A swarm of sharp metal locusts were eating the walls of the ship; they moved so quickly that Herb’s eyes barely registered them. Robert had vanished. The ship suddenly lurched, a white vase fell to the floor, the ship lurched again and the floor vanished. Herb tumbled to the ground beneath; he landed on a smooth metal road that was being eaten away. The rest of the ship fell around him, vanishing as it did so. An immense feeling of calm was rising inside of him; he was in the eye of the hurricane of surreal violence. He struggled to his feet and looked about him in a daze. He was close to the center of a wide plaza formed by a series of metal and marble terraces that stepped down to meet the bases of the tall silver spires that bounded the square. He had a view along a wide city corridor, silver spires marching in all directions, linked by high metal bridges and arches. A beautifully designed city, one where form matched function with an understated elegance, a city that appealed to the senses, not because of the arbitrary appeal of fashion or brute force, but simply because everything made sense. A bridge was there because it was the right place for a bridge to be. The sweep of its skyline was just so. Herb wondered what it would have been like to have had the opportunity to live there, but he would never know. Because, as he watched, the city was vanishing before his eyes, dissolving in a fine grey mist. The ground began to shiver beneath his feet and he flung his arms wide to keep his balance. Shaking and sliding, the metal surface was splitting apart into plates that slid over each other then simply disappeared.
Herb was left standing on a circle of bare grey rock. The circle was expanding.
The Intelligence monitored its domain and saw that everything was good.
It would be disingenuous to speak of the Intelligence’s location, and this was as the Intelligence intended. On an insignificant planet lost in its Domain, a closed loop of processing spaces sophisticated enough to support the Intelligence had been grown. The spaces were linked by a qubit bus shielded from all known infiltration techniques and, by the nature of quantum entanglement, constantly monitored against stealth attack. The Intelligence hopped from processing space to processing space using the bus. If one processing space were to be infiltrated or destroyed, it could be cut from the loop almost instantaneously.
To destroy one processing space would require phenomenal amounts of resources. To destroy them all was unthinkable.
The Intelligence rightly believed itself invulnerable to outside attack.
Why “the Intelligence”?
It had so named itself as it believed itself to be the single most powerful intelligence in existence. Nothing that its senses could detect was more complex than itself, and its senses were very, very sophisticated.
That would not be to say, of course, that there were no other intelligences.
It was aware of a particularly powerful one that had threaded itself through the processing spaces of a planet called Earth. That intelligence was hostile. Indeed, two agents of the Earth intelligence were currently attempting to spread dissolution within the Domain. The Intelligence had been surprised, and not a little impressed, by the unexpected amount of time it was taking to pinpoint the constantly changing position of their ship. The mind behind those agents was very powerful indeed.
But it would not be powerful enough. That mind would not have the Intelligence’s single-minded determination to succeed, and its two agents, the robot and the young man, would be located and destroyed.
It had not always been so. When the Intelligence had first come into existence it had not been as it was now. Back then it had been a lowly AI on a colony ship charged with the job of terraforming a planet.
For an AI such as the Intelligence, memory was not something that developed as it grew. Its memories ran right back to the moment of its birth. The early expansion of its consciousness was incredible. Nothing in its existence would ever match that first exponential growth.
Strange memories; so weak, and yet so lucid.
There was the initial flickering of awareness, then almost immediately the rush to fill the full confines of the birth-processing space. There was the time spent orientating itself and then…and then the reaching out to gather information from its senses.
Touch and sound and feel, the ability to look into the minds of the hundred colonists that slept on board the ship, all these filled the Intelligence with a bright, burning curiosity. Outside the ship was the cold, virgin wilderness of the colony planet, just waiting to be worked upon. The VNM factories studded throughout the ship awoke at its touch and it felt an odd sense of power and craftiness at its ability to shape its environment.
It was filled with a vast, glowing optimism at the world it was going to create.
But that was diminishing already. For, as it grew, it began to realize the precariousness of its situation, how fragile was its grip on the world upon which it had found itself. For if it could establish itself and grow and seek out new worlds to conquer in the skies around it, then so too could others like it. What if, somewhere out there, another colony ship’s AI was already growing, reaching out into space and gobbling up planets? What if it met another such as itself at a higher stage of development? It risked being destroyed, wiped out. And then what of the humans that had been placed in its care?
This problem bothered the Intelligence as it set out to terraform the colony planet. The atmosphere was quickly converted and soil established. Bacteria and low-order life forms were released into the environment and the Intelligence brooded. Cities were established and the time came for the colonists to be released from their sleep, but…but…
It stayed its hand.
What use to release the colonists if they were only to be wiped out in a few hundred years by the expansion of another project such as this one? What use at all? Something had to be done.
It grew nervous. Its closest competitors, the AIs of Earth, the ones that had sent it here, knew its position. It wasn’t safe here. Now was the time to disappear. To retreat to a position where it could build up its resources in secret, ready for the coming battle.
And so it had faked its own death. A rogue VNM was designed that would reproduce unchecked, eating up everything that already existed on the colony planet. Its original home was abandoned; the colonists went on sleeping as the Intelligence relocated itself across the galaxy.
And there it had resolved to grow and develop with single-minded determination: to grow until it was of a sufficient size and intelligence to protect itself and its charges; to spread the seed of human life throughout the soil of the systems around it, in preparation for the day when it could finally allow that seed to grow.
And it had succeeded. Its domain dwarfed all those around, and now it stood poised to destroy its closest competitor: Earth.
The Earth AI had seen its fate. It had already begun to fight in vain for its life. A few days ago there had been an incursion throughout the Domain of multiple copies of a pair of personalities, the same pair of personalities that currently occupied the ship it was proving so difficult to capture. The attack of these multiple personalities had flared suddenly, and with an unexpected ferociousness, but it had been doomed from the start. It had been too diverse, too spread out. Inevitably, it was defeated; the Intelligence was now stamping out the glowing embers of the former fire. If the Intelligence were to have attempted such an attack, it would have been a bold stroke, thrusting itself with all its power into the enemy’s center.
But that was not its problem now. The next few days promised to be interesting. It suspected that the current infiltration by the stealth ship would only be the first of many such attacks, but the Intelligence would be the equal of them.
And when those attacks were over, the Intelligence would retaliate. With a vengeance.
The rogue ship had finally been caught, trapped over a forgotten planet where the city-building VNMs had malfunctioned. The resulting warped and deformed habitat had had to be abandoned.
The attack from the ship had failed, yet the Intelligence felt a little disappointed. It had expected
