Semper Human. Ian Douglas

streams of positrons emerging from the turbulent areas above the black hole’s north and south poles. The interaction of antimatter with normal matter hundreds of light years from the singularity filled the Core with radio noise—the 511?keV screech of positronium annihilating its normal-matter counterpart—electrons. The object had been detected and named “The Great Annihilator” by Earth astronomers millennia ago, but the discovery had only deepened the mystery of the actual nature of the Galactic Core. By measuring the velocities of stars in the Annihilator’s immediate vicinity, astronomers had proven that it was a black hole, but not the far more massive one at the exact center that they’d been looking for.

      In Garroway’s day, of course, it had been well understood that the Xul Dyson cloud had been masking the radiation leakage from the actual Core, and would continue to do so until the Core Detonation crawled out into the Galactic suburbs and impinged upon waiting detectors and sense organs. The Great Annihilator, though, had become a footnote to Galactic cosmography, a little-brother satellite of the larger, better known singularity at GalCenter.

      The Core Detonation would have swallowed the Great Annihilator centuries ago. Evidently, the object had not been destroyed, as might have been expected. Clouds of dust and gas sweeping out from the Core explosions had spiraled into the Annihilator’s accretion disk, which glowed now as brightly as a supernova. So much matter continued to fall into the singularity itself that vast quantities, instead of being swallowed, were flung outward as radiant plasmas, and the radio shriek of annihilating matter was far louder now than it had been twelve hundred years before. Garroway could hear that shriek overlaid upon the visual image. Inset windows gave scrolling blocks of data describing the energies exploding from the brilliant object. Radiation levels, he noticed, were high enough to instantly fry any organic matter.

      He watched the glowing object for a moment. Through filters raised by the software controlling the imagery, he could actually see the movement of the inner edge of the accretion disk as it whipped across the singularity’s event horizon.

      “We have detected signals emerging as nonlocal events from within the Great Annihilator,” Schilling told him. “The physics are … difficult. Suffice to say that phase-shifted habitats may have been inserted into the black hole’s ergosphere.”

      “Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “that there’s something alive inside that Hell?”

      “Something, yes,” Socrates said. “The Xul, or a part of them. And they’re using their base within the Great Annihilator to attack us.”

      “Inside a black hole?”

       “Within the ergosphere, yes.”

      “That’s impossible,” Garroway said, shaking his head. “Nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational field if it gets too close, not even light. That’s part of the thing’s definition.”

      “You’re aware of phase shifting, aren’t you, sir?” Schilling asked.

      “Yes. We have … sorry, had bases and ships back in my day that could rotate out of phase with four-dimensional spacetime. They existed at the base state of Reality, what we called the Quantum Sea.”

      “The Xul apparently can do that as well,” Socrates said, “and from the Quantum Sea, it’s possible to manipulate gravity.”

      “The quantum converters?” Schilling added. “The devices we use to provide microsuns for our terraform projects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond? We phase-shift those into the Quantum Sea, where they can draw as much energy as we need directly from the Reality base state. The Xul are doing something similar inside the Great Annihilator.”

      “What?”

      “We’re not sure,” Socrates said. “It’s possible that they hope to affect the entirety of the Reality base state … to, in effect, rewrite what we’re pleased to think of as reality.”

      “Editing us out of existence?”

       “It’s a possibility. That, at least, is one of the scenarios our Xul iteration programs have developed. But it’s also possible that they’re using singularity-identity nonlocality to infect our AI and computer networks with alien emomemes.”

      “Whoa,” Garroway said. “You just lost me … about eight hundred years ago.”

      “Singularity-identity nonlocality?” Schilling asked. Garroway nodded.

      “The theory can be a bit murky,” Socrates told him. “Do you know how stargates work?”

      “Not the technical details, but yes,” Garroway said. “In principle, at least.”

      Stargates were immense artifacts scattered across the Galaxy and beyond, ten- to twenty-kilometer-wide rings within which pairs of planetary-mass black holes revolved in opposite directions. The interplay of moving gravitational fields opened direct links between one gate and another, light years distant, with which it was tuned. Exactly who had built them, or when, was a mystery, but stargates were still the principal means of long-range travel throughout the Galaxy.

      “Stargates work,” Socrates told him, “because the movement of singularities within two stargates can be tuned to one another so that they essentially become congruent, a fancy way of saying they are the same. Identical. The same gate, but located in two widely separated places at once … orbiting Sirius, say, and the Galactic Core. The theory depends on quantum states and an aspect of quantum dynamics called nonlocality, which says that two objects or particles entangled at the quantum level remain connected to one another, as though there was no space, no distance, between them.”

      “I know about that one,” Garroway said. “Albert Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance,’ and refused to accept that it described the universe realistically.”

      “Albert … who?” Schilling asked.

      “Einstein,” Socrates told her. “A pre-spaceflight philosopher.”

      “Physicist, actually,” Garroway said. “At least according to the history downloads I’ve seen.”

      “Physicist, then,” Socrates agreed, “though physicists and philosophers are much the same thing when it comes to describing aspects of the metaverse that can only indirectly be apprehended, and which can only be described by myth and metaphor. In any case … if you have access to base-state reality in one black hole, you theoretically have direct access to all black holes … and to the star gates as well, since they depend on artificial singularities for their operation.”

      “We don’t know if they’re really trying to change reality,” Schilling said. “That may be too much of a stretch even for them. But we have detected signals emerging from several stargates that suggest they’re broadcasting emomemes.”

      “And what the hell is an emomeme?”

      “?‘Meme’ is an old term for a transmissible unit of cultural information,” Socrates told him. “Especially one that can be passed on from mind to mind verbally, by repeated actions, or through general cultural transmission. Religions are memes. So are fashions in bodily adornment. Or popular sayings or slogans or tunes or fads in entertainment or advertising.”

      “Right,” Schilling said. “If I say ‘vavoob!’ That probably doesn’t mean much to you.”

      “?‘Vavoob.’ Nope.” He shook his head. “Can’t say that it does.”

      “But it’s a popular saying in Sol-System cities right now. It means … I don’t know. Sexy. Smart. Well integrated.”

      “?‘With it?’?”

      “With what?”

      “Never mind. Your point is taken.”

      “The expression is one of the current memes in human pan-urban culture,” Schilling told