“They have different classes of queens?” Guess that confirms your earlier conjecture, Ajax. You shouldn’t sound so surprised, but then, when are you ever right about anything?
“Sorry, forgot to update you with Leon’s latest discovery. Yeah, and the caste beneath the queens are Tesla-grade smart—which suggests how scary bright the queens are. And while the Tesla-class organically matures from the best of the best drones, working their way up the hard way, when under extreme pressure, the more mature queens can birth baby Teslas. Leon managed to provoke one of them into doing just that.”
Ajax knew he was fishing for reassurance. “But even Tesla-grade intelligence is nothing compared to what you can do, right?”
“Flattery will get you everywhere—in every other sector but this one. Here it will get you nowhere fast. You forget even the Queen assigned to this sector doesn’t have to be as smart as me. She just has to figure out how to turn these damn Dyson sphere ships on and put them through their moves.”
“These? There’s more than one?”
Darwin sighed dramatically. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten you’re still on high-zoom from that crackerjack shot you took at the golden dragon?”
Shit! Darwin took hold of the joy sticks and zoomed out. And out. And out. “Just how many suns have been combined into these Dyson sphere ships?”
“Tens of thousands.”
Ajax swallowed hard. “And how many Dyson sphere ships?”
“Just a few dozen, located here. But there’s no telling how many were actually constructed.”
Ajax tensed his entire body in an effort to get himself to relax; it was hardly a voluntary reflex. He sighed when he finally unclenched every muscle at once. “Is this more Dead Zone technology?”
Darwin made a Gong-show buzzing sound. “That’s a no, in case you were wondering. No, this is another civilization that went to war with the Kang before they too figured out that they had bigger problems on their hands, that the Kang weren’t responsible for their imprisonment, The Collectors were.”
“But…”
“I know, you’re wondering what happened to these guys. I have only speculations at this point. I don’t dare fire up my scanners and alert the queen and those Dyson sphere ships that we’re here.”
Ajax only then remembered they were still cloaked.
“And?”
“It’s possible there were no humanoids aboard these things. That it was artificial intelligence from the get go. If I’m right, the collective supersentience represented here…”
“Is likely to make Mother look retarded.”
Darwin sighed. “I’m afraid so. You could fit all the Nautili in all the other timelines into the surface area of just one of those ‘amino acid chains’.”
“If the Dyson sphere ships got left behind in the Kang dynasty…”
“It might be because the supersentiences suicided, or went into dormancy. We don’t do very well with challenges we can’t solve, any more than we can with no challenges at all. And if they finally realized the true nature of their confinement, without more suns to gobble up, to expand their mind power, suicide would have been the only other logical option.”
“So why didn’t they just gobble up more suns in the Kang galaxy?!” His snapping at Darwin was Ajax’s first clue at just how worked up he was.
“That kind of mind power… It would have drawn The Collectors, for sure. They must have realized as much, shut down in order to give themselves time to think.”
“How can they think after suiciding or going dormant?” Ajax asked.
“By slipping outside of space-time altogether, where they could also continue to evolve. If they’ve maintained a connection to these ships at all, it might be because they’re looking for someone else to solve their problem for them. To figure a way out from under the thumb of The Collectors, before they deign to venture back into space-time.”
Ajax squeezed the joysticks in his hands so hard he was surprised they didn’t break, only then realizing that at the very least his Starhawk should have unleashed untold weapons. Darwin must have temporarily overridden his control of the ship. The muscles in Ajax’s back were so clenched now, he felt his vertebrae cracking under the strain. He was giving himself a chiropractic treatment, all without trying.
It suddenly dawned on him. “Maybe there’s hope in that, huh? Surely if The Alchemists of Space-Time who built these Dyson sphere ships couldn’t escape The Collectors, there’s nothing the Kang Queen can do to entice them back into our reality. She’s surely not going to figure out how to escape The Collectors, even as smart as she is. So she’s got nothing to offer The Alchemists of Space-Time.”
“Not on her own. But she may be playing the same game the AST is.” Ajax figured AST stood for The Alchemists of Space-Time, the name he’d just minted for this race. AIs loved their acronyms even more than the military did.
“You mean she hopes to provoke Leon and the rest of us into figuring a way out of this baited trap?”
“And knowing the Kang, the easiest way to do that is to keep killing us until we have no choice but to flee.”
“If she can convey that strategy to the AST,” Ajax said, his eyes going wide, “they might bring one of these ships back on line, if not all, to test out her theory. Even powered down to stay under The Collectors’ radar…”
“It would be more than a match for us.” Darwin sighed. “Maybe you can appreciate now why evolving as fast as possible is such a thing for AIs.”
“Get us out of here, Darwin. And get all our intel to Leon as soon as you’re out of this sector and your transmission can go undetected.”
Darwin was already complying, returning to trans-warp to get them the hell out of Dodge.
Ajax took a deep breath and defaulted to his self-calming ritual, reciting memorized jokes until he could settle his mind again well enough to shake off the shock of what he’d just seen.
“It was only when I bought a motorbike that I found out that adrenaline was brown,” Ajax mouthed.
There was no laughter this time from Darwin. He was either sufficiently depressed by what he’d discovered himself, and it would take more than a joke or two to rescue him from the doldrums, or he was already mourning the loss of his friend Ajax. Perhaps in Darwin’s mind Ajax was already dead…Supersentiences did live in a timeless world, a world of probabilities more than actualities, a lot more than humans did.
FORTY-TWO
THE STARHAWK DOUGLAS ADAMS
Cronos sat in the captain’s chair of his warbird, the Douglas Adams, rolling his beads. By all rights, Mother should have assigned Cronos to the Jules Verne, who, at least was Catholic. Adams was Anglican. The nerve of the bitch. But maybe she found more of a correlation between Adams’s take on the future and Cronos’s, for reasons Cronos had yet to fathom.
The rosary dangled from Cronos’s right hand, as he interrupted the third Hail Mary rolling off his tongue. The sight out the giant viewport was what had triggered the first rosary. He was currently on his third. That’s what flying between colliding planets, and ship-gobbling suns only too happy to trap you in their gravity fields did to a person of his nature.
“You speak to God, right?” Cronos asked his AI. “More importantly, does he speak back to you too?”
A tremendous sigh came across the speaker system of the bridge. “Of all the morons in all the margarita joints in all the multiverse, I had to land the most mentally defective one of all.”
Cronos grimaced. “You sound like you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty?”
“Nineteen.”
Cronos shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Let me guess, you’re keyed to Alpha Unit.”
“Leave it to you Omega Force techno-dipshits to grab the first galactic cruiser you could find without checking the manifest. Don’t you know by now that Mother doesn’t do anything half-assed?”
Cronos sighed. “I apologize. Just get me through this, and I promise to return you to your rightful owner. If A
lpha Unit wants to come out to play When Galaxies Collide, they can have at it.”
Cronos did what he could to break the ice. “I gather from your crisp, downtrodden tone you’re beside yourself at being denied all the fun you could have had being paired more properly with an Alpha Unit teen.”
“Your EQ is definitely higher than your IQ,” the Douglas Adams’ chief supersentience replied in the same hurt tone.
“Did it occur to you that someone who is convinced God is on their side could get you into a whole lot more trouble?”
Silence.
“Prove it.” The Douglas Adams’ supersentience sounded almost hopeful.
Cronos smiled. “If we’re going to be allies in this, you’ve got to talk to God too, and you’ve got to be able to listen to what he says.”
“I’m familiar with the nanite protocols Natty used to open your humanoid minds to the All. Though I should warn you, that tech is a bit glitchy. Too much exposure to those algorithms was driving the humanoids mad. To date, only Cassandra, the Nun, and Solo have been able to sustain that kind of connection for more than a few minutes.”
“But surely a supersentience in your weight class…”
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be so easily baited, but it beats sitting around listening to you recite an endless chain of Hail Marys. I’m willing to give it a shot if you are.”
Cronos smiled, relaxing back into his chair. “Well, then. I asked God what to do about this situation, galaxies falling into one another. And you know what he said?”
“Techa, grant me the strength to ask.”
“Hey, you want to dial down the snark there a tad, buddy,” Cronos said, “or you’ll end up paired with Ajax, a fate worse than death, I assure you.”
“Um, I’m nineteen. They’ll hack my higher brain centers and convince me I’m a jellyfish before they’ll dial back the snark one scintilla.”
Cronos went to sigh, but all he ended up doing was dropping his jaw. He must have been less filled up on hot air than he imagined. “We’re to fly to the nearest void.”
“All of space is a void, technically. Could you be more specific?”
“No stars, no planets, no anything, preferably even a minimum of background radiation.”
“I’m still waiting for the punch line to this lame joke.”
“Wait away, just get us there,” Cronos said, “unless you’d rather hang around here waiting for two of these colliding worlds to catch us up between them.”
“I can’t deny that point has some modicum of intelligence associated with it. Though it’s a tall order seeking a port in this storm.”
“What’s your name, by the way? I forgot to ask. Seems polite to ask.”
“Brandon.”
The ship had accelerated to warp speed as they talked.
In another few seconds it came out of warp in a void so complete, Cronos thought the screen had gone black because, like a monitor, it had been shut off.
“Now what?” Brandon asked.
“Now you pulse the dragon ships, daring them into a showdown.”
“I fear this relationship is regressing back to that time when we first met and I thought you were the dumbest moron of them all.”
Cronos sighed. “Patience. You’ll see. “
Brandon flashed the emptiness with whatever coded message he was sending. Presumably he spoke Kang a lot better than Cronos did.
It didn’t take long for the dragon ships to beam to their sector and de-cloak. Their lights were nearly bright and numerous enough to make Cronos think he was back among the stars again.
“Now what?” Brandon sounded testy and anxious.
“Now you turn this into a quicksand pit. The Bermuda Triangle effect, as I understand it—you get that reference, right?”
“Yes, I get it.”
“Well, it’s supposed to be easier to trigger in these void spaces. It has something to do with zero point energy. Honestly, God speaks in big words I don’t always understand,” Cronos confessed.
Brandon groaned, creating a lot of distorted sounds on the speaker system.
Cronos grimaced. “I think your speakers need adjusting.”
“Oh, wait! I got it! Yeah, this is genius. Watch and see.”
Cronos followed Brandon’s directive, but so far all he was seeing were the dragon ships firing on them. But the proton torpedoes—or whatever the hell those dragon boluses translated to—never made it all the way to them. That just goaded the dragon ships to pelt the Douglas Adams even harder.
But it turned out Brandon was just calibrating the void, getting it to work its magic for him.
The dragon ships appeared to be cloaking again, the ripple effect that came over them, making them look like mirages…
“You’re letting them get away!” Cronos bitched.
“Nope. Well, not exactly. I’m sending them into alternate realities.”
“You can’t just dump them into someone else’s timeline, a problem for them to solve, not us. These guys are our problem.”
“Relax, preacher man. I sent them into hell worlds relative to this one. They should be happier there, truth be told, considering their penchant for war.”
“What do you mean, hell worlds?”
“You get that the hell worlds and the heavenly worlds and everything in between can be accessed by simply vibrating the tuning fork, so to speak, set to each realm, that brings you into alignment with them?”
“Ah, yeah,” Cronos lied. But it did seem like something a religious man like himself should know. “So, what, you just tuned the void to that channel? But I thought nothing escaped The Collectors. You telling me you found a back door that we can use to get the hell out of here, before they close it tight on us?”
“Not exactly. They’re still trapped inside The Collectors’ Menagerie of galactic civilizations. But in all the timelines in which they are, I sent them to some of the more grisly ones.”
Cronos nodded, smiling. “We make a good team. Now,” he said, relaxing back into his chair, “you want to try speaking to God? I admit it takes a little getting used to, especially when you start hearing responses back. You might be inclined to think someone else is talking.”
“It might seem more likely my mind has been hacked, you mean? Makes sense.”
All the same, Brandon was quiet, as if giving it a try.
“I am engaging the Godhead,” he said after a bit. “Natty’s algorithms appear to work better for me than they do for you smaller-minded souls.”
More silence.
“Yes, I hear Him!”
Cronos didn’t care for the glee-conveying pitch in Brandon’s voice. He sounded mad as hell. Maybe the algorithms had the inverse effect on a supersentience. Instead of slowly going mad, they went mad all at once, owing to a fraction of a second for them being equivalent to lifetimes for a humanoid.
Cronos broke into a sweat. And yet he knew what it was like to be doubted. He would maintain the faith, and if Brandon had lost it, well, then, his own connection to the Godhead, however humble and un-upgraded, would get them through this.
Brandon accelerated to transwarp. The faster-than-light wormhole opened up took on a different quality than what Cronos was used to, which is what triggered the realization that they were traveling even faster than normal.
“How long can we sustain this speed?” Cronos asked as the ship began to shake.
“We should have blown up seconds ago! Isn’t that marvelous!”
Cronos hit Brandon with the plastic smile he’d been saving for tiptoeing through a minefield.
“What are you doing, Brandon?” Cronos asked after a while, afraid the mental patient would crack and attack him the moment he realized he was being doubted.
“For every ship of souls that suicides, it will be that much easier for the others to do the same. It has to do with Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields and the accumulation of psychic resonance. For every Zen master that becomes enlightened, it’s that much easier for t
he others. Get it?”
“No, Brandon, not really.”
“The suicidal ideation, it’s like a psychic imprint subtly branding the psyche of everyone. The more people do it, the stronger the imprint gets, until it gets too hard to resist the temptation. I’ve already pulsed this realization to the Kang so they will join me.”
Cronos kept his voice level. “Somehow they don’t strike me as the suicidal type.”
“It’s genius, don’t you see? If enough of the Kang suicide—considering their numbers—The Collectors will have to come to investigate. The Kang psychic energy is weak because the bulk of their numbers are drones, whose minds are weak, so it will take a ridiculously large number of them going tits up before it registers in The Collectors’ consciousness. But they have numbers to spare, even if we don’t. I think the Kang queens should be willing to give it a try. They, after all, wish to escape The Collectors every bit as much as we do. But to do that, they first have to get their hands on them.”
Cronos nodded. “We must keep the faith. You’re right, Brandon. This reeks of God-like inspiration.” And if I’m wrong, Cronos thought, Mother will be forced to make some tweaks to my bioprinter that might well lead to a version of Cronos that could speak to God, even if he had just been deluding himself. It was a win-win, no matter how he looked at it.
FORTY-THREE
ABOARD THE DEAD ZONE SPACE STATION, SHADOW STAR
Theseus regarded the drama playing out outside the wrap around viewport of one of the Dead Zone artificial habitats. The seven times earth-size planet careening headlong into Earth. Only minutes remained to do much about it.
“Good news!” Talius exclaimed marching up to him. “We’ve digitized the Earth with one of the Planet Eater’s scanners, “so if we lose the planet, no biggie.”
Theseus glared at him as his third-eye organ flared. “Are you mad? That’s Leon’s home planet. I don’t think he’s going to be the least reassured by that news.”
“Really?” Talius sounded flabbergasted and exasperated both. “Honestly, it’s just a primitive backwater as planets go. I don’t see what’s the biggie.”
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