***Analyzing all known tactical scenarios now…perhaps if you loosened enough rock along the seams of the cave ceiling…you could bury or distort the formation, at last for a short time…I have no other options at this time, General…sorry…***
The Doc Frost face faded momentarily and was lost in the glare. Winger wondered if the embed would even work properly in such close proximity to the Keeper. There had been issues with ANAD reliability during the Jovian Hammer mission ten years before, when operating near the Keeper.
Winger pressed the CAPTURE button on his wristpad and the image of Doc Frost faded to nothing, as the bots drifted back toward his shoulder capsule. At that same moment, Starnes’ voice erupted over the crewnet.
“General…look! It’s changing…it’s--!”
The sun-like core of the Keeper had stopped expanding and dimmed slightly, but more importantly, a portion of the orb the size of a head had separated and was drifting freely toward them. The ball of light pulsed and throbbed and roiled like a miniature star as it settled onto a small ledge below the cave opening.
“What the ---?”
Even as they watched, the small lightball was changing before their eyes, dimming fast, swelling and stretching, like a flaming sheet unfolding. It unrolled itself like a blanket on fire. Now, images began to appear on the blanket, as if it were a screen. Images unspooled at high speed, colliding and mixing in a chaotic flicker. Soon enough, the images began to stabilize.
Johnny Winger was stunned to see a passable impression of old Doc Frost, hanging in mid-air, framed by a backdrop of a screen burning around the edges.
“What is it?” Starnes said.
“Some kind of simulation,” Winger told him. “I’ve seen stuff like this before…the Keeper can do this. It’s—“
Now the Doc Frost thing was talking, its mouth and lips were moving, as if a film strip were playing. In the backdrop, colliding images appeared and disappeared in dizzying profusion….desert sandstorms, fires burning out of control, volcanic eruptions, asteroids impacting a surface, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis. A litany of disaster.
The voice, when it came, was a scratchy, out of synch rendition of Doc Frost, recognizable but thick, slurred, reverberating with echoes and overtones.
Winger and Starnes strained to hear….
“…when the Central Entity arrives…this I have known for many years, Johnny…ever since I extracted the viral genome at Engebbe and inserted it into ANAD—“
Winger felt a chill go down his back. “Somehow the Keeper’s created a likeness of Doc Frost…it’s using that to communicate….”
“Looks like a history class I had in school,” Starnes muttered. “That’s pretty much how I remember it, too…all jumbled up and confusing, dates and places and names.”
“You may be more right than you think. Listen—“
Frost narrated, not a history, but a plan. Winger realized that the Keeper was illustrating what was to come. It was all there, the knowledge of the Old Ones and their plan, embedded in the genome of every ANAD system created since the first one. Frost told them that it taken years for him to realize that, years of decrypting and analysis, guesses and backtracking, before he had put the whole story together….
It was called the Imperative. And it was driven by a massive algorithm known as the Prime Key.
The first phase was a purge, purging Earth of all non-Prime Key lifeforms… all life and living systems. The preferred way would be to disassemble all lifeforms into their constituent atoms and molecules. A form of mass Assimilation, starting with deconstruction. This was the rationale behind Symborg and the philosophy of Assimilationism, created, aided and abetted by Config Zero.
Once this purge was finished, the next step would be re-engineering the Earth’s surface to be more compatible with swarm-based life...the oceans would be eliminated and all the Earth’s surface ‘locked’ into a geologically stable state, providing maximum surface area for swarm activity and growth. Also, the stable point temperature of the Earth would be raised…an enforced climatic change similar to what Humans were doing now on the Earth, unwittingly helping the Old Ones along. This would provide a consistent environment conducive to swarm growth and activity. The Earth would become, in effect, an incubator or giant Petri dish, to incubate this new kind of life.
Coincident with geoengineering the Earth’s surface, new forms of life, initially similar to early ANAD, similar to ancient viruses, would be seeded and allowed to evolve at the maximum permissible rate consistent with these environmental changes. This would help bring Earth life up to the development level of the Mother Swarm, in terms of architecture, processing capability, memory, quantum comm links, and overall programming.
The final phase was Integration. Re-evolved Earth life forms would be fully absorbed into the Mother Swarm. Once this process was done, the Earth and all planetary objects in the Solar System would be disassembled to provide feedstock for the Mother Swarm, to continue its advance across the galaxy. In other words, the Petri dish would be destroyed and the incubator shut down. The Imperative drove the Mother Swarm onward.
“…Johnny, all this was there from the beginning. I just couldn’t read it. The whole story was embedded in that genome. This strain of virus came from the Old Ones, they seeded Earth with it. And I used it to add to ANAD’s capabilities…every ANAD system since then has had this story…but we just didn’t know it….”
Now the Doc Frost image seemed to lift away from the burning sheet and take on 3-dimensions, becoming an even more realistic likeness of the ANAD creator. Framed by the glow from the core of the Keeper behind it, the simulacrum of Doc Frost offered a faint smile, its face only slightly blurred and out of synch. Frost was saying something else….
“…the time has come, Johnny. It’s time to decide. I’ve shown you the future. I’ve shown you what must be. It’s time to be part of it…time to be assimilated….”
Frost went on to describe assimilation as if it were the most natural thing, just an extension of all that had already happened.
Starnes wanted no part of the idea. “Count me out, sir. I like my body the way it is. I’m not going into no booth and becoming atom fluff, no sirrreee.” He started backing out of the cavern, backing up the slope, stumbling slightly as he did so. Rocks and gravel cascaded down behind him.
Winger stayed put. Was this a one-way story or could he have a conversation with this nightmare?
“I don’t know, Doc. You’re starting to sound like my son Liam. ‘Deconstruction is the future…it’s cool to be a multi-config entity, you can go anywhere, be anything, you can’t die.’ I’m not so sure….”
Starnes halted his climb. “General, we need to get out of here. If that thing blows, we’ll be trapped. Or incinerated.”
Frost was still talking, now answering Winger, though he knew it was really an algorithm inside the Keeper. Or something like that.
“…all these things are true, Johnny…but the greater truth is something you’ve always known…you and I have discussed this before…it’s the nature of Life itself….we’re all nothing but atoms and molecules…your own body is nothing but a swarm of cells, organized into systems and collectives you call organs…the Old Ones are no different, just a greater collective, a collective that spans time and space on a scale you can’t really conceive….
“I always figured the Old Ones were just something we imagined, something we created. Sort of a new god, to fit our times.”
Now the Frost image settled down and assumed an almost grandfatherly look, right down to the wrinkles and the crow’s feet. It wasn’t the Doc Frost he had known in the past. This was an older Doc Frost, much older, as if the Keeper were aging the simulation to better correspond with some visceral impression in the back of Winger’s mind.
“…let me explain the Old Ones to you, Johnny….first, they are very real…you must accept that…they’re no
t some imaginary creation of billions of lonely and troubled minds, as some of your theologians have said… the basic element of the Old Ones is what you have always called a nanobot. An autonomous, nanoscale assembler/disassembler of incredible sophistication and complexity.
“Nobody knows how the Old Ones came to be, not even the Old Ones themselves. As an organized superorganism of bots approximately half a light-year in extent, the Old Ones have existed for a substantial fraction of the age of the Universe. Some of your own scientists have estimated 6 to 8 billion years old.
“The Old Ones were instrumental in seeding Earth with self-replicating molecules that eventually evolved into living organisms, although the evolutionary track went awry.
“Make no mistake, Johnny, the Old Ones are a true superswarm of vast proportions. In size and extent and connection density, it exceeds the complexity of all the human minds that have ever lived on Earth combined. It is a thinking sentience, whose true environment is interstellar space.
“The Old Ones have no known head or leadership group or body. However, the term Central Entity has been used by Config Zero to refer to the Old Ones. Also, the term Mother Swarm has also been used.
“Nanobotic elements of the Old Ones engage in some specialization to ensure that the swarm survives and the Central Entity is maintained. Bots can specialize in such tasks as logical processing, communication, maintenance, archiving and memory, internal transport, navigation, world-seeding, orientation, etc.
“Part of the Old Ones swarm is organized as a vast logic array or processor, capable of quantum computation on a stupendous scale. Effectively, this could be considered the Central Entity, perhaps even a galactic scale CPU. But the truth is that the Old Ones are a true collective entity whose behavior evolves from relatively simple rules applied to a vast congregation. Most sentience and observable behavior emanating from the Old Ones is emergent from the complexity and scale of the nanobotic connections.
“It’s not too farfetched to consider the Old Ones as a sort of galactic brain, although it certainly doesn’t encompass the entire galaxy.
“But the important thing is this: the Old Ones have an Imperative of Life which compels them to grow and expand the swarm. Ultimately, they want to unite all world-based instances of swarm life which they have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind (like a neural network or computational cloud). To the Old Ones, this is the Imperative of Life itself. The Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or builds structure or order. Life is anti-entropic.
“In order to get their heads around the idea of the Old Ones, some descriptors your scientists and media have used have been: galactic brain, interstellar neural network, computational cloud, galactic internet, and universal web. The basic organizing principle or topology of the Old Ones isn’t important now.
“The general physical dimensions of the Old Ones swarm have been estimated to vary anywhere from a few billion kilometers in breadth to about half a light year. Cosmologists say that very few organized structures in the Universe are that big. Astronomers point to some nebula, gas and dust clouds, even black holes as objects of that dimension or larger. Some of your cosmologists question whether the Old Ones are truly alive in a traditional sense. Even your biologists say the proven existence of the Old Ones stretches the definition of life and sentience nearly to the breaking point.
“The Old Ones can manipulate quantum states of the subscale fine structure of space itself to communicate and affect matter at great distances. As one of your scientists once said, “If the Universe were a great quilt, the Old Ones can yank on a fiber at one end and untie a knot at the other.” Their ability to use quantum entanglement as a means of manipulation is eons ahead of Humans’ ability to understand, let alone emulate.
“So you see that the future is fixed and determined, Johnny. It’s time for you to be part of that future.”
Winger looked behind…Starnes was still there, clinging to a rock outcrop, HERF carbine trained. He fidgeted, motioning for Winger to come on, his hands extended out to help.
The truth was that Winger felt his whole life had been leading to this very moment. That made sense, didn’t it? That could happen, couldn’t it? For over fifty years, he had battled with and against ANAD bots. Now the thing wanted him to become one, or at least a swarm of bots. Maybe Doc Frost was right…maybe this was the future. Maybe this was his future. Rene was gone. Dana was an angel. Liam was heading that way. What did he have to go back to?
“Lieutenant,” he called up to Starnes, “get out of here. I’ve got to face this thing.”
Starnes looked incredulous, evident even behind his hypersuit helmet. “General, don’t be crazy. We can blast this thing. We can MOBnet the cave. Give me your hand—“
But Winger knew the decision was here and the time was now. “No, Starnes, get your ass out of here. Tell Metcalf and Yamato, this is personal. It’s something I have to do.”
“General, no one expects you to be a hero. You can’t fight off that cloud of bugs by yourself…let us help. Live to fight another day…”
Winger had made up his mind, sort of. “Starnes, get lost! That’s an order!” He looked back at the Lieutenant. For a brief moment, they glared at each other: Starnes…ready to get on with the mission, young, full of tactics and courage and Winger…worn down, wise but resigned to fate, facing the hardest decision of his life.
Starnes backpedaled and hauled himself out of the cave branch, his hypersuit glowing red and blue-white from the Keeper’s glow. “Have it your way, General. We’ll send the cavalry in soon as I get topside.” Then he groped for footing in the loose soil and ice and was gone.
Now Winger turned to face the Keeper, the Doc Frost image fading fast. Soon, only the blinding brilliant orb hung in the air in front of him.
Time to have a chat with Doc. The Doc III swarm was still embedded in his shoulder capsule. Winger decided to open a comm channel and leave the little bugger protected as much as he could inside the capsule. He cocked his head just so, and the connection was made.
“Doc, for once in my life, I don’t know what to do.”
***Johnny, the entity is generating decoherence waves at a high rate…a quantum displacement event may be imminent…recommending you evacuate the cave and achieve minimum safe distance of one thousand meters***
“Doc, I can’t do that. The thing wants to assimilate me, deconstruct me. You saw the imagery same as me. Maybe that’s the best way to fight this bastard. Go small and go inside, fight from inside. What do you think?”