Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Twenty-One

1 July 2405

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

0235 hours, TFT

Gray was asleep when his AI switched back on.

He’d let himself drift off because there wasn’t anything else he could do. His AI would switch on, or it wouldn’t, Lieutenant Schiere would show up or not, the fleet would arrive with particle beams burning and fighters zorching or it wouldn’t . . . and since Gray couldn’t affect any of these things himself, he fell back on that most ancient of prerogatives of military men throughout the ages—the ability to grab some personal downtime whenever the opportunity presented itself.

But he became aware of links opening and in-head icons switching on and came fully awake in an instant. “You’re back!” Then an unpleasant thought occurred to him. “Is that . . . you?”

“This is your Starhawk Gödel 920 artificial intelligence linking through your implanted personal assistant,” the familiar voice said in his head.

“Where the hell have you been?” Gray’s own shout, ringing within the close confines of the fighter’s cockpit, startled him. He’d not realized that he’d been that stressed.

“I have not been anywhere,” the AI replied. “Unlike humans, my existence depends upon the presence or absence of superpositional quantum states within a crystalline matrix. I can be erased or copied, but not moved within the conventional meaning of the word.”

“You’ve been off-line,” Gray replied, “for eleven fucking hours! You must have been somewhere!”

The AI didn’t answer, and Gray realized that he was trying to argue with it as though it were human. It was extremely intelligent, but human it was not.

He took a deep breath and tried again. “Do you have any record of events during the past eleven hours?”

“Negative. We were experiencing a visual feed from outside sources, observing the Six Suns and some unusual artifacts in the sky.” There was a pause. “I cannot now regain that link.”

“Do you feel . . . any different?”

It was a stupid question, Gray knew, but he couldn’t think of any other way to phrase it. Artificially sentient systems didn’t feel, though they certainly could imitate human emotions if they needed to.

“I submit that I would not be aware of any difference in my own mentation,” the AI replied, “since stored memories of past mental states might have been altered.”

“So why would they switch you off for half a day, then just switch you on again?”

“Unknown. I believe it possible, however, that the intelligences running the local information systems essentially froze my overall memory and processor quantum states in order to avoid decoherence.”

Gray’s understanding of how AI computer systems worked was weak. After all, he used the things, had elements of quantum computer technology implanted in his central nervous system, but he didn’t need to know how they worked.

He knew, however, that his AI functioned through the manipulation of qubits—quantum bits. Where classical computers operated on binary bits—one or zero, on or off, yes or no—quantum computing used the superposition of those two states to define a far vaster range of possibilities. During his training, he’d been given a brief explanation of the mathematics, and been introduced to the concept of a Bloch sphere; if the binary bit possibilities were represented as the north and south poles on a sphere, the probability amplitudes of superposition included any point on the sphere’s entire surface.

The problem with using quantum states in computers, however, was that even the act of simply observing the system could change it, a process known as decoherence. His AI was suggesting that their captors had somehow isolated the computer system’s memory and processors, taking them off-line, in order to . . . do what?

“Run diagnostics,” Gray told the AI.

“I have been doing so. I should note, however, that if malicious changes have been made to my programming, I would likely also be programmed not to be aware of them.”

“I know. Do it anyway.”

A hard knot of fear uncurled within Gray’s gut, and his heart was pounding. As a Prim, he’d never particularly trusted modern computer technology. Kids growing up on the mainland—citizens—received their first cerebral implants within a year or two of being born, and had those systems upgraded when they started formal educational downloading, usually before age four. Gray hadn’t received his first implant until he’d been inducted into the Confederation Navy in his early twenties. Worse, he’d grown up on the Periphery hearing stories all his life about how the citizens on the mainland weren’t entirely human, how they were controlled by their implants, how the monolithic Authority could watch and record everything they did, integrating them into the global network as if they were cubits in a vast, planet-sized computer.

Scare stories. Propaganda, taking advantage of the natural human tendency to fear the unknown, to focus on us against them. When he’d joined the Navy, Gray had actually begun a kind of late blossoming. A whole new world had opened up to him through downloads from the global Net. The Authority didn’t really watch all of its citizens all of the time . . . or if it did, you were never aware of it. Hell, even if they did, the advantages of universal health monitoring, instant in-head communication with anyone else within the network, access to any and all information about anything and everything with a simple thoughtclick . . .

It sure as hell beat grubbing around in rooftop gardens above the watery canyons of Manhattan, hoarding precious caches of nano for food, clean water, and clothing, or hunting rats in the labyrinthine ruins of the TriBeCa Tower. People on the Periphery tended to romanticize the so-called free life of the Ruins, but what that freedom generally meant was freezing in the winter, fighting off raids by rival clans, and dying of any of a ridiculous number of diseases or injuries because you didn’t have the medinano to treat them.

As Gray thought about it, it wasn’t the technology that had bothered him for these past few years so much as the isolation. His fellow TriBeCans had been his family, one of the most powerful independent clans in the Ruins. They were all gone now—God knew where. Some time after he’d left, joining the Confederation Navy in a desperate bid to get medical help for his wife, they’d been wiped out by a rival gang—probably before the tidal wave that had scoured the Ruins during the Defense of Earth.

Since coming on board the America he’d made a few close friends—Ben Donovan . . . Rissa Schiff . . . Shay Ryan, his fellow Prim in the squadron. Most of his squadron mates had kept their distance, though, or actively closed ranks against him. Worse, he’d even started keeping his own distance from Schiffie and from Shay, just because of the rumors and the snide comments about Gray and his monogie perversions.

Gray pulled himself up short. What the hell was he doing? Somehow, his memories, memories he generally kept tightly locked down, had started rising as if of their own volition.

“I think,” he heard his AI say, “that they are interested in your thoughts on technology.”

“They’re working through you somehow, aren’t they?”

“Unknown. I cannot detect their presence. However, it is distinctly possible that they are using me to access your mind, your memories, through your personal assistant. If they did indeed copy me without creating decoherence of my quantum storage matrices, they would have had ample time to examine my structure and operational algorithms, plan and initiate desired changes, and even test those changes within a virtual environment.”

“But what do they want?” It was a scream, piercing in the fighter’s cramped cockpit.

Gray realized that he was terrified, on the verge of panic. He was trying desperately not to think, wondering if the Sh’daar could read his mind through his PA, wondering how he could block them, how he could fight back, wishing he could somehow claw the nanochelated microcircuitry out of his skull now, before they peered any deeper into his memories, into his soul.

“I believe they want to communicate,” the AI replied.

“So where is that virtual Agletsch? We were doing okay with that approach.”

“As you point out, Thedreh’schul is a virtual Agletsch, meaning that she is an illusion created by a complex AI system. I have the impression that we are dealing with a very large, very powerful AI rather than organic sentients. Clearly, this intelligence understands human language, thanks to contact with the Agletsch. What it does not understand are the myriad points of attitude, belief, conditioning, and worldview inherent in human existence—human psychology, if you will.” The AI broke off suddenly, then added, “Someone wishes to link with you.”

“Who? What?”

“Unknown.”

Gray took several deep breaths, forcing himself to at least a ragged imitation of calm. If the Sh’daar had wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t have gone through all of this.

“Put them . . . put them through,” Gray said.

And his cockpit faded away, replaced almost at once by a place that Gray knew very well. . . .

Admiral’s Quarters

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

0250 hours, TFT

Rank doth have privileges beyond the ken of the lower ranks. Koenig’s private quarters were adjacent to his office and constituted a small apartment suite with separate living and sleeping areas. Unlike the stacked bulkhead occutubes used by junior officers and enlisted men, his bed was thought-responsive and mutable, capable of shifting from flat and open to womblike and close, with adjustable heating, pressure, and surface texture.

Nevertheless, Koenig couldn’t sleep.

He could have linked into the bed’s electronics through his personal assistant and allowed it to adjust his brainwave patterns, lowering him into unconsciousness, but he didn’t like the muzzy and incoherent feeling left when the program brought him back out. If he was awakened in the middle of the night watch for an emergency, he needed to be instantly alert. The medtechs all assured him that electronically enhanced sleep induction—eesie as it was popularly known—was completely natural and should leave no unpleasant side effects, that any side effects he was feeling must be purely psychological.

Koenig didn’t buy it. He’d resorted to eesie a time or two over the years when he’d been afflicted by particularly severe insomnia, but he much preferred to rely on his organic brain’s rhythms and chemistries.

He was, he realized, lonely, nothing more.

He had his bed unfolded to full-open, and was staring up at the viewall which ran from the deck toward the foot of the bed up the curve of the bulkhead to the gently ascending ceiling over his head. He often liked displaying scenes of Earth there, but at the moment it was linked to the ship’s astrogational sensors, showing the stars outside the ship.

Ten and a half hours into the acceleration phase of the jump, America and her consorts had traveled some three and a half billion kilometers from the TRGA tunnel. Their speed now was 189,000 kilometers per hour, some 63 percent of c. At that tremendous velocity, the stars outside were only just beginning their relativity-induced crawl toward the starbow effect, and were so tightly clustered across the entire sky that it was impossible to note with certainty any distortion at all. Had his eyes been more sensitive, he knew, he might have noticed that the stars in the direction of their travel were glowing just a bit brighter and a bit bluer. Now that he knew what to look for against that stellar backdrop, he could see the Six Suns directly ahead.

God, he missed Karyn. Eight months since her death, and the hole inside, if anything, gaped worse than ever.

He resisted the temptation to talk to her simulation, his PA.

Koenig’s sleeping quarters were equipped with some high-technology innovations common enough on Earth, but rare within the Spartan confines of military warships in space. Ginnie was one, sealed at the moment inside a storage compartment in the bulkhead nearby.

Ginnie the Gynoid, Mark XII, was a commercial sex surrogate. She had a respectable and long-established pedigree; a German firm had first marketed Andy the Android as far back as the early twenty-first century, a humanoid robot so lifelike that she’d actually managed to leap the barrier of the uncanny valley. The more expensive models had actually simulated breathing and pulse rates, both of which increased if you stimulated certain portions of their anatomy.

Ginnie was far more sophisticated than her precursor of four centuries before. She could talk, for one thing, using a link to the local network to acquire an AI personality human enough to beat even the toughest Turing Test. She could move with human smoothness and precision, her eyes would follow yours and blink in a lifelike manner, and microactuators gave her an incredible range of expressions and emotional simulations. A nanomatrix within the gynoid’s skin and facial bones allowed it to sculpt itself into a good double of any specific person.

And there was more. Through virtual links, it was even possible for a human partner to teleoperate Ginnie from a distance. Koenig and Karyn had used a Ginnie several times when he’d been stationed on Mars, she’d been up at Mars Synchorbit, and their schedules had precluded their getting together physically. There were male analogues available as well.

Koenig had never much cared for the surrogate, even when he knew that Karyn was looking at him through those lifelike gynoid eyes and her face, that when he touched the thing’s body Karyn felt the touch within her virtual simulation tens of thousands of kilometers overhead. Even though his brain couldn’t tell the difference, he knew the thing wasn’t real.

Within a world culture that valued sexual creativity, pleasure, and enhancement, devices like the Ginnie surrogates were common, fully accepted, and reasonably affordable. Koenig, though, had felt an attraction to one woman, Karyn Mendelson, that was almost monogie in its focus and intensity. Karyn had teased him once about his being as bad as a Prim.

As lifelike as Ginnie was, it could not replace the woman he loved. Without her, sex was just . . . sex, a physical release that did nothing for the ache in his soul.

“Karyn?” he said.

“I’m here,” her voice replied.

But the PA was as much a surrogate, he knew, as the lifelike doll in the storage compartment. And he was still unhappy about the emotional outburst earlier, when he’d angrily cut off Karyn’s voice. It was possible that he was allowing the simulation to affect the way he thought, the way he acted, even the way he made decisions . . . and that was not good, not when the lives of fifty thousand people depended on him and his clear thinking.

“Karyn . . . I’d like to have you revert to your base programming.”

“You want me to delete the Mendelson persona?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Your command has been executed.” The voice was not exactly flat, now, but it was neutral in tone, androgynous, and nothing at all like Karyn.

Perhaps now, Koenig thought, he could get to sleep. . . .

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

0254 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray was back in the Manhattan Ruins.

Clearly, whoever or whatever was running this simulation was doing so by tapping into his personal memories, using both his ship’s AI and his own personal in-head hardware.

He was riding his old broom, the Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle he’d found years before, overlooked in a burned-out shop in Old Harlem. Three meters long, with fore- and aft grav-impeller blocks, they were scarce in the Periphery, but not unknown. The locals called them “gimps,” for “grav-impellers,” or “pogo sticks” or “brooms,” and they operated in a fashion much like his Starhawk, projecting tiny knots of fiercely twisted spacetime that levitated the vehicle in a gentle hover or whipped it ahead at a couple of hundred kph. Too small to mount a quantum power tap, it relied on micro-fusion cells for power, and required periodic rechargings from a generator or a power grid, both a bit hard to come by in the Periphery. Gray had often snuck up to Haworth or west across the Jersey Bay to Newark Shore to tap into the power grid. It was illegal, of course, but there’d been citizens willing to exchange some of their grid juice for a string of fresh fish or a box of antique relics scavenged from the ruins of Old New York.

At the moment, within his mind’s eye, he was hovering at a slow drift above the waters of the lower Hudson. The ancient Statue of Liberty rose from her submerged island below, one armed and vigilant; the top six meters of her right arm long ago broken off and fallen into the dark waters of the bay below. Gray often, before he’d joined the Navy, had come here, parked his broom on the Lady’s head, and stared across the water at the Manhattan Ruins, vine-covered cliffs rising from the waters that had submerged the original island to a depth of more than fifteen meters.

Gray no longer felt like this was home. He’d come to grips a long time ago with the fact that everyone he’d known here was gone. Including Angela, living now in Haworth with someone named Fred and his extended family.

Damn them all, damn them all. . . .

“You feel some extremely strong emotions concerning your culture,” a voice said behind him.

Gray twisted on his broom, looking back. Thedreh’schul was there, standing on what looked like a dull silver circular platter hovering in midair. “Okay, Agletsch!” he said, angry. “What the hell is going on?”

“As I told you at our last encounter, the Sh’daar are curious about you, and the fact that you appear to have been abandoned by the technological facet of your culture. The Sh’daar have been investigating your personal store of memories. There is much, however, that they do not understand. And they do not know how to ask.”

“So what’s their hang-up with technology?” Gray demanded.

“We see within your memories reference to something you call the Vinge Singularity, yes-no?”

Every man and woman in the fleet knew the term. When the Sh’daar, through their Agletsch clients, had demanded that Humankind cease development of certain key technologies in 2367, the assumption had been that they feared a runaway growth in human technological development.

“Okay,” Gray said. “Some human philosophers have been expecting us to hit the Singularity any day now for the past four centuries. But we haven’t hit it yet.”

“The Sh’daar fear the same.”

“They’re about to hit the Singularity?”

“They fear you are about to do so.”

“Okay . . . why? That has nothing to do with them.”

“It has everything to do with them. The Sh’daar . . . the precursors of the Sh’daar, I should say, reached their equivalent of the Vinge Singularity some time ago.”

Gray nodded. Months ago, in Sarnelli’s, a restaurant in Earth’s synchorbital complex near the Quito space elevator, Gray and some fellow pilots had shared drinks with Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde, the two Agletsch who’d later come along with the carrier battlegroup as alien liaisons. Both had imbibed just a little too much acetic acid that evening, and one had confided that the Sh’daar had transcended.

“We knew that,” Gray said. “But I don’t think we understand it, even yet. I was told once that the Sh’daar had transcended. But why would they want to keep anyone else from doing the same?”

“The ones you know as the Sh’daar,” Thedreh’schul said with grave deliberation, “are not the original Sh’daar. They are the ones who were left behind when the original Sh’daar . . . transcended. Transformed. Went away. Yes-no?”

The revelation struck Gray like a solid blow to the gut. “Wait! You’re saying the Sh’daar, the ones who started this damned war, they were left behind by the ones who went through the Singularity?”

Thedreh’schul gestured with two of her forelegs, taking in the sweep of the Manhat Ruins across the bay. “I believe this is what brought you to the Masters’ attention,” she said. “You, personally, I mean, yes-no? You are a member of a space-faring, technologically advanced species, and yet you lived for a time under primitive conditions, without access to that technology. And you seem to have resented this.”

“I guess you could say that, sure.” Gray pointed north, off to the left, where the gleaming, clean towers of Haworth and the Palisades Eudaimonium rose above the horizon, tiny at this distance, but imposing in the realization that they were over forty kilometers away. “Up there, those were the tech-haves. Down here, we were the have-nots.”

“But why? Surely it is the responsibility of any technic culture to care for, to provide for all of its members, yes-no?”

“Maybe. But there’s not a whole lot they can do if some of those members want nothing to do with them, is there?”

The Agletsch hesitated, her eye stalks twitching in a manner that suggested agitation, or perhaps confusion. “Are you saying that you and those with you did not want to partake of that culture? That you isolated yourselves deliberately?”

Gray took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He wasn’t entirely sure of his own reasoning here. The circumstances had been . . . difficult.

“Look, I don’t know all of the details,” he said. “I know that the global ocean levels were rising all the way back in the twenty-first century . . . uh, about four hundred years ago. You know what a ‘year’ is?”

“Of course. One revolution of your homeworld around your star. We would call it—” The Agletsch gave an unpleasant and unpronounceable burp from the mouth located at its stomach. “One of our years is the same as roughly eleven-twelfths of one of yours.”

Gray was startled when Thedreh’schul volunteered this. He’d not known how long an Agletsch year was, wasn’t sure that anything was known about the Agletsch homeworld. The spiders were galactic traders in information, and some information they’d simply kept out of reach by putting too high a price on it.

Interesting that Thedreh’schul wasn’t dickering on prices or exchange rates here.

“Okay, so four hundred years ago, ocean levels were rising. They built a wall across this stretch of water, over there.” He pointed south, to the ruin of the Verrazano Dam. “There was another dam over there, too, at a place called Throg’s Neck, on the East River. You can’t see it from here.

“It was an incredible feat of engineering . . . but I guess the technology wasn’t quite there yet, because there was still a lot of flooding. Lots of people began leaving the city and rebuilding to the north. Morningside Heights. Yonkers. The Palisades. Haworth. But things really got bad a little less than a century later, when the Chinese dropped an asteroid into the ocean.”

“Excuse me. The ‘Chinese’? Ah. Another branch of your species. You seem oddly . . . fragmented. Yes-no?”

“Fragmented. That’s us.” Gray wondered if he should be admitting this to the Agletsch . . . and to the Sh’daar who must be listening in somewhere behind her. He had no idea what they knew—or understood—about Humankind. Fractious, argumentative, divided, inconsistent, bigoted, jealous, covetous, warring.

How to show the good side of humanity?

For that matter, was there a good side, at least as the aliens would understand the term?

And that was just the problem. What was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ if you were a Sh’daar?

“The tidal wave,” he continued, “smashed through the dam and wrecked the city. Most of what was left of the population moved then. That was in the 2130s, a little less than two hundred years before we met you.”

“Your histories indicate that you entered a technological revolution at about that time.”

Gray nodded. “Nanotechnology—building extremely tiny machines, computers, robots—we’d been working on that since the twentieth century, I guess, but with the wars and the population problems and the sea levels rising and everything, things didn’t really start to take off until late in the twenty-second century. And that caused all sorts of other problems, like a global economic crash.”

“I do not understand? ‘Crash’?”

“Our economic system fell apart. With nanotechnology, you could feed a handful of dirt into a machine and extract a full-course meal . . . or a suit of clothes . . . or put in enough dirt and you could grow a house. That revolution completely changed the way we put a value on things.”

“I am not sure what you mean by ‘value.’ ”

“The Agletsch put a value on information when you trade, right? I give you information in exchange for other information that has the same value? But we have to agree on what that value is, how important it is to both you and to me.”

“That I understand. I am accessing your files . . . ah. I believe I now understand fully, though the reference to ‘money’ is unclear.”

“An agreed-upon medium of exchange. After the crash, we did things differently.”

Gray hoped the Agletsch didn’t ask any questions about that. In the Ruins, he’d grown up with barter, a system that had worked well enough in the low-tech milieu. Once he’d become a part of civilized society, transactions involved invisible electronic exchanges between his in-head circuitry and the local Net, and were rarely visible. He knew about money as a historical concept, a kind of marker for trade-item value, but he had no idea as to how it had worked.

“Anyway,” he continued, “not everyone moved to the mainland. Some people stayed behind in the Ruins.”

“Why? That seems . . . counterproductive.”

“I guess you could say so. But humans are stubborn . . . and what works for one doesn’t work for someone else. On the mainland, people were starting to get cerebral implants—nanotech computers grown inside their brains and central nervous systems. Some people didn’t like that idea.”

“But . . . why?” Thedreh’schul seemed genuinely puzzled. “It was clearly in the best interests of all members of your species to enjoy the benefits of this . . . this technological revolution, as you call it.”

“Some of us valued freedom more than gee-whiz high-tech.”

“ ‘Freedom,’ ” the Agletsch said. “As in ‘personal freedom’? The freedom for an individual to do what she desires, yes-no?”

“That’s right.”

“For the Agletsch, freedom is simply being what you are. We might say to follow our nature, yes-no? I do not see how this applies to you.”

“Our . . . nature,” Gray said, “is to pursue what we think is best for us, first, for our families and those close to us, second, and only then do we get around to social groups as big as the city we live in, or the country, or the planet. Sometimes there’s conflict between what’s good for us and what’s good for someone else. Sometimes we have to make compromises, trying to find something that’s the best possible for everyone concerned. And sometimes humans are just selfish bastards who don’t care about anything or anyone else. And that’s when we get into trouble.”

“So some of you refused to accept the new technology.”

“I suppose so. Mostly, they didn’t like being forced to fit into a larger system that they hadn’t chosen for themselves. Not everyone wanted a computer inside their brain, but the way things were going, pretty soon everyone needed that computer just to open automatic doors or to pay for dinner or to talk to a friend in another city. Those people stayed behind, living in the Ruins. They called us Prims. Primitives.”

“I . . . comprehend. The Sh’daar Masters seem to comprehend as well.”

“They do?”

“It seems that those whom you call Sh’daar are also what you would call Prims.”

Gray had not seen that one coming.