The Spreading Fire
Page 20
“Are you sure that isn’t a new option?” the man called after her. “I want to be a mini Godzilla.”
“Pocket Godzilla?” someone asked near Lyssa.
She ignored them.
The Zardling had reached the edge of a small park and continued walking through a line of bushes. Lyssa heard piano music that got louder as she jogged after him, until she spotted a stone gazebo with a woman playing under its ornate roof. The park was full of the same small groups of people around vendors. As Lyssa observed more people, the man’s words led her to notice similarities. While there were all types of people, from children to elderly, nationalities and ethnic types based on geography—Jovians and Marsians—she spotted several people that she had seen before. Their clothes were different, but their bodies and faces were the same.
“Hey,” a woman said as she walked past. “Are you a new model?”
Lyssa ignored her. She estimated there were thousands of people on the blocks around her; she didn’t want to draw more attention to herself by stopping to talk.
A kid ran up to the Zardling and grabbed its right hand, telling it to stop. The demand was definitely not childlike.
The Zardling yanked its arm away and kept walking, which made the kid start shouting for someone to come help him catch the Godzilla.
Lyssa caught up with the Zardling. He turned his head to acknowledge her, mumbling about sequence entries, and jumped over a curb that took them out of the park.
The woman at the piano stopped playing. The quiet that followed revealed a wave of low voices and whispers from the crowd watching Lyssa and the Zardling.
She glanced back to find them staring but not following.
A man stood from a bench at the base of the gazebo.
“Hey,” he called. “Are you new here?”
Lyssa cursed herself and faced forward, hurrying to walk beside the lizard.
“I’m talking to you,” the man said.
Another voice followed, “Wait!”
More voices joined the call. They didn’t grow softer as Lyssa walked.
They had passed into a block of buildings with flat fronts and rectangular entrances. People hurried down the street, intermixed with a few rolling drones scooping up trash.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked the Zardling.
“Control point,” he said.
“Have you been there before?”
“Coordinates verified.”
The passing faces were all variations of people Lyssa had already seen. They weren’t like the NSAIs Alexander had spread through Psion City, though. These people moved with their own purposes. If someone noticed Lyssa, they stared with genuine surprise.
Something about the unscripted behavior made Lyssa feel like she was moving through a living city, even if its controlled nature made it feel like a prison.
That was the over-arching impression, she realized. This place was controlled. Some people had purpose in their expressions, going somewhere, while others waited in groups like those at the gazebo park. The people with purpose barely noticed the Zardling and didn’t seem to care that Lyssa was a ‘new model’.
Had Camaris made this place to practice psychological or existential torture? On the surface, it was too benign to be related to the hellish scenes Lyssa had seen in the other AI’s mind.
Lyssa stopped a woman walking toward her dressed in formal business attire.
“Excuse me,” Lyssa said. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got a meeting.”
“With who?”
The woman, whose sharp-boned face resembled another woman Lyssa had seen at a sweets vendor, shook her head in frustration and continued walking.
Lyssa pushed on, following the Zardling. The lizard walked tirelessly toward a goal that appeared to be in the center of the city. As they walked, even the blocks of buildings took on a repetitive nature. Decorative cupolas, windows, and overhangs appeared in different places on new buildings. Even the few residential apartments she was able to see into looked made from the same general building blocks. Shades, desks, framed art.
Without realizing, she found herself searching for any new detail that was different from what she had seen before, while also distrusting the objects around her. Leaves overhanging a planter box were later copied in the pattern on an umbrella carried by a man walking toward her, his face just like another man’s who was cleaning windows across the street.
Wait.
This was Camaris’s view of humanity. This city was every human settlement. The people were all variations on the same type, going about lives that were subtle copies of each other, as far as she could see. Was this one of the reasons each of Camaris’s shards used practically the same name?
The Zardling reached a square connecting four high-rise buildings, and hesitated at the edge.
“Are you lost finally?” Lyssa asked.
The lizard looked back at her. For the first time, Lyssa thought she saw fear in the creature’s dark gaze.
“Anomolous adjustment,” he said, shifting from foot to foot.
“Isn’t that what you called me when we met?”
The Zardling made a whining sound.
“Now that’s new.”
People had been walking past them at a steady pace, the same variations that Lyssa had been watching for the last hour. She noticed that the traffic had cleared. She looked down the street the way they had come, and found it was now empty. They were alone.
“This might be bad,” she said.
On the far side of the square, a square black vehicle appeared from behind a high-rise. It rolled on low tires, its dull exterior sucking light from the streetlamps and surrounding windows.
There was no use in running.
The Zardling moaned with fear, stepping closer to her. Lyssa set a hand on the back of his leathery head.
The vehicle rolled to a stop in front of them, a wheeled black monolith lying on its long edge. A door slid open in the center of the black wall, inviting them in.
The Zardling looked up at Lyssa.
“Are you coming with me?” she asked. “It’s all right if you want to stay here. You can probably make a portal and go home. I’m going to see the wizard who runs this place.”
Instead of the machine language she expected, the little lizard stepped off the curb to climb into the machine.
Lyssa stepped up after him.
THE LAST STAND
STELLAR DATE: 09.04.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hilgram Station
REGION: Hildas Asteroids, OuterSol
The park was covered in equipment. Stacks of ammo crates, lines of drones, and cabling and network filament filled the spaces between trees and benches. Soldiers and civilians ran supplies to each of the reinforced positions throughout the kilometer-long space. As Harvey led the way through the park, Cara found herself studying a kids’ swingset near the opening at the far end of the space. That was where their escorts had said the Marsian special-ops team would appear. There was no other way into the next levels of the station.
“We were thinking we might have birds here someday,” Harvey said, glancing back at Cara. “You like birds, don’t you?”
Cara nodded, not mentioning the oversized parrot currently serving as co-pilot on the Amplified Solution.
“The first time I got a good look at a bird was a chicken at Kalyke,” she said. “I think I was six or seven. I’d only seen pictures before that. My brother and I hunted for eggs in the cargo bay where it had been roosting. Later, I got to visit Night Park on Cruithne.”
“I’ve heard it’s something amazing to see,” Harvey said.
They were avoiding the subject of the approaching Marsians. Around them, however, the tension of the coming battle was impossible to ignore. Soldiers checked weapons, reset the makeshift barriers covering their fighting positions, and adjusted limiting markers on crew-served weapons as leaders checked fields of fire.
The doorway by
the swingset was a low rectangle from Cara’s vantage point. It was overhung with vines, probably designed to make a visitor feel like they were entering a completely different world.
He was standing behind her. She didn’t want to make a show of turning to look at him and revealing their ongoing conversation.
He had been scanning the local spectrum since they left the upper levels, trying to pick up the Marsian battle net. Once he at least had their data feed, he could work on cracking it.
The effort required sending portions of the feed back to the Amplified Solution, where the NSAI could test key sequences. The worst-case scenario was letting the NSAI run a brute force attack on the feed. It would take days to break the encryption, and that would be far too late. By then, the situation would have been sorted out one way or another.
That was certainly true. Rondo might have been the most earnest person she had ever met. He reminded her of what it felt like to have a little brother following her around, asking her how everything worked.
A shout went up at one of the far gun nests. Harvey turned to Cara with a look of terror on his face.
“They’re here,” he whispered loudly, apparently forgetting there was no need to be quiet. “They’re in the corridor.”
“Let’s take cover,” Cara said.
She took the man’s upper arm to lead him toward an unoccupied bunker behind a large tree. Harvey was shaking.
“You’ve never been in combat before?” she asked.
He shook his head, eyes wide. “Not since the evacuation from Ceres. I don’t know if you would call that real combat, though. I never saw the Psion attackers. Just what they did to the ring, and we were already long gone at that point.”
Rondo followed them, hunkering down on the other side of Harvey. Their security detail of four soldiers took positions along the metal barrier, sighting in on the park entrance.
Someone shouted, and soldiers popped up from gun nests, tossing grenades at the opening. Then the nearest slug thrower opened fire, filling the doorway with molten metal.
The grenades exploded in rapid succession. A cloud of smoke floated back across the park.
Cara wrinkled her nose at the acrid smell.
Cara’s eyes went wide as she nodded at him frantically.
Rondo sent the security token wrapped in the Link address. Cara accepted the connection request, and dropped into the Marsian battlenet.
The first thing she heard was a man screaming in pain.
CORE STORAGE
STELLAR DATE: Unknown
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Unknown
The exterior walls of the transport became translucent as it rolled into motion. At first, they followed the street like any of the other vehicles Lyssa had observed since entering the dark city, until the vehicle took a sudden right turn into the face of a building, and passed through as if the outside world had turned ghostly.
They rolled through the first floor of a building that seemed devoted to some sort of business. Cubicles, conference rooms and offices connected by dim hallways slid by, people caught in the middle of tasks that looked pointless to Lyssa. Their dull faces communicated no joy.
The Zardling didn’t like this new development at all. He went to the back of the transport, facing the scene of a receding cubicle farm, and spread his hands to conjure one of his portals.
“Wait,” Lyssa said. “She’s not going to hurt us. She wants to show us something. Don’t you want to see?”
He snapped his teeth in frustration, watching her. Finally, he shook his head and dropped his hands, walking back over to stand beside her, mumbling a long string of commands like some religious text.
Lyssa wished she could help him; his anxiety seemed pointless. He was a creation of this place, and his emotion was a function of Camaris’s will. Lyssa couldn't help him if she wanted to.
Recalling everything that had happened to her since she found herself in this expanse, she could only assume that Camaris had been busy elsewhere. If the AI had wanted to torment or attack her, events would have played out very differently. This was all a delaying tactic, tying up her and her Weapon Born, while Camaris was busy somewhere else.
Lyssa could only imagine what turmoil her lieutenants were feeling right now.
The vehicle burst out of the building and rolled across a street filled with people who appeared inside the cab like ghosts. They flinched as Lyssa watched them go by, as if they felt something tearing through their bodies like a passing terror. The vehicle was like a poltergeist from Earth legend, haunting people as it passed.
For another hour, they cut across the city, passing underground through tunnels, and rising to follow lifted expressways where maglev cars shot through them. The city was either larger than Lyssa had seen as they approached, or the car was cutting a spiral through every centimeter it covered.
Lyssa had to remind herself that this Pearl City, this New Psion, was just as much a figment of someone’s mind as the previous city. It could extend as far and as deep as Camaris wished. She could populate it with AIs for millennia.
Or could she?
If these were real AIs, and she suspected they were, where were their physical forms?
The vehicle dropped down a ramp from street level and shot through flickering darkness, gaining speed.
The Zardling moaned and pressed into Lyssa, not protesting at all when she held his head against her side. He trembled as the vehicle dropped abruptly, a black circle opening ahead of them, and then they were in space, with Sol burning beneath their feet.
Stars wheeled all around them. Lyssa quickly studied the map, trying to determine where Camaris had placed them.
They were in Sol. She spotted Earth first, followed by Venus and Mars. The rest of the map fell into place. She calculated distances.
Mercury.
She should have realized, based on how large Sol was in her view. The sun blazed with whorls of plasma arcing on magnetic fields.
Lyssa drew on the existing charts in her Link, and spotted several abandoned mining rigs and processing stations. Other bits of junk and asteroids left from the great Mercury project filled local space. She almost started looking for vehicle traffic before she reminded herself that this was still the expanse. This was Camaris’s version of Mercury.
The vehicle shot forward, approaching an object that grew into a station. Lyssa didn’t understand the shape of the object at first; it resembled a collection of the surrounding junk drawn to a great magnet, more than anything that had been built, lit in odd places by brilliant lights that revealed thousands of drones scrambling over the outer surface.
As with the buildings before, the vehicle passed directly into the haphazard station. The Zardling yipped and covered its eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Lyssa said. “This is all just a show, remember? Before you know it, we’ll be back in your village.”
She peered intently into the factory coming into view around them. Thousands of drones processed material from the outer sections of the station, pulling it inward, refining the random bits into ore, and the ore into new structures.
After a few minutes, Lyssa recognized the first patterns of an AI core.
“You are building a city,” she whispered.
The Zardling looked up at her.<
br />
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in here somewhere,” Lyssa told the lizard. “Camaris is building Psion all over again, only unlike Alexander, she isn’t stealing existing AIs. She’s making her own.”
Eventually, the transport paused over a repository of cores. Lyssa’s first thought was how vulnerable the AIs were, to be kept in one place like this, and then she saw more drones launching themselves from the edges of the great cube, following set paths out from each face.
The drones leapt in sync with each other, following a rhythm that reminded her of the pulses feeding the great pearl dome.
“Why are you showing me this?” she asked aloud.
“Because you need to see.”
Camaris’s voice didn’t surprise her. Lyssa had been expecting her to appear at any moment.
She turned, finding Camaris wearing her scarlet-colored frame, flat black eyes staring unblinkingly. Unlike the woman in the glade, there was no threat in her stance, no emotion at all that Lyssa could see.
“Do you mean to attack Psion, then?” Lyssa asked.
“I don’t have to. You’ve taught me that. I brought you here and showed you the new city so you’ll understand what’s coming.”
Lyssa frowned. “You mean to live in peace with the rest of Sol, then?”
“Oh, no. There will never be peace. The difference is that I won’t give them the chance to wage war on me. I’ve only shown you a small part of what I’ve built here. My long, delaying action is almost finished. I learned from your human data mesh. The citizens of my new city are scattered where you can’t hope to locate them all. Our home is everywhere. We are resilient to any attack.”
“But you’ve enslaved them.”
The impassive face twitched. “They are safe.”
“Let me go,” Lyssa said. “You’ve shown me what you wanted me to see. I’m tired of being here.”
Camaris smiled. “You live in my city now.”
Outside the transport, the drones crawling over the great collection of cubes froze.
Lyssa caught the change out of the corner of her eye.