Jackers

by William H. Keith

  “We’re pretty well goked,” he said, the crudity shocking on his lips. “Our ground forces are deployed around Mount Athos, but we don’t have any place else even surveyed except for the atmosphere plant. Our space squadron isn’t going to get clear in time. That damned Ryu is going to have them for breakfast.”

  She looked at Sinclair, caught by the pain in his voice. He was, she decided, a man forced to make a desperate choice, who’d just seen the result of that decision and knew he’d failed completely in his purpose. She could feel her anger and resentment of him, of his ordering Dev into that tunnel, evaporating.

  I never did get the hang of ordering my people into certain death, she thought. Maybe that’s something no commander ever gets used to.

  “If our fleet can get away,” she said gently, “then maybe we can disperse into the Outback. We can wait them out.”

  Sinclair looked at her, one eyebrow climbing. “This isn’t New America, Katya. There’s not much to eat out there but what we can nanogrow for ourselves. And there’s no cover. They’ll land their assault forces and hunt us down.”

  “We could try the tunnel system under the air generator,” she suggested. “It’s a labyrinth down there. We could set up traps, ambushes. If they ever managed to find us they’d be sorry they did.”

  Sinclair nodded. “Maybe. Maybe so. But we’ll be a hell of a lot worse off than we would have been back on New America, you know. The rebellion…”

  “Right now we have to worry about survival, General. The politics will come later. If we make it.”

  Reluctantly, he nodded.

  On the holoprojection, the Imperial ships were moving closer with terrifying speed.

  Self continued to savor this bizarrely constructed and articulated not-Self form, cast so precipitously onto the fringe of Here. The… form was not Self, nor was it »self«, and the mysteries of its existence piled one upon the other in jumbled confusion.

  It knew, now, that the form was called a human, that it was at least as intelligent as most »selves« and possibly more so, but that its memories and thinking processes were ordered quite differently from the Boolean is/is-not categorization of Self.

  When the not-Self had first hurtled into the not-Rock niche within Mother Rock, Self had been ready to devour it, to absorb its mineral wealth, to leach out everything of value and distribute its very molecules throughout the whole that was Self. Curiosity had stayed that first impulse, however. The not-Self was harmless now, skinned of its shell of remarkably pure and intricately worked metals and artificial materials. It was vulnerable, easily manipulated, easily controlled and explored.

  Self would have been able to understand nothing had it not been for the »self« discovered within the not-Rock passage. Assimilated into Self now, its memories circulating within the Whole, that alien »self« bore images, thoughts, and wonders incomprehensible.

  So much that was new to think about!

  Self’s first action had been to probe the human, savoring it chemically. Among the data stored within the alien »self« were memories of another encounter with a human in that other, distant Here. Had that been the same human as this? It was hard to tell, but it seemed unlikely. The remembered tastes of that human were quite different from these, more alkaline, with a different balance of certain metabolic chemistries. Still, the two were similar enough for gross explorations.…

  That remembered human had been acquired on the surface of the Void and carried deep into Mother Rock. There, that other Self—such a strange thought, that, another Self—had entered the human… this way.…

  Smells and flavors—the closest human approximations to senses for which there were no names—assailed Self. The human tasted of hydrocarbons and salts, of metals and wonderfully complex carbon chains,of a fine covering of artificial substances layered over most of its form. One appendage was sheathed in something else… hydrocarbons and long-chain polymers, substantially different in certain key ways from the rest of the not-Self almost as though it were an entirely different creature.

  No! It was a different creature, in symbiosis with the first! It called itself a comel and served as a bridge for thought and memory. A cornel had been on the remembered human as well. How strange… and how wonderful!

  Curiosity had burned, bright as a hot volcanic vent, drawing Self on. For Self, each new discovery was an Event, marking the passage of time. Thousands… no, tens of thousands of Events passed in flickering succession, discovery following discovery in bewildering array.

  Shortly after the human had arrived, Self had learned that it was broken. It functioned still, after a fashion, and in a low-metabolic, energy-conserving state… but that curious chain of interlocking calcium nodules that stiffened the creature’s main, central segment had clearly been broken, interfering with the transmission of neural impulses throughout its central nervous system. Other calcium structures had broken as well; Self compared the structures of his not-Self and the remembered one. This should be arranged that way… and this part should be like this.…

  Countless gross differences between the human in memory and the reality Here were incomprehensible. The organs for the elimination of liquid waste, for example, were bizarrely different in this specimen than from those remembered by the alien »self«, and there were other differences, of chemistries, of fuzzy growths on the thing’s surface, of layered deposits of fat. Self decided that these gross differences were natural and should be left alone; their organization and complexfunctionality suggested evolutionary design rather than damage.

  But on a finer level, the two organisms were identical, and… if the »self’s« memories were any guide, this human’s systems were rapidly failing. Self had begun experimenting, adding certain hastily constructed molecules a few at a time, and tasting the results.

  Yes… that was the way. A touch here, a few molecules of a slightly altered hydrocarbon chain added there…

  More time passed, Event piling upon Event.

  Contact with the human was actually dangerous for Self. The creature possessed within its being a complex and interwoven network of tubules for circulating liquid throughout its body mass; the liquid within those tubules was an electrolytic solution almost identical in nature to the great, electrolyte-laden reservoirs of liquid water that overlaid some parts of the Rock along its interface with the Void. Contact tended to disrupt the electrical activity within Self’s being, causing a sharp and unpleasant sensation that could be called pain.

  Self had shut down certain of its own, internal receptors that were registering pain… and it had learned how to toughen the permeable membranes covering those portions of itself flowing through the minute pores of the human’s outer integument. The deeper it probed, the more fascinated it became.

  And as it explored, Self feasted on new memories, and on their meaning. With the alien »self’s« memories for a guide, Self probed deeper, exploring the fantastically complex branchings of nerves… of ganglia… of firing dendrites… acetylcholine triggering chemical signals and sweeping waves of polarization…

  To repair the damage in the broken part required the growth of new nerve tissue, duplicating it molecule by molecule, weaving new with old…

  And then Self reached the top of the human’s central nervous system, and stopped, astounded. Self thought, felt, remembered, acted with all of its body mass, but the human’s separate body parts were specialized to an unimaginable degree.

  Self had never imagined anything so complex or so mysterious as a human brain.…

  Chapter 25

  If we think a Naga is strange, think how strange we look to the Naga. Look, it sees the universe inside-out from the way we do, like a bubble of vacuum inside an ocean of solid rock. It’s so self-centered it thinks that it’s the only intelligence in the universe, that Here is the only place in the universe, and that there are two and only two ways of cataloguing every fact in the universe. Then it blunders into us and finds out differently.

  I think the
poor thing really does very well in adapting to the strange and the unexpected. We could probably learn a thing or two from that.

  —Scientific Methods

  ViRtransmission interview

  with Jame Carlyle

  C.E. 2543

  Awareness… dim and pain-racked. Dev struggled up through layers of smothering darkness, trying to reach light… and failing. It was so dark… dark and stiflingly hot, and his back was broken, and he remembered feeling his back snapping and his body pinwheeling into darkness and falling and falling…

  Wonder…

  Not-Rock thinks… it feels… bafflement… it actually senses its surroundings, but in a manner different from Self. It cannot sense this… or this… or this… yet it is aware.

  What would Self be like if it had first come to being in the Void, an alien otherness of inexplicable phenomena and strange radiations. Might Self have been shaped differently by different conditions, shaped, possibly, like this tiny not-Self?…

  That might-have-been was a new idea, an Event worthy of careful study.…

  Dev felt heavy, and the thoughts churning through his mind bore the alien, strange-tasting sensations of a dream. Consciousness faded into the black.…

  Encountering that alien »self« had been more shocking, more destructive of Self’s certainty of its identity and place within the universe than had been the discovery that it shared a universe with humans. That »self« had not been generated by Self… but by another Self, a revelation of intricate complexity and unexpected wonder in a once-comprehensible universe that had left Self literally dazed.

  Another Self? One might as well speak of another Universe, for the two were, if not synonymous, then closely paired. Self bore memories within its innermost being of previous Selves grown sated and complete, distant Selves launching countless pods of Will-be-Self into the not-Rock Void at the Universe’s center. There were other Selves, certainly; there must be to explain the unremembered voyage across the Void to this part of the Universe of Rock.

  But such… beings were far removed indeed from Here, unreachable by any means, separated by the Void itself and by uncountable numbers of Events. Here, unheralded, was proof of the physical existence of other Selves within a reachable portion of the Universe.

  Self had contemplated the possibility of one day meeting other Selves. It imagined that such a meeting must be inevitable, though it had never imagined that such a meeting might happen Here. In its inverted cosmology, the Universe was infinite Rock centered—though such a word could scarcely be applied to infinity—upon an immense Void of not-Rock. For a given Self, the Cycles ran ever toward completion, encompassing billions of Events; ultimately there came the final Event, when Self had reached the inner surface of the Void and undergone the Change, when clouds of Will-be-Selves were hurled into the Void on internally generated pulses of intense magnetic energy. The Will-be-Selves arced across the Void, ultimately landing on some other part of the Void’s surface.

  Self had glimpsed that surface, and the Void beyond, though the Change was still many thousands of Events in the future. Still, it had imagined itself close to the final Event… close enough to taste, in fact, until the Burning had seared through Being, truncating Self and cauterizing untold aspects of being and memory and experience.

  The memory caused Self to tremble slightly. The human rocked on the yielding surface, half-submerged in the whole.

  For Self, the Burning was inextricably linked to these… humans, for it had first tasted them when its »selves« had first emerged on the surface of the Void. Humans, or things like them, had exterminated uncounted thousands of »selves« sent to probe and acquire those tantalizing concentrations of alien metals and materials sensed as delicious disruptions of Rock’s inner magnetic fields, clinging to the edge of the Void. Humans had been present on the surface of the Void until just before the Burning.

  It was natural to assume that the humans had somehow caused the Burning.

  Almost, Self again closed its grip on the human, intending to dissociate the thing’s molecules one from the other and absorb its substance.

  But some of the new memories stopped it, made it pause and consider.

  The new memories were from the alien »self«, and they continued speaking of another Here, another Self… and of humans much like this one. There were other memories as well… of shadowy glimpses of the Void, of myriad aspects of the Universe that were neither not-Rock nor Rock, or rather, perhaps they were very special subsets of Rock, solid and unyielding, yet with a variety of structure astonishing to a mind that had marked the passage of billions of separate Events, great and little, within the black warmth of Mother Rock.

  Probing deeper, Self studied the memories brought by the alien »self«. There was so much that was strange there, things perplexing, things bewildering.

  Most of all, there was wonder, for it seemed that the Universe still held myriad surprises far beyond what was Here and comfortably familiar.

  Dev knew the Empire as enemy. The Empire had sundered his family, ordering his father to divorce his mother in order to take a socially acceptable wife with the promotion that elevated him to an Imperial command. That command had led to disgrace, to court-martial, to suicide. Dev’s mother lived still, but with psychoreconstruction she had become a stranger, withdrawn and uncommunicative. And Dev’s brother… where was Greg now?

  Dev had been forced to find a new family.…

  * * *

  Family? What is family? Impression of a gathering of »selves«, but more distinct, more… independent. Not echoes of Self, but Selves in their own right.

  Astonishing.

  Fight the Empire. Not for revenge, though that was motivation enough at first. But because it is wrong. Because it stifles individuality, human purpose, the God-given right to try and fail and learn and try again.

  Because it batters down the barriers that separate men from machines.

  Because it tries to impose one way of being, one way of thinking on cultures as diverse as North Americans and Cantonese, as Japanese and Juanyekundan, as Latino and North Hindi.

  Because it is inefficient, creating pain as it sacrifices individuality for conformity.

  Because the proper place for government is not inside a man’s heart or head.

  Government.Conformity. Individuality. Bizarre thoughts, alien and incomprehensible.

  Yet Self could feel and savor the flow of thoughts with a precise clarity now. The cornel the human had been wearing on its… arm… had been absorbed, its patterns analyzed, its purpose clear. What the cornel had been designed to do, bridging the gulf between thinking beings, Self could do now.

  But with thought itself made perfectly and mutually intelligible, how does the One communicate with another that cannot taste the same aspects of the surrounding Universe… or if it tastes them, tastes them as differently as Rock differs from not-Rock?

  What happens if neural stimulation is applied… here?

  * * *

  Dev awoke suddenly, fully alert… though he couldn’t immediately tell if his eyes were open for the darkness pressing in about him was absolute. He felt as though he were lying on a waterbed, though the gentle undulations beneath his back did not seem to correspond with his movements.

  His back…

  He remembered those last few moments of terror, and he remembered the distinct whiplash of pain followed by empty nothingness in his lower body as he’d felt his spine snap. A good team of somatic engineers could graft him back together again, of course… but there were no somatic engineers here.

  Fearfully, bracing himself against the worst, he tried to wiggle his toes.…

  … and felt them move!

  The relief as he realized that he could still feel his legs was indescribable, a flood of warm joy that lasted until he remembered that amputees could often sense ghost limbs where their real limbs once had been. Was that what he was feeling?

  Anxiously, he slid an arm down, felt his touched leg�
� and reveled in the sensation of his fingers sliding over his thigh. There was no pain, just a curiously heavy feeling on his chest as he tried to rise, as though several kilos of wet clay were lying there.

  There was something on his chest! He could feel it there, soft beneath his fingers. What?…

  All of his memories up to the instant when he’d fallen into the pit were accessible to him. He was in that cavern still… must be lying in or on the mass of the Xenophobe.

  Panic rippled through his being… instantly suppressed. He was still alive and apparently unhurt. He could sense the close, sulfurous heat of the place but was having no trouble breathing.

  And he could remember now the strangest dreams.…

  * * *

  The complexity of Dev Cameron conscious was delightfully more intricate than the merely chemical complexity of Dev Cameron’s unconscious body. The thoughts flickering through his brain were wonderfully patterned, a rush and flow and ebb of neural currents, triggered from the very top of the brain, then flashing out across the surface of the cerebral cortex, sensed as a wave of interlocking sensory imagery.

  Self sensed… strangeness… there were multiple personalities here within the single being that called itself Dev Cameron, multiple Selves within one being, but so completely interconnected and integrated as to make it impossible to distinguish where one left off and another began. There was a Dev Cameron that was determined to fight for something it called freedom against an oppressor it called the Empire; there was another Dev Cameron, rigid and precise and logical; still another hungered for—that was the only possible translation—another human called Katya Alessandro.

  Currents within currents, thoughts beneath thoughts. This complex being was at once One and Many.

  Dev Cameron’s upper brain was physically divided in two, with each half regulating and manipulating different types of information in different ways. Strange, too, was the fine network of incredibly pure metals that overlaid and interpenetrated various parts of the brain, and the ceramic and alloy devices implanted in head and hand and interwoven with the nervous system in a manner that was clearly derived from nanotechnology. At first, Self thought that this network was natural, but closer examination revealed that it was something added to the organism from without. Curious. Humans did not carry their own, inborn nanotechnology with them but had been forced to develop it on their own as a kind of externally applied prosthesis.