by Paul Anlee
“I hope so,” answered Darian. He yawned. “I’m sorry guys, but I think I need to get some sleep. Let’s talk Monday and we’ll see where we’re at.” He gave in and let slumber drag him to empty peace. Greg and Kathy turned off the lights and tip-toed out of the room.
37
KEV857349 drifted peacefully inward without engines or running lights for the last million kilometers.
Running silent was a preference, not a necessity. He had no fear of being stopped shy of his mission. His target, the Cybrid-manufactured planetoid officially designated SagA* 358.102.714, carried no detection equipment. Here at the center of the Milky Way, there were no known threats to Alum’s Divine Plan requiring continuous surveillance, and the orbital path around the black hole Sagittarius A* had long since been cleared of dangerous debris.
Kev’s supervisor thought he was out with a team, herding yet another group of asteroids into a more convenient orbit. Miners stood by, ready to extract construction materials.
It was easy to slip away. He’d kept to the assigned flight plan until they were outside the heavy traffic zone, and then dropped behind the rest of the team, altered course, and set a hard burn for his target.
The others were inworld by the time anyone noticed. A simple message saying he wanted to be alone to work on some new design ideas sufficed to explain his absence from the group entertainment on the trip out. Nobody noticed his course change.
Kev wasn’t sure when he’d first started hating Alum and His Divine Plan. His recent visit to the new Origin-like inworld had moved him to action, but the disillusionment had started long before then. The source of his earliest doubts was difficult to pinpoint; there were dozens and dozens of tiny cracks in the veneer of idyllic life, here and there, over time.
When he had first discovered the fairytale kingdom of Lysrandia, all those niggling, inconsequential doubts found substance, form, and support. He became friends with one of Princess Darya’s senior acolytes, and no longer felt alone in his doubts; he was one of many, and the rebellion was taking root. On the recommendation of the acolyte, Darya granted him access to the Alternus inworld in its earliest iteration.
As an early participant in the game, he had the advantage of scouting the environment ahead of others and choosing an advantageous position.
He discovered he had a knack for using his initial bankroll to generate more “money” in the “markets.” In a few short inworld years, he was equally adept at betting against other Alternus Cybrids as he was at betting against the slower-witted human Partials.
He liked to think his success was due to his exceptional skill and shrewdness but, every once in a while, it also helped to cheat. His experience as a mid-level investment banker on the simulated planet exposed him to the corruption and disillusionment that inevitably came with wealth and power.
Kev developed relationships with other powerful players and with Partials who had not yet been inhabited by Cybrid minds. These relationships gave him access to numerous political decisions well before they were general knowledge. He became aware that politics and investment outcomes were closely tied. He learned to listen carefully to what his political friends told him; sometimes they permitted him to influence their decisions in ways that improved his returns on investment even more.
After all, Alternus was a sim world, a game, and someone had to win. He never let ponderous questions about the point of it all prevent him from basking in this inworld life, rich with excitement, travel, and luxurious acquisitions. More than anything, he enjoyed winning.
In addition to the standard economic and financial statistics, Kev collected data on social attitudes around the inworld. His charts showed fear and distrust surging through societies all over Alternus. People segregated themselves into arbitrary groups according to differing economic or ideological belief systems, each of which Kev considered to be equally replete with unprovable claims.
It was hard to say what the leaders of the different ideologies were up to. Were they using the many incompatible but equally irrational belief systems to manipulate their populations into eternal, unwinnable wars? Or were they simply unable to control all the channels through which such beliefs took hold of their people?
At any rate, it was clear to Kev that Alternus had become an unmanageable mess. On a personal level, he was largely unaffected by troubles that ruined other people’s lives. The elite looked out for themselves, their closest friends, and their family. He had been diligent in making all the right friends. He’d read somewhere that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. His observations certainly supported that hypothesis.
In the outworld, Alum was the only power that really mattered. If ever a single authority could have been said to rule absolutely over the known universe, it was Him. Therefore, Kev extrapolated, He must be one of the most corrupt individuals ever, Living God or not. Perhaps all the more so, because who could question the will of God?
Kev had kept his own questions mostly to himself until he met like-minded people on Lysrandia. His activities on Alternus were a natural progression. He recalled the warm summer inworld evening when he’d left work from his downtown Manhattan office, and a smartly dressed young man handed him a flyer calling him to a meeting to discuss what was happening in the outworld with Alum’s Divine Plan. He’d almost discarded the flyer. Almost. Talking about the real universe inside a simulated one was so gauche. But something about it piqued his interest:
Alum’s “Divine Plan” Reveals Alum’s Great Ego
Urgent: Your life is in danger! Not just your inworld sim life, but your real life in the real world, where there will be no reset. Largely unopposed in the real universe, Alum is about to make Himself unopposable by rebuilding the universe in a manner more pleasing to Him. Come and discover the true nature and purpose of Alum’s “Divine Plan” and the asteroid-sized machines being built near the center of our galaxy. We have a plan to halt Him, but your help is desperately needed. Your very existence depends on it!
The Deplosion, they’d called it, Alum’s Divine Plan. Kev wasn’t sure why the idea of such a meeting had appealed to him. Normally, the notion of subversive activity would have sent him running in the opposite direction. This was Alum they were talking about, the All-Powerful, the Almighty. But something about the pamphlet drew him to attend the meeting later that evening.
If he had realized that his decision was not entirely of his own free will, would he have been any better able to resist its pull? Probably not.
* * *
The foyer of the nondescript meeting hall held about a hundred people. Most attendees looked just like him, Kev noticed, business men and women who were curious but uncertain of the wisdom of attending a gathering to plan a rebellion. Like him, they may have felt uncomfortable about Alum’s plans, but they were not inclined to get directly involved in any opposition movement.
They exchanged nervous, flitting glances as they took their seats. Few were sure why they were there. They crowded to the quiet corners and the back of the room until the only seats remaining were near the front. Last minute arrivals trickled in and, before the speaker appeared, the room was filled.
“Thank you for coming,” the woman began. “We understand how much courage it took for you to walk through those doors.” She made deliberate eye contact with as many among the audience as possible.
“Tonight is one of many such meetings we’ve held like this. Word is getting out. Over five million of us have now received the message about Alum’s Deceit.”
The crowd murmured and looked around nervously. You could almost hear people fighting the urge to bolt from the hall and report this conspiracy to the authorities before they could be considered complicit.
“If you have spent any significant amount of time here inworld, you have learned that sooner or later most leaders tend toward corruption, acting in the interests of themselves and their friends rather than for the majority of people over which the
y rule.
“For the tens of millions of years during which Alum has led us, we have always trusted that whatever He did was best for The People, both Cybrid and Human.
“But it is impossible to understand how Alum’s plan to utterly destroy this universe, the real universe as Yov originally created it, could be in our best interest. This, we cannot accept.
“Yov’s infinite universe is a place of endless variety and surprise. Some of the things we encountered as we expanded from Home World and into the broader universe came as unpleasant surprises. But through these hardships, and through the occasional conflicts with powerful enemies, we learned. Think of these trials as Yov’s test of our suitability and determination. For our perseverance through these difficulties, we were rewarded with endless bounty, beauty, and joy. We learned things about ourselves, about unfamiliar stars and planets, and about Yov’s great Creation.
“Though Alum is the Living God, we must always remember that His authority comes from Yov, the Creator. Alum’s Divine Plan breaks with the ways of Yov’s Nature. He seeks to form a new universe, one more suited to His own senses and desires. He is not content that The People worship Him and do as He bids. He demands even more, a universe in which to contemplate doing anything but worship Him will be physically impossible. He desires a simpler universe, void of Yov’s surprising variety.
“Alum’s corruption, His desire for limitless power to the exclusion of Yov’s Nature has become insupportable. Therefore, we must act.
“Alum cannot be overthrown, nor do we wish such a thing. Who, besides Yov, Himself, could replace Alum as God? This is not our goal. We only wish to provide a voice that will demand He reconsider His Divine Plan. We only wish to delay the completion of the plan, so that He will allow the wisdom of Yov’s natural universe to shine forth. These meetings, tonight’s and the many others like it, are to find those who will have the courage to do what is right, to defy the Living God.”
The Speaker looked for questions, doubts, or agreement. Many people cast their eyes downward, unwilling to meet her challenge to confront Alum’s corruption. A handful met her gaze confidently, some nodded, and a few raised a closed fist in solidarity. Kev was among the latter.
“We won’t ask more of you than you can give. For most of you, we only ask that you think about what I have said and about the material in your brochures. Tell others about us. Invite them to one of our weekly meetings.
“If you would like to become more involved, if you’d like to find out how you can help with the resistance, please stay for a while to discuss how to become an active member of the inner circle. Thanks again for coming out.”
With that, the speaker stepped down from the small platform and moved into the audience. She sought out the individuals who’d held her gaze seconds earlier. They gathered in a small group near the front of the hall while the others quietly filed out of the room.
Kev stayed behind with the conspirators. He had no idea what possessed him to stay. He had a new girlfriend waiting for him at a local bar.
He recalled a princess back on the Lysrandia inworld giving similar but uninspiring scientific talks about how everything came from nothing, natural processes, and how Alum was perverting all that. But the princess, pretty as she was, wasn’t as inspiring as this speaker. Working against the natural universe was one thing; working against Yov’s Natural Universe was something entirely different. Kev found himself hating Alum.
The new recruits met in subgroups many more times after that first meeting. Kev learned the details of Alum’s insane plan, and of the limited weapons the resistance had at its disposal.
Considering the fire power and force that Alum and his Wings of Angels had at their disposal, the rebels’ weapons amounted to a useless pile. Except for one. With minor modifications, the natural propulsion system of the Cybrid asteroid herders could be converted into a powerful antimatter bomb. There was a lot of energy contained in the drives, energy normally used to propel cumbersome asteroids over long distances through space.
The design rationale was lost in antiquity but Cybrids like Kev carried roughly a hundred kilograms of mercury, half of that as normal matter and half as antimatter, in separate frozen spheres. Destruction of this material could release the equivalent of more than a billion megatons of TNT.
Normally, their laser ablation system only thawed a small amount of the material at a time. The resulting gaseous product was mixed in a special chamber containing an engineered microverse (provided by Alum’s magic), which elevated the energy conversion from the conventional E=mc2 to E=mc4. The released energy provided more than adequate propulsive power to the Cybrid and whatever it was pushing.
The proposed design changes would outfit the herder Cybrids with heated magnetic bottles for holding the matter and anti-matter pools of mercury in gaseous form, safely contained away from each other. Some of the Cybrids’ internal manipulators and structural elements would have to be removed in order to make room for the modifications, but that was of little importance.
They developed a rapid release mechanism to dump the gaseous mercury from the bottles into a containment microverse field on command. Inside the customized conditions of the microverse field, the matter-antimatter would combine, resulting in a massive explosion that would vaporize anything within a few hundred kilometers.
This was by far their most powerful weapon, and nobody outside the inner circle knew about it. Unfortunately, it also required the ultimate sacrifice by those who used it. No more than they could give, the Speaker had promised the first night.
* * *
As KEV857349 approached the thousand-kilometer mark from the target planetoid, he brought his attention back to the task at hand. He took pleasure in the knowledge that a million of his kind had been similarly honored to target other deplosion machines, a significant percentage altogether. The others were simultaneously maneuvering into their positions. The explosions, all of them, would happen without warning and within a narrow temporal window, too narrow for Alum to defend against, even using His magical displacement capability.
Kev was a little sad that they hadn’t been able to backup all of the Cybrid memories and personalities before the mission. Unable to commit the expertise and resources needed for the necessary substrate or programming in the short time left before the call to action, the theoretical possibility of download remained just that.
One million Cybrids will die today. Together, we’ll eliminate about five percent of the machinery required to deplode Yov’s Universe. That should get Alum’s attention: Rethink your insane plan or face further Cybrid action.
Kev was proud of his role and of the multitude of his comrades who would sacrifice their lives with him in the next few seconds.
It was time. Across a span of several light-years near the center of the Milky Way, the Cybrid recruits drew to within a kilometer of their target spheroids. Within milliseconds of one another, a million bright points of light blossomed around Sagittarius A*.
38
Gerhardt walked out of the Waldhaus Sheraton Hotel and onto the icy streets of Davos, the Alternus simulation of the ancient Swiss city of the same name.
He made a decisive turn onto Matastrasse, away from the flow of the well-dressed, busy people taking the shortest route to the World Economic Forum. Following the road over the Landwasser River crossing would put them at the conference center in no more than ten minutes.
Gerhardt preferred a more circuitous route to the Kongresszentrum. He treasured this bit of alone time; it was an opportunity to clear his head before another intense day of hopeless discussion and debate.
He had a lot to think about. The group was a long way from solving the complex enigma that was ancient Earth. If he had to sum up their progress in one word, it would be dismal.
* * *
Darya’s beautifully crafted Alternus inworld mimicked the early 2040s era of Earth in minute detail, except for a single important difference
. She forestalled development of the DNND super-intelligence.
It was an easy tweak. A few key investigators were steered toward new tracks; some early experiments were disturbed, giving the appearance of unpromising results; a handful of reviewers and publishers were influenced to ensure certain findings never found a way into the public domain; and there was no Sharon Leigh on Alternus.
These seemingly minor adjustments to the original history helped achieve an overall calming and stabilizing effect. In the absence of DNND-amplified intelligence, the planet made little technological progress beyond its previous twenty years. Many people of the original Earth would have deemed that a positive turn of events.
The slowdown allowed people time to catch up, psychologically and philosophically, with the pace of technological advancements. Centuries of rapid change had left most citizens disconnected from a world they didn’t understand. Darya’s adjustments provided the participants, the inhabitants of Alternus, with some much needed time to catch their collective breath.
With the same purpose in mind, she prohibited participating Cybrids from using their superior scientific knowledge to develop advancements beyond what otherwise would have been possible. The rules were enforced by the inworld supervisory program. The Supervisor limited them to inventions and discoveries that were plausible given the state of science and technology at the time.
Within those parameters, Darya encouraged Cybrids to fully participate and to influence thinking on economics, politics, religion, philosophy, and any other field. Because the Cybrid population was limited to less than ten percent of the global population, their ideas had to compete for acceptance with those of other thinkers. The democratic actions of the billions of Alternus inhabitants made it a challenging environment. Even the best Cybrid thinkers found it difficult to achieve great influence in current financial systems, religious beliefs, or geopolitical relations.
