“That … is a rather uncomfortable image,” Garroway said slowly. He’d been more comfortable thinking of the Xul as a conventional enemy, an interstellar empire seeking to exterminate Humankind. The mental picture Schilling invoked was of something much, much larger, more powerful, and potentially far more dangerous than a mere alien interstellar empire. The fact that the Xul as a Galaxy-wide CAS hadn’t yet put all the pieces together implied that some day they would.
If the Xul ever got their act together and thought and moved as a species, there might be little that Humankind could do to fight back.
“As we understand the Xul now,” Schilling told him, “most of their original uploaded mentalities, the governing choruses, are … aware of what goes on outside their virtual worlds, but not really a part of it, do you see? The minds that control their hunterships and probes, the minds we’ve been up against in combat, all of those are either copies of the original minds, or AI.”
“Artificial intelligence. What’s the difference between an uploaded electronic mind and an artificial one?”
“Good question. Maybe none. The two may be completely interchangeable within what passes for Xul society. Especially when the ability to upload a conscious mind brings with it the ability to copy a conscious mind, to replicate it as often as needed, and to tweak it, to change it from iteration to iteration.”
“So the original Xul minds form the basis of the AI infrastructure, but they fill in with copies and AIs.” He was still thinking about it in classical military terms. No matter how many casualties humans inflicted on the Xul, they could fill in the gaps in an eye’s blink, simply by running off more copies of themselves.
“We believe so.”
“How the hell do you fight an enemy like that?”
“Well, we’ve been using our own AI assault complexes to take down Xul nodes as we discover them. They’re programmed to integrate themselves with the Xul AI software within a target node and gradually take it over, substituting our own virtual reality for theirs.”
“Really?” The concept was intriguing.
“So far as the Xul minds within the target node are aware, everything’s going fine, they’ve stamped out all possible threats to their existence, and there’s nothing out there to upset their poor, xenophobic sensibilities. They get routine—and negative—reports from their probes and listening stations, routine comm traffic from other nodes, everything’s fine. And our AIs are in a position to intercept any incoming data that says otherwise, or be aware of any decision by the node’s chorus to go out looking for trouble. They could even shut the node down completely, if need be. Literally cut their power and turn them off.”
“Why don’t you? Turn them all off, I mean.”
She looked uncomfortable. “Genocide, you mean.”
“If it’s a matter of survival for Humankind … yes.”
“We can’t do that!”
“Why not? I’m not even sure electronic uploads qualify as life.”
“Members of Homo telae would object to that, General. So would most members of our AI communities.”
“But their survival is at stake, too, damn it!” He felt exasperation building up, threatening to emerge as raw fury. How could he make her understand? No Marine he knew liked the idea of wholesale genocide, but when your back was up against the wall, you did what you had to do to survive.
She sighed. “That … option is debated from time to time. It comes up from time to time as a possible strategy. But there’s a strong egalatist faction within the Associative government—”
“?‘Egalatist?’?”
“All intelligence is equally valid, no matter what the shape of the body that houses it. And many Associative species—many human religious factions, too—think the Xul are a legitimate sapient life form, and that wiping them out is the same as genocide.”
“Hell,” Garroway said. “The bastards have tried to pull the plug on humans often enough in the past few thousand years. Maybe we should pull the plug on them. This is war.”
“The concept of war may be out of date, General,” Schilling said. “If we can contain the Xul without switching them off … wouldn’t that be better? Especially if we can eventually find a way to reason with them? Cure their xenophobia, and bring them into the Associative?”
Garroway wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “Maybe. …”
“The Xul aren’t evil,” Schilling said. “Very, very different, yes. And they have a worldview that makes it tough to reason with them on human terms. But they would have a lot to contribute to Associative culture.”
“Listen, if you people are so all-fired eager to make friends with those things, why’d you bring me out of cold storage?”
“Because the containment may be failing,” Schilling said. “We have intelligence from several sources that suggests that, just as we’ve been infiltrating their systems electronically, they’ve been infiltrating ours.
“And just the possibility that they’ve begun reacting to us coherently has scared the shit out of some of us. …”
Hassetas, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1901 hours, GMT
The Krysni mob, a wall of gas bags and writhing tentacles, lunged toward the Marine line. Garwe saw a telltale warning wink on within his in-head displays, and read the data unscrolling beside it.
“I’m getting a power spike, Captain!” he shouted. “The bastards are armed!”
“Weapons free!” Xander called.
With a thunderclap, a searing, violet beam snapped in from the jungle wall to the left, washing across Lieutenant Wahrst’s strikepod in coruscating sheets and arcing forks of grounding energy. The smooth surface of her pod silvered, then seemed to flow like water as internal fields and nanotechnics shifted to shunt aside the charge.
The attacking wall of gas bags struck an instant later, carrying the Marines back a few steps by the sheer inertia of their rush. Garwe found himself grappling with half a dozen of the things. They appeared to be trying to grab his pod in their tentacles; he responded by growing tentacles of his own, silver-sheened whiplashes emerging from the active nano surface of his pod.
Odd. The pod’s response was a bit sluggish. Garwe’s neural interface with the pod’s AI and electronic circuitry was supposed to be essentially instantaneous, but either the connection was running slow, or his brain was running way fast. It wasn’t enough to cause major problems, but he was painfully aware of the way time seemed to stretch around him as more and more of the Krysni gas bags crowded in close. His hull sensors felt them, a dead weight clinging to his armor, growing more and more massive with each dragging second.
He sent a mental command to his pod’s defense system, and the outer surface crackled with electricity. Krysni floaters in contact with his pod shriveled and twisted, their blue-white skins crisping to brown and black in a second or two of arcing fury.
A second high-energy bolt fired from the jungle, catching Captain Xander’s pod as she tried to rise above the tangled melee. Her pod shrugged off the attack, but as it rotated away from the sniper, Garwe noticed that a dinner-plate-sized patch of her outer nano had been burned away, leaving a ragged, gray-white scar. If her pod couldn’t repair itself before