The Reality Rebellions

by Paul Anlee

  To that end, his code contained a small routine to make the computer think everything had been entered manually. Spyware or anyone checking his work would detect a history of keystrokes, complete with typos, fixes, test compilations, and practice runs. Greg wouldn’t be present for most of it.

  He walked over to the bench and picked up the Cybrid CPPU Trillian had been holding minutes earlier.

  Curious that Trillian chose this particular unit. Even more curious, he seemed to know something about it.

  On a whim, he threw the brain into a test harness. He’d become intimately familiar with every association, label, and conceptual relationship in the simplified mind of Sgt. St. Michael. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but he’d been picking up something odd from Trillian, and he was pretty sure this brain held a clue. He activated the CPPU and dove into the conceptual structures stored within.

  Trillian, you’ve been busy! The alterations to the abbreviated data structures jumped out at him as if they’d been written in flaming letters.

  Greg extricated his own lattice senses from the Cybrid concepta. It had to have been Trillian. Who else? Unless…could Alum himself have deigned to visit the science labs? Highly unlikely. No, this coding was too similar to what he’d discovered in the Securitor minds he’d examined.

  Sneaky! Trillian had altered the loyalty and honor sections of the concepta, giving it a peculiar admiration of Alum and emphasizing the protection of his Administration over that of the habitats and their citizens.

  That’s scary; he’s also ramped up aggressiveness to dangerous levels.

  Greg paced the length of the bench. Without Securitors, this makes no sense. I’ve seen no sign of any more being built. So either the construction program is still secretly active or the CPPU is intended for something else.

  Any Vesta facilities capable of housing a covert Securitor manufacturing facility were all nearby. Without a thought, Greg shifted to the closest one.

  The facility was quiet. A single half-completed Securitor body sat in the middle of the room, wires dangling, electro-muscles without power. Not here.

  He shifted to two other nearby possibilities in quick succession. There was no sign of Securitor construction in either of them. He shifted back to his lab and went for a walk down by the river in the park.

  The two scientists he’d seen earlier had left; nobody was visible in any direction.

  Something else had been bothering him about the changes to Sgt. Michael’s data structures. He called up the memory of his code review, and turned his attention to the lowest level of the operating system.

  There. The BIOS routines for managing rocket propulsion and thruster jets had all been replaced.

  Greg recognized the intent of the code. A shifter. An independent, locally-entangled jump-shift management routine.

  Someone had figured out his travel method!

  Sure, shifters were almost ubiquitous now, but they all went from one discrete entangled point to another.

  I’m the only one who’s ever experimented with shifting using nothing but naturally-available entangled particles. His heart was hammering. He took a moment to dampen his emotional response to the discovery. His breathing slowed.

  He examined the code more closely. Whoever programmed those shift routines had stopped well short of the kind of distances that Greg’s sense of adventure and desperation had taken him. Maximum jumps were sensibly limited to under a kilometer at a time, with short recalculation rests in between.

  He couldn’t help but smirk. There are some advantages to being a little crazy, I guess. Still, it’s a fast method to get around, and it uses very little energy. Just a little for calculations and the specialized RAF generator, that’s all.

  So, is this modified concepta heading for some new kind of Securitor? And who’s responsible? In all the habitats, who has the skill to challenge Kathy’s original designs?

  There was only one possible answer. Alum.

  If Alum were building some new kind of police or military Cybrid, where would he hide it?

  Greg called up the construction plans of all three asteroids. For redundancy, every critical scientific function had been installed on at least two of the three asteroids. Cybrid manufacture was on Vesta and Pallas. He’d already checked out the likely locations on Vesta and found no covert activities there.

  He shifted to a storage closet inside one of the four possible Cybrid labs in Pallas. He listened at the door then cracked it slightly ajar. Nothing. He stepped out and swept the empty lab. There were no signs of any recent activity.

  He jumped to a supply closet in the next lab on his list. He could hear sounds of movement outside the closet, the whine of e-muscle, the click-click of metal tools. He cracked open the door for a peek.

  What the hell is that? He fell back into the closet, pulling the door closed as he reeled. The latch made a soft snick as it fell into place. He held his breath.

  The sounds in the lab stopped.

  He called up the schematics for the area and shifted to an observation and control room across the lab. When a Cybrid tentacle pulled open the closet door, he was already gone.

  He stood up slowly, carefully, behind machine panels in the control room and with one eye peeked into the lab through a gap between two instruments.

  In the middle of the lab, a Cybrid tinkered on a three-meter tall humanoid structure.

  No, not human. A demon? He looked more closely. No, not demonic either. Not exactly. An Angel?

  The polished metal surface gleamed in the functional lighting of the lab. Its e-muscles flexed beneath the surface when the Cybrid moved stimulating probes around inside an open panel in the abdomen.

  In the middle of the open panel lay a standard Cybrid harness, waiting to receive a new CPPU. Sgt. St. Michael’s?

  Nothing besides his suspicions led to that conclusion. Still, it wasn’t unreasonable, and the coincidence behind his two discoveries was unsettling.

  He couldn’t see any propulsion ports. Maybe they open up on the bottom of the feet.

  Could the shift software be for the Angel? They wouldn’t need rockets if they could make sequential shifts.

  The Cybrid probe moved again, and the construct flapped its wings once, twice. They barely stirred a breeze. For decoration only—Greg mused.

  Unless that thing contained an RAF generator for mass reduction, the wings would never provide enough lift. Anyway, why lift when you can shift?

  It all made sense now. Why Alum was continuing with the inworld battle training though he’d cancelled the Securitor program. Why someone had meddled with some Partial’s—Sgt. St. Michael’s—concepta. Angels!

  Greg had a sour taste in his mouth. The most devilish Angel I’ve ever seen.

  Now that he thought about it, his inworld programming assignment had been given a strange specification. Trillian had insisted on it. “Assume a smaller version of the tunnel drills is available as a weapon,” he’d said.

  As Greg grasped the implications, he broke into a cold sweat. He remembered the first time the Reverend LaMontagne had demonstrated a small tunnel drill to him and Kathy, back in the wilderness park area of Texas. It had made small work of an entire mountainside.

  What would it do against humans? Or Cybrids?

  He had to talk to someone in the opposition. If he was going to stop this, he needed help.

  40

  Alum sat alone in a chamber surrounded by blank Cybrid CPPUs. John Trillian watched attentively from the adjacent control room.

  “Are you ready, sir?”

  Am I ready? How can one know if one is truly ready to take the first step toward Godhood?

  Alum adjusted his induction helmet. Not that he normally needed one, but today would stretch even his interface abilities. Once the new chips are implanted, I can dispense with this—he thought.

  He ran his fingers over the surface of the helmet trying to sense the exotic particles contained inside. Maybe a bump, here and there. T
hat could be anything—he told himself—a seam, a slight manufacturing variation.

  The pods containing the clusters of spin-entangled atoms were microscopic. Each one held no more than a million individual specimens.

  The hardware around them, which enabled his mind to be distributed throughout the asteroid habitats, was bigger by far. Each micromodem was a chip, just a few millimeters square, lying over corresponding transmitter/receivers he had grown on his neocortex.

  That was a brilliant bit of virus engineering—he thought. Darian Leigh would be proud.

  “Sir?” Trillian’s voice intruded on his thoughts. The man was clearly eager to get on with it.

  “A moment, please, John.” Why shouldn’t he be eager? This is his crowning achievement as much as mine. Trillian designed the communications hardware and the special software that will allow me to run all the important machinery in the habitats.

  Alum put his hand on a small brown crystalline cube. And just what will you do?—he wondered, and turned the cube over in his hand.

  Will you be interfaced to a starstep, or drive a loop train? Will you control lighting and airflow, or watch over crops and livestock? Will you monitor billions of transactions, or supervise people as they go about their daily business?

  Over the past month, Trillian had overseen the installation of special interfaces all over the habitats. “Partial AI will enhance the reliability, safety, and security of critical habitat systems,” they’d told the citizens. That much was true.

  They didn’t mention it would also put every single automated process in all three colonies under the direct control of Alum’s consciousness.

  Most of the lattice cubes were smaller than a full Cybrid brain. The smallest were for simple purposes, and were barely smarter than a finger. Others will be my extra eyes or ears.

  Alum moved his hand to a much larger one, almost twice the size of the normal Cybrid cube. And some will be only for thinking, for housing more of me than this body can hold.

  So why am I so glum? So pensive?

  When Trillian had first proposed the cubes, Alum hadn’t been convinced it would be a good idea. At first.

  “Just think about it,” John had said. “Everything will be connected to you. The habitats will rely on you completely. Elected or not, your control will be absolute,”

  To usurp control. To maintain that control beyond my natural lifetime. Is that a thing Yeshua would condone? Not to mention that we’ve publicly discredited the unnatural; should we now embrace it? He tormented himself for weeks over the decision.

  Even when he’d finally warmed up to the idea, he’d remained reluctant. “As appealing as it may be, I’m concerned about the higher-level nodes,” he’d shared with Trillian.

  “Ah, yes. The independents.”

  “It seems risky to have multiple copies of one’s self floating around the solar system. Even without corporeal bodies, what’s to stop the copies of me from seeing themselves as competitors to me? I mean, the original, flesh and blood me?”

  “No doubt, your concern is increased by the potential risk of embodiment. Perhaps in some convenient Cybrid body?” Trillian could barely suppress his grin.

  “You make it sound less palatable by the minute but, judging by your glee, I suspect you have a solution in mind.”

  “I do, indeed, sir.” Trillian beamed. “When I proposed to ‘distribute’ you, I didn’t mean copies of you. I meant all of you.”

  “Okay, John. Now I’m intrigued. How do you propose to do that?”

  “With these.” He held up a pair of unremarkable devices, about the size of a pair of hearing aids. “These are highly miniaturized, dedicated quantum shifters coupled to standard optical transmitter/receivers.”

  Alum caught on instantly. “I see. You circumvent speed-of-light limitations on transmission delay by connecting the pair through shifting technology.”

  He plucked one of the devices from Trillian’s hand. “Very clever, John. No matter how far apart my various processing units are, it will be as if they are all together.”

  “Exactly,” Trillian replied. “In effect, we won’t be placing copies of you throughout the habitats; we’ll be distributing all of you across all of the habitats. Your mind will stretch across the solar system.”

  “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” Alum had whispered.

  “Jeremiah 23:24,” Trillian answered. “Not quite in the same way as our Lord, God. But certainly larger than life, I think.”

  “Though always in humble service to Yeshua’s People,” Alum added, and bowed his head. How pragmatic!—he thought. How easy to ignore the morality of a thing, like expanding one’s mind beyond the merely human, once it becomes a real possibility. But can it be done without risk? That’s the only question that really matters.

  Trillian caught a flicker of something in Alum’s eyes before the lids drew down as veils. Was it guilt? Recognition of the hubris of the idea? Or simply an acknowledgement of how attractive the idea was?

  Alum gave himself over to the weight of what he was about to do.

  Truly, it is a service to become a God. I will remember this: Absolute power demands absolute responsibility and absolute humility.

  “Are you ready now, sir?” Again, Trillian’s voice pulled Alum back to the present.

  He nodded. “Yes, John. I’m ready, now.”

  41

  the heavy cell door flew open, and crashed against the stone wall, tearing Mary from her intense meditation.

  “What did she tell you?” Trillian yelled from across the room.

  By the time she opened her eyes and looked up, he was already halfway across the darkened room. Even in the dim light she could see the chords in his neck straining and spittle flying as he yelled.

  “I said, what did she tell you? Answer me!”

  Mary jumped to her feet and backed away from the enraged Shard. The calm achieved through hours of focusing on code and conceptual structures dispersed like thin fog in a wind tunnel. Virtual adrenaline streamed through her body.

  “What. Did. She. Tell. You?” Trillian screamed. His contorted face, only inches away, had gone scarlet and his eyes bulged with fury.

  “What did who tell me?” Mary cried. “Darya? You saw her for yourself. She didn’t say anything to me. Just, ‘I’m sorry.’ Nothing else.” She wiped the spit off her cheek with the back of her hand.

  “Liar!” Trillian clasped her throat with one hand and slammed her into the wall.

  Gasping for air, Mary struggled against him and tried to loosen his grip. Her efforts had no more effect than a mouse struggling to open a bear trap.

  Why doesn’t he just kill me?—she wondered. Why this show?

  Oh! The answer came to her and she laughed. Or tried to. She choked on the revelation, broke into a cough, and a wheeze that she could barely squeeze out around his clawing fingers.

  Sensing a shift but not able to guess the reason, Trillian threw her to the ground and stood over her. He leaned lower and stared directly into her eyes as she sucked in air.

  “Mary, what did she tell you?” he said in a soft, deadly voice.

  Mary coughed and, in spite of the pain it caused, laughed. “I had no inkling that she’d told me anything until now,” she said, brushing her hair back off her face. “Thanks for that.”

  Trillian backhanded her across the face. He could’ve taken off her head but he restrained himself. She remained conscious.

  Mary massaged her jaw and spit out some blood. “I can only assume that the burst of light before Darya and Timothy left contained a message of some sort. I was a little busy being tortured at the time, if you’ll recall. I didn’t have a chance to pick it up at the time, but I promise to look into it soon as I have time. At the moment, I have no idea.”

  “Then, how about we review it together?” Trillian suggested through clenched teeth.

  “If that’ll make you happy,” Mary said. She loaded her recording of the event into her working memory and T
rillian did the same. The flash of light registered as a brief blip in her recollection. Now that she knew it contained a compressed message, she filtered it through a high-speed playback algorithm.

  Darya stood on the other side of a campfire in a clearing in the forest near her Keep in Lysrandia. The soft glow of dwindling flames threw dancing shadows across her face. The sound of soft music and conversation drifted in from somewhere nearby. No one else was visible in the projection.

  “Mary, I’m so sorry we had to leave you. Timothy and I found a specific function to get outside and safely away. Please know that we are working hard to provide a second function to release you from your virtual prison. Trillian appears to have trapped your trueself in the recharging station. I’m certain you’ll be able to turn the inworld tables on him and escape back outworld in a second. Once you are out, you know where to find me. Keep fighting. Remember to maintain a positive spin on everything. That will help you immensely. See you soon.”

  The message stopped there, with Darya smiling reassuringly as if she could transmit her hope to Mary through sheer willpower.

  Trillian lifted Mary off the floor and dropped her roughly onto a high-backed wooden chair that had a helmet hinged to the top-back of the chair. He flipped the helmet over her head and tightened the screws.

  She cried out as they bit into her scalp.

  “You will tell me what it means,” he demanded. “What is the message hidden within the message?”

  He gave one of the screws a full turn. It pressed into her forehead, drawing blood and a whimper.

  “You saw it,” Mary protested. “It was a meaningless bunch of platitudes. We’re working hard to help you. Keep up your positive attitude. We’ll get you out. What a crock!”

  “I don’t believe you. Where did that scene take place? Did you recognize the spot?”

  “Yes; it was in the Lysrandia inworld, outside of Darya’s Keep. She took our group there into the forest for a meeting once. But that tells me nothing; it’s just some random place from a better time. She must’ve meant it to comfort me.”