And it shouldn’t have been, Patti reflected. They knew, all too well, what the Killers could do. All across the Community, starships were being used to evacuate vulnerable settlements, carrying billions of humans off to an unknown destination, overloading their life support and drives as they fled. Who knew where most of them would end up? Patti suspected that far too many of them would die before the Defence Force could rescue them, if the Defence Force wasn’t wiped out in a hopeless future battle against the Killers. Patti had a vision of space filled with fireballs as starship after starship died, until there were no starships left and humanity’s settlements were wiped out, one by one, leaving nothing, but ghosts. Would the MassMind survive, she wondered, or would it die with the rest of humanity?
“You’re the President,” someone called. “That’s the President!”
Before she could react, Patti found herself surrounded by the handful of adult and teenage evacuees, pleading and asking questions she couldn’t answer. What had happened to the remaining people on the settlement? Why was there no food or drink? Why did they all have to be checked by the medics? What about their rights? The babble just went on and on, overwhelming her and blurring into an endless scream of pain and hatred. Patti staggered and recoiled as one of the evacuees, an older man in his late forties, grabbed her hand and pulled her towards a little girl who was cradling her arm. It had been broken, somehow, and the break was too bad for her improved biology to repair without help.
“Help her,” the man pleaded. His breath stank of stimulants and fear. “Please, help her.”
Patti closed her eyes for a long moment. The scene refused to fade. “Get a medic over here,” she said, into her private communications channel. The powers of the President of the Community were strictly limited, but she could do that much. “Do what you can for her.”
A small detachment of Footsoldiers arrived and restored order, one of them carrying the wounded girl out of the area towards the medical bay. Patti watched her go, recoiling from the look in the girl’s eyes. She was the latest strain of humanity and felt no pain — her body would have automatically blocked anything beyond minor discomfort — but her eyes had been wide and staring, unable to understand what had happened to her. She had almost certainly gone into shock, Patti realised, despite all the modification. A few days ago, her life had been idyllic, far better than the life of a child on Old Earth, and now there was nothing, but misery and fear. Patti stumbled away and didn’t stop until she had reached her quarters and collapsed into her chair. She had never felt helpless, not even as a young child, until now. What were the powers of the President of the Community against the Killers? She closed her eyes and let the tears flow freely. It didn’t help.
“Al,” she said, without opening her eyes. “Open a direct link to the MassMind.”
There was no delay in response. “We are here,” a new voice said. “How may we be of service?”
Patti opened her eyes to see the MassMind representative standing by her chair. The MassMind normally communicated with mortal humans through a handful of personalities — like Tabitha Cunningham — but the President was one of a handful of mortal humans who had direct access to the heart of the MassMind, the intelligence formed from the personalities of billions of humans who had faded into one single mind. The representative was humanoid, but odd, with a flickering face that — the MassMind swore — was an accurate composite of all of the human personalities stored within the MassMind. Watching it had been known to give people eyestrain.
“Tell me something,” Patti said, bitterly. “Was it worthwhile?”
The MassMind seemed to shrug. “If we fail to defeat the Killers, our extermination is merely a matter of time,” it said. “The only way to develop technology that can match or exceed the Killers is through studying their technology. The only way to do that is — was — to capture one of their starships intact and take it for study. We had no other choice. We cannot evacuate the entire human race to another galaxy and, even if we did, we would not have solved the problem. The Killers might follow us one day into our new home.”
Patti scowled. There was no evidence that the Killers had any presence outside the Milky Way, but that meant nothing. Three hundred years had passed between the destruction of Earth and the rediscovery of the Killers… and that had been a matter of mere chance, a routine survey mission that had nearly turned into a disaster. Even then, it hadn’t been until the invention of the Anderson Drive that humanity had been able to scout out hundreds of Killer star systems… and still they hadn’t realised the nature of their foe. No one had believed that the Killers could have been born in a gas giant, until the evidence had become unmistakable.
“I know,” she said, bitterly. “How many humans have been forced to flee, or transferred into you?”
“Upwards of fifty billion humans are now in starships, attempting to find safer homes,” the MassMind said. “As we are unable to predict the next Killer targets, they may move from a safe location to one that is on the hit list, as it were. Others are heading out into interstellar space, or even towards the Clouds or the next galaxy. They are slipping beyond my range.”
“Poor bastards,” Patti said, bitterly. “It shouldn’t happen to humans.”
The MassMind gave another shrug. “Are they human?”
Patti felt herself snap awake, alarmed. “What do you mean?”
“You are a modified baseline human,” the MassMind said, flatly. “You are completely immune to almost all known diseases, even without nanotech assistance, and, if wounded, heal rapidly and completely. Your brain works at a level of efficiency that only a handful of pre-space humans could have matched and, potentially at least, you should be capable of outthinking them. You are around fifty percent stronger than a pre-space human man, let alone a woman. Your eyes, ears, nose and taste buds do not decay. You should reach an age of two hundred without advanced medical care. You link into neural links with AIs and entities like myself without problems. You are, in short, vastly superior to pre-space humans.
“If they saw you, would they consider you human?”
“They would be able to breed with me,” Patti said, finally. “They wouldn’t reject me because I’m a modified human, would they?”
“The pre-space human race was often unsure of its own capabilities and compensated by being” — there was a hint of a pause — “fanatical about the wrong thing. They worried endlessly about nuclear power, genetic engineering and even the morality of space travel, as if there were such a thing. The opposition to space travel was so strong that many groups who left Earth, when that became possible, were renegades who wanted to work without restrictions. The scientists of Uranus, who became the Technical Faction, were one such group. They believed that humanity could only advance through further development and ignored all Earth-bound laws in their desire to succeed.
“If they had pushed space development as fast as possible,” the MassMind continued, “they would have had billions of humans in space when the Killers arrived. They would probably not have been able to destroy the Killer starship, unless they had warp drive by that time, but the human race’s position would have been much more secure. If they had succeeded in their mission to retard spaceflight, they would have ensured the extermination of the human race — even if the Killers had never existed. Despite considerable evidence and warnings, the human race never pushed for the deployment of an asteroid-protection shield, which would have protected them from the consequences of an asteroid strike. They would certainly have reacted badly to my existence and considered me an abomination, an attempt to cheat God.”