by Ian Douglas
"So… if we're facing a new threat— mad minds from the Web—maybe the Overmind will wake up again and protect us."
Vaughn chuckled at that. "How very… Arthurian. In our time of greatest need, he rises from sleep and leads his knights forth." He shook his head. "Maybe, but I really don't think we can count on it. For one thing, the Overmind must be restricted to the Solar System. It has a body—all of the servers and nodes and networks inside the Solar System. Presumably it can't just wander off from the computer network that spawned it."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"I imagine ConMilCom is thinking about how they might use the Overmind to communicate with any Web nodes we encounter… but I'm afraid I don't see how we could use it as a weapon."
"In other words, it'll protect the Sol System," Wheeler said, "but can't leave its home network."
"Exactly. At least that's what the sophontologists think. Hey!" She'd just nibbled on his ear. "You want to talk, or you want to play?"
"Both." They snuggled deeply for a few moments. Kokoro Wheeler and Vaughn had been jacking in together for about six months, now. She was, he thought, superb recreation… but lately she'd become something more. Vaughn wasn't sure how he felt about that. Sexual relations between soldiers were not… discouraged, exactly, but they weren't encouraged either. Fraternization between officers and enlisted personnel was discouraged because of the perceived differences in levels of power and free will… but both he and Wheeler were noncoms and flight leaders, and the issue was irrelevant.
But there was the danger that he or Koko might be killed in combat, and he was increasingly concerned about that.
What would he do without her?…
"I wonder…" Wheeler said after a long and delicious interlude, "what do the Japanese think about the Overmind?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, they control the Sol System, right? The Overmind is right in their back yard. They must have known what happened during the Web attack. They must be trying to communicate with it."
"Hadn't thought about that, but I guess so. They need Dev Cameron, or someone like him."
The Overmind had been an emergent AI, an accident, though apparently only the legendary Dev Cameron in his ascended, digital form had been able to interact with it. It had brought the first phase of the civil war between Dai Nihon and the Confederation to an abrupt and rather unsatisfactory end… a truce that did little to resolve the differences between the two.
The truce had held—more or less—for twenty years, until the disagreement over the status of Abundancia and several other colony worlds had led to the fighting breaking out once more.
"Dev Cameron was… unique," Vaughn continued after a moment's thought. "He was a human who'd… well… 'ascended' is as good a word as any. Somehow he was digitized and managed to enter the Net. We're not sure how he did it, but chances are good it had to do with his symbiotic relationship with a bit of Naga living inside his brain."
"Ah. And the Japanese are fussy about things like that."
"Exactly. Osen, they call it. Contamination."
"And since Cameron was a westerner, an American, he was able to sense the Overmind, while the Japanese could not."
"Uh-huh."
"So what happens now that the Japanese have overcome their inhibitions and brainjacked with the Naga?"
He pulled her closer. "We hope to hell we can get to the hypernode in Ophiucus before they do," he told her. "And that we can find a way to talk to them without having them squirt star plasma at us."
"And if we can't?"
"Then we work on our star-tans," he said, "just as quickly as we can." Then he kissed her and pulled her closer still.
* * *
Chujo Yoichi Hojo stood on the bridge of the dragon-battleship Hoshiryu, as blue currents of simulated light whipped and curled toward his face from the point of perspective directly ahead of the ship. The forward bridge gallery was an enormous open space, the simulated window a viewall two stories tall. Taisa Shinzo Shiozaki climbed the steps to the gallery stage, gave a deferential bow, and saluted. "Daimyo Hojosama…"
"Yes, Taisasan." The rank was that of first-rank captain; Shiozaki was Hoshiryu's commanding officer.
"We are twenty-five minutes from breakout, Lord."
"Very well. You may take the ship to battle stations."
"Hai, Daimyo Hojosama!" Again, he bowed. Shiozaki was a conservative naval officer of Dai Nihon, absolutely formal and correct in all matters of protocol. He was also, however, a brilliant tactician and a creative and inventive ship commander… which was why Hojo had specifically requested him as his flag captain.
A warning chime sounded as Shiozaki transmitted a thought through his cerebral implant. Throughout the enormous battleship, men would be manning their stations.
Somewhere out there in all of that blue light, three other carrier-battleships, Ryujo, Hiryu, and Unryu, plus six cruisers and a dozen destroyers, would likewise be preparing for breakout. Communication through the godsea Void was difficult to the point of impossibility, however, so no attempt was being made to coordinate the entire squadron from the flagship.
Those captains, too, had been personally selected by Hojo. He trusted them completely to do what was necessary… and according to schedule.
"I know it is difficult to anticipate exactly where we will emerge from the godsea," Hojo began.
"Yes, sir. But we can be confident of dropping out of the Kamisamano Taiyo within ten astronomical units of the objective. The Shinsei was able to extensively map the gravitational matrix of the local space during her approach and transmit the data before she was destroyed. Even across two thousand light years, our trajectory should be accurate to within an astronomical unit or so."
Hojo nodded his understanding. Navigation from within the blue-litten Ocean of God was always problematical since the K-T plenum was essentially outside of normal space. There were ways, in principle, to detect nearby gravitational sources, but steering from point A to point B was mostly a matter of knowing exactly the distance between them… and timing the passage with obsessive precision. The longer the voyage, the greater the uncertainty at the end. Typical K-T jumps within the Shichiju—the realm of human colonized space—were generally on the order of a few tens of light years, no more. The Ophiuchan hypernode was 2,107.4 light years from Sol, and so the chance for error creeping in was correspondingly larger.
Human ships had traveled farther… much farther. Some made the voyage to the Galactic Core, some 26,000 light years from Earth… but the actual target there had been a volume of space thousands of light years across… not an area measured in light minutes.
The precision necessary for this piece of celestial navigation was unprecedented. Under normal circumstances, the fleet might have jumped to a way point some light years short of the objective... but they still weren't sure how good the hypernode's detection technologies might be. Better by far to jump directly to the objective. The only thing that made it possible was the fact that Shinsei had already blazed a metaphorical trail, and transmitted her precious data to Imperial Navy HQ.
"Your navigators," Hojo said, "have been briefed on the need for an immediate corrective jump."
It was not a question. Everything depended on the fleet's ability to make a second jump from wherever they emerged to a specific location in space. A location much closer to the objective.
"Yes, sir." Again, the bow. "Our primary capacitors will have been drained when we emerge from the K-T plenum, of course… but the secondaries are fully charged, and will enable us to make a second jump as soon as we have secured the necessary navigational data."
"Good." He considered the tactics of the problem. "Of course, according to classical naval strategy, if we emerge ten AUs from the objective we will have eighty minutes or so before the enemy becomes aware of us… plenty of time." One astronomical unit was a bit over eight minutes, so slow was the crawl of light through normal space. "But… we're not certain ye
t of the aliens' capabilities. We are facing the threat of true Clarketech here. We need to anticipate all possibilities."
" 'Clarketech,' my Lord?"
"Maho no tekunoroji," Hojo said, using the Nihongo term. "Clarke was a pre-spaceflight futurist who said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The matrioshka aliens may have ways of being alerted to our presence long before the light front from our emergence reaches them."
Shiozaki gave a puzzled scowl, and shook his head. "How would that even be possible, my Lord?"
"If we knew that, Taisosan, it wouldn't be magic, now, would it? But… local space might be seeded with billions of small satellites—perhaps even nanosatellites smaller than grains of dust. If these could transmit a warning faster than light, the matrioshka intelligence could be aware of our arrival within seconds."
"Ah. I see…"
"Or… the matrioshka intelligence might have a way of peering through the dimensions at surrounding space, and see approaching vessels in real time, without a speed-of-light delay. Who can say?"
"But then, Lord… they might be watching us now, while we're here in the godsea! How could we even hope to surprise them?"
"Gambaru," Hojo said with a small shrug. "Gambaru, Taisosan." The word meant, roughly, doing your very best no matter what difficulties or obstacles you faced.
"Yes, sir."
"Don't look so unhappy, Shiozaki! We try to anticipate what the matrioshka intelligence might do… but we also take comfort in the fact that it took them some time to realize the Shinsei was there and spying on them. Over ten minutes! Frankly, that performance does not suggest superhuman technologies… or magic."
Shiozaki looked relieved. "I am delighted to hear that, Lord."
"However, we will take no chances… or, rather, we shall take as few chances as is possible. It will be imperative to make that second jump just as soon as we have the necessary navigational data. Understood?"
"Hai, Chusosama!"
"Good."
Shiozaki checked an internal clock. "Five minutes, Lord."
Hojo nodded, continuing to stare out into the blue currents ahead. He was under no illusions about the possibility of defeating the matrioshka hypernode in combat. No human technology could hope to stand against Clarketech.
But if he could just get them to talk.…
The last few minutes trickled away, and the Hoshiryu dropped out of the K-T plenum. Starlight blazed ahead… and Hojo stared into wonder.…
* * *
The following morning, Vaughn and Wheeler were on the Connie's mess deck, eating breakfast. The compartment's viewalls were set to show the high central Cambrian Plains of American Dream, an Earthlike world circling 38 Geminorum C. Some sort of herd animal, gray and green-striped, grazed in the foreground. A sister planet, pale white in a deep blue sky, hung suspended three-quarters of the way above the far horizon.
"The new striderjacks seem to be working out okay," Vaughn said.
"I hope so," Wheeler replied around a mouthful of fabbed chonpatty. "Simming isn't the same as striding, though."
"Point."
It was an old complaint. As good as direct link combat simulations were, they fell short of the raw emotion, confusion, and utter chaos of a real op. The new crop of jackers had been pulled from Connie's reserve jacker pool immediately after the Battle of the Catarata Cliffs and rushed into advanced training. Vaughn had helped put Green Flight's nubes through their paces, and knew they were good.
The question was how they would perform when the yokie lust hit their blood.
"That's okay," Vaughn said with a shrug. "It's all just one huge computer simulation anyway."
"What is?"
"The universe. Reality…"
"Oh. That again."
"I just keep wondering when someone is going to switch off the lights."
Vaughn had long been fascinated by the whole idea of the universe-as-computer. It had started with a keen interest in the so-called Anthropic Principle, which noted that the universe appeared to be very precisely tuned to allow the evolution of life and Mind. Change any of a handful of physical constants by the tiniest degree—the strength of gravity, the strength of the forces within an atomic nucleus, the size of the cosmological constant, and a few others—and stars wouldn't have formed, or all matter would have collapsed into black holes in the first instant of existence, and humans wouldn't be around 13.8 billion years later to argue about it.
Of course, if the universe was finely tuned, that presupposed a Tuner, a Creator. Vaughn no longer believed in God, but there was an odd satisfaction in the thought that what humans thought of as Reality was in fact a digital simulation on a vast, cosmic computer in some higher dimension or universe.
Maybe Reality was the result of a bunch of drunken undergrads running history sims and tinkering with the variables. It would explain so much.…
Vaughn was far from being an expert. He was a striderjack, not a cosmologist or physicist or even a programmer. But he was interested in the idea… especially in regards to how it suggested that life might not be as meaningless or as random or as empty as it would be if it was dictated by sheer chance.
Those civilians trapped in the church on Abundancia…
No one else shared his minor obsession, not even Koko. That was okay, though. He just wanted to know what would happen when those damned undergrads finished messing around with the supra-universal university's supercomputer. That was the long-running joke, anyway.
But that reminded him of something else. "I wonder how much longer?" Vaughn said, half aloud.
"What… until they switch off the power?"
Vaughn chuckled. "No. Actually, I was wondering when we're going to drop out of K-T space. The trip is dragging on forever."
It had been more of a rhetorical question than anything else—he could easily have pulled the information down from the ship's Net—but Wheeler beat him to it.
"One hour, twelve minutes to go," she told him.
"Good. This was one hell of a long jump. I'll be glad to see the end of it."
"Me too. Of course, once we come out we get to find out what's waiting for us."
"You mean the Japanese?"
"That's one. A SAIco with giant squirt-suns for weapons is another."
" 'Squirt-suns?' " Vaughn smiled at the silliness.
"What else would you call them?"
"Terrifying."
"Well, yeah. But you have to admit that squeezing the plasma off a star to vaporize an enemy ship has all the finesse of setting off a nuclear warhead to slap a mosquito."
"True." Vaughn considered for a moment the idea of casually nuking mosquitoes. "My guess is that they really don't care. They may give no thought to their actions at all."
"You mean… they don't think about frying inquisitive starships?"
"I mean… they don't think at all. Not on that level of consciousness."
She shook her head. "I can't believe that, Tad! If you're unconscious you can't build starships. Or Dyson nodes. Hell, matrioshka brains are all about building smarter and smarter minds, right?"
"Are they?" Vaughn grinned. "Ant hills… termite mounds… bee hives.… All very complex structures that show cunning ingenuity. In termite mounds the internal temperature can be regulated to within less than a degree even in mid-afternoon on the African savanna. Social insect hives are sometimes referred to as 'hive minds,' but no one seriously contends that they're self-aware or conscious."
"You think the Dyson node was made by social insects?"
"Not insects, necessarily, no. I'm just saying that there might be other forms of intelligence… really different kinds of intelligence, and they might not have the same degree of consciousness—whatever that is—that we do."
"Well… I would say that consciousness is just the ability to receive sensory impressions from the outside world, right?"
Vaughn shrugged. "Most sophontologists say it includes the ability to reason, judg
e, hypothesize, plan… internal stuff. Some add that consciousness means the being is able to observe and report on itself, what's called internal monitoring. There's also what they call phenomonological consciousness… which is kind of hard to put into words. It means… what does it feel like to be a given entity? If it feels pleasure, or pain… what do those sensations feel like, not to the sophontologist, but to the entity?"
"I think you're splitting hairs now."
"Mind specialists have been wrestling with the concept since… I don't know. The twentieth century at least. Maybe before. They agree that what you perceive as—say—a spicy taste might not be spicy at all to me. I might taste sour instead."
"You do not!" She laughed, a wicked look in her eyes. "At least you didn't last night!"
Vaughn gave an exaggeratedly disgusted pretend-grimace and threw his hands in the air. "Why do I even try? Look—"
"Now hear this, now hear this," a voice said over their implants inside their heads. "All warstrider pilots report to your squad bays and jack in for combat operations."
"To be continued," Wheeler said, laughing as she stood up. "Maybe G2 can tell us whether the matrioshka critters are conscious… or just the builders of a big, unconscious ant hill!"
"I think the big question," Vaughn replied, picking up the remnants of breakfast and stuffing it in his mouth, "is what they'll do if we try to kick their ant hill over.…"
* * *
The Dai Nihon fleet had emerged dead on target, ten astronomical units from the cluster of stars and strangely dwarfed sub-stars that made up the Ophiuchan hypernode. At that distance, the hypernode had been so dim that it was invisible to the naked eye save as an extremely faint, reddish smudge, but optical magnification had revealed the true scope and spread of the object.…
The cluster—2,994 perfect red jewels in a tightly bound setting—gleamed against blackness. With increasing magnification, each red jewel revealed tightly organized loops, whorls, and orbital arcs of black dust; each ruby sub-sun was orbited by millions—perhaps billions—of structures. The entire cluster spanned at least three million kilometers—twice the diameter of Earth's sun.
