Читать книгу Bright Light - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 9

1 February 2426

Lieutenant Gregory

SupraQuito Synchorbital

1218 hours, TFT

The offices of Paradise, Inc. were located in a rotating wheel attached to the synchorbital complex just outside of the naval yards. Gregory had checked himself off of the Republic and taken a mag-tube to the office structure’s microgravity hub, from which he caught an elevator “down” to the wheel’s one-G rim. The reception office was luxuriously appointed, with viewalls set to peaceful mood-abstract animations, and with hauntingly ethereal music piped through from hidden speakers.

An android robot took Gregory’s personal stats, and he was ushered through to an inner space where he met Kazuko Marukawa, seemingly adrift in swirls of colored light. “So, Lieutenant Gregory,” she said with a dazzling smile as he took a chair opposite her desk. “What brings you to Paradise?”

“I’ve … lost someone,” he told her. “Someone very important to me. I’ve been wondering about the eschatoverse.”

“An eschatoverse,” she said, gently correcting him. “We build one exactly to your specifications. We have, quite literally, billions of available models to choose from.”

The thought of his own private heaven felt uncomfortably claustrophobic. “Isn’t that … I don’t know … kind of lonely? A virtual universe just for me and whoever I bring along?”

“Not at all. Think of your ’verse as a bubble … but one that is constantly merging and interacting with others, with many others. You would have access to the entire virtual multiverse of billions of distinct realities. We offer ready-made realities representing the afterlives of hundreds of distinct religions and belief sets. We offer realities tailor-made to your specifications, where you can fly with a thought, enjoy superhuman powers, anything that is possible for you to imagine … and much, much more! Your new reality, I assure you, will be far, far more intricate, more interesting, and more fulfilling than the so-called real world is for you now!”

Gregory knew about virtual uploads. It was the same trick, more or less, used by the Baondyeddi and other technically advanced alien species to vanish down a virtual rabbit hole out at Heimdall. Human technology had been moving toward this goal for centuries, but virtual uploads had become practical only within the past few decades and on a much smaller scale.

But that scale was growing fast.

“So … I know it’s possible to make a copy of the human brain,” he told her. “And that copy can be uploaded into a computer that’s running a virtual simulation of a world … of an entire universe, even. But if I uploaded myself into one of your bubbles … would that really be me? I mean … even a perfect copy of my mental state is still a copy. What happens to the … uh … real me?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Lieutenant, you would be amazed at how many times we hear that exact question!”

“You would be amazed, Ms. Marukawa, how much I would hate to wake up and find that I was the version of myself that didn’t get uploaded.”

“Do you believe in the soul, Lieutenant?”

“I’m … not sure. I don’t think so …”

“Well, let’s concentrate on your conscious awareness, your sense of self. You have one, I assume?”

He was becoming annoyed with her perky assertiveness. “Of course I do.”

“Your brain is a network of interconnecting neurons … about one hundred billion of them linked with one another in complex structures through up to eleven topological dimensions, yes?”

“Uh … yeah …”

“The interactions of all of those neurons give rise to memory, to decisions, to what we call consciousness.”

He nodded.

“Okay. If I were to take just one of your neurons and replace it with a microscopic nanocomputer, maintaining all of those synaptic linkages … would you notice the difference?”

“Probably not.”

“Would you still be you?”

“Yes …” He saw where this was going. He’d heard the argument before, but still wasn’t sure he bought it.

“And if I replaced ten of your neurons … ten out of one hundred billion. Would you still be you?”

“I know what you’re saying, Ms. Marukawa. If you could magically replace my neurons one at a time, eventually, my brain would be all machine instead of organic jelly and my mind could be transferred to a robot body … or uploaded to a supercomputer. If all of the connections are the same, I shouldn’t notice any difference.”

“Your consciousness would be preserved, identical to what you think of as you in every way.”

“I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is how you can move my conscious mind from here”—he tapped his forehead—“into a machine. That’s different than just swapping out parts.”

“All I can tell you, Lieutenant, is that we’ve had no complaints.”

“What happens to the organic body once the consciousness leaves it?” He realized as soon as the words were out that it was a damned silly question.

“The organic brain is destroyed in the scanning process, Lieutenant. The body is disposed of in a manner determined by the client. We offer a number of mortuary—”

He held up his hand. “I don’t think I want to hear that part. Listen … about my friend …”

“This was someone you loved?” He nodded. “A woman?”

“Her name was Megan.”

“Do you have a recording? Or is she already in an eschatoverse?”

He sighed. “I have her avatar.”

“Ah.” Marukawa’s face fell. “We can offer you an extremely lifelike simulation, of course. A dedicated AI recreates her appearance, her emotions, her thoughts and mannerisms based on the available data. It’s not—”

“It’s not really her. I know.”

Gregory leaned back in the chair, fingers drumming on an armrest. The flow of soft light and random shapes around him was distracting, even hypnotic. He needed to think this through.

Meg’s avatar had been the electronic version of her she used to communicate with others virtually, a kind of personal assistant and secretary that could seamlessly stand in for her electronically. He thought of it as a kind of sketch of the real person, though that hadn’t stopped him from having long conversations with it since Meg’s death. Everyone had one—everyone except Prims, of course, or religious fanatics who didn’t believe in using such things.

Gregory had been considering suicide for some time, now, a simple and painless way out of the pain of a world without Meg. Paradise, Inc. offered him an option: even if the mind—not the real Don Gregory—was transferred to a simulated universe, the Gregory left behind would end, and that in and of itself would be a form of heaven.

And if this company was able to transfer the conscious mind, the self, the sense of ego and being and self-awareness that was Don Gregory, he would wake up in a better, richer, more vibrant universe with at least the illusion of Megan with him again.

Maybe in time he could forget that she was an illusion wrapped around a packet of AI software.

Marukawa seemed to be reading his thoughts. “We can edit your memories during processing, Lieutenant,” she told him. “You could be unaware that she was a copy. If you wished, you would be unaware that you were living in a simulated universe.”

He chuckled. “I’ve heard it suggested that we’re already in such a simulation. And how would we know?”

“An untestable hypothesis,” she said, “but a fascinating one.”

“If we are living in a simulation, someone up there programmed a piss-poor reality for us.”

“And that, Lieutenant,” she said cheerfully, “is why Paradise, Inc. is here. Now … you’re currently on active duty?”

“I am. Two more years before I can resign my commission.”

“That is not a problem, Lieutenant. We can make a reservation for you, and even begin designing your ideal universe for you before you process.”

“I’ll need to think about it, ma’am,” he told her. He stood up. “One more question?”

“Of course.”

“How do I pay for all this if I’m dead?”

“You turn over your personal credit when you come for processing, Lieutenant, with a ten-thousand-credit minimum. The more credit you transfer, the larger the field of available universes open to you once you cross over. The cost is applied to the ongoing maintenance of your eschatoverse, to administrative overhead—”

“Including your own salary, I’m sure.” He grinned at her. “Thank you, Ms. Marukawa. You’ve been most helpful.”

“We look forward to your new life with us, Lieutenant.”

Gregory left the office and made his way cross-complex to the Free Fall, a watering hole popular with naval officers enjoying some downtime “ashore.” His conversation with Marukawa had brought up a couple of unpleasant points.

First and foremost, of course, was the inescapable fact that Meg was dead, that if he shared an artificial reality with her, it would be with an electronic illusion, not with the real person. Okay … he could edit that part out of his memory. But still, the idea was … unpleasant.

There was also the very real question of eternity. Nothing lasts forever, and that certainly included the computers and AI networks girdling Earth in the various synchorbitals or buried underground on the moon and elsewhere. Granted, someday all of those networks might be subsumed into a larger, more powerful, more advanced electronic infrastructure. He could imagine Humankind building its own Dyson swarm, like the one they’d discovered out at Tabby’s Star … or even a Kardashev-3 galactic Dyson sphere, like the one they’d glimpsed a few million years in the future. If that happened, Paradise, Inc.’s virtual multiverse would likely get picked up and passed along.

But Gregory had seen what happened when the Rosette entity had descended on Heimdall, just twelve light years from Sol. Uploaded minds occupying artificial realities there had been … eaten. Were they still alive—assuming of course that digital minds in a virtual reality could be thought of as “alive”?

What if the entity came to earth one day … maybe after he’d turned off his organic body and begun cavorting in a Paradise, Inc. heaven?

Or … shit. What if the maintenance workers just decided to walk off the job? What if someone pulled the plug?

He didn’t like the idea that his very existence would be utterly dependent on someone, anyone, else.

It might be a better idea in the long run, Gregory thought, to come to grips with the universe he was in now.

TC/USNA CVS Republic

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1427 hours, TFT

“Bright Light Module One is on board,” the ship’s executive officer said. Commander Jonathan Rohlwing turned and gave Gray an unfathomable look. “Republic is ready in all respects for departure.”

“Personnel?”

“We still have twelve personnel ashore, but all are due back on board by sixteen hundred hours.”

“Very well.”

Was there a measure of resentment in Rohlwing’s voice, Gray wondered? Republic would have been Rohlwing’s command, presumably, had they not dragged Gray in off the street, dusted him off, and put him in the command seat.

Gray wouldn’t have blamed his exec if he did resent what had happened. This whole arrangement—kicking him out of the Navy, then bringing him back as a civilian CO—was ridiculous.

It wasn’t entirely without precedent, though. Centuries before, in the wet Navy, certain classes of supply and cargo ships had been civilian vessels with civilian skippers … but in an emergency the ships could be activated as military vessels under military command.

And yet they’d kept their civilian skippers.

But command of a ship, any ship, demanded absolute trust between crew and captain. That trust ran both ways, too. The ship’s XO had to trust his captain to make the right decisions and give the right commands. At the same time, Gray had to know that he could trust Rohlwing to follow his commands to the letter.

As always, building that two-way trust would take time.

Gray just hoped that they had that time.

USNA CVE Guadalcanal

Orbiting Heimdall

Kapteyn’s Star

1650 hours, TFT

The Guadalcanal had reached the rest of the small flotilla keeping watch within the Kapteyn’s Star system. Captain Taggart had linked through to Admiral Rasmussen and his staff on board the heavy cruiser Toronto in orbit around the ice giant Thrymheim, the system’s fourth planet.

For several hours, now, Guadalcanal had drifted in a slow orbit with the rest of the flotilla. On her external feeds, Taggart could see the other five ships of the group—the flagship Toronto, a North Chinese light cruiser Shanxi, and three destroyers. The ’Canal had long since fed the Toronto images of what they’d seen over Heimdall. Now the small squadron was watching and recording the light show taking place sunward, over five astronomical units distant within the inner core of the system. At this distance, almost 9 AUs, the tiny red sun was a sullen-ember pinpoint, one barely visible to the naked eye. The Rosette entity’s construction consisted of a surreal tangle of geometric shapes and lights, and it appeared to be unfolding out of itself, growing rapidly larger and more complex.

“It’s matching the patterns that were here before the battle,” Taggart told Rasmussen over the tactical link. “I think once those structures are built, they can turn them on or off whenever they please.”

“The structures are anchored within the spacetime matrix,” Dr. Howard Thornton of Toronto’s xenosoph department observed. “Captain Taggart is right. They store the pattern of those shapes inside 4-D space and summon them when they need them.”

“How the hell do they manage that?” Rasmussen demanded.

“If I could tell you that, Admiral,” Thornton said, “I would be from a K-2 civilization. Maybe K-3.”

Referring to the Kardashev Scale, what Thornton meant was that Humankind was nowhere near the technological level they would need to be to understand what was happening, let alone produce those results. Whatever the Rosette entity was, it was eons ahead of Humankind on the learning curve and was manipulating spacetime in ways that suggested an ability to suck up every erg produced by a star … and quite possibly considerably more.

Taggart again felt the stirrings of a deep, inward religious awe.

For years she’d been a member of her former husband’s church, the Ancient Alien Creationists. It had taken her several years to shake that belief set; Trevor Gray’s discussions with her had eventually helped convince her that the AAC’s image of advanced galactic aliens tinkering with the human genome was weak and hopelessly anthropocentric. Beings powerful enough to do that—rewiring spacetime to their own advantage—wouldn’t give any thought at all to a bunch of paleolithic hominids crouching in their caves. In fact, past experience with the Rosetters suggested that they didn’t even notice star-faring species at Humankind’s current levels of advancement … didn’t notice, or didn’t care.

That revelation was crushing in its implications. Humans, she thought, tended to believe they were pretty hot stuff … and meeting something like the Rosette Consciousness was devastating to the human ego.

“What the hell are they doing in there?” Rasmussen wondered aloud over the link. “And why?”

“They appear,” Thornton observed, “to be surrounding Kapteyn’s Star with scaffolding of solid light. And I seriously doubt that we are capable of understanding why …”

Taggart noticed something in the data readout appearing on her in-head display. “Admiral?”

“Yes, Captain Taggart.”

“We’re picking up movement, sir … lots of it. Looks like a cloud of fireflies something like an astronomical unit across—”

“My God …”

“—and it’s headed our way damned fast.”

TC/USNA CVS Republic

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1707 hours, TFT

“The ship is ready in all respects for space, Captain.”

“Very well. Release grapples fore and aft.”

“Magnetic grapples released, sir.”

“Helm, engage thrusters. Take us astern, dead slow.”

“Thrusters, dead slow astern, aye, aye, sir.”

Gray felt the slight thump and a surge of acceleration as the Republic began backing out of the docking gantry. There was nothing for him to do at this point but watch. The ship’s AI was in control of all steering, power, and navigation functions, though human ratings and officers remained in the loop. The Republic’s artificial intelligence was far more capable than merely human brains, with far better sensory awareness of the ship’s surroundings.

“We are clear of the gantry, Captain.”

“Very well. You have the course.”

“Yes, sir. Aligned, laid in, and locked.”

“Accelerate.”

“Accelerate, aye, aye.”

The synchorbital complex off to port blurred and vanished as the Republic accelerated under gravitics. The waning crescent of the Earth rapidly dwindled in apparent size, together with Earth’s moon. In another few seconds Earth was merely a bright star gently drifting toward the sun.

Gray pulled up the reference on their destination within the Encyclopedia Galactica, and an in-head window filled with scrolling text.

Object: KIC 8462852

Alternate names: WTF Star, Tabby’s Star

Type: Main-sequence star; Spectral Type: F3 V/IV

Coordinates: RA: 20h 06m 15.457s Dec: +44° 27′ 24.61″;

Constellation: Cygnus

Mass: ~ 1.43 Sol; Radius: 1.58 Sol; Rotation: 0.8797 days;

Temperature: 6750° K; Luminosity: 5 x Sol;

Apparent Magnitude: 11.7; Absolute Magnitude: 3.08

Distance: 1480 ly

Age: ~ 4 billion years

Notes: First noted in 2009–2015 as a part of the data collected by the Kepler space telescope. An extremely unusual pattern of light fluctuations proved difficult to explain as a natural phenomenon and raised the possibility that intermittent dips in the star’s light output were the result of occultations by intelligently designed alien megastructures.

KIC 8462852 received the unofficial name “Tabby’s Star” after Tabetha S. Boyajian, head of the citizen scientist group that first called attention to the object. It was also called the “WTF star”—a humorous name drawn from the title of her paper: “Where’s the Flux?” At that time, “WTF” was a slang expression of surprise or disbelief …

There was a lot more, material added since America’s visit to the system weeks before. For over three centuries, astronomers had found comfort in finding natural explanations for the star’s oddball behavior that did not involve alien super-civilizations. The most popular theory combined the star’s high rate of spin causing gravitational darkening with the presence of an oddly tilted accretion disk—despite the fact that infrared studies of the system had never been able to detect an accretion disk’s warm presence. Other theories involved collisions of large planets with the star, causing an overall brightening that had been slowly dimming over the centuries.

The trouble was that none of those explanations fit all of the observations, and all were so coincidentally complex as to be unlikely in the extreme.

Gray found it amusing, actually. In 1960, Freeman Dyson, a mathematician and theoretical physicist, had suggested that any search for advanced civilizations in the galaxy be on the lookout for stars that unaccountably dimmed or winked out—indications of what became known as a Dyson swarm or Dyson sphere. These were hypothetical megastructures intended to capture all of a star’s radiation output by means either of a spherical cloud of solar collectors or a solid shell enclosing the star. By the early twenty-first century, Humankind had been thoroughly primed to discover signs of extraterrestrial intelligence … and yet when they’d actually spotted precisely what Dyson had predicted, they’d dismissed them as natural phenomenon.

Then the star-faring species of interstellar traders, the Agletsch, had strongly urged Konstantin to check out the star KIC 8462852. Gray had disobeyed orders to follow Konstantin’s directions and taken America to Tabby’s Star, where they’d discovered the ruins of an alien megastructure, and the surviving digital intelligence they called the Satori.

And now he was returning. They would visit the Satori at Tabby’s Star, then attempt to make contact with whatever was at Deneb, an unknown something that had destroyed much of the Satori infrastructure.

Whether or not the Denebans would be willing to help Humankind against the Rosette entity—or even communicate with them—was still very much an open question.

Forty minutes later, the Republic was boosting at seven thousand gravities, an acceleration unfelt because every atom of the ship was accelerating at the same rate within a gravitational field, essentially in free fall. They were moving at a sizeable percentage of the speed of light, and the sky ahead and aft was beginning to look strange as relativistic effects began to manifest.

“Captain Gray?” Lieutenant Ellen Walters, the duty sensor officer, called. “We’ve got something weird going on. Bearing two-eight-five minus one-five.”

Gray looked in the indicated direction, magnifying his in-head view. He saw … light.

“Xeno Department,” he called. “What do you make of those structures to port?”

“I’m not certain, Captain,” Dr. Vasilyeva replied. “It appears to be a Rosette light show.”

“That’s what I thought. Republic? Can you correct for relativistic aberration?”

“Correcting, Captain.”

Their high-velocity motion through space was bending incoming light beams, seeming to shift the images of stars and other objects forward, distorting them. At their current velocity, about six-tenths c, the effect wasn’t pronounced, but it was annoying. Republic’s AI applied a mathematical algorithm to the ship’s optical receivers, and the image snapped back to crystal clarity.

Beams of light appeared to be emerging from empty space, diverging slightly, like the entrance to a tunnel. A faintly luminous fog was emerging from the tunnel mouth, as geometric shapes carved from white and yellow light began to take form.

“Definitely Rosette phenomenon, Captain,” Vasilyeva said. “Are you going to change course for an intercept?”

Gray considered the question for only a second or so. “Negative.”

“Captain!” Commander Rohlwing said. His executive officer sounded shocked. “If that’s the Rosette entity … I mean … it’s not supposed to be here! Earth will need every ship to mount a defense!”

Gray closed his eyes. He was being presented with the same impossible choice twice within the space of a few weeks, and it freaking wasn’t fair!

“First,” he said, “a light space carrier does not have the sheer firepower to make a difference fighting that thing. Second … and more important, right now Earth’s only hope is for us to get to Deneb and get help. And that’s precisely what I intend to do.”

“But—”

“Comm! Transmit corrected images of what we’re seeing out there back to Earth and include a warning. Tell them what’s coming.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. Speed-of-light transmission time currently is eleven minutes.”

“Will it get to Earth before that … thing?”

“Yes, sir. Our message will beat it … By about eight minutes.”

“Then that’s the best we can do.”

The next dozen minutes passed in silence, as Gray and those members of the crew not actively engaged in operating the ship watched the unfolding patterns and shapes of light. They’d all seen much the same at Kapteyn’s Star, or heard about it from men and women who’d been there.

I wonder, Gray thought with some bitterness, if Earth will still be there when we return.

It was distinctly possible that even if the Denebans agreed to help them with some incredible high-tech weapon they could use against the Rosette, they’d get back to Earth only to find that they were too late …