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2 November 2425

Virtual Reality

N’gai Cluster

1212 hours, TFT

Konstantin-2 fed recorded imagery to the Sh’daar Council as Gray continued to speak. The powerful AIs on board America had, 12 million years in Humankind’s future, tapped into the vast and intricate web of Glothr information networks. The information and imagery found there had been returned to Konstantin in the year 2425, analyzed, and translated. Those records, now imbedded within Konstantin-2’s memory, created a visual backdrop shared by all of the entities present as Gray spoke.

“This,” Gray said, “is the galaxy, my galaxy—we call it the Milky Way. This is what it looks like in my own time.”

The plain and its looming circle of giant beings had vanished. In its place, the Milky Way hung in silent, glowing splendor against Night Absolute. The central hub showed a faint reddish tinge while the spiral arms around it glowed faintly blue. From this vantage point, it was easy to see that the galaxy was, in fact, a barred spiral, its hub elongated in its ponderous revolution about the super-massive black hole at its heart.

Four hundred billion stars … forty billion Earthlike worlds … some millions of intelligent species, many with star-faring civilizations—all within that single soft glow of tangled, nebulae-knotted, spiraling starlight.

“A wise human named Sun Tzu once said, ‘Know your enemy,’” Gray told the others, “and so we humans have been learning as much as we can about the Sh’daar Collective. We know you evolved within this dwarf galaxy you call the N’gai Cluster, that your civilization was destroyed by the Schjaa Hok, the Transcendence, and that you rebuilt it from the ashes.

“We know that as the N’gai Cluster was devoured by the larger Milky Way, you spread out to create a new empire, one spanning both space and time … and that you were determined that the Transcendence would never again threaten your culture, or the cultures of other species that were interacting with you. We know that you found ways to travel from your epoch to mine, where you gathered many more species to your cause … the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Slan, and others. And when we humans refused what you offered—and what you demanded in return—you urged those species to attack us, either to force us into obedience, or to destroy us …”

Thunder rumbled, deep and insistent—the Drerd interrupting. You humans are balanced on the precipice, the translation informed him. You are closer to Schjaa Hok than you realize. If you fall, you threaten us all.

“We have never understood your fears about this,” Gray said. “If a single species in this entire, vast galaxy goes extinct—or if it enters its own transcendence and vanishes entirely—how does that threaten you?”

The spinning gateways give access not only to far expanses of space, another being—the one like a golden slug, the Sjhlurrr—reminded him, but to the deeps of time as well. Causality can be broken. Whole universes of creativity and creation, of experience, of suffering and of ecstasy, of Mind can be made void in an instant. What thinking being could not fear such an eventuality?

Spinning gateways. That must be what the Sh’daar called the TRGA cylinders. He felt the Agletsch within his implant, confirming his guess.

“There may be,” Gray said, “greater fears. We recently traveled twelve million years into our own future, and encountered the Glothr. We learned a great deal from them.

“And we learned about the end of galactic civilization … or at least of that aspect of civilization that includes the Sh’daar and Humankind.”

And the virtual image of the Milky Way … changed.

That vast whirlpool of hundreds of billions of suns, young and bright and vital, its spiral arms picked out by the long, knotted battlements and parapets of black dust and by the piercing gleam of young, hot stars, faded away to shreds and tatters, to be replaced by … something else, a pale shell of its former beauty. The mathematical perfection of those spiral arms had been torn apart, the nebulae devoured, the myriad stars vanished or somehow dimmed—a handful of stars surviving of the myriads visible before. The galaxy had become a wan, dim shadow of its former light and strength.

And at the galactic core something strange was visible, nestled in among the remnant suns. Something shadowy, with just a hint of golden light. It was difficult to see, difficult to interpret, to understand, but it looked like an immense translucent sphere fully ten thousand light years across, forged, perhaps, out of the clotted clouds of suns that had been there before.

A scant handful of species, according to the Glothr records, and including the Glothr themselves, were in full flight from the ravaged galaxy behind them, fleeing to other galaxies across the empty gulfs of space. A number of dark and frigid worlds—a fleet, a pack of Steppenwolf worlds—were fleeing out into darkness.

“We think,” Gray told the Council, “that what we’re seeing in there engulfing the galaxy’s central core is a full-blown Kardeshev III civilization … a galactic Dyson sphere.”

As he said this, Konstantin-2 shared with the Council the background information to what must have been untranslatable terms to the alien species:

In the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev had lent his name to his proposed method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological development. A K-I civilization used all of the available energy of its home planet. A K-II used all of the energy from its star, and physicist Freeman Dyson had suggested how that might be possible: a hollow sphere, or, alternatively, a cloud of orbiting satellites, that collected all of the energy emitted by the civilization’s star.

Which meant that a K-III civilization would use all of the energy available within an entire galaxy.

When Gray suggested the possibility of a galactic-scale Dyson sphere—and as they accepted the AI’s data—he felt an uneasy stir move through his audience.

Why, the Groth Hoj asked him, should we fear this? This … event lies nearly a billion years in our future. And it could well be our own remote descendents who do this …

The ephemeral is correct, the Adjugredudhran said. Its branching arms gestured sharply. A mere four galactic rotations is a brief space of time for a truly mature civilization.

The being’s use of the word ephemeral almost jolted Gray out of the simulation. How long did the Adjugredudhra live?

And that question raised another. Presumably, they possessed long life spans—possibly even functional immortality—because they’d learned how to manipulate their own genome. But genetics was one of the proscribed technologies—the “G” in “GRIN,” knowledge that could lead to the Tech Singularity. Supposedly, the Adjugredudhra, like the rest of the Sh’daar, were doing everything in their power to avoid another one.

Were all of the members of the Sh’daar Collective hypocrites on such an astronomical scale?

That thought disturbed him even as he answered their question. “Eight hundred seventy-six million years is more like three galactic rotations, not four,” Gray said. “A mere instant!” He meant the statement as a joke, but sensed a kind of impact, an increasing sense of unease, among the alien listeners. Maybe they did casually think on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. “And in my time, my epoch, we might be seeing the first arrival of the galactic Dyson sphere makers. We believe them to be the Rosette Aliens.”

At Gray’s mental signal, Konstantin-2 loaded another set of images into the collective, virtual consciousness—images originally returned to Earth from the heart of the Omega Centauri star cluster. “A lot of ephemeral lives were lost,” he said, “getting this information.”

Konstantin was showing the gathered beings images collected by America, and by various survey ships and probes sent into the cluster’s heart. The six black holes the Council were seeing—cosmologists were now certain—were the far-future embers of the Six Suns of the remote past.

The beings gathered about the virtual circle stared up, with wildly different sensory organs, into utter strangeness. Not all of them had eyes … but the imagery had been made available in a wide range of formats.

The Six Suns all were hot, young stars, each some forty times the mass of Earth’s sun. Such large stars were profligate and short-lived. They burned through their stores of nuclear fuel in just tens of millions of years before ending their relatively brief lives as Type II supernovae and collapsing into black holes. The various star-faring beings around him had to know what these images implied, but he said it aloud anyway.

“This is the ultimate fate of your Six Suns,” Gray told them. “Six black holes spinning in a rosette. Those masses, rotating that quickly, distort spacetime in the same way as the TRGAs … what you call the Spinning Gateways.”

Gray knew, though, that the most intriguing part of the images humans had recorded weren’t the black holes themselves, but what was within the central opening at the Rosette’s heart: starscapes.

Different starscapes.

They changed with the changing angle of the recording sensors as they passed the opening, and Gray thought about how a slight change in the angle of approach through a TRGA cylinder could change your destination in both time and space. Here, one view of a sparseness of stars—a stellar desert—gave way to the teeming myriads of suns at the heart of a cluster or a galaxy, which in turn gave way to tangled, knotted curtains of nebulae … to the emptiness of intergalactic space … to a view of a binary star from relatively close … to a view of a spiral galaxy—quite possibly the Milky Way—seen in all of its spectacular beauty from Outside.

Some of those different views, those different realities, were alien in the extreme. One appeared to be a realm of searing, white-hot energy … the core of a sun, perhaps … or the chaotic incandescence of an instant after the big bang … or even a cosmos of completely different laws and makeup.

Cosmologists studying the changing scenes had concluded that each different starscape was looking into a different universe—alternate, parallel realities, some very like this one, some completely other.

“We believe the Rosette Aliens came through this gateway,” Gray told the assembly. “They might be from the remote future. More likely they’re from an alternative universe, a different reality. Some of our cosmologists have speculated that they’re from a universe that is nearing the end of its lifetime, a universe in the final eons of cold, entropic decay. If so, the Rosette Aliens might be seeking a younger, healthier universe. They would be migrating here to escape their dying cosmos.

“But we don’t know. We haven’t been able to establish communications with them. We don’t know what they are, what they’re thinking, where they’re from. They may be so far advanced that they literally do not, cannot notice us.

“Some human xenosophontologists have begun speculating,” Gray went on, “about the galactic Dyson sphere we glimpsed in the far future … eight hundred eighty-eight million years after this epoch you inhabit here. It seems statistically unlikely that we’re dealing with two Kardashev-III species here—one entering my time as the Rosette Aliens, and a different one building a galaxy-sized Dyson sphere just twelve million years later. If these two … manifestations are in fact the same species, we need to confront them before they become well-established and begin cannibalizing the entire galaxy. This is completely beyond the scope and capabilities of Humankind. But if it is of interest to the Sh’daar, perhaps an alliance between humans and the Sh’daar is a possibility after all.”

Gray hated saying that, hated the necessity of stating it. He’d spent most of his adult life fighting the Sh’daar. He’d started off as a fighter pilot off the America, then gone on to flying a console at Navy HQ Command. He’d served as CAG on board the Republic, as skipper of the Nassau and then as XO back on board the America once more, before eventually moving up to becoming America’s CO.

And now he was a fleet admiral in command of the America battlegroup, with orders from the president himself to forge an alliance with the federation of alien cultures he’d been fighting now for twenty … no, twenty-four years.

No … he didn’t like that one damned bit.

Hell, the whole point of the war had been to maintain Earth’s sovereignty against a coalition of beings determined to incorporate Humankind into their own order. But now here he was, with orders from President Koenig to explore the possibility of recruiting those same beings into an alliance with Earth. Could the Sh’daar be trusted? Could they even be understood?

Were humans going to lose their independence after all, after nearly sixty years of bitter and bloody conflict?

It tore at him, knowing so many of his soldiers—so many of his friends—had died because of these beings, and now he was essentially here, begging for their help.

He’d stopped speaking, his message delivered, and he realized that all of the gathered aliens were discussing it now with considerable animation. Gray found that he was unable to follow more than a fraction of what was being said. It was like being in a conversation where everyone was talking at once, and hearing only a word here and there.

He found the Agletsch’s channel. “Aar’mithdisch? I’m not following the translation.”

“The human brain has limitations,” she replied. “It is unable to follow multiple threads, it seems.”

“Are you telling me these beings can?”

“To an extent. All have been enhanced to one extent or another. You will be able to use the translation software to pick out separate threads and hear them in isolation, perhaps at a later time.”

Which didn’t help him understand what was going on now.

He tried to tune in on different threads.

We do not know if these images represent non-Sh’daar manipulation of the galaxy …

We do not know that these images represent reality …

If the Glothr flee …

The ephemerals distort the truth …

… has nothing to do with us …

… ephemerals do not …

… a billion years …

… afraid …

“What are they saying?” McKennon asked on a private channel, and for the first time, Gray realized that she had been experiencing this virtual reality as well, even though he didn’t see her avatar here.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Our translation expert says human brains aren’t good enough for us to join in.”

“Some Sh’daar brains and nervous systems have been artificially enhanced,” she told him. “The Adjugredudhra … the Zhalleg …”

“I thought these species were all Refusers?” Gray replied, a petulant edge to his mental voice. “No GRIN technologies, no genetics, no robotics—”

“As far as we’ve been able to determine,” McKennon told him, “that was almost never an absolute for them. If humans gave up all technology, that would include fire, sharpened sticks, and the hand ax. The most virulent Luddite wouldn’t demand that.”

“I suppose not. It just seems … I don’t know … hypocritical, I guess, for them to demand we give up certain technologies while they continue using them.”

“They’re also alien, Admiral. By definition, that means they don’t see things the same way we do.”

“I’ve heard that one before.” He laughed. “And I still think that’s a piss-poor excuse that explains nothing.”

“Well, excuse me …”

“Oh, I wasn’t picking on you. They have different worldviews, a different context. I get that. But if this were a virdrama, having the villains do something weird just because they’re alien wouldn’t cut it.”

“Maybe the problem is that this isn’t a virdrama,” she told him. “Real life is never as neatly ordered—or as explicable—as fiction.”

… the Six Suns of the future …

… the Spinning Gateways …

… if the ephemerals upset the balance of …

… we must not …

… they must not …

“Are you recording all of this?” Gray asked McKennon.

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“I am. It’s good to have a backup, though. You may be picking up pieces that my hardware misses.”

“Good thought.”

“Konstantin should be able to untangle it all later. But I do wish we knew what the argument was about now.”

“Ask the Agletsch.”

“Damn it. Of course …” He shifted channels. “Aar’mithdisch? What are they arguing about? Explain it for my poor, underdeveloped human brain.”

“They do not argue … not precisely. There is doubt that the imagery you bring from the remote future represents what is really happening. Two—the Adjugredudhra and the Baondyeddi—think it likely that the galactic Dyson sphere you’ve imaged here is in fact something built by the farfuture descendents of the Sh’daar Collective. If that is true, of course, there is nothing about which they need to be concerned … yes-no?”

“The Glothr records show Sh’daar species fleeing the galaxy.”

“The term ‘Sh’daar’ may have no meaning—or pertinence—in another four Galactic rotations.

“Too, others continue to insist that a billion years is too long an expanse of time for anyone to worry about what lies beyond. Those inhabited worlds fleeing into intergalactic space could be the future equivalent of Refusers, for example, or a defeated faction … or almost anything else at all. Nearly a billion years is a very long period of time, in which cultures will likely evolve and change out of all recognition.”

“How … ephemeral of them …”

“Some Sh’daar species are extremely long-lived,” the Agletsch said. “They tend to take what you humans call the long view … and with good reason. But most feel the problems of today are more than enough to occupy their full attention … yes-no?”

“Time travel rather puts a different spin on things, though,” Gray pointed out. “What the Sh’daar do here, in the N’gai Cluster, has spread to my own time.”

“Of course. But of greater moment … the technically advanced species of the remote future may be able to travel back in time and affect what happens here. The Glothr, clearly, can do this. You humans have done it, by means of the TRGA cylinders. What terrifies the decision makers of the Collective is the possibility that someone … you, the Glothr … the Rosette Aliens will come back to this time or before and wipe out all that they have built here.”

“Why? What are they building that is so damned important?” He meant the words lightly, a kind of joke.

The Agletsch liaison answered him, though. “They seek to undo the Technological Singularity, which destroyed their former totsch.”

The Agletsch word was not easily translated. According to Konstantin-2’s database, though, it carried elements of the words “glory,” “reputation,” and “effectiveness.” Gray decided that a good fit might be the Asian concept of face.

Could that be the answer? The Sh’daar had set out on their anti-singularity jihad because they were embarrassed? Because they felt they’d lost face?

It didn’t seem reasonable. And yet, knowing the human causes for so much of their own history, maybe that shouldn’t be surprising.

“The war itself may be an emergent phenomenon,” Konstantin-2 whispered in Gray’s thoughts, almost as though reading them.

“What do you mean?”

“The Collective consists of several diverse species, each with its own agenda … and with numerous individual members of each species with their own goals and desires, all interacting with one another in essentially unpredictable ways. The pro-singularity Sh’daar who attacked us upon our arrival are a case in point.”

“So?”

“Emergent behavior is defined as a larger pattern or behavior arising from interactions among smaller or simpler entities which may not, themselves, display that behavior. Mind arising from trillions of neural synaptic connections would be one such. Life itself, emerging from the associated cells of an organism, is another.”

“Okay, okay. I get it. But war?”

“It seems evident that no one of the Sh’daar species rules or dominates the others. All do fear a repeat of their singularity event, however, and seek to prevent this. Their interaction with one another, however, might have led to a social acceptance of warfare as a means to an end, and the attitudes of other species would reinforce the emerging group ethic.”

“Like a lynch mob,” Gray said slowly.

“Precisely. One human alone might be unwilling to execute another human, but a large group, with the members exciting one another, would not hesitate. Humans have demonstrated this principle time and time again, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in the Chinese Hegemony …”

“So what do we do about it?”

“Unknown. Improved lines of communication will help.”

“Of course it would. The problem is we can’t even understand them now.”

The ephemerals try to deceive us …

The ephemerals are of no consequence …

We should investigate the Rosette intelligence …

Who’d said that? Gray checked the datastream, and had Konstantin-2 tease out the tagline on the statement. It was the Sjhlurrr.

The Sjhlurrr posed an interesting problem for those studying the Sh’daar Collective of species, Gray thought. According to the data acquired twenty years ago, the red-golden slugs appeared to be less psychologically attached to a particular body image than were humans. Evidently, they’d used advanced genetic techniques to alter their ponderous and often inconvenient forms, transferring their considerable intellects into other, smaller and more mobile organic bodies in myriad shapes and sizes.

“I wonder,” McKennon said, “if that’s the Sjhlurrr’s real shape.”

She seemed to be reading his thoughts. “I thought the Refusers rejected the idea of genetic manipulation.”

“Some did. But just as not all of the ur-Sh’daar went along with the technologies that kicked off their singularity, not all members of a species buy into a single ideology or meme. Think of how diverse human beliefs are.”

“I guess so. It’s easy to see all aliens as alike …”

“There are some. One F’heen is pretty much identical to every other F’heen in its swarm, both genetically and in its worldview. They form telepathic group minds, so they kind of have to all look at the world the same way, not only within their home swarm, but among all swarms. But for most other species? No, they’re as much individuals within their own groups as are humans.”

Gray thought about that statement for a moment. While he agreed in principle, he was not completely convinced. For a long time, humans had assumed that the near-mythic Sh’daar were a single alien species, the monolithic power behind an alliance of galactic species within the T_prime epoch that they’d set to attacking humans. When the America battlegroup had first traveled back in time to the N’gai Cluster, Humankind had discovered that the Sh’daar were, in fact, an assembly of several dozen star-faring species working together … an empire of sorts, spanning both space and time, united in the need to stop other species from entering their own technological singularities.

And something about that idea simply did not make sense. Gray felt like he was tantalizingly close to seeing a larger picture, a motive behind Sh’daar decisions and actions, something that humans had not yet grasped. It had to do with what McKennon had just said about diversity within the separate species … but he couldn’t quite grasp it.

With a mental shrug, he decided to look at it later. Maybe Konstantin-2 would be able to help pin down what was bothering him.