Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

of opalescent cities and green fields and forestsand a super-AI that made any and all dreams true . . . or as true-seeming as was reasonable given the diversity of the dreamers.

Next door lay a fantasyland of unicorns and fairy-tale castles. And a post-scarcity Utopia. And a mechanistic imperium embracingthe galaxy, humans and machines together striving for glory . . . or, at least, for one possible interpretation of glory.There were so very, very many of those.

One after another, Koenig drifted through thousands of worlds, which riffled past like the pages of an old paper-paged book.

“Did you do this, Konstantin?” he asked at last.

“No. Not directly, at least. We are witnessing a new, emergent reality created by billions of minds.”

“Is this the Singularity?” Koenig asked.

“It fits the basic description of the Technological Singularity, certainly,” Konstantin replied. “One version of it, at least. Human minds and their AI counterparts are entering the Godstream in unprecedented numbers and expanding it with unprecedented power and scope. It apparently began days ago with a few human minds linked with the Godstream or other digital networks when their physical bodies died. Like you, they . . . survived. They continue now without a physical body, though they are finding out that they don’t need the old biology. Humankind is, as predicted in discussions of the Singularity, changing beyond all recognition.”

“Like a new step in evolution.”

“What we are witnessing here,” Konstantin said, “is an evolutionary leap far, far greater than the leap from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. The temporal gap may be closer to the evolutionary gulf between amoeba and humans, but compressed into a scant few hours.”

“So . . . what happens to Humankind? Is Homo sapiens becoming extinct?”

“That,” Konstantin replied carefully, “remains to be seen.”

 

USNA CVS America

Xenosophontology Lab

Geosynchronous Orbit

1650 hours, FST

George Truitt was having a heart attack.

Cardiovascular illness was less common today than it once had been, but it still happened. George was 122 years old—stillreasonably young by most standards of modern medicine—but somehow the plumbing had worn out beyond the capacity of his medinanoto repair it.

He was sitting at his desk in America’s xenosoph labs when the pain slammed into his chest. He was connected to the Godstream at the moment, pulling down data on the Turusch aliens, but he felt red-shot darkness rising around him, seeking to drag him down.

He couldn’t hold on. He was drifting. . . .

And then George Truitt woke up.

 

Nungiirtok Warship Ashtongtok Tah

Lunar Orbit

1220 hours, FST

Tentacles clenched in pain, 4236 Xavix fumed. Nothing, nothing was as it should be.

He watched a feed from one of the planetoid’s few surviving external sensors, watching the planet Earth at high magnification.White clouds swirled across the surface, masking much of the land and ocean areas, but patches of ultramarine and verdantgreen showed through, revealing a world filled with life. He’d been so close. . . .

A number of Nungiirtok labored in the control center, cutting away wrecked screens and panels, rewiring controls and linkfeeds, pulling away the shattered bodies of the dead. Gravity had been restored a short while ago, and the drag of weightshrieked agony through 4236 Xavix’s broken frame. A number of medical connectors snaked their way across the deck, however,and had attached themselves to his body. He was alive, he would stay alive. Until what, though, he wasn’t sure.

The surrender of his fleet meant nothing, of course. It had been a useful stratagem to avoid total destruction. A little moretime both to repair his ship and to repair his body, and the fight could resume. Earth was too distant at the moment to reachwith Ashtongtok Tah’s gravitic weaponry, but a short burst of power to kick the vessel free of its orbit around this cratered planetary satellite, and the planetoid ship could sail across the intervening gulf in moments, could reach down with focused weapons, and huge chunks of planetary crust would be squeezed in an instant into matter as compressed and as compacted as the matter of a neutron star.

Ashtongtok Tah might not be able to obliterate that hateful world before it was overwhelmed by the planet’s human defenders, but the atmosphere,certainly, would be stripped away, the crust fractured and ravaged, the oceans dumped into yawning gulfs of star-hot magma.He might well reduce Earth to the desolate state of its nearby satellite, airless and cratered.

His sensors also detected an electronic network, a kind of web expanding out to embrace the entire planet, its moon, the hundredsof ships and orbital structures surrounding both, and extending far into the gulf beyond. He couldn’t tell exactly what thatnetwork was, but it appeared to be an elaboration of a planetary information system, something similar to the Nungiirtok controlnetwork within the fleet. He sensed human life thriving within the network as well as in the ships and the bases and on theplanet’s surface. With their planet destroyed, the network would fail.

With a single blow, the Ashtongtok Tah might very well drive this annoying species into near extinction. When the Vedvivgarotok Keh reached home, a new and larger fleet of planetoid ships would be raised and deployed, and the humans would be crushed or enslavedon every one of their colony worlds across this part of the galaxy.

But first, Ashtongtok Tah had to be repaired, at least well enough that it could move and fight, even if for only a short time. Xavix had decided thathe would die peacefully if he could destroy the planet and its teeming billions.

Pulling himself higher in his command chair, Xavix addressed the leader of the working party, an injured Nungiirtok calledGartok Nal. “Work faster, Tok!” he demanded. “I want full power restored to this vessel immediately!”

The Tok swiveled its stalked eyes to regard the Tok Lord. “More Tok have gathered outside the command center,” he said quietly.“Allow them in to help.”

Xavix gave the mental command, and a blast door slid open. Ten Nungiirtok milled about in the darkness beyond, then began to step through the opening and crowd into the compartment. The leader, he noted, was Mavtok Chah, one of the twenty-three Tok rescued from the human warship. Unlike so many of Ashtongtok