The spherules were few in absolute number and easily overlooked, hardly distinguishable from dust, but consistently present in a thousand years of deposited ice. The Society’s hypothesis was that they had sifted down through the atmosphere from the radio-reflective layer, the radiosphere—that the radiosphere itself was an orbital cloud of trillions of such granules, evenly distributed around the Earth. The cloud was too diffuse to block more than a fraction of incoming sunlight or to detect with the naked eye, but the distributed mass of it, Ethan had calculated, must be immense.
Without its enclosing membrane of rock, the fraction of organic matter preserved in the spherules decayed on exposure to air. But Ethan had been able to accumulate measurable amounts of it in chambers bathed in inert gases and maintained at temperatures and radiation levels commensurate with the vacuum of space. Add a few molecules of carbon and ice, and the substance would bind to them. Give it a sufficient substrate of raw material and it self-assembled new rocky granules, and the new granules revealed more complexity than the degraded ones isolated from the ice cores: complex crystallizations, venous lacings of carbon and silicon…
By the time of their marriage—an unspectacular civil ceremony followed by a catered dinner at a country-club function room—Ethan had shared samples of his cultures with Werner Beck and with a few of what he called “the digital computation people” for further study. And although Nerissa tried to wall herself off from the implications of her husband’s work, she had to admit it was a momentous and disturbing idea—that some ancient and actually cosmic force was screwing around with human communications. But what did that really mean, in practical terms? If the relative prosperity and tranquility of the twentieth century was a product of that intervention (which the Society had long believed), was it sensible to inquire too closely? Humanity’s earlier track record was hardly inspiring: endless cycles of war, famine, superstition, pestilence…
But these ideas were remote and conjectural and ultimately easy to set aside. Nerissa had managed to go about the business of her life—her teaching position at UMass, a book in progress, her newly-minted marriage—without giving more than a moment’s occasional thought to the nature of the fucking radiosphere.
It had seemed like a reasonable accommodation, in the years before the bloodshed began.
Ethan told her the monster in his cellar called itself Winston Bayliss. Nerissa wondered how it had come by the name. Had there been a real Winston Bayliss, perhaps killed and replaced by the sim? Or had the monster invented its name out of a statistical analysis of human nomenclature?
No way of knowing. And it didn’t matter.
The monster wore a pair of white briefs, its pale belly drooping over the elastic waistband. Its torso, arms and legs were duct-taped to a heavy wooden chair, effectively immobilizing it. The monster lifted its head as she approached. It wore the bland face of a middle-aged white male, not unhealthy but soft around the edges. Of course, its appearance meant nothing. The weary expression on its face meant nothing. Its beseeching eyes meant nothing. The creature’s body was simply a display surface, a signaling mechanism. In a human being the look it gave her might have meant, I’ve been through a lot. I’m all tired out. But from the monster all it signified was an attempt to arouse and exploit her sympathy.
Promptly—as if the monster had read her mind, though really it was just interpreting her body language—the pudgy face turned smooth and indifferent. As if to say: You know what I am, and I won’t try to fool you. And that was also a lie, albeit a subtler one.
Or not even a lie. If Ethan and Werner Beck were right, the monster operated by hive logic. Its verbalizations were neither knowingly true nor knowingly false. Ethan had explained this to her long ago: Hive insects—ants, for instance—operated according to a few simple rules, written on their genetics by evolution over the course of millions of years. They did amazing things: built cities in the soil, scavenged for food with startling efficiency. But no ant ever “decided” to do any of these things. Ants didn’t plot strategy, and there was no board of directors in the hive. There was no conscious mind at work—there was no mind at all, only chemistry and environmental triggers. A cascade of such interactions produced complex behavior. But only the behavior was complex. The rules themselves, and the beings that enacted them, were relatively simple.
It was the same way with the hypercolony. It was a sort of nest or hive that had enveloped the entire planet. Its smallest component parts were the spherules of rock and organic matter Ethan had learned to cultivate. As small as they were, the spherules were capable of generating and receiving impulses over a broad band of radio frequencies. They were also capable, Ethan said, of performing enormously elaborate calculations. (Correspondence Society people talked about “binary code” and “quantum-scale computation,” but Nerissa understood none of that; the only computers she had ever dealt with were the ponderous card-reading machines the utility companies used to generate her monthly bills; she took Ethan’s claim at face value.)
The spherules weren’t, in any plausible sense, individually intelligent. Like ants, they followed rules but didn’t write them. Like ants, they exchanged signals and responded in programmed ways to environmental cues. What made the hypercolony remarkable was its collective power to manipulate electronic signals and mimic human beings. Mindless as it was, it could somehow generate a sim like Winston Bayliss and pass it off as human. But when Bayliss said the word “I,” it was a noise that meant nothing. There was no “I” inside the monster. There was no one home. There was only the operation of a relentless, empty arithmetic.
She took a step closer to the chair. She could see where Ethan had shot the monster in the leg. He had bandaged the wound, either to keep the mess off the floor or to keep the creature from dying of blood loss. The bandage, improvised from a hand towel and a strip of duct tape, leaked viscous beads of red and green matter. The rotting-hay smell of it hovered cloyingly in the still air of the cellar.
She realized she was avoiding eye contact with the thing. That was cowardly, and the simulacrum would probably sense her fear and try to manipulate it. She refused to offer it even that slender advantage. She steeled herself and stared it in the face. Its eyes were brown and moist, its eyelashes almost femininely long. It returned her gaze unblinkingly. “Hello, Mrs. Iverson,” it said.
She was shocked despite her expectations. She swallowed her nausea and said, “How do you know me?” Not because she expected a truthful answer but because she wanted to hear what the monster would say.
“The hypercolony knows you. I share some of that knowledge.”
Its voice was a mild, reedy tenor. In itself, that wasn’t surprising. The parts of the monster that produced speech were all authentically human—throat, lungs, vocal cords.
“You are the hypercolony, isn’t that correct?”
“I understand why you believe that, but no. That’s what I came here to explain.”
She shrugged. “Say what you want to say.” Ethan stood beside her with the pistol in his hand. The simulacrum licked its lips.
“Most of what the Correspondence Society deduced about the hypercolony is true. It’s a living thing. Its origins are ancient and incompletely remembered, but it has spread over vast distances, star to star. Its cycle of life is very long. It identifies and engulfs biologically active planets on which tool-making cultures might emerge. If such a culture does emerge, the hypercolony then exploits it for its own ends. Under ideal circumstances the relationship is beneficial to both parties.”
“Is it?”
“Once such a culture begins to generate electronic communication, the hypercolony intervenes to foster certain outcomes. Peace as opposed to war, for example. In that way the relationship becomes fully symbiotic. The adopted species is freed from the consequences of its own bellicosity, while prosperity becomes generalized and formerly hostile tribes or nations grow mutually interdependent. Useful technologies then arise naturally and efficiently, and the hypercolony exploits these technologies.”