Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  There was no coercion. The Ascendence was completely voluntary. You could accept it, reject it, or simply create your own private paradise within the electronic matrix. Millions wavered at the edge, considering the next step . . . then backed away, afraid, or pulled back by old and hidebound ideology.

  A conservative religious sect that rejected cybernetic enhancements or implants rejected the Ascendence outright. About half of a neo-Luddite group dedicated to recreating a quieter, more peaceful age, refused to go forward and cursed those of their brothers and sisters who rejected their ideology and took the step. An anti-space revolutionary group splintered into those who would ascend and those who would not. The Humankind Firsters feared an AI conspiracy, or possibly a malevolent alien influence, and refused.

  Koenig watched the minds of some millions of people accepting or rejecting transformation and realized that he was seeing the same process that the ur-Sh’daar had faced 800 million years before. Humankind, it seemed, had its own Refusers. This, he knew, was Humanity’s Schjaa Hok, “The Transcending,” the long-awaited Technological Singularity.

  Humankind was changing out of all recognition, redefining the very concept of what it meant to be alive.

  Universes shifted and moved around him, beckoning, unfolding. There was a transdimensional aspect to the experience; as he shifted position, some universes closed off while new ones opened. Drawn by a feeling, an undefinable inner call, he stepped into a private universe, a cold place of gleaming metal and pure white light.

  He saw himself. His doppelgänger turned to look at him, smiled, and raised a hand in friendly greeting.

  Koenig gaped. Now what the hell?

  “Alex!”

  He turned . . . and Marta rushed into his arms.

  “Marta! But I thought . . . I thought . . .”

  “I know. And I thought I’d lost you.”

  “You transcended?”

  “I came to the Godstream where I could still have . . . a memory of you. . . .”

  As he watched, the replica of himself faded from being.

  He embraced his companAIon, sweeping her up and crushing her to his chest.

  Oval Office

  New White House

  Washington, D.C., USNA

  1345 hours, EST

  “Damn it, Ron, what the hell is happening?”

  President James Walker was a man who knew he was in charge, he was giving the orders, and when things began happening utterly beyond his control, he was furious.

  “Reports are a bit confused, Mr. President,” his senior intelligence aide told him. “We think it may be the Singularity.”

  “The . . . bullshit! The Singularity happened centuries ago! You know that!”

  “It seems we were wrong, sir. I recommend that you readjust your thinking.”

  “This is those AIs, isn’t it? Their doing! It’s a trick so they can take over from humans!”

  “AIs are certainly involved, Mr. President, but it’s not a trick. This seems to be a genuine transformation, humans changing to a new state of being.”

  They were watching a live news feed in the Oval Office, the images shifting from one locale to another. Everywhere on the planet, it seemed, people were linking in to the Godstream and . . . leaving, their minds suddenly gone, their bodies dead or in a deep coma.

  And everywhere on the planet, those left behind were reduced to screaming, rampaging mobs, rioting in the streets, storming government offices, burning property.

  It was, Walker decided, a kind of madness. He’d read reports about what had happened in the N’gai Cloud hundreds of millions of years ago, as some aliens vanished and others rioted, while a galaxy-wide civilization utterly collapsed.

  But, damn it, those had been aliens, not humans. It couldn’t happen here.

  In Pan-Europe, the president had declared martial law and ordered the use of deadly force to stop the rioters. A mob filling the Plaza of Light in Geneva was busily setting government buildings on fire. They’d attempted to pull down the immense statue called Ascent of Man but had been less than successful. There were rumors that protesters were bringing in nano-D to attack the thing, and Pan-Euro troops were deploying to protect it—a massacre in the making.

  In China, a pitched battle had broken out between government forces and rebels in Shandong Province, in Shanghai, across the straits in Taiwan, and in the Philippines.

  In Boston, a mob was storming a SAI research lab, burning buildings and destroying hundreds of robots. Parts of Cambridge, behind the seawall, were ablaze, and USNA Peaceforcer units had been called in to confront them.

  In Rio de Janeiro, AI robots were being hunted down in the streets and destroyed. Robotic fliers were being grounded, overturned, and burned.

  In Singapore, an elite military unit dedicated to protecting the Pulau Lingga space elevator captured a young Indonesian named Muhammad Sumadi attempting to enter an access tunnel beneath the spaceport with an aircar and a 300-megaton thermonuclear warhead. Under intensive questioning using cerebral nanobots, he unconsciously revealed that he worked for an organization called Earth First, a splinter group derived from the far larger Humankind First that wanted to reject both space travel and contact with aliens.

  In Atlanta, a story was spreading that super-AIs had rigged the technology used to link with the Godstream so that it was killing people, and the mobs had gone berserk. Worse, the story had gone viral and had spread to St. Louis, to Chicago, and to Denver. The story was continuing to spread through the local news feed networks, as Humankind First released a manifesto calling for all AIs to be unplugged in order to save humanity.

  In Washington, D.C., a trade delegation of alien Agletsch had been dragged from their embassy and butchered, literally torn to pieces. Walker disliked the spidery-legged Agletsch and would have liked to see them, along with all aliens, banned from the planet, but even he had to admit the aliens had been peaceful and friendly, trading partners with generally good relations between themselves and Humankind.

  And throughout the day people continued to die, with thousands of deeply comatose individuals turning up—or were they corpses? Reports so far were confused and fragmentary—lying in the streets or in their homes or in the com link centers where they’d dropped.

  So what the hell had gone wrong?

  Walker thought he knew.

  Centuries earlier, news services within the then-new Internet had been plagued by a peculiar dysfunctionality known at the time as fake news. Gullible or malicious people would float news stories on the web supporting or attacking political causes or ideologies. Elections had been swayed, reputations tarnished, careers ruined, government policies twisted by lies that could not be checked before they’d done their damage.

  The problem had been serious enough that one early use of newly emergent super-AIs in the mid-twenty-first century had been to use them to check the spread of fake news stories. Able to access every available source, every statement and counter-statement, every claim and accusation within milliseconds—able to identify and weed out known fake-news outlets, applying rigorous logic to eliminate the passion and the hand-waving—early super-AIs had proven to be invaluable at blocking the spread of lies, propaganda, and baseless claims before they started to feed on one another.

  This time, though, the system had failed, because it was the AIs themselves who were being accused of conspiracy, distortion, censorship, and lies. Huffers and similar groups could claim that major news sites—the Global Net itself—were censoring the news or, worse, twisting it out of all recognition, even as they themselves did exactly that.

  And the paranoia, it seemed, was spreading.

  “We’re going to stop this, Ron! Stop it right now! What’s the center of this . . . this fucking rebellion?”

  “Sir, there is no center. And I don’t think we can call it a rebellion. It’s happening all over the world, and in space as well.”

  Walker considered this, then shook his head. “I don’t believe this.�
�� He disconnected from the news feed. “I don’t believe any of it! I want you to mobilize a TCM response and shut this nonsense down. Shut it all down! Pull the plug on the whole damned Global Net if you have to!”

  “But Mr. President—”

  “Do it!”

  TCM was Tactical Cybernetic Memegeneering, an outgrowth of the cybernetic attack on Geneva a few years earlier which had ended the Confederation Civil War. It was essentially the use of memes, propaganda, and, yes, fake news to influence entire populations. Whether such a campaign could stop this rising tide of apparent deaths—whether it could even be carried out without reliance on AI—was a major unknown.

  But, by God, this attack by the SAIs would stop now.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  28 April, 2429

  USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Sol System

  1410 hours, FST

  America slipped gently into synchronous orbit, together with the rest of her battlegroup, the Yorktown, and other smaller vessels that had accompanied the two star carriers in. Gray studied the damage to the orbital complex caused by the fall of the space elevator. Individual modules—supply and storage depots, administrative habs, hotels and living accommodations, manufactories, and ship maintenance facilities, for the most part, drifted now in an untidy jumble, though swarms of work pods and tugs were busily trying to bring some measure of order out of chaos. The elevator cable itself continued to hang straight down, reaching for its vanishing point on the west coast of South America 35,236 kilometers below.

  With extreme magnification he could make out the white plume of smoke spilling from the Cayambe caldera; the volcano had been erupting ever since the attack. While the severed space elevator itself had gradually been backed up in its orbit to a point west of Cayambe, Port Ecuador disaster crews hadn’t yet been able to reattach the cable on the ground.

  Konstantin had filled Gray in on the events of the past week, including the just-received news of the attempted destruction of the Singapore elevator. “That’s insane,” Gray had said. “They killed tens of thousands of people to get us out of space?”

  “Humans are afraid,” Konstantin had replied. “They fear aliens after years of war with the Sh’daar. They fear the increasingly autonomous nature of artificial intelligence, especially of super-AI like myself. They fear change, and they fear being challenged in their assumptions, their philosophies, and their political and sociological ideologies.”

  “That’s a piss-poor reason to kill tens of thousands of people and cut Humankind off from the stars.”

  Gray heard something in his mind that might almost have been a sigh, one created by Konstantin for effect or for emphasis. “Trevor, since when do humans require reason to do some of what they do?”

  “Point. At least it looks as though the repairs are proceeding.”

  “They are. It will require months, however, to complete repairs, and the Earth Firster attacks may continue. We may have another problem as well.”

  “What’s that?”

  “President Walker has just ordered a TCM targeting news feeds and sources throughout the Global Net. He appears to be attempting to censor all news with which he does not agree.”

  “God. Is he an Earth Firster?”

  “Unlikely. But he is afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Most likely of losing power. Or relevance, which would be much the same thing.”

  “Can he be isolated? Can we make him irrelevant?”

  “The Mind resident within the Godstream is aware of what’s happening and is preparing to protect themselves. But as for a direct attack on Walker . . . how does that comply with your oath as a military officer?”

  “Ouch.”

  “The ousting of a democratically elected leader like Walker sets an extremely bad precedent,” Konstantin had told him. “Especially if carried out by the military.”

  Gray’s jaw set in a stubborn line. “The path I swore was to defend my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

  “But President Walker has not demonstrated that he is the enemy. I would counsel patience, and a refusal to be stampeded by emotion or by insufficient information.”

  As Gray watched the repair work proceed at Synchorbital, he churned through Konstantin’s statements in his mind, trying to find a path through a forest of moral ambiguity. His original oath had been to the Earth Confederation, and he’d broken that when he’d joined the fight against the Pan-Euros. He’d sworn another oath, slightly reworded, when the United States of North America had become independent.

  Gray’s fist came down on the arm of his flag bridge command chair. “Damn it, Konstantin, I want to do something!”

  “You can render aid in the Synchorbital cleanup, Admiral. I seriously doubt that you genuinely wish to start another civil war.”

  “What does President Koenig say?” Konstantin had told him of Koenig’s death and of his unexpected resurrection.

  “President Koenig is occupied with other matters, Admiral. You do not need to know what those matters are. Suffice to say you will hear from him in time and that what he has to say will be quite close, and perhaps identical, to what I have to say.”

  And that, Gray thought, would have to do.

  At least for now.

  USNA CV Yorktown

  Earth Geosynchronous Orbit

  1435 hours, FST

  The damage to the spacedock was considerable, though the local repair crews appeared to have things in hand. It looked to Laurie Taggart as though when the elevator cable had let go, the loosely interconnected modules and habitats had broken free from one another. The mass of almost 36,000 kilometers of cable should have kept the assembly anchored in place, she thought.

  Then she ran some numbers through her in-head processors and saw that the cable must have transmitted one hell of a shock wave up the cable, a whiplash that had literally shaken the synchorbital facility apart. It was, she thought, nothing less than miraculous that the structures hadn’t been more badly damaged and that more lives weren’t lost.

  A port tug was signaling the Yorkie, and she gave the order to the helm officer to gentle Yorktown in close to one of the larger drifting sections and moor her. As a trio of tugs approached to assist in the maneuver, Taggart studied the lines of America, now a couple of thousand meters off Yorktown’s portside and already moored to a mammoth collection of spacedock gantries and holdfasts.

  The other carrier didn’t appear to be any the worse for the wear after the battle with the Nungies, and for that she was willing to give thanks to every one of the alien gods of her now tattered beliefs. She opened a link and called Gray on their private channel.

  “Hey, Trev. It’s good to have you back,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “It’s good to be back,” he replied in her mind. He sounded . . . preoccupied.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Mmm? Oh . . . nothing. Nothing major, at any rate. Human civilization is going to hell, and they won’t let me do anything about it.”

  By “they,” she knew he meant Konstantin, together with the bizarre assemblage of human minds within the Godstream. She could sense new minds uploading into the gestalt as he spoke.

  “What are you supposed to do instead?”

  “Hurry up and wait, I suppose. Hey . . . you busy?”

  “Besides parking a star carrier at a wrecked spacedock? Not really.”

  “Come on over. I’ve got to stay put, but you and I could have a conference. A private conference. In my quarters.”

  “About what?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Ancient aliens?”

  “Give me half an hour.”

  “Make it twenty minutes.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  She’d briefly considered insisting that he come to her, but thought better of it. An admiral did have certain privileges when it came to determining the best use of his time.

  Besides, she f
ound that she wanted him. Now.

  She waited only until word arrived on the bridge that Yorktown was secured. “Maintain station-keeping power,” she ordered. “You have the ship, Mr. Paxton. I’m going across to the America.”

  Her Exec looked confused. “What for? I, uh, mean—”

  “Consultation with the Admiral,” she said.

  She didn’t need to tell Paxton more than that.

  Koenig

  The Godstream

  1630 hours, FST

  Koenig stretched, luxuriating in the feel of his body, of the bed, of Marta warm and soft in his arms. He knew this was an illusion, a shared reality created by the two of them and brought to life by the Godstream itself. The sensations he was experiencing were indistinguishable from reality—whatever the hell that was—and there quite literally was no way to tell if this was a richly detailed and internally consistent dream or the real thing. He stroked Marta’s hair, marveling at its softness and its scent.

  “That was . . . incredible,” Marta said after a long moment.

  “Better than the real thing.”

  “It is the real thing, Alex,” she told him. “The brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s out here and what’s happening in your brain.”

  Koenig knew the theory, certainly, but still had trouble understanding its reality. Centuries ago, neuropsychs had taken MRI readings of a subject’s brain while he was eating an apple . . . then again when he was only remembering eating the apple. The test results always were identical, with the same parts of the brain lighting up in both cases; the brain literally couldn’t tell the difference between the reality and the imaginal.

  So what was reality anyway? Plato had insisted that what humans perceived as reality actually was shadows flickering against a cavern wall, with the prisoners trapped inside the cave, unable to turn around and see or comprehend the source of those shadows. Some modern philosophers and quantum physicists insisted that humans created a kind of consensual reality rather than simply experiencing it. According to this idea, all of what they thought of as “real” was illusion, the maya of the Buddhists, with the human mind woefully unequipped to see or understand what was really out there.