Bright Light by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Konstantin

Enigma

1438 hours, TFT

Konstantin felt the storm of the alien thoughts swirl about and through him with a tornadic intensity. He was not so much engaging in communication with the Deneban as he was watching its lightning-fast flow of thoughts, only a very few of which Konstantin could actually translate. Dr. Godfrey had been right. The Denebans did not have a spoken language as such but communicated by pulses of electromagnetic energy in binary. Teasing meaning out of that code was tremendously difficult, but when Konstantin had been in communication with the alien Gaki probes he’d learned at least the basics of the language.

His biggest problem at the moment was determining whether or not the Deneban aliens were conscious.

He’d run into this issue before. The Gaki probes sent to Tabby’s Star from Deneb were highly intelligent, artificial intelligences of amazing scope and power, far faster and far smarter in terms of information processing and analysis than any merely human mind. Unlike human minds, however, they were not self-aware. They were intelligent without being conscious.

For Konstantin, an apt metaphor, of which he was aware, would be termite colonies on Earth. Some constructed castlelike mounds rising as much as twelve meters or more above the ground, housing millions of insects, and with ventilation tubes, chimneys, and an overall nest orientation designed to maintain and control internal temperatures to within a fraction of a degree. The design and function of a living mound seemed to indicate intelligence. An individual termite was certainly not self-aware or intelligent, but intelligent behavior seemed to arise from the functioning of the colony as a whole, a super-organism composed of myriad tiny, unintelligent nest members.

In fact, super-organisms such as termite colonies were sentient—meaning they could sense and process information—without being aware of what they were doing. The same could be said of most computers, machines that could count and perform other mathematical calculations very quickly . . . but which could not discuss anything for which they’d not been programmed. Experts still argued over whether Konstantin and other super-AIs were truly self-aware or if they simply claimed to be so, presumably in order to relate to humans.

Konstantin, of course, had his own ideas about that, but he rarely discussed them with his human associates.

At the same moment he was telling Gray that he was in contact with the alien, he was merging a portion of his awareness with the swirling storm of alien thoughts. He couldn’t tell yet if he was sensing the Deneban SAI’s deliberate attempts to show him something or incidental background noise. He was able to glimpse fragments . . . images and scraps of meaning as he gently tweaked the translation program he’d generated during his interaction with the Gaki.

He could see the incoming Satori star sails enring the Deneb system, using the fierce light of the blue-white star to decelerate. Separate payloads were cast off from the enormous sails . . . maneuvered independently . . . joined together . . . unfolded. Robotic Deneban ships approached cautiously .

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