Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  She tried to predict what Cassandra would do, if Cassandra were the nun. It was easy enough; she’d try her best to sabotage that membrane she was passing through, hack it enough to give the Nautilus a way in and out without anyone knowing.

  But Cassandra would fail. She just didn’t have the necessary aptitudes. The nun, on the other hand…might be able to install the malware she needed to serve a variety of purposes, taking advantage of the AI’s crude sentience.

  Of course, that “crude” sentience would have been engineered to thwart just the kind of malware attacks the nun was contemplating.

  Still, she had to try.

  If nothing else, a pinprick is all they would need to get Theta Team in here to explore this graveyard further. For the nun was not specialized to do what they could do—make sense of complex ecosystems as living, breathing things—even these ailing ones. That data would be far less useless than the static, lifeless blueprints and engineering designs she had stored in her head. Even if the All could have given her access to more information, her mind just wasn’t engineered to process it.

  The nun synthesized her malware, with enough Trojan Horse viruses in the outercoat to make it seem like a welcome addition to cell membrane protection.

  With any luck the ruse would last just long enough…

  The nun beamed straight into the membrane next.

  Downloaded her malware.

  Even as she felt her brain and her physical form being gobbled up by cell membrane security.

  She would be dead soon enough.

  She would not make it to the other side.

  Only Solo now could be counted on to make the details of her hack, if successful, known to the Nautilus and its crew.

  It was time for an Our Father prayer, while she still could.

  She had been modeled on the Catholic School nun that had terrorized Natty in his youth, as a way to help him face his demons, at a time when that was a mission-critical assignment to weather one of the many challenges of The Star Gate.

  And she was as unable to transcend her baser programming, she supposed, as the rest of them. “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

  ***

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  THE SITUATION ROOM

  The nun never got to finish her prayer. Leon felt angry on her behalf; it seemed that the universal mind could at least have afforded her that small comfort.

  “Did the malware take, Solo?”

  “Yes. We’ve got a way in, for now. I suggest we jump on it.”

  Leon craned to Theseus, the Theta Team go-between at the table. “We’ll deploy immediately, of course,” Theseus said. He was already on the move without Leon needing to say anything.

  Theseus exited the room before hearing what else Leon had to say, figuring, no doubt, that whatever it was, it didn’t concern him. Even if Leon had specific instructions about how Theta Team was to carry out their mission, he wasn’t nearly as qualified as they were to make that decision. So his orders would have been ignored anyway. Leon sighed in frustration. He’d been down this path with Theta Team before.

  Leon glanced around at the demoralized faces and realized he needed to address the group. Even Natty, customarily excited by impossible challenges—you might say it was the only thing that got him out of bed in the morning—looked unusually down in the dumps. The boy wonder, now twenty-three years of age, with thick curly black locks and the rest of the good looks and physique to go with Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, owing to his personality, might well remain a boy-man for the rest of his life, never completing the transition fully into adulthood. In fact, he appeared to be on the verge of a psychotic break the way his eyes and face were set.

  On The Star Gate mission, a diplomat from one of the other timelines had made it aboard the Nautilus, defected in fact, from a timeline in which Natty had gone mad trying to carry the weight of humanity as only he could. Even assisted with his “doll house” of well-chosen Special Forces operatives, they were not enough to take sufficient pressure off of him to procure a rabbit out of the hat time and time again. All Leon could think of now was, in how many timelines had Natty lost it? Were they in one of them when he had? And was he looking at the first line to snap that had been tethering Natty to the balloon that held his spirits aloft?

  His wife, Laney, more nurse than wife most days, tasked with holding Natty together and realizing his all-important role in the scheme of things, refused to leave him, though parenting was not what she’d signed on for. Her plain, undecorated beauty—she refused to wear makeup—was further played down by her casual wear of blue jeans and pullover, as always. She squeezed Natty’s hand for moral support, though Natty’s eyes suggested his mind was a million miles away, and he likely was no more conscious of her beside him now than a coma patient—the other likely thing he might become to escape the looming psychotic break.

  Leon shifted his attention back to the rest of the group, looking to save who he could save, before they too went mad from what they’d seen.

  Speaking to everyone at once, he said, “We’re going to have to dig deep on this one. Remember, the clone teams on Earth have their roles to play, and they will come through for us.”

  He sighed. “As for myself, I will be risking timeline sickness for the greater good.”

  He could hear the groans around the table. “Please tell me things aren’t that bad yet,” Patent said.

  “You saw the same mind scans I saw, Patent. You tell me.”

  Leon shifted his attention back to the group as a whole. “The rest of you will get your assignments soon enough. You won’t know how to further tweak your training or what to prepare for exactly, until we gather more intel. Until then, rely on the fourth-brain protocol Natty engendered toward the end of the last mission. Use your encounters with one another, guided by Mother’s interventions, to get ready. That’s where the Nautilus supersentience and the ecosystem of lifeforms aboard this ship will pay the most dividends.”

  The fourth brain—as Natty explained it—was an extension of the three human brains, the most primitive reptilian brain, the mammalian brain that had grown up around it, enveloping it, and last of all, evolutionarily speaking, the forebrain, seat of reason, taking us beyond the primitive fears of the reptilian brain, beyond the family and tribal alliances of the mammalian brain which put the tribe ahead of the greater good. The forebrain used reason and intuition to integrate those more primitive brains in a far more complex web of reasoning.

  More transcendental still was the fourth brain—the ecosystem of interconnected lifeforms aboard the Nautilus, themselves dialed into Mother. And it was their most formidable asset against any enemy.

  If anything could save their butts this time out, that would be it.

  “Meeting adjourned.” Leon exited without looking back. He realized the rest of them would need more time to get their bodies to respond to signals from their brain once again. Shock was an ugly thing.

  Fighting your way through it in the presence of an enemy was uglier still.

  ***

  Leon took stock of the sobering facts of their situation as he left the situation room, hiking the hall circling about the inner perimeter of the Nautilus.

  So far they’d just been exposed to the equivalent of a children’s rumpus room, and a graveyard civilization. Hardly the best of what the enemy had to offer.

  And already, his two most powerful warriors had been totally neutralized.

  All without even setting off the enemy’s security systems.

  And the nun and Cassandra were right; there could really just be one explanation for that. They just weren’t considered enough of a threat.

  The alien civilization may well have to contend with bacteria on their side of the barrier more formidable than Leon and his people.

  Earth could well be destroyed—even with a fleet of Nautili to protect it, each with technology unfathomable relative to what they had on Earth—as Mother’s mind existed in Singularity State
. And all without the enemy knowing the latest humanoids were even at their gates.

  And should they actually manage to get the enemy’s attention?

  Well, that could only open up rungs of Dante’s hell even Dante couldn’t imagine.

  Leon was surprised he hadn’t gone mad. No wonder his team felt a bit shaken.

  EIGHT

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  “Honey?” DeWitt knocked at the sliding doors that still refused to let him inside, hating himself for sounding every bit as whiny as Ajax had in their debrief.

  He kept hammering and pleading, when the silence on the other side grew deafening.

  “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll become an entirely different person if you like. Hell, I’ll have the Nautilus print me up whatever personality you can possibly stand, just give me one more chance.”

  “We’re divorced, DeWitt, and for good reason. You had all the one more chances you’re going to get.”

  “But think of our son!” He hated playing the son card, but the truth was he’d say and do anything right now to claw his way back into her good graces. For the record, when he awoke, he remembered being married to her, not being divorced. It was just possible they were all feeling the effects of timeline sickness to various degrees.

  From inside their rejuvenation tanks they could “dream” life as it was in parallel universes, taking full advantage of the Nautilus’s ability to communicate across timelines. In dream state they were more able to assimilate the information without it frying their brains, without the shock of what they saw causing all kinds of neurochemical pushback that compelled them to lose it in this timeline. But the technique was hardly without complications. It had a lot to do with how much you indulged this strange form of meditation.

  Omega Force tended to over-indulge as a rule. They could play out their battles in other timelines, like war games, learning from them better than they could with any VR, and from their successes and their failures, without getting nearly so close up and personal as the poor bastard version of themselves actually stuck in the other timelines. For those in this timeline, their nano-saturated bodies inside the rejuvenation tanks would even store the new muscle memories, enhancing their reflexes, improving their judgement, just as with actual battle exercises.

  It was one of the few things Omega Force went in for more than Alpha Unit as regards nextgen tech. The Alpha Unit teens were too busy enjoying what they could do aboard the Nautilus that they customarily could only do in VR and AR. For them, the Omega Force practice of meditating on other timelines seemed more of a regression than a step forward.

  “The reason you’re not coming in here is I intend to keep our son well away from you!” Corin blared from the other side of the door. “Why do you think I divorced you in the first place? He was following in your footsteps, putting himself in the heat of battle as if he were one of you. He is like an even more irresponsible version of you, just when I thought that wasn’t possible!” She said in another crescendo of emotion which hit DeWitt like the crashing surf of a storm on the heels of a tsunami.

  DeWitt groaned and banged his head against the seam where the metal doors to their once shared private suite came together. “You can’t keep me from my son, Corin! I won’t stand for it.”

  “Well, if the Nautilus thought I should be ignored, she’d open the doors for you. If a supersentience thinks you’re out of line, that’s telling you something!”

  DeWitt sighed out the last bit of life he had in him. Time to regroup and consider the best way around this insurmountable hurdle he’d made for himself by his fools-rush-in behavior that his wife didn’t think was appropriate for a military man, far less the father of her child—who she expected to make it back home alive.

  The last time out, Leon had to stall her with an avatar, because DeWitt had died during The Star Gate mission. And Mother, the Nautilus’s chief supersentience, couldn’t be bothered to bioprint DeWitt a new body with memory downloads up till his last moments in life. Nauti could be that way, responding to human requests on an ad hoc basis, as it suited her. When Corin caught on to what was going on… She skinned Leon alive. And she still liked him. No surprise, his payback torture was over relatively quickly, whereas DeWitt’s seemed never-ending.

  “I guess in terms of the bigger picture, DeWitt,” he mumbled to himself, hobbling away with his head held low, “what’s getting around a Stage 3 civilization compared to getting around the wife?”

  Tears streaming down his face, he rubbed his eyes and walked blind until he could stem the sluice of water coming down the pike from his tear ducts well enough to see again.

  He was a square-jawed bloke who could take as many blows to the chin as need be at one time, with a hot bod he’d never lost, whose pinup still adorned a hall in their suite aboard the Nautilus. He had that much going for him. How much pressure like that could she really take? Or was pinup psychology more of a guy thing? It was time to reread Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; if anything, the never out of print book seemed timelier than ever.

  ***

  DeWitt’s son, Thor, sat in his room, on the floor, with his knees folded up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his legs. Most of the time, being eleven-years-old wasn’t half bad. Especially aboard the Nautilus. Natty’s father had built the spaceship for Natty, fully stocked with Theta Team, as a toy chest full of toys he could open and have everything he needed to explore eternity.

  But it was Thor who put the doll house concept to its real test. As far as he was concerned, these grownups had no sense at all of how to make the most of this largesse.

  And now that the storm between his parents had blown over, he could get back to making far more use of this ship than the adults could.

  He stood, wiped his eyes, and summoned his chief minion. “Frog Doll, where are you?”

  Frog Doll hopped off the top shelf of stuffed animals, where he traditionally hid himself away from traipsing humans, and joined Thor on the floor. Standing upright on his two rear big-hopping legs, he still only reached to about Thor’s waist. And despite his blue-tinged rather than-green-tinged Kermit-the-frog-like getup—he was painted more like a tiger shark—he was a fairly advanced sentience, brighter than most humans, but programmed to be a kid’s companion. He wasn’t half bad at the job.

  “Well, Frog Doll, it’s high time we got into some trouble around here. I feel like I’m at risk of losing my kid status if I act reasonable a moment longer.”

  “I feel it only fair to tell you that kid is not a synonym for ‘horse’s ass’ or ‘complete dipshit’ or…”

  “I catch your drift, Frog Doll. Please desist with the lecture. We have a lot to accomplish and little time to accomplish it in.”

  “I thought we were in a holding pattern, until Leon and the rest of the brain trust could figure out how to possibly get around a Stage 3 civilization. As if there’s any solving that puzzle.”

  “Let’s leave standing still to the military grunts. Come on, we’ve got to get down to Earth.” Thor was already suiting up with his flexible body armor and armaments.

  “Um, the place currently under asteroid bombardment? I’m going to take a pass on that suicide plan and wait for you to come up with a far less efficient one, that I have at least a one percent chance of surviving.”

  “Not you, too. I’m drowning in reasonableness! I’ll have you know the impulsive part of us is the smart part. The right brain sees in an instant what the left brain will take months to see. Or so I’ve been told. Whatever the hell that means. First they tell me I have four brains—thanks to the Nautilus ecosystem—and then they tell me I have two. They can add worse than I can.”

  Thor was on the move, ransacking his room for whatever additional gear he felt he needed before beaming down to Earth.

  Talking absently, as he rummaged through his toy chest, tossing items, he said, “I assume you already have any number of schematics that can be of use to us when we’re on the ground. Energy gri
ds for the planet, key installations of military value, weapons stockpiles, things of that nature?”

  “Of course. I’m not the idiot you are.”

  “Got it!” Thor bolted upward with the device in his hands and a big smile on his face.

  “Got what?” Frog Doll hopped closer to get a better look.

  “A prodigy finder, calibrated to find other child superstars like myself. Just think what mischief we can get into together relative to what I can do on my lonesome.”

  “I’m afraid even the Nautilus supersentience doesn’t have a brain big enough to properly recoil from the horror of such an idea.”

  “No time like the present. Let’s get the hell out of here before the parents catch on.”

  “There’s no way the Nautilus chief supersentience is going to sign off on that. Proof, there is a god, by the way.”

  “Then hit up the Mars war God supersentience for a quick assist. He was amenable that last time.”

  “That’s because you have an epic knack for inviting disaster that would humble Homer. So of course he was happy to throw you at the enemy last time. But we’re not going across enemy lines.”

  Footsteps were coming toward the door.

  “Quick!” Thor stage-whispered, “before I throw you over for the talking teddy bear.”

  Thor craned toward the stuffed animal.

  Frog Doll sighed. “You’re right. I’d never live down the shame of it.”

  Thor and Frog Doll were dematerializing from the room.

  By the time Corin opened the door, they were already gone. “Where is that kid off to now?” Corin groaned. “You really need to rethink living in a spaceship big enough to swallow up a city, at least until he’s a bit older.”

  NINE

  EARTH

  LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO

  “Where are we?” Thor asked, continuing with his stage-whispering. “Wherever it is, it’s cold, dark, and creepy. You couldn’t do better than this?”

  “You wanted access to military assets. We’re outside Los Alamos Labs, one of the military brain trusts for the planet. These are the people who came up with the atomic bomb. I’m frightened to think of what they’re up to now.”