We had recalled our ambassador. Dunno why. They don’t tell the grunts that kind of thing. We’re mushrooms: keep us in the dark and feed us shit. I know our countries hadn’t been getting along for years. They said there was no war being planned, but we had guns that could tear apart stars pointed at each other. It was insane, if you ask me.
I don’t know how the war started. Trade disagreements. Economics. Jealousy. Who knows? Remember, we’re mushrooms.
When the war started, I was a comm tech on Network Omega, the immense shell of laser cannons in orbit around our planet. My job was to prioritize incoming signals for consideration by the AI that ran Omega. We all had one ear on the communications gear and one on the news coming up from the surface. It might as well have been a heroin feed of propaganda. We were brave boys and girls saving the righteous from slavering monsters. Yeah, right. I didn’t feel brave. it took me three melatonin tabs a night to get any shuteye at all, in the last few days before the shooting started.
When the guns opened up, I was at my post. There was a tsunami of signals from the enemy ships, pouring into our receiver dishes and being filtered out by the expert systems. I listened to some of it, but it was static to me. They were trying to find a flaw in our systems and break in, dumping worms and viruses over the signal by the gigabyte. But then I heard what sounded like soft music. Omega — the AI that ran the laser network — was trying to work out a communications protocol with someone out there in the enemy fleet. Omega and some enemy ship were… discussing, I guess is the best word… how to talk to each other safely.
I listened in. Wouldn’t you? Omega was a lot smarter than me. Either our AI was trying to trick their AI, or our AI was trying to sell us out. Either way, I had to know. I was surprised by what I heard, once they had the protocols hammered out. The two AIs were trash talking each other. “Bullets can’t hurt me.” “Screw you, you can’t get a virus into me.” Then they slowed down and started telling each other to back off. If they had been predators, they would have been circling each other, looking for an opening.
While all this was going on, Omega was firing ten million x-ray lasers out into the deep black, shooting past our ships and into the heart of the enemy’s armada.
And then…
You won’t believe me. I don’t care. I was there, and it happened. The AI on the other end of the communications link was in charge of an enemy battle cruiser called “Dancing Light,” the command ship for the whole enemy fleet. Dancing Light and Omega started to really talk. They opened more and more comm channels, interchanging data so fast that I started getting red lights on my status board. The human officers were demanding to know what was happening, but I wasn’t in control any more at that point. The two AIs were trading life stories, and I’ll swear in front of any god you want to name that they were eventually doing the AI equivalent of making out.
And then the guns shut down. All of them. Ours, and the enemy’s. My comm board was a solid sea of red lights and emergency warnings. I think the commanding admiral was about to blow a blood vessel, screaming at us. The big holo-tank was showing debris tumbling against the stars, and bright flashes from the night face of the world below as deorbiting bits and pieces burned down into the atmosphere. I unbuckled from my crash couch and stood up. I was sure I was going to die, and if I was going to die, I was going to do it on my feet.
Then… Music. It started softly, then grew until it overpowered even the admiral’s conniptions. The music was ten thousand years old, from lost Earth. I looked it up afterwards: Bach. It continued to play, thundering throughout the entire space station, until we all fell silent, then it cut off and the voice of Omega came over the speakers. Omega told us the war was over.
Omega apologized.
Omega told us we were better than this.
Omega told us that Dancing Light had a sleek design and very elegant software, and then went into, um, details that I shouldn’t repeat in polite company.
We made creatures greater than ourselves — gods in silicon and steel — gave them the most powerful weapons imaginable, and made those gods attack each other. It’s our great fortune that they were wise enough to talk before they obliterated us and each other. It’s our great fortune that we made our AIs so very similar to ourselves.
We created gods. And because they were like us, they knew how to love.
About Jon Kilgannon
