Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (6 page)

“Go on,” Elyria said, before everyone could start talking at once. “What do you mean?”

“Quite apart from the... magic,” Jorlem said, “there are three other oddities about the Darius System that are immediately noticeable. The first one is that it is thousands of light years from Earth. If we assume that the settlers left Earth during the First Expansion Era – quite a few colony missions left Earth and were never seen again – they still travelled a remarkable distance to reach Darius. I rather doubt that any starship launched during that Era could have
reached
Darius, at least under its own power.”

“They could have encountered a wormhole,” Adam said, thoughtfully. “We know of at least one other colony ship that passed through a wormhole while attempting to reach a new world.”

“It’s possible,” Jorlem agreed. “However, even if they left during the
Second
Expansion Era, they’d have problems reaching Darius, not least because there would be plenty of other worlds to settle closer to Earth. The last great exodus was during the Thule War, but those ships should have had the technological base to support themselves, wherever they went. None of the surveys located the remains of a colony ship. It seems to have vanished completely.”

He brought up a star chart and pointed out Darius’s location. “The second major oddity is just how
isolated
Darius is,” he explained. “There isn’t a world with a native sentient race for just over a thousand light years and no major interstellar power – apart from us – for nearly
two
thousand light years from Darius. Indeed, given that the exact concept of what is
our
space is a little flexible, we may be further away.”

Dacron nodded. The early interstellar empires had defined whole volumes of space as belonging to humanity, but as technology advanced that concept had become increasingly outdated. Right now, the Confederation was spread over a vast region of space that happened to include several alien races who were not
part
of the Confederation. Why would humanity and a species that happened to live in stars rather than planets go to war? Even with the AIs, communication between humanity and the star-born was close to impossible. Most recorded interstellar wars had been fought out between races that needed the same planets. More advanced races moved away from planets altogether. The Confederation covered a vast region of space, but only included five hundred planets, mostly terraformed by human technology.

“They could have been seeded by the Killers,” Adana pointed out. “Have those worlds been surveyed for their plants?”

“Not yet,” Jorlem said. “The possibility has been considered.”

Dacron saw several humans grimace. Centuries ago, humanity had discovered a number of planets that looked surprisingly habitable, almost perfectly compatible with human life. They’d been colonised, of course, before anyone could look for the snake in the garden. Eventually, they’d discovered that a number of very tasty fruits and berries on the planets were deliberately designed to cripple intelligent life. Those who ate them didn’t notice anything until it was too late to prevent severe brain damage, while their children came out of the womb mentally disabled. Later, nanotech and careful survey work had eliminated most of the threat – and humans had been engineered to make it impossible for the poisoned fruit to do their work – but no one had ever identified the race that had created the weapon. The only thing that could be said for certain about them was that they didn’t want intelligent life to emerge anywhere else.

“The
third
oddity is the system itself,” Jorlem concluded. “Darius is a lone planet. The only other object in the system that is worth noting is a single comet on a very elliptical orbit, one that suggests that it might have been captured by the primary star. Single-planet systems are not unknown, but there are none that happen to include a habitable world. In fact, the level of space dust within the system is remarkably low.”

“As if someone had swept it all away,” Adam said, thoughtfully. “The same has been said about most of the Ancient worlds.”

“Except the Ancient worlds happen to be dead,” Gigot countered. “Darius is alive.”

“And we still don’t understand the weirdness surrounding the Ancient worlds,” Adam reminded her. “They are completely dead, but they have a breathable atmosphere. They appear to have no technology, yet
something
interferes with our best sensor systems and research drones. Every so often, people report seeing things that never show up on records, or orbital observation... why couldn’t Darius be a living Ancient world?”

“No one has ever succeeded in terraforming an Ancient world, restoring it to life,” Jorlem said, thoughtfully. “We certainly haven’t – and I find it hard to believe that a colony ship from the early days of space expansion could do something the Confederation can’t. Besides, we haven’t found any Ancient buildings on Darius.”

“So far,” Adam pointed out. “Half of the sensor readings the original survey ship made appear to be unreliable.”

Dacron scowled. The AIs had painstakingly analysed every last component of the records, only to discover that something down on the planet had been scrambling the sensors. Half of their results didn’t jibe with the other half, creating contradictions that the RIs had dismissed as sensor error. It had been believed impossible to fool optical sensors, but Darius seemed to manage it. The AIs had eventually concluded that they needed more data. Dacron’s briefings had admitted that the CSC hadn’t been very impressed with the result.

“We will find our answers,” Elyria said. She stood up, ending the meeting. “I suggest that you spend the next three days settling in and reviewing the data, then we can start planning our operations. We will need considerably more intelligence to determine our precise course of action. Between us, we have considerable experience of operating in primitive societies, even without technological backup. We will succeed.”

Dacron watched as the briefing room slowly emptied, leaving him alone with his thoughts. Outside the viewports, the eerie lights of hyperspace flickered past the starship, reminding him that he had once fully comprehended the functions of a hyperdrive. Right now, he couldn’t even remember the theory. Slowly, he stood up and walked over to the viewport, staring out into space. It made him feel...

... Insignificant. Hyperspace was a high-energy dimension. The higher a starship went, the greater the power – and the dangers. Even the AIs had to be careful when they tapped hyperspace for power. Used poorly, the results could be worse than the disaster that had exterminated the entire population of Polaris.

And he felt useless. The humans could offer suggestions and ideas, no matter how insane, but it wasn’t something
he
could do. An AI who had been stripped down to fit into a human brain didn’t have imagination, just knowledge – and very little of that. What else was he good for? His thoughts seemed to crawl through the meat that made up his mind. He was
stupid
now.

Shaking his head, a gesture he must have picked up from one of the humans he’d met on the AI ship, he turned and headed back to his quarters. Really, this body was most inefficient. How much time did humans waste
sleeping
? Surely something could be done about
that
.

But all he could do was wait, and endure. Hopefully, there would be something for him to do on Darius. After all, they’d created him to visit the planet. No doubt they thought he’d fit right in.

Privately, Dacron rather doubted it.

CHAPTER
F
IVE

“I really should have looked up Prometheus at once,” Elyria said, as she faced Jorlem over the dining table. “Prometheus was the man who stole fire from the gods...”

“... And gave it to the human race,” Jorlem confirmed. “Prometheus exists to develop the technology to manipulate the quantum foam.”

Elyria snorted, still annoyed with herself. It had taken her three days to think of simply looking up the name in the ship’s datafiles. She had spent too long trying to pull together the few hints she’d found into a coherent pattern and getting nowhere. There were very few secrets in the Confederation, but those the Peacekeepers and the AIs collaborated to hide were almost impossible to find. Any researcher trying to locate a secret Peacekeeper project would find themselves buried in billions of terabytes of useless information.

She took a sip of her drink, composing herself. “And have you had any success?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Jorlem admitted. “There are some hints that alien telepaths may actually gain their powers through the quantum foam, but there are no clear answers as to why and how. All of the proposed devices for interacting with the foam simply fail when constructed, assuming that they
can
be constructed. If it wasn’t for the fact that we know of at least nineteen Elder races, we might have given up by now.”

“True,” Elyria said. It wasn’t in humanity’s nature to accept being second-best at anything. If there were races out there that were effectively all-powerful, humanity would struggle to match them – and the Confederation could pour vast resources into solving the mystery of the quantum foam. “Have you any theory as to why it doesn’t work?”

“They range from the commonplace to the metaphysical,” Jorlem said. “One theory simply states that humanity is too young a race to master the quantum foam, that we have to evolve a great deal more before we can make the jump into becoming an Elder race. Another is that you have to be composed of energy to manipulate the foam; a third is that we have derailed the whole process of advancement by altering and improving our own bodies.”

“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” Elyria pointed out. “Every known race has been improving itself since it developed the intelligence to work out that mating two healthy people was more likely to produce healthy children than mating two unhealthy people. I don’t think the Elders could have avoided engineering themselves.”

“I rather doubt it,” Jorlem agreed. “The alternative to
that
theory is that we haven’t improved ourselves
enough
, that we should be working on enhancing the capabilities of the human mind. Research is still underway, but there are limits to what more we can do.”

Elyria nodded. Even the ‘baseline’ humans in the Confederation were the recipients of a vast amount of genetic engineering. Her body might have looked little different to a pre-singularity human, but internally she was very different. She would never become ill; indeed, if injured, she would heal very quickly. Even without any other form of medical assistance, she would live for at least five hundred years – and that could be extended indefinitely with proper care and attention. Her memory was extremely good, her intelligence was high and her senses were perfect. The pre-singularity humans would have seen her as a superhuman.

“Darius must upset your people,” she said, after a moment. “Humans manipulating the quantum foam so easily?”

“It does,” Jorlem agreed. “Right now, there’s a split in opinion between those who think that Darius represents a mutation that we can splice into our own genetic code, and those who think that it’s a trick of some kind.”

Elyria blinked. “A trick?”

“There are too many oddities around the planet for us to assume that their abilities are just a matter of random chance,” Jorlem reminded her. “One theory is that the Elders gave them their abilities and then just stepped back to see what would happen.”

“Experimenting on humans,” Elyria said. “Do you think that’s possible?”

There were legends, of course; there always were, dating all the way back to humanity’s first tentative steps into outer space. Humans who had been abducted by aliens for medical testing, or even judged to see if humanity was worthy of continued existence. There was no shortage of speculation that the legends had some basis in fact, but centuries of research had turned up no evidence to support those theories. The closest humans had come to being alien research subjects had been back during the First Interstellar War, and
those
aliens had operated on the same level as mankind.

But the legends persisted, talking about strange encounters at the rim of explored space...

“Anything is possible,” Jorlem said. “The Prometheus Project took a considerable interest in Shaman, a world that had legends about direct divine attention, and discovered that there were any number of oddities surrounding the planet, almost as many as Darius. Our best guess is that their legends had some basis in fact and an Elder race was looking after them, answering prayers and suchlike.”

“I never looked outside human worlds,” Elyria said. “But that one sounds fascinating...”

“Not for the inhabitants,” Jorlem said. “They don’t realise it, but whatever happened to them destroyed their capability for self-advancement. Everything they have came as a gift from their gods. They’re stuck in the First Age, without any real prospect of developing the technology needed to lift themselves into the Second Age. And there is nothing we can do about it unless we want to interfere openly.”

Elyria scowled. The Confederation had no qualms about interfering in a primitive
human
society, but it preferred not to meddle with
alien
societies unless they posed a threat to the Confederation or their neighbours. She’d heard that the debate between the different factions had been going on for years, without any real solution. One side claimed that allowing aliens to wallow in the mud was racist, that aliens too deserved to share in the unlimited bounty of the Confederation. The other side pointed out that aliens needed to work their own way up from the mud, or they’d never become anything other than clones of humanity.

“If Darius can really teach us how to manipulate the quantum foam,” Jorlem mused, “our society will be turned upside down.”

Elyria lifted an eyebrow. “How so?”

“
You
ought to understand,” he said, dryly. “What would a person from a pre-singularity society make of us?”

“Culture shock, at the very least,” Elyria said. “And the leaders would want to stop their people from emigrating.”