Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

There was no coercion. The Ascendence was completely voluntary. You could accept it, reject it, or simply create your own private paradise within the electronic matrix. Millions wavered at the edge, considering the next step . . . then backed away, afraid, or pulled back by old and hidebound ideology.

A conservative religious sect that rejected cybernetic enhancements or implants rejected the Ascendence outright. About halfof a neo-Luddite group dedicated to recreating a quieter, more peaceful age, refused to go forward and cursed those of theirbrothers and sisters who rejected their ideology and took the step. An anti-space revolutionary group splintered into thosewho would ascend and those who would not. The Humankind Firsters feared an AI conspiracy, or possibly a malevolent alien influence,and refused.

Koenig watched the minds of some millions of people accepting or rejecting transformation and realized that he was seeingthe same process that the ur-Sh’daar had faced 800 million years before. Humankind, it seemed, had its own Refusers. This,he knew, was Humanity’s Schjaa Hok, “The Transcending,” the long-awaited Technological Singularity.

Humankind was changing out of all recognition, redefining the very concept of what it meant to be alive.

Universes shifted and moved around him, beckoning, unfolding. There was a transdimensional aspect to the experience; as heshifted position, some universes closed off while new ones opened. Drawn by a feeling, an undefinable inner call, he steppedinto a private universe, a cold place of gleaming metal and pure white light.

He saw himself. His doppelgänger turned to look at him, smiled, and raised a hand in friendly greeting.

Koenig gaped. Now what the hell?

“Alex!”

He turned . . . and Marta rushed into his arms.

“Marta! But I thought . . . I thought . . .”

“I know. And I thought I’d lost you.”

“You transcended?”

“I came to the Godstream where I could still have . . . a memory of you. . . .”

As he watched, the replica of himself faded from being.

He embraced his companAIon, sweeping her up and crushing her to his chest.

Oval Office

New White House

Washington, D.C., USNA

1345 hours, EST

“Damn it, Ron, what the hell is happening?”

President James Walker was a man who knew he was in charge, he was giving the orders, and when things began happening utterlybeyond his control, he was furious.

“Reports are a bit confused, Mr. President,” his senior intelligence aide told him. “We think it may be the Singularity.”

“The . . . bullshit! The Singularity happened centuries ago! You know that!”

“It seems we were wrong, sir. I recommend that you readjust your thinking.”

“This is those AIs, isn’t it? Their doing! It’s a trick so they can take over from humans!”

“AIs are certainly involved, Mr. President, but it’s not a trick. This seems to be a genuine transformation, humans changingto a new state of being.”

They were watching a live news feed in the Oval Office, the images shifting from one locale to another. Everywhere on theplanet, it seemed, people were linking in to the Godstream and . . . leaving, their minds suddenly gone, their bodies dead or in a deep coma.

And everywhere on the planet, those left behind were reduced to screaming, rampaging mobs, rioting in the streets, storminggovernment offices, burning property.

It was, Walker decided, a kind of madness. He’d read reports about what had happened in the N’gai Cloud hundreds of millionsof years ago, as some aliens vanished and others rioted, while a galaxy-wide civilization utterly collapsed.

But, damn it, those had been aliens, not humans. It couldn’t happen here.

In Pan-Europe, the president had declared martial law and ordered the use of deadly force to stop the rioters. A mob fillingthe Plaza of Light in Geneva was busily setting government buildings on fire. They’d attempted to pull down the immense statuecalled Ascent of Man but had been less than successful. There were rumors that protesters were bringing in nano-D to attack the thing, and Pan-Eurotroops were deploying to protect it—a massacre in the making.

In China, a pitched battle had broken out between government forces and rebels in Shandong Province, in Shanghai, across thestraits in Taiwan, and in the Philippines.

In Boston, a mob was storming a SAI research lab, burning buildings and destroying hundreds of robots. Parts of Cambridge,behind the seawall, were ablaze, and USNA Peaceforcer units had been called in to confront them.

In Rio de Janeiro, AI robots were being hunted down in the streets and destroyed. Robotic fliers were being grounded, overturned,and burned.

In Singapore, an elite military unit dedicated to protecting the Pulau Lingga space elevator captured a young Indonesian namedMuhammad Sumadi attempting to enter an access tunnel beneath the spaceport with an aircar and a 300-megaton thermonuclearwarhead. Under intensive questioning using cerebral nanobots, he unconsciously revealed that he worked for an organizationcalled Earth First, a splinter group derived from the far larger Humankind First that wanted to reject both space travel andcontact with aliens.

In Atlanta, a story was spreading that super-AIs had rigged the technology used to link with the Godstream so that it waskilling people, and the mobs had gone berserk. Worse, the story had gone viral and had spread to St. Louis, to Chicago, andto Denver. The story was continuing to spread through the local news feed networks, as Humankind First released a manifestocalling for all AIs to be unplugged in order to save humanity.

In Washington, D.C., a trade delegation of alien Agletsch had been dragged from their embassy and butchered, literally torn to pieces. Walker disliked the spidery-legged Agletsch and would have liked to see them, along with all aliens, banned from the planet, but even he had to admit the aliens had been peaceful and friendly, trading partners withgenerally good relations between themselves and Humankind.

And throughout the day people continued to die, with thousands of deeply comatose individuals turning up—or were they corpses?Reports so far were confused and fragmentary—lying in the streets or in their homes or in the com link centers where they’ddropped.

So what the hell had gone wrong?

Walker thought he knew.

Centuries earlier, news services within the then-new Internet had been plagued by a peculiar dysfunctionality known at thetime as fake news. Gullible or malicious people would float news stories on the web supporting or attacking