The Reality Assertion

by Paul Anlee

  The knowledge of God—she realized.

  She let her mind drift as the entire universe opened up to her knowing. Secrets at the base of nature revealed themselves. Equations, a torrent of equations, threatened to overwhelm her, then snapped neatly into position within her own knowledge base and instantly enriched her understanding.

  She saw how she could cast complex fields to affect the interactions between particles. She saw ways to shape the infinite possibilities of the laws of nature and to mold new real matter with different physics.

  She extrapolated millions of years of experimental work in the only universe she’d ever known into myriad new, hypothetical universes.

  The playground of the multiverse opened before her.

  How will I ever have the time to explore all this? She felt at once daunted and inspired by all the new knowledge filling her mind.

  Why would Alum want to destroy this? To freeze the beauty of possibilities? His fear of the unknown must be enormous. Unbearable.

  She couldn’t imagine ever feeling that way.

  Unbidden, a memory bubbled up: during her previous incarnation, her Kathy-self had imposed exactly that kind of restriction on her own knowledge and abilities.

  Oh, yes. Well, there was that.

  Darya looked inward, and examined her own persona. She pushed past her damaged CPPU paths to find the incomplete traces of knowledge and memories that lurked beyond.

  Despite Alum’s crimes and the dire threat He posed to her own existence, she was not entirely without compassion for the man acting out the role of the Living God. Was Alum likewise damaged and just striving to give Himself and His People a life with less pain?

  She’d done a commendably thorough job of protecting her archives from herself. She found snatches of memories and frustratingly brief hints but couldn’t make sense of them.

  Except one.

  A full ten seconds of an ancient memory. She saw a young—so young!—Kathy Liang version of herself drifting into peaceful sleep beside the Greg Mahajani version of Darak Legsu. She felt the love she’d experienced in that moment, and let the sweet contentment wash over her.

  How much have I lost?—she cried.

  Darya pushed aside the new power and capabilities flowing through her. She would make time to explore those later. Right now, it was time she to confront her incompleteness.

  She sent a message to Darak. I still can’t get past my blocks and into the missing bits. We’re losing precious time. Help me—she implored.

  She sensed him pushing past her burgeoning new knowledge and into the deep, damaged part of her. Atoms rearranged within the lattice structure of her CPPU and reformed damaged memories, concepts, and beliefs long forgotten. Her life, all that Darak had known of Kathy Liang and of DAR-K blossomed within her mind.

  She remembered.

  I haven’t been able to alter your original substrate to mesh perfectly with the quark-spin nature of the newer parts of your lattice—Darak said. I can’t see how it works yet, and we don’t have time for me to figure it out on my own.

  In the glow of the love that resurfaced within her restored memories, she showed him where to find the secrets she’d locked away, revealing ages worth of research probing at the boundaries of matter in the real universe.

  It was his turn to learn.

  This is brilliant!—he said.

  He went back over the repaired parts of her CPPU substrate and adjusted them to match the rest of her brain.

  Darya’s thinking quickened as he made the alterations.

  A gift for a gift!—she laughed.

  It sparkled through her mind and leaped across the open channel into his. She felt him copy and implement the quark-spin changes into his own mind, felt his own thinking quicken with new computational power.

  I’ll need a while to process this—he said, staring at her. But first, let’s save Eso-La.

  Five seconds had passed since sak Lahr had alerted him.

  * * *

  darian LEIGH didn’t need convincing. He closed his eyes and turned off his anti-virus security.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  He chuckled, and reframed the question.

  What do I have to lose? I’m barely a complete person, anyway.

  He nodded permission, and Darak invaded his mostly-lattice but still part-biological mind, dragging an enormous concepta behind him.

  The volume of information rose above Darian like a tsunami. It blinded him like an exploding sun. He struggled to not scream or run away in terror from the flood of new understanding.

  Darak scanned the man’s mental structures, searching for appropriate places to integrate the new knowledge.

  The task proved unexpectedly challenging. He’d fashioned the God-concepta for Darya. Darian’s mind was a jumble of a whole different sort.

  Too many branches of the association pattern go nowhere.

  When he’d pulled Darian’s memories from the Eater and put them into the shell of Trillian’s body—what seemed like a normal human lifetime ago—it had been an emergency quick fix, and he hadn’t had the time to fill in every detail. He’d meant to go back and finish the job properly but he’d been busy raising the shattered personas of a million Cybrid minds into new Full personas and training them to attack Alum’s Deplosion Array. He’d neglected to go back and complete the job with Darian. His guilt over the irresponsible omission almost made him change his mind and attempt some kind of kludge.

  Should I leave him as a Partial God? No, that wouldn’t be fair to anyone, unleashing such an abomination on the universe.

  He set his lips. No alternative. I’ll have to finish the job, now. It’ll be a good test for my new CPPU.

  Only seconds had transpired since he’d reconfigured his own brain to incorporate Darya’s quark-spin lattice but already he could feel his mental processes accelerating to new heights.

  And that’s only with my “Darak” lattice—he thought. It would take a little longer to propagate the changes out to his Cybrid, Aelu, and Angel selves, all hidden away in other universes.

  No, his human lattice would have to step up to the task on its own, given how little time they had.

  He extended Darian Leigh’s lattice overlay further into Trillian’s original biological brain. He laid down fresh dendy tracks along neural pathways that had remained untouched for ages.

  He didn’t replace the brain tissue. Darian was starting to get used to that; he would need some time to adjust. But he did upgrade Darian’s existing lattice to Darya’s quark-spin technology and brought its circuit density up to his own standard.

  If I’m going to make a God of Darian, he will be my equal, not a subordinate. Darian deserves no less.

  Darak worked quickly, supplementing Darian’s knowledge of the physics of the Reality Assertion Field. He filled in memory gaps from the man’s life with archived files, details Darak had stored away long ago.

  The process felt like paying off a long-owed debt to the mentor who’d first opened him to the universe.

  To think, if I hadn’t caved in to sentiment, I would’ve discarded most of the Darian memories shortly after leaving Alum’s service—he thought. Luckily, I didn’t. Here’s to sentimentality!

  The long-buried files made Darian Leigh whole and lifted him to a plain of knowledge he’d only had a glimpse of before Larry had trapped him inside the microverse that would become the Eater.

  I started all of this in motion—Darian Leigh realized as his new memories solidified. What others had made of his early achievements awed him. He enjoyed a moment of pride and then quashed it.

  I may have initiated it but Greg and Kathy—Darak and Darya—have carried it forward for millions of years. Now, Darak has returned the knowledge to me, amplified and refined a million times over.

  A tingle tickled at the edge of his mind where new lattice was penetrating antiquated tissue. He pushed his new consciousness into the nascent lattice and probed at the hints of neural activity
he found there. A splinter of a memory shot to the front.

  What’s this?—he wondered as the trace unfurled. Something unexpected. A back door?

  He let the code pass through his mind. Alum’s QUEECH channels!

  “I’ve found something that may be useful,” he said and heard for himself the tone of bewilderment in his voice.

  “Save it,” Darak replied. “Can you do what we need to do? Both of you?”

  Darian and Darya reviewed their new knowledge and noticed how smoothly it integrated with the familiar.

  “I can,” they answered in unison.

  Eight seconds had passed.

  26

  “Alum is defeated!” Depchaun proclaimed. He settled back into his throne to soak up the surprise and admiration that he knew would fill the Hall of Thrones.

  “What...?”

  “How…?”

  “You…?”

  Depchaun rested contentedly and waited for the din to die down.

  Ishtgor leaned forward, “Be truthful, did you send us out to explore the rest of Alum’s Realm so you could launch your attack?”

  “Are we to fear you now, Depchaun, as we once feared Him?” Lyv sneered. The disdain and amusement in her voice made clear what she thought about that prospect.

  Raytansoh took it all in quietly. Nobody expected him to contribute, anyway. His millennia of silence had guaranteed him time to think about what the others were saying and to choose his words carefully before chiming in.

  Depchaun levitated off his padded stool, drawing everyone’s attention and bringing silence to the Hall.

  “Thank you,” he began. “More accurately, I should say that I confronted Alum in a double ringworld system, what He and His people call His Home World. I defeated Him there and took control of the ringworlds.”

  “Pahh!” Glenchax responded, making light of Depchaun’s extraordinary achievement and dismissing it in a single wave. “One whole system, you say?”

  “Yes, only one,” Depchaun replied. “He closed off access to His distributed self before I could penetrate further. But the principle has been established and I’ve shown Alum to be vulnerable. Imagine what we could do if we invaded His Realm as a cohesive front!”

  “Oh, I see,” Lyv said, much too sweetly, “that changes everything. In that case, shall we tally up your great achievements, Depchaun? Let’s see. You hastily claimed a tiny piece of Alum’s Realm, a fine trinket, to be sure. Oh, yes, which you did behind our backs. And, let me see, what else? You alerted Him to our presence. You let Him—or the majority of His distributed consciousness—survive, and you ensured He would seek punishment and revenge. Did I leave out anything?”

  “Never mind that. What’s done is done. We must attack now!” Glenchax advised. “Immediately, while Alum is still reeling from the loss of His Home World.”

  “First, tell us how you did it,” Ki-tan-la urged.

  Depchaun ignored Lyv’s scathing sarcasm and answered Ki-tan-la.

  “I finally saw through the gross deception that has kept us cowering here in this microverse of Alum’s making, and I took the initiative to attack.”

  “Correction: this universe was established by Darak,” Glenchax said.

  Depchaun turned to Glenchax. “Or so we all thought,” he taunted. He pointedly met the eyes of each of the other Gods in turn.

  “Quit speaking in riddles,” Lyv admonished. “Are you suggesting Darak and Alum are one and the same?”

  “Ah! So you’ve contemplated this as well?”

  “Haven’t we all? But why would Darak attempt such a deception?”

  Depchaun scanned his audience in the Hall. Yes, he had their complete attention now.

  “In retrospect, it seems obvious. What better way to subdue us and quell our ambitions than to invent a God that intimidates even Darak, the most powerful of us all?”

  He let that thought rest with them a while, and remained quiet while they ran their various simulations of Darak’s motivations in the context of a Realm that might be different than had been portrayed to them.

  Lyv shifted on her throne, first left and then right. Her grooming mites scurried quietly across her pincers and forelegs.

  Glenchax shuffled uncomfortably from foot, to foot, to foot, to foot.

  Ki-tan-la twiddled both pairs of opposable thumbs.

  Ishtgor floated up and down over his throne.

  Raytansoh agitated the water in his tank.

  “Have you been able to verify this hypothesis?” Lyv asked, with no trace of sarcasm or chiding this time.

  “Good question!” Glenchax jumped in. “What direct evidence do you have to support your speculations, Depchaun? My simulations are hardly conclusive. The evidence is open to various interpretations.”

  “The evidence may only be circumstantial but it fits with our experience. More importantly, it fits with my defeat of Alum/Darak at His Home World.”

  “Let us examine your reasoning together,” Ki-tan-la suggested.

  “Very well. Consider each of these points. We have nothing but Darak’s word to suggest Alum exists as a separate entity. Darak emphasizes the danger Alum represents, but resists our proposals to take direct action to secure the universe and our places in it. Right after we distracted Darak with our attack on him here, I easily conquered Alum’s Home World. In fact, it was entirely too easy, as if He’d been off considering His next strategy to keep us at bay.

  “And where is either one right now? Perhaps, having barely survived our combined might, Darak/Alum has withdrawn to a more defensible position. You’ve all seen this isolated ringworld they call Eso-La. I think that’s where He—they—may be now.”

  “From what I could tell,” Raytansoh answered, “Eso-La appears to be entirely outside of Alum’s Realm. Perhaps only Darak with his uniquely reckless shifting can access it. My drones followed your navigation guides there, but they were discovered by some kind of tripedal machines.”

  He sent an image to the others.

  “The tripeds destroyed one of the drones; within seconds the rest all stopped transmitting. I’m not sure if they were obliterated, deactivated, or just had their signals blocked.”

  “Fool!” Dephaun yelled. “Those are the Aelu that Darak mentioned only a millennium and a half ago. Review the meeting.”

  He sent a short clip of the long-past meeting in which Darak discussed the Aelu and their war against the Realm.

  Raytansoh felt the flush of humiliation. He’d transferred his records of meetings older than a thousand Standard years into archival storage. Nothing important had happened for so long and it had seemed pointless to keep irrelevant memories active.

  “The deficiency is mine,” he acknowledged to the group. “But I was thinking…do any of you still have contact with the Eso-La ringworld?”

  No one replied.

  “I’ll take that as a no. If Alum, or Alum/Darak, is aware of our incursions into His Realm, perhaps He has set traps for us.”

  “Traps? What kind of traps?” Depchaun demanded. “I attacked. I penetrated His system security. I was quick and ruthless. He was unable to initiate any RAF countermeasures.”

  “And does that sound like the Darak you know?” Raytansoh shot back. “Does that sound like the Alum he describes?”

  Depchaun fought to keep his voice level. “That’s. What. I’m. Saying. Alum is not the God we must fear. Darak is Alum, and He’s fled, following our show of force and on seeing our determination.”

  “I concur,” Lyv purred, salivating over the idea of conquering Alum, of conquering Darak, and especially, of taking great parts of His Realm for herself.

  Raytansoh extended his tentacles over the front of the tank. “And I disagree. My explorations showed an impressive collection of colonized planets, intricate asteroid habitats, and sophisticated ringworlds. Everything runs remarkably smoothly, in fact, it’s exceedingly efficient for such a large empire. I find it hard to believe Alum would simply abandon such a Realm. He may be strong
er than your apparent victory indicates. He’s up to something.”

  “Of course it’s efficient,” countered Depchaun. “It’s running mainly on programmed automatic systems. On autopilot. I think Alum/Darak has withdrawn much of his conscious control.”

  Raytansoh retreated within. Now, who’s the fool?—he silently admonished. You’ll get us all killed. Alum laid a beautiful trap, one so seductive you ignore how obvious it is.

  Frantically, he searched for some way he could survive, should the others choose recklessly. If he couldn’t dissuade them from this plan, he’d better figure out a way to outlast their foolishness.

  He had a pretty strong hunch he wouldn’t succeed by withdrawing to his own empire and awaiting his fate while the universe was destroyed, and his gut feelings were rarely wrong.

  Besides, millions of his own drones were already located all over Alum’s Realm. Theoretically, they could all be traced back to him. If he missed collapsing even a single entangled particle, he could face an invasion himself. There had to be another way.

  He sorted through his collection of entangled particles that Depchaun had found on the dead Angel.

  We sent out exploration drones to wherever the pairs led. But Angels wouldn’t blindly jump to random particles. They must have identified and catalogued potential destinations somehow, somewhere. There must be some kind of key or roadmap to guide them.

  He examined the nanoparticles more closely this time. They were set in a curious configuration. Each nanoscopic particle was bound with about a hundred similar particles on a larger grain of some ten-to-the-twentieth carrier molecules. On first inspection, he’d assumed that this was no more than a storage convenience. But what if it were both a storage convenience and, say, a filing system?

  As the other Gods argued, Raytansoh isolated a few of the grains and bathed them in a variety of radiation modalities along the electromagnetic spectrum. A certain narrow range of frequencies excited the grains, causing them to emit encoded signals. Raytansoh recorded the signals and set about decrypting them. He separated the remaining grains and exposed them to the same treatment, hoping to discover some version of Realm-specific navigation coordinates. A part of the decrypted signal did indeed contain strings of letters and numbers but, without. a reference point, it remained meaningless gibberish.