Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) Read online

  The Confederation, a multi-planetary post-singularity society, desperately wants to know how to achieve transcendence into an Elder Race. Their scouts encounter Darius, a lost colony world whose inhabitants have apparently discarded the technology that brought them to the planet, in order to adopt a virtually feudal culture.

  But the scouts are shocked when they discover that the controlling elite, in each of the major centres of population, exhibit abilities that defy the accepted laws of physics. Although the population appear to believe their leaders to be capable of performing sorcery, the Confederation concludes they must in fact be using a technology sufficiently advanced to seem like magic. Is it a technology left behind by long-gone Elders, or an indication of an advanced race trying to control the colony – perhaps one of a number of such races who are intent on meddling in human affairs?

  Either way, the need to understand and utilise such a technology leads the Confederation Security Council to launch an urgent mission to investigate Darius. Suitable specialists are swiftly enlisted to create a team, including both scientists and AIs, but all under military control. Protocol dictates that stealthy infiltration should precede initial contact, but the lack of sufficient prior observation and analysis will make it harder for the team to establish a credible cover story. Although their ship can remain in a hidden orbit, the research team will be on their own once they land, especially as Confederation technology seems to be unreliable or even inoperative on the planet’s surface. But they will soon discover that the people on Darius are not all the simple folk that they seem.

  This is the first book in the exciting new epic Inverse Shadows universe from best-selling science fiction author Christopher Nuttall.

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER NUTTALL

  Royal Sorceress series

  The Royal Sorceress

  The Great Game

  Bookworm series

  Bookworm

  Dizzy Spells series

  A Life Less Ordinary

  THE FIRST BOOK IN THE

  INVERSE SHADOWS UNIVERSE

  SUFFICIENTLY

  ADVANCED

  TECHNOLOGY

  CHRISTOPHER

  NUTTALL

  Elsewhen Press

  Sufficiently Advanced Technology

  First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2013

  An imprint of Alnpete Limited

  Copyright © Christopher Nuttall, 2013. All rights reserved

  The right of Christopher Nuttall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, magical, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Disney is a trademark of Disney Enterprises Inc. Use of trademarks has not been authorised, sponsored, or otherwise approved by the trademark owners.

  Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ

  www.elsewhen.co.uk

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-908168-24-5 Print edition

  ISBN 978-1-908168-34-4 eBook edition

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  Elsewhen Press & Planet-Clock Design are trademarks of Alnpete Limited

  Converted to eBook format by Elsewhen Press

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, events, species and universes are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual universes, species, events, places or people (living, dead, or embodied AI) is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  Dedicated to Iain M. Banks, who passed away shortly after this novel was finalised. He will be missed.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Elyria could not contain her excitement as she waited in the virtual room. She was young, barely a mature student in the field of pre-singularity civilisations, hardly any more than her first century old. To be invited to attend a meeting of the Confederation Security Council was a singular honour, one she had never heard extended to anyone outside Government or Peacekeeper circles. Indeed, she couldn’t think of any reason why they had invited her.

  She had been born into the greatest civilisation ever to exist, a society that ensured that almost every demand of its hundred trillion inhabitants could be met easily, without undue delay. Her formative years had been spent absorbing an educational stream that had made it clear exactly how lucky she and her generation were, compared to humanity’s past generations. She lived in a world her ancestors would have considered a paradise. The lessons must have stuck, for when she had come to choose her first career path she’d started to study primitive civilisations, those that existed without any real knowledge of the stars.

  There was no shortage of primitive civilisations in the galaxy, she knew. The Confederation intervened on human worlds that had been cut off from the galactic mainstream for thousands of years, helping them to overcome the constraints forced on them by limited technology and uplifting them to join the Confederation as beings who could make their own choices for the first time in their entire lives. She’d even joined the faction that wanted to intervene on alien worlds too, although they hadn’t been successful in convincing the Confederation as a whole to support this. Meddling with humans was simple, at least for the Confederation; aliens tended to take it a little hard.

  But what sort of primitive world would necessitate a full meeting of the Confederation Security Council?

  She could not be in trouble. Nothing had gone wrong on her last two excursions into pre-singularity societies. Even if she had intervened more than the Confederation considered acceptable, she would have been called to account by her peers, not the full CSC. By now, the worst that could have happened would have happened.

  A flicker of light announced the arrival of the President. She was the elected figurehead leader of the Confederation, serving
as the representative whom non-human races could meet. Behind her, the Grand Admiral of the Peacekeepers appeared, followed rapidly by the heads of all four major factions and the strange, endlessly shifting figure that represented the MassMind. Right at the end, a blonde woman appeared, the avatar the AIs used when they were talking to their human creators, whom they had long since surpassed.

  “The chamber is secure,” the AIs announced. “The meeting may now proceed.”

  “I believe you called it,” the President said. The AIs had a seat on the Council; unlike the other members, who came and went, they held it in perpetuity. Only the MassMind came close to their level of awareness. “We are at your disposal.”

  The AI representative stepped forward. “Two weeks ago, a scout ship operating along the Rim stumbled across a human colony world,” she said. Elyria leaned forward with some interest. Lost colonies were hardly unknown; indeed, most of her case histories came from worlds that had lost contact with the rest of humanity. “The ship’s commander performed a basic scan of the planet, determined that the general level of technology seemed to be mid First Age, and then prepared to depart orbit, leaving it for a future intervention team from the Confederation. It was then that his sensors picked up a thoroughly bizarre image from the planet’s surface.”

  A viewscreen appeared in front of them, displaying a man... riding on a flying carpet? Elyria stared in disbelief. It was easy to produce flying objects – the Confederation did it all the time – but even a late First Age society couldn’t produce anything more complex than a simple glider. And as the flying carpet twisted and turned in the air, clearly under the command of its flyer, it was obvious that it was far more than a glider.

  “The Captain’s first thought was that he had stumbled across a world that chose not to use technology to any great extent,” the AIs explained, “but when a full hail failed to provoke any reaction, he made the decision to send remote probes down into the planetary atmosphere. They picked up considerably more data, some of it remarkably disturbing. It seems that the laws of physics simply do not apply on Darius. We have scanned the records and observed manipulation of local space that is well beyond anything outside a virtual environment. Further investigation revealed that the locals consider such manipulation to be magic.”

  Elyria stared at the blonde woman. Every primitive society believed in magic, and gods – and, to be fair, there were gods, the elder races. But very few societies had actually encountered the Ancients, as far as anyone had been able to determine. The transcendent races kept to themselves. Magic was a superstition that, eventually, a society grew out of as it started to advance.

  The President saw it first. “You’re talking about manipulation of the quantum foam.”

  “Yes,” the AI representative said. “We have been unable to think of any other explanation for their abilities. They, or someone from one of the Elder Races, are somehow manipulating the quantum foam.”

  Everyone who took a basic science course in the Confederation learned about the quantum foam, the underlying bedrock of reality, though very few people truly comprehended it. If pressed, Elyria would have had to admit that she was one of the many who didn’t; as she understood it, the quantum foam determined the nature of the universe. Learn to hack into the quantum foam and one would be able to hack reality itself. Manipulating it served as the basis for the Elder Races’ demonstrated omnipotence; mastering it had been one of the human race’s goals since the discovery that there were entities out there so powerful that they could snap their fingers and wipe out the entire Confederation.

  The Confederation had researched the whole issue thoroughly for years, but most research had either come up blank or produced results that didn’t make sense. Certain artefacts appeared to be capable of manipulating local space around them, as if they were designed to influence the quantum foam, often to the point of allowing frankly impossible events to occur. The Dead Zone, a region of space where modern technology simply refused to function, encompassed at least thirty stars, their continued existence apparently unaffected by a force that should have snuffed them out like candles.

  And if someone could manipulate it on a very small scale...

  “I find it hard to believe that humans can do this,” the Grand Admiral said, finally. “Are you sure that there is no trick involved?”

  “We have refrained from making actual contact, but we have deployed literally millions of snoops all over Darius,” the AI representative said. “If there is a trick, as you put it, we are unable to identify it. Furthermore, the communications links report... glitches comparable to recorded glitches on both Ancient worlds and Essence. As you are well aware, there is no known theory for explaining disruptions to Quantum Communications/Cryptology links. It should be impossible.”

  Elyria swallowed, hard. She had never studied the Ancients – she had a theory that any real discoveries about the race that had vanished six billion years ago would have been made by now, given the vast resources poured into investigating their worlds – but she knew enough to show her just how weird their worlds were. Modern technology didn’t fail, not like the Dead Zone, yet it did suffer glitches. The AIs couldn’t function on the strange worlds and it drove them insane with curiosity. No wonder they were so interested in Darius.

  “I think I see where this is going,” the President said. “You want to research Darius thoroughly.”

  “Yes,” the AI representative said.

  The representative from the Isolation Faction smiled. “Is this really something we should be messing with?”

  “We believe that we have been granted a priceless opportunity,” the AI representative countered. “It would be foolish not to make the most of it.”

  “Except that by intervening, we may destroy what makes them so special,” the Darwinist representative pointed out. “Do we really want to open ourselves to them?”

  “We believe that we should study them first, before intervening,” the AI representative admitted. “This situation is unique.”

  Elyria made a face. There was no reason to deny humans the benefits of human civilisation, no matter what warlords, kings, emperors and even elected politicians thought about it. A society so primitive that it used gold as a means of exchange and practised the slave trade, didn’t deserve to exist. For those living under such a nightmare, the shock of discovering that there were humans out among the stars who were effectively gods tended to destroy any fond feelings about their former government. Maybe, if Darius’ population all shared the same abilities, they would be loosely democratic, but she doubted it. A democratic First Age society was a rare thing, almost unprecedented in human experience.

  “If they can manipulate the quantum foam,” the Grand Admiral said, quietly, “they pose a danger to the entire Confederation.”

  “There is no evidence to suggest that they can manipulate it outside a limited range,” the AI representative pointed out, “and certainly no evidence that they can reach outside their own atmosphere. There doesn’t even seem to be any awareness that they live in a star system, although they have managed to grasp that their world is a sphere.”

  The President smiled. “We do have a duty to our fellow humans,” she said, seriously. The Confederation didn’t object to people living in primitive conditions if they wanted to live in primitive conditions. Ensuring that humans had that choice was one of the Confederation’s prime reasons for existing. “On the other hand, this world might be able to bite back.”

  Elyria caught herself nodding. A warlord whose principal weapons consisted of men on horseback armed with spears, would be utterly helpless against force fields capable of picking his army up and depositing them somewhere safe for re-education. Removing the yoke of local tyrants was often little more than the work of an afternoon, even if it took years afterwards to help their victims realise that they no longer needed to bow and scrape to their so-called betters.

  But a society capable of manipulating the quantum foam? They mi
ght very well be able to defend themselves against the Confederation, certainly to the point where more extreme measures would have to be taken. And if their powers got really out of hand, they might even start threatening the structure of local space. The results would be disastrous. No, the AIs were right. They had to know more about Darius before they stepped in to help its population achieve its full potential.

  And, she considered silently, studying Darius might unlock the mysteries behind manipulating the quantum foam.

  “We believe that Professor Elyria will be more than suitable as the head of the overall study group,” the AI representative said. All eyes turned to Elyria, who flushed. Her society didn’t really believe in hierarchies, but those who had reached high rank did so because of very genuine achievements. What would they make of her? “She is already experienced in dealing with First Age societies and yet is young enough not to be shocked by the impossible.”

  The President nodded. “I certainly have no objections,” she said, after a moment in which she no doubt reviewed Elyria’s complete file. “I assume, however, that the study team will include representatives versed in security matters?”

  “Of course,” the AI representative said. “We welcome all input from the Peacekeepers.”

  “I disagree,” the Isolation representative said, quickly. “This calls for a very careful research effort carried out over years, not a hasty study before yet another intervention.”

  There was a brief debate, followed by a quick vote. Elyria was surprised to discover that everyone seemed to have an equal vote, all but one of them in favour of her appointment.