The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  “It’s possible the Nautilus has got some wires crossed, I’ll get to work on it.”

  Theseus ignored him and the fact that Solo was once again turning his back on him. “I wanted to show you this.”

  “Not now!”

  “I think I found a way to keep COMMS open between this version of the Nautilus and all the others in all parallel universes. Laney tried earlier, and managed as much with the Nautilus’s higher brain in a coma state. The idea was to achieve the same ends without putting her into a coma.”

  And just like that Solo became a true believer in the new status quo. His eyes went wide and Theseus realized he had his full attention. “But were she in a coma again…?” Solo asked.

  “It wouldn’t matter. I figure this way the special forces guys could wile away their downtime enjoying their exploits in the other timelines. Might make for cheap distraction and potent R&R. Not to mention, the next best thing to battle, after all, for us, is practice. With the augmented reality glasses on, it’d be like being there, only for us, they would be battle simulations, a chance to not make the mistakes made by the others in the other timelines.”

  Solo, of course, had other uses entirely to put this new COMMS system to—Theseus could read as much in his shifty eyes, past all the foreign alien body language—but he couldn’t deny Theseus’s proposed applications. “By new COMMS,” Solo said, “you mean…?”

  “Well, we’d have to build another super-sentience, or course, to sort through it all, allowing us to practice for engagements we’ve yet to incur in this timeline, but that we’ll be running into next. A thousand failed missions in a thousand other timelines reran in this timeline, well… we’d be ready for most anything that could go wrong.”

  Solo nodded. “You just need me to iron out the finer points of constructing the AI?”

  “Ahem, yes. Maybe you could look at my drawings. They’re just preliminary, and in no way worthy of you, but…”

  “Spare me the humility. I’ve been meditating on this problem for some time without any idea how to make headway on it.” He grabbed the 11” x 14” iPad out of Theseus’s hands and commenced flicking through his diagrams and electronic blueprints.

  Theseus knew he wasn’t a half-bad engineer when it came to applying theoretical ideas. Solo was more theoretical scientist than practical scientist; at this rate, this might turn out to be a worthwhile partnership. Solo found himself nodding at what he was looking at, perhaps without realizing, lending Theseus the confirmation he needed.

  “So you think you can make something of this then?”

  That was when Solo realized he had been nodding his head. “Yes. Yes, I can. Good work, Theseus. Drop by anytime.”

  “You mean it?”

  “No. But I’ll get over myself in time.”

  Theseus smiled tentatively, then bowed, and excused himself.

  Solo was already so engaged with the schematics in his hand that he really didn’t register Theseus’s departure until he looked up some time later to massage the kinks in his neck from craning forward so much and saw that Theseus was gone.

  ***

  “I believe we’re overdue for one of our flirtations,” Leon said, falling into stride beside Laney.

  “You mean the totally inappropriate ones where you try to come between me and my husband?”

  “Are there any other kind?” He smiled at her mischievously. “Why do you put up with them anyway?”

  “There is overwhelming evidence that firing-up the second chakra, which governs sexuality and creativity, also feeds the mind. I consider it my responsibility to help keep your strategic thinking sharp by indulging these totally inappropriate flirtations.”

  “I really appreciate you saving me the trouble of digging up that rationalization on my own.”

  She smiled despite herself. “But you should seriously direct these passes at Cassandra; she’s the one for you, not me.”

  “Yes, well, that’s a work in progress. There’s the small matter of her willingness to kill me just to discourage the activity.”

  Laney chuckled. Leon dialed up the flirtation by putting his hand about Laney’s waist, figuring the tonal adjustments to his voice and alteration of his facial mannerisms were not going to be nearly enough. He noticed she didn’t automatically tighten; some part of her enjoyed it; but she was right, it was the part of her inside of Cassandra, her clone, that Leon truly needed to appeal to.

  “I do wonder what Natty was thinking cloning me just to get my aptitudes in bioengineering into Cassandra, who would then be manipulated further into the perfect tool of war. Not even I would have dared to try and separate my tendency to treasure all of life from my bioengineering aptitudes; they’re too interlinked.” Laney stepped over a ladybug crawling across the floor that by all rights she should have stepped on—adjusting her stride to avoid squishing it, when her eyes weren’t even on the floor. Some part of her brain alerted her to the creature she was about to kill even while her mind was entirely elsewhere. Talk about practicing what you preached, Leon thought.

  “If my love of life did get transferred over to Cassandra,” Laney continued, “only to be submerged under all the psy-ops programming she was subject to in order to make her into the perfect killing machine… Well, it might be one more reason she strikes so many people as unstable, and as a bigger threat to our survival than anything we could encounter in outer space.”

  Leon thought about that. The truth was he’d never considered the point, which meant he couldn’t factor it into his ongoing efforts to save Cassandra from herself. Evidently Laney’s remarks had shaken Leon up enough for him to withdraw his hand from her waist. He kissed her on the top of the head. “Until we meet again for that next chi energy squirt from my 2nd chakra to my brain,” he said, breaking contact with her and heading for another destination aboard ship.

  ***

  Leon kept passing Cassandra along the Nautilus’s great halls. By the third time, they were both growing suspicious. “Stop it,” she said.

  Leon smiled mischievously at her. “It’s not me, I swear. I know better than to provoke you.”

  “What then?”

  Leon’s eyes went wide and he gestured even more broadly at the ship as a whole.

  “She wouldn’t dare! I’ll lobotomize the bitch.” In another second it dawned on her to ask, “How?”

  “It’s possible she’s teleporting us from one deck to another or just disorienting us so we’re walking toward each other when we think we’re walking away.”

  Cassandra sighed. “Well, at least she’s conniving. There might be hope for her. But now’s hardly the time.”

  Leon bit his lip. “I’m guessing she thinks differently.” He paused to consider the significance of their forced union. “I do seem to remember we had a bit of a thing once.”

  “I remember you putting your hand on mine and my not cutting it off. Is that the moment you’re referring to?”

  He stifled another smile. “Maybe we can build on that.”

  “Somehow I doubt it.” She moved to get past him but he grabbed her by the arm.

  “You’re looking for someone to spar with,” he said, “so you don’t lose your edge. But you’ll keep getting worse, Cassandra, not better, if you keep letting your anger eat away at you. Why don’t you let me show you how to not let your emotions control you in the heat of battle. If you could master that, you will get better not just at fighting but at leading, good enough perhaps to replace me as head of Omega Force someday.”

  He saw the temptation in her eyes overcoming the latest emotional flair up at being manhandled; it was like watching a star ship trying to outrun a supernova that it had had the misfortune to get too close to. “Fine,” she said, yanking her arm away, as if the concession had been made only under duress.

  “We have some downtime we can take advantage of before the Nautilus can speed us to our next destination, even at the rate at which she chews through space-time. Let’s see if we can make any
progress by then. You won’t leave my side until I feel you really are ready to fight at the next level.”

  “You’re going to put your other obligations aside to devote all your time to me over the next two weeks?”

  “Don’t see why not? I can’t imagine a better use of my time than tuning up our best superweapon.”

  She glared at him.

  “See, you caught the double entendre in ‘tuning up’. And yet you didn’t launch into a drop kick. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

  She smiled halfheartedly, walking by his side.

  ***

  Natty heard the beeping, abandoned his work area in his and Laney’s private chambers, made his way into the bedroom, and stared disheartened at the empty bed. That prompted the subsequent exploratory mission.

  He discovered Laney at her work station in their private suite, of course. He held his wrist up to Laney. “See my new watch?”

  Laney beheld the watch, it was beeping and flashing in big LED letters, “ROMANCE.”

  “And it keeps perfect time, too,” Natty insisted.

  She bit off her smile. “Is this the Nautilus’s idea of how to bring us together?”

  “Well, you do have to admit we tend to get caught up. It’s not like we can’t benefit from the reminders. And how do you argue with a supersentience exactly?”

  She slipped her arms around him. “Yes, how do you?” She gave him a peck on the lips.

  “Wait, you aren’t going to make this hard on me? Isn’t that part of the deal?”

  “If I was a lioness and not yet coming into heat. But otherwise, I really don’t see the problem.”

  He made satisfied male lion purrs as he leaned in for a more involved kiss.

  Sometime later, after what he was sure would just be round one of their lovemaking, she rolled over and sighed. It wasn’t a sigh of exhaustion combined with delight, more a sigh of sadness. His fragile male ego being what it was, he said, “Um, something didn’t please?”

  She brushed away the strands of hair from her face that didn’t have the decency to fall to the side. “Your perpetual hard-on—”

  “I assure you that was a hundred-percent natural.”

  She smiled. “Keep it up and I’ll be insisting on divine births myself, using my nanites to cut you out of the equation altogether.”

  He groaned surrender. “Fine, I might have had a little help from the little buggers. What’s your point?”

  She sat up in bed and leaned against the backboard. “Your hard on is not what’s driving a wedge between us.”

  He frowned. “Play on words aside.”

  “Look at the two of us. Hell, look at all of us, racing blindly into the future on the assertion that the next generation of technology will be better than the last, and without a doubt, therefore, life will be better as well.” She abruptly got off the bed and slipped her robe on. “I guess that star gate made me question some of my assumptions.”

  “You have doubts about the transhumanist agenda? Perish the thought. If there’s such a thing as heaven on earth, trust me, it’s not nirvana but techno-varna.” He came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist as she stood staring out the viewport, and then he rested his chin on her shoulder. “If it weren’t for all the technological wonders of the Nautilus, we wouldn’t have stood a chance against that star gate—from the past, mind you, not the present. Even then, we had to invent new tech on the fly. No, no, no. Trust me, you jump off this stairway to heaven, you won’t appreciate the fall.”

  “Stairway to heaven or escalator to hell?” She spun around in his arms to face him, their lips just a teasing distance apart. “I sometimes wonder if we’re caught up in a progressive apocalypse of our own making, unfolding one tech breakthrough at a time, and we’re just too addicted to the next big thing to notice.”

  Natty once again rested his chin on her shoulder and stared out at the stars, trying to open his mind to the possibility that there might be a grain of truth to what his wife was saying. It was not surprising that between the two of them, he was the blind optimist. She dealt in living systems, where evolution was always slower and more painful and a good deal uglier—even when each cell in their bodies was being invaded by nanites. In his world, there was no problem a little coding and a few hours on Modafinil couldn’t solve—which his nanites now blissfully secreted on command.

  Ironically, it wasn’t too long ago that he was the ultimate cynic when it came to untested technologies—including his own breakthroughs. But surrounded by supersentiences which he and his father helped program that could outthink him on the number of things that could go wrong with any path forward they cared to choose—by several orders of magnitude—and well, continuing to play the doubting Thomas seemed a bit silly.

  He took a deep breath and lifted his head and stepped back, even as he took her in his arms. “All civilizations hit this point sooner or later, the Singularity—an era of runaway technology so empowering that it eliminates all human need and allows us all to live like gods. I grant you that the challenges are ironically that much bigger. We proved that much already with the encounter with the star gate. No doubt that’s a thesis we’ll get to prove again and again.

  “I also concede that this is the most dangerous time in our history. This Singularity in a bottle that is the Nautilus—it’s not natural; the Singularity, like a genie, wasn’t meant to be contained. It won’t be corralled or controlled. But we can help to sort through why most civilizations perish before they can cross over into the Singularity. We can examine the reasons for their failure to abandon their Age of Scarcity thinking in time to embrace the Age of Abundance mentality that’s so desperately needed to get behind this much empowerment. That’s one advantage studying the Singularity in this more contained environment gives us; and we can share those insights with Earth. And we won’t be troubleshooting the transition to Singularity state from the Nautilus alone; the clone teams I’ve set up on Earth and elsewhere—we’ll be helping to thread the eye of the needle together. I’ve given us the best chance we could give ourselves. Much better than leaving this in the hands of CEOs and greed-addled multi-billionaires and the corrupt politicians dancing on their strings. With them steering us toward the future, I have no doubt things will be calamitous and we likely won’t survive the passage across the threshold to Singularity State.”

  She broke away from him, put some distance between them, and wrapped her hands around herself. The gesture was less defensive and more self-nurturing. “Will you listen to yourself? ‘I did this…’ ‘I did that…’ Your ego is every bit a challenge to a sustainable future as our corrupt leaders back on Earth doing everything they can to stall the inevitable.”

  “Not just me, Laney, the fourth brain, remember? All of us together? Each person aboard the Nautilus is a check to my thinking. You no longer have to carry that burden alone.” He came over and squeezed her upper arms supportively from behind.

  “That’s not enough though, is it?”

  He sighed. “Yes, the star gate taught us that much. The Singularity reaction must spread until it has caught up everyone on Earth in it; without that combined mind power, without each of us acting as checks and balances to one another, without that thriving ecosystem of minds, we will never have the power of mind we need to truly take on the problems of the future; certainly not what we need to come up against what’s out here.”

  He broke contact with her, pacing, starting to respond to the greater gravity of her own mind, like getting sucked into a black hole. “I suspect to continue the journey we’re on, we’ll rely more and more on the insights from the Nautilus in other timelines, on what the clone teams back on Earth can relay to us. Though these workarounds for our intellectual shortfalls, too, will be little more than an effort to transition us toward the point where all life forms can share in the Singularity on Earth.

  “One day, I suspect we in turn will have to link up with the extraterrestrial civilizations that have also entered Sin
gularity state to ensure our continued survival, to continue to augment our mind power to deal with what’s out there. In the absence of such assistance, we’ll have to spread the Singularity reaction across the universe ourselves, from planet to planet, adapting to these worlds, and creating still more synthetic lifeforms; because this is the only way we can create higher integral orders to our thinking—through incorporating this growing diversity, learning to play the different voices making up the orchestra off of one another.

  “The future is fraught with peril, more peril than either of us could have imagined, I know that now. I just don’t see any other way through it.”

  She rejoined him, slipping her arms around his waist, anchoring him to one spot to put an end to his pacing, and to help settle his mind. “I guess we won’t figure out all the answers in this moment. But we can put an end to lingering bad habits.”

  It took him a second to realize what she was getting at. “You mean retreating into myself. Quite right. But I suppose that will take some practice,” he said teasingly, leaning in for another kiss.

  ***

  The meditation room above the disk of the Nautilus had morphed to accommodate its occupants’ needs. Leon himself was wondering what those were as he grappled with Cassandra. They had a hold of one another’s upper arms like a pair of Greco-Roman wrestlers, and they were both trying to get one another off balance both figuratively and literally. The bean bags of earlier when Leon was last here talking with Natty were gone. The floor was no longer carpeted but covered in mats to cushion the takedowns. The shapeshifting of the room had been handled by the Nautilus without Leon even needing to speak his mind.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Leon said, “but the fact is that Natty made you like he would a breakfast omelet. The only difference is he didn’t want you inside his stomach any more than his heart.”

  Maybe he’d struck a nerve or maybe she just objected in principle to the tone he’d taken. Either way, he went flying out the shatterproof metallic glass as Cassandra threw him with a primal scream used as a jet propellant. As acoustic blasts go, it certainly contained more than enough force to do the trick of shattering the skylight dome over their heads.