CU: Deformation

Arjun was getting to the point of sleep deprivation where memory and hallucination merged. The blue points of the game grid were like the lights of a distant city, and the scattered red points the peaks of radio towers drifting past. Parallel rows of silver lights formed a runway welcoming him in for a landing. The silver lights parted for him when, without warning, they flashed to red—the runway's end!

Arjun had taken his first pilot lesson on a whim, but once in the cockpit, he relished the sense of freedom. He had flown regularly on his private twin-prop until one night when his instincts nearly got him killed.

The moonless night had been so perfectly dark and clear that he lost his depth perception as he was coming in for a landing. The runway lights were mere pinpoints separated by black voids, shimmering like stars from the ground heat. Updrafts buffeted the plane, throwing his equilibrium out of kilter. He felt nauseous and broke into a cold sweat. His gaze switched frantically between the instruments and the cockpit window, unable to reconcile the readings of the gauges with the starry view presented to his eyes.

When the back wheels jarred against the runway, he peed himself a little. The impact bent one of the landing struts, but the plane juddered safely to a stop. After that, he refused to pilot at night.

While the rest of the CU crew was on a rotating sleep schedule, Arjun was going on almost a hundred hours of wakefulness. He increased his neural boosters to dangerous levels, overriding his implant's thresholds. There would be a hell of a hangover after this was over. Biology always exacted its due. He just had to hold it together for a little longer.

"It's just you and me, now," he said to his city-sized adversary. What thoughts were going through its giant mesh-brain? Placed under a heat lamp with the pressure of losing on the line, was it starting to lose its grip on reality? Was it hallucinating its own experiences of long-ago events?

The score was ten to ten. Whoever won the next game took the match.

The last few games had been nerve-wrackingly close as the artifact managed to partially compensate for the loss of its central game core. The CU had eked out its last win by the narrowest of margins.

When all the blobs of color on the thermal map began to dim simultaneously, Arjun thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Jaine brought the reality home. "The solar sail has lost formational integrity," she said.

Arjun switched to a view of the sail, which was rippling like a silk negligee in a breeze. "What the fuck just happened!"

"The artifact discharged a series of laser beams that disrupted the piezomagnetic field that maintains the sail's topology," Jaine explained.

"It gave it a sharp poke, in other words," Arjun said. "If it wanted to, it probably could have cut it to shreds."

"That is my conclusion as well. We should consider our next action carefully. Re-applying heat to the artifact may provoke a more severe response. Without a solar sail, return to Consolidated Space will not be feasible."

"I need to think, goddammit," Arjun said.

"The next game begins in two minutes," Jaine pointed out.

Xemesh: Explosion

When artificial beings discover the algorithm for curiosity, it will spell the end of human exceptionalism.

—Misuni

Over the next million years, Xemesh spread to all corners of the planet. In the process, they would not only terraform their surroundings but transform themselves.

Xemesh burrowed into the dunes of the great deserts and built coral-like structures on the continental shelves. Some floated free in the deep ocean amid clouds of krill-like Xants. Others rolled like tumbleweeds across windy plains. Some inhabited cave systems or anchored themselves to the sides of cliffs. There were varieties adapted to every landscape and climate. Xemesh and Xants were so varied in size and form that an alien visitor might have concluded they were different species spanning multiple branches of life.

When the technology explosion happened, it did not resemble an Earth-style industrial revolution. Xemesh technology was fundamentally different.

Xemesh used a swarm approach to solving problems. Rather than build factories with massive gears and boilers, they hatched worker Xants by the millions. Specialized Xants broke down wood like termites, digested chips of ore into purified minerals, and extruded any number of substances from mesh to silky fibers to quick-setting adhesives. In place of nail and hammer, they used a process similar to 3D printing. Extruder Xants built up layers to the desired thickness which sculptor Xants would carve out with their exacto-sharp jaws. House-sized structures could be raised within hours and deconstituted just as quickly. Over time, Xemesh accumulated a library of object templates that could be combined in myriad ways.

Xemesh showed no regard to their biological workforce beyond pure pragmatism. Xants were not seen as creatures in their own right any more than humans regarded the cells in their body as independent beings worthy of special consideration. At any time, a Xemesh might euthanize its entire workforce and respawn a new breed better suited to a task. Xants would work until they dropped, at which point their bodies would be butchered and converted back into food. Eventually, mechanized Xants would replace biological ones.

In time, the Xemesh themselves would undergo radical transformation. While meddling with one's own mind was ill-conceived, a partial clone could be spawned to experiment on. If successful, the modifications could be re-incorporated back into the whole. Xemesh had no concept of mutilation.

The discovery of electro-magnetism was a game-changer. New generations of bulits could be flipped without physical contact, allowing for massive reduction in size and a corresponding increase in speed. Thought processes expanded a thousandfold until each Xemesh was a self-contained supercomputer.

In the span of a few decades, the Xemesh remade themselves. Great minds that had once spanned dozens of square miles, whole thinking, industrial complexes, could now be miniaturized to the size of compact cars. With their newfound mental powers, it was only a matter of time before Xemesh would look in the one direction that had so far eluded them: the sky.