beautiful. The soft glow of four hundred billion stars shone behind Schilling’s head, a radiant corona of stardust.
Watch yourself, Trevor, he told himself. You’ve just been hibed for way too long. A pretty girl, romantic lighting …
Then he wondered if he’d just transmitted that thought. This new hardware was going to take some getting used to.
If Schilling had mentally heard him, she gave no sign. She merely watched him, backlit by the eternal curves of the galactic spiral arms, waiting.
“The Xul?” he said. “Not a lot about their origins, really. Uploaded mentalities. They must have been a technic civilization like us, once, but at some point they embraced a kind of immortality by turning themselves into patterns of data—software, really—running on their computer networks. The xenosoph theory I was taught was that when they were biologicals, before they even achieved sentience, they evolved a hyper-Darwinian survival tactic—an extreme racial xenophobia that led them to wipe out anyone who might be or might become a threat. And when they uploaded themselves, they took with them their hardwired xenophobia. And that turned out to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”
Schilling nodded. “We know it as the ‘Galactic Null Set Problem.’ The Galaxy apparently empty of technic civilization.”
“Okay. Before we got off of our world, though, we didn’t know what the answer was. There were lots of possible explanations. Maybe civilizations routinely destroyed themselves as they developed bigger and badder weapons. Maybe the only way to survive for millions of years was to develop a completely static, non-expansive culture that stayed on the home planet contemplating its collective navel. Maybe all of the rest simply never developed technology as we understand it, or never moved out of the Stone Age. Or, just maybe, we humans were the first, the only civilization to make it to the stars.” He shrugged. “Somebody had to be the first.”
“And then we found out we weren’t the first.”
“Right. Ancient ruins on Earth’s moon, on Mars, on the earthlike worlds of nearby stars. And, buried beneath the ice covering one of Jupiter’s moons, we found The Singer. A Xul huntership, trapped in the Europan world-ocean for half a million years. And eventually we did encounter other civilizations. But apparently the Xul had been hovering over the entire Galaxy for … I don’t know. A million years?”
“We think at least ten million, General.”
“Okay, ten million years. So the Xul are sitting out there in their network nodes, just listening. When a radio signal suggestive of technic life comes in, they would trace it back to the source and smack the planet with a high-velocity asteroid.
“You people will be more up on this stuff than me. But we know a kind of Galactic Federation of beings we called the ‘Builders’ or the ‘Ancients’ were genegineering Homo sapiens and terraforming Mars half a million years ago, and had built planetwide cities on Chiron and a number of other extrasolar worlds. Along came the Xul and—” Garroway slapped the back of his hand, as though swatting a mosquito. “The Builders were wiped out. Then about ten thousand years ago, an enterprising interstellar empire had enslaved much of humankind and set themselves up as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Along came the Xul and—” He slapped his hand again. “And apparently the Xul have been doing this for most of their history, and across most of the Galaxy. Now tell me how they could do that and not be waging war against us and every other emergent technological civilization in the Galaxy.”
“When you hit your hand just now, General … like you were swatting a fly?”
“Yes.”
“When you swat a fly, are you at war with it?”
Garroway thought about this. “Oh. You’re saying they’re so advanced—”
“Not really,” she told him. “They might’ve been around for ten million years, but the Xul haven’t advanced technologically at anything like our pace. In fact, they’re actually not that far ahead of us in most respects today. We’ve begun uploading personalities into computers ourselves, did you know?”
He scanned quickly through some of the historical data he’d just downloaded. “Ah … I do now.” His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Shit! Humans who live on the Net. You’ve given them a species name of their own?”
“Homo telae,” she said, nodding. “?‘Man of the Web,’ which in this case means the electronic web of the Galactic Net. Actually, we learned how to upload minds partly from the Xul, inferring parts of the process from what we knew about their technology, and doing some reverse engineering from captured hunterships. In any case, we can pattern a person now and upload her to a virtual electronic world. Her body can die, but the mind, the personality, everything that made her her is saved, and lives on.”
“If you call that living,” Garroway said.
“So far as the uploaded individuals are concerned, they’re alive,” she told him.
Almost, he asked her if the uploaded personality really was the same as the living mind. As he saw it, the original mind died with the body; what was saved was a back-up, a replica that, with a complete set of memories, would think it was the original … but if that was immortality, it was an immortality that did not in the least help the original, body-bound mind. There’s been a lot of speculation about the process, though, back in the thirty-second and thirty-third centuries, he recalled, and some people tended to get pretty animated in their insistence that if the backed-up personality was the same as the original in every respect, it was the original.
Garroway had never understood the fine points of the theory, though, and had little patience with philosophy. Evidently, though, speculation had become reality, and enough people had opted for the technique to justify inventing a new species of humanity to describe them. That made sense, he supposed, given that one definition of species was its inability to interbreed with other species. A member of Homo telae, living its noncorporeal existence up on the Net, certainly wasn’t going to be able to produce offspring by mating with Homo sapiens.
“The point is,” Schilling told him, “the Xul are barely aware of us. Certain parts of the entire Xul body react to us the way your toe might twitch when an ant walks across it, or the way you might swat that fly without really thinking about what you’re doing.”
“So the Xul are some kind of group mind, a metamind?” That had been a popular theory about them back in his day.
“Not quite. They seem to function as what we call a CAS, a Complex Adaptive System. That’s a very large organization made up of many participants, or agents … like termite communities in Earth, or a hurricane.”
“You’re saying they’re not intelligent? They build starships, for God’s sake!”
“There are different kinds of intelligence, remember. Individual Xul may be what we think of as intelligent beings, but for the most part they’re locked into their virtual worlds and unaware of what we would call real. The group-Xul presence, the meta-Xul, if you will, is more an expression of the original Xul instincts, their xenophobia in particular. Even their construction of starships is probably completely automated by now—we’ve never found a Xul shipyard, remember—or they may all be relics of a much earlier age.”
“But … we’ve eavesdropped on them, Captain. We know they have us catalogued as a threat. They know our home world … hell, they bombarded Earth in 2314. How can they not be aware of us?”
“We’ve been sending our AI probes into Xul nodes for almost two thousand years, now, and we’ve done a lot of listening. There are … call them different levels of awareness. One Xul node might learn about us, but they were always slow to share with the others. Together, they were still driven by their original xenophobia, but taken in isolation, individual nodes don’t seem to really be conscious. Most of their defenses are automated. We know that within one node, or aboard one starship, they arrive at decisions through a kind