by Paul Anlee
“Very good, but I am concerned about her other trait. I sensed her disdain for institutional authority leaking outward toward me, personally.”
Trillian laughed. “Yeah, I guess that’s not something you’ve had to deal with a lot. Most people you speak with have automatic respect for you.”
“It wasn’t always that way,” Alum reminded him.
“True. I’d forgotten how your lattice overlapped with your father’s. I bet he had a tough battle, clawing his way up the Church hierarchy.”
“Not to mention his efforts to gain political office.”
Trillian focussed intently on Alum. He could hear bitterness in his tone. “How much of his memories and experiences would you say transferred over to you?”
Alum shook his head and forced a polite smile. “Another time, John,” he said. “I want to know how you’ll make this virtual woman blindly obey my orders and do whatever it takes to keep me safe.”
“It’s related to her faith and distrust of authority issues. Strengthening both of those provides the base. Then I add this little structure I copied from some of our more ardent supporters,” Trillian explained.
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Well, if everyone’s lattice was more deeply integrated into their frontal cortex, it would have been easier to extract. As it is, I had to go back into ancient psychiatric techniques—Freud, actually—and design some association methods to allow me to construct this conceptual branch. So it’s not an actual copy; it’s more like a model of what their structure must look like.”
Alum stroked his chin as he thought about that. “It sounds a little simplistic,” he observed.
“You’d be surprised by how simple the concept of complete loyalty and devotion really is.”
“And you believe that’s all it’ll take?”
“There’s only one way to be sure,” Trillian replied.
Alum nodded uncertainly. He was surprisingly nervous about the test, which was silly, since everything would happen in a simulation. There won’t be any real, physical danger to me—he reassured himself.
“Okay, let’s begin,” he said.
15
Alum and John Trillian materialized at one end of a long habitat tunnel inside a new asteroid undergoing the earliest stages of construction. The tunnel was the most recent simulation conceived by Trillian and implemented by Darak Legsu under his direction. It was indistinguishable from a real habitat.
Minimal lighting along what would become the ceiling revealed some basic structures, with buildings under construction half a kilometer below them. Stark gray tower walls cast sharp shadows on the barren ground below, a reminder of the lack of atmosphere.
Alum spied the twinkle of distant starlight through the as yet unsealed end of the habitat tunnel, tens of kilometers away.
The two men floated comfortably in their protective space suits. Trillian adjusted their internal virtual settings so they were motionless relative to the interior of the simulated rotating asteroid. Their manoeuvring jets fired automatically to maintain a stable position.
A black orb, three meters across, floated before them, a Cybrid with Securitor modifications. Its normal carboceramic surface had been replaced with a black matte finish, textured at the nanoscale to absorb radar and visible light. The external shell was broken by several shallow thin grooves hiding portals. Some of the portals housed propulsion and manoeuvring jets; others hid missiles, high-powered lasers, and powerful tentacle-like manipulators. The Securitor was a formidable machine built for destruction or detainment.
Trillian flourished a hand in the direction of the orb. Nothing happened for a second, and then they heard Rebecca’s voice directly in their heads.
“Hello, Alum. Hello, John. I am ready for my tests.” Her voice sounded somehow more formal, more deferential, than it had during the interview a few minutes ago on Vacationland.
“Hello, Rebecca,” Trillian answered. “Welcome to Hygiea One, soon to be the newest of the asteroid habitats.”
Two portals slid open and small antennae protruded. Rebecca surveyed the tunnel with all of the optical and electromagnetic senses available in her new body.
“This chamber is approximately 420.3 kilometers long and 9.34 kilometers in diameter. We are 615 meters from the nearest structures. I presume those will form the living and working towers for the local population once the habitat is completed.”
“That’s correct. I see you are quickly getting accustomed to your new sensory capabilities.”
“John, this body is remarkable. You were right; it’s nothing like flying a plane. It’s a whole new me.”
Even through the flat echo of her transmitted voice, Alum could detect her excitement at the new experience.
“Why don’t we begin with some simple manoeuvring, then we can progress to manipulation, and then on to weapons?” Alum suggested.
“As you wish, Alum,” the Securitor answered. She opened several small thruster ports and moved higher in the tunnel. Once she was clear of the two men, she opened up her primary matter-antimatter drive ports and accelerated down the tube. Within seconds, she was a distant dot.
Trillian ordered a positional display be projected inside their helmets.
Two hundred klicks down the tunnel, Rebecca turned and sped back toward them. She moved closer to the ground, weaving in and out of the towering buildings.
Trillian displayed her emotional matrix inside their helmets to the side of the map of the habitat. The joy reflected in her flight path was more evident in the map of her mental state.
Rebecca came to a floating halt below them. They could detect no trace of her excitement when she reported, “Manoeuvring tests completed. MAM drive operational. All systems nominal.”
“Did you enjoy that?” Trillian asked.
“All systems nominal,” Rebecca repeated. Trillian wondered if he had increased her respect quotient too much. He verified the echoes of her earlier excitement in the persona display and tweaked the formality down a bit.
“Proceeding to manipulator tests,” she said.
Trillian and Alum followed her down. At ground level, near a pile of bricks beside a construction site, the Securitor extended four telescoping tentacles.
She placed the bricks in a neat square around her. She spotted a tube of pre-mixed adhesive and a caulking gun off to the side of the bricks. She removed the cap, and placed the tube in the barrel of the caulking gun. One of her tentacles bifurcated near the end as she brought the plunger into contact with the back of the tube. She wrapped one “finger” around the handle, and put the other one on the trigger.
She picked up each of the bricks in turn, applied a layer of adhesive to the bottom side, and returned them to the ground where they held fast. Moving faster and faster, her tentacles grabbed bricks from the pile, applied adhesive, and stuck them in place on the growing wall. Within a minute, she was completing a new layer every few seconds; her manipulators were a blur of precise action. Soon she had built a room ten meters deep around herself.
The construction halted. After a brief pause to allow the adhesive to set, bricks exploded outward and her tentacles poked through newly-formed holes. She punched several more holes through other parts of the wall, then ripped whole sections from the structure and flung them powerfully away. In a few seconds, nothing remained of the room she had built. Her tentacles retracted into her body.
“Manipulators nominal,” she reported. “Request permission to commence weapons test.”
Trillian glanced at Alum, who said, “Permission granted. Here’s the first target.” He sent an image of a nearby tower.
The Securitor hesitated. “Please confirm target,” she said.
Alum laughed. “Don’t worry, my friend. There is no one inside, and there are thousands of your cousins waiting to rebuild what you destroy. Proceed with your weapons test.”
“Very well, sir.” The Securitor rose and jetted toward the building.
&nb
sp; The two men rose with her and followed at a respectful distance. When Rebecca arrived within a few hundred meters of her target, she opened forward ports and let loose a short burst of cannon fire, ripping holes in the side of the building.
“Kinetic weapons nominal,” she reported.
The cannon ports slid shut and Rebecca moved a few kilometers down the avenues leading to the target building. She detoured a few blocks off to one side, putting other buildings between herself and the target. Two ports on opposite sides of her body flipped open and released ten thin, half-meter long missiles in quick succession.
The missiles sped down the gaps between the buildings, taking different routes and weaving complex trails above streets and avenues. They converged on different sides of the target within milliseconds of each other, and struck at different heights. The explosions rocked the building. Huge chunks of the exterior walls blew outward toward the streets below.
Before the debris reached the ground, Rebecca was there, zooming high over the destroyed tower.
“Missiles nominal. Activating lasers,” she reported.
Brilliant violet rays burst from new ports in her smooth surface, and lanced downward, blasting falling chunks of debris into powder and gas. The streets and surrounding towers were covered in a thick layer of dust but otherwise unscathed. The target building was half-gone.
Rebecca returned to a hovering position in front of Trillian and Alum. “Weapon systems nominal,” she reported.
Alum clapped his glove-clad hands together. “Excellent job, Rebecca. And you, too, John. Well done.”
Trillian bowed graciously and the Securitor bobbed in acknowledgement. “Thank you,” they said in unison.
Without warning, a port snapped open on Rebecca’s side and a violet beam pierced the air.
Before Alum could ask, “What was that,” several more beams shot out all around him. Rebecca slid to his other side to act as a shield, with the beams still firing.
“Incoming high-speed kinetics,” she reported. “Defensive measures engaged. Analyzing debris.” There was a brief delay.
Alum realized he’d been holding his breath and let it out with a whoosh.
Rebecca completed her analysis. “Kinetic weapons are consistent with asteroid composition.”
“Rocks?” Alum asked to no one in particular. “Someone’s throwing rocks at us?” He raised one eyebrow at Trillian, who simply shrugged.
Rebecca deployed a wide field of centimeter-sized drones around her and boosted her radar signal. “Those rocks were moving as fast as bullets. They came from approaching anomalies. Nature is unknown. Recommend protective measures.”
“Where should we hide?” Trillian asked her.
Rebecca immediately indicated a location on the open ground below.
“Don’t you think we should head for cover?” John asked.
“I am the best protection available,” the Securitor replied.
Alum had to admit the building walls would be useless at stopping most projectiles or beams, and would provide the added risk of debris to be avoided in the case of explosives. The instinctive desire to seek the false safety of walls, even in this virtual world, is hard to deny.
The three of them descended rapidly, Alum and Trillian landing on the ground in a wide clearing—according to the designs, a future town square. Rebecca remained hovering fifty meters overhead. All of her sensory and weapons ports were open and half a dozen tentacles were extended and ready for action. They waited.
An amorphous black cloud was approaching. It was blotchy, with indistinct dark objects in the middle of the smoky haze. In the drawn out silence, Rebecca reported, “Two klicks away. No change in velocity. Permission to engage.”
“Granted,” Alum answered. To his surprise, his voice shook a little.
The Securitor launched a volley of missiles toward the approaching mass. They exploded soundlessly seconds later. Balls of flame destroyed most of the haze and revealed what was behind it.
“What the hell is that?” Rebecca asked, her voice breaking out of its formality.
Trillian answered, “Did we not say some unusual things were released when Earth’s crust was ripped open?”
“No, really? You’re telling me those are honest-to-God demons?”
“We have no other explanation for them,” Alum said, remembering his role in the act. “There have been a small number of other inexplicable encounters, easily handled by human security. This is the first time we’ve seen so many gathered at once.”
“What are they doing here? How’d they get through space?”
“Besides our Lord himself, who can know the limits of evil?” Alum replied.
“These beasts of Hell are determined to destroy God’s people, no matter where we go,” Trillian added. “Evil has never been content to let Good live in peace. It will seek us to the edges of the universe, if necessary.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll have to go through me to get to you,” Rebecca said. She launched herself toward the approaching demon horde.
Horrible winged things, gargoyles, monsters with misshapen heads, tusks, claws, and horns descended. They roared, screeched, and clamored.
Rebecca wondered how she could be hearing them in the vacuum of the habitat. Magic—she thought, without bothering to question it too much. Anything is possible with magic. She hoped her advanced technology was effective against them.
She released another volley of missiles and opened fire with her cannons. She was relieved to see the bullets rip through the limbs of the demons as though they were common flesh. The missile explosions were even more damaging.
The demons spewed greenish blood from torn torsos, and severed limbs flew all around them, but their mangled bodies pushed onward, determined to reach Alum and Trillian.
Rebecca flew into the midst of the beasts, firing cannons and energy beams in precise bursts aimed at the heads of these horrors. She fashioned her tentacles into razor sharp scythes and swept through the demons’ ranks.
By the hundreds, they cried out in defiance and in pain, and then stopped moving at all. Those still alive after her first charge split into two groups. One half proceeded downward, and the other half turned on their attacker.
Rebecca dispatched more missiles into the middle of the group bearing down on her and sped through the resulting hole in their formation.
Her first priority was to protect Alum. She targeted the ones heading for him. Guns and beams blazing, she attacked them from behind, decimating their ranks.
The group she’d left above had followed and joined in the defence of their comrades but they were no match for Alum’s defender. Rebecca turned her remaining bullets, beams, razor-edged tentacles, and rockets against them. Soon, the few beasts remaining alive fled.
Rebecca floated toward the ground. She had never felt like this before in her life. The victory left her feeling elated; her body hummed with adrenaline. Only, she had no body, and the adrenaline was simulated.
“Opponents defeated or dispersing,” she reported. She felt a deep satisfaction for a task well done and a warm glow on seeing Alum was safe. She’d neither feared nor hated her opponents. She had dispatched them as efficiently as possible, and prevailed. Her Securitor body design and manufacture, inspired by Alum and carried out by Trillian, had proven superior to the Demons of Hell.
As the three exchanged congratulations, Rebecca noticed an odd distortion in her visual field. The ground a few feet below Alum and Trillian trembled. She ran a quick diagnostic, but there was nothing wrong with her receptors.
She extended a tentacle to the ground, as the two men looked on. There it was again; the ground shook ever so slightly. And a few seconds later, once again.
“I am detecting a slight, regular tremor in the ground,” she reported.
“Can you describe its nature?”
“It comes in waves, evenly spaced, an initial shock followed by aftershocks of rapidly decreasing intensity. If I didn’t know better, I�
�d say someone is walking our way. But they’d need to mass thousands of tons to shake the ground like that.”
As she finished speaking, an ear-splitting roar erupted from the far end of the square.
All three turned to the source of the noise.
Noise?—Rebecca wondered. There it was, again, and the sound was definitely coming through her auditory sensors rather than through radio transmission. More magic.
She directed her visible sensors and radar along the line of sight, and moved higher to get a better view.
Another roar split the air and flames shot out from between the buildings at the far edge of the square.
Rebecca sped forward to investigate. The two towers directly in front of her shook, and exploded outward. A giant creature crafted from humanity’s darkest nightmares emerged from behind the destroyed buildings.
The King of Demons stood over eight stories high. His red, leathery wings spread wider than the two structures he’d just decimated. Aside from the wings, his muscular physique was human, but his face was a horned, toothy horror and his eyes burned with the fires of Hell.
The creature spewed fire on the fallen buildings, and its enormous clawed hands tore open what remained, scattering debris for hundreds of meters.
The demon spotted the black carboceramic sphere, Rebecca, floating a hundred meters before him, and the two tiny men behind her. His furious roar shattered windows. He spat fire at Rebecca, and bombarded her with sections of broken wall. The beast leaped over the pile of destruction between them and came at her with great, powerful strides.
“Please tell me that’s just another demon,” Rebecca sent to Trillian as she shot her remaining missiles at the attacking monstrosity.
“It is Lucifer, himself,” he replied. “It is Satan, Lord of Darkness. You must protect Alum!”
This is impossible—she thought. The Devil himself is attacking me in the vacuum of an unfinished asteroid habitat. There has to be some other explanation.
But, she had no time to think, only to react. God had brought His people to the colonies and appointed Alum to be His representative. God had judged her ready to protect Alum from the Beast of Hell. She had to save their Leader at all costs, even if it meant her life.
