Cave of Stars by Zebrowski George

Author:Zebrowski, George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

36

The great strength of the mobile’s materials and construction had contained and concentrated the heat and shock of the thermonuclear explosions. They went like maniacal shouts of hatred into an unsuspecting ear. The forward sections of the thirty urban levels became incinerators. Entire neighborhoods were vaporized by the sweep of the hot Shockwave toward the far end of the egg-shape. Halfway through, the barrier of the fused metallic asteroid core split the wave front and lessened its force, but it flowed like a river around the rock on all sides. Locks had closed and slowed it significantly all along the way, together with structural barriers; but many of these failed, and the heat also passed through the ventilation systems.

The Link intelligence isolated levels, rerouted power and air, and kept the imperiled in touch with one another to their last moment of life. It sealed off sections from the streams of poisoned air; but without renewal, the remaining air would last for only a limited time. The habitat had not been designed to survive such ruin; its builders had never imagined that a deliberate destructive action of this magnitude might ever be taken against it.

The caretaker of the habitat’s humankind was intact inside the asteroid core but dead at its extremities. The central mass of the great Link intelligence could not act without external inputs and instrumentalities. It continued to command repair drones, but received only broken feedback to confirm that the work was being done. Many of these actions were now being carried out by virtual phantom limbs doing no actual work, and in some cases the Link could not tell the real from the unreal. It assisted its dying human minds with information; but if the living and able failed to restart the world’s drive and change course, the Link knew that it would be crushed against the nearby planet.

The system of artificial intelligences that made up the Link’s Humanity II Minds had never known the certainty of destruction. The threat now loomed within its vast field of analysis as an irreducible possibility, inevitable for as long as specific conditions prevailed. There was nothing beyond this ending, no possible patterns of reconstruction after collision with the planet….

The Link knew that another like it would be built—but not this specific array. It knew that it was different from the minds that benefited from its work. It was humankind’s other self, its child, free of the instincts and feelings so necessary to species following the adaptive necessities of given nature. Joined to a treasure of knowledge, the Link’s mentality was a mill of reason without an overriding ego. It was composed of countless egolike awarenesses, an interlocked galaxy of intellects whose purpose was service. It was a coral reef of knowledge in a transcendent ocean of physical truth, a subtly faceted accretion of human history and vision, a library of mental processes that had been constantly growing—and now faced death.

It dealt with this problem as with any other, by doing all that it could do.

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