The Web cloud did not at first respond to the attack; perhaps the machines couldn’t tell that the fire was being launched from the vicinity of Earth, still no more than a bright, blue-hued star barely visible near the shrunken sun, some five a.u.s distant. Or maybe there was a shortcoming in their design strategy… something that made it difficult for them to change their tactics in the middle of a battle.
Dev thought about that. At Nova Aquila, the Webber force had relied on overwhelming superiority of numbers, with their formations guided by five planetoid-sized vessels dubbed “Alphas” by the Confederation Military Command. The Overmind had defeated them by somehow—Dev still wasn’t sure how—breaking into their command network and ordering most of the Web machines to shut down. The Web, in turn, had countered that tactic by launching this assault without any Alphas.
How, he wondered, were they coordinating the attack? The only possibility that made any sense was that they were using a widely distributed network, one resident in all or most of the Web devices, which must be communicating with one another somehow. If that mode of communications could be discovered, perhaps the human forces would have the key to again penetrate the enemy force and shut it down.
For another hour, Dev watched the battle, continuing to try to reach the Overmind every few moments, and failing each time.
Damn it, what should I do? He felt an agonizing vacillation. He needed to return to Nova Aquila and let the people there know what was happening. He needed, too, to link up with other human forces, Imperial and Confederation. He would be able to help coordinate their arrival, and—as he’d done when he’d been part of the DalRiss explorer fleet for all of those years—he’d be able to provide navigational data for their cityship Achievers.
But to leave the battle now…
The solution was almost laughably simple… but it struck him with hammerblow force. It was quite possible, Dev realized, for him to literally be in two places at once.
He was currently resident in the Hachiman Defense Facility at Aristarchus, on the surface of Earth’s Moon. Hachiman was a sprawling complex of domes and half-buried hab modules, interconnected by subsurface tunnels and mag-lev transport tubes. Buried deep beneath the lunar regolith near the center of the station was the Hachiman Command Control Center, an enormous, artificial cavern that included the heavily armored base headquarters, with multiple I2C links extending throughout the Solar System and to several other nearby stars, as well as a direct link with Tenno Kyuden itself. While the Imperial Staff Command Headquarters at Tenno Kyuden was technically the command center for the entire Imperial military, Hachiman was the actual operations center, coordinating intelligence from literally thousands of sources, correlating it, and providing the ISCH with a streamlined image of what was actually going on.
The computer center for Hachiman, located directly beneath the HC3, was built around a system that was, arguably, the fastest and most powerful computer ever designed. Called Quantum K5050 Oki-Okasan—the Nihongo meant very roughly “Big Mother”—it was the latest generation of what was generally called the quantum computer, a processor that used the Uncertainty Principle regarding where an electron was at any given instant to create alternate but simultaneous paths of electronic reasoning in a way eerily similar to the functioning of the human brain.
Once, centuries before, the quantum computer had promised to be the most likely route to the development of true artificial intelligence—computers as self-aware and at least as intelligent as humans. In fact, that route had proven to be far more complex than even its creators had ever envisioned; artificial intelligence, when it had been developed in the mid-twenty-first century, had been achieved through increasingly sophisticated software. Oki-Okasan was not self-aware, but some hundreds of AI programs were running simultaneously within its vast, electronic memory, with Dev an undetected extra guest. Swiftly, he began replicating himself.
He’d done this once before, downloading a copy of himself into a Naga-based probe which he’d sent on a reconnaissance into the center of the Galaxy. That time, of course, he’d relied on the considerable power of a Naga-DalRiss fusion within the heart of a DalRiss cityship. This time, he was alone and in the Quantum Oki-Okasan, but his memory included the entire process. It was, in fact, much like the common autopsych process known as jigging, the ViRsimulated creation of personality fragments with which a person could hold conversations as a means of resolving inner conflict or problems.
The process felt like a thinning, an indescribable stretching… and for a ragged, wavering moment, his self-awareness was fading. Dev had fainted perhaps twice in his life, both times when he was a kid, and this was like that, a lightheaded, whirling sensation as blackness closed in from the periphery of his vision. He fought to retain a grip on his sense of identity, clinging to the mental self-image he carried as a kind of talisman against the night.
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 rel
entless 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.
Battlemind Page 22
