The Cure (36 page)

“The Seventeen survived self-destruction because they are timid, slow-thinking sheep in the scheme of things, compared to the wolves that are required to tame the galaxy. But we realized long ago that it was only a matter of time before we became extinct as well. Our populations are shrinking every year. We’re old, in decline, tired. It may not happen for millions, or tens of millions of years. But our extinction is equally inevitable.”

The alien paused and raised his eyebrows. “Thus the paradox. Timid species like the Seventeen who can survive their adolescences don’t have the drive to colonize, the drive to blast through seemingly impenetrable scientific barriers through tenacity and force of will alone. Those that have the proper drive, like you, can’t survive their adolescences.”

Erin nodded, transfixed by the strange alien.

“We reasoned that the only chance for life in the long term was if we could find a ruthlessly competitive species and intervene in its natural development. Help it survive its adolescence. Nurture it.”

Erin nodded. “So this species can lead you to the next level,” she whispered. “So it can make advances and provide a shot of vitality into the Seventeen. And however many more intelligences you may encounter over millions of years of scientific growth and colonization.”

“Exactly,” said Fermi. “Being too satisfied, too comfortable, and not ambitious enough was the disease. And such a species would be the cure. This hypothetical species of wolves, if you will, would be like a hydrogen bomb on the cusp of detonation. If the Seventeen could defuse it in time, and then channel its explosive power into constructive pursuits, this enormous power could be harnessed to drive all of us forward.”

The alien held Erin’s gaze. “That’s not to say there was unanimity in this regard. A significant percentage worried that such a species unleashed upon the galaxy would accelerate our demise. That the cure would be worse than the disease. But they were voted down in favor of employing this strategy—if we were ever in a position to do so. But we weren’t sure we would ever be able to find such a species. And even if one did arise, and we were lucky enough to find it, we would have little chance of reaching them in time to intervene.

“So with the last bit of our collective drive, we endeavored to be prepared if the chance ever did arise. To find a way to at least send a few emissaries faster than light to protect such a species. No matter what it took. Our top scientists, from a galactic population of almost a hundred billion, worked on the problem for tens of thousands of years. Finally, a method was found to transport a small number of beings, along with a modest quantum computer, faster than light. The resources required were tremendous. Unthinkable. But if we ever found a species capable of driving the galaxy to a new level, with all the adolescent baggage that inevitably came with this drive, they would be our only chance.”

Incredible, thought Erin. It made a kind of bizarre sense. The yin and yang of human nature. The self-destructive qualities of humanity were the very qualities needed to grab the unconquerable laws of physics, the unconquerable galaxy, by the horns. A soft, unambitious species, kind and caring and gentle—everything humanity strived to be—could not. Only a species who was domineering, and arrogant, and competitive, and relentless, could hope to challenge the galaxy on its own terms.

“So I take it that we’re the species you were looking for,” said Erin.

Fermi sighed. “Yes. You are, indeed,” he said. “But, unfortunately, we found something else first. Something that made things even more complicated. A form of life we hadn’t predicted. One that would shorten the time we had to avoid extinction from millions of years to thousands.” He leaned forward. “A form of life that would make the most malevolent members of your species seem like harmless saints by comparison.”

44

ERIN’S EYEBROWS CAME
together in confusion. “Intelligent?”

“Very much so,” replied Fermi. “I won’t explain the physics of it, but we detected strange quantum patterns coming from a region of space fifty-eight thousand light years away. Similar to the quantum pattern we expected to generate on the day we sent our emissaries out to a gifted but destructive civilization, if this day were ever to come. But far stronger. We soon realized what it was we were witnessing. A species was creating wormholes and holding them open as gates; gates allowing instantaneous travel between them. Using technology that we can’t begin to match.”

Fermi paused. “And now that we knew where to look,” he continued, “we discovered this species occupied much of the galaxy behind them and were working their way toward our neck of the galactic woods. And they were annihilating intelligent species along the way.
Ruthless
wasn’t even the right word. The species had as little regard for other intelligences as a raging wildfire would have for dry twigs in its path.”

“How fast are they coming?” asked Erin.

“Fast,” said Fermi. “They’ll be here in thirty-two thousand years.”

These Wraps were apparently more used to thinking in cosmological time scales than she was, thought Erin.

“And we knew we would have no chance when they arrived. They don’t want to dominate other species, they simply want to annihilate them. Destroy them utterly.”

“You said it was a form of life you hadn’t predicted,” said Erin. “What does that mean?”

“Are you familiar with insects on Earth you call army ants?” asked Fermi.

“Uh-oh,” said Erin worriedly. “That can’t be good.”

“It isn’t,” said Fermi. “Army ants have a genetic need to march. To constantly move and seek out new territory, obliterating everything in their path. Locusts are the only other life form on Earth to come close. Or maybe viruses, which use cells to create more copies of themselves and then destroy the cells and move on. But army ants kill everything they encounter.
Everything
. To not kill would be an impossible concept to them.”

“I’ve seen documentaries,” said Erin grimly.

“Imagine a planet in which army ants developed a collective intelligence,” said Fuller. “Maybe this conferred a selective advantage against other tribes of army ants.”

“That is not to say that they resemble ants physically,” added Fermi. “We have no idea as to their appearance. Just their behavior.” He paused. “We call this species the Hive. For obvious reasons.”

Erin nodded thoughtfully. “Okay,” she said. “So you’ve got intelligent army ants—who may not look anything like ants, but are just as destructive—who find a way off planet. Pretty horrible to contemplate.”

“Don’t worry,” said Steve Fuller. “It gets much worse.”

“Hard to imagine that.”

“I know,” said Fermi. “That’s why we never did. Imagine ants again for a moment. Each individual ant has some brain capacity, but not enough for sentience. But the
colony
could gain sentience, if each ant member were able to combine its brain capacity collectively into some sort of neural network. Call it a hive-mind. On a planet rife with individual ant colonies, vying for supremacy, if evolution conferred this adaptation on one of these millions of colonies, it would soon dominate all others. Not just other ant colonies but all other forms of life on the planet. Eventually this winner of the evolutionary lottery would range over its entire globe. Just like humans range over Earth and Wraps over Suran. And now, as I mentioned, this single colony is ranging over thousands of light years.” The alien leaned closer to Erin, his eyes locked on hers. “You’ve studied the human brain. Do you see any problem with that?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“Remember, the colony has become a superorganism. Again, every last individual member, although physically separate, is somehow connected to form a single mind. A hive-mind. Do you see why the Seventeen never imagined this as a real possibility for a space-faring race?”

Erin’s eyes widened. “Of course,” she said. “Because it’s impossible. Even over a single planet. If all the neurons in a human brain were spread out over the entire earth, you couldn’t get the brain to work. Even at the speed of light, the communication between neurons wouldn’t be fast enough. One of the reasons the brain is so compact is so signals can reach every last neuron as quickly as needed.”

“That’s right,” said Fermi. “That’s what I was getting at. The only way an abomination like this could exist is if the life form evolved the ability to send their equivalent of a neuronal firing faster than light. Instantaneously.
If evolution provided the species with a way to take advantage of quantum entanglement
.”

Erin blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that is,” she said.

Fermi described how every particle in the universe was in some way connected with every other, and how the Seventeen had eventually learned how to make use of this entanglement to communicate instantaneously, whether the communication was next door or at the edge of the universe.

“So this is a species with an army ant nature and an intuitive sense of quantum mechanics,” said the alien. “Which explains the superiority of its technology based on this science.”

“You said
its
technology,” said Erin. “Not
their
technology.”

“The members of the hive make up a single individual,” said Fermi. “A single superorganism. You’re made up of trillions of individual cells, but when I speak of these trillion cells in the collective sense, I’m speaking about you in the singular.”

“But then how can it be a species?”

Fermi smiled. “Excellent question. The semantics are a little tricky. A species is defined as a group of organisms, so you are technically correct. The Hive began as separate individuals, with separate minds, limited though they must have been, but have become something else. But since this one superorganism has conquered thousands of light years of space, we consider it both an individual and an entire species.”

Erin decided to move on. She would have to ponder semantics at another time. “But since it’s intelligent,” she said, deciding to use the singular, “won’t it modify its behavior? I understand its possible unwillingness to stop killing nonintelligent life. Even very compassionate humans still eat meat, or chicken, or fish. And plant life is life as well. So for a human to give up taking any life would be suicide. But an intelligent colony of army ants could at least bring itself to draw the line at fellow intelligences.”

“One would think,” said Fermi. “But that’s not how it goes. Intelligent, nonintelligent, it’s all the same to the Hive.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s been able to infiltrate some of our societies,” said Fermi simply.

45

THERE WAS A
knock at the conference room door and a man brought in a tray of bottled water and cold soft drinks. There was a coffeemaker in the room, and Steve Fuller took the interruption as an excuse to pour himself a cup. Coffee was a drink for which Erin Palmer had never developed a taste, so she opened a bottle of the chilled water instead and poured it into a glass.

Fermi took a bottle of water as well, and Erin wondered if all members of the Seventeen had arisen from this liquid. She didn’t know much about this subject, but for some reason she had a feeling that they would all enjoy a cold glass of water.

When everyone had settled in once again, Erin turned her eyes back to Fermi and said, “What do you mean, infiltrate? I thought they wouldn’t get here for thirty-two thousand years. I mean
it
wouldn’t get here.”

“The infiltration wasn’t physical,” explained Fermi. “The physical members of the Hive can do short hops across space-time. But for longer ones the Hive needs to establish gates, which its physical members are building at an incredible pace. But fourteen hundred years ago, we discovered the Hive had another ability: it can enter a sentient mind from any distance, and suppress the mind of its host. Not easily. And, thankfully, not often.

“We soon discovered that twelve of the seventeen species had been infiltrated. The other five, for reasons which were not entirely clear, were resistant. When the few individuals who were being used as hosts were discovered, they were almost always killed by the portion of the hive mind that had controlled them. But a handful did survive. And this handful gained insight into the thought processes of the hive-mind.”

Erin looked on expectantly.

“So fourteen hundred years ago,” continued Fermi, “we discovered that the Hive was utterly selfish, utterly ruthless, and utterly without mercy, remorse, or compassion. It was a mentality that could not be understood. And although the hive-mind is one entity, it’s a highly splintered one. It has its mental tendrils in thousands or millions of places, so only a fraction of its attention is devoted in our direction. But it was sending out feelers. Scouting parties. It was using the principles of quantum entanglement, through a method we still don’t understand, to seize the minds of sentients to help prepare the way for its conquests, tens of thousands of years in the future.”

Erin thought of the scouts in an ant colony, the advance team, branching off from the main body. The army ant analogy was proving quite useful.

“Ultimately, we found foolproof means of identifying those few individuals controlled by the hive-mind in this way. And the twelve susceptible species found genetic countermeasures that they embedded in the DNA of their entire populations, making them resistant to this form of infiltration. When these genetic modifications had been completed, the Hive scouts were pushed out, never to return.”

“Okay,” said Erin. “So their last infiltration happened more than thirteen hundred years ago.”

“Actually,” said Fermi. “It took several hundred years to perfect and implement the countermeasures. So the Hive was fully blocked from entering any of the Seventeen’s minds only about eleven hundred years ago.” The alien frowned. “Not that it really mattered. We obviously couldn’t let it control individuals and gather intelligence. But even without the use of its scouts we knew we were ripe for the taking. Maybe ants would need good intel going against something that could mount a challenge to them. But we were like a few soft grub worms in the path of an entire colony of seething army ants, millions strong. No intel needed in our case.”