***
Solo was working with the string-theory equations to get them to shore up the idea of a 11th dimension to multi-dimensional space. The equations floated about him in mid-air, but they were also scrolled on the walls of his chamber, across the furniture, along every surface he could find. Solo continued turning on himself, taking it all in, and crossing out the pieces that weren’t working, and writing in new equations to fill the blanks.
None of the drawing boards were static; the equations rolled by to make room for more segments to come into view. The actual equations would have filled a room full of computer servers; even he struggled to keep it all in his head, hence the visual aids.
He didn’t have that much computer power to throw at the problem; it would have taken far more than a traditional computer farm to test the equations in real time. For that he had the other ten dimensions he’d managed to recruit; the supersentiences lodged in each—also his creations—were working on some part of the problem. They were doing most of the heavy lifting for him, seeing their way to a more solid proof of this 11th dimension, but more to the point, how to access it in a meaningful way. It wouldn’t do merely to provide a mathematical proof the damn thing actually existed.
Solo leaned on his cane, driving the crystal-dome handle into the palm chakra, using the chakra as a pressure point to enhance his thinking.
There! He’d found what he was looking for. But he wanted this solution so badly he could taste it, and that fact alone might well be compromising his thinking.
But he had some insurance going in. The 10-dimensional brain working on giving rise to the 11th dimension—with the kind of computing power it had access to—might well simply create the 11th dimension he needed if it didn’t actually exist. He might have transitioned from theoretical mathematics with the power of mind at his disposal to simply changing the laws of space-time to suit himself. And if so, that may prove the even bigger out.
His puzzle piece in place, he sent it off to Natty and Laney. He’d given them and the Nautilus a new adjunct brain, a rip cord to pull when it had no other choice. This kind of power—probably not something you wanted to use just because you could. There was no telling what conscious entities already existed at these dimensions; if they tolerated a breach of their space-time dynamics. Sensing what was up and realizing it was temporary, they might well let the intrusion go without reacting. But longer stays in a realm to which Solo and his people didn’t belong—and they might well be squished like bugs.
FORTY-SEVEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Natty and Laney arrived in the chamber where access to the Nautilus’s higher brain was permitted. The primitive nature of this access—a simple computer terminal—might have explained why no one had bothered to guard this entry point to her mind.
Natty glanced down at his iPad as he walked into the room. “Holy shit! Solo has fabricated us an 11th dimensional mind—another supersentience—to buffet the Nautilus’s other supersentiences.”
“I have no idea what to do with that information.”
Natty thought about it, his eyes losing focus. Then they quickly sharpened again, “I do!”
Laney paced the room rubbing her hands wondering if she still had anything to add to the enticements to draw the Nautilus out of her coma that Natty hadn’t already tried. As she was fighting to break free of the jailhouse of her own anxiety, Natty keyed away on the computer. She would throw a glance over his shoulders intermittently as she paced back and forth. He was trying to get the Nautilus to open up COMMS to the 11th dimensional supersentience, to establish a relationship.
The irony did not escape her. The last time Natty and Laney were together, he was headed for the DNA-soup with his own last-ditch effort to save them, and she was headed elsewhere; they couldn’t even be bothered to confide in one another as to what they were actually up to. It was sheer chance they found one another again, both drawn to the same weak link in the Nautilus’s defenses.
Just as well. Natty hitting a sour note with the subject of relationship building gave Laney an idea. “Explain to her that we were wrong to take the approach we did. For too long now each of us has been walled off inside our own specialties, barely touching base with one another. Alone time is good, but without more communion with one another we run the risk of growing stale; there has to be a better balance. Without that balance, our thinking grows moribund, starved of the stimulation it needs to think outside the box. More to the point, our relationships suffer.”
Laney could tell she’d struck a nerve with Natty if no one else. He winced visibly at the realization of how he’d once again gotten overly absorbed in his work like the rest of them, the result being damage to his and Laney’s relationship and loss of the group dynamic aboard the ship that very much went to his whole fourth brain idea—that only an ecosystem of interdependent life forms, with their wild biodiversity, could possibly hope to stave off the hazards of the future. Until that dynamic could be restored, there would be no fourth brain—no way out from under the supersentience still determined to destroy the Nautilus and the ship.
“Tell her that we’ve been just as remiss about not communing more with her as with not communing more with one another,” Laney continued, still rubbing her hands over one another and pacing faster now. Natty was nodding and his keying on the terminal had also accelerated.
“She needs to see herself as vital to this group cohesion, Natty. Explain to her that we can’t do it without her; as much as we may bemoan the loss of the group dynamic, without her, the pull of our powerful minds will continue to keep our focus on self-stimulation above and beyond what the world can offer us, what each of us can offer one another.”
Natty rested his head in his hand and massaged his forehead as he kept his elbow on the desktop. He was groaning; her guess—he was realizing now how he could be so right and so wrong at the same time. He had intuited the importance and nature of the fourth brain, what defined it, but beyond embracing the diversity and letting each part of the ecosystem or society of minds contribute to the whole how it wished, he had failed to account for the friction of these parties rubbing up against one another, by not allowing them more contact. Providing those frustrations led each person to find new ways to incorporate the other’s thinking and not build even stronger walls between them, they had a winning formula. If Natty wasn’t fretting over all that, then he was fretting over the fact that he’d missed the importance of the Nautilus in this equation. Without the Nautilus’s supersentience to serve as the glue holding everything together, it was just possible the fourth brain idea couldn’t be made to work. It was one thing for the crew to use her as they might Google, to simply do the heavy lifting of their research for them; it was another thing to truly dialogue with her, interact with her. They had to let her further inside their heads and she needed to let them further inside hers.
Laney wasn’t done overhauling both Natty’s thinking and the Nautilus’s. “Tell her to go inside the crew’s heads, find ways to nudge them to interact more, look for opportunities where that interaction could lead to the very breakthroughs that could accelerate their work, or reenergize otherwise exhausted minds. Look for moments when a break is needed from the workaholism we’re all given to, but we refuse to see it or take it. Tell her to design a world of delightful surprises, for herself as well.”
“Techa!” Natty mumbled. “How could I not have seen this? How could I have missed it?”
Laney stopped dead in her tracks. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
She resumed her pacing and Natty resumed his keying. Moments later, he said, “There.” He hit “Enter” on the keyboard.
There was an instantaneous response that actually caused Natty and Laney to recoil, both of them thinking the same thing, “How had they messed up?” She could read it in his panicked eyes as readily as he could read it in hers.
“She does think a lot faster than us, Natty.”
“A split second to us that we can barely register is an eternity to her,” Natty echoed, trying to assuage himself with the same rationalization.
“The ship is moving!” Laney said, her tone no less anxious than it had been when she and Natty were lobbing placating remarks at one another.
Natty turned to find her staring out the window in amazement; he could read her reflection in the glass as readily as he could see what was beyond the window—stars. They had already zoomed beyond the planet’s atmosphere.
Laney was rubbing her knuckles again. “There’s no way she could have blasted off that planet with this kind of force without cracking that planet in two. That’s not like her. She’s programmed to respect life. You think she’s running scared, making a dash for it? You think we’re still not out of this?”
Natty didn’t answer, but he’d filled the void between them, approaching the viewport, and slipping his hand around her waist. “I think she’s got an 11th dimensional brain in her back pocket now, and a war-time supersentience that has been talking strategy with Leon and Patent, speaking of the value of fostering greater communion between all players.”
“We’re approaching the star gate,” Laney said. “Looks like we’re going back the way we came. So much for the trials that lay on the far side of the other gates. Wasn’t the idea to pass through them one by one to evolve us step by step to where we could actually contend with the biggest and baddest supersentience out there that was heading toward Earth with a mind to putting all life there out of commission?”
“Yes, it was.” Natty’s eyes were no longer on the viewport.
She felt his arm leave her back, and felt the air whirl about her to fill the void he’d just made by vacating her side. She turned toward him. “Where are you going?”
“To follow your advice. I’m about to commune with the Nautilus in ways we never have before. She overrode my decision to continue toward the second star gate. Apparently she thought my stroke of genius was anything but. And I’m going to find out where that bitch finds the nerve.”
The doors made a swishing sound as they swept back to make way for Natty. Before they could close, Laney had returned her attention to the approaching star gate out the window, a smile on her face. “Easy, Natty. You have to learn how to rub up against people better without getting friction burn.”
***
Leon was standing at the perimeter of the Nautilus’s inner courtyard—now reverted to tropical jungle—staring at the animals and foliage as a way to decompress. Crumley stepped up to him and informed him dryly, “We have three Omega Force operatives down.”
“What!”
Crumley was certain it was just the overexcited reaction that caused the cup of coffee in Leon’s hand to end up in his face; and that Leon did not mean to throw it at him. Crumley sighed, wiped the spillage from his eyes, and then gave the data dump on the death toll: “Ajax, who probably couldn’t stop running his mouth enough to get off a final shot in time; Cronos—the idiot probably thought charging one of these humanoids with a sword, in keeping with his latest Knights Templar kick, was a good idea; and DeWitt; my guess is he was trying to out-strategize you on the best way to take out a Medusa-head and his idea didn’t work out so well for him.”
“Oh no, I’m not having that conversation with the wife, not after what happened to the boy.”
“Um, about the kid. I have it on good authority he’s trapped somewhere in multidimensional space where he continues to fight off the alien supersentience singlehandedly—unless you count his sidekick, the frog doll.”
“Crumley!”
“You want the death toll, or don’t you?” Crumley wasn’t being deadpan; he just had had all the life squeezed out of him that he had to give right now; this was more of a low-grade, poorly-energy-funded depression.
“And why the hell hasn’t the Nautilus brought the kid back and restored my operatives to life? Worst case scenario she can print up some replacement bodies and download everything she had on them up to their last recorded memories.”
“You’re preaching to the choir there, buddy. But this is a supersentience we’re talking about; negotiating with her what favor she will and won’t do for you next is easier said than done. But I’ll keep on it. I am your quartermaster after all, and I’m in charge of procuring the unprocurable.”
Leon took a couple heaving breaths. “See to it. And have Nauti’s DNA-backup brain synthesize an avatar of DeWitt for now until I have the strength to tell Corin what happened.”
“I’ll have it do one of the boy too, but they’re not going to be nearly as authentic. If she looks too close…”
Leon had gone back to staring at the jungle as if the matter was closed. Crumley sighed. “So be it.” He put through the order to the DNA-soup brain regarding the latest renditions of Thor and DeWitt.
“You don’t want a report on Alpha Unit and Theta Team?” Crumley realized that Leon might be far enough spent himself to simply not have thought that far ahead.
Leon groaned, rubbed his forehead, and stared at his cup of coffee. The atmospheric nanites had replaced the hot liquid for him—replete with a heart-shape of white foam on top the caramel-colored coffee. It was no doubt meant to make him happy as opposed to kicking a man when he was down with an insidious form of irony. “Yes, Crumley, sock it to me.”
“Alpha Unit lost thirty.”
“Thirty! We’re not running a goddamn fire sale?!”
Crumley was surprised he could manage even a heaving sigh, but his enervated state did prevent him from punching Leon in the face; the nerve of Leon treating him as if he were immune to the ugly facts. “Alpha Unit has some advantages we don’t, including tech that can be used to bring some of the dead ones back until Nauti decides to be a little more helpful. Until then, they’ll put the rest of the bodies in cryogenic freeze. Natty’s nanites are so sophisticated, they will restore the bodies on their own in time. But perhaps not in time that…”
“That what?”
“After a certain period, I have it on good authority, the soul moves on, and what you get coming back into the body is known as a walk-in, another entity entirely. Apparently the true master computer in the sky that some of us refer to as God and others as Techa can get some funny ideas of its own about whether or not to reanimate us.”
Leon managed to hit a new gear of crestfallen, his face melting like candlewax. No good leader wanted to learn that anyone died under his watch—no matter the odds of anyone surviving.
“And Theta Team?”
“They’re already back at one-hundred percent. The Nautilus refuses to have them off-line even for a moment, so long as she has mind power enough to attend to their resurrections, and now she does.” Leon gave him an ugly look as if again he were to blame, to which Crumley replied, “They are, after all, her babies. Literally. The rest of us she just tolerates.”
“That’s enough, Crumley. The next thing I want speaking to me is a jabbering monkey.”
Crumley excused himself, heading for the nearest bar.
One of the talking monkeys, a Proboscis, jumped up on the railing, padded over to Leon, reached into his pocket and took out a cigarette from the pack and a Zippo and lit a cigarette for himself. Leon retrieved the Zippo the monkey had grabbed and put it back in his pocket. The Proboscis, after taking a puff, said, “I prefer Patent’s cigars. These things are just nasty.”
“I only keep them to frustrate you.”
“Oh, we’re starting in with this passive-aggressive shit, huh?” The Proboscis sighed. “Well it beats what the wife puts me through.” The Proboscis was venting as he stared into the forest as well. He pointed to one of the tree snakes, a boa constrictor, slithering around a tree branch. “Had an affair with that boa once—after defanging it, of course. You want the details?”
“Not really.”
“Pity, you looking for some images to push the ones out of your mind of your dead soldiers, trust me, I got a few for you, starting w
ith that one.”
ACT FIVE
A NEW ERA BEGINS
FORTY-EIGHT
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Natty noticed the beams of radiation from the five pulsars—also known as spinning neutron stars—heading from the magnetic poles of those stars straight for the star gate’s tips once again. The door was opening for the Nautilus and its crew to exit the way they had come. Why? Did the star gate mean only to test them to see if they were worthy of going further, and if they weren’t, meant them no particular ill will? Or had the Nautilus used the space-warping technology they’d reverse-engineered from the clam ship to provide it the mind power it needed to commune with the master civilization that had created the star gate—and had gotten that civilization to respond to their request for safe passage back the way they’d come? Either way, someone was being damned accommodating, and it bothered Natty that he didn’t know who exactly. But he had an idea for how to get to the bottom of things. It would constitute another little side project he’d inform Leon of in due time.
FORTY-NINE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“You want to explain to me why we shot through the star gate—headed in the wrong direction?” Leon said, his tone suggesting the simmering pot was about to boil over.
The Nautilus had made a room for them above the disk of the ship itself. Inside it were a couple of bean bags on which Leon and Natty were ensconced, facing one another. About them was a half dome of pure skylight—you couldn’t even tell it was there. It was like walking outside the ship amongst the stars, only they weren’t walking. Though, if Leon didn’t check his feelings Natty might soon be flying through the window to be one with the stars for real. Screw him, Natty thought; it wasn’t like Natty didn’t retain the nanite upgrades that would allow him to drift in the depths of space indefinitely. Though perhaps that wasn’t as comforting a thought as all that, when it came right down to it.
The Star Gate Page 53
