Prologue: The men in the watchtower
The end has come and gone, yet mankind knows no peace
Some 40 million klicks out from the upper cloud layers of Saturn Fan Xiaoming lies dreaming, wide awake in his sarcophagus.
All his dreams are about flying. The Tempter's veil surrounds him, 15 000 parsecs to windward, on the opposite side of the galactic center, but also here and now. Towering molecular dust pillars, parsecs long, gold fading to bronze, russet and amber. Between them the gossamer silk of molecular hydrogen and helium, navy, indigo and jade, shifting to mauve and violet. Bird flocks taking flight and fairy castles and windblown sailing ships painted in brush-strokes of dust and light and twirling translucent magnetic fields like the skirts of a temple dancer.
With a shrug of his shoulders his wings unfurl, four square kilometers of perfectly reflective smart-matter membrane, catching the sun wind of the stellar nursery. A million stars litter the sky, a pirate's jeweled treasure trove spilled over black samite, rerouted nerves translating their radiation into gentle pin-pricks on his vacuum sealed skin.
Space is silent no more. The universe sings to him. Over the bas-rumble of the universal background radiation and the fog-horn sound of pulsars, the birth cries and death songs of far stars fill his auditory cortex with music.
The dreamer spreads his wings and dances.
Somewhere, half a galaxy and 20 centimeters away from the dreamer in the frontal lobes, force-grown high bandwidth neurons pour a torrent of data from his brain interface into his Occipital Lobe, bypassing the visual nerve.
Somewhere behind a thick plate of frosted glass the dreamer frolics in his wonderland, but here a sleepless watchman relentlessly hunts the data stream for the telltale signs prey, of signal in the noise.
The dark twins knows no exhaustion, no distractions, no sense of self, his lidless gaze never wavers. His senses reach across the solar system and beyond, from the hard gamma to the ELF radio band, from the mourning dirge of the memory beacons in high earth orbit to the backscattered whisper of a billion tight beam laser transmissions. From the Helium-III freighters launching towards Mars from the Löfstrom Loops in Saturn's upper cloud bands to the ten thousand fusion torch drive flames crisscrossing the inner system, he sees them all.
His sarcophagus surrounds him with a mother's warm embrace. It's micromachinery and his implants, nurse his body while his mind dreams and hunts. It's a spark of warmth and oxygen, amid the icy, airless darkness of the good ship CSCS "Nostalgia for Infinity". A squat armored cylinder, 109 meters from fusion torch nozzle to bow radar cupola, the Infinity has little in common with the space vehicles of bygone areas. No cabins, no commons, no bridge, only dense blocks of machinery stacked atop the fusion reactor and enormous fuel tanks, full of metastable helium-III ice, permeated by kilometers of winding, airless, lightless maintenance tunnels, most of them just large enough to admit a cyber-roach.
Time passes. The Infinity reaches aphelion and begins its long fall backwards towards Saturn, home and the end of its long futile watch. Their relief, the CSCS "Lapsed Pacifist", meets them one days travel outside of Phoebes orbit, fusion torch working intermittently while climbing out of Saturn's gravity well. At 500 000 kilometers, communication lasers are booted, handshakes established, transponder signatures confirmed, security tokens checked. A fountain of data begins to flow as sensor and maintenance logs are exchanged.
The watchman drinks it in with the same impassive, uncompromising hunger with which he has devoured Terabytes for months. A flag is thrown by one of the many dutiful little preprocessing engines, as it registers a faint radar echo exceeding the detection limit by about two standard deviations. This is in itself nothing unusual. It has happened a dozen times in the second before and will undoubtedly happen another dozen times in the next. A well-rehearsed routine of higher level analytical engines and filters awaits to sort out and eliminate the grains of interplanetary dust, the high energy charged particles triggering sensor artifacts and all the other causes of false positives, known to man. This one attracts ever more LAIs, circling like a hunting pack of hungry barracudas, as it is bumped upwards through ever higher levels of analysis. There is blood in the water. The illumination frequency is correct for a military radar reflection but the power signature of the return signal is all wrong for the measured range and the carrier wave frequencies are subtly Doppler-shifted the wrong way for it's apparent velocity vector.
Mircoseconds later, a moment of exultation as convergence is achieved. Neural nets bloom new connections, as underperforming LAIs are culled from the herd and the reward functions copies in a new generation, while the results are dumped into the short term memory of Fan and his crewmates, rudely ripped from their dreamlands to full wakefulness.
The Bogey is cloaked with adjustable meta materials. While the interloper adjust its shape to scatter radar signals away from the source, conservation of energy demands that the incoming pulse goes somewhere. The incoming signals correspond not to the radar search beam of the Infinity, whose output is reflected away from her sensors by the cloak, but to the radar pulses of her sister ship.
Fan Xiaoming knows a brief second of full awareness as Captain Bach's voice whispers in his auditory cortex: "Set condition 3 throughout the ship. Prepare for hard burn and release the data throttles."
"So you are just going to stick your big dataline in my interface and turn me on? Sorry bossman, but that's no way to treat a lady." Andrea Kramcynzski, Electronic Warfare Specialist and resident smart-ass.
"Luckily I'm only dealing with you and the rest of the clown circus …"
"Oi. Uncalled for!"
"… so that's not really a consideration I have to make, M. Kramcynzski. Rest assured I will give your insights all the careful consideration they deserve."
"We would get better results anyway if you would just authorize me to outsource some of neurological function related to tactile interactions and maybe the Bianchi-Demicheli feedback loop in the anterior insula to the extant infrastructure, it would decrease traffic on the system bus by 6% and markedly increase crew performance."
"That's a … very fancy way of saying: Can I run my yaoi porn virs on the targeting computer. Answer is still no, by the way."
"An army fails or stands on its morale, captain.
"The Circum-Saturnian Commenwealth knows a lost causes, when she sees it and she is not in the habit of wasting resources, citizien-soldier."
"You are going to dent my self-confidence, boss man."
"I just command a spaceship powered by the fire of stars with my mind, I'm not actually a magician. M. Fan, M. Kramcynzski is about to do permanent damage to my sanity. Where is my synchronity event?"
Fan rolls his eyes, or rather he would have if the motor function suppressors would have let him. "Truly a dire situation, Captain. We know you have not much left to spare in that respect. Brainwave patterns green across the board. Latency is dropping as per standard boot sequence…"
New intelligence is uploaded into their tactical short term memory caches. One of the analysis engines has backtracked the vector of the Boogey. It has spent the last 120 years first on a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, than caught in a highly elliptic orbit around Saturn. Most likely launch date is the 17 March 2119 with a two sigma of 37.9 days. Earthfall.
The conversation gutters and dies. Captain Bach's mindstate feels like a blade in his head, cold control with an edge of colder fear. "M. Fan. Synchronity event. Now. M. Elbert prepare missiles for tactical nuclear strike."
"Awaiting command authorization, Captain."
Fan Xiaoming thinks of burning cities and oceans the color of arterial blood. He thinks of the cold butchery at the quarantine lines, of corpses dancing on their pyres of red napalm, of endless refugee columns fleeing from something to somewhere. He thinks of ash on the wind.
Most of all he thinks of wind chimes playing and the quite squeak of badly oiled hinges as a door opens. There is nothing else there, though. The public healthcare psycho-surgeons cut those memories right out, cut the pain and the panic and the gut-wrenching fear, leaving only the paper-thin black and white of a bad action sim. If he tries hard enough he will remember the names of these people but it will have no emotional impact. No connection. Dust to dust. Ash to ash.
Discontinuity. The command codes have taken effect and all that is Fan Xiaoming, all he feels, knows, believes and fears melts like ice in the sun, as brain regions go dark, dropping of the network. All that remains are the mission directives and the force grown neural tumors metastasizing out of the visual cortex and their siren song of seek and kill. A firestorm of neural activity as brain temperatures spike and cooling implants work hard to suck the excess heat from the blood stream
Mercy sleeps tonight, empathy is press ganged into service as an intelligence officer, but murder? Murder is out and about and boy, it is going to be hot night in town today.
As bandwidth spikes and latency drops 24 minds fuse into one.
The Warmind wakes.