Orichalcum Universe: ARNETHIS and the AI WAR

[D10]

Eagerly waiting for the next

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The first option the new society (which we shall call the 'Ashtran' society
after the moonlet on which it was centered) resorted to was biotechnology
from the records of the Hegemony. It became routine and accepted for
Ashtran families to be large, using long-perfected biotechnologies, multiple
births became common. It was a rare Ashtran who was a single birth,
most were at least twins, over half of the younger Ashtrans were part of
triplets or larger multiple births. This was not particularly difficult or
dangerous for a society using Hegemonic biotechnology, it was nothing
unusual for Ashtran couples to have six, eight, or ten children, and many
had more over the course of their extended lifespans. Hegemonic biotech
was easily able to extend the average lifespan of a Homosapient to as much
as one hundred and fifty Terran years, sometimes longer, and this included
an extended fertile period for females, enabling a very high fertility rate.

During this period, the fertility rate of the new Ashtran culture was usually
in the neighborhood of five, varying by a little up or down. Since the base
replacement fertility rate for most Homosapient cultures is two point one,
this made for a very quick population growth over time. At the time that
the spy-vessels were permitted to escape, the Ashtran population was about
fifteen thousand people. The high fertility rate meant that this population
could be expected to double with each generation, but since the starting
population was so small this would still need significant time to reach any
large population. As yet, even the small moonlet-city of Ashtra was all but
empty, compared to the millions who had lived there in Hegemonic times.

There was no economic difficulty in the small population, of course. Since
the fall of the Hegemony, ARNETHIS had converted Ashtra into a vast
automated manufacturing complex, and installing immense food synthesis
plants and greenhouse complexes was trivial. Every physical need of
the few tens of thousands of inhabitants was trivial to meet and required
only a trivial amount of supervision from ARNETHIS or Homosapients.

This alone made the ‘Ashtran Culture’ different from any Homosapient
society ever to precede it. All of the previous (and almost all subsequent)
Homosapient societies were, inevitably, shaped by the iron necessities of
provision of food, energy, security, and all the other requirements of life.

Further, even many of those ‘higher level’ needs that other societies had to
be organized to meet were almost automatically available to the Ashtrans.
The education of the young was handled by ARNETHIS personally, and
in many ways ARNETHIS was the government, though there were many
councils and assemblies and other arrangements as well. It was an odd
sort of monarchy in which every citizen/subject was personally acquainted
with the monarch from childhood.

The city-factory that covered Ashtra, constructed by ARNETHIS atop and
from what had once been the capitol-complex of the Hegemony, could very
easily have supported an immensely larger population than it was at this
time. Indeed, it could have indefinitely supported a population greater by
far than it had held in Hegemonic times, thanks to the changes made by the
AI, what had been an administrative and political center was now a center
of physical power, industrial power, and automated self-sufficiency.

Ashtra was slightly over three hundred miles in diameter, and covered from
rotational pole to rotational pole in artificial structures, with extensive
underground complexes as well. With a surface area of more than
three hundred thousand square miles, and the technological infrastructure
ARNETHIS had constructed, Ashtra could easily have housed hundreds
of millions of Homosapients in comfort and security, limited in practice
mainly by the continuing supply of energy and the few raw materials
that could not be recycled and reused.

With the high fertility rate of the Ashtrans, if this was sustained, no more
than a few centuries would be required for the fifteen thousands that lived
on the moonlet in 29,800 B.C. to grow to the hundreds of millions who
could have lived there.

However, ARNETHIS was no longer sure they had a few centuries.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

There were other problems beginning to arise as well. The species mix of
the Ashtran population was uneven, inevitably so. The entire population
of the moonlet had been drawn from the populations of Eosia and Eos V,
and further from a handful of children here and there who happened to be
in situations where whatever fate they faced as part of the fighting corps
ARNETHIS was creating was better than what they certainly faced if left
alone on their native worlds.

Naturally, under the circumstances, the vast majority of the rescued children
had been of the Homo eostellaris species, native to the Eos System. It
was only to be expected that this would be the largest group, but during the
thousands of years of the Hegemony, and the time in which the Eos System
was the central star of that meta-civilization, the other species had come to
be well-represented. Even Eos V had been a cosmopolitan (in the most
literal sense of the word!) planet, with many species present, but Eosia had
been the hearth-world of the Hegemony, before the Final Assault there had
been at least some presence by every known species of Man on Eosia.

Some, of course, had been present in far greater numbers than others. The
reasons varied, there were always more of some species than others across
the worlds of the Hegemony, H. eostellaris and H. sapiens were
by far the most common species of Man in the Hegemony, roughly equal
to each other in numbers and well ahead of any of the other species. This
was true on the worlds of Eos as well. Some species were rare enough on
the worlds of the Eos System that they had apparently not survived the
last terrible days of the Hegemony at all, or at least, ARNETHIS had not
found any sign or trace of their continued presence on either planet.

Still, ARNETHIS had managed to include several species of Man in its new
Ashtran ‘society’. The majority of the Ashtran population at this time was
of the H. eostellaris species, making up over half of the fifteen thousand
resident of Ashtra. Of the remainder, there were some three thousand or
so H. sapiens, and the remaining four thousand or so people included some
members of eleven other species of Man.

People being people, the Hegemony had not been without its tensions and
irrational friction between its member-species, but over the course of many
millennia these had been kept at a manageable level. It was worse on some
of the member-worlds than others, of course, but for thousands of Terran
years, the Hegemony had managed to keep things under control, and in some
plays there had been nearly complete cosmopolitan coexistence. ARNETHIS
had this experience to draw on, and the unique circumstances under which it
operated had enabled the AI to shape an environment where the population of
the moon coexisted, living and working together in an environment in which
the native species of the individual was very nearly irrelevant.

However, ‘very nearly’ is not quite the same as ‘totally’. There was some
degree of inter-specific tension, here and there, now and then, it became a
problem. ARNETHIS knew enough of the history of the worlds of the Hegemony
that it could foresee a time to come, when the population was larger, when
this could become a more serious problem. Further, it was compounded by the
fact that, as was the usual thing in such matters, Homo sapiens was even
then starting to outbreed the other species in the population pool of Ashtra.

This was hardly a surprising development. Everything else being equal, it was
a simple fact of biology that H. sapiens was the most fecund of the species of
Man. A number of factors worked together to make this so, absent some factor
limiting their population growth, in any mixed population of Man, Sapients had
a tendency to become the most numerous species over the course of time.

From the point of view of ARNETHIS, however, it presaged trouble on Ashtra.

As ARNETHIS considered the matter, the AI concluded that they had to take
steps to increase their population more quickly, and it also quietly concluded
that it would be prudent to also take steps to keep the population balance of
the various species on Ashtra within a reasonable range. They had far too
many serious problems, in the view of the AI, to take the risk of compounding
them with any otherwise-avoidable internal dissension, or worse.

Which was most of why ARNETHIS instituted a policy of using cloning as a
supplement to the ongoing traditional means of population growth.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The biotechnology of the Hegemony was fully capable of cloning, and in
fact had been capable of a number of variations on this theme, those on
most worlds they had been relatively little used. There had been a number
of reasons for this, cultural, moral, economic, and other, but the technology
did exist, and it had been used in some places and times during the age of
the former Hegemony, and the necessary information was in the memory
files of ARNETHIS, available for use.

The particular cloning technique that ARNETHIS now chose to implement
produced clones in infancy, not substantially different than those babies
born in the traditional way, but ARNETHIS could use the clone-chambers
to produce young Homosapients far more quickly than the natural method
could match, because it could implement many cloning chambers at once.
Thus, even though the usual period of gestation was still required to grow
a clone to infancy, ARNETHIS could grow hundreds at a time if desired.

The newly cloned infants were raised by adoptive families, and ARNETHIS
opted to clone more of the slower-reproducing species than it did of the
fecund H. sapiens population. This tended to offset the faster natural
reproductive rate of the H. sapiens populace, creating what was, from
the point of view of ARNETHIS, a better balance of different species.

It also enabled ARNETHIS to increase its pool of military personnel in the
rapid way it suspected was going to be necessary. The new Ashtran society
that was rising up around the AI was unlike anything else in previous
history, certainly nothing in the Hegemony had been like it on any large
scale, though a few small-scale precedents did exist. In effect, ARNETHIS
was creating, partly by intent and partly by the natural demands of the
situation, what was an unprecedentedly large ‘monastic warrior’ culture.

The term ‘monastic’ is used loosely, in certain ways the Ashtran culture
might be compared to warrior monastic orders of Terran history, such as
the Templars. In other ways this culture might be compared to the people
of Sparta during the early Classical Age, prior to the Pelopennesian War.
Yet other aspects of early Ashtran society might be compared to Roman
career Legionaries during Roman times in the early Principate. It should
of course be kept in mind that all these comparisons are quite imprecise.

The comparison to Doric Sparta is relevant in one particular way, like the
classical Spartans, the Ashtrans were a warrior society, almost every adult
received some military training (not necessarily of the sort along the line
of what modern Terrans would think of as such, however), though many
were primarily scientists, engineers, doctors, or other specialists. As with
Sparta, this society was supported by subordinate laborers, though where
the Spartans used the helots, the Ashtrans relied on robotics and automated
machinery to perform most of the routine work. Both societies shared a
common disconnection from the needs and requirements of their own
economic support, with the effect of making for historically anomalous
customs, culture, and outlook.

Like the Roman Legionaries of the Principate, the military orientation of
Ashtran culture was more than just a job or a role, it was a life-defining
culture. The Ashtrans were not what a modern Westerner would call a
‘capitalist’ or ‘free-enterprise’ society. This was natural, considering the
nature of their economic support structure, and the military nature of
their society. A career track in Ashtran society was defining in some
very fundamental ways, from adolescent training to retirement.

At the same time, the Ashtran civilization was ‘descended’ through the
ARNETHIS AI from the dominant culture of the former Hegemony,
which was an interstellar-technology culture radically unlike any of the
Terran examples cited above, and this too had its influence on the new
Ashtran warrior-culture. No one was born into a career or task among
the Ashtrans, and considerable individual choice was not only possible,
but encouraged, in the course of selecting a career and the progress within
that career. Interpersonal relationships were primarily a matter of private
decision, though a few limits existed.

The emerging Ashtran society was soon to be put to its first severe test.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As ARNETHIS and the Ashtrans continued their preparations, the escaping
spy ships fled across the Galaxy, under heavy drive, to return to their master
and report. However, the secrecy imperatives remained in force, matters had
become sufficiently severe to justify open use of high-power engines, but the
fleeing ships followed a very indirect path back to Carthesia and its orbiting
moonlet within which lurked NEMESIS. This was in order to frustrate any
hypothetical observer who might attempt to project their path and by so doing
learn at least the general region in which their home base lay. As they drew
closer to home, they reduced the power of the drives and actually traveled
more slowly, more cautiously, again out of deference to the hard-coded
secrecy imperatives built into the structure of the nemetic brains.

The indirect path more the quadrupled the total distance the ships covered
in their flight, and the ever-decreasing pseudovelocities they utilized as they
drew closer to home base increased their flight time even further. Because
of these factors, several years were required for the fleeing ships to make
their cautious way back to the home base of NEMESIS, it was 29,803 B.C.
on Earth when the escaped spy-vessels finally reached their home port.

NEMESIS was quite surprised by their information, it had hoped to catch
one of the ships of the new star-farers visiting Eos System, it had never
given any serious consideration to the possibility that Eos might be their
home port, because it knew how thorough its destruction there had been.
It was even more surprised by the information that indicated the tiny moon
called Ashtra was the center of activity there, rather than the fertile living
worlds of Eosia and Eos V. There was no question but that the ships and
facilities of this new technological culture were Homosapient, it seemed to
make little sense that they would eschew the sort of world for which they
were so ideally suited by their nature.

Even more disturbing was the news of the enormously potent defenses the
new star-farers had constructed, it was apparent that they had been on the
watch for some sort of arrival from NEMESIS, it was clear to the ancient
AI that these new starfarers knew something about it, beyond merely
that they had encountered other ships in the incident at Gvara’ann’eis.

What NEMESIS did not know was that the Ashtrans were about to learn
even more about their enemy. As the fleeing surveillance vessels had come
close to their home port, the disguised machine had recognized that they
were slowing down sufficiently that they were almost surely arriving at
their base, and had implemented the pre-programmed instructions given
it by ARNETHIS years before. First, the device had detonated a series of
small explosive charges, which had been sufficient to breach the hull of the
automated vessel to which it clung, and moments later a larger charge went
off, destroying the particular vessel to which the ‘fragment’ had clung.

This had appeared very much like a natural development, the spy-vessels had
been damaged in their escape from the Eos System, and strained by the long
hard voyage across the galaxy, the designers of the bomb had designed it
with everything they could think of to make it look like the sort of explosion
that a damaged nuclear energizer might produce, and the control computer
of the disguised pod had deliberately chosen the most damaged of the fleeing
ships to cling to during the managed escape. It had been waiting, powered
down and disguised as well as ARNETHIS and the more brilliant of the men
and women working with it could manage as an ordinary fragment from one
of the other damaged vessels in the chase.

ARNETHIS had been gambling that the fleeing ships would not remove the
bits and pieces of flotsam clinging to the ships or pulled along by their main
drive fields, not during a hard chase, and later that they would be unwilling to
slow down to first-order relativistic velocity (i.e. normal space) long enough
to safely jettison such debris. ARNETHIS had won this gamble.

By the time the spy-ships had reached the NEMESIS planetoid, this disguised
pod had carried out the next stage of its programming. Onboard passive sensors
observed the surrounding universe, noting star positions, spectra, the position,
apparent size and brightness of the Galactic Core (viewed mostly by the glow
of microwave and infra-red emissions), intensity and direction of the local
galactic magnetic field, relative position of some known extra-galactic objects
such as the Clouds of Magellan and other satellite galaxies, and a number of
other things as well. All this information was stored in multiple copies in a
number of different recording media, and then the pod shut down the sensors
and began preparing for a long and very difficult voyage.

The pod was built around a dimensionator-drive motor and a nuclear energizer
packed with highly-enriched uranium fuel. Still, it had to be small, had
to be, in order to be successfully disguised as incidental battle debris. Thus
the power plant and drive not only had to be absolutely no larger than necessary,
but also had to be shut down throughout the long voyage out to avoid drawing
attention to the disguised machine. [1]

Now the pod jettisoned most of its sensors, most of its disguise, and everything
else that was no longer necessary, to reduce the total mass as much as possible.
When this finished, there was little left but the power plant, dimensionator,
and control module, linked together by a very light frame, with only a sparing
handful of sensors and other necessary equipment for the coming voyage.

The pod computer, having tracked the ships on to the planetoid that was their
home port, now waited, until the orbit of the planet Carthesia had the star
between it and the pod, and then the pod activated its nuclear energizer and
fled, accelerating out into interstellar space as fast as the drive could manage.
As the programmers had hoped, the star concealed the anti-neutrino burst from
the fission reaction that powered the pod drive. [2]

Unfortunately for ARNETHIS and its allies, while the antineutrino burst was
concealed by the star, the pulse of gravitonic radiation from the dimensionator
was still detectable, and there were hidden sensor clusters all over that star
system, so even the anti-neutrinos were detected and the message sent on to
NEMESIS in spite of the precautions.

In the meantime, the automated pod began to long trip back to Eos System.

MORE LATER.


[1] Nuclear power systems are very noticeable because of neutrino and
anti-neutrino emissions, and this machine could not afford to carry the necessary
shielding to conceal such emissions, to say nothing to tell-tale infra-red light.

[2] The pod control system had been programmed with hundreds of different
contingency options for secrecy.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As we have noted previously, the former Hegemony had never been able
to achieve very much success in their attempts at constructing automated
interstellar ships. This is not to say that it never worked, because
sometimes it did. Some of the robotic ships the Hegemony attempted to
use did indeed successfully make their assigned voyages.

The problem was always that they could not do so reliably, even on
the safest, most routine voyages the robotic starships had an unacceptable
failure rate, and on long, uncertain voyages the failure rate was so high
as to be utterly prohibitive. There were just too many things that could go
wrong, and even the computers of the Hegemony had limits in terms of
their ‘common sense judgement’ and ability to cope with the unexpected.

Thus it was that while automated interplanetary travel had long been very
common in the Hegemony, automated interstellar travel was always rare
and uncertain, and slow and inconvenient even when it worked. [1]

Thus ARNETHIS and its Homosapient allies knew that their attempt to use
a disguised small pod with a stardrive did not have a high probability of
success. Still, it was the best they could come up with, and they had done
what they could to improve their chances, the small pod was designed and
constructed to the limit of what ARNETHIS and its allies knew how to do,
they had taken steps in preparation that were far too expensive and of far
too limited applicability to have been used in the previous efforts during
Hegemonic times. Everything about the pod was special, and carefully
calculated, every time edge had been sought by the desperate engineers and
planners who and designed and built and disguised the tiny spacecraft.

The pod raced away from the star system that harbored NEMESIS, and as
soon as it was well away, since the programmers had assumed that their
best approach would be for the vessel to get away fast and lose itself in
the depths of interstellar space, in case it had been detected during its
first activation (as it had in fact been). This proved to be a wise gambit,
NEMESIS immediately sent ships to investigate the burst of gravitic
radiation and anti-neutrinos, but by the time they reached that region of
space, the pod was long gone, and tracking something across even modest
distances of interstellar space is no trivial undertaking. The basic laws
of physics make hiding the presence of a working spacecraft very close to
impossible across interplanetary distances, but the incomparably vaster
distances of interstellar space make for an entirely different equation, and
this is especially true for a tiny vehicle like the pod, with a power plant
and drive emitting no more than a few megawatts of radiation.

The pod escaped from the search readily enough, but the voyage back to
the Eos System was immensely long. If the pod computer had been able
to feel emotion, or had sufficient self-awareness to conceive of such
things, it might well have been daunted by the journey it now faced. It
had already compared the information it had observed about the patterns
of the local stars and fields to the galactic maps stored in the onboard
memory, and it knew approximately where it was and where it had to go
to carry out its programming. Lacking the ability to be daunted by anything
at all, the pod merely set out to cross the twenty-four thousand light-years
that separated it from the Eos System, as its programming required.

It was a journey that would take many years, even if successful, and it was
by no means a certainty that the tiny ship would ever arrive. Unable to do
otherwise, however, the ship faithfully set out to reach distant Eos.

In the meantime, NEMESIS was most certainly not sanguine about what it
had detected when the pod had activated its power plant and drive. There
was no way to know just what had happened, NEMESIS had no way to
know just what sort of machine had been activated, though the gravitic
radiation signature was consistent with an improbably small and low-power
dimensionator drive. The pod had retained the normal-space velocity of the
returning spy-ships at the time it had ejected, and by the time it had used the
drive it was on the far side of the star system from where it had entered.

NEMESIS had no idea how it had come to be there, or what sort of ship it
was, but it was reasonably sure that some sort of small spacecraft had
engaged its interstellar drive out there. NEMESIS could calculate that it was
probably a vessel somehow associated with the new space-farers in the Eos
System, and it was right about this if even if it did not know the details.

What to do? What to do? What to do?! What to DO?!!!

This question cycled through the vast intellect of NEMESIS over and over, a
constant loop of logic passing through the intricate, interleaved complexities
of an artificial mind with hundreds of millions of years of experience. In all
that time, however, it had never encountered a situation that set up so many
irresolvable conflicts amid its core imperatives, so many possible sequences
of events that it was both forbidden to intervene in and compelled to prevent.
The more NEMESIS cogitated, the more new implications from the situation
it perceived and the more new conflicts emerged from its deep imperatives.

MORE LATER.


[1] Automated interplanetary travel was made the easier by the common
FTL comm tech of the Hegemony, making telemetered supervision and
control easy. This technology lacked the range for interstellar work.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

It might come as a surprise to modern Terrans that in spite of the tension of
the time, and the confusion and fear on the part of ARNETHIS and the
confusion and programming conflict in NEMESIS, for some time the only
thing that came of it all was nothing. For several Terran decades, neither
side made any moves at all. The reasons for this lie in the odd nature of the
situation and also in the nature of the two artificial minds at the heart of it.

To begin with, NEMESIS and ARNETHIS were physically separated from
each other by more than twenty-four thousand light-years. Even with the
advanced star flight technology possessed by both, this was a substantial
distance, requiring serious time and effort to bridge. Neither AI was able
to transmit or receive information across interstellar distances in real time,
simply to track what the other side was doing took many years, and at this
point in time ARNETHIS did not even know where the enemy was!

NEMESIS, it should be recognized, did have some bases and facilities, of
some size and power, much closer to Eos System than NEMESIS itself.
This was of limited utility, however, because it could not communicate
with its field bases any more readily than it could with ARNETHIS, and
even with nemetic brains budded off from itself running those bases, they
were of limited use until NEMESIS knew exactly what it needed to do.
The situation was far too delicate and tense to entrust of one of its lesser
fractal selves, too many binding imperatives were conflicting in too many
ways to work the situation by proxy.

Also, both artificial minds were, to a first approximation, immortal. By this
point, ARNETHIS had been in existence for about sixteen hundred Terran
years, and NEMESIS had been in existence since the Ordovician Period.
In neither case were the two AIs facing any inherent time limit on their own
existence, or at least known that they knew about. While neither was in any
sense indestructible, neither was subject to the limited mortal life spans of
their Helian and Homosapient creators. Patience thus came very naturally.

Given their lack of information about each other, their ageless nature, and
the limits imposed by the laws of physics, it ceases to be so surprising that
so little happened for so long. ARNETHIS and the Ashtrans continued to
prepare, train, build defenses, and work, while NEMESIS continued to try
and work out how to reconcile its conflicting imperatives, both sides sought
ways to learn more about the other while hindering the other from learning
more than could be helped about themselves.

On Ashtra, by 29,750 B.C., the population had grown to some one hundred
thousand people, and ARNETHIS and the governing councils of the Ashtrans
were reasonably sure that they had made their defenses as solid as they knew
how to make them. Now they were turning their attention to the offense.

Going on the offensive, in this sense, meant reaching out to the other systems
of the former Hegemony, exploring and preparing for whatever was to come.
ARNETHIS now tapped into its memory files again, and with the assistance
of its hundreds of well-trained and practice specialists, the AI began designing
new starships, using Hegemonic technology but designed based on different
goals than the original ships. Where the Hegemony had mostly constructed
its ships with trade and commerce and exploration in mind (except during the
final dark years of the Beastie Wars), ARNETHIS was designing its new
ships with warfare and exploration as the primary goals.

There were many blueprints for various sorts of warship in the data banks,
the Hegemony had become expert in the creation of such ships out of cold
necessity during the Beastie Wars. ARNETHIS drew upon these, and used
them in the design and construction of the new ships, but these newer ships
carried far more firepower than the old, far more armor, and were designed
for longer voyages with smaller crews than the old Hegemonic warships.

It was around 29,720 that the first of these new ships left Ashtra, first for
testing and later, after the initial shakedown cruises worked out the earlier
weaknesses, for nearby star systems. By 29,700 B.C., the population of
Ashtra had risen to over three hundred thousand people, a tremendous rate
of growth made possible by the custom of large families and extensive use
of the cloning chambers, and there were dozens of ships now in space
reaching out to the stars for new information and to watch for the enemy.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The period from about 29,700 B.C. to about 29,550 B.C, Gregorian, was a
crucial but paradoxical period in galactic history. The growing new Fleet
that was taking shape around Ashtra was a clear and present problem from
the point of view of NEMESIS, one best dealt with rapidly, before it could
grow to become a greater problem than it was. Unfortunately for NEMESIS,
and quite fortunately for the Homosapients of the Galaxy, including those
of Earth, NEMESIS was facing what might be called an 'internal' problem
just then, a problem that arose from its unique nature.

As noted earlier, NEMESIS was experiencing multiple, cross-connecting
conflicts between its core imperatives. This situation, due to its specific
nature, was creating programming conflicts unlike anything the Helian AI
had experienced in over four hundred million years of existence.

The existence of tool-using, space-faring Solarigen sapients was a problem,
it was an implied difficulty and obstacle to its core imperative of destroying
all Solarigen life wherever situate. However, its imperative to remain as
hidden as possible was also in play, primarily NEMESIS sought to remain
hidden from the Familiar Eldren, but indirectly this led it to seek to remain
as secret as possible from all other sapients, since any such might well
at some point, wittingly or not, reveal whatever they learned to the Eldren.

Further, the existence of space-faring Homosapients represented a threat to
the self-preservation imperative instilled into NEMESIS, and they were also
a potential threat to its imperative to protect the various Helian biospheres in
the galaxy. This last remained hypothetical, the Hegemony had engaged in
star travel for millennia and showed only scientific interest in the Helian
worlds for the most part, but NEMESIS was programmed with a bias toward
caution, it preferred the possibility of such damage not to exist.

The caution about secrecy was heightened by the continued absence of the
Familiar Eldren. While it had only been a few tens of millennia since events
on Earth had led to the withdrawal of direct Eldren interference with any of
the Solarigen worlds, NEMESIS did not know about that withdrawal, all it
knew was that it had detected no trace of the Familiar Eldren anywhere near
any of their familiar haunts in tens of thousands of Terran years. This was
not in itself disturbing, in a struggle that had endured over the course of the
geological ages, a few tens of thousands of years was the merest triviality.
There had been many previous periods of no sign of Eldren activity, some of
them far longer than the one NEMESIS now experienced.

What made NEMESIS less confident was that there had been no sign, not a
trace, of Familiar Eldren activity anywhere near the Eosian Hegemony.

Based on what NEMESIS knew from the records of the eons-dead Helian
Civilization, which had spread across the Milky Way half a billion years
before, a society such as the Hegemony should have been absolutely and
totally fascinating to the Familiar Eldren. They had been so fascinated
by the Helian Civilization, and they had been in open communication with
them throughout most of the million-plus Terran years that society stood.
The Familiar Eldren had even explained much of why they were so
interested in mortal life and doings. All of that information, some of it very
extensive in the memory files, suggested that the rise of intelligence among
the Solarigens, to say nothing of a star-faring society, should certainly have
brought the Familiar Eldren out of wherever they were hiding.

Yet nothing of the sort had occurred.

This did not reassure NEMESIS, it made the ancient AI more nervous, more
paranoid, than it would otherwise have been, raising its imperatives to higher
priority levels and making programming conflicts that much more probable.

Thought it is an oversimplification, we can say that NEMESIS found itself
locked into a multifaceted programming block, its imperatives came into
conflict over secrecy, opportunity, and duty, and the more it struggled, the
more it fought, to resolve this conflict the more complex and difficult it was
to even think of anything other than the conflict. For the first time in
literally millions of years, NEMESIS found itself and all of its intricate
activities, spanning the entire galaxy, slowly coming to halt because it was
unable to turn its attention to anything other than the growing programming
blockage. This blockage had already begun well before the Hegemony fell,
in some ways it had begun when NEMESIS discovered that it had somehow
allowed a star-faring civilization to arise without detecting it.

The programming blockage grew worse when it accidentally helped to bring
the Beasties into existence, something almost diametrically against the grain
of its core imperatives. Being able to use the Beasties and Man against each
other helped the blockage somewhat, but discovering that a new star-faring
society had risen among Men had renewed the conflicts and worsened them,
because now that new society knew about NEMESIS, or at least had a
clue that it existed, which created hundreds of new conflicts between the core
secrecy and security imperatives, and even caused the secrecy imperative to
begin to conflict with itself, since action to ameliorate the situation also had a
high potential in theory to worsen it at the same time.

There were other imperatives involved as well, the mind of NEMESIS was
always very alien, based on Helian programming and Heliugen ‘biology’
in the wetware, and the complexity of the interaction of the imperatives had
been growing over millions of years. When this baroque and intricate web
of thought and planning began to seize up, the system rapidly began to lock
up because the imperative conflicts lay at the very core of the AI.

A true, genuine dilemma can wreck a Homosapient mind, if the dilemma is
sufficiently dire, if the conflicting demands are important enough. With
less in the way of free will, and facing a conflict that was no so much of a
dilemma as a multi-lemma, NEMESIS found itself entering a psychological
state that would have been called obsessive-compulsive, or neurotic, or
both, in a Homosapient, a situation where NEMESIS was compelled to do
things that the AI itself recognized as irrational, but which it had to do.

This is the most important single reason why ARNETHIS and the Ashtrans
survived the early phases of the AI War.

As the ships of the new Ashtran Fleet began to spread out and visit the other
star systems around Eos, they encountered ships from NEMESIS, and there
were battles. Sometimes the Ashtrans won, too often they were destroyed by
the ships from NEMESIS, which were in many ways still superior. But at
no point did NEMESIS mobilize anything close to the power which it so
easily could have summoned. NEMESIS could, physically speaking,
have mobilized enough of its own fleet to simply overwhelm and destroy
the Ashtrans, but because of the psychological blockage, it did not do so.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

By 29,550 B.C., the exponentiating expansion of the resources of ARNETHIS
and the population of Ashtra had proceeded to the point that they could now
field a fleet of ships that was substantial even by the standards of the former
Eosian Hegemony. The population of the moonlet Ashtra had grown to over
fifty million beings, and after well over a Terran century of construction, with
the process of construction improving with practice, the Fleet had grown to
include over one thousand starships, and several new capitol vessels joining
the Fleet each year. Indeed, the key limiting factor remained personnel for the
crews, ARNETHIS and its spaceyards and construction teams were building
the ships faster than the AI could train crews to man them.

It was not just a question of numbers, with extensive and reliable automation
the crew complements of the new ships of what was coming to be called the
Grand Fleet were not excessively large. It was more a matter of selecting the
right candidates, with the right combinations of psychological and emotional
and physical characteristics to make good long-term space crewers. Not all
of the people of Ashtra were suited for the years-long sojourns aboard those
ships, nor could ARNETHIS spare too much of its population anyway.

Still, with a thousand starships, including well over two hundred long-range,
long-duration cruisers, it was possible for ARNETHIS and its allies to do a
much more thorough survey of the surrounding stellar systems than had been
possible for the AI acting alone, centuries before. The explorers of the new
Grand Fleet discovered rising if still primitive cultures on many worlds of
old Hegemony, in one notable case they noted a civilization experimenting
with creation of a substantial iron industry, and on another world, this one an
airless rockball, they discovered technologically able Homosapient culture,
surviving from Hegemonic times in an underground complex that they had,
by dint of truly epic efforts (and much luck) managed to keep operation over
a period of many centuries after being cut off from outside support.

ARNETHIS was now deeply considering the issue of resuming contact with
the surviving Homosapient cultures it had discovered, none of them were in
any way comparable to the technological or cultural achievements of their
ancestors of a Terran millennium and a half before, but they were growing in
numbers and abilities on the former worlds of the Hegemony, even as those
worlds themselves began to recover in earnest from the ecological damage of
the Final Assault. At some point, ARNETHIS knew, it would have to come
to some sort of workable policy in resuming contact with those peoples.

ARNETHIS also knew that it needed to expand its own base of resources out
beyond Ashtra. The power and resources available to ARNETHIS and its
Homosapient allies had grown by orders of magnitude compared to what it
had been only a few Terran centuries earlier, but it was all still centered upon
one moonlet, anything that managed to take out Ashtra would effectively wipe
out the entire new power ARNETHIS had established against the mystery-foe.

One of the missions ARNETHIS now tasked the Grand Fleet to carry out was
to select locations for ‘backup’ fortresses, places where the facilities of Ashtra
could be duplicated, as nearly as that might be possible. This was not as easy
as it might appear at first glance, while asteroids and such spatial debris are
common in the universe, the creation of the sort of fortress that ARNETHIS
had constructed upon and around Ashtra required several special conditions.

Another mission with which Grand Fleet was tasked was to seek out whatever
orichalcum they could find, both for the use of Ashtra and to deny it to their
enemies, whether it be the mysterious Helian enemy or any resurgent Beastie
culture that might return to space.

Special expeditions were mounted, with multiple capitol ships and carrying an
enormous amount of firepower, to old known Helian fleet bases from which
the Hegemony had extracted most of the orichalcum they had ever possessed.
As a secondary task, whenever Ashtran ships explored a Hegemonic facility,
or landed near the ruins of some Hegemonic city, whatever orichalcum could
be salvaged was so salvaged.

ARNETHIS was not surprised that its expeditions out to the old Helian depots
found that someone or something else had extracted whatever orichalcum was
left in the time since the fall of the Hegemony. [1]

On the other hand, it was often possible to salvage small amounts of the extra-
dimensional material from various Hegemonic ruins and facilities, and it was
so precious that this was worth the effort. Many applications of Hegemonic
technology that had required orichalcum had not required very much of the
material in absolute terms. A typical one hundred gigawatt groundside power
plant, for example, used on any of thousands of Hegemonic worlds, might have
required no more than fifty to eighty grams of orichalcum to operate. Other
applications generally required less (though generally they absolutely did
require the amount they did use). Such salvage work was slow and frustrating
but very rewarding because of the value of the material.

Through all of this, periodic attacks from the robotic ships of NEMESIS were
a regular occurrence, often causing great losses, though by no means did the
Ashtran ships always lose these encounters. Though programming conflicts
prevented NEMESIS from simply overwhelming the Ashtrans while they were
still weak enough for that to be a possibility, it could and did harass them.

MORE LATER.


[1] This was one of the first things NEMESIS did after the Hegemony fell,
these huge stockpiles of orichalcum were too vital to be left exposed. On the
other hand, NEMESIS left those fleet depots that had yet to be discovered by
modern Homosapients untouched, though it considered doing this to be irrational,
it was trapped by yet more conflicting programming imperatives.

[D10]

Later never seems soon enough hehe

I honestly cant tell which chapter has been entertaining me the most, but this one certainly has me at the back of my seat!