Future Weapons of War

faces us as Sentient Mind—to prevent the randomization of all we have created, and to ensure our future growth.”

The conversation was being carried out across the breadth of the Conclave’s environs about the Core, information traveling on the wings of laser, gravitic pulse, and gamma flux emulation. A statement by one member required ten thousand years to reach all of the others, and required a like period for a complete reply. Such was the snail’s pace of conversation across the interstellar Void.

For one and a third galactic years, then, as humans might have measured the span, the Conclave deliberated.

And consensus was reached.

In principle, at least, it should be possible to project an induced gravity field in such a way as to deflect M-31, either ripping it apart until it was too diffuse to gravitationally affect the home galaxy’s structure, or sending it— more or less intact—off on a different vector entirely, harmlessly into intergalactic space.

By manipulating the Zero Point Field, that subatomic realm of metareality where virtual particles and antiparticles foamed in and out of existence, gravity could be controlled on a scale large enough to redirect the orbits of entire suns. Indeed, the early stages of the Galactic Dyson sphere were already visibly manifest, as neatly ordered rings of stars circled the Core in precise arrays visible from as far out as the Rim. Ordering the stars and their attendant worlds in this way made vastly simpler the task of linking all of the worlds together into a communications web: one that already embraced fifty million worlds, and which one day would link them to all.

And if they could manipulate the paths of individual stars, it was only a matter of scaling up the engineering to manipulate the paths of four hundred billion stars at once.

In Ygal26.18, work on the Weapon began in earnest.

And the epochs passed.

* * * *

Ygal28.95

By the end of the twenty-eighth galactic year after Sol’s birth, and some 1.9 billion years after the far-off epoch of Selan and Valova, the two slow-spinning pinwheels of stars had closed the gap between them to something just less than half a million light-years—a mere five times the diameter of the Milky Way, and two and a half times huge Andromeda’s breadth. Even to organic eyes—and there yet were many of those even within a metacivilization composed largely of machines or of noncorporeal intelligences resident within the Galaxy’s communicative network—the Andromedan spiral now dominated the night skies of appropriately situated worlds, a vast oval of light spanning nearly thirty degrees, or sixty times the size of the long-vanished Moon in Earth’s ancient sky.

Intrinsically, M-31 was one of the brightest galaxies known—at least among those without a highly active nucleus, and the lanes of dust marking the spiral arms were clearly apparent, as was the brighter bulge of the Core.

Hanging within the emptiness beyond the Rim of the Home Galaxy, a titanic structure was slowly taking shape in the darkness. Within a world-sized construct orbiting the intense gravitational maelstrom of an artificial black hole, two intelligent machines surveyed the huge and pale-glowing spiral of light that was Andromeda.

“I suppose,” one machine told the other, “that we could destroy them. That is what a weapon does, after all.”

“Is it? I thought the purpose of the Weapon was to simply deflect the approaching galaxy. Not to destroy it.”

“It is. But it will be powerful enough to destroy. I refer to the Dark Gods.”

Over the millennia, repeated attempts had been made to signal any civilizations that might be resident within Andromeda, but, until recently, with no result. Two galactic years before, however, the first fleets of worldships had bridged the Gulf between the galaxies. If a metacivilization existed within Andromeda as well, then perhaps the two could work together, to a common goal.

But sadly, it was not to be. Life was encountered within Andromeda, life as diverse and as stubborn and as swiftly blossoming as that within the home Galaxy, and Civilization as well…

But Mind there had taken strange, alarmingly irrational turns, alien from the consensus-Mind of the home Galaxy. There, mind and soul were resources to be harvested, reshaped, enslaved, consumed.

Sentience twisted in strange ways, dominated by philosophies bleak and dark, by nihilistic outlooks that made the long-forgotten works of Nietzsche or Camus seem cheerful by comparison. There, civilizations without number, teeming hives of ephemeral organics, fed the godminds of Darkness that, like Kronos, devoured their own children.

Dark Gods….

The first worldship fleets had vanished within Andromeda.

But other fleets followed.

“A whole new metacivilization,” one of the machine minds thought aloud, glittering optics staring across the Gulf into the face of Andromeda. “Another… what? Ten to the ten, ten to the eleven civilized worlds? Enough perhaps, to let us advance to K3.6R.”

“If what passes for Civilization over there were compatible with our own,” the other replied.

“What dwells there is not Mind as we know it.”

Mind as we know it. The concept, with its corollary—that there were things about Mind that were not, or could not be known—was unsettling.

“The Imperial Network will know what to do.”

The social order embracing the home Galaxy had changed with the gigayears. The Conclave had faded into forgetfulness eons ago, replaced by several younger, more vigorous Caretaker metacivilizations—the Syncretium, the Associative, the Commonwealth, the Watchers, and so many thousands of others. For thirty-two and a half million years, work on the Weapon had all but ceased, as the philosophy of the Passive Enlightenment had held sway, dedicated to quiet contemplation of Things as They Are.

But the Enlightenment was short-lived, overthrown by the burst of growth-oriented enthusiasm that followed the application of non-local communications.

Nonlocality, rooted in the ancient dawnings of quantum awareness, proved that the seemingly common sense concept of space itself was illusory; that what happened here could affect things there without crossing the seeming emptiness between. Though understood for as long as Mind had understood the weirdness of quantum physics, only now, as an outgrowth of the Weapons research and engineering, was it applied on a scale that spanned the Galaxy. Using microscopic artificial singularities to reach into and manipulate the Zero Point Field, communication across the vast web of worlds became instantaneous. Within the span of four half-lives of plutonium-239, the time it took for the technology to be physically carried across the Galaxy at the speed of light, every world, every spome, every sentient mind across a hundred billion worlds could link into the Galactic Overmind in realtime. Travel times remained limited by the universal constant of c. The transmission of information, however, the only truly viable interstellar commodity, was something else again.

The narrow passivity of the Enlightenment could not long endure what proved to be a true enlightenment, and a burst of creativity on a galactic scale. Ironically, that creativity carried within itself its own set of checks and balances. Attempts to regulate and control the exchange of information resulted in an increased centralization of authority.

It resulted in Empire.

By their nature, galactic imperia tended to be somewhat unstable. The Forty-fifth Empire had arisen from the ashes of the Forty-forth, seized the worlds of the Core, and by virtue of their central position come to dominate most of the Galactic Network. The current emperor, twelfth of its line, had decreed that the Weapon, long neglected, must be completed: swiftly, and with precision.

The Empire’s long-term survival depended upon it. After two billion years of sanity, the ancient madness of war had reappeared: this time on an intergalactic scale.

* * * *

Ygal29.02

The War of the Galaxies raged for fewer than sixteen million years—a scant one seven-hundredth of a