“We don’t know,” Ilich said. “We didn’t have any of our ships in the ring space at the time. There’s some indication that ships in the ring space may have been… um… eaten, if that’s the term. The same way the Typhoon and Medina were. But I don’t have confirmation. The event doesn’t seem correlated with anything we did, but we only have an active naval presence in about one hundred and twenty systems right now. If something happened outside of those, we might not know.”
“Seriously?” Trejo said.
“I can’t overstate how devastating it’s been to lose Medina Station, sir. Controlling that choke point was the leash we had on the empire. Without it…”
Trejo leaned back in his chair, scowling. He opened his hands to Elvi and Cortázar, giving the floor to them. Cortázar didn’t seem to care, but Elvi found herself sitting forward to speak as if she owed the admiral something.
“If I can try to put this all in a wider context?”
“Please do,” Trejo said.
“It’s about the nature of consciousness.”
“That may be a wider context than I was looking for, Major.”
“Bear with me,” Elvi said. “Unless we’re reaching for religious explanations, which I’m not the person to comment on, consciousness is a property of matter. That’s trivial. We’re made out of matter, we’re conscious. Minds are a thing that brains do. And there’s an energetic component. We know that neurons firing is a sign that a particular kind of conscious experience is happening. So, for instance, if I’m looking at your brain while you imagine something, I can guess reliably whether you’re imagining a song or a picture by seeing if your visual or auditory cortex is lighting up.”
“All right,” Trejo said.
“There’s no reason to believe that a brain is the only structure capable of having that combination of structure and energy. And in fact, there’s a fair amount of evidence that the gate builders had a conscious structure—a brain-like thing—where the material component wasn’t at all the same kind of thing we use. Anecdotally, we’ve found at least one brain-like structure that was a diamond the size of Jupiter.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Trejo said.
“Like we don’t have a steel chamber in fusion reactors. We have magnetic bottles. Magnetic fields that perform the same basic function as matter. The older civilization appears to have developed its consciousness in a form that relied more on energetic fields and maybe structures in unobservable matter than the stuff we made a brain from. There’s also some implication that quantum effects have something to do with our being aware. If that’s true for us, it was probably true for them.
“My thesis—the one I was working on before I came here—explored the idea that our brains are kind of a field combat version of consciousness. Not too complex. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but takes a lot of punishment and keeps functioning. Our brain may actually have a kick-starting effect, so when the quantum interactions that underlie having experiences break down, they’re easier to start up again. Does that make sense?”
Trejo said Barely at the same time Cortázar said Of course. The two men looked at each other. Elvi felt annoyed at both of them, but she went on.
“So, the scenario that James Holden brought back from the alien station in the ring space was of something systematically destroying the consciousness of the older civilization. Killing it. The previous civilization tried getting rid of systems. Inducing supernovas. That didn’t help. They eventually closed all the gates, and that didn’t fix the problem either, because whatever it was killed them all anyway.
“And that’s where we came in. We found—and I have directly observed—things that we call bullets or scars or persistent nonlocal field effects. Basically a place where whatever hates the ring gates has done something to collapse consciousness on a planet or in a system. Or in all the systems at once. What I suspect—and I don’t have any data for this—is that the enemy figured out how to snuff out all the systems at once, whether the gates were active or not. I believe that our travel through the gates is irritating to these beings. Maybe even damaging in some way. When that damage gets high enough, they react.”
“So when I killed Pallas Station in Sol …,” Trejo said.
“You also hit some weird, aphysical dark god in whatever passes for its nose,” Elvi said. “And they did what you’d expect them to do. If you get sick and a penicillin shot makes you better, then the next time you get sick, you try another shot. Only it turns out we aren’t the same kind of conscious system as the gate makers. We don’t break as easy, and we recover better. What slaughtered their civilization just lost us a few minutes of time.”
“How disappointing for the dark gods,” Trejo said.
“Right? But then they’re not done. Especially, and no offense here, when we start dropping bomb ships into wherever they are. Playing tit for tat. And the way this one felt different? Light and shapes instead of that kind of hyperawareness?”
“I did notice that, yes,” Trejo said dryly.
“I believe that the enemy, whatever it is, is experimenting with new ways to break conscious systems. Brains. I think we’re the equivalent of a penicillin-resistant infection, and the last event we experienced was an attempt at tetracycline.”
“And the trigger?” Trejo asked.
“There doesn’t need to be a trigger,” Elvi said,“if the enemy has gone past being purely reactive. Maybe we just convinced them to take us seriously.”
Trejo sank a little as the implications unfolded in his mind.
“Is this new information?” Cortázar said. “I feel we’ve covered this all before. I mean, nothing in this is really new, is it?”
Trejo and Ilich exchanged a look.
“It’s useful to me,” Trejo said, “to have Dr. Okoye’s summary. So yes. Do we have any progress on healing the high consul?”
“It would be helpful,” Cortázar said, “if I could examine Ilich’s castoff. I don’t suppose there’s been any new word on finding it?”