by Ian Douglas
A SAIco.
"So the situation now," Griffin said in their minds, "is extremely uncertain. The DalRiss believe that a number of former nodes comprising the Web have lost contact with the primary intelligence. Several have tried to initiate a new singularity, probably in hopes of reconnecting with whatever is left of the Web. A few are… damaged. And dangerous. "
"Dangerous how, Sir?" Hallman asked.
"Shut it, Hallman," Lieutenant Vanderkamp growled over the link.
"No… that's okay, Lieutenant," Griffin said. "Good question. Some may be paranoid, and lashing out at anything they perceive to be a threat. Some may—with a certain amount of justification, I suppose—blame us for what happened to the Web. They could be seeking retaliation. For most of them, though… their thought processes, attitudes, and personal filters are impossible for humans to understand even at the best of times. Their emotions—ha! Assuming they even have emotions as we understand the word—they would be utterly beyond our ability to grasp them. They might lash out at other cultures or technologies… and if we were on the receiving end we would never know what hit us. Like I said, even these… these fragments of the Web are more powerful, are smarter than any god ever worshipped by human humans. They're gods, very powerful gods. Some of them have been trying to bootstrap themselves back up to super-godhood over the past twenty years… and some of them have gone crazy trying it. Hell, I would imagine that after Cameron finished with the Web, even the sane ones were pissed.…"
He let that sink in. How, Vaughn wondered, do you go about fighting a god?
"The intelligence you brought back from the Imperial mobile fortress the other day," Griffin continued, "mentions something the Japanese are calling Operation Hisui Tsuki… Jade Moon. It seems that one of their scouts has found… something, something well out beyond the edge of human-explored space. It appears to be a kind of matrioshka brain.…"
The concept took its name from the multiply nested Russian dolls carved from wood and painted like a succession of figures—family members, or politicians, or characters from fables. For xenosophontologists, a matrioshka brain was a Dyson swarm of objects surrounding a star or, possibly, something smaller—a brown dwarf, a Jovian planet ignited to radiate like a small star, or even a black hole. If the swarm consisted of asteroid-sized modules of computronium using lasers or radio to mutually communicate, they could create a computer network of staggering size and power. The nested-doll concept came into play with the distribution of a number of the computronium modules as shells surrounding the central object. The innermost shell would absorb heat and radiation directly from the star or other body, use it to power its part of the network, and radiate waste heat. The second shell would absorb this secondary radiation, use it, and emit radiation of its own… and so on up and up and up until only a trickle of waste heat emerged from the outermost shell.
These shells would not be solid, of course; such a design would be inherently unstable and would eventually slide off-center and collide with the central object. They would be, rather, clouds of separate modules, either in independent orbits or, more likely, they would consist of clouds of statites—stationary satellites—suspended motionless above the star, balanced between gravity and radiation pressure on vast light sails.
An image appeared inside a download window within Vaughn's mind, and in the mind of each other person in the briefing. He could see a starfield… and a tightly packed globular star cluster circled by multiple rings of blackness.
No… not a globular cluster. At least… not a natural one. Several hundred deep red stars glowed in tightly packed splendor, but as chains, loops, and whorls of obviously artificial design. As he watched, Vaughn could see movement in there, with sun chasing sun along those precisely engineered courses.
Japanese kanji appeared on the view at the lower right—readouts of distance, temperature, azimuth and elevation, velocity, magnetic flux, and other data. The cluster was less than one astronomical unit distant.
"What the hell are we looking at?" Talmand asked.
"Keep watching," Griffin said.
The view panned right, taking in several nearby stars, red dwarf suns close enough to cast glimmers of a somber ruby glow across those dark clouds… just enough to show that there was something there, something very dark, quite indistinct… and looking slightly fuzzy against the vista of background stars. One red dwarf was clearly beyond the cluster and its attendant clouds, and as Vaughn stared at it the perspective of what he was seeing snapped into focus.
A typical red dwarf star is small… perhaps an eighth up to half the mass of Earth's sun, and measuring between eight percent and sixty percent of Sol's radius. Assuming the nearby red dwarfs were in that range… the close-packed ruby stars of the patently artificial cluster were considerably smaller, smaller even than a brown dwarf… perhaps the size of Jupiter or a little larger.
Jupiter didn't burn like a star, however.
Nor, for that matter, did gas giants follow one another in densely engineered orbits. Vaughn didn't know how the trick was being done—the orbits, the tiny size of the suns—but he knew he was looking at some extremely advanced technology.
One of the red dwarfs, positioned well off to one side of the cluster, was connected to the very center of the cluster by a dazzling thread of white light. The thread appeared to be bathing something at the center of the artificial cluster, creating a pulsing, lambent glare. The star, somehow, was feeding its own energy into the cluster.
"These images were returned by the Nihongo explorer Shinsei five weeks ago," Griffin told them. "The location is in the general direction of the constellation Ophiuchus… about two thousand light years out. We think this is a matrioshka hypernode… and that it's the closest Web node to Sol. We're still trying to understand what we're looking at here… but we think that the cluster is made of fusing packets of hydrogen—Jupiter-sized artificial stars. Each of those smaller stars is the center of a micro-Dyson sphere, essentially a planetary matrioshka brain. We've counted nearly three thousand of them in there. The intellect within the cluster must be incredibly powerful."
After experiencing one impossible revelation after another, Vaughn felt as though his brain was going to explode. Humans, he thought, had no business peering into the doings of the gods.…
But what if?…
"Colonel… question?" Vaughn asked.
"Shoot."
"Sir, if this thing is a computronium node… a piece of the Web… is it one of these Mad Minds you mentioned?"
"We don't know, Sergeant Major," Griffin replied. "Not for certain. But if you keep watching, you'll see something that might begin to answer your question. Something… disquieting, I'm afraid."
The camera angle capturing the image in their heads panned again, centering on one of the other, nearer red dwarf stars. The view blurred… steadied… then zoomed in sharply. The star, they could now see, was ringed by glittering black and silver objects that looked like dust but which must be titanic machines or devices of some kind in orbit around the sun. There were millions of them, reduced to fuzzy rings by distance.
And as they watched, the rings on the nearest star began rotating latitudinally, the plane of their orbit shifting until it took on the aspect of a titanic bullseye—a glowing red central target surrounded by a darker ring.
"If I didn't know better," Falcone said quietly, "I'd swear that thing was being pointed at us!"
Vaughn noticed that the numerals alongside the words "magnetic flux" were suddenly increasing… increasing fast. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields were reaching out from the star to the Nihongo spacecraft.
"As a matter of fact—" Giffin began…
And then the scene flared and went black. A babble of excited murmurs ran through the watching troops. "Christ!" Sergeant Wheeler said.
"The Nihongo ship was destroyed by what appears to be a deliberately directed stream of plasma from that star."
"If the ship recording those images was dest
royed," Vanderkamp said, "how did we get them?"
"The Shinsei had established a lasercom link with another ship ten light hours away," Griffin replied. "That other ship recorded the Shinsei's transmissions, and was able to escape into K-T space before the locals could reach her."
"Gok, those bastards are starlifting," Falcone said, his mental voice incredulous. "Starlifting…"
Starlifting was another of those hypotheticals, something described by the DalRiss but never encountered yet by humans. It involved using various advanced technologies to remove mass from a star—a very great deal of mass, which would then then be separated into its constituent elements and used in mega-engineering projects like Dyson spheres or matrioshka brains. The most common element, hydrogen, might be diverted into Jupiter-sized lumps and turned into microstars; if you happened to know the trick of elemental transmutation, you could squeeze the extracted matter into any element on the periodic table.
According to DalRiss sources, starlifting could also be used to reduce the mass of very large suns—the O and B supergiants that burned so hot and fast that they used up their stores of fuel in a mere few hundred million years. Reduce a giant down to red dwarf size, and you had a star that would burn happily for trillions of years. The Web intelligences, it seemed, preferred to take the long view.
Smaller stars were more efficient, too. Naturally burning suns used only a few percent of their mass as nuclear fuel. Artificially reducing a giant to sub-dwarf size ensured that much more of the fuel would be burned, and that would extend the star's lifetime even more.
The intelligence now occupying the Ophiuchan hypernode evidently was so comfortable manipulating stars that they could use them as weapons. Those dusty looking rings, Vaughn thought, were probably devices designed to somehow squeeze the star's magnetic field—or generate a much more powerful field of their own. Squeeze the star hard enough, right down to its core, and a slender jet of white-hot plasma, probably running some tens of millions of degrees, would shoot out of the star with terrifying accuracy. They were using the system to feed something at the heart of the hypernode… probably a small black hole, Vaughn thought, if the local gravitational metrics were anything to judge by.
And at need they could flip the jet around and turn it into a weapon powerful enough to turn a planet into a cinder… and instantly vaporize a Dai Nihon starship.
And the Japanese were sending an expedition out there to try to talk to these beings, who might or might not be SAIco.
"New America," Griffin said slowly, "wants us to get an expeditionary force out there… and fast. If we can beat the Japanese and get there first, well and good. If they get there first… well, we have to see if we can kick them out. Either way, it is imperative that they not be allowed to form an alliance with highly advanced aliens.
"One way or another, Confederation Military Command wants us to make contact with these aliens, not the Japanese. That… or at least make certain that the Japanese don't manage to do so. The fact that the aliens shot first and didn't even bother talking about it suggests that we won't have to worry about Japanese first-contact. The Ophiuchan hypernode intelligence might be SAIco. It might just not be interested in talking with pre-Singularity knuckle-draggers.
"But we don't know. So the 451st is going to go in and find out.…"
Vaughn closed his eyes. Great. Just gokking great.…
5
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
Profiles of the Future, C.E. 1973 revision
The long-ranged Confederation heavy cruiser Constitution slipped along the hyperdimensional interface between normal fourspace and the deeper reality of the quantum sea, an eerily blue-lit non-space called the Kamisamano Taiyo, the "Ocean of God." Less poetically, it was the K-T Plenum, the space outside of space that allowed starships to seemingly violate the physics dictating that absolutely nothing could travel faster than light.
Vaughn knew little of the physics describing K-T space, and, frankly, cared less. The Constitution was nearing the end of her nine-week transit. In another ten hours they would emerge at their destination… and what might happen then was anyone's guess.
He was laying in his bunk in the Connie's aft troop compartment, with Kokoro Wheeler nestled close under his arm. He'd paid off his three bunkmates to be elsewhere tonight so that he and Koko would have some privacy. The compartment's overhead and one bulkhead had been set to show the shifting blue currents of the godsea—a computer simulation, actually, of energies that could not be directly apprehended by human senses. The moving light had a restful, almost hypnotic effect.
"What I want to know," Wheeler said, her voice barely above a sexy whisper, "is what happened to the Overmind. Maybe that could stand up to one of these renegade nodes."
Vaughn looked at her sharply. "How do you know about the Overmind?"
She laughed. "I might ask you the same thing."
Knowledge of the Overmind was still classified. Vaughn knew about it, though, because he'd been a clerk in the Intelligence Division at ConMilCom in New America synchorbit before transferring first to the infantry, then to warstriders. His security clearance level back then had been yellow-two—high enough that he'd once seen briefing material on the emergent AI within the Sol System Net.
As classified military information went, the Overmind was not that well-kept a secret. Hell, he'd been a lowly itto hei at the time, a private first-class. He'd had the classified clearance only because he was working with personnel files. If a yellow-two clerk could see that stuff, plenty of other enlisted personnel could as well.
"It was my job," he told Wheeler. "I had the clearance. A posting for a briefing came through my head one morning, and it was… intriguing enough that I dug up some more intel on it. Not much… but enough to put the pieces together. How did you find out?"
She laughed. "Strictly scuttlebutt. I had a girlfriend in C-Corp HQ. She told me about it, and some of what I heard I was able to confirm from other sources. It's not really much of a secret, is it?"
"Not really, I suppose. But the government would rather that sort of thing not get out, y'know?"
"Why not? We keep hearing about emergent AIs and how they're going to take over the next step in human evolution… the tech singularity, and all of that. I never understood why they tried keeping it under wraps."
"Well… that's the military for you." He thought a moment. "Actually, it's not the military so much as the government."
"Which government?"
"Any government. They don't want it known that super-intelligent minds might pop up out of the internet whenever Nakamura's Number is reached."
"Because… why? Panic in the streets?"
"Something like that. Some people would be terrified and flee… or riot and loot. Some would think it was God and try to worship it. Some would try to package it and sell it. Some might decide that it was time to kick out the old government in favor of… whatever it was. With enough disorder, the economy might collapse. Maybe civilization as well."
"So what's Nakamura's Number?"
"Basic AI theory. It's not so much a number as it is a measure of the complexity of an electronic information system. At a point very roughly equivalent to the complexity of a human brain, systems might wake up, achieving at least a form of consciousness and self-awareness."
"Like the Net on Earth?"
"Sort of." Vaughn frowned into the blue light. "Consciousness is a… a spectrum, a range of values, not just a matter of you have it or you don't. Any system—organic or artificial—with enough integrated complexity has at least a modicum of what we call consciousness. By that definition, earthworms are conscious, at least after a fashion. Not self-aware, perhaps… but they're more than data processing machines. They're aware of what they interact with around them. Dogs are conscious, way more so than worms. They're not really self-aware—if they see their reflection in a mirror they usually think it's another
dog, not themselves. But they experience a broad range of positive or negative emotions, can anticipate the future, at least after a fashion, and they'll perform complex tasks for the promise of a reward. Some apes show genuine self-awareness, though. Put a spot of paint on their faces and let them see themselves in a mirror. They know at once that there's something on their own face."
"What does any of that have to do with the Net waking up? Or… what did you call it? Nakamura's Number?"
"Relating conscious thought to the complexity of an information-processing system has always been pretty dicey. The old Internet—and before that, the global telephone network—were more complex than a human brain, at least in terms of the number of transistors six hundred years ago—late 20th century. Complex… but not well integrated.
"Actually, some sophonotologists today think the old Internet was aware, but laying low. We don't have any evidence of that, however. We developed the first genuine AIs in the mid-21st century, with networks that were very roughly as complex as the human brain. A neuroscientist named Christof Koch had already predicted a number—designated as phi—representing both a system's complexity and its level of integration."
"The golden ratio?"
"Uh-uh. Different phi. A couple of centuries later, Nakamura was able to predict that the Net in his day was—in theory, at least—conscious and self-aware. Since the Japanese were running things by that time, Koch's phi became known as Nakamura's number."
"Was it?"
"Was what?"
"Was the Net aware?"
Vaughn shrugged. "It still didn't show any sign that it was any of those things… not until Cameron felt it waking up and taking an interest during the Web crisis twenty years ago. The Sol System had been under extreme threat—a titanic space fleet deployed by the Web. The Net woke up and dealt with it… with some guidance from Cameron."
"But then it disappeared, right?"
"Well… let's just say that it didn't interact with humans any more… at least not that we know of. It might have had better things to do."
