by Paul Anlee
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.
22
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. That 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 th
e 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.”
23
“Okay. So, ‘A voice for all citizens,’ it is.” Stephen Humphrey pushed his seat back from the table and stood up, stretching out to his full six-foot three height.
“After only forty minutes,” Nigel Hodge muttered to Debbie Cutter, in the chair beside him. She stifled a laugh.
“Not the most inspirational of messages, but solid enough,” he added for the benefit of the others.
“I’m glad you approve,” Jared Strang replied.
Hodge mirrored Strang’s wry smile. “Well, it beats, ‘A solid opposition for a solid democracy.’”
This time, Cutter couldn’t contain her laughter. “Ha! That was a winner!”
Priyam Kaloor was not amused. “This one still sounds like we assume we’re going to lose,” he noted.
“You do realize that it would take a miracle to win an actual majority, right? A bona fide miracle,” Jenny Thurgood pointed out.
The seven members of the Election Committee of the Progressive Justice Party sat elbow-to-elbow around a circular table in the small meeting room. The room was lit by three overhead LEDs whose blinding light reflected off the table’s polished stone surface. Beyond the chairs, the light fell off quickly, leaving the corners of the room in darkness.
Only six of the seven attendees occupied a chair. DAR-K’s imposing two-meter spherical body, hovering a few centimeters above the floor, took up the last place at the table. The LED lights reflected dully off her matte gray finish.
Hodge was finally getting used to DAR-K being there. He hardly flinched anymore when she floated in for a meeting. In fact, he almost didn’t register her presence at all, as if she were a piece of furniture, until some brilliant analysis or other emanated from her speaker in Kathy Liang’s voice. He still got nervous when her voice emerged from near darkness on the other side of the table. That, he couldn’t get used to.
They were meeting at the back of the official party headquarters in the building next to Rumi’s Café. The location gave Hodge and Cutter a convenient excuse to be in the neighborhood. The quality of Rumi’s coffee and carrot-ginger cake was rapidly gaining renown throughout Vesta One, and it wasn’t all that far from the Vesta Project Management Tower so, all in all, it seemed like a natural place they might visit.
The fact that a supposedly permanently locked door joined Rumi’s supply room to an unused office in the party headquarters was a bonus.
Hodge and Cutter used the secret passage to attend opposition party election committee meetings without alerting Alum to their betrayal. They hadn’t publicly come out as candidates for the Progressive Justice Party yet.
Better to wait until Alum officially announced citizenship for the Cybrids and the incumbent rights that went along with their new status. The Cybrid Grand March was only a week away. Until then, discretion was critical.
All that would change after the Grand March, once the personhood of the Cybrids was formally recognized and their supporters no longer had to hide.
When Alum discovers we’ve switched support, he’ll remove us from the ruling party in the Governing Council faster than we can blink. I don’t think he’ll kick us off the Council entirely, though. Overly harsh retribution would give the impression he doesn’t tolerate dissenting perspectives, even from the opposition.
Hodge and Cutter could wait out the next few years on the Council sidelines rather than in the midst of the government. Life would be different for everyone after the election.
They could still just cross the floor to the other side once an official opposition was recognized. Alum had permitted Strang and associates from the old Administration to remain on the Council. He no longer sought their advice, but at least he’d let them stay on.
Strang interrupted Hodge’s musings. “If we were to win a majority, how would we make that miracle happen?”
“The one strategy that always works,” Hodge replied.
“Go negative?”
“We have lots to work with. Not the least of which is, the man really isn’t even human.”
“No. Absolutely not. We’ve talked about this before,” DAR-K reminded them.
“I realize Alum has as much potential to damage us with his own negative campaign as we have to hurt him, but—“
“A negative strategy would destroy us both and throw Vesta into political chaos,” DAR-K interrupted. “That is unacceptable.”
“Surely there has to be a way to get a rumor out there, some way to make him reveal himself.”
“Reveal himself as what?” Strang asked.
“As the machine he is. The man’s not even human.”
“I’m not human either,” DAR-K pointed out.
“Well, then, we’ll at least level the playing field. The election will be between two different machine candidates.”
“Your insistence on the importance of computational substrate over cognitive structure in determining humanity has always been troubling, Nigel,” DAR-K said.
“See what I mean?” Hodge replied. “Nobody, no human person, would ever say something like that.”
Jared jumped in. “Listen, you two. We’ve already agreed to disagree on this. Nigel, we’re not going down that road in the campaign. Please give it a rest.”
Hodge held up his hands, fingers splayed, in front of his chest. “Very well. Sorry if I happen to prefer first place over second.”
DAR-K sighed. “We all like to win, but that’s not the way to get there. Alum is too autocratic for his own good. Sooner or later, he’ll show his true colors and when he does, we’ll be ready to appeal to the people.”
Thurgood frowned. “You’re assuming that people prefer the right to choose, over being ruled by a beloved dictator they see as their Spiritual Leader.”
“One has to have some faith in humanity,” the Cybrid replied.
“Perhaps I can help.” The voice came unexpected out of the dark.
DAR-K shot out four tentacles in a defensive posture and heads turned toward the corner of the room, craning to see who had barged into their clandestine meeting.
A middle–aged man with a moderately muscular build, softly chiseled features, and an air of gentle confidence stepped forward into the light.
“Who are you?” Strang asked.
“My name is Darak Legsu.”
“And how do you think you can help? More importantly, how did you get in here, and how long have you been listening?”
“I’m good at being in places I’m not supposed to be,” Darak answered. “And I’ve been listening long enough. As to your first question, I have some information I think you’ll find important to your campaign.”
“Right!” Hodge laughed. “We have no idea who you are. Why should we believe any information you have? For all we know, Alum sent you.”
Darak stepped closer to the table so they could see his face. “Those who are most untrustworthy are often most suspicious as well, wouldn’t you agree Mr. Hodge?”
Nigel stood up, knocking his chair backward, and took a step toward the stranger. “If you know who I am, you might think better than to insult me in front of my friends,” he hissed.
“Friends?” Darak raised his eyebrows and laughed softly, audibly blowing air from his nostrils. “I’m not so sure you’re right about that. You barely tolerate each other’s company. And you certainly aren’t all of like mind. I’d say something more like unwanted, but necessary, allies. At least, that’s probably how Alum would see it.”
DAR-K darted around the table. Her manipulators shot out to encircle the interloper. Before they could t
rap him, the man stepped back into the darkness and was gone.
“I expected a friendlier reception,” Darak said from the other side of the room. Heads spun around to follow the new source of his voice. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to deactivate the Cybrid’s motor routines while we talk.”
He activated a virus to invade DAR-K’s semiconductor CPPU and override her voluntary control of propulsion and tentacles. Her security rebuffed it effortlessly.
Darak frowned and modified the virus to accommodate a more sophisticated level of protection. It was equally ineffective. He tried again with three different versions in rapid succession. The Cybrid glided toward him, manipulators extended.
There’s something familiar about its defenses—Greg/Darak thought. He should’ve shifted away to safety as DAR-K brushed off his best attempts to hack her control systems and drifted closer. He should have, but he didn’t.
There was something about that style of mental thrust and parry tugged at the edge of his consciousness and kept him from leaving.
I’ve done this before.
His eyes widened, and he stopped the viral attack. These defensive moves could only belong to one person.
“Kathy?”
24
The politicians around the table looked from DAR-K to the stranger who’d materialized from the shadows, and back to DAR-K.
The stranger stood still. His eyes focused expectantly on the Cybrid.
“Hello, Greg,” DAR-K said, her voice level and quiet. She halted her advance a meter away.
“What? DAR-K, do you know this man?” Strang’s gaze whipped back and forth between Darak and DAR-K.
“I’d recognize my husband’s mind anywhere, in any guise,” the Cybrid answered. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present Dr. Greg Mahajani, apparently now also known as Darak Legsu.”
For a second or two, the room was suspended in stunned silence.
“You look good, Greg. Or should I say, Darak? I like the new name, and the new look,” she said, sincerely.
“I guess we both kept a few secrets,” Darak observed.
DAR-K bobbed slightly, as if nodding. “So it would seem.”
