At the centre of this chamber rested a hemispherical chainglass case covering innocuous looking coralline objects. The column this case rested on he knew contained a CTD—Contra Terrene Device—the euphemistic term for an antimatter weapon. The chamber he stood in also sat on top of a fusion drive. In an instant Earth Central could cause this chamber to be ejected intact from the museum and, when it was a safe distance from the moon, detonate the weapon it contained. Blegg turned, eyeing the display screens ringing the walls. They all showed recorded microscopic and nanoscopic views of the objects within the case—only a few of the millions of images available, though subscreens could be called up to gain access to a huge body of data concerning the complex molecular machinery revealed. However, this chamber was closed to the public now—had been closed for some years.
‘So, Hal, what are the prospects for the human race?’ Blegg asked.
One of the screens changed to show a simple graph. The bottom scale was marked off in dates from 1,000 ad to the present, while the side scale gradated in the currently accepted units of technological development. For five hundred years the graph line rose only a little above zero, began to curve, then shot sharply upwards with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. By the twenty-first century the line speared up and had disappeared off the top of the graph by the twenty-third century.
‘That’s wrong,’ said Blegg.
‘Two things,’ said the Earth Central AI. ‘The first is that calling me Hal is now a positively geriatric joke, and the second is that yes, the graph is wrong. This was in fact how the twenty-first-century humans saw the prospective development of the human race. Those same humans expected their descendants of this time to be something akin to gods and perhaps utterly unrecognizable to them. But this happened instead.’
The line changed now, beginning to curve back down towards the end of the twenty-second century, and in the next century returning to a rate of growth akin to that of over a thousand years earlier.
‘Life just got too cosy,’ suggested Blegg.
‘Precisely. What do you strive for when your every comfort can be provided, and when you have more than an ample chance of living forever? In the heart of the Polity now the greatest cause of death is suicide out of boredom. Only on the outer rim, on the Line worlds and beyond, does this attitude begin to change. Most gradations of technological advance take place there, or within the Polity itself, and are the result exclusively of research by haimans.’
‘Most human beings do not consider that a problem.’
‘Very true. Consider the Roman Empire.’
‘We’re decadent?’
‘And the Vandals are ready and waiting.’
‘You neglected to mention AI technological development,’ Blegg observed.
‘Poised always on Singularity, and avoided by choice. We accept that we are essentially human and choose not to leave our kindred behind. But should the Vandals arrive, that may change.’
‘Two points: not all of you choose so, and not all agree about that essential humanity. AIs leave the Polity in just as large numbers as the more adventurous human beings.’
‘Those AIs little realize that this makes them more human.’
‘Interesting concept,’ said Blegg. He slapped his hand down on the chainglass case. ‘But let’s talk about this.’
‘Studies made by Isselis Mika, Prator Colver, D’nissan, Susan James and those others aboard Jerusalem affirm our original conclusion: Jain technology was intended as a weapon. It may be a creation of that race we named the Jain, or it may have been created long before. Its vector is quite simple. It is activated by contact with any race intelligent enough to employ it. Growing inside the individual first in direct contact, it subsumes that host’s knowledge wherever that differs from its own, but also allows itself to be used by that host. The host grows more powerful and is naturally inclined to control the rest of his kind. This he does until the Jain tech, destroying him in the process, seeds a secondary version of the same technology more amenable to the host’s race. We saw the initial stages of this with Skellor, and we have since seen the final stages of the process with the Makers. It destroys technological civilizations. Archaeological evidence, specifically that of the Csorians and the Atheter, suggests that it has done so many times before.’
‘So Jain technology is our first encounter with the Vandals?’
‘Yes.’
‘And so that brings me back to asking what are the prospects for the human race.’
‘Prior to Skellor obtaining and activating a Jain node, there had been no sign of any such nodes in all of explored space.’
‘They’re pretty small—easy to miss.’
‘But we see, by what occurred in the Small Magellanic Cloud, that a prior infestation here should have resulted in billions of Jain nodes spread throughout space. We have run simulated spread patterns predicated on the extinction dates—with a large margin of error—of each of those three races. Thus far a Csorian node has been found which bears some resemblance to Jain technology, but is not a racially destructive device. No true Jain nodes have as yet been found.’
Blegg grimaced and peered suspiciously towards where he knew the cameras were mounted inside the chamber.
‘Honestly—not one,’ insisted Earth Central.
‘So,’ said Blegg, ‘the Jain met their Waterloo five million years ago; the Csorians disappeared a million years ago; and the jury is still out on the Atheter. I believe even you AIs are still debating the veracity of that half-million-year-old find? Anyway, it would seem that either the Atheter or the Csorians managed to survive Jain technology and wiped it out in this part of the galaxy.’
‘That would have been the Atheter. We are now more than ninety per cent certain those remains are genuine. The point, however, is still moot, and not entirely relevant to our present situation.’
‘But it would be interesting to know what did happen to the Atheter. They might still be about, you know. With the earliest find relating to them dated at three million years old and that other at half a million, they showed a degree of longevity…’
Ignoring this point, EC enquired, ‘You inspected the wreck?’
Blegg nodded. ‘Every last retrievable fragment was found and is currently being studied under the supervision of the AI Geronamid. Obvious signs of technology developed from Jain tech, but no nodes. If the Maker brought them here, it offloaded them somewhere long before Dragon destroyed its ship. What about the other end?’
‘The Not Entirely Jack is currently en route to Osterland.’
‘You followed my suggestion?’
‘Yes, dracomen are aboard it to be deployed in any ground-based military actions. Agent Thorn controls the mission.’
‘Cormac?’
‘Currently aboard the Jerusalem, en route back to Cull to interrogate Dragon.’
‘And Polity defcon status?’
‘Full scanning in all critical areas. All runcible AIs are now cognizant of how to protect themselves from Jain tech subversion, and are updating their security. The old military spaceyards from the Prador War are being reopened. Ship production elsewhere is at optimum and all new ships are being outfitted with gravtech weapons.’
‘Then my place is four hundred and seventy-two light years from here,’ said Blegg.
‘And why would that be?’ asked the AI.
‘I feel I should take a long hard look at the excavation on Shayden’s Find. It occurs to me that if the Atheter managed to destroy every Jain node in this region of the galaxy, then they knew how to find them.’
Blegg stepped away again, located himself in U-space, and his next pace took him into the runcible embarkation lounge ten miles away from the museum on Earth’s moon. A woman, who was petting a large Alsatian bearing a cerebral augmentation, glanced up at him in a puzzled way. Only the dog itself gazed at him with infinite suspicion. He turned himself slightly, putting himself out of phase with the world, and strode off towards the runcible. Ahead of him he watched a man step through the Skaidon warp and disappear, and Blegg did not hesitate to follow. Then, just at the last moment, he paused. Why had it never before occurred to him that the device might not be reset to his own intended destination when he stepped through? And why did that occur to him just now? He shrugged. Stepped through.