Jackers

by William H. Keith

  They’d done a fair job, on the whole. Still, some things could use improvement. If there were more connections between the left and right sides of the brain, for example…

  Like this…

  Dev was uncomfortably aware that his thoughts were far too clear, too precise, too… creative. He had never felt this way, and the heady, almost dizzying sensation, as though his own mind was racing ahead at breakneck speed, was frightening at first.

  And the… ideas. Sudden.Brilliant. Inspired. Was he hallucinating?

  Perhaps he was insane. He’d once heard schizophrenia described as an inability to control the leap and flow of thoughts.

  Yet if this was insanity, it was a pleasantly creative one. The sensation was like the exhilaration he felt when he was in full linkage, commanding the raw power of a warstrider with his body, of a high-grade AI linked to his mind. But he wasn’t linked…

  Or was he?

  He was linked with… something.

  Turning inward, he perceived the Naga, and in a flash of inspiration perceived just what the Naga had done to him. With the ease of imagination, but with a clarity that he knew represented reality, he saw in his mind’s eye the network of connections, no more than a few molecules thick, that crisscrossed throughout his body, threading especially along his central nervous system and concentrated within his brain.

  Threads of Naga-growth exploded in a fuzzy mass from his face and his chest; the heavy weight on his chest was a specially grown Naga supracell, the source of the alien growth which consisted almost entirely of nanotechnic organelles strung together as connecting fibers.

  Dev was reminded forcibly of some kind of fungus, of countless branching hyphae feeding on his substance… but before some deep and primitive part of his awareness could react to such a horrifying thought, inspiration provided realization and complete understanding. He was part of the Naga, as the Naga was part of him.

  And there was nothing to fear, for the Naga only wanted to… know.

  As he did.

  A universe of wonder, seen inside out.Rock as… minute globules, adrift in an infinite sea of not-Rock. Radiation… the wavelengths growing progressively shorter from the familiar, comfortable warmth of heat and the longer, slippery questings of radio. Revelation! The electromagnetic spectrum extended far beyond the known!

  Was it possible to sense these radiations? Humans did, apparently. Many of their memories contained far more detail than could be expected from thermal imaging. Patterning the organ to detect those radiations was relatively simple. More difficult by far was the reordering of the means of perceiving the images.

  Vision, after all, took place not in the eyes, but in the brain.

  Dev could see.

  It was not the same as seeing with his own eyes, but he knew at once what was happening. Linked to a warstrider, he often shifted to infrared viewing, and what he was seeing now was like IR imaging, ragged patterns perceived as red and yellow and green that shaped form and substance in patterns that were nearly abstract.

  His sharpened mind took the patterns and enhanced them, finding sense and order. He was, as he’d deduced, in a vast, underground chamber, lying on a sea of Naga supracells that extended in every direction and up the sides of the surrounding rock walls. The specialized supracell on his chest was linked to the whole by thousands of connectors ranging in size from the diameter of Dev’s little finger to threads so thin they were… sensed, somehow, but not seen.

  The actual sight of that thin fuzz of tendrils growing between the supracell and his own body jarred Dev unexpectedly, even though he’d already sensed its presence with another, newer part of his mind. The reaction, sharp and involuntary, sickened… and he was surprised to feel that sickening rippling out through the mass of organic tissue around him.

  *I did not intend to cause distress.

  **No problem. I… we… are not fully integrated.

  *Yet.

  **Yet.

  *The association can be terminated at any time. The changes wrought within your/my body need not be permanent. They were necessary, first, to save your/my life, second to learn about your/my functioning.

  **Understanding. Acceptance.

  Dev recognized the shock of unpleasant realization that had been triggered by the infrared image of the supracell and its extrusions into his own body. There was within most humans a queasy mistrust of organisms that fed—as parasites or as saprophytes—on other organisms. Bacteria. Fungi and molds. Parasitic worms and insects.

  But when the relationship between two species was mutually beneficial, it was true symbiosis.

  Symbiosis, Dev realized with an unaccustomed burst of mental clarity, was the natural way of most organisms with which he was familiar. The mitochondria within his body’s cells had begun eons ago as viral or bacterial symbionts within larger cell hosts and had become so completely integrated into the system that they were now cellular organelles vital to the cell’s conversion of food to energy. On a far larger and more distinct scale were the bacteria within the human gut, without which humans would be unable to digest their food.…

  What Dev was experiencing now was a symbiosis less complete than the one, more complete than the other, and differing from both in the fact that both the participants could voluntarily dissociate from one another… and in that dissociation would not cause their deaths.

  And the possibilities of this new association were intriguing. Dev could already perceive how greatly his senses had been extended simply by increasing the efficiency of certain interacting portions of his cerebral cortex; sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling all were dramatically heightened… and they were controllable, to the point that too much input could be dialed down as easily as the texture or intensity of a ViRdrama could be adjusted for the linker’s comfort. And there were other senses, as well. He could feel radio now, in the pulse and tingle of long wavelengths issuing from the creature around him, as easily as he could feel its heat, and both wavelengths carried far more information to him than the simple sensation of temperature had borne before. His hearing was incredibly sharp; the sounds of supracells gliding over one another on a rock wall some twenty meters away were instantly pinpointed, immediately identified… and they brought with them a crude picture of their cause. He could shut his eyes and image his surroundings—softer and with less clarity than through his eyes—through his ears.

  Was this, Dev wondered, what a dolphin “saw” with its natural sonar in Earth’s ocean depths?

  And the new connections between the two sides of his brain offered undreamed of potential. His intelligence, he was sure, had expanded to the point where a direct correlation with his former cognitive abilities was meaningless. He could process information faster and more efficiently; his memory worked as accurately as his implanted RAM but on a far vaster, more complete, and more accessible level; and his spontaneous creativity—his ability to gain insights, intuition, hunches drawn from scanty or incomplete data—had grown to the point where it was almost a new sense in its own right.

  The Naga supracell appeared to be dwindling. Actually, it was sinking, molecule by molecule, through the pores in his bodysuit and his skin, its mass rapidly trickling into the network of fine threads already growing throughout his body, or to pools of Naga-cellular material forming within empty spaces in abdomen and chest. The fuzz of molecular connections between himself and the Naga proper grew thicker.

  Dev flexed his awareness, reaching out, savoring input from his own senses… and from those eldritch senses of his symbiont companion. He could sense, somehow, the entirety of the Naga, huge within its vast network of underground chambers, could read its history, could receive impressions from as far away as…

  Then Dev drew back, shuddering, suddenly afraid. Even a super genius, it seemed, could be a bit slow to perceive the obvious.

  Not until this moment had he realized that he was no longer at all even remotely human.

  Chapter 26

  What does it mean
to be human? A particular genotype to be sure… but beyond outward form is there some abiding characteristic of thought or being that distinguishes what is human from what is not? Genies possess much within their genotype that is undeniably human; most possess ninety-nine percent or more of the original human genome, yet they are legally barred from a human’s rights of property and self-government. Artificial intelligences possess nothing of the human genome, yet possess—some prefer the word “mimic”—certain human modes and processes of thought.

  And a human possessing cephlink implants, with inwardly grown and artificial memory storage, with direct mental access to computer networks and AI control systems, with senses and a clarity of senses unknown to his ancestors… is he less human than the naked child drawn squalling and new from its mother’s womb?

  —Man and His Works

  Karl Gunther Fielding

  C.E. 2488

  “Here they come!”

  Aerospace interceptors, sleek Se-280 Soratakas stooped out of the gold-blue sky. Missiles drew white, thread-thin scratches across the heavens before impacting in savage, earth-shaking detonations.

  Katya pivoted her Ghostrider, tracking incoming targets. “Targeting!” she cried as red cursors locked on to one plunging Se-280, pinning it against the background of her awareness. The cursors flashed: target lock. Fire!

  Laser energy dazzled as it reflected from the root of a wing… then flashed brilliantly as metallic vapor exploded outward. Slush hydrogen boiled into air… then ignited catastrophically. Fragments of metal and alloy composite rained down through the sky, trailing smoke, and a thunderclap rolled across the Heraklean valley.

  “Good shot, Katya!” Vic Hagan called over the tactical link. “Now move it! There are too many of the bastards!”

  “On my way!”

  The assault pods were already touching down on the slopes of Mount Athos. The base at Morgan’s Hold had been turned into a red-hot scar smoldering beneath a pillar of black smoke staining the afternoon sky. Everyone at the base had escaped, barely, by piling into every vehicle that could move. The convoy was heading north, now, a ragged line of magflitters and four-legged transport walkers, guarded to sides and rear by twenty of the warstriders that Dev had taken with him to Athena.

  Those striders were all the rebels had to protect themselves with now. The fleet was already scattering as the Imperial squadron moved into orbit. Two rebel ships had been destroyed before all radio communications had been lost in a firestorm of Imperial broad-spectrum jamming. Many of the Confederation government people were almost certainly still in the sky-el, trapped until a ship could be dispatched to rescue them.

  There were no ships coming.

  On the ground, the convoy had been attempting to reach the shelter of the air generation plant. They’d been only halfway there when the first Imperial interceptors had appeared overhead. A running battle had developed, the warstriders pausing only long enough to target and fire before continuing their northward trek. The rugged plain between Mount Athos and the generator plant was already littered with the funeral pyres of crashed and burning ascraft, which were not as robust as a typical warstrider and tended to disintegrate easily when tagged. Still, there were so many ascraft now, launched from the orbiting Donryu, that numbers were beginning to tell. Two warstriders had already been lost to laser and missile fire from the sky, and three more badly damaged.

  “I’ve got one incoming at three-one-one,” Sublieutenant Lanager called over the Ghostrider’s ICS. “Elevation one-two. He’s tracking on us.”

  “Got him, Tomid. Target lock! Fire!”

  Laser light flared; the Se-280 wobbled, then pulled up, a thin streamer of smoke trailing from its port engine. The interceptors were harassing the column, trying to slow it enough so that the assault striders could sweep in and finish them off.

  “General Sinclair!” Katya called over the tactical laser frequency. Sinclair was up ahead somewhere, riding in one of three KC-212 cargo transporters, four-legged, eighty-ton monsters more commonly called Rhinos. “General Sinclair, do you copy?”

  “I’m here, Katya. Go ahead.”

  “General, I think the only way out of this is for me to take half of the warstriders and make a stand here. The rest of the striders will escort you VIPs to the generator.”

  “Now see here, Colonel,” General Smith cut in. “You’re not in command here.…”

  “I’m in command of the tactical element,” she replied. “And you people aren’t going to make it to the generator unless we manage to slow up the pursuit. Besides, we should take some of the heat from those interceptors off of the rest of you.”

  There was a long, heavy silence. “Colonel, I don’t really see any alternative. However, I want you to delegate the authority. We need you now, more than ever.”

  To communicate with the Heraklean Naga, now that Dev was…

  “Sorry, General. Can’t do it.” She’d already abandoned too many friends, too many comrades, for the sake of following orders.

  “Colonel, that is not a request. That is an order. We cannot afford to lose you, our only expert on communication with the Naga.”

  “Katya, listen to him!” That was Vic Hagan. “Let me take the defense!”

  “You stick with the transports, Vic. Get them to the generator.”

  “But—”

  “THAT’S A GOKING ORDER!”

  “Colonel, we can’t let you do this…” That was Smith again.

  “And you, General, will have a goking hard time stopping me!” Abruptly, she swung out of the line of march. “Yo! I need nine volunteers to kick some Imperial ass!”

  “Here!”

  “You got me!”

  “Affirmative!”

  “I’m with you, Katya!”

  As the acknowledgments rolled in, Katya switched to ICS to speak with the young man slotted with her in the Ghostrider. “You can take off, if you want, Tomid. If you quick-step it, you can snag a ride on one of the magflitters. I was volunteering me, not you. I can handle this lummox on my own.”

  “That’s a negative, Colonel,” Lanager replied. “You think I could live with myself, leaving you slotted in here alone?”

  Katya could find no answer for that. “Okay, Tomid. Thanks. But it’s going to be a damned bumpy ride.”

  “That’s why I came along, Colonel. Watch it! Incoming at two-five-niner, elevation one-five!”

  An explosion hurled clumps of earth skyward, shaking the ground.

  “Targeting!Fire!”

  **I am afraid.

  *Why?

  **I am not…

  *… what I was.

  **I am no longer human.

  *I am no longer Self.Loneliness… and curiosity. What am/are/I/we?

  **Let’s go to the surface of the Void.

  *Why?

  **To… perceive. I sense vibrations there. Shocks transmitted…

  *… through the Rock. I sense…

  **… Events.

  *… Agreement. And the taste…

  **… of pure metals and churning…

  *… magnetic fields.

  **I feel them.

  *Curiosity. But the surface of the Void is a horrible, alien place, a gulf of not-Rock vaster and emptier than anything imaginable.

  **The surface of the Void is where I belong. Where humans belong. And the Empire has come. Do you sense their ships, beacons of mass and magnetism and flowing power suspended in the Void?

  *I/we sense them. But you/we are no…

  **… longer human.Agreement. Sadness… loss and loneliness. I need…

  *… want…

  **… to sense…

  *… the surface…

  **… Katya…

  *… directly.Agreement. We go…

  **How?

  *So.…

  Chujo Kawashima’s body was ensconced within his link slot aboard the Donryu, orbiting Herakles at synchorbit, thirty-two thousand kilometers up. His mind, however, was soaring with one of the
Se-280s, linked to the aerospace craft’s AI and primary sensor suite. The linkage gave him an excellent view of the overall landing area, and of the skirmish harrying the fleeing rebels on the ground.

  The Sorataka banked left, wind shrieking as it was cleaved by the ascraft’s stubby wings. “We have them running, Chujosan,” the ascraft’s pilot told him.

  “Indeed. Order your squadron to press the attack. It looks as though they are deploying half of their warstriders along that ridge in order to give the others time to escape.”

  “Affirmative. Shall we attack the line, or the large transports?”

  Kawashima considered. “The transports. If we can slow them before they reach the generator facility, we can trap them all. We will smash the defenders on the ridge from orbit, then move in with the assault striders.”

  “Hai, Chujosan! Downloading your command now.…”

  Dev emerged from an opening halfway up the side of the artificial mountain of the atmosphere generator.

  Unlike the pyramids of ancient Egypt, this mountain’s sides had not been covered with smooth, sloping sides, nor did they exhibit the stacked block architecture of the pyramids as they existed today. Instead, the surface was an open latticework of extruded iron and fabricrete plates and bars interlocking in a complex, three-dimensional array, providing support for the mountain’s inner workings, and easy passage for the gases going in and out.