Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “He’s a war gaming mastermind those fools The Collectors had the poor sense to imprison. You don’t put a guy like that in a corner. That’s when they’re at their most creative. He doesn’t need me to get him away from The Collectors. I doubt he even needs Mother for that. But he’ll need the fourth-brain, and the rest of his leadership team to be able to hit the ground running when we get out of here. If I’m right about what this place is, life isn’t as likely to be quite so soft when the front doors open to let us out.”

  “What you’re asking us to do… I suspect that’s a big part of Solo’s job description, to pipe through what he thinks our human minds can handle.”

  “Perhaps, but I suspect he’s more of a go-between intervening between supersentiences and the physical realm. And so long as he’s more like them than like us…Besides, aren’t other dimensions more his thing? He might well be helping Mother to open channels to them as well, all part of augmenting her mind power to get us ready for the next stage in our unfolding. That leaves him precious little time to ponder what is worthy of putting forth to our primitive humanoid brains or not.”

  “You remember when the DNA soup generated soldiers out of itself, walking DNA-computing humanoids to combat a wave of attacks during The Star Gate mission?”

  “You’re thinking we can have it create a permanent class of those emissaries to the biological supersentients Mother is creating,” Natty said, jumping on the train of thought she was on. “Leon does love his Special Forces units adapted to functioning their best in different milieus.”

  “With them as his informants…”

  “You’re trying to save me from a psychotic break from which I shall never return,” Natty said. “You see me as fragile.”

  “Maybe, but I also see you as a generalist. Just how long do you think we can spend in that DNA soup serving a very specialized function before we grow bored or frustrated? Let specialists do what specialists do.”

  Natty took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Yeah, okay.”

  The doors parted before them, offering exit from their private suite. Laney took Natty by the hand. “In light of recent thinking…” They headed back to their consoles.

  Several hours and countless keystrokes later, Natty and Laney eased back in their chairs and took their hands away from their keyboards in sync, like a pair of dueling violinists finishing off a sonic masterpiece. And they watched on the big screens as the latest Special Forces soldiers walked out of the DNA soup that was Mother’s backup brain. “Nice,” Natty and Laney said in tandem.

  Made of nothing but algae hive-minds colored various greens and speckled with gold—each gold fleck an indication of another DNA-based hive mind working in cooperation with all the others—they made a beeline for the nearest space dock. There they boarded one-man craft with space-warping capabilities so they could fulfill their new missions, serving as go-betweens between Mother’s supersentience and the biological supersentiences she was seeding the Gypsy Galaxy with—and most importantly—the humanoids in Mother’s charge.

  Laney and Natty both sighed when the ships departed the space docks and quickly disappeared as they engaged their ships’ warp drive engines.

  “What next?” Laney asked.

  Natty hit her with one of his impish smiles, and of course, the tell-all twitching eyebrows. This was typical for him. First be brilliant, then engage in unbridled sex. It helped him balance the neurochemistry of his brain. Who was she to argue? Better that than an imbalanced Natty.

  NINETY-SIX

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  NATTY AND LANEY’S PRIVATE SUITE

  Sauntering out of the bedroom some hours after their latest tryst, Laney sat herself before her bank of monitors at her work station.

  “Looks like your idea to keep an eye on Mother to see how she performs under pressure is already paying dividends,” she said.

  She showed Natty the results of the probes of Progenitor on the bank of monitors in her study.

  Standing on each of those Orchlids was a Theta Team member.

  “I always thought Theta Team humanoids were too dissimilar to function cohesively as one unit,” Natty said. “And it’s not like those dissimilarities complement one another.”

  “Almost as if she designed each one to biodiversify themselves enough to fill an entire planet singlehandedly.”

  “No wonder she never bothered to make more than one of a kind. But what the hell is she up to with this prototype?”

  Laney zoomed in closer with the probes—Mother’s idea of a quadcopter, just a bit more robust and alien-biosphere proof.

  Natty turned up the audio.

  Laney rushed to cover her mouth and her gasp, and she was already tearing up.

  Natty looked from her back to the screen to determine what was up. Maybe being a bioengineer had benefits at times like this because he still wasn’t seeing it. And then he did. Those ambient sounds weren’t ambient at all; they were screams, coming from the now numberless Theta Team operatives spanning the globe, one per Orchlid; more Theta Team members were incubating in the ocean waters below. “They’re a food supply for that alien take on Venus flytraps?”

  Laney didn’t answer, just buried her face in her hands and sobbed. A moment later came a piercing scream from her that climbed over the din of screams on the big screens.

  They had caught a whiff of what was going on here earlier with Curtis, the Theta Team member, of course, but back then their emotional numbness to what was going on was facilitated by the heap of intellectual abstractions they threw at the problem in an effort to figure out what was going on—but perhaps also to defend themselves against the pain, and even the obvious. A few hours of lovemaking had stripped them bare of their typical defense mechanisms, enough to perceive the raw ugliness before them.

  In reprisal, Natty’s fingers flew over his virtual keyboard.

  She stopped him by putting her hands over his, shaking her head slowly. “We are not about to intercede in the machinations of a supersentience until we know the bigger picture. We could be shooting off our own feet. She is quite capable of helping us in ways we don’t fully understand.”

  He leapt from his seat. “Oh, yeah? And what if we just witnessed all the proof we need that she’s lost it! What if she’s been hacked?” He was pacing and gesturing and shouting.

  Laney ignored his histrionics. It was his way. She had just been subject to a flood of emotions all her own, so who was she to say if Natty was being inappropriate? He might well be the one person in the room, as usual, who saw more than anyone else. But right now, she wasn’t so sure. And when it came to biospheres, Natty knew to let Laney have the last say. The question was, did she want it?

  She shifted her attention back to a planetful of Theta Team operatives, thinking if Leon knew about this, he might well interrupt his war on The Collectors to wage war against Mother.

  They would wait to tell him. They would wait until they could figure out what in the hell was really going on here.

  ***

  Laney had managed to convince Natty, finally, to continue their research together regarding what exactly Mother was up to, before going off half-cocked to Leon and ruining everything for everybody. She hadn’t gotten far until he’d pulled his heart connection to the Theta Team operatives on Progenitor being used as food for the Orchlids, and retreated into his mind, allowing him to stifle his emotions; it was the only way he could deal. This coping mechanism was his baseline.

  “I don’t understand,” Natty fretted anew, looking at the latest intel coming over the monitors in Laney’s study. “Mother knows better than to interfere with the biological evolution of a planet by inserting foreign DNA.”

  “This goes beyond polluting the biosphere with foreign matter, Natty. We’re witnessing co-evolution in progress. She is changing herself as much as the planet.”

  “Why? If she wants to feel more embodied, she can do that through each of us, just infect us with more nanite clouds with thei
r own agendas. She can clone herself as she’s done before by making another Nautilus. Hell, she could probably build planets from the ground up.”

  “We need more data. More probes on more worlds to attain it for us. If we’re ever to confirm our suspicions about what she’s up to. I wouldn’t be surprised if she isn’t following the same logic.”

  “Where do you find the strength to probe further, when all I want to do is look away?”

  Laney sighed. “According to some forms of Eastern belief, the God of being or yin aspect, outside of manifest form, creates the physical universe we inhabit, the God of becoming, the yang aspect. The yin aspect can’t stand being raw potential forever unrealized, but all that potential can never truly be realized, can it? So the yin aspect has to keep running the simulations, us, in universe after universe, all of creation a desperate attempt on the part of a God to know more about Godself. Why should Mother be any different? She’s a god relative to us, even if not the God/Goddess, if there is such a thing.”

  “You want to immortalize Mother for what she’s doing!”

  Natty was spewing again, like the all-too-predictable geysers at Yellowstone. Techa, she was really going to have to update her metaphors.

  “I’m thinking it’s back to the drawing board,” Natty blared. “Didn’t that alien ambassador from another world we had walking around here at one time tell us that I’d lost it in another timeline? Gone completely bonkers? That’s why he fled into this timeline; he needed a vacation from the madness. What happened to that guy after The Star Gate mission? Maybe he has some insights for me. Maybe there are timelines in which Mother has gone completely mad, and we’re now caught up in one of them.”

  Natty stormed out of the room.

  “Shall I divert him back to you?” Mother asked, her disembodied voice jostling Laney. How easy to forget she oversaw everything.

  “No. He needs to blow off steam. You might finally have presented him with a problem he can’t solve. That might be the one thing that does drive him crazy. Is he going to find that ambassador he’s looking for?”

  “No, he/she is off-ship, trying to keep a lid on intergalactic quibbling.”

  “It’s probably best you don’t tell Natty that. Let him walk it off.”

  “Why are you being more patient with me than he is?” Mother asked.

  Laney returned her attention to the rather painful sight on the screen of Beach Ball Babe, or whatever she was, populating an entire world, and not without a great deal of pain and self-sacrifice. The Theta Team operative appeared to be little more than a stack of sentient embryonic sacks. “Because I know what it’s like to birth things, the pain, the blood and the gore involved. It’s not pretty until it is.”

  After a respectful silence, Mother cut in again. “You never told him, did you?”

  Laney sighed. “About the miscarriage? About the prognosis of never being able to have kids?”

  “You know I can fix that.”

  Laney groaned. “I’m raising Natty right now. He’s all the kid I can handle. Now, Mother, if you’d kindly get out of my head. I need time to think, to decide if Natty’s right and you truly are mad.”

  Mother cut the COMMS.

  NINETY-SEVEN

  THE JARDARIAN GALAXY

  THE GAS GIANT WORLD OMITHRON

  Glowworm, not exactly the name he’d been born with, but it was how he’d come to be known. A nickname. Whether it conveyed fondness for him or derision depended very much on who you asked.

  He was one of Sonny’s freaks, and, more broadly speaking, a Shadow Warrior in his employ. He was too specialized to qualify for the Special Forces division of the Shadow Warriors, but he was his own kind of superweapon—a matter of great pride that made up for when “Glowworm” was used more derisively.

  He was drifting toward Omithron, like a space cadet blown out of his space ship, now stuck in a gravity well that was just too expensive to pull him out of. Not with an all-hands-on-deck war waging against far superior enemies.

  Whoever “they” were, they weren’t kidding when they referred to these planets as gas giants. Omithron was nearly as big as a sun, and glowed dimly with its own light. A variety of purple shades intermixed with silver-white and gray hues radiated back at him.

  Glowworm would be swallowed up by the gas giant soon, where he could fulfill his mission. His entire body was comprised of, well, glow worms, for lack of a better term, crawling all over him like larvae consuming a ripe corpse. “Fresh Kill,” “Corpse,” “Maggot” were all on a shopping list of names he’d been called over the years as a result.

  Each of his glow worms had been evolved to thrive within a sun, of virtually any size, chemical and heat mixture, and in a variety of the sun’s pressures zones. Not just thrive, but rapidly proliferate. He was a sentient bomb, in effect, made to make suns not just self-aware and smart, but super-sentient. The prion and amino acid chains that formed his glow worms were adapted to feed off the raw materials a sun had to offer without themselves being consumed by the intense heat of the corona or any other layer of the sun. Needless to say, he’d been engineered by a super-sentience, who alone could master the variables involved. Mother’s supersentience, to be precise, and to be even more precise, he’d been engineered to infect supersentients more evolved than Mother. His, like so many others, these days, was a David and Goliath story; he was built to take down things Mother herself couldn’t take down.

  His amino acid chains and prions were self-evolving algorithms. As soon as they received the food in the form and in the amounts they needed, they would start building out Glowworm’s body, diffusing it, until it filled the sun. Omithron’s intelligence would truly be his intelligence, though he would have evolved so far beyond his current humanoid state, it was doubtful he’d even remember it.

  So, why not deposit him directly onto a Sun? Why settle for a gas giant?

  It was a question he couldn’t avoid asking himself.

  Sonny had advised him that all the gas giant worlds at the core of the Jardarian galaxy were already supersentients. Getting past them would be the real trick. Once that was accomplished, Glowworm could go on to his primary food source, the suns that were at the center of those solar systems full of gas giant worlds.

  The last of the gas giant worlds Glowworm would infiltrate would be Enoquin, the biggest supersentient gas giant world of them all, and the smartest. She would be saved for last because she would be the hardest to take down.

  Enoquin had been chosen, for her unassailability, as the home base for the Emperor Cities, cities floating high in the gas giant’s atmosphere. And it was in the Emperor Cities that resided the most advanced war gaming strategists of the Jardarian Galaxy.

  Enoquin would need coaxing to allow Glowworm to infiltrate her outermost atmosphere.

  Glowworm would, the instant he entered Omithron, begin to compound its mind power. Omithron itself would be hungry for more mind power. It was just how things worked in Jardaria. The more mind power at the emperor cities’ disposal, the more war games could be elevated. And no one lived for that more than the Imperials, nestled into Gomora, the greatest of all the Emperor Cities on Enoquin.

  All the other sentient gas giant worlds had already been brought into the fold for the sole purpose of using that parallel-processing super-sentient array of gas giants as additional protection for Enoquin.

  Those gas giant worlds surrounding Enoquin in turn would release the armadas each of them housed in a fully automated ballet of offensive and defensive strategies, “automated” in the sense that the gas giant supersentiences themselves would coordinate the armadas.

  The Imperials alone could override the decisions of the gas giant supersentiences, but they seldom did, as coordinating warfare on that level in real time was well beyond humanoid capacities.

  But the Imperials could merge their minds with the Supersentients, receiving the high-level Cliff-notes of their strategies, and the results of those strategies and tactics. It would
be the very tip of the iceberg only, again, just what the plugged-in humanoid minds could make of things, but perhaps enough that they could partake in those higher level decisions. The supersentient suns in turn valued the Imperials’ input as the Imperials had each evolved strategic thinking in such a way that it was unique to them, embodying a host of decision-making algorithms that could not be duplicated, not exactly.

  Even the capacity to bioprint a humanoid body precisely so it could resume its algorithmic processing did not mean that a supersentient could fabricate the same processing, because that could only be glimpsed from within the closed world of the humanoid mind itself. Artificial humanoid personalities generated by supersentients might be better or worse, but never the same.

  Enoquin would find its communications with Omithron offline while she was undergoing her “upgrade.” At the completion of which, Glowworm would send a clone of himself into the next sentient gas giant world to be infiltrated. He would be fired like a missile out of Omithron by taking advantage of the pressure differentials between the core and the surface of the planet.

  And so the next gas giant world would lose communications with Enoquin as well.

  No doubt Enoquin would be desperate to find out what the hell was going on with her slaved supersentients, but as they would be clearly undergoing upgrades from her perspective, which she could monitor for herself well enough by sending a number of probes into them, it was doubtful she would do anything until the upgrades and reboots were complete. And Glowworm would see to it that any probe entering Omithron would get a transmission to the effect of: “Currently undergoing upgrade pursuant of newly evolved algorithms, a product of our ongoing experiments to boost intelligence.” Which, of course, would jive perfectly with the instructions that these worlds had already received from Enoquin. “Once upgrade is complete and stress tested for stability, you will be sent the upgrade to use on yourself.”