“We killed a star and countless Killers,” she said, shortly. “Do you approve of the slaughter?”
“We cannot not approve,” the MassMind said. “We are the thoughts and feelings of those who watched the Killers kill without mercy, without hate, without even the simple dignity of being recognised as an enemy. We are their lust for revenge, their desire for a safe universe for their children, and their determination to do whatever it takes to end the threat, once and for all. The supernova bomb may have deep philosophical implications and more worrying implications for the power balance within the Community, but to us it is just another weapon, one to be used against the Enemies of Humanity.”
“There are times when you worry me,” Patti admitted. “Are you sane?”
The representative shrugged. “Define sane,” it said. “We believe that we are as sane as it is possible to be, and we have that disconnected self-awareness that humans so noticeably lack. We are sane.”
Patti frowned. It was odd, and she had never thought of it before, but only a handful of former Community Presidents had downloaded themselves into the MassMind. Tabitha, of course, had been the first President and she had downloaded herself, but of the four hundred and seventy Presidents who had followed her, only eighty-one had downloaded themselves. Some of them had existed before the MassMind had been created and probably didn’t count, but the others…? They had accepted death without the continuity provided by the MassMind. It bothered Patti, now. Had they had their own discussions with the MassMind to unnerve them, or to convince them not to add their memories to humanity’s collective gestalt?
“Am I?” She asked, finally. “Are our plans sane, or those of a madman?”
“There is little sane in the Killers and their actions,” the MassMind said. “Our desire for revenge is only one part of it. We also have no reason to believe that the Killers would leave us alone indefinitely, even after we blew up a star. We cannot talk to them; we cannot bargain or compromise. We can only fight or run. We can do both.”
Patti felt her eyes narrow. “Do you believe that the Killers were attempting to communicate with Sparta?”
There was a pause. “We do not know,” the MassMind said. “We possess enough computing capability to unlock the secrets of many alien languages, but the Killers are utterly alien, with little in common with humanity. Their technology has taken a very different path to our own. We may never be able to communicate with them on any real basis. Indeed…
“The Community that survived the destruction of Earth was a fairly united culture, although they would have denied it,” it continued. “Although there were political and religious differences, they shared a common background and a common sense of what was what. That was not true on Earth; different people, with different cultural backgrounds, acted differently to the same stimulus. It was not always easy to fully predict what a person from a different background to your own would do, even though you believed that they would do what you would do — or differently, because you believed the stereotypes about different cultures. It was hard to separate out your unspoken assumptions about your own culture, nor was attempting that a good idea.
“But the Killers are truly alien. We may share nothing in common with them. We may never accomplish anything more than an uneasy truce.”
“I don’t understand,” Patti said. “They didn’t share the same science…?”
“Cultural background,” the MassMind said, flatly. “There were societies that believed that the older a person was, the wiser they were, and therefore tended to dismiss the young. There were societies that believed that one group of humans was inherently inferior to their group, or that women were little more than grown-up children, unsuited to handle their own affairs. They tended to run into problems when they blended societies together; some would simply find themselves disobeying the law to maintain their own cultural imperatives. The result was civil unrest and disruption.
“By contrast, our society is effectively uniform,” it added. “We have lost a degree of diversity in our development. This was effectively inevitable. Was it a good thing?”
It carried on before Patti could answer. “Our society is perhaps the healthiest known to mankind,” it continued. “Our people can explore any perversity they want within the virtual worlds created by tiny amounts of my computing power. The urges that lead to crimes against humanity can be indulged, or countered, without having to allow innocent people to get caught up in the firing line. We have beaten want and hunger, famine and plague. For the first time in human history, there is enough for everyone — unless the Killers come to call. The deprivation experienced by thousands of humans over the last fortnight was the first time in their lives that they had experienced such suffering. The living might truly have envied the dead. Our society is so great, yet we are at the mercy of a force we don’t control; the Killers.
“We must safeguard ourselves, or die.”
Patti felt her eyes narrow. “Is that why you told me about the supernova bomb?”
“Correct,” the MassMind agreed. “We have a perspective on humanity that no human — no mortal human — is capable of sharing. We had to encourage the deployment of the one weapon we knew could hurt the Killers. The Admiral’s… displeasure at the information leaking out into the public sphere is effectively immaterial compared to the need to hit back, whatever the risk. We must maintain confidence in our own society. Far too many humans have already retreated completely into artificial worlds.”
“But you could simply kick them out,” Patti pointed out. The MassMind controlled all of the virtual worlds. “You could even just reshape the worlds so that they become less hospitable.”
“That wouldn’t solve the underlying problem,” the MassMind concluded. “Those humans lack the one thing all humans need; hope. They must have a reason to hope and hitting back at the Killers, storming the very face of Heaven itself, is the only thing that will encourage them to get back into human society. We have no choice.”
There was a chilling pause. “The Killers must be defeated so that we can live.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shiva was a red supergiant star in the later years of its life, Paula knew, although it would have survived for millions of years longer without human involvement. Its mere presence at the edge of the galaxy — if thousands of light years from Star’s End or another human settlement — was an oddity in a galaxy that was full of oddities, although her own private computations had concluded that the star had originally drifted out from the galactic core and eventually settled into an outlaying orbit. It had probably taken billions of years to reach its current location before it died… and she was going to kill it.
It was easy, looking down at the star from several AUs distant, to believe that it was immortal, an endless constant in a universe of change, but Paula knew better. Shiva already massed over fifty times the mass of Sol, the star that had watched over Earth before the Killers arrived and destroyed the planet, and its death could not be long delayed. In astronomical terms, the star was already on the brink of collapsing into a nova, or perhaps even a black hole, without her intervention. It was mere seconds, as the galaxy reckoned time, from death. In human terms, it probably still had millions of years to go.