Semper Human

Such essistants were considered vital in modern communications and interface technologies, and more and more interactions with machines, from accessing research data banks or piloting spacecraft to growing furniture or opening doors or turning on a room’s illumination system, required an implant.

Which left people without implants, the Disimplanteds, or “Disimps,” out in the cold and dark, often literally.

But the AIs of Garroway’s day had been designed to pick up only on those thoughts that were appropriately coded, preceded by a mental symbol that told the AI that it was welcome. The idea of allowing any intelligence, even a manmade one, into his thoughts without permission was profoundly disturbing.

And allowing machines to read minds for purposes of “social control” was, to Garroway’s way of thinking, horrifying. Did that mean they had artificial intelligences prowling the streets of human worlds and habs, listening for stray thoughts that might lead to social unrest, crime, or dissidence?

And how did you tell the difference between an artificial intelligence and a member of that new species Schilling had mentioned … what had she called them? The Homo telae? Could they read minds as well?

“I don’t think I like this full-access idea,” he told them.

“I don’t imagine you do,” Schilling said. “It probably feels pretty strange … even creepy. It’s not a bad thing, however. Crime—at least outside of the free zones—is almost unknown. Intraspecies war—both civil war and war between separate human governments or religious groups—is all but obsolete. Humankind has never known such an era of peace and general well-being.”

“So what do the AIs do in this utopia of yours?” Garroway said. “Eavesdrop on street corners, and call the cops when they hear the random, disgruntled rant against the government?”

“Not ‘cops,’?” Socrates told him. “That’s antiquated terminology. We refer to socons. Agents of social control.”

“This is sounding worse and worse.”

“Most socons are AIs,” Schilling said. “Though there are human agents, of course. In most cases, they can correct aberrant behavior directly and immediately, and the person involved—whether he’s a criminal, a political dissident, or mentally ill—can be adjusted, healed … and never even know the adjustment has taken place.”

“Captain,” he replied slowly, “you are scaring the hell out of me. Who decides what is dissident, and what is just an expression of a less-than-mainstream opinion? Who determines what mentally ill is? What are the standards? It’s not like you can diagnose mental illness by pulling a throat culture, damn it!”

“Gently, General,” Socrates told him. “It’s not as bad as you think. Our system has worked, and worked well, for over five centuries.”

Garroway started to reply, then thought better of it. Until he had a better feel for this culture, and for its rules and regulations both written and unwritten, he was going to need to keep his mouth shut and his eyes, ears, and implant open. Something he said now, in ignorance, might well prejudice these people against both him and his own Marines.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said, but his reservations remained. “You were telling me, though, about alien intelligences inhabiting stars.”

“Indeed. They seem to be relatively rare, but several species, existing as coherent plasmas, have evolved within stellar atmospheres, or, in two cases of which we know, deep within the stellar core. Obviously, our communications with such beings are somewhat … limited.”

The view of the Core Detonation had continued to grow and change as they talked. The scene now appeared to be centered on a glowing disk, a pinwheel of light shading from red at the outer rim to an intense, eye-watering violet at the center.

“Is that the Galactic Core?” Garroway asked. The pinwheel, obviously, was an accretion disk. At its center was a tiny void, an emptiness, into which compressed gas and stellar material appeared to be funneling, a large and massive black hole. Dying matter shrieked its death scream in X-rays and the far ultraviolet.

“No,” Socrates told him. “The Core is about 350 light years in that direction.” Garroway sensed the gesture, deeper into an impenetrable haze of blue-white radiance beyond. “This is the Great Annihilator.”

Garroway had heard of it. A black hole, yes … but not, as once had been imagined, the supermassive black hole at the Galaxy’s exact center. The true Galactic Core consisted of a black hole of about two million solar masses, but, until the Core Detonation wavefront reached the vicinity of Earth, there would be no physical evidence pinpointing it from Earth’s vicinity save for the observed movements of core stars, no light, no radiation of any sort.

The Great Annihilator, on the other hand, was a black hole of only about fifteen solar masses, but it was far noisier—as heard from Earth, at any rate—than its far larger brother nearby. Twin shafts of high-energy radiation speared in opposite directions from the poles of its central hub, streams of positrons emerging from the turbulent areas above the black hole’s north and south poles. The interaction of antimatter with normal matter hundreds of light years from the singularity filled the Core with radio noise—the 511?keV screech of positronium annihilating its normal-matter counterpart—electrons. The object had been detected and named “The Great Annihilator” by Earth astronomers millennia ago, but the discovery had only deepened the mystery of the actual nature of the Galactic Core. By measuring the velocities of stars in the Annihilator’s immediate vicinity, astronomers had proven that it was a black hole, but not the far more massive one at the exact center that they’d been looking for.

In Garroway’s day, of course, it had been well understood that the Xul Dyson cloud had been masking the radiation leakage from the actual Core, and would continue to do so until the Core Detonation crawled out into the Galactic suburbs and impinged upon waiting detectors and sense organs. The Great Annihilator, though, had become a footnote to Galactic cosmography, a little-brother satellite of the larger, better known singularity at GalCenter.

The Core Detonation would have swallowed the Great Annihilator centuries ago. Evidently, the object had not been destroyed, as might have been expected. Clouds of dust and gas sweeping out from the Core explosions had spiraled into the Annihilator’s accretion disk, which glowed now as brightly as a supernova. So much matter continued to fall into the singularity itself that vast quantities, instead of being swallowed, were flung outward as radiant plasmas, and the radio shriek of annihilating matter was far louder now than it had been twelve hundred years before. Garroway could hear that shriek overlaid upon the visual image. Inset windows gave scrolling blocks of data describing the energies exploding from the brilliant object. Radiation levels, he noticed, were high enough to instantly fry any organic matter.

He watched the glowing object for a moment. Through filters raised by the software controlling the imagery, he could actually see the movement of the inner edge of the accretion disk as it whipped across the singularity’s event horizon.

“We have detected signals emerging as nonlocal events from within the Great Annihilator,” Schilling told him. “The physics are … difficult. Suffice to say that phase-shifted habitats may have been inserted into the black hole’s ergosphere.”

“Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “that there’s something alive inside that Hell?”

“Something, yes,” Socrates said. “The Xul, or a part of them. And they’re using their base within the Great Annihilator to attack us.”

“Inside a black hole?”

“Within the ergosphere, yes.”

“That’s impossible,” Garroway said, shaking his head. “Nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational field if it gets too close, not even light. That’s part of the thing’s definition.”

“You’re aware of phase shifting, aren’t you, sir?” Schilling asked.

“Yes. We have … sorry, had bases and ships back in my day that could rotate out of phase with four-dimensional spacetime. They existed at the base state of Reality, what we called the Quantum Sea.”

“The Xul apparently can do that as well,” Socrates said, “and from the Quantum Sea, it’s possible to manipulate gravity.”

“The quantum converters?” Schilling added. “The devices we use to provide microsuns for our terraform projects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond? We phase-shift those into the Quantum Sea, where they can draw as much energy as we need directly from the Reality base state. The Xul are doing something similar inside the Great Annihilator.”

“What?”

“We’re not sure,” Socrates said. “It’s possible that they hope to affect the entirety of the Reality base state … to, in effect, rewrite what we’re pleased to think of as reality.”

“Editing us out of existence?”

“It’s a possibility. That, at least, is one of the scenarios our Xul iteration programs have developed. But it’s also possible that they’re using singularity-identity nonlocality to infect our AI and computer networks with alien emomemes.”

“Whoa,” Garroway said. “You just lost me … about eight hundred years ago.”

“Singularity-identity nonlocality?” Schilling asked. Garroway nodded.

“The theory can be a bit murky,” Socrates told him. “Do you know how stargates work?”

“Not the technical details, but yes,” Garroway said. “In principle, at least.”

Stargates were immense artifacts scattered across the Galaxy and beyond, ten- to twenty-kilometer-wide rings within which pairs of planetary-mass black holes revolved in opposite directions. The interplay of moving gravitational fields opened direct links between one gate and another, light years distant, with which it was tuned. Exactly who had built them, or when, was a mystery, but stargates were still the principal means of long-range travel throughout the Galaxy.

“Stargates work,” Socrates told him, “because the movement of singularities within two stargates can be tuned to one another so that they essentially become congruent, a fancy way of saying they are the same. Identical. The same gate, but located in two widely separated places at once … orbiting Sirius, say, and the Galactic Core. The theory depends on quantum states and an aspect of quantum dynamics called nonlocality, which says that two objects or particles entangled at the quantum level remain connected to one another, as though there was no space, no distance, between them.”

“I know about that one,” Garroway said. “Albert Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance,’ and refused to accept that it described the universe realistically.”

“Albert … who?” Schilling asked.

“Einstein,” Socrates told her. “A pre-spaceflight philosopher.”

“Physicist, actually,” Garroway said. “At least according to the history downloads I’ve seen.”

“Physicist, then,” Socrates agreed, “though physicists and philosophers are much the same thing when it comes to describing aspects of the metaverse that can only indirectly be apprehended, and which can only be described by myth and metaphor. In any case … if you have access to base-state reality in one black hole, you theoretically have direct access to all black holes … and to the star gates as well, since they depend on artificial singularities for their operation.”

“We don’t know if they’re really trying to change reality,” Schilling said. “That may be too much of a stretch even for them. But we have detected signals emerging from several stargates that suggest they’re broadcasting emomemes.”

“And what the hell is an emomeme?”

“?‘Meme’ is an old term for a transmissible unit of cultural information,” Socrates told him. “Especially one that can be passed on from mind to mind verbally, by repeated actions, or through general cultural transmission. Religions are memes. So are fashions in bodily adornment. Or popular sayings or slogans or tunes or fads in entertainment or advertising.”

“Right,” Schilling said. “If I say ‘vavoob!’ That probably doesn’t mean much to you.”

“?‘Vavoob.’ Nope.” He shook his head. “Can’t say that it does.”

“But it’s a popular saying in Sol-System cities right now. It means … I don’t know. Sexy. Smart. Well integrated.”

“?‘With it?’?”

“With what?”

“Never mind. Your point is taken.”

“The expression is one of the current memes in human pan-urban culture,” Schilling told him. “Comes from a routine by Deidre Sallens, a well-known eroticomic VirSim personality. You haven’t been exposed, so it’s meaningless to you.”

“Memes tend to pass from person to person or group to group like a virus,” Socrates added.

“I’ve heard the term before,” Garroway said. “Even in my day. How is that different from an emomeme?”

“Emomemes are emotional memes … specifically those affecting how people feel about other people, about ideas or situations or groups. Things like racial stereotypes. Or prejudices against a given group of people or beings. A particular religion. A particular cultural worldview. A particular sexual practice or preference. They can also affect how strongly we respond to such impulses. Turning belief in a certain religious worldview into fanaticism, for instance. Or anger into rage.”

“And … you’re saying the Xul are beaming these things to us through the stargates?”

“There is intelligence to support this, General,” Socrates told him. “Yes.”

“How? I mean, how do these emomeme things affect humans? I always thought of ‘meme’ as a kind of metaphor, another word, maybe, for ‘idea.’ Not something with a physical reality.”

“In this case,” Socrates said, “they are quite objectively real.”

“Think of extremely efficient, self-contained, and well-camoflaged software,” Schilling told him, “viruses, if you will, infecting the personal AIs resident in people’s implants. Through the infected AIs, people’s attitudes, the strength of their emotional responses, even their very belief structures can be … changed.”

“Oh,” Garroway said. Then his eyes widened as the implications became clear. “Oh! …”

6

2201.2229

Associative AI Net Access

Government Node

Earthring, Sol System

2245 hours, GMT

“Gentlebeings, we have a problem. A big problem.”

Star Lord Garrick Rame looked out from his electronic viewpoint across the other representatives of the Associative Conclave. The stadium-sized chamber appeared to be filled with them, though only a handful were physically present. Most appeared within translucent pillars of light; some of them occupied luminous pillars that looked hazy or even murky with their native atmospheres. The Eulers, for instance, seemed to float within cylindrical columns of dark and nearly opaque water, while the one Veldik present was almost lost in the nearly impenetrable yellow mists of its sulfurous world. A few pillars were night black, their occupants nocturnal beings who shunned visible light.

“If you mean, Lord Rame, that the Xul group entity poses a threat to the Associative, the evidence suggests otherwise. We have no proof of these emomemonic manipulations you’ve described.”

The speaker was Lelan Valoc, a transfigured s-Human, her enlarged and elongated skull encased in the nano enhancement sheath hardwiring her into the Galactic Net. Her image addressed the Conclave from the speaker’s dais a few meters from Rame’s viewpoint.

In fact, each being linked into the Conclave saw the assembly from the same electronic viewpoint. The AI running the room simulation took care of projecting each image onto the speaker’s dais as that representative was recognized.

Overhead, within the vast dome of the room’s interior, a piercingly brilliant blue rose hung suspended in emptiness, backdrop to a multi-hued spiral disk of infalling starstuff. Rame had just completed his presentation, a virtual sim of the final moments of the OM-27 Eavesdropper Major Dion Williams, as it approached the Galactic Center. Together, the assembled Conclave had witnessed the doomed craft’s approach toward the Great Annihilator, had witnessed the eerie bending of light and beamed transmissions in a gravitational lensing effect, had watched the vessel shudder, flare, and disintegrate.

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