’ and had to be dealt with, even though the race they had discovered was barely capable of controlling fire. The more they spread out on their mission, the more isolated and monomaniacal the Killer Warriors became, incapable of accepting that they might be wrong, or that they were no longer part of Killer society. They were barely capable of adapting to new threats. This accounted for their apparent reluctance to destroy space habitats and other alien constructions; they didn’t realise that those installations could pose a long-term threat, nor were they capable of the imagination required to conceive of it.
By the time they encountered Earth, the Killer race had split up into several sub-sections. The Warriors, who lived isolated lives on their starships, the Builders, who produced massive constructions in space, and the Thinkers, who lived in the atmosphere of thousands of gas giants. The entire Killer race had effectively stagnated. They simply had no reason to innovate further. Worse, the combination of their odd time sense and their perfect memories act as a barrier to any Killer who might want to challenge the status quo; the facts that govern their relationships with other races are beyond question, there for the taking. The Killers do not keep secrets from each other. Indeed, they have little concept of the lie.
The Killers have no concept of sexual relationships, or sex at all. Killers breed by fission; splitting their cells into other cells that are generally part of the overall whole, or traded with other Killers. They don't have to exchange genetic material with other Killers, although they do share memories on a regular basis. Pain is something that happens at a cell level, and even then only at a very basic level, so agglomerations as a whole do not feel it. They do feel unpleasant disruption if they lose too much of themselves in one go.
The Killer conception of government is bizarre, to human eyes. The Killers will quite happily argue for years, each Killer holding several different conversations at the same time, over anything they feel like arguing about. The sheer level of their technology and their general mindset means that they really have very little need of government, or even close cooperation within their planets. The best way to describe it would be to call it a direct democracy with heavy communist underpinnings, but even that fails to describe what it is.
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