Netlink (28 page)

Then, close on the heels of that unpleasant revelation, the shock of what he’d glimpsed on the far side of the Device had nearly broken him. Certainly, it had changed him.

But changed him into what?

Holding Dev close in her mind, then, she relived those next few horrible moments. She remembered with him the copy’s passage through the Device, and on the other side she saw the Galactic Core, vast beyond human comprehension, centered by black holes and their radiation-screaming rings of accreted star stuff. She saw the encircling walls of molecular clouds, saw the stars crowded together in all directions, like angelic hosts in glory, saw a vast cavern, a bubble at the Galaxy’s heart, swept clean of gas and dust by the gravitational singularities there.

And, close by, she saw the enigmatic Ring, astonishing, twenty astronomical units across, enclosing the unrelenting chaos of the Great Annihilator. In another moment, she felt the attack from behind, was there as the Dev-copy fought its brief, hopeless battle.

She saw the damaged enemy ship looming close…

…
THE WEB IS EVERYTHING THAT IS, THAT EVER WAS, THAT EVER WILL BE, A COSMOS MOLDED TO A SINGLE PURPOSE, AND THE PURPOSE IS THE CONTINUATION OF THE WEB.

Several times, Katya had been immersed in the strangeness of Naga thought. This was like that, eerily so… and yet she could sense a vast, latent power and sheer confidence behind the mental voice that she had never experienced in the Naga. An untamed planetary Naga was powerful, yes… but compared to the depth and breadth and scope of the intelligence she sensed here, the Naga were insignificant.

As were humans.

CONFUSION.LACK OF INTEGRATION. PART OF THE WEB HAS REFUSED DIRECTION AND HAS BECOME DANGEROUS. INTEGRATE. REINTEGRATE. CORRECTION. WEB CALL HAS BECOME CORRUPTED. NEGATIVE-INTEGRATE. DESTROY. DESTROY. ELIMINATE NONRESPONSIVE AND NONINTEGRATIVE WEB CELLS IMPERATIVEIMPERATIVEIMPERATIVE.

To the blurred impressions of her own mind mingled with Dev’s mingled with the copy’s, there were now added… others. Strange, jumbled thoughts and impressions, harsh and mechanical, lacking emotion, lacking any hint of such counter-survival traits as pity, mercy, empathic understanding, or love.

There were memories, old memories, of…
something.
A galaxy, looking down at its core? A black hole with its wheeling, star-hot accretion disk? What was she
seeing…
?

Madness… madness… a spinning, whirling loss of reason that threatened to shatter completely the crystal clarity of her perceptions…

Much, so very much, made no sense at all, and she perceived it only as a vague jumbling of shapes, colors, and incoherence. Other memories, though, carried imagery that, while strange, could be deciphered.

There was the Ring, of course. It was not solid after all, but composed of countless separate units, many interconnected, many more not. Indeed, few of the Web’s units were more than a few kilometers across, though there were titanic exceptions for special and dimly perceived purposes. Exceptions such as the Devices themselves, in all their countless millions scattered through space and time.

PRESERVATION.MAINTENANCE. NULL ENTROPY.

She sensed the Web’s machine parts in their billions, concentrated about the fifteen-solar-mass black hole human cosmologists knew as the Great Annihilator. The Ring seen close up resembled an asteroid belt—or the pleated, myriad rings of a gas giant. Individual sections crawled with insectlike machines; spacecraft, some kilometers long, some no larger than extraordinarily complex long-chain molecules, moved from worldlet to worldlet in patterns that made no sense at small scales but at larger scales mimicked the evolution-shaped purposefulness of some vast and perfectly designed circulatory system. Star stuff, ultraviolet hot and amazingly dense, spilled from elsewhere into concentrated hellfurnaces of radiant fusion. Strange elements were shaped in those cauldrons, while fantastic energies came from the gravitational annihilation of matter in the central bottomless well.

Much of the technology she barely grasped. Some was wholly beyond understanding at all, as noncausal as magic itself. Even so, there were curious inconsistencies. The Web didn’t know how to draw energy from the Quantum Sea; she could detect nothing like the human theory of quantum mechanics.

Among the alien machines and thoughts and memories, though, she did catch some echoes of the Builders. Surprisingly, there were many species of Builder; one among those tens of thousands of disparate voices she heard must have been first… but over eons, others had joined it, willingly or by simply being absorbed, whatever the individual members thought of the matter. Their physical shapes and forms were long since gone, now, not even a distant memory. What had been preserved—in a fashion eerily similar to what had happened to Dev—was intellect alone, as programs, as patterns of data, uploaded to superbly intricate and complex machines.

If there was anything organic left among the crawling, bustling machines of the Web, she could not detect it, even in fading echoes of long-ago memories. All that remained was an intense and purposeful lust.

That lust, when she examined it, triggered a shock of recognition. At last here was something she could actually relate to in a human way!

It was a drive, honed by billions of years of machine evolution… to
survive.…

Chapter 18

Surely there can be no fundamental difference between the evolution of life forms based on carbon and that of those based on silicon, sulfur, or some other element. Given that life both shapes and is shaped by its environment, Darwinian logic will mold it like clay on a potter’s wheel, bringing order, efficiency, and competitive success out of the mindless and relentless decay and chaos of entropy.

—
Evolution and Life

D
R
. R. G
UTMA
R
AJASINGH

C
.
E
. 2412

Later, Katya turned to Dev, beneath the blue smear of a nebula’s light. Dev had taken her through the entire sequence, from the fate of the probe sent to the Galactic Core to
Sirghal’s
escape after the battle at the Stargate.

Revelation upon revelation had left her dazed; unanswered questions continued to burn. “Why did they attack?” she asked him. “I… I sensed they attacked out of a need for survival, but I don’t understand how they perceived that you, that your duplicate, rather, was a threat.”

“I don’t know.”

“Could they have attacked because they perceived your penetration of their Stargate as a threat? An attack on their home, there in the Galaxy’s core?”

Dev gave her a wan smile. “Like ants attacking blindly when their nest is disturbed? I wondered about that. But we have no answers yet. None that I’ve been able to fathom, anyway.”

“The impression I had was that the Web is all machine. A kind of machine intelligence.”

“Self-programming AIs,” Dev agreed. “A cliché given life.”

Katya thought about that. Speculation about robotic intelligence, about machine evolution and the possibility of machine-based intelligence ultimately replacing Man, had been around for centuries. At the heart of the idea was the argument that it didn’t really matter whether the organism was built out of proteins or silicon chips. The same laws of evolution that shaped form and structure in organic systems could be expected to shape the programs of computers equipped to carry out their own self-repair or even replication. Given both an environment complex enough that chaotic processes came into play and a means of passing mutable design information from one generation to the next, machine-based evolution was at least as probable as the evolution of organic life. And in a universe as vast and as complex as this one, it was a safe bet that what
could
happen probably had.

Katya wondered if the machines’ mode of transmitting their blueprints from parent to offspring was as much fun as it was for humans.

“There’s a saying among AI techs,” she said. “ ‘Organic life is the universe’s way of making machines.’ ”

If Dev responded to the old joke, if he even recognized it as such, he gave no sign. “I couldn’t get any sense of organic life within the matrix of the thoughts I encountered. Did you?”

“No. It was all kind of… stiff. Direct. No flexibility.”

“Or flexible only within very narrow parameters.”

“Somebody had to build them, though. Who? And when?”

“I’m not entirely sure those questions have meaning anymore,” Dev replied. “The Web’s origins lie so far in the past that, well… my guess is billions of years. Maybe back to the formation of this galaxy. There must have been an organic race somewhere in their history.” He paused, thoughtful. “Did you get that one brief fragment in that flurry of alien thought… something like a galaxy, but with an intense, blinding white light at the center?”

“Yes,” Katya said. “I saw that. It reminded me of AI simulations of a quasar. Or a black hole spewing out intense polar jets.”

“Very good,” Dev said, nodding approval. “That was my impression too. I think what we saw was our own Galaxy, back when it was new.”

Katya felt a shiver at her spine. “But, my God! That would have been something like ten billion years ago!”

“I’ve said already that I think the Web stretches across large tracts of time as well as space. If so, it could be the Builders were around when our galaxy was very young, when the black hole at the core was first forming and gobbling down so many of the suns packed at the center that it was spewing the leftovers across the light years. A quasar…”

“I’m… not sure I can accept that,” Katya said. “I know there’s been some theorizing that maybe our Galaxy went through a quasar stage early in its history. But would life have been able to evolve in that kind of environment?”

“We don’t really know what conditions were like. Maybe the birth of a quasar in the neighborhood, the growing intensity of radiation, was what led them to develop a machine-based intelligence. If their technology developed at all like ours, they must have also experimented with rebuilding themselves.”

“Like our biotech interfaces, before the Companions,” Katya said. “With nano-implants, cephlinks, and sockets.”

“Or like me,” Dev said. “Possibly they learned to download the program that was their mind, their soul, if you will, into machine bodies. Bodies safe from radiation. From disease. Even from aging. Immortality.”

“Are you saying the Builders are still there inside their machines? Immortal? Unchanging?”

“I don’t think that has an easy answer,” Dev said.

Katya listened to Dev’s voice and heard a bleakness there. And a horror. It was as though he were being forced to look at things he really didn’t want to examine.

“Go on.”

“That kind of immortality could be more of a curse than a blessing. To live forever in a machine body…”

“Dev?” Katya said. She wanted to reach out and take him in her arms, to hold him close, and didn’t quite dare, couldn’t yet trust her own feelings. “Dev, are you okay?”

“I’m… fine.” He paused for a long moment, and Katya wondered if he was searching for the right words… or simply trying to control some powerful, hidden emotion. “You know, an interesting thing happened when I reassimilated the memories, the record made by my copy. I found out he didn’t like me very much.”

The thought struck Katya as so incongruous she almost laughed aloud. Somehow, she swallowed the reaction. Dev seemed so… vulnerable. “Why not?”

“You’re… aware, of course, of the DalRiss attitude toward Achievers.”

“Certainly,” Katya said. “Lots of people don’t like it. There was a time, not long after you left, when there was some talk about using DalRiss Achievers to replace K-T drives in human starcraft. If it hadn’t turned out that Achievers didn’t work with human technology, it probably would’ve caused another war. Whole movements formed in some places, calling for some kind of law to protect Achievers from exploitation.”

“Protecting DalRiss Achievers?” Dev asked.

She nodded. “Some of the more extreme groups were calling for a war against the DalRiss to free them.”

“I guess I really am out of date,” Dev said. “Anyway, a law to help the Achievers would be unenforceable. The DalRiss don’t think about them the way we do. Come to think of it, the Achievers don’t think about it the way we do either. You might say that the supreme moment of their existence is that moment when they complete the translation of a DalRiss ship from one point in space to another.”

“And die.”

“And die. From their point of view, dying is the whole point of being born.”

“The same could be said of us. What does all of this have to do with your copy disliking you?” She knew the answer, but she wanted Dev to say it for himself.

He didn’t answer for a long time. He was facing the sprawling color-smear of the nebula, as though studying the finely detailed traceries and soft-glowing sheets outstretched across space like wings. “When I reintegrated with it,” he said at last, “I realized that it felt… used. Like an Achiever. I’d not really thought one way or the other, when I started the download process, that a copy of myself might protest against a plan I myself had conceived. But its memories up to the point of copying were clear enough, detailed enough, that it didn’t understand at first that it was the copy. When it realized that it was the one being sent on what could easily be described as a suicide mission, it… became upset.”

“You keep referring to your duplicate as ‘it.’ ”

“Do I?” He thought about it. “You’re saying it should be ‘him’?”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“I guess… that’s part of the problem. To me, the download was just a tool. When I saw the process through its… through
his
eyes, later, I realized that I’d become a lot more like the DalRiss than, than like I used to be.” He turned, his eyes staring into Katya’s, the light of the nebula touching his skin with highlights of blue and violet. “Katya, I feel… I feel like I’m losing what I was.”