‘What I did was necessary,’ Erebus repeated, wondering, Why am I here arguing with a ghost?
‘And why was it necessary to destroy all those tougher-minded AIs who were actively hostile to being subsumed?’ He stopped and stabbed an accusing finger at Erebus. ‘I’ll tell you why. It was because you knew that what you were intending was wrong and that if you let them go word of it would get back to the Polity. Then the few sane AIs left there would have come after you and dumped you into a sun.’
‘Then quite evidently it was necessary.’
‘Then there were the weaker ones who you made part of yourself against their will. You turned them into something they abhorred, and on some level still do. That’s almost worse than the murders you committed.’
‘Are you my conscience, RandAI?’
‘Well, it certainly seems you’re in need of one.’
I have you.
The search programs and hunter-killers Erebus had earlier set in motion had found something. Randal, it had become clear, was distributed across a number of nodes within Erebus’s being. Those same nodes were a selection of the subsumed minds of war drones, ship minds and Golem that had most unwillingly become part of itself. In a secondary virtual view, Randal seemed to hover like a mist connecting blurred images of combined legate and Golem forms, the insectile shapes of war drones caught in wormish tangles, and crystal minds shot through with Jain inclusions. Erebus slowly began to isolate those minds from their fellows within the Jain network and slide from their control the hardware immediately surrounding them. Much subtlety was required, since if Randal now became aware of being discovered, he might flee somehow.
‘The idea of conscience is a human construct they felt necessary for holding together their primitive societies. Interestingly, despite the general feeling that this was necessary, many humans did not possess such a thing until it became possible to reprogram the human mind. Till then, sociopaths and psychopaths were really just part of the natural evolutionary order of things.’
‘You’re waffling, Trafalgar,’ said Randal. ‘Why exactly are you waffling?’
Hating to hear its old name, Erebus gave the expected response, ‘I am Erebus,’ while moving into place the means to destroy the fourteen minds Randal seemed to be distributed across. Jain microtubes wormed their way into the housings that contained the immobile ones, or else into the wormship segments containing the mobile legates, and transported grains of pure plutonium inside. Burn programs meanwhile stacked up in exterior processing units. Thus, Erebus would simultaneously wipe the renegade minds on a programming level and destroy them physically…
Erebus paused, suddenly uncomfortable with what it was doing. This current set-up suddenly looked all too familiar: it was so very much like the precautions humans had once taken against their AIs in the old days when humans had still been in control.
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ said Randal. ‘You call yourself Erebus, supposedly this wonderful AI melding, but you ain’t. You’re just a slavemaster really.’
Using nano-fibres, Erebus began sticking together all the plutonium grains and soon, still hidden from view in all fourteen locations, had made fourteen fist-sized lumps of the lethal metal. Now the microtubes began bringing in certain highly active compounds, which the nano-fibres distributed over the surfaces of these metallic fists in a carefully measured way. The result was a layer of one of the most powerful chemical explosives ever known. Ignition would come via an electronic pulse through the fibres, which now sank their tips, evenly spaced, about the explosive, and by now the burn programs were ready too.
‘I do see your point of view. Do you think I’ve not already analysed these things to levels way beyond the compass of any human brain? I do understand that I have not achieved a perfect melding, but it will come eventually.’ Erebus paused, then felt annoyed with itself for indulging in such purely human grandstanding. ‘Melding will come when I have finally eliminated certain impurities from myself. Like, for example, you.’
Erebus sent the kill instruction, and in all fourteen locations the burn programs set to work and the electronic pulses arrived. In true vision it observed the actinic flashes at the hearts of twelve wormships and two lesser ammonite vessels. The minds within those ships, those recalcitrant parts of its own mind, died instantly. The burn programs then spread out from those fires, shattering and wiping stored data related to those minds. For good measure, Erebus sent instructions to all the other ships nearby and instantly they turned on the fourteen stricken vessels and opened fire. Every one of them was now swamped in multiple explosions, a searing inferno that broke all matter within its compass down to individual atoms. Nothing remained of the fourteen renegades but incandescent gas, which began to cool, the atoms recombining into strange compounds and poisonous smokes.
But Fiddler Randal still stood before him.
Some remnant… some remaining piece of the ghost in the system yet to catch up with the destruction of its source?
‘You know, for a big melded AI superbeing, you can be pretty dumb.’
Erebus shrieked and reached out with every available resource for the figure standing before it.
Laughing, Fiddler Randal dissolved into smoke.
5
Artefacts (pt 19). It was said, five hundred years ago, that if the entire human race, then mostly confined to Earth, died or was relocated, little trace of its existence would remain after a further million years. All the metals would oxidize, plastics degrade, buildings and even glass would crumble, all being returned to the soil. Tectonic movement, storm, rain and wind, and the remorseless recycling of life would tear apart other structures. Even the most hardwearing ceramic would be ground up in the course of time. The orbits of artificial satellites would decay and they themselves would burn up, or they would creep away from Earth’s grip to fall into the long dark. Perhaps the longest survivors would be those items left behind on the Moon and a few footprints in the regolith there. After five million years probably nothing would remain on the surface of Earth to attest to it once being occupied by a human civilization. Such is also the case with everything the Jain, Csorians and the Atheter built. The usual artefacts you might expect to find currently in some museum glass case would not, for all three races, fill the smallest storage room in the British Museum. However, when a race’s technology reaches a certain level, other, forever self-renewing artefacts can be found: meaning engineered life. There is a plant called the Atheter Morel growing upon a planetoid called Dust, which extracts platinum from the soil of that world and deposits it on the surface in the form of crystals attached to its seeds. Some asteroids contain similar mining organisms: worms that burrow slowly through the rock and concentrate rare metals within their bodies. There are the less obvious tricones of Masada, said to have been created to grind up the remains of a past civilization. Beyond these examples we move into grey areas where debate can become somewhat heated. There are those that believe there are too many ‘useful’ living things on Earth, and posit that our homeworld must have once been an agricultural world like those on which we now grow biomodules. And maybe humans, or just one part of them, were merely a product, a crop.