“Yes?”
“I want to be the first one assimilated...tonight.”
“Tonight?” 1 responded, amused. “I admire your dedication, but it really isn’t necessary. You’ll need to remain a post-human for the time being or else—”
“I’ll be a post-human too,” Aldous interrupted. “I want to be a hybrid. I’ll need an MTF generator so that I can pass for post-human, as well as the ability to access the post-human mind’s eye system, but my plan also requires that I be an android before it begins.”
1’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“You know why,” Aldous replied.
She nodded. “Yes, I do. I just wanted to hear you admit it.”
Aldous paused for a moment before finally acquiescing. “Fine. I am taking away your ability to renege on our deal. As I see it, there are three things you can use to blackmail me. The first is Craig’s life, which is why I won’t help you gain access to the Purists until he’s delivered to me on Venus as an android. The second is my wife’s life, which is why I want to be the one to assimilate her. I’ll keep her pattern with me until our mission is complete. And the last is my own life. If I’m already assimilated, but in a body of my own specifications, not the least of which is that it’ll be separate from the network you use to hop from person to person in your high-tech demonic possessions, then I’ll be rather difficult to terminate. Is that good enough for you, or would you like to waste more of our time?”
“Oh I didn’t waste our time,” 1 responded, causing a look of concern to cross Aldous’s face. “Getting it on record just gives me a little insurance.”
Aldous’s eyes became quizzical. He didn’t understand what she meant, but as Old-timer watched the replay, he did understand. 1 knew that Aldous’s memories might be viewed against his will, and she wanted to make sure Aldous wasn’t in a position to deny anything.
She thrust her hand out once again. “Ready this time? Do we have an agreement?”
Aldous narrowed his eyes before reaching out with his own hand to make their covenant official.
The deal to betray post-humanity had been struck.
14
Old-timer sneered as he looked into the guilty expression of the man whose memories he’d just viewed. “I’d say it was a deal with the devil,” he seethed, “but I’m not sure which one of you is the bigger devil.”
“Get over your pretensions, Craig!” Aldous retorted, his voice scratchy like broken glass as a result of the damage Old-timer and 1 had caused, electronic, garbled pops inundating the words. “You’re smart enough to know better. You have eyes! After everything you’ve seen, everything you now know, you still dare assign condemnation? You still cling to the belief that an infinity computer is a good thing?”
Old-timer grabbed Aldous with his powerful hands, balling the former chief’s shirt in his fists as he pulled Aldous’s face close to his. “You don’t know that Trans-human will be like those other computers. You betrayed everyone based on a hypothesis. A conjecture!”
“That’s right!” Aldous shouted in return, his voice sounding computerized and inhuman. “Trans-human might kill us, and all evidence points to the fact that it will, but I don’t know it for sure. And what you’re too blind to see, even though it’s right in front of you, is that we don’t have to place the bet! All we have to do is walk away from the table and we’ll ensure that we’ll live on!”
“Live on?” Old-timer responded, aghast. “As androids? Running for our lives throughout the multiverse? Buying time until the whole thing is eventually destroyed?”
“Perhaps so,” Aldous answered. “But I’d rather live today than die today. With life, there’s still a chance—still hope. With death, there’s nothing.”
“Trans-human might be our chance to change the game!” Djanet shouted, injecting herself into the conflict as she and the others watched Old-timer and Aldous’s shouting match.
Aldous turned to her and shook his head, regretfully. “Trans-human will never be activated...and James and the A.I. are now dead.” He turned to Rich, who stood several meters away, behind the others, still holding the hard drive in his hands. “I would’ve protected them—my goal was always to preserve them! But your insistence on behaving irrationally—like children—has led to their deaths. They will have used that Tesla tower as the signal boost to send their patterns on a course for Earth by now, and 1 and the androids would’ve had no choice but to disrupt them, erasing their patterns forever.”
“What?” Old-timer said, horrified by the pronouncement. “You’d better be wrong, you son-of-a—”
“They died en route,” Aldous responded, his lips twisted in disgust as he relayed news that he, himself, was distraught by. “It didn’t have to be this way…if you’d have just used your damn reason!”
Old-timer dropped Aldous to the dusty surface of Venus and turned, as if in a trance, to 1, who remained in the body of a nearly random android named Jules. “This can’t be true,” he whispered, his voice failing him as he spoke.
The android that housed 1 looked at the figures who surrounded her, each of them scrutinizing her countenance. “It can be true,” she replied.
Old-timer’s eyes welled with tears, and his head dropped, bowing as he fell to his knees, the pain of the loss too much for him to bear. It was, he thought for a moment, the final straw on the back of his sanity.
“But it’s not true,” 1 continued.
Old-timer’s face snapped up in astonishment. “What did you say?”
Aldous’s expression mirrored Old-timer’s as he propped himself up on his elbows, his mouth opening with wordless surprise.
“James and your A.I. live on,” 1 announced. “At this moment, the signal containing their patterns should be arriving on Earth.”
15
WAKING UP was not something James had to work hard to accomplish; in that instance, the A.I. had taken care of it for him, already bringing his nervous system back up to optimum parameters.
What would be difficult was what would happen next.
“Jesus,” James cursed when he felt the enormous pressure that encapsulated his entire body.
“We’ve been driven several kilometers below the surface of the Earth, James,” the A.I. related calmly. “Your body’s sensor array is functioning correctly and quite impressively, but since we’re no longer connected to a mainframe, there’s actually too much information for our core matrix processing power to sort through. I’m trying to determine how far below the surface we are so—”
“It doesn’t matter,” James grunted in reply as he began wriggling his body, using his enormous strength to break apart the earth around him, allowing him more room to gain even more leverage. “The body is strong enough, and even if there’s too much information to process, I can sense the gravity field enough to fly. All that matters is that we get out. Now.”
“Agreed, although, James, you should prepare yourself for what you’re about to see. It will be, albeit on a slightly smaller scale, a replay of the incident in which the moon was originally formed after the Earth collided with another body roughly the size of Mars. The android ship was smaller than Mars, but when a collision is that massive, the results are quite extraordinary.”
“I already know,” James responded through gritted teeth as he managed to pry himself enough room to raise up his legs and push the crust of the Earth away from him. He began to propel himself upward, into the darkness, his determination increasing as he progressed, the crust exploding out of his way as he moved. “It won’t matter. We won’t let this outcome stand. It’s up to us to make this right.”
“Indeed it is, James,” the A.I. replied, though his tone reflected dubiousness that didn’t match the focused determination James was exhibiting.
“What is it?” James asked as he continued to fight his way to the surface, clawing and punching, forcing the darkness in front of him to give way meter by meter, the sound of his escape so deafening that the A.I. had already turned
their shared aural sensors down to near zero.
“We’re still in the dark, metaphorically as well as literally. Do you not find that troublesome?”
“Your intuition again?” James responded.
“I suppose so,” the A.I. replied. “I’ve been connected to the mainframe for so long—I’ve been in control and sure I had the tools to solve any puzzle, so much so that to be disconnected has created what I might describe as something like phantom limb syndrome.”
“I know the feeling,” James agreed. “Even though my time in the mainframe was shorter than yours, losing those extra abilities feels like losing a huge part of yourself.”
“Every instinct I have is screaming at me to run game theory scenarios based on our new information to determine the answers to our questions,” the A.I. complained, “but we simply don’t have access to that sort of power. It feels as though we’re fighting blind.”
“We’ve got your brain pattern and mine,” James reminded him as he grunted, continuing to fight his way to the surface as only a superhuman could, “and two heads are better than one.”
“This is too easy.”
“Too easy?” James responded as he continued punching. “Are you not connected to my optics yet?”
“Of course I am. I am aware that burrowing up to the surface is difficult, but when we reach the surface we’ll be able to fly to Trans-human, and from there, you’ll be able to input my pattern. Then, in theory, I should be able to firewall us and, using the computational power of Trans-human, reverse all of the events in the solar system, thereby restoring the lost lives of the Purists and the biosphere of the Earth, not to mention the mainframe.”
“Right,” James huffed in reply as he felt the pressure decreasing noticeably. “We must be getting close to the surface.”
“James, we’ve been a step behind throughout this entire ordeal—at least since the androids fired that anti-matter missile at the mainframe, which, at the time, appeared to be against all reason.”
“You’re saying there was some method to the madness?”
“Think about it. That action caused us to move up our timeframe for testing the candidate and inserting a core matrix program into Trans-human.”
“Sure. The androids, and most likely 1, made a deal with Aldous and Aldous would’ve suggested poking us with that anti-matter missile stick to prod us into immersing in the sim. Elementary. You hadn’t figured that out already?”
“I had, James,” the A.I. replied, “but what I have yet to figure out is how and why their plan went astray. Both Aldous and the androids benefited from us being trapped in the sim, so who took control of the Kali avatar and gave us the help we needed to escape? Who benefits from this?”
“Does it matter at the moment? As long as we put things right—”
“I think it does, James, because if our plan goes accordingly, all of this will be much ado about nothing, almost literally, except for our memories of the event.”
“Maybe whoever it was just wanted to help us put things right.”
“Maybe, but something tells me something isn’t right.”
“It’s natural to worry when you don’t have all the variables,” James replied, reassuringly. “Welcome to how most humans feel every day of their lives.”
“Perhaps. But may I remind you that the nan’s black hole computer has already swallowed one of the android’s ships. We may not have as clear a path to victory as we think.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that,” James responded. “Other than keep our fingers crossed that its only target was the android’s mothership. Hopefully, it got a bellyful of our solar system and has moved on.”
“Things are seldom that—”
Suddenly, the noise and vibration that James had been experiencing increased tenfold. He stopped, bracing himself against the two rock faces that he’d only a second earlier created by splitting the granite above him with his fists. The rumbling continued, despite his ceasing his upward progression toward the surface. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
Almost as soon as he’d asked the question, the first jet of molten rock sprayed over his hands and then jetted down farther, into the seemingly bottomless fissure he’d created. The glow of the lava was the first light James had seen since he’d awakened besides the reflected glow of his own azure eyes.
“You’re nearly at the surface, James. It will remain molten rock for several days yet. Be prepared.”
“We’re going to put this right,” James asserted, this time vehemently as he gritted his teeth, resuming his upward push. The further up he went, the more lava jetted down until James was eventually engulfed, the surface of his body beginning to glow as his punching and clawing eventually gave way to him flying through the extraordinarily bright, nearly white-hot liquid surface of humanity’s formerly home planet.
When he finally burst free, his momentum caused a plume of molten rock to follow him upward for hundreds of meters as he flew away from the surface, sneering as he focused on his goal.
Behind them, the Earth glowed, a combination of whites, oranges and reds, interspersed with infrequent veins of black rock that, themselves, floated like vessels over the sea of death. The debris field extended as far as the moon, which was still blue and white, its oceans having survived so far. But it was taking on so many impacts from gigantic, newly formed meteors—meteors that had been part of the Earth just hours earlier, that the moon’s ability to support life wouldn’t last long.
“If this were to remain the state of affairs,” the A.I. observed, “the Earth would likely gain a second smaller moon, unless the moon itself were to swallow up the—”
“Stop it,” James said to the voice in his head. “It won’t remain,” he asserted, once again. “We can’t go faster than light speed,” he pointed out, focusing on his mission, “but I think I can still warp the gravity field enough to ride a wave to Trans-human that’ll make it seem faster than light.” James sighed. “I can beat light time by maybe 50 percent.” He grunted with the frustration his new limits were causing. “I’m not liking being cut down to size like this.”
“I understand and empathize,” the A.I. replied, “but you’ll be happy to know there is another option.”
“Yes?”
“Your sensor array is picking up an object orbiting amongst the debris field that is of your own creation.”
James smiled. “Are you serious? The Planck platform is in orbit?”
“Indeed. Old-timer or Djanet must’ve used it to cheat light speed and get to Earth. If we reach it before it is destroyed by a collision with debris, we can use it for the same purpose.”
“I smell what you’re cookin’,” James responded excitedly. “Set a course. If this goes according to plan, you’ll be in control of Trans-human and turning back the clock in no time.”
“I hope you’re right, James. I hope you’re right.”
16
“What!?” Aldous exclaimed, his voice still electronically gargling in his throat as he yelled at 1. “Why? Why would you do that? You know what happens if that machine is activated!”
“I know what has already happened,” 1 responded. “I know an infinity computer destroyed the Constructor, and with it, took the stored patterns of everyone in the collective. I know it will take years for us to rebuild the Constructor, and in the meantime, any android who dies will potentially be lost forever. That is unacceptable.”
“So you are calling an audible,” Samantha observed, causing Old-timer’s eyes to dart to her.
Djanet was reminded of Samantha’s earlier use of the expression and her claim to the knowledge that Craig liked football, but she was wise enough not to bring it up.
“That’s right,” 1 replied. “Aldous shared with me the memories you received of our initial attempt to assimilate this universe. Trans-human turned back time in that instance. If James and your A.I. succeed at doing that again, they’ll only have succeeded in reseting the table, and that’s a
n outcome that, given current circumstances, I find exceedingly acceptable.”
“But…” Aldous was flummoxed as he struggled in the dust to get to his feet. “You described gods in other dimensions to James when you warned him about his ignorance, gods like Trans-human! You’ve assimilated hundreds of Earths to prevent this very thing. How can you now just flip flop—”
“I’ve successfully overseen the rescue of nearly 200 Earths, that’s true,” 1 responded, “but I have not successfully overseen this one. Chief Gibson, our constructor ship is gone. Our collective is effectively crippled. That is unacceptable.”
“So you’ll risk all of our lives?” Aldous shot back, his voice skipping in an out as the damaged system struggled.
“Turning on an infinity computer has always been a bet that I and the collective have sought to avoid,” 1 explained, “because our mission was to preserve life. Today, we’ve failed in that mission. If I want to reverse that outcome, I must place the bet. I must bet on your A.I. and James Keats. It’s double or nothing, so to speak. I have no other option.”
“But you do!” Aldous fired back. “You can retreat! Save the lives of trillions who remain—”
“Chief, there is no retreat,” 1 replied. “The Constructor housed the most precious commodity we had: our patterns—our souls. To maintain the integrity of our system, our only way to access the fantastic power of the collective was also contained in the ship. You’re aware of the power it requires to move your pathetic Planck platforms from one universe to another. Try to fathom the power required to successfully transport vessels the size of the Constructor. We had the technology, but that technology was just lost.”
“Are you saying the collective is trapped in our universe?” Old-timer asked, suddenly realizing the terrible implication.
1 nodded. “Yes. We can generate enough power to evacuate individuals and small vessels, but it would take days. A quick escape is impossible, and if the infinity computer that destroyed the Constructor so chooses, it can destroy this universe before I can get even a small fraction of my people out of here.”
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