Todd Drashner

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
–Hamlet, William Shakespeare
(Pre-Spaceflight Old Earth)

Settled firmly into his seat on the bridge of a warship about to launch, Dayyid Mok Noon found himself thinking back to recent events.

It had been only two nights ago when he and Magda had walked along the seawall, the lights of the city towers reflecting across the water and illuminating the night around them. Here and there other couples and triples walked, each lost in their thoughts or in their partners. He and Magda had just as studiously worked to have attention only for each other. This night, only days away from Launch, seemed one for quiet closeness, not laughter or loud conversation; a time to treasure one’s memories or the presence of your loved ones. Because in a few days both might be gone.

Suddenly Magda had turned to him and pressed close, hiding her face in his shoulder.

“Tell me you’re going to be ok,” she whispered. “Tell me that when you go to the Center tomorrow that it’ll still be you when they’re done.”

“Of course it will still be me.” He had replied. “The scan process is completely non-destructive. I’ll go in, lie down on a big soft bed for a few hours and then be out in time for lunch. After that, it’ll be up to him. I mean them.”

“And what about them?” Magda asked, pulling back a little and looking up into his eyes. “Let’s say this whole crazy scheme of the Teacher’s works. What happens after? What do we do afterward? What do we do with these…people?”

“I don’t know, Mia,” he murmured, pulling her close again. “I just don’t know. But I do know that if we don’t do this, we won’t have an afterward to worry about.”

And in the sky above a new star burned with a cold, hard light.

**********

Settled firmly into his seat on the bridge of a warship about to launch, Dayyid Mok Noon found himself thinking back to how it all began.

Even at its best, Shasa could only have been described as a backwater world. And Shasan civilization liked it that way. Their single inhabited planet in an otherwise unremarkable system was home to a hundred and fifty million near-baseline souls. No transapients occupied their quiet system, no wormhole gates, not even the comm-gauge variety, linked it to the galaxy at large. A starship might visit but once a century and the nearest beam-rider station was 70 light-years away. There was the Known Net link, of course, orbiting 100 AUs above the plane of the ecliptic and continually taking in the transmitted data of a billion worlds, but that was a minor consideration.

Shasa had successfully resisted the temptations of the wider galactic culture for centuries. The occasional bit of useful science or technological innovation might be culled from the flood for the betterment of all, but the more radical or disruptive features of the outside world were something to be avoided and left to sink into the obscurity of the Net archives. No Shasan would think of altering themselves in the manner of the Tweaks or Splices who swarmed across the rest of Terragens civilization. No Shasan would ever willingly upload themselves into the sterile immortality of virtual worlds and cybernetic bodies. And although bots and nanotech, gengineering and AI were an everyday part of Shasan life, all such technologies were strictly limited to levels that could only ever enhance, never dominate, the Shasan people and their comfortable existence.

The Screamer changed all that.

On the fifth day of Jeda, the month of celebration, a new star flared in the Shasan sky. For three days it shone and for three days instruments all over the system turned toward what at first was taken to be an odd new kind of supernova. However, that first impression was proven wrong within an hour. The glaring pinpoint of light was no supernova. It was monochromatic, being only and entirely a single shade of purest blue. It was coherent, its light waves marching in lockstep like soldiers on an ancient drill field. And it was only visible from Shasa and its immediate orbital environs. In short it was a laser. A laser of incredible power locked onto the orbit of Shasa around its sun and bathing that orbit, and of course the planet itself, in light. After these revelations, the final bit of data delivered by the observation AIs probably shouldn’t have come as any great surprise but it had just the same. The laser light illuminating Shasa was not simply a bolt of raw energy, but a modulated beam transmitting terabytes of data per second and repeating itself approximately once per minute. Someone, it seemed, had something to say to the Shasan people and was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to make their message heard.

For all their proud independence from galactic civilization, Shasa’s leadership was not above hedging their bets. The continuous stream of incoming data from the Known Net might be mostly ignored, or even restricted, but it was never destroyed. All information received was archived in case of future need. Faced with a situation that even their best advance planning simulations had never anticipated, Shasa’s ruling council had turned to that vast storehouse of data. And they had not been disappointed. Less than ten seconds after presenting the contents of the signal to the archive AIs, a translation had been produced. And with it terror.

**********
Settled firmly into his seat on the bridge of a warship about to launch, Dayyid Mok Noon (version 3.0) found himself thinking back to everything they had learned.

The Screamer’s opening message employed a fairly standard galactic transmission protocol and was devastatingly straightforward. War raged in the heavens. Even the transapients were threatened. Perhaps even the archai, god-like AI rulers of millions of worlds, had reason to fear. The foe was more dangerous, clever, and powerful than any that had come before. It absorbed individuals, worlds, entire civilizations into itself and destroyed anything it could not consume. It was implacable and utterly unrelenting, never accepting any attempt at negotiation or communication except to further its own expansion. It was called the Amalgamation.

Shasa knew about the Amalgamation and the war that was being fought against it by the so-called Amalgamation Containment Initiative, a great alliance of many civilizations, in a distant sort of way. The news from the stars was as constant as everything else coming across the Known Net and largely just as ignored. What did the Shasan people know or care of great battles fought tens or hundreds of light-years away and struggles that would test the strength of a god? Certainly, in the last century or so the conflict had seemed to be moving closer to Shasan space, but surely that was a temporary aberration and no cause for real concern. Or so the thinking had been. Thinking that was now proven dangerously wrong.

Far across the stars a great battle had been fought. Two fleets had met and unleashed massive forces, each striving to wipe the other from existence. Whole worlds had burned in the fires of that struggle and an entire solar system had died. In the end, one of the fleets, the Amalgamation fleet, had broken and fled, attempting to retreat in a thousand directions at once. This could not be allowed.

Fearful that any of their enemy might survive to start the conflict anew; the Initiative had split its forces and sent them flying in pursuit, each striving to overtake and destroy a different element of the Amalgamation fleet before it had a chance to take root in some new location. Each pursuing ship or sub-fleet had accelerated to the limits of its engines, boosting up to nearly the speed of light as quickly as possible. Only then had the error been discovered.

In their haste to chase down the enemy that was escaping, they had been insufficiently thorough in confirming that they were leaving only the dead of their enemy behind. Some time after the Initiative ships had left the scene of battle, a lone Amalgamation vessel, damaged, perhaps even reconstituted from the remnants of several others, had boosted away and set its course toward Shasa’s star. But for a minor bit of cosmic chance it might have traveled all the way there undiscovered. However, during its covert flight the fleeing ship had run afoul of a drifting piece of random cosmic debris, a fragment of a comet or Kuiper body perhaps, and been forced to redirect its drive systems at emergency thrust to avoid a collision. In the process it had illuminated one of the Initiative’s combat squadrons as it strove to catch up to several Amalgamation warships. And the forces of civilization found themselves in a quandary.

The fleeing ships of the enemy were in full retreat but still formidable. No ship, even one with the minor level of firepower required to eliminate a single damaged straggler, could be spared. Worse, even if the Initiative could have diverted its resources to backtracking and correcting its error there was no time. They were too far away and moving too fast and the enemy had made too much progress toward its goal. By the time any of their forces could effect the necessary maneuvers to intercept the lone ship it would have arrived in Shasa’s solar system and had sufficient time to make repairs, replicate itself any number of times and, almost as an afterthought, subsume all of Shasan civilization into itself. The Initiative forces might arrive to find all the gains they had made in battle undone by a single survivor, or worse that their error had opened the door for the enemy to end up even stronger than before. The situation was intolerable!

Fortunately, the squadron was nothing if not inventive. Among its contingent were numerous transapient minds, including minds of the Second Singularity. Vast intellects of superhuman intelligence, they now turned their attention to snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. They inventoried the resources available to them, discussed and considered their options, and developed a course of action. From their efforts the Screamer was born.

Synchronizing the laser weapons of hundreds of vessels they sent a signal across the blackness. Contained within it were plans, strategies, logistics programs, and an AI control matrix the people of Shasa would come to call the Teacher. The forces of the Containment Initiative might not be able to reach Shasa in time to aid them in their hour of need. But their knowledge and their agents were not so limited.

**********
Settled firmly into his seat on the bridge of a warship about to launch, Dayyid Mok Noon (version 4.0) found himself thinking back to everything they had done to reach this moment.

Although it freely admitted that it was not a fully sophont being but rather just a very sophisticated tool, the Teacher had proven to be tremendously helpful. Loaded into Shasa’s Known Net archive the Teacher immediately began accessing designs for a host of devices to be used in the Shasan defense. Negotiating with the Known Net receiver itself, it engineered the release of a small number of magnetic monopoles from the node’s emergency power core. At a stroke, Shasa found itself in possession of the seeds of mass conversion technology, something that had been beyond the grasp of the colony since its founding a thousand years before. Speaking first with Shasa’s leaders and then with the Shasan people directly, it brought advice, wisdom, and, perhaps most importantly, hope where there might otherwise have been none.

By the time the Screamer’s signal was flooding Shasan receivers the Amalgamation vessel was almost upon them. They had barely a year before it would begin deceleration and only a month after that before it would approach their world with the intent of consuming both it and them to help fuel its rebirth. Time enough to do what must be done, but only just. And being so constrained by time there was a need for…sacrifices.

As the nanofacs and robot builders swarmed across the surface of Shasa and its moons, building monopole factories and growing warships, the people of Shasa were forced to make a painful choice. Ever since it’s founding their civilization had eschewed the technology of uploading. Creating a cybernetic copy of a beings mind for the purpose of supposedly living on after the death of the original, or worse, deliberately replacing ones brain with a computronium equivalent was anathema to them.

“It’s a joke!” Dayyid himself had once said at a party held only a few years before the Screamer’s light shone down upon them. “It’s a sick joke, and not even a slightly funny one. There’s no way you can make me believe that some kludge made out of software is really me. Or really even my pet. It’s not that software can’t be alive. Everybody knows ais are alive. But a copy being functionally the same as the original? Just because they share all the same information? Not a chance! The whole idea’s ridiculous”

That had been his position then and the vast majority of Shasa’s population would have readily agreed with him. But time, and imminent destruction, can force many changes.

The problem, on the face of it, was really quite simple. The Teacher, for all its impressive capabilities, was not a combat AI. The level of skill and knowledge necessary for such tasks, especially when facing a foe of the power of the Amalgamation, was beyond it. Nor could a combat AI be sent from the Initiative fleet. There was not sufficient bandwidth available in the Screamer to carry a mind of the necessary sophistication. Neither could the records of the Known Net help them in this instance. Combat specialized AIs, particularly combat specialized AIs able to face a threat of the scale of the Amalgamation were one of the few things not readily available in that vast repository of knowledge. That left only one alternative.

The people of Shasa would be tested, using programs carried by the Teacher. Those of the proper psychological makeup, deemed able to handle the stress of existing as uploaded intelligences sent into a war, would first have their minds nondestructively scanned and then copied into computronium substrates built from Known Net designs. Then they would be injected into a series of high-speed virtual training environments that would prepare them for combat against the approaching Amalgamation vessel. Finally their mind-states, trained at a hundred times human normal rates to fit the education of years into a few weeks, would be copied multiple times and loaded into solid-state warships built from designs also brought by the Teacher.

Under any other circumstances, the plan would have been condemned and rejected out of hand. But these were not any other circumstances.

**********
Settled firmly into his seat on the bridge of a warship about to launch, Dayyid Mok Noon checked environmental systems status one more time and looked around at the people he was about to go into battle with. Yanna was checking intership comms again, a little frown of concentration creasing her face, and Tak was focused on the lasers, making sure that the phased array optics were properly calibrated.

Around them the ship hummed with activity (although the actual hum was really just a bit of virtual simulation added for verisimilitude). Bots and drones swarmed both inside and out, checking for flaws or malfunctions, so far without success. Sensors on the ships, in the surrounding launch complex, and spreading for kilometers around across the landscape reported on everything from ships temperature and power consumption, to launch laser status, to the weather. Here, and at the ninety-nine other launch complexes scattered across the globe, events were moving toward a climax.

Each launch point for the newly created Shasan Defense Force contained ten launch cradles, each containing a solid-state warship. The ships themselves were both impressive and unprepossessing. Each was a gleaming, streamlined cone a hundred meters long. Scattered around the planet, their hulls glittered in sunlight or moonlight, dawn, noon, or dusk. They were made of diamondoid and sapphiroid, ceramic and buckyfiber. Locked into their launch cradles and preparing to fly upward through kilometers of atmosphere they were mostly featureless now, their various secondary systems hidden away behind protective hatches. All that would change once the ships reached space, but that time was not quite yet.

The enemy had been decelerating toward them for a month now, its drive exhaust shining like a new star in the night sky. Within a few hours that light would go out and then the enemy would be almost upon them. The time to act was now.

The final run-up began. The last ports and access panels were closed and sealed, bots and drones scurried and flew away, and a countdown began. When it reached zero, immense superconducting storage rings began dumping their power into the great laser arrays arranged around the launch site. A moment later the conversion reactors cut in and added their output to the flow of energy being converted into light.

Underneath each vessel, solid fuel blocks and shaped combustion chambers absorbed each shot of laser fire and flashed into plasma. The resulting roar would have shattered the eardrums of any human within a kilometer. Driven upward by the superheated exhaust, each ship rose skyward at an acceleration that would have crushed flesh and blood crewmembers had any been aboard. Behind them, the lasers continued to fire at hundreds of times per second, each burst pushing the ships higher and creating a blinding pillar of argent light. Thunder, driven to an almost continuous bone-shattering hum by the pulsing brilliance, rolled across each launch point. The ships rose, faster and faster. Within minutes each achieved escape velocity and then flashed into space.

As it settled into orbit, each ship took a moment to check its condition and status and to establish communication with the vessels around it. In short order a network formed, riding on encrypted laser pulses and welding the fleet into a coordinated whole. Fusion drive cores powered up, radiator arrays deployed, and like a vast flock of crystalline birds, the ships oriented on the star of the approaching foe and boosted into the night.

*****

More about the author, Todd Drasher, here