This is a short story I wrote for a contest.  I never heard back, so I suppose the judges didn't think it particularly good.  On the plus side, by not using it they've relinquished publication rights, so I can post it wherever I like.

Ubiquity



Robert nodded his thanks to the nameless gopher that had placed a large coffee in front of him. He hadn’t asked, but the shadows under his eyes had spoken loudly enough.

Robert took a sip, enduring the onslaught of sugar and oils, willing to endure anything for the jolt of caffeine. He noticed the Starbucks label for the first time and nearly tossed the poison away, but realized there was little other choice. The establishment was truly everywhere these days. He’d passed at least two kiosks inside this building alone.

“Try to relax. This is just a formality, remember? The men that matter are already on board.”

Robert smiled and nodded again, wondering how that man had ever risen to the top of the chain. Coleridge was an excellent scientist, but his social skills were worse than useless. He meant well, but unceasingly said the wrong things.

Robert knew this was just a formality. He’d heard that repeated dozens of times, if not hundreds. It didn’t change the fact that he’d barely slept in over a week.

“We’re connected in five, Mr. Oslo,” whispered one of the techs. Robert took a final swallow and faced the far wall where the image of the United States President would momentarily appear. On cue, the blank screen lit up with the man’s face. It wasn’t quite what Robert had been expecting though. The resolution was too low, the coloration too uniform.

“You’re an avatar,” he blurted before he could stop himself. His crippling stage fright immediately downgraded itself to merely troublesome, and he wondered if he’d underestimated his boss. He risked a glance to the side and caught Coleridge winking.

“Correct,” the image replied. “Due to a scheduling conflict, my organic template could not listen to you today. I assure you, I’m true to all of his personality characteristics and acquired knowledge bases that are relevant. I am soft-Turing compliant, and am authorized to make binding decisions.

“Before I can approve the request of our European allies, I’ll need to hear more than they’ve been willing to share however. The weapon you propose could be quite deadly if turned back at the earth, and my advisors aren’t convinced the threat is real. In fact, we’re not entirely convinced the plastructs themselves are real.”

For the next two hours Robert did his best to convey and explain all the classified data obtained from the starwisp probe, and to show what it meant in conjunction with the recently declassified data gathered by the United States’ orbital swarm telescope.

The starwisp probe was humanity’s greatest technological triumph to date. A lightweight bundle of instruments tied to a solar sail, the probe was the first device capable of interstellar travel. Boosted by a microwave beam from earth, the probe achieved a final velocity more than one tenth the speed of light. In less than thirty five years it began its entry of the Centauri system and its final braking.

The sail itself vaporized. It was the only way to achieve enough reverse thrust to allow gravitational capture. The instrument package survived though, and it immediately began broadcasting.

When the data reached earth, researchers first suspected a glitch. Massive and stable plasma structures filled the star as deeply as the probe’s instruments could penetrate. The structures appeared to be contained by precise magnetic fields, fields that were occasionally renewed through contact with a different class of mobile plasma formation. Self sustaining storms were one thing, but structures like this were orders of magnitude more organized. No theory of stellar evolution could come close to explaining them.

The AI on board the starwisp had enough intelligence to recognize these structures as objects of interest, and it switched from passive to active monitoring. Radio and microwave pulses pinged off the uppermost structures, mapping them with greater precision. The surveillance did not long go ignored.

Less than seventy two hours after the starwisp probe activated its emitters, Proxima Centauri erupted in a series of massive flares that targeted each of the inner rocky worlds. Had there been any form of advanced life on the surface of those worlds, it was now gone.

The probe, damaged by the particle storm but still functional, continued to take passive measurements and relay them to earth. It monitored all structures equally, while back home a particular class became the center of all focus.

The mobile plasma structures, eventually called plastructs, often moved against the currents in which they were carried. It soon became obvious that these giant electromagnetic storms, some far larger than the entire earth, were alive. That meant the more permanent forms were constructs, the equivalent of roads and buildings.

Composed of ionized gases, separated into cells by magnetic bottles, and deriving energy from the temperature differential within the star itself, these life forms were both incredibly simple and magnificently complex. In many ways they were similar to the ancient archaebacteria that still eked out a living along hydrothermal vents. But in other ways, they were potentially as beyond us as we were to the individual cells of our bodies.

Computer scientists showed that the network of magnetic field lines holding these creatures together was similar in form to the simulated neural networks powering the latest attempts at true AI. Each microcell of plasma acted as an individual node or neuron, with the larger supercells reaching the complexity of a human brain. The creatures themselves, composed of millions of such cells, potentially became something we could never even understand.

New starwisp probes were planned, new systems targeted, and the Centauri system might have been left to the plastructs indefinitely, if not for the declassification of pictures taken by the U.S. orbital swarm telescope.

Hundreds of exoplanets had been detected within their host stars’ habitable zones. Preliminary spectral analysis indicated atmospheric anomalies with at least one third of them. The images gathered by the swarm telescope revealed the cause of these mysteries.

At some point in the last ten million years, over one third of the earth-like exoplanets had been hit by massive solar flares. The flares had disrupted any protective magnetic field, bathed the planets in enough radiation to destroy all surface life, and boiled away most of the atmosphere.

Earth now understood why it had seemed to be alone in the universe, why SETI and its progeny had heard no signs of intelligence. The plastructs had evolved first, and had spread throughout the galaxy. Once established, they tolerated no other forms of life to rise past sentience.

Some fluke within Sol, the plastruct equivalent of a natural disaster or ecological collapse, had wiped their presence from our star millions of years ago. For reasons that currently evaded human comprehension, Sol had not yet been recolonized. Through such luck had we avoided destruction so far.

It seemed at first that humanity was eternally locked into a single system, doomed to last only until the plastructs eventually reclaimed this wild territory. But man has always dared to challenge the gods, and data from the starwisp probe continued to trickle across four light years to reach its destination. A plan began to form.

“He seemed to understand the concepts fairly well. You did a good job in there.”

Robert shrugged his shoulders. He agreed that the past couple hours had gone smoothly, but he wasn’t as optimistic as his boss. “He’s an avatar. He could have downloaded all our data while I was speaking. Doesn’t mean the real guy will react the same when it gets forwarded.”

“You haven’t been keeping up with the AI laws they passed in the States. Soft-Turing compliant means he can’t download from our files. The avatar can only learn through senses equivalent to human sight and hearing. He can’t even process images at better resolution than a human with 20/20 vision. So he can’t become anything more than the man he’s modeled after.”

Robert wasn’t ready to surrender his pessimism just yet. “That was just background. I haven’t even begun to explain the weapon. How do you think the rest of the world would feel if they wanted to build a massive x-ray cannon? Sure, they’re going to point it into space. But we know it could be bounced off the mirrors of the swarm telescope to hit anywhere on Earth. This could be worse than the nuclear arms race a century ago.”

Coleridge sighed and pointed to a cluster of motionless interns. “They’re playing that new game, the one with half a billion downloads over the last three months. Do you know what people are saying? That it’s the end of society, that wiring optic implants directly to the brain is unnatural and will cause the breakdown of meaningful communication. Forty years ago they said the same thing about cell phones and Angry Birds. Forty years before that, it was Pong. Technology moves, and people stay the same.

“You’re probably right about an arms race. Humans have been in the middle of one since our ancestors first began using rocks. But we’ve always emerged better off than before, and this time will be no different. Trust me. I understand people a lot better than you think. Now let’s go back in there and finish the presentation.”

Evidence that behaviorally similar plastructs were widespread strongly suggested they had evolved once and expanded, rather than evolving independently in multiple stars. Scientists focused on the mystery of how they propagated themselves, for knowing how they spread might lead to a defense against their return to Sol.

Several hypothesis’s were proposed and shot down, until all that remained was the theory that the plastructs had originated elsewhere. Computer simulations showed that carefully modulated x-ray and gamma pulses could induce the formation of simple plasma structures. Beams of sufficient complexity could target a star and create even the planet-sized formations. At some point in the far past, a technological civilization had emerged. Finding itself alone, it had begun to spread. Finally, it had found a way to achieve near immortality. It had essentially transmitted its members into the heart of every star in the galaxy, where they could reign for billions of years to come.

Their planet-bound and space-faring technology long gone, the plastructs would be at the mercy of any intelligence that rose to such levels as themselves. The newcomer could transmit its own members, and attack in unending waves until it had conquered all. Thus, the plastructs were careful to destroy any planetary environment harboring such life.

This line of reasoning led to more than a possible defense. It led to a plan of attack, a way to purge the galaxy and make way for human expansion. It led to Operation Ubiquity.

The avatar interrupted for the first time. “Are you suggesting we could imprint our own personalities in the stellar plasma? Beam our soldiers directly into the stars and fight the plastructs on their own ground?”

“No, sir. That level of sophistication is far beyond present technology, possibly by thousands of years. We plan to induce the creation of much simpler structures, identical to some of the formations the plastructs already maintain.”

“I don’t understand how that helps. Are these structures the plastruct equivalent of roadside bombs?”

“Unlikely. The structures are most probably benign, or the plastructs wouldn’t build and maintain them. Computer simulations predict that once the density of the structures reaches a critical threshold, the host star will destabilize. Think of it as ecological disaster. A few roads are a good thing, but if we paved the entire planet, we would destroy the food chain and bring about our own destruction.

“The beauty of the plan is that we don’t have to understand what the structures are, or how the plastructs use them. We just have to trust the computer models that predict overpopulation of them leads to disaster. Think of this as a bacterial attack, and we’re the bacteria. We may not even be conscious on the level of the organism we’ve infected, but that doesn’t mean we can’t kill it.”

“Humans invented antibiotics to contend with bacteria, Mr. Oslo. If these plastructs are as intelligent as you think they are, won’t they realize what we’re doing and figure out a way to stop us?”

“That’s where their vast size works against them, Mr. President. An average human can switch from one discrete thought to the next in about eighty milliseconds. Even though signals travel along their magnetic field lines far more rapidly than across our synapses, it still takes longer for plasma cells to communicate. They experience less time than us, by a factor of thousands.

“From start to finish, we can build enough plasma structures to cause a massive starquake in a matter of days. From the perspective of the plastructs, it will have been minutes. It appears even their automatic systems require nearly seventy two hours to activate. By the time they hear the alarms, it will be too late.”

“What about repercussions? Won’t we give away our presence? What if we’re wrong about their capabilities and they can still transmit themselves? Our aggression would ensure they’d beam themselves directly to Sol and wipe us out.”

Robert found himself at a loss for words. He’d worked on the ionization simulations from the beginning, but he’d never thought ahead. What if Operation Ubiquity failed? What if it succeeded, but alerted other systems of plastructs in the process?

Coleridge jumped into the silence. “We have a new crop of starwisp probes already under construction. We plan to use them to carry mirrors far from the ecliptic plane. Our beam will be reflected off these mirrors to mask its true origin. Sol system will not be implicated.”

“I thought you couldn’t stand that stuff?”

Robert glanced at the Starbucks cup in his hand and then back to Coleridge. “One of your interns brought it to me as I was heading for the stairs. Do I really look that bad?”

“We’ve both looked worse. Besides, the hard part’s over for us. From now on all the pressure falls to the engineers. You can go home and sleep for thirty hours straight if you want.”

“I doubt it. The new robotic maid is broken. It keeps making whirring noises in the night, and I can’t shut it down. I’ve spent more time trying to repair it than I ever spent maintaining the apartment. Now I know why people are competing to give them away.”

Coleridge laughed. “Don’t worry. We all fall for that one at some time or another. I’ll have to tell you about how my father picked up a free hot tub on Craigslist when I was just a boy. He said he saw ads for them every day, until he couldn’t resist any longer. We never did get it to work. Eventually we paid to have it removed.”

Coleridge continued on his way, leaving Robert alone by the stairwell again. He knew his boss meant well, but there was no argument that could ease his mind right now. Deep down, he knew it wasn’t stress about this presentation that had kept him awake at night. Nor had the noises of the mechanical maid disturbed his sleep. Instead, it was a fear that had settled upon him as he tried to understand the plastructs.

What would the human intervention appear as to them? Most used metaphors like roads and ecological disasters, but what if the metaphors were wrong? What if the structures created by the beam were more like the cup in his hand right now? One day, the plastructs were paying five bucks for a drink. The next, they were giving them away free. And the next, they were dead, doomed by a causal chain their vast intellects hadn’t had time to comprehend.

And humans could be next. Something as simple as a bacterium, something brainless and devoid of understanding, could be instinctively acting against the entire human species. The weapon could be anything. A business, a game, a damn hot tub ad on an ancient web site!

Robert would never know. Could never know. All he knew was that Coleridge was right about one thing. Technology advanced while humans remained the same. Whatever form the weapon finally took, one thing could be certain. It would be everywhere.

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