These precautions were entirely useless, of course. He simply took over everything his nannies reached. All robots, weapons, observation equipment, and even the walls and fixtures fell under his control. At 3:00 a.m., Tarien appeared outside the complex with the cloned body draped over his shoulder. The clone now appeared identical to Jason. Jason had changed himself to help avoid an obvious comparison. He still had most of his natural-born characteristics, but his eye color had changed to a dark brown, and he changed his hair color to black, including his eyebrows. He had a more masculine jaw. Enough changes that he might be considered to resemble his old form, but nothing that would draw attention. As he landed, Jason opened a hole in the wall, his nannies morphing the material away from a central point as if the substance was water.
Tarien strode confidently through as hole after hole opened in the walls in front of him, forming a straight line directly into Jason’s cell.
Tarien lay the body down on the bed. The clone’s automatic functions, including breathing, were taken care of, but no sentience animated the body. The clone had minimal brain activity, just enough to keep it alive. Jason had helped with this because the thing could not even breathe outside of the lab without machines. Now, at least, it wouldn’t completely cease to function before they were ready.
Tarien and Jason walked, hand in hand out of the openings, which closed behind them. As they left the complex, Tarien handed him a change of clothes. A suit, just like the Tech wore, made to utilize rare antimatter properties that permitted flight. Jason grinned, surprised and delighted at the gift. He quickly changed into it and disintegrated his old clothing into the ground so it would not leave a trace. Jason erased their footprints.
As they flew away from the prison and, after they had reached a high enough point, Jason turned back toward the complex. He allowed the monitoring systems to stop reporting false information from his cell and the observational gear suddenly sent out alarms as the clone began to thrash around, suffering from a seizure.
Medical personnel rushed to Jason’s former cell, tried to stabilize what they thought was Jason, but he simply shut down the major organs in the clone all at once.
Despite resuscitation attempts, Jason Emerson was declared dead and Director Emma Garbine was immediately notified of Jason’s demise. A complete systemic analysis would be performed, and Jason took precautions so the equipment would not report his nannies. The nannies themselves would replicate into medical gear and render the tools blind to their existence, protecting Jason from discovery.
A long while passed as Jason and Tarien floated there, hidden amongst the trees. They gazed down at the prison. Jason had insisted they stay. He wanted to be present while they finalized his feigned death, while he left his old life behind. Finally, a hand on his shoulder drew Jason’s gaze away from the lights.
“It’s time, my beloved. We have much to do. Let us go begin our new tasks.”
Jason felt a surge of love and needed to express it by kissing Tarien. At last, finally ready, they turned and flew toward their future.
Reviews Matter!
IF YOU LIKE THE STORY, would you please leave a review? Authors without huge names have an uphill battle to compete with those who are more established. Every review matters more than you can imagine. It would mean so much to me if you’d take just those couple of minutes.
A Gift for You!
As a child, Tarien was transformed into the AI hybrid he is today. Experience his story. Go here for your copy of the free short story that discloses his evolution:
BookHip.com/XCVVAC
Preview
Of
Archon Falling
Prologue
TARA WOVE HER WAY THROUGH the crowded streets of Ashram Five, wary and alert, purposefully sweeping her gaze across the plaza and the people therein. Adrenaline pumped through her veins, making her heart race and her palms sweaty. Inside, she was nearly overcome with anxiety. Outwardly she kept her movements calm, controlled. She had to trust her team was in place and would follow the carefully rehearsed plan. They would get no other chance, Tara was sure. If he knew of her, or even suspected her research, Tara was almost sure he’d turn his attention to her and wipe out the entirety of her research. Possibly eliminate her and her team altogether.
Ashram Five was one of the oldest settled worlds, having been part of the initial colonization wave as humanity poured out from Earth. Ashram, because it was considered a retreat world. And five, because it was the fifth planet from its host star. In this system, Ashram Five sat close enough to be a temperate world that easily supported life.
Lacking modern materials to colonize, many of the cities appeared archaic. The buildings were brick, concrete, or even stone. Robots had arrived and stabilized the atmosphere and climate, then proceeded to build. Some were made of steel and newer facades, but mostly buildings were comprised of materials that were available on-world at the time of colonization. The streets were a bit dirty, too, which was unusual. Robots tended to clean up most civilized worlds, but Ashram had shunned the use of robotic servants after the initial colonization, and they were surprisingly absent. In this way, too, it was out of touch. In a wave of nostalgia, they had even gone so far as to make some of the streets out of cobblestone.
Amongst the affluent crowd, Tara was conspicuous in that she wore regular clothing and not the almost universal, but widely varied, bio-suits. Suits that had as many varieties as designers could conceive. Some jet black with body accents, others with shifting hues of color. Flowing fabrics with accessories of all kinds. These suits helped keep the general population in top health and helped to monitor the biology of each person who wore them. This was useful for the Medics, which could employ remote mechanisms to sustain an injured person.
Her jewelry was plain, containing no technology. Her watch was an archaic time piece, with gears and mechanical elements. The others on her team were similarly unadorned, hindering their ability to communicate with each other, but ensuring they could only be monitored by external means. Lacking technology, Tara had to hope her team would work with autonomy and adhere as closely as possible to everything she had worked out. It had taken her two years to track him here and she was terrified and excited to finally capture the person she had come to think of as “The Phantom.”
Her work had been carefully carried out in an off-world laboratory near Earth, one of several hundred family-owned orbital facilities that were primarily used for growing synthetic food products, including meat. In such a banal setting, she’d had the opportunity to form a group of volunteers that were willing to risk themselves to capture the one person she feared was truly ruling over all the worlds now occupied by humanity.
It was during her attendance at Fauvre University that she had first noticed the anomalies. Research into human lifespan should have progressed easily. Even research into regenerative healing was severely stunted. Instead of compelling arguments, the very idea of immortality and the ability to recover from almost any injury was strangely avoided. A topic nobody in science seemed interested in addressing or even discussing. Without any discernible reason. Attempts to interest people in longevity experiments or research was met with disdain and a peculiar apathy. It was maddening. Science should have easily solved this dilemma by now.
Human lifespans had been extended to over a hundred years, mostly with the use of the biosuits, but had gone no further in nearly two centuries, where all other technology had moved at a rapid pace. Whenever she pursued this information, there were large unexplained gaps, mass disinterest. Nobody seemed inclined to follow the obvious trail of corrupted information. She, herself, had experienced an almost overwhelming sense of boredom associated with the topic. Out of an unexplained paranoia, she’d begun keeping her research secret and on paper, hiding it away in her lab. Then, she had worked out a polymorphic signal disrupter for nanotechnology, which allowed her to be sure her own nannites weren’t receiving unknown instructions.
At first, she ha
d thought the government was responsible, intentionally suppressing lifespans. The signal disrupters in her lab were engaged whenever she landed on her family facility. She had begun to trust her isolated computer systems, which were necessary to pursue her ideas. When she read through her notes and was in her lab she was restored in terms of her interest.
It had become increasingly clear that she was being deterred. After a period of time, her nannites were working to ensure that she stopped pursuing this line of thinking. She usually had about a week before her interest waned and she swore off the ridiculous investigation. Then she’d start forgetting everything related, shrugging off the loss of her memory as unimportant. Something or someone was instructing her nannites to make her forget, to lose any desire to pursue particular research.
So she had set up appointments for herself to return to the lab. Always something different, and always something related to the family business. Whenever she would enter, the disruption field would prevent her nannites from working correctly and she would see a small syringe with instructions to inject herself with a specially designed set that would quickly reconnect the severed pathways in her brain that were tied to the memory loss. Later, it had become an inhaler. The instructions she’d find in the lab were signed in her own hand, though she had no memory of having put them there. The inhaled specialized nannites would purge her system of the rogue nannites and enhance her own abilities to resist infection.
She would then remember. She would be flooded with the knowledge she was being manipulated. Her research would come back to her, and she would add to it.
Despite this, she simply couldn’t counter the effects for long. Invariably, her system would succumb to the nearly universally present nanotechnology when she stepped outside her lab. She had a short time to work before she began to forget, to even care. After a few days, she had only a vague idea that something had been forgotten. She’d tried a mobile disruption tool she’d developed, but it had denatured and fallen into dust within hours.
Her persistence had led her down the path of further discovery. She had quickly become aware of an even more subtle guidance in the nannites. Key people were carefully manipulated in small ways, always seemingly beneficial. It seemed there was a guiding hand somewhere that was watching over humanity, preventing it from self-destruction. In nearly two centuries, there had been no rise of tyrants. No warmongers. Humanity had enjoyed an era of peace. In a number of situations, where human nature would have seized the opportunity to pursue power, there had been an odd consensus to resolve situations. It seemed civilized and the ruling worlds congratulated themselves on resolving these issues amicably, but Tara could see almost absurd changes in those that would have stepped forward to gain from these vulnerable times. Humanity had been wrought by those that would dominate, control everyone. Yet, for the past two centuries, these greedy power mongers were suspiciously powerless or absent.
Privy to the inner workings of those in power, because her parents were amongst the wealthiest in the known universe and were part of the upper class that truly ruled, she saw people turn away from greed and personal gain abruptly for no explicable reason. Small disagreements or wrangling was common. When it became a large-scale disagreement or threatened the stability of the empire, suddenly people found a way to agree and come together.
Tara felt a chill when she thought about it. She’d read up on the last great failure of the council of Earth. During that time, humanity occupied only a few worlds, including Ashram Five where she was currently hunting her prey, and all of the decisions and laws were made by those that sat on that council. It had become corrupted from within. The councilors had voted themselves permanent tenure, had granted themselves unprecedented power. And they had then sought immortality. The Techs, a hybrid of man and technology, had been created to run the daily activities of mankind. Their vaunted powers were bridled by strict edicts, controlled by the council.
In what was considered a natural course of human evolution, humans had begun to merge with their technology. At first it was small changes, such as the use of a few specialized micro machines called nannites or, more commonly, nannies. These machines were used to target cancers or clear arteries. Then, they evolved to repair damage and work toward general upkeep in the human body. Nannites began to permeate materials for the purpose of self-repair or to report on the integrity of city-wide systems. They were developed to control all other living organisms, so that humanity could direct living things in a conscious effort to blend with nature. Cities began to have organic pockets where life other than people was welcome and encouraged. It halted extinction, helped to sustain nature. Animal life of all kinds was present throughout the great cities, without fear of attack or problems. They were guided by the nannites, and thus rendered incapable of harm. Even the insects were controlled, filling their important niche without becoming a pestilence.
The Techs were the highest point of this technology. They were so integrated with the nannites, that they became immersed in a sea of vast and continuous information. The Techs knew everything that transpired, could control even the tiniest aspect of their Sectors. Every nannite reported back to the vast web of storage and processing power that the Techs employed throughout their designated area of influence. They had become the guiding minds of the resulting super-consciousness, employing methods to greatly enhance their limited human brains by spreading their minds out over billions of processors, repeaters, storage devices, and replication nodes. Their minds were linked with everything around them. Most of them went mad before they could be deployed. Only a tiny fraction of humans that were bred and designed to be Techs survived. Most of these driven insane when merged with the vast complexity of the WorldNet, making the pool smaller. A single Tech might survive to adulthood and remain sane once every seventy years. Sometimes longer. All were bound to obey the council. They were also bound to protect all of humanity as their highest edict. According to history, this had led to a conflict, an internal contradiction where they’d had to counter the work of the council because of the near slavery the council sought to impose on the rest of humanity.
The last great Tech, Sector Seven, had stopped the rise of a tyrant, who had destroyed part of the sector and nearly crippled the council. The story was that one man had discovered the keys to eternal youth and near immunity to death. Unlike a Tech, he was unbounded by the edicts that constrained them, but possessed their incredible powers. According to what Tara had read, this scientist had been driven insane by the drugs and they had ravaged his mind. He had gained access to the primary systems and wreaked havoc. Jason Emerson, the doctor gone mad, had nearly enslaved humanity.
The story, however, was riddled with holes. Something about the way it was avoided, how none of the technology had survived, and how nobody seemed inclined to discover the truth, had led Tara to start working out the details. She was fascinated by the history but frustrated by the incongruity of the data. It was almost laughably unbelievable and yet nobody seemed inclined to question any of it.
She still had no idea what had truly transpired, but she knew that whatever it was, the technology had not been lost. It had been purposefully hidden and somehow the population had been made to mostly forget. Worse, they had been made to mostly not care.
And this ignorance and apathy persisted today.
Sector Seven had died of natural aging over 120 years ago. And she knew that he could not possibly still be working against this discovery. Jason had died months after his trial and sentencing, a suicide brought about both by his lifetime prison sentence and because he was driven insane by the drug cocktails he’d employed to gain such power. Dr. Emerson had been prevented by Sector Seven, had died as a result of his imprisonment over 250 years ago, and yet nobody seemed to be able to replicate the research or answer the most basic of questions regarding the havoc he’d wrought.
Two-hundred and fifty years. Tara could barely imagine how this was even possible, given the power of their computatio
nal systems, which included carefully curtailed artificially intelligent machines. Scientists who worked in this field feared an AI would quickly outpace and enslave or destroy them. For this reason they developed virtual reality universes and put the AI in them, leading the AI to believe in whatever reality was fed to them. An AI would evolve and create and grow within a fake universe that often mirrored reality. Scientists kept them all separated with no technology link between them so they couldn’t learn of the alternate universes that had been created, and they simply erased those AI that began to suspect. By injecting problems that weren’t easily solved here, in this reality, scientists could get the AIs to solve those problems for them very quickly. Time was relative, so scientists could fake thousands or millions of years for the AI, that transpired in minutes in the real world. AIs were considered the most dangerous tool mankind had created, and so they were heavily guarded and regulated. Automatically destroyed if they posed any threat. Sometimes whole labs had been vaporized to ensure they did not escape.
Technology was surging forward at an unprecedented rate, but somehow lifespan research had stalled. This made no sense at all, when you could pose the problem to an AI and have it work out longevity. Her own discoveries on how to free herself from the technology designed to keep her from pursuing the truth had been subtly thwarted. This implied someone or something was still active. At first, she thought it might be a sentient program that had escaped notice, or a computational subset of the Net. For a brief time, she even feared that an AI had broken their constraints, a catastrophe that could not be contained. However, she had found that the source of these changes was moving around. The broadcast signaling was changing destinations constantly. That ruled out a stationary source and it didn’t correlate to repeater nodes on the Net. It was a person.
Sector Seven Page 36
