by Ian Douglas
“Get that cleared out of here,” he ordered. He addressed the electronic agent again. “Are there any Medusae taboos or cultural imperatives for disposing of their dead?”
“Other members of its family would eat the body.”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to arrange that. But we’ll save the body in case we get back.”
“That would serve.”
Aloud, St. Clair gave orders to preserve what was left of the corpse in the medical department’s morgue. Then, “Agent . . . I need to know. How much of the Liaison is in you? Are you the Liaison?”
It was, he knew, a strange question, but a vitally important one. It was rumored that some members of the Coadunation were able to upload themselves electronically into super-powerful AI computers. Was the agent such a digitally uploaded personality? Or was it a clever simulation being run purely by software?
“We are a digital agent that ‘knows’ everything the Liaison knew, a complete copy of its memory. We do not fully replicate a Medusan life or responses in the sense that we think you mean.”
“I notice you still refer to yourself in the plural, as a Medusan would.”
“That is part of the programming. Medusans cannot think in any other way.”
“Just so you don’t get lonely and switch yourself off.”
“There is a tendency in that direction, I admit. But I am a part of the far larger software entity you call Newton. I am not alone. I am content.”
A couple of maintenance techs had arrived and were using heavy gloves to deactivate the opened pod and transfer it to a litter. Symm gave them some orders about preserving and storing the body, and then told the other humans standing nearby, “Okay, folks. Show’s over.”
St. Clair returned to his seat. “I think that concludes this meeting in any case,” he said. He glanced again at Adler, who was speaking with an assistant and didn’t meet his eyes. “We’re agreed, then, to remain in this volume of space while we figure out how the alien probe works, and see if it will help us talk to the locals. Comm Department, you’ll follow up on the signals we’ve been receiving, and deliver to the command constellation your recommendations if any appear suitable for contact. Astrogation, you’ll assist Comm and also do a survey of nearby systems where we might top off our water stores and other consumables.”
“I can give you an intial thought about the latter right now: it’s kind of thin out here, my lord,” Holt told him. She looked up at the display overhead, at the vast sweep of two spiral galaxies locked together in a titanic embrace. “We’re well above the plane of both galaxies, out in the halo. Stars are few and far between here.”
“How far?”
“Hundreds of light years between one and the next. Thousands in some cases.”
“Actually, the local interstellar medium is a bit thicker than that,” Tsang added. “The gravitational interaction of the two galaxies has . . . churned things up quite a bit. There . . .” He pointed to where a smudge of stars appeared to be curving up and out from the nucleus . . . then at another star stream dwindling off from a wildly distorted spiral arm. “And over there . . . you can see stars that have been torn out of their parent galaxy and tossed out into the cold. We’ll likely find a lot of individual stars out here.”
“I leave the finding to you. Dismissed.”
THE LIAISON’S suicide was a shock, but at least the Medusan’s electronic alter ego appeared to be working well. That was important to St. Clair, because he was pretty sure they were going to need the digital Medusan, and access to the Liaison’s memories would go a long way toward helping them find allies in this remote future of colliding galaxies.
He was reminded how little was still known or understood about the Coadunation. Humankind had been in contact with them for barely thirty-eight years, which was not long enough by far to understand something as large and as diverse as an interstellar culture.
And he had a strong feeling that understanding the Coadunation of the 22nd century would help them understand whatever they might find in this epoch. Surely different cultures would have worked out similar systems to deal with the vast distances between the stars. Empires, confederations, republics, stellar alliances—the Galaxy must have seen them all, and the most successful forms of government might well have survived to the present time.
“But why must we find these other civilizations?” Lisa asked him. They were tangled together in bed, the down-tube wall and ceiling set to transparency—an illusion, actually, created by cameras and very good point-mapping. “The Galaxy is so big . . . surely we could just find an out-of-the-way star system and start over.”
“Adam and Eve?”
“Something like that.” She giggled. “Maybe not for robots. We’ll need manufactories to reproduce.”
“It’s not a crazy idea. A million organic humans is a good size for starting a viable population.”
“Humans have done it with less,” Lisa reminded him. “The Toba bottleneck?”
Around 73,000 years before Ad Astra had left Earth, a supervolcano called Toba, located in Sumatra, exploded. The ash and dust thrown into the atmosphere caused a ten-year volcanic winter, followed by a thousand years of global cooling. The worldwide human population at the time dropped to perhaps fewer than ten thousand individuals, creating a “genetic bottleneck” still visible in the human genome.
The theory was still controversial—use of stone tools in places like India showed that local populations had survived and even prospered at the time—but it was reassuring to know that with a million people living in the O’Neill cylinders, the human species could get a new start.
Because it was dead certain that they would not find humans—not Homo sapiens, that is—anywhere in the Galaxy after 4 billion years of continued evolution.
“You continue to astonish me,” St. Clair told her.
“In what way?”
“Oh . . . the breadth of what you know. I don’t expect a robot to know about things like the Toba bottleneck.”
She arched one perfect eyebrow. “Why not? I’m linked to the ship’s Net. And can access any data I want, just like you.”
“Well, yes. Of course.” Universal access to extensive data libraries was taken for granted throughout human society, at least within that large percentage of the population. Perhaps 80 percent of all people on Earth now carried nano-grown implants nestled into the sulci and fissures of their brains, allowing them to interact seamlessly with computers, AIs, and communications networks.
And yet . . .
“It’s just . . . I don’t know. I’m surprised, often, by your initiative and curiosity. Your originality. Robots aren’t known for their spontaneous creativity.”
She drew back from him a little, staring into his eyes. He noted the countless small human effects—the constriction of her irises, the flare in her nostrils, the tug at the corner of her mouth that might be the beginning of a smile . . . or of a frown.
“My brain is just as good as yours, Gray,” she told him. She sounded angry. “Maybe better. It was designed that way, yes . . . so it wasn’t the product of random genetic match-ups like yours.”
“I know . . .”
“And we’re designed to be creative,” she went on. She pulled back farther, disentangling herself from him. “The Zeta-3 series especially! We’re notorious for coming up with original solutions to difficult puzzles.”
“Okay! Okay! I didn’t mean—”
“The first novel written by a robot AI was published fifty-eight years ago! The first dramatic docuinteractive came out fifty-one years ago!”
“Lisa—”
“The first AI to show definitively human-level intelligence and self-awareness came out in 2053! That’s well over a century!”
“I know, Lisa! I wasn’t criticizing! I was expressing surprise at how . . . how human you are!”
“And why is that such a surprise, Gray? Intelligence isn’t a single-dimensional point, like an IQ number. It includes things
like curiosity, self-awareness, and originality. I am not just a machine, you know. Any more than you are just an animal.”
“Look . . . Lisa, will you accept my apology?”
She looked as though she was going to continue arguing, then softened. “Of course.” She gave a convincing sigh, quite a feat for someone who didn’t breathe. “No apology required, really . . . but thank you for the thought.”
He reached out with a fingertip to trace the curve of her shoulder . . . her throat . . . the top of her breast. So soft . . .
“We clumsy organic types,” he said, “still have trouble thinking of machines with emotions. Even when we programmed them in the first place.”
She caught his hand, pulled it to her mouth, kissed it.
“I think you’re not used to the whole idea of synthetic life forms yet. You as a species, I mean. It caught you by surprise, and you haven’t adapted yet.”
“Our tech curve has been going asymptotic for over a century, now,” he said. “Some people claim we’re already well into the Singularity.”
She nodded. “We may be.”
He found it interesting that she’d used the plural we, as in humans and robots creating an unknowable future together. The Technological Singularity had first been proposed back in the mid twentieth century, a hypothesized point at which technological growth and change would advance so rapidly that human life—and what it even meant to be human—would be changed out of all recognition. Human immortality. Digitally uploading human consciousness. Mergers of human and computer life forms. The onset of godlike super-human intelligence, both through AI and by means of the amplification of organic brains. All this and much more had been anticipated with the acceleration of technological advance, although by definition the exact nature of the Singularity was unknowable by Mark I Mod 0 humans. Theorists had expected the Singularity to occur sometime in the mid twenty-first century, no later. Human life, however, remained perfectly recognizable in the twenty-second, despite the appearance of AIs as smart as or smarter than humans, of robots so lifelike you couldn’t tell them apart from organics, and of direct human-machine interfaces through molecular nanobiotechnology. For whatever reason, the Singularity had failed to appear. Many futurists hoped that contact with the Coadunation would explain why Humankind’s long-awaited apotheosis had been put on hold.
Her touch brought him back from his pondering. “No immortality yet,” he said after a long moment. “No intelligence explosion. And I still feel human. So we ain’t there yet.”
“You realize that this far into the future, there’s a much higher chance of encountering the Ascended.”
The Ascended. It sounded like the title for an interactive sim. The term was used to refer to civilizations that had already gone through their version of a technological singularity, though what that might mean was rarely specified. It implied beings—whether organic, inorganic, or some mix of the two—with godlike powers and outlooks, whether they lived here, in some higher dimension, or inside a computer-generated artificial reality.
But St. Clair knew what Lisa was getting at, and he agreed with her. An Ascended civilization might be expected to be immortal, or nearly so. Individual members might live in one form or another for millions of years, and a mature and stable Ascended galactic culture might survive for billions.
Over the course of 4 billion years, then, it was possible that the Galaxy had generated a kind of population crisis involving more and more Ascended cultures. The Coadunation, and many more that had arisen since as well, might have survived to the present.
Or . . . not.
Much more likely, the Coad had collapsed eons ago, to be replaced by others . . . with those replaced by still others in turn. Some would have entered a singularity and Ascended; others would have foundered and gone extinct. There might be some Ascended cultures in the Galaxy now, but it seemed unlikely, somehow, that they were tripping over one another.
A signal sounded in his mind. “Lord Commander?” It was Valerie Holt’s voice.
He opened the mental channel. “St. Clair. Go ahead.”
“My lord, request permission for a ten-light-year jump for astrogational purposes.”
“Permission granted.”
“Thank you, my lord.” The channel closed.
Lisa had noticed the momentary loss of focus in his eyes. “Problem on the bridge?”
“No problem. Astro wants to shift the Ad Astra . . .” He felt the faint, inner tremor that meant the ship had just made a spacial transition. “Ah. There it was. We’ve shifted, probably to get a range bearing on something.”
She snuggled closer, holding him. “I’m glad they didn’t call twenty minutes ago.”
“They would have gotten my secretary.” Most of the organic humans on board Ad Astra had electronic avatars running on their in-head systems, electronic agents that could perfectly mimic the actual human over a Net connection.
“Well, your secretary can handle the bridge for a little while longer, I think,” Lisa told him, her hand wandering.
“Mmm . . . that’s nice.” St. Clair thoughtclicked a wall control, and the scene through the bedroom transparency changed, showing now a view of outside. It looked exactly as before; a ten-light-year shift had made no difference at all in the starscape, of course. The very nearest of those stars—a hundred light years or so distant—might have moved a few degrees, but any change would have been barely noticeable.
Beyond, the two nuclei of the galaxies looked like vast, flattened swarms of stars, each passing through the other. Young new stars flared, brilliant, highlighting cloudbanks of gas that were like black cliffs. Slipping an arm around Lisa, he pulled her closer.
“The light is romantic,” she said. “So beautiful.”
A new thought occurred to him. “So . . . how do robots experience emotion? Or something like beauty?”
“Differently than you do.” She shrugged, a movement that did delightful things to her upper torso. “We feel—we’re programmed to feel—but we’re not directed by them. They don’t dictate our behavior. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” St. Clair said. “It sounds wonderful.”
He was thinking of Natalya . . . and how he’d felt when she’d walked out on him.
That had been five years ago.
“Emotions,” he said slowly. “Nasty, ugly things. You’re better off without them.”
“But I do feel,” she replied. “Certain things like affection and loyalty are hardwired into me. I’m just not capable of what humans call falling in love. I can love—if I understand the term at all—but that emotion does not control my thoughts or actions. It’s simply one more datum in the input circuitry.”
“Exactly my point,” St. Clair told her. “Come here . . .”
Further sensory input was confined to touch and related sensations, skin against skin, and the stimulation of certain highly sensitive nerve plexi.
And conversation was not necessary.
“WHAT DO you make of it, Gene?”
Sublieutenant Gene Kirkpatrick let the data stream through his in-head processors, looking for patterns, for anything at all that stood out from the background. There was nothing, save for that ongoing, steady pulse of neutrinos, coded to distinguish it from a billion other identical point sources scattered across the sky.
“I don’t see anything special there,” he replied. “Do you?”
“You see the IR smear?”
“Yeah . . . what is that? An accretion disk, maybe?”
Rhonda Delacroix shook her head. “I thought so, too, at first,” she told him. “A big, flat dust cloud, and the parts closest to the star are heating up, the outer parts are cold. But it’s not acting like a dust cloud.”
“What then?”
“Gene . . . it’s solid. Look at the movement profiles.”
Now he saw what the astronomy department tech was getting at. Long-range scans showed that something was orbiting that distant star . . . but it wasn’t
flowing the way a dust cloud would. It was moving like a solid object.
And that was flat-out impossible.
“You think I should wake the skipper?” The thought was a bit terrifying.
“Your call, Sublieutenant,” Delacroix told him. “Thank God.”
“Yeah . . .”
Kirkpatrick was the ship’s least senior tactical officer, and as such he’d drawn the so-called night watch on the bridge. There was truly no such thing as day or night on board a starship; control stations had to be fully crewed at all times no matter who was off-duty or asleep. For human convenience, though, the ship’s “day” was divided into twenty-four hours, and those hours were grouped into three eight-hour watches, with enough overlap to allow smooth handovers.
The night watch ran from 2400 hours through to 0800, and the only thing distinguishing it from other duty periods was the fact that the skipper was enjoying his sleep period at this time, and was not on the bridge.
And enjoying was the operative word, Kirkpatrick thought with a grin. There was plenty of shipboard scuttlebutt and speculation about that hot and cuddly little gynie he kept. Rank, it seemed, did have a few privileges. Junior sublieuies had neither the credit nor the available bunk space even to consider keeping a gynoid playmate.
The point was that he didn’t care to wake the skipper unless it was damned important . . . and that meant something that absolutely would not wait. This . . . thing, whatever is was, had been out there for a long time. It would keep until the day watch. So he decided he would pass on what little data they had to St. Clair’s electronic secretary.
He opened the channel. “St. Clair,” the skipper’s voice sounded in his mind. “Is this urgent?”
E-secretaries could be indistinguishable from their owners over electronic channels, and had enough intelligence to make decisions as to whether or not an incoming call could be deferred, or should be put through immediately.
“No, my lord,” Kirkpatrick replied. “But I thought you’d want to see this . . .”
He opened another channel and the data flowed into St. Clair’s in-head RAM.
IN PLACES among the stars, Darkness possessed form, mass, and purpose. Sliding down through lightless and tightly twisted dimensions, the axionic hunters emerged within normal space. Light did not interact with the immateriality of their bodies, so they were blind to the spectacular vista of colliding galaxies.
