Absorption: Ragnarok v. 1 (Ragnarock 1)

by John Meaney

  I was Rafael.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Like pulling one instrument out of an orchestra, memories of a single plexcore should be incoherent fragments - particularly for an individual as unusual as the late, murderous Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega, dead for one hundred years. And he had subsumed so many other Luculentus personalities, absorbing them into his vast plexcore network, trembling on the brink of transcendence, when a single human felled him . . . with the aid of Pilots.

  ‘Pilots,’ she said out loud.

  The ones who had killed her - killed Rafael - would be long dead themselves. She considered this for nearly a thousand milliseconds, a long time for a Luculenta.

  Lowering her head, she closed her eyes and immersed herself in Skein. So much data about the past was invisible, but she instantiated a flock of netSprites and netAngels to help, scouring the query-reefs, helping her to interpolate and extrapolate, to form a strong guess about what ordinary Luculenti knew, and what the peacekeepers were likely to suspect.

  Pretty much nothing, was her estimate. They had buried the old knowledge too deeply.

  So she did a thing to please herself, to create an ironic footnote in history, should Skein survive her intentions. Accessing the legal functions, she changed her name.

  She was now Rafaella, not Rashella, Stargonier.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

  A holo menu grew to one side, displayed by the house system, but offering only food. How could the poor thing understand what she really needed? There had only ever been one other person such as she was now.

  And Rafaella was not going to meet Rafael’s sudden, violent fate.

  Hungry . . .

  Inside Lucis City, with so many people, she could find what she needed. Of course there were surveilling systems in every building, in the smartmaterial of the ground, and in the open from SatScan. That made it all the easier to get away with it, for someone of her capabilities. Peacekeepers would believe the data, believing it incorruptible.

  She walked across the atrium and gestured an opening in the outer wall. Outside was the blue lawn, shimmering beneath a creamy sun in a dark avocado sky. Any of her aircars could get her to the city in twenty minutes.

  High in the sky, a clear shape was soaring. She wore no smartlenses - that was so plebeian - but could still magnify the image, by accessing the house surveillance and by using coherent sound, emitted by vibrating smartmotes, to alter the refractive index of the air overhead, forming a lens.

  A lone man rode in the clear hull. Gliding for fun, high above the grounds of Mansion Stargonier.

  She pinged him. A Luculentus.

  So hungry.

  There he was, a Luculentus, élite of the élite, his mind enhanced with plexnodes: faster, more powerful than an unenhanced human . . . and succulent prey for Rafaella Stargonier, trembling on the brink of her first, panting with the knowledge of another kind of virginity she was about to lose.

  While the other party knew nothing of his imminent transition.

  Daniel Deighton was not born a Luculentus. Nor had he belonged to a family who aspired to upraise for their son.

  His mother Liva had been poor, raised in old Schaum Crescent on the Tarquil Coast. She met his father on a trip into a hypozone, one of the receding areas of natural ecology that continued to shrink before the encroaching, centuries-old terraforming.

  Shadow Folk of various clans and clades still lived there, needing respmasks to breathe outside their homes - very traditional, a dying way of life. Oz Deighton was one of them: slimeherder and biochemist, thirty Standard Years old when he met Liva. He loved the outdoor freedom, even in a region where to breathe unmasked meant lung-searing death. Yet he gave it up to marry an urbanite who could never thrive amid native ecology.

  Oz and Liva opened a small store in Caltrop Pentagon, on the outskirts of Lucis City. They worked hard. Daniel was born during the first year of their marriage; and many of his earliest memories involved crawling around the shop floor, playing with bright toys, sitting in shafts of sunlight that fell through skylights.

  What happened was, one of the store’s customers, a Fulgidus merchant trader who shipped goods via the Pilot’s Guild to a dozen human-occupied worlds but remembered his own humble beginnings, saw just how bright the young boy was. He recommended the mindware enhancements that first allowed Daniel to excel at his schooling.

  Richer Fulgidi often did everything they could to assist their children, sometimes pushing them too far in their familial ambition. There was no talk of hothousing Daniel that way; still, his parents loved it when he won a literary prize aged fifteen for his essay on cognitive changes during the twenty-second century.

  His thesis was that writing changed the way people thought. In old two-dimensional writing, ideographic languages were written vertically, alphabetic languages with vowels were written left to right, while those without vowels, such as Hebrew and Arabic (the missing sounds filled in via the reader’s interpretation) were written right to left. And the neurology was different too, like the additional right-hemisphere processing required to contextualise missing vowels.

  And in the late twenty-first century, with the advent of FourSpeak holoscript for both Anglic and Web Mand’rin, the beginnings of modern cognition were evident. He traced current trends, with a diversion on new departures, such as the high-response triconic writing of the mysterious world called Nulapeiron.

  On the third day of Lupus Festival, the family attended the Lucis Literary Congress where Daniel received his award, a crystal statuette. Afterwards, his parents drank far too much jantrasta-laced champagne. In the aircab home, their singing had been loud, off-key but harmonious in the ways that truly mattered.

  That night, while they slept in their apartment above the store, thieves broke in.

  Oz and Liva were giggling as they staggered downstairs to investigate the noise, asking each other who had let the cat in - a joke, since they had no pets. Perhaps the last sound they heard was each other’s laughter; or perhaps it was the hum of vibroblades in the seconds before death.

  It was Daniel who found them later, never knowing what had woken him up, for he had slept through everything else.

  The therapist who helped him afterward was a Luculentus. The bills were paid by the Fulgidus merchant trader who had first recommended mindware for the young Daniel. The man was kind, and though he had no wish to enlarge his own family, he helped with Daniel’s finances and education, guiding him.

  Neither of the thieves-turned-murderers was caught. A smartatom mist and strategic scanwipes were all they needed to evade surveillance.

  Pride and vengeance drove Daniel to study hard, to become ambitious, and when he applied to the Via Lucis Institute for upraise, he passed every test. One year later, he was a Luculentus.

  Aged fifteen, he had written about old FourSpeak, whose name partly derived from the ability of some people to think four-dimensionally given strong three-dimensional constructs to work with, such as model hypercubes. Now, entering his third decade, his expertise became mathematical fields whose understanding required the many-dimensional and multimodal cognition that only a full Luculentus, at home with every capability Skein offered, could comprehend. Esoteric, strongly-coloured figures in hypergeometrical spaces were just part of it - a person had to feel the momentum and intensity as it varied through the figures, and taste the rightness of his logic.

  Peacekeeper Intelligence was always interested in bright people.

  He trained with others like him, but only himself and his friend Keinosuke graduated to counterintelligence, thanks to their abilities in analysing surveilled behaviour patterns. Their first joint mission of importance had been against the Siganthian embassy; soon, everything the opposition cell was learning consisted of material devised by Fulgor’s peacekeepers.

  Daniel also found time for twelve auxiliary careers - he was a Luculentus, after all. The least kudos but a whimsical satisfaction attached to his poetry.
Perhaps he was least successful in his relationships with Luculentae.

  Lately, his netSprites had been working on new determinants of suspect behaviour. One of the possible targets was an ecologist called Greg Ranulph, whose behaviour patterns might be consistent with conspiracy - betraying interest in Lucis Multi’s security, hiring equipment off Skein that might be used for infiltrating secure systems. Daniel was keeping the investigation wholly private, because he was testing new algorithms that might prove wrong.

  Using the quickglass glider had been a whim. He had been too sedentary of late, and he was curious as to why Ranulph spent so much time on the Stargonier estate. From the owner’s viewpoint, an ecologist was required to work on symbiosis between DNA- and ZNA-based lifeforms, the native ZNA being a triplet of cooperating substances, not a single compound.

  But some of Ranulph’s trips to the estate had been flagged as furtive, and possibly suspicious, by Daniel’s netSprites.

  For now, he was enjoying the gliding.

  High above the grounds of Mansion Stargonier, he gazed down, simultaneously noting in Skein that the owner’s name was now Rafaella, a legal amendment. Still, here he was in a quickglass glider, so who was he to challenge whimsy? She could call herself anything she—

  From a patio below, a tiny figure - surely the Luculenta in question - was looking up at him. Perhaps he should initiate comms.

  But then low-level messages - such as he had never experienced since training - flared through his awareness.

  <>

  <>

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  <>

  He needed to react.

  <>

  And then he realized—

  Vampire code!

  —was ravening through his deep defences, a monstrous violation, but his plexweb was swinging into action, because such code existed a century ago and femtoscopic inoculation had been laid down inside him, but the code was fast and evolving new stratagems, while he did everything he could to hold it back.

  A challenge, on her first kill!

  Rashella’s plexweb fought to enhance the vampire code inside her. Deep within were factory-marrows and ecologies of code entities containing ware-organs, cells, components, and finally objects, all goal-directed and adaptive. Her thoughtware was on the offensive.

  Her target’s name was Daniel Deighton - she now knew - and his defences were fast, peacekeeper-fast, their battle accelerating on a timescale of femtoseconds. Their thoughtware warriors combined the rigour of symbolic logic with the power of evolution, in a blindingly swift arms race. Then a 303rd generation descendant of Rafael de la Vega’s original code burst through the latest versions of Daniel’s defences.

  Got you.

  Vampire code ravened through barriers, spread like wildfire down paranerve channels, tearing and ripping, copying and plundering, taking the quantum state of Daniel’s mind and copying it back to Rafaella’s cache, to the waiting, hungry buffer, heisenberging the original brain-plus-plexweb into oblivion.

  Daniel’s mouth opened to scream. Then he slumped inside the quickglass cockpit.

  Nothing human was here now, only dead meat, already beginning its slide into biochemical chaos, the dissolution from pattern to randomness, the transition known as death.

  Rafaella clenched her fists, thrumming with victory, her vampire code - already improved - shining in her awareness, the conqueror in a battle that had last four hundred and two milliseconds.

  You’re the first, dearest Daniel.

  Overhead, the quickglass glider, with its carrion cargo that no longer cared, continued its flight.

  FOURTEEN

  EARTH, 1926 AD

  Migraines, and the hints of memories of dreams. For the past week or longer, Gavriela had been finding it hard to focus during lectures. Or perhaps that was partly due to Lucas Krause’s habit of sitting near her, his intent look so compelling.

  Today, as Professor Hartmann wrote on the blackboard, her mind drifted from thoughts of electrons and current flow, remembering the strangest thing, a being of crystal who could move and talk and—

  ‘Fräulein Wolf?’

  ‘Um, excuse me, Herr Professor.’

  ‘And your explanation, please?’

  His diagram showed a curving track of varying width. Inside the chalked track were small circles containing minus signs - electrons, obviously - while off to one side was an equation, I = dq/dt, defining electric current as the rate of flow of charge.

  ‘Er . . .’ She struggled to reconstruct his half-heard original question. ‘You want to know how current can be constant everywhere in a circuit, even with a twisted wire, squeezing electrons closer together in tight turns, farther apart elsewhere. ’

  ‘So you heard what I asked, but I have not yet heard your answer.’

  There were rueful looks around her - sympathy from her fellow students, none of whom looked to have a solution. But when she stared back at the diagram, it came to life inside her mind, a moving picture of jostling pearls inside a curved pipe, and the answer felt so obvious, but she could not put it into words.

  She gestured with her hands.

  ‘The closer the electrons get the more they, um, push against each other - inverse-square repulsion - so they have to spread out. It balances the curvature exactly, and the, um, well . . . It’s obvious, isn’t it? But I just can’t, um . . .’

  Then Professor Hartmann did an unusual thing.

  He gave a broad, happy smile.

  ‘So you are a physicist, Fräulein Wolf. You feel exactly what’s going on. All we need do is add some conversational skills - a minor matter - and you will do very well. Excellent.’

  Lucas winked at her.

  Afterwards, she went off to study by herself, but every few minutes she found herself looking up from her book, and seeing not the library but a transparent woman whose name was Kenna, while other tangled images fell through her awareness, too fast to interpret.

  In the evening, she went to play cards with Petra, Inge and Elke. It was Elke’s apartment, and she owned a card table covered with green baize. Their stakes were matchsticks, and often they would place all the cards face-down, suspending the game in order to chat.

  ‘Are they giving you a hard time, Gavi?’ asked Petra. ‘I mean the professors.’

  ‘Oh, no. Today Professor Hartmann picked on me, but he knew that I knew the answer, while no one else did. At least I think he knew. He’s quite a sweet old man.’

  ‘Picking on you is sweet, huh? Well, good for you.’

  ‘And there’s no boy in class distracting you?’ asked Elke.

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘Tell us his name,’ said Inge. ‘And how he’s hurt you.’

  ‘Hurt me? What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve not been yourself.’ Petra patted her hand. ‘We’ve noticed, haven’t we, girls?’

  ‘Oh.’ Gavriela blinked, feeling black pressure over one eye. ‘It’s the headaches and the, um, the dreams. Lucas hasn’t . . . We’re just acquaintances, really.’

  Her friends looked at each other.

  Then Inge said: ‘There’s a family friend visiting from Vienna, and he’s rather famous. Do you really have bad dreams that upset you, dearest Gavi?’

  ‘Just . . . recently.’

  Gavriela’s right hand, still holding her cards, began to tremble. It was awful, because she could not control the motion. So she put down the cards and placed both hands in her lap, squeezing them together, using pain to fight back the shaking.

  ‘You’re very pale,’ said Petra.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You need to see him, the Herr Doktor.’ Inge touched Gavriela’s upper arm. ‘My family has a good relationship with him. Some of his ideas are deliciously racy, but—Never mind. My mother will make the arrangements.’

  ‘No, sorry. I can’t afford—’

  ‘Excuse me, bu
t I said my family will arrange everything. There will be no charge.’

  Gavriela swallowed salt tears.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She needed help. Suddenly it was obvious.

  ‘Thanks . . .’

  Then she was crying, and the worst part of it was, she had no idea exactly why.

  Two days later, she knocked on a front door, and a short maid opened it.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the maid. ‘Are you Fräulein Wolf, please?’

  ‘Um, yes. Your employer’s daughter, Inge Scholl, arranged for—’