“They don’t,” Chiyo99 said, bitterly. “They’ve decided that we are impossible, so we don’t exist for them. We have to be nothing more than a data glitch for them.”
Tabitha felt bitter despair. “What do we do now?” She asked. The sense of frustration almost overwhelmed her. To have come so far, only to fail at the last hurdle. How could the Killers just ignore them? “Just crash the entire network, all of it?”
“That may no longer be possible,” the MassMind said. It’s normally confident tenor shifted. Tabitha felt its doubt and growing despair. The grand plan, the nuclear option, would no longer work. “They may already have prevented us from successfully crashing their network.”
The newborn had been wrapped in conversation with Rupert — the mite, no, the human, had a name, something else alien to the Killers — when it had heard the first human call through the communications network. It had almost been lost in the howling data storm that the destruction of one of the hubs had created, yet it was unquestionably alien. The newborn abandoned its conversation and extended its mind out to the newcomer, but the other Killers simply ignored it. It could not exist, so it didn’t exist. The newborn had no such preconceptions.
It formatted a call of its own, using what it had learned from Rupert and the human minds it had absorbed, and replied. The sense of the MassMind almost overwhelmed it, yet it was prepared and ready for such an entity — it was almost like encountering a far larger and diverse Killer, like the ones who had been slaughtered on the remains of the sphere. There was a sense of presence, of many minds working together as one, yet also a sense of unity and calm contemplation. The MassMind was everything that the human race was, it realised; it was all the glory, the delight, the pride and the agony. It was far more like a Killer than the Killers themselves — or the humans — would have felt comfortable admitting, yet it was surprisingly alien… and different.
Their minds meshed together almost unwillingly, each bringing something different to the merger. The newborn saw, for the second time, many different human lifetimes and the fear of the Killers that had bound the human race together. The MassMind saw, for the first time, the memories of the war against the First Enemy, a foe that had been defeated millions of years ago, yet how the Killers had never realised that there were different races on each of the rocky worlds. They had never encountered another gas giant-dwelling race, never, yet was that such a surprise. The gas giants were hardly as habitable as Earth-like worlds.
“We need to end this,” the MassMind said, directly to the newborn. There was no room for doubt or deceit, not when two very different and yet alike minds were in such close harmony. It would have destroyed another Killer, but the newborn had the mental capability to endure the touch, even embrace it. “We need to end this before we destroy each other.”
“We have to shout louder,” the newborn replied. They were sharing thoughts and ideas faster than any human mind could understand, or handle. They were both vaguely aware of the two puny human minds, left far behind by their communication, yet there was no time to update them, or seek their consent. “You have to… here.”
A plan formed in their shared mind. The MassMind reached out, through the Killer Communications Network, to touch the very heart of their shared consensus. They used their own network to share thoughts and ideas, even though they were far from human, and they all used it. They might no longer be able to share memories directly, through the transference of cells from Killer to Killer, but they could talk. They could be one.
The MassMind formatted a new message, a gestalt of everything they were, everything they ever had been and everything they could be, in the future, and broadcast it right into the heart of the Killer consensus. It was a massive shout, a wordless cry of WE ARE HERE, and it screamed into their minds. The shock was undeniable. No amount of disbelief could hide its true nature, or humanity’s, from the Killers, either from the Warriors or the Civilians living down in the gas giants; they could no longer deny the truth. The entire fate of the universe seemed to hang in the balance.
And then the Killers replied.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The peace accords were signed at Ceres, at Patti’s insistence. The war had begun in the Solar System, after all, and it had seemed fitting to her that it end there. Thousands of humans from all over the Community had come to see the end of the war, although the Killers had only sent a handful of starships and representatives. The Killers — no one had yet parsed out their actual name for themselves — were hardly comfortable in a human environment and vice versa. It was that, Patti decided, that would ensure that the truce would ensure and become a permanent peace.
Both sides had slaughtered billions of the other’s population, civilian and military, but they actually had little to fight over. They couldn’t use the same worlds, or even the same technology to some extent, and there were an infinitive number of asteroids and stars out there to use for resources. The only real difference was that humanity could now land on and settle as many planets as they liked, while the Killers could infest as many gas giants as they wanted. Patti knew that there were researchers from the Technical Faction and Builder Killers getting together to share their thoughts and combine their intellectual resources. The combinations of human and Killer technology had already provided some interesting results.
She had been worried about lone maniacs on both sides attempting to restart the war, but insane — as opposed to monomaniacal — Killers seemed to be rare, almost non-existent. The remaining Killer Warriors had been as shocked by the discovery that humans were not the First Enemy as had the Thinkers, Civilians and Builders and had reintegrated themselves with the Killer civilisation. A handful had actually opened wormholes and vanished in the direction of other galaxies, apparently with the intention of being alone for a long time. The Killers didn’t measure time the way humans did; the Killers she’d seen hadn’t been too worried about their brethren. They were effectively immortal; if they wanted to spend millions of years on their own, they would be welcome back when — if — they finally returned.
The Community had been more of a problem, but the hotheads had been restrained by more reasonable people who pointed out just how much damage the Community had taken over the last few months and how many more would die if the war restarted. The Defence Force had halted a handful of small efforts to strike back at the Killers — and a handful more had failed utterly without intervention — and Patti privately hoped that the reopening of Earth-like worlds and the new challenges opened by the Killer technology would prevent further outbreaks. There were already billions of humans planning to land and settle new worlds, while billions more were choosing to remain in space. They saw no reason to land on heavy worlds when they could have the freedom of the stars and the resources that floated through space, free for the taking.
And Earth…
The Technical Faction had long had a plan to reform Earth, one that was already underway. Starships were dumping genetically engineered seeds into the atmosphere already, absorbing and filtering out the gunk in the air, while robotic teams were landing on the planet to start clearing the radiation. The Killers had actually assisted by providing some details on their weapons and their long-term effects; the Technical Faction was already talking in terms of recovering Earth for human settlement within the next thousand years. Patti was almost tempted to go into stasis at the end of her term, to wait until she could walk on Earth without powered armour and heavy internal shielding, but it would have to wait. She had a term to finish and, with all the new worlds and internal divisions opening up, she might be the last President of the Community. Without a deadly external enemy, humanity’s worst traits were starting to surface again. It had been all she could do to convince the Assembly to pass laws forbidding the redevelopment of the other inhabited worlds the Killers had destroyed. Let them stay, she’d argued, as monuments to the war. Let the universe remember what had happened when one race lost its way.