“Universe X? A doorway to my universe? Why?” Old-timer asked.
Aldous nodded, ready to elaborate. “We couldn’t access Planck portals on our own, but there was one place we knew of that did have the technology. Universe X. And if the door opened from your side, we knew we could traverse the boundary and escape this frozen hell with you.”
“What happened to your universe? You said it was erased, but I don’t understand that,” Old-timer said, readying himself for what he knew could only be a mesmerizingly absurd answer.
“V-SINN,” Paine responded, the corner of his lip curling slightly as he reflected on what he saw as the source of all of their shared loss.
“V-what?” Old-timer asked.
“V-SINN. Short for Virtual Specialized Intelligent Neural Network,” Aldous explained the acronym.
“A.I.?” Old-timer reacted.
“Of a sort, yes,” Aldous replied. “Of a very ill-conceived, extremely unpredictable, and extraordinarily advanced type.”
“But I thought you said you weren’t able to build an A.I.” Old-timer questioned.
“I wasn’t,” Aldous replied, as though he thought the point was obvious. “I certainly didn’t build V-SINN,” he said, placing his hand on his heart with indignation to emphasize his innocence.
“Then who—”
“V-SINN built itself.”
“Huh? I-I don’t follow you,” Old-timer said, shaking his head as he tried to understand. “How could it—”
“That’s where you come in,” Paine said. A can of beer suddenly appeared in his hand. He popped the top open and took a swig.
“Me?” Old-timer said, suddenly alarmed. Does he know? How?
“Your people,” Paine corrected himself, pointing with the hand that held the beer as he swallowed, “your universe, Universe X. By the way,” he held his beer up for Old-timer, “you want a cold one?”
Old-timer’s eyes were wide for a moment as he looked at the simulated beverage.
“Don’t worry,” Paine said with a slight smile. “It tastes as good as the real thing. It’ll even give you a buzz, but only while you’re in the void.”
“Then yes.” Old-timer nodded emphatically. “I could use it.”
Paine grinned as he tossed a second can, seemingly summoned out of nothing, toward Old-timer. He then turned to Aldous and Samantha. “He sure seems like the Craig we knew, doesn’t he?”
“Indeed he does,” Aldous said, returning the hint of a smile.
Samantha remained silent, but she couldn’t help but think the same thing. “Do you know why they did it?” she asked Old-timer, trying to keep everyone on topic, since it helped to distract her from the bittersweet presence of the twin of the man she was sure was her soulmate.
“Why who did what?”
“Why they crossed into our universe and attacked us. Why they left their technology behind and never explained why?”
“Uh…” Old-timer stuttered again, not knowing how to reply. “I think…I think it was a mistake,” he offered. As soon as the words left his lips, he experienced the deepest feeling of cowardice he’d ever felt in his life.
“It was a mistake they could’ve undone by coming back,” Samantha fired back. “How could they do that? Just left that tech here—terrified the hell out of the whole world, and then to not even bother to come back to explain. It was as if we were nothing to them, not even worth a second thought!”
Old-timer was rendered speechless. He hadn’t opened his beer and couldn’t muster the strength to reply or even move his finger on the tab.
“It’s not his fault, Sam,” Aldous said in Old-timer’s defense. “Our people could’ve chosen to react in a much more thoughtful, considered way. It was our own fear, our own overreaction that led us to this.” He turned to Old-timer. “Besides, it’s not like Craig can be held responsible for the actions of whoever crossed over.” He smiled at what he saw as the absurdity of the notion.
Old-timer still couldn’t speak. Instead, he doubled over and dropped his beer, nearly falling off the log in the process before catching himself at the last moment.
“Are you okay, Doc?” Paine asked as he watched Old-timer try to regain his breath.
“I-I’m sorry. I just didn’t...I wasn’t expecting any of this. This was just supposed to be a reconnaissance mission. We were just supposed to check and make sure everything was okay.” He looked up at Samantha, who, after a brief moment that was too painful for either of them to bear, looked away. “I-I’m so, so sorry.”
Aldous seemed to appreciate the gesture and the honesty and grimaced faintly. “You couldn’t have known, and as I said, the burden of blame is on our people, not yours.”
“Why?” Old-timer asked.
“The technology that made its way into our hands should’ve been seen as wondrous. It was a gift,” Aldous said as his heart swelled with the memory of the grand possibilities. “The materials, the power source, the advancements in nanotech—all of it should’ve led to the end of humankind’s suffering.” His face suddenly paled. “But instead, all our leaders saw was an imaginary threat. They couldn’t see past their own terror, so every instinct became about survival.”
“As far as they were concerned,” Paine said, taking over, “if this other universe had more advanced technology, and had already attacked us once, killed our citizens, then our only alternative was to prepare as quickly as possible for an imminent second attack. Comparisons were made at the highest level to Columbus versus the Native Americans. The Conquistador was brought up a lot too. The fear was that we’d be wiped out, and with no way of knowing when the next intrusion into our universe would come, every imaginable resource was suddenly funneled into reverse-engineering the advanced tech your people had left behind. They tried to gain a workable understanding of it as quickly as possible so they could build weapons with it so we could defend ourselves.”
“On the surface, it may sound like a rational response,” Aldous said directly to Old-timer, “but there was so much they failed to consider.” He closed his eyes tight as he thought about the missed opportunity. “They were so blind to the dangers.”
“V-SINN?” Old-timer asked.
Aldous nodded.
“But you said it built itself. How?”
“Nanotech,” Samantha answered. “The Planck portal and the prosthetics on the dead cyborg soldier’s body were rife with intricate nano structures. Within a decade, the age of nanorobotics had arrived.”
“V-SINN was a nanorobot neural net,” Aldous elaborated. “It had incredible abilities and aided us tremendously. We solved so many problems with its advanced algorithms and specialized intelligence. Advances in medicine came rapidly, disease and even aging were eradicated. An age of abundance was upon us.”
“But then,” Samantha cut in, “V-SINN woke up.”
“Woke up?” Old-timer reacted. “It became conscious?”
“It didn’t pass the Turing test,” Aldous pointed out, “so it didn’t pass for human, but it—”
“It stopped taking orders,” Paine stated frankly as he finished swallowing a swig of his simulated beer. “And just like that, we had ourselves an artificially generated intelligence that could outsmart us and didn’t particularly seem to give two shits about the problems of the human race.”
Old-timer thought back to a conversation he’d had with Colonel Paine in his own universe, so many decades ago. That version of Paine had warned about the exact scenario that the trio of cyber ghosts were now relating to him. Back then, Old-timer hadn’t wanted to listen—he’d thought it was the trifling fears of a Luddite—the small-minded concerns of an evil man. But now, here he was, being told that very scenario, that very nightmare, had come true.
“V-SINN wasn’t even remotely human,” Samantha further explained. “We could never understand it, and because we couldn’t understand it, it got out of our control.” Then she held her hands up to the void around her. “And that’s how we ended up here. Nowhere. E
rased.”
12
Rich and Djanet returned to Universe 1, and floated just above the surface of the Planck platform, seemingly hanging together in a still picture. Old-timer’s body had unfurled dozens of tendrils to latch itself into place on the platform’s surface. He had warned them about potential time distortions after a crossover, but this was their first experience with the unpredictable effects of universe-hopping. Hovering there momentarily in their miniature tableau gave both of them the time to absorb the terror of what they saw all around them. Rather than being in open space, covered by the radiation of a coronal mass ejection, they found themselves surrounded by the android armada, their incomprehensibly monolithic ships seemingly still, blocking out the vastness of the starscape around them.
Then, a moment later, like a video clip suddenly taken off pause, the ships began moving again, the Planck ripple having subsided. It immediately became clear that the ships were moving at a tremendous speed, continent-sized ships sailing past them on a trajectory that both Rich and Djanet immediately recognized was heading toward Earth.
“What the hell is going on!?” Rich shouted.
“James, are you detecting this?” Djanet asked through her mind’s eye. A few seconds later, her face paled as she turned to Rich. “No response.”
“James?” Rich asked through his own connection. “Commander James Keats, this is Rich Borges. Come in! Are you there?”
“Try the A.I.,” Djanet urged.
“I am,” Rich said in a near panic. His terror increased several fold when he saw the look on Djanet’s face as she stared behind him. He turned to see one of the android ships, a structure larger than most of the moons in the solar system, heading straight for them on a collision course. “Get the Planck and Old-timer’s body onto the ship before we get demolished!” he shouted to Djanet.
They scrambled to guide the Planck safely onto the craft James had designed for them. When the platform lifted back up into the belly of the ship, they re-pressurized the interior and fired the thrusters.
“Can we outrun them?” Rich shouted.
“I don’t know. They’re fast! Calculating!”
“Calculate faster! Or we’re gonna be bugs on this thing’s windshield!”
“I think we can outrun ‘em,” Djanet called back, slight relief in her voice. “We can open wormholes and suture space together, just like the android ships, but we’re smaller, so the energy is far less for us. We should be able to beat them to Earth.”
“But will we be able to send a warning message to Earth if we’re going faster than light?” Rich asked.
“I doubt it, but we can try!”
Rich looked down at the screen in front of him, which showed a real-time image of the enormous vessel quickly gaining on them from behind. “You better plot the course and open the first wormhole, because we’re getting sucked into this thing’s gravity!”
“I’ve almost got it. Just need to—”
A second later, a lone android male, on a kamikaze-like trajectory crashed himself right into the front of their ship. He clung to the front screen, digging his powerful fingertips into the transparent palladium composite, causing shear bands to form on the screen’s surface.
“Uh, we just got a hop on,” Rich stated over his shoulder to Djanet. His eyes met those of the android, who bared his teeth ferociously as he determinedly held on to the post-human craft. The android then began to look around the craft, craning his neck, swiveling to examine the structure for any potentially compromising weaknesses.
“I’m ready to open the first wormhole!” Djanet confirmed for Rich. “It’ll be a rough ride for him. Maybe we can shake him off?”
“I’d be comfortable with that!” Rich called back as he watched the android attempt to punch through the palladium. Luckily, even its powerful fist wasn’t enough to cause anything more than a scuff. “Yeah,” Rich continued, “let’s give that a try. Quickly.”
“All right. Brace yourself.”
Rich held on to the console in front of him. “Hit it!”
Djanet opened the first wormhole, and the familiar white whirlwind of sound and fury enveloped them.
13
“You really have been cut down to size,” Thel whispered harshly to the A.I. as they made their way up the elevator in the candidate’s building, “because anyone with even half a normal human brain wouldn’t think this is a great place to lie low.”
James was almost able to stand under his own power, his head having cleared enough that he could speak, but he squinted in the harsh light of the elevator as Thel and the A.I. continued to help prop him up on his unsteady, rubbery legs. “Wh-where are we?” he asked.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Thel replied.
“What?” he groaned in reply.
“We’re in the candidate’s building,” the A.I. answered. His complexion was frighteningly pale as he hadn’t yet stopped the blood from oozing out of his partially consumed face. He held his still sopping-wet jacket against it, trying to keep the blood from dripping onto the elevator floor, attempting to prevent a pool of blood forming, leaving clear evidence behind of their presence.
“Easily the stupidest hideout we could have—” Thel began before the A.I. gently cut her off.
“Not a hideout, per se. It’s imperative that we be here,” the A.I. stated.
“If the candidate finds us, he’ll tear us to shreds,” Thel countered.
“That’s unlikely.”
The elevator stopped, just one floor before the penthouse, just below the belly of the supposed beast.
The door opened.
The A.I. stepped out into the hallway first, swiveled his head to look both ways, then stepped back into the elevator to help Thel with James. “The coast is clear,” he said in a low tone.
“The sim is purging,” Thel replied. “If an NPC sees us and they start swarming, we’ve got no way to protect ourselves.”
“Let’s just get him to the bedroom,” the A.I. said as he recognized the similar layout of the apartment to that of the penthouse just one floor above. Though the memories were old, they hadn’t faded in the slightest. The apartment they were now in was extraordinarily similar to the one in which he’d been burned alive—a recollection he wouldn’t soon forget.
They laid James on the bed, and he groaned softly. “Thank you,” he said in a faint whisper.
The A.I. put the back of his hand on James’s forehead. “Good. No fever.”
“What’s a fever?” Thel asked.
The A.I. briefly considered how little people like Thel, born in the era of post-humanism, knew about the frailty of the natural human body. “A fever is one of the body’s natural defenses. If there’s an infection, the body automatically raises its temperature to try kill it. The absence of a fever means James doesn’t have an infection—at least not yet.”
“Should we lay him on his side or…”
“I don’t know,” the A.I. said with a shrug. “The sim does have a rudimentary version of the Internet, however. We all lost our aug glasses in the crash,” he said as he got up from the side of the bed and started searching the apartment for a device, “but if I can get online, I’m sure I can find directions.”
Thel sighed and closed her eyes, trying to be patient. “This era is so...slow...fumbling with clunky devices to access information that may or may not be accurate. Thank God I didn’t have to live back then, when everything was so archaic.”
“Well, we’re stuck ‘back then’ for the foreseeable future,” the A.I. responded. He opened the drawer in the bedside table and found a bracelet reminiscent of one he remembered from his own time as a candidate, inhabiting an extraordinarily similar sim. “This will do,” he said. He swiped the small touchscreen, searching for information. “It’ll just take me a moment to hide our location, and then…voilà. Hmm. It appears James’s chances of surviving depend on whether or not he inhaled water into his lungs.”
“We know he did
,” Thel said, her heart suddenly thundering to life in her chest.
“Not necessarily,” the A.I. replied calmly. “There is a chance that the water never made it past his nose and mouth, since his airways might have automatically closed off. I saw him clutching his throat as though that were indeed the case. If that turns out to be what occurred, then his chances of survival are quite high.”
“What if he did inhale water into his lungs?”
“Then there’s still a chance of secondary drowning, unfortunately.”
“Secondary drowning?”
Anywhere between now and forty-eight hours from now, he could develop pneumonia symptoms. If that happens, he’ll die quickly, unless we can get him out of the sim.”
“So what do we do?” Thel asked, desperate. “Just watch him?”
The A.I. nodded. “At the very least, we have to let him recover from his concussion. Remember, all of our avatars are human and, therefore, extraordinarily suboptimal. A concussion recovery can take anywhere from just a few hours to a few weeks, depending on the severity.”
“Did you read that online too?”
“Yes,” the A.I. replied before setting the bracelet down on the bed and slumping his shoulders, exhausted.
“What about your face?” Thel asked, standing up and crossing to the other side of the room to check on the A.I.’s gruesome wound.
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