The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2003-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

4.

Another thread in the conversation talked about the war itself.

Atkins offered grimly: “Aurelian and the Parliament have already decided not to postpone the Transcendence. They’re hoping to tempt the Nothing Sophotech into waiting until everyone is completely defenseless before it strikes. Frankly, I thought this was one of the stupidest ideas in the history of war. The Parliament is risking everything on the idea that one session of diplomacy with the enemy will end all the attacks. I’m sorry, but I just find that hard to believe. Okay, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say it’s not really ‘diplomacy,’ that it is more like debugging a faulty computer routine. But what if it’s not? What if the enemy is not defective, just evil? Not wrong, just bad?”

Diomedes asked Atkins what he recommended.

Atkins just shook his head, a bitter and tired expression on his features. “It is not too late to try to set up a blockade around the sun. Destruction of the Solar Array, if it could be mined in time, would be best, before the whole thing falls into enemy hands and is used as a weapon to destroy all Inner System traffic.

“The enemy will strike during the Transcendence, or as soon as it sees a volume-drop in the amount of people linked in.

“We can assume, at worst, a twenty percent casualty rate in the civilian population in the first eight minutes of combat, most of that from minds in transit during the celebration, and from viruses corrupting the noumenal personality records.

“We can write off the energy shapes living above the solar north pole; they’re as good as dead; and we can assume almost complete destruction of the people living at Mercury Equilateral.

“Also, the form cities on Demeter, and the shadow clouds living in Earth’s penumbra don’t have any defenses hardened against high radiation; we can expect more deaths there when the Demeter grid goes down.

“Expect communication and power failures along Earth’s ring city, and many more deaths from anyone who relies on continuous energy sustenance, like a download, or a deep-dreamer. The atmosphere will protect Earth herself from the worst of the storms.

“The Earthmind’s intelligence will drop considerably when she is cut off from her remote stations, and orbital-based Sophotechs will be killed.

“The moons of Jupiter will still be in good shape, though, and the Jovian magnetosphere has enough dikes to dampen out the worse of any particle floods the enemy might throw their way. That’s the first eight to sixteen minutes of combat.

“Then, over the next six hundred years or so, the Jovian equatorial supercollider might be able to make enough material to create a fleet of smaller sun-diving vessels like the Phoenix here, and by that time, whatever population the enemy has produced inside the sun or throughout the wreckage of the Solar Array could probably be brought down by sheer weight of numbers. This assumes that civilian morale and support for the war effort will not instantly collapse after the first

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