Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  “About that,” Mallory agreed, nodding. “Of course, we’re pretty sure now that it was the Sh’daar who created the TRGAs in the first place . . . their ur-Sh’daar ancestors, I should say. If they have any TRGAs set up along their line of flight, all bets are off.”

  “Why is that?” Kline asked.

  “Because TRGAs are gateways to multiple places across multiple times. A slight shift in your transit trajectory can drop you thousands of light years off course . . . and maybe put you in a completely different time period.”

  “Yes,” Truitt said. “Passing through a TRGA is how we originally reached this epoch, over 800 million years in our past. I see your problem.”

  “Our problem, Doctor,” Gray sighed. “To find these guys, we’re going to have to be incredibly lucky.”

  Truitt looked glum for a moment, then brightened. “Well, we do have one ace in the hole.”

  Gray looked at him, wondering what the doctor could possibly be thinking.

  Chapter Eleven

  18 April, 2429

  Koenig Residence

  Westerville, Ohio

  1545 hours, EST

  Koenig was watching the news feed on his living room wall. The anti-AI riots in D.C. had spread and were growing like some monstrous, evil cancer. Troops had been brought in to restore order, and in some of the outlying sectors of the city, the fighting was house-to-house.

  A talking head from a D.C. network station was describing the scene, with wrecked and burning vehicles behind her. Koenig had the house enhance the image; on a charred wall behind the reporter, he could just make out a scrawled piece of graffiti in bright scarlet—the words fight pAIn.

  “You can see the logo of Fight pAIn behind me,” the reporter was saying. “Anti-AI elements have been growing stronger in several cities, and Dr. Anton Michaels, from his home at Midway, has told us that these riots are the inevitable result of giving more and more decision-making powers to our machines.”

  The shot shifted to a view of Michaels, floating in partial microgravity, his pale halo of frizzy hair unkempt. He started speaking, but Koenig thoughtclicked the sound off. He had no desire to hear what that acid little Humankind Firster had to say about machines or anything else.

  That pAIn meme, however, had been popping up with increasing frequency in riot-torn cities across the country of late . . . and it had all the hallmarks of being a particularly sneaky bit of memegineering. The question, of course, was who was behind it? The Russians? The Pan-Euros?

  Or maybe it was a memegineering attack by a group—the Humankind Firsters, for instance. They were derisively referred to as “Huffers,” as in they would huff and puff and blow the SAIs away. Koenig had not thought them a serious threat, but he was beginning to have some second thoughts about that.

  God, things were bad in D.C. And he’d sent Marta into the middle of all of that . . .

  The wall announced the arrival of an aircar, and Koenig heard the guard outside greet someone. Marta walked in the door a moment later and Koenig breathed a deep and heartfelt sigh of relief. He’d been worried about her being out and about on her own, and her safe return meant she hadn’t been spotted and identified . . . or caught in the anti-AI riots.

  He did not want Marta to go through this kind of danger again, though Marta, for her part, seemed perfectly happy to run his occasional “errands.”

  It didn’t look like Marta, though. She was wearing a face, a kind of organic mask grown from human tissue that gave her the look of a much older woman. In a second, though, she peeled the mask off, and they kissed.

  “I’m so glad you’re back!” he told her. “I was worried sick . . .”

  “I was fine. The new software worked perfectly.” Her ID, he sensed, was already changing. By law, all AI robots were required to broadcast signals that could be picked up by the cerebral implants of people around them, a tag proclaiming them to be robots, not people. Heaven forbid that a robot be mistaken for a real person! For her mission to D.C., she’d been given a slick bit of highly illegal computer code that IDed her as human, complete with fictitious background, address, employment status, and hobbies. The mask had been there to enhance the deception.

  “So how’d it go?” he asked, releasing her.

  “Phillip is concerned,” she told him. “He believes the President is about to enact a new directive calling for the elimination of all SAIs such as Konstantin.”

  “Shit . . .”

  Phillip Caldwell was a former director of the National Security Council and an old friend. He’d been one of Koenig’s key advisors when he’d been President. After Koenig had left office, Caldwell had taken a position as the head of Cybersec, a Washington think tank specializing in AI security. There’d been rumors for weeks that they were going to pull the plug on Konstantin and others like him, and secondary rumors that they would be calling for the registration of AI robots and restrictions on their manufacture and use. Koenig had asked Marta to travel to D.C. and speak with Phillip in person. Koenig himself was too well-known, but a robot, especially one as lifelike as Marta, would be able to pull it off . . . if she was disguised as human.

  Evidently, she had.

  “Phillip says they’re keeping it a deep, dark secret, of course. There’d be too much opposition from the pro-tech groups . . . or from pro-robotics countries like North India, Japan, or the Hegemony.”

  “What, they’re just going to spring it on people out of the blue?”

  “That’s what he believes. An executive order, letting Walker bypass Congress.”

  “He has enough support in Congress to get away with it, too.” He was remembering the applause from the Congressional floor when Walker talked to them about the Singularity. That had been absolutely chilling.

  “He doesn’t have as much support as some believe,” Marta told him. “If Walker pulls the plug, Phillip believes, there is going to be massive unrest and economic displacement. AIs already control a huge percentage of both government and industry. People aren’t trained to just step in and replace them. Besides, the AIs are just too good at what they do. Can you imagine the educational download system being run by a human? Or the healthcare bureau? Or—”

  “Marta, some days I seriously question whether humans are capable of dressing themselves without help. I honestly don’t know how he thinks he can pull this off without having a civil war on his hands.”

  “Phillip says the government has very quietly been stationing troops around the country and enacting protocols that will allow him to deploy them in the event of civil unrest.”

  “Damn it, the guy’s gone rogue. We need to stop him.”

  Marta cocked her head to one side. “How do you do that within the strictures established by the Constitution?”

  “Carefully, Marta. Very, very carefully.”

  “There’s something more that Phillip thought you should see.”

  Koenig sighed. “Show me.”

  The news image of a silently pontificating Michaels on the living room viewall was replaced by a graphic showing the solar system, with the orbits of the planets out to Jupiter shown in green, and a bright white line extending out from the middle of the asteroid belt.

  “What’s that?”

  “It hasn’t been announced,” Marta told him, “but a High Guard ship picked this up on April 6—twelve days ago. A small, heavily cloaked vessel of unknown configuration broke solar orbit and accelerated out of the system. It moved very slowly at first, as if it didn’t want its drive wake to attract any attention, but then it accelerated to c, engaged something like an Alcubierre Drive, and vanished. It was on a direct heading to . . . here.”

  The image changed, showing the scattered stars of a patch of sky, the hazy cloud of the Milky Way stretched across the center. A red circle and two lines of numbers marked precise coordinates.

  “Seventeen hours, fifty-two minutes, twenty-eight seconds,” Koenig said, reading the coordinates. “Plus thirteen degrees, forty-one seconds, twenty s
econds. Okay, constellation of Sagittarius, and in toward the galactic core. Intelligence doesn’t know who that was?”

  “No, Alex.”

  “And why hasn’t this been reported?” Koenig asked.

  “Phillip said that Navy Intelligence received pretty explicit instructions not to make this public. Too much chance of panic.”

  “Panic. About what? Someone keeping an eye on us?”

  “I don’t know,” Marta said. “Naval Intelligence reported it as an alien spacecraft. They did not know who—or what—was operating it.”

  “Phil is just full of good news,” Koenig said. “Okay, Marta. You did a splendid job. Thank you! And, again, I’m sorry to have had to send you in there.”

  “I was never in any real danger. The riots are in the peripheral sectors of the city. I was in the central government area—you know, tourist Washington? Cybersec’s offices are just three blocks from the Capitol dome, so it wasn’t as if I was wandering all around the city.”

  “I know . . . but things could have gone so wrong.” He took her in his arms again. “I will never do that to you again.”

  “You’ll do what you need to do, Alex.” She hugged him close. “And I’ll be here to help.”

  USNA CVS America

  CIC

  N’gai Cluster

  1650 hours, FST

  “Take us ahead, point seven-five c,” Gray said. “Grav sensors, keep a sharp lookout. Full spread, maximum sensitivity.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mackey replied from the bridge. “Nothing on the sensors yet.”

  As America accelerated, pushing closer to the speed of light, the view of space ahead took on an increasingly surreal look, the stars aft and around them crowding forward into a kind of glowing doughnut centered on the empty blackness directly ahead. The effect was caused by the ship plowing through incoming photons at relativistic speeds, until even starlight coming from astern was twisted into geometries that seemed to put it in front.

  America and her consorts were spread out across nearly 10 million kilometers, the better to pick up the faint whispers of gravitational waves over as large a volume of space as possible. Their search routine called for jumping to Alcubierre Drive every hour and moving ahead several hundred astronomical units. Between their FTL runs, they plowed through normal space at relativistic speed . . . listening. The plan offered them the best hope of covering the most ground in the least time.

  They were still in for a very long hunt.

  It was frustrating trying to predict what the Sh’daar migration fleet might be doing. Things would be a lot easier if the alien fleet was spread out over a huge volume of space, the lumbering space habitats trailing far astern of the faster and more nimble naval vessels. Indeed, Gray felt fairly sure, in a gut-instinct kind of way, that they would be scattered, possibly across ten thousand light years.

  But he also suspected that the really large Sh’daar vessels, those traveling strictly at sublight speeds, would be clumped tightly together for mutual protection, and that meant a tiny target in a vast expanse of empty space. They only needed to search three light years for the slow-movers—that was as far as they could have moved in three years, after all, traveling at near-c—but the word only in that context was deceptive. Even a fleet of hundreds of massive McKendree cylinders, Banks orbitals, and Bishop rings would be vanishingly small in a cone-shaped volume three light years long and of unknown breadth.

  But they had to try.

  “Negative on all scans, Admiral,” Mackey told him.

  “Very well. Coordinate with the other ships, then initiate another FTL run.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Of course, they’d known they would have trouble finding the alien migration before America had even left Earth. But planners had expected the Sh’daar to be using beacons of some sort, or more powerful grav drives—something that would make them stand out across the light years. Those planners had not anticipated the Sh’daar desire to stay hidden, to slip beneath the notice of the Consciousness.

  Or the efficiency with which they’d been able to make themselves disappear.

  Reluctantly, Gray turned his mind once more to Truitt’s proposal. The idea scared him, scared him badly, but the xenosophontologist was right. If they couldn’t find the Sh’daar by conventional means, poking along and listening for their gravity wave emissions, Truitt’s little brainstorm might well be the only workable option.

  Leaning back in his seat, Gray closed his eyes and summoned up Konstantin.

  “This idea of Truitt’s,” he said in-head. “How would it work?”

  “You’ve done it before,” Konstantin replied. “Essentially, it’s a form of the Bright Light group consciousness.”

  “I understand that. But how would we do it?”

  “We would start by nanoconstructing a number of Bright Light modules,” Konstantin replied. “A very large number—several hundred at the very least, and several thousand would be better. We scatter them across a large volume of space and allow them to establish a communications network among themselves. We have volunteers from the fleet upload onto the electronic network created and instruct them to search for evidence of the Sh’daar fleet.”

  Gray made a sour face. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “The idea is fairly simple in principle,” the SAI told him. “It will be complex to execute logistically.”

  “But I don’t understand what it buys us,” Gray said. “This network, we can’t spread it across light years. The time lag—”

  “Would be prohibitive, I know. A module placed one light year out would require a full year to establish contact with us. But what we need essentially is a very, very large VLBI, one with multiple baselines on the order of astronomical units long.”

  “VLBI?”

  “Very Long Baseline Interferometry.”

  “Ah. Right.”

  Gray knew the term, though it had been years since he’d heard it discussed. For centuries, relatively small telescopes, both radio and optical, had been linked together in a way that combined the images from many small instruments to create a much larger virtual one, one with a diameter equal to the largest baseline between discrete units. Three centuries before, fifteen space telescopes, each of 100-meter diameter, had been positioned in deep space in a pattern almost an astronomical unit across. When the incoming optical signals were combined, astronomers had been able to image the surfaces of planets and moons with what amounted to a single virtual mirror one AU across. The surface of Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A, had been mapped in detail that way.

  In principle, Truitt’s idea was based on this, but the individual networked units wouldn’t be gathering light. They would be the supporting framework of a far-flung network of minds, human and AI, that would merge to create a single, emergent consciousness—a Mind of incredible scope and power.

  Three years ago, Gray had been part of such a super-Mind, during the final confrontation with the Consciousness. Guided and directed by Konstantin, Gray and some thousands of other human and AI intellects had merged to become . . . something greater. Inconceivably greater. That merger had been necessary to make direct contact with an alien Mind so vast it literally did not recognize human minds as distinct and intelligent units. They had used hundreds of Bright Light modules as the framework for their shared awareness, probes originally designed to make contact with the Harvesters, a highly advanced electronic intelligence occupying the high-energy environment around the star Deneb.

  Gray remembered that time spent as a super-intellect, as a Mind of godlike scope and power. The memory, faded like a dream, still lingered . . . and it scared the hell out of him.

  But it wasn’t without precedent. Back on Earth, the same principle had been applied to the Global Net, the modern iteration of what once had been called the Internet. Rather than merely using the new infrastructure for mind-to-mind communications, the entire mind could enter the Net, surfing its crests and troughs, exploring a staggeringly
rich virtual environment, and merging with other minds in what had become known as the Godstream.

  The Godstream on and near Earth didn’t scare Gray. If something went wrong, the connection was lost and you woke up back in your chair at home. But what Truitt was proposing was a Net with a baseline many light-minutes across. If you got kicked off of that monster, you might well not wake up back home.

  You might well not wake up at all.

  “What do we need, Konstantin?” Gray asked at last.

  “We need to create a large number of modified Bright Light modules,” the SAI replied. “I anticipated your agreeing to the plan and took the liberty of beginning to nanufacture them based on plans stored within America’s RAM. You should call for volunteers within the crew and coordinate with the other ships as well. We will need all of our resources and assets to carry this off.”

  “And the implementation? The logistics?”

  “I shall plot the necessary courses for the placement of each module. That part will be time-consuming, but careful positioning of all modules will maximize our chances of detecting the Sh’daar.”

  Gray hesitated, then nodded. “Do it.”

  “Admiral?” Mackey’s voice said in his head. “Excuse the interruption. We have entered Alcubierre space again. Five minutes at two lights.”

  “Very well.” Gray disengaged from the link with Konstantin and opened his eyes. The CIC external view screens showed a sterile blackness, the emptiness that was America’s own private universe as she folded space around herself in a tight little bubble.

  Bright Light modules. Did they offer the squadron a chance? He felt as though it were a long shot . . . some tens of thousands of light years.

  At this point, though, long shot might be the best odds they had.

  USNA CVS America

  Flight Deck Storage Locker

  N’gai Cluster

  1745 hours, FST

  “My God!” Gregory said, his voice close to trembling. “I thought you were dead!”