Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  What is the highest good for any intelligent being? Was it the philosophy of the ancient Greek Epicurus, who held that pleasure and pain were measures of good and evil, and that the purpose of life was to attain happiness? Or was it the eudaimonia of Aristotle, who felt that happiness needed to be combined with virtue and with ethical wisdom to achieve the highest possible human good?

  What happened when a technic society achieved the means—through nanotechnology and advanced biological engineering—to remake itself in such a way as to abolish all pain and suffering, and bring about a state of supreme happiness for all of its members? Might that society withdraw into a self-contained state of perpetual bliss, unaware of events in the outside universe?

  Might that be why the sky appeared to be empty? Every civilization out there, once it reached a certain level of technological prowess, concentrated on a hedonistic indulgence in pleasure to the exclusion of all else.

  As an answer to the Fermi paradox, the Hedonistic Imperative fell short. It was unlikely that every intelligent species in the Galaxy fell into such an obvious trap. Some must escape . . . those that valued intellectual curiosity, a wanderlust for new horizons, a need for raw materials, or even a simple warrior ethos.

  And yet, Gus had just admitted that his own species, at least, preferred just such an existence.

  “It seems to me,” St. Clair said, “that the other members of your species need to wake up and get involved. They can’t enjoy being hooked into their dream machines if someone comes along and pulls the plug on them.”

  “It is not so simple,” Gus replied. “They are Transcended.”

  “So?”

  “How do you wake up a god?”

  “But their existence depends on you waking them!”

  “How do you even talk to them?”

  St. Clair recalled having read of a study some years ago on Earth, a study dealing with the problems of intelligence. The issue had come to a head in human psychological studies as more and more people opted to enhance their own brain power through implant electronics, or to increase the functional intelligence of their children through genengineering. The study suggested that two people separated by two standard deviation points on the intelligence charts—that amounted to about thirty points on the old and now discredited IQ charts—actually had significant trouble communicating with each other.

  He’d encountered similar problems himself in a social context rather than one involving intelligence; some of those vac-heads at Lloyd’s party last night were a case in point: he’d been utterly baffled by some of the conversations he’d overheard. Some of those damned glitterati might as well have been speaking an alien language, and him without a translation AI.

  But that level of problem might be literally insignificant compared to the difficulties involved in communicating with a hyperintelligence—a SAI or augmented organic intelligence so powerful that they had nothing whatsoever in common with ordinary minds. Such beings might live at a vastly slowed temporal rate, for instance . . . with centuries in the outside universe flickering past as seconds for them. Or they might have gone the other way, living within an electronically hyper-accelerated world, eons within their virtual reality as seconds passed outside.

  Either way, a digitized, virtual life within a vast computer network might offer an existence that made organic life seem unbearably tedious or unimportant. Raiders from Andromeda might simply not interest them, and the forces left “outside” to protect them might not be able to communicate with them on a meaningful level. A skewed sense of time might not even be involved; could an ant claim that it was talking with a human when it ran across a man’s toe and elicited a spontaneous twitch of the skin? Quite possibly, the difference in intelligence between ascended and unascended beings of the same species might be roughly similar to the difference in intelligence between a human and an insect.

  And we’re the insects.

  “That . . . object out there,” St. Clair said. “It’s what we call a matrioshka brain, isn’t it?”

  “I do not see the term matrioshka in the data to which I have access.”

  “The name is from one of the root cultures of our civilization,” St. Clair explained. “It refers to a series of small, ornamental dolls or figurines, hollow and designed to be pulled open, and sized to nest inside one another—a large one holds one slightly smaller, and inside that one smaller still, and so on.”

  “I understand. Perfectly descriptive.”

  “The structure out there is one about which our futurists have speculated quite a bit. A shell of orbitals, consisting of solar power plants and computronium processors—smart matter. Inside that shell is another shell . . . and another inside that, and so on all the way through to the core. The innermost shell is directly powered by the sun at the center. Each shell is powered by the waste heat from the one below, so the entire energy output of a sun could be devoted to powering a vast computer system of immense computational capacity.”

  “We call it an isid. This one is Isid 495, and is one of a large network of such structures throughout a large volume of space.”

  The alien word isid appeared to translate as something like “node” or “nexus,” which was descriptive enough in its own way. “Galactic node” would be a fair translation, St. Clair thought. The translation also revealed an important point about the aliens’ technology. If they had hundreds of matrioshka brains wired into a network of some sort, they must possess faster-than-light communication.

  There’d been rumors and speculations that Coadunation technology included FTL communications, probably involving quantum entanglement, but that had never been confirmed. The point was a minor one, but important. Possessing ships capable of FTL travel was one thing. Having a communications net that could instantly interconnect a large number of widely separated computer nodes was quite something else. Just one matrioshka brain might have computing power enough to run a digital simulation of an entire universe . . . or at least the simulation of an entire civilization within such an artificial cosmos.

  So what happened when someone hooked up five hundred or more matrioshka brains in parallel? What problems were they solving, what simulations might they be running?

  Providing a virtual world for the digitized members of a single ascended species would be trivial.

  At the same time, St. Clair was struck by an irreverent thought. So much computing power, such awesome technological capabilities, and it was devoted to providing a state of unending bliss for the civilization that created it.

  It had been a joke that the original Earth Internet was devoted almost entirely to pornography. Apparently that idea transcended species.

  But that thought was rapidly followed by another. Perhaps that blissful state was, after all, only a very minor part of the whole.

  In terms of numbers of synapses and brain complexity, the Neural Connectivity Equivalence, a human brain was roughly 109 times more powerful than the brain of a typical nematode—a billion times the computational capacity of a worm. According to the encyclopedia reference he’d just seen, the NCE of a Kroajid was about six-tenths greater than a human’s.

  But a matrioshka brain would possess an NCE on the order of 1024, which gave it a computational capacity very roughly 10 trillion times greater than that of a human. And if this was Galactic Node number 495, there were at least 494 other brains, all, according to Gus, linked together in a single network. Quite a comfortable standard of virtual living for trillions of digitized inhabitants could be provided by a fraction of that brain power; the rest might represent a single Mind, or set of Minds of truly godlike capacity.

  The digitized Kroajid might well have been reduced to the level of pets . . . or lab experiments or even viral parasites.

  Like the physical layering of shells in a matrioshka brain, there might be layer upon layer of intelligence in there, each far deeper and more powerful than the last.

  St. Clair glimpsed—just glimpsed—the possible vistas of inf
inite nested Mind . . . and reeled, staggered by the vision.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  A mob had formed in Bethesda.

  St. Clair stood on his veranda, looking across the sprawl of the town emerging from the woods half a kilometer below his cliffside overlook. He could hear the sound of it, a ragged susurration drifting above the trees. He thought he could make out the sharper tones of someone using an amplifier, addressing the crowd verbally as well as electronically.

  What the hell was going on down there?

  Lisa stepped out of the house behind him, bringing him a cup of coffee. “They sound pretty upset,” she observed.

  He accepted the cup. “Thank you. Are you linked in to the news feed?”

  “Of course.”

  He ran through a list of channels on his in-head, and settled on a local Bethesda station. A window opened, and he found himself looking down through a newsdrone’s eye on an angry mob.

  “Demonstrators are protesting what they say are the high-handed actions of the Navy,” an announcer was saying. “Rumors are circulating to the effect that the Ad Astra has come forward in time several billion years—that’s billions of years—engaged in combat with unknown alien forces, and brought on board a potentially hazardous alien artifact—possibly a weapon of enormous destructive potential. Ambassador Clayton Lloyd has been closeted with community leaders for several hours now in an attempt—”

  St. Clair switched off the feed.

  Adler’s orders that the civilian population at large not be told of the temporal jump, that the details of the Jump into this remote future remain classified, were rearing a collective and very ugly head.

  “This is Lord Adler’s doing?” Lisa asked. Sometimes it was as though she could read his mind without relying on in-head electronics.

  “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know for sure. He wanted to see me while I was talking to the aliens and I shut him down. Maybe he just wanted to warn me about . . . all this. Or maybe he incited it.”

  “But why?”

  “To get my attention?”

  “There are aspects of human behavior I do not understand, Gray.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  He checked Ad Astra’s current population status. There were several alerts up; large-scale demonstrations had broken out in eight towns and small cities scattered through both hab modules. Marine units were already en route to all of them. Scattered fighting between Marines and civilians had already broken out in Seattle, Virginia Beach, and Goddard.

  His in-head secretary had been deluged over the past twenty-four hours by messages and queries concerning the Kroajid. There was, evidently, quite a lot of arachnophobia within the Tellus Ad Astra population, and the jolting appearance of the being known as “Gus” had shaken a lot of people to their spider-fearing cores.

  A majority of the people in the expedition had no problem with the aliens’ appearance. Evidently, though, enough of them had panicked that they were making a fuss, calling for large-scale demonstrations, for policy reviews, or even for Ad Astra’s withdrawal from the area until things could be sorted out.

  And Adler and some of his Cybercouncil legislators wanted the civilian government to be in charge.

  St. Clair wondered what their take was on the Kroajid, and on the accident of their appearance. Obviously they represented a case of parallel evolution, at least to a point. There was much about them that wasn’t very spiderlike—the columnar, bristle-covered elephant legs and their sheer size, to name two. He’d thought the language, the way they vibrated their body hairs, was another, but a little research had turned up the interesting fact that some spiders on Earth had communicated in exactly that way, buzzing away with their body hair in order to impress potential mates.

  That coincidence had been surprising enough that St. Clair had even wondered, briefly, if the Kroajid might be the many-times’ great descendents of terrestrial spiders, but the ship’s xenobiology department had assured him otherwise. There were, after all, only so many basic body types and shapes possible. With millions of available ecosystems all busily evolving more and more complex life forms, it would have been astonishing if certain basic body patterns had not repeated independently of one another across the Galaxy. Earth alone had given rise to three marine species: the swordfish, the dolphin, and the extinct ichthyosaur, representatives of fish, mammals, and reptiles unrelated to one another, yet all possessing the same torpedo shape, curved dorsal fin, and slender snout.

  What St. Clair found more interesting was the number of people who’d reacted with fear, disgust, or panic at the sudden appearance of the Kroajid on their in-head displays. He genuinely regretted that . . . and wouldn’t have allowed a mass link-up if he’d known what was going to happen.

  According to the medical department, somewhere between 3 and 6 percent of all humans were arachnophobic, though the reasons for that fear were still not well understood. Suggestions that it was a case of survival of the fittest—or, in this case, survival of the most phobic—just didn’t hold up under close examination. Spider venom simply wasn’t fatal often enough to make large-scale changes to the human genome.

  In any case, according to the med department, something closer to 10 percent of Ad Astra’s population had reacted with fear or even panic when Gus appeared, possibly because of the suddenness of the event, possibly because of the Kroajid’s apparent size. Even without any obvious scale or size referents, Gus felt huge—at least as large as a human—when he’d appeared.

  The panic raised another issue. How much of the demonstrations and protests in the Tellus cities now was due to the shock experienced by 10 percent of the population? Was it simply a matter of a sizeable percentage of the population getting scared . . . and assuming that the Navy wasn’t doing its job?

  He would have to see what Adler and his people had to say about that possibility.

  And in fact . . .

  An icon began winking within his in-head view. Adler still wanted to talk—in person, not virtually. He’d been asking St. Clair’s secretary for a face-to-face meeting in the Carousel ever since the first linked encounter with Gus.

  “I suppose I should get that over with,” St. Clair said, just barely aloud.

  “What was that, Gray?” Lisa asked.

  “Nothing, dear.” He sighed, then checked his in-head clock. “Listen, I’d better take off.”

  “You’re not scheduled to go to the bridge for a couple of hours yet.”

  “I know. But I’d better go see what the Lord Cybercouncil Director has to say to me.” He kissed her. “See you later.”

  Not that he had any doubt at this point. Adler, he’d decided, was making a push to take command of the expedition and put it under civilian control.

  And St. Clair was pretty sure he knew how he was going to respond.

  THOUGH LIGHT could not interact with the mass of axionic bodies, the Dark could sense Mind across even intergalactic distances. Mind, it turned out, reshaped physical reality in certain subtle ways, much as did gravity, and for an essentially four-dimensional entity, that reshaping could be sensed across substantial distances in three-dimensional space.

  And if you brought time into the equation—as in Einsteinian spacetime—abstract concepts such as distance became very nearly inconsequential.

  In fact, the axionic hunters known collectively as the Dark could hear alien thoughts from tens of thousands of light years away.

  And it was reacting to those thoughts, those delicious thoughts, now.

  A raider fleet was dispatched to follow this taste to one of the alien nodes.

  “I PROPOSE,” St. Clair said quietly, “to leave Tellus here with the Kroajid matrioshka brain. Your civilian population can run itself any way that it chooses . . . can study the Kroajid and the Xalit Ta, establish treaties . . . communicate with them to your hearts’ content. I intend to take the Ad Astra off for a scouting run to Andromeda.”

  “And leave us alone? Unprotected?”r />
  St. Clair and Adler sat in one of the Carousel briefing rooms. Walls and overhead were set to depict the view outside—the frozen clash of two galaxies, plus a beehive swarm of habitats that made up the matrioshka brain—the “matbrain,” as the xeno people were calling it now. St. Clair looked at the Dyson swarm displayed across one conference-room wall, at the layers upon layers of dust motes with a tiny fraction of sunlight managing to peek out from the core through the clouds. Was that an imperfection, he wondered . . . evidence that the architects of that structure weren’t completely efficient? Or was it, rather, art, a minor inefficiency left in place for its intrinsic beauty?

  And just what would beings like the Kroajid, he wondered, consider to be beautiful?

  “Gus tells me there are several trillion Kroajid living within the matbrain,” St. Clair pointed out.

  “Yes . . . as brain-dead vegetables! Wireheads who don’t even know we’re here!” Adler sounded horrified at the thought. “What if these alien raiders—this Dark that Gus was telling us about—attack?”

  St. Clair was tempted to say something like, “Then you’ll be shit out of luck,” but he refrained from doing so. He was trying to be diplomatic about this mess. He needed Adler’s cooperation, needed him as an ally, not a political enemy.

  “I can leave, say, three quarters of the Marine compliment with you, under General Frazier. Plus the Marine space assets.”

  Adler considered this. “What good will Marines do? That matrioshka thing is a cloud of small habitats, not a planetary surface.”

  St. Clair spread his hands. “So? What good will Ad Astra do? She’s just one ship.” He didn’t add that she had twenty squadrons of advanced fighters on board, as well as several armed auxiliary vessels. He needed that small fleet to support the Ad Astra, and didn’t want to remind Adler that they were there.

  Adler finally shook his head. “Uh-uh. I really can’t allow you to take so much of our military capability off on some wild goose chase to another galaxy.”