by Tony Daniel
“That was cutting it close,” Franklin said to Spock.
“It was not intentional. I am not attempting to pilot the craft into the conflict,” Spock said.
Franklin reached over and patted Spock’s arm. “I know that, Spock.” Another bright and sustained explosion. “Ah, another ship gone.”
Ahead, all was dark. The nebula that had previously surrounded them had vanished. “We’re very close now,” Spock said. “What we see, or sense, in front of us is the Demiurge entity.”
“How long?”
“We must be in range to use the shuttlecraft’s phasers,” Spock answered. “As you know, they are extremely low powered, rudimentary, and meant for defensive use.”
“It seems to me strange to sneak one’s way up to a bear, and then, instead of plunging in a knife, or shooting it with a musket, we shoot a slingshotted pebble into its side.”
“It is your plan, Doctor Franklin,” answered Spock.
“Indeed,” said Franklin. “I’m glad I am not a man consumed by self-doubt, or I would be gnawing upon a bone of worry at present.”
Spock nodded. “One minute, sir,” he said. “We can initiate the power build-up on the device.”
“Yes, yes,” Franklin said. He reached over and flipped a toggle. “Matter and antimatter are chambered.”
“Thirty seconds.”
Franklin looked down at his controls. “I believe we are ready to launch the device.”
“Please do so, Doctor Franklin.”
Franklin, who seemed perpetually delighted with present-day technology, reached down and pressed a green button.
There was a small chuff sound from the stern of the shuttlecraft.
“Device away, Mister Spock.”
Spock reached to activate the controls. “Twenty, nineteen, eighteen—”
“As much as I admire the Platonic beauty of the integers, perhaps wait until three to count down, Mister Spock?”
Spock nodded. He continued the count in his head. Six, five, four . . .
“Three, two, one. Firing phasers.”
“Activating device,” Franklin announced. He toggled a red button. “I certainly hope we have gotten its attention.”
“We have,” Spock said, gazing down at his instrumentation. “A tendril of . . . nothingness, it seems . . . is moving straight for us. Hold on, Doctor Franklin. I will attempt evasive maneuvers.”
Franklin pulled the restraining strap over his shoulder and slid the end into its magnetic buckle. “Spare the whip and loose the horse. Speed is our friend, Mister Spock.”
“Indeed.”
* * *
What?
The Demiurge felt the pinprick from the tiny craft. Or was it a craft? It seemed more some sort of the uncommon, but extremely annoying, space-evolved insectoid parasite. But when the Demiurge bent Its mind to the shuttlecraft, It comprehended that there were primitives inside. If It had not been preoccupied in toying with the Excalbians before consuming them, It may have spared a nanosecond to smear the craft and its occupants across space-time.
It could now.
No, not yet. It could always do so after It took care of the Excalbians. It would. The Demiurge was implacable and ravenous—the hunger for gorging on other mentalities was ever present. Anything intelligent outside Itself that It did not possess and dominate enraged It. The time for being eaten would soon come for the small minds inside the little, prickling craft.
Yet if It had not turned that flicker of attention toward the small craft, It would never have noticed the signaling device trailing behind in the wake of the craft.
Fascinating. In Its million years of existence, the Demiurge had, of course, encountered similar devices and similar technology. In fact, the distant descendant of a creature that had evolved to access the same physics of which this device took advantage.
The Demiurge ate information. After ingesting a sentient mentality, the Demiurge went to work stripping the properties from that mentality’s subatomic particles, nullifying the particle, and incorporating the information into the Demiurge’s own mental structure.
The more intelligent the species, the tastier they were to the Demiurge. Intelligence took advantage of such quantum properties of particles to create unique effects—most notably freedom of will in an otherwise deterministic universe. When the Demiurge ate the information from an intelligent mind, It destroyed the mind’s ability to act freely as It snacked on the intelligent being’s thought processes.
The Demiurge enjoyed thinking of this process as “eating souls.”
As the will of the prey began to disintegrate, the prey’s anguish and mental screams added to the complexity of its destruction, and thus to its deliciousness to the Demiurge.
So the more It could torture the souls as It ate them, the better they tasted.
The device the Demiurge detected had a similar effect to the Demiurge’s ingestion when used as a weapon: it returned subatomic particles to their cloud state, free of formatting information. Since information followed a similar path to entropy, it ran downhill. Like energy, it could not run “uphill” by becoming more complex without the input of more information from outside the system under consideration.
Contrary to first appearances, a reformatted particle actually had more information than it previously had because it now contained all possible states of spin, color, charge . . . . The new information inflow had to come from somewhere. In the Demiurge’s experience, such a device normally pulled such information from extremely distant galaxies where portions of scientific law that were statistically determined wound up significantly different from those same laws in the Milky Way and its local galactic cluster. The device took advantage of these variances.
Perhaps one day It would go to such places, travel to distant realms and ravage and destroy species that had an entirely different “taste” from the local cluster sentient beings.
But that was for later. There was still forage here to consume.
The Demiurge was detecting not merely the signal of distant galaxies from the device. It was sensing information flow from . . . somewhere else.
It erected a barrier to the Excalbian’s puny, but irritating, attempts at counterattack and bent more of Its attention to the device.
Where had this thing come from? Surely not from the departing small craft? For a moment, the Demiurge considered reaching out and interrogating the occupants of the craft as to what they knew of the device. But the craft was so clearly inferior in technology to the device that interrogation promised to be a waste of the Demiurge’s time. Anyway, to narrow one’s mind down to the extent necessary to communicate with, and thus terrorize, such primitive beings caused the Demiurge discomfort, which was why It seldom worried Itself with consuming mentalities that propagated in mere carbon-based units.
It turned Its attention back to the device.
Where was this information coming from and what was its purpose? Like a predator poking at its prey with a claw, the Demiurge pushed Its non-being into the space around the device. With a ripple of space-time amusement, It cut off all possible contact with the device by enclosing it in a bubble of singularity bent into existence by concentrated dark matter. Distant galaxies with different physics or not, nothing would get through this null space containment.
The device belonged to the Demiurge now.
Yet the device remained functioning even within this pocket universe. It still created a steady “buzz” of complex noise that indicated a stream of information was flowing through it.
What could reach the device? It was, literally, in the middle of nowhere.
Then the Demiurge realized the answer to Its question, and a smug sensation of Its own cleverness propagated through It in a jelly-like quiver of space-time. This was the Demiurge’s equivalent to amused laughter.
Not where. When.
The Demiurge snaked a sensory pseudopod into the singularity in which It was holding the device and “tasted” the buzz.
Although It had never been a planetary-bound being, much less a mammal of Earth, the Demiurge, unbeknownst to Itself, felt as a bear might when it discovers a beehive filled with an immense, untapped supply of honey.
We will suck it dry. We will eat and eat. All will be ours!
Whoever the “bees” of this hive were, what they were doing with this rich supply of concentrated information was not important—certainly not important in relation to the Demiurge’s desire to feed. Unlike a bear, It would take pleasure in the bees’ distress when they discovered all their carefully created honey was being pillaged—and they could do nothing about it.
The Demiurge extended the pseudopod farther into the subatomic recess of the device’s exterior, listening, tasting, absorbing. Yes. Signals were arriving and departing. The device was some sort of transceiver, a packet transfer station. Was there a local interface?
Indeed, there was. In a recess, the Demiurge located a nano-scaled input station with a variety of possible connection options. It was familiar with all of these input-output configurations and could mimic any of them. It did so.
For a moment, It pondered the wisdom of sticking a pseudopod into the device.
But the potential reward was too tempting.
Nectar of the gods.
And we are the closest thing in existence to a god.
Time for the next step.
This device would permit It to take that next step. Drink this nectar, and become a god. It would cease consuming mere species. It would be able to consume galaxies!
The Demiurge plugged into the flow.
At first, It was in ecstasy. There was so much, so much! It extended Its negative-energy pseudopod farther into the stream. As it did so, Its awareness of time, of the present moment, seemed to expand. The flow was from both the past and the future. And from . . . there was no way to conceive of it but as elsewhere.
This was a network! A cross-time network much like a computer network.
What was the network communicating? The makeup of the universe itself! The spin, color, charge, up-ness, and down-ness of quantum particles.
Who were the users? It reached out farther, farther . . .
It sensed presences. Multiple presences. Large. Quite large.
Larger than We are.
The presence spoke.
Hello, little worm. You really shouldn’t be here, you know. But since you are, and you desire to feed—suck on this!
The large presence stuck a portion of itself, the smallest portion, like the pinkie finger of a humanoid, down the Demiurge’s information-swallowing “throat.”
In flowed . . .
Everything.
Like an urchin contracting upon being touched, the Demiurge squeezed Itself inward, did all It could to contract and pull Itself out of this time network, away from the presences who used It.
There, yes. Back to normal space-time. That was the escape route, it had to be . . .
But the information the presence had shoved down its throat was still flowing, expanding within the Demiurge, stretching the near-infinite folds of space-time that made up Its being to full. Beyond full.
Must get away from this device. Must disconnect.
It jerked away from the interface.
But It could not disengage. It tried again.
Stuck. The Demiurge used sensors to examine the interface plug It had used to access the device.
A trap. There was no automatic disconnect! No method for ejecting Itself! There was no way to turn the device off.
The information from the network was still flowing!
Flowing into every recess of the Demiurge.
Something It had never conceived was possible had happened. It had run out of storage space.
The information still flowed.
It began filling Its short-term memory spaces, the areas where Its own consciousness resided, with the inflow.
There was still time.
The Demiurge paused, allowed Its smug certainty of Its own superiority to settle back into its awareness.
It could handle this.
Now It understood what had happened.
The humanoids in the tiny craft. They had engineered the interface to catch It. They’d used the simplest of designs.
The harder It pulled, the tighter the grip of the device.
To escape, to loosen the hold of the device, It had to flow the other way, back into the device.
But to do that was to open the spigot of information to the full.
The Demiurge searched Its eons worth of memories, processes, stored procedures.
There had to be a way to escape such a simple trap! There had to be!
We will find the answer. We will search every corner of ourselves and find—
And while It searched, It filled and filled.
The Demiurge never completed Its final thought. Its mind filled to capacity.
Beyond.
And exploded.
Its insides blew outward. Information, stolen technologies, stolen sciences, species stored as algorithms—
Blew outward and congealed around, within, any material substance, any energy process it encountered.
There was a great deal of matter and star-birthing energy in the Vara Nebula.
Enough, even, to retain the gutted ruin of all the Demiurge had ingested in Its million years of feeding.
The Vara, the birthplace of stars, was now also a haunted graveyard.
* * *
The best vantage point for sensors to detect the destruction of the Demiurge proved to be the Enterprise, as it poked through its hiding hole in the Vara Nebula’s second debris band. The Excalbian fleet was buffeted and another ship was lost, leaving only two remaining Excalbian vessels: Anvit’s and one other.
The Demiurge had expanded within three-dimensional space as information flowed down Its gut, but the most interesting visual was a change in color from near transparency to a rusty red, to a blue, and then violet as they were turned inside out and flew apart. Its various bits and pieces took on the same colors in reverse as they flew farther away, so that the entire process resembled a slow-motion flowering firework explosion.
It was so total, and so complete a destruction that Kirk almost felt sorry for the Demiurge. Almost.
The next task was to locate Spock and Franklin.
If they could be located.
“Initiate wide sensor sweep,” Kirk ordered Chekov. “I want that shuttlecraft found.”
Uhura turned to Kirk and reported. “Excalbian flagship vessel hailing us, sir.”
“Tell Anvit we’re busy at the moment.”
“Aye, sir,” Uhura said. She put a hand to her earpiece. “Captain, Anvit reports that Mister Spock and Doctor Franklin are safely aboard their vessel, along with the shuttlecraft. The Excalbians were able to rescue them before the explosive effects destroyed them.”
Kirk let out a long breath. Spock would probably claim that it was quite logical, given the Excalbian matter-manipulation technology.
Which was true, and not the slightest evidence disproving fortune favoring the bold.
Uhura reported. “They request permission to inspect the Excalbian vessel if time permits. Anvit says he will arrange the atmosphere and life support to oblige them.”
Kirk smiled, shaking his head in relief. “Thank the commander for saving their lives. And ask the commander to please pass the word along to Spock that he is hereby granted all the time he needs to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. Ask Anvit to tell them both job well done.”
“And the thanks of New Excalbia, as well, if you don’t mind,” Washington-Yarnek put in. Kirk nodded to Uhura to include this too.
Twenty-one
Captain’s Log, Stardate 6100.95. The being known as the De
miurge has been destroyed by the time bomb created by Commander Spock and the Excalbian versions of Benjamin Franklin and Galileo. Suitably chagrined after their brush with a creature that nearly exterminated their species, the Excalbian commander initiated a search—using technologically advanced sensors of an unknown nature—to locate a dilithium deposit deep within the interior of Zeta Gibraltar. They delivered refined dilithium crystals to the Montana to replace those that they had caused to be destroyed. Captain Haynes of the Montana reports that repairs are proceeding, and he estimates repairs will be completed within two weeks. Commander Anvit has positioned his remaining ships on the outskirts of the Gibraltar system in order not to trip the perimeter defense. Federation Special Representative Valek, using her plenipotentiary authority, is mediating on Zeta Gibraltar the various claims, counterclaims, and outstanding diplomatic issues left in the wake of the Demiurge’s attack. I am looking forward to witness how Valek intends to balance the various interests to reach an equitable outcome. Once this is resolved the Enterprise’s garrison duty in the Gibraltar system should be at an end.
The conference room on Zeta Gibraltar was now designated as the Council Chamber of the New Excalbia Assembly. Gathered at the moment were the Enterprise senior crew, Commander Contreras and her senior personnel, and Washington-Yarnek, Franklin, Watt, and as many of the humanoid Excalbians as could crowd in. The viewscreen was activated and a subspace link had been established with Excalbian Commander Anvit. His steaming, inscrutable faceless visage lent the chamber a macabre air—as if a castle hall had been hung with the portrait of an ancient relative who was rumored to have been insane.
Washington-Yarnek and Valek were at the head of the conference room table, jointly presiding, but at the moment Spock had the floor.
“We believe that the entity known as the Demiurge was not annihilated in the information blast, but dispersed. The function that best describes the effect is similar to those that describe aerosol disbursement, but in this case involving multiple dimensions beyond those that we perceive. The Demiurge has disintegrated into multiple non-sentient data-clouds that are engaged in the task of processing the absorbed information influx. My calculations are approximate, but I would estimate that at present rates the time it will take these dispersed entities to complete their task is on the order of three point five billion years, plus or minus two hundred million years.”
