When they reached the end of the aisle, Leon and Cassandra took one another’s hands, and beamed back to the UFO.
They sped out of the sky without ever looking back.
“This accord won’t last, you know that?” Cassandra said.
“We so need someone whose political acumen and coercive abilities outstrip even ours. Give me time, I’ll find the one.”
FORTY-SEVEN
A CLONE OF THE PATENT-DESIGNED UFO
LEON AND CASSANDRA FROM CLONE TEAM ONE ABOARD
Leon took a look at what the UFO’s viewport had to show him now that Mother had beamed them to another location. He had no idea how she could beam an entire ship from one location to another, but possibly being networked with the other Nautili was augmenting her abilities in ways he couldn’t entirely predict. He hadn’t been in his new location but a split-second and he was already swallowing hard. “You want to tell me anything I might need to know going in?”
“Mother has now drafted Hailey into her supersentience, no longer waiting for Dillon’s permission. Sorry if that news is coming a bit off cue,” Cassandra replied.
He craned his head so fast to her he could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. “Oh, yeah, let’s give the guy with the ability to pull suns and planets apart and crash them into one another a nervous breakdown. Maybe she should have consulted her Mars war god supersentience first, to see if that was such a bright idea!”
“The Mars war god was getting ready to override Mother’s communications with the jellyfish. It was have Hailey take over the engagement or her Mars war god.”
Leon realized, when Cassandra put it that way, that Mother had chosen wisely. The last thing he needed was for a supersentience designed for warfare to be handling delicate communications with a new lifeform capable of Techa knows what.
Leon snorted a succession of power breaths to help him plow his way through a number of big decisions that should well take days of rumination at his mind speeds—considering he did not have access to Mother’s supersentience—the one person who needed it!
“What’s done is done. I suggest we focus on what’s in front of us,” Cassandra mused aloud.
“I’m losing my ability to coordinate a battle on this big of a canvas, Cassandra!” The statement, blared in frustration, didn’t come out as intended, making him feel like he was losing it more than he realized.
“Leon, it’s fairly safe to say to command your Special Forces units on a canvas this large, you’re going to need to get used to working with nanite upgrades you do not feel comfortable with.”
“You mean the ones that inform your baseline.”
“Not exactly, as I’m not specialized for high level strategic thinking,” Cassandra said, “but yes, that’s a serviceable enough analogy.”
Leon didn’t care for the implications, but supposed the obvious realization hadn’t occurred to him because he was repressing it. “I guess I’m more of a field general in her employ for now and better get used to it. What have you got for me on whatever the hell this is?” he asked, returning his full attention to the viewport.
“Something Mother considers a problem you can tackle.”
“I swear, just when I was getting used to your condescension,” Leon mumbled.
“If you ask me, this problem is beyond you, beyond both of us. She must be getting mighty overloaded to offload an assignment like this to us.”
“Why do you say that?” Leon already didn’t want to know the answer.
“This is the atmosphere of a Milky Way Galaxy world we’re heading into. And my scanners tell me it is a Level 1 civilization.”
“Refresh my mind again on what that is exactly?”
“Earth is still at level zero. A level one can harness the full powers of a sun, not just an infinitesimally small sliver of it.”
“Okay. And…”
“And one of the Dead Zone artifacts just gobbled up their sun. No offense, Leon, but even your diplomatic skills aren’t going to keep them from lynching us. And I don’t think you want me killing Milky Way Galaxy allies. Even if they don’t quite get the ‘allies’ thing yet.”
Leon stretched a pained, plastic, close-lipped smile across his face that did nothing to hold back the tears. He bit down on his lips hard to trigger the emotion-dampening reflex like he’d trained himself to do when things got this bad.
“Hey, on the plus side,” Cassandra said, “if you ever expect to earn the cooperation of other galaxies in The Collectors’ Menagerie, this will be good practice.”
He glared at her but the fire in his eyes had been quelled by a dampening of his spirits. “You really know how to kick a guy when he’s down.”
The ship was coming within range of their cities.
“Dear God!” Leon wiped his eyes because he needed to see clearly, whether he wanted to or not. There was still hope that his smeared vision was creating phantom effects.
***
UFO WITH LEON AND CASSANDRA OF CLONE TEAM ONE ARRIVING AT NEWLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY GALAXY WORLD
CLASS 1 CIVLIZATION
A PEOPLE REFERRED TO AS THE RAJ
THE PLANET MIRAGE
“What am I looking at?” Leon asked, staring out the viewport of the UFO.
“I’m not your damn tour guide, Leon. Work the control panel. Or just talk to the UFO’s AI.” Cassandra was obviously making assessments of her own and didn’t feel helping her field general to get a clue to be high up on her priority list.
“Give me the brief, AI.”
“My name is Ria, sir.”
The AI sounded miffed for not being addressed by her name, and put out that Leon hadn’t had the decency to brief himself on what she could do. Apparently AIs came with a sense of pride, too. Who knew?
“They refer to themselves as The Raj,” Ria explained. “Each of the glowing lights you’re seeing, the size of Earth’s lightning bugs, is a sentient lifeform with human grade intelligence to roughly an IQ of 150, EQ 175, SQ 190. You will want to adjust your diplomacy accordingly, playing to the spiritual and emotional and finally the intellectual components of their psyche in that order.”
“And…”
“I can read your mind, sir. Didn’t mean to cut you off, just to hurry the briefing. The phantom images you’re seeing appearing and disappearing highlight the various crises going on as The Milky Way Galaxy continues to crash into The Kang Dynasty galaxy. The images are formed by the coalescing of all those individual lifeforms into group minds that are assigned to the various problems. Once configured as group minds, their capacities equal that of a supersentience, not quite on Mother’s level, but close. They can only sustain the group mind configurations for so long. And soon they will not be able to sustain them at all. Now that we’ve eliminated the source of their energy by destroying the sun they use to recharge by day, the deep thinking they do at night—analogous to human dream state, but far more productive—will soon come to an end.”
The UFO continued to glide at great speed over the terrain, which Leon understood now was no more than one mirage bleeding into another, giving the highlights of flashpoints across both galaxies. Perhaps the Raj projected the images while in group mind state to give them something to meditate on, analogous to humans using computer monitors as a visual aid.
“Your analogy of mirages is apt, sir,” Ria said. “They themselves refer to this planet as Mirage. In their language of course. The words phantoms or ghosts in English would also work.”
“Where is the actual terrain?” Leon asked, continuing to be torn between delighted with landing on such a resource and horrified at what was going on across both galaxies.
“There is no terrain, sir. This is a water world with a crystal core the density of diamond. The core has been modified to store the solar energy like a backup battery to get them through solar eclipses. That backup is buying them time now. The water medium itself, too, has been modified by the Raj over time to act as a polarizing medium, so as not to scatter the light
but intensify it.”
Leon’s jaw remained slack throughout the debrief. “I should tell you, sir,” Ria continued, “their sun is as close to a god as they have. I don’t envy you trying to forge an alliance.”
Leon swallowed hard. “Nonetheless, we must. This world is a field general’s wet dream, giving a layout of the battle field on a transgalactic scale, along with real time computations on how best to handle situations in each area. We couldn’t accomplish this much with all the Nautili from all the timelines combined. Or all the Mars war gods arrayed, for that matter. They are general purpose instruments. Here I have in my hands a world specialized for crisis resolution and that alone, even in the total absence of military applications. Phenomenal.
“I guess that takes me to my next question. How the hell does a stage 1 civilization, that hasn’t even left this planet, reach out its consciousness to a trans-galactic level? Far less affect things at a distance?”
“Without full access to their sun, they can do neither,” Ria replied. “But with full access, this planet is pure Gaia-like consciousness. That planetary uber-mind formed by the equivalent of sentient bacteria, or more accurately, what was once a kind of phytoplankton adrift in the oceans, is comparable to a couple hundred or so Nautili-grade supersentiences parallel arrayed, focused as you say on one thing, protecting Gaia-like consciousness on a galactic scale. They are functioning at a trans-galactic level now only because the two galaxies are overlapped.”
Leon shook his head slowly in disbelief. “Techa, it’s the perfect central intelligence agency for a gypsy galaxy like we’re contemplating. Even if the Nautilus replicates itself several times over in this one timeline to help with overseeing the Gypsy Galaxy, it couldn’t offer us what these people do.”
“Might I suggest teleporting this world sir, forthwith,” Ria said, “to the nearest sun to facilitate it functioning in just such a capacity.”
Leon flinched at the idea of taking command advice from a dashboard computer, even one that Patent had designed. It seemed that scarcely a day went by any more where his ego didn’t get treated to a hefty dose of humility in the land of ever-proliferating AIs, which Mother continued to seed, and Patent, God bless him, just empowered further for battlefield applications with his tweaks.
All the same, Ria was right.
“Let’s see if I can explain to them what’s going on first,” Leon said, “and offer to move the planet in exchange for their help, moving forward, as a battlefield command station for the Gypsy Galaxy.”
“Sir, if you upgraded your mind’s nanites, neither you nor any of your clones would actually need to be based here. Singularity COMMS capacity would allow you to maintain a mind link with Mirage wherever you were in the Gypsy Galaxy, helping to inform your decisions. You might even be able to boost the Gaia-supersentience to a trans-galactic level by finding a brighter sun or perhaps a pair of them that can radiate more light their way. Likely the Raj would build out the diamond core further to make the most of the extra light, as well as the water world which surrounds it. The Raj are quite capable of scaling this world up. Once that is done…”
“It’s that much more leverage for when I graduate my peacekeeping to a transgalactic level. The Raj might also then have the mind power they need to push worlds and suns apart for us, keeping them from colliding without us needing to rely on our technology. The day may well come when our tech fails us, subject to viral attack. What’s more, there are likely races out there that will respond better to more god-like interference, or what seems godlike from their perspective. If they consider the gods on our side…”
“It seems you have a lot to discuss with the Raj, sir. You must keep in mind, however, that such a resource could easily be turned against you if it’s discovered.”
Leon thought about it. “Perhaps, but I don’t think such a people would be easily turned to doing harm. Perhaps to protect themselves. I will make sure to cloak the planet and station war birds here that are also cloaked to see that Mirage can never be coerced to act outside of its own interests. One more talking point for the bargaining table.”
“Leon,” Cassandra interjected, “if it’s a Gaia-like supersentience, chances are it feeds on more bandwidths of Chi than even I do. And if that’s the case…”
Leon ran with the idea for himself. “It might be able to do more than gather and disseminate intelligence at a galactic scale, and help with cosmic engineering. If it’s plugged into the energy veins coursing through a transgalactic region, it ought to affect outcomes at a distance. Dialing up chi or dialing it down in one galaxy or another can affect how people think and feel, pacify galactic allies and enemies alike, or drive the incorrigibles away if the feel-good energy is toxic to them.”
“Would you like me to put you through to the Raj, sir, now that you’ve got your thinking in order?” Ria asked.
Leon wanted to smile and bite her head off at the same time. That comment sounded almost smug considering how much of his thinking had grown out of their interaction. Still, that was his ego talking, not his higher self.
“One second.” Leon turned to Cassandra. “Well, cut off from the Mars war god, you’re the closest thing I have to a war god. Anything Ria and I discussed so far rankle you in any way?”
“No. The sooner you get on with onboarding the Raj, the sooner I graduate this galactic playpen to raise havoc on a trans-galactic level.”
Leon smiled warily and returned his attention to the viewport. It was hard not to get enraptured by the glowing sights in the dark outside the window. He reminded himself that as pretty as the pictures were, their destiny was not to pacify his worried mind—not in this way. “Yes, Ria, put me through, please.”
***
The Raj had conceded to Leon’s requests—all of them.
He wasn’t sure how much of that was on account of his appealing to the Raj’s high spiritual ideals firstly, their emotional reactions to the Kang secondarily, or the intellectual/logical implications of what would happen to them if the Kang Tesla types got their hands on Mirage—with the Kang’s ability to put higher technology at their service. But pushback to his ideas from the Raj were minimal.
He had since briefed Mother via a channel Ria opened for him.
Mother had in turn put through a request to Dillon to tweak his space-warping equations and engineering designs which he continued to evolve while in singularity state—united with Mother’s supersentience. Those tweaks would take into consideration the contribution of the Raj from here on out to cosmic engineering. She had prioritized Leon’s request above all else. Leon felt like he’d won the lottery; often his assignments for her went ignored.
Those tweaks in place, Mirage had been teleported to some choicer real estate within the Milky Way Galaxy, orbiting binary suns.
The Raj were still ramping up with the extra juice they were getting, to work more effectively on a trans-galactic level, even with both galaxies overlapping so closely.
But the stats from Mother were good.
Solar and planetary collisions were now down another 50%. That was 80% below the number of collisions happening when both galaxies had come crashing into one another.
Leon would like to take a moment to feel good about himself. But as it turned out, 20% of their initial baseline meant that thousands of suns and tens of thousands of worlds were going up in smoke, if not with each heartbeat, then quickly enough.
It was still a mass extinction event that sent shivers up his spine.
Especially after chancing upon the Raj.
Who might well have been one of the casualties of playing When Galaxies Collide.
And they were just one of three stage-one civilizations encountered so far. In the Milky Way Galaxy alone. How many more were there that Leon needed to get to before the physics of colliding galaxies put an end to them?
To say nothing of alien legacy tech abandoned in the Kang Dynasty by other alien races after their conflict with the Kang had come to an end, which t
oo was susceptible to being taken out by the colliding galaxies.
Forget no rest for the wicked.
There was no acting proactively or fast enough for the good.
Their mission complete with the Raj, Mother had teleported Leon and Cassandra and their little UFO yet again.
He was burning more calories than on a treadmill and he’d yet to leave his seat. This much thinking and worrying at this high a level was great for the waistline.
FORTY-EIGHT
CASSANDRA AND LEON FROM CLONE TEAM ONE
CYLINDER WORLD KNOWN AS
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE
Leon and Cassandra’s UFO had been teleported straight to a Cylinder world, one of many in their collection of stolen Dead Zone artifacts now dotting the Milky Way galaxy.
The small UFO hovered above the commotion below.
Theta Team was doing their best to tear one another apart. And there were thousands of them here. That alone was a mystery worthy of investigating. What the hell was so special about this cylinder world that had drawn so many of Theta Team?
Each member of Theta Team was a one-of-a-kind humanoid engineered by Mother to go where no others could go into other habitats—granted, mostly theoretically speaking, at least in their timeline. Many of the worlds Theta Team had been designed to make the most of had no doubt been encountered by Mother for real in alternative timelines, just not in theirs yet. All the same, their go-anywhere-and-adapt-to-new-environs-on-a-dime abilities continued to expand.
Though they appeared to be experiencing one hell of a setback currently.
The Nautilus couldn’t afford to lose one of these guys far less thousands.
“What the hell is going on?” Leon asked.
Ria explained, “They activated that device you see in the center of the cylinder and all hell broke loose.”
Leon noted several of the nuns from the various Nautili had materialized on site to keep the Theta Team members from tearing one another apart until they could see to reason again. Theta Team, while slow to provoke, was theoretically even more deadly than Omega Force. And while they hated fighting, one would be sadly mistaken to think they weren’t damn good at it.
Moving Earth Page 39
