“I’m guessing the former,” Cassandra said.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve just lost control of this craft. Mother is stepping in to interact with whatever that is directly. If I don’t miss my guess, we’re about to be reassigned another mission in this intergalactic war.”
Leon could affirm that the Nautilus had materialized, visible now in the viewport. Or at least one of the Nautili had; he couldn’t be entirely sure it was the one from their timeline, as opposed to a visiting Nautilus from another timeline assisting with what was going on here.
“Stepping in? Without orders from me? Oh, no, she isn’t.” Leon’s voice flared. “Just who does she think is in charge during wartime?”
Cassandra glared at him as if she was checking for signs of an aneurism. “Get a grip, Leon. That’s one supersentience talking to another in all likelihood. Just what do you think you have to contribute to the conversation?”
Leon sighed. “Find out for me what else she has been doing behind my back, please? With her mind occupied with that thing, she might be more amenable to any backdoor approach you might take.”
Cassandra complied. That look she gave when accessing her mindchip and getting it to do things even Patent’s UFO dashboard wasn’t about to do for her, suggested as much.
After a while she showed him something besides the whites of her eyes. “Mother has granted access to her supersentience to Dillon, Hailey’s father.”
“Wait, aren’t those two on Earth? Bad enough I’ve got bit players entering this battle uninvited, and now you’re saying they’ve got access to Mother even I don’t have?”
“Dillon has been given the highest access. She scanned him and bioprinted a body for him on the Nautilus, which she supersaturated with our most powerful nanites.”
“You’re saying…”
“He’s now living in Singularity Time with her. Months, if not years of thinking at his normal speeds, now take up but seconds.”
Leon took a deep breath. “You said earlier that he’s some genius cosmological physicist?”
“IQ 350, by Mother’s estimates. Though that has now been greatly amplified with access to her supersentience.”
Leon’s every muscle tightened in a pulsating wave like one of those cuttlefish changing colors as it moved from one habitat to another to better blend.
“And just what has he accomplished with this access?” Leon asked defensively. He was still keeping an eye on that “conversation” between the Nautilus and the “jellyfish.”
“Dillon has provided her the underlying mathematics that will help her keep worlds and suns from colliding even with galaxies this close in proximity. She has farmed out the intel to the other Nautili who are now doing their best to protect your precious Milky Way Galaxy real estate.”
Leon actually relaxed on the news. “How much of an impact are they having?”
“Collisions between suns and worlds is already down thirty percent.”
Leon flared again, glared at her. “That’s still tens of thousands of suns and hundreds of thousands of worlds we’re losing! I will not be privy to a mass extinction event that makes what happened to the Amazon back on Earth look good!”
“She’s looking to recruit Hailey into the mix, but she wants Dillon’s permission first. It appears he’s still rather fragile, even in his bioprinted state. She was afraid to mess with any of his algorithms for not understanding how exactly the recipe to his genius worked.”
“Just what does Nauti think Hailey can do?”
Cassandra groaned. Leon didn’t have to guess why. Explaining the facts of life to him wasn’t high up on her priority list; killing people was, the more the merrier.
“Both parties contain thinking styles she can’t exactly duplicate with her algorithms—at least not yet. And both have a very different kind of genius.”
“Judging from the child’s penchant for getting into places she shouldn’t, she might well facilitate communications with lifeforms this alien, like the jellyfish, crossing cultural and language barriers as well,” Leon mumbled, putting two and two together for himself.
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Hailey had levitated off the floor of the Nautilus’s bridge, facing the port screen on the other side of which was the giant jellyfish. Whatever energy exchange was going on between them had nullified the Nautilus’s artificial gravity. Static energy throughout Hailey’s hair had each long strand struggling to get as far as possible from the other, forever keeping her hair in motion about her. Her entire body pulsed with energy and she glowed so brightly that even with the lights off on the bridge the brightness partly obscured the giant glowing jellyfish-like lifeform she was attempting to communicate with.
The nano-enhanced bioprinted form Hailey had been given just so her body-double could survive the Nautilus’s complex atmosphere had been taken over, hacked by the jellyfish, attempting in turn to communicate with her. The nanites percolating throughout Hailey’s body—trillions of them—were now providing the jellyfish with the infrastructure it needed to communicate with Hailey’s brain.
Hailey was also dialed into Mother, with full, if monitored access, to her supersentience. Mother would handle most of the supercomputing power necessary to dialogue with this lifeform.
Hailey’s job was simply to use her own unique gift for hacking the unhackable to find a way for the two superintellects to dialogue—without frying her own mind, hence the co-opting of her body’s nanites.
The longer the exchange went on, the more light-headed and out of her body Hailey felt. It was is if Hailey’s higher self, the part of her most connected with the Godhead, was making sure to get the false-personality that was Hailey out of the way, the part of her that was ego and insecurities, and a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions, stripping it away like tarnish, to leave only the purified essence of her, the part that would throw up the least interference with being taken over—something she felt quite confident the more egoistic part of her would definitely be all too happy to sabotage. She held on instead to the feel-good sensation, allowed the raw confidence to saturate her instead of the blind fear.
The jellyfish had become, over billions of years, a nomadic, galactic-star-system-wandering cluster of civilizations, all descending from the original tribe of star nomads. They existed more for the collection of knowledge now that their continued survival was largely without question. They were just too evolved for enemies to reach them; they existed across too many dimensions and space-times for anything to fully penetrate their defenses.
And as knowledge gatherers, they were keenly interested in The Space-Time Alchemist ships.
That gave Hailey and the Nautilus huge bargaining power.
As the Nautilus and its technologies and peoples were also new to the jellyfish, and they wanted access to both. And as they were not of a warring nature per se…
The alliance between them had been formed. Many of the details of it would remain above Hailey’s head and possibly classified. It was anyone’s guess if Mother would even share this information with Leon and his brain trust. But Hailey’s part was done.
The communication broke off. The lights came back on on the bridge just as Hailey’s brightness dimmed and her nanites stopped tingling throughout her body, and she was gently lowered to the ground.
She couldn’t exactly say that this type of work was her thing, but she was happy to be called upon to do it from time to time. Besides, with the jellyfish’s help, a hack of The Space-Time Alchemist’s ships seemed a far more likely possibility, in which case Hailey may have just been instrumental in saving not just her universe, but all universes. Though recent experience had educated her on the matter of getting too far ahead of herself. Namely: don’t.
***
MOMENTS EARLIER…
ABOARD CASSANDRA’S AND LEON’S PATENT-APPROPRIATED UFO
Leon swore he could see Hailey levitating before the hull port of the Nautilus. It had to be a
trick of the eye at this distance. “Dare I ask,” Leon said, how Mother scanned them for uploading when they’re both still on Earth?”
“She beamed them aboard while they were sleeping, scanned Dillon, Hailey, Rose, and the dog, Rex, as well. She wasn’t taking any chances with disturbing that family dynamic without knowing the real nature of what drives Dillon’s genius. She then beamed them back to Earth.”
Leon thought about the situation more deeply, per his job description as supreme leader of all Special Forces units. “Do you have any idea what could happen if the unstable Dillon loses it, with that kind of access? Worse, once Mother feels confident she’s got a lock on the algorithms that make him who he is and permanently etches them into her supersentience?”
Cassandra rubbernecked his direction, taking her eyes off the portal. “You worry too much. We’re in a middle of an intergalactic war, what we were born for. These are good times.”
He glared back at her. “How is it I can be so in love with you?”
Cassandra smiled condescendingly. “I suggest you have a few loose wires in that brain yourself.”
“We’re being teleported out of here,” Cassandra informed him, smelling something in the air, perhaps a shift in the negative ion mix, and feeling it viscerally at a cellular level.
“Why now? The show is just getting interesting.” Leon noticed the Nautilus was trying to communicate with the jellyfish via pulsing lights, like watching the rainbow radiance of a person’s aura—if he were psychic.
“Why now?” Cassandra repeated testily. “If I have to sit here a moment longer without being able to commit mass murder, I’m going to vent on you instead.”
Leon groaned and rubbed his forehead, the migraine already growing like a tsunami wave of neuronal synapses in his head firing in ever increasing number. “I hate how the utterances of a sociopathic serial killer can be so comforting at times like this. There are a lot of Kang that definitely have to die, if only to buy us time, if not to figure out how to forge a truce, to figure out how to get the hell out of their domain.”
FORTY-SIX
PRESENT TIME…
LEON AND CASSANDRA FROM CLONE TEAM TWO
ABOARD THE UFO
ENTERING RILE AIRSPACE
“Mother has teleported our Team One clones to meet up with the Raj, a stage one civilization, to put out a fire there we appear to have started.”
“Do I even want to know?”
“Not when there are clones of us to share the burdens of eternity.”
“And these people?”
“We get the real prize. The Rile. Their names do them justice. They make me look like a pacifist.”
In another era, another time, he would have bitten off a smile. Instead he took a deep breath and tried not to crack his teeth clenching his jaw. “Just how advanced are they?”
Before she could get out a response, they found themselves flanked and harried by UFOs—glimmering lights of various shapes, moving at phenomenal speeds. The sky was just becoming busier. “I do believe they’re trying to scare us. Of course, it could just be curiosity,” Leon said. And then came the energy bombardment that Patent’s UFO alone could sustain.
“They picked the wrong person to intimidate.” Cassandra just glared at them.
As far as Leon could tell, that was her only response. Her hands were not moving over the dashboard controls.
And then the UFOs lost their brilliance, showing the shapes of the ships beneath—and they went crashing to the ground, one and all, taking out huge swaths of metropolis below.
Leon realized too late that Cassandra had sicced her nanites on the UFOs. They were no doubt the source of her delayed response. “This civilization exhibits markers of Stage 0, 1, 2, and 3 civilizations conjointly. If I had to guess, their viciousness prevents them from locking in any stage entirely. That or incessant warring amongst themselves has left only remnants of prior ages, perhaps once more advanced.”
Surveying the city below, it took a second for the insight to queue up in his brain. The city looked as if made entirely of Gothic cathedrals of varying designs. A lot of ornate stonework and glass and elaborate architecture. The prettiness of it exaggerated the ugliness of the destruction caused by the fallen spaceships, but also gave Leon an idea.
“That’s a lot of reverence inscribed in their architecture. It’s not cheap and it’s not practical. You got to think that this might well be a heavily religious people.”
“That would come as no surprise to me, since most wars are started by religious extremists,” Cassandra said coolly.
Leon noticed as he continued to stare at the city and the smoldering ruins that different factions or religious sects could be made out by different religious styles among the buildings and the clothing worn by the people below, many coming outside to take in the air show.
The people themselves looked much like the Gothic Cathedrals, their bodies every bit as ornate, multifaceted, ancient-looking, some incorporating jewel inlays in their bodies to mirror the stained glass windows of the churches themselves.
“Let’s scan for the leaders and beam them to a location of our choosing for a little powwow. I might need some of your nanites to speak their tongues convincingly, even with Mother updating my mindchip accordingly.”
“Done and done.” She pointed to the most imposing of all the Gothic cathedrals high up on a hill, overlooking the city’s flats. Of all the churches dispensing UFOs earlier, flying out of their bellies like angelic energy beings on patrol for the true believers, this edifice had expectorated the most. Leon surmised it might well be the high priests who flew those ships, and that it was part of how they maintained power on this world. Possibly they were seen as godlike because they and they alone remembered how to activate the UFOs and even what they were, in truth, as opposed to what their high priests wanted their followers to believe. Leon noticed many had been assisted out of the downed warbirds, earlier, their injuries being attended to. They were no longer visible on the streets; perhaps because Cassandra had relocated them. If his theory was correct, it was just as well their leadership team remained intact—more or less.
Cassandra beamed them and the UFO to the meeting place, where they disembarked the vessel.
The Tower of Babel effect didn’t take long to kick in with the chorus of angry voices speaking in many tongues to chastise, threaten, curse, demean, and promise all sorts of vile consequences for their behavior. Leon answered one and all simultaneously in their native languages and dialects with the help of his mindchip, telecasting his thoughts straight into their heads with a little additional help from Cassandra’s nanites. She stood by his side like a well-trained leopard only too eager to strike.
The room fell into silence and awe when they realized what was going on.
Cassandra’s nanites also allowed him to peer more fully inside their minds, and it appeared that first impressions were correct: these people could barely keep their tempers in check long enough to keep from tearing one another apart most days. And indeed, even among the high priests, knowledge of the “gods” embodied in their spaceships was sketchy at best, even if they were all too happy to accept the gifts as proof of their divine right to rule this world.
Leon explained the facts of life to them in terms they could understand, explaining that the gods that had once bequeathed them their “angelic beings” were currently fighting amongst themselves. They were throwing planets and suns at one another, gobbling up one another’s planets with giant planet eaters. Nowhere and no one was safe. Their faces, for however alien, registered panic in the universal language of moans and gasps and twisted facial muscles. Several were buckling at the knees and needed to grab hold of church religious artifacts to steady themselves. The ones in the room were very old, older than most. Not surprising since they lived in a world where they had the one edge that allowed them to grow old. And with all the other elders killed off it was all the easier to manipulate the youth.
Leon promis
ed he and he alone could keep them alive and keep their planet out of harm’s way, that he was the greatest of the gods and allegiance to anyone else now and in the future was sheer folly.
“Prove i—…” One of them blared, stepping forward.
Cassandra vaporized him before he could get the rest of the words out. She’d done it with her nanites and with no outward physical gestures. It was all Leon could do to hold his poker face, so they would think he’d done it. He tried to pacify himself on the idea that the execution was justified because this culture would respect nothing other than might is right.
Just when he’d recovered enough to continue his sermon on the mount, the church itself started disappearing, and the reaction just spread, her nanites dissolving the entire city from where they were standing.
The high priests screamed and held up their hands, surrendering in a gaggle of tongues.
Not to be outdone, Cassandra started restoring the city to its former glory, reversing the reaction, even repairing the damaged churches of earlier from the fallen ships, and repairing the fallen ships so the priests could continue to hold sway over their flocks. The ships were already flying back to the churches they’d zoomed out of on autopilot. The priests, never having figured out how to work the autopilots, gasped, and took it as the latest sign of the gods’ almighty powers.
Leon had to admit, she’d taken the fight out of them.
They staged their exit for the benefit of the audience on the streets. The elders left first, forming an aisle Cassandra and Leon could walk down between them. As they walked past the elders they gestured to each other with a touching of foreheads, a sign of affection and accord between equals—at least for these peoples. Let the followship believe their leadership team had made the gods happy yet again. How they spun it from there was up to them.
Moving Earth Page 38
