Netlink (42 page)

The Netlink Overmind penetrated the Web. Dev was not sure exactly how that happened, though he could imagine several possibilities. The Web must depend on the communicative interaction of its separate parts, as did the Netlink. Those communications were carried out through readily apparent and analyzed processes, through modulated radio and laser transmissions. Such transmissions could be tapped, analyzed, decoded,
broken
with a speed and an efficiency unthinkable to any merely human mind. Dev could sense the Overmind expanding—growing at the expense of the Web. One by one… then in tens… in hundreds… in thousands… in millions, the myriad craft that made up the physical expression of the Web went inert. Some turned their weapons on their fellows before they, in turn, were blasted out of existence; most simply went dead, their processors fused by overloads, their data receptors switched off, rendering them blind and deaf to the increasingly urgent calls of the Web intelligence.

Watching through the massed probes and sensors of the fleet, Dev could see everywhere the vast, glittering pseudopodia of the Web growing ragged at the edges… tattering just a little at first, then beginning to disintegrate with astonishing speed. Dimly, he was aware that he was witness to the power of exponents. An effect doubled, then doubled again, then doubled time after time can eventually and relentlessly overpower the most impossible of numbers.

Dev watched as the monster, itself far more than Nakamura’s Number of component parts, began to disintegrate with bewildering speed.

“What’s… what’s happening?” Kara staggered as they pulled her, nude and dripping, from the liquid embrace of her shattered warflyer. “I couldn’t see.…”

Everywhere was total and complete and shrieking, wildly happy confusion. The spin gravity bay had been repressurized and was swarming now with men and women, some from the Phantoms, others from the ship’s crew, and even some of the scientists, all milling about in happy, joyful, madly exultant chaos. Ran Ferris helped her stand up, catching her as she almost fell.

And then Katya was there, holding out a robe, tears streaming down her face. Everywhere in the bay there was jubilation, men and women cheering and hurling pieces of uniform and anything they could throw aloft. “I thought you were dead!” Katya yelled, her voice barely reaching above the roaring cheers around her.

Kara took the robe and shrugged it on, grateful for its warmth in the chill of a compartment only recently open to vacuum.

“Someone came out and got me,” Kara replied. “With a remote. Was it Daren?”

And there was Daren, shoving his way through the celebrating crewmen. “Not me!” he yelled.

“It was the Japanese woman,” Ran told her. “Dr. Oe. She stopped your spin with the probe and got you headed back toward the ship before her reaction mass ran dry. All I had to do was catch you and bring you in,”

“Taki!” Daren cried. “She went back out again after we both got knocked off-line! I didn’t know she was chasing you, though!”

Taki! Kara stared at Ran and her brother, then laughed, shaking her head. Little Taki, the woman she’d not even wanted to talk to!

“What… what’s going on?” she asked again. “My commo was knocked out. I still had the AI and my visual sensors, but I couldn’t see much of anything until the probe grabbed me. What’s all the cheering?”

Katya steered her aside, toward a marginally quieter part of the chamber, near an inner bulkhead. “We won!” she shouted.

“We… won…?”

It hardly seemed possible. They’d been losing, losing big right up to the moment when she’d been hit by a piece of Phil Dolan’s
Philosopher.

Poor Phil…

“We still don’t know what’s happened,” Daren said. “But my father’s been on-line with us, and he says something happened with the grand Netlink. All of the people watching online. Somehow they were able to infiltrate the Web, make parts of it start attacking itself. Sounds like they broke the thing’s encoding somehow and started giving it conflicting orders. Right now, it’s all just individual machines drifting through space, with no control or coherence at all.”

The battle—if not quite the war—was over.

She hugged herself, shivering.

“Let’s get you dried off and dressed,” her mother said.

Kara shook her head. “No,” she said. “First things first. Where’s Taki?”

She wanted to thank the woman who’d just saved her life.

And in the cyberspace defined by the massed, interlinked computers and intelligences and jacked-in minds, a newborn intelligence stretched forth its… they were not
hands,
actually, since the being had no physical instrumentality, but “hands” would serve as an adequate descriptor for powers of manipulation that it was only beginning to be aware of.

So much was possible now, undreamed of before.

It looked out at the stars surrounding it, comprehending. There were vistas there of time and space… and of other intelligences now dimly sensed.

So very much was possible.…

Epilogue

“The war isn’t over,” Kara said. “Not by about ten million light years. We still have the Web, the
real
Web, to contend with, at the Galactic Core.”

“Well, that can’t be that hard, can it?” Daren asked. “We beat ’em at the Nova. And by the time we got to Alya, the machines that were left had all switched. Nothing left but floating junk.”

They were seated on the raised patio at the back of Cascadia, overlooking the mountains on a glorious, crisp New American morning. Columbia was dimly seen behind a light haze in the east. Morninglories chirped and warbled at one another from a dancing golden cloud above the amberbushes below. Kara was sitting on a double seat next to Taki, her arm around the young woman’s shoulders. They’d become close friends since the Battle of Nova Aquila, somewhat to Daren’s irritation. He claimed that Taki didn’t have time for him anymore, because she was always talking with Kara.

And Kara didn’t really care. She’d found a new friend in Taki, a woman with a mind as bright and as incisive as her own. She was enjoying getting to know her as a
person,
instead of as an oriental face. She looked across the patio and caught Ran’s eye; he grinned at her, and she wondered if he was thinking about that ViRsim they’d shared before the battle, when she’d admitted her distrust of all Nihonjin.

She’d changed a lot since then.

Katya stretched out in a couch that molded itself to her thought. “I doubt that it will pose that much of a problem. The last time we talked to Dev about it, he seemed to think the Netlink was more than a match for the Web. ‘Infinitely beyond it,’ he said. Because of its flexibility.”

“But as I understand it,” Vic said, “this Overmind was a product of all those massed billions of human minds on the Net. They’re not there anymore. What happened to the Overmind? Did it just… blink out?”

“It’s still there,” Katya told him. “At least Dev says it is, even if we’re not aware of it. I suppose we could think of it as being asleep… but there’s also an impression he got that that number… what did you call it, Daren?”

“Nakamura’s Number.”

“Right. There was an impression Dev had that the Overmind wasn’t completely reliant on that number. Maybe the number was responsible for its birth in the first place, but… it’s still there. And growing stronger.”

“Scary,” Kara said with a small inner shudder.

Taki patted her arm. “It seems we have need of large and powerful friends. The larger and more powerful, the better.”

“I’d be happier if I could understand it better,” Ran said. “The scale of this thing is a little overwhelming.”

“That’ll come,” Vic said. “With time. I guess with Dev as a kind of go-between, we should be able to learn more about it eventually, even if it doesn’t seem all that interested in communicating directly with us.”

“How often do we stop to talk with insects?” Kara said. “That’s what scares me, that it’s so far beyond human comprehension that we don’t really have that much in common with it. Even though it sprang from us, somehow.”

“What I want to know more about is the Web,” Daren said. “They’ve been analyzing the sample machines we brought back over at the University. They say the Naga link has been proven.”

“God help us,” Katya said softly. “The Web created the Naga?”

“Almost certainly. We think… we
think
that the Web collective began sending Naga seed pods out beyond the Galactic Core, oh, maybe seven, eight billion years ago. Understand, a lot of this is still guesswork.”

“Go on,” Kara said.

“The idea may have been to use them like von Neumann machines. Self-replicating. Exponentiating. A Naga seed pod would land on a planet with certain parameters of temperature, gravity, and magnetic moment and begin preparing it. Like terraforming… but getting it ready for the Web, not humans. But something went wrong.”

“What?” Ran said.

“We’re really not sure,” Taki told him. “Some of us think that the process was taking so long—millions of years between one planet colonized and another—that a kind of evolution set in. Like genetic drift.”

Kara had had to look that one up when Taki first mentioned it. In biology, genetic drift occurred when a species changed slightly to meet different conditions in a neighboring territory… and then that subspecies changed as it migrated again… and again…

There were cases known of ten or twelve subspecies living in adjacent territories, each slightly different from its neighbors, each able to breed with its neighbors… and yet the subspecies on either end of that chain were so different from one another that they could be regarded as entirely separate species, unable even to interbreed.

In this case, the genetic drift had been a subtle but constant shift in the organization of information, slight at first, but enough so that eventually the Naga were no longer recognized as part of the Web.

And the Naga, by that time, was a self-sufficient life form, operating under its own set of programming.

“We’re pretty sure the Naga were supposed to start turning planets into easily digestible chunks for the Web when it arrived,” Daren continued. “The Web apparently has the rather single-minded goal of turning all of the matter in the universe, stars, planets, rocks, us, whatever it can get its claws on, into more machines. Components of itself. Judging from the number of machines at Nova Aquila, it could do it, too.”

“Sounds like a von Neumann machine run amuck,” Kara said.

“In a way. From the Web’s point of view, the Naga have become a kind of cancer, cells, if you will, growing and evolving on their own, instead of according to the master plan.”

“Lucky for us,” Ran said. “And to think we once thought the Naga were our enemies!”

Kara held out her hand, palm up. A black spot appeared in the center of her palm, spread, then extruded itself, a gleaming black stalk that rose ten centimeters from her skin, swaying in the breeze. It dipped and twisted, bowing to each of the others in turn.

“Enemies can become friends,” Kara said, grinning. She winked at Taki. “Given time.”

TERMINOLOGY AND GLOSSARY

AI:
Artificial Intelligence. Since the Sentient Status Act of 2204, higher-model networking systems have been recognized as “self-aware but of restricted purview,” a legal formula that precludes enfranchisement of machine intelligences.

Alpha:
Type of Xenophobe combat machine, also called stalker, shapeshifter, silvershifter, etc. They are animated by numerous organic-machine hybrids and mass ten to twelve tons. Their weapons include nano-D shells and surfaces, and various magnetic effects. Alphas appear in two guises, a snake-or wormlike shape that lets them travel underground along SDTs, and any of a variety of combat shapes, usually geometrical with numerous spines or tentacles. Each distinctive combat type is named after a poisonous Terran reptile, e.g., Fer-de-Lance, Cobra, Mamba, etc.

Alya:
Naked-eye star Theta Serpentis (63 Serpentis) 130 light years from Sol. A double star with a separation of 900 All (5 light-days), Alya A is an A5 star, Alya B an A7. Alya B-V is the homeworld of the DalRiss, who know it as GhegnuRish. Alya A-VI is known as ShraRish, a DalRiss colony.

Analogue:
Computer-generated “double” of a person, used to handle routine business, communications, and duties through ViRcom linkage.

Annaisha:
“Guide.” Term for Imperial liaison officers who coordinate military or political activity between the Empire and Hegemony military forces.

AND Round:
Anti-nano disassembler. Tube-launched NCM round that bursts almost as soon as it is fired, releasing an NCM cloud.

Antigenics:
Nanotechnic devices programmed to hunt down and destroy disease bacteria and parasites inside the body.

APW:
Armored Personnel Walker. Any of several large, four-legged striders designed to carry unlinked passengers. VbH Zo (“Elephant”) can carry fifty troops. Kani (“Crab”) can carry twenty.

Ascraft:
Aerospace craft. Vehicles that can fly both in space and in atmosphere, including various transports, fighters, and shuttles.

Beta:
Second class of Xenophobe combat machine, adapted from captured or abandoned human equipment. Its weapons are human-manufactured weapons, often reshaped to Xeno purposes. They have been known to travel underground.

Bionangineering:
Use of nanotechnology to restructure life-forms for medical or ornamental reasons.

CA:
Combat Armor. Light personal armor/space suit providing eight hours’ life support in hostile environment.

Cephing:
Also linking. Derived from cephlink. To operate equipment, computers, striders, etc., through a cephlink.

Cephlink:
Implant within the human brain allowing direct interface with computer-operated systems. It contains its own microcomputer and RAM storage and is accessed through sockets, usually located in the subject’s temporal bones above and behind each ear. Limited (non-ViR) control and interface is possible through neural implants in the skin, usually in the palm of one hand.