The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  “Take me to one of the crime lords calling the shots in this district.”

  “Nut case it is.” The driver swerved the car in the other direction. “You’ll forgive me if I drop you off within walking distance. Those guys have perimeter patrols that not even a robo dog could sniff its way through.”

  “Why did you pick me up, really?” Leon asked suspiciously. He hadn’t forgotten what thought had triggered this whole psychotic episode.

  “You realize I’m not real, right?” the driver replied, staring at him with a pitiful “get a clue” expression. “The reason I say that is I have a little voice in my head telling me I’m not real, that I was just synthesized in the moment by an all-knowing supersentience, and well, it makes about as much sense as anything else around here. That and when I try to remember my past, it seems I’ve lived two billion lifetimes and I remember them all with vivid detail. If that supersentient bitch wanted to make a point about who’s really in charge around here, I’d say she made it. Must say though, it’s a real bitch to not know if you’re real or not until somebody asks.”

  “Why is it you trust the voice in your head?”

  “If I don’t that would make me a nut case. God, I really hate nut cases. So that can’t be it.”

  Leon smiled despite himself. For a guy born five seconds ago, the taxi driver was really growing on him. “I came here expecting to face impossible odds I’d have to fight my way out from under. At least I thought that was the deal.”

  “Trust me, pal, you might want to try some diplomacy where you’re headed, save the saber-rattling for when you’re good and tired of living, because you aren’t shooting your way past those guys.”

  Leon smiled ruefully. The driver might have a point. Leon hadn’t had to rely on his political acumen in a while; he was probably a little rusty. Negotiations with the Nouveau Vikings notwithstanding. They were hardly a real test for his deliberating skills. But likely, too, there was more to this than the Nautilus supersentience was saying.

  “Here you are, Pal,” the taxi driver said, bringing the air car down to the curb. “His name is Sonny, by the way, the mobster you’re going to go see. Figured you might want to get at least that part right. Oh, and he hates, I mean hates, being called Sonny.”

  Leon restrained another smile as he stepped out of the taxi. Leon tapped his pockets. “Hey, what do I pay you with?”

  “Relax, pal. Says here,” the driver pointed to his dashboard visual display, “that my next fare is a multibillionaire. So I’m guessing your fare is covered by his tip and then some. If not, I’ll hunt you down and fleece your dead body. Not like you’re walking out of this mess.” The driver zoomed off, gaining altitude as fast as he was putting horizontal distance on Leon.

  As Leon walked in Sonny’s direction he realized how much fun he was having and that it never occurred to him that “Mother” was smart enough to design a combination AR-VR-POR (Augmented Reality-Virtual Reality-Plain Old Reality) retreat for him that was every bit as entertaining as it was taxing to survive. His men might not need downtime in the classic sense ever again.

  Sonny’s security team definitely made an impression. They were freaks, one and all, the worst kind of genetic mutants, likely from early attempts to splice genes together that had no right being in the same test tube. In any other reality they’d have been killed at birth, rejected by their parents, but their gasp appeal was such that some thought perhaps ill-fate could be turned to their advantage, the kids sold off to the circus or… Leon expected this was more of an Oliver Twist story. Sonny had drawn his army of loyal followers from the homeless and downtrodden, with the intent of making the fortunate serve them in some other capacity besides gaping, gasping, and tossing coins at his freaks.

  Leon shouldered past them, pretending to be blind, holding his poker face, refusing to let his eyes linger on any one, instantly intuiting who would gain entry into Sonny’s club without being hassled too terribly at the door, or worse, shot on sight, or played with like a cat plays with a mouse.

  Inside, the bodies were writhing on the dance floor to techno music. The club’s more select clientele were obviously Sonny’s middle managers, his district “dons”. They were dressed in elegant clothing and expensive jewelry just made to look all the more ridiculous contrasting against their inborn hideousness. That didn’t stop the gorgeous male and female hookers on tap from cozying up to them on the dance floor or at the bar in hopes that some of the money would rub off on them.

  Leon made a beeline for Sonny’s table; it wasn’t terribly hard to locate amid the hubbub. It was against a far wall on a raised platform, allowing for easy ogling of the entire bar. He didn’t bother with extra security around his table because at the flick of a finger, anyone and everyone would respond, since they were all in one way or another on his payroll.

  Leon took a seat opposite him in the booth. Sonny looked up from his seven course meal, surprised. He had a face that would make a basset hound howl for its mother. Though the drooping jowls made him more akin to a Bull Mastiff. “Well, well, if it isn’t Leon DiSparta. Fancy meeting you here.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t think much of your security.”

  “Yes, well, you definitely worked an obvious loophole in my defenses I’ll have to plug. We get a fair amount of blind bouncers applying for work, all too happy to trade their other heightened senses and beefy bodies for money. But you guessed as much, or you’d have tried another approach. What can I do for you, Leon?”

  “Forgive me, but before we get down to business, I have to know, are you real, or are you one of Mother’s sims?”

  Sonny laughed hard enough to choke on his food. He managed to spit some of it out, and rushed the napkin to his face. “Hope I didn’t get any on you,” he said, finishing cleaning himself and the table up. “Oh, yes, we’re quite real. You could say we are her original cast and crew. Took her awhile to perfect the whole aliens-are-among-us thing.”

  “And she permits you to live because…?”

  Sonny’s face showed he’d taken offense, but he quickly adjusted. “The same way she allows any of us to live, I suppose, by finding some way to justify our existence. Maybe it just keeps her from feeling lonely. But our real value-add is in carving out new niches of debauchery, evolving humanity into ever new hell holes she can’t be bothered to contemplate, because it would serve her no purpose to. Not on the million-to-one chance any of them will pay off. But in a multiverse this big, fair to say, we’ll earn our keep sooner or later.”

  Leon grunted. “Fair enough.”

  “Now, your question?” Sonny hadn’t interrupted his meal the entire time Leon had spent in front of him.

  “I thought from time to time you might let me play fly on the wall, go on ride-alongs with your men, learn from the master. I can give you better than one-in-a-million odds sooner or later my survival will hinge on a pointer or two I picked up from you and your guys.” Leon hastened to add the final hook. “That would be in exchange for whatever goods and services you needed in return from me, of course.”

  Sonny laughed, this time without turning his mouth into a Gatling-gun ejecting shrapnel in Leon’s direction. He must have noticed Leon hadn’t bothered to wipe his face from the spittle that had landed on him earlier; that he was being careful not to show the least sign of disrespect. As Sonny sobered and his laughter subsided, he said, “You’re very diplomatic for a military leader.” He stared Leon down, then he said, “I’ll be only too happy to grant your wish.”

  Leon could tell from Sonny’s face that he was already pondering what he wanted in exchange for such largesse. But he had time enough to contemplate that. And there was no need to sour the deal now by driving Leon into a corner he couldn’t get out of. First he’d learn more about his opponent playing on the other side of the chess table.

  Sonny gestured for him to leave. Leon nodded respectfully, and sauntered out of the club the way he’d come in. He, of course, had known that he wasn’t getti
ng out alive unless he told Sonny something that would hold his interest, make him play Leon’s game. Maybe he wasn’t as rusty at this diplomacy gig as he thought. Then again, it was a little too early to tell who had fallen into who’s web exactly, and who was the spider and who was the fly in this scenario.

  Right now, Leon was more interested in how any of this fit in with what lay ahead for them. He gave this chapter in his life a mere seven on a scale of one to ten for ominousness, but a much higher rating for sheer strangeness and innocuousness. Then again, this entire jaunt so far, from the time he hopped on the spaceship was a matter of dealing with puzzle pieces, none of which fit entirely right until they just did.

  Maybe this latest puzzle piece had to do with “Mother” reassuring Leon that she was hard at work on their long-term survival, evolving them constantly—and along tangents they would never have considered evolving along—upgrading them under pressure, whether they knew it or not, so he could content himself with their day-to-day survival, and focus his mind more solely on that star gate.

  Or maybe after an extended bout of purposefulness getting everyone ready to jump through the star gate, she realized he needed some pointless distraction to relax his mind enough to see clearly what his next step was.

  Most profoundly of all, the Nautilus’s supersentience had just made it clear that although Leon couldn’t possibly ever know who all he had working for him as assets, far less what they were truly capable of in advance of any mission by his own doing, it didn’t matter. The Nautilus would anticipate his needs for him and ensure he had his “meetings with remarkable men and women” in the just-in-time manner that he needed to have them in order to be fully prepared to leap into the abyss—all too graphically symbolized in this case by the star gate. Again, Leon felt uncomfortable with surrendering this much control; but not as uncomfortable as before the dawning realization.

  ***

  “Yes, sir!” Satellite said, materializing before Leon as he was en route to his cabin, startling him. Granted, Leon’s startle response was subdued next to most, considering his training. More alarmingly still, Leon had just been thinking about summoning Satellite; he sometimes forgot that this communications officer was better at getting inside people’s heads than most. He trusted Satellite not to misuse those skills as regarded sensitive information; it was doubtful the nanite hive mind inside Leon’s head would have permitted a hack of sensitive information, in any case, and certainly not with the Nautilus Supersentience monitoring the neurons in Leon’s brain’s trafficking of every electron.

  The kid was bubbling over with excitement—it seemed to be a requirement for an Alpha Unit cadet; totally inappropriate, over-the-top excitement. Leon took it as just one more indication of their refusal to step out of hyperspace with their minds; and one more reason that reality was never enough—not even out here, not even on the Nautilus; and so they existed in a merger of virtual reality, augmented reality, and whatever native thrills just “plain good old” reality could offer aboard the Nautilus, or wherever the ship happened to take them.

  “Have you pulled any more intel out of the clam ship?”

  “No, sir. The AI that created the singularity sufficient to get through the gate—or so they thought—is fried. Starhawk managed to tease out the secret regarding how the ship warped space within the hull because it was a matter of its construction, so the specs weren’t solely stored within the AI, even if they were locked down more securely than the chains around Hercules.”

  Leon lowered his eyes and nodded slowly. His expression must not have been all that comforting because Satellite grew nervous—Leon could hear it in his voice—and said, “I’ll be leaving now,” excusing himself and beaming away. He should have waited to be dismissed, but it seemed the Alpha Unit cadets could never master the basics of soldiering—just the advanced stuff that no one else seemed able to master but them.

  ***

  Leon marched toward one of the pairs of sliding doors with the Alpha and Omega overlapping logos on it. Beneath the logo was his name, Leon, and in case there was any doubt it stood for “lion” in any number of languages, there was a lion embossed beneath his name, one with a fantastic mane.

  The lion leapt off the door, bounding toward him, the nanites on protective duty intent on sniffing him out. Upon becoming flesh and bone, and getting a good whiff of him, the lion settled down. It made purring sounds of endearment as it rubbed its head against him, both marking its territory and responding positively to the petting as it continued to walk by Leon’s side toward Leon’s private chambers.

  The lion followed him inside, leaping beyond the parting doors ahead of him to make sure the chambers were clear of danger. After roaring the “all clear” sign, the lion decided it could relax its guard and promptly leaped up on Leon’s king-size bed and parked itself there, where it could keep an eye on him and the rest of the apartment at the same time.

  When Leon perched himself at his work station, making it evident that he really wasn’t taking the lion on and that his time was his, the lion emitted an attenuated, half-muted roar, one of many such calls. Within a few seconds the cubs came gallivanting out to play from the adjoining room, pouncing on the bed and taking on dad in an all-out assault on him and one another as a matter of developing their killing instincts. Shortly thereafter mother sauntered out of the same adjoining room and perched herself on the floor some distance away from the bed, happy for the respite from the boundless energy of the cubs. She was not in heat, so dad must have figured this was a better use of his time than trying to get anywhere with her. Leon, taking in the entire drama peripherally, felt pangs of guilt, as if he were on his own mating and reproducing timeclock and he was well behind schedule.

  Leon brought up the files on his computer pertaining to his team. He’d gotten to know them quite well on their last mission that had taken them into the depths of the Amazon jungle, but he had to know more if he expected to get more out of them. Relationships within a unit were much like any other; they were constantly growing and maturing, or they were withering, but there was no putting them on cruise control. If this mission was going to take more out of them, they were going to have to put in more, invest more time in getting to know themselves and one another if they expected to have more reserves to tap come time to tap them.

  Solo was the first file Leon ventured into. Solo, the latest addition to the team, was the man with the most mystery and question marks swirling about him. His reclusive nature hadn’t made it any easier getting to know him.

  Leon had evidently lost track of time, delving into the details of Solo’s past because he heard the mother call for her cubs, to give dad a break before he took to eating his children. She then set out on a hunt with them, making the most of Leon’s suite which came with AI all too willing to synthesize prey for the cubs to practice their takedowns on, conjured from atmospheric nanites which could rapidly self-replicate as called upon to fulfill most any manifestation trick desired. Leon’s chambers were the size of a palatial suite suitable for royalty and its size and character could be morphed further by the room AI, so Leon wasn’t terribly concerned about the kids roughhousing disturbing his studies.

  Leon returned his attention to the monitor. As it turned out, so far he hadn’t dug up anything on Solo he didn’t already know. The specifics of his bioengineering had been dumbed down for him, because Truman, who had tweaked Natty’s initial designs without first informing Natty, had a supercomputer brain of his own to work with, which Leon did not. Still, Leon resisted the inclination to gloss over the already familiar territory entirely. He slowed his pace as he went over some of the close-up scans and diagrams revealing the magic behind Solo’s baser biophysics, and the nature of the electrical engineering behind the interfaces between his unique nanites—whose makeup no one fully understood, save for Truman. Various elements of the pictures were flashing red before him. When Leon checked into what the red stood for, the color chart in the corner revealed that it st
ood for where Solo’s underlying structure defied what was known to be possible even with cutting edge mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology—and the hundreds of subspecialties and crossovers embedded in each of those macro-fields. This, too, was nothing new to Leon, but he saw something he hadn’t seen before, the last time he looked at these schematics. Time and again certain cabalistic images seemed to be drawn in within the areas highlighted in red. It was the kind of clue you’d find in a Dan Brown or James Rollins novel, where tie-ins with ancient sects and conspiracies running rampant were de rigueur. Just what did the cabalistic images linking Solo’s genes, and the various nanite hive minds inside him do?

  Truman had a flair for mucking around in ancient history, looking to decipher everything from Egyptian cuneiform tablets and Viking runes. He’d dug up something in fact that alluded to the true nature of the moon artifact. So Leon couldn’t exactly disparage the timeless nature of his research or the connections he found among dots he and he alone seemed able to connect across not just millennia but millions and even billions of years of earth history.

  Apparently Earth had survived numerous cataclysmic meteor strikes in its history, each one coming thousands, even millions of years apart or longer—the oldest recorded one being roughly two billion years ago—and at least one of them had wiped out more than the dinosaurs. One or more had wiped out civilizations on par with Atlantis and Lemuria—the stuff of fables that indicated there were actually points in time when mankind was more advanced than they were now before the next meteor strike hit, the next planet killer, setting the clock back. To see back in time as Truman had done, deciphering clues from fragments—the few that could survive such terrific meteor strikes—well that would take a supercomputer mind like Truman had, and it would take the endless resources of very affluent mega-corporations the likes of which Truman commanded as CEO working for Natty’s father, before his own actions got him ousted from the job.