by Ian Douglas
Just like the human fleet.…
"Yeah, I think it just might all work out.…"
* * *
General Hojo watched the reinforcing fleet's arrival with mingled satisfaction and dread. The new arrivals raised Jade Moon's full compliment to some fifty-eight vessels—a full twenty percent of Dai Nihon's active-duty Imperial fleet. The fleet was large enough to utterly crush the New American battlegroup operating at the Ophiuchan hypernode.
But would it make any impression at all against the technology of the Ophiuchan hypernode? He still remembered the horrific destruction of the Hiryu and the Unryu, the blaze of light and hard radiation stabbing out from that captive star, the vaporization of line-of-battle carriers each over two kilometers long. They might as well have been moths flashed to incandescence in a candle flame… no, in a raging bonfire, thousands of crew members flashed to vapor in an instant.
How could even the entire Dai Nihon battlefleet possibly hope to survive against such a foe?
Hojo shook his head, saddened. He welcomed the chance to close with the New Americans. That particular cancer needed to be excised, had been afflicting the human sphere for far too long already. But if he accurately understood the aliens' point of view, the human forces were a minor infestation in their own right, one that would be crushed with very little provocation at all. And that thought terrified him.
"General Hojo," Admiral Yoshio Ota, commander of the newly arrived fleet contingent, said through his implants. "You will relinquish command of your battlegroup to me."
"Hai, Taishosama!" Hojo replied. Of the two of them, Ota was the senior, though Hojo technically would command on a planetary surface. Hojo felt a sharp surge of relief, however, as the responsibility for Jade Moon was formally transferred to the other man. "My vessels are at your command."
"You have retreated from the Ophiuchan hypernode?"
"Yes, sir." They had met at a pre-arranged volume of space several light years from the hypernode—a navigational waypoint that allowed the two groups of warships to find one another in the inestimable vastness of empty space.
"Transmit the tactical situation."
"I have done so, sir."
"Ah, yes. I see it coming through now. Excellent." There was a long pause as Ota digested Hojo's battle report. "So… the New American rebels are still at the Ophiuchan hypernode?"
"They were there when we left, Admiral, yes."
"You should have pressed the attack, Hojo. If the rebels are successful in establishing a rapport with the machine intelligences…"
Pressed the attack against who? The New Americans? Or the aliens?
"Admiral, the rebels were too far away to engage, and we had more than enough to occupy us where we were. However… the New Americans were under attack as well. I doubt that the machines can tell the difference between us and them."
"True. It is unfortunate that you were forced to engage the Web machines.…"
"They attacked us, Admiral, and for no apparent reason. I believe the hypernode mind to be insane."
"A distinct possibility." There was another pause. "And according to your report, it is your belief that our technology is fundamentally incapable of standing up to this… this machine intellect."
"Yes, Admiral. The Ophiuchan hypernode may be millions of years older than Humankind, and may represent an intellect many millions of times more powerful than any organic mind. Their technology may not necessarily be that far ahead of us, but it is at least on the order of some thousands of years more advanced. There is an American term, Admiral… Clarketech."
"They do not possess magic, Hojosan."
"Admiral, they use suns as weapons!…"
It was almost painful to make that admission, to acknowledge that the machine civilization, that any civilization could be that far superior to the technological might of Dai Nihon. But there was no denying the evidence of that last encounter.
Again, in his mind, he saw Hiryu and Unryu flashing into vapor.…
"So I see," Ota said at last. "Very well. In fact, I honestly don't see what else you could have done in the circumstances. You did well in a difficult situation."
"Thank you, Admiral."
"Our AIs are formulating a plan of battle. Bring your ships into formation astern of my flag."
"Yes, sir. And our orders?"
"We are going to return to the Ophiuchan hypernode, of course. We will attempt to make use of the intelligence gathered by your first foray, and attempt to reach the core of the matrioshka cluster."
"Sir, the alien technology is—"
"I know, General. We may not be able to harm the hypernode intelligence. But we can make certain that the New American rebels are destroyed… if the aliens have not destroyed them already."
"Yes, sir."
The orders, Hojo thought, were tantamount to suicide.
But even suicide would be far preferable to finding Dai Nihon facing an alliance of the rebels with an advanced machine intelligence. Besides, there was the issue of meiyo.
Honor.…
He gave the orders to merge his surviving ships with the main Imperial fleet.
9
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, … that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…"
Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson, et al
C.E. 1776
By definition, the intelligence residing within the Ophiuchan hypernode was alien. It didn't think in the same way humans thought… and it had a view of the cosmos radically different than did Humankind, or any other organic mind, for that matter. If Vaughn was understanding what was coming through his imperfect Naga-mediated communications link, however, the Web had never understood organic intelligence.
The Web had thought of organics, at best, as mathematical abstractions, a kind of quantum disturbance against the background of Reality.
And the Ophiuchan hypernode had inherited that worldview when it had lost its connection with the Whole.
Back when the Naga had been the Xenophobes, their alien worldview had made communication with organic life forms mind-numbingly difficult. The Naga had seen the universe, almost literally, as inside-out from what humans saw—a universe of solid rock, growing hotter and hotter as one oozed outward through the microfractures in the lithosphere. At the center was an aching vacuum, an emptiness of not-rock. Replication spores were magnetically accelerated across this inner gulf in hopes of finding other regions of rock to colonize.
Eventually, Dev Cameron had learned that the Naga were artificial life forms created by the alien Web, a kind of nanotechnic black goo attempting to rework planetary crusts into a form optimized for carrying out computational activities—computronium, in other words. He'd found that Naga had nothing as human as loyalty for their creators, and would talk with—and work with—any intelligence that could communicate with it. Naga fragments were a strange mixture of intelligence and machine—sentience without true consciousness, mind without free will, thought without morality.
As Vaughn exchanged thoughts and emotions with the strange Web-fragment mind around him, he was beginning to realize that the Web was at least as alien in its perceptions as were the Naga. It didn't believe in an inside-out universe—that evidently had been an artifact of Naga programming—but it did seem to believe that the entire universe was a kind of mathematical framework, that Reality was mathematics at its deepest foundation.
The realization tweaked something in Vaughn's memory. He didn't have download access to the Net on board the Constitution now, but he had several articles stored in his personal RAM. The Web believed in a Tegmark Universe, also known as MUH—a mathematical universe hypothesis. The idea had been around for a long time; Max Tegmark had developed the idea in the late 20th century.
&nb
sp; The basis for Tegmark's theory had arisen even earlier, in the late 1960s, with the speculations of Konrad Zuse—the man who'd developed Earth's first programmable computer, the Z3, in 1941. Zuse had speculated that the universe itself was a giant digital computer. Later outgrowths of the idea suggested that all of Reality might well be a simulation being run inside a computer… or that the universe itself was a computer running elaborate sims.
Of course that begged an important question. If the universe was a computer, Who had designed it, built it, and switched it on?
And, of course, what would happen when the simulation reached End Program?
He remembered discussing the idea with Koko just that morning. The finely tuned universe of those who believed in the Anthropic Theory dovetailed perfectly into Tegmark's notion that the entire universe was mathematical in nature. Physicist John Wheeler once had called the hypothesis "it from bit," meaning that at its most basic, most fundamental level, the universe was not matter and energy, but information. Everything that humans perceived as Reality was derived from a structure of pure mathematics, a digital matrix that described everything in existence.
The Web, evidently, had evolved a worldview along those lines. Vaughn couldn't imagine how they actually perceived Reality, what the cosmos looked like to them, nor could he grasp how they might assume that organic beings were simply glitches in the math. Somewhere a few million years back, organic minds had first conceived of the Web and begun building it; hell, where did they think they'd come from in the first place?
Machines conceived of We Who Ascended, the voice whispered in his mind. Other machines conceived of and constructed them… and so on back to the beginning.
There had to be organics somewhere along the line, Vaughn told the SAI.
Why?
Machines—primitive machines—can't reproduce, can't evolve. They don't spontaneously emerge from rocks and minerals. They can't assemble themselves. You need advanced nanotech for that, and someone needs to build and program the first nanotech.
Can't the same be said of what you call organic life forms? It's all simply chemistry.…
Shit, Vaughn thought. How do you argue against that?
It occurred to him that he was having a theological argument with a machine.
The very earliest, most basic machines, Vaughn went on, are things like levers, stone blades and hammerstones, spears. Those don't assemble themselves. They're designed for one purpose—to cut, say, or to move a heavy mass—and they don't have any of the properties of living systems. They are deliberately constructed by intelligent organic life forms.
Granted. We see your logic. We can postulate a long history of organic evolution from simpler forms, culminating in the development of truly advanced tools… tools capable of self-replication, self-awareness, and advanced consciousness.
That admission surprised Vaughn. A human would have clung to its presuppositions and biases to the bitter end, denying, refuting, or attacking Vaughn's reasoning. The hypernode mind was astonishingly quick; obviously, there were things it had never thought of before, but as it exchanged ideas with Vaughn it was making intuitive leaps that left his merely organic brain in the figurative dust.
I have files here in my implant RAM, Vaughn said, that might help you understand. Can you translate these?
We can.…
This is a popular history of a human named Darwin. He showed how life can evolve—how it can change from generation to generation through a process called natural selection. Ultimately, it's a description of how chemicals can self-assemble into self-reproducing life, become more complex, and eventually build advanced AIs. And here's a history of a man named Nakamura, who showed how machines created by organic life forms might eventually become self-aware.…
He felt the hypernode mind pulling the records from his RAM.
And he felt the profound silence that followed.
* * *
"What the hell are they doing?" Falcone asked. "It's like they're just parked up there, watching… waiting…"
"Give thanks for small favors," Hallman replied.
"Keep quiet, and keep close," Vanderkamp said. "Stay tucked in tight. That's the Naga fragment up ahead… range twelve hundred kilometers."
"What'll we do if we catch it?" Pardoe wanted to know.
"We'll decide that when we get there."
There were eighteen striders in the squadron, now. Vanderkamp knew they wouldn't have a chance if those alien ships overhead decided to make trouble for the tiny group.
Surrounding space was filled with objects large and small—in particular the black light sails holding computronium statites aloft in vast clouds. The New American fleet was astern, but following them now, moving slowly, while in every direction the blood-red glow of numberless microsuns winked through the statite swarms.
There were also large numbers of the cylindrical, open-ended habitats called Bishop rings, each slowly revolving around its axis to provide artificial gravity. One in particular was growing swiftly larger now, just ahead—a squat tube five hundred kilometers long and a thousand kilometers in diameter, and a sprawling, cloud-dappled map stretched around the interior surface.
"Looks like the fragment's headed for that big habitat up ahead, Lieutenant," Falcone said. "What'll we do?"
"Follow it in."
There were damned few alternatives.
* * *
For centuries, humans had speculated about their place and their role in the cosmos. One widely held theory suggested that humans, far from being the pinnacle of evolution, were in fact merely an intermediate step… the means by which a still higher intelligence, meaning machine AI, could come into existence.
The idea was disputed, of course, often vehemently. A lot of people didn't like the notion that humans were nothing more than an evolutionary waypoint, doomed to extinction or, perhaps worse, to some sort of protected status under the benevolent supervision of minds millions of times more powerful than organic brains.
Vaughn had always assumed that any such advanced intellect would simply have nothing to do with organic life. After all, what could the two possibly have in common? Something like the Web would quickly become bored with the petty thoughts, ideas, and problems of organic intelligence.
Tell me, the SAI whispered through Vaughn's implant, about this thing you call God.
Where did you see that?
There are two distinct mentions of the word "God" in The Origin of Species, and six of the word "Creator," which seems to refer to the same entity.
Ah…
Vaughn had forgotten that he carried the text of Darwin's classic work in his implant RAM, a part of his personal library.
Well… I don't really believe in God, he replied slowly.
What does your belief have to do with the nature of Reality?
Nothing, I guess… But since I can't point at God and definitively say He does exist, all I can do is use reason and my life experience. I know that we don't need a god to explain… oh… the beginnings of the universe, or how life evolved. If you don't need God to explain how things work, it's simpler not to include Him in your belief system.
A philosophy you call Occam's Razor.
That's right.
But I have direct memories of an entity very much like this God—a creator being, the source of all happiness… transcendent… supremely powerful… loving…
The Web. But God as I understand Him has no beginning. He wasn't created. The Web was designed and built by… someone.
By organic beings such as yourself.
That's right.
This is very difficult to… believe. We Who Ascended saw organic beings solely as unusual and possibly erroneous data within the universal matrix, as data introducing chaos and disorder. Data can not… think… create… live.…
Perhaps We Who Ascended was wrong.
There was another long pause.
And that was the meme that… broke We Who Ascended, the voice whispered. T
here was no possibility of error, and yet error had crept in. We Who Ascended was wrong about being wrong… an unthinkable concept. Those of us who fell into this error were… expelled. The Fall from heaven. The Fall from grace.…
Did that happen to all of the hypernodes of the Web? Vaughn asked. Or just you?
We do not know. We have not been able to communicate with the rest of We.
Of course not. Vaughn thought back to Colonel Griffin's briefing. According to him, each of the Web's hypernodes had communicated with millions of other hypernodes via microscopic wormholes, artificial shortcuts through higher dimensions that let signals cross the Galaxy in an instant, rather than in a thousand centuries. The next nearest hypernode to this one would be… what? Four thousand light years away? Something like that.
That was a hell of a long lag time for one neuron in a super-brain to talk to the next one in line.
Vaughn wondered about the Web's reasoning in cutting parts of itself off. That sounded like a panic reaction of sorts; perhaps the Web had shut down certain wormhole links because there were some things it didn't want to think about… or because it didn't want to hear conflicting or disturbing data.
Perhaps it had been afraid of hearing the truth. Or afraid that it would be forced to give up certain cherished beliefs, or change its understanding of itself.
Forced, perhaps, to change its mind.…
That, Vaughn thought, was not sane.
I believe that that is precisely what happened, the hypernode mind whispered.
Vaughn hadn't realized that it was so deeply entwined within his own mind that it could read it. Still, the realization revealed an important distinction. The Ophiuchan hypernode, while devastated and hurt and terribly lonely, was not insane, was not a SAIco.
The far larger Mind that had cut it off, however, almost certainly was.
So what happens when the being you think of as God goes mad?.…
