Semper Human by Ian Douglas Page A

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    â€œGeneral Garroway,” Schilling said, “this is Socrates. He’s your AI liaison with the Council of Lords.”
    â€œ Pleased to meet you, General, ” Socrates said. The voice was mellifluous and deep, a rich baritone. Where Schilling spoke with a slight accent, Socrates’ Anglic was perfect.
    Well, he was an AI. He would be perfect in every way possible.
    â€œHello, Socrates,” Garroway said. “The pleasure is mine. Or do AIs feel emotion now?”
    The AI chuckled. Either it had a genuine sense of humor, or was programmed to mimic one quite well. Garroway did wonder how far artificial intelligence had developed in the past eight centuries.
    â€œ If you can’t tell the difference, ” Socrates told him, “ and if I can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference between my feelings being programmed or natural? ”
    â€œPoint.”
    â€œSocrates is a Star-level artificial sentience,” Schilling explained. “That means he’s at least as bright as the smartest s-Human, but much faster. We refer to them as our archAIngels.” Schilling pronounced the word “archangel,”but Garroway sensed the neologism within, and the meaning behind it. “Sometimes I think they are the real rulers of the Human domain now.”
    â€œWe all do what we can,” Socrates said. Garroway blinked. A modest AI? Or was that simply another aspect of its programming?
    â€œThere was quite a bit of speculation about how serious the Core Detonation was,” Schilling said, picking up on the earlier topic. “That was, oh, four or five centuries ago, when we started getting hard data about the expanding Core wavefront. Created a bit of a minor panic, in fact, according to the history downloads.”
    â€œIf we managed to turn our own Galaxy into even a small quasar,” Garroway said, “I’d think a little judicious panic might be called for.”
    A quasar was a galaxy with an exceptionally bright nucleus, an active core that outshone the rest of the galaxy by a hundred times or more. Quasars were also extremely distant. The closest known was three-quarters of a billion light years away…which meant it was also a glimpse of something that had happened three-quarters of a billion years in the past, ancient cosmic history. Accepted astrophysical theory suggested that many or, perhaps, all large galaxies had gone through a quasar phase early in their evolution, some billions of years ago, as the supermassive black hole at their cores devoured suns by the millions, spewing out the residue as fantastic bursts of high-energy radiation, a blazing beacon visible across all of time and space. Eventually, the core of the galaxy would be pretty well cleaned out, except for the central black hole itself, of course, and the galaxy would settle down to being a normal, well-behaved member of the cosmic community.
    Presumably, the Milky Way Galaxy had been through such a phase some billions of years ago; the supermassive black hole at the Core was an ancient quasar, slumbering and quiescent now that much of the matter at GalCenter hadbeen devoured. But then the Commonwealth Fleet and the Fleet Marines had come along late in the twenty-ninth century and upset the delicately balanced megastructure the Xul had constructed at the Core.
    And a shadow, at the very least, of the ancient monster had awakened once again.
    â€œIt should be spectacular, though,” Schilling told him. “When the light gets this far out, our night skies will be incredible in the direction of Sagittarius. We think there will be enough light streaming out from the Core that you’ll be able to read by it.”
    â€œ The slower, heavier particles will pile up into the gas clouds that surround the Galactic Hub and create shock waves over the next five to ten thousand years,” Socrates added, “triggering an incredible burst of star formation. The