Christopher Nuttall: Storming Heaven

It studied the human memories again, carefully, and used them as a guide to understanding the human language. Human, it reflected. The mites called themselves humans. The living human, the human who was almost a Killer, was trying to talk to it, yet the method was so limited. It formed a single question in the human tongue — it was so strange to talk by vocalising messages, rather than sharing thoughts and feelings — and spoke directly to the human.

“I think we should talk, don’t you?”

“What the hell happened to her?”

Chris Kelsey was almost frantic. One moment, Paula had been linked into the communications network, controlling the black hole and, just incidentally, saving their lives several times over. The next, she had failed, blood dripping from her nose and ears. The medical team had arrived at once, but they were just as confused as he was, even though they suspected a brain overload. It shouldn’t have caused her to bleed.

“The system overwhelmed her,” a voice said. Chris turned to see a MassMind representative forming out of thin air. “Do not worry. She should recover in time.”

Chris bit down several angry statements that came to mind. “What the hell do we do now?”

The MassMind representative smiled. “Do not worry,” he said. “Everything is well in hand.”

Chris wanted to say something else, but the MassMind was right; whatever happened, it was out of his hands. He sighed and helped the medics to move her to the sickbay, before going forward and programming new orders into the AI. If the Killers showed up in firing range, they wouldn’t even hesitate before they triggered the Anderson Drive and jumped halfway across the galaxy to escape. The resolution of the war was going to be settled elsewhere.

Tabitha Cunningham felt herself slipping into the universe formerly occupied by Paula Handley and smiled as she sensed power, real power, building around her. Unlike Paula, she wasn’t human any longer and wasn’t limited by human limitations — and she had an idea of what the interior of the Killer system actually looked like. The perceptual reality shifted as Chiyo99 materialised beside her, looking wan and pale, but ready to play her part. Behind her, she heard the ever-present muttering of the MassMind, ready to act or intervene, as required. Its power was formidable elsewhere, yet here it actually affected the outside world. The sheer power at her disposal — at their disposal — was astonishing.

“But it is nothing compared to what the Killers have at their disposal,” the MassMind warned, as they extended their mind towards the Killer Communications Network. The universe of black holes, massive power storage facilities — built, literally, out of space-time itself, and data formed around them. “We must not engage in a power struggle with them or we will lose.”

“I’m not arguing,” Tabitha pointed out, curtly. The goal was to interface with the Killer Communications Network, not get destroyed by it. The Killers would certainly seek to expel them as soon as they knew that they were there. “Shall we proceed?”

She extended her mind towards the Killer Network and felt it vibrating like a drunken man, shocked by the sudden loss of one of its hubs. The Shiva hole was already linked into the network, but she extended it now until it was in place to actually do more than just tapping the data, but absorbing it as well. The MassMind followed her rapidly, studying the data and working rapidly to translate it. Chiyo99 could use her experience to point the MassMind in the right direction and its processing power could unlock vast secrets. The entire network opened up in front of them.

It was familiar and strange, understandable and alien. There were vast sections that were almost understandable — the Killers, despite their nature, shared the same universe as mankind — and other sections that were beyond understanding. Tabitha wondered, in a moment of flickering humour, if the Killer network was three-quarters pornography as well; the vast majority of fantasy worlds in the MassMind involved sex, to one degree or another. The Killers were asexual, reproducing by fission and splitting their cells, but did they have anything like sex? Would they ever get distracted by thoughts of other Killers?

The thought made her smile as they hacked deeper into the Killer network. The young Tabitha had spent much of her time chasing men — or getting men to chase her while she carefully didn’t run very fast — and the older Tabitha had wondered how much she would have accomplished if she hadn’t allowed her hormones to distract her. Perhaps she would have been Director of NASA when the Killers arrived, slain along with the remainder of the planet; perhaps, without her leadership, the Community would never have formed and the human race would have died out, faded away like the Ghosts. She shook her head as more Killer data rose up in front of her, showing her the deeper structure underlying the communications network; there was no point in wondering about what might have been if…

“There,” Chiyo99 said, sensing the web of data that formed the remaining eleven hubs. Shiva was already vibrating with them; now, the black hole linked completely into the Killer network, dragging the other black holes into alignment with it and the human system. The Killers didn’t have time to react before their communications network suddenly had twelve hubs again, one of them human. “We’re in.”

“Reach out to them,” Tabitha urged. There was so little time, even at computer speeds, infinitively faster than anything the human mind could grasp. “Reach out to them before they reconfigure the network and throw us out again!”

Presented with a valid threat, the Killers were already responding; she could feel their controlling minds struggling to alter the network and remove Shiva from their links, preventing the human race from exploring further. Their network stood exposed, yet there was no way to tell which messages were ordering a change, or even a controlled collapse of the network, before they altered their frequencies to prevent another hacking event. The MassMind configured a general greeting and broadcast it into the network, but there was no response. The Killers ignored it, as they had ignored every other human attempt to communicate with them; they just continued to focus on reconfiguring their network. It was almost as if their controlling minds didn’t know that the humans were there, yet…

“They don’t,” Chiyo99 said, bitterly. “They’ve decided that we are impossible, so we don’t exist for them. We have to be nothing more than a data glitch for them.”

Tabitha felt bitter despair. “What do we do now?” She asked. The sense of frustration almost overwhelmed her. To have come so far, only to fail at the last hurdle. How could the Killers just ignore them? “Just crash the entire network, all of it?”

“That may no longer be possible,” the MassMind said. It’s normally confident tenor shifted. Tabitha felt its doubt and growing despair. The grand plan, the nuclear option, would no longer work. “They may already have prevented us from successfully crashing their network.”

The newborn had been wrapped in conversation with Rupert — the mite, no, the human , had a name, something else alien to the Killers — when it had heard the first human call through the communications network. It had almost been lost in the howling data storm that the destruction of one of the hubs had created, yet it was unquestionably alien. The newborn abandoned its conversation and extended its mind out to the newcomer, but the other Killers simply ignored it. It could not exist, so it didn’t exist. The newborn had no such preconceptions.