Mystical Tales of Romance

by Ed Hurst

no doubt.

  So this is what his teachers at the Brotherhood called a psychopath, someone clearly possessed by demons. He didn’t cower; he simply watched. He was pretty sure sooner or later she would tire of this game and wander off in search of other victims. He’d have to make sure he wasn’t around for a second encounter with her.

  She was too much like someone else who had almost destroyed him.

  2

  At one time it had been a mining station. When the ores played out, the mining company moved on, auctioned off the equipment and allowed the facility to rot. However, it was in a place which seemed oddly shielded from most degrading particles. Somehow the random alignment of free floating asteroids in the belt, along with the isolation from most radiation sources, allowed the old seals to keep functioning and the place never lost any air. It was stale, but breathable.

  During one of the many interstellar wars and pogroms and other conflicts the fleeing Brotherhood ship stumbled onto the one planetoid in the belt which had been previously inhabited. Their sensors had only picked up internal cavities, and they were hoping for a pocket they might hide their crippled ship. It turned out to be a docking bay properly excavated. While the fittings were ancient, it was just possible to extend a flexible seal over the portals. A hasty exploration showed it was still quite livable.

  In just a matter of hours, they had transferred the power and air generators into place, and the ship was scrapped out for various furnishings. The war went on without them. At last they were free to carry on their research and develop a fairly substantial hospital.

  While they had all the standard physical therapeutic equipment, it wasn’t their specialty. This was what in ancient times would have been called a “asylum” or “nut house.” The Brotherhood specialized in treating disorders of the soul.

  Typical traffic from passing ships might go like this: “Can you take a patient? He’s a real basket case, comatose and barely breathing.”

  To which the station communications would respond: Basket cases are all we handle.

  Most people could find ways to cope. There were various implants with electrodes, field generators to stimulate various organs or the ever popular virtual reality implants. The majority of humanity was able to get by like that. It required a peculiar sensitivity to be so devastated by psychic trauma as to need real help. These were the only people capable of being helped by the Brotherhood.

  They never bothered to document their own history. That was a critical expression of what made them unique in the galaxy. Indeed, they were vaguely aware, only because historians told them, they once had a much longer name, but they never seemed interested in digging into it. They had been called simply the Brotherhood for a very long time, and it was comfortable. The only archives they had were those related to their own research. None of it had names of authors because it all belonged to the Brotherhood.

  People didn’t shed their identity to join, of course, nor did they have to surrender all they owned or anything like that. But if they got involved in the work, it was all for the Brotherhood and the good of mankind, not for fame or fortune. No one was turned away, but of course the wealthiest families desperate to save their own were critical to their survival as an organization. It was also what kept them free and independent most of the time.

  So it was during one of those boom times when donations were heavy and membership was high, they received yet one more comatose man, tightly balled up in a fetal position. He had been a trainee, found in his cabin after saving the ship. Aside from a few moans when he was moved to a safer place in the sick bay, they couldn’t get him to respond in any way. He did take food and water periodically, and eliminated, but it was all utterly mechanical and minimal. The crew had never managed to get him out of the main portion of his pressure suit.

  Only the Brotherhood understood how they did it, and no one would ever talk. They said it was because there was no way to explain it. While a few never did recover, this one did. As part of his recovery, he was offered a chance to stay and learn the ways of the Brotherhood. He went through the basic introductory phase, but decided it was not for him. Not that they needed him, but he decided he really did have something he needed to do. That, said the Brotherhood, was the primary symptom of recovery.

  3

  It was not a question of how much, but what kind. Human advancement was unlimited in some areas, but there were distinct and immovable boundaries in other areas. While this did not prevent recurrent attempts at times in human history to breach those barriers, each failure was more spectacular than the last, and the recovery of vain hope took longer each time.

  A paradox over which philosophers through countless generations chuckled was the pursuit of harnessing energy. Every advancement brought hopes of finally having enough. Each time, demand rose to outrun it again and again. Previous generations could not imagine what their children could accomplish, but those same children often complained at what they imagined their parents didn’t suffer from energy deficits.

  Still, with each new leap forward in harnessing new sources of power, the baseline of human capability did rise. First came interstellar travel, which was a simple matter of anchoring the ship just outside the normal space continuum, spinning space past them, then coming back out wherever it was they wanted to be.

  Soon enough communications were able to pull the same trick, which was then networked and piped to individual devices. Various schemes were introduced to maintain access to hyperspace communications, but it never really worked. Hyperspace was an unlimited transmission vector. The only question was how to control the process by which the various devices offered a trustworthy identity. Encryption schemes and subscriptions became the final means of metering. Thus was born the Network Civilization, scattered across the galaxy.

  Naturally it bred a certain flatness in human society, reducing the variations by virtue of ubiquitous sharing of human lack of creativity. Meanwhile, opportunities for what little creativity remained were continually narrowed. It was human creativity which became the final barrier which very nearly destroyed the Network Civilization in its infancy.

  First, it is necessary to understand the fiction of separation between human political organization and the profitable enterprise died early in human history, just before interstellar travel became possible. It became a common understanding corporations and government were the same thing. The fiction of human aspirations to greatness didn’t die, but the means took on a flavorless realization everything humans did was for profit.

  No matter what one might visualize as morally pure artistic endeavor, someone found a way to sell it. If it could be measured and packaged, if only in theory, someone would do so for a price. Thus, all academic research was funded by the profit motive. Surprisingly, this did not limit the directions in which research would stretch, because a new generation of entrepreneurs arose which could not imagine controlling things until it came time to deliver the product. Academics actually became freer than under presumably benign objective government from the old dying Western Civilization.

  Second, Artificial Intelligence finally ran into The Boundary. One particular corporation managed to leverage themselves into control one a significant portion of academic research institutions in the field of computer science. About the same time the scientists were first touching on 512-bit computation theory and hardware design, it become utterly impossible for humans to handle it directly. It became necessary to let computers take over the design, production, and finally the software writing. At the time, some imagined this was the first step in AI self-awareness. This was the final total end of malware and computer cracking.

  It was also the death of everything in computer science except the very narrow field of algorithm design, sometimes referred to as “decision processing.” This particular corporation cornered the market on those researchers who first recognized this and were devoting all their efforts to just that. At some point, the wild dreams of achievement saw this corporati
on mortgage everything they could control or cajole from anyone, and estimates were the resource pool was almost a full quarter of all galactic commerce at the time. They pushed the computers to redesign themselves to the point it became necessary to simply build the ultimate big AI machine as an artificial satellite in orbit above the corporate home planet.

  Reaching deep into mythology, the scientists proposed what they called the Forbin Hypothesis: Create a computer so big and capable of evaluating objectively literally billions of branches at the same time, with the capability of nearly limitless branching from each of those branches, and see if it could reach anything resembling self-awareness. Of course, getting a large enough database would require having this thing actually invasively hack into every existing database throughout the galaxy, which was easily the most expensive part of the whole thing. Most shocking of all was their success.

  The satellite was physically not so large itself. Most ship builders said it seemed no larger than a ship which might house a crew of seven, tops. Zipping across the galaxy in record time was the easy part, since there would be no humans on board which would require slowing the process of jumping in and out of hyperspace. But the project