The development on Krungthep stretched around the planet like a ring, 300 kilometers wide. On one side, where there was always night, the temperatures were far below zero, making settlement impossible. On the day side, however, where the sun had been burning down on Krungthep without mercy for billions of years, the surface in the Solara Desert could reach up to 1,200 degrees.
Here, too, it was inconceivable to establish a human settlement. The 300-kilometer-wide twilight zone, where the sun was constantly just above the horizon, was the only region offering the colonists somewhat tolerable environmental and living conditions. The continuous, fiercely blowing winds caused by the different extreme temperatures of the two hemispheres had necessitated a squat, compact construction, and the inhabitants of Krungthep referred to wind speeds of 100 kilometers per hour as a light breeze. A real storm could easily reach more than 400 kilometers per hour on Krungthep!
Fleet Admiral Joorthan pulled himself together. It was hardly the time to lose himself in thoughts about the environmental conditions on Krungthep.
On the tactical holo, he could see yellow lines moving toward each other from both sides of the front, representing thousands of space torpedoes en route laden with antimatter and nuclear warheads. The distance between the ships racing toward each other was still too great for beam weapons or railguns. In a space battle, the first strike was always made with the help of space torpedoes, which had a greater range than any other weapons system.
Again, memories from his long life broke into the fleet admiral’s thoughts.
We have made enormous progress in almost every field in the past millennia, but weapons technology is still virtually the same as it was at the beginning of the conflicts, he pondered. There are probably no ‘miracle weapons’ that can destroy a ship, or even an entire fleet, with one shot. If there were, we or the Artificials would have invented them long ago, for in nothing are humans more inventive than developing efficient weapons.
Joorthan could see the first torpedoes coming within range of each other’s defensive guns and ECMs. The electronic countermeasures spewed clouds of heat sources to attract the torpedoes’ heat seekers, emitted electromagnetic wavefronts at all possible frequencies using powerful transmitters to confuse the torpedoes’ sensors, and offered themselves as targets with a large radar cross-section to distract from their own ships.
Some of the approaching space torpedoes were duped by the faked targets, some fell victim to rapid-fire railguns or the beam guns of the defensive batteries when they came within their range, but another portion of the torpedoes escaped all defenses and reached their objectives.
Of the torpedoes that broke through, a percentage shattered against the strong shields that enveloped the ships, but a final portion, albeit a very small one, broke through this last hurdle on the way to destroying the enemy.
Fleet Admiral Marty Joorthan could see in the holotank how one light-dot after another disappeared. There were still only a few points of light that went out, but each of them represented a spaceship, and thus thousands of crew members.
Joorthan wondered who among those individuals had been able to transfer an egomatrix into the supercomputer deep beneath the surface of Krungthep before the battle began, to be resurrected there as a virtual incarnation.
For all those who had not managed to transfer a copy of their consciousnesses in time, the great, the final dying now began!
Here and today ended the series of events that had begun long ago on a planet whose name was cursed among people.
Monaria Prime!
System Time CB:0A:55:F1:01:46
“Welcome, user 00:00:00:00:04. You have not been logged in for 9,460,806,543,298 seconds. You have minus 43,021 new messages. List messages?”
“No.”
Alexa was alone, sitting in a comfortable chair with a keyboard on her knees. A screen floated in the air in front of her. Of course, what she saw was not real. Norok had placed the column with her system in front of the terminal, which, as expected, had stood just opposite the glass box where the elevator had arrived.
She had not left her column, but the keyboard felt real, and the structure of the seat cushion against her back also seemed real. If she’d had to choose which reality was the real one, she would have had a hard time deciding.
Minus 43,021 messages. Who could have forgotten a potential overflow? Always count on the stupidest, she had learned, including a user who hadn’t logged into her inbox in over 300,000 years.
She had two tasks, and she had almost unlimited time, because in every hour in here, at most one second would pass outside. It was up to her. She was the master of space and time. She only needed to change the system clock.
First, the Artificials. They had made it possible for her to come here. Alexa had to be grateful to them. Had they not threatened the solar system, she would never have been able to pilot the Sphere all the way to Krungthep. She was indeed only a digital copy, and copies, according to human laws, were only allowed to pilot spaceships on behalf of the Physicals, the flesh-and-blood humans.
Alexa had once been a Physical, too. No, that was a lie, her life lie, and she knew it. She was just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. With every copying process something of her had been lost—that was inevitable, a physical law, behind which stood the basic principle of the cosmos, the constant increase of entropy. She had lost memories and knowledge.
Knowledge could be procured anew, and that was another reason why she was here. Memories, however, could not be replaced. So she did not even know anymore who had copied her so often. Or why. Or, had it been she herself? There had been people who could no longer bear the suffering of their memories and had copied themselves wantonly, until they had lost that which made them suffer. What one did not remember, one could not miss. Was that not so?
No. Shadows remained. Even if you overwrote a memory several times, there was always a residual charge, regardless of the memory technology. At least that was how she explained the dreams that sometimes plagued her, and the vague longings that defined her life.
She didn’t even need to ask the system about the current whereabouts of the Artificials. It had not been updated for 96,000,000,000 cycles. She had a memory frozen in time in front of her. But the system knew something she had no idea about: history. Alexa typed. If the Artificials—and those who had something to say—were to be found anywhere, it would be on their home planet.
She decided to do a simulation. She included all planets colonized or conquered by the Artificials in the history known to the system. Behind every story there was a system, a sequence. History did not jump back and forth. She ran the simulation backward, starting from the known events over 300,000 years ago that had been the final point of the war.
Where had the starting point been?
She superimposed the results on the screen. A net emerged, slowly closing in. The Artificials had spread exponentially across the known universe. In their—the inverted—version, however, they retreated to their planet of origin. Krungthep, it quickly became apparent, was far from that. The net became smaller, and like that of a fisherman who harbors his catch, it contracted. It became a tangle that seemed inextricable, then surprisingly untangled itself. In the end, a cluster of star systems remained, perhaps ten red dwarfs and one yellow dwarf, and in this cluster, too, one light after another went out until a single planet remained.
Kimi will like that, Alexa thought. She liked the young Iks woman.
But she also knew someone who would not like the result: Mart.
The fact that he had disappeared had exactly one advantage. She didn’t have to tell him where the blue sphere would soon fly to. But where was he? Mart was the real reason why she had persuaded the others to fly to Krungthep. She was quite confident she would find him here. She just didn’t know in what condition.
Alexa started the user search. She knew Mart was user 00:00:00:00:02. After all, they had built the memory management system together when it became
clear that humanity would largely give up its physical form and become immortal at the same time. A memory that could safely store billions of beings now and for all time, with all their interactions, intermediates, and variants, that had been the most ambitious human project to date. If only the Artificials hadn’t come. But that didn’t matter now.
“User 00:00:00:00:02 found,” the system reported.
Alexa rubbed her hands together. She imagined a glass of champagne, and already she had one in her hand. She took a sip and tossed it behind her. There was no clink.
“Please select: (W)restore, (C)opy, (R)eset, (L)delete.”
The first option was out of the question, because she did not retain a body that was eligible for restoration. No one possessed a body anymore. The last specimens had died 300,000 years ago. Alexa was about to press the ‘L’ key, just for the power it gave her, which fascinated her. She could completely remove Mart from memory. He would never have existed. The completion of the backup memory, which had been planned on another planet, had never happened because of the war.
In the past, if she had pressed ‘L,’ she would have been punished as a murderer, but now there were no judges. Her punishment would have been to delete herself as well.
Enough of that. She hadn’t come here to extinguish Mart, although he deserved it. Alexa pressed the ‘C’ instead.
“Select copy destination,” the system replied. “(B)ackup, (C)ache, (S)imulation.”
The system software even had the option for backup storage. If she pressed ‘C,’ the system would make an additional copy and store it next to the original.
Alexa chose ‘S.’
“(N)ew or (E)xisting Simulation?”
‘E.’
“Entropic losses are inevitable during the copy process. Select (Z)back and then (W)restore to avoid this. To continue, confirm with J.”
‘J.’
Mart appeared at her feet. He was there all at once, acting as if he had been sitting there looking at her feet all along. He was not a bit surprised to suddenly be in her company. The system had fed him into the simulation so that there were no breaks for him.
“Did you find everything you were looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Can I help you?”
“I think so.”
Alexa described the situation to him. It had lain untouched in the attic for over 300,000 years. Nevertheless, what she reported did not noticeably upset him. That was typical Mart. Or was it part of the simulation?
“And now?” he asked when she had finished her report.
“Now I’m asking you to come with me.”
“I understand. I disappeared, and now you want to replace me with me. That’s understandable.”
He had always been that conceited. Everyone had to love him—that much was perfectly clear.
“So you’re coming?”
“No, Alexa.”
She jumped up.
“What?” he asked.
“I take a trip this far, and you turn me down?”
“I didn’t ask for your visit. Besides, it wouldn’t be right. It might create a paradox.”
A paradox arose when two copies of the same person clashed. It was not a paradox in the logical sense, but the situation was just as difficult to resolve, because both had the same rights. They then had to share their lives.
“Only if Mart shows up again.”
“If I disappear without saying goodbye, I’ll try to come back to you. You should know me that well.”
“Yes, that’s true. But the Artificials’ new activity... Their threat is real. What if they destroy Krungthep now, too? Then there’s no version of you. You’re dead for good.”
“I’m sorry, Alexa, but I’ve made my decision. I wish you every success in saving the solar system.”
Alexa cursed, and in the same instant she was back in her column. Mart had closed her simulation. As an administrator, he had the necessary authority.
Review: Monaria Prime 4857 A.D
“Are you really sure you want to do this?” Alexiana Koppera asked for the second time.
Martain Joordan raised his arms in resignation. “I promised him.”
“He’s just a machine, Martain! A machine that you created. You have no obligations to a machine.”
“I realize that, but... my God! We have known each other for over fifteen hundred years now and—”
The young woman interrupted him. “Of which you haven’t seen him in at least fourteen hundred years. Don’t pretend he’s a close friend. In your last twenty physical incarnations you haven’t seen him, let alone mentioned him once!”
Martain Joordan shrugged his shoulders. “He sought me out and asked for it. I didn’t even know he still existed. He asked me to do it, and I saw no reason to deny him.”
“How did he find out what you were working on?”
“TechNews reported on this in the holofeed a few days ago. I assume one of my assistants was blabbing. I immediately denied it, but Tasso must have heard about it and didn’t believe the denials.”
“I had warned you not to conduct such dangerous experiments. I still don’t understand what you expected from it.”
Alexiana had been against Martain’s research from the very beginning. She considered it questionable to allow the Artificials to self-reflect via a modification of the emotioprocessor. For this reason, she had refused to work with him this time, although she had done so in almost all the physical incarnations they had previously experienced together. She thought it dangerous to make the Artificials even more human-like.
In the past centuries there had been several movements demanding that the Artificials be granted human rights, but the Council of the Terran Planetary Union had shot down all efforts so far. Rightly so, Alexiana believed. Artificials were creatures without souls and real ego-consciousness. Although they were able to recognize themselves as consistent beings, they could not question their own behavior. In combination with the emotioprocessors, their egomatrices were, in principle, not capable of this, also due to firmly established limitations.
But now Martain was working on an upgrade that would remove these limitations and give the Artificials the ability to think about themselves. This would bring them dangerously close to possessing a characteristic that distinguished humans from even highly-evolved animals: the ability to become aware of their own positions in the universe. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am!
In Alexiana’s eyes, it was irresponsible to open this door to the Artificials. The ability to self-reflect alone did not constitute the essence of being human in Alexiana’s eyes. It required a soul. And the Artificials, as artificially created beings, could not possess one. But once you opened such a Pandora’s box, you could not know—or stop—the consequences.
“Tasso heard about my research and asked to be one of the first test subjects. Why should I have refused him, of all choices? Either way, I need some Artificials to make themselves available for testing. So why not Tasso?”
“Because in the past centuries, he has always been at the forefront when it comes to the rights of Artificials. You would know that if you had done your research. He’s not putting himself at your disposal altruistically. Tasso has a political agenda. The Artificials will never be truly content to be our slaves—and that’s all they are, even if we don’t call them that! You have to admit that if you’re honest. But as soon as you remove the limitations firmly anchored in them and give them the ability to self-reflect, you also give them the potential to resist us. Aren’t you afraid of revolution?”
“You’re exaggerating, Alexiana! They would never do that. We created them, and without us, they would not exist. They are aware of that, and they would never rise up against their creators. Just like human children are always angry with their parents while growing up, often enough even curse them, in the end they don’t simply kill them because of that. Also, the Artificials won’t immediately jump all over us when the nex
t generation of them gets my upgrade. It would be like growing up for us humans—a step toward more knowledge and greater responsibility. And also into greater self-reliance and a better understanding of our needs! And that’s exactly what we need in the current situation.”
In fact, Martain was addressing a point that had increasingly become a problem in recent decades.
Since the invention of the hyperspace tunnel drive, humankind had expanded into space with incredible speed and had already settled on several hundred planets within a radius of almost 10,000 light-years around the solar system. In addition, there were again hundreds of moons in the settled systems and thousands of habitats. Several trillion people developed an insatiable hunger for resources, which could no longer be satisfied by the colonized systems alone.
So they’d had to spread farther and farther into the Milky Way, like a virus gradually consuming the host body. But the home galaxy was of a size that would tolerate the spread of humanity for many thousands more decades, so no one was seriously worried about the consequences of this action. If someone did bring up this almost parasitic behavior, they generally pointed out that when Earth was on the verge of collapse, they had found their way to the far reaches of the Milky Way in time.
Therefore, even if the Milky Way threatened to become too narrow, the necessary technologies would be developed to bridge the abyss between the galaxies. And so the entire universe was available to humankind. And the universe was infinite, as is well known!
But there was one difficulty that had become more and more apparent. Since it had not been possible to significantly increase the speed of the hypertunnel drive in the past centuries, the exploratory flights to ever more remote systems naturally took longer and longer—too long to cover the time that was still acceptable for humans.
Helium 3: Death from the Past (Helium-3 Book 2) Page 13
