Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (16 page)

Of course, the other half of Sun Tzu’s famous dictum was just as important:
know yourself
.

Gray had the distinct feeling that humans would remain a mystery to other humans long after they understood perfectly what motivated the Turusch with their three-part consciousness . . . or the hulking, belligerent Nungiirtok.

But there was nothing more he could learn here. “Good luck, Doctor,” he told Hallowell. “Let me know if I can direct any assets, anything at all you might need, in your direction.”

“Yes, sir. And we’ll call you if we learn anything important.”

“Do that.”

Anything important.
Like what the Grdoch were getting out of an alliance with the Confederation. Surely they had enough in common with humans that they wouldn’t have offered their military help without an expectation of something in return.

But what was it?

His inner clock told him it was past 0930 hours. Time to compose an update for HQMILCOM Mars.

And maybe a personal report for the president as well . . .

Virtual Combat Center

Colorado Springs, USNA

1310 hours, CST

“New orders, people,” Major Aldridge told his team. They were gathered again in the VCC’s briefing center, deep within the heart of Cheyenne Mountain. “Or . . . I should say . . . an
addition
to our orders. Just what we all wanted.”

Several in the group groaned—those with hard-core military experience, and Shay Ashton was one of them. In any military operation, the key was
keep it simple
. . . and attempts by the brass to add on extra bells and whistles, extra objectives, extra constraints, or new complications were just about guaranteed to royally fuck things up.

“Yesterday,” Aldridge went on, “Carrier Battlegroup 40 won a significant battle at Enceladus. In the process, they captured a ship belonging to an unknown alien species . . . critters that call themselves the
Grdoch
. Apparently, Geneva has climbed into bed with these things, and is working with them, at least to some degree.”

In-head windows opened for each of them, and they looked at a vid clip of one of the aliens—bright red, covered with questing, pulsing tubes of a soft and fleshy material. Ashton had never seen anything at all like it.

“The carrier
America
will be bringing some of these things back for study,” Aldridge told them. “In the meantime, though, it’s important to find out what the hell the Confederation knows about them. While most of the information is probably highly classified, there’s a good likelihood that at least some has been circulating through Confederation IS networks. Some of their AIs may know about it. Some of their senators might have files. Their intelligence services certainly do.

“Our primary objective is the same: infiltrate Confederation computer networks and initiate a recombinant memetic attack. But I want two of you . . . Cabot . . . and you, Ashton, to volunteer for something a little extra.”

Never volunteer
was a standard piece of advice for military personnel that probably went back to Sargon the Great, but it was different when your CO pointed at you and said
you
. . . you just volunteered. It could have been worse, possibly. Lieutenant Commander Newton Cabot was a good guy . . . a fellow Navy Starhawk driver and a combat veteran.

He was also a fellow Prim—a Primitive from the periphery zone inland from the sunken wreck of Old Boston. A confirmed monogamist like many Prims, he’d encountered a lot of prejudice in the hidebound aristocracy of the Navy, and had eventually resigned his commission when he’d been passed over for promotion to full commander.

He was back in military harness again, however. And he was going to be her partner.

“You two,” Aldridge continued, “will be sniffing around for any hint of data on the Grdoch. If you find it, you’ll slap a siphon onto it and shoot it back here. You won’t have to worry about staying covert, or about deniability. We don’t care if Geneva knows we got the goods or not. Just get in, get the information, and get out.”

Of course, unspoken was the knowledge that if Ashton and Cabot managed to set off the alarm bells when they reached Geneva’s electronic safeguards, there would be a full load of ICEscream thundering down on their virtual avatars, and it would
not
be pleasant.

“The rest of you,” Aldridge said, “will plant your RM worms, then cover Cabot and Ashton as they complete their op and pull out.” He looked at the two of them in turn. “You will both carry RM worms as well, of course, and place them wherever you think they might do the most good. Questions?”

There was one, from Cabot. “If the RM attack works, Major,” he said, “we’ll just be able to
ask
them for that information, won’t we?”

“If it works, sure,” Aldridge replied. “And keep in mind that we’re dealing with an entire culture and government ideology here. Even if the RM insertion works perfectly, it might be months before we see any changes. Changing a government’s belief set takes time . . . and time is something we’re a little short of right at the moment.”

The earliest, most primitive forms of recombinant memetics had been simple military or nationalist propaganda, an ancient science developed more fully in the late twentieth century as military psyops programs. Do you need to unite your population against an enemy? Do you need to convince an enemy population that they should change sides and support you? Nothing simpler. You bombard the target audience with words, music, images, and ideas designed to nudge them around to your way of thinking.

Four centuries before, that sort of thing had been all hit or miss. With enough data, however, plus the computational power and a delicate touch, it was possible to subvert entire populations. Global Net sampling and data mining, the manipulation of databases, and the precise, electronic subversion of entertainment and news media to introduce new memes to a social equation . . . some argued that these now were the most fundamental weapons in the human arsenal.

As new memes and new memeplexes took root and grew, they could change old and well-established memeplexes. By carefully balancing crafted meme against meme, a good RM team could convince a target audience that left was right, right was wrong, and blue was green.

At least, that was the claim. Ashton hadn’t seen any evidence of major memetic rewrites . . . not since the social engineering that had led to the White Covenant in the late 2100s.

The trouble was that this level of social manipulation took
time
, as well as incredible computing power and direct access to the target’s information systems. RM manipulation could not promise a rapid end to the war.

And if the Confederation was already on the lookout for an RM penetration, they might have counter-memetics ready to de-fang any attempted ideological assault—might even have offensive memes ready for an attack of their own.

“Other questions?” Aldridge asked. There were none. He nodded. “Good. H-hour has been set for 2030 hours this evening . . . that will be 0230 Geneva time, the middle of the night for them.

“Let’s just see if we can wake the bastards up out of a sound sleep.”

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto,

United States of North America

1425 hours, EST

“Tonight?” Koenig asked.

“That’s right, sir,” Admiral Armitage said. “We’re calling it Operation Luther.”

“
Martin
Luther?”

Armitage looked uncomfortable. “That’s right, sir. We’re starting a new religious movement, after all.”

They were in the Presidential Command Post’s Operations Center, deep beneath the York Civic Plaza in downtown Toronto, the emergency USNA presidential headquarters since the nano-D annihilation of the city of Columbus. Admiral Eugene Armitage was head of the USNA Joint Chiefs of Staff. With him were Phillip Caldwell, the National Security Council director; Secretary of Defense Lawrence Vandenberg; Dr. Mara Delmonico, the head of the Department of Cybersecurity; Thomas McFarlane, Director of Central Intelligence; and Dr. Horace Lee, an expert in Recombinant Memetics; plus his Chief of Staff, Marcus Whitney, and a small army of other aides, assistants, and human secretaries. The room, with its large central conference table, was almost claustrophobically crowded.

“I still find this whole idea . . . unlikely in the extreme,” Vandenberg said. His tone of voice sounded like he found the operation
distasteful
rather than unrealistic.

Vandenberg and Caldwell both had opposed the RM program almost from the start. Both men had strong personal religious beliefs, Koenig knew. Were they resisting Operation Luther because of the idea of introducing a new—and therefore false—religion to an unsuspecting planet? Or was it that they technically would be violating the White Covenant?

“Mr. President, we have absolutely no proof that something on this scale is going to work,” Caldwell said. “A religion,
any
religion, is an extremely powerful memeplex. Memeplexes like that are extremely resilient . . . and they have built-in defenses. Very strong defenses.”

“Dr. Lee?” Koenig said. He’d not met the diminutive RM expert before, but knew him by reputation. His e-file listed him as a memetics consultant on Delmonico’s staff, but he also held a position as senior chair of the memetics program at the University of Chicago. “What do you have to say about it?”

“Well, an entrenched memeplex does have defenses,” Lee said. “One of the defining characteristics of a memeplex, of an association of interrelated memes or sociocultural ideas, is the idea that—like genes—memes evolve through natural selection, and do so in order to protect and strengthen themselves from outside pressures. Successful memes became extremely stable, and resist any attempts to change them.”

“I don’t understand how a meme can protect itself,” Koenig said. “A meme is just . . . an idea, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s an idea, Mr. President, to be sure. But human nature makes it more. A
lot
more.

“Take the idea that you
must
convert others to your religion out of duty or altruism. That injunction has long been one meme within the larger memeplex of certain religions—most notably radical Islam and some of the noisier fundamentalist sects within Christianity. The entire memeplex works together to protect individual memes within the system.

“For example, a meme that values
faith
over
reason
serves to protect the overall memeplex from attack by societal or cultural forces outside of that belief set. So does the meme stating that this particular faith is the
only
way to reach heaven. People infected by those memes tend to close ranks against any and all others,
outsiders
, who are not infected by those memes. Arguments based on reason or science are automatically rejected since they don’t come from faith. Suggestions that other faiths might be acceptable to God are rejected because clearly
my
interpretation of the Bible or the Quran or the Book of Mormon is right. If it’s not,
then
I am wrong
.

“And being wrong is an unthinkable paradox, one leaving the disappointed believer vulnerable and adrift. He’ll cling to the original memeplex, and all of the internally consistent internal memes, at all costs, against all arguments, against all reason, even, rather than admit he was wrong.”

“I see. Thank you.” Koenig reflected that in some ways, the White Covenant had sidestepped such issues by making any discussion or comparison of religions wrong . . . or, at the very least, an unconscionably bad breach of manners. Don’t attack another’s religious faith. Don’t try to convert him. Don’t attack him because he doesn’t believe what
you
believe. No matter what he believes in, he has an absolute and unalienable right to that belief . . . so long as he doesn’t try to harm others. For the majority of humans on the planet, the White Covenant had pushed religion into the background . . . something you believed or did but which you did
not
discuss with others not of your faith.

But even after more than three centuries of enforcing a truce among competing religious memes, attacking a religion head-on was still almost unthinkably difficult. Lee was claiming that people who were immersed within their religion, no matter what it was, were shielded by that religion’s defensive memes, defenses that rendered true believers blind to logical fallacies, to mistaken assumptions, to bad research or impossible history, to
any
argument that denied or even questioned the rationality or the reality of that faith.

What they were going to try to do with Operation Luther, however, wasn’t quite as head-on direct as attacking another religion. Instead, Konstantin had crafted a spiritual-humanistic movement called, variously,
lumière des étoiles
or
Sternenlicht
. . . in English, “Starlight.”

Koenig still wondered if Konstantin understood humans or the way they thought well enough to create what amounted to a new religion, but the Starlight Movement was going to cause a stir, of that much he was certain.

Assuming, of course, that Starlight worms could be planted within the Pan-European AI networks in the first place.

“I don’t think it will work, Mr. President,” Caldwell said. “People’s beliefs . . . they’re just too strong to be taken apart overnight by advertising. This Starlight movement of Konstantin’s is going to be squelched from the very beginning.”

“Do you agree, Dr. Lee?”

The man shrugged. “Recombinant memetics is nowhere even remotely close to being an exact science, Mr. President. Predictions are impossible. But, given time, and good placement, there’s a chance. . . .”

“It’s not perfect, Phil,” Koenig said after a long moment, replying to Caldwell’s blunt statement. “We don’t know if it will work. We
can’t
. But it’s the best weapon we have right now to reach inside the Confed government and grab them where it hurts.