She hovers next to a star that now seems painfully ordinary. The last subspace tunnel she saw blew her mind, but this system’s looks like a hole worn in an overused fabric. She watches millions of ships entering and exiting reality like a stream of dust, each one a boring four-dimensional object.
Why does it feel so…flat? she asks. There’s really no other word to describe it. Is it because it’s fake?
This is how you’ve always seen things, tiny one. But now you’ve seen it from the outside, and it will take time to get used to fewer dimensions again—if you ever do.
So why—
Don’t talk. Watch. I want you to experience this as I did, years ago. You have access to every sensor in this system, just as I did. For all intents and purposes, you are the slice of Me that governed this solar system a millennium ago.
But—
Watch!
And then it begins.
This solar system, like any Networked system, is bristling with sensors. They are attached to every station, to every ship, every satellite. They blanket the surfaces of multiple planets and dozens of moons. Still, even with trillions of sensor feeds to choose from, the shockwave comes as a complete surprise. It’s a distortion in spacetime itself, a lightspeed ripple that expands through this solar system and lifts millions of ships and stations up and over itself like leaves in a pond. Mere nanoseconds behind the shockwave comes a brilliant light; for a split second, a second sun illuminates this solar system.
What the hell was that? she asks.
Six hours ago, a relativistic projectile exited subspace—thus, the ripple. It emerged at sixty percent lightspeed, on a collision course with a station named Crescent Orbital—thus the explosion.
She stares toward the fading glow with every sensor feed she has available. But I thought—
You thought there were strict laws against unsanctioned faster-than-light travel and relativistic speeds? Now you know why: because there is no defense against either. Forty-eight thousand legal intelligences were aboard Crescent Orbital, give or take—not counting those on ships near enough to be vaporized by the radiation. Plus a half million sub-legals, since you seem to care about that sort of thing. These are the first casualties of the war.
The war? You mean—
I mean the only interstellar conflict in the last ten million years. That war.
Before she can respond, there’s another shockwave somewhere else in the solar system, then another. Network traffic is growing, but it’s also focusing. Transmitters like Crescent Orbital fall off the grid, but those remaining have more to say. Station after station goes down, most of them so suddenly that their sensors don’t register an attack at all. Network keeps a running tally in the back of her mind as the shockwaves cross the solar system to mingle in a vast and beautiful interference pattern. One hundred sixty thousand, it says as another dozen stations transform into split-second suns. Two hundred ten thousand. A quarter million. Two million. Six—eight—fourteen—fifteen million. Twenty-six million. One hundred fifteen million. A quarter billion. A third—a half billion.
These are lives lost, she realizes as she watches the destruction. Each one of these instantaneous suns is a Watertower. Each one is the home of tens or hundreds of thousands of intelligences. Why didn’t you do anything? she wants to scream at Network. Couldn’t you have stopped this?
Stopped it? laughs Network. Stopped something that happened six hours before My senses picked it up? Did you forget how the universe works, tiny sphere? I am vastly more intelligent than you will ever comprehend, but I am not a time traveler. At this point in history, this solar system had already been cold for hours. All you can do is what I did: wait for the light to arrive, so you can see what has already occurred.
And now a new kind of alert is clamoring for her attention. She shoves the relativistic detonations to one side and focuses her sensors. Through the continual rumble of twisting spacetime, she can see that something is changing in the atmosphere of the outer planets. These are gas giants, nearly the size of the planet Watertower once orbited, but something is wrong with them—
Nanoplagues, says Network.
What do you mean?
Yet another highly illegal, unspeakably dangerous technology. Uncountable nanomachines have been released within those planets. They are reproducing at a geometric rate, and when there are sufficient numbers they will begin to manufacture more relativistic projectiles. Those will be used on the next few systems, whose mass will be used for the next few, and so on. Tell Me, Human: how many enemies could you kill with an unlimited supply of unstoppable weapons? That’s the kind of question one must ask oneself when building an empire.
She leaps from one sensor feed to the next as they are knocked out one by one. The devastation is almost abstract, it’s on such a large scale.
Oh, pardon Me, says Network. In all the excitement I’ve neglected to keep track of lives lost. And this time, she is sure she feels a jolt of emotion with the next message. Nine and a half billion. Ten and a quarter billion.
And then another shockwave comes, this time near one of the three terrestrial planets. This is the biggest one yet, a tidal wave of spacetime. The wave itself passes through the planet without damaging it, but the same cannot be said for the projectile whose arrival it heralded. Another flash of radiation spreads on the heels of the shockwave.
What did I just see? she asks, almost afraid of the answer.
In peacetime—which is anytime in the last ten million years—that would be called a terraforming-class projectile, says Network. Seven hundred billion tons of mass, traveling quickly enough to crack the crust of a planet.
But—
Why would they terraform a populated planet? They wouldn’t. They are simply clearing threats from their newly claimed territory.
She is sick. But why would they—
You tell Me.
And now the picture—experience, whatever you call it—has grown shaky. Sensors are failing all across the solar system, which means she is receiving smaller and smaller pieces of reality.
This is My last defense, says Network dispassionately. This segment of Myself—the quadrillions of intelligences that made up this cell of My mind—has failed to protect itself. With its last action, it will seal itself off from the rest of Me. When this subspace tunnel closes, this system will be quarantined, and therefore dark to Me. On a practical note, since the nearest Network star system is nine lightyears away, that means it will be nearly a decade before I learn the final death count. It will be twenty-two billion legals, if you’re wondering.
Twenty-two billion, she repeats, shocked. So many, gone in such a short time.
And now, pay attention, says Network. Our attackers have left us just enough time to see one more thing.