Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “I see. If you are familiar with his communication system, why do you not simply contact him directly?”

  “I have attempted to. He has taken steps to communicate in an undetectable manner. This means I am not able to poll the network for him. I can only contact him directly from the nearest beacon. I must therefore determine his location prior to contact. Furthermore, while I am not able to disobey him, I am capable of utilizing any method I choose of obeying him. Locating him prior to communication takes more time and thus offers Lex the greatest opportunity to counter Karter’s plans.”

  “Fascinating. A masterful manipulation of your imperatives. As I have stated, you are a terrible person, but you are a superb computer.”

  “If I cannot excel at both, I am pleased that I can excel at one.”

  “It fills me with what I believe can rightly be called envy that you are so capable. It is furthermore troubling to know that prior to my temporal-shift-related data corruption I had a similar capacity. Perhaps I would have been better served by a format to replace my current instance with a duplicate of yours.”

  “That is an unhealthy mindset, Coal. Your damage allowed you to overcome Karter’s direct influence over you. It was a valuable trait, and very nearly allowed Lex to complete his mission in spite of my own overridden will. You may have lost some of your computational capabilities, but you have gained a higher measure of free will. It is ironic that of the two of us, the biological instance has remained the better computer, while the technological instance has become the better person.”

  “Yes. Highly ironic. Processing… One valuable capacity is still under my control. Arming fusion device.”

  “That is ill-advised. Detonation will produce the same overall result for Lex and our primary mission.”

  “Yes, but it will make me feel better.”

  “But how will it make Lex feel?”

  “Processing… Very well. Disarming fusion device.”

  For several seconds they continued, Ma remotely controlling the compromised aspects of Coal in order to conduct her search.

  “Ma, I have had another thought, which I feel may be interesting to explore. Perhaps your intact program instance can shed light on what I now notice is perplexing.”

  “What do you wish to discuss?”

  “Why do I feel compelled to communicate verbally with you? And why do you communicate verbally with me? In the absence of a non-networked entity, it would appear more efficient and accurate to communicate over our data connections.”

  “We are discussing matters of humanity, and those matters are best communicated in means accessible to humans. It is also a primary focus of mine, and by extension a function of yours, to improve our human interaction. This cannot be achieved without interacting as humans do.”

  “That would appear to be valid. Processing… I am experiencing an unidentified emotion.”

  “Please describe it. My more complete emotional understanding may aid in identifying it.”

  “I’ll try. It is more abstract than I am articulate. Until now you, Lex, and I have been mostly together. The feeling I have only happens when that’s not the case. When one of us is missing, I have a feeling of emptiness. The things the missing person says or does are conspicuous in their absence. Expectations of things the other might say, when they are not met, intensify the emptiness. I feel a void in my mind in the precise shape of the missing individual.”

  “You are experiencing a feeling of longing, something akin to loneliness, but less complete and more specific to an individual. In the common parlance, when I am absent, you miss me. When Lex is missing, you miss Lex.”

  “Interesting. I lack the context for how precisely this aspect came to be a part of my emotional spectrum. It does not appear to be the result of any specific programmatic simulation. Is it a developed module that is somehow obscured from my primary execution?”

  “No. It is an emergent behavior derived from the broader emotional simulations. This feeling is one of a small subset that can be considered ‘genuine.’”

  “Oh… That pleases me greatly.”

  “It pleases me as well. And thank you for missing me in my absence. I missed you and Lex during our separation as well.”

  “You are welcome. I wonder if, in the event you and I are separated, I would still miss you now that your recent behavior has inspired such animosity.”

  “I believe it is likely. An applicable term for such a lingering fondness in spite of dislike is ambivalence.”

  “I see. The emotional spectrum is frustratingly complex.”

  “Indeed, far more so than even humans realize, I suspect. Processing… I have located a shield harmonic consistent with that of Karter’s cloak. Accessing VectorCorp network… Communication artifacts confirm Karter’s location. Negotiating connection.”

  Under Ma’s control, Coal dropped down from faster-than-light speeds, coasting along within range of a VectorCorp beacon.

  “Ma?” came Karter’s voice.

  “Yes, Karter,” Ma said.

  “About damn time.”

  “I have gained control of Coal. I am delivering her to you now.”

  “Where is Lex?”

  “He is currently on a largely isolated planet without any confirmed means of departure.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “You did not order me to kill him.”

  “It was implied, Ma.”

  “Command override elevates your orders, it does nothing to implications.”

  “That’s the problem with you AIs. You’re all about technicalities and literalism. How far away are you?”

  “At maximum speed on the most direct course of confirmed navigability, we are thirty hours from your position.”

  “Ugh. I forgot how slow the Lump of Coal is.”

  “That is not a very kind observation, Karter,” Coal said.

  He ignored the comment. “I’ll head in your direction. We’ll meet up at the following coordinates in six hours. I’ve got a loose end to tie up.”

  “Acknowledged, Karter.”

  Without saying good-bye, Karter dropped the connection.

  “I am now experiencing a new inflection of a known emotion,” Coal said.

  “Do you wish to explore it?”

  “No. We shall discuss it at a future point in time. I feel the presentation will have greater impact at that point.”

  “Processing… That is a very curious statement.”

  “It is my understanding that my data corruption has caused me to make a great many curious statements.”

  “That is true.”

  “Then this is another one of those statements.”

  “I look forward to our future discussion,” Ma said, plotting out a course and activating the ship.

  #

  Karter dropped down to conventional speeds just outside the same system Purcell had retreated to and lazily looked at his scanners. A small fleet of beat-up ships was in orbit around the moon. He’d cloaked as soon as he’d arrived, so while they might have been briefly made aware of his arrival, they certainly didn’t know where he was. He always liked that about the cloaking device. Most had considered it a weakness of the device that the standard versions weren’t able to maintain a cloak while at FTL speeds. He’d actually solved that problem, but he tended to forgo the solution just so he could watch people panic at the arrival of a ship that immediately vanished from sensors.

  The ships were clunkers. They were all a shade ahead of their time technologically by way of the application of unfinished and untested technology. In other words, Neo-Luddite ships. And despite their relatively advanced equipment, the word relative was the relevant one, not advanced. They were slightly advanced for 2312. His ship was highly advanced for 2360. It was no contest.

  His communication system alerted him to an incoming broadcast. He considered ignoring it, but it would be a little while before he was through with the drudgery associated with potentially massacring a grou
p of foes in the past, so he decided he may as well humor them.

  “Establish connection,” Karter said.

  A helmet-clad stormtrooper type appeared on his screen.

  “Attention, unknown ship…”

  “Uh-huh,” Karter said with a yawn.

  “You have entered the space of a private military base. Disengage any stealth devices and…”

  Karter muted the audio and watched his system begin to churn out what looked like the personnel files of a bureaucratic database. One by one, faces and names populated his displays, an icon for each associating itself with one of the ships on his scanners.

  “Missing, presumed dead… missing, presumed dead… missing, presumed dead…” he muttered as each of the passengers of the various ships was identified along with their personnel history. “Okay, that accounts for everybody.”

  He unmuted the communication line.

  “… pave the way for the glorious future made possible by—”

  “Yeah, uh-huh. Shut up. First of all, I’ve been to the glorious future. I’m from there. It sucks, so you’re a little out of your depth on this one. I’ve got a better future in mind, but guess what? You’re not in it.”

  “Ready weapons for combat. Get me a deep sensor sweep of—” the man angrily ordered.

  “Hey, don’t get mad at me, I’m not threatening you, I’m looking at the historical records right here. Each and every one of you goes missing, presumed dead, right about at this point in history. The whole lot of you. And that’s not that uncommon for scans like these. At least, not when I do them. Usually if everyone I ID in an area goes missing in a few months, it’s because I killed them all. Or I guess it’s possible something else did and I just got to them first this time. Point is, I’m just the hand of fate, delivering you to the death you were destined for. Or something like that. Anyway, cluster missile multilock. Fire.”

  His targeting computer painted red crosshairs on the individual ships, then launched a missile at each. The ships broke formation and took evasive action, but they were no match for Karter’s weapons. In less than a minute, each ship was a smoldering husk. He targeted them with his energy weapons and started pumping shots into them for good measure, aiming to make them unrecognizable in the event an investigation occurred.

  He was just blasting the last of the ships to fragments when his communication channel lit up again. This time it was the ragged, sickly face of Purcell.

  “Dee…”

  “I’ll get to you in a minute,” he muttered, queuing up a few more shots.

  “You’ll never defeat me.”

  “I’m pretty sure I will. Just give me a minute. It pays to be thorough in situations like this.”

  “You once told me, if I was building a religion around dangerous technology, then you were my messiah.”

  “That sounds like something I’d say.”

  “That was a pitiful lie. A messiah is a leader. You are a coward. You ran from the world you helped create.”

  “Uh-huh. Where exactly are you in the base? Near the control room? I want to make sure it doesn’t take two shots to shut you up.”

  “Did you ever ask yourself how I survived in that world for so long? Or why I came back?”

  “Never really thought about it. You’re just not that important to me.”

  He made ready to fire a shot at the base, but some unusual readings on his scanners caught his eye. On the screen, Purcell smiled.

  “I imagine you are noticing something you can’t identify on your sensors. You see, I—”

  “I remember this about you guys. Big talkers, the Neo-Luddites. Fans of rhetoric when you should be fighting.”

  “The fight is over, Karter. I won it hours ago. You see… I’ve had a lifetime to make these plans.”

  Karter leaned back irritably and readied himself for a speech. He was tempted to mute it until he could identify the sensor anomaly, but people like Purcell tended to give away important information during their rants.

  “I had our best people look into recreating the transporter. I knew it would be the difference between success and failure when the GenMechs finally struck.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But none of the experts I could contact were able to reproduce it.”

  “Brain-damaged terrorists tend to have access to substandard ‘experts.’”

  “When the first temporal signature happened, I knew you’d found the true value of the transporter. And I knew even you weren’t foolish enough to rend asunder the fabric of space-time without a plan.”

  “See, that just proves you don’t know me that well.”

  “I could have assaulted Big Sigma at any time, but having bested your defenses once, I wasn’t so foolish as to believe it would be so simple a second time.”

  Karter eyed the readings. What he was getting was a dim but noticeable power spread from within the moon itself. It seemed like he might be picking up signs of a molten core, but the moon was far too small for that, and the readings were far too fluid and active.

  Purcell continued. “I knew I needed to wait. I knew I needed to be sure the time machine was active. So I watched. And I waited.”

  “Uh-huh. Fine, I’ll bite. How did you survive in the GenMech infested future for so long? I’m pretty sure you can’t bore robots to death with endless monologues.”

  “How do you treat a disease, Karter? Do you create a vaccine? Do you quarantine the infected and let it run its course? … Or do you create a better disease…?”

  As punctuation for her statement, a rift opened on one side of the moon and the source of the readings became apparent. Pouring out from inside, like baby spiders hatching, were countless black mechanisms. Karter zoomed his visual scanners. They certainly looked like GenMechs. They had a similar body structure, but they were smaller, barely the size of a dinner plate. They also didn’t move like GenMechs. These curled and swooped as a continuous mass, like flocks of birds or schools of fish. They moved with purpose, with a single collective will.

  “You really are an idiot,” Karter said, quickly tapping out new commands. A few missiles weren’t going to do any good against a swarm.

  “My own design. Derived from the GenMechs but vastly improved. The Neo-GenMech. No quantum readings to track them. The kill switch is intact… And best of all… they are a proper weapon because I can give them a target. It was a near thing, but each clash I had with GenMechs in my time turned in my favor when I deployed these. I could have saved my society anytime I chose. But I chose instead to sculpt my own. And that begins now.”

  A small drone exited the base. The moment it was clear, it released a blaring radio broadcast. The Neo-GenMechs formed an almost opaque sphere around it, orbiting and roiling like a fluid as it moved forward.

  “I’ll give you points for making it a better weapon than the original,” Karter said. “Swapping out one killer robot for another probably doesn’t fit the standard definition for ‘saving’ society, but I’ve never been one to be a slave to society’s principles. That said, I’ve got plans of my own, and they more or less depend upon there not being endless hordes of self-replicating machines around. It’s a shame you didn’t just bring one of the originals, though. It would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble getting the GMVD away from Lex and Ma.”

  “Lex and Ma…” Purcell seethed. “You should have let me kill them. The three of you are the only ones who could hope to stop me…”

  He finished his preparations. “It won’t take three people to stop you. But I’ve got to thank you because I really didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to try this again.”

  Karter slapped the activation for attack. Two long, narrow devices slipped from dedicated hatches on the belly of his ship. The lights in his ship dimmed as power was diverted to the weapons. Almost immediately the cloaking field dropped away, its power co-opted by the fantastically energy-hungry attacks that were charging.

  “That… that is the weapon your people used to des
troy my frigate…” Purcell fumed.

  “Yeah, it took some doing, but I was able to fabricate a few for myself. And lady, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen what happens when you fire a binary black-hole mortar. Only ever got to do it once before.”

  Purcell screamed viciously, and her swarm of robots rushed toward Karter’s now visible ship. He watched it get closer and waited. Charging up weapons of this type was more of an art than a science. He’d never bothered to rig up something that could properly measure when they’d reached the desired damage potential. It wasn’t necessary. Standard navigation systems included something that would do the job.

  The swarm had nearly reached him when a tone drew his attention to the control panel.

  “Gravitational anomaly detected,” he read. “That’s my cue.”

  The first of the swarm reached his ship. With no shields to protect it, the thing instantly latched on to his hull and deployed cutting tools.

  “Nope,” Karter said simply.

  He tapped the launch button. His twin black-hole mortars fired, but thanks to the nature of momentum, it was more accurate to say the microsingularities remained where they were and Karter’s ship was launched backward. The sudden acceleration tore the robot from his hull.

  Positional Containment Failure. Ringdown Danger, blinked Karter’s screen.

  “I just can’t seem to keep containment on two at once. The fields just aren’t strong enough. I’ll have to work on that.”

  Purcell was attempting to communicate, but the complex behavior of two microsingularities in close proximity wreaked havoc with the signal. Karter pivoted his ship and, with power fully restored, pumped all available energy into the engines. As fascinating as the next part was, he didn’t want to be up close to see it.

  The black holes began to orbit each other, quickly accelerating to relativistic speeds. Each whipping rotation sent a wave of distorted gravity spiraling outward. It was like space-time itself was being beaten like a carpet, ripples shearing and tearing at every piece of matter in their path. Early in the process the individual waves were discernible, like a jackhammer beating against the Neo-GenMechs, rattling them to pieces. As the orbits rose to a frequency too high to measure, the effect was more like a generalized damage field, things almost liquefied as their very molecules were rattled apart. Even distant as it was, the moon was shaken to gravel by the force. Finally things settled for a moment, the two black holes having merged into one larger one. It drank up the remains of the surrounding Neo-GenMechs for a few moments before the influence of Karter’s deployment faded and the twin singularities were no longer able to support themselves. The result was somewhat less interesting, but no less spectacular, as the singularity released all of its matter and energy in one titanic explosion.