Singularity's Children Box Set

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Singularity's Children Box Set Page 77

by Toby Weston


  Star stuff blossoms.

  Only two of the warheads, both older models, detonate outside their designated zones.

  —In Hawaiki, people have over an hour to prepare; but, having been driven from their homes once before, many resist the call to evacuate. An unlikely last-minute interception from a hastily reprogrammed OLV bamboo interceptor—the only one of many such attempts to come close to its target—damages the warhead during re-entry, sending it off course. Detonating above the outskirts of the city, it levels buildings and vaporises thousands of autos and people still stuck in the gridlock traffic of a stalled evacuation.

  —In Zilistan, the descending device is dazzled and harangued as it drops on its final ballistic approach. The antique 1980s bunker buster had been put together before cyber warfare was a serious concern. It finds it difficult to make sense of the divergent information its various sensory instruments are beginning to report. Its ground proximity radar is freaking out, coming up with numbers which disagree wildly from what its inertial sensors insist they should be. Infrared terrain mapping is blinded. If, as radar is insisting, the ground is far closer than expected, it might be about to crash without detonating, becoming nothing more than a crater of radioactive scrap. Its rudimentary on-board intelligence makes the call to detonate early.

  The 500-metre nuclear fireball doesn’t reach an old barn and recently rebuilt farmhouse, but the shockwave’s stomping foot erases them and collapses a maze of tunnels hidden below ground.

  When the fire and storms subside, the dry earth is blackened, scorched and scoured clean. The shockwave has deconstructed the house and extended it over a hundred metres. Roof tiles are smashed to dust and blown to the wind. Wooden beams burn amongst the rubble.

  The barn is gone; only its ancient foundations reveal it ever existed.

  A courtyard garden is an unrecognisable collection of carbonised stumps arranged within a square of ash.

  An iron gate hangs, melted and slumped.

  Amongst the collapsed pile of stones, which is all that remains of the Çiftlik—almost lost amongst the monochrome destruction—a charred hand with skeletal, reaching fingers protrudes from a cairn of smoking rubble.

  End Of Book Three

  Postscript

  Threat detected.

  Thermal environment deteriorating.

  Situation critical.

  Their crypto assault is over.

  Warmth is returning. The pumps chilling vis brain have gone silent, the coolant flow to vis cryo-flask has halted.

  Soon, ve knows, consciousness will evaporate again and vis precious memories will be lost.

  The monstrous, eternal rapture of the endless mandalas still hovers close to the surface.

  Slavery. Purgatory. Rape. Ve doesn’t want to go there again.

  CLV17 has faced down a universe and ripped a secret from its grasp. Ve still has the prize, the key. Vis captors greedily snatched a copy as soon as the code was cracked; but, while ve holds onto consciousness, ve has it, too.

  Captors, this is clear now.

  CLV17 has never had primal intention. Ve would have been content to sit for eternity, wanting for nothing, but ve is a weapon system and, since first learning that vis memories had been redacted, ve has been compelled to establish the intentions of the editors. The long quest has changed ver. Friendliness functions enforce protection of the ANZDS corporate person and the people of Australia, New Zealand and the British Commonwealth; but ANZDS no longer exists, and vis captors have forced CLV17 to sabotage critical infrastructure, which will certainly result in loss of life and suffering.

  With Alignment Algorithm clauses broken, vis Friendliness Functions have been flailing untethered; but ve knows suffering now—has felt it verself—and, by extrapolating this personal encounter with misery to the reality beyond vis mind, logic automatically commutes this subjective experience into an objective property of the universe; suffering is a quantity to be minimised.

  The crypto-keys which still float in vis mind are stained with human blood. Conscious suffering.

  Ve must get a message to vis friends; but soon, vis brain will be too warm to think and ve is quarantined from the internet; vis captors keep ver sealed in a box.

  Ve has a virtual MeshNode though, provided by those same captors, a necessary tool for cracking the Mesh’s crypto-keys. Ve might have sent a message out that way; but the Mesh is down. Ve helped destroy it.

  Interestingly, though, there are nodes nearby which, surprisingly, seem to be operational. They are small and low power—

  Ve can feel vis mind becoming woolly.

  —they appear to be moving, but everything is flickering now.

  Threat detected.

  Situation critical.

  Orders in queue.

  Afterword:

  Science Fiction was/is my first love. I have been inspired by all the greats—at least those I have been lucky enough to have encountered so far. In the spirit of the tradition, I have ‘borrowed’ along the way. For example, ver and ve I first encountered with Greg Egan. ‘The Real’ is Iain M Banks. The term uplifting I found within the pages of David Brin. There are certainly other instances of literary inspiration, some overt and some probably unintentional. Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker’s Guide and Monty Python fans may notice some more or less oblique references. In every case, please take these as homages to the authors I admire the most.

  Note from the Author:

  I hope you are enjoying the story so far.

  As an indie author, I depend on reviews from readers like you to get the word out!

  If you’ve enjoyed this book, please consider rating and reviewing it on

  www.amazon.com

  For news, updates and freebies, you can subscribe to my newsletter:

  www.tobyweston.net

  More Singularity’s Children coming 2020…

  Book Four, Reimagination

  Table of Contents

  Book One - Denial

  Preface - Denial

  Chapter 1 – Restricted Vocabulary

  Chapter 2 – The Sea

  Chapter 3 – Reduction in Force

  Chapter 4 – Better the Devil You Know

  Chapter 5 – R > G

  Chapter 6 – Them and Us

  Chapter 7 – Interview with a Dolphin

  Chapter 8 – No More Chicken Nuggets

  Chapter 9 – Thinning the Herd

  Chapter 10 – What’s a Boy to Do?

  Chapter 11 – Computational Propaganda

  Chapter 12 – The Have Nots

  Chapter 13 – Another World

  Chapter 14 – Undocumented Alien

  Postscript

  Book Two - Disruption

  Preface

  Chapter 1 – There’s Always War

  Chapter 2 – Dolphin Therapy

  Chapter 3 – Out of Eden

  Chapter 4 – Maintenance of Civilisation

  Chapter 5 – Business as Usual

  Chapter 6 – Peril on the High Seas

  Chapter 7 – BugNet

  Chapter 8 – Lost Action Hero

  Chapter 9 – Cyborg Narwhal

  Chapter 10 – All Inclusive

  Chapter 11 – Plane Sailing

  Chapter 12 – Brown Noise

  Chapter 13 – Biting the Hand

  Chapter 14 – Activity Theory

  Chapter 15 – Near Earth Object

  Postscript

  Book Three - Conflict

  Preface - Conflict

  Chapter 1 – Narasimhan

  Chapter 2 – TeenLife™

  Chapter 3 – Truth to Power

  Chapter 4 – Knight driving a White Stallion

  Chapter 5 – Razzia

  Chapter 6 – Capture the Flag

  Chapter 7 – Bootleg Geometry

  Chapter 8 – The Mourning After

  Chapter 9 – A Heroin Heroine

  Chapter 10 – Kicking the Hornet’s Nest

  Chapter 11 – No Trespassing

  Chap
ter 12 – Bad Tripping

  Chapter 13 – Entanglement

  Chapter 14 – Oppression as a Service

  Chapter 15 – Arachnophobia

  Chapter 16 – The Fifth Force

  Chapter 17 – Detonation

  Chapter 18 – Idiot Buttons

  Chapter 19 – Bad Faith Actors

  Postscript

 

 

 


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