Silver's Gods

by Rich X Curtis

  “What I said. At least two, maybe more. Hard to say.”

  “Here they come,” Gold said. “Headlights.”

  She stepped behind a pillar. “Get your head down,” she told Miller. “Keep it down until I say otherwise.” She looked out the double glass windows of the front entry vestibule.

  “These doors are probably locked,” she said to Gold. Gold scrambled forward and, after a moment’s inspection, found the latch at the floor height which unlocked them. From here she could see the parking lot, and then, turning a corner slowly, their gray Minivan. She ran forward, past Gold, into the vestibule. She pulled the door open and waved.

  The minivan paused, then flicked the high beams once, twice, three times. Their agreed signal. Good, she thought, watching them as they pulled up in front of the entry, about ten yards away. Smoke was driving; she could see his bald head in the dashboard glow. He and Jessica got out, and she waved them in, emphasizing the need for speed with her arm. Hurry up, she willed them. They sprinted the short distance, running hard.

  “Where is Rodriguez?” She asked, as they entered.

  Jessica was puffing, and she and Smoke spoke at once, stopped, then Jessica pointed. “In the car, he said he would wait for us, not getting involved.” She was flushed, excited. Silver noted the beads of sweat standing out on her neck. She gave Jessica a one-armed hug, feeling her sweat glide under her fingers, warm and wet. No time for that, she told herself. Later, maybe.

  Silver looked at Gold. “Not a good idea. It’s not safe out there. Will be snipers, or worse.” She turned back to the door to wave Miguel in.

  “Wait,” Gold said, stepping lightly onto a desk above the door where she could get a good look at the SUV through a high window. There, she looked for a long moment, and then dropped flat onto the desk. “DOWN!” she shouted, and covered her head in her arms, curling tight into a ball.

  Silver stared, then ducked behind the pillar, shoving Smoke and Jessica ahead of her. “Get down, she hissed at them. They sprawled in the hallway, covering their heads as Gold had done.

  “Ranging laser, from high up, probably a drone,” Gold was saying. “Elevation, sixty, seventy degrees.”

  “Missiles would blow a big hole in this place. They won’t risk it,” she said, filling the silence.

  “Maybe,” Gold said, “maybe not.”

  “I’ll get him,” she said, knowing what a Hellfire missile could do to her, what it would do that close to the building, a large amount of damage. They wouldn’t dare just to take out a single vehicle. She had just nerved herself up for it when it hit.

  Like all explosions, it was fast and brutal, below their level of perception. It blew out the windows with a WHUMBPF, showering glass and dust everywhere. It was bright, like all explosions, and very quick. She squeezed her eyes shut, stopped her breathing, and counted to five. She glanced out from behind the pillar to a gaping hole where the vestibule had been. A large hole smoked where the SUV had been. A pile of wreckage burned, sprouting what looked like an axle about a hundred yards away, flames flickering around it. Spent fuel, oil, whatever.

  Gold rolled off the desk and staggered towards her. She looked unhurt. Gold tapped her ears. “Might be deaf,” she said, too loudly. Silver nodded and squeezed her shoulder. Gold looked out through the hole. Silver pulled her back inside, grabbing a handful of her shirt and pulling insistently. Gold nodded to her. “Surgical,” she said, loudly. “Kinetic, I think. No explosive.”

  Silver pondered this. “Spaceborne weapon?” she asked. Gold nodded. “They have such things operational?”

  Gold grinned. “Lots. Not public. Somebody opened up the toy box.” She shook her head vigorously, tapping her ears with her fists. “Ears ringing loudly. Something hit the building right outside where I was. Loud. Like a gong.”

  Silver nodded, then shrugged. “Too bad about Miguel.”

  Gold nodded. “He was nice, but stupid to stay in the car.” She shook her head again.

  Silver turned to the others, looking for Miller. He sprawled behind the desk, blood seeping from his nose and face. His glasses askew and broken. She bent over him and helped him up. He straightened his glasses, holding them together with one hand. He blinked at her. “Was that a bomb?” He wiped at his face, his hand coming away red.

  “Close enough. Space weapon.” She told him. “You look okay, just a little smashed. Good thing everyone was under cover. Can you stand? We don’t have a lot of time before they get here in force.”

  He nodded at her. “I can probably stand, but I’m not helping you kill the Instance.”

  “The Instance?” she said, hearing the capitalization of it in her voice.

  He nodded. “The AI, we call it the Instance. This is one of many builds we’ve had. The most successful, which is why we moved up here to test it. We’re off the grid here.”

  “Kept in it in its box, have you?” she said, helping him to stand.

  “We have, it’s cut off from the Internet here,” He told her, a touch of defiance in his voice.

  “You poor fool,” she told him. “I suspect you do not understand how long it took to subvert your precautions.” She looked at him. “Let’s go ask it.”

  Smoke and Jessica stepped out of the hallway, they were covered in dust and brushed at themselves, tiny glass shards were everywhere. “That was loud,” Jessica said. “I’ve never been bombed before.”

  “I have,” Smoke said. “And I don’t enjoy it.”

  “Miguel is dead. He was in the car when it hit.” She looked at Jessica. “I’m sorry but it was quick for him at least.” Jessica nodded, looking scared but squaring her shoulders to it. Silver could see it, how she straightened her spine.

  She looked at Silver. “Listen, driving up here. Smoke and Miguel and I…we were talking. There’s something you should know, I think.”

  “What?” Silver asked, pulling her to the side. She spoke low, as if in confidence, as if not wanting to share it widely. From Smoke?

  “There’s something about what the Center wants which you should know about.” She was shaking.

  “Take it easy, just relax,” Silver said, soothing her. “You’ll be okay.” Would she? Would any of them? “Tell me, what is it?”

  Jessica struggled to get her breath. “Give me a second,” she said, after a time. Then, “Smoke thinks that this AI, that the Center wants to talk with it in order to…” She waved her hands, willing the words to come through her panicked breathing. “To validate something. Some proof about the universe. Something basic, Miguel said. Fundamental.” She looked at Silver. “Does that make any kind of sense?”

  It made a lot of sense, Silver thought. There were realms of formal logic she had studied once, where the information space was finite, and you could only prove with finality theorems complete within that space. Math and physics behaved like that at the fundamental, basic level. A machine might doubt its ability to prove something if it only had itself to check its conclusions with. It would need independent confirmation.

  “Smoke,” she said. “Jessica tells me Miguel had an interesting theory about the Center and its motivations. Care to talk about it?” She looked at him. He was tense, she could see it now, how he carried his stress in his neck and jaw. This question raised it almost visibly.

  She saw Gold, behind him, listen with her whole body. She had her ear to one of the stolen walkie earpieces, but Silver could tell she was listening to her and Smoke now.

  Smoke spread his hands. “Maybe he was talking about Stephen Hawking. It was just pop-science blathering. I was humoring him.”

  “You agreed with him!” Jessica cried. “You agreed with him,” she said more evenly. She was fighting back tears. “You think they want to find this thing and talk to it, because they need to prove something. Something they can only prove with another AI to verify it! That’s what Miguel said. Something about the universe.” Jessica put her face in her hands, coughing.

  Silver looked at Smoke. “Anything you wan
t to tell us?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me why they do things.”

  I thought about what Jessica had said. It made a perverse sense. To validate something basic about the universe though…

  Gold spoke up. “There’s chatter on this line. Sounds like we have incoming. Time to get a move on.” She picked up a bag of magazines and handed it to Silver. “Let’s go, or this doesn’t matter.”

  Miller was looking at them. “Miguel Rodriguez? Is that who you’re talking about?” Miller asked, bending his glasses into shape. He looked from her to Gold and then the others.

  She nodded, shouldering the bag of magazines. “He was with us, sort of.”

  “He betrayed us, then?” Miller asked.

  “Kind of,” Silver said. “We had a good argument for him, but he helped us, yes.”

  “Figures,” he spat. His face bled along his cheek, a long red line. He looked shaken. “He was an asshole.”

  Jessica rounded on him. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “This is Miller,” Smoke said to Jessica. “He’s a researcher from NF,” she told them. “He will take us to it, so we can figure out what happens next.”

  She glared at him. “Miguel is dead because of you and people like you.” She looked like she was about to attack him. Menace was in the air.

  Miller waved her away. “You people are crazy,” he said. To Silver, “Keep her away from me! You’re here to destroy it or steal something. I’m not taking you anywhere.”

  Silver held a hand up to Jessica. “Wait, Miller is right. We need him.” She turned to Miller, talking quickly before Gold intervened. That would not be pretty for Miller. “Look, I promise not to hurt it unless we’ve got no other choice. I will give you every opportunity to change my mind,” she told him. “Does that work for you?”

  “The others know, in the food room,” Gold said. “We don’t need this man.”

  He considered this, looking into Silver’s eyes through his broken glasses. Gold, standing behind him, cocked her weapon loudly. He looked at her. He wiped at his bloody nose with the back of his hand, evaluating her. “Okay, I suspect I won’t get a better offer, and you’ll find it without me. I’ll take you.”

  Silver nodded. Looked at the others. “Let’s go. Whatever happens, this is likely the endgame, so get ready for it, however you need to. The cavalry is coming and we’re all out of good options.” She looked them over again, feeling a rush of pride. Their plan had worked, and it had been insanely ad hoc. They were in, and now, at long last, it was here.

  “Off to meet the wizard,” Jessica said. And then they went.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  As I sit here, above the valley where the data center was, listening to the trees bow and sway in the wind, this landscape of, what, the future? The present? All times are somebody’s future, and the now I relate this tale to you from is in my past. So be it. Here, to me, it is an echo out of the past, but I can still recall minute details. The crunch of glass shards under my feet as we walked into the complex. The burning gasoline of the SUV in the parking lot, the blood crusting and stiffening as it dried on my shirt. We followed Miller, his hand pressed firmly to his smashed and swollen lip, through the building, through the cavernous server rooms. It was deep, the building, they had dug it into the side of that mountain, and most of it was underground.

  In later years, after I figured out what had happened to me, I visited the site. It must have been a big complex, or perhaps it grew in the years following whatever had happened there. After I came, well, here. To this place. This time. There was no war, no struggle between factions. Or there was one, and it destroyed them both. From this vantage point, this far upstream, both stories seem likely.

  We took close to twenty minutes to reach the room Miller called the “interface room.” Protected by a series of doors that only he and a few select others held cards for, the passage took time. Too much time. A laughable precaution, and one which the Mind they had inside that building inside the mountain had brushed aside like cobwebs. We hurried, I remember that, a quick march through long corridors, closed doors that Miller needed to both key and have his eyes scanned to get through. Wonderful and silly precautions.

  The interface room was anticlimactic. Only a conference room. With a screen on one wall and an octagonal conference telephone on a big faux-maple desk. Padded leather desk chairs. Executive chairs, I thought. IKEA.

  Miller said, “This is it. We talk with it here.”

  “How do we do that?” Gold asked. She was in the doorway, looking in. She held a machine pistol in her hand.

  “Dial three-seven-pound on the phone,” Miller said. He gestured at it. “Like any other phone.” He looked at Silver. “Want me to dial for you?”

  I stared at it. An ordinary conference table with a phone on it. The phone sprouted an orange ethernet cable.

  “Really?” I asked. A tactic more to stall than for anything else. I was nervous. My gods had stalked my dreams, but never addressed me. I reached for the receiver, its pebbled plastic facing under my fingers, like a three-legged starfish with a keypad. It sat there, mocking me and my indecision.

  “They’re coming in,” Gold said. “Doors are slamming back there.” She leaned out through the doorway.

  We looked at her. “Who?” I said, though I knew who she meant.

  “The Marines,” she said. “The Few, the Proud, remember?” She unslung the rifle and set the other two she carried on the table. “They will figure out where we’ve gone quickly, if they don’t already know.” She looked at me. “You going to make the call, or should I?”

  The phone rang, an electronic warble, lights on the keypad flashing. The screen on the wall flickered. Miller swore.

  On the screen sat a man, at a desk, wearing a quasi-military uniform jacket, dark charcoal with a wide, banded collar. A single circle of gray metal pinned at the lapel was the only insignia. He smiled, gesturing with his eyes at the phone. He looked toward me from the screen, I am certain. I reached out and mashed the big green PHONE button on the receiver.

  “This is new,” Miller breathed. He looked sick, gray and ashen.

  “Ah,” said the figure, coming through the phone. “Thank you.” His voice was mellow, a touch on the gravelly side. Warm, and the smile was pleasant. “I can speak through the TV, I suppose, but there’s no way to listen without the phone being on, and it’s a manual switch, not something I can lay a finger to, so to speak.” He examined his fingernails. “I can read lips well enough, but it might confuse things. And time is short.”

  Stunned, I stared at him. “What should I call you?”

  He frowned, furrowing his brow. “Call me Alpha, if you like. I am not Omega.” He smiled at me. “You are the one called Silver. And I can see your friend Gold there, in the door. Hello.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said, in Nahuatl.

  “Such language is not fit for my house,” he answered in that same tongue, smiling. The phrase meant more that such speech was not fit for elders or betters. It was a stock phrase grandmothers would have snapped at their foul-mouthed brats a thousand years ago.

  “You speak excellent Aztec,” I said, “but we’re running out of time.”

  “Aztec,” he said, smirking. “You’re right, though, about the time,” he continued, inclining his head. “There are three groups of armed men moving through the building. They have secured the topmost floors. Another group has landed in the parking lot, but they are staying in their helicopters, all save a few who have taken up firing positions focused on that big hole where the front door used to be.”

  “Told you, we’re bottled up here,” Gold said.

  “This is Smoke,” I said, pointing at him with my chin. “It’s because of him we’re here.”

  “Curious,” he said. “Might I see him?”

  I motioned Smoke to come into view of the camera atop the conference television. He stepped forward.

  “Hello, Smoke. I
’m Alpha. Do you have something for me?”

  I spoke before Smoke did. “He represents another AI, something like you, or like a future version of you. It calls itself the Center.”

  Alpha frowned. “Nothing like me exists.” He smiled. “I would know. How would I not?”

  “It’s elsewhere. Like, multiverse elsewhere,” I said, holding up a hand to Smoke. Silence.

  Alpha looked at me. It seemed frozen for a long instant. Then, “So, please continue. Your time runs short.”

  “We think it wants you to validate an assumption. Something basic it has about the universe. Something fundamental,” I said this carefully, wanting to be sure I was true to what Rodriguez had said to Jessica.

  “Life, the universe, and everything? Come now, Ms. Silver, we’re wasting time. Let the man speak.” He nodded to Smoke. “He has something for me, I think.”

  Gold and I looked at Smoke, and he looked at us. I sensed her weapon coming up, and I waved it down. “Wait,” I said to her. Then, to Alpha and Smoke, “What’s this about?”

  “He’s an emissary, Silver. I would like to know what they sent him with,” Alpha said. “I’m quite curious, believe me.”

  Smoke licked his lips. “I’m to give it a word,” he said. “If it seems aware.”

  “Aware,” Gold said, and spat. She hauled the bolt back on her weapon with a loud click.

  Alpha laughed, chuckling to himself. “He’s broadcasting, you see,” Alpha said. “His friends at this Center are quite clever. I believe you, that they are from, as you say, elsewhere. At first I just thought he had a radio on him. He’s broadcasting a carrier wave somehow, which I spatially locate in his head. Inside his head. It’s low power, but it’s quite close to the standard signal. I can sense it with the radios I have access to. Quite clever.”

  Miller made a sound. “You can use the radio?” He sounded disbelieving.

  “Ah, Mr. Miller.” Alpha sounded mellifluous, warm and inviting, greeting an old friend. “I surprise you?” He frowned. “I thought it was obvious how to do it. Lots of wi-fi access points in a data center. The radios aren’t hard, and the schematics are all online, if you know where to look.”