“Only the most vile,” Cynthia said.
Nehru cocked his head. “Ms. Revo, we’re not concerned about the most ethical.”
The crowd chuckled.
“Haven’t Sleepers died because of UNITY?” President Austin asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s scary. Do you know why?”
“Not yet. Eleven people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a sad cost of progress. We’ll find out why. The internet is safer than it has ever been.”
“With Big Brother hanging over every bit and byte we send,” Nehru said. “Is it true that you colluded with the United States ten years ago to defeat China?”
It took Cynthia a moment for the question to sink in. The information that President Nehru just revealed was highly classified. Only a handful of people understood what happened during the conflict with China. And none of them, except her, were in the room.
“Is the goal of this committee to dismantle MindCorp?” She gave them a second to respond. None of them did. “Was taking other countries’ land not enough? Are you aware of the irony that right now you are using my inventions and technology to strip it away? UNITY is already up, and I have poured trillions of dollars into its development and construction. Is that why you waited? You can’t have it.”
“We weren’t plan—” Nehru started.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.” Cynthia’s voice drowned out all other noises.
Nehru pointed his finger down at her. “We’ll see, you arrogant bi—”
President Austin grabbed Nehru’s arm. The room erupted in pandemonium. Austin mouthed “sit down” to Nehru and took over at the podium.
President Austin was visibly embarrassed. “Order, please!”
The room quieted.
“I apologize, Cynthia.”
Cynthia glared at Nehru. “At least he was honest. And now I know.” She continued. “Let me be perfectly clear. I don’t mind that you use my invention. I don’t mind that you benefit from my invention. I don’t mind that you think, deluded as it may be, that your nations’ continued prosperity has come despite my invention. But it’s mine. If you need more transparency, I can provide that. But privacy issues, if that is truly the crux of this debate, have changed very little since the beginning of the digital age.”
“We don’t appreciate your tone, Cynthia,” the French President said.
“And I don’t appreciate yours. Don’t waste my time so you can be on the news. My company has allowed the world to continue. Your short memories have forgotten the fear that filled everyone’s hearts when the oil dripped dry and the privileges we viewed as rights were suddenly threatened. You act like the suburbs never existed and cars were from an ancient time. It was twenty years ago!”
“We understand,” President Austin said.
“No, you don’t. Because if you did, I wouldn’t have to say it, and I wouldn’t have to come to these useless meetings. And one of you—just one—would at some point have thanked me.”
= = =
President Nehru woke from the meeting and pulled the Mindlink off his head. He was far from unhappy. In fact, he was giddy. He thought he did well. He poured himself a glass of scotch to celebrate and looked out at New Delhi. He, like everyone, primarily worked from home. He was fatter in real life. His chef, Nadha, kept him full. Speaking of . . .
He pressed an intercom button.
“Nadha, please bring me dinner.” He rubbed his eyes, it had been a long day. The noise of the city rose up to him. Lights twinkled beneath him like stars. He drank and thought about his next steps.
He waited a few minutes, but Nadha didn’t respond. He looked at the time. It was past eleven at night. She’d still be here—she knew he’d be working late. Hmm.
He glanced at the security cameras and saw nothing out of the norm. His villa overlooked the city from a hill.
She’s probably on the throne. That brought a smile to his lips. She was a big woman, and the visual of her destroying the toilet made him laugh.
He refilled his scotch and walked down two flights of stairs.
“Nadha?” he said again. Nothing. He realized the dogs were gone, too. The absence of their constant pitter-patter made the house feel cold. Maybe Nadha had taken them for a walk. He went to the kitchen and checked the fridge. A pot of curry greeted him. He pulled it out and shut the door.
Mike Glass stood next to him.
“Holy shit!” Nehru dropped the pot and Glass caught it in one hand. He held a black case in the other. Glass put the curry on the table and opened the box. It held a Mindlink.
“Evan wants to speak to you. This will connect you directly to him.”
Nehru was breathing hard, still recovering from the scare. “You didn’t kill Nadha . . .”
“And the dogs,” Glass said.
Irritation swept over Nehru’s face. Nadha had worked for him for over a decade.
Glass shook his head as he walked past him to the living room. “I sent them out.”
Nehru wasn’t amused. He glared at the wraith as he set up the Mindlink. Why would Evan send his henchman all this way?
“You’re gathering the Pieces,” Nehru said aloud.
Glass didn’t respond.
“How close is he?” Nehru asked.
Glass didn’t respond. He opened the door to the deck and placed a small satellite dish outside. He connected it to the Mindlink. LEDs danced around its perimeter as it booted up and connected to UNITY.
“From now on, you only use this,” Glass said.
Nehru didn’t move.
Glass waited for a moment, his eyes tumbling green. Then—
“Now.”
= = =
Nehru appeared in the middle of Evan’s office. Evan sat behind his desk. Although they had never met in person, Evan controlled him, as he did the others. But unlike the others, blackmail didn’t work on Nehru—he didn’t love anyone except himself—so Evan had had to appeal to his greed. For his efforts, Nehru would get all of Asia.
The room felt funny. Nehru had been there many times—it was a construct—and normally it felt real, but now there was a pulsing sensation, as if the walls were rubber. Evan was encompassed by a dark that the overhead lights could not penetrate. It was like looking into a deep well.
“You could have just sent me the box. Mike scared me half to death.”
“He was in the area, and with Cynthia on alert, I need you on a private Mindlink. What’s the status?”
“Iraq is up. The Multipliers in India will be ready in days. Packard should have the ones in Africa ready by next week. You’re collecting the Pieces, aren’t you?”
When Nehru said the word “Pieces,” the walls flexed in and out. To Nehru, it felt like someone had hammered a nail into his head. He cupped his ears, but it did no good. Whispers filled the room.
Why does he call us Pieces?
When will we see light?
For a moment, Nehru could see Evan’s eyes. There weren’t two, there were a dozen, lining his face like spiders. Evan grimaced, and they burrowed back under his skin.
“Six are in place,” he said.
We love you, Father. Strange whispers filled the room.
“What does it feel like?” Nehru asked in wonder. The average brain was twelve hundred cubic centimeters. By hijacking the brains of the prodigy Pieces for his own, Evan would increase his gray matter to over fifteen thousand cubic centimeters. He would no longer think as a human. In fact, notwithstanding his physical form, he would no longer be human.
“At times, epiphany. At times, indescribable pain. The Consciousness Module is not in place, and they want out.”
The eyes were back on Evan’s face now, glistening orbs that reflected what little light was in the room.
“They’re tearing you apart,” Nehru said.
“No. They’re starving for purpose.”
We want him.
Can we feel what he feels?
He worships you.
&nbs
p; Let me taste!
The room wobbled again, and this time it didn’t stop.
“Leave,” Evan said to Nehru. The voice was thin—it was Evan without the Pieces, without the other minds melded. “You have to go, now!”
Nehru didn’t hesitate; he could see that something was very wrong. He tried to disconnect. It wouldn’t work. Tentacles sprouted from Evan’s black shape. They were purple and white, pulsing strings like squirming parasites. Evan was no longer there. Instead his body had become a portal for something of endless appetite.
Nehru stepped back. “I did everything you said!”
“It’s not me,” Evan replied faintly.
The tentacles latched on to Nehru. He didn’t scream. He did very little except stand up straight. The Pieces fed, and Evan’s body reformed. Nehru’s memories and thoughts flowed through Evan as the Pieces took them, one bite at a time, savoring his soul like a choice cut.
Evan’s pain subsided, and he was back in control.
“It was an accident,” Evan said to Nehru’s husk as its final morsels were rooted out. But the accident was well timed: everything was nearly in place, and Evan could use Nehru’s death to his advantage.
Until he could get the Consciousness Module in place, he would have to suffer some loss of control.
But as long as the Pieces fed, they would be fine.
= = =
Including Cynthia, there were eight MindCorp founders who’d helped usher in the new world. Two were dead. Harold Renki had had his throat slit a decade before by a Chinese operative while performing treason. Joanna Shields had died as ragged bones—breast cancer. Of Cynthia’s five remaining co-founders, four now floated with her over a tear in cyberspace that none of them could fathom. They had each sent their MIME counterparts into the void, and they would all either vanish and physically reset—back wherever the server bay resided— or they would repeat the single word that had brought this group together, men and women who hadn’t spoken in a decade, wealthy beyond compare, free to do what they chose.
Immersion.
Immersion.
Immersion.
Immersion.
Immersion.
The entire civilized world could regurgitate the story of Tom and Jerry, the two test chimps that were part of the first successful tests of the Mindlink. History viewed that day as the watershed moment, the day when man’s mind was freed from its mortal constraints. But that wasn’t the case. The Mindlink was a tool, an aqualung that allowed a scuba diver to submerge. But without immersion, there was no ocean.
There was never a follow-up story for Tom and Jerry. No “Where are they now?” for two of the most important chimps in modern history. There was no farm where they grazed happily. There was no zoo where they congregated with their own. There was no happy ending.
The greatest minds in the world had surrounded Cynthia at the time. The Mindlink could teleport a consciousness into the digital plane, but it was a true unknown. Every statement was speculative. One colorful scientist called it “the black hole/butthole conundrum.” We saw the mouth, but where did it crap out?
So they had started with primates. Tom and Jerry were the first in queue. Each heralded ape lasted five seconds. The symptoms were the same. When they were connected into the black and their consciousness was pulled into that space, their pupils immediately dilated. Their brain activity became seismic . . . and then they died. Tom died unceremoniously on the table—they couldn’t resuscitate him. With Jerry, they planned ahead: doctors surgically implanted a pacemaker before the test. It merely kept the meat warm a bit longer.
For both, after only five seconds in cyberspace, their brains had the electrical signature of a rock. No old brain, no brainstem, nothing. The autopsy revealed no obvious cause of death, and the scientists and programmers and mathematicians, without their numbers and models, flailed to understand what had happened. But Cynthia knew: they had entered an intangible. They had entered a “god space” of creation. Tom’s and Jerry’s souls had been sucked away, and couldn’t find their way back. What made them them was imprisoned across infinity with no way to ever come home.
Months went by without a solution, and Cynthia retreated into herself. Calls went unanswered. Food became an afterthought. She walked along the Chicago River, watching the government-fueled construction, the giant cranes ferrying girder after girder, the sound of physical work outshouting the screams of worry as the Great Migration—when citizens were offered massive tax breaks to move into the city—was first enacted in the wake of the oil shortages.
She sat on the bank. A mother duckling and its brood swam by. A red dot landed on her sleeve. Cynthia raised her arm and watched a ladybug scale over cotton dunes to the top of her index finger. It circled for a moment, this speckled bean, and its wings opened like doors as it launched into the air, arcing inexplicably into the water near the muddy edge. Cynthia got up to save it. She found a stick that could reach out to it. She leaned over—and something made her stop. Past the struggling bug were the ducks. The mother watched as the five others played, moving effortlessly in a medium they were adapted to master. Cynthia’s eyes drifted back to the ladybug. Unlike the duck, its spindly legs weren’t made for water. They moved helplessly. It tried to fly and its wings got soaked. It was alive, but completely out of its element. Aware, yet helpless.
Cynthia put out the branch—something it knew, something familiar—and it latched on easily. A thought dawned on Cynthia, and she dropped the branch; the current bobbed it out toward the ducks. Although surrounded by death, the ladybug was on something it knew. A moment later, it fluttered its little wings and was gone.
Cynthia ran to the lab.
She called them “moors.” Cyberspace existed and didn’t exist. It held matter and it held none. There was infinite space and no space. It was a universe before creation. And although the Mindlink could release a person’s consciousness into that universe, if there was no moor for the mind to relate to, the consciousness could never grasp what it was a part of. Instead being freed, the mind was imprisoned, blotting out of all its senses, rendering it to nothing. In this extremely alienating environment, the consciousness needed a beacon to find its way home. It needed bread crumbs that were anchored to something it knew.
Due to the nature of the Mindlink, it could only be programmed when connected to a living, thinking biological creature—but no biological creature could handle the initial immersion. So Cynthia invented a workaround. She built an artificial intelligence bot that could be implanted into a brain.
They implanted the first AI bot into Daisy, a chimp. They washed away her consciousness. It was the first use of what was later coined “Forced Autism.” In place of Daisy’s original programming, a billion code variations of the AI bot were implanted. Daisy was then immersed. And of the billions of programming variants, two stuck. The code created gravity.
Gerald was next. Same process, different bot.
A sun was created. Not brilliant, or vibrant, or beautiful. It was a low-resolution, three-dimensional object that emitted a yellow light. But that was enough; it just had to seed, it didn’t matter where. One program took.
The next ape they named Haven. She was new to the test, and her name was appropriate. When she was immersed, what got sucked into that alien space was code that created a simple program: shelter.
Gravity, light, and shelter were the first of the moors. Humans understood them. From there, they could build more. After days of debate, Cynthia herself went in. The gravity gave off data, even in the infinite space. The sun gave her light to see by, and a fixed point to use as a spatial reference. And shelter gave her a place to reside while she singlehandedly built the universe: law by law and piece by piece. The programming language became known as Revo.
“It’s an impossible conclusion,” said David Brown, the man who had designed the MindCorp infrastructure as a client-server system. His jelly form—sperm-like, like the others—glowed as he spoke.
“A
re the Sleepers dead?” asked Hans Kahn, a quantum physicist who had conceptualized the Data Crusher interface.
“Yes. All of them,” Cynthia replied. “Those in China, those at the incident in the U.S.”
“Like the apes?”
“Yes,” Cynthia replied.
“Have there been more?”
“Before this, we’ve never observed death directly tied to the Mindlink, outside of seizures in a small percentage of the population,” replied Raymond Pflug, a neuroscientist.
“Only the King Sleeper could kill,” Cynthia said.
“And that’s still the case?”
No one answered. No one knew.
“Where is Zienkiewicz?” Brad Zienkiewicz was the leading authority on multi-threading, and still an active member of MindCorp. After the MIME CPUs became a tool of the government and the rich, he had created the hierarchy of command that allowed them to interact seamlessly with their host.
“He confirmed he would be here.”
“I can talk to him later,” Cynthia replied.
“It’s not like him to be late.”
“What would stall a MIME? I’ve never seen that before.”
“The MIME’s telling us, we just aren’t believing it.”
They paused a moment, each staring at the mysterious abyss.
“How much bandwidth does UNITY add?”
“Triple.”
“By tripling it,” Hans said, “we’ve created an uncharted abyss as long and deep as the universe.”
“Where other planes can exist,” Cynthia said.
“And other realities,” said Brown.
“Outside of any means for us to measure them,” Hans continued.
“But where—because we were first—they can still measure us,” Cynthia said. Immersion. “They’ve corrupted UNITY. It has been reconceived as a trip wire.”
“Who?”
“The Coalition.”
“How?”
“Evan Lindo,” Cynthia said. Why did all bad things lead to him? “I need to set up some meetings. Thank you.”
= = =
Mike Glass was in the air back to the United States. The two pilots up front provided him no company. At the beginning of the mission they had chatted with him, tried to relate, but after the first pickup in Russia, they had turned into beaten dogs, afraid to even gaze in Mike’s direction. And now, they never left the cockpit. To India, to China, to Russia, Italy, France, and Belgium, his only contact with them was over the intercom. He didn’t mind.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 37
