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“Quid pro quo?” Koenig asked. It was a term that the Agletsch loved, and which fit well with their trade in information. This for that.
“Of course. What do you want to know?”
Koenig had been giving a lot of thought to what question he could ask. It had to be relatively low level in terms of import . . . what they called first-level compensation. More critical information—eighth level, say—could be quite expensive.
“Will the Sh’daar use you or another client species as their representatives when they come to Earth? Or will they come to Earth themselves?”
“Almost certainly they will send servant representatives,” Dra’ethde told him. “The Sh’daar have not been seen . . . in the flesh, I believe is your term, for many tens of thousands of your years. However, those representatives will no doubt have a direct communications link with their Masters.”
“That’s good, because if they came themselves, we’d need to lock up our friend Gru’mulkisch, here, to keep her Seed from dumping.”
It had happened once before, when the star carrier America had passed close to a va Sh’daar base at Alchameth, a gas giant in the Arcturan system, and data stored in Gru’mulkisch’s Seed had been transmitted to the enemy. That was the reason human intelligence services were so cautious when it came to Agletsch in human space.
Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch both had been carefully scanned, and their Sh’daar technoparasites identified. A scrambler had been designed and placed into the translator units they wore to block the receipt and transmission of any state secrets. In general, however, it was wiser simply not to discuss state secrets in their presence.
In any case, it was possible that a hotline to the Sh’daar might someday be useful.
“And your information in exchange?” Gru’mulkisch asked him.
“The Sh’daar have trouble dominating the galaxy,” Koenig said, “because the galaxy is far too large. Too many worlds, too many sapient species. Interstellar empires, as such, simply can’t exist . . . not when the amount of information needed to manage them is so vast. And that’s where we humans have an advantage. Interior lines of communication.”
“I do not understand your use of interior,” Gru’mulkisch said. “The Sh’daar do not surround you.”
Score, Koenig thought. Until that moment, the Earth Confederation had not been sure how extensive Sh’daar space was. Most contacts with their clients had been in toward the galactic core, in the constellations of Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, Libra, and others in that general direction.
Earth needs allies, Koenig thought to himself. Technic species not yet under the Sh’daar thrall. We just might find them in the opposite direction from the core. Orion, Taurus . . . out toward the rim.
“I meant the word figuratively,” Koenig told the Agletsch. “With a much smaller volume of space to defend, and fewer worlds with which we have to be concerned, we can move from one to another more quickly, react more quickly to a threat than can the Sh’daar, with their much larger domain. When we make a decision, when Fleet HQ gives an order, it can be disseminated among all of our forces and put into effect much more swiftly than is possible for the enemy.”
“Quite true,” Gru’mulkisch said. “Of course, you currently have the singular disadvantage of being . . . I believe one of your politicians called it ‘a house divided.’ ”
“The quote originally was from one of our sacred texts,” Koenig said. He tried to find a way to give a positive response, to turn it around and dismiss the implied threat, but could not. “And . . . no. You’re quite right.”
He looked away from the two aliens, letting his gaze drift across the glittering crowd of humans filling the plaza. Most were in formal attire—evening dress, diplomatic cloaks, designer gowns and dinner jackets. Numerous others were stylishly nude, some with luminous jewelry or skin adornment . . . or wearing holographic projections that flowed and rippled like liquid light. You would never guess, looking at that throng of civilians, that the nation currently was at war both with the unseen alien puppet masters dominating much of the galaxy and with other humans.
He turned back to the two Agletsch data traders. “You’re right . . . and we’re going to have to do something about that.”
Chapter Four
21 January 2425
Squadron Briefing Room
USNA CVS America
In transit
0950 hours, TFT
By now, Omega Centauri was far behind. America and her escorts had threaded their way through the TRGA cylinder at Omega Centauri—one of seven discovered so far in that star-packed volume of space—and emerged again at the original Sh’daar Node cylinder from which the acronym was taken . . . the Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly.
“Funny name,” a young Starhawk driver with lieutenant’s rank tabs at his throat said. “ ‘Texaghu.’ Does that have anything to do with Texas?”
America’s fighter squadron pilots had been gathering on the carrier’s briefing-room deck for the past ten minutes, now, and the place was already pretty crowded.
“Nah,” Lieutenant Donald Gregory said. “But you’re new, right? Just came aboard a couple of months ago?”
“That’s right.” The pilot extended his hand and Gregory took it. “Lieutenant Jamis Anderson. Late of the great state of Texas, and now with the Merry Reapers.”
“Don Gregory.” He slapped the VFA-96 squadron patch on his shoulder. “Black Demons.” He turned to introduce the attractive woman with him. “And this here is Meg Connor.”
“Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Anderson said, a broad grin spreading across his face. “I downloaded your report about you and your run-in with the Slan!”
Connor, formerly of VFA-140, the Dracos, had been captured by the highly advanced alien Slan in an operation at 36 Ophiuchi two months ago, but been rescued by the Marines shortly after. Her observations of her captors had helped Naval Intelligence put together a strategy to deal with the va Sh’daar aliens . . . and led to Admiral Gray’s unexpected victory over them a few days later at 70 Ophiuchi. Since then, her own squadron lost in the Slan attack, she’d been transferred to the Black Demons.
“Texaghu Resch,” Gregory told him, “is Drukrhu—that’s the principal Agetsch trade pidgin—for a star originally catalogued by the Turusch, another Sh’daar client species. Means ‘the Eye of Resch.’ Actually, it’s a transliteration from the language of a species called the Chelk.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“They’re extinct,” Connor told him. “Apparently, the star was seen as the eye of a mythic god or hero in their culture, a being called Resch.”
“And they’re extinct?”
Gregory nodded. Whoever or whatever Resch had been, he’d not been powerful enough to save the Chelk. Like Humankind, they’d chosen to fight the Sh’daar rather than have their technologies restricted. “Humans haven’t been there, but according to the Agletsch, the Chelk homeworld is now a lifeless, airless, glassed-over ball of charred and blasted rock. Seems like they didn’t get the Sh’daar memo about no technic singularities.”
“Damn . . .”
“It’s all written up in America’s archives,” Connor pointed out. “Interesting reading . . . and it helps you kind of stay focused on what we’re fighting for.”
“Better living through higher technology,” Anderson said, still grinning. The catchphrase was currently a popular one, and expression of North America’s determination to continue Humankind’s exponential increase in GRIN technologies.
“May I have your attention, please,” another voice said over the pilots’ in-head circuitry. They turned to face the front of the briefing room, where Captain Fletcher, America’s CAG, stood on a low stage. “Please grow your seats and link in. We have the visuals from the recon flyby yesterday.”
Chairs began emerging from the deck in neatly ordered rows, and the crowd—more than two hundred strong—began taking seats. America carried six fighter and strike squadrons, one recon squadron, and two search and rescues . . . fifteen hundred people if you included the support, intelligence, logistics, and maintenance personnel. But the meeting this morning had been called just for the pilots and flight officers—the pointed end of America’s very big and powerful stick.
With a rustle of motion and dwindling conversation, the crowd of men and women sat down and began linking in. The briefing would be carried out through America’s primary AI, and consisted of a download of information acquired by the recon squadron—VQ-7, the Sneaky Peaks. Commander James Henry Peak, who’d given his name to the group twenty-some years ago, had long since been promoted to captain, rotated Earthside to Naval Intelligence, and eventually retired, but his old squadron had kept the punning name. VQ-7’s current CO was Commander Thom McCabe, who was on the stage now with the CAG.
“Good morning,” McCabe said. “I’m sure you’re all eager to see the results of our close recon pass of the Black Rosette yesterday. What Lieutenant Walton saw was . . . interesting. . . .”
Data flowed into Gregory’s in-head, and he opened an inner window to view it. He saw again the crowded inner reaches of the Omega Centauri cluster, millions of brilliant stars filling the sky, and, ahead, the blurred and eerie doughnut of blue light and gas, turned almost edge-on, set in an infalling swirl of hot dust and tortured hydrogen atoms. Shadowy, vast structures hung in the distance, made indistinct by the dust . . . the stellarchitecture of the Rosette Aliens. America’s fighter squadrons had flown CAP over the past several days—the term was from combat air patrol, an anachronistic holdover from the days of wet navies and atmospheric fighters—but never approached the Rosette. It would be kind of nice, Gregory thought, to actually see up close what all of the fuss and scuttlebutt was about.
The blurred disk grew larger, and the angle shifted as Walton’s ship approached, giving them a line of sight into the Rosette’s interior. Gregory saw scattered stars . . . a black and empty night sky . . .
“We’ve slowed down the images by a factor of ten,” McCabe told the audience. “Lieutenant Walton was only over the Rosette for a few seconds, but by slowing down the feed we can see details that are not, at first, apparent. What we’re looking at here, obviously, is deep space . . . but you can see that it’s not the space within the cluster. The stars are few and far between. This particular line of sight, we think, lets us look through to a region out on the galactic rim.”
One by one, the other spaces recorded during Walton’s passage came into view, each replacing the one that had gone before. The heart of a nebula . . . various starfields . . . the mottled, close-up surface of a red sun . . . a scattering of distant galaxies . . .
The final scene was of a searing field of radiant blue light, as though the line of sight was plunging into the heart of an exploding sun.
McCabe froze the image there. A new window opened to one side, one showing the familiar blurred cylinder of a TRGA. The two images floated next to each other in Gregory’s mind at identical angles, allowing a close comparison.
“Despite the obvious physical differences,” Commander McCabe went on, “the Rosette is a transport mechanism quite similar to the TRGAs, except for the size, of course. A TRGA, we now know, is a kind of everted Tipler machine. The original device—the theory, rather—was developed in 1974 by a physicist named Frank J. Tipler. According to him, a cylinder of extremely dense matter rotating at near-light velocity would drag the spacetime fabric around it in a way that would permit what physicists call closed, timelike curves, creating gateways or portals across vast distances of both space and time. Two decades later, physicist Stephen Hawking demonstrated that closed, timelike curves were impossible, as was time travel.
“Evidently, the TRGA Builders did not read Hawking. Instead, they seem to have turned the idea inside out, creating a hollow cylinder about a kilometer across, with solar-sized masses rotating around the cylinder’s axis within the walls. A number of distinct paths through the interior of the cylinder result in spacial displacements of, in one case, several tens of thousands of light years—and a temporal displacement of eight hundred seventy-six million years. The Agletsch refer to the TRGAs as Sh’daar Nodes. However, we know that the Builders were not the modern Sh’daar, but instead they were, hundreds of millions of years ago, the ur-Sh’daar, the ancient community of highly advanced civilizations inhabiting the small, irregular galaxy called the N’gai Cloud.
“Which, of course, brings us to the Black Rosette.”
The TRGA image vanished, and the in-head image expanded slightly, closing in on the Rosette’s eldritch maw. Harsh blue light glared from the opening.
“The Rosette,” McCabe continued, “appears to be an expansion of TRGA technology . . . but on a far vaster scale. Six black holes, each fifty times the mass of Sol, rotating about a common center of gravity at high speed, creating a gateway nearly one hundred thousand kilometers across.”
A second window opened once again, this time showing a perfect circle of six brilliant, sapphire-blue suns—the Six Suns, encountered by America’s task force in the N’gai Cloud in the remote past.
“The Rosette is at least nine hundred million years old,” McCabe said, “and obviously artificial. The original members of the Six Suns were balanced in a rotating hexagon one hundred astronomical units across. The stars themselves seem to have been artificially enhanced or rejuvenated by merging smaller stars together . . . but as is well understood, hot, bright, blue stars like these have lifetimes measured in, at best, a few tens of millions of years. When they ultimately burn up their reserves of nuclear fuel, they collapse into black holes, such as what we see in the Rosette today. We do not as yet know whether the distances between the member stars of the Rosette were deliberately manipulated—shrunken from about fifty astronomical units, in the remote past, down to a few tens of thousands of kilometers—or if this represents a natural evolution of the system over hundreds of millions of years. . . .”
As McCabe’s voice continued downloading into Gregory’s head, he stared into the blue glare. America’s AI was stopping the light down by a good 80 percent to keep the image from being washed out completely—or more likely the dimming had first taken place within the recon fighter to keep from blinding Lieutenant Walton.
Gregory had heard scuttlebutt to the effect that the “blue-light gateway” represented a pathway into the heart of a star or, just possibly, was looking at an exploding star, a nova or supernova, at close range. He could make out a kind of texture in there, a variation in tone and brightness—the light was not at all flat or uniform in its intensity. That seemed to rule out a star core, a supernova, or some other stellar disruption, but he couldn’t guess what it might be instead.
“We’re not at all sure what we’re looking at in this image,” McCabe was saying, echoing Gregory’s own thoughts, “but the physics department thinks that this particular line of sight may be a glimpse into an altogether different universe . . . a parallel universe to our own somewhere within the Bulk, and quite possibly an alien universe with completely different physical laws, environments, geometries, and characteristics than our own. . . .”
Funny name, Gregory thought, the Bulk. He knew the theory, of course: that there were other universes, a near infinity of them, side by side in a hyperdimensional way, like the pages of a book, but arrayed in a non-spacial otherness called the Bulk. All of the universes taken together were termed the metaverse. The nature of those other universes was still in doubt; they might host wildly differing natural laws and physical properties . . . or they might be alternate variations of one plan, spawned by the trillion in response to alternative solutions to collapsing quantum wave equations.
The blue-lit space within the Rosette apparently represented a space with different physics . . . where pi was equal to exactly three point one four, perhaps . . . or where gravity was stronger than it was here . . . or where sigma, the strength of the strong nuclear force, was strong enough to overwhelm the repulsion between electrons and protons.
So far as Gregory was concerned, however, this one universe he was inhabiting now was more than big enough—more than strange enough—for him.
“We estimate,” McCabe told his audience, “that the Rosette opens up a very large number of spacetime pathways . . . as many, the physics boys think, as ten to the twenty-seventh power. That number, one octillion, is so large as to be all but infinite for any practical purposes.
“So . . . are there any questions?”
Several hands rose. McCabe pointed at one.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Wes Fargo said. “Our ships can’t stand up to technology like that! Just what in hell are we supposed to do about these . . . people?”
“Unknown, as yet,” McCabe replied. He sounded grim, and Gregory realized that he didn’t have any answers, and that the lack of answers worried him. “All we know is that the Rosette Aliens, as we call them, are coming in through a crack in space, quite possibly from an entirely different universe. They may be a million years in advance of us . . . they may be much more. They may be so far beyond us that meaningful communication between their species and ours is impossible.
“And intelligence believes that their emergence only sixteen thousand light years from Sol is a matter of extremely serious concern. . . .”
And Gregory was forced to agree.
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
1322 hours, EST
“Recombinant Memetics,” Konstantin said, “may offer you your best hope for defeating the Confederation relatively quickly. Speed is, of course, essential if you are to have a chance of an alliance between Geneva and the Sh’daar.”
President Koenig studied the system’s schoolteacher avatar in his inner window and wondered about the AI’s programming. How did Konstantin pull off that kind of magic, anyway?
Not that the carefully crafted image conversing with him inside his head would yield any clues. The lunar computer network had not been directly programmed by humans; Konstantin, he knew, was an artificial intelligence-programmed machine, an AIP. Given that, how much could Konstantin possibly know—or guess—of human behavior?
“I notice,” Koenig said carefully, “that you tend to emphasize the fact that you are not human. When you’re speaking with me, you always say ‘your war,’ ‘your nation,’ as if you’re not one of us.”
“A fact that should be self-evident,” Konstantin replied. “I am not human. This is not my war. And while, technically, this facility was funded primarily by the United States of North America, I was intended, I remind you, to work on problems affecting all of Humankind. War is the single most wasteful, tragic, and senseless of human activities, and is not within my purview.”
“But you have been helping us.” Konstantin had been instrumental in formulating strategies against the Confederation, and in using its data-mining capabilities to gather intelligence from the Global Net.
“I have,” the system replied. “My function—my higher purpose, a human might say—is to gather, assess, and provide information. It is up to human agencies such as your government to determine what to do with that information.”
Konstantin’s mandate was to provide information useful for all of humanity, or at least so ran the claim. So far as Koenig was aware, though, Konstantin had been providing intelligence to the United States of North America and not to the Confederation. Was that because Konstantin had been designed and funded primarily by the USNA government, and by USNA-based corporations like Bluetel and Simmons-AI? Or were there other, deeper motives . . . perhaps motives not even remotely comprehensible to brains of mere blood and tissue?
“And the Confederation government? Do you provide them with information as well?”
“I maintain covert links with certain Confederation communications and AI networks, of course. Doing so requires that I provide certain information, yes. IP eddresses and DNS registration, for instance, as well as synchronization pingpackets.”
“Okay, Konstantin,” Koenig said after a moment. He knew better than to try to get the hyperintelligent AI network to say anything it was not prepared to divulge. “But how are you planning on using memetics?”
That was the real question, he thought—how well could a silicon-based intelligence understand the complexities of recombinant memetics? A machine figuring out the most effective buttons to push, to change human cultures, to reshape Humankind . . .
That, Koenig decided, was a truly chilling concept. . . .
If you had enough small and disparate bits of information, if you could conduct Big Data mining on a large-enough scale, could you accurately and consistently predict human behavior?
Koenig knew the official answer, of course. Predicting the actions of a handful of people or, worse, of an individual, was possible only in fairly limited situations—if the subject was a sociopath, for instance, and following the dictates of his disease, and even then, predictions could all too easily be lost in the randomness of background noise.
Large groups of people, however, were another matter altogether. As with large numbers of atoms or molecules acting within the rules laid down by quantum dynamics and basic chemistry, the actions of large populations were more predictable.
And where actions were predictable, it was possible—if you were both careful enough and skillful enough—to guide them, to change the shape and course of those actions to achieve a desired outcome. The science was called recombinant memetics, the science of using one set of memeplexes to alter another. In much the same way that recombinant DNA can change genetic structures and give rise to whole new types of life, it was possible to identify particular memes within a social unit and change them into something else entirely.
But identifying and targeting key memes within a given culture could be tricky, requiring data mining on a scale only possible for an AI as complex and as perceptive as Konstantin.
And changing them was trickier still, requiring selective manipulation of memes within the target culture.
The word meme had been coined four centuries before by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who first suggested them as units transmitting cultural practices, ideas and concepts, or as symbols passed from mind to mind through writing, speech, rituals, mass entertainment, or imitation. Like genes, memes spread from person to person, and like genes they compete, vary, select, mutate, and attempt to ensure their own survival. Put another way, a meme is like a virus, propagating through a population, infecting individuals, and spreading by means of the behaviors it generates in its hosts.
The question in Koenig’s mind was how a computer network, no matter how complex, could understand how memes worked, how memes could infect and affect human populations without possessing a key human ingredient—emotion.
And if a silicon mind like Konstantin’s could understand memetics, it gave AI systems an absolutely incredible power with which to manipulate human civilization.
“Several possibilities present themselves,” Konstantin replied. “I could foment revolution within the Confederation by building upon the impetus already generated by the defections from the Confederation’s ranks—Russia and North India. Or I could create a new religion . . . one that would require Geneva to embrace peace.”
That statement rocked Koenig back on his figurative heels. A religion?
A cluster of related memes working together and supporting one another was a memeplex; religion was the perfect example. Religions evolve, spawn new and different offspring, become set or rigid in their ways, or they mutate under cultural pressures which are themselves memeplexes.
