Why? She thought, desperately. She had spread herself thin, rendering herself almost unnoticeable, but it wasn’t enough to allow her to grasp how the network worked. If she’d had the computing power of the MassMind behind her, she might have been able to unravel it, yet the MassMind was very different. There could not have been two gods competing for the same area of digital space. Why are you doing this to us? Why are you killing us all…?
The block of memory rose up in front of her and she plunged right into it before she realised what she was doing. It was like watching a history lesson unfolding in front of her eyes, or perhaps an implanted or downloaded memory, yet it was very alien. She found herself struggling to comprehend visions seen through alien eyes — but they weren’t eyes. It wasn’t an entertainment; it was more like an old-style movie. She was nothing, but a helpless observer.
She saw a massive world, at once both alien and surprisingly mundane. She saw giant balloons rising away from the strange world and up into space. She saw the flowering of an alien civilisation in space, a civilisation that exploded into development as they finally gained access to raw materials that allowed them to turn their dreams and theories into practice. She saw primitive spacecraft, similar to the ships humanity had deployed before the Killers arrived and smashed Earth, heading out further into space, expanding their reach and grasp. She saw…
Aliens; alien ships. The sense of overwhelming evil was so powerful that it almost threw her right out of the memory, back into the alien network. She saw the aliens opening fire and devastating entire colonies and settlements, a war over infinitive resources. Humanity had fought wars over limited resources on Earth; the aliens, it seemed, waged war over everything. The judgement was both dispassionate and shockingly passionate; the aliens had to be destroyed. The war scenes seemed to blur together until the alien race was finally exterminated, but at a cost. The race humanity had learned to call the Killers had been forever changed by the experience.
The memory faded away, to be replaced by another, and another, strange alien scenes that made no sense to her. She could hear words whispered on the wind, yet she couldn’t understand them, or their context. Some of them provoked anger, or fear, or rage, or arousal in her, but she couldn’t understand why. She saw massive jellyfish-like creatures floating in an endless sea one moment, scenes of space exploration or devastation the second. She saw humanoid races burning before her eyes, exterminated down to the last few members of their race, yet there was no hatred or rage. It was coldly precise and dispassionate.
It made her feel sick. Hitler had created great storms of anti-Jewish feeling to allow him to commit genocide and attempt to exterminate them. Every time the human race had committed genocide, there had been an attempt to justify it, no matter how thin. The enemy was subhuman, or useless, or permanently hateful; there was always a reason. The human race seemed to have unlimited capability for believing –and creating — such propaganda, but the Killers? They didn’t seem to have a reason, or any need to justify it to themselves. They just… were.
She pulled herself out of the memory storm with an effort, only to discover that the network had changed around her. There were two spiders now — three spiders, ten spiders, an infinity of spiders — and they were talking to each other. She tried to listen, but again, it was beyond her understanding… or perhaps not. She was no longer human, after all, and there were things she could do as a personality that she could never have done as a human. She concentrated, trying to work out how to reproduce asexually, and felt herself split into two people. It was weird, looking at her own twin; Chiyo2 was her. The MassMind rarely allowed such duplication — it raised all kinds of legal and ethical questions — but now there was no choice. She had to take the risk.
“Go,” she said. Chiyo2 understood as clearly as Chiyo1. They were the same person, after all, and if one died the other would survive. “Good luck.”
She felt herself stretched as Chiyo2 inched closer to the spiders, reaching out to experience their thoughts directly. Their words were deafeningly loud, yet if she ran them through her skull — her metaphorical skull — she could understand them, somehow. The spiders — she realised now that the spiders were the Killers, as they were represented in their own version of the MassMind — were discussing something that had happened. It took her a moment longer to realise what that had been.
Memory — a Killer memory — swept over Chiyo2. One of their mighty starships was under attack. The two human personalities watched in astonishment as an entire attack wing of human starships mounted a desperate and ultimately futile assault, barely damaging the Killer ship. It looked useless, resulting in nothing, but dead humans, until new problems appeared within the Killer starship. It took her a moment to grasp what was happening — had happened — but it seemed to take the Killers longer. They barely grasped the concept of a boarding party. The death of one of their kind took them by complete surprise. It hadn’t happened for thousands of years.
The sense of just how old the Killers were didn’t take Chiyo by surprise. The Defence Force had endlessly speculated on how long the Killers had been around, but human explorations had turned up worlds that had been destroyed well before Jesus Christ brought his message of peace, love and understanding to an unreceptive world. The Killers had to have existed for far longer, or else they would have been destroyed themselves by an elder race, if such races existed. There were odd reports of strange encounters with hyper-advanced aliens, but no one in the Defence Force believed them. The Killers had to be old indeed. It had been Great Cycles since one of them had been killed by alien attack.
“Push closer,” Chiyo1 urged Chiyo2. The sense that humanity had finally managed to strike back, to destroy a Killer starship, was matched by fear for the future. If the Killers decided to start taking the human race seriously, Chiyo might end up the last human in existence, trapped in the Killer network. “Find out what they’re going to do in response.”
Their thoughts seemed to grow louder as Chiyo2 pushed closer, unnoticed in the roar of the disagreement. The Killers seemed to be reinforcing their own thoughts, somehow, an attempt to form a consensus where no consensus could exist. Chiyo understood, suddenly, what a democracy must look like from the perspective of a higher being; hundreds of voices arguing over nothing. The largest Killer faction seemed to want to strike back — if she understood them correctly and there was no guarantee of that — but other factions were more interested in something they thought of as the Great Project, even though they conceded that there might be a problem. The strange combination of xenophobia, concern, and unconcern puzzled her; the Killers, it seemed, just didn’t regard other races as a serious threat. They just regarded them as targets.
It made a bitter kind of sense, she decided. Earth hadn’t been able to mount a defence when the Killer starship had arrived… and, without the MassMind, humanity would never have become a serious threat. If they smashed alien cultures while they were still primitive, they prevented them from becoming a threat in the future, even if they survived for years afterwards. The Ghosts had never managed to turn their handful of survivors into a permanent civilisation… unless, of course, some had managed to survive in hidden settlements. It was possible, but a hidden settlement would never become a threat in its own right. How could it?