by J L Forrest
Suhto had died in just such a place.
Yw Sabi held Nyahri’s hand as the portal sealed behind them.
{31}
Their footsteps sounded clearly on the hard floor. Nyahri followed her mistress, wide-eyed and on the balls of her feet, ready for violence. A sloping white corridor ended as it began, at a single portal, and it opened.
Beyond it, delicate crimson arabesques adorned the plain walls of a vaulted chamber, and within it a golden dais stood off center. Iris doors led in every direction, their surfaces closed and connections unknowable.
As much as she had hated them, Nyahri preferred the Templari’s cramped passages to the rooms of this House of Hell. She understood the fortress’s earth and stone, but Sojourn Temple contained nothing of common clay. Sorcery surrounded her, ambient light emanating from everywhere and nowhere, the walls humming in soft choruses.
Yw Sabi climbed the dais, raising her arm. “Control panel.”
Englisce text unfurled through ghost-fires too quick for Nyahri’s eye. Yw Sabi manipulated these images and, where she touched them, new lights appeared or changed color or vanished. Hovering panels flanked her, appearing and disappearing as yw Sabi required.
The room darkened and poltergeists sang. Nyahri retreated from the walls.
A voice said, “Welcome, Magistress Sultah yw Sabi, to Sojourn Temple.”
From above, white light focused on Nyahri, and she crouched, raising her spear. Dim lasers flashed into her eyes.
The voice continued, “Collar signed Magistress Sultah yw Sabi Atreian to an unregistered Exemplari. Name and vocal recognition required.”
Nyahri looked to yw Sabi.
“Say your name, lovely one.”
“Nyahri E’cwn.”
The voice chimed, “Print recorded, confirmed. Welcome, Nyahri E’cwn et Sultah, to Sojourn Temple. Entry approved. Power sequence initiated. Bioreconstitution will complete in two hours, fifty-seven minutes, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen seconds and counting.”
The collar warmed again. Nyahri edged closer to yw Sabi, forcing a brave front.
“Sojourn,” yw Sabi began, “a first question.”
“Ask.”
“The outside timeframe of our descent was fifty years, but this Citadel has been dormant five thousand. Overshot your programming a little, didn’t you?”
“I am sorry. I do not understand the query.”
“Who or what overrode your requirement to awaken fifty years after first hibernation? Who gave the order? What was the approval protocol?”
“AutumnOne overrode my programming. AutumnOne commanded me under classified protocols.”
“The Hive gave the order?”
“Confirmed.”
Yw Sabi frowned, surprised by this news, though Nyahri understood none of it. The Atreiani bowed her head in thought.
“Sojourn,” she said, “what port is this?”
“You are at port three.”
“Retrieval services.”
“Loaded.”
“Hardcopy the highest-rated extant literature,” yw Sabi said in Englisce, “best agricultural practices, nineteenth through twenty-fourth centuries, no annotation, no references, minimum type, no more than sixteen thousand A4 pages. In addition, provide the content digitally in a handheld reader, including references. Deliver to port three, fifteen minutes.”
“Affirmed.”
Nyahri caught only every third word, struggling with the ancient tongue.
“Inventory services,” yw Sabi said.
“Loaded.”
“How many direct dosages of Prosee, heuristic medical protein endo-genesis cells can you manufacture in an hour? Predispose against super influenza, scarlet fever, yellow fever, malaria, common pox strains, streptococcus, and as many disease types as you can optimize. Suggest type.”
“For human or other?”
“Human.”
“Four thousand three hundred ten doses, eighty-six point-two liters in twenty-milliliter units, Deck Fourteen-M.”
Nyahri sighed thankfully. “You are helping the Oudwnii.”
Yw Sabi glanced at her, then returned her attention to the Citadel. “I’ll require two low-duty carriers, all aforementioned dosages and two portable lab units. Time to delivery, port three?”
“One hour, thirteen minutes.”
“I’ll need sixty eleven-milligram compressed-magnesium pin incendiaries, twenty low-yield four-ounce industrial explosives. Time to delivery, port three?”
“Nine minutes.”
“Two long-range line-of-sight comms, multichannel and super-bit encoded—”
“Unavailable at this site. Do you require a substitute item?”
“Can you print them?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Three hours twenty-four minutes.”
Yw Sabi snarled. “Too long. No. List all primary equipment tagged military grade.”
“No equipment listed.”
“You must be fucking kidding.” Yw Sabi thumped her fist against the dais. “I need air transport, a skiff or a light fighter.”
“Unavailable at this site. Do you require a substitute item?”
“Don’t suppose you can print a skiff in two hours, thirty minutes?”
“Shortest printing time for a Skiff Class X is seven hours, thirty- eight minutes.”
“That won’t do. Do you have any overland gravitics transport?”
“Unavailable at this site. Do you—”
“No.” Yw Sabi looked to Nyahri and said, “I guess I’m going to have to get much better at riding a horse.” To the Citadel she said, “I need live-map assistance to this Citadel’s imagery chamber, then to the berth cylinder, then to the string core.”
“Clearance status must be approved for string-core access. Do you want to proceed now?”
“Any other Magisters at this site?”
“You are the only Magister registered at this site.”
“Then, you bitch of a computer, you know my core access can’t be overridden.”
“Clearance status must be approved for string-core access. Rules of record, section nineteen, subsection four-point-six. Do you want to proceed now?”
“Clear and proceed, signed by Magistress Sultah yw Sabi et Nyahri.”
“Command status confirmed. Access approved.”
Nyahri jumped from a burst of ghost-fire which floated before yw Sabi, an image in reds and blues and greens with height and width and depth, a model of what Nyahri knew must be the Citadel. Its phallic pillar jutted to its pinnacle, a broad disk below it, and layer upon layer of concentric rings descending into the earth, farther below the ground than the pinnacle stretched above it. Bright lines illustrated shafts and corridors. A yellow pulse shone near the top disc.
Yw Sabi pointed to it and said, “That’s our location.” She indicated blue at the lower levels, “The imagery chamber. Sojourn Hall, where we will go next. The string core at the bottom.”
Nyahri swept her arm through the hologram. Only an illusion. She drew her finger along a blue cylinder in the map’s heart.
“What is here?” she asked.
“That’s the berth, and I want you to see it.” Yw Sabi turned her face upward, addressing the Citadel again. “Sojourn! Time to bioreconstitution?”
Sojourn replied, “Two hours, fifty-three minutes, forty, thirty- nine, thirty-eight seconds and counting.”
Yw Sabi laid her hands against Nyahri’s cheeks, her face close, eyes calm and intense. Her thumbs stroked Nyahri’s skin, following Nyahri’s cheekbones.
“You’re going to experience much. No panicking, understand? We’ve no time for it.”
“Yea, Atreiani.”
“Sojourn! Guide us to the imagery chamber.”
A door opened, light growing from the darkness beyond it. Stale air wafted from within, but cleaner drafts now accumulated. The Citadel whirred to life.
◆◆◆
The live-map hologram floated ahe
ad, and yw Sabi and Nyahri followed behind it. Like tree roots, the labyrinthine passages descended along ramps, branching left or right, sometimes opening into chambers containing witchcraft, Atreianii-made tools or clothes. Yw Sabi added whatever she thought useful to her possessions, including two light tunics of witch-cloth.
“Armor,” she explained.
Reaching the end of the ramps, they entered another white-lit hallway. A human’s mummified remains lay on the floor, its clothing tattered. He had carried weapons of stone and wood, but no metal. Nyahri curled her lip.
“He made it rather far,” yw Sabi said, “before he died.”
“What killed him?”
“The Citadel’s defenses, no telling which.”
Did Suhto die thus? Nyahri frowned. Of course he did.
At the end of the hallway, a dome soared above them. Its zenith crested high overhead, the gray and white honeycombs of its surface set one next to another. An iris door closed behind Nyahri, vanishing as if it’d never existed, no exit in sight. Her heart raced, but yw Sabi stood calm.
“Everything you’ll face here,” she said, “is nothing more than illusions and recollections. None of it will hurt you.”
Nyahri tilted her head, watching in every direction.
“Sojourn!” yw Sabi called. “Imaging services.”
“Loaded,” the Citadel said.
“Render three-dimensional solar system, five hundred fifty years before the Yellowstone eruption to fifty years post, fifty years per minute. Set the scale and color distortion for normal human readability.”
“Some conditions following the Yellowstone eruption will need to be estimated, accuracy plus or minus three percent. Off-world estimates accurate to plus or minus nineteen percent.”
“Estimate as needed.”
“Playing.”
The room darkened and Nyahri gasped. To her eyes the Citadel vanished and the night sky surrounded her, the hemisphere above arrayed in familiar stellar patterns. Endless space expanded in all directions, black and brilliant and infinite. No floor existed beneath her, and she stood over a void of unfamiliar stars. At the room’s center glowed a fiery orb larger than the rest, rotating and smoldering, its aurora stretching and shimmering.
“Sol, our sun,” yw Sabi said.
The scene pitched, zoomed, and panned. Nyahri dizzied, recognizing the planets as yw Sabi had taught her, naming them as they approached, grew large, and receded.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
Uncountable stones revolved, the errant Jupiter and his moons followed, then Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Hades, and lastly the artificial Nibiru in its immense elliptical orbit. Nyahri soared above the disc of worlds, the ten revolving with the incomprehensible distances between them. She approached Earth, then hovered above its deserts and mountains.
The oceans raised only a fraction, but flooded cities and coastlines. The icecaps melted, the north pole disappeared, and cloud cover increased.
With the birth of the Atreianii, a brief burst of activity transformed Earth’s surface, coupled with enormous destruction. The world emptied of humans and few settlements remained. In time the haze thinned, cities disappeared or reordered, and forests and grasslands spread.
“Even after we claimed power,” the Atreiani said, “it took eighty years to reverse the disastrous tide wrought by humans, the long tail of degradation following the Industrial Revolution, but indeed we did.”
Upon the Earth, wildernesses widened. Above it, massive satellites circled the globe. Two artificial moons grew from seeds of nanotechnological diamond, in synchronous orbit with Lwn—Luna, the Moon. Ships departed the Station, riding the sea of space, exploring worlds and traveling to proximate stars, distances Nyahri failed to fathom.
Old infrastructures vanished. On Luna, automated hubs grew and connected, lighting their ghost-fires, becoming the familiar spider web of Nyahri’s childhood stargazing. The Atreianii unfurled Dyson sails into the solar winds, capturing the sun’s power. Working colonies burgeoned on Mars, populated by human men and women who worked with the machines under the yoke of the Atreianii. The Atreianii set Mar’s iron core spinning, and the world’s atmosphere thickened. Blue water covered its red surface and green life flourished. Populations extended to Jupiter’s moons, and as distant as Pluto and Chronos.
“We Atreianii claimed the Earth as our home,” yw Sabi said. “We curated humans, and their cultures, as we thought best. In our time, every remaining city became a university, all villages were monasteries, but we taught only those humans we deemed worthy and only what we decided helpful. We created paradise. We were gods, in our way, the shepherds of humankind. It wasn’t to last.”
On Earth, a fury burst in brimstone and magma. The first caldera exploded, and a continent suffered under its firestorm. The Earth’s crust slipped, entire volcanic chains erupted, and a portion of North America collapsed beneath the mantle. Ash clouds swept from one hemisphere to the next, devouring forests and jungles and fields, and storms covered the oceans. Where once Earth’s rich hues had glimmered blue and green and white, they shown now only gray and gray and gray.
“The magnetic field faltered. As I once said to you, Nyahri, it actually is a wonder anything survived.” Yw Sabi paused, touching her fingertip to her chin, then said to herself, “Life blooms. Kepler first said it to me. Vertebrate life should not have survived.”
“Yet it did, mistress.”
“So it did, in abundance.”
The image froze, ashen Earth orbited by its three moons. Yw Sabi walked around the world, a globe no taller than she, her face alabaster, her eyes cold iron. Nyahri let go her breath.
“I still cannot imagine so many humans,” Nyahri said. “The number seems impossible.”
“Many, many billions lived before we Atreianii were born. Humans failed as caretakers of the biosphere, and as interplanetary explorers. It was we Atreianii who succeeded, or we dreamed we had.”
“Then?”
“We ruled for half a millennium, but within one year our political system dissolved into squabbling. Following on that, almost unforeseen, the single most magnificent technical failure in the history of the world.”
“The volcano?”
“One of our largest power stations. When it blew, the circle of destruction spread at just under the speed of sound, and it triggered a chain reaction which I figured would destroy everything but bacteria.”
“What went wrong?”
“I don’t honestly know. I was in the ground for those final days, but I knew our system was cracking under design flaws and, worse, political flaws. What I expressed to Shwn Pawl is what I believe. Conflict is an inherent quality of individuation.
“Long before it came to this, my own enemies laid plans within plans. I had no fools for opponents. The complex systems we created, too, clearly played some role. Borea will not answer me, Autumn ordered the override of the Citadels’ slumber, and I can only guess at how the Hive has evolved.”
“I confess, mistress, I do not understand the Hive.”
Yw Sabi laughed. “No one did. That’s the nature of strong artificial intelligence.”
Nyahri furrowed her brow. “None of this explains your hatred of your own kind. It went wrong before they killed—” She hesitated on the name. “—Ekaterina.”
An emotional rush bubbled from Nyahri’s chest, a sense of injustice, an anger not over another’s death but her own. The sensation grew palpable, immediate and real, the lingering pain of betrayal, abuse, and a violent death.
“Not hatred,” yw Sabi said. “More like a deep disappointment. What we did to humanity—” Yw Sabi shook her head. “We imagined we stood in the moral right, that the end justified such monumental means, but we caused so much greater harm than humanity ever had. It would be like this, Nyahri—imagine you murdered your father for keeping a messy camp, then you burned the camp down yourself, the bloody knife still in your hand.”
“Ay.”
“Do you k
now how we built paradise?”
“With your wisdom, your knowledge—”
The Atreiani shook her head. “We built it on the ruins of humanity. Sojourn! Load video library.”
“Loaded,” the computer said.
“Show the Culling. Edit to three minutes.”
“Playing.”
Projections filled the domed ceiling, and Nyahri witnessed the birth of the Numenii, technological demons whose sorcery infected the globe. One after the other, humans appeared in strange dress, humans of many colors gathered into crowds, a hundred cultures. Some smiled or laughed, seemingly hale, and in the next moment they fell dead, snuffed as if only candles. Crowd after crowd, place after place, people after people, all perished. Innocent men, women, and children, their deaths recorded in moving pictures.
Tears coursed Nyahri’s cheeks.
“In the first phase,” yw Sabi explained, “we Magisters gifted the Numenii with the ability to generate and control nanotechnological swarms. These spread, undetected by any human defenses, for nearly six weeks. All humans on Earth had them inside their lungs, their bloodstream, their brain. When we triggered the system, more than eleven billion people died within five minutes—the quickest, most thorough, and painless mass extinction in natural history.”
Once the swarms did their first work, the Atreianii set the Numenii to other tasks. The demons disposed of the dead, transforming the leftover carbon and other particles however they wished. Great machines, infinitely malleable and powerful, the Numenii built new cities which were, despite all the horror which came before, more paradises than prisons. They brought the small number of human survivors to these places, giving them every sustenance and comfort—
Everything but loved ones and societies lost.
All the survivors were women with child. None survived to their own children’s adolescence.
Yw Sabi’s voice trembled, “In four years we completed this second phase. By the time the deed was done, less than one hundred million humans lived, all under age six. The New Childhood. We raised them in the purest environments, teaching them ourselves or with the aid of the Templarii or the Numenii. While we did, we also went about restructuring the world. We counted unimproved Homo sapiens much the way we counted cheetahs, mastodons, or blue whales, which wasn’t all bad. We were, among other things, excellent conservationists. We brought humans within the bounds of what the biosphere could support and, as if they’d been unruly children, we took all their power from them.”
