Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Droplet.”

“They’re both Falling Droplet?” Koenig asked. “I thought they just neglected to tell us the other one’s name.”

“The third sentence was there, Admiral, imbedded in the resonant frequencies created by the first two overlaying one another.”

There was a slight jump in the image, where Wilkerson had edited out some of the conversation.

“Why do you work for the Sh’daar?” Koenig’s voice asked.

“The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one Turusch said.

“The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind Below. How would it be otherwise?” said the other.

“We work with them, our minds in harmony with theirs,” the third line read. “They fear your rapid technological growth.”

“What do you mean, they reject our transcendence?” Koenig’s voice asked. “What is that?”

“Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.

“Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.

“Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave behind…death.”

“Are your needs being looked after?” Koenig’s voice asked. “Are your nutritional needs being met?”

“We require the Seed,” said one.

“We are the Seed,” said the other.

The third line read, “We are dying alone.”

“My God,” Koenig said.

“Their meaning is still a bit opaque in places,” Wilkerson said. “Their psychologies are very different.”

“But they’re making a hell of a lot more sense now than they did the other day.” He shook his head. “It must have been terribly frustrating for them. They were holding what they thought was a perfectly normal conversation with us…and we didn’t understand, didn’t have a clue to what they were actually saying. ‘We are dying alone’?”

“Yes. We think-this is still all speculation, understand-we think that the internal dialogue predisposes them to working in groups. First with their twins…but then in successively higher and higher groupings. It’s possible that the meta-Turusch I mentioned is a kind of group mind created by superimposing tens or hundreds or even thousands of separate conversations, all going on at once, and having new meaning arising from the background hash of separate voices.”

“You said they had to have incredible brains to think on so many different levels at once. I think I’m beginning to understand.”

“By comparison, we’re very slow,” Wilkerson agreed. “Just think about it. This concept of multiple layers in their conversation, even in their thinking, that’s something they evolved over the course of millions of years, probably, as they evolved speech. But what Falling Droplet was doing was communicating on three levels-one from each individual Turusch and a third arising from the two at once-and it was doing that in a language that was alien to it, in Lingua Galactica.”

Koenig blinked, confused for a moment by Wilkerson’s use of the singular to refer to the two Turusch together…but it did make sense in an eldritch way. Turusch concepts of “them” and “me,” of “others” and “self,” must be quite different from the way humans thought of those concepts.

He wondered if there was a way the difference could be used against them.

Or if greater understanding would facilitate better communication…and an end to the war.

“I’ll want you to put this together into a report, Doctor. Something we can broadcast to Earth and Mars. The Directorate needs to see this. So does Naval Intelligence. This could be what we need to put a stop to this war.”

“I don’t think I see how, Admiral.”

“Know your enemy, Doctor. One of the oldest and most basic of military dictums. If we know the enemy, that’s half of the battle. Half of the victory.”

“Ah. And the other half?”

“Knowing ourselves.”

Wilkerson cut the electronic connection, and Koenig was alone with his thoughts once more in the CIC. The others of the CIC watch manned their stations in the pit, but, as Koenig had said, there wasn’t a lot for any of them to do now except to stay alert. The carrier battlegroup was now four hours into her 16.64-hour voyage out to the thirty-AU shell, approaching the orbit of Saturn and traveling now at a bit under 75,000 kilometers per second. At a quarter of the speed of light, there wasn’t yet any visible aberration in the view of the stars ahead. Bootis and neighboring Corona Borealis maintained their familiar shapes-a kite to the right, with bright Arcturus at the base, and a broad U shape of stars, like an upraised arm, to the left.

What was it about transcendence that the Turusch-or, more likely, their Sh’daar masters-so feared? For that matter, what was transcendence, as they understood the term? That was the real problem here…knowing what completely alien cultures meant by the term.

Hell, Koenig wasn’t certain he understood what the word meant. And beings with such different brains as the Turusch likely meant something very different, very alien.

What was it the Turusch had said, their third-line description of transcendence? “Technic species evolve into higher forms. When they pass beyond, they leave behind…death.”

That was it. The first half of that statement was transparent enough. For centuries now, humankind had speculated about its relationship with its technology, and about where that technology might be taking it. Humans today, human technology today, would be comprehensible-barely-to humans of three or four hundred years ago. But the GRIN technologies, especially, were rapidly going a long way toward changing what it meant to be human.

Genetics. People like Michael Noranaga had engaged genetic prostheses to change their somatypes. Noranaga had done so in the line of duty, becoming a semi-aquatic selkie with more in common with marine mammals than with unaltered humans. But on Earth there were humans who changed their body shapes as a form of cultural or artistic expression…shapeshifters, they called themselves. The very idea of a human who looked like an elf or a mixture of wolf and human challenged the very concept of what it meant to be human.

Robotics. Robots had become ubiquitous throughout human culture. The teleoperation of NTE robots let human minds explore toxic and deadly environments like the surface of Venus or the nitrogen-ice plains of Triton… human minds temporarily taking on bodies of plastic and nanolaminate alloys. And non-sentient robotic intelligences were everywhere, from smart clothes to smart buildings to smart missiles.

Information Systems. Perhaps the biggest changes had occurred in that field. Through cerebral implants, any human in any civilized location could have instant access to all available information through the Net-Cloud. He could talk to anyone anywhere, limited only by the speed of light, and at great distances he could converse with another person’s AI-generated avatar. AIs, artificial intelligences of greater than human capability, operated everywhere throughout the myriad Net-Clouds, gathering and storing information, transmitting it, reshaping it, editing it, artificial minds that had already transcended the merely human.

And Nanotechnology. Ships that reshaped themselves in flight, buildings that grew themselves from piles of debris, those were the most visible applications of the technology. Less visible but even more powerful were examples such as the trillions of nanorobotic devices pumping through Koenig’s circulatory system, cleaning out arteries, maintaining key balances within his metabolic processes, even repairing damaged chromosomes and guarding against cancers, disease, even the effects of aging. Alexander Koenig could expect to live to see the age of five hundred, they told him-theoretically, given ongoing nanomedical advances, there was no way to even guess how long he might live-assuming he survived the next day or so.

The more far-reaching effects, though, the most transforming ones, appeared when various technologies mingled-the use of nanotechnology to grow the cerebral implants that gave people their links with the Net-Cloud, and which allowed people to have their own personal AI software running on their internal hardware. The four technologies designated as GRIN interacted with one another, multiplied one another’s effects and potencies.

And where, and what, were they all leading to?

Of greater concern right now, though, to Koenig’s mind, was the second half of the Turusch statement: “When they pass beyond, they leave behind death.”