The This, page 21
‘I don’t know how much you know about the deep history of the Hive-Mind-θ?’
At this, Adan simply stared at her.
‘It’s a complicated and not especially edifying story.’ The general drank down what remained in her wineglass. ‘Go back a couple of centuries to the beginnings of social media. In those days phones were the tech by which people intermediated – I mean, old-school phones, the sorts of thing you rarely see nowadays. The germ that grew into the HMθ began as a hands-free social media app. Now, obviously, it very quickly evolved beyond that, and nowadays we are dealing with a massively multiparty co-ordinated entity, legally human – according to the Global Supreme Court’s judgement of last year, anyway – possessing immense financial resources, distributed unequally around the world and widely through outer space. There are nodes we can hit, or we believe there are, where we can damage their ability to interconnect, but if I’m being honest we’ve never noticed any diminution in their capacities after one of our attacks.’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘The HMθ has long since left that old phone technology behind, of course. But that is where they started, and our strategy mentats think there may be some residual attachment to … to phones as such – to that old technology – in their as-it-were DNA. It hasn’t been top-down designed, the HMθ – it has evolved, it has grown. In evolutionary terms it’s been an accelerated process, sure, but with any process like this a bunch of junk ends up in the genes, along with the stuff that makes everything work. Maybe that’s what this is. Phenes are called that because they are Phenotypes of human DNA, after all.’
That reminded Adan of something, and trying to recall exactly what it was distracted him from his distress that Elegy – his Elegy – was currently in some place and he didn’t know where.
‘Is that right, though, ma’am?’ he asked.
‘We believe so. A digital copy of human DNA was encoded in the original hard-body program, and the Phenes we have today are a curated and modified version of that.’
‘I thought it was just a brand-name spin on the word phone.’
The general blinked. Then she took another sporkful of pasta and ate it. Then she tossed her bowl and empty glass in the recycle slot.
‘One working theory,’ she said, eventually, ‘is that the HMθ feels some peculiar affinity to the Phenes, because of their own origin as a collective entity, their deep history – and because they, too, are a phenotype of human development. We’re all expressing our genes, after all. They think they’re the inevitable evolutionary next step for Homo sapiens. They’re wrong about that, but it’s what they think. So … whatever is going on here – with you, with your Phene and this shutdown code – it’s all tangled up with these questions.’
Adan drank his wine. It soothed him, some.
‘I’m not sure I understand, ma’am,’ he said.
‘No,’ the general agreed. ‘No more do I. The hypothesis is – some element in the HMθ – maybe some individual incompletely assimilated, maybe somebody suffering in some way – passes this shutdown code out of the collective and to us. She, he, whatever, does so by hacking a Phene. We all know that there’s been a lot of anxiety that the HMθ might hack the network where Phenes are concerned, and override their three-law programming. The more hysterical corners of the chatsphere envisage an army of murdering Phenes spreeing through humanity with guns and … I don’t know. Swords, kung fu, who knows. Safety protocols are baked into Phenes, of course, so I think these fears are overwrought. But Phenes are, by nature, highly interconnected items and the HMθ are very sophisticated players when it comes to hacking.’
‘My Elegy wouldn’t hurt anybody,’ said Adan. ‘She couldn’t. It’s not in her nature.’
‘Sure, my lad,’ said the general, expansively. ‘So let’s say … this rogue agent inside the HMθ – if that’s what we’re dealing with – hacks your Phene. Why yours? Either because there’s something special about you, or maybe about your Phene, or else because they had to pick a random Phene and it happened to be yours.’
Adan wished she would stop talking about Elegy. It made him uncomfortable. But he said: ‘I can’t believe there’s anything special about me, ma’am.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Adan, but I agree. You’re a regular guy. You’re a soldier who follows orders, but you’re not super intelligent or super well positioned, socially or culturally.’
‘I wasn’t a soldier when it happened, though.’
‘True! This predates your enlistment. Maybe the hacker didn’t know that. Maybe they figured the shutdown code would get out and find its way to the military one way or another. Maybe they gauged the likelihood of you joining up and went with that.’
‘But they saw the future.’
The general raised her eyebrows. ‘They did?’
‘It did – the glitch. It told me that I should say the words during the Wallelei assault.’
‘But they didn’t actually mention Wallelei. By name.’
‘No,’ Adan conceded. ‘It wasn’t that. But the … the situation was described real precise, with lots of … you know. Detail.’
‘Since,’ said the general, ‘actually seeing the future is impossible, this must be a best-guess kind of scenario. Maybe they figured you were about to enlist. I’ve seen your file, and you weren’t best qualified for any other kind of work, let’s be honest. So they figure – he’ll probably go into the army. So they know you’d be sent into combat, and a good proportion of our raids are attempts to disrupt HMθ nodes – concentrations of HMθ population or technology, many of which are on private islands. So it’s a reasonable guess.’
This didn’t sound correct to Adan, but what did he know?
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘So here we are,’ said the general. ‘And I still haven’t told you why we’re going to Venus!’
Adan waited. The general watched him. Eventually she said:
‘All of this, everything I’ve just said to you, is best-guess discourse. We don’t really know. There’s something radically unpredictable about the HMθ, is the truth, and we’re not good at modelling their processes. But we know one thing: we can’t cohabit, long-term. They are an existential threat to us. Maybe they are right, and they are the next evolutionary step – maybe they’re Homo sapiens and we’re Homo neanderthalensis. So what? We are what we are. Should Neanderthal men and women just lay down and die? Of course not. Evolution isn’t a script, it’s a struggle. If the Neanderthals had defeated Homo sapiens, then Homo sapiens would look like the evolutionary dead end.’
Much of this went over Adan’s head; but at least she had stopped talking about Gee in that disconcerting way.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.
‘This war, the one we’re fighting, is all skirmishes and black ops and counter-ops. We can’t mount an all-out war because we don’t have a discrete target – we’re not Scipio with a Carthage to attack, we’re not Patton facing Germany. Our enemy is hugely distributed around the world and in space. So we skirmish, and we look for medium- and long-term tactical advantage. They’re doing the same thing. You understand what they want with Venus?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Adan. And then, because he realised he had no idea, ‘No, ma’am, I don’t, ma’am.’
‘You don’t follow the news much, do you, Trooper? The HMθ want to terraform Venus. Their declared aim – if you think we can trust that – is … they will make Venus habitable and claim it as their world, leaving us to live on the Earth. Then we can just, both of us, get on with live-and-let-living.’
‘That sounds like a pretty good idea,’ said Adan, and then, because of the look the general gave him, he wished he hadn’t.
‘There are a hundred or so reasons as to why it’s not a good idea, soldier,’ she said. ‘For one thing, our two populations are now incredibly intimately interwoven across a very large set of discrete national territories. Separating this into two entirely distinct populations – it’s just not going to happen. But assume it did. Assume two radically distinct versions of humanity lived on two adjacent planets. Two versions that each regarded the other, with some justification, as existential threats. If all of us live on A and all of them live on B, then the temptation will be – hit B hard, co-ordinate some planet-busting mass assault and achieve your maximum genocide. And the kicker is – if both populations are thinking that, then there’s a premium on being the one to act first, which shrinks the window and increases crazy and paranoid thinking, which in turn massively raises the probability that A and B wipe one another out, and everybody dies.’ She shook her head. ‘Prisoner’s dilemma. We need a stake in one another’s territories to minimise that. So if they terraform Venus we need half that territory for our kind of humanity to settle, as a security.’
‘Yes, ma’am!’ said Adan, brightly.
‘So we’re going to Venus. They – the HMθ I mean – want to open up diplomatic channels, and we will talk. But if there’s a way of using you to force them to stand down their Venusian fleet, well … that’s leverage that could come in very handy at exactly this time. So, Adan – you have a clearer sense of why we’re flying you to another planet?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Adan lied.
‘Turn in, son. We’ll speak again tomorrow.’
:10:
The (metaphorical) ratchets on which the Q-drive rotated its (metaphorical) cog-teeth were the unimaginably small gradations in electron-shell orbital possible positions. This provides a firm enough grid to accelerate even very large masses, but spinning your (metaphorical) cogwheel trillions of times a second hardly moves you at all. Luckily for you, the acceleration is cumulative, so after an initial reaction-mass burst it’s possible to spin the (metaphorical) wheels until you have traction and then you can build, build, build momentum. Within three weeks you’re travelling so fast you have to disengage the engine and, depending on your destination, put it into reverse to start slowing yourself down.
For short-term course corrections, or – Providence forbid! – dogfights with enemy craft, the main drive is so sluggish as to be absolutely useless. In such eventualities, Earth craft use reaction-mass blasts. The HMθ use a different spread of technologies to move their craft around: nippier, more wrenching, drawing on what seems from the outside – but presumably can’t be – zero point sources. At any rate, the Owl of Minerva hurtled through the perpetual night sky of the solar system, downhill towards the sun, faster now than the planet it was aiming past and on course to catch up with her in less than a week.
For Adan, life on board was a mode of hiatus. Everybody else there had duties, had a timetable, periods on and off. He alone didn’t, since he was cargo, not crew. He had a little cabin to himself and spent a long time in there watching old screen dramas and playing games. After that one personal one-on-one meal in the general’s stateroom, he ate in the mess thrice daily, with whichever tranche of the crew was free to eat at those times. He was not forthcoming, and they did not ask him many questions.
There were actual portholes, but they only afforded views of the basalt cladding that surrounded the craft. It didn’t matter. Any wall would display exterior views if requested. The interior design was a series of stacked floors linked by a central shaft that was supplied on all sides with rungs – useful as ladders for when the Owl was under constant acceleration and as handholds when it free-fell.
For the first week of flight Adan dreamt of Elegy every night. After that he generally didn’t remember his dreams. Each morning he made his wall a viewscreen and requested a real-size view of the exterior vista, and the screen showed him a fist-sized ring of bristling whiteness – the Sun, with its disc optically occluded to prevent it blinding him – and a vast spread of stars, uncountable tips of light in every direction and the foggy, spunky band of ragged brightness that was the Milky Way. If he touched his cabin wall at any point, the screen would give him information about which star he was indicating. He had to ask the program to identify Venus early in the voyage: a fatter, brighter tip of light among the insane profusion of stars. But after three weeks the planet was a distinct blob, and after six it was a manhole cover of brightness inviting you to lift it and tumble down the Alice-hole it topped.
There were areas in the ship he wasn’t permitted to go. This did not bother him. He was not so constituted, psychologically, so as to be provoked by such things. Fine. Whatever. He spent an hour a day in the ship’s gym, hauling spring-loaded levers and kicking out his legs like a frog. He saw the general from time to time, although she spent most of the voyage in her stateroom. Once he passed her in the central corridor, and she said, gnomically: ‘The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.’
Another time she was perkier: ‘You bearing up, bright boy?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘We’re all prisoners on a spaceship, hon’. Try not to sweat it.’
Well, all right: but he truly wasn’t sweating it. The only thing that preyed on his mind was: Gee. He tried not to obsess. He was putting on weight. There was little to do but eat and watch TV shows, and his hour of daily exercise was only enough to keep his bones from brittling.
Then, one day, he was called into a senior level meeting. Three of the officers were present remotely, which entailed a time lag. For two of these officers the lag was ten minutes. That meant that they contributed only a little, and that towards the end. For the third the time lag was only a few seconds, which must have meant she was riding another ship somewhere nearby. The remaining people in the cabin were the Owl’s senior officers – and Adan.
‘You understand, Trooper,’ said General Cho, ‘that you are about to hear information pertaining to a highly classified operation, and that you must not disclose or disseminate any data you acquire over the next forty minutes in any form, medium, socially or otherwise – do you understand?’
‘Ma’am,’ said Adan.
‘General Baghdassarian – would you like to sketch out the situation, please?’
The third virtual presence in the room, the one with the briefest lag, said: ‘Three years ago we mounted a major sting operation aimed at penetrating the core operative function of Hive-Mind-θ. As is known, while all members of the gestalt experience a unity of mentation, both emotionally and rationally, not all constitutive consciousnesses have the same decision-making and deep-mind access to the whole. As the cells in our bodies are specialised in various ways, so some members of this hive mind have more influence on the cognition and perception of the whole than others. This specialisation is necessary, just as our human bodies would not exist if all the cells were clones of one another. But it is also a weakness. Our mission aimed to exploit that weakness.’
Baghdassarian’s face peered out of its screen as if from a window.
‘We created a false flag. The HMθ ambitions with respect to terraforming Venus have been known for a long time. We confected an imaginary technology that would have materially sped up and facilitated their project – no small job, this, since the technology, though invented, had to be plausible enough to intrigue the HMθ – and we had to set up a whole front of scientists and engineers, developmental facilities and experimental test bases. To reinforce notions of the potency of this device, we created and then explosively destroyed entire spaceships. Then we false-flagged a particular trail that suggested all prototypes of the terraforming device had been destroyed and all blueprints or techdata with it. We false-flagged the road that led to one of our operatives, Ewe Bondar. The cover story was—’
‘Very brave woman,’ said General Cho. The other two physically present muttered assent.
‘—that Bondar had the plans for the device in her mind. The HMθ moved quickly. There was some …’ He paused, as Cho’s statement reached him, nodded briskly, and went on: ‘There was some disagreement at top level as to whether they would even take the bait, but they did. They seized Bondar in a well-co-ordinated raid on Earth and flew her directly to Venus orbit. She was ready for a number of possible interrogation strategies, and we’re not sure how they approached her. They executed her shortly after but she was—’
‘Killed her?’ said Adan.
‘—able to insert our countermeasure package directly – physically – into the neural net of one of the core-mind components of the hive mind. It was a remarkable achievement.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Cho.
‘We had designed our weapon to smoke-mirror the HMθ. It is part of the operating dynamic of their collective consciousness that, for them, subject and object cannot, in the most fundamental sense, be meaningfully separated out from one another. This leaves them vulnerable, putting it in the crudest terms to … well, to wishful thinking. Of course it’s true that they have immensely sophisticated processing and ideational capacity, and they have, as it were, the wisdom of their crowd, which is considerable. So it is very rare that they lose touch with objective reality. Our mission was the first time, so far as we know, that they have ever been tricked in this way. Indeed, it seems likely that they avoid the problem of being fooled by wishful thinking by not wishing, by and large. Want is a mode of lack, and they are defined by their plenitude, their fullness, not by their absence. Or so they say! But Venus – a homeworld – is something they lack. And that enabled us to insert a collective hallucination. For seventeen minutes, the entire HMθ hallucinated that they were decades in the future, and that the terraforming device (which, in actuality, does not exist) had done its job. They believed Venus was on the verge of becoming a habitable settlement.’
There was a pause, and General Cho took up the narrative.
‘Thank you, Davit. Unfortunately, those precious seventeen minutes, for which Bondar sacrificed her life, were squandered. I don’t want to be too critical of the military commanders in charge of the mission. Nobody expected such an instantaneous and system-wide success, and nobody knew, in the event of that success, how long it would be before the HMθ realised they were being fooled. It was eight minutes before we understood how complete our victory even was. Eight minutes and forty seconds after that the HMθ shook themselves, so to speak, and reverted to reality. In that time we managed four tactically significant strikes, including the important attack on the satellite swarm in Venus-orbit they have been using as a soletta. Eight further attacks were in train. The enemy’s retaliation, though, was prodigious – a massive co-ordinated counter-attack that destroyed forty-six of our spacecraft, damaged eighty more and killed over a thousand people. For three months the war was the hottest it has ever been. We have kept the scale of our military losses from the general public, although they are of course aware that for three months the fighting was very severe.’
