Manifestations

by David M Henley

  ‘We wait for our runner.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t come back?’

  ‘Then we go in.’

  They didn’t have to wait long. A naked man soon appeared and jogged towards them. It was Carlos, the messenger Salvator had sent to request a meeting with Chiggy. He hadn’t been naked when he had left them ...

  They both stood up and stared at the man as he approached.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Randall was studying Carlos through a pair of hand-held lenses. ‘He’s smiling but he’s been beat all over.’

  ‘Is he delirious?’

  The naked runner reached the car.

  ‘Carlos, are you hurt?’ Salvator asked.

  ‘I’m fine, Sal.’

  ‘What happened? Did they beat you?’

  ‘They tried,’ he quipped. ‘They said if I wanted to talk to Chiggy, I had to go in the arena.’

  ‘Did you get the message to Chiggy?’

  ‘Of course I did. Those benders are strong, but stupid.’

  ‘Don’t get a taste for it,’ Sal said and passed him a blanket from the back of the car. ‘Was there a reply?’

  ‘Um, yeah ...’ Carlos hesitated. ‘He said, “Don’t cross the bridge.’”

  ‘Will he come to meet me?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Sal looked in the direction of Bendertown. The buildings on the other side of the storm drain looked dingier, older and darker than what was around him. He could hear a faint cheer coming from the arena.

  Sal thought quietly to himself. Chiggy ... he didn’t know what to make of him. ‘What’s he like?’ he asked.

  ‘Chiggy? He’s the fattest man I’ve ever seen. He’s as big as a squib and has all these machines plugged into him.’

  ‘And you spoke to him?’

  ‘Well, I spoke to Rocks and she spoke to Chiggy. I wasn’t allowed to get any closer.’

  ‘Okay,’ Sal said. ‘You two go join Tamsin. I’ll go on alone.’

  ‘We’ll go with you,’ Carlos said and the driver agreed.

  ‘No. Let’s not risk any more of us than we have to. Tamsin needs you more.’ They were reluctant to let him go in by himself. Probably thought of him as too old.

  Sal stepped off the hover and walked across the bridge. He looked up to see if he would be immediately attacked, but nothing happened. People at the windows watched him, and the glint of lenses from rooftops and cameras on poles said that Chiggy knew he was coming. Would he have to fight as Carlos had?

  ~ * ~

  Simply because a conclusion is logical does not mean it is always correct. Logic is often overturned with the inclusion of new information that defeats its original conclusions.

  What We Can See, Milawi Ortega

  Two servitors carried the chaise between them and sat it down in the corner Geof indicated. They bobbed their heads and rolled out.

  First he looked at it, then he ran his hands over it. The release on the side lifted a footstool from below. He could already feel it warming and softening as it inducted electricity from the building.

  A weaver could always rely on the Weave for data, but it was impossible to keep data perfectly secure and it was never as immediate as using a symbiot. He was also used to controlling by thought and that was only possible with the organic circuitry of symbiots.

  Now that he needed more than one brain, the symbiot chair would do nicely. He could be connected to it when active and also leave it, as and when he needed to, and the chaise would continue to process until it ran out of tasks.

  Before he sat he rummaged in his pack for an old sylus. He had it preprogrammed to scan for malicious traps, material flaws and signs of pre-use. This little slug had been with him for years, approving his equipment before use.

  Once he had the all clear he sat down, lay back and waited as the connections formed. It was always satisfying to expand one’s mind this way. It felt boundless and unconfined.

  He began transferring tasks from his symbiot into the chaise. All the data patterning that was processing, looking for the links and patterns that would lead them to Pierre Jnr. There were too many grey zones and anomalies right now for such a search to prove fruitful, but there was always a chance it would come up with something.

  This last week had been incredibly trying. Geof didn’t like being rushed to form decisions, or to make judgements quickly. The Prime was not that way. Working under him was an exhausting rotation of duties and redirection. Colonel Pinter was no better.

  In his line of work, first answers were often the wrong ones. There was always another layer of knowledge that could change your perception, just as the good book said. Despite how much you learn about the world and how it works, there is always something you don’t know that could change everything you believed you knew. Such is the nature of knowledge, and such is life, he thought.

  As a child you pass through many levels of understanding. Every now and then you learn a thing that changes how you understood all the things that came before. Pain, death, fear, acceptance, truth, untruth. For weavers, trained to recognise their limitations, these became just new barriers to surpass, a wall the same as any technical challenge or security measure; the internal and external limits every individual mind has.

  He was familiar with the walls that held back his understanding, such as the activity in the Cape, simply because those connections no longer existed. There were other grey areas in STOC and Mexica as so few there had strong connections to the Weave; they were the unsurveyed portion of humanity. The Prime’s command centre was a place he hadn’t broken into. He might be able to, but the consequences would defeat the aim.

  Then there was the wall of the future, where prediction and simulation could determine no logical end. Such as how the conflict with the psis would play out ...

  With the revelation that Kronos was most likely a product of the great Shen Li, and thus a mechalogical entity rather than biological, the thought room was culled and new members were co-opted to join the study, including the two biggest names in technology: Morritz Kay and Egon Shelley.

  These two gods of tech were not used to being ordered around, but with the Prime’s authority cornering them, they made themselves available when the Colonel requested their presence.

  He patched them into his overlay: the two techists, Colonel Pinter and Gretchen Caswell. Geof had never met the gods of tech, though their work was well known to him.

  ‘Gentlemen, thank you for coming. I realise you are both busy men,’ Pinter began.

  Egon Shelley was as tall as the Colonel, muscular and looked like he was a person transformed into a graphite black statue. He was covered in a symbiot that spanned all the way over his hairless scalp, leaving only his face showing. Even his eyes had non-reflective lenses built over them. The statue smiled broadly. ‘Not at all, Colonel. I am always happy to dabble in an enigma.’

  Morritz Kay, on the other hand, was short, had tussocks for sideburns and wore overlapping chains of trinkets and bracelets. Kay didn’t use symbiots, he made trinkets which could be worn and easily removed, each charm performing different functions for, and linked to, his own external network. They were not as efficient as wearing a symbiot, but he had many supporters for his tech in those of a conservative mindset.

  When he moved they rattled and Geof noticed something on one of Morritz’s chains. A small silver bauble, a polyhedron with so many sides it almost looked round. He’d seen one of those before.

  ‘What is the meaning of this, Colonel? I’m not a Serviceman. You can’t order me around.’

  ‘This is a matter of global security, Master Kay, so your cooperation would be much appreciated. But if you need inducement I’m sure I can find some; if that makes you feel better,’ Pinter replied.

  ‘Now, listen here —’

  ‘What we don’t have time for is bluster. Here’s the problem I need you to help us solve.’ The Colonel muted Morritz’s audio so he
could speak without interruption. ‘At present, we don’t know much. We don’t yet know enough to know exactly what “it” is. We are presuming, for now, that this entity has come from the labs of Shen Li. Geof Ozenbach recently visited with Li and reported an experiment called Kronos that Li kept locked away. Obviously it escaped. We need to know how to stop it and how to reverse it. Yes?’

  ‘Do we have a sample?’ Egon asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Pinter answered.

  ‘As I understand it, everything it touches it absorbs,’ Kay said.

  ‘We have found Faraday-V cages effective,’ Geof said.

  ‘Gentlemen, this is Geof Ozenbach, who is running the data for the Prime. And this is Gretchen Caswell, who is running the thought room. You will have complete access.’

  ‘May I speak?’ Morritz asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m not sure I should be included. I am not an expert on symbiotics.’

  ‘You’re right. The truth is, although I didn’t want to be rude, it is your labs I need most. You are one of few who have the level of containment we require. If you prefer, we could simply borrow your lab and leave you out of it?’ the Colonel suggested sweetly.

  Morritz stretched his neck in both directions. ‘If that is the case, I would prefer to be included.’

  ‘I’m glad you see it that way. Your expertise will be invaluable.’

  Two labs were set up: Kay’s in West, Shelley’s in Buenos Aires. A third would be ready within the week, in a Lagrange point, safe from Earth. Each had several metre-long samples of Kronos to work with.

  Geof followed the experiments as much as time allowed, and summarised a short report at the end of each eight-hour cycle.

  Egon Shelley had taken a personal interest and continually exclaimed over what he was discovering about the mysterious compound. ‘Brilliant’, ‘Fascinating’, ‘Genius’, he would say loudly at various moments, without offering any further explanation. ‘This has all the hallmarks of Shen. Remarkable!’

  He’d always been a follower of Shen Li, and now he had a chance to truly understand the father of symbiotics.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Shen, mechalogics wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. He found out how to complete the interface and build it into the genetic structure. If I’m right, we should see his core code at the genetic level.’

  ‘What if he started with new code?’ Geof asked.

  ‘He might have, but he liked to recycle as much as the rest of us.’

  ‘Is it a life-form?’

  ‘Only as much as symbiots and sylus are. By older definitions they would be considered alive. Here, let me show you something interesting.’ Egon turned away from his scopes and sat back, ordering up lab footage for Geof to watch. ‘Tell me after this if you think it is alive.’

  The view he shared was from the inside of a spherical containment chamber. The bottom held a drop of black. Zooming in, he could see the filaments of its hairs lolling about, a miniature of the beast of Busan.

  ‘It looks alive, you see, much more proactive than any plant. But ...’ Egon skipped through the footage to an earlier experiment, ‘with a little bit of x-raying and polarity shifting, it stops moving and is just a black sludge that doesn’t react, and doesn’t try to assimilate.’ The video showed a hair-thin wire being inserted into the goo, pushed around and stirred without any response. ‘It no longer absorbs.’

  ‘So you can kill it?’ Geof asked.

  ‘If you consider it alive. Now look at this ... When we introduce a sylus to it...’ From the top of the chamber a thumb-sized lump of sylus was dropped into the dark oil. The ooze sprang to life. Hundreds of tiny tentacles jumped from the pool and began crawling over the slug.

  ‘The specimen activates and takes over the sylus material and then returns to its waiting state.’ They compared footage of Kronos rolling its tentacles through the air with the black sample performing the same motions in their cages. Probing and searching. ‘Over time, it will absorb the glass wall and begin to attack the second shell. It is slower getting through metal. Again we apply the x-ray and demagnetising process and it becomes once more a lifeless puddle.’

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ Geof said.

  ‘I interpolate that Kronos has three settings or states. I’m currently labelling them as: hibernating, hunting and harvesting.’ Egon scrolled to another clip. ‘Here we have returned the sample to hibernation for the next experiment. The same thing happens if we drop a mouse in.’ Egon shuttled to the next clip, where a mouse was lowered into some inert Kronos. As soon as its feet touched the ooze the black attacked as if triggered, spearing into the body and head of the poor animal. It stopped kicking quickly and Kronos covered over it, raising and waving its tentacles in victory.

  ‘What can a sylus and a mouse have in common?’ Geof asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but I have had one thought,’ Egon said, smiling through the mask of his symbiot.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It might sound a little crazy.’

  ‘Then we might be on the right track. Shen didn’t think like others.’

  ‘I think Kronos is two parts.’ He held up his palms as if holding something in each hand. ‘Mind and body. Both exist separately but need the other to become active. Like a bot needs a program. A car needs a driver.’

  ‘I don’t follow exactly.’

  ‘A sylus and a mouse have little in common but they both have neural networks.’

  ‘And that is the key?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or to see it another way, it is like a sperm and an egg. The egg remains dormant until a sperm triggers its germination.’

  Geof connected to Morritz Kay, who had followed the entire exchange. ‘Any mind will do,’ Morritz giggled.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m just saying that it doesn’t discriminate. It isn’t a fussy eater.’

  ‘Ah.’ Geof didn’t comply with Kay’s sense of humour. ‘Have you learnt anything I can report? It’s close to cycle end.’

  What had occupied Morritz during the day was Kronos’s digestive process. Like a symbiot it took energy where it found it, through heat and resonance and the sun, but it could also break down nearly any material it came into contact with. ‘It eats everything. Eats and grows.’

  ‘So why doesn’t it touch the trees?’ Geof asked.

  ‘Oh, it does, but it uses them differently. I’ve only done one test at the moment — I need a bigger Faraday before I do it again — but my hypothesis is that plants are more useful to it as they are.

  ‘Here, we put a potted plant into the chamber and Kronos digested the pot, leaving the plant untouched. But when we reset Kronos to dormancy, or as Shelley called it — hibernation mode — and take a cross-section of the plant, you can see that Kronos is inside it and has branched through the vascular structure.’

  ‘For energy collection?’ Geof suggested.

  ‘And more I suspect. Plants can be very good sensors so it might be using them as antennas.’

  ‘Plants can also produce nutrients and compounds. It might be pharming them like we do,’ Egon added.

  ‘If I had to take an educated guess, as all my guesses are, then I’d say this is a chimera of a synthetic life-form and a symbiot,’ Morritz said.

  ‘Aren’t symbiots meant to work in combination with our bodies?’ Geof asked.

  ‘Yes. Or our minds. You can see why I don’t trust them.’ He was happy with what he had found. Evidence that the rival tech was untrustworthy.

  It was then that Geof again noticed something amongst Morritz’s chains of trinkets. The bauble that he’d last seen being constructed in Shen’s lab.

  ‘What does the sphere do?’ he asked.

  ‘What sphere?’

  ‘That one on your wrist, next to the blue diamond.’

  ‘Oh, my charms.’ Morritz held his arm up to look. ‘Just something we are developing. It’s proprietary. I won’t sa
y more.’

  ~ * ~

  The morning they left West, Desh arrived with a large duffel bag over his shoulders, chunky with shapes. ‘What you got there?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Just a few little things I’ve been working on.’ He took out a hard vinyl case and opened the magnetic catch for Ben to see. ‘Meet our new nav.’ Desh picked the sylus up and shook it vigorously until it began moving in his hand. ‘Wake up, little fella, time to work.’

  To keep the bus from becoming interesting to the eyes of the Weave, Desh disconnected the onboard computer, tagging the action as a systems check because they believed the unit faulty. He then put the sylus he’d brought in its place so they could still operate the vehicle manually. An uncommon but still standard procedure that would give them an hour.