Garroway wanted to know, “is that stuff going to hit us in another twenty, twenty-five thousand years?” The thought that Humankind’s attack on the Galactic Core eleven hundred years ago might actually have unleashed a beast that was going to devour the entire galaxy was horrifying.
“It’s attenuating,” Schilling told him. “Twenty-six thousand years, or a little less, after the original Core detonation, the electromagnetic wavefront will pass Earth at the speed of light. Long before that happens, the heavier charged particles and plasmas, the hard, dangerous stuff, will have been absorbed by intervening clouds of dust and gas.”
“Even so,” a new voice said, “the astrophysicists are calling it a microquasar. It won’t scour the Galaxy of life, fortunately, but they estimate the total light output from our Galaxy will more than quintuple, and probably set the astronomers in Andromeda to scratching whatever they use for heads.”
“General Garroway,” Schilling said, “this is Socrates. He’s your AI liaison with the Council of Lords.”
“Pleased to meet you, General,” Socrates said. The voice was mellifluous and deep, a rich baritone. Where Schilling spoke with a slight accent, Socrates’ Anglic was perfect.
Well, he was an AI. He would be perfect in every way possible.
“Hello, Socrates,” Garroway said. “The pleasure is mine. Or do AIs feel emotion now?”
The AI chuckled. Either it had a genuine sense of humor, or was programmed to mimic one quite well. Garroway did wonder how far artificial intelligence had developed in the past eight centuries.
“If you can’t tell the difference,” Socrates told him, “and if I can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference between my feelings being programmed or natural?”
“Point.”
“Socrates is a Star-level artificial sentience,” Schilling explained. “That means he’s at least as bright as the smartest s-Human, but much faster. We refer to them as our archAIngels.” Schilling pronounced the word “archangel,” but Garroway sensed the neologism within, and the meaning behind it. “Sometimes I think they are the real rulers of the Human domain now.”
“We all do what we can,” Socrates said. Garroway blinked. A modest AI? Or was that simply another aspect of its programming?
“There was quite a bit of speculation about how serious the Core Detonation was,” Schilling said, picking up on the earlier topic. “That was, oh, four or five centuries ago, when we started getting hard data about the expanding Core wavefront. Created a bit of a minor panic, in fact, according to the history downloads.”
“If we managed to turn our own Galaxy into even a small quasar,” Garroway said, “I’d think a little judicious panic might be called for.”
A quasar was a galaxy with an exceptionally bright nucleus, an active core that outshone the rest of the galaxy by a hundred times or more. Quasars were also extremely distant. The closest known was three-quarters of a billion light years away … which meant it was also a glimpse of something that had happened three-quarters of a billion years in the past, ancient cosmic history. Accepted astrophysical theory suggested that many or, perhaps, all large galaxies had gone through a quasar phase early in their evolution, some billions of years ago, as the supermassive black hole at their cores devoured suns by the millions, spewing out the residue as fantastic bursts of high-energy radiation, a blazing beacon visible across all of time and space. Eventually, the core of the galaxy would be pretty well cleaned out, except for the central black hole itself, of course, and the galaxy would settle down to being a normal, well-behaved member of the cosmic community.
Presumably, the Milky Way Galaxy had been through such a phase some billions of years ago; the supermassive black hole at the Core was an ancient quasar, slumbering and quiescent now that much of the matter at GalCenter had been devoured. But then the Commonwealth Fleet and the Fleet Marines had come along late in the twenty-ninth century and upset the delicately balanced megastructure the Xul had constructed at the Core.
And a shadow, at the very least, of the ancient monster had awakened once again.
“It should be spectacular, though,” Schilling told him. “When the light gets this far out, our night skies will be incredible in the direction of Sagittarius. We think there will be enough light streaming out from the Core that you’ll be able to read by it.”
“The slower, heavier particles will pile up into the gas clouds that surround the Galactic Hub and create shock waves over the next five to ten thousand years,” Socrates added, “triggering an incredible burst of star formation. The Galaxy, in toward the Core, is going to be an amazing, beautiful sight for ten thousand years or more afterward.”
“Maybe I should go back into cybe-hibe,” Garroway said. “Wake me when the show starts.”
“We’ll go you one better,” Socrates told him. “The Lords of the Associative, or one important facet of them, at any rate, want you and your Marines to go in there.”
“Say what?” He looked into that blue-white hell. The simulation carried no sensation of temperature, but he could swear his face felt hot as he looked into that searing blaze of light.
“We had assumed that the Xul presence at the Galactic Core had been burned out by the Core Detonation over a thousand years ago,” Socrates told him.
“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Garroway said. “Do you mean to tell me they survived in that?”
“We’re attempting to verify that now. We’ve deployed AI probes to investigate. As you can imagine, the environment poses certain … difficulties.”
The view of the luminous rose of light expanded, the viewpoint rushing in toward the inner Core. The sheer magnificent beauty of the scene was overwhelming, and Garroway had to remind himself that the environment must be as hostile, in terms of radiation and temperature, as the surface of a star.
“It is,” Socrates told him. “Keep in mind, though, that we have encountered no fewer than twenty distinct species of intelligent life dwelling either in the photospheres or within the cores of their stars. Life evolves, develops, and adapts everywhere, when given the chance.”
“Socrates,” Garroway said aloud, “did you just read my mind?”
There was a slight hesitation. “I did, General. Excuse me, please.”
“General Garroway hasn’t been exposed to the concept of full access yet,” Schilling told the AI.
“So I understand now. It won’t happen again, General. At least, not until you authorize it.”
“Full access?”
“High-end AIs, like Socrates, have what we refer to as full access to human mentation. They can pretty much pick up and track anything you’re thinking, without interfacing through your implant.”
“I see. Why?”
“Social control, of course. And universal data access for the Disimplanted.”
The way she
