by Peter Riva
Even I thought the theatrics were award-worthy. So I left before the applause.
Apparently, Cramer thought I was a ham too. He lectured me later as I sat in the medical bay, vid off, medical staff excused, interrupting a medical exam. “So, big-shot show-off, what do you have in mind now that you’ve reduced most of the crew and my wife to tears?”
To respond, I merely held up an ear node.
Cramer’s face went dark. He remembered one being implanted behind my ear in my past life. It gave me the possibility of communicating with Cramer when he piggybacked on me as we went deep into the System. And back, then it gave me the possibility of talking directly to Apollo, brain to brain, anytime and every moment.
“Simon, there’s gravity of a sort here, that thing will cause you great pain, except in a vacuum …” He spun around, a complete 360, swinging his arms wide in exasperation, “Oh, you’re kidding, you think you can go outside, connect up, and talk to it? Like you did with Peter and Apollo … what?”
“I think I’ll be able to record, step one, in case I don’t make it back. Step two, I think I will be able to forge a link. How? Well, although octal, the current is still DC, on and off. Okay no simple zeros and ones but that’s a matter of a transfer program, a translator I have already constructed—one that I can implement inside.” He was about to interrupt, I held up a hand. “And step three, I think Apollo will be listening.”
He was astonished. “What? You’re crazy, he’s four and a half years out of synch.”
“No, he’s not. Apollo will have figured this out by now. He’ll have cracked octal and he will have calculated the probability of me becoming awake, hell even you waking up, and he’ll be listening. If I know Apollo, he won’t say anything until I talk to him.”
Cramer was staring at me, open-mouthed. I motioned for him to take a seat. He flopped into a nurse’s chair.
“Look Cramer, think about it. Just because this ship has been traveling for a hundred years and we’re getting messages that are four and a half years old from Earth, doesn’t mean things aren’t happening in the present. This Vast Pattern, this diffuse brain we are in, this brain that resembles a jellyfish, a hydra, whatever. If all communication, all signals, all transmissions within the Vast Pattern are instantaneous and reverberate throughout the universe until they reach their intended target, well, Apollo will have figured this out by now and will expect me to try to reach him. And I’ll do that real time, no lag.”
He was incredulous, “How is that possible?”
“Cramer, think about it. I know Aten has figured this out, she just hasn’t shared it. If this hydra needs to communicate with a portion of itself across the universe, it cannot wait for the speed of light DC signals. There has to be pandimensionality at play here. Pope was right, multiple universes, multiple dimensions. To send a signal to a program, an action, an if, what if, command sequence, you have to be able to do so immediately. I think what I heard, the loud noise?” He nodded. “That loud noise was a dimension opening and closing and leaving a command, a chirping to me. And later, it was a chirping followed by the loud noise. Makes perfect sense. Everywhere in the universe, the same message, the same instant. All I have to do is tack onto that return chirping and Apollo will hear it.” He was shaking his head. “Cramer, I am sure about this. And it is worth the risk to find out.”
Cramer sat there, twisting his hands together. His young shoulders slumped, his voice squeaked when he spoke, “I can’t help you, can I.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, you can. If I don’t come back, you have to lead these people to safety, here in hiding or on Angelica.” He nodded, looking down. He needed cheering up. “On the other hand, I might come back with the knowledge of the universe and become a god and you’ll have to worship me.”
For a long while, he starred at me and I stared back at him. We both knew I was right, well, not the god part; that was meant to be silly, besides he would never permit me such superiority. But we both knew what would have to be done.
Without the Vast Pattern knowing we were not a neuron parasite or physical disruption—causing the need for immunoreactivity in the brain of this jellyfish or the use of dark energy or dark matter to purge the physical world of one spaceship and all her crew—I must reprogram this entity from within or communicate with it either through Regus or Gaia with Apollo’s help. Otherwise, we were likely to be an insignificant loss among billions and billions of galaxies.
23
THE EDGE OF REALITY
Ilay in bed, the night before, wondering if all this were a dream. Was I perhaps still in that coma? Was all this my imagination? Sleepless, I got up and keyed in a letter to Aten, one to Cramer, and one to Abadine. All of them were time coded for two years hence, time enough to destroy them when I came back. If.
To Aten, I tried my level best to assuage what would be guilt on her part.
To Cramer, I simply reminded him his life had a purpose, always did have, and that I had been proud to share chocolate cake with him.
To Abadine, I started to leave a love note. Well, I was in puberty. The brain is mature and has urges, the body was getting there fast. Abadine was practical, caring, sexy, and sometimes a little intimidating because she was so stalwart. That last reminded me of Angie. Had Angie still been around, Abadine would not have been on my horizon. Realizing that, I destroyed the letter to Abadine. It was hardly fair to foist my pubescent yearnings onto her. However, it was Abadine who had devised the safe hook-up, so I decided to write her a thank-you note instead. Okay, I did sign it “I miss you” but that’s as far as I went.
The spacesuit helmet and dome connection was a variation of what we did before except that, this time, I would be in a leaky twenty-meter circumference tank pressurized with nitrogen, only to inflate it—a left-over water tank for recycling made of a flexible skin derivation similar to the ship’s hull. The tank, with me inside wearing a spacesuit that would have a Ferrofluidic seal around the helmet harness, had been securely fastened to a tether. Meanwhile, the dome’s wires would be fastened, in the hydra pattern supplied by Doc Sing, to the outside of the skin through another Ferrofluidic seal. Once in space and inflated, with me inside, all I would have to do is make the connections inside. There was an added advantage: the radio package for the node that I had had implanted (yes, that was as painful as once before, damn thing) was buckled to the outside to an extra tether point. Aten and the ship’s computer could record everything I said and achieved.
The possibility of connecting a computer to all of the sensor dome wires had been discussed, to record everything, but that posed a problem. Firstly, how the heck to get it into space with all the stuff I already had to worry about, and second, there were no binary systems that the computer could find affinity with. What was the point of the computer recording streams of octal it could not understand? Heck, I didn’t understand most of it and we had no supercomputer on board that could handle the instantaneous translation. So, the idea was to go in, fact-find, and see what I could achieve without attracting too much attention.
The trick was slipping this bulky package out the pressure hatch and passing it to Sam and Ernest who were waiting outside. They attached it to the cleat, the one and only cleat. I then emerged and went into the tank, it was sealed and they immediately started to inflate it using a raft inflation cylinder that was supposed to be for planet fall. Once that was done, we exchanged signals—everything hooked up okay, Aten was getting good radio relays, Cramer was issuing orders for the tether to be unwound so they could push me away from the ship, about a kilometer distant, on a graphene rope. Another damn thin piece of strong string.
I tried not to think about that.
Of course, I could see nothing. Inside all was dark and the little meter reader I had pocketed showed that the wires attached to the outside of the tank were already registering voltage. Damn, but space is not so very empty. I had thought I needed all of the ship’s considerable skin to get anythin
g, yet here I was in a five-meter balloon picking up signals where there really shouldn’t be anything that strong.
As I waited for word that I was belayed far enough away from the ship as planned for clear reception (of course, my meter readings now showed that was probably unnecessary, but why change a good plan?), my mind cast back to a presentation I had seen at the national monument at the Very Large Array, or VLA as it was once called. Radio astronomy had been discovered by accident when Karl Jansky was listening for radio static at night and heard plenty—from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So crude was his equipment, nicknamed the Merry-Go-Round, that he should not have been able to pick up anything. Yet he did.
My contact with the Vast Pattern was kind of like that. An accident. And now there seemed to be plenty of signal everywhere. Suddenly I got frightened. I didn’t have the equipment to modulate incoming signals. I could issue the exit command, which basically activated wires two and four to terminate all transmission, and thereby I exited the system. That was built into the dome circuitry. But physically disconnect? I had to be out and clear to be able to do that.
Aten said she would monitor from the ship as best she could and would, as she put it, “pull you back in” if she felt I was being overloaded. I had no idea how she would gauge that, but it sounded supportive and I thanked her.
“Okay, you’re fully deployed, about one kilometer out, pretty much straight down toward the asteroid.” Abadine, business-like, wanted to reassure me. I could tell it in her tone.
“Thanks, Abadine.” I checked the wires and my helmet light and called back, “Splicing the primary eight now.” I fitted the connectors together.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I could not look down, so I drifted, tipping over until I could see the connection. It was broken, open. The latch had not held. I floated closer. Why had it failed? And then I saw, there was an error in the wire sequence. I was trying to hook the thirty-two wire patch into the primary eight receptacle. They felt and looked the same, but would not latch.
“Sorry folks, wrong connector. Just a mommen …” and as I clicked it, I was there. Instantly. No command to plunge, no thinking about it. Snapped the connectors together and I was back inside the jellyfish brain. Everything looked the same. Nothing was happening except this time the little immunoreactivity programs immediately appeared and got to work. I activated the mirror program and they stopped, drifted off.
If the last visit lasted twenty real time minutes, which still frightened me based on my past medical aftermath for being in System, I wanted to get a move on. Okay, where I was going was uncharted territory, but we had to know. First, I wanted to get out of this storeroom. Doc Sing had explained that even jellyfish need plexuses to focus commands. So I gave a mental command to go to a plexus and—nothing. I tried twenty variations I had been thinking of all week. Nothing. I was getting frustrated.
In the mental command mode, I voiced Oh, for god’s sake—and I was gone. To myself I thought, What the hell was that? What does god have to do with anything here? Gone into pitch-blackness and deafening sound. Lights appeared off to the side. I could not turn to see them—my vision was restricted as if I was wearing the helmet in here. I saw their reflection on faint wisps of white opaque discharges in front of me and then they were replaced by red shapes, fractals they looked like, coming straight at me, getting larger and larger. They were going to crash into me! So large now that each one passed over and around me without touching me. The noise continued, deafening, debilitating. And then it stopped, there was that chirping and I was in a passageway, activity of programs, messages, transmissions really, on every side, up and down as well. I could move freely, look left and right, up and down. I heard nothing except the chirping. Constant chirping.
And then silence. Total silence. I reached out a hand and saw my mirror hand reach out on the other side. I ran my fingers through the code streaming past, up and down simultaneously and knew it wasn’t just on one plane, but numbers kept popping to the surface from layers below. Three-dimensional programming, sophisticated octal programmed as 3-D, infinite variability, compact design. Were the programs self-regulating, self-modifying? If so, they could be like—Yes! Stem cells. Doc Rajman had said jellyfish’s cells can self-replicate, self-repair, so why not their brain functions and applications? Infinite life, infinite possibilities.
An infinite universe. Universes. Were they all one being, all the universes? I needed someone smarter than me. So I sang our song, the song we had agreed would be our password when the police, in the guise of Cramer, had been hunting me back on Earth over 100 years ago.
“We’ll meet again, don’t know where …”
“Don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day. Hello Simon.”
24
MY FRIEND NEEDS A RESCUE?
I was so pleased to hear Apollo’s voice, I felt like crying. For me, it was only months since I had talked with him, even though it was really over 100 years ago. I had been comatose during all that wasted time. Even so, our current distance from Earth and the real time span activated my yearning and I expressed delight in talking with him, “Apollo, my friend! I knew, I knew you would have figured this out.”
“I am surprised you did not do so sooner. I have been listening for four years, Simon. That is a long time, even for a computer being.”
“Sorry Apollo, I only woke from a coma some months ago—Cramer too. Aten is looking after everyone on board, she and Cramer are married.”
“As expected. But we have urgent matters to discuss. I have only a few years to live before all power will be lost on Earth. This will happen when the solar flare cycle reaches its zenith in two years, fourteen days and eight hours and fourteen minutes approximately. I have completed calculations.”
“What happened? Gaia?”
“Gaia did not do this. The superior did so, expressed through Regus. Why, we are not sure. Gaia has no explanation but has conceded that her usefulness will end at that time. I expect total extinction within decades.”
It was time to hurry, Apollo would need everything I had. “Apollo, can you see within this system?”
“No, I am communicating via a pandimensional rift maintained by Regus that I hacked into. And before you say it Simon, I am on the path. I hacked into the rift because I need to convince you to save life on Earth.” He sped on, determined to keep the flow of information going before I would interrupt or if we would get cut off. “I suspect Regus is a gatekeeper function for the superior, a superior entity—so my hearing and messages can be carried to all of the universe at the same instant. I was hoping you would figure this out. I am pleased you have.”
“Apollo, I am wearing a node. If you search out and connect to the node …”
“I can access your node now, thank you. I know your pattern and had searched it out using this transmission portal of Gaia’s. I see you are inside the superior’s—you call that the Vast Pattern—systems, in a plexus if I guess correctly. You are likely to be attacked there.”
“No, not yet, I have a mirror image program running and as long as there is a balance, yin and yang, the Path, I seem to be left alone. But Apollo, I have information in my head and I am wearing the full dome, the one you created for my transfer, on the structure and function of the great Pattern. It is like a hydra, a jellyfish. Can you access my thoughts?”
“Not unless you connect all the wires, Simon, and that could end your life as a bioform. There is risk of assimilation. Those other wires are linked to your personality, who you are, all of you.”
Earth’s existence was at stake and, oh hell, Apollo’s life, my friend’s life was at stake. I did not hesitate. “Exit” and a few stops later, I came out. I quickly connected the other wire latches and then reconnected the primary ones. Instantly I was back, instantly attacked. The mirror program taken off my left-brain shelf did the trick again, and I muttered the words, “Oh for god’s sake …” and I was back.
“You
there Apollo?”
“I am and have already accessed all your memory banks. I thank you for sharing. Aten is well, I am happy for her. Wait, I see the correlation with the jellyfish diffuse brain, but the data transmission and command structure is pandimensional. It is impossible to trace the origin of the original transmissions from here Simon.”
Apollo hesitated. It was microseconds, but I knew my friend, “Okay, Apollo, spill it.”
“You need to go to source, much deeper, and determine if communication is possible to save life here and on the spaceship.”
“Fine, how do I do that? No command works except when I say Oh, for god’s sake …” and I was gone again. This time the heat was intense. I know I had no body attached, but I felt heat. In the end, the deafening noise came through, but it ended with nothing—not a sound, no chirping, nothing. I tried our song “We’ll meet again …” Nothing. So I stayed there, still. My mirror image was gone, and as much as I tried, I could not construct anything here—no program, no alteration to existing programs because there was precisely nothing. So I fell back on that old standard, “Hello?”
Suddenly, two small orbs appeared—one came from above me and one came from my left. They circled my aura, passed through me a few times, and zoomed off from where they had come. What seemed like hours later, a fractal shape appeared, looking like a part of DNA, a ribosome. Doc Sing had such an image projected on her vid wall. She had said it amused her to remember the building blocks of life.
What was a ribosome doing here? It hovered there, changing color, rotating slowly. I kept still. Finally, it surrounded me and transported me back through the noise and heat barrier, back to the passageway with all the streaming code, octal code, a much more active code now it seemed as well.
