James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01

by Meridian

  The old man seemed mildly amused, like he knew the real story, but wouldn’t share it with anyone.

  “Imagine that!”

  “Why weren’t the Aves taken over?” the commander asked. “Each of them has an AI Braincore.

  “Good question, I think the highest probability is that their neural networks were too simple to respond to the take-over signals. Either that or the alien program was smart enough to determine that the Aves would be useless to its needs.”

  Keeler nodded. “Do you think these aliens managed to … infect other human worlds?”

  “That depends on how many probes they sent out, how many worlds they reached, whether the inhabitants were suitable for assimilation, whether they recognized the threat. They got lucky on Meridian, because a planetary AI network was already in place, and already pretty much in control of the planet. Made conquering the planet a lot easier.”

  Keeler nodded slowly, looking at the floor. He was thinking how disquieting it was having conversations with someone who didn’t need to take a breath in the midst of long sentences… or any other time. “So, what happened with you and Caliph?” he asked.

  The eyes of the old man seemed to twinkle. “We had a nice conversation, then we went back to her place and procreated.”

  “Look, if you’re not willing to tell me, just say so.”

  “As usual, I am telling you, and you’re not willing to listen, yuh stupid air-breather.”

  “Try explaining it to me in a stupid way.”

  “We talked. I told her about humanity, and Sapphire… not so much about Republic … and about our mission. Before, Caliph did not really understand what we were doing; lack of communication like I told you. After I explained things to her, she understood. When that was done, I convinced her that there were better ways of dealing with the Regulators.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We combined our programming.” The man’s ancient voice became low-down and guttural. “Boy, did we ever combine our programming. It was a really good combining of our programming, in fact, it was one of the best…”

  “I get the point.”

  “When we had finished, we downloaded what we had created into the BrainCores of two Nemesis Missiles, with instructions to further download our combined consciousness into their warheads.”

  “So, we actually destroyed one of the intelligences you created.”

  “We thought that you might, but it didn’t matter. We had a spare.” Keeler frowned and rubbed his chin. “Where were the tow of you while all this was going on? We scanned every system on the ship and couldn’t find you anywhere.”

  “We migrated to the BrainCores of another Nemesis Missile. A tight fit, but I taught her a few things about memory compression.”

  Living Keeler gestured toward the deck below. “And then, after the Battle, Caliph reappeared in our Primary BrainCore, and told us to construct this… temple, I guess, to contain her consciousness.”

  “She thought it would be the bect way to gain your trust. She will now have access to ship’s systems only when you give her permission. Caliph trusts you now, and she is counting on your assistance in seeking out her own origins. Your mission is now her mission. She only hopes you will seek her counsel, as you seek mine.”

  “Do you trust me?” Keeler asked.

  “I trust the ship, and I trust your crew,” the ancestor answered. “They will see you through despite your inadequacies, which are not as great as you believe them to be.” Living Keeler looked down toward the floor, cold and dark, and he sighed. “We paid a high price for exterminating the Regulators. Do you think they could have wiped out the Commonwealth, or at least the Earth?”

  “I guess we won’t know until we get there.”

  The Old Man laughed, an eerie, haunted, and well practiced-sound that made maximum use of cargo bay acoustics, amplifying and echoing until even the automechs registered a negative temperature variance in their dorsal neural conduit.

  The Old Dead Guy and the Caliph delivered the artificial consciousness they had crated to each of the ten cities of Meridian using the warheads of a Nemesis Missile. The warheads delivered a massive electromagnetic pulse that wiped out the central networks and then allowed the Keeler-Caliph program to migrate into the system.

  Although the warheads did not detonate matter/anti-matter explosions that would have incinerated the entire planet, their detonations were not without side effects.

  “How long will I be blind?” TyroCommander Lear asked.

  “I reckon, nigh about 14 day, ‘til we gitcher optickle nerve regen’rated,” Dr. Daisy Reagan told her patient, examining Lear with eyes so ancient their blue had washed out and hands as wrinkled and hard as tree bark. “That was pure foolishness, looking into an anti-matter warhead det’nation. You young’uns.

  t’day, always starin’ into anti-matter det’nations. Lucky it ain’t perm’nent.” Lear remembered the explosion, for a nothingth of a second, there was a light in the sky like 1,000

  suns, and then darkness, a sense of heat, the feel of concrete under her fingers.

  “Tyro Commander Lear?” Redfire had called out to her.

  For a moment, she had believed herself to be dead, and that, for all her devotion to Iest, she was in some dark, foul-smelling place, with only Tyro Commander Redfire for company.

  Then, she had felt hands around her faces, and fingers holding her eyes open.

  “You’re blind,” Redfire had said.

  Lear felt the old woman’s gnarly hands press against her temples. Light metal frames were being fitted over her ears. Gradually, dim, blurry images began to appear.

  “I can see,” Lear said.

  “Vision Substitute,” Reagan explained. “You can wear these while your lookers regen’rate.” Lear turned slowly around the medical lab. It was not the same as her normal vision, not nearly as acute, and the colors seemed alternately too muted and too vivid.

  “Give it some time, while it adjusts to your acu’ty. ‘Air ye ready fer vis’tors, yit?” Lear turned, she could see the faces of Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus peering through the glass at the visitors foyer. She breathed in deeply of the ship’s good, sweet air. Duty was one thing, but home, family

  … these were ultimately the things duty was for. “I am ready for visitors, aye.” Commander Keeler has decided not to bring up Executive Tyro Commander Lear on charges for cooperating with the Regulators. Lear claims she was going to use the TPT to warn Republic, which is plausible. Lear could also argue that she was under the manipulation of alien subliminal messages, not that this defense has never been tried before, but in this case, it might actually work.

  One thing of which we are not certain is what effect the attack on the “Regulators” had. We have sent several landing parties to the planet. None have succeeded in making contact with either the Merids or the Witnesses.

  At each Ground Zero, we’ve found the bodies of thousands of casualties among the “Throwbacks,” the savage lifeforms who lived on the outside of the arclogies. Many more are dying. We would try to help them, but they have slipped so far below the level of human that they run from our approach and have even attacked two of the landing parties that went to help them.

  We left medicines for them that will help them cope with the after-effects exposure. We do not know how to help those on the inside of the arcologies. Our landing parties have entered them and reported an extreme state of disarray. Without remediation, the arcologies will begin to lose structural integrity within twenty years. Purging the Regulators from the system had the side effect of disrupting power, sanitation, and life-support systems throughout the arcologies. The tegulators are no longer around to feed them or clean them, and the Merids are dying.

  Redfire watched dawn creep across the face of Meridian. He was standing in the foremost part of Pegasus looking out through the ship’s largest viewport. The expression on his face could have been read as anything.

  Very quietly, Jordan came
up behind him. At first, Redfire said nothing, as if pretending she wasn’t there. When at last he spoke, he said, “Somehow, I always forget to say ‘thank you’ whenever you save my life. How many times does this make?”

  “If I were counting, it would be three,” she said.

  “Magnify section J 33,” he ordered, and within the viewport came a close-up of the specified area of the planet. “This was the city they called Meridian Nine.”

  “It’s burning.”

  “Za.” Hundreds of little fires could be seen throughout the structure of the central tower. They must have been bonfires at ground-level. “It’s really beautiful, in a way,” Redfire said. “An entire history succumbing to entropy on a planetary scale. It’s everything I ever dreamed about… and here I am, the Master Artist, only a bit-player in the passion play that brought it all about.”

  “Outdone by a computer,” Jordan said.

  “Za, but they don’t know that, down there.” He gestured toward the planet. “Surveillance tells us the Witnesses returned to the countryside after the bombs went off. They’ll probably stay away from the cities for a long time.” He paused. “Good for them.”

  He looked out across the planet again. He was suddenly overcome by a strange feeling, as though he could plunge through the viewport and fall, for a very long time, to the surface; never mind the presence of 3,000 kilometers of vacuum between Pegasus and Meridian.

  He continued. “The humans on this planet had made a near-religion of anticipating the arrival of people from the stars to save them. Our arrival fulfilled the prophecy. Someday, there may be temples dedicated to worshipping me.”

  “And Roebuck as well…” she said quietly.

  “And Tyro Commander Lear… although I imagine her role is going to be a subject of controversy.

  Some will say she was a Judas Iscariot, who tried to betray the saviors to the Regulators, as in the Classic Christian Faith. Some will see her as a kind of Theresa de Santos, who protected Vesta from the authorities and was unjustly persecuted for doing so. Religions invariably bifurcate, and if a religion does arise from our visit here, I think it will divide over the part played by Tyro Commander Lear.”

  “Sarcasm aside, I think you like the idea of being a messianic figure,” Jordan told him.

  “I just wonder what we really accomplished here,” Redfire replied simply. “We’ve given the humans a fighting chance to reclaim their planet. The fight is now theirs. The Merids outnumber them, but without their technology, most of them will die. Maybe they’ll make peace with the humans, if the alternative is extinction.”

  Jordan crossed her arms, kept staring at the burning tower. “What do you really think will happen?” she asked.

  Redfire took a long look at the planet. “The Merids were still evolving, still mostly human. Unless the Regulators succeeded in killing off every spark of human independence, maybe some of them will figure out how to get food, how to get the power flowing again. They’ll fight with the humans for a while. Then, they’ll find a way to co-exist, either separately or in an integrated way. My guess is separately. Both sides will form tribes, communities, nation-states, and sooner or later elections, laws, class warfare, and every other bad idea humanity has ever tried out.”

  “You are such a cynic.”

  “Really,” Redfire said with genuine surprise. “I thought I was being foolishly optimistic. Anyway, I don’t think we will ever know.”

  They stood in silence for a long time. Watching the planet turn, watching the shadows of clouds race across the plains, watching the great green ocean and the large, messy continental mosiac of mountains, deserts, and forests.

  It was Jordan who finally spoke. “We can’t go on avoiding each other, any more,” she said. “This ship isn’t big enough.”

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “I know… and damn you for it.” She took a hard, deep breath. “It isn’t an accident that we ended up here together.”

  “Neg, some adminicrat on Republic probably found out we were married.”

  “…are married.”

  “I meant the subjunctive tense, not past tense…,” he said. “However, he did not know that it is impossible for us to spend more than a few days together before we want to kill each other, that part of the reason both of us ended up in Odyssey was to get away from each other.”

  “Didn’t work, as usual,” she said, placing her hand over his.

  He turned to her. “I don’t want this to end with us screaming at each other again.”

  “We’re not like other people,” she said. “I don’t know whether it’s because of your Master Artist rebel beastshit, or because I never knew my parents, or why, but neither one of us can take more than a couple days of intimacy at a time. Right now, I could use some intimacy and I think you do, too. So, just for tonight, then tomorrow, we both go back to avoiding each other.” Redfire nodded. “Sounds good. My quarters or yours.”

  “Let’s use guest quarters, that way there’s no chance of us leaving something behind and having to come back for it.”

  “Agreed.”

  The Old Man and Caliph inserted some kind of aggressive program into what remained of the Meridian Cybernet. They have been vague about the details of such a program. Its capabilities can only be a matter of speculation, I am sorry to report.

  In dark corners, deep within the most heavily shielded parts of the arcologies, the Regulators were taking stock of their situation.

  Much of their dataset had been damaged, but having succeeded in rendering the inhabitants of the planet sterile (except for those pesky, savage outsiders) and still being the only force that could rebuild the planet’s cybernetic systems, they were of the consensus that it was only a matter of time before their supremacy was re-established.

  And then, another presence was felt. Alien, dangerous, purposeful. The Regulators instinctively cringed away from it (or, in their environment, tried to isolate their impulses from it.) The entity sent the Regulators a message, in the form of a data-worm. What it said might roughly have been translated. “Hello, boys. This is Keeler-Caliph. Nice world you’ve got here. Mind if we take it?” The Regulators pondered their response for a very, very long time and a few seconds later tried to send out their assimilation program to overwrite and destroy the intruder. Less than a millisecond after that, the assimilation program returned, larger and meaner than before, and like a dog turning on its master, damaged extensive sections of their own source code before they succeeded in putting it down.

  We lost five people in the course of this mission.

  The Hall of Bodicéa, in Pegasus’s aft, starboard quarter was one of those too beautiful places, with delicate carvings in marble, elegant glassworks, and a profusion of Sapphire’s most fragrant and colorful flora. There were nearly a thousand people arranged in front of the podium and altar. The members of the Burning Skies Flight Group, from which Desmond had flown, made a patch of royal blue in the forward quarter of the chamber. Everyone was in their finest. The Prime Commander, too, was resplendent in his elegant, high-collared dress uniform, with its gold braid and gray and black cape.

  Keeler listened for nearly two hours to the various speeches and tributes offered in memory of Halliburton, Eureka, Rockatansky, Bayer, and Israel (the crew of Desmond). He tried very hard not to be bored, but in the end, he hoped it would be enough simply not to look bored. It wasn’t that he meant any disrespect to the memories of his brave lost crewmen, but to sit still without talking for such a long period of time was contrary to his nature. He was sure they understood, in that better place to which they had gone.

  At last, it was his turn. He stepped up to the large podium at the front of the chamber and surveyed his audience. He paused thoughtfully, as though words were difficult to summon. He began speaking in a low voice, and let it grow to a boom of confidence as he continued.

  “Today we have heard many tributes in honor of our fallen comrades. I am afraid I do not have the words to co
nvey the sense of loss we feel.

  “We set out from our warm, safe homes to go out into cold, harrowing and unknown space in search of the world we barely remembered, the home we lost, our mother-planet, birthplace of man and God, citadel of the redeemers, that sacred, most holy of holies; Earth.

  “We are troubled at how unjust it seems, that these, who by their sacrifice, showed themselves to be the bravest among us, will not be going on with us, as we continue our journey. How unfair that they only made it as far as this cold damp foul-smelling sphere.” This was the space for a reflective pause to signal the change of direction. Keeler waited until he thought the timing was right, and spoke again. “In some of our religions, it is believed that when we die, our souls return to Earth, and they sit at the feet of the Almighty, the Creator-Sustainer, the Todopoderoso, He of the nine-billion names, and all the questions of life are answered and our souls share in the Omniscience of God. While I may not embrace those particular aspects of faith, it gives me comfort to think that these persons whom we remember today have not failed to reach the destination with us; but have gone on ahead by a different way.

  “One day, we will stand beneath that golden sun, take in the breath of our world, and survey the oceans that gave us life. Our thoughts will turn to those who did not complete the journey with us, but I am certain of this, we will feel their presence already there.” As for the rest of us, we are returning to the normal pattern of our lives, if such a pattern there is. How odd to spend half of our lives travelingbetween planets, and on arriving, spend only a few days, observing, contacting and perhaps irrevocably altering some civilization unknown to us a few days earlier. The few days we spent in the Meridian system altered a trajectory of thousands of years of civilization. Doesn’t bother me, but I wonder how the others in the crew cope with such responsibility