by Terry Mixon
“I’m very much afraid that Julia may be correct. It may prove impossible to do anything more than obliterate the master AI. Even so, that’s still a significant accomplishment. The remaining AIs aren’t exactly well-known for their independent thinking.
“Without the master AI guiding the overall activities inside the Rebel Empire, the defense against the Clans is going to degrade. Even if the AIs win that particular war, it is unlikely that they will remain united.”
Sean leaned forward and looked around the group. “We also can’t rule out the Singularity sticking their oar in. As soon as the AIs and the Clans are locked in battle, you can almost count on the Singularity invading. We’re going to have a three-sided war in no time flat.
“Even if we manage to subvert the master AI and order it to shut down all the automated defenses throughout the Rebel Empire, the Clans will take possession of the majority of the systems, and you can be certain that that’s when the Singularity will stick a shiv in their backs. No matter what happens going forward, things are going to get messy.”
Kelsey shook her head. “I’m not sure that messy even begins to cover it. I heard something about a potential method to get to where I believe the master AI is hiding. Simply based on a couple of hints that the AI running the trap dropped, I think Alpha Centauri fits the bill.
“There’s no one in the Terra system that can make note of the passage of ships back and forth into Alpha Centauri. It would make the perfect hiding place, and it gives a reason for the AIs to attempt to eradicate all life on Terra.
“If they manage that, no matter who wins this war, they’re not going to want to risk spreading the Omega plague throughout human-occupied space. That means the master AI would still be safe and secure.
“Depending on the support structure in that system, it could build a fleet to rival anything that exists now. Time is a meaningless construct to a machine that lives forever. It would be more than willing to wait decades or even centuries to strike back. After all, who would expect it to come out from hiding after all that time?”
“That’s a chilling thought,” Jared said grimly. “At this point, we don’t exactly have a lot of options. Even if we can get there, it’s going to be chancy, depending on the defenses. If Elise is right and there is a back door, that might at least make a strike possible, but it’s not going to be as easy as sneaking into Twilight River would’ve been.
“I realize that might not make a lot of sense, considering that the AI never knew about the multiflip points or the far flip points, and we only just found out about the ultra-far flip points. Hell, going through the map that Talbot and Carl found might reveal even stranger phenomena. At this point, I’m not willing to rule anything out.
“Elise, can you lay out what we know from the map so we can bring Kelsey up to speed?”
His wife nodded. “One of those ultra-far flip points that Jared mentioned leads from the Obelisk system straight to Alpha Centauri in a single flip. My theory is that the aliens picked up a sampling of life on Terra millions of years ago, took the flip to Alpha Centauri, and then took one straight to the Obelisk system. They could’ve come via a different route, I suppose, but Occam’s razor suggests that they used the ultra-far flip point.”
“That’s wild,” Kelsey said. “I supposed that it doesn’t hurt to check the thing out. It’s only a single flip, and then we’ll know whether or not my theory is right.”
“A single flip, yes, but Carl tells me that the ultra-far flip point will take almost a week to reach, even if it’s exactly where the map claims it is. We’ll need a similar amount of time to come in on the Alpha Centauri end. If it hasn’t disappeared over the scale of millions of years.”
Kelsey felt herself frowning. “Wait a second. Flip points disappearing? How does that work? The things are eternal.”
“They might seem that way to us,” Sean said, “but over the scale of time we’re talking about, stars move. If two stars that share a flip point connection get too far apart to support it through their gravitic linkage, then it fades. Other stars that were distant from one another come close enough to form a new connection.
“The flip point network is always changing, from the way I understand it. I had to read a lot into Carl’s report, but it seems clear that for our purposes, we can consider flip points to be basically eternal. Over the entire existence of the Terran Empire, less than a dozen have disappeared or formed, but the phenomenon did happen.
“The question we should be asking is, considering how far apart Terra and the Obelisk system are, does that ultra-far flip point still exist? There’s not really a yardstick we can use to measure how far apart something like that can be and still exist since we don’t understand the science that goes into explaining them.”
Kelsey wanted to ask more about that, but that would basically be just displaying her ignorance. Either the flip point existed or it didn’t.
“How do we go about figuring out where this flip point should be?” she asked. “Does the map down there display it to that level of detail? Are we going to have to go back down to look at the map, or did we make a recording that we can reference?”
“There is a recording, but I can try to get more information about the location and placement of the flip points without referencing it,” Elise said. “That might be a good test of the alien tech, since I know how to make that part work.”
Kelsey blinked. “You can? How?”
“One of the benefits of having alien nanites running through your body is apparently still being plugged into their network somehow. I can bring up the control interface even here in orbit, so it’s conceivable that I can access that portion of the map. It doesn’t hurt to try, right?”
Elise stood and made a strange kind of gesture with both of her hands. She then reached out as if she were spinning something in front of her and touched her finger to something.
Kelsey received a communications request through her implants from Elise and accepted. Moments later, a video began flowing through the connection, and Kelsey saw the room as Elise saw it.
Only the room looked a lot different, with the massive star map floating over the table with numerous colored lines shooting through it.
“Is that the map?” Kelsey asked, her voice hushed with awe. “Is all this data just being displayed through your implants?”
“It’s not coming through my implants. This is precisely how it behaved down below. We assumed that holoprojectors were showing us everything, but maybe we were wrong. Maybe I can see all of this because I’ve got the alien nanites in my body.
“What I can’t understand is how I can have all of the data. There’s no processing power to back any of this up, no data storage. How is this even possible?”
Her friend made a twisting gesture with her fingers and then raised an eyebrow. “Can you see the map now?”
Kelsey frowned. “You mean without you sending it? No.”
“Well, it was worth a try. I was able to make it publicly viewable down below, but that probably had something to do with the chamber.”
“Can you find out roughly where the ultra-far flip point in this system is and what Alpha Centauri looks like?” Jared asked.
“Based on the other systems that I’ve looked at, the data on Alpha Centauri is going to be from millions of years ago,” Elise warned. “It’s not going to show us anything relevant to the layout there except for where the flip point is located. The data we have in our own computers is going to be a lot more recent than what the alien interface can show me about that system.”
“Then let’s start with the flip point,” Kelsey said. “We’re going to have to probe that system to find out what we’re up against. The good news is that word of the attack on Twilight River can’t possibly reach it before we do if this flip point really exists.
“When they created the master AI, they had more than one override. It’s possible that the master AI destroyed the rest. Their existence is an unlikely chance, b
ut it’s the best hope we have at this point. We’re going to have to figure out what’s waiting for us on the other end, sneak into it, and do whatever we can to force the master AI to give up.”
Kelsey knew exactly how low their chances were, but they weren’t zero, and that meant that they had to try. Uncounted trillions of human beings were counting on them to succeed, and she wasn’t going to even consider failure now.
Elise expanded the map and showed the Obelisk system. The ultra-far flip point was indeed a long way out from the star.
“Okay, that tells us where we have to go look,” Jared said. “Persephone will do the scouting, but because of the travel time, the entire fleet is going. Let’s wrap this up and find out what we’re really looking at.”
29
Elise left the conference room, picked up her robotic henchman, and made her way down to Carl’s lab. What she really wanted to do was go to the medical center aboard Caduceus to see the gestation pods, but she knew that she couldn’t be in the same area as her children. Not now. Maybe not until they were decanted. That stung.
Jared would visit them soon, and she longed to be with him, but she wasn’t going to put them in danger. There’d be time enough to figure out how to safely be around her babies once they finished this damned fight.
But to do that, they had to make this work. She couldn’t magically wave her hands and create a map of what they would find at Alpha Centauri. All she could do was try and figure out how to effectively use whatever the aliens had done to her.
She suspected it was going to take a long time to even get a basic understanding—if that was even possible—but she’d never get there if she didn’t devote herself to the task. The robot could do various things, and she could do at least some of them too. Perhaps by testing the robot, they could figure out more about what she could do as well.
Thinking about the robot made her turn her head slightly and eye it as it followed along behind her on its long, spindly legs. It still unsettled her, but she was getting used to it. She really didn’t think it had designs to harm her.
From the haphazard way in which they’d found it, she knew that it wasn’t a trap. It had been designed to serve the aliens, and for whatever reason, it had decided that she was an acceptable replacement. As she doubted the aliens had wanted their servants to harm them, it would likely be an annoyance at times but not a threat.
Fitting into a lift with it was something of a challenge, particularly when there were other people present. It had no concept of personal space and would jam people into the corners. People who had no desire to be anywhere close to the thing.
She’d started settling the problem by politely asking if she could commandeer the lifts for herself and her companion. No one seemed inclined to argue.
Once she reached Carl’s laboratory, she walked in and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw what they were working on. They’d set up holoprojectors of their own and had displayed the flip point map that Talbot had recorded on the planet using the Marine Raider drones. It looked like a colorful pile of spaghetti to her, but she knew that there was order to it.
Since it had displayed its contents for them starting at the Obelisk system and then going out in layers, it had been possible to record the inner portions of the map as they’d appeared.
The map showed all of the flip point connections in various colors. The thought made her frown slightly. What did that mean? Did that mean the flip points were somehow different from one another?
Speaking of colors, what shades did the aliens see in? Just because this was what they’d recorded, was it truly all of the information that had been displayed?
What if the aliens saw things in infrared, ultraviolet, or even something more esoteric like magnetism or temperature? There was no telling, and she wasn’t going to make assumptions that just because she and her human companions saw something, that meant that was all there was to it.
With that thought in mind, she marched up to Carl, where he stood talking with Austin and Ralph. “Hey, boys. What’s going on?”
“We’re working with the map to see if we can formulate any basic theories about how the flip point network actually works,” Carl said. “Thus far, we’ve determined that there are regular flip points, multiflip points, far flip points, ultra-far flip points, and some weird potential flip points near the center of the galaxy that might lead to other galaxies.
“The ultra-far flip points are a lot rarer than any other kind—except for the potential ones at the core of the Milky Way—and they’re set a great distance from their host stars. Also, some of what we’ve been calling far flip points can be placed farther out than I’d suspected, but there is still a gap between where far flip points stop and ultra-far flip points start.
“The ultra-far flip points can take a traveler a long way. We’re talking around ten thousand light-years in a single flip. The far flip points act much like regular ones, though they have a somewhat extended range of around a thousand light-years. They’re definitely a different beast than their more extended cousins.
“To me, it looks like the ultra-far flip points connect nodes of flip points together. Sure, there’s some overlap at the edges, but the ultra-far flip points don’t seem to go to the same locations, cosmologically speaking.”
Elise considered that and slowly nodded. “So, leaving aside the potential galactic flip points, what you’re saying is that for close flips, we’ve got the regular flip point network and the multiflip point network. The far flip points go a greater distance, but they don’t cover the same range as the ultra-far flip points.
“I can see that. What kind of coverage are you thinking they add up to, and are we certain that we’re seeing everything the map has to show us?”
Carl frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Just because we can only see in the visible spectrum doesn’t mean that the aliens couldn’t see more. There might be ultraviolet and infrared or even more esoteric things like temperature or magnetic resonance. I have no idea, but I don’t want to assume that what we’re seeing in the map is all there is.”
Her young friend rubbed his chin and then nodded. “That’s valid, but unless we go back down to the planet with a lot more equipment, we’re not going to get a second reading out of it. Frankly, I’m not sure that I want to take the risk of going down there again. There’s no telling what might happen next time.”
“What if I just display the map and see what I can figure out?”
His frown deepened. “Are we talking about using the recording that you made? It won’t be anything close to the resolution the drones got.”
She shook her head. “I just found out that I can still display the map. I have no idea how these little machines store the information inside me, but it doesn’t seem to be relative to being in the obelisk.
“I’m more than willing to give it a try and see if we can figure something out. What’s the worst that can happen? We end up with the same map that we already had and don’t learn anything new.”
Carl made a gesture for her to continue. “If it’s anything like what you saw down in the obelisk, we’re not going to be able to see what you see. Frankly, if what you’re saying is correct, you might not be able to see all the things that you think you should see. It’s not as if you have the optic nerves that the aliens had.
“Who knows how the nanites are getting the information to you? Are they feeding it into your implants, or are they just placing the information straight into your brain? It might be some kind of overlay that they’re generating through your optic nerve, with its inherent limitations.”
“Damned if I know. You’ll have to tell me. Eventually.”
At Carl’s gesture, Austin turned the holoprojector off, leaving the area above the table free of obstructions. When she made the gestures to create the map again, it bloomed to life, filling the top half of the compartment. Unfortunately, the show was only visible to her.
Or was that really true?
She’d already proven that she could force a hatch to do what she wanted. That was a lot different than what she had in mind, but the general principle was similar. Could she send the information to the holoprojector?
She wouldn’t know unless she tried.
Elise closed her eyes and extended a hand toward the holoprojector. Without saying anything, she willed it to show what she was seeing. Sadly for her, nothing seemed to be happening. Still, this was a lot more complex than opening the hatch, which had taken a couple of seconds.
“What are you doing?” Ralph asked, his eyes narrowed.
“I’m trying something that shouldn’t be possible,” she said in a low voice. “Just give me a minute.”
She continued trying to exert her will for the holoprojector to display the map she was seeing. A minute passed. Two. And just as she was about to give it up as a stupid attempt, the three men gasped, their gazes snapping up.
Everything looked the same to her, but based on the way they were staring at the area over the table with their mouths open, they could now see her map too.
Carl turned toward her, his expression one of both awe and consternation. “You did that? You made the holoprojector display what you wanted without even feeding the data into it?”
Elise shrugged slightly. “It’s more like I willed it to happen, and something else figured out how to make the process work. Obviously, the alien nanites understand me a lot better than I do them. Do you see the full map? I’m not sure that I’m seeing the same thing you are.”
The young scientist turned back toward the map and put his hands on his hips as he looked upward. “It certainly looks like the full display of the Milky Way. There’s a lot of information there, so I can’t tell which time frame we’re looking at. This might be from millions of years in the past, or it might be the current layout. Can you tell which it is without checking the parts of the map that we’re familiar with?”
