Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Then he was staring at himself . . . an analogue of himself, actually, called into being by the literal doubling and fission of the carefully patterned information that made up the program that was Dev's conscious mind.

  "Good," the two Devs thought in perfect unison. "I'll stay here and keep an eye on things, while you go—"

  Both Devs broke off the thought simultaneously. It would be several seconds, they realized jointly, before their differing perspectives began to color their experiences, resulting in two markedly different individuals, instead of identical copies of the same person.

  "I'm Dev One," he said, smiling. "You're Dev Two."

  "What gives you priority?" his double asked, but he was grinning as he spoke. Both were remembering the uncomfortable time Dev had had with the recon probe double; since a duplication copied everything, including memories up to the moment of program fission, there was, in fact, no "original." Each Dev was as real as the other . . . whatever the word "real" might mean inside this artificial space.

  "I'm Dev One," he said again. "But I give you the choice. You want to stay or go?"

  His alter self considered this a moment. "I'll stay. You go. I want to see how the battle develops, see if the Web develops any surprises we should know about."

  "Agreed. But we also need reinforcements. I'll see that the DalRiss Achievers have the nav data they need to make pinpoint jumps in-system."

  "Agreed. I 'll . . . um . . . talk to you later. Take care of yourself."

  "You take care of my-self."

  Dev One uploaded himself into the main system Net, then patched through to 26 Draconis, then to Nova Aquila, where Shinryu and the other Imperial ships were already departing for Earth. After that, he began transferring with the speed of thought to one system after another in both Imperial space and along the independent worlds of the Frontier, assessing the reaction of Humanity's armed forces.

  Everywhere, ships were moving. When DalRiss cityships were available, the largest human ships present in-system were being maneuvered into their ventral folds and prepared for an immediate jump back to near-Earth space. At each stop, Dev entered the local military command computer network for that system, jacking in with the flagships of both Imperial and Confederation forces when both were present and uploading the latest combat information he'd received from Hachiman. He also linked with any DalRiss ships that were in system, interfacing with their Achiever network and uploading current field maps of the Sol system, a kind of mental road map based on the relative positions of gravitational sources and the background flux of magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation, rather than actual highways. This type of "map" was what the DalRiss Achievers used to establish a mental image of their destination, and when it was accurate, detailed, and recent, it permitted the DalRiss cityships to jump very far indeed.

  Dev felt a small thrill as he worked with both the human and the DalRiss forces. After the initial panic riding on the news that the Web had struck at Sol itself, it seemed, it felt as though all of humanity was pulling together, working with relentless and dogged persistence toward the single goal of getting as many warships to the Sol system as quickly as possible.

  The atmosphere was taut throughout the ship, with the translation to Sol now only hours away. Kara had some time, though, before the final mission briefing. She'd elected to spend it with Ran.

  She stepped off the ramp coming down from the middeck, then took the left branch of the corridor to Gauss's recreation lounge. Lieutenant Ran Ferris was there, lying back in a game couch, eyes closed, his Companion extending a small forest of silvery tendrils from his head and interconnecting with the smart interfaces of his seat. She stood next to him for a moment, looking down into his face. He wore what might have been a barely detectable frown of concentration, though his mind should have been disconnected from his organic brain and nervous system. She wondered what he was experiencing.

  Beside his chair was a glossy, black contact plate. Kara reached out her hand, focusing her mind as a single tendril grew from her palm and plunged into the interface.

  She couldn't enter Ran's world, but she could, in effect, look over his shoulder. She caught a burst of music—early classical, she thought—with powerful rhythms and stirring, martial melody. Visually . . . she wasn't certain what he was watching. It appeared to be a ViRdrama of some sort.

  "Ran? It's Kara. Can I interrupt?"

  "Of course," she heard him say, the voice distant, in the back of her mind. "Hang on a sec. Program freeze. Save as Ferris One."

  His eyes blinked open as the silvery tendrils melted rapidly back into his head, and his skin resumed its normal, natural tone and texture. "Hey, Kara," he said, grinning up at her. "What's the word?"

  "Sorry to interrupt," she told him. She gestured toward the interface plate. "What was that, anyway? Classical?"

  He nodded. "John Williams. One of the great pre-Imperials. This is an old ViRdrama version, played with three-veed clips drawn from some two-vee flat projections that originally carried his music. Great stuff."

  "I never cared much for three-veed stuff. It doesn't feel as natural as sims designed to be full-sensed from the start."

  "I don't know. Some of those old filmmakers could still create a pretty powerful emotional effect, even when they were limited to two dimensions. But I'm mostly linked to the stuff by the music."

  "I didn't know you were into classical," she said, smiling. "You just never cease to amaze."

  His grin grew wider, and he reached for her, pulling her to him. "Stick with me, kid. I'll astonish you."

  They kissed.

  "So," he said after a long, warm moment, "you didn't come here to check upon my taste in music and archaic popular sims."

  She traced her finger down the curves of his cheek and chin. "Well, not really."

  "Is it the fight coming up?"

  She nodded. "I suppose so. I always get a little tight before a big one."

  "Nothing to worry about. It's not like we're going to be fighting the Webbers in person."

  Her smile faded, and she drew back from him a bit. "You ever hear of RDTS?"

  "Sure, but that's psych-stuff. Not nearly as big a down-grudge as getting killed, right?"

  "Wrong." Kara didn't like Ran's cocky attitude, though she knew that it was a common one among striderjacks. Too many people she knew, too many friends were lost now in one or another of the psych ViRworlds. "I'm not ready for Nirvana. I like this world just fine, thank you."

  "Oh, I don't know. Nirvana might be kind of fun, from what I've heard. You want to D-L in and check it out together?"

  "Have you ever been there?"

  "No. Been meaning to, just to check in on Daniels and some of the other guys. Never got around to it, though."

  "Yeah." She stood up again. "Listen, I'm heading up to the ship's mess for some chow. I'll see you later, for final briefing, okay?"

  "Well sure, but—"

  Kara turned abruptly and walked off. She'd come here looking for some companionship, maybe even some intimacy with Ran before Gauss completed her preparations and they had to go into combat, but his flip attitude about Remote Death Transference had soured her. She liked Ran, liked him a lot. Their relationship was far more than casual, and they'd talked more than once about contract pairing. But damn it all, sometimes she just couldn't figure out what was going on in his head.

  Virtual worlds. They represented, in quite a literal way, an entirely new universe opening for humankind, a universe as real in its rather specialized and artificial way as the original universe was physically. Down the centuries, people had been entertained and informed by a variety of media, first with live actors on stage, then through presentations on an electronic display screen, and finally through realtime downloads directly into the viewer's brain, this last such a perfect simulation of the real world that it had been popularized by the term ViRsim, a Virtual Reality Simulation.

  The next step, evidently, was turning out to be an inversion
of the old processes. Rather than packaging entertainment and downloading it into the viewer's brain, the viewer himself—or, rather, the software, the biological programming that comprised his or her thoughts, memories, and identity—could be downloaded into a computer network where it could live, if that was the appropriate word, apparently indefinitely. Further, the network could be programmed to provide all of the sensations and experience of a real world; complex AIs, using chaos-directed programming routines of their own design, could come up with virtual worlds as surprising, as challenging, as intellectually and physically stimulating, even as dangerous, as real worlds.

  More and more people were choosing to "emigrate" to the virtual universe. Commercial firms competed with one another to see who could make the most challenging and realistic environments, which included anything and everything from recreations of Earth at various eras in her history, to a dazzling array of realistic and scientifically accurate planets, to fantasy worlds where magic worked and the laws of physics were changed or challenged, to places—other dimensions, other existences—where all of the rules of ordinary existence had been changed. In most cases, the travelers simply stored their bodies in coffin-like life pods that kept their physical selves alive while their minds roamed their chosen alternate reality.

  Many, however—and if the medes were to be believed, the numbers of people opting for this route were growing at a fantastic rate—-simply never returned to their organic bodies. The downloaded software, once running in its electronically created surroundings, could be supported indefinitely. Some called that option the new frontier; others thought of it as legal, high-tech suicide with the promise of immortality. Downloading personalities was fast becoming a technological substitute for the purely metaphysical concept of heaven.

  In a sense, that was what had happened to Dev, save that he was still able to freely interact with humans stuck in the real world of physical law and physical limitations. Kara remembered her conversation with Dev some time before, when he'd counted himself among the first of humanity's "virtual humans."

  Kara had been headed for the Gauss's main mess area, but she decided on the way that she wasn't really hungry enough to make the chore of eating worthwhile. She rarely was before combat, the tension building in her gut making any thought of food nearly unbearable. Instead, she headed for the nearest communications center. There, commods were arrayed in gleaming, metal-and-plastic ranks, affording a privacy that the couches down in the rec area or the smaller, open conning modules for teleoperating warstriders couldn't provide.

  Taking the nearest unoccupied module, Kara palmed open the hatch, sat down, and swung her legs inside. The door slid shut as she lay back and extended her Companion's tendrils to interface with the commod's electronic circuits. As she linked in, she summoned a destination menu.

  She selected the list of available virtual worlds, then from there linked in to Nirvana.

  There were basically two approaches to the ViRworlds, depending on whether you simply wanted to visit or were going to move there permanently. Visitors could enter any world at any time through a commod like the one Kara was using; indeed, communications modules had been creating virtual worlds for centuries now, settings and scenes—such as the imaginary dinner atop a New American oceanside cliff—where two or more people could seem to meet in a virtual reality middle ground, when in fact both were lying in padded life support modules, imagining the visit with the help of artificial intelligences and internal computer connections.

  Those who wanted to enter a virtual world permanently, or those who had no choice, had their minds downloaded—scanned, replicated, and transferred to the ViRworld system like any other packet of data. The body might be stored for later use, but most permanent ViRworld residents were those either who'd lost their bodies, or whose bodies were so badly damaged that even the best somatechs and nanosurgery couldn't get them working again. More and more people on the verge of physical death had opted to try downloading as a means of cheating death, of living—in theory, at any rate—forever. No one knew if the process conferred actual immortality, but most scientists working in the field felt that downloaded lifespans would be limited only by the lifetime of the machine generating the environment in which they existed. If the computer networks supporting those downloaded systems ever crashed all at once, it would be a kind of electronic genocide; so long as technic civilization endured, however, the individual mental patterns would survive.

  It was, Kara reflected, a potential immortality like that of the Gr'tak, where the pattern of mind remained the same, even though the organic bodies wore out and were replaced along the way.

  Reaction to the new technology had been predictable. There were plenty of willing emigrants to the virtual worlds, evenly divided between young people who questioned the values and the worth of the universe they'd been born to, and older people who were looking for a way to cheat death. There were plenty more, however, who felt that emigration to a virtual world was nothing more than an elaborate form of suicide.

  Kara opened her eyes and stepped into Nirvana.

  The light always took some getting used to. Most available virtual worlds were idealized versions of Earth or other man-habitable planets, but Nirvana had been crafted more imaginatively, a combination of an imaginary heaven and an equally imaginary far-future civilization, where buildings were constructed of pure force, and the inhabitants moved through a dazzling, golden light by the power of thought.

  A young woman floated before her, her form all but lost in light and vapor. "How can we help you, Kara?" They knew who she was, of course, as soon as her Companion accessed the system. The figure before her was in fact the analogue construct for one of the Als creating this world. Kara had been here visiting before.

  "I'm looking for Willis Daniels, please," Kara replied.

  "I'll have to see if he's available, if he wants to have company. Excuse me for a moment." The hazy figure vanished, gone with the speed of thought.

  Kara glanced down at herself. The ViRsim persona she was currently using was her analogue image, wearing her gray Confederation uniform. Many of the inhabitants of Nirvana, however, lacked even the illusion of solid bodies . . . particularly those suffering from RDTS.

  Most of the military personnel who'd suffered remote death transference problems had ended up here, in Nirvana, where few of the visible bodies held much substance. The emigrant's bodies were always Naga-patterned, of course, if there was anything available to be patterned, with the idea that they might be recreated later, possibly through cloning from samples of the person's cells. Unfortunately, the majority of these people seemed to have lost hold of their-body's shape, to have lost the idea of a body, and they had trouble projecting anything even remotely like an image of their former selves.

  She could sense the technic ghosts adrift in the fog around her. Nirvana had been intended by its programmers as a kind of high-tech heaven, a place where the bodiless could enjoy existence of a sort until a way could be found to join them with bodies once more. For Kara, however, despite golden light and floating, ethereal forms, the place seemed more like a foretaste of hell, doomed souls wandering endless vistas, bodiless, powerless, cut off forever from the world of the living.

  "Hello, Captain."

  She tried to focus on the voice. It was Will's voice, but there was no face, no body to attach to it. Instead, there was a kind of solidity to the air and light a few meters in front of her, a concentration of awareness somehow made more than insubstantial. She smiled at it. "Hello, Will. How's it going?"

  "Well enough, Captain," the voice replied. "It ain't too bad here. Better than being brain-dead, I suppose, like poor Pritch."

  She nodded, feeling a little unsteady. Pritchard had come out of the battle at the Core with his mind gone, with no hope of downloading or retrieval.

  "So. How you getting on without me?"

  She sighed. "Not so well, really. I wish we still had you on the roster. There's a battle coming
up. A big one."

  Kara sensed the ghost's amusement. "The Web is attacking Earth."

  "You know?"

  "Hey, we may be ghosts in here, but we're not completely cut off from the real world. We've been following all the excitement coming in through the Net for hours, now."

  "What do you think? Can we stop it? Stop the Web from destroying Earth, I mean?"

  "How the hell should we know?" He sounded bitter. "There's nothing we can do about it here."

  "You can tell me what went wrong on Core D9837."

  She could feel his wry smile, even if she couldn't see it. "There were too damned many of them, and not near enough of us. That's what went wrong."

  "They're using the same tactics at Earth. Three groups, targeting Earth, Mars, and the sun. We're marshaling everything we can to try to stop them, but it doesn't look good." She paused, gathering her thoughts. "Actually, I was also wondering about access to the Overmind. Dev—Dev Cameron—has been trying to make contact with it, try to get it to help, but without success."

  "It's in the battle. Taking part."

  "So I've heard. It switched on an old asteroid-defense system and seems to be wearing down the enemy some. But Dev can't talk to it. Can't even seem to get its attention. You've been in here for a while. Can you sense . . . anything? The Overmind's presence on the Net, maybe?"

  "Even if we could, the Overmind wouldn't listen to us. We're ghosts, remember. Shadows. . . ."

  "You're men."

  "We were." She sensed a terrible longing in the words.

  "You still are. Mind is what makes a person, not the body. Body shape and size, color, weight, age, none of that makes a gokking bit of difference. It doesn't even matter if you have a body. It's what the body has evolved to recognize itself and deal with the universe, the mind, the soul, if you want. That's all that matters."