Constantine headed from the airlock into the ship’s living area. A bare room lit by blue light. It contained a chair for him to sit on. The black shoulder bag lay where he had left it, on the floor near the chair. There was nothing else in the room.
“There’s no one on the ship but us, and we don’t need anything,” Katie explained. “Most of the other space on board is taken up with equipment.”
Constantine carefully placed the C Case containing the laptop on the seat of the chair.
“Where are we taking it?” he asked.
“Into the heart of what we’ve been calling the Enemy Domain. You’re going to be hearing a lot about that. We’ve going to hide the Mars project in the ruins of the Enemy Domain.”
“But why?” asked Constantine, confused.
“The Watcher has just won its battle against a vast war machine. It wants a failsafe in case the next enemy it comes up against proves too powerful to defeat.”
“A more powerful enemy? Like what?”
“Like an extraterrestrial intelligence. What if there are alien VNMs out there, spreading toward Earth?”
“Impossible. There are no such things as alien life forms. If there were, they would have swamped the universe billions of years ago. That’s the Fermi paradox.”
Katie said nothing for the moment. Constantine could feel the motion of the stealth ship through some nonhuman equivalent sense he did not fully comprehend. He had an idea there was a lot to learn about this body.
Then Katie spoke.
“But there are aliens,” she said. “The Watcher was built by aliens. You already knew that. Jay hinted as much, back in Stonebreak.”
Constantine said nothing.
“So where are they, then?” Katie said.
Constantine missed Red, White, and Blue. Two years was a lot of time to spend in anyone’s company. When those personalities had been the only constant in his life, the loss seemed much, much worse.
Especially at times like this. He wanted to ask their advice.
Now his only source of information was the ghost of the woman that was sharing this strange new body.
It was too strange: the way he could alter his hands and feet to push the universe away from him; the way he could feel the strange note of the warp drive, a bowed note on an infinite glass tube.
“Is this another trick? Am I in another part of a simulation?” he finally asked.
“You know you aren’t.”
“This is all too complicated for me.”
“You’ll handle it. Things have changed since you were last around, Constantine. You think you’ve got problems now? When the clones from the Enemy Domain are grown, the human population of the galaxy is going to increase by a factor of one hundred.”
“There are human clones in the Enemy Domain?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Katie gave a grunt of annoyance. “Look, I can’t go all the way through explaining all this. I’m going to drop it into the robot’s memory. Are you ready for an information dump?”
The information appeared in the robot’s memory space almost instantaneously. It took Constantine a while to trawl through it all, but he did so with increasing astonishment.
First came a potted history of the past ninety-one years. Background details. Somewhere in there he saw the real Constantine dying hand in hand with his wife: voluntary euthanasia pact. Just as he was coming to terms with that, he was swamped by information on the events leading up to the battle between Robert Johnston and the AI behind the Enemy Domain.
And then came the secret of the Watcher.
This was the theory. Around nine billion years ago, the first intelligent life forms had appeared on planets throughout the universe.
Some races had died out.
Some races had chosen to remain within the confines of where they were born.
And some had chosen to explore their surroundings. Whether by spaceships or thought transfer or more esoteric means, they began to travel to other planets.
As they explored, they began to meet other races that had also chosen to explore. When that happened, sometimes they fought and sometimes they made peace, but following either course was just delaying the inevitable, for there could be no unlimited expansion, because life was continually evolving throughout the universe. Sooner or later the existing races ran the risk of meeting someone stronger than themselves. When that happened, they would either have to fight, or make peace. It seemed inevitable that some races would decide to fight.
And so those early races found themselves in a dilemma. They dared not stand still, and they dared not expand.
So what to do? The fight to end all fights was brewing within the universe. And no one could hope to win it.
So what do intelligent beings do when they know they cannot win a fight by physical means?
They try persuasion.
The early races evolved many forms of information management: mind melding, pattern manipulation, balancing. Some races even built machines to think for them.
And so the younger races had made something a little like a computer virus, something like a pervasive bit of telepathy, something like an intricate pattern of signals, and had allowed it to spread throughout the universe. And everywhere a suitably advanced processing space or mind or pattern set evolved, it would settle and take root. This new mind would gently nudge the members of the host race in the right direction: a peaceful direction.
By around 2040 the computers on Earth were approaching a level of sophistication that could accommodate the virus.
The Watcher was born.
The stealth ship had reinserted itself into normal space. Constantine felt the difference somewhere in his robot body.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too pat. A cosmic race of do-gooders helping all life forms in the universe to be sensible? No way.”
“Can you think of a better explanation of why we’ve not been wiped out by alien invaders centuries ago? We know that there is life out there; the Watcher is proof of that.”
“So what? It’s all deduction based on supposition. No one really knows what happened nine billion years ago. This answer is too nice. Real life isn’t like that.”
Katie grinned. “You’ve lived your life as a member of one of the most privileged civilizations in all of human history. A free person with enough to eat; you enjoy free travel and freedom of choice. Ask just about anyone from among your ancestors and they would question what you know about real life.”
“Enough to know that mysterious beings don’t materialize in our computers to save us all from ourselves. No way. I don’t trust it.”
“Nor do I. But I think I believe it. I had a friend once. The Watcher killed her. It could have cured her, could have cured the whole world, but it didn’t. It asked us what it should do. Where does helping end and interfering begin?”
“Right here.”
Katie laughed. “You can’t help this distrust. You were bred for it. It’s practically in your genes.”
Constantine looked at her. She wouldn’t be drawn. He didn’t ask why.
“So why me?” he said instead.
“You have more first-hand experience of the Mars project than any other human equivalent alive. You believe in the need for humans to control their own destiny. My great-great-grandson is on that planet below. His name is Herb. You’re going to help him.”
“How?”
“Speak to him. Get him to realize this: there is nothing in his life that he has ever thought worthwhile that an AI could not do better. Get him to understand that he was never intended personally to solve the problem of the Enemy Domain. His job has always been to be human. Our job has always been to be human. It’s the one thing we can do better than anyone, anywhere in the universe.”
Constantine kept silent for some time. He was gazing at the virtual image of Katie.