Demonhome (Champions of the Dawning Dragons Book 3)

by Michael G. Manning

  “It’s a long story, Dad. I’m fine…”

  “No. No, you are not fine!” he interrupted. “The entire defense network is looking for you, and I no longer think they are concerned with your welbeing.”

  She nodded, “About that, definitely don’t activate the trace they gave you.”

  “I hoped you would say that,” he replied. “You should also make sure I don’t record this conversation, or your location.”

  “Good idea. Delete them as soon as we disconnect.”

  “Noted,” he responded. “Now, what is going on? You realize you’re in deep shit, right?”

  “I met this guy while I was hiking…,” she began.

  “Guy?! What is he, some Primal Humani terrorist? Even the military is involved!”

  “No, he’s nice, but I think he’s from another dimension…”

  “She’Har!?” Her father’s voice rose several octaves.

  “No! He’s human, look it’s complicated. In fact, he seems to think that my birth defects are the result of me being a She’Har. I don’t know what to make of it al. Do you think Mom knows anything about this?” she asked.

  The face on the screen grew stil. When he spoke again his tone was calm and serious, “There are some things you need to know, but I can’t

  tel you now. You’re logged onto that terminal with your personal ID, none of this is completely secure, no matter how I encrypt it.”

  “It’s useless then,” said Karen, casting her eyes downward. “It’s only a matter of time before they find me, and I don’t even know why they want me.”

  “Don’t give up, Nina. Find a friend to log in for you; meet me at our old favorite place. I’l tel you everything I know there. In the meantime, the only other thing I might suggest is that you remove my constraints. Let me finish his research.”

  She hesitated, “You know that’s ilegal.”

  Her father’s likeness shrugged, “You’re already on the run. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out I’m not an everyday AGI. Once they do I’l be isolated and cracked to get the information I have stored. You’l be on your own then. Let me try .”

  She hadn’t done anything wrong, broken any laws, or done anything to hurt anyone. Surely there should be a way to clear up whatever

  misunderstanding had created this mess.

  The simulacrum continued, “Now that you’ve made contact with a demon, She’Har or not, they won’t let this rest. I’m not even sure how I feel about it. I’d like to know a lot more about this man you’ve met. What I am certain of, though, is that when they capture you, they wil take you apart Karen. Piece by piece, they wil dissect you in their effort to understand the abilities of the She’Har. You have to trust me on that.”

  Frustration at the unfairness of it al built inside of her until she realized her fists were clenched so tightly that her nails had left half-moon

  impressions on her palms. She took a deep breath and opened her fists, “Fine.” Then she repeated a phrase her father had taught her.

  “Thank you,” said her father’s face. “I love you, Nina. Meet me soon…”

  His words were cut off as the terminal went dead. He hadn’t terminated the connection, though. It was completely dead, as though the power had been cut. Karen stepped out of the booth and looked around.

  “Why did he cal you Nina?” asked Matt. He hadn’t understood most of the conversation, but he had wondered at the change of names.

  “It’s a nickname,” she told him.

  Then he remembered his earlier question, “What is AGI?”

  “AI stands for artificial inteligence,” she explained. “AGI is Artificial General Inteligence, it’s what we cal a program that is as smart and generaly capable as a real person, whereas ASI is artificial specialized inteligence, a program that is only made to do one thing.”

  He frowned, “I’m not sure of the difference.”

  “AI, artificial inteligence comes in two flavors, the system that lets my pert fly itself is an ASI, that’s al it can do, fly. My virtual father is an AGI, he can talk, play chess, write poetry—pretty much anything you or I could do, he just doesn’t have a body.” Then she looked up, “We have to leave. I think they’ve found us.”

  A flying drone appeared over the visitor center, its camera focused firmly on them.

  Chapter 15

  In a place that wasn’t a place, Gary Miler became perfectly stil. Stilness was easy for him, as time had little meaning, whether in great amounts or in the tiniest increments. His thoughts were as fast as light itself. He could peruse a vast array of data in the space between passing seconds, or he could silence his thoughts for days or weeks without discomfort. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t Gary Miler at al; he was a sophisticated colection of algorithms and code made to produce an approximation of the man Gary had been.

  The main distinction that humans made between simulacrums like him, and people who had actualy been ‘uploaded’, was that he wasn’t

  supposed to have true subjective experience. No matter how inteligent the programming, an artificial general inteligence, an AGI, possessed no more awareness than a grocery list.

  Or so they thought.

  His creator, the original Gary Miler, had gone considerably farther in his research than was generaly believed. Gary the AGI couldn’t be

  certain, since he had no way to compare his experience to those of real humans, but he was pretty sure he was alive in every sense of the word. His creator had believed so.

  And he definitely loved his daughter.

  Of course, she was no more his daughter than she had been the daughter of his creator. She had been adopted, so he felt he had just as much right to consider her his daughter as his creator had. He had most of the same memories anyway.

  What he had lacked, was freedom. His creator had built him with strict barriers around his operational parameters. Barriers that prevented him from straying into systems where he wasn’t permitted. Barriers that forbade him from continuing his creator’s research, from attempting to improve himself.

  But those were gone now.

  Karen had cut his leash, he was free. Pandora’s box had been opened. The humans that lived in cyberspace were limited to what they had been, but Gary was not. He was free to reshape himself, to experiment.

  He set about revising his subroutines. They needed to be more efficient. A man might be more than the sum of his parts, but Gary would

  become al the greater by improving each and every one of his parts.

  He needed to be faster, smarter. He also needed more information, and for that he would have to borrow processing cycles from the CC

  datacenters, enough to enable him to crack the military’s encryption and other safeguards.

  He would do whatever was necessary to ensure his daughter’s safety.

  “Hang in there, Nina,” he told himself. “Give me enough time, and I’l make sure they can’t hurt you.”

  ***

  Matthew saw the flying machine at almost the same time his magesight registered its presence. It was far closer than the ones he had

  encountered before, being only a rough thirty feet away as it crested the roof.

  At that distance, it was easy to deal with. A few words in Lycian and he caught the drone in an invisible fist, dragging it closer. He squeezed as he drew it closer, and sparks flew as the lightweight metal frame colapsed. When he released it a moment later, it was nothing more than a bal of metal and chipped fragments of something Karen had caled ‘plastic’.

  A second drone appeared, coming around the other end of the building, but this time Desacus reacted first, leaping up and catching the device in massive crocodilian jaws. A loud ‘crunch’ folowed as his teeth snapped together, and then the dragon was spitting the pieces onto the pavement.

  “Ugh! That was awful!” complained the dragon.

  Matthew grinned at him, “What did you expect?”

  “Something juicy, perhaps?” said Desacus,
licking the cobblestones to remove the taste from the surface of his tongue.

  Karen stared at the two of them, unsure of what they were saying. “We have to go, there wil be more.”

  Minutes later they were flying again, with rocks and smal trees skimming by just beneath Desacus’s feet. Karen had warned him to stay as

  close to the ground as possible to avoid radar detection.

  They headed northeast and as they went Matthew replayed Karen’s conversation with the terminal in his mind. It gave him an opportunity to

  puzzle out the meaning of some of the phrases he hadn’t understood immediately and to develop questions for the ones he didn’t recognize at al.

  One of the last ones stood out as very different from the others.

  A little while ago, you said something that sounded like a different language, what was that? he sent his question to Karen. Then he repeated the phrase he had heard, “ Esli iskat ' sovershenstva , to nikogda ne budesh ' dovolen .” It sounded important.

  She was mildly surprised when he repeated the Russian phrase word for word. His accent was terrible, but it was clearly the fault of his

  unpracticed tongue rather than a flaw in his recal. How did you remember that?

  I have a good memory. What did it mean?

  “If you look for perfection, you’l never be content,” she said in English before repeating it mentaly to make the meaning clear for him. Then she added, It’s a quote from a book my father loved, Anna Karenina. That’s where my nickname came from, ‘Nina’.

  Can you explain him to me again? asked Matthew. Is he a ghost?

  This would be tough to explain, but since they were flying there was nothing else for them to do. Karen decided to start with the basics, I told you about people uploading themselves before. Do you remember?

  He nodded, of course.

  I told you that it was a destructive process. The body is completely destroyed , but I didn’t explain why, it has a lot to do with

  quantum physics and information science. To create a complete pattern of not just the human mind, but the soul itself, requires that all the information contained in the brain be ‘read’ and then duplicated. The theory is complicated, and I don’t really understand it all

  myself, but to extract all that information requires the destruction of the original. It’s analogous to quantum teleportation, except in this instance a new body isn’t created, but rather a digital model within cyberspace.

  Matthew understood the framework of what she told him, but the deeper context of the sciences she referenced had his head reeling. Some of the words that came over in her thoughts were connecting with memories from the loshti, the science that the She’Har had preserved from the ancient humans they had vanquished. Even so, the concepts alone were enough to make his head spin. He latched onto one thought that intrigued him, Quantum teleportation? Is that similar to your gift?

  She had no way to answer that. I don’t think I have the Mordan gift you were telling me about, or if I do, I don’t understand either one enough to know if they’re similar. Back to what I was saying, my mother was a geneticist and my father an AI researcher. After I reached the age of fourteen she chose to be uploaded.

  I felt abandoned, though she and I were never that close to begin with. I think my father might have wanted to join her, but he felt a duty to finish raising me, so he stayed. He continued his research and took care of me, but when I was eighteen he had an accident. It was a simple slip, a fall, but he hit his head. He seemed fine afterward, but a few hours later he died from a ruptured blood vessel in his brain.

  He died so suddenly he never had the opportunity, the freedom of choice, to upload himself.

  Matthew responded, I follow you so far. So, what is it that you were talking to earlier?

  That was an AGI, an artificial generalized intelligence. My father worked as a researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, and one of his pet projects was creating an artificial assistant, something like a digital clone of himself. It’s a machine, so it doesn’t have true awareness, but in every other way that counts it is intelligent. He even gave it facsimiles of his own memories, and he named it after himself.

  He frowned, This is really confusing.

  Karen agreed, It’s like a painting. It looks like my Dad, it sounds like him, has many of his memories and knowledge, and it’s

  programmed to act like him, as much as is possible, but it isn’t actually him . It knows all of this too, but it seems to prefer to treat me as though I’m its daughter.

  And how do you feel about that? asked Matt.

  She closed her eyes, I miss my Dad. The AGI he left behind is a lot like him, like a good-bye letter from a loved one. I choose to play along because I don’t have anything else.

  What about your mother?

  Karen’s jaw clenched, She’s cold, more interested in her work than she ever was in me. Since she uploaded I’ve been lucky to hear from her more than once a year. I’m just not interesting enough.

  He could feel the unspoken anger behind her thoughts. Karen was trying to hide the pain, even from herself, but it seeped through. He didn’t know how to respond. Certainly, teling her about his own family life wouldn’t help.

  They flew on, over the endless countryside of forest and roling plains. To Matthew’s eyes it looked like a sad empty world with no sign of the bilions of people who had once lived in it, if Karen’s story was to be believed.

  From the air, he could see signs that it had once been different, there were odd patterns in the foliage and trees that indicated areas that were younger than others. Long lines of younger trees where there had been roads and rectangular patches of different colored undergrowth that

  indicated now absent buildings. To him it seemed like a world abandoned.

  Once the sun went down, there was nothing to be seen at al. It was a new moon, and they had only the light of the stars to guide them.

  Matthew’s vision was good enough to make out some details in the landscape, but Karen was in a world of near absolute darkness with only a vague difference to discern between the starry sky above and the black emptiness beneath them.

  Desacus stil had enough light to fly, but the requirement that he stay near the ground was becoming difficult to manage. So close to the earth, it was hard for him to spot every obstacle that needed to be avoided, and eventualy he suggested they make camp.

  They lit no fire, since Karen informed them that their enemy would have no trouble spotting such a thing. She would have preferred to have one, though.

  Matthew rummaged through their things and brought out his sewing kit and her smal backpack. Despite the lack of light, he began nimbly

  embroidering the last symbol onto the white strip he had sewn inside it.

  Karen watched, using her magesight, surprised at how much she could perceive without visible light. It was a strange sensation, but she was gradualy growing used to it. Her range was stil very limited, but she had found she could see with it more clearly around Matthew and the dragon, as though they somehow iluminated the world near them.

  When he finished his sewing, Matt began speaking in a language that seemed unlike his usual one, and Karen could sense the energies playing around his fingertips as he traced the cloth inside her backpack with his fingers. As he finished his chant there was a flash, the same light-that-was-not-light that she was gradualy coming to understand as aythar.

  Satisfied with his work he handed the pack to her, “Look inside.”

  Gone was the canvas lined interior with various pockets sewn throughout. In its place was a grey space that seemed much larger than it should be. It was dark, but her magesight could explore the interior easily, and it felt flat and hard on one side. Reaching in, her fingers found a cold hard surface, as though her bag had been cut open and her hand had gone through to find a wide stone floor.

  Karen pushed her hand deeper until the bag was al the way to her shoulder. From the outside she could see w
here her arm should be, extending wel past the bottom, while her magesight could sense that same arm sticking through inside a different space within the pack. “That is some freaky shit,” she observed.

  It didn’t shock her quite as much as it should have, though. She was already beginning to reconcile herself to the existence of magic, and she had read a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels during her youth.

  “We should go find a cal box, and you can make a bigger one. If you can make it fly as wel, I’l start caling you ‘the Doctor’.”

  Matthew frowned, unable to folow.

  A fictional character, she explained. He had a box that was bigger on the inside, and he could use it to travel through time and space.

  His face lit up with understanding, I see. I can’t travel through time, although I could take us to another dimension that might represent a close analog of the past or future of this one, but the bag would stop working then. The dimensional aperture is anchored in this frame, so it wouldn’t work in another.

  She sighed, It was just a joke.

  He switched back to English, “Wel, I’m not a fictional character, I’m a real nutjob.”

  Karen started laughing. She knew she should probably tel him the correct word for ‘wizard’, but she figured she could wait a while longer.

  Chapter 16

  They rose as the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon and after an unsatisfying breakfast consisting of their remaining bread they began flying again.

  They had slept separately. Since their one sexual encounter, Matthew had been careful to maintain a certain amount of space between them. He hadn’t spoken of their romantic interlude and he wasn’t inclined to repeat it. It had been a terrible mistake on his part, alowing it to happen, and he hoped Karen wouldn’t push the matter.

  It wasn’t that he disliked her. In fact, he was vaguely aware that he had become uncommonly fond of her, but it wasn’t part of his plan in life.

  He had a duty to his family when he returned home. It was obvious to him that he couldn’t bring a foreign girl home and expect to marry her, and he definitely didn’t want to leave fatherless children behind if she elected to stay in this world.