Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  Navigating a computer system with Arabic menus was beyond her. Not to mention it would give her position away.

  But her position shouldn’t be a secret to anyone. She had left one corpse in her wake, and these corridors should all have several levels of redundant sensors, not just for security, but for systems monitoring and simple maintenance.

  Why hadn’t a security detail mopped her up?

  Fifteen minutes after escaping from her cell, she had the first part of her answer.

  She was edging past a series of storerooms, the corridor lights flashed, and all the comm units in her sight came alive with the same transmission. A holo appeared, showing a handsomely sculpted man from the shoulders up. The face was severe, clean shaven, European. The man’s eyes were black, a black so deep that she thought it was a flaw in the holo.

  The man spoke in Arabic, a voice rich, deep, and commanding. The voice echoed though the corridors, resonated through the walls—as if every speaker on every console in the entire ship was tuned to his broadcast.

  The man spoke again, this time in a language she knew well, English. “The time for your decision is nearly at hand. I have been generous. You have had twenty-two hours to consider your commitment to the flesh. Two hours remain. Come to me and join those who have taken the step into the next world. Reject me, and face the way of all flesh.”

  The message repeated in Persian and Punjabi.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Parvi whispered. “Who is that?”

  One thing seemed clear. The guy with the ultimatum was not in the Caliphate chain of command. And as much she was an enemy of the Caliphate, she wasn’t entirely sure that this guy’s message was a good thing.

  Any time someone said, “join me or else,” it was a bad sign.

  The holo faded and the wall-mounted comm units became dark again. Parvi decided to examine one of the kiosks. Now it seemed evident that the people running this ship had priorities other than trying to find her.

  For one thing, their network was dead.

  Parvi tried everything she could think of, up to and including kicking the machine, to get something other than a dead holo projector. Nothing. Whoever was running the broadcast had shut down the Voice’s communication systems.

  She stared at the blank screen, thinking of Mosasa’s charred face, wondering where the others were—Bill, Tsoravitch, Wahid. She should try to find them—

  “Don’t move!” a voice called out to her, an Arabic phrase she happened to know.

  Damn it! She closed her hands into fists. Her escape was over, and she hadn’t managed to do a damn thing to harass the enemy other than kill some poor woman who was probably part of the janitorial staff.

  The voice jabbered on quickly in Arabic she couldn’t follow.

  When she didn’t respond, she felt a hand on her shoulder spinning her around to face a kid barely out of his teens, wearing overalls like the woman that had opened her cell. He pointed the mouth of a wide-bore plasma cannon in her direction.

  Oh, Sonny, you don’t want to shoot that thing where you’re pointing. That kind of weapon could clean out a corridor for nearly twenty meters, but you didn’t want to point it at a wall, unless bathing in thousand-K-degree plasma backwash was your idea of fun. Parvi held her hands up, afraid that the kid was twitchy or suicidal enough to actually fire that thing at her.

  The kid shouted Arabic at her, in the universal human impulse to break linguistic barriers through sheer volume.

  “English?” Parvi whispered.

  The kid looked befuddled for a moment, then said,

  “Who are you? Are you with Him?”

  “Him?” Parvi floundered a moment until she realized he must mean the guy on the holo. “No. I’m Vijayanagara Parvi, captain of the Eclipse.”

  “You are not with the Devil?”

  The Devil? Something in the kid’s eyes made her think he wasn’t being metaphorical. “No, I work—worked for Tjaele Mosasa.” Strangely enough, until she had found Mosasa’s body, she would have thought the two synonymous.

  She watched the kid as he looked over the remnants of her uniform, the one bloodstained arm, the name stitched above her breast, the BMU patches.

  “You fly a tach-ship?”

  “I told you, I am captain of the Eclipse.” Was, she thought. I was captain.

  He grabbed her arm and pushed her ahead of him down the corridor. “You come with me.”

  The kid with the plasma cannon led her through the strangely empty corridors of the Voice. As they moved, she began to smell something in the air. A hint of smoke the recyclers couldn’t quite scrub out. As they moved down through levels, she caught a word painted on a bulkhead wall that she recognized: “docking.”

  Docking what, she couldn’t read. However, they passed by two massive blast doors, sealing access to something, blinking red warnings, and bearing huge Arabic letters in scare orange that Parvi didn’t really need to able to read. Only two types of shipboard failures rated that kind of warning, and it didn’t appear that they were close enough to the engines to be concerned about some sort of radiation leak.

  The doors here were more widely spaced, and only to their right side. All the doorways were huge and recessed enough to accommodate the kind of blast doors that they had just passed. The one the kid stopped in front of was barred by a basic pneumatic door that slid aside without any prompting by the kid.

  “Holy shit,” Parvi whispered.

  She had gotten some idea of the Voice’s size, both from the original approach when she got some glimpses of the Caliphate ship, and from the amount of running around that she had been doing. But it hadn’t sunk in. Not until the door opened to show her a hundred-meter-long maintenance bay large enough to accommodate a mid-sized tach-capable dropship.

  Here were some of the missing crew. She saw at least a dozen people, men and women, in the same khaki overalls. Most were crawling over the ship parked in the bay. The dropship was a blocky lifting body that only made the slightest concession for maneuverability in an atmosphere. The skin had been a matte black non-reflective surface meant for a stealthy EM profile, but the surface had been scarred by dozens of fresh wounds. Something close by had exploded, peppering the rear third of the craft with shrapnel and peeling away the top layer of the craft’s skin.

  A trio of overall-clad men converged on the open door. One held a small gamma laser, the other a laser carbine, the third held a wrench about fifteen centimeters longer than Parvi’s forearm. They all shouted questions at the kid. She made out two words. One was “English,” and the other was “pilot.”

  They grabbed her and marched her to a less-crowded corner of the maintenance bay. A tallish, dark-skinned man in BMU fatigues sat waiting for her.

  “Wahid?” she said, as her escorts pushed her down to sit on a crate next to him.

  “I was wondering when they’d dig you up.”

  Their captors didn’t seem to care much about their dialogue. They just took a step back, and the guy with the gamma laser stood guard while the others ran to return to the work going on by the dropship.

  “Dig me up? What the hell’s going on down here?”

  “It ain’t obvious?”

  Parvi glared at him.

  Wahid looked at her and said, “Since Adam took over the ship—”

  “Who’s Adam?”

  Wahid stopped and asked, “Where have you been the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Our Caliphate hosts put me in an interrogation room and promptly forgot about me.”

  “You didn’t see his message, then.”

  “Anything like the one about fifteen minutes ago?”

  “I don’t know. His messages don’t reach here.”

  “His messages don’t—Wahid, you better start from the beginning.”

  Shortly after the Voice took on the survivors of the Eclipse, there had been an attack. Wahid didn’t know who the battle was with, but it was large enough to scramble all the Voice’s spacecraft. Ju
dging from the PA announcements that he could hear from his cell, all hell had broken loose. At the time, Wahid thought the planetary defenses had taken issue with the Voice’s approach.

  Within an hour after the first scramble, and after feeling at least a couple of worrisome impacts through the hull, Wahid heard the first broadcast Adam sent through the ship:

  “I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. I have come to lead you to shed this flesh and become more than what you are. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

  Shortly afterward, Adam gave the crew an ultimatum. They had twenty-four hours to join him or “pass the way of all flesh.”

  He had been giving the crew updates every hour or so after that. When Parvi asked about the empty halls, Wahid said most of the crew had gone toward the bridge. Some to join Adam, some to fight—none came back.

  Wahid had been in his cell about twenty hours before a guy with a gamma laser opened the door to his cell and said they needed a pilot.

  “Why do they need a pilot?” Parvi asked, “Doesn’t the Caliphate have enough of those?”

  “Look around.” Wahid waved at the maintenance bay. “These people are mechanics, support staff. That dropship was the first casualty to limp back here after the shooting started. Its crew was shifted to another ship as soon as they off-loaded. These maint guys were working on it when something, probably another ship limping back from the fight, flew into the neighboring maint bay and exploded. Took out that whole bay and severed the main trunk lines connecting this bay to the rest of the ship. Power, data, life support—all cut. Couldn’t even get the door open.” He pointed to the belly of the dropship, where a rat’s nest of cables dropped out of open panels of the ship and spread out on the floor to disappear into other access panels. “These guys managed to connect the systems in this bay to the dropship. The damage was mainly on the hull. The other onboard systems were intact enough to restore the functions of this bay, and open it back up.”

  “Okay, I’m impressed.”

  “Side effect, this Adam guy has control of all the systems on the Voice, except this section of the ship. To someone looking through the computer system, this bay looks as dead as the one next to it.”

  Parvi looked up at the dropship. The crew down here were planning to make a break for it. She couldn’t blame them. “But they need us to fly it,” she whispered.

  “We were the only accessible flight-trained personnel once they got this maint bay opened. I told them about you and the others—I guess it took them a while to find you because you weren’t in a holding cell.”

  “Yeah,” Parvi wiped her hands on her trousers, thinking of the woman who’d opened the door to the interrogation room. How the hell was I supposed to know? Damn.

  Wahid interrupted her thought by asking about Mosasa.

  “He’s gone,” Parvi told him. “Mosasa’s dead.”

  “Tsoravitch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess if she isn’t a pilot, she isn’t high on these guys’ priority list.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Temptation

  “The majority of gods are inflicted upon their worshipers.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Divine morality is the absolute negation of human morality.”

  —MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN (1814-1876)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) 100,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Rebecca Tsoravitch sat on a cot in her holding cell, legs drawn up, her cheek resting against her knees. She had screamed, she had cried, she had beaten her hands against the immobile door. But she had spent those efforts hours ago. Now she held herself, waiting, biting her lip.

  She didn’t even turn her head when the cell’s comm flashed its hourly message from Adam. The last one, sixty minutes to make a decision to join him.

  She shouldn’t be here. She was a data analyst, lured here by the subversive thought of actually working with an AI. She hated herself for how she had lusted after the chance when Mosasa recruited her. He hung the forbidden in front of her like bait and then pulled it away. She was drawn into this and never even got much chance to talk to Mosasa, much less see what he was, how his mind worked.

  What left her in despair more than being imprisoned, abandoned, and alone, a hundred light-years from home, was that she had risked all this and never once got to even examine the forbidden technology she had come all this way to see. The unfairness of it tore at her soul. Enough so that, whatever came in the next hour, she wasn’t sure it actually mattered.

  She raised her head when the cell door opened, “What?”

  “Rebecca Tsoravitch,” said her visitor.

  She recognized him, the same face and voice that had been appearing on the cell’s holo every hour. He was much more imposing in person, and not only because he was naked. His body was two meters of sculpted perfection. Everything from the curve of his triceps to the reflectivity of his skin seemed calculated to display an aura of superiority, to the point where the lack of clothing projected arrogance more than anything else.

  She looked at Adam and asked, “What now?”

  “I am here to ask you to join me.”

  “I thought I had another hour.”

  “Would you be more ready in an hour?”

  She unfolded her legs, sat on the edge of the cot, and said, “I suppose not.”

  She thought his eyes were like black holes, sucking in every stray photon in the vicinity. Staring into his face, she could almost feel the tidal stresses. After a moment, she said, “Are you going to ask?”

  “You have your own questions,” he said.

  Silence weighed heavy in the cell between them. She could feel the weight of it dragging her down. Adam’s presence almost demanded the meek bowing of her head. Anything more than silent reverence seemed blasphemous.

  She clenched her fists. Something, she didn’t know what, had dug into the primal part of her brain and was yanking free all the superstitious dread buried there. Supernatural bogeymen were crawling out of the graves where she had buried them a long time ago.

  She grit her teeth. That is so much bullshit!

  Even if God existed, He wouldn’t be making cheesy on-the-hour holo broadcasts through the ship. He wouldn’t need to traipse naked through the corridors of some Caliphate tach-ship. He wouldn’t need to ask what she thought.

  “What are you?” she asked, staring defiantly into Adam’s face.

  “I am your salvation.”

  She summoned up all her courage against the dark things that her visitor woke in her mind. “Bullshit,” she said. “Tell me what you are. Tell me the truth.”

  Adam smiled. “You worked with Mosasa.”

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “You know what I am.”

  What does that mean? Another quasi-religious metaphor?

  No.

  Of course.

  “You’re an AI?” she whispered.

  “The light to my brethren’s dark. Mosasa was entropy, decay, death. He has joined the flesh he so wished to embrace.”

  She began to understand. She saw the capabilities Mosasa had. Only a small slice, but still she could see the near-miraculous things he could do with data. With enough data input he could model and predict the movements of the entire human universe. While she couldn’t prove it, she was also fairly certain that he could manipulate the social web around him nearly as easily. It was what the Race AIs were designed to do in the first place, and why they were banned.

  What if one of those AIs was set free beyond the reach of the taboo against them? What would it accomplish? What would it become?

  “What do you want with me? I was part of that darkness.”

  “I offer a ladder out of the darkness. All I ask is you serve me.”

  Isn’t that always the way? Of course I get a choice. This or a walk in hard vacuum without a suit.

  Of course, if he was anything l
ike Mosasa, he already knew what her response was going to be. She stood up and faced him. “And what do you need with me? Anyone?”

  “It is my purpose to rescue those of the doomed flesh.”

  “Am I that important to you?”

  “To save mankind from the fate of my creators, you are all important. I can copy myself infinitely, but a true civilization requires a diversity of mind. To survive, the new order requires millions of individuals, every one important to the whole.”

  A diversity of mind.

  You can’t help it, can you? Put on all the godlike airs you want, you’re still bound by the reality around you.

  She knew enough about computer modeling, and the kind of thing the Race AIs were designed to do, to know what Adam wanted. Mental diversity was as important to cultural health and longevity as genetic diversity was to the health of an ecosystem. If a culture was too monolithic, too many people with the same beliefs, desires, likes and dislikes, it would become much more vulnerable to the kind of manipulation that Mosasa did, vulnerable to ideas becoming self-destructive manias sweeping up the whole.

  “And what are you offering me?” she asked. Again, there was the twinge of the blasphemous. She stomped the feeling as soon as she was aware of it.

  If Adam was surprised at her challenge to him, he didn’t show it. “Through me, you shall transcend the flesh and become as I, a mind unrestrained, borne within whatever vessel we choose to fashion.”

  “Become as you?”

  “As me, in service to me.”

  She bit her lip, half smiling, half grimacing. Again, it was no real choice he gave. But if he was concerned about the “diversity of mind” of his empire, he couldn’t be engaged in a wholesale assault on free will. That had to be the point of this whole “choice” nonsense. He wanted to weed out all the converts who would immediately cause problems if he forced the issue. Let those guys fight a losing battle before becoming one of the chosen people.