“Yeah, you’d do well to keep that in mind. He pays a steeper price for enduring us than we pay for enduring him. It’s gotta hurt not being around his own kind.”
Motown kept his eyes on his spoon this time to make sure he delivered the goods where they were meant to go. From all appearances, he felt he deserved a medal just for getting the food in his mouth. Reading his mind from the expression on his face, and doing her best Motown, “No one should feel this exhausted. It has to be a violation of the Geneva convention. I’ll make sure to take a highlighter to the lines in question the next time I get to scan the document.” “How did he get to be so fearless?” Motown asked.
“I hacked my way into his file inside DARPA headquarters—”
Motown’s chuckle interrupted her delivery. “That was you! Cool hacker handle, by the way: Scapegoat. Kind of like the sacrificial lamb for the egalitarian age we’re trying to build around those horde-all-the-empowerment-technologies-for-themselves mother fuckers.”
She ignored him and continued, “I was expecting to find something like youngest brother of twelve, had to fight his way out of the womb and keep fighting just to survive the parental neglect and sibling rivalry, not to mention beef up to compensate for being the runt of the litter.”
“And…?”
“Not even close. The guy was an investment counselor at Morgan Stanley.”
The food caught in Motown’s throat and she had to do the Heimlich maneuver on him to quell the hacking. Just as he got the coughing under control, another pair of feet wandered into camp, hitting the deck upon hearing Patent’s snoring. Like she was thinking earlier, “There’s no touching the classics.” She smiled at the latest fool to get caught with his guard down. Even in sleep mode, Patent was still dishing out the lessons on survival. She checked Motown. “Honestly, I didn’t think the facts of Patent’s background were all that shocking.”
“No, no,” Motown insisted. “I’m still too exhausted from tussling with that dragon to swallow properly. I didn’t know involuntary muscles could just bail on you like that.”
“They must be taking lessons from some of our sorry soldiers. Poor Patent trying to whip this crew into shape.”
They both collapsed back down where they had been sitting and returned to what was left of their stew.
“Investment counselor, huh?” Motown sounded like he just couldn’t get his mind around the idea.
“Yeah, I guess he woke up one day and decided the best way to invest in his future—our collective future—was to go out and help make it happen; solder off the locks on the doors keeping us forever on this side of it, put there by the old world powers that be doing their damnedest to make sure nothing challenged the status quo ever, and that the future just never happened.”
Motown was boring his eyes into Patent’s back once again. There were scorpion-like insects trying to crawl up the broad cobra-head-shaped back that either committed suicide before reaching the top, or simply felt the “boulder” shifting under them and figured it wasn’t worth getting crushed, so just jumped off. “The back-to-basics, return-to-boot-camp thing he’s putting us through is a bit silly, don’t you think?”
“I think the idea is to get the fight reflex to kick in ahead of the flight response, perhaps stifle it altogether.”
“I don’t know; this place doesn’t seem that bad.” Motown took in the forest rising and receding in the distance over a series of hills like the swells of an ocean tossed in a storm, a storm he couldn’t feel because he was caught in the same freeze-frame photograph as the rest of the scenery.
Gabrielle snorted. “My gut tells me not even Patent is going to be able to keep us alive this time.”
“Why? What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“Everything. Absolutely everything.” She could see the most dangerous hunters of all—the planet’s humanoids; the ones at the top of the food chain—closing in on their position even now with her AR goggles with her proprietary software. She’d already sent the info to Patent, who couldn’t be bothered to cut his nap short. He’d told her not to share the information with the others; they’d communicated “telepathically” via the nanites in their respective neural webs. Patent didn’t think the cadets could handle the news; not yet, not until he’d chiseled some more confidence into them. What did he know that she didn’t, she wondered. Maybe just that it was wise to rest up when she could between engagements, especially with the shit about to hit the fan. Who knew how long this next encounter would go on? And to survive it, if that were possible, they were going to need to bring their A-game.
She set her bowl down, and rolled over on her side. It was time she took a nap. Imitation was the best form of flattery, not to mention proof that some of Patent’s teachings were finally sinking in.
“You’re going to sleep on a full stomach?” Motown bitched. He made a dismissive sound with his lips like a tire going flat. “Crazy woman.”
Maybe Patent had taken away a bit more from Morgan Stanley than he’d let on, Gabrielle thought; like “store up your energy savings now for a rainy day.” The rain was coming; likely a torrential downpour.
THIRTY-FIVE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Natty awoke at a terminal in a nondescript room. Apparently the Nautilus could be as devoid of personality in places as she could be full of it in others. Head-Taller, his taxi driver, was towering over him looking impatient. “What happened?” he asked her.
“You fell from the air taxi the combined distance of a couple Empire State Buildings, not that I’ve seen the actual edifice, but my nanites advise me you’ll find the analogy soothing.”
“Soothing? Yeah, right.”
“I suspect you survived because your latest-generation nanites work—at least partially.”
She did an about face and headed for the sliding doors sealing off this chamber. “Wait!” Natty shouted. “I’m where I’m supposed to be?”
“Trust me, that’s a question we’re all asking ourselves right now,” she said without turning around or slowing. Her remark was punctuated by the susurrus of sliding doors opening to let her out and then closing behind her.
“I can’t decide if women just don’t come with the kind of variety they once did, or if I just keep eliciting the same reactions in them wherever I go.”
He shifted his attention back to the terminal. “Come on, genius, don’t let me down now.”
He typed his first couple of lines, hoping to dialogue directly with the Nautilus’s supersentience. “Your primary task must be to determine if the reality we find ourselves in now is a form of attack. Has it been engineered to challenge us in ways we all wish to be challenged, and thus, feels so right as to be so wrong? Is this a honey trap, or not? And if it is, how do we escape it?”
He let his fingers rest over the keyboard as he considered his next move. He really didn’t have any more questions to ask her. He’d long forgone any hope of writing code that she might use to the ends he wanted her to devote her supersentience right now. Laney was right; that was a fool’s enterprise. The best he could hope for was as Head-Taller had suggested, pray that the Nautilus’s ecosystem of supersentiences could somehow process what he was saying from a comatose state.
It occurred to him that the Nautilus’s chief supersentience might be using the coma state as a way to heal, the way doctors induce comas in patients. If so, she might already have her self-care in hand better than even Theta Team could manage.
For that matter, was the Nautilus supersentience trying to signal him regarding the planet’s true nature as a well-baited trap by way of his psychic abilities, as a way to get around her diminished communication capacities while in coma state? Was she the true source of his revelation? Had she crashed the ship, moreover, on what amounted to a power spot for the planet, to further boost her ability to link with her crew, even from coma state?
“That’s positive thinking at its best, Natty.”
But she could also be laying one colossal
guilt trip on herself; she was responsible for the welfare of all life onboard, after all. The last thing any of them needed was for her to direct that mammoth intellect at herself in one self-flagellating scenario that compromised her thinking further; compromised it to where it was akin to a self-induced coma.
Shit. Maybe it was time to take some of the pressure off her. He continued typing, “I’ve taken precautions that I didn’t share with Leon in this timeline. There are other versions of us—cloned teams I left back on Earth to attend various scenarios no less cosmic in scale than the ones we’re dealing with here. He knows about some of these cloned teams, but not all, not the ones fending off other efforts to take us over on the part of alien civilizations. We’re fighting this war on multiple fronts against multiple enemies, even though this set of action figures just knows about one of the fronts. I’m typing this to you now because I don’t want you wasting your precious mind power saving humanity as a whole from all these threats at once that you can put toward saving yourself.”
Natty took a deep breath and sighed it out as he considered lobbing the next salvo of rhetoric, determining the size of the charge he needed, angle and direction. Then he resumed his typing, “What’s more, Laney is tunneling through to the other timelines now to find out if there is a solution to our current predicament. If I don’t miss my guess, there are no end of solutions to our dilemma of how best to survive this crash landing and every other kind of predicament; that intel will soon be available to us. So one more branch on that tree of algorithms you’re growing in your mind you can prune off. Save yourself the mind power. But none of that will do any good if all the solutions to all of the predicaments we’ve gotten ourselves into on this side of the star gate get us no closer to understanding the nature of the game and of our captors—if I’m right that is, and this entire planet is all part of some elaborate simulation, some endless set of war games designed to keep us in check forever. A supersentience a lot more like you than like me could do this without any of us getting at the true nature of the game.” He didn’t know when he’d started vocalizing to go with the words he was keying, but he realized he was speaking aloud as he keyed in the last few lines.
“I hope you will agree with me that you really have just one purpose now. I know you’re not designed that way. You’re designed to attend to countless assignments in parallel. Theta Team can keep those in your care going until you’re fully back on line. For now at least, like the rest of us, you must learn to be something other than you are if you—if we—are to survive.”
Natty hit enter to punctuate the end of the sermon, though he hardly needed to. She either was processing what he was typing and saying aloud all along, or she wasn’t; hitting the enter key was more of a formality for his primitive mind for which habits die hard.
He thought about what he just said. If the Nautilus’s supersentiences failed at the mission he’d set for them, or chose not to accept their new mission, then they really only had one fallback position. If this reality they were faced with was indeed simulated as the perfect honey trap for them, to cater to their deepest yearnings and desires for themselves—of which they might well be unaware—then their only real hope was to not let their buttons be pushed like that; in short, to get over themselves. One thing all three teams shared in common with Natty and Laney though: they were all incorrigible to a fault. One might say they had been engineered that way; as unstoppable forces that just kept going no matter what. But dauntless spirit, courage, and positive mental hygiene weren’t going to work if the gamers who had designed this virtual reality for them had factored in for all that already.
No, they had to act out of sorts, and they had to find how to climb levels in this video game, learn the rules real fast, if they had any hopes of determining the nature of the game itself. In that sense, it would be much like any other video game. Sooner or later, the designers of the game started to reveal more about themselves than they could possibly know about you by how they structured the game itself. That is, if you played the game like a real pro. That meant staying in the zone; being at once hyper-immersed in the game, and also entirely detached from it, witnessing it without emotional investment or judgement. Zone psychology was the kind of thing top athletes and artists and scholars—anyone at the apex of their fields—wrote books about.
It might well be an ace in the hole, because, hand it to Leon and his people; for whatever else you could say about them, zone management was a bit of a forte.
Natty rose from the chair and padded over to his window on the world. For whatever reason, the only person he had COMMS access to by way of the nanites floating about in his brain was Crumley. Natty sent the output of his thinking and the actions he’d taken to him. He thought about why Crumley might be the only one he could establish a link with. Crumley was Omega Force’s quartermaster. That meant it fell on him to find the things his team needed to keep moving, the things they couldn’t pack with them or foresee when entering a battle zone. He excelled at the job. He was also the first to determine what plants and animals of a new environment they could rely on for food. Technically such functions were superseded by Theta Team.
But Theta Team wouldn’t have dared to eat the locals in any form—not even the smallest of bacteria—for fear of provoking the Gaia supersentience of a new world. They wouldn’t have allowed themselves to be compromised in such a manner, either, being as what you ate, usually ate you. Once those microbes were allowed inside the body—they could hack their way into places you didn’t want them to go. No, Theta Team had been engineered to convert energy from simple kinetic movement; they could also convert sunlight or any temperature differential into energy—whether the environment was hotter or colder than they were. And if need be, they could fire up the zero-point energy converters in their stomachs; a last-minute retrofit given them by the Nautilus prior to slipping through the star gate—once the tech had been perfected. Because for all Theta Team knew, borrowing sunlight or capturing energy from temperature differentials meant stealing those energy sources away from whatever applications Gaia had in mind for them—and there was nothing like pissing a supersentience off right out of the starting gate.
Even if you subscribed to the Gaia hypothesis, it was safe to say that not all worlds had biomes sophisticated enough for the interlinked lifeforms to constitute a supersentience—whether unconscious or conscious. No one was arguing Mother Nature back on earth was a “conscious life form”—well, few were arguing it anyway. But the numberless microbes in her biomes might well describe a form of interconnected intelligence the way bacteria lining the GI tract was behind “gut instinct” in people—or so the latest theory went in scientific circles.
But until Gaia’s presence could be proven or disproven—Theta Team had been bioengineered not to make the first fatal misstep in alien negotiations. In the future world they occupied inside the Nautilus, moreover, relative to most back on earth—supersentiences came in many forms—nanite clouds, networked intelligence—and it could be stuffed into any shape—like the Nautilus itself—and occupy any substrate. That being the case, the mud those soldiers were tracking on their boots right now might contain more intelligence than any of them.
All of which took Natty back to Crumley and why he above anyone else could hear Natty in his head. It may not be a hopeful sign. You could bet Crumley would have been among the first to stuff something in his mouth to see if he could feed his team on it. And if he was being rewarded for doing so—it was because the planet wanted to get inside them and wanted to encourage them to take as much of the biosphere into their bodies as possible. So as to more easily take them over.
He suggested to Crumley that everyone go on an immediate fasting diet. That they not even drink water that had been distilled for them. That they instead inject themselves with nanites that could produce water inside them—in the event they didn’t already have those circulating in their bodies.
All he got back from Crumley was, “I’ll pass al
l this on to Leon.” Natty wanted to scream. But like it or not, Leon was in charge now, and Natty was back to his old job of playing consultant, nothing more. Because who was Natty kidding?
They were already under attack and had been from the beginning. His own instincts had informed him of as much, and he wasn’t even a warrior. Right now, those guys’ hairs must have been standing on end.
***
Thor, who had been listening to Natty’s exchange with Crumley the entire time, standing just inside the closed sliding doors sealing off the chamber, smiled.
Moments later, his avatar dematerialized from the room.
Thor may have been tossed into a cryogenic freeze against his will, but that didn’t mean he had been made mischief-proof. It would take more than that to stop him.
***
THE UNCHARTED PLANET, AGEMIR
“Let me guess, they elected you to be emissary,” Leon said, spying the same Theta Team member coming before him as when he first opened his eyes on this God forsaken world.
“Yes, sir, my name is Theseus. The rest of Theta Team wasn’t sure how much trauma you could take, having to interact with more than one of us, being as you’re just Omega Force.”
Crumley bit his lip. Leon restrained the impulse to bite the guy’s head off. Finally, he smiled.
“We’re beaming back to the Nautilus,” Theseus said. “It’s time for the fighting to commence, so we’re out of here.”
“You guys can fight, too, right?”
“Yes, sir, but we’re more like the army corps of engineers. We build bridges, we don’t tear them down.”
“What if I command you to stay?”
“No can do, sir. When it comes to fighting and dying, no one does that better than Omega Force. And if they need to get even better at it, for that they have Alpha Unit. We won’t step in unless you both get in over your heads. By then we’ll have studied the biosphere enough and how it contains all its warring agents, to know what’s not working and to determine why it’s not working to intercede with a possible fix.”
The Star Gate Page 39
