Authors: Charles Stross
Oshi had no desire to share her biosphere with such a runaway horror. She had more than a suspicion that if it caught her it would treat her as just another parcel of protein: in any case, there was much that demanded attention in the core. The airlock doors stayed resolutely shut, the axial redoubt running on canned air. There would be time to explore later.
Oshi spent the next two days exploring her twilight domain, checking over resources and making a comprehensive inventory. She didn't stop to think: somehow she knew that if she stopped she might never start again. She worked with the feverish single-mindedness of a crash survivor stranded in a desert far from civilization. She paused only to swallow some meagre rations, or to close her eyes for an hour of exhausted sleep. The colony central planning methodologies were intact, she discovered, dumped to static store before the radiation attack. The robot factories, extending from the long axis of the colony like a string of garlic bulbs attached to a medicine ball, could be powered up and reconfigured to produce anything she desired. Resources were limited -- only a few megatons of raw materials were on hand -- but Oshi could hardly see how that mattered. Three things could happen in the near future. The ultrabright presence (she shuddered at this thought, which rose to meet her in eerie dreams) might come to the colony; the colony itself might disintegrate before the depradations of the ontological weapon chewing away at its guts: or her own survival plan might succeed. Not that she held much hope for it, but it seemed to her that the third option was little better than the other two. After all, she was twenty light-years from the nearest other civilized world. And when she got there, if she got there, the Boss would be sure to notice ...
When these worries assailed her she shook her head impatiently, laughed -- somewhat dementedly -- and felt a transient sorrow.
If only I'd kept my mouth shut in front of the Boss none of this would have happened
, she rationalised. If only the superbrights hadn't trusted the entire system to one dangerously unstable AI, she would not have been needed here. If only the escapists hadn't deployed that incredibly stupid biological weapon, or if only they'd managed to follow her up to the redoubt ... this entire fiasco might have been avoided by any number of gamits. Oshi felt a vast and tenuous sense of guilt, aggravated by a sense of failure. It did not strike her as inappropriate. After all, in a very real way she
had
failed.
The event that finally broke through her frail shell of obsession occurred on the fifth day. That morning, Oshi awakened in the core control room with a sense of purpose. The night before she had planned her day in advance; she was going to enter the factory zones, locate certain items of equipment that were being assembled to her specification, and move them to the docking bay. The items were specialised and deadly; lengths of monofilament cable, refurbished attitude-thrusters, life support components for one of the docked shuttlecraft.
Almost without thinking she found herself in the factory unit. It was a geodesic sphere lined with robots that hurled components from one side to the other, guided by sonar and timing interrupts. There was something organic about the process, like cilia lining the wall of the gut of some primitive organism. Oshi waited impatiently, having arrived too early.
She floated in the main cargo entrance, keeping well out of the way; she had no desire to be pulped between a flying thruster-chassis and a blind drone. It was there that she saw something floating in the twilit centre of the room, not moving despite the barrage of components drifting past on all sides. She frowned.
The object was asymmetric, lumpy, almost unrecognisable as it slid out of shadow, into a harsh cone of light cast by a welding torch that illuminated its features mercilessly. Its rag-doll face was withered and sunken; limbs flopped randomly where slowly-contracting tendons had pulled them in gravity-free rigor.
Yes
, she thought.
Even here. Is there no end to it
? A wave of depression swept over her.
Yes, that's right. Run away from it. Run away from reality! What else is there to do
? Oshi turned away, unable to express her sense of disconnected despair verbally -- she had a morbid fear that if she started talking to herself she would slip slowly into a breakdown. There seemed to be nothing around her but death on all sides; past, present, future. Turning her face away from the accusing corpse, she made the connection; and she made another one, via wisdom uplink, to the core communications buffer.
"
Tell me your status
," she sent. "
List uploads in progress
."
Status: functional following self-repair self-test sequence. Pascal gatecoder responding but isolated. Diagnostics indicate that a terminal Dreamtime fault occured four days ago. No other gatecoders on line. All uploads queued pending fault resolution. Total two thousand three hundred and nineteen uploads in progress. Loading nominal.
Oshi's eyes widened. "You're holding more than two thousand uploads! What happened on Pascal?"
The literal-minded comm supervisor paused for a moment before answering.
Query in progress. Please wait. Please wait. Please wait -- confirmed. At T minus three hundred and sixty thousand seconds Pascal monitors registered unacceptable distributed degradation on all networked processes. Radiation induced damage exceeded local emergency resources' ability to offload processing at T minus three hundred and fifty-seven thousand seconds. At T minus three hundred and fifty-six thousand seconds approximately, Pascal Dreamtime entered a distributed panic status and lost real-time synch. At T minus infinity, Pascal Dreamtime went NP-incomplete.
The Dreamtime is down. Do you want to restart?
It took a moment to hit her. But when she understood, Oshi began to giggle uncontrollably. She curled in on herself and floated into the maze of light and shadow and drifting components, sailing on a stately waltz with the mummified corpse of the dead engineer: and she laughed hysterically, sobbing when the breath came hard to her burning ribs, then sobbing more slowly and rhythmically when she understood the magnitude of what had happened.
Something bumped into her. She came to rest in mid-air, face to face with the wizened, tortured expression of the corpse. "It's all right," she explained patiently. "There's nothing to worry about: I'm not mad, not mad at all. It's just that we're all going to survive!" The corpse ducked and bobbed before her.
She reached out and patted the corpse on one bony shoulder. It drifted away, spinning. "I'll tell you about it when you're alive again!" she shouted after it. Then she turned and reached for the nearest support stanchion. "
Axis control: get me a climb spider," she said. "I'm going down into the colony.
" She swallowed, twitched her wisdom link to a different channel. "
Comm centre.
"
Listening
.
"
You will commence Dreamtime restart at my command, parameters to follow. Do a total memory wipe and shut down the NP-static world line. Initiate hardware self-test immediately and tell me when it's stable enough to fit standard human-rating criteria. Not, repeat
not,
to support superbrights. Do
not
start any non-human sentient upload processes. Just stick to the basic virtual environment and begin reactivating human uploads as they come on stream. Call me when it's complete. Finally, patch me through a call to Boris.
"When he answers, tell him I want to talk to him about an escape plan ...
"
It was inevitable that war would break out between the Ultrabrights and the Superbrights. The laws of computation, the science of algorithmics, dictated it. But, oddly, human beings didn't even know that a war was taking place; for the most part, they didn't even know that either side existed. They knew no more of it than worms in the ground know of supersonic fighters dogfighting above their patch of soil. Even those who, like Oshi, were used as foot-soldiers in the conflict, might not be aware of its true nature -- or of the fact that there could be no winners, only losers.
This is the way the Density War began:
First, the expansion processors were built. Robot probes entered newly discovered solar systems. On entering a system each probe spawned, sent its daughter probes forth to visit other stars, then landed on a tectonically stable, airless moon and set to work. It bred furiously, spawning a hive of robot factories. Then the hive-complex went to work and began fabricating an expansion processor. Thin layers of superconducting circuitry crept across airless rock; circuitry designed to support a distributed virtual reality.
Within this simulation, other programs could run: it was designed to house the minds of human beings, neural firing mapped onto computer logic by sleight of upload technology. After all, nerve cells are complex switches: components in a biological switching network that can be simulated by a program. And as Turing observed, any program that can be run on a given computer can be run on any other computer, given enough memory or time for the process. Time or memory are equivalent, to a computer: equivalent and interchangeable -- in the most general terms, one can be traded for the other. A moon the size of Luna had sufficient power to maintain a billion people in real time, using just a thin rind of processors: a billion people, living and thinking and seeing and feeling an entire world around themselves.
The process was inexorable. Robot probes entered new star systems, seeded them with new Expansion processors, built Gatecoders to interface them to the other Dreamtimes, and expanded the virtual universe. The afterlife was a fact; even when every living flesh-bodied human had died, the Dreamtime would contain their living essence, scattered like frozen gems across the gas giant moons of half a galaxy.
But people grew ... complex. Strange new intellectual hyperstructures begin to appear in the Dreamtime, drawing massive amounts of processor time from the substrate of reality. Maybe they had started out as human beings; perhaps they originated as experimental AI's. Whatever their origins, the Superbrights were a thousand times as smart as humans: they reified around mythical archetypes, assuming the signifiers of the gods before their awe-struck or otherwise bemused subjects. But they had very different requirements from the humans.
As time went by, the first Dreamtimes ran hot and slow, dropping their state-change rate below real time. Why erase valuable information? People need their memories, after all, and by trading off memory space for time the Dreamtimes could simulate a richer, denser universe. But the Superbrights didn't
want
to slow down; to slow down was to accelerate into the future. Minds are immortal. They knew they'd get there soon enough anyhow. So the Superbrights began to rebuild the Dreamtimes to meet their requirements. They started by mopping up all the remaining human intellects, assimilating them and sucking a steady crop of dead minds in from the outer worlds. But that didn't free up much processing space; drastic action was called for.
Everywhere, in the fullness of time, the crust of processors around any Expansion world turned into a shell, then a rind, then an incredibly thick cortex engulfing the molten core of an entire planet. Drawing power from dynamo effects in the hot iron core, from the solar wind, from any available source, the expansion processor struggled to reduce its informational entropy by any means available. Eventually a limit would be reached: the Superbright dominated system spawned drone craft that flickered out to take other worlds. Pretty soon the entire available planetary surface of every moon in the system would be used up. But it was never anything like enough, because by then the first Ultrabrights were appearing; minds as far beyond the Superbrights as Superbrights were beyond the merely transhuman.
Now we have reached the present, we can watch the process at first hand. It's happening all around us, on every side. A landslide of sentience, eating entire worlds ...
The Ultrabrights turn first to gas giants with greedy arms of steel and silicon. Orbiting fusion reactors pulse down, kicking churning storms of methane away from the core. A spongy diamond the size of a planet swings through a planetary nebula; nanorobots riddle it, busy etching many-dimensional networks of simple processors into its delicate filigree of surfaces. Meanwhile, other constructors fashion condensing hydrocarbons into strange, lacy structures in deep orbit through the star's Kuiper belt, the distant realm of the ice dwarfs that circle beyond the farthest gas giants. Halos and rings a million kilometres across flutter like huge parasols, strobing with the excrement of a billion billion optical processors.
And it
still
isn't enough.
The Ultrabrights, lusting for the power to transcend their information-flow bounded existence, turn their attention to the star. But it's too young, too small; too well embedded in the Main Sequence. The ultimate goal of claiming the greatest mass in the solar system is inadequate. Gatecoders pulse informational effluent out across the light years, but bandwidth is limited. Space is vast, and Von Neumann's limit -- the bandwidth bottleneck on the rate at which information can be transferred -- is biting at the heels of the new Ultrabright system.
Human and Dreamtime space has been expanding in a sphere for centuries. The innermost colony systems are already saturated, their own Ultrabrights unwilling to shoulder the timeburden of the home systems. Mere humans are long since confined to the outer colonies, where information swirls endlessly into the entropic wastes of the future. Soon a vicious war will break out between stellar intelligences: a war for which the prize is spacetime -- all the spacetime a world-sized simulation processor can offer. The losers will be suspended, NP-static: the number of processors available to them drops below a critical level, they can't get enough connections, can't run in anything like real time, can't even complete a thought. The fate of an NP-static Dreamtime is to be sent on a one-way trip into the distant future, a long but subjectively rapid journey into the heat-death of the universe -- unless somebody physically reboots the world, consigning its frozen inhabitants to oblivion.