Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

Slowly, the blue hand, fingers splayed, descended toward the green plane. The finger tips touched . . . then moved through the plane from above. Bright white circles highlighted the intersections where the hand was passing through the green surface.

  “A two-dimensional inhabitant of the two-dimensional universe wouldn’t be able to see the entire 3-D hand. She’s not even aware that a fourth dimension exists. What she would see is the intersection of my hand with her universe—four, now five circles that appear to expand as my hand moves down through the plane. The 2-D being can’t perceive up or down. Those directions don’t exist in her universe. But she sees these circles appear out of nowhere, even inside a closed room . . . or inside her two-dimensional body. And now . . .”

  The image of Sandoval’s hand penetrated the plane more deeply, and the separate, growing white circles merged—four of them joining into a long and narrow outline of light, with the thumb as a separate circle off to the side. The hand continued its descent, and the white light around the thumb merged with the rest of the hand.

  “My God,” Cameron said. “Those separate black blobs we’re seeing behind CAS . . .”

  “Are the three-dimensional intersection of parts of a higher-dimensional being,” Sandoval said. “Exactly.”

  “That’s a hand?”

  “I’m not making any guesses about the shape of this thing, or its anatomy,” Sandoval replied. “I imagine those are parts of its body, though. Run vid.” The image of PriFly became animated again. The black spheres appeared to grow, enveloping the struggling Francesca . . . then unfolded into hard-to-follow shapes that looked like bunches of tentacles or worms, writhing with an unpleasant life of their own. Francesca’s body abruptly vanished . . . then reappeared.

  Rather, something reappeared—an expanding cloud of blood forming jittering zero-gravity globules, some the size of basketballs. There was also something else . . . a human-sized mass of blood-drenched grit or sand or paste; it was tough to tell what the consistency was like. Whatever it was fell apart like wet powder.

  “What just happened there?” St. Clair asked.

  “Eversion,” Sokolov told him. “She’s been turned inside out.”

  “God in heaven . . .” someone said over the network.

  “God had nothing to do with it,” Sandoval said.

  “But how?” St. Clair asked.

  “Analogy again,” she said. On the graphic, the blue hand vanished. “Here’s an inhabitant of Flatland, our two-dimensional universe.” A dark green right triangle appeared on the lighter green plane. A white dot appeared, off center. “That’s his heart,” Sandoval continued. “As with humans, it’s off to one side, not centered. Now, our three-dimensional inhabitant comes along and . . .”

  The blue hand reappeared, reaching down from above, grasping the triangle, and pulling it up and away from the plane, flipping it, then letting it drop back. When it re-merged with the plane, the triangle was upside down. The right angle was now on the other side . . . as was the white dot.

  “He’s been rotated through 3-D space. If a human was rotated that way through four-dimensional space, he’d find out that his organs were now mirror images of what they’d been before. His heart would be on the right side of his chest, not the left. His liver would be on his left, his spleen on the right, and so on.”

  “Damn it, Maria wasn’t turned into a mirror image of anything,” Symm said.

  “No. And that’s where the analogy breaks down. Flipping triangles—that illustrates one way to rotate the subject. Rotate it a different way, in a different direction . . . and you turn the subject and everything in it inside out.”

  “Inside out . . .” St. Clair said. How horrible.

  At least it had been mercifully quick.

  “The eversion only went down to about the one-millimeter level,” Dr. Sokolov explained. “Only the larger blood veins and arteries were turned inside out . . . not the capillaries or smaller vessels. Heart, eyeballs, intestines, skull . . . they all were everted, but individual cells were still intact . . . including the red cells in her blood. We’re not sure why.”

  “It may have to do with how far the subject was moved within the higher dimension,” Sandoval said.

  “Maria Francesca was not a subject,” St. Clair said, angry. Shock at what he’d seen, plus his own helplessness, was making it difficult to think clearly. He pressed his fingers against his eyes, rubbing them. He had to think.

  “Look,” he said, composing himself. “I thought higher dimensions were supposed to be curled up real small. Eleven dimensions—something like that?”

  “String theory,” Sandoval said, agreeing. “That’s right—ten dimensions plus time, and seven of the dimensions are curled up into a space smaller than a proton, so we can’t see or otherwise experience them. However, how large a given dimension appears to be depends on your perspective. What’s tiny when viewed from one angle in three-dimensional space might be enormous viewed from another, if you have more than three dimensions to play with.”

  Which begged the question as to why humans couldn’t turn an oddly angled corner and vanish into a higher dimension suddenly grown large. Hell, maybe they can, St. Clair thought. That might explain what had happened to Ambrose Bierce, Judge Crater, and the crew of the Marie Celeste.

  “These four-dimensional hyperbeings,” St. Clair said, “are they intelligent? Are they using technology to move through higher dimensions? Or are they, I don’t know, some kind of 4-D animal?”

  “We have no way of telling yet,” Sandoval said.

  “In any case,” St. Clair said, “it doesn’t look like we’ll get much information out of these critters. They’re not exactly communicative.”

  “Not in a good way,” Symm added.

  “Right. Whether they are an animal or represent a higher-dimensional intelligence, they don’t seem to offer us much hope of getting the answers we need. So we’ll go elsewhere. We need to find someone out here we can talk to. We need to find someplace with a population.”

  “But if there’s a civilization still somewhere inside the Alderson disk . . .” Adler began.

  “No,” St. Clair said, cutting him off. “Until we understand what’s happening there, I’m not risking our people. We have no way of defending against extradimensional attacks.”

  “I agree completely, my lord,” Lieutenant Gonzalez said. “Do we have any possible objectives?”

  “We do,” Jablonsky said. “The Roceti torpedo has quite a long list. At least it gives us a place to start.”

  “Roseti?” St. Clair asked, amused, and mishearing the word. “Like the Rosetta stone?”

  “Yes, sir. But with CETI thrown in. Communications with extraterrestrial intelligence.”

  “Ah.” St. Clair nodded. The Rosetta stone, of course, had long been a famous historical footnote—a tablet found near Alexandria, Egypt, that contained the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Your name for it, I take it?”

  Jablonsky shrugged. “The AI department’s name, yes, sir. We had to call it something besides ‘the torpedo.’ It’s actually not a weapon at all.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “It is a very powerful computer, although as best as we can tell, it’s pretty narrow in what it does. But apparently, it’s like a kind of electronic Rosetta stone. It should let us communicate with a number of galactic cultures in this epoch.”

  “ ‘Apparently?’ ” Adler said. “Don’t you know?”

  “Well, we haven’t actually talked to anybody yet, my lord,” Jablonsky said. “But Newton tells us that’s how it ought to work. There appear to be a large number of language types. The linguistics people could tell you more about that.”

  “Out in the Galaxy,” Gonzalez said, “there are a lot of different ways that biological organisms can communicate with each other. Through spoken language, as with humans, of course, but some of those are mutually incomprehensible. Or unpronounceable. Our speech, for example, and a language of clicks,
pops, and whistles, like with dolphins. But apparently there are also languages based on color changes in the body, or the movement of tentacles or other appendages, or smell, or changes in electrical fields. Roceti seems to use a few specialized languages—probably artificial—to enable communication between different communicative styles and biologies.”

  “Right,” Jablonsky said. “With Roceti, we should be able to use the system to translate English to a spoken analogue, and that in turn can be translated into any language type we might encounter. We hope, anyway.

  “We’ll have to contact them first, of course, and that means getting close enough for a two-way dialogue. We can’t just broadcast a call and wait a few millennia for a reply.”

  “Does Roceti list some possibilities for us?” St. Clair said.

  “Yes, sir. We don’t know how up to date the list is. But we’ve culled fifteen entries from a far more extensive list in Roceti’s database. At least it gives a starting point.”

  “Let’s see,” St. Clair said.

  So far there was little to go on—names rendered by Newton into something humans could pronounce, and columns of numbers that appeared to be navigational information. There was a lot of additional data, but the xenotech research team hadn’t yet correlated it.

  “This one is the nearest,” Jablonsky said. “Twenty-three hundred light years in toward the galactic core.” An image came up, showing a portion of the Galaxy visible outside of Ad Astra. A red icon blinked within a tangle of bright stars and glowing dust clouds. “As you can see, it’s located within a region of heavy dust and gas, and with a lot of new star formation. Strong neutrino beacon. We have a transliteration of the place . . . but not a translation. It’s called isid, whatever that is. Specifically . . . Isid 495.”

  “What is it?” Ambassador Lloyd asked. “A star? A star system? Another of these huge disk things?”

  “Obviously, Mr. Ambassador,” St. Clair said, “it’s an isid. And we’ll find out what that means when we get there.”

  “Lord Commander—” Adler’s voice said.

  “We are going,” St. Clair said. “We’ll come back to the Alderson disk later, if and when that seems appropriate.” He looked at each of the officers around the table in turn, waiting to see if there were any additional challenges to his decision. His people all seemed to be with him. Adler and his cronies, though, were going to be trouble. They didn’t voice their concerns, but their faces conveyed that with little ambiguity.

  For now, though, they were letting him focus on the here and now, and he was going to take advantage of that opportunity.

  “What about the virself effect you felt?” St. Clair asked.

  Jablonsky looked uncomfortable. “It might have been a machine ghost, my lord,” he replied.

  Two centuries before, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle had coined the phrase “ghost in the machine” to describe Cartesian dualism . . . the idea that Mind or Spirit was distinct from Body, literally a ghost animating a machine. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the term had become a bit more pointed. Did AI computers possess souls? Was the mind something distinct from but inhabiting the computer—or the human brain, for that matter? Or was the mind a kind of illusion, an epiphenomenal effect arising from the machine’s operation?

  A “machine ghost” nowadays was the feeling that a machine was looking back at you, that there was a mind, a self-aware intelligence, somewhere inside. It was that insubstantial something that created the sense of a virself.

  “But whatever it was, it didn’t try to communicate with you.”

  “I don’t think so, my lord. But Newton is still trying to find congruencies in his operating system and in the Roceti. Possibly there’s an AI in there, but it’s not able to express itself on or through our system. The memory inside the torpedo is enormous. It may have more storage—by several orders of magnitude—than our entire onboard network.”

  “That’s . . . interesting.” He’d almost said “frightening,” but it wouldn’t do to admit to that fear in front of the crew. Or Adler, for that matter. The human brain possessed something like two and a half petabytes—2.5 × 1015 bytes—of storage; the ship—meaning Newton—possessed roughly 8 × 1017 bytes. Something “several orders of magnitude larger,” tucked into a shape-shifting package two meters long, suggested astonishing computing power. If there was an alien artificial intelligence resident within the torpedo, there was no telling what its capabilities might be.

  The ghost might even be real. And they were trusting it to guide them home. There was another matter to deal with, though.

  “Our first stop,” St. Clair decided, “will be a system, along our line of flight to Isid 495, if possible, where we can find ice to replenish our water reserves, and metals to complete our repairs. Then we will find out what this isid is, and attempt to make contact. Questions?”

  He was expecting further protest from Adler, but none was forthcoming.

  For now, St. Clair thought.

  “Good. Subcommander Adams? Find us some water. This meeting is concluded.”

  AND DEEP within the artificial structure known as Isid 495, Mind took note of the instantaneous transmissions from one of its agents. The alien starship was approaching.

  At last.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  “How is he?”

  St. Clair was physically present on Ward 2 of Ad Astra’s sick bay, an enormous medical facility more hospital than military clinic. It was, under the circumstances, the least he could do.

  Doctor Kildare117 AI Delta-2pmd looked at St. Clair with what was probably intended to be compassion—a programmed response. The expression came across as disingenuous, however . . . something done purely for show. Kildare was a medical robot in Sokolov’s department; the “pmd” in his designator stood for “psychiatric medical doctor.” It was all a fancy way of saying he was a shrink.

  “We are keeping Private Patterson in a deep medical coma, Lord Commander. He is psychotic and incapable of normal interaction.”

  They were standing on either side of Patterson’s support pod, a mummy-case affair with a transparent top. Ad Astra’s sick bay was located in its own carousel aft of the bridge; some medical processes—the healing of broken bones, for instance—required a gravity field, though the burns unit and some other specialized sections were located in microgravity. Patterson was still, his eyes closed.

  “And how the hell did that happen?”

  “Unknown,” Kildare replied. “However, probes of Patterson’s brain show that the electrical circuitry of his chelated implants has been burned out, possibly by an extremely powerful and narrowly focused EMP.”

  St. Clair frowned. EMPs—electromagnetic pulses—could play havoc with electronic and electrical systems. Most such systems nowadays were insulated or hardened against them, including the delicate traceries of wiring and molecular switches grown inside the brains of most humans. Simply put, a very powerful magnetic field moving past a wire induced an electrical current; if that current was strong enough, the circuit would overload, even short-circuit and melt. The problem was, human implants were well shielded to avoid such nasty side effects when a person happened to walk through a magnet field, so this shouldn’t have been able to happen.

  “How is that even possible?”

  “Unknown. What happened to CAS Francesca suggests an extradimensional component, however. The two cases are almost certainly related.”

  “We’d assumed as much.” He looked down at Patterson’s sleeping face. “Can you get any information out of him? Anything coherent?”

  “Not that I, Dr. Sokolov, or the medical-unit AIs have been able to recognize. Here . . . see for yourself.”

  Dr. Kildare didn’t move, but a pattern of lights winked on beside Patterson’s head. A minute passed . . . then another. “Dr. Kildare,” St. Clair said. “This really isn’t—”

  And then Patterson woke up.

  His eyes came wide open, staring up into the
overhead lights, and his mouth opened in a shrill scream only slightly muffled by the transplas shield over his face. The muscles of his neck stood out like rigid cables.

  “Man grabbed pet but just darkness darkness darkness my God throw run home before five engaged mass surefire general order of a sentry in the dark it watches—”

  The pattern of lights changed, Patterson’s face froze in mid shriek, then relaxed, slowly, back to a resting state. His eyes closed, and he was asleep once more.

  “My God, Doctor . . . you didn’t need to do that!”

  “I wanted you to hear him, Lord Commander. Sometimes, the words almost make sense. His speech patterns are what in psychiatric terms are called word salad, an unintelligible hash of distinct words and phrases. But there obviously is an underlying meaning there, if we could just reach it.”

  “So . . . what’s going to happen to him?”

  “His neural circuitry is burned out. Parts of the cerebral cortex and subcortex have been damaged. We are programming a nanorepair infusion that will, first, disassemble the inorganic remnants of the circuitry, and then move into the organic tissue and begin effecting repairs. We predict an eighty percent chance of full physical recovery, especially with the introduction of new cerebral prosthetics. It is unlikely that we will be able to preserve all of Private Patterson’s memory, however, and retraining will be necessary in some areas.”

  “Very well. Please keep me informed.”

  “Yes, Lord Commander. Of course.”

  “What about Maxwell?” Sublieutenant Ogden Maxwell had been the fighter pilot coming in to trap on board Ad Astra’s flight deck when CAS had been killed. His fighter had brushed an antenna when communications with CAS had gone down, and his fighter had been damaged.

  “Already returned to duty, Lord Commander. He suffered some minor bruises, and the effects of vacc exposure when his cockpit was breached, but his suit systems kept him alive until a SAR robot could reach him.”

  “That’s good. Thank you, Doctor.”

  “Anytime, Lord Commander.”

  And there was that compassionate look again.