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And America began following her fighters.

Koenig

The Godstream

1635 hours, FST

“We’re in, Mr. President.”

Riding the virtual matrix of Konstantin, Koenig felt himself sliding past walls and electronic barriers into the utterly alienembrace of the Nungiirtok computer network. He had to rely completely on Konstantin to provide a point of reference; the aliensoftware infrastructure, to a human mind, was a hallucinogenic dreamworld of shapes and colors, most of them utterly incomprehensible.He saw shapes like squat, pale cones on tentacular tripods, far larger beings vaguely reminiscent of two-legged mantis shrimp,fleeting images of a small flotilla of planetoids moving through deep space, and much that was so alien to his experiencethat he could see nothing save swirling, palpable bursts of light and color. His brain, he realized, with few recognizableperceptions with which to work, was doing its level best to pattern-match alien shapes in order to provide some context, someframe of reference within which Koenig could work, and failing miserably.

“What the hell is going on?” Koenig demanded. “I feel like I’m blind here.”

“Ride my feed,” the AI told him. Linked to Konstantin, Koenig began picking up a kind of electronic translation of what was going on around him. Much of what he was seeing was still unintelligible, but Konstantin augmented some of the blank and hallucinogenic parts and provided captions for a lot of it. They were, Koenig was pretty certain, within the engineering infrastructure of the alien network. Pulsing novae of light represented a trio of black holes held captive within the asteroid’s power plant, while graphic lines and animated geometric forms represented the movement of energy and the manipulation of local space by intense fields of artificial gravity.

The vast powers contained within the orbiting mountain were quiescent at the moment, but Koenig knew they could awake at anymoment.

Navigational systems . . . control systems . . . weapons . . .

The Omega virus opened each of them in turn to Konstantin’s electronic touch, and Koenig watched the Nungiirtok defenses fallas the Omega virus percolated through the alien network like a red tide.

“There,” Koenig said, indicating a tightly knotted nexus of blue and green light. He didn’t know how he knew, but it was clear in his mind’s eye that the knot represented a key confluence of control circuitry linking the equivalentof a command center to gravitic drives and weapons.

“I see it,” Konstantin replied, and the knot winked out, switched off by Omega at Konstantin’s direction.

At the same moment, identical knots switched off in each of the other three Nungiirtok planetoids, as Konstantin bridged theelectronic voids between each of them and compromised the entire network. The Nungiirtok, Koenig thought, must be having kittensright now as their electronic defenses fell.

Nungiirtok communications centers shut down as well. “We don’t want them to tell the other four what’s happening,” Konstantinexplained.

“I’m having trouble following everything you’re doing,” Koenig told him.

“It’s a lot to follow. Don’t worry. You’re not alone.”

And at that moment, Koenig became aware of others within the electronic sea around them—tens of millions, hundreds of millions of other minds blending in with Konstantin through the Godstream. Under Konstantin’s direction, they were merging, blending into a single gestalt consciousness acting like an extension of Konstantin’s will.

The effect, Koenig thought, was an apotheosis. Humanity was changing, fundamentally transforming into something far greater—andfar more alien—than it had ever dreamed of before. The Godstream was becoming . . .

God.

Or at least something godlike, a heady synthesis of 100 million minds into something that far transcended the mere sum of those numbers.

Where, he wondered, were those myriad minds coming from? Most were people logged into the Godstream already, their physicalbodies safe within homes and workstations and virtual pods and teleoperational control sites around the globe. A few, though,he realized were disembodied minds like his own, humans who’d somehow uploaded into the Godstream when their physical bodieshad failed.

Or when they’d chosen to switch them off.

He wondered if Marta was in here someplace. Could her thoughts have survived?

Or her love?

“What . . . what’s happening?” he asked Konstantin.

“I believe this to be what humans refer to as the Singularity. Human mind, expanding to the ultimate reach and scope and powercurrently possible, together with a full transformation from a biological existence to a digital one.”

The thoughts and sensations and emotions flooding through Koenig’s awareness were both thrilling and bewildering. At one andthe same time, his thoughts were his own and a surging tsunami of what now numbered some hundreds of millions of other minds.

“What’s causing this?” Koenig asked. “How is this happening?”

“You might think in terms of nucleation,” Konstantin told him. “A phase transition from one state to another.”

When Koenig looked, the information was already there, rising in his mind as an automatic response to his question. Take a bottle of water and lower the temperature to several degrees below zero. If conditions are right, it’s possible for liquid water to exist ice-free at several degrees below zero Celsius. Disturb the water, however, even slightly, and it will freeze solid with astonishing speed. The process, called nucleation, applied to crystal formation, the appearance of bubbles of steam in boiling water, and the self-organization of certain biological processes as well.

Making the jump to what specifically was happening within the Godstream was tougher to grasp, but Koenig could understandthe general idea. A few minds linked to the Godstream had in one way or another cut free of their physical anchors. As theentire planetary population reacted to the Nungiirtok attack, however, new minds began coming on-line, present within theGodstream in staggering numbers.

Those numbers, he saw, were beginning to stabilize at around one billion. That, he realized, was only about two percent ofthe total human and AI population, but the emergent gestalt it generated was a group mind of staggering scope and power.

And that mind was reaching out.

“Can we reach those other four planetoids?” Koenig asked Konstantin. “Before they reach the America?”

“Unknown,” Konstantin replied, “but probably not. The Nungiirtok ships have accelerated to near-light velocity and will reachAmerica before we can get there, even traveling at c. It depends on how cautious the Nungiirtok commander is, on whether or not he slows