***
Ariel had just breathed life into her avatar, all she had to do was hit “enter” to coax her to materialize out of the virtual reality world of the AI into the real world.
But Ariel was already dematerializing, as was the rest of Alpha Unit and what of Omega Force remained on Eresdra. Leon was calling them all back to the ship. And he hadn’t exactly flashed them any kind of warning.
The others were hugging it out with the locals while they were still tangible enough to squeeze one another tight. But Ariel was banging away on her keyboard to no avail, already too incorporeal to make contact with her “Enter” key. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
In desperation she tried a wild idea. She used her nanite-enabled telepathic link to the work-station AI she was communicating with. And she downloaded self-evolving algorithms that would allow for her avatar to tunnel her way out from the virtual world to the real world. It was a scenario she remembered from Dean C. Moore’s sci-fi novel, Sentience.
Now she had to hope it worked. She had been left no choice but to hack her way into the AI after herself ensuring such safety protocols were put in place to keep just anyone aboard the Nautilus from overriding her commands at the keyboard. She had allotted for at least one saboteur in their number. Why had such a notion occurred to her? The TV series on the VSC that had gotten her to sign on for this mission in the first place was Lost in Space—featuring the most classic of all stowaway saboteurs. Okay, granted that was a far more low budget affair than what she had since come to be accustomed to, but that was all the more reason to fear a rogue force set loose on the ship.
Her worst nightmare might still prove true.
Her coding had been written so that should she lose access to her keyboard commands, she still had a backdoor in, one that even a modern-day Doctor Smith was not about to find, not in their timeframe.
A cold chill ran up her spine that could not be explained by Eresdra’s winter weather giving way to Spring, and to a relatively “balmy” seventeen degrees or so—considering she was no longer corporeal enough to feel the planet’s effects on her.
What if this saboteur waited until they were across the star gate to show his hand? Maybe he was the final bit of insurance that assured that no amount of countermeasures would get them to survive the passage through the portal intact.
And why did she have reason to believe in such an outlandish idea?
If the master race that had decimated Eresdra once upon a time was still around, and it had bested the most advanced supersentiences in Eresdra’s heyday, who was to say it couldn’t hack the Nautilus? The saboteur may well be one of the Nautilus’s supersentient AIs as opposed to one of more of its crew members.
It was Leon’s job to consider all possible military contingencies. That was why he was head of Omega Force. Had he considered this one?
***
Patent would be the last to beam back aboard the Nautilus; he was holding off responding to her summons even now to ensure that Omega Force had made good on all of Leon’s promises before leaving the Nouveau Vikings behind. It wasn’t just a matter of good humanoid relations; it was a matter of honor, and of covering Leon’s ass. Patent realized that Leon’s mind would have moved on to addressing the latest strategic imperatives, and he likely would have lost track of what he’d assigned his people to do in his name.
But the NARs that had been promised had indeed stayed behind. The equivalent of teens and twenty-somes in humans hadn’t been allowed to commandeer all of the NARs for their purposes. Four of the NARs had been tasked with seeing to the seven and nine year old (again, in terms of what they looked like relative to humans.) They were the last births to have taken place on Eresdra, as the last of the mothers’ wombs had since become infertile. The womb infertility problem was being addressed by Ariel’s Avatar even as Patent’s mind digressed in relation to the subject of pregnancies.
The four kids-only NARS played with the pugnacious youngsters, actually encouraging their combativeness, per their dictates to bolster the children’s war-readiness. Already they were giving the constant twenty-four seven attention the parents could never afford to give. The kids were eating up the doting over them with a shovel-sized spoon. Techa help anyone that tried to keep those kids away from their new playmates. They’d likely cut open their own mothers than let anyone come between them and the NARs. For now they were playing a rather low-key game of tag from inside the cockpits of the NARs, the latter allowing themselves to be piloted as if elaborate exoskeletons that turned the kids into even bigger giants. That was one more reason no one was going to mess with these NARs—not the teens or adults of this world, or the other NARs for that matter, which were only a fraction of the size of the 4 NARs assigned to the kids.
Mind you, a game of “harmless tag” didn’t look quite so harmless on Eresdra as it did in other parts of the universe. Already, the kids had managed to tromp the nest of eggs of one of Eresdra’s more predatory lifeforms. It was anybody’s guess whether they’d survive the mother’s wrath with just the four giant NARs to protect them, or if the rest of the tribe would need to be called in and the other NARs recruited as well to get them out of the hot water a moment’s inattentiveness that any adult might be guilty of, far less a child, had brought upon them.
Patent smiled at the dinosaurs; the mother and the father belonging to the eggs joined the game of tag in process, determined to play “tag, you’re it” by getting their mouths around the two kids.
He shifted his attention to Asger, standing beside him. “I believe you asked Leon for some ear guards that would filter out the women’s nagging,” Patent said, handing him his gift.
Asger fitted the earplugs to his ears, and pressed the buttons on the in-ear mikes, and proceeded to watch Patent’s mouth moving without a sound passing through. When he pressed the in-ear mikes again, Patent was saying, “Well, what do you think?”
Asger smiled. “I think you are a people of your word.”
Patent smiled ruefully and sighed. “Sometimes I wish that weren’t true.”
“Don’t worry about us, my friend. We’ll be ready for whatever comes through that star gate next, no small thanks to you.”
“Good bye, my friend,” Patent said, giving him a big hug, but he was already dematerializing. Leon had overridden his determination to linger another moment; that or the Nautilus had sensed that his business was finished here.
Asger said something back in his native language. Patent didn’t quite catch it, but Asger’s tone said it all. Somewhere across this cosmos that they were both about to get lost in like needles in the proverbial haystack, these soulmates would find one another again; it was just in the nature of souls to do so in their maturation across eternity in which separation by different timelines meant little.
TWENTY-EIGHT
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Starhawk was playing a game of fetch with a tennis ball—from the perspective of the dog. It was the dog’s own panting and face relatively close to the ground that gave it away. With practice, he learned to switch perspectives to the one throwing the ball—the young child. The boy was Starhawk around the age of eleven. As if a ball in a pinball machine, he kept bouncing from one paddle to the other; each time he got stuck in one of the traps, it was the perspective of someone else in the backyard scene from his childhood: his mother bringing out a tray of treats for everyone; his father reading the paper in his swimsuit with his legs outstretched on the lawn chair; the five-year-old kicking her legs in the pool, supported by her inflated duck, which she wore like a particularly fat waist belt.
The uncomfortable sensation of being trapped in one head or another ultimately yielded to the soothing warmth of familiarity and family. As the tension bled away, the next head he popped into was his own—as he was in the present moment—aboard the Nautilus, in the Alpha Unit barracks. They’d pivoted him to face the pentagram-shaped obelisk outside the viewport. There was just enough battery-powered lantern light in the dark barrac
ks for Starhawk to catch a reflection of himself in the viewport. They had turned him into a utility rack. Dangling off his frozen arms were someone’s pants, a couple rifles hanging by their straps, and in the frozen grip of his hand was a box of condoms. Thrown over his face was some female cadet’s G-string underwear; it might have been red; it was hard to tell in the dim light. As to why the room was lit with nothing other than lantern light, many of the cadets preferred the sensation of camping out aboard the ship. Over a succession of deployments, they’d adopted a nomadic lifestyle they were hard-pressed to give up.
Starhawk peeled the undies off his face and tossed the rest of the items. “I can tell I’ve been sorely missed.” He gazed around at the barracks; most of the bunk beds were empty. Considering the Nautilus’s penchant for expanding on itself, they probably could each have had their own master suites, but old habits die hard; most of the men and women of Alpha Unit had grown accustomed to the forced proximity; it was as soothing as that backyard scene from Skyhawk’s youth.
The one person in the room was Satellite. “I can’t believe you abandoned me,” Starhawk said to him.
“Dude, who do you think planted that backyard scene from your childhood in your head?” Satellite gazed up from his currently uncurled 11” x 14” iPad—the latest version was a flexi-screen that wrapped around his forearm like an arm guard on a Roman gladiator for easy transport. The Nautilus could have whipped him up far superior tech, but again, even for the younger Alpha Unit cadets, some habits were hard to shake. Satellite was sitting on the bottom bunk closest to Starhawk. “In case you were wondering, the Nautilus’s communication nanites are damn near unhackable. I’m just lucky she rarely devotes more than an infinitesimal sliver of her super-sentience to any one task. Still took forever to convince the COMMS nanites in your brain to paint the pictures I wanted them to paint. And by the way, not to show off or anything, you never had a family like that; I just made you think you did.”
“Great. Just traumatize me all over again.”
“Speaking of, what brought on the catatonia?”
Starhawk groaned. “Smooth move, Sherlock. Did it occur to you that getting me to think about it all over again might just trigger another episode?”
“Good point.” Satellite shifted his attention back to his iPad.
Starhawk was simply happy he’d dodged the question for now. “You make any headway communicating with that star gate?”
“You mean did I beat the one-tenth of one percent of her majesty’s—I mean the Nautilus’s—super-sentience that she threw at the task? Perhaps.”
“What do you mean, perhaps?”
“Come see what you make of this.”
Starhawk took a painful step toward the bed, realized that his joints weren’t fully cooperating after his prolonged period in stasis. When enough time had elapsed and he still hadn’t arrived at the bed, Satellite said, “Fine, ignore me,” his face buried in his display.
“I’m not ignoring you, you dick. Seems like I forgot how to walk.”
Satellite looked up from his iPad in time to catch Starhawk’s latest winces and pained expression as he tried to pick up one knee with both hands and move it forward.
“Never mind,” Satellite said, moving from the bed to where Starhawk was standing. He shoved the display in front of Starhawk—still bent down half way to his waist as he tried to free up the frozen knee—to within inches from his face.
“Shit!” Starhawk exclaimed. “What the hell is that?”
“I know, right?”
“What are those, hieroglyphs?” Starhawk was looking at the close-up views of the carvings on the surface of the star gate. “No, wait… It’s like Close Encounters, right, the movie? Like at the end where the aliens and the humans try to talk to one another in the universal language of math?”
“That’s what I thought, so I had the Nautilus piggyback on this signal. She’s been helping me with the math.”
“And?”
“According to her, those formulas describe the different mathematical physics underlying different parallel universes. She’s been running the simulations to get a better sense of the nature of those parallel universes and what life might be like inside them, what biophysics is possible based on just the physics that follows from the math… the crazy lifeforms those sectors of space-time could actually support. All of which is beside the point, if you ask me. But she’s the one with mind power to spare, so I guess she can afford to get lost down any number of tangents.”
“So this star gate isn’t just affecting the local galaxies in this sector, like we thought,” Starhawk said.
“Nope.”
“I get it now. The maintenance crew inside the star gate—they awake to attend to repairs when in crisis mode, but when in sleep mode, they’re able to coordinate across parallel universes, affect what happens there. It would justify their dormancy, their willingness to spend 99.9% of their lives asleep. It’s like some altered state of consciousness for them that’s more potent than being awake. It’s the real secret behind the star gates uplifting magic.”
“Cool theory. Hopefully you’re right because it’s way cooler than anything I could come up with.”
“What did you come up with?” Starhawk noticed the threatened tone in his own voice, knew it traced somehow back to his response earlier that had thrown him into a catatonic state.
“I was wondering if those other parallel universes that the equations describe, if they might not be signs of the gate beaming its thought magic at them, so much as emanations from the various parallel universes themselves, each one trying to hack the star gate. Maybe they’ve figured out its purpose as well and they want it to focus more of the uplifting light on them, subtly enhance and accelerate their evolution. Maybe it’s like young chicks in a nest vying for mother’s attention. The more aggressive ones get fed the most, and ultimately outcompete the meeker ones, starving the other universes of attention, until their balloons burst or deflate, making room in turn for the last remaining universes to grow to maturity. That’s assuming Stephen Hawking is right, I mean, that most of the action in any universe happens along a thin membrane or boundary, just as it does inside our bodies between the peripheries of the billions of cells communicating with one another.”
Starhawk stared at him hang-jawed. “How is it that your theory isn’t cooler than mine? Dude, it’s way cooler.”
“You think so?”
“Shit, yeah. It’s also the last thing you want to say to a guy who just spent seeming ages in catatonia, unless you’re trying to get him to regress.” Starhawk slapped Satellite upside the head.
“Good point. Consider this your desensitization therapy.” Satellite flicked the images on the screen, looking for other hieroglyphs on the star gate’s surface that jumped out at him. “I should probably mention that Omega Force has its own theory about what those hieroglyphs mean. Leon says the White Indian from the amazon appeared to him and explained that certain artifacts from worlds the star gate has been uplifting can be fitted into individual carvings to give access through the gate for those particular peoples.”
Starhawk thought about it. “Huh. So the individual carvings function to open the star gate—not just constellations of the etchings, which key instead to certain parallel universes.”
“Yeah, I thought it was a pretty crazy idea myself, until I came up with this even crazier one. Something tells me there are still more to the runes etched into this thing than we can divine.”
“Huh.” Starhawk thought about Satellite’s assertion that there might still be more ways of reading the runes, decided he liked the idea. “Good one. You got any more shocks for me?” Starhawk grabbed the display out of Satellite’s hands, scanned through the runes to see if indeed he could divine other ways to read them.
“No, that’s it, really. Guess my mind sort of locked on to my big idea like a dog with a bone, and maybe it froze up in its own way, like your mind froze up.”
Starhawk h
anded Satellite back the display. “I remember now why I retreated into a catatonic state.”
“Was it something I said?”
“It was totally what you said.” Starhawk was running toward the sliding doors with the Alpha/Omega overlapping symbols on them.
“Cool. I’m so the man.” Satellite shifted his attention back to his display. “Maybe I can figure out how many of these civilizations have matured enough to attempt hacking the star gate. And if there’s some critical mass they might hit even working separately and without knowledge of one another that might force the gate open.”
***
Starhawk slid into the hangar-size room that had turned him to a pillar of salt once before for daring to look back at the sight of that crashed space ship. It was hovering as innocuously as before, the most threatening thing about it being that ominous sounding hum that it forever gave off that occasionally caused things to vibrate in the room as the oscillation waves built on one another, crested with a minor “earth tremor,” before dissipating again. Starhawk, still in his socks, which made braking difficult, slid to a stop in time to catch the latest quake.
But he was a bit more shockproof than the last time he entered this room. He ran up the levitating steps and through the clam’s airlock door. The air inside, rank with decaying flesh, greeted him as it had no doubt greeted the others to enter before him. Why the air hadn’t dissipated into the adjoining room now that there was nothing blocking the air from escaping was another mystery. Starhawk passed his hand between the outside and the inside of the ship through the doorway to see if he could detect any air pressure differential that his body didn’t sense earlier. Nope. Screw it; they’d likely be trying to make sense of this craft for the next hundred years. The topic was a bit off point for now in any case.
Starhawk noticed the ship was buzzing with newborns from the Nautilus, humanoids whose facades and physiques didn’t look any less alien or any less trippy than the dead bodies they were studying. The fields of expertise ranged from field medics to astrobiologists, astroarcheologists, astromicrobiologists… Each patch on the shoulders of the Nautilus’s crew inside the clam pointed to some other specialty that the Nautilus was translating for him; he sure as hell couldn’t decode them all just by the symbols and acronyms on the patches. Like it or not, Alpha Unit and Omega Force now had a third unit, Theta Team. Starhawk picked the letter from the Greek alphabet mostly because it was one of the few options that had two syllables to match the other letters they’d gone with. Though he doubted he’d be the one given the honor of naming them.
The Star Gate Page 29
