The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity

“Too swiftly you grow and lose your balance,” said the other.

“I don’t understand,” George said. “How are we a threat to ourselves?”

“Transcendence looms near.”

“Transcendence blossoms.”

“Transcendence destroys.”

“Transcendence abandons.”

“Transcendence of what? Help us understand. What is transcending?”

Both Turusch writhed for a moment. Though it was impossible to read anything like emotion in the two, their movements seemed to project frustration, perhaps anger.

“You transcend into darkness,” one said, its tentacles lashing.

“You change, change, change,” insisted the other.

Abruptly, both turned away from the robot, buzzing at each other.

“Why isn’t there a translation of what they’re saying now?” Mendelson asked.

“The xenopsych people think they’re speaking their own language there,” Koenig told her. “Keep in mind that our translations of their speech are based on an artificial language—LG—which we learned from the Spiders. We don’t have a clue as to how to break the original Turusch language.”

The recording ended, and Koenig again faced the members of the preliminary board across the empty table.

“Transcendence,” Admiral Barry said. “That seems to be an ongoing theme with these creatures.”

“Yes, sir. In particular, we think they’re talking about the GRIN Singularity.”

Since the twentieth century—some would say earlier—human technology had been advancing in exponential leaps, each advance in science spawning new advances in dizzying and fast-accelerating profusion. It wasn’t just the technology that had been growing; it was the pace of that growth, the ever-increasing speed of technological innovation and development. Just five centuries ago, humans had made their first successful heavier-than-air flight in a fabric-and-spruce glider powered by a gasoline engine, a voyage lasting all of twelve seconds and covering 120 feet. Thirty years later, aviator Wiley Post flew a Lockheed Vega monoplane around the world, the first man to do so solo, making eleven stops along the way and logging the total time in the air at 115 hours, 36 minutes.

And thirty years after that, humans were riding rockets into low Earth orbit, circling the globe in ninety minutes, and were just six short years from walking on the Moon.

In the late twentieth century, a science fiction writer, math professor, and computer scientist named Vernor Vinge had pointed out that if the rate of technological change was graphed against time, the slope representing that change was fast approaching a vertical line—what he called the “technological singularity” in an essay written in 1993. Human life and civilization, he’d pointed out, would very quickly become unrecognizable, assuming that humans weren’t replaced entirely by their technological offspring within the next few decades.

Other writers of the era had pointed out that there were four principle drivers of this exponential increase in high-tech wizardry: genetics, robotics, infotechnology, and nanotechnology, hence the acronym “GRIN.” The GRIN Singularity became a catchphrase for the next four centuries of human technological progress.

“GRIN wasn’t quite the apotheosis people thought it would be,” Noranaga pointed out.

“That’s kind of a strange statement coming from a guy who breathes with gills and can outswim a dolphin,” Barry pointed out.

“He’s right, though,” Mendelson said. “The way the pace of things was picking up in the twenty-first century, it looked like humans would become super-sentient god-machines before the twenty-second. The surprise is that we didn’t.”

“Well,” Koenig said, “we did kind of get distracted along the way.”

As Mendelson had pointed out, the only surprising thing about any of this was that the rate of increase hadn’t already rocketed into the singularity sometime in the late twenty-first century. Various factors were to blame—the Islamic Wars, two nasty wars with the Chinese Hegemony culminating in an asteroid strike in the Atlantic, the ongoing struggle with Earth’s fast-changing climate and the loss of most of Earth’s coastal cities, the collapse of the global currency and the subsequent World Depression. The Blood Death of the early twenty-second century had brought about startling advances in nanomedicine … but it had also killed one and a half billion people and brought about a major collapse of civilization in Southern Asia and Africa.

Those challenges and others had helped spur technological advances, certainly, but at the same time they’d slowed social change, redirected human creativity and innovation into less productive avenues, and siphoned off trillions of creds that otherwise would have financed both technological and social change. Human technological advance, it seemed, came more in fits and starts than in sweeping asymptotic curves.

Admiral Barry shrugged. “There are those who still claim that the exponential increase in technological growth can’t be sustained indefinitely, that the rate of growth has actually been slowing over the past three centuries. They say that eventually, things will level off onto a mathematically stable plateau.”

While Koenig was aware of the arguments—he had to be, to keep track of the rapid-fire advances in military technology—he had no opinion one way or the other. Technology simply was; you lived with it, grew up with it, depended upon it to integrate with the modern world. From virtual conferences such as this one to interfacing with the NTE robots in America’s research facility to Noranaga’s genetic prostheses to the nanufacture techniques used to construct Phobia, GRIN technologies were a part of each and every aspect of modern life.

Of course, the big question was what the technological singularity actually meant. How would life become unrecognizable? Modern commentators frequently used the word transcendence, without explaining what that might mean. The suggestion was that Humankind would turn into something else. But what?

“I wonder, though,” Koenig said, “if what the Sh’daar are worried about is the technological transcendence of humanity. If we did become half-machine, half-god hybrids, we might pose a threat to them.”

“Maybe,” Mendelson said. She didn’t sound convinced. “But if we had truly godlike technologies, why would we want to fight or conquer anyone?”

“Well, we have one clue staring us right in the face,” Koenig said. “From what we learned through the Agletsch, the Sh’daar have been around for a long time. If anyone should be technological supermen—superbeings, rather—it would be them, right?”

Barry nodded. “Our best information on the Sh’daar suggests that they began moving out into interstellar space from their home planet sometime during the late Ordovician … say four hundred fifty million years ago. That’s a long time.”

“Most xenosophontologists think we don’t understand Agletsch dating systems,” Noranaga pointed out. “A sentient species that exists for almost half a billion years? It’s not possible.”

“Bullshit, Admiral,” Mendelson said. “We don’t know yet what’s possible and what’s not. It they reached a point of perfect stability … either no growth or very little, with control over their own genome so they didn’t evolve into something else, why not?”

“The point is,” Koenig said, “a race that’s been around for half a billion years or so ought to be so far beyond us that there’s no way we could fight them, no more than clams could stop people from building an arcology on their beach.”

“True,” Mendelson said. “Even if they’re only a half million years ahead of us technologically, they’d be like gods from our vantage point, and their technology would look like magic. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Well, we haven’t been fighting the Sh’daar directly,” Noranaga said. “All we’ve seen are their front men … the Agletsch and the Turusch.”

“And why even bother with the likes of them,” Mendelson said, “if the Sh’daar could just wave whatever it is they use for hands and make us vanish? Poof! Problem solved.”

“We can’t really speculate about their reasoning,” Admiral Barry said. “It is, after all, alien.”

“But that reasoning is still rooted in the real world,” Koenig said. “At least … in the real world as they perceive it. If we can understand that reasoning, we might have a chance to come to an agreement with them. To understand them.”

“All of which is for the xenosoph people to figure out,” Barry said, leaning back in his virtual chair. “While interesting, speculation about alien motivations is not germane to this Board of Inquiry. Admiral Koenig, did you have a particular reason for bringing all of this to our attention?”

“Only insofar as it might have a bearing on this hearing,” Koenig replied. “Unofficially, at least, my battlegroup’s primary orders were to go to Eta Boötis and retrieve those Turusch prisoners, bring them back to Mars. That part of the mission, at least, failed. That fact could have a bearing on these proceedings.”

“Hm.” Barry gave the faint shadow of a smile. “And what does your legal AI have to say about this?”

“It advised me to say nothing about the Turusch killing each other, that I should focus on the fact that we did get the aliens and Gorman’s Marines, plus several thousand civilians who otherwise would have been killed, back to human space.”

“You don’t believe in listening to legal counsel?”

“Only when I believe that counsel is the right thing to do. Sir.”

“I see. Well … I declare this hearing into the conduct of Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig during the recent operational deployment of the America battlegroup open. Let’s begin by reviewing the operational orders for Carrier Battlegroup America from the time when they were issued … beginning on 6 September, 2404 …”

Intrasystem High-G Transport Kelvin

Approaching SupraQuito