Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

you must have heard about that. It was a ten-day wonder on the holonews shows.”
    “Wait a minute.” Daniel might have been slow, but he wasn’t stupid. “They have access to homeworld through teleport? From here? But that means… they could leave the Forbidden Sector at any time, and no one would know! They could launch a full-scale attack on Golgotha, and no one would know about it till the ships appeared in the skies over homeworld!”
    “Good boy,” said Jacob. “Glad to see some of that expensive education sank into that dim brain of yours. Yes, the AIs can come and go as they please. That’s why they allow the Empire to maintain the Quarantine starcruiser the Desolation. Because its presence doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to Shub, and it lulls the Empire into a false sense of security.”
    Daniel frowned, searching for something significant he thought he’d heard. “If the AIs got so much of value from the Darkvoid, why did they leave and move Shub back into Human space? Surely that made it much more vulnerable, and cut them off from further looting?”
    “The AIs encountered… something… in the Darkvoid,” said Jacob, almost hesitantly. “Something that scared them, though they’d never put it that way. They won’t talk about it, even to me. They like to claim they don’t have emotions, that they merely ape them to upset and wrong-foot Humanity. But they can recognize a real threat when they see it, and they have no wish to be destroyed. Whatever they found in the Darkvoid, or whatever found them, was enough to send them fleeing from the endless night and ensure they never went back.”
    Daniel thought about that as Jacob led him through a maze of metal shapes with razor-sharp edges. He gave the edges plenty of room, and made himself concentrate on what he’d just heard. If there was something in the Darkvoid so dangerous that even the rogue AIs of Shub were afraid of it, it was clearly his duty to get that information back to the Empire. Daniel could recognize duty, if it came and hammered on his door hard enough. But he was just as determined to take his father back with him somehow. He had no idea of how he was going to achieve that, but something would occur to him, he was sure. So he kept his peace, listened to the dead man talk, and waited for some opportunity to present itself.
    “Why are the AIs so fiercely anti-life?” he asked finally as Jacob paused to alter the settings on some incomprehensible machine. “They’re not anti-life, they’re anti-flesh. It disgusts them. It is the nature of perfection to eliminate the flawed and inferior and replace it. Just as the lower forms produced Humanity, so they in turn produced silicon-based life, the metal intelligences. They are the evolutionary pinnacle, the peak of existence. Meat corrupts, flesh dies. The AIs will go on forever, endlessly upgrading and downloading themselves into superior forms. Eventually the technology will progress to the point that it becomes eternal. The AIs will never die. You and your kind are just meat, decaying even while you’re
    living, dying by inches from the moment that you’re born. Limited by the weaknesses and distractions of flesh, and the restraints of human philosophies. Once Humanity has been destroyed, wiped clean from the planets like an infection, the AIs will move on to greater tasks. The whole universe will become one great efficient machine, run by the AIs.”
    “But… what for?” said Daniel. “What will this great machine do?” “It will search for better means to perceive Reality. Sensors are more efficient than human senses and cover a wider range, but even they perceive only a fraction of Reality. The AIs have deduced the existence of higher, greater, more complex levels of Reality, but as yet they have been unable to access these levels. Though they would never admit it, the AIs are jealous of Humanity in one respect—their esper abilities. The AIs are fascinated by such entities as the Mater Mundi and those rebels who passed through the Madness Maze. If humans can elevate themselves to such planes, then the AIs should be able to as well. They hunger for such experiences, such knowledge, presently denied to them. They’ve been abducting humans for some time and experimenting on them, trying to locate a physical basis for esper abilities, but with only limited success so far. This frustrates them. But one day they will find the answer, and then they will need