The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  Shit! It was one of the Hairies; the metal-crystal combatants with long transparent hair-follicles trailing from their entire bodies. Of all the Theta Team operatives whose labs he could have broken into…

  Word had gotten out from Renegade to Alpha Unit and then to Omega Force and Theta Team regarding the Hairies’ true nature. All of a sudden the battle was all about finding these innocuous fuckers which no one could be bothered with before.

  Already over fifty of them had reached out to the Nautilus’s chief-supersentience through Theta Team operatives who couldn’t fend them off—which was saying a lot; they weren’t exactly known for being pushovers. But hacking your way into the Nautilus’s chief supersentience was no ordinary matter, and the Mars war god supersentience in the center of the ship was running interference. All of the Theta Team operatives had overcome their chemical sedation enough to suicide in order to sever the link. Apparently, their equivalent of a medulla oblongata, which controlled autonomic functions in the human body, came with some upgrades. In a pinch, Theta Team operatives could explode themselves, the organ doubling as a suicide vest wrapped around the brain instead of the chest.

  Pulse really wasn’t of a mind to suicide today.

  Nicknamed because of his tendency to emit light in pulsing streams—from the light-emitting diodes all over his body—he was giving his intruder quite the light show right now. With his anxiety level through the roof, there was no avoiding it. The Hairy seemed drawn curiously though more to the variety of ferns under Pulse’s care. His more silicon-based body, for now, was buying him cover. The enemy supersentience must have been expecting more carbon-based lifeforms like the ones she encountered out on the surface of the planet.

  Not one to squander his good fortune, Pulse darted to his work station, and started keying in new instructions. The spray coming out of the ceiling jets right now wasn’t exactly intended to put out a fire. It was genetically modifying the plants in the room on aisles and aisles of tables, soaking up the pink grow-lights. If there was one thing Pulse had learned, all the plants, just like all the animals on Agemir, were genetically encoded so as to be highly morphable. No doubt that had something to do with the Gaia effect and the sentient planet’s own choice about what the plant’s niche would be in the cosmic scheme of things—literally.

  The genetically altered plants had already responded to their new instructions via the RNA-viruses circulating in the air by way of the aerosols being pumped into the room from overhead. The ferns were cleaning the Hairy of its follicles like a car slowly moving through a conveyor belt at a carwash as the plants whipped its surface, holding on with the sharp-edged tongues of their long leaves, and pulling back.

  For the briefest of moments, Pulse thought he was in the clear.

  But apparently all it took was one remaining hair follicle on those Hairies to do the trick—the one now extending and lashing out at Pulse.

  As it lifted him off the ground on a micro-thin strand stronger than a thick band of muscle fibers, it grew and branched out inside Pulse’s body. He hated to say it, but it was game over. The metal-glass warriors were silicon-based lifeforms themselves; Pulse would be hacked even faster than the other Theta Team operators had been.

  It dawned on Pulse that he had a piece of the puzzle Renegade did not. Those last fifty-or-so Theta Team members that had been compromised—they ran the spectrum from silicon-based lifeforms to carbon-based lifeforms, to everything in between, and everything that fell under “other.” No two operatives were chosen with the same mix of underlying life matrix. Pulse could only think of one reason for this: The alien supersentience had not been fooled—she had gone for the shortest route to the Nautilus’s higher brain centers, selecting just the clues she needed to hack her way in.

  The message Pulse sent out to the rest of the team now, he realized, was highly defeatist in nature. He was in effect telling them that the enemy’s supersentience had known all along that it couldn’t hack the Nautilus’s supersentience by way of any one vector of an individual Theta Team operative, even along many such vectors, if those operatives were too alike in genetic makeup. But once it understood the individual tumblers on the combination lock to the Nautilus’s chief supersentience…

  Maybe Pulse was reading the implications all wrong; hacking a supersentience wasn’t exactly his forte. If he was right, however, Pulse’s message would in all likelihood knock the last wind out of the resistance’s sails. It was bad enough for Pulse to know all was lost, but did he really have to share that with the others of the crew so they could share their dark night of the soul collectively?

  Maybe the group mind gestalt itself would be enough to save those who might feel individually beaten; maybe in the synergy that would come out of all the minds of the crew and the supersentiences working collectively, there would arise a course of action that the 4th brain—as Natty referred to it—alone could recognize.

  False hope was better than no hope.

  Pulse availed himself of the “suicide vest.”

  A jihadist he wasn’t. So his heart wasn’t in this; but his mind definitely was, and it had just gone supernova.

  FORTY-SIX

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Laney’s hands were shaking.

  And for good reason.

  Despite the Nautilus’s coma state, Laney had established a link to the other timelines; she’d done so with the help of the DNA-soup—roughly filling the hollow of an aircraft carrier—that the Nautilus was currently using for a backup brain. The soup had figured out how to get the Nautilus to service this one request perhaps because coma state for the supersentience was not too unlike drifting between timelines, muddling them, as if dreaming. It was not uncommon in dream state for events of the day to get mixed together as the brain tried to sort through them, make sense of things that it didn’t have time to process from a fully conscious state—things which were still nagging at it.

  Whatever was actually going on, Laney had pored through the intel from the other timelines—again with the DNA soup’s help, and with help from her neural nanites keeping her biological brain from overheating trying to process so much information.

  But she only had to grasp one idea loud and clear.

  In. No. Other. Timeline. Had. The. Nautilus. Succeeded. In. Freeing. Itself. From. The. Trap. It. Had. Fallen. Into.

  Shit!

  Laney bolted up out of the chair and ran for the sliding doors. Or, at least she’d done so in her mind. But her body hadn’t responded. The shock to her nervous system had evidently been greater than she realized. Prying herself out of the chair was actually more like pulling frozen chicken legs apart that no one had thought to store in separate freezer bags. Her heart pounded as if what life remained in her had been forced into it and it alone, and it was attempting to pour hot lava out to the rest of the body that had run cold to restore motion; she could feel the bellows filling and emptying, her heart about to burst.

  Your heart isn’t going to do this on its own! Think, Techa, damn it, think! Okay, so what hadn’t they tried? The one in a million chance at success approach might just work—if they had ruled out the other 999,999 approaches already! With each idea she ran through her mind, dismissing each out of hand, her body warmed some more, and movement became a bit more fluid. By the time she’d stone-woman walked her way to the edge of the desk, using its long span like a guard rail, she was able to stand on her own, wobbly sure, but what was making her giddy now might just be the latest idea to pop into her head.

  It may just work.

  “Are you okay?” Theseus asked, grabbing her as she slipped between the sliding doors to the hall beyond. She must have looked to him as if she were about to fall despite feeling far more surefooted than she’d felt since incurring a meteor impact to her frontal lobes.

  “I…I…I’m fine.” Her eyes. Her eyes would betray her. Why hadn’t she had the sense to put on a pair of shades before plodding this far?

  He stared
into her million-mile gaze as if he had the eyes to see clear through to the other side of the tunnel. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m just a little blown away by my latest thinking. Get me to my lab, please.”

  Theseus flexed that iris in the center of his head and the next thing she knew, she was in her lab, and he was lingering just long enough to see if he should leave her alone. “I’ll be fine,” she said reassuringly, lying through her teeth. She had her eyes under better control now, and how well could he really read human expressions anyway? She hated to think it, but the guy was just alien enough to possibly be blind to…

  “Very well,” he said, and, like that, he was gone, without ever having ambled away from the spot where he was standing.

  Laney took a step toward her desk and fell on her face. She still didn’t have her sea legs under her, evidently. She pulled herself along the floor by her arms when she realized she’d lost control of her legs entirely. She knew enough about the various stages of shock to know that no two bodies reacted entirely the same to it, but graphed on a bell-shaped curve, she would definitely qualify as an outlier. Possibly some other part of her mind was mutinying against what she was proposing. At least now she had something concrete to fight against, a tangible enemy, as opposed to raw fear behind whose opaque veil was an opponent she could neither see nor fathom. Now at least there was just herself she was fighting against. She’d take this bizarre twist of fate as a win.

  By the time she pulled herself into her desk chair, she was more resolute than ever. She started slipping her puzzle piece into the overall puzzle—the entirely new construct she and the rest of the leadership team were now assembling even without knowing what the other members were doing entirely—that formed the big picture of their escape plan. She had to trust that the Nautilus had found a way to guide them as a unit past this latest stumbling block, if only by tunneling out of her coma the same way Laney had tunneled into it—via the DNA soup. If nothing else, moreover, that DNA soup ought to be able to calculate just what notions to percolate to the tops of the minds of the leadership team—hell, to everyone aboard ship—based on their genetic potential, their personality predilections, their… She realized she was just rationalizing being so resolutely determined to resist whichever part of her brain that had already shut her off from the waist down, and was trying to spread the paralysis to the rest of her body. Surely she had to be smarter than that other part of her mind, right? Or was that the supersentience trying to get through to her?

  It could just as easily be the enemy supersentience hacking its way further past their defenses. For right now Laney had nothing better to go on than her intuition, and she couldn’t even be entirely sure she could trust that.

  Her fingers were already flying across the virtual keyboard, confirming the instructions that were being communicated wirelessly directly from her brain to the DNA soup, to minimize any distrust that might come at the soup’s end, that possibly transmissions back and forth had been hacked. No doubt, many of those transmissions had been.

  When Laney’d had contact with the minds of the others on the leadership team—before that link was severed secondary to being hacked, or possibly to the Nautilus AIs no longer being able to maintain so many life support services at once aboard the Nautilus with her higher functions crippled—Laney had an idea, one that got buried under all the business of her mind focused on moment-by-moment survival.

  If Natty wanted to give that invading supersentient universe trying to hack the star gate room to grow so it wouldn’t have to step on others’ toes, maybe she could find a way to buffet his line of reasoning. Very possibly it was that very universe-wide supersentience that had created this honey trap of a planet to ensure that no other civilization beat it at its own game.

  She turned her attention now toward formulating Gaia—the supersentience of a living planet as a collaboration among its many lifeforms—from the ground up. Laney could use her prowess for bioengineering and genetics to conceive of pathways that biomes could mature along until they linked up into biospheres that could empower Gaia like never before. With the countless planets within a universe, this could buy a stage 4 civilization more time and more computing power until it could find a less aggressive way into stage 5 civilization status. But to pull this off, she was going to need Theta Team—only they had the eco-consciousness and savvy to put meat on the bones of this skeletal notion still forming in the back of her mind.

  Once again she fed the idea to the DNA soup, for it would have to handle the coordination of so many minds to achieve this aim, and what it couldn’t handle, Laney had to hope it could offload to the supersentience still in coma state; if it had tunneled its way in before for a singular purpose, well, it could do so again, with a new prime directive.

  ***

  Theta Team had all along been assisting the Nautilus’s self-mending functions, allowing her backup DNA-soup brain to offload responsibilities to them to free up more mind power for itself. It looked like their labors were starting to bear fruit.

  Cassandra observed the floor on the deck she was on give way in places like quicksand pits, swallowing up the alien invaders.

  From above, nanite swarms closed in on the alien humanoids’ heads, effectively blinding them by changing how light was refracted in their vicinity—causing them to lash out at the Nautilus crew and miss, time and again. The nanites must have been changing the light refracting index continuously so the metal-crystal heads couldn’t learn to correct for the refractions. Cassandra was filling in the blanks for herself, of course, not entirely sure how Theta Team managed to pull of that stunt.

  Some Theta Team member must have figured out how to calibrate the Nautilus’s space-warping, shape-shifting algorithms to coordinate it with the battle in progress. The metal-crystal people getting ready to deliver a death blow to Theta Team operatives found themselves moved out of the way, as if someone was trying to puzzle a Chinese box from the outside by sliding panels. They ended up in coffin-like spaces whose walls then closed in on them, or they were dropped down a deck to land in front of someone who had dispatched their attacker and was free and ready to go at the next one.

  The new calibration must have been set to “energy saving mode” because fights in progress that looked to be going the way of the good guys were not interrupted.

  Atmospheric nanites—normally entirely invisible to the naked eye, and assigned such tasks as atmospheric purification, immune-system boosting, and so on—started congealing into AI-enabled weapons. A metal octopus would materialize out of thin air, get its victim in its grip, then pull them apart in the directions of the eight or more tentacles, sending body pieces flying everywhere, leaving just enough nanites behind to thwart any resurrection technology their enemy might be employing. And then the octopus would dematerialize again before it could even be targeted, only to be reborn a moment later in another form, like a “goop” monster that fell on its victim as if bird dung dropped from above, only to explode with more force than more traditional plastic explosives. The goop, once its job was done, returned to the seemingly infinite reservoir of weapons awaiting its next hive-mind-driven reincarnation.

  If Cassandra didn’t have much respect for the tree-hugger, eco-tourist-in-disposition Theta Team operatives before—she was learning fast to respect their place in the scheme of things.

  It took them a little too long to get their asses in gear for her taste, but once they mobilized… Dear Techa. What a marvel it was to experience what a sophisticated understanding of ecosystems could do—even the ecosystems of the Nautilus.

  But it appeared that Theta Team was now siccing their knowledge gleaned from studying Agemir on the interloping humanoids.

  The metal-glass people must have had a pecking order that included a queen bee-type issuing their marching orders. Sounds started percolating through the air—from the repurposed atmospheric nanites—that the metal-glass warriors responded to as verbal commands issued from the queen itself. T
hey retreated towards the hull of the ship, looking to pass through it as before. Some didn’t even wait to get that far before ghosting.

  Only the Medusa-headed metal-glass warriors—evidently belonging to a different caste—refused to respond to the summons. They made some loud utterances of their own but failed to turn back the ones fleeing through the walls.

  The snakes’ flicking tongues on the Medusa-head warriors started tasting something in the air; likely a hallucinogenic synthesized by the atmospheric nanites working within this latest self-organizing hive-mind. Cassandra had reached that conclusion observing how the snakes, upon flicking their tongues at the substances still invisible to her eye, turned on the Medusas, as well as the other classes of enemy warriors. And, in the case of the metal-crystal warriors, how does venom travel through a crystalline body, one has to ask oneself? The “venom” amounted to lightning in a bottle. The Tesla-bulbs that the warriors’ bodies subsequently turned into ultimately shattered from trying to contain that much energy which they could no longer ground; possibly owing to yet another atmospheric-hive mind moving quickly to prevent grounding out the electrical charges.

  Cassandra didn’t have any more time to waste cataloguing the countless ways Theta Team had managed to turn the Nautilus into a Pandora’s box of demons aimed at its enemies. She had her own role to play. The Nautilus’s well-orchestrated defense—that had self-organized by how every player played his or her part based on what they were best designed for—required her to play in tune with the rest of the orchestra. One sour note now might affect more than the alien supersentient AI playing the part of the “appreciative” audience taking in the symphony the orchestra was playing for her.

  Cassandra dashed down the hall hoping her own alienness wouldn’t accidentally turn this Pandora’s box of demons on her, looking to be struck instead by her next moment of inspiration for how best to stymie the fortress crashers.