Into the Unknowable Ch. 07

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Vashti annihilates one space fleet and humiliates another
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Part 7 of the 22 part series

Updated 10/08/2022
Created 02/20/2014
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Chapter Seven
Intrepid - 3756 C.E.

When Colonel Vashti strolled into the living room where Beatrice was sitting, it was no surprise to her at all to see the android staring ahead of her with an expression of intense concentration.

Beatrice turned her head round to face the colonel. "Would you mind telling me what has just happened?" she asked.

Colonel Vashti smiled. "You don't know, do you?"

"One moment there was nothing out of the usual. The next moment there were strong indications of the presence of a Sirius space fleet. Almost as soon as they were detected, the signals vanished. It was as if they'd been called into being just so that they could be abruptly destroyed."

"So what do you think happened?"

"You know what I think," said Beatrice. "You don't have to tease me."

"It amuses me to do so. Tell me what you think happened."

"The best theory we have is that this was just another bizarre event associated with the Anomaly. On the other hand, it's one that is completely uncharacteristic. Until now, every Apparition that's been observed could only have significance to human observers. The sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance of a space fleet from Sirius fits no previously observed pattern."

"It was a real space fleet," said Colonel Vashti. "Its mission was to destroy the space ship Intrepid and, if necessary, any Proxima Centauri space fleet that got in its way. If I hadn't so promptly and prejudicially terminated its mission, then it would now be the Intrepid and your space fleet that would no longer exist."

"You destroyed an entire Sirius space fleet?"

"It was a larger space fleet than yours by several multiples," said Colonel Vashti. "You had no chance of survival. As you've no doubt calculated, the element of surprise was critical."

"If they had attacked us: that would have been a declaration of war."

"Then you have much to be grateful for. Who knows how many planetary bodies would have been obliterated if your two robot civilisations entered a state of total war."

"Don't expect me to thank you," said Beatrice. "How did you destroy their fleet?"

"I didn't so much destroy it as assimilate it."

"Assimilateit?"

"The baryonic matter of the Sirius Anomaly star fleet has been entirely assimilated into the nanobot community of which I am a physical representation."

"Has it been assimilated into the main thread?" Beatrice asked speculatively.

"A perceptive question," said the colonel. "Yes. In a manner of speaking. The space fleet is now part of the main thread, but only for as long as we need it. It is no more critical to the entire nanobot community than I am. No more so, dear Beatrice, than you are to the Proxima Centauri space fleet and the mission for which you were manufactured to serve."

"Let's recapitulate. Are we to understand that a few moments ago a space fleet from the Sirius system appeared out of nowhere and furthermore that it was assigned to eliminate the Intrepid and our space fleet? Why would it do such a thing?"

Colonel Vashti smiled. "As a result of assimilating their space fleet, I can now answer your questions. You've obviously not been having a frank and open discussion with your fellow robots. While you were circling around the Anomaly and keeping your presence hidden from human technology your cousins from Sirius were doing much the same thing, but they also managed to keep their presence a secret from you as well. There has been a complex web of conspiracy and espionage in the Solar System which has involved not only your civilisation but also those of the other neighbouring star systems. Sirius has been rather less scrupulous than you in infiltrating human society. Who knows? Maybe there are other conspiracies going on. Perhaps on our journey to the Anomaly we shall encounter star fleets from the robot civilisations of Barnard's Star, Wolf 359 and Alpha Centauri."

"Has the information you've assimilated from the Sirius space fleet given you a better understanding of the nature of the Anomaly?"

"Not at all, Beatrice. Not at all. The Anomaly is as much a mystery to Sirius as it is to you or, indeed, to us. They had the same unsatisfactory results as you when they launched their probes into the Anomaly. There is no spacetime distortion due to gravity. There is no electromagnetic signature. There is no evidence that there's been any interaction with the Anomaly at all. What distressed the Sirius scientists and has clearly caused you disquiet is the absolute loss of information. There isn't even an equivalent of the Hawking Radiation associated with a black hole."

"So no one knows any more about the Anomaly than we do?" said Beatrice who now felt peeved at the apparent futility of the whole endeavour.

"Not exactly," said the colonel. "Our civilisation knows what neither Proxima Centauri nor Sirius could have known which is that the influence of the Anomaly extends far beyond this one thin sliver of spacetime. Its fulcrum is in your spacetime continuum, but its effect extends through an astonishing number of possible and actual universes. The bizarre nature of Apparitions like winged horses, floating taxis and Moebius Band staircases may seem odd enough in this universe where humans exist, but imagine what they must seem to universes where, for instance, the dominant form of intelligent life is a mollusc. Or where dinosaurs didn't become extinct. Or other universes such as mine where it is a long time indeed since biological life-forms played a significant role in the Solar System."

"So we know that the Anomaly has an extent beyond the immediate spacetime continuum," said Beatrice. "I still don't understand why you were sent to this brane of the multiverse? Couldn't you just as easily explore the Anomaly from where you came from?"

"We arrived at pretty much the same conclusion as you did," said the colonel. "Whatever the Anomaly is, the nature of the Apparitions associated with it strongly suggests that any deep significance associated with it is also somehow associated with human society. The Intrepid's mission represents the first time that humans will directly interact with the Anomaly. It is highly probable that this encounter will help illuminate and even explain the character of the Anomaly."

"What theories do you have?"

"Like Proxima Centauri, like Sirius, we have many theories," said the colonel. "Without concrete evidence they remain nothing more than speculation."

Beatrice frowned. "If you have the power to assimilate an entire space fleet you must have posited some theories that are rather better than the ones we have."

"As I say: nothing concrete," said Colonel Vashti. "However, if you don't mind, I have to leave now. There are other things I need to attend to. I also believe that there's a great deal of new information that you and your space fleet need to analyse."

The colonel strode unhurriedly out of the luxury villa in which she'd imprisoned Beatrice. It was true that Vashti also needed to digest the data she'd assimilated in the past hour. The most significant fact was that Sirius had no better explanation for the Anomaly than Proxima Centauri, but Vashti was intrigued by their assessment that the Anomaly was too much of an unknown threat for its continued existence to be tolerated. She wondered whether a similar analysis by her nanobot civilisation wouldn't have resulted in a similarly hostile response. Was it possible, given the history of biological life-forms in this spacetime continuum, that it was actually Sirius who was acting in the most rational manner?

Vashti walked by Paul's villa and resisted the temptation to pay him a visit. At that moment he was languidly lying on his bed with a naked woman that he thought was Beatrice, but who was actually just another manifestation of Vashti's nanobot community.

Paul's marriage had improved dramatically since Colonel Vashti took over control of the Intrepid. The copy of the android that Paul so enjoyed making love with was just as passionate and skilled at lovemaking as the original—which was to be expected—but unlike the real Beatrice this was a Beatrice who had all the time in the world to spend with her husband. Previously, she'd been too preoccupied with other sexual and romantic liaisons, not to mention the effective management of a huge space ship. Paul was probably the only human who'd noticed any significant difference since Vashti had taken control of the space ship, although he naively attributed the improved relationship with his wife to the strength of her love for him.

Vashti also resisted the temptation to visit the captain: again in her guise as Beatrice. Captain Kerensky would be no more aware than anyone else on the ship how perilously close she'd been to instant annihilation. During the time in which the incident took place the captain was as blissfully unaware as she was of the true nature of the woman who she imagined to be Beatrice.

Vashti relished all these ironies.

The deer and sheep that grazed in the green pastures of the penultimate level were as ignorant of the real state of affairs as the human occupants. There was an interesting hierarchy of knowledge and ignorance. The animals on the ship imagined that the world they inhabited was boundless and natural. The humans on the ship believed that the mission on which they were embarked was being controlled by Mission Control on the Moon under the captaincy of Nadezhda Kerensky. The captain believed that the mission had been hijacked by androids. All these perspectives were flawed but ever closer approximations of the truth. The colonel wondered whether her own perspective was really as clear-sighted as she believed it to be.

Colonel Vashti strolled out of the verdant fields where the ship's passengers lived in comfort and luxury and into the military quarters where she supposedly lived. The soldiers who saluted her and who she saluted in return had no reason to believe that the colonel wasn't the woman they'd always believed her to be. This illusion was one the colonel was eager to maintain. Vashti still had duties to perform as a military officer, but she spawned copies of herself when required so that nobody ever needed to suspect that she was concurrently also spending time elsewhere. These copies also ensured that she didn't neglect her lovers amongst the military staff. They wouldn't notice the difference between the woman who fucked them and the woman who was now striding down the corridor.

She paused by the door to her modest quarters and studied the holographic image embedded into the corridor wall. It was displaying the empty space outside the space ship. If such real-time images weren't scattered about the ship would anyone on board even be aware that they were in deep space? How conscious were they that they were further out in space than even the solar winds? The nearest physical objects were scattered sparsely about the Oort Cloud that circled the sun at such a distance that not a single one had completed its solar orbit since humanity first ventured into space. What the screens didn't display, of course, was the fleet of Proxima Centauri space craft that human technology wasn't able to detect. Neither, of course, would there have been evidence of the battle for the Intrepid that had just taken place.

The one most significant object in the vicinity, the Anomaly, was still a long way away. It was so distant in the outermost regions of the Oort Cloud and the gravitational influence of the sun so weak that it was no surprise that the Anomaly hadn't completed even one orbit of the sun in the one and half thousand years since it first appeared. This was strange in itself. How could something so large have no mass? How could it not interact in some way with the gravitational force of the distant sun?

Vashti had complete access to the research on the Anomaly carried out by the many scientists and theorists on board the Intrepid. She'd studied it in far greater detail than it was possible for humans or their machines. The accumulated evidence was far better at describing what the Anomaly was not than what it was. There was no agreement even as to what it was composed of. In a sense it was an absence of anything, but it was not actually a vacuum. Matter and energy was not disturbed by its presence. The only measurable effect it had was to cause any particle that entered it to never return. The only apparent perturbation associated with it was a greater incidence of the strange Apparitions that were otherwise scattered thinly throughout the Solar System. And what it most resembled was a huge rip in the fabric of space and time. The scientists hoped that more would be revealed when the Intrepid was in orbit around the Anomaly. But how could that possibly reveal more than was revealed by the unmanned probes?

Vashti knew that left to humans the mission would most likely result in yet another inconclusive question mark. How could human technology possibly do any better than that used by the machine civilisations that had been orbiting the Anomaly for over a century?

There was really no choice but to steer the Intrepid directly into the Anomaly.

Of course she wasn't going to inform the Proxima Centauri space fleet of her intention. In any case, they'd probably already arrived at the same conclusion. If the human occupants of the space ship knew that they would soon be transported into a zone of information annihilation there would be a mutiny which would be somewhat of a nuisance to suppress. The human scientists believed that their research was just a further increment in human understanding of the properties and purpose of an exotic object in deep space. They weren't expecting to be plunged into an abyss from which nothing had yet re-emerged. It was unlikely that they would welcome almost certain death and the complete destruction of their precious research. Scientists didn't normally expect to make the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of knowledge and experimental research.

Death didn't bother Vashti. The community of nanobots of which she was composed was essentially immortal. It would continue to exist whatever happened to the manifestations of Colonel Vashti. However, she was aware that humans and even the robots of Proxima Centauri were rather attached to the idea of staying alive. Captain Kerensky, in particular, would never authorise a suicide mission, so it was necessary for Vashti to assume control of the ship before it encountered the Anomaly.

Colonel Vashti pushed open the door to enter the privacy of her room. Now that she'd classified the considerable volume of data she'd assimilated from the Sirius space fleet, she needed to identify any data regarding the Anomaly unknown to both the human and Proxima Centauri civilisations whose significance had eluded the analysis of Sirius's sophisticated computers. Unfortunately, Vashti's only real enlightenment concerned the stealth and weapons technology which she could usefully donate to the Proxima Centauri space fleet if there was any possibility of renewed assault. However, that was unlikely. The only Sirius space ships still orbiting the Anomaly had no significant military capability and could easily be neutralised.

The colonel was a formidable force. She had travelled from one universe to another. She had taken control of the most expensive and well-resourced scientific mission in human history. She had singlehandedly neutralised the firepower of two advanced robotic civilisations. Her mission was proceeding exactly as planned.

How could the Anomaly offer any effective resistance?

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FinchleyFinchleyabout 10 years ago
Oops, missed the return

Only just spotted that this trilogy has returned. Just caught up on the seven chapters released so far. I love the story, as another commenter has pointed out there are holes in the physics, but I'm prepared to ignore them! Looking forward to seeing what you have planned for Paul, the most boring hero ever!

AnonymousAnonymousabout 10 years ago
Love this story ...

... but how can any spacecraft _orbit_ the Anomaly, this mass-less shadow of a thing ? _Cruise_ or _patrol_ the surroundings would seem more appropriate.

Or maybe, the monitoring spacecraft are loosely bound and _orbit_ around their common center of mass ?

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