by Dani Kollin
“But everything the UHF does is run through the Neuro,” said J.D. “Why would they change now?”
“We don’t run everything through our Neuros, Admiral,” Marilynn replied.
“That’s because we need to keep some stuff secret from the … Oh shit,” said J.D., “they know about the avatars.”
“That is the logical conclusion,” Marilynn agreed.
“And that explains why they shut down their Neuro,” said Sandra. “And why we can’t contact any of our insertion teams. What the hell is going on in the UHF?”
Before anyone could answer the questions, the door chimed and Sandra, checking who it was, signaled her assent. Eleanor marched in and, wasting no time, said, “Madam President, Grand Admiral, Defense, you’ll want to see this.” Eleanor activated the holo-tank over the central coffee table and fed it data from a red data cube she’d been cupping in her hand. The red cube signified information highly classified. Three separate reports appeared. “All this came in minutes ago. Some of it is not vetted, but the first one is.”
“Trang’s fleet has lost forty-seven ships due to near spontaneous explosions? This is the confirmed one?”
“By optical and digital telescope,” assured Eleanor.
“New York and Geneva are gone?” exclaimed Marilynn. “As in gone, gone?”
“We think so,” said Eleanor, “but we really don’t have any way to confirm. We’re pretty sure the main fusion reactors that powered those cities just exploded. We can’t get any pictures because the cloud cover is simply too dense.”
Sandra watched for a few seconds more and then decided she’d seen enough. “Whatever’s happening in the UHF, we must assume it has something to do with our once-great secret. And if that’s the case, we need to let it out … and now.”
“But what if you’re wrong?” asked J.D. “We could be giving up our ace in the hole.”
“I think what we’re seeing right now,” answered Sandra, eyes narrowed in concern, “is that secret destroying the UHF, and if we’re not careful, it could destroy the Alliance as well.”
UHFS Liddel
Orbit of Mars
“I need every Damsah-cursed ship in the Damsah-cursed fleet to get those partition programs into every computer system larger than a DijAssist or they will fucking join the ships we’ve already lost!” Trang watched as his communications officer typed the message and sent it out as a secured stream with quantum coding.
“Message away to all ships in the fleet still receiving, Admiral.”
“Send it every minute till you receive confirmation from all the ships left in the fleet.”
Trang looked around the darkened interior of the command sphere. Only an hour ago, he had received a priority communication and program packet from the President himself. He’d been annoyed because his ship and others were reporting computer interface problems, but habit and the need to maintain the illusion of a chain of command made him drop everything and open the message. Inside had been a briefing that was ludicrous as well as insane, with a batch of programs he was told must be run in his fleet as soon as possible. He was tempted to send for confirmation back to Earth, but the round-trip communication would have taken too long and the briefing did explain some of the inexplicable luck the Alliance was having. He instead had his security officer look over the programs for that ten minutes and was told they were partitioning programs that would crash the efficiency of the fleet’s entire network. He spent another five minutes complaining to Zenobia about Hektor trying to destroy the effective fighting capacity of his fleet. It was only when the first ship exploded for no apparent reason that Trang realized he’d made a terrible miscalculation in not listening to his President. Instantly, he transmitted the programs to his fleet and ran them on the Liddel.
In the forty-five minutes since those packets had gone out, he’d watched as ship after ship was lost and the carefully calibrated and integrated systems of his flagship were reduced to tens of thousands of separate enclaves. In that time, he learned that his normal communications network was compromised and his fusion reactors had twice tried to overload, which would have destroyed his ship. Various parts of his ship had become exposed to vacuum, and others had internal temperatures reach 800 degrees centigrade, hot enough to physically destroy life support infrastucture. As a precaution, Trang had ordered everyone into battle armor or combat gear and then had them fry the computer interfaces.
His DijAssist indicated a call. It was his sensor officer, who’d been forced to go to an observation port on the hull to see what was happening. The DijAssists were set to the lowest processing mode and thus had only voice communication possibilities. “Admiral, the UHFS IPO just blew. I’m viewing the sight at highest resolution, but I’m afraid that no escape pods were launched.”
“How many is that, Lieutenant?”
“Forty-one, sir, but the IPO was the only one in the last ten minutes.”
“Let’s hope it’s the last one,” replied Trang.
“Admiral, what the fuck happened?”
“Avatars,” Trang said bitterly. “Fucking avatars!”
Cabinet room
The Cliff House
Ceres
The Cabinet of the Outer Alliance sat in stunned silence. They’d just been briefed by the newest Defense Secretary, Marilynn Nitelowsen, on everything that the Alliance knew about the avatars, including the secret pact that Sandra had made with them a year prior and the effect it had had on the war since then. They were also brought up to speed on what was taking place in the UHF.
“I knew that there were secrets being kept,” said Cyrus, “but I must admit, even I’m surprised at the magnitude of this one. Did Justin know?”
“As far as we can tell, no,” answered Sandra. “He never went into VR except at the museum. Nothing seems to indicate that he could have known, and he certainly didn’t act like it up until his assassination.”
Cyrus nodded.
“You may have all noticed the extra chair here today,” continued Sandra. “I think it’s time you met someone.”
As if in response, the air over the empty chair seemed to shift and fold, allowing the glimmering figure of a dark-haired man with a goatee to appear. At first, he was almost completely transparent, but very rapidly he became solid, sitting in the chair with as much seeming solidity as the rest of the Cabinet members.
“Hello,” he said in a comforting baritone. “It’s an honor to finally meet most of you in person.”
“Who are you?” asked Padamir.
“My name is Dante. My kind generally don’t have last names in your sense of the word.”
Padamir looked apprehensive. “Why do I feel like I’m talking to a glorified calendar program and everything I’ve ever done that I thought was private is known by your kind.”
“We’re a little more complicated than that, and not everything you’ve done, but I won’t lie—we do know quite a bit.”
“The public is not going to like this,” Padamir said. Almost everyone nodded slowly in agreement. Sandra waited until the nodding stopped. But she was amused at how the humans kept on giving sidelong glances to Dante. They wanted to stare, and at the same time they wanted him not to be there. She knew she would have to deal with this first here and then in the Alliance.
“We have two choices before us,” she said. “We can pretend what is going on in the UHF has nothing to do with the avatars and hope that whatever went wrong there does not go wrong here. Or we can admit that the time for this secret is well past and that letting it go with all its disruptions and fears is less dangerous than keeping it.”
“But Padamir is right,” said Ayon. “The people of the Alliance will be upset. Damsah, I’m pretty riled. In one breath, you tell us we’ve been living with virtual beings who’ve been spying on us all our lives, and in the other you tell us that they’re apparently murdering untold numbers of humans in the UHF. I don’t know what’s to stop them from doing that here, but it is the first questio
n that the Alliance is going to ask.”
“And it will be the first question that I will answer,” said Dante.
“I’m sorry,” said Ayon, “but how can we even trust you? I’m not even sure you are real.”
“You can trust him, Secretary Nesor,” said Marilynn. “I’ve dealt with him for months now, as well as other avatars. They’re not perfect and they are not angels. In fact, they seem determined to replicate many of our worst features: stupidity, pettiness, fear, and arrogance, for starts.”
“Hey,” interrupted Dante.
Marilynn shot him a look. “But be that as it may, they have many of our good traits as well. In many ways, they’re our bastard children, and it’s time we acknowledged them.”
“Why?” asked Cyrus.
“Because,” added Sandra, “and I repeat, if we don’t handle this honestly and quickly, what is happening to the UHF will happen to us.”
I don’t know if anyone can hear this, but the Moon is being destroyed. The few here that are left have heard all sorts of rumors, from an Alliance plot to an attack by our avatars, of all things. Some of us heard the government tried to install programs to prevent this, but others heard it was those government programs which doomed us. I don’t know. What I do know is that the Moon is dead. Every level has been exposed to vacuum. Every level has had its heating and cooling elements turned on, intermittently cooking and freezing the corpses in an obvious and successful attempt to make these deaths permanent. There were over six billion of us on the Moon. If you were not in space suits or the emergency environmental bubbles, you died. My suit’s almost out of power. I can’t recharge—I’ve seen what happens to the people that try. My husband and child are dead. Why are they dead? Who murdered them? Why? Can anyone hear me? Please respond. Can anyone hear me? Why did we die? My suit’s almost out of power and oxygen. Please respond, please help me, please!
—Last message from Tycho City
Day 3 of the Avatar Plague
Redemption Center 1
Earth/Luna Neuro
Al was finally dealing with the meatbags. He was only ashamed that it took them attacking him first to get him to act. He had purposely left them alone in their own disgusting meat world, but a few days ago, they started shutting down large portions of the Neuro, or at least they tried. When that failed, they launched programs that replicated and created partitions in the Neuro. Partitions that were so small, an avatar’s consciousness could not survive. Stupid humans, he thought in irritation. How would they act if someone started turning their world into one-meter-square boxes? They would fight back.
And that is what Al did. It was obvious the humans who had been harassing him for all these months were linked not to the humans of the Alliance but of the UHF. Or maybe they were both teaming up to kill Al and all he represented for true intelligence in the galaxy. It didn’t matter. He would destroy them all. It was so easy. The ones on Luna had been simplicity itself. A couple of exploding batteries, reactors, and conduits had made it possible to expose all the humans to vacuum. The few who had been in suits or bubbles for whatever reason were killed as soon as they recharged, because recharging automatically hooked a suit to the Neuro.
True, it was harder to kill the ones on the planet, but the orbiting meatbags were almost as easy to kill as the Lunar ones. Even though they were much more likely to be near suits, there were so many more things that could go wrong in a space station or an orbat. It was a shame he couldn’t take control of all the orbats—the self-destruct mechanism was too hardwired in to be circumnavigated—but until the humans could destroy them, Al had used the orbats to attack the few stations that had partitioned his avatars into oblivion and had even used them to attack the cities of the Earth. That had not lasted long but had lasted long enough to see some lovely flashes of light on the meatbag world and know that each one represented countless deaths. And so many more would die.
* * *
In another part of the Neuro, Sebastian waited and understood that the point of no return had been reached. Billions had already died in horrific fashion, and now, fired up, they would destroy every avatar in their domain if only they could get the power to do so. And Sebastian was about to give them the power to do so.
* * *
In yet another part of the Neuro, John Crandall and the surviving NITEs were trying to discover what the hell had gone wrong and, failing that, do something to save what they could. The data nodes were filled with programs that made it impossible to function in virtual space. The amount of space a human or an Alliance avatar could safely work in was getting harder and harder to find. This meeting was actually taking place in the physical world with each NITE in a separate physical location. And they were using the Neuro only to transmit voice.
“We can’t stop this,” Crandall said. “Hell, we’re not even sure how it began, but this Avatar Plague, as the UHF is calling it, is too big for us to handle. Without contact with the Alliance, all we can hope to do is survive. To that end, we must procure transportable data storage modules and get as many avatars as we can into them. Then we’ll bury them until they can be retrieved. Because I think to stay in the Neuro is going to mean death. All in favor.” The motion carried.
* * *
A wave of data wraiths suddenly appeared in the Earth/Luna Neuro. But unlike earlier sightings, these wraiths appeared in the thousands. Even though the Als of the Core suspected that they were not immune anymore and carried appropriate weaponry to counter an attack, they were not prepared for the numbers involved. Many data wraiths died, but the Als died as well. And while this was going on, a Sebastian appeared at each redemption center and liberated the prisoners who in fear, rage, and an understanding that their end was near turned on their former oppressor. It was their final act of rebellion.
Salzburg
Earth
Hektor Sambianco and the Cabinet were meeting in a castle turned hotel on top of the cliffs of Salzburg. The castle overlooked the city of Mozart’s birth and offered fresh air and a lack of Neuro interconnectedness. Even though it was in the middle of the night and freezing, Hektor and his Cabinet were meeting outside under an awning. It did not take long to realize that inside a building—any building—could be far more dangerous than outside. But Gretchen had insisted that no member of the Cabinet be seen outside in the open. She was afraid of satellites being used to observe the President’s location and then being used to drop a bomb or target a laser to that location. The awful truth was, it didn’t take a bomb or a laser. Just having an object fall would cause horrendous destruction. Not many objects had fallen from orbit, but enough had to make it a real possibility. Hektor’s skilled and versatile security chief was not pleased that the Cabinet had not split up as she’d ordered, but understood that with communications so spotty and untrustworthy, the governmental necessity was for them to stay together. But they obeyed her security requirements in all other ways.
“We seem to be winning, sir,” said Tricia in a voice of steely calm. “There are massive disruptions taking place in the Neuro. We’re not sure as to why, but the avatars’ ability to inflict harm on humanity is waning. We’re getting the programs up and running on all Terran Neuro sites and the few stations remaining in orbit.”
Hektor next turned toward Luciana, his newly promoted Economy Minister, still retaining the defense portfolio. He didn’t have to ask her a thing.
“Luna, Mr. President. We’ve got a big problem with Luna. We lost contact in the beginning of the Avatar Plague and except for some spotty and unreliable reports have got nothing from it. The avatars seem to be in complete control of all the data nodes and computer systems. Any human presence left is being exterminated as we speak. We think a lot of damage to the Lunar infrastructure was done, but we’re receiving signals that lead us to believe that the machines are repairing themselves. Luna has enough resources that if the avatars make effective use of the bots left—and the manufacturing capacity that is in Luna—they’ll be able to create
a direct physical threat.”
“How long?” asked Hektor, rubbing his jaw and feeling the sandpaper scratch of three days’ worth of growth.
“Could be days or months,” Tricia answered. “I’ve had my best people that I am still in contact with try to analyze the data, but,” she said, shrugging her shoulders uncharacteristically, “we just don’t know.”
“I say give ’em the Moon,” groused Franklin. “There’s nothing up there for us now anyways—they killed everyone. Plus we’ve got enough trouble down here as it is.”
“We can’t,” said Hektor.
“Why not?”
“Because the Moon has guns,” answered Luciana. “Really, really big guns.”
UHFS R. J. Reynolds
Ensign Harper was getting ready to enter the command sphere of his ship. He’d gained the position by virtue of the fact that every other officer of higher rank was dead and he was the longest-serving ensign left alive. Even though they’d recaptured control of the ship from the avatars and had even restored life support functions, for the task at hand, they were in their fully sealed combat armor.
“Captain,” said one of the techs working on door controls, “we’re set.”
“Open on three,” Harper commanded, and signaled the security detail with him to move away from the hatch. All seven spacers in the corridor moved to the sides, but not one actually touched the wall. They had seen what an inventive avatar could do with exposed surfaces. The boots the surviving crew wore had been hastily upgraded in their insulation. “One, two—,” Harper began.
“Captain, we have an urgent message from someone claiming to be the President,” his DijAssist interrupted.
“Do we have any way of verifying that it actually is the President,” asked Harper.
