The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  The metal-glass would heal; Leon wasn’t so sure about his back, reinforced with nanites or not. She could have left him for the emptiness of space to finish him off, but Cassandra being who she was, Techa forbid she leave finishing him off to anybody else; they might not be half as efficient at it. She crouched down and launched herself off the floor at him with terminal velocity—by “terminal” he was referring to the impact of the projectile she’d become and what it’d do to him upon catching up to him. Ordinarily the vacuum of space would have sucked her out after him, but what was the vacuum of space against her?

  Leon’s body was already compensating for the lack of atmosphere outside the ship, and the minus 150 degrees centigrade. By “compensating” he meant it hurt like a bitch, as his nanites tore him up in their desperation to reorder his every molecule; maybe they could have gone easier on him and this was just them giving him a piece of their mind for not giving them a heads-up first; they were designed, after all, to respond to his thought-directives.

  Cassandra had grabbed one of the shards from the shattered viewport in the vicinity of the hole she’d made and she was currently tenderizing her meat with it now that she’d overtaken him and the rate at which he’d been ejected from the pressurized chamber. Leon ignored her stabs despite the spiking pain in his body and used both hands to choke her by the neck. Maybe if he could deprive her of enough oxygen she’d run out of the fuel she needed to feed that temper and ease out of combat mode; he sure as hell couldn’t actually hurt her.

  His lips were moving; he realized that had nothing to do with the words he wanted to convey, as sound didn’t carry in a vacuum. But their nanites would be communicating directly via whatever channel they’d opened to one another.

  As to the “freefall,” in truth he could feel the tractor beam the Nautilus had thrown around them to keep them from drifting too far away.

  “When Natty cloned Laney to make you, that made sense, right?” Leon began. “He needed to imbue you with her aptitudes so you could rewrite your own genetic algorithms on the fly if they came up short during combat. Brilliant, really, but he didn’t factor in, did he, the possibility that he might also clone Laney’s affection for him over to you. I mean, what pushes her buttons pretty much pushes yours, right? Not to mention that the only two people who can get inside each other’s heads better than identical twins have got to be clones. So, thinking this through logically, I’m guessing every time they make love or feel the least bit romantic toward one another, your every corpuscle must tingle. Got to be damn irritating.”

  “You’d think I’d been taking this ice pick to your brain all this time instead of to your torso, as soft in the head as you sound right now.” The bitch of it was Cassandra didn’t even sound winded as she railed back at him.

  “I’m just trying to help you to put an end to the pain, Cassandra,” he managed between yelps from Cassandra’s digs with the shard of metal-glass.

  “Same here. I’m trying to cure you of the pains of being alive inside such a thick head.”

  He let go of her neck and grabbed both her arms, squeezed hard enough on the one with the shard in it that she had no choice but to let go of the makeshift dagger. “See, just like freefalling without the parachute. Just surrender to the sensation, the peace and quiet.”

  Frustrated by being deprived of her weapon, Cassandra had unfurled her hand and was currently using her palm chakra to funnel space dust toward her, which she quickly infused with nanites to forge her latest weapon. The nanites around the chakras in her body were there to maximize the amount of chi flowing through her, which in turn could empower her by any number of means, but of course the form of empowerment she’d chosen presently was less than ideal. Leave it to her to shut down her crown chakra and any connection to her higher self she might use to calm her ass down. Leon figured he better talk fast.

  “On the plus side, I see you’re trying to digest your pain as all artists do through their creative medium of expression,” he said, eying the latest dagger taking shape in her hand. “On the minus side, how many poems to the war gods do you plan to write using your dagger there as a pen before you realize that a real solution to the problem eludes you? Might I suggest a few fixes. You could try inserting yourself into Natty and Laney’s relationship as the third leg. What guy doesn’t have fantasies about a three-way with twins? Did you consider that when he cloned you he might also have cloned his feelings toward Laney toward you as well?” The force in Cassandra’s hand, holding the still-forming dagger, seemed to bleed off temporarily.

  “He also made me a sociopath, remember?” Cassandra blurted, eying the weapon nearly complete in her hand now with a menacing smile. “It’s a great feature for numbing the pain.”

  “I think it’s the numbness that you’re rebelling against with all the anger. It’s a smokescreen, but no matter how thick it gets, it still can’t blind you from the truth can it? I believe you’ve proven that much already.”

  The knife, fully formed in her hand now, extended, the tip growing until it had driven its way through his left eye and clear through his brain. He screamed bloody murder in defiance of the soundlessness of space. “You’re such a charmer, Cassandra. Honestly, I don’t know how any man can resist you?” He craned his neck, breaking off the shaft of the knife, and let go another agonizing outcry upon pulling out the thorn in his eye. The vitreous solution of his eyeball along with some blood and brain matter spewed out at her as if he were vomiting on her. The “vomit” flash froze about her face. “Can you see yourself in the black of my one good remaining eye?” he asked, pulling her toward him. “This is the real you, and like the female answer to Dorian Grey, it’s just going to get uglier with time.”

  She yelled so loudly he thought his eardrums would shatter, but instead every molecule in his body scattered to the heavens. She’d vaporized him. “Wonderful,” he thought, “what an opportunity to be born again. If only I can get her to embrace the same psychology!” All that remained of him now was a nanite swarm, at least until the various hive minds could reconstitute him. But first his nanites would have to morph themselves, adding miniature rocket engines to their bases so they could fly about vacuuming up what they needed to put him back together.

  Cassandra wasn’t waiting to see if he made it back to the ship in one piece. She was already flying back to the ship off the thrust from the chakras in the balls of her feet, moving enough chi energy through her to fly her body as one would fly a spaceship. Shaolin monks able to snuff out a candle at fifty paces with the chi energy they could blast through their bodies had nothing on this woman.

  Leon re-agglutinated a short while later; she was aboard ship by then, walking across the meditation room and descending down through the hidden trap door in the floor that opened into a stairwell on psychic command.

  Using his mind-link to the Nautilus, Leon teleported back into the meditation room, the domed skylight once again intact. “All in all, not a bad first session,” Leon said between gasping breaths. “I’m sensing real progress.”

  He marched in her direction, though he was really headed for the nearest bar aboard the Nautilus, in case anyone was watching and given to getting any mistaken notions about his intent.

  ***

  Leaving her appointment with Leon, Cassandra’s mind went back to her trial by fire with the nun, which had been no less brutal, when Cassandra was asked to test-pilot the latest roll out of the next-gen nanites. Cassandra realized her worst fears about the prototype’s flaws had not borne fruit. She had not been turned against the Nautilus, and even if she had, Solo had held his ground. So long as they couldn’t get past him, they couldn’t turn her.

  But this aggressive, alien supersentience had had some limitations governing it that the next one might not. The only surefire protection was to find a way to a calm, meditative center that might allow Cassandra to hack her way towards a greater understanding of how her mind might be infiltrated, and her connection to the Nautilus supersentie
nce severed. That meant that to truly safeguard the ship going forward would mean getting over herself in ways she had not been able to up until now. Leon was right; she fed off her own anger, used it like a nuclear-fusion reaction inside her. As much as she hated to admit it, she might need him to doctor her psyche enough so she could use an inner calm instead to power her; and to address other concerns—that weighed on everyone’s survival, not just hers. So the sessions with him would continue for now—if she didn’t kill him before they were through.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Thor’s family’s suite—theoretically expandable on a thought—never seemed any smaller; Thor could feel the walls closing in on him.

  “It’s your birthday,” his dad said, “and I’ve got the perfect gift for you.”

  Then why does it feel like they have me surrounded? Thor’s mom and dad were standing before him with all the authority of looming giants. He couldn’t wait until he grew another couple of feet so he could finally take up these “discussions” on an even footing.

  His dad put his thumb and index finger to his lips and whistled. An entire platoon of soldiers—all two feet tall—double-timed it out of their barracks. I guess that’s what passes for a doll house these days, Thor thought. The soldiers quickly came to attention between him and his parents, standing before them with their bayonet-tipped rifles leaned against their shoulders like a strange picket fence before the picture of middle-class perfection beyond.

  “We figured, since you like playing soldier,” mom said, “we’d get you these to play with so you don’t get yourself into any more trouble.”

  Thor stood firm and crossed his hands. Frog Doll was standing beside him on the living room floor of their private chamber aboard the Nautilus with the same look of trepidation on his face. “Show them how I feel about that, Frog Doll.”

  With a heart-stopping leap and a ferocity more commonly found in lions, Frog Doll pounced on a soldier selected at random and bit him in half, swallowing everything from the waist up whole. The other soldiers picked then to take up far superior positions throughout the apartment without being told. They fired at anything that moved—including Thor’s parents, whose open-mouthed expressions just earned them rubber bullets to the hard palate.

  After his father held up his hand in a cease and desist gesture, and brought his coughing fit to a crescendo, he said, “Okay. How about we just use them to stay in practice for the next big confrontation, you know?” He was directing his words at Thor. Thor wasn’t sure why, as Thor had disowned him. “More practical than having a full platoon of life-sized soldiers in our living quarters.”

  With his hands still crossed, Thor uttered decisively, “An acceptable compromise.” He pivoted at the waist to take in Frog Doll. “What do you think, Frog Doll?”

  “They do taste pretty good. Beats the hell out of playing snatch and grab with the fish food.”

  Thor sighed dramatically. “Fine, I suppose we better get on with it.” He dove for his assault rifle tucked conveniently under the couch for quick access in case of emergencies such as this. But no sooner had he gotten his hands around the weapon than it morphed in his hands. It had turned into a sniper rifle. “Whoa!”

  Their family’s private chambers morphed into a cityscape. An Augmented Reality-Virtual Reality hybrid that doesn’t require goggles! How cool is that, Thor thought. He was going to weather this new era of heightened interactivity between the Nautilus supersentience and its crew better than most.

  Thor and his parents were poised on the flat roof of one of the skyscrapers. Flashing on the passing Goodyear blimp were the words “Urban Warfare.”

  Floating in the sky just above Thor’s head were mathematical equations for calculating the sniper shot he needed to take to reach the highlighted soldier which could only be seen through the reflective glass of his rifle’s scope. There were variables for wind speed and direction, overall distance, velocity of the bullet Thor’s sniper rifle could deliver, angle of the muzzle on his rifle needed to send the bullet in the perfect parabolic arc to its mark. All that was needed was for Thor to complete the math in time to keep from being shot. He dodged the incoming sniper bullet as he ducked behind the lip of the ledge running the perimeter of the roof.

  He gazed back at his parents. They were currently dining at a table set for two with all the romantic flourishes. Thor wasn’t sure if the nanites giving the sim a footing in reality were on account of the doll house’s AI, or the Nautilus room’s AI, but he wasn’t sure he cared. “Is this how you plan to get me to do my math homework?” Thor protested. “Your ruse smacks of transparency!”

  Thor was taking some pelting hits from the rubber bullets from the sniper that stung worse than bees.

  “And your genetics homework and your robotics homework and your homework in a few dozen other fields,” mom replied, sipping her wine and exuding an “ah” of satisfaction. Evidently she thought it was a good vintage, Thor thought, though he was terribly afraid her sense of smugness owed to another source entirely.

  “Each of the soldiers is an expert in a different field!” his dad exclaimed. “Isn’t that wonderful? Just like a real SEALS team.”

  “I have to admit, homework does seem a bit more captivating in this new context,” Thor said, trying to work the math on a piece of black chalk that had materialized in his hands, using the protective wall he was hiding behind as a blackboard. Once his calculations were complete, he got off a return shot at the sniper, but it went wide. “I guess X only marks the spot if you get the math right.” He fired again after playing with the equation some more, and then adjusting his scope slightly for the next shot. This time when he fired he hit his mark. “Yes!” That fist pump earned him the stinging rebuke of another rubber bullet to the upheld hand.

  “Shoot!” Thor found a helmet materializing on his head and flipped down the see-all goggles. That allowed him to peer through the protective barrier of the wall at the soldier tight-rope walking the transmission wire between telephone poles on the street below long enough to fire his grappling hook against the side of Thor’s building. He reeled himself in via the weapon’s hydraulic mechanism and then used his adhesive gloves and socks to climb the wall Gecko-like toward Thor. Thor was looking through the floor and the lower levels now to take in what was going on below.

  Another math equation materialized before him so he could calculate how much time he had to take evasive maneuvers. “You know, math is pretty cool,” Thor mumbled.

  His parents eyed the giant projection screen that had materialized for them as part of their dining ambiance. Through the magic of AI editing they could follow the drama involving their son unfolding on the big screen, the editor pointing out dangers Thor would have to fight off before he could figure out what was going on.

  Chewing her steak, Corin said, “Well, it’s not quite the quality family time I had in mind, but I have to admit, I’m comforted to finally see him taking to his homework.”

  DeWitt finished chewing his food. “Just wait until the genetics lesson kicks in and the only way to find his way back to human form again after being transformed into the swamp creature, breathing in the enemy’s chemical weapons, is to get the organic chemistry right.”

  “Maybe our son isn’t quite the prodigy you think he is, darling. You might want to dumb down those lessons a little.”

  “Nonsense. You can’t make a prodigy without breaking a few lesser minds.” He held up his wine glass, expecting her to toast the point.

  She hesitated, but then she raised her glass. “I suppose we can always throw in a psychotherapist to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

  “Two steps ahead of you. Wait till he gets a load of the psy-ops soldier in the unit.”

  Corin relented and tinkled her glass against his. It was nice to see her husband, every bit the incorrigible child as her son, get something right for a change.

  This was turning out to be more of a birthday present for her than for Thor.

  Someth
ing caught her eye.

  She thought it was a glitch in the augmented reality technology. She was looking into her husband’s eyes and one of them looked pixilated.

  What took her mind off that alarming sight was a staticy groan coming from her son; it wasn’t like he was talking over a COMMS channel.

  She glanced over in his direction. Thor yelled, “Ta-ta-take this, you-you…” He didn’t have to finish the sentence for Corin to figure out what was up.

  She bolted up out of her chair with just one word, “Leon!” That sonic blast she had no doubt would reach him wherever he was on the Nautilus—if it didn’t shatter the hull of the ship first.

  ***

  The sounds of the splashes—it was like listening to glacier ice cleaving in the great global warming on Earth. The Omega Force operatives were dropping into their Samadhi tanks. Once submerged in the oxygenated liquid that allowed them to breathe under water, they saw the two words flashing on the metal-glass walls. Two glorious words: Nanite Removal. Leon thought he might have them tattooed to his forehead. No thought had ever made him happier than his return to humanity from the realm of the transhuman. In another few minutes he would be officially a dinosaur once again; it would no longer be a nasty rumor.

  Less than an hour later, Crumley walked in on Leon wearing nothing more than a towel wrapped around his waist; Leon’s chambers adjoined the Omega Forces shared barracks. “You realize that we couldn’t defend this ship if we tried right now,” Crumley said. “Not in this dilapidated human state.”

  Leon smiled. “Save the melodrama for the kids, Crumley. It doesn’t wear well on you.”

  Crumley frowned. “You can bet Alpha Unit won’t be rolling back their latest generation nanites. God forbid. I suppose so long as they can hold down the fort until we’re back on line…”