by Mike Ashley
Next, the dominant, turtle-like predators vanished as well. Had they been dispatched?
On Shiva, all the forms humans thought of as life, plant and animal alike, were now in fact mere . . . well, maintenance workers. They served docilely in a far more complex ecology. They were as vital and as unnoticeable and as ignorable as the mitochondria in the stomach linings of Adventurer’s crew.
Of the immensely more complex electrical ecology, they were only beginning to learn even the rudiments. If Shiva was in a sense a single interdependent, colonial organism, what were its deep rules?
By focusing on the traditional elements of the organic biosphere they had quite missed the point.
Then the Circular Ocean’s laser discharged again. The starship was nearer the lancing packet of emission, and picked up a side lobe. They learned more in a millisecond than they had in a month.
A human brain has about ten billion neurons, each connected with about 100,000 of its neighbors. A firing neuron carries one bit of information. But the signal depends upon the path it follows, and in the labyrinth of the brain there are 1,015 pathways. This torrent of information flows through the brain in machine-gun packets of electrical impulses, coursing through myriad synapses. Since a single book has about a million bits in it, a single human carries the equivalent of a billion books of information – all riding around in a two-kilogram lump of electrically wired jelly.
Only one to ten per cent of a human brain’s connections are firing at any one time. A neuron can charge and discharge at best a hundred times in a second. Human brains, then, can carry roughly 1,010 bits of information in a second.
Thus, to read out a brain containing 1,015 bits would take 100,000 seconds, or about a day.
The turtle-predators had approximately the same capacity. Indeed, there were theoretical arguments that a mobile, intelligent species would carry roughly the same load of stored information as a human could. For all its limitations, the human brain has an impressive data-store capability, even if, in many, it frequently went unused.
The Circular Ocean had sent discrete packets of information of about this size, 1015 bits compressed into its powerful millisecond pulse. The packets within it were distinct, well bordered by banks of marker code. The representation was digital, an outcome mandated by the fact that any number enjoys a unique representation only in base 2.
Within the laser’s millisecond burst were fully a thousand brain equivalent transmissions. A trove. What the packets actually said was quite undecipherable.
The target was equally clear: a star 347 light years away. Targeting was precise; there could be no mistake. Far cheaper if one knows the recipient, to send a focused message, rather than to broadcast wastefully in the low-grade, narrow bandwidth radio frequencies.
Earth had never heard such powerful signals, of course, not because humans were not straining to hear, but because Shiva was ignoring them.
After Badquor’s death and Lissa’s narrow escape, Adventurer studied the surface with elaborately planned robot expeditions. The machines skirted the edge of a vast tile-plain, observing the incessant jiggling, fed on the piezoelectric feast welling from the crusted rocks.
After some days, they came upon a small tile lying still. The others had forced it out of the eternal jostling jam. It lay stiff and discoloured, baking in the double suns’ glare. Scarcely a meter across and thin, it looked like construction material for a patio in Arizona.
The robots carried it off. Nothing pursued them. The tile-thing was dead, apparently left for mere chemical processes to harvest its body.
This bonanza kept the ship’s biologists sleepless for weeks as they dissected it. Gray-green, hard of carapace, and extraordinarily complex in its nervous system – these they had expected. But the dead alien devoted fully a quarter of its body volume to a brain that was broken into compact, separate segments.
The tile-creatures were indeed part of an ecology driven by electrical harvesting of the planetary energies. The tiles alone used a far higher percentage of the total energetic wealth than did Earth’s entire sluggish, chemically driven biosphere.
And deep within the tile-thing was the same bone structure as they had seen in the turtle-like predator. The dominant, apparently intelligent species had not gone to the stars. Instead, they had formed the basis of an intricate ecology of the mind.
Then the engineers had a chance to study the tile-thing, and found even more.
As a manifestation of their world, the tiles were impressive. Their neurological system fashioned a skein of interpretations, of lived scenarios, of expressive renderings – all apparently for communication outward in well-sculpted bunches of electrical information, intricately coded. They had large computing capacity and ceaselessly exchanged great gouts of information with each other. This explained their rough skins, which maximized piezo connections when they rubbed against each other. And they “spoke” to each other through the ground, as well, where their big, crabbed feet carried currents, too.
Slowly it dawned that Shiva was an unimaginably huge computational complex, operating in a state of information flux many orders of magnitude greater than the entire sum of human culture. Shiva was to Earth as humans are to beetles.
The first transmissions about Shiva’s biosphere reached Earth four years later. Already, in a culture more than a century into the dual evolution of society and computers, there were disturbing parallels.
Some communities in the advanced regions of Earth felt that real-time itself was a pallid, ephemeral experience. After all, one could not archive it for replay, savor it, return until it became a true part of oneself. Real-time was for one time only, then lost.
So increasingly, some people lived instead in worlds made totally volitional – truncated, chopped, governed by technologies they could barely sense as ghostlike constraints on an otherwise wide compass.
“Disposable realities,” some sneered – but the fascination of such lives was clear.
Shiva’s implication was extreme: an entire world could give itself over to life-as-computation.
Could the intelligent species of Shiva have executed a huge fraction of their fellow inhabitants? And then themselves gone extinct? For what? Could they have fled – perhaps from the enormity of their own deeds?
Or had those original predators become the tile-polygons?
The Adventurer crew decided to return to Shiva’s surface in force, to crack the puzzles. They notified Earth and descended.
Shortly after, the Shiva teams ceased reporting back to Earth. Through the hiss of interstellar static there came no signal.
After years of anxious waiting, Earth launched the second expedition. They too survived the passage. Cautiously they approached Shiva.
Adventurer still orbited the planet, but was vacant.
This time they were wary. Further years of hard thinking and careful study passed before the truth began to come.
4
{— John/Odis/Lissa/Tagore/Cap’n —}
—all assembled/congealed/thickened —
—into a composite veneer persona—
—on the central deck of their old starship,
—to greet the second expedition.
Or so they seemed to intend.
They came up from the Shiva surface in a craft not of human construction. The sleek, webbed thing seemed to ride upon electromagnetic winds.
They entered through the main lock, after using proper hailing protocols.
But what came through the lock was an ordered array of people no one could recognize as being from the Adventurer crew
They seemed younger, unworn. Smooth, bland features looked out at the bewildered second expedition. The party moved together, maintaining a hexagonal array with a constant spacing of four centimeters. Fifty-six pairs of eyes surveyed the new Earth ship, each momentarily gazing at a different portion of the field of view as if to memorize only a portion, for later integration.
To convey a sentence, each pe
rson spoke a separate word. The effect was jarring, with no clue to how an individual knew what to say, or when, for the lines were not rehearsed. The group reacted to questions in a blur of scattershot talk, words like volleys.
Sentences ricocheted and bounced around the assembly deck where the survivors of the first expedition all stood, erect and clothed in a shapeless gray garment. Their phrases made sense when isolated, but the experience of hearing them was unsettling. Long minutes stretched out before the second expedition realized that these hexagonally spaced humans were trying to greet them, to induct them into something they termed the Being Suite.
This offer made, the faces within the hexagonal array began to show separate expressions. Tapes of this encounter show regular facial alterations with a fixed periodicity of 1.27 seconds. Each separate face racheted, jerking among a menu of finely graduated countenances – anger, sympathy, laughter, rage, curiosity, shock, puzzlement, ecstasy – flickering, flickering, endlessly flickering.
A witness later said that it were as if the hexagonals (as they came to be called) knew that human expressiveness centered on the face, and so had slipped into a kind of language of facial aspects. This seemed natural to them, and yet the 1.27 second pace quickly gave the witnesses a sense of creeping horror.
High-speed tapes of the event showed more. Beneath the 1.27 frequency there was a higher harmonic, barely perceptible to the human eye, in which other expressions shot across the hexagonals’ faces. These were like waves, muscular twitches that washed over the skin like tidal pulls.
This periodicity was the same as the tile-polygons had displayed. The subliminal aspects were faster than the conscious human optical processor can manage, yet research showed that they were decipherable in the target audience.
Researchers later concluded that this rapid display was the origin of the growing unease felt by the second expedition. The hexagonals said nothing throughout all this.
The second expedition crew described the experience as uncanny, racking, unbearable. Their distinct impression was that the first expedition now manifested as like the tile-things. Such testimony was often followed by an involuntary twitch.
Tapes do not yield such an impression upon similar audiences: they have become the classic example of having to be in a place and time to sense the meaning of an event. Still, the tapes are disturbing, and access is controlled. Some Earth audiences experienced breakdowns after viewing them.
But the second expedition agreed even more strongly upon a second conclusion. Plainly, the Adventurer expedition had joined the computational labyrinth that was Shiva. How they were seduced was never clear; the second expedition feared finding out.
Indeed, their sole, momentary brush with {— John/Odis/Lissa/ Tagore/Cap’n . . . —} convinced the second expedition that there was no point in pursuing the maze of Shiva.
The hostility radiating from the second expedition soon drove the hexagonals back into their ship and away. The fresh humans from Earth felt something gut-level and instinctive, a reaction beyond words. The hexagonals retreated without showing a coherent reaction. They simply turned and walked away, holding to the four centimeter spacing. The 1.27 second flicker stopped and they returned to a bland expression, alert but giving nothing away.
The vision these hexagonals conveyed was austere, jarring . . . and yet, plainly intended to be inviting.
The magnitude of their failure was a measure of the abyss that separated the two parties. The hexagonals were now both more and less than human.
The hexagonals left recurrent patterns that told much, though only in retrospect. Behind the second expedition’s revulsion lay a revelation: of a galaxy spanned by intelligences formal and remote, far developed beyond the organic stage. Such intelligences had been born variously, of early organic forms, or of later machine civilizations which had arisen upon the ashes of extinct organic societies. The gleam of the stars was in fact a metallic glitter.
This vision was daunting enough: of minds so distant and strange, hosted in bodies free of sinew and skin. But there was something more, an inexpressible repulsion in the manifestation of {— John/Odis/Lissa/Tagore/Cap’n . . . —}.
A nineteenth-century philosopher, Goethe, had once remarked that if one stared into the abyss long enough, it stared back. This proved true. A mere moment’s lingering look, quiet and almost casual, was enough. The second expedition panicked. It is not good to stare into a pit that has no bottom.
They had sensed the final implication of Shiva’s evolution. To alight upon such interior worlds of deep, terrible exotica exacted a high cost: the body itself. Yet all those diverse people had joined the syntony of Shiva – an electrical harmony that danced to unheard musics. Whether they had been seduced, or even raped, would forever be unclear.
Out of the raw data-stream the second expedition could sample transmissions from the tile-things, as well. The second expedition caught a link-locked sense of repulsive grandeur. Still organic in their basic organization, still tied to the eternal wheel of birth and death, the tiles had once been lords of their own world, holding dominion over all they knew.
Now they were patient, willing drones in a hive they could not comprehend. But – and here human terms undoubtedly fail – they loved their immersion.
Where was their consciousness housed? Partially in each, or in some displaced, additive sense? There was no clear way to test either idea.
The tile-things were like durable, patient machines that could best carry forward the first stages of a grand computation. Some biologists compared them with insects, but no evolutionary mechanism seemed capable of yielding a reason why a species would give itself over to computation. The insect analogy died, unable to predict the response of the polygons to stimulus, or even why they existed.
Or was their unending jostling only in the service of calculation? The tile-polygons would not say. They never responded to overtures.
The Circular Ocean’s enormous atmospheric laser pulsed regularly, as the planet’s orbit and rotation carried the laser’s field of targeting onto a fresh partner-star system. Only then did the system send its rich messages out into the galaxy. The pulses carried mind-packets of unimaginable data, bound on expeditions of the intellect.
The second expedition reported, studied. Slowly at first, and then accelerating, the terror overcame them.
They could not fathom Shiva, and steadily they lost crew members to its clasp. Confronting the truly, irreducibly exotic, there is no end of ways to perish.
In the end they studied Shiva from a distance, no more. Try as they could, they always met a barrier in their understanding. Theories came and went, fruitlessly. Finally, they fled.
It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy. Worse, the lack was clearly in oneself, and was irredeemable.
This was the first contact humanity had with the true nature of the galaxy. It would not be the last. But the sense of utter and complete diminishment never left the species, in all the strange millennia that rolled on thereafter.
PALINDROMIC
Peter Crowther
Peter Crowther (b. 1949) is a writer, editor, anthologist and publisher – he runs the small press PS Publishing and produces the quarterly magazine Postscripts. Despite his British origins, and northern British at that, Crowther sets most of his stories in the United States, and writes in an American idiom. His stories have been collected in The Longest Single Note (1999), Songs of Leaving (2004) and The Space Between the Lines (2007).
Alien invasion stories may seem all too common and not immediately a theme to evoke that sense of wonder, but the opening paragraph of this story will soon change all that.
What seest thou else,
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
William Shakespeare, The Tem
pest
IT WAS ON THE THIRD DAY after the aliens arrived that we made the fateful discovery which placed the future of the entire planet in our hands. That discovery was that they hadn’t arrived yet.
There were three of us who went over to the vacant lot alongside Sycamore . . . that’s me, Derby – like the hat – McLeod, plus my good friend and local genius Jimmy-James Bannister and Ed Brewster, Forest Plains’ very own bad boy . . . except there was nothing bad about Ed. Not really.
We went up into that giant tumbleweed cloud thing that served as some kind of interstellar flivver – it had been at the aliens’ invitation, or so we thought: our subsequent discovery called that particular fact into some considerable dispute – purely to get a look at whatever this one alien was doing. Jimmy reckoned – and he was right, as it turned out – he was keeping tabs on what was going on and recording everything in some kind of ‘book’.
Not that he – if the alien was a ‘he’: we never did find out – was writing the way you or I would write, because he wasn’t. We didn’t even know if he was writing at all until later that night, when Jimmy-James had taken a long look in that foam-book of theirs.
Not that this book was like any other book you ever saw. It wasn’t. Just like the ship that brought them to Forest Plains wasn’t like any other ship you ever saw, not in Earth vs The Flying Saucers or even on Twilight Zone – both of which were what you might call ‘current’ back then. And the aliens themselves weren’t like any kind of alien you ever saw in the dime comic books or even dreamed about . . . not even after maybe eating warmed-over two-day-old pizza last thing at night on top of a gut full of Michelob and three or four plates of Ma Chetton’s cheese surprises, the small pieces of toasted cheese flapjack that Ma used to serve up when we were holding the monthly Forest Plains Pool Knockout Competition.
It was during one of those special nights, with the moon hanging over the desert like a crazy Jack o’Lantern and the heat making your shirt stick to your back and underarms, that the whole thing actually got itself started. That was the night that creatures from outer space arrived in Forest Plains. Then again, it wasn’t.
