Semper Human (9 page)

“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 ‘va
voob
!' 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 panurban 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
!…”

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 en
hancement 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.

The echoes of Lieutenant Vrellit's shrill last words, broadcast over the vessel's QCC unit, still hung in the air of the chamber.

“Get! Them! Out! Of! My! Mind!…”

If the AI-crafted sim wasn't proof, what was?

“My Lord, if there
is
a threat, as suggested by our simulations,” Rame replied slowly, “we, this Conclave and the many cultures it represents, would be at direct and terrible risk. The Xul would have access to our memories, and to the Metamind itself. They might even be able to influence our deliberations without our knowing it. We
must
improve our electronic security…and we must directly address the Xul threat.”

“And I say the threat is overstated,” Valoc replied. “One ship approaching a black hole at the Galactic Core destroyed? There's no indication that the Xul caused this. We might simply be seeing the accidental failure of that ship's radiation shielding within an unforgiving environment.”

“If that were all we were dealing with, my Lord,” Rame
said carefully, “I might agree with you. But we've had evidence for centuries that the Xul have been learning how to infiltrate our electronic networks.”

“And there has never been the slightest indication that our security has been compromised,” Valoc replied, dismissive. “Even if it had been, the internal protective measures already in place are more than adequate. These…these rumors of Xul ghosts within our e-systems have persisted for centuries, now. Specters. Chimeras. Surely, if they were able to reach us, they would have done more to us by now than give rise to idiot rumor and ghost stories!”

“And what,” Rame said, “if this rising tide of sociocultural disturbances
is
due to Xul interference, Xul contamination, Xul
attacks
through our own electronic nets? Maybe all we've seen so far have been reconnaissance probes as they've tested our systems, our defenses. Maybe it's taken them this long to learn enough about us to be able to attack us in this way! If there's even the slightest chance they are loose within the Galactic Net…Lords of the Conclave,
can we afford to take that chance?
”

Rame felt an inner tug, and a voice whispered at the back of his mind that another lord had been recognized. The new speaker materialized, apparently suspended in emptiness between the flower of the Core Detonation and the crowd below. It was a G'fellet, hunched and massive, its body encased in a chitinous, segmented shell.

“The problem-difficulty,” it said, its two-throated voices giving an odd, mismatched echo to the words as the Conclaves translators attempted to keep up with the doubled and not-quite-synchronous streams of thought, “lies-rests with the lower ranks-the
nadhre
. Quell-end the rising-disobedience, and the problem-difficulty is-will be solved.”

As it spoke, Rame accessed a background channel, checking the Conclave library for data on the new speaker. He thought he remembered this one, but it was always best to be certain of your data.

Yes. He'd remembered correctly. The G'fel, from most
human perspectives, were obsessed with hierarchy and the chain of command.
Nadhre
was one of their words for the lower castes within their culture—slaves, cleaners, social guardians, and both male sexes of their species. G'fellet—a neuter subspecies bred to facilitate communications—tended toward a somewhat aristocratic detachment, an attitude Rame thought of as “it's not
my
problem.” Working productively with the hard-shelled xenomalacostracans—they physically resembled an uncomfortable mix of land crab and shrimp—could be an adventure at times.

“These reported disturbances,” Rame said, “are the symptoms, my Lord. Not the disease.”

Another figure replaced the G'fellet—this one the icon for a t-Human community representative identified as Radather. With no physical form to display, it used an avatar, an image of a young man with green-slit eyes, cat's ears, and a tail. “The warriors Lord Rame called for should be sufficient,” the uploaded personality said, “
if
their reputation is to be believed.”

“How long,” Lord Valoc asked, “before these human Marines arrive?”

“The Globe Marines have been revived, Lord Valoc,”
a resonant voice said. The speaker, known only as the First Associate, was an AI moderator resident within the government Net. Without either a physical avatar or an electronic icon, it was invisible, but its presence could be felt by all linked into the system, huge, deep, powerful, and all but omniscient.
“Against my best judgment, but they have been revived. I still fail to see what a handful of ancients can do against this new threat.”

“We are not yet in agreement that there
is
a major threat,” Valoc pointed out. “A threat, yes. But the Galaxy is large, the Associative stable. I see no possibility of these…attacks, if that is what they are, being more than a nuisance.”

“We would prefer to see hard proof that these phenomenon are real, and that they in fact constitute a threat,” another delegate put in, a paraholothurid from a world deep
within the Sagittarian star clouds in toward the Galactic Core. The taxonomical name indicated that the being's morphology in some ways was similar to that of a terrestrial sea cucumber, though in fact it was heavily scaled, giving it the appearance of a three-meter-long pine cone with a single red eye glaring from within a nest of slender, branching manipulators at the tip. They lived in seaside mounds of their own excrement, communicated through bursts of radio noise, and were arrogant egoists, certain of their privileged place in the cosmos. Humans knew them as Cynthiads, presumably after the person who'd first contacted them.

“And just what
would
you accept as a threat?” Rame asked.

The being hesitated as though thinking about the question, though it was of course impossible to read feeling or intent into those alien features.

“The Master's Eye is ever upon us,” it said after a moment, “and in fact we have nothing to fear from any of His servants. There is always the possibility of misunderstanding or accident, but the Master will keep us alive for His pleasure.”

Which didn't quite answer the question.

There was no personal name attached to the image; like the Vulcans and numerous other species, Cynthiads either had no concept of names for individuals, or their personal identifiers were meaningless to outsiders. A screech of broad-spectrum radio static was tough to translate into syllables that could be reproduced by the human voice. Even translating the general meaning of their speech presented unusual problems, simply because of the way they saw Reality.

Another being—an amphibious juvenile N'mah—was speaking now, but Rame was no longer paying attention. His essistant would catch anything of which he needed to be aware and bring it to his attention later. For the moment, he was interested in the Cynthiads, and in the problems of mutual understanding.

According to their entry in the Conclave library, their
view of the night sky, for half of each long, long year, looked Coreward into a flattened, dust-mottled mass of stars and nebulae that, ages ago, their ancestors had interpreted as the principle sensory organ of their God. The Cynthiads viewed themselves as the slaves of an ever-watching God, and for thousands of years had been broadcasting their version of the Gospel out into the Galaxy. They'd been extremely fortunate that the Xul had never zeroed in on those transmissions. Their homeworld was the tide-stressed moon of a superjovian gas giant well outside of their star's habitable zone, and had, therefore, been repeatedly overlooked by searching Xul hunterships.

Cynthiads took this as yet another sign of divine providence; Rame had decided that they were in for a rude shock when the Core Detonation reached their system, perhaps eight thousand years from now. The Cynthiads had an annoying tendency to twist the words and realities of other species into bizarre caricatures of what others accepted as fact, and it was always a challenge to follow their lines of thought.

And that, Rame thought, was the big difficulty in all interspecies communication within the Associative Conclave. With a few notable exceptions, group minds like the Havod and hive species like the Saarin Queen, no two members of a single species thought in precisely the same way, or saw their surroundings in exactly the same way. When you brought together the individual representatives of some thousands of mutually alien species, not even the best translation AIs could bridge the gap between one view of the cosmos and the next. Humans with their narrow sensory range and monkey curiosity; placid, gas-giant balloonists suspended above bottomless and storm-wracked gulfs; knots of organized plasmas riding the magnetic loops of stellar coronae; tentacled, mathematically oriented Eulers lurking within the eternal night of the benthic abyss; scaly, invertebrate Cynthiads squirming in their own shit…true understanding between such mutually alien beings demanded far more than simple translation. The general meanings of concepts expressed through separate
languages might come across more or less precisely…but the worldviews of the creatures expressing them could be so bizarrely shifted in meaning that they made no sense to others whatsoever.

In most cases, difficulties in communication could be ignored. The Associative was designed to be gently inclusive; membership was completely voluntary, and there was little in the way of government in the traditional sense. The Conclave itself existed for the most part strictly as an advisory group on matters of interspecies trade, information exchange, and defense. The wildly differing ecologies, biochemistries, and cultural preferences of the member races guaranteed that no one species would try to dominate the others.

At least, that had been the idea behind the Associative in the eight centuries of its existence so far. None of the member races really cared about the worlds of other species; the benefits of trade and data exchange far outweighed any possible profit arising from invasion, conquest, or coercion.

But the Xul presented the Galactic community with a special challenge. Hardwired to see any sentience other than itself as a threat, crafted by evolutionary imperatives to eliminate anything perceived as a threat, the Xul were uninterested in trade or data;
their
worldview demanded xenocide on a galactic scale, which to human sensibilities was about as serious a threat as it was possible to imagine.

Unfortunately, not all members of the Associative could see it that way.

The N'mah had finished speaking, and Rame's essistant gave him a quick, catch-up synopsis. The N'mah had survived for almost ten thousand years as rats in the walls, occupying the internal structures of several stargates, escaping the Xul's notice by giving up star travel and much of their once highly advanced technology. The answer, the N'mah representative had just suggested, was simply to lie low, adopt a low technological profile, and wait for the Xul threat, if any, to pass.

Rame shook his head. For humans, that would mean giving up their implants, which appeared to be how the Xul were
transmitting their emomemes. And that simply was not a viable option for the far-flung worlds of Humankind.

Through his personal essistant, Rame tried to judge the overall mood of the Conclave. So far, three other species had sided with the human representatives calling for direct action. Fifteen had come out in opposition, including both the s-Human and t-Human reps, and the AI serving as the Conclave's moderator, all of them insisting either that there was no threat, or that the threat was a minor one, a
nuisance
as Valoc had called it.

There were seven hundred eighteen other representatives currently linked in to the Conclave. None of them had expressed any opinion yet, one way or the other.