Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

For a few deadly half-lives of plutonium-239, the nonlocal Network was threatened as key communications nodes were vaporized. The original Net, however, remained, taking up the slack between sundered switching points.

Within any dynamic system dependent upon the processing of information, information is power, the only power that truly matters. Metacivilizations of Type K3.6Q, with access to some 1022bits of data, the forty-fifth and forty-sixth Empires had little difficulty holding off the Dark Gods. The Andromedan metacivilization complex—totalitarian, inflexible, and unsupportive of truly creative thought—proved to be a less efficient system of Type K3.3P, marshalling only about 1021bits. Despite its losses, the Home Galaxy’s victory was certain and absolute.

Two million years after Civilization’s final triumph, a Star Lord watched the two galaxies from the vantage point of an artificial world a hundred thousand light years above the Home Galaxy’s Core. The Star Lords were composite Minds, heirs of the now vanished galactic empires.

Both galaxies appeared paler now, dimmer than in eons past. The War, in the way of all wars, had drastically thinned both of stars and inhabited worlds. The Home Galaxy had been further dimmed by clouds accumulating about its Core for the past several galactic years—clouds of artificial worlds and titanic structures, orbiting the Core in teeming trillions—the next step in the evolution of a mature K3 metacivilization as the energies of an entire galaxy were harnessed and redirected.

To the inorganic eyes of a Star Lord, however, the Galaxy’s face shone more brightly than ever, alive with starlight reradiated in the infrared, with the myriad flickerings and pulses of interstellar lasers, radio, and gravities, alive with the vivid imprints of Life and Technology.

“The Weapon has proven itself,” the Star Lord said. “Employed on a larger scale, it will shield the Home Galaxy from further disruption. We shall survive as a Type 3 metacivilization.”

“It may be too late to deflect Andromeda as an intact entity,” another Star Lord observed from the communications nexus within a globular star cluster far beyond the Rim. “It will be necessary to completely disrupt and scatter its member suns and dust clouds. Many of its stars may be destroyed in the process.” Imagery unfolded within the watching Minds—of the myriad stars of Andromeda channeled by sharply warping space into a thin, tight stream and sprayed out into the intergalactic Void.

That channeling would fuse stars and gas clouds into plasma and eject it at close to the speed of light, creating a beam of energy like the polar jets of an exploding galactic core. Suns and worlds by the tens—even by the hundreds of millions—would be annihilated.

“We might yet avoid that necessity,” the first Star Lord said. “I hope so. There are still trillions of sentient beings in among the worlds of Andromeda. Communicating with them remains… difficult, but it would be a pity to incinerate them all.”

“Incineration for them, or the end of K3 metacivilization,” another said. “An interesting ethical choice.”

“If we act swiftly—within, I estimate, ten half-lives of plutonium-239—few of Andromeda’s systems will be destroyed. They will be scattered across the Void, and be unable ever to regain a viable K3-level civilization. But they will survive as independent systems, Type 2.”

“Intriguing. That is the same fate we ourselves seek to avoid.”

“A question remains,” another Star Lord said, this one from a world deep within the Galactic Core itself, “as to whether we can marshal the requisite energy.”

“The energy is there,” the first Lord said. “We need only tap the Collective Will.”

Every alteration of mass or energy—from materializing a cup of nutrient to diverting a galaxy like water sprayed from a hose—required the expenditure of energy. Since the dim prehistory of Galactic Metaculture, that energy had been most efficiently tapped from the Zero Point Field.

Certain philosopher-shamans of the Earth of Kardeshev’s day had made the first, crude calculations of the energy resident within so-called empty space. Some had ventured the opinion that a volume of hard vacuum a few centimeters on a side contained energy enough, if released all at once, to destroy the Galaxy. Their peers had refined the figures, and pointed out a slight error in magnitude. The actual energy, they declared, would be something on the order of 10100times greater.

Perhaps fortunately, in all of the eons since, only a tiny fraction of that unthinkable torrent of energy could ever be tapped.

The Weapon could not draw upon all available zero-point energy—not yet, at any rate—but it could channel a respectable fraction, and initial estimates suggested that that fraction would be enough, easily, to create a gravity field intense enough to obliterate Andromeda. What was required was the harnessed, ranked, and ordered intent and will of some quintillions of Net-linked minds. During the height of the battle with the Andromedans, a linked and focused array of some twenty to thirty billion minds had been sufficient to redirect the enemy worldfleets and some ninety percent of the incoming relativistic star-killers.

To divert Andromeda would require an effort some nine orders of magnitude greater.

Consensus was reached. The command was given. The Galactic Will would reach forth….

Failure. Cold and stunning failure. The Weapon triggered, but with only a tiny fraction of the necessary power. Some few millions of Andromeda’s nearer stars, indeed, were redirected into radically different vectors at a sizeable fraction of c, and hundreds of millions more were somewhat shifted in their courses… but the vast, spiraling mass of suns continued closing with the Home Galaxy, accelerating now under gravity’s inexorable hand as if eager for the final embrace. Both of the Magellanic Clouds, attendant satellites of the Home Galaxy, were devoured by the monster, vanishing like tiny, swallowed morsels into the Andromedan maw.

Through much of Ygal29, the Star Lords sought desperately to find out what had gone wrong.

The failure, it was soon clear, had been a failure of Will.

And another epoch passed…

Ygal32.54

The Metacivilization of the Star Lords, like all of the Caretaker civilizations that had gone before, was a hierarchical construct: a pyramid with each course dependent for support upon the course beneath. The uppermost levels, drawing upon the energy and the data of the entire Galaxy, now could be classified as K3.8Q. Individual star systems, however, each with its attendant Dyson cloud or pearl-strings of inhabited worlds or rings and shells manufactured from disassembled worlds, drew upon their own energy resources, and none could be said to rate higher than K2.0, with only a few of the larger interstellar associatives weighing in at around K2.5. The transgalactic Net assured access to all available information, however, which was distributed across the Galaxy. The long dreamed-of compendium of all known data, the so-called Encyclopedia Galactica, was instantly accessible from nearly every inhabited world or spome—1022bits of information compiled from among 1011worlds.

With such a complete distribution of data, a certain amount of homogeneity of culture might be expected, even among a hundred billion worlds.

Such, the Star Lords learned, was not the case.

Unity of culture was a myth. At the level of individual worlds and Dyson clouds—even at the level of individual spomes—Mind delved, pondered, explored, considered, grew, and changed. Among hundreds of billions of distinct galactic cultures, though many were similar, no two possessed exactly the same cosmic view or viewpoint.