Wine of the Gods 1: Outcasts and Gods

by Pam Uphoff

  "In other words," Wolfgang could feel his grin widening. "The perfect place for all of us to escape to, next time."

  Charlie nodded. "Nice thought, but not terribly practical. We’re all sterile, we’re mostly male, and tools would be nice."

  "Books." Rebeccah frowned at him. "Doctors."

  "Details, my fellow telies, mere details. Right now, we need to do a bit of work toward controlling our own lives. I think we ought to start by switching the door locks so we can lock people out, instead of them being able to lock us in."

  Charlie eyed him. "Nice idea, but Rebeccah figured it out over a year ago."

  "Really? Excellent. Now, what should our next step be? Or are we up to three or four, already?" He grinned at their expressions. "Hey, we were manufactured to be smarter than hell."

  "Actually, we were manufactured to open transdimensional gates. Jason's seduced roughly half the women employees and found out all sorts of interesting things about the company." Rebeccah sat down under the tree and gave him the full rundown on what they'd discovered.

  Chapter Seventeen

  NewGene Experimental Facilities

  Wisconsin, North American Union

  20 May 2115

  "You're very good at this Wolfgang."

  "Oh, boy! Do I get a doggy bone? Consider my tail to be wagging." He couldn't keep the sarcasm out of his voice all the time, and this Jack Kelso person was really irritating him. So far he'd just taken his ire out on the security measures in the dorms. And the building structure. Charlie and Rebeccah really liked the doorway into the empty room next to hers. Two bathrooms, no waiting. Two narrow beds, snugged up tight.

  Getting some furniture for their 'sitting room' was going to be a bit of a challenge.

  "Don't piss me off. I can hurt your friends."

  Ah yes. That method of control. We are all hostages for each other. Wolfgang eyed him. "That is an escalation you don't want to make."

  The idiot just snorted. "I kinda of have a hankering for that Rebeccah girl."

  Wolfgang reached out mentally, delicately. It was so easy to part a few fibers, weaken the wall of a mid-sized blood vessel . . . Not too much yet. Learn the ground first.

  "Tomorrow morning, before the regularly scheduled delivery, we'll try you with a pickup group of people that don't seem to coordinate well with others. Dismissed, soldier boy." Kelso squinted and rubbed his temples.

  Wolf walked out, paying attention to the electric impulses that scanned his implant, checked his permission to leave and opened the door. He mentally spotted the junction to the computer, and the brief code that enabled the door mechanism. There didn't seem to be anything tricky about it. He should be able to come and go at will. He'd picked up the magnetic car game quickly, and was working on the "prototype" rings. He wasn't able to juice up the power, balance the rings and mentally reach out to connect to anything on his own, but he might be able to do any of those jobs while two other people managed the other tasks. Rebeccah’s lessons had been very helpful in getting him up to speed.

  Trying to coordinate with the others on the big ring was going to be interesting.

  It was apparently the mix of talents in the control team that determined the broad 'area' of the multiverse the gate accessed. Adding himself was going to open even more possibilities, but did he want that? It might be better to stay in the background. He needed to test the limits to the telies' autonomy, and start stretching them. Work on how to take control of the direction the whole project was headed. Find out what they could do, and what they could hide. He especially wanted to hide his own abilities. Which was going to be difficult, given the number of people who would need to know.

  Immediately after breakfast he was back in the gate building with Chauncey and Richie. Both rated by Rebeccah as essentially selfish, and thus not-to-be-trusted.

  "I don't do it the same way twice, according to Rebeccah. AK says I probably don't even do the same thing." Chauncey shrugged. "It's no matter to me, I try to not bias the numbers either direction."

  "And I don't trust them, don't see why I should do anything for them. Assholes." Richie crossed his arms.

  "I'm surprised they've kept you two here. You'd think they'd realize you can't do the work."

  "Oh, they can." Jack stalked around the three of them. "They just won't. But we're coming up with some really neat ideas about how to deal with that." His smile was nasty, but trailed off into an expression of pain. He rubbed his forehead.

  Wolfgang turned away and got out the headsets, started sticking his on. Richie whined and took forever. Chauncey had half of his in the wrong places. Wolf tromped hard on a hint of sympathy as Jack snarled at them.

  The magnetic bottle was brought up first. The rings were always in motion, slowing but never stopping, lest their near perfect roundness sag beyond tolerances. They were always cold, bathed in liquid nitrogen. Their speed of rotation was gently ramped up to their usual operating range.

  Wolfgang held out his hands and grabbed the other two men. The circuit that should spin through them all limped through their indifference and rebellion. Wolfgang reached out and felt the mag bottle. Saw how the electrons started flowing when he did so. :: Chauncey, what is the probability of all the electrons going in the same direction? If we increase or decrease the size of the mag bottle, how does that probability change? Is it harder or easier for us to affect probability? ::

  He felt the other man reach for the bottle, and study the effects as he tightened his mental grip, then loosened it.

  :: So, Richie. You don't like it here? Where do you want to go? Maybe find some volcanoes? :: Wolfgang leaned on the rings, damped the vibrations, and heard the clean tones.

  :: Throw you into them? Now that would be fun. :: The boy finally reached out into the bubbling electric blue sea. They studied it all a bit. There were faint dim clouds in the distance.

  Wolfgang reached for the one on the lower right, but put on the brakes, and just looked. Dry, poisonous . . . he pulled back, looked the other dim clouds over. The next cloud he could faintly see cars buzzing about. Pull back. The third cloud was empty and park-like. Odd twisted spirals and walls of rock . . . No. Ruins. He pulled back. The fourth cloud was faintly off putting, he hadn't a clue why. He just didn't want to go there. Oh, no that was Richie.

  :: Let's go back to the one with cars. It might be close enough to here that we could pass. ::

  Wolfgang took aim at the second cloud. The energy seeped away, half way. He opened his eyes and blinked, aware of a loud bang that had awoken him.

  He could hear stressed voices beyond the door, and decided to ignore them.

  Jack stomped back and forth, glaring. "Couldn't hook up, couldn't hold steady. Damn good thing we have the capacitors now, you could have killed someone. Worthless, utterly worthless."

  Excellent.

  Richie and Chauncey both gave him thoughtful looks and said nothing.

  They see the value in secrets. Good. So long as their best interests coincide with mine.

  "Might as well assign you three to the exploration teams."

  Wolf grinned. "Trying to get rid of us? I suppose accidentally losing us on some uninhabitable world would do the trick."

  Jack looked thoughtful, and Wolfgang found himself assigned to a team the next day. They were pansies, compared to soldiers. But the man in charge, Deiter Sloan, seemed to actually care about his people, and put Wolfgang in charge of training.

  He taught them slice and shield, how to throw fireballs. Unnoticeability, how to warp light. They didn’t seem to be able to see his bubbles, but once he put handles on them, they could use them. He made sure they had weapons, a useful array of tools, and a month’s worth of food with them every time they jumped through the gate.

  They talked about how to hunt, process prey, build shelters.

  How to know when to cut and run, and never, ever return to this Earth. He went through the gate several times, himself, for quick grab-and-return missions. However temptin
g, he always returned.

  I want everyone to get away, next time.

  Chapter Eighteen

  NewGene Experimental Facilities

  Wisconsin, North American Union

  5 June 2115

  She was deep in the decision tree modeling, conceptualizing in the dimness of the empty game room when the door opened.

  ". . . where they first learned the semi-subconscious manipulation of computers. With the dimensional interface computers this results in the observed stability. Without the telies hooked up to it, all you get is a lot of wasted electricity. The eighteen telies who can directly handle the magnetic containment fields means we can—for brief periods—generate huge currents." Jack-the-Ass. Ick.

  He flicked on the light, augmenting the late evening light coming through the high windows.

  Rebeccah craned to see who he was talking to. :: Don't notice me, insignificant, nobody here, empty. ::

  A stranger walked by, looking right through her. Asian, compact and muscular. Light on his feet.

  "That was not planned. I don't understand how they manage that." Someone else was talking to Jack, over by the doors.

  The man who'd walked by, walked back. Stood alertly, a bit away from Jack and the other man. Rebeccah shifted slowly out of his field of view and peeked between game machines, for a glimpse of the speaker.

  "Neither do we, frankly. But they can strip the electrons and drive them around in one direction, resulting in a magnetic field so strong we can pull megawatts and use it for the rings."

  "So the operating cost—for us—is low?" A short, broad, oriental gentleman. Could this be the Chairman? Chou? Why was he here, this time? No, wait, this man was older. Much older. Rebeccah felt a sudden chill. Someone above Chou? A senior member of the family that owned the majority of the Company? Maybe the legendary Jaejong himself?

  "Incredibly. We won't actually mention that, of course. Any clients can measure our power requirements, and we can offer a below market price due to our onsite generation, if you think that would be a prudent and honest action."

  Chou, if that was his name, chuckled. "Certainly. I thought Mueller was overstating the problems."

  "We've dealt with every problem except the randomness of the locations. We need to be able to find our explorers, else we'll be limited to the ninety-second snatch and grabs like we've been doing. We need to send a party over for a week. Composed mainly of their friends."

  Chou nodded. "So, subconsciously the constructs will want to find their friends, and so they should be able to find the right membrane. And having learned one 'address' they can learn others. And we can sell access to mining companies, farming combines, lumber and paper companies, governments, universities, even private people—colonizing companies and so forth. Yes. I think this project is going to pay off, finally. I knew the Russians were missing the utility of their constructs, ignoring the most important test results and their applicability to the early dimensional experiments. And fortunately there's enough prejudice against the freaks that we won't have any of our competitors stumbling over this control method. It might be a good idea to get rid of as many of the constructs out there as possible. I'll talk to a few Congressmen, see what I can do about that on the cheap."

  :: Nobody here. Empty room. ::

  "So, how about a demonstration?" Jack was smirking proudly. "I can get eight students together and fire up the rings if you are interested."

  "Oh yes, indeed I am."

  They walked out, leaving Rebeccah breathless.

  "It might be a good idea to get rid of as many of the constructs out there as possible." Surely they aren't going to turn on the kids who've had their problems fixed, maybe a bit of enhancement. There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds. And they all have families who vote.

  Rebeccah returned to the dorm, apartment now. No doubt the guards monitoring the outside cams were checking her off their lists as in for the night. Charlie wasn't home. She dumped her books, then let herself out the window. Away from the flood lights, it was plenty dark, even for a girl in bright yellow. She spotted a group of men walking across toward the dimensional interface building and stayed well out of sight. The main doors were all electronically controlled, but she circled around and found the back emergency doors propped open to relieve the air pressure fluctuations. High Tech Security, meet Human Nature.

  The rings spun up, slowly and gently. Rebeccah settled down where she had a good view through the six inch gap. She could only see the rings obliquely, but through the door on the far side, she saw Jason and the seven other men placing the microwire loops and sticking them down. She ran her hand through her short hair, feeling the little bald spots. They could have given us the choice of shaving them every time, but they neither asked, nor even told us the hair would never grow back.

  The eight men formed a circle and grasped wrists. Rebeccah sank into her own meditations, and mentally, stood carefully back to watch what the men did, and how it did or didn't differ from what the women did.

  Voices intruded. Jack and the elder Chou. Three men hanging back. Bodyguards? One was the young man who'd swept the game room.

  Hasty footsteps heralded a new arrival. Ted McNiff was the director's liaison with anyone and everyone who came for a tour. Someone with brains had realized they needed to get Jack-the-Ass away from the main shareholder. The bodyguards shifted to intercept him, then withdrew at a gesture from Chou.

  There were the usual meet and greet noises, then the Chairman frowned at the two Trans World flunkies. "How do you find the Constructs with Talent?"

  Jack leapt in, trying to impress. "They all have two different types of power collection genes. No one else has this ability. We've got Telies from twelve different companies, so the number and mix of the other genes varies. We're testing that now. In fact, our original NewGene Telies were deliberately created with a matrix of allele and gene combinations, specifically so we could determine the whole spectrum of abilities, their interactions and understand which ones, and which combinations, enabled which abilities."

  Chou waved that away. "I know that. Americans. So willing to experiment. The Chinese were unbelievably cautious. That's why father and I had to leave. But here among all these variations, how are you discovering the most useful?"

  Not Jaejaong, one of his sons, his eldest, perhaps?

  "They all have most of the engineered genes. Just slightly different versions." McNiff shot a censorious glance Jack's way. "The people with the almost complete sets of engineered genes—I'm afraid my people have gotten into the habit of calling them gods—can modify the randomness of the Dimensional Interface process. By testing them in small groups, we've eliminated most of the ones with no talent for this. Of the original four hundred and twenty-eight double powered test children, only one hundred and forty-two appear to have any talent towards dimensional work. We're keeping all of them, of course, they can play supporting roles, if nothing else. There are so many almost random factors that determine which world the gate opens into that we haven't managed to even identify all of them, let alone figured out how to control them. The gods are learning to do it subconsciously, automatically. The ones we consider useless right now may prove to be necessary in the future."

  They walked further in from the visitors' entrance of the building, to her left, McNiff still talking. "The working groups run anywhere from three to eleven gods, and the specific group of gods tends to open gates to worlds with similar characteristics."

  "So you just randomly try different mixes of constructs?"

  "Not randomly, we're working slowly through a formula that will test each of them with each of the rest, in every possible mixture. This also gives us an idea of who to use to find the different sorts of worlds. Some of the world types don't appear to be easily habitable. Primitive life, dangerous life. Extended Ice Ages, and so forth."

  "Hmph. Well, perhaps we could use those worlds as penal colonies. The New Australia, you know?" Chou nodded abruptly. "They ca
n be the solution to their own problem. Round up the excess and the slightly modified and send them away. Keep the ones with useful abilities, clone them when you need more." He leaned in close and stared at McNiff. "And do not ever again refer to them as gods in my hearing."

  McNiff nodded. Turned a bit jerkily. "These are the rings, as you can see they are being spun up to operating speed, and then we'll run the current through them and see what these eight . . . constructs can do for us."

  "Could they find a nearby world, not very different from ours?"

  "It's actually fairly difficult to power down enough to reach something near, without dropping so low in energy that the gate collapses. Or what we think of as near; worlds very similar to ours. So we have had very few gates to civilized human worlds. The most easily reached spot appears to be a region where either humans never evolved, or became extinct prior to any widespread development. We’ve identified three teams of . . . constructs who can reach that branch, and we’re looking for more, as that looks like the best destination for colonization."

  "Do not neglect the worlds with people. Civilizations that have taken a slightly different path, that might have advanced science, medicine and so forth, could be valuable sources of information."

  McNiff swallowed. "Yes. We'll need to consider potential problems with unfamiliar bacteria and viruses, traveling both directions."

  Chou shrugged indifferently. "What sort of commercial opportunities are there in the power generation?"

  "It's hard to judge. We haven't even figured out what they do—the electrons just start flowing as long as one of eighteen constructs has a mental grasp of the magnetic bottle. We were trying to test a fusion containment system, when it just happened."

  Rebeccah spotted his hand, fingers crossed. She smirked. The techs were sending gestures his way.

  "Now, sir, for safety's sake, we need to leave the floor. The observation room will give us an excellent view through the rings of the world we connect to." He waved at the safety glass enclosed balcony above the cryogenic equipment.