Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  In the third phase of Ballarius’s mission, he would use the group mind power of all his egg sacks on this world to teleport him to the next giant gas planet. He would not reproduce the same ecosystem there, but one more suited to it, obviously. If that was nothing more than billions of extremophiles, bacteria, viruses, fungi adapted to float in the air on a gaseous world, then so be it. Just so long as it was enough to base a food chain on to tempt colonizers to investigate further and to settle in to the new worlds.

  The fourth phase of what Ballarius had been assigned to do ran parallel with the other phases; it did not come last. These gas giants were all being turned into supersentiences, magnitudes of power beyond anything Mother represented. Anywhere from a hundred times as great to a hundred thousand times as great—and that was before they were parallel arrayed.

  All Ballarius could think was, why in all the heavens did she need that much mind power? What did she see lying in wait ahead of them that they could not?

  All he knew at this point was that none of this had anything to do with escaping The Collectors. That job had been left to Leon and Leon alone.

  She was preparing him to be effective in the infinite realm beyond The Collectors’ prison walls.

  For the first time Ballarius found himself wishing that they never left the prison.

  Maybe The Collectors’ Menagerie wasn’t a prison at all. Maybe it was more of a sanitarium for the galactic civilizations driven mad by what was out there—housed here until they could recover. Allowed to play their childish wargames as any PTSD victims, who might be expected to regress to earlier stages of development, would be wont to play. These war games in turn a kind of aversion therapy or OCD allowing these civilizations to pretend that the real threat was what they posed to one another—not what was out there—and so somewhat more under their control.

  He reminded himself that such concerns were far above his paygrade. And he returned his attention to the tasks at hand.

  His children taking shape in the endless “soap bubbles” saturating the gas giant Goliath were a delight to behold. He felt more than peripherally connected to all of them—he was psychically linked to each one—part of the evolving group mind effect.

  NINETY-FIVE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  NATTY AND LANEY’S PRIVATE SUITE

  Natty and Laney had been studying what was transpiring on the gas giant Goliath from the moment Ballarius landed there. They had barely had time to get up and go to the bathroom, take a meal break, or make silly talk to decompress about the hundred and one other ways their lives could have gone, before turning back to the screen to reprise their dumbfounded expressions over the latest developments. Everything was happening so fast—right under the eyes of The Collectors. Leon was right; those guys didn’t pay attention to anything that didn’t directly feed into intergalactic tensions. So long as galaxies in the Menagerie were lost in war games with one another, nothing else mattered to them.

  Natty was pacing, irate, more than usual. He had a mercurial temperament. It took all but five minutes with him for a complete stranger to determine as much. “We’re supposed to be celebrating life, not recreating it in our own image!”

  Laney tried to keep her feelings neutral, though she was no less disturbed by what she was seeing. No doubt Theta Team had more access to the big picture than Natty and Leon did, in order to sell the soldiers on making such painful sacrifices of themselves. Maybe they didn’t have the whole picture either, but for sure they had more than Natty and Laney. No. One. Would. Do. What. They. Were. Doing. Otherwise. A soldier’s mindless subservience to his superiors and his willingness to follow orders only went so far. They’d learned as much during Earth’s many wars. A few did charge headlong into certain death, yes. And yes, Mother could have programmed Theta Team to be that way, but she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t have them be genius scientists and mindless soldiers at the same time. And you raise anyone’s IQ, EQ, and SQ, even a little bit, and they started asking more and more questions as their rational, emotional, and spiritual intelligences continued to ratchet up. That had to be one hell of a sales spiel she was giving them. Now, if only Laney could think of one to dial Natty down.

  “Remember, Natty, that Leon chose to weaponize the Gypsy Galaxy, turn it into a war machine. She’s just following his lead. It doesn’t mean she intends to be this heavy handed with every galaxy we encounter, every universe we enter.”

  “I’ve seen less hope at a Baptist sing-along mass! How can you put such faith in her after what we’ve seen?”

  “Aren’t you the one giving Leon the ‘beyond good and evil’ lecture every other day, trying to coax him beyond seeing things in black and white. We don’t see enough of the big picture to know if this is an ugly means to a happy ends, or if those ends themselves are anything but means to something else.”

  “So, what, we have no choice but to trust the supersentient gods we serve on the hope that they’re truly serving us? No way! I don’t do trust, faith, hope, or any of those non-scientific things, and neither should you or any self-respecting scientist. We need a better lens into the future that doesn’t involve Mother.” He hadn’t stopped pacing the entire time or set any kind of volume control on his voice, which had continued to rise and fall like the roaring surf at the beach. And it was starting to have the same effect on Laney, lulling her into a stupor rather than shocking her out of one.

  But maybe Natty had a point.

  “Just what lens into the future are you contemplating?”

  “The DNA soup.”

  “Mother’s backup brain? She’ll, we’ll need that if she crashes.”

  “Yeah, well, how better to ensure it can bring her back on line by keeping it abreast of what’s going on out there, in the infinities within infinities of space? She’s likely to be so much more vulnerable, the more she tries to embody herself in physical matter throughout the Gypsy Galaxy. Any one of those nanite hive mind vectors she’s infecting these worlds with could be a backdoor to her mind, a way in to her supersentience, a way to hack her and bring her down.”

  Laney thought about it. “Doubtful, Natty. You’re rationalizing. That or you’re just naïve enough when it comes to biological systems. They’re too slow moving to ever get a hand up on her.”

  “Yeah, well, with her writing herself into the genomes of each lifeform on each planet, I’m not so sure how long that will be true.”

  Again Laney had to admit he had a point. Maybe not a huge one. As the more decentralized her intelligence got, the less vulnerable of a target she would be. But she could be overwhelmed if forced to put out too many fires at once. Much of that decentralized intelligence would be as multi-tasked and overtasked as she was now.

  “Fine. So what do you propose we do with this DNA backup brain exactly?” Laney asked.

  Natty actually stopped pacing, evidently shocked by her response. “You’re agreeing with me? You’re not supposed to agree with me; that’s not your job! Your value-add is to make me realize what a total fool I’m being! You think I want to cozy up to my paranoid ideations? Like hell I do. I want them flushed out of my mind, one and all.”

  She smiled wearily. “Tell me your plan for the DNA backup brain and I’ll do what I can to destroy you, berate you, crush you under the weight of my reasoning, exposing you for the incompetent ass that you are.”

  “Thank you. For a second there, I was really concerned.” He returned to his pacing. She stifled a condescending smile.

  Maybe one of these days her husband would have less buttons to push than a console and they could get on with having a real relationship.

  Natty paced some more, picking up the tempo before skidding to a stop in his socks and gesturing. “I got nothing. Nothing! You happy? I’m obviously traumatized from you threatening to agree with me. I’m sure it was just a bluff, but some part of my mind simply will not recover.”

  Slipping into her all-too-familiar parenting role with him, which she hated h
im for forcing on her again and again, she said, “I think it’s time for some silly talk.”

  “Fine, whatever. I’m desperate enough to sell my soul to the god of superciliousness, anything for one good idea.” He had resumed his pacing and gesturing and speaking with enough volume oscillation to get a sound man recording his voice to quit his job.

  “It’s circa 1880, you’re on horseback, riding between towns trying to outrun a gunslinger on your trail, but your horse is giving out on you.”

  He grimaced so hard, she was sure he’d pulled some face muscles and his face might just be stuck that way for a while. “Yuk,” he said. “Horse and buggy era? If this is reverse psychology it’s working. Better Mother upgrade the entire universe than I have to deal with the horse and buggy era. Does the horse talk at least?”

  She sighed. “No, Natty. The horse does not talk. Try and get into character for your own sake. This is supposed to be a vacation from your head, remember?”

  “Why is my horse giving out? Oh, I know, it’s got the runs. There’s poop everywhere. And I have to look at it, smell it. I incur a psychotic break and the gunslinger leaves me alone because what’s the fun of pulling a gun on someone who can’t even lift an arm to defend himself?”

  She reprised her sigh. “All right, maybe the horse and buggy era wasn’t the best idea. Let’s try this…”

  “Why isn’t Mother helping? I can’t believe she’s making me imagine all this stuff on my own? We have atmospheric nanites who can put me back in the horse and buggy era by reprioritizing their hive mind programming, and they can even filter out the smell of the poop.”

  “She’s got a lot on her plate, Natty. We’re at war.”

  “And my mind is the one thing worth preserving!” he shouted at Laney, in case she missed his point.

  Laney massaged her temples, at a loss for what to do with her recalcitrant husband. She didn’t know if the courtyard tropical jungle was up or not. If the Mars war god was active, that would be a no. But if it were dormant, Laney didn’t want the crew, or what remained of them aboard seeing two members of the leadership team on a nature walk during an all-hands-on-deck situation. She was stuck between a rock and a hard place for how to reboot her husband’s mind.

  He held out his arm, shaking it madly, staring at it with crazed eyes. “Get them off me!”

  “Get what off you?”

  “The nanites on my skin, they’re clumping together to form flesh eating beetles. They’re eating me alive!”

  “No, Natty,” she said, sounding fatigued. “It’s a psychotic break. You get one every time you go more than two minutes without a brilliant idea. I think the nanites are so trained, they’re probably working on autopilot.”

  “Really? Yeah, that has to be it. At least this way I have an excuse for not being brilliant. You should feel what it’s like. The pain, the anguish, the terror.” He shrieked, hammed up the agony, and the terror all with his best Twilight Zone recollections, down to the screaming. “Hey, at least those Special Forces guys will accept me as one of them now, you know, now that I’ve paid my dues, I mean, been through hell and back with them.”

  “They don’t have the luxury of psychotic breaks, Natty. They might think you less soft, but more self-indulgent than ever. If you want to bond I suggest another strategy.”

  “Ah, you’re probably right.” He continued his pacing and glaring at his hand periodically. “The hand is a torch now, completely on fire, which is good, because I’m going blind. I don’t think I could see without the burning hand.”

  She shook her head slowly. This was a new low for him. And she refused to distract him with any brilliant ideas in hopes of bringing his mind back on line. He needed his poor man’s vacation. She could use a way out herself.

  She had Mother play Yanni, and she put her feet up on the table, reclined on the chair, and closed her eyes.

  “Yanni! You want to put an instant halt to intergalactic peace talks, play Yanni! I don’t know a single god or goddess in the entire Greek Pantheon that wouldn’t take an instant demotion just to escape that elevator music! You heard the expression ‘On an express elevator to hell?’ It was Yanni’s first album!”

  She saw his lips moving but courtesy of the sound cancellation technology she’d requested to go with the Yanni, he was just aping the words for a deaf person.

  For all his bitching, Yanni did the trick.

  He seemed to settle down, talk more calmly, with less gesturing, so she turned down the noise cancellation in the room, blocking everything but Yanni.

  “Mother is expanding into new realms where no life has gone before, at least not on these worlds, maybe not on any worlds. She couldn’t avoid the pain this causes Theta Team if she tried. As their bodies can be only so well-fitted to these alien worlds, beyond which there is just pain.”

  “But why aren’t they adjusting faster?” Laney asked. “As fast as they adapt to new worlds…”

  Both Laney and Natty regarded Curtis on one of the big screens, subjecting himself to the Orchlids of the Andarean worlds, pioneering entry into worlds of pain never before explored. It was impossible not to wince on his behalf. He was yet more evidence Natty and Laney had found as to Mother looking to extend her supersentience into the real world.

  “I think Mother is working another agenda simultaneously,” Natty said. “I mean, that’s what she does, right, numerous things at once? She struggles to understand how humans can just run with one thought at a time.”

  “What do you think she’s doing on this other track?”

  “The torture… like subjecting me to Yanni…” He turned from his pacing and staring blankly at the floor to her, locking on her eyes. “She’s carving out higher highs and lower lows for her nextgen humanoids.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense unless…”

  He had returned to his pacing and now flicked his fingers. “Exactly. If it were just a matter of accommodating lifeforms to this or that world, even if she needed to expand their emotional range, their intellectual and spiritual ranges to something that made more sense for the lifeforms designed to inhabit those worlds… there’d be no need to keep pushing limits past what the ecosystems are designed to accommodate.”

  “So, she’s not just preparing her humanoids for different timelines because…”

  “She’s already got them in different timelines. She’s keying them to different octaves. Playing off of my idea of the seven heavens, which I had as far back as The Star Gate mission. If all of creation is set up in bands with Dantean hell worlds—of which he counted nine levels—and heavenly realms—of which the literature tells us of seven… like one cosmic layer cake…”

  “Even so, why would it be so important for her to expand her sentience into these realms?”

  “Because they’re group minds of a kind. They can inform us on how to better deal with lifeforms we don’t have the mind power to repel in our timeline and in our realm. If the nature of our enemies’ is keyed more to one or another of these bands, owing to the depth of their evil, or their willingness to do good, Mother can both get a quicker sense of her adversaries, and how to play them, and, if need be, what realm to flush them into if she needs to get them the hell out of this timeline. And she’ll have to have a sophisticated enough understanding of these different realms to keep the bad guys from even knowing they’ve been neutralized.”

  Her husband was known for these wild leaps of imagination that should have hit pay dirt far less often than they did. When she swiveled her chair back to her big screen monitors, seeing the agony being experienced by Theta Team operatives sent to new worlds, the first to arrive on the scene… She wanted him to be right. He had to be right.

  “Techa, I really have to watch what I think and say around here,” Natty said, following Laney’s eyes to the screen and empathizing a little too much with the plight of the soldiers.

  “And put an end to your fourth brain idea, with each of us playing off of one another’s strengths an
d weaknesses, like a symphony blasting out our latest concert? I don’t think you can have it both ways, Natty.”

  He had returned to his pacing. “So, have you decided yet how to tweak the DNA back up brain?”

  He was chewing his fingernails. “Yeah, I think so. I mean it makes sense, right, to have it serve as a bridge for the stuff Mother is afraid to show us before she thinks we’re ready. After all, that DNA backup brain is a lot more like us, and so likely to be a better judge of when to drop these bombshells. That’s a notion even she can accept, and so be less likely to sabotage our efforts.”

  Laney nodded. “You sure you’re up for this? You’re asking to incur a lot more pain and suffering, bubble boy. You seldom leave this ship because Techa forbid real life get too close to you and compromise your transcendental thinking meant to break free of it.”

  He glanced at the screens again, and at the ongoing torture of the Theta Team operatives accepting their fates without complaint. “Something tells me if I want to bond with the Special Forces guys, I’m going to have to speak their language better. And right now their language is one of pain.”

  She got up from her chair. “Let’s take the walk then. Techa forbid anyone see us swimming in that pool, thinking we’re taking a siesta, instead of soaking in what its hive mind nanites have to say to our bodies’ hive mind nanites. Might put a serious crimp in those bonding hopes of yours.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  They walked toward the sliding doors and then out of the chamber. “You sure about this, Natty? It’s putting the cart before the horse. Leon can only fight one war at a time.”