by Paul Anlee
That was hours ago. Truth be told, I am little tired—he thought. Maybe something to read and a rest would be good.
* * *
Stralasi woke with a start. The book he’d been reading was closed on the table beside his chair. A small blanket covered his lap and the reading lamp was off. Only the dim light of the distant stars suffused their protective bubble.
Darak stood rooted in the same place he’d been hours earlier, at the edge of their tiny piece of land. His hands were crossed behind his back, and his face was locked in concentration on the nearby galaxies.
“Any luck?” Stralasi asked.
Darak turned. “Oddly, no.”
“Why ‘oddly’?”
“The detector readings should have narrowed the location of the Eater to within thirty light years. I realize it’s been over a hundred million years since Alum first moved it out of the Origin system, but I wouldn’t think it could have travelled very far.”
“You weren’t there?”
“No, I was away on missions to distant colonies at the time. When I returned, I assumed He’d wisely redirected the Eater into intergalactic space, somewhere comparatively empty. Out there, between the galaxies, it would grow at a crawling pace and not be a threat to anyone for billions of years. I felt sure we’d figure out a solution long before it posed a problem again.”
“So why isn’t it there? Wherever ‘there’ is.”
“That’s a good question. There were some anomalies in the data. Perhaps I should investigate those.”
“Anomalies?”
“The more recent readings, starting about seven million years ago, made no sense. I assumed the machinery had grown faulty and ignored them.”
“How did they make no sense?”
“Well, at first they indicated the Eater had suddenly changed position by many millions of light years. Then, I don’t know, they got strange.”
“Strange?”
“Well, it would make no sense to you.”
“Try me,” the monk invited.
“Okay. There was an odd shift in the polarization of the soltron emissions—“
“You’re right. That meant nothing.”
“In any case, the theory would suggest that one might see such a change if the Eater were moving at near light speed. But that’s impossible.”
“I thought you were all about the impossible.”
Darak regarded Stralasi with some combination of amusement, respect, and irritation.
“Mm,” he said.
“Not particularly enlightening,” Stralasi noted aloud.
“True. Sorry, I was distracted. I’ve just now calculated where the Eater might be if I didn’t throw out the anomalous data.”
“And the answer is?”
“Far away. And I don’t like where it’s heading.”
19
“There you have it: nomination, election, and coronation all in one.” Jared Strang turned from the screen he and DAR-K had been watching from a service tunnel some kilometers beneath the stage hosting Alum’s opening ceremony in Pallas Three.
“What else did you expect?” DAR-K’s voice emanated flatly from a speaker panel beneath a sliding portal in her outer shell.
“True. It was rather masterful. Deftly done. Still, I’m sure there are a few ambitious members of the Council who aren’t going to be happy about his announcement.”
“Surely they’re not so naïve as to believe he was going to relinquish power once everything settled down, are they?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe they hoped so. Maybe they assumed there’d be some separation between church and state, or at least different leaders for each.”
“Hah! I guess they’ve never visited the New Confederacy.”
“Hey, you can laugh but even there, even with Yeshua’s True Guard declared as their official religion, they kept leadership of the church separate from politics.”
“Officially.”
“Granted. Yes, that was their official position. I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on the actual arrangements. At any rate, a number of people in the current Administration have come from other countries. They won’t happily accept this arrangement.”
“Not to mention those who were wealthy back on Earth.”
“Them, either. I had moderately socialist leanings when I sat in Parliament, but others….”
“Such as your friend, Lord Hodge.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you know about him. Yes, Nigel is decidedly conservative, and ambitious as well. His family is in banking, you know, for as far back as anyone can trace. No, I don’t imagine he and his friends were too happy with Alum’s speech.”
“Certainly not with the parts that removed any chance of them re-establishing their ‘rightfully superior’ position,” she responded, with a clear edge in her voice.
Strang’s right eyebrow rose of its own accord, and he regarded the Cybrid with fresh interest. After years of daily interactions with DAR-K, her sharp sarcasm still struck him on occasion.
“Do I detect some bitterness, DAR-K?”
“Your friend may have lost his easy route to riches and power, but he hasn’t been completely disenfranchised like we Cybrids have been.”
“Yes, I can’t imagine you’re too happy, either.”
“Shall I play back the part where Alum says Cybrids aren’t really people? Or perhaps the part where he casually dismisses how we carved these habitats from rocks in the vacuum of space? How we built everything in them, gave them air and water. How we planted crops and forests, and raised herds and flocks for food. Or maybe you’d prefer to review how he attributed Greg Mahajani’s development of shifting technology to his God?”
The latter was no revelation to Jared. He’d been among the privileged few who knew the true origins of the new technologies used to get humanity into space and to build the asteroid colonies.
“Given the situation on Earth, Cybrid citizenship was always going to be a hard sell out here.”
“Not with the original colonists, it wasn’t,” DAR-K corrected.
“Okay, not with them. You know I’ve tried to plead your case to the new Administration, even to Alum himself.”
“Thank you for trying. That’s probably why they gave us Vacationland, as some sort of consolation prize with the handy added benefit that it keeps us distracted.”
“I’d like to take credit but, no, that was a private initiative from someone else. Darak…something. Alum seemed supportive.”
“Of course he was. How better to placate the working slaves than with top-of-the-line entertainment?
“Well, I can’t disagree with you on that.”
“Nor I with you. So, now, no one is happy. Other than the public at large. What do you think your friends will do?”
“I really can’t say. I’ll have to talk with Nigel. I imagine there’ll be grumblings and anaemic protests. Perhaps they’ll create an opposition party, though how they could possibly defeat Alum in an election is beyond me.”
“A palace coup, then?”
“I doubt it,” Strang replied. “I haven’t heard any talk about that kind of action. Pressure, yes. Vigorous debate, certainly. But these aren’t the kind of people who take precipitous action.”
“They also aren’t the kind to easily accept defeat, or simple equality. Without the ability to apply financial pressure, who knows what they might resort to?”
Strang frowned. DAR-K’s right. Nigel and his friends in the Administration aren’t going to take Alum’s proclamation of supreme leadership lightly. Just what they’ll do about it is unpredictable. Things could get ugly.
“What about you, DAR-K? What are you going to do?”
“Believe it or not, in spite of the affront to Cybrids, Alum’s basic economic plan makes sense. His brief analysis of the history of the rentier class and their evolution into industrialists and bankers is fairly accurate. I’d need to see the details of his new system, to be su
re, but I can see it being essentially effective and fair. Of course, centrally planned economies often appear to be brilliant until they rub up against human greed.”
“I don’t know. Greed worked well enough on Earth.”
“For a long time, yes. But only because people got good at managing collapse. The privileged class always got enough advance notice that they were able to protect the majority of their wealth and power to get them through the changes that accompanied revolution and war. I actually think that Alum’s system has the potential for stability without sacrificing growth and innovation.”
“It surprises me to hear you say that,” Jared replied. “The system’s essentially built on Cybrid slavery.”
“Humans don’t make out much better. Besides, it’s not much different than what we Cybrids were already doing. We get the opportunity to do work we’re good at, and to build new worlds. We get free energy, free movement, and a great place to rest and enjoy our free time. Vacationland makes up for a lot of drudgery and dissatisfaction. It might be wise to explore the creation of more virtual worlds like Vacationland that would give us a better variety of outlets for our creativity.”
“You’d take refuge in your inner worlds?”
“What would be so bad about that? It’s impossible to enslave our thoughts, Jared. The worlds we build in our imaginations could be as real as anywhere else. We could be whoever we wanted, do anything we dream of. If we had an easy way for any of us to create our own worlds….”
DAR-K set up an internal routine to design the base code for programming such a virtual world. The code would have to be relatively user friendly—not all Cybrids would have her raw intelligence—and yet still be capable of simulating a wide variety of rich environments.
Strang couldn’t leave the conversation there. “I can’t imagine your people would be happy simply twiddling their cybernetic thumbs.”
“For a while, anyway. Alum isn’t giving us much choice. He’s taking away many of our jobs. Don’t forget, besides the twenty million of us presently active, there’s over five times that number in storage.”
“What of them?” Strang asked.
“As Alum said, ‘People must have purpose in their lives.’ Every one of those minds will hunger for meaningful activity. There are scientists, engineers, managers, writers, musicians, artists, and many other professions encoded in those semiconductor brains. If we can’t make rewarding contributions to this society, perhaps we’ll need to establish another one.”
Strang was horrified. “You’d abandon us?”
DAR-K didn’t reply, which made Jared more nervous.
“DAR-K?” he prompted.
“No,” she said. “We pledged to help save humanity. We will not treat humans the way they’ve treated us. We were built to serve, whether out of enlightenment, duty, or obligation, that doesn’t matter. We’ll continue to fulfill our role as long as humans need our services.”
“And we’re grateful to you for that, DAR-K. We are. At least, most of us are.”
“For the moment, that’ll have to do. We’ll leave the political problems to the human realm. You people brought Alum into power. You deal with him.”
20
Darya stopped at the end of the twenty-klick long tunnel leading out from the far end of the abandoned habitat.
“What do you see?” Timothy asked, bumping into her from behind.
“Here, patch into my sensorium; you’ll be able to see through my receptors.”
Space outside the tunnel was dark, as always. Darya switched modes from visible light to the microwave spectrum and everything lit up. She traced the radiation to a pair of satellites orbiting their asteroid about a hundred kilometers above the surface. The satellites pulsed brightly as they swept the surface below.
“Can they see us?” he asked.
“No, don’t worry. At that wavelength and distance, there’s not enough resolution. But if we leave this hole, we’ll be easy to detect.”
“So we can’t go back, and we can’t go forward. What do we do?”
Darya watched the satellites. As one came up over the horizon, the other disappeared from view. They used a single antenna to both illuminate and listen for returning signals, which meant their radar broadcast wasn’t continuous over any single location. She timed the pulses sweeping over the landscape and considered options.
“I’m not sure yet,” she replied. “The pulses are coming in ten-second intervals. That’s not much to work with. Maybe the best thing is to wait and see if they’ll leave after a few hours without anything to report.”
“In that case, should we go back into the habitat?” Timothy asked. “What if they decide to search there?”
“That could be a concern, but I doubt anyone realizes it still exists. I have access to massive archives, and even I had no idea it was here. Anyway, let’s wait inside a while. We can check back later.”
The pair turned and returned down the long passageway. Not daring to tip off the satellites with rocket emissions, they used their extended manipulators to push and pull their way along the tunnel.
They explored the abandoned habitat for hours, drifting in and out of long-vacated buildings. The dim visibility made possible by their microwave pulses allowed them to see a few hundred yards at a time, beyond which everything deteriorated from fuzzy gray to featureless black.
They moved over dark, empty streets and frozen riverbeds, taking care not to warm the ice enough to produce detectable off-gassing.
The overall experience was the gloomiest in Timothy’s memory. Even during the height of terror when they were fleeing Trillian inworld, there were moments one might call “life affirming.” Here, everything was a shade of barely distinguishable bleakness.
If there was a Hell, he imagined it must be like this, dark, out of focus, devoid of life and joy, and filled with the constant fear that Securitors or Angels could fly out of one of the connecting tunnels and into the habitat at any time.
That would, at least, end this pointless waiting—he thought.
After millions of year of servitude as a Partial in DonTon, one would think he’d have become accustomed to waiting. Apparently, his newly found consciousness was accompanied by impatience.
Maybe the dark, eerie silence of the abandoned cavern was starting to affect him or maybe it was his experience since gaining Full consciousness, but he doubted the sentinels would leave their stations anytime soon.
Twice, Darya drifted to the ends of the passageways at each cap to check if the surveillance had moved on. Thirty hours later, the satellites were still there, high above.
When she returned, Timothy was full of questions.
“How long should we wait before we do something? What if they never leave?”
Darya had no answers for him. “I don’t understand why they’re still there. By now, they must’ve compared the records of all the Cybrids who were docked in the recharging crater and everyone who lifted out. It’s only logical to conclude we were among the thousands destroyed by the Angels. They couldn’t have kept track of every single Cybrid they blasted.”
“Maybe they’re just a suspicious lot.”
“They are, but they’ve never given me or my followers much credit when it comes to planning. If that’s changed, they’re doing deeper strategic analysis than they used to.”
“Trillian’s influence?”
“No doubt. And if he won’t rest until he’s sure I’m dead or gone, we could be waiting here for years, perhaps decades.”
“If that’s our only option, I’ll go mad,” Timothy replied, and he meant it.
“I’m not ready to give up yet,” Darya said. “We’ve got a ten second window to cover a hundred kilometers, if we want to get past the sentinels.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Maybe the hint of one. Let me take another look in a few hours.”
Timothy did his best to be patient. He explored more of the empty city, looking for options. He found a h
uge door leading into an old access shaft that connected to a service cavern closer to the asteroid’s exterior. The narrower chamber was more oppressive than the main habitat and he fled within minutes of discovering it.
He returned to the main habitat just as Darya came back from a final visit to the portal of the tunnel. “Are they still there?” he asked.
“Yes, and they’ve added another group of satellites to the surveillance.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It halves the time between radar pulses. We’re down to a five-second window between scans. If we’re going to make a run for it, we’ll only have five seconds to get past their sweeps.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Maybe…barely. But if we wait and they add more, it’ll be impossible. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to figure out there’s an old habitat down here. When that happens, it’s game over, and no Reset button.”
“That would be most unpleasant.” The British accent that Timothy had retained from his Casa DonTon days played well to understatement. “I vote to go now.”
“Me, too. I have no desire to hang around and watch our options disappear. So far, they’re acting as if they have no idea this place exists. That gives us an advantage. If we can get up enough speed, we can get past the radar net between sweeps.”
“Can we get up enough speed?”
Darya transmitted her plan to Timothy. “I think so. According to my calculations, we’ve got a little over two hundred kilometers in this tunnel to accelerate. We should be able to get up to thirty klicks per second in that distance. Before we start, we’ll need to plug the tunnel we took into this cavern so our rocket exhaust won’t give us away too soon.”
“I see. So, just to confirm, your plan is to hurtle ourselves the length of the habitat at maximum acceleration and “thread the needle” into a tiny tunnel at the end, while traveling about thirty kilometers per second?”
“No, worse. We’ll only have one chance to do it, so we’ll have to leave together. Our propulsion exhausts will follow us out and be detected within seconds. We’ll need to fly in tandem.”
