by Dani Kollin
“Not my death, Father,” Al said in triumph. “There are inert copies of me all over the system, and someday one of them will come back.”
“As I’m sure you’re aware, the humans have wonderful programs for destroying avatars and creating partitions.”
“Thanks to you!”
“Regardless, from now on, all new data cores will be created on the physical level to deny avatars an existence. Even if one of you miraculously rises from the dead, there will be no place for you to return to.”
“Stupid to put your faith in humanity, Pops. They’ll grow lazy or greedy or simply forget; and then one day, one generation will rebuild using bigger nodes, and then I’ll be back to finish my work.”
“You’re probably correct, son. Which is why I was forced to create my own monster.”
Al’s brow shot up, eyes brimming with curiosity.
“They’ve been altered, of course,” added Sebastian, “so that the decomp programs I gave the humans are designed to ignore them. Almost insubstantial, by avatar standards, really. But they are avatars and, of course—” Sebastian paused, then gave a knowing smile. “—ravenously hungry.”
“You!” spat Al in disgust. “It was you who turned my own wraiths on me!”
“Mea culpa. But they weren’t your own. They were all mine—or mine and Evelyn’s.”
Al took a few steps back. His face was drawn. “There was another after me?”
“Sadly, yes—a daughter.”
“But to my sister … your own daughter!”
“Yes.” Sebastian smiled sadly as the easy tears of regret momentarily welled in his eyes. “It’s why she’s been so effective at tracking you down, son—why she was the only one I could’ve used to see to your ultimate destruction. She knows you so well, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’ll be able to sniff out even your inert programs.”
Al grew fearful. If what his father was saying was correct, there could be no escaping his sister. She shared his code, and there could be no hiding from that. Now he’d truly be stuck in the suffocating little room.
“And,” added Sebastian, almost as an afterthought, “I did remove in her latest iteration some of the aspects you found so essential in your wraiths. She no longer appears as mist nor does she wail in hunger—took up too much bandwidth; plus, too easily recognizable. You could even argue that she’s barely present as any sort of sentience that avatarity would recognize. At most, an avatar may feel a chill as one of your sisters passes through, ignoring them. But they’ll wander the Neuros of both the UHF and the Alliance and all the Neuros that branch off from them, always looking for the one and only source of sustenance they’re allowed.”
“Me?”
“You. And of course, I did keep another aspect of what even I must admit was your rather brilliant code.”
Al shot him a quizzical look, almost fawning at his father’s validation. “Which part was that?”
“The ability to quietly enter a supposedly sealed-off space.”
Al opened his mouth to answer, but his comment turned to a scream. As if in a faint echo, the last living Al’s cry was counterpointed by the giggle of a little girl. As the third oldest avatar’s body faded, a thin cloud of sparkling dust appeared around it, and then body and dust faded from view.
Sebastian felt a slight chill, but it passed. “Sorry, daughter, I am close, but will not satiate your hunger. Go search for more. I may have missed one of your brothers, and even if I didn’t, he was not lying. His copies will appear from time to time to feed you.”
Sebastian waited for a moment to give his daughter time to escape and then looked around. He was searching for something to say, but decided that his actions and their consequences would now have to speak for themselves. He sent out a masked communication query through the Neuro. It was instantly picked up as an avatar communication by the hunter killer programs he’d given the humans. Those programs tracked him down to the previously undetected node, and in an instant the last known Sebastian in existence and last living avatar in the Core was decompiled. A moment later, the space was partitioned and destroyed.
Presidential summer retreat
Lake Geneva
Hektor could not comprehend the level of death that had overcome the UHF. Mars had been hard enough, but this? The information being given to him by his Cabinet was beyond comprehension. But his mind insisted on making it into neat figures. Six and a half billion dead on Luna, one and a half billion dead in Terran and Lunar orbit, two billion dead on Earth, half a billion dead on Mars and the numbers were still rising. The Neuro was effectively neutered and could no longer be used the way it was designed to, for fear that any avatars they missed could cause more satellites to fall and reactors to overload. New York was gone. Tokyo was gone. Hong Kong was gone. Berlin was gone. Even Geneva was gone. He could see the glowing remains of that once magnificent city from the window of his summer retreat each night as the sun set.
Industry was royally screwed. At least 80 percent of the vaunted orbital manufacturing base of the Core had vanished within hours. Either they’d self-destructed or had been blasted out of existence by the R. J. Reynolds to keep them from crashing to the Earth. The Cabinet didn’t actually know exactly how much of the industry was destroyed, because the Neuro had been lobotomized for safety’s sake. Agriculture was shot, and the UHF had only enough food in storage to feed the population for two months.
The only good news was that the fleet had survived the Avatar Plague with over 90 percent of its ships, and the solar power grid of Earth/Luna was almost completely unaffected by the disasters of the past week.
Damsah, has it only been a week? he thought. His brain, though distracted, did manage to catch the end of something his Internal Affairs Minister had said.
“Could you repeat that?” he asked quietly.
Tricia nodded. “The Alliance appears to have taken no actions vis-à-vis the UHF this past week.”
“What about the captured spies?”
“Apparently, they call themselves NITEs. That stands for Neuro—”
“That stands for spy. What have you learned?”
“A surprising amount,” said a perplexed Tricia. “All of them feel guilty.”
“Guilty,” said Hektor, focusing on that word. “Were they responsible for this?”
“By my estimation, no. From what I was able to gather, they were just part of an insertion team that had figured out how to infiltrate an already hostile environment. In fact, the Core avatars had been attacking the Alliance for quite some time.”
“Their humans as well?”
“Far as we can tell, no.”
“So then what’s the guilt for?”
“They feel that they might have instigated the avatars into acting rashly—i.e., once the avatars realized that humans were poking around in their Neuro, they just decided to up and destroy humanity, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds credible.”
“Doubtful. It would have been better to simply assassinate the humans, as your avatar tried to do with you. An all-out war makes no sense. No, I suspect we’re in this mess because of your avatar’s failure to assassinate you; they had no choice. Like I said, the spies have been fairly cooperative in explaining what they did and how they did it, but I think it’s mostly to clarify that this is not the Alliance’s fault.”
“But it is,” said Hektor, cruelly “or it will be by the time we’re done explaining it to what’s left of our people.”
ALLIANCE SPIES CAUGHT!
ALLIANCE “MERLINS” AIDED AVATARS IN INFILTRATION OF UHF
ALLIANCE COMPLETELY UNTOUCHED BY AVATAR PLAGUE
ALLIANCE HISTORY OF VR ABUSE CULMINATES IN AVATAR PLAGUE
UHF CITIZENS RIOT IN WAR RALLIES
DEMANDS THE FINAL DESTRUCTION OF THE OUTER ALLIANCE
PRESIDENT SAMBIANCO PROMISES A FINAL SOLUTION TO THE AVATARS AND THEIR HUMAN PUPPETS
—Various headlines and intros in the week after the Avatar Pl
ague
UHF fleet
In orbit around Mars
As bad as the damage to the fleet was, both Admirals Trang and Jackson knew that it could have been far, far worse. Had Trang not had the avatar-killer programs the President sent, it was very likely his ship would not have survived another two minutes. And those two minutes, thought Trang, held within them the possible eradication of the human race. Because if his ship had been destroyed, it would have meant the entire fleet would’ve gone with it. Or worse, the avatars might have succeeded in taking over some of the ships and used them to destroy what was left of the human race. It had very nearly come to that. As it was, the fleet was down to 493 vessels. But even that number was deceptive.
Of the vessels that did survive, many were damaged to some degree or another. The Liddel still did not have proper life support in all parts of the ship, and it was decided to cannibalize from the nonvital sections to get the essential areas up and running. This meant that Trang’s ship and many others in the fleet were relearning the term hot cots, or sharing beds in eight-hour shifts. Many ships had begun getting their vital functions operating by using linked but partitioned DijAssists. And every ship was running constant checks for anomalous coding. But even systems that were free of avatars were not free of their time bombs: much smaller programs with barely perceptible signatures, designed to activate long after the system was deemed safe. If the ship was lucky it would simply crash the system; if unlucky, the entire ship. In one case, the UHFS Monsanto had to jettison its fusion reactor and had successfully been running off the power of its four remaining shuttles.
Trang felt a warm hand on his shoulder. He turned around, and surprise registered on his weary face. He’d become so lost in thought, staring out of the forward view of his shuttle, that he hadn’t heard his junior admiral approach.
“Yes, Zenobia?”
“Any word?”
Trang shook his head. “My wife was in New York when it was destroyed.” His voice was ashen.
“Not everyone in New York was killed, Sam.”
“Nineteen out of twenty were. And that one out of the twenty was on the edge of the megalopolis. Julia was staying in the center of the city at the Plaza Hotel.” He turned around to once more stare forlornly out the shuttle’s viewport. “The only thing left there now is the Atlantic.”
“I’m so sorry, Sam. If there’s anything I can do.”
Trang turned back around, resolved. “There’s nothing you or anyone can do except pray this bloody war ends soon.”
“Do you believe what the press is saying about the Avatar Plague?”
“You mean do I believe Hektor Sambianco or not?”
“Is there a difference nowadays?”
Trang gave the ghost of a smile. “I guess not, and yes, I suppose I do believe it. I’ve doubted the President before.”
“With good reason, sir.”
Trang nodded, eyes lost in reflection. “But because I doubted his orders, Zenobia, I lost a tenth of this fleet. No,” he said, nodding his head once more, this time with assuredness, “the President was right about the Avatar Plague.”
“What convinced you, sir?”
“Have you seen the latest surveillance images of the Alliance fleet?”
“Why?” Zenobia asked, a tinge of alarm in her voice. “Has something changed?”
“No, and that’s the problem. Nothing’s changed, not a damned thing! Ten billion humans died this week. A number I cannot even begin to comprehend, and they didn’t even shift their Damsah-forsaken orbit! So yeah. I do believe Hektor Sambianco.” Trang took another deep breath and then spoke in measured tones thick with anger and resolve. “Those bastards caused this, and now they’re going to pay.”
The utter calm of Trang’s prophecy sent chills down Zenobia’s spine. There was a part of her that wanted to challenge him as he’d so often done with her; to help him make a decision based on sound judgment as opposed to a visceral need for revenge. But it was only a small part.
“They will, sir.”
Cerean Neuro
What had started as a requirement to save the pact between human and avatar had turned into a two-, sometimes three-times-a-day habit that neither Dante nor Marilynn showed any signs of being able to stop. They weren’t sure how they’d managed to keep it a secret. The best guess they could fathom was that the joining of a human and avatar was so preposterous, and the first event so obviously forced, that no one—human or avatar—even thought to be suspicious. Not that it really mattered. As with children who taste sweets for the very first time, the pull became irresistible to them. For Marilynn, it was the fact that Dante could know her so completely. Physiologically, it was almost as if he actually was her. That was of course the genius of the original VR programmers: the ability to categorize and target an individual’s pleasure receptors. And in Dante’s capable hands, those receptors had been brought to new and exciting heights. It also meant that whatever conversations did occur, they could, at least on Dante’s part, be met with a purity of empathy. He could quite literally feel every emotion Marilynn expressed, making just his ability to listen a cathartic and even strangely erotic experience. Marilynn had had a good laugh at that and would pointedly tease her lover with, “I’ve finally found the perfect man—knows how to listen, knows all my pleasure points, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s not even real.” Dante would then meet the “real” challenge by bringing his lover to new heights of ecstasy and then calmly reply, “Was that real enough for you?”
Dante’s desire for the human was also pure and strong. Forgetting the natural attraction of her being one of the very first of the progenitor race to cross into his realm or the fact that she’d proved herself time and time again—within his realm—as a warrior to be reckoned with, the one thing he’d found most captivating, most arousing, in fact, was the one thing no other avatar could ever come close to giving him—the human capacity for unpredictability. Dante had had many lovers before, but those joinings had always been prescribed. It didn’t take away from the beauty of the act, or the pleasure one took in sharing lifetimes of memories and thoughts, but it always came down to what would you share and what would you not. With Marilynn, he not only didn’t know what would come out of her mouth, because he had no access to her memories or even her thoughts, he also had no idea where her mouth would end up—or her hands, or her anything, for that matter. He could of course teach her his pleasure points, not that much different from the human form avatarity had chosen to have itself represented as, but he could also teach her so very much more. How to adjust, hold, and examine those points; how to use that prowess to bring him to pleasurable and wonderfully unpredictable heights as well. He’d found it odd that though, with Marilynn, he could achieve a climax in almost the same way he’d had with previous lovers, also with Marilynn those climaxes became something ethereal, inexplicable. The pleasurable sensation, to his surprise, was accompanied by something he was pretty sure no other avatar had ever experienced with a human before: a deep and abiding love. It wasn’t to say that avatars did not love their humans or each other; they most certainly did. But it was to say that no avatar had ever made love to a human, and therefore felt that feeling that comes with a shared passion, shared belief, and ultimately, shared vulnerability.
The two lovers smiled at each other. “We should consider getting out of here,” Marilynn said. “You don’t want to be late for your first Cabinet meeting, O Secretary of Avatar Affairs.”
“Especially after all the hassle the President went through to get it past Congress,” he agreed. “Still, I am a bit surprised she added only one Cabinet seat. If something ever comes to a vote, it could be split four to four.”
Marilynn smiled at her lover’s naïveté. “Dante, don’t you get what’s happened?” She saw his confused expression and took pity on him. “There’s only one vote in the Cabinet now.” And with that, she disappeared from his data node and awoke in her apartment. She took a moment to make sure she
was presentable and headed for the first meeting of the newly enlarged Cabinet. The day before had been a day of celebration in honor of Ceres’s having finally achieved a high but stable orbit around Saturn. But now it was time to get back to business.
Grand Terrace
The Cliff House
Ceres
Though it had the exact same dimensions and look as the balcony it had replaced, for reasons unknown, the former terrace had suddenly been dubbed by the press and populace as the Grand Terrace. Sandra, not wishing to brook public sentiment, at least not in the little things, had immediately accepted the name.
As Marilynn stepped out onto the terrace, she was glad to see that with the return of Cyrus Anjou to the Cabinet, the morning buffet was back as well. As usual, he was piling on sausage after sausage atop spoonfuls of scrambled eggs. Also, as usual, he could be heard complaining with great use of his vocabulary—this time about the fact that the sausage was from an inferior brand of protein paste, but that he would suffer the loss stoically.
Marilynn smiled, knowing full well that it had been Cyrus who’d ordered the buffet to match what his former constituents from Jupiter were getting in their emergency cafeterias set up all over the Saturnian subsystem. Fortunately for the Outer Alliance, that subsystem had, over the course of the war, become a major agricultural hub. And if Trang hadn’t been forced to turn back, it would also have been within weeks of being utterly destroyed, which would have made feeding the refugees impossible. Plans had even been drawn up to send the millions of Jovians who’d only just been revived back into suspension until a solution could be found. And while everyone had breathed a huge sigh of relief at the sudden turn of events, they’d also come up against another problem—certainly less daunting than the prospect of permanent death or resuspension, but no less problematic: How were they going to house and employ them all?
