Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane, just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.

The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed with joy at the treasure… and determined to be cautious just the same. They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that — this was beyond the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).

So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned… Humans starting fires and playing with the flames.

The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built, recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum, but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them along. Straum itself would be famous for this.

Six months passed. A year.

The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much over-rated. Most automation works far better as a part of a whole, and even if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.

But the local net at the High Lab had transcended — almost without the humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness… and occasionally the need.

"We should not be."

"Talking like this?"

"Talking at all."

The link between them was a thread, barely more than the narrowness that connects one human to another. But it was one way to escape the overness of the local net, and it forced separate consciousness upon them. They drifted from node to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the landing field. An armed frigate and a empty container vessel were all that sat there. It had been six months since resupply. A safety precaution early suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the Trap. Flitting, flitting. We are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by the Power that soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost remembered humanity, became echoes…

"Poor humans; they will all die."

"Poor us; we will not."

"I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway." Once upon a time we were copies of those two. Once upon a time just weeks ago when the archaeologists started the ego-level programs.

"Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've wakened. Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every message from home."

Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife.

Then the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made here.

"Still," thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the craziest outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."

"The evil is young, barely three days old."

"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a great evil in this archive."

"Perhaps they found two."

"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things and misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we can." The ghost spread itself across a dozen workstations and showed its companion a view down an old tunnel, far from human artifacts. For five billion years it had been abandoned, airless, lightless. Two humans stood in the dark there, helmets touching. "See? Sjana and Arne conspire. So can we."

The other didn't answer in words. Glumness. So the humans conspired, hiding in darkness they thought unwatched. But everything they said was surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet.

"I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible too. Perhaps all together, we can make a greater impossibility come true." Perhaps we can hurt the evil newly born here.

A wish and a decision. The two misted their consciousness across the local net, faded to the faintest color of awareness. And eventually there was a plan, a deception — worthless unless they could separately get word to the outside. Was there time still for that?

Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.

The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to escape. For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep and putting them aboard the freighter. "Preparations for departure," was how they described the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been refitting the frigate — behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the humans understood that what they had wakened could be the end of them, that it might be the end of their Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such disasters, stories of races that had played with fire and had burned for it.

None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had fallen upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million star systems.

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so close. The dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this time held. Only one thing was missing, and that was something quite unconnected with the humans' schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes, there should have been a little bit more. In billions of years, something could be lost. The newborn felt all its powers of before, in potential… yet there should be something more, something it had learned in its fall, or something left by its enemies (if there ever were such).

Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged. Some of the damage was age…

Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing field, rising on silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins five billion years old. Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft. Their escape attempt, so carefully concealed. The effort had been humored till now: it was not quite time for the flowering, and the humans were still of some use.