Semper Human by Ian Douglas Page A

ancient Sumeria. Along came the Xul and—” He slapped his hand again. “And apparently the Xul have been doing this for most of their history, and across most of the Galaxy. Now tell me how they could do that and not be waging war against us and every other emergent technological civilization in the Galaxy.”
    â€œWhen you hit your hand just now, General…like you were swatting a fly?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhen you swat a fly, are you at war with it?”
    Garroway thought about this. “Oh. You’re saying they’re so advanced—”
    â€œNot really,” she told him. “They might’ve been around for ten million years, but the Xul haven’t advanced technologically at anything like our pace. In fact, they’re actuallynot that far ahead of us in most respects today. We’ve begun uploading personalities into computers ourselves, did you know?”
    He scanned quickly through some of the historical data he’d just downloaded. “Ah…I do now.” His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Shit! Humans who live on the Net. You’ve given them a species name of their own?”
    â€œ Homo telae ,” she said, nodding. “‘Man of the Web,’ which in this case means the electronic web of the Galactic Net. Actually, we learned how to upload minds partly from the Xul, inferring parts of the process from what we knew about their technology, and doing some reverse engineering from captured hunterships. In any case, we can pattern a person now and upload her to a virtual electronic world. Her body can die, but the mind, the personality, everything that made her her is saved, and lives on.”
    â€œIf you call that living,” Garroway said.
    â€œSo far as the uploaded individuals are concerned, they’re alive,” she told him.
    Almost, he asked her if the uploaded personality really was the same as the living mind. As he saw it, the original mind died with the body; what was saved was a back-up, a replica that, with a complete set of memories, would think it was the original…but if that was immortality, it was an immortality that did not in the least help the original, body-bound mind. There’s been a lot of speculation about the process, though, back in the thirty-second and thirty-third centuries, he recalled, and some people tended to get pretty animated in their insistence that if the backed-up personality was the same as the original in every respect, it was the original.
    Garroway had never understood the fine points of the theory, though, and had little patience with philosophy. Evidently, though, speculation had become reality, and enough people had opted for the technique to justify inventing a new species of humanity to describe them. That made sense, he supposed, given that one definition of species was its inability to interbreed with other species. A member of Homo telae , living its noncorporeal existence up on the Net, certainly wasn’t going to be able to produce offspring by mating with Homo sapiens .
    â€œThe point is,” Schilling told him, “the Xul are barely aware of us. Certain parts of the entire Xul body react to us the way your toe might twitch when an ant walks across it, or the way you might swat that fly without really thinking about what you’re doing.”
    â€œSo the Xul are some kind of group mind, a metamind?” That had been a popular theory about them back in his day.
    â€œNot quite. They seem to function as what we call a CAS, a Complex Adaptive System. That’s a very large organization made up of many participants, or agents…like termite communities in Earth, or a hurricane.”
    â€œYou’re saying they’re not intelligent? They build starships , for God’s sake!”
    â€œThere are different kinds of intelligence, remember. Individual Xul may be what we think of as intelligent beings, but for the most part they’re