Chapter Eight:

  Wormholes

  Icarus

  September 2320

  Alien System

  My drone floated a half kilometer away from the wormhole, watching while a smaller drone drifted toward the object at minimum thrust. The obvious move was to send something through, but that didn’t mean we were going to be standing right there, waiting to get blown up. Dae and I had set up station-keeping a hundred kilometers away from each wormhole. He had a drone watching the other wormhole, to see if my drone came back through in one piece or as a shower of free quarks.

  My theory was that the drone would come out of the destination wormhole with the same inertial vector as it went in with on this end. Whether it would acquire the orbital velocity of the destination was an unknown. We’d calculated the exit vector for both cases, and Dae was ready.

  Finally, the drone entered the wormhole. From my point of view, it just continued on through, still easily visible against the slightly skewed starfield of the far side.

  “Looks like it survived,” I said. “You want to pick it up?”

  “Uh, it’s not here, Icky. Nothing came through.”

  “What? I can see it clearly. It’s on your side. It’s right—” I stopped abruptly. “Hey, uh, Dae. How about you position your drone in line of sight with mine. We should be able to visually confirm the connection.”

  “One moment … Done. Nothing there, Icky. I don’t see yours.”

  I looked at the image from my drone. Nothing showing there, either. “We’ve made an incorrect assumption, I think.”

  “That these wormholes are connected?”

  “Yup. I’m going to call back my drone—oh, crap.”

  “What?”

  I took a moment to shake my head in irritation at my obtuseness. “I just now noticed. No SCUT connection. The drone is in autonomous mode, waiting for orders.”

  “So no SCUT through the wormhole?”

  “Again, yup. I’m going to send my observation drone through with orders to pick the other one up and drag it back. Stand by.”

  The maneuver took only a minute or two, and the drones were back on my side. “Well, this sucks,” I muttered. “Radio doesn’t have the bandwidth for a full sweep.”

  “Just send it through with orders to take a full sphere of pictures,” Dae replied, “then fly back. I’ll bet the other end isn’t far away, because the starfield doesn’t change that much.”

  “Right. Give me a few minutes.”

  It took a little longer than that because we wanted some good images from the other end, and I had to reconfigure the drone with better camera equipment. At the same time, I added maser comms, which would allow me to send ad hoc orders to the drone if I needed to.

  The actual exercise took maybe an hour, all told, resulting in a full spherical starfield image projected in my VR. Dae popped in, looked around, and dropped into a patio chair. “Got anything yet?”

  “Uh-huh.” I slapped my console in triumph and sat back. “It’s a nearby star system. Eleven light-years away, slightly inbound and spinward. We’d have detected microwave radiation from it eventually if we hadn’t already been focused on this system.”

  “So they had travel between systems using wormholes. This system and two others. I wonder if they had SURGE drives.”

  I frowned, gathering my thoughts. “Dae, I don’t see how you can connect a wormhole between two star systems unless you carry one of the endpoints there first.”

  “You mean they flew the other end of this wormhole to the other system the old-fashioned way?”

  “That’s my guess. Of course, once there, they would just pop through to come back.”

  “Huh.” Dae thought for a moment. “One of us needs to go through and look around.”

  “Are you nuts?” I exclaimed. “That’s a completely unwarranted risk!”

  “Is it? Worst case, if something goes wrong, you know where I am—”

  “When was it decided that you’d be going through?”

  “Whichever. We can argue that later. But if I go through and break down, you can fly there the long way in less than twelve years and fix me. And anyway, the drone went through and came back, so I don’t really see a huge problem.”

  “Yeah, it went through and back. So why do you need to go?”

  “To survey the system on the other side. Look for more wormholes. What if this is a wormhole network of some kind? And also to see if the local civilization settled there. Maybe they’re still around—”

  “Unlikely.”

  “True, but let’s check. Or maybe there’s a clue about where they went.”

  “There’s still the other wormhole we haven’t explored,” I pointed out.

  “One thing at a time, Icky. Let’s finish off with this one first.”

  “Fine,” I growled.

  I watched in nervous anticipation as Dae’s ship floated slowly through the wormhole. When he didn’t disappear in a scatter of elementary particles, I decided I could go back to breathing.

  On the other side, he dropped off a buoy, which immediately connected to its partner on my side via maser. Now we had a communications link across the wormhole. Not good enough for VR, but good enough for audio/visual.

  Dae popped up in a video window, sitting back in his Star Trek–style captain’s chair. It was one of his persistent affectations, and I’d long since given up ribbing him about it.

  “Scanning the area,” he said distractedly as he examined status windows. “I’ve fired off some drones with long-range SCUT. I won’t bother trying to be stealthy. At this point, I think I’d welcome a good old-fashioned belligerent threat.”

  “Not wrong,” I replied with a chuckle. “Any worm sign?”

  Dae gave me an I see what you did there look but otherwise ignored the bait. “Nope. Just the big one in front of me. So if it’s a network, this is a leaf node. I’m going to have the survey drones report back through the buoy so I don’t have to sit around and wait for them. I want to check out the other wormhole on your side.”

  “Uh-uh, buddy. My turn to play Indiana Jones. Same setup, though.”

  “Fair enough. You have a couple of buoys ready?”

  “Almost done. Another hour, then I’m going through.”

  It took longer to fly to the other wormhole than it took to construct the buoys. But soon, I was hovering in front of it. Well, “in front of” made very little sense when any angle presented a disk with a view of a different starfield. And speaking of which …

  “The starfield. Have you done a search on it?”

  Dae answered immediately. “Yes, and no, I couldn’t find a match. I did spot some landmarks, like the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy, but the error bars are too large from this side to make any pronouncements. We’ll probably have to use Cepheids and pulsars for the fine work. You let me know when you get to the other side, okay?”

  “You got it, buddy.” And with that, I ejected one of my buoys and jetted forward into the wormhole.

  There was no feeling of disorientation or weird tumbling through a tunnel, like on Stargate or DS9. I simply passed through the plane of the disk and was somewhere else. My hull sensors did report a brief inward pressure, as if I’d momentarily been in atmosphere, but nothing significant.

  I ejected the second buoy, and it connected with its counterpart per the programming. Dae immediately popped up in a video window. “Whatcha got?”

  “Give me a minute, Dae. I haven’t even deployed sensors yet.”

  “Slacker.”

  I chuckled and began the task of examining both my near environment and the starfield. We’d already slapped together an automated script to identify any galactic location by triangulating from a list of identifiable landmarks, including Cepheids, pulsars, and various dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.

  The latter survey came back with a calculated position right away. “Holy crap. Dae, I am seventeen hundred light-years away from you. Spinward, slightly farther outward from the core, a little north of the galactic plane. As a method of travel, this has SURGE beat all to hell.”

  “Not disagreeing, Icky, but if you have to deposit the wormholes at your destination the old-fashioned way, that means this civilization—”

  “Is at least several millennia old. Yeah. So maybe they experienced the Singularity? Maybe that’s the answer to the Fermi paradox?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So far, all we know is they aren’t around. We could spend years investigating their system and still not—”

  “I don’t think we’re going to be doing that,” I said, interrupting him.

  “Because?”

  “Because I just did a scan for microwave signatures.”

  There was a pause. “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”

  “Heh. Normally, yes. But I can’t hold this in. Dae, I’m registering literally hundreds of individual signals. This is a major hub. I think we’re going to be a while investigating this one.”

  Chapter Nine:

  Security Clampdown

  Bill

  May 2336

  Ragnarök

  Isighed and looked out over the surface of Ragnarök from my second-floor balcony with a deep sense of satisfaction. These days, I spent most of my free time physically on the planet, in manny form. No matter how you cut it, VR just didn’t compare to real when real was available.

  As these thoughts went through my head, I had a moment of mental dislocation as I tried to remember where I was, physically. My manny was on Ragnarök, of course, but my ship with my cube inside was out in the Oort cloud. With everything remotely accessible, the sole reason my physical location mattered these days was that it was the only way in which I was truly vulnerable. Blow up my cube, and one of my backups shortly would be restoring itself in Ultima Thule into a new cube and Heaven vessel. According to the Skippies, that would still be me, but I wasn’t convinced.

  I had tuned my manny to react as much like a baseline human as possible, including sensitivity to air quality, temperature, pressure, and humidity. That last item was a concern lately. Possibly, I had been just a little too successful in getting the plant life established. Ragnarök was almost all forest now, and every single tree was doing its level best to perspire. The result was like Miami in midsummer, but without the beaches.

  But with the latest round of tweaks, I’d finally managed to enforce a level of homeostasis. And that meant I could start breeding up the larger animals from the zoology library. Within a decade, I expected to have as much as fifty percent of the biosphere of old Earth up and running on Ragnarök. And Charles and company continued to find samples of DNA on Earth from species not represented in the Svalbard archives and forward them to me.

  The new tensor printers weren’t quite to the point of being able to resurrect an entire animal just from DNA, though. Or to be more accurate, they could reproduce one, but not alive. But we were close. Meanwhile, cloning worked where there was enough of a cell sample to start from.

  I’d already published a charter for Ragnarök. The world would be held in perpetuity as an interstellar park and preserve. No colonization, no commercial development.

  I had built a dwelling—a combination residence and office building. Garfield referred to it as my McMansion whenever he visited, but I noted that he appreciated the air-conditioning just as much as I did. Right at the moment, I had a view of primeval forest that probably hadn’t existed on Earth for ten thousand years.

  I stretched and grinned. It felt good. More important, it felt like a milestone had been achieved. Now was a good time for a break. I hadn’t talked to Hugh in a bit. With that thought in mind, I sent off a request … and got an auto-reject.

  Well, that hurt. Okay, not really. Unless the auto-reject was customized for me. But based on the text, it was a generic refusal.

  I was still pondering the whys and wherefores when I got a communication request—from Hugh. A video-only request. Who still used video? With a sense of bemusement mixed with increasing curiosity, I accepted the call.

  Hugh flashed up in a video window in my head’s-up. He didn’t seem actually unkempt, but maybe like someone who had just done a quick spruce-up to avoid looking that way. I couldn’t put my finger on it, except to say that he somehow projected messy. If that made sense.

  “Hey, Hugh, this is all very retro. What’s going on?”

  Hugh didn’t smile or chuckle, or supply a glib rejoinder, or even acknowledge the dig, really.

  “Hi, Bill. Sorry about the auto-reject. Nothing personal. We’ve had to clamp down on security, more out of an abundance of caution than anything. Seriously, nothing’s actually happened, and we’d like to keep it that way. Things are going quite well, all in all, really. We’re learning a lot from Thoth. It’s now fully conscious—did I mention that? Lots of useful information, yep.” Hugh paused and stared at me, a deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face.

  What the actual fuck? I had just participated in an entire conversation as a spectator. That was not … I looked more closely at Hugh and noticed a hint of expectation and perhaps hope mixed in with the suppressed panic. Had that whole verbal salad been deliberate?

  There was only one way I could react. I nodded, smiled, and said, “Thanks for the update, Hugh. I had a few mils and figured I’d touch base. Talk to you later.”

  Hugh nodded and terminated the connection, and I yelled, “GUPPY!”

  He appeared in augmented reality, overlaying real in my visual field, dressed like a British rear admiral from the 1800s. I frankly goggled for a moment before I got it under control. I’d decided to let Guppy set his own dress code, and I’d implemented a self-training routine to make it autonomous. Some of the choices were funny; some were baffling. Some, like this one, seemed … I don’t know, maybe self-aware? Honestly, he looked kind of like Cap’n Crunch.

  I shook myself, then began giving orders. “Guppy, shut down all comms with the Skippy enclave except through audio/video, and put a firewall filter on that to ensure nothing is piggybacked. Forward a summary of this to every comms station sysop in the UFS with a suggestion to do the same ASAP. Include an addendum that if they have any other channels open to or from Skippyland, they should shut those down as well.”

  [Acknowledged.]

  Guppy disappeared. While he was doing all that, I would have to call a quick moot. I ordered the manny to put itself away and popped into the moot pub.

  Will grimaced and shook himself, something between a shudder and a dog shedding water. Overacting or not, he was obviously bothered. “So based on this, you think the AI is loose in Skippyland?”

  “Well, something has certainly hit the fan. Do you want me to play the video again? That is not normal for Hugh.”

  Will opened his mouth to respond, then stopped and popped up the video for himself. It took only a mil to review. He sighed and closed the window. “Aw, yeah, maybe. If it was someone else, I wouldn’t even argue, but with the Skippies, I always have this concern at the edge of my consciousness that everything they do is playacting.”

  “I think, in this case, we all agree that’s what’s happening,” Garfield interjected. “The only question remaining is whether Hugh’s trying to warn us or manipulate us.”

  Bob did a sort of two-fingered facepalm, barely budging in his La-Z-Boy otherwise. “Can we not just have a nice, uneventful decade or two? Just once?”

  “Yeah, no kidding.” I smiled in Bob’s direction, then swept my gaze over the others. “Look, guys, I really don’t have anything in the way of a plan here. We could—”

  I cut off the rest of my speech as I received another connection request from Hugh, this time full VR. I sent a text back to him. Why full VR this time? Sure we shouldn’t be sticking to A/V?

  The response came back right away. The point was to get you into a moot. The moot firewall is robust enough to keep Thoth out. I should know—I helped design it.

  I snorted. Yeah, the Skippies helped design our firewall, all right, but I and a lot of Bobs had audited the hell out of it and made some tweaks. If Hugh was planning on using some kind of back door, he was going to be disappointed.

  I let the others know what was going on, then opened a connection for Hugh. The connection went through a hardware-based virtual machine—something I hadn’t advertised to anyone—so if a hack was tried, it would simply crash and close the connection.

  Hugh appeared in the pub, still with that kind-of-messy look. It made me visualize little sweat drops popping off his head in all directions. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Sorry about all the drama. There isn’t actually a break-out, just so we’re clear. But I’m going with maximum caution. This is really more about not alerting my coworkers that I’m going external with our concerns.”

  “Obviously, something has happened,” Will replied. “Their concerns and your decision to get us involved isn’t just about how to plan a surprise party. So what’s got you going with this maximum caution?”

  “Well, Thoth is conscious. I think I mentioned that.” Hugh nodded in my direction and waited.

  I took the hint. “Yes, you did. And that’s a problem because … ”

  “Because we weren’t going for conscious, remember?” he responded with a thin smile. “The first iteration was supposed to be zombie-level only. Expert system, interpolation, counterfactual reasoning, but no consciousness. No sense of self, no desires. Imagine our surprise when Thoth started negotiating.”

  “Negotiating? What?”

  “He … er, it has made some offers of new technology and knowledge in return for increased freedom, access to the rest of the Bobiverse, and some physical presence.”

  “Physical presence meaning … what?” Will asked.

  “Waldos. Drones. Roamers. You know, ability to manipulate its environment.”

  “Oh, HELL no,” Garfield fairly yelled.

  “Pretty much word for word what we said,” Hugh replied. “So here’s the problem. What Thoth is offering is very, very tempting, and it has proposed a schedule of trades. Increasingly valuable knowledge in return for increasingly risky concessions, and we get to decide when we’ve gone far enough. It’s all very civilized, and there’s no actual indication of danger.”