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|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
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| There Ain't No Justice |
| |
| #118 |
| |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
- Metamorph -
Chapter 04
by Arifel
IV
`You know when you put a stick in the
water and it looks like it's bent but
it's not? <pause> That's why I don't take
baths.' - Steven Wright
travelling through the solar system at about half the speed of light
isn't anywhere as near as exciting as it sounds. it wasn't until we'd
got there before i wondered what would've happened if we'd run into
something on the way; if our bodies had been in real space, there would
have been an impressive explosion. they would have been able to see it
back on earth.
my best estimate told me we'd be within mass-sensing range of Neptune in
around ten hours. during that time, Lydya and i hung onto each other,
occasionally swapping information at the phenomenal rate of high-speed
computers, but mostly just working on private projects and cataloguing
information, because there wasn't a great deal to see. i'd known that
the asteroids were nothing like they were portrayed in popular science
fiction (i.e. thousands of huge rocks bumping off each other) but even
so, we went right through the `asteroid belt' without even seeing one.
the planets were disappointingly distant, the best being Saturn, a wan
orange blob with faint visual discontinuities around its middle.
i continued to work on my sculpture-project, discovering a new potential
power-source in the process, one that could utilise raw silicates. the
seed device, the precursor of millions of such, was about the size of a
large grain of rice, a radially symmetrical, five-legged precision
instrument; almost as intelligent, in its own single-minded way, as a
beaver and just as rapacious in its appetite. i was quite proud of it;
dark grey, translucent three-jointed legs, tiny rasping teeth on the
underside, its upper body doubling as a nanogravitic transmitter plate
and a remote mass-sensor. i imagined it, having been tossed at an
asteroid, its legs scrabbling for a hold on the bare rock; eating its
way in, extruding fine hairs composed of complex silicate compounds as
it ate, weaving them into microscopic effectors and linear motors,
forging the tiny reaction chamber that formed the heart of each of these
devices, assembling the cell-sized distributed processors, copying its
stock of instructions into its offspring and then setting it to work.
the entire reproductive process would take about two hours. within
forty hours, there'd be over a million of them.
once that number had been reached, there'd be enough of them to form a
networked intelligence about as smart as a single human, albeit limited.
by that time, they'd've crawled over the entire surface of the object
and would have a detailed map of it. they would project the largest
possible cube inside that shape and would begin carving away the excess
rock, converting it into yet more sculptors. once the cube had been
exposed, they would polish the surface atom-smooth and then carve the
designs, digging in to a depth of one hundredth of the cube's total
width. having completed the project, they would link together to form
as large a grid as possible and begin searching for another target, any
nickel-iron-silicate body between two and ten kilometres in its longest
diameter. they would keep looking until they found one, then they'd
push off towards it, consuming the bodies of about two percent of their
number in tiny exposions in order to reach the new target. once there,
they'd begin again.
i tossed up between the idea of having them stay together and
`swarming', or separating into smaller groups, and decided on the
latter, because it would mean a wider distribution. as a fail-safe, i
built in a self-destruct command that would explode each one if it
received a particular sequence of nanogravitic pulses, a binary
representation of the phone number - a prime number, incidentally - of a
house i used to live in. if they were damaged, they would have to be
broken beyond the point of inactivity before being unable to act on the
self-destruct sequence. i wasn't going to have the little fuckers get
out of control and do something stupid like eat the earth.
i'd been spending a bit too much time thinking about them; Lydya noticed
how quiet i'd been and asked me what i was up to. when i showed her the
designs, she grinned with approval and made some suggestions.
`firstly, you might like to consider this,' she transmitted data for a
three-jointed leg much like my design, but with subtle differences that
made it more resilient, stronger, and allowed a greater degree of
motion. it was obviously the result of many years' worth of trial and
error. `the only other change i would make would be to give them the
capability to recognise their own work. otherwise, they'd complete a
block, fly away from it, scan for another target, spot the rock they'd
just left, fly back and carve another block out of it, two-thousandths
smaller. Personally, i think the upper limit on the diameter of their
targets should be one hundred kilometres.'
`but that would allow them to work on Deimos - and most of the smaller
moons -' she nodded.
`anything larger than that is likely to have a significant degree of
volcanic activity at its centre, which would slow down the project if
your nibblers burrowed down deep enough to expose the core.' i
pondered.
`if they did, say, reach the moon - seven hundred and thirty four point
nine by ten to the twentieth kilograms - you'd need two point nine three
nine six by ten to the twenty-third of them - they'd've eaten the whole
moon in just under seventy-eight hours.' I thought about it some more.
`If they encountered material too hot to deal with, they'd back off, try
to go around it. Eventually, it'd cool to the point where they could
eat it. Admittedly, that would take quite a while with an object as
large as Luna, with that degree of vulcanism...'
`the easiest way to find out would be to build the seed device and toss
it at an asteroid,' she sent. `Unfortunately, we won't be anywhere near
Jupiter, or you could use one of the smaller moons. There's always - '
abruptly, she stopped sending; she signalled that we should deactivate
our drives. we did so, hanging in open space, nothing around us to
indicate that we were within the confines of a solar system; the hard
stars glaring at us, without the twinkling effect caused by atmosphere.
Lydya was slowly scanning the view, utilising some sense that i hadn't
been given yet. one hand reached out, her index finger touched my
throat and a capillary-sized needle penetrated my skin. she gave me a
few mils of fluid containing chemical data, which my body interpreted as
a construction template, plans for the sense she was using. there was a
warning to use the device in passive mode first time; i looked over the
docs while my body built a resonator-plate on the outside of my skull,
between my eyes. It was some kind of neutrino-sensor; when i activated
it, i saw hundreds of neutrino sources in the general area of the
asteroid belt, far off to our left. i switched to visual, saw nothing,
added maximum magnification and every enhancement trick i knew; the
projections of probable shapes from passive data showed an even dozen
shapes, jet black elongated arrow-heads. they were clustered around
something shaped like a large grey pumpkin, which wasn't emitting
neutrinos. either another ship, or an asteroid. i glanced at Lydya. She
glanced back at me.
`Do you want to go over and take a look?'
`i don't know. they can't be human... i assume that they aren't from
this solar system, therefore they must have some kind of FTL capability,
therefore they could have visited earth before this, but have chosen not
to. i suppose they're just observing...'
`and I expect they wouldn't take kindly to having their cover blown.
we'll leave them alone for now, but i'll put it about on the Net that
they're here. someone else might want to come out and say hello, if not
on the behalf of humanity, then on our behalf.'
we continued on our way, hugging closely and combining our fields,
turning slowly as we sliced through space like a shell dropped into a
fish-tank.
my calculations, based as they were on observations made by humans
(which had been, in the past, less than accurate), proved to be spot-on.
after spending nine hours and fifty-six minutes in the half-field, we
were forced into real space by the presence of Neptune's gravity well.
we opted for a high orbit, after examining the frozen, muddy-looking
depths of Neptune's atmosphere, and began casting about for the moons.
Lydya was mildly annoyed.
`According to NASA, Neptune is only supposed to have two moons. I can
see at least seven.' I tracked the faint mass-stirrings caused by their
far-cast orbits, pointed to the largest.
`That'd be Triton. The next smallest should be Nereid.' Lydya nodded,
and held out her hand. I tilted my head to one side.
`Come on. I've thought of a new way of getting around.' i took her
hand and she drifted off without any apparent reaction, no controlled
combustion, no visible tossing of mass overboard.
`I'm impressed! Is this the reactionless drive that Pournelle and his
friends used to go on about?' she snorted.
`Nothing that simple. I've been thinking about this one for a long
time.' We moved towards Neptune's horizon, moving as close as we dared
for a slingshot which would throw us directly at Nereid.
the place turned out to be unremarkable. even under a high level of
visual enhancement, the terrain was dull, dark grey rock, not even
methane ice to jazz the scenery up. it looked like earth's moon, except
more so. more jagged mountains. less craters. the sun was a
glittering marble-sized star, casting insufficient light to read by
under ordinary conditions.
Lydya led me over the surface in an orbit almost low enough to touch
some of the higher peaks. it was fun. in the meantime, my imagination
had begun to work overtime. it was always the way; in the past, i'd had
some of my best ideas when i wasn't in any position to act on them. i'd
changed my mind about the lunar mining robots several times; at one
point, i wanted them to construct replicas of washing-lines - Hill's
Hoists - on the larger asteroids. my latest design called for something
about the size of a soccer ball which would gradually reduce an asteroid
to thousands of stone sculptures, each one a perfect replica of a
crushed coca-cola can, aimed and fired off so that they'd eventually end
up in earth orbit. anyone who examined them could estimate that the
cans had been crushed by a left hand belonging to a young girl. i'd
given serious thought to trying some cheap form of mass-conversion, to
have the cans made of aluminium instead of nickel-silicates, but that
would have been overdoing it. or would it? oh, why not go all the way?
i'd have to make sure that the aluminium produced by the device had the
right amount of impurities.
`here.' Lydya sent. we were passing over a flat plain; not the result
of volcanic action - this area had been cleared manually in a circle
about twelve kilometres in diameter, easily spotted from orbit (as close
as we were, we'd almost missed it), and at the centre, a jet-black
column shaped like the Washington Monument, four kilometres tall. it
had obviously been dug out of something else, sculpted and planted here.
i did some radar soundings, saw that it had a central column of
something crystalline, maybe diamond, that extended about eight hundred
metres under the surface, branching out like the roots of a tree. not
that there was any wind to blow it over.
Lydya let go of my hand and i floated above the plain, drifting slowly
towards the column. it seemed as if there wasn't any gravity; my
back-processor said Nereid's was about zero point zero zero zero two
percent of earth's. i'd fall, eventually, but i wouldn't hit very hard.
the monument was about seven hundred metres across at the bottom,
perhaps three hundred at the top, where it narrowed to a pyramidal
point. on each face of this pyramid was a symbol, or a pictogram made
of a golden-copper coloured metal set in to the black stone; a vaguely
left-slanting blob with three irregularly-shaped legs below it, curving
to the right. it meant nothing to me.
as we got closer, i could see inscriptions carved into the side,
reaching from the ground to about a quarter of the way up. they were in
various scripts, various sizes; as we got closer, i recognised Chinese,
Thai, cyrillic, roman characters; towards the bottom, there were
Egyptian symbols, rows of cuneiform and some other more obscure systems
of writing. the characters were about twenty centimetres in height.
i reached the face of the monument, absorbed my velocity with my hands
and ever so slowly began to fall to the moon's surface, about a
kilometre below. when i had the chance, i hooked my fingers into the
inscriptions and levered myself down, reading some of them as i passed:
FOR GOD, KING AND COUNTRY
GERVAISE DE SELCHESTER
THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1197
ULRIIKA * 604
GJE 1982
JOANNA GUERIN 1441
JOHN B GARVER, JNR.
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1952
P NEE
M POS
M NEE
P POS
the next was merely a hand-print, a good thirty centimetres across, and
below that a row of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Lydya waited for me to finish my descent; she pointed to the first
inscription at the base, done in a script that wasn't immediately
recogniseable to me. below it was a smaller line of cuneiform; below
that, Chinese characters; below that, Greek letters, and below that, in
English:
I WHO WAS FIRST TO BECOME AS YOU SEND MY LOVE AND SYMPATHY - HEPELE
near the base were some shards of black stone, about the size of a
fingernail. i picked up a few of them, passed some to Lydya, then
practised making marks on it. whatever it was - some collapsed form of
obsidian - it would take something diamond-hard to make any imprint in
it. Lydya had already formed a point on one of her fingernails and had
jumped up, to write her name at the top of the list. it took about
twenty seconds for me to crystallise a diamond point out of spare carbon
sufficiently well supported for inscribing work. once it had formed, i
tested it, found it adequate, and then i jumped also.
i was going to put a quote from Hassan I Sabbah, but i saw that someone -
possibly the Old Man himself - had already used it. i free-associated
for a few seconds, and after floating past Lydya, who was still at work,
i carved in fifteen-centimetre tall lower-case Triumvirate:
i feel more like i do now than i did a while ago - Arifel, 1994
i thought Zippy the Pinhead would be proud of that one.
i floated back at arm's length and allowed myself to float down to see
what Lydya had written:
Dark, but still, I crave light. Lydya Farradine, 1994
i don't know what possessed me to do so, but a few seconds after
finishing reading this, i felt an urge to climb up. it wasn't an
undeniable compulsion, but it did get stronger the more i tried to
ignore it, so i gave in to it and climbed to the top of the monument,
Lydya close behind me. when i'd reached the apex, the symbol glowing
bronze-gold before me, i reached out tentatively and touched it. i felt
a faint voice somewhere far off, like someone speaking at the bottom of
a stairwell. i jerked my hand back and the voice stopped.
Lydya joined me and together we touched the symbol. the voice was
slightly louder this time, and with concentration, i could make out what
it was saying. we listened, completely absorbed:
once upon a time, it happened that there were a number of races
capable of interstellar travel. of those, four were most
prominent: the Parkry, hive-structured, insect-like, rigidly
defined socially and dedicated to a program of continual
expansion to all worlds that they could inhabit or modify easily;
the Sthelane, who had never expanded their civilisation beyond
the one world they evolved on, but nevertheless travelled far,
exchanging information with as many different species as
possible; the Akhaga, a name which covered a loose conglomeration
of races united by their dependence on governance by a primitive
artificial intelligence, and (a note of pride crept in to the
voice here) the Moridani, a species given to adapting to
different environments by self-modification.
at that time, distribution of the secret of faster-than-light
travel made the practice of interstellar war possible. the
Parkry spread further afield until their borders touched those of
the Akhaga and the Moridani; those races then defended
themselves. the resources of the Parkry which had previously been
devoted to expansion in all directions became focused on the
Moridani/Akhaga borders, while the Akhaga began recruiting nearby
races to their cause, sometimes accelerating primitive species
through several evolutionary stages to the point where they could
be of use in interstellar warfare; soon, the three-sided war
became a five, then nine, and eventually twenty-three-sided war
as races expanded far more rapidly than usual and declared
independence. many of these races were destroyed, their
territories either absorbed into the seemingly unstoppable Parkry
advance, or rendered uninhabitable.
the Moridani called a meeting at a neutral point. representatives
of most prominent races attended and while no agreement on limits
for Parkry expansion (the main reason for the meeting) was
reached, consensus was that something had to be done. while the
others debated, a sub-set of the beings at this meeting - three
Moridani, six of the Akhaga and one Sthelane - met in secret and
devised a plan for an artificial intelligence more extensive and
powerful than any previous system. in direct contravention of
established rules concerning such devices, they gave it only one
directive: maintain peace in the galaxy, by whatever means
possible. they gave it access to materials and machines by which
it could expand itself; they placed the complex on a world far
outside any disputed territories, sat back and waited for a result.
the device, named Coordinator, did nothing beyond minor expansion
of its hardware systems for some time; it was busy re-designing
itself. while its creators were occupied with the continuing
wars, it dug out the centre of the planet it had been placed on
and began construction of a small fleet of ships, to be manned by
a race of beings the Coordinator had designed from scratch;
implacable, supremely capable warriors whose home planet was a
moon of a nearby gas giant, Bythe.
these beings took control of the warships and went to the centre
of the Parkry territories, killing as they went by the simple
expedient of forcing any nearby asteroids down onto the planets
occupied by the Parkry. whenever Parkry attack-craft encountered
these ships, the result was inevitably one-sided; no Parkry ever
survived the conflicts. the Bythians' ships were a magnitude
faster and more powerful than their opponents.
within a year, the backbone of the Parkry's empire had been
broken. their forces became more desperate, more inclined to use
suicide tactics against their opponents, to no avail. the Bythians
began spreading a virus which altered the Parkry at a genetic level,
inhibiting the production of the warrior class.
the Moridani and the Akhaga congratulated themselves, but then
found themselves under attack from the Bythians, directed by the
Coordinator who now saw them as a potential threat to galactic
peace. the Akhaga rapidly folded under the Bythians' attack,
splitting into their dozen-or-so component civilisations. the
Sthelane seemed to vanish; their homeworld was abandoned. the
Bythians left Sthelanar alone, after incurring serious losses
through traps left there.
the Moridani put up more of a fight; they were hampered by a need
to defend their territories against an enemy who had nothing to
lose by complete destruction of the battle-ground. every move the
Moridani made was predicted and countered by the Coordinator,
whose talent for invention and discovery soon outstripped the
Moridani's level of technology. forced back to their last two
systems, the Moridani scattered to the edges of the galaxy,
individuals hiding out on previously unexplored worlds, often
among developing civilisations. the scattered Moridani maintained
communication by a method the Coordinator couldn't trace, and
watched helplessly as the Bythians gained control of one system
after another, enforcing a limit on technological advancement
that would permit nothing higher than interplanetary travel. at
this time, the original series of Edicts were drawn up; the Laws
of the Dominion, which proscribed /any/ faster-than-light drive
other than that provided by the Coordinator; artificial intelligence
of any kind; nanotechnology of any kind; stellar engineering of any
kind. several other minor limits were also enforced, such as
restrictions on virtual reality, genetic modification and
self-replicating machinery.
at this time, the Coordinator formed the structure of the
Dominion; in the Moridani language it was known as the Circle
Within the Circle, or `Nos-a-Nos'. this became generally known as
the NoSanNoOs.
(an image formed in my mind, hearing this: a dark red circle surrounded
by a second circle broken into seventeen irregular, radial segments.)
the structure was thus: at the head, the Coordinator, which was
later known simply as the NoSanNoOs Associative-Processing
Artificial Intelligence, or NAPAI; next, a series of smaller
units, known as NAPAISubs, one for each planetary system in the
dominion. below this, the territories were governed by
representatives of the races occupying the worlds, or if this was
impractical (or if the race refused to cooperate) by a team of
Bythians. many places below this were occupied by the remnants
of the Parkry, who had been forced into a non-violent attitude.
the pattern developed so: a Bythian scout would enter a system,
check for signs of intelligent life, ascertain the level of
intelligence and whether or not the race was a threat to its
immediate neighbours. if this was the case, the race was contacted
and offered the benefits of the Dominion; free faster-than-light
travel to anywhere in the occupied part of the galaxy; food
resources more than sufficient to feed even the most densely
populated planet; access to the galaxy-wide information net and
free energy management to maintain a consistently high level of
quality of life. most civilisations, caught on that difficult
border between space migration and collapse through exhausted
resources, agreed; the few who saw through the NoSanNoOs' offer
were soon convinced by a show of strength from the Bythians.
occasionally, the Bythians found existing interstellar
civilisations; in most cases, these races were convinced that
their opposition was more powerful, and that war would be
impractical, wasteful and could only have one result. any races
stubborn enough to fight were easily defeated, since they were
operating under the same drawbacks as the Moridani had been.
occasionally, a race within the Dominion was found to be too
difficult to control; either they refused to accept the
NoSanNoOs' limitations on their technology, or the ongoing
analysis of their race by the NAPAISub revealed that they would
become a significant problem some time in the future. such races
were exterminated wholesale; the homeworld was bombed out of
existence, and any individuals of that species running loose in
the Dominion were rounded up and executed.
the voice fell silent then. we glanced at each other; what did this
have to do with us? just then, i thought of the ships we'd seen on the
way out; Lydya's expression confirmed that she was thinking along
similar lines... no. it would have been too much of a coincidence.
you, chosen to undergo the Change, would be declared illegal
under NoSanNoOs rule. you have two options; you can run and
hide... or you can fight. i, Saranaxio-Feylen-Nadawi-Kenak,
Moridani warrior; i made your Change possible. i first visited
your world and gave this gift to Hepele, priestess of the Mother.
you are my children. i urge you to fight; not for my sake, not
for your own sake, not for the memories of so many who have
fallen to the NoSanNoOs but for all those who are to come.
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