Semper Human by Ian Douglas Page B

locked into their virtual worlds and unaware of what we would call real . The group-Xul presence, the meta-Xul, if you will, is more an expression of the original Xul instincts, their xenophobia in particular. Even their construction of starships is probably completely automated by now—we’ve never found a Xul shipyard, remember—or they may all be relics of a much earlier age.”
    â€œBut…we’ve eavesdropped on them, Captain. We know they have us catalogued as a threat. They know our home world…hell, they bombarded Earth in 2314. How can they not be aware of us?”
    â€œWe’ve been sending our AI probes into Xul nodes for almost two thousand years, now, and we’ve done a lot of listening. There are…call them different levels of awareness. One Xul node might learn about us, but they were always slow to share with the others. Together, they were still driven by their original xenophobia, but taken in isolation,individual nodes don’t seem to really be conscious. Most of their defenses are automated. We know that within one node, or aboard one starship, they arrive at decisions through a kind of chorus of thoughts and counterthoughts until they reach a consensus.”
    â€œThe Singer,” he put in. “Europa.”
    â€œExactly. But individual Xul nodes tend to be pretty isolated from one another—minimum internodal communication across a widely distributed net—and the Galaxy is too big to allow that kind of consensus on a specieswide scale. From the point of view of the species, of the CAS, they’re all blissfully living a near-eternal existence in their own virtual universe, and once in a while we run across their toe and make it twitch.”
    â€œThat…is a rather uncomfortable image,” Garroway said slowly. He’d been more comfortable thinking of the Xul as a conventional enemy, an interstellar empire seeking to exterminate Humankind. The mental picture Schilling invoked was of something much, much larger, more powerful, and potentially far more dangerous than a mere alien interstellar empire. The fact that the Xul as a Galaxy-wide CAS hadn’t yet put all the pieces together implied that some day they would.
    If the Xul ever got their act together and thought and moved as a species, there might be little that Humankind could do to fight back.
    â€œAs we understand the Xul now,” Schilling told him, “most of their original uploaded mentalities, the governing choruses, are…aware of what goes on outside their virtual worlds, but not really a part of it, do you see? The minds that control their hunterships and probes, the minds we’ve been up against in combat, all of those are either copies of the original minds, or AI.”
    â€œArtificial intelligence. What’s the difference between an uploaded electronic mind and an artificial one?”
    â€œGood question. Maybe none. The two may be completelyinterchangeable within what passes for Xul society. Especially when the ability to upload a conscious mind brings with it the ability to copy a conscious mind, to replicate it as often as needed, and to tweak it, to change it from iteration to iteration.”
    â€œSo the original Xul minds form the basis of the AI infrastructure, but they fill in with copies and AIs.” He was still thinking about it in classical military terms. No matter how many casualties humans inflicted on the Xul, they could fill in the gaps in an eye’s blink, simply by running off more copies of themselves.
    â€œWe believe so.”
    â€œHow the hell do you fight an enemy like that?”
    â€œWell, we’ve been using our own AI assault complexes to take down Xul nodes as we discover them. They’re programmed to integrate themselves with the Xul AI software within a target node and gradually take it over, substituting our own virtual reality for theirs.”
    â€œReally?” The concept was