“Carrier battlegroup America was operating under two principle mission orders—to retrieve General Gorman’s Marine Expeditionary Force from the surface of Haris, Eta Boötis IV, and to retrieve two alien POWs, a couple of Turusch fighter pilots shot down during the ongoing fighting on Haris before we got there. While the two missions were given equal weight in my operational orders, I was told verbally by Vice Admiral Menendez that it was imperative that I bring the aliens safely back to Mars, that that mission should be my primary concern. In his words, ‘If you don’t get the Trash back to Mars, everything Gorman’s grunts have gone through will be for nothing.’”
“Was this statement on or off the record?” Noranaga’s avatar asked. The virtual image looked fully human in the simulation, right down to the details of the man’s naval dress uniform. The reality, Koenig knew, was quite different.
“Off the record, Admiral. It was unofficial. What I need to tell the board, however, is that the two aliens are dead. That part of the mission was a failure.”
“Dead?” Mendelson said. “How?”
“I have the recordings here.”
He opened a new window in the virtual room. The four stood as silent and unseen observers in the compartment in America’s research lab, watching as the Turusch speared and murdered each other, as the medtechs and robots attempted to separate them.
Afterward, back in the meeting chamber, Noranaga shook his head. “Suicide, obviously.”
“We don’t know enough about the species, about their psychology or their physiology, to know that for sure, Admiral,” Mendelson said. “They might have been … hungry. Just that.”
“So hungry they couldn’t help trying to eat each other?” Barry said. “That doesn’t seem likely.”
“The research department told me they get at least some of their nutritional needs from light,” Koenig said, “through a process in their skins similar to photosynthesis. Their report suggests that the Turusch can go a long time without food.”
“They’re plants?” Noranaga asked.
“Words like ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ don’t have much meaning when it comes to the truly alien, Admiral,” Koenig replied. He was still getting used to that truth himself.
“It’s not even that alien, Admiral Noranaga,” Mendelson put in. “There are one-celled creatures on Earth—Euglena—that move and act like animals, but they use chlorophyll to manufacture food in addition to what it can catch.”
There remained, Koenig knew, an ongoing debate among biological scientists about how to divvy up the world of life. One popular scheme called for plants, animals, and four other “kingdoms,” including fungi and the protista—which included the genus Euglena that Mendelson had mentioned. More recent attempts to describe and group life forms discovered on other worlds than Earth during the past 350 years had so far succeeded only in bogging the entire process down in a morass of conflicting classification schemes.
None of which helped describe what the hell the Turusch were, or how they thought.
“We do have additional information on the Turusch, however,” Koenig went on, “and possibly about the Sh’daar as well. Brandt and George were questioning them shortly before they … died.”
Again, a new window opened above the virtual conference table. This time, the two aliens slumped side by side on the deck, apparently watching the robot camera hanging from above. Date and time stamps showed the session as having taken place just over twenty-six hours earlier, an hour before the aliens had killed each other.
Dr. George’s voice could be heard in the background. “But why are you attacking us?”
Again, the two spoke together, their buzzing speech creating peculiarly ringing harmonics as running translations appeared at the bottom of the window.
“We do not attack you,” said one.
“The Seed attacks to save you,” said the other.
“And just what is the Seed saving us from?” George asked.
“The Seed saves you from yourselves and poor choice,” said one.
“Too swiftly you grow and lose your balance,” said the other.
“I don’t understand,” George said. “How are we a threat to ourselves?”
“Transcendence looms near.”
“Transcendence blossoms.”
“Transcendence destroys.”
“Transcendence abandons.”
“Transcendence of what? Help us understand. What is transcending?”
Both Turusch writhed for a moment. Though it was impossible to read anything like emotion in the two, their movements seemed to project frustration, perhaps anger.
“You transcend into darkness,” one said, its tentacles lashing.
“You change, change, change,” insisted the other.
Abruptly, both turned away from the robot, buzzing at each other.
“Why isn’t there a translation of what they’re saying now?” Mendelson asked.
“The xenopsych people think they’re speaking their own language there,” Koenig told her. “Keep in mind that our translations of their speech are based on an artificial language—LG—which we learned from the Spiders. We don’t have a clue as to how to break the original Turusch language.”
The recording ended, and Koenig again faced the members of the preliminary board across the empty table.
“Transcendence,” Admiral Barry said. “That seems to be an ongoing theme with these creatures.”
“Yes, sir. In particular, we think they’re talking about the GRIN Singularity.”
Since the twentieth century—some would say earlier—human technology had been advancing in exponential leaps, each advance in science spawning new advances in dizzying and fast-accelerating profusion. It wasn’t just the technology that had been growing; it was the pace of that growth, the ever-increasing speed of technological innovation and development. Just five centuries ago, humans had made their first successful heavier-than-air flight in a fabric-and-spruce glider powered by a gasoline engine, a voyage lasting all of twelve seconds and covering 120 feet. Thirty years later, aviator Wiley Post flew a Lockheed Vega monoplane around the world, the first man to do so solo, making eleven stops along the way and logging the total time in the air at 115 hours, 36 minutes.
And thirty years after that, humans were riding rockets into low Earth orbit, circling the globe in ninety minutes, and were just six short years from walking on the Moon.
In the late twentieth century, a science fiction writer, math professor, and computer scientist named Vernor Vinge had pointed out that if the rate of technological change was graphed against time, the slope representing that change was fast approaching a vertical line—what he called the “technological singularity” in an essay written in 1993. Human life and civilization, he’d pointed out, would very quickly become unrecognizable, assuming that humans weren’t replaced entirely by their technological offspring within the next few decades.
Other writers of the era had pointed out that there were four principle drivers of this exponential increase in high-tech wizardry: genetics, robotics, infotechnology, and nanotechnology, hence the acronym “GRIN.” The GRIN Singularity became a catchphrase for the next four centuries of human technological progress.
“GRIN wasn’t quite the apotheosis people thought it would be,” Noranaga pointed out.
“That’s kind of a strange statement coming from a guy who breathes with gills and can outswim a