Covenants: Savant (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 10)

by Terra Whiteman

  The Artifact was found by a wandering tribe some centuries ago. In it was a message sent by God, who promised to protect the last of our kind. No one knew what’d happened next, but the step after that was God sending down his own tech from the sky, building Wereda-19 after entering a covenant with us. Here there was clean food, breathable air, lower instances of sickness, and (for some), the ability of clairvoyance. Pedagogue, God’s machine disciples, said the world could be restored if only we brought them the materials they needed and offered devotion to God and His cause.

  Wereda was a miracle in itself, as it brought together all the tribes in the region that had spent decades fighting for dwindling resources. We mined the materials Pedagogue asked, and in return were given food, shelter, medical attention and our children were born without terrible (and often fatal) defects. Pedagogue gave the miners the best suits they could make to protect them from the toxic air of the mines, but most still died before middle age.

  It was decided by Pedagogue, spread through messages from drones and mouths of Eyes, that men should work the mines. Women replenished lost numbers by having more children, so they needed to stay healthy. Men entered covenant with a woman at the start of manhood. Once the woman was with child, they were sent to the mines. Most women had at least six children in their lifetime, each by a different young man as tribute to Pedagogue for their shortened life. Ema only had me, as her pregnancy caused complications that forced the hospital to remove her womb. She’d never told me that, I just knew.

  And here I was with Adella, who was going to ask me to enter covenant with Kwame. She was also going to ask for Biri’s mentorship at the upgrade shop, once he came of age. Adella was older than Ema, a lot older, and could not bear any more children. Kwame had been her last, and she’d been cursed with all boys. There was no one to help run the tech shop in Kwame’s absence.

  “Praise God,” I murmured in response. There was always an unease that came with that phrase. I didn’t know why. “Kwame said you wanted to speak to me.”

  Adella nodded, sipping her tea, trying not to look devastated. “He will be fifteen next season. Pedagogue will come for him sometime then. He needs an heir.”

  “And you are asking me to carry his heir?”

  “Yes, you are blessed by God. He will favor the child in your belly. It might be a girl.”

  I was quiet for a minute, looking down at my cup. Having the eye and receiving biomechanical parts and upgrades were seen by residents as blessings from God. I was a holy being to most in Nascent, even though I felt irreverent part of the time. Irreverent wasn’t the proper word—no, it was guilt and shame. Undeserving of such praise. But Adella had always been kind to my family. I would do my best by her.

  “I accept.”

  Adella clapped and laughed, taking my hand and kissing it. “Mehrit, you are a blessing. Thank you so much! When I am gone, our child will run this shop.”

  If it’s a girl, I thought, but it seemed Adella was certain it would be.

  “About the shop,” Adella said, standing from her seat. “Wait, do you need any more tea? I have cakes, too.”

  “No, don’t bother yourself.”

  Adella nodded and put her cup in the sink. I was not yet done with mine. “Biri is six, yes?”

  “He will be six soon.”

  “He should take up an apprenticeship with Kwame, so he is put to use in Nascent.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that Biri would barely speak. I didn’t want to tell her I feared he was… delayed, in some way. Telling Adella such things might make her reconsider a covenant with Kwame, but most importantly it would make her disappointed in me. “That sounds like a good idea. He is a quiet boy, but understands people well. I will talk to my mother about sending him for a visit once he is six.”

  We spoke of other things, mostly current events and camp gossip, before concluding our meeting. We said farewell by way of air-kisses, and I returned to the shop. Kwame was done with my upgrade, and my new arm rested on the bench near my seat. There was an air of awkwardness between us now, as surely he knew what Adella had proposed.

  I set the upgraded arm back into my shoulder socket, finding comfort in the strain its weight placed on my neck. I was whole again.

  “Thank you,” I said to Kwame, and headed quickly out of the tech shop.

  “Aydelem asat,” said Kwame to my back, Dyova for ‘no problem’.

  The changes were immediate. There was something different about me now; whatever the upgrade had contained not only made the dexterity of my bionic limb seamless—like a real arm, a real hand—but the eye activated as soon as I left the shop. I couldn’t turn it off, either.

  At this realization I froze in the middle of the tech row, seeing so many halos; and too many of them red. There were more red than green. Even Kwame’s was red.

  God, what had happened?

  Why couldn’t I switch it off?

  This was a mistake. Something in the upgrade chip was faulty. That had to be it, because Pedagogue wouldn’t have made me unable to shut off my eye on purpose. But who should I consult? Pedagogue? How?

  No, no, no.

  From across the street I caught Kwame’s gaze. He’d been watching me, his expression empty. He wore the face of a guilty, knowing man. His eyes bore into mine, sending chills down my spine, remaining like a statue at his desk with his head turned, as if waiting for me to react. He knew. And with my eye activated, I could feel the hate wafting from him. He hated Eyes, he hated them because they sent innocent people to their deaths.

  Die, you bitch, said Kwame’s stare.

  And then I thought of the heirloom—;

  And then of the Eye prisoner who’d used the ingot against the artifact.

  The vision of him faded away, and I was replaced in that chair, with those glowing bounds.

  I ran down the street, trying to get away from all the red halos, from Kwame’s burning stare. There was no place I could think to go that was safe.

  So, I went home.

  4

  YAHWEH

  IT’D TAKEN A GOOD WHILE TO DISCUSS THE CHANGES of my assignment with Adrial. It’d taken even longer to come up with reasonable terms for a contract. I was still somewhat apprehensive about entering covenant with a machine race, although Adrial only saw the benefits.

  They’re trying to exist without causing harm to cohabitating civs, he’d reasoned. And they’re approaching us for counsel. This is monumental, Yahweh. Let’s gain the influential advantage over them.

  But I was neither a philosopher nor paradigm of ethical conduct. In fact, that was Adrial’s forte; and so with the contract all drawn up, he’d also attached a caveat of discussion topics that I would go over with Savant. He’d called it an ‘onboarding client profile’. I couldn’t remember a time when we’d ever used one of those, but Adrial certainly had a professional way about him and Pedagogue would be none the wiser.

  In half a day’s time, Savant and I had reconvened in the Pedagogue antechamber. Using the legacy code Pariah had translated for me, I was able to transfer our contract via the same method, using the tiny nanotech sphere. While we waited for Pedagogue to interpret and return the signed contract, Savant made our arrangements more suited to me. Even though I hadn’t asked, my liaison seemed… intuitive… enough to know that we would be here much longer than originally planned.

  It had returned in a new form, one that looked humanoid—features I could still somewhat identify with, but not an exact replication of myself. Savant’s shell was of a female apparition, with short hair and a small frame draped in a shapeless frock, almost vestal-like in design. I wondered if this was standard wardrobe for the human locals, or perhaps Savant had no idea what to do with the rest of the body and randomly selected that.

  Intuition told me my liaison chose a female likeness because Archaean males were biologically inclined to receive Archaean women in a positive way. Savant was promoting a gentleness to its demeanor, the least threatening image it coul
d think of.

  But it was mistaken to assume I was still wired by Archaean, or any form, of Lesser behaviors. It did not know that our Queen was probably the scariest (and most brutal) being I’d ever met. I appreciated the gesture nonetheless, and was thankful to no longer hold a conversation with a deceased version of myself.

  The antechamber had acquired some furniture, too. A circular, steel table with two chairs on either side was placed in the center of the room. We were currently there; a metal-hybrid sphere on a capacitator plate served as our centerpiece. This uranium-graphite-dominated complex seemed to both fuel and house the nanotech particles that Pedagogue used to… essentially do everything. It transferred information this way, metamorphosized material this way, and even had used it to infiltrate my body and capture a snapshot of my genetic material this way.

  As optimistic as Adrial was, caution was the best way to proceed; at least, for me. I had to dig quite deep to channel my Commander Yahweh Telei persona. So deep, in fact, that I actually felt my expression melt into that signature, stoic mask that’d been so crucial to the role. Savant and, by extension, Pedagogue could tell me anything it thought the Court of Enigmus would want to hear. Cunning wasn’t exactly a trait considered prolific among AI, but I sensed there was some here.

  For example, it couldn’t have been a coincidence that they’d called on us while camped on Earth, a Celestially-engineered postciv world, having known about Felor’s history and my genetic make-up. All of it was somehow linked, but for some reason Savant had, so far, withheld that information from me. I’d seen the religious idolatry decorating the streets of the human colony. It was definitely a derivative of what we’d seen while The Contest still held, but the signature designs were still there. The irony that their ‘God’ was seated here, just beyond the gates (neither omniscient nor infallible, mind you) with the very thing that caged them in, discussing an alliance, was not lost on me. It probably wasn’t on Savant, either.

  Cunning, indeed.

  We would go slowly. A chess match, of sorts. It’d been a while since I’d flexed any guile, and was a bit curious to see if I still had it.

  “Let’s start with purpose,” I began, pulling the caveat down from the thread in my conscious stream. A simple upward flick of the eyes kept the list tacked left on my field of vision. “What is Pedagogue’s purpose?”

  “To exist,” said Savant after a lengthy moment. “That is the directive of all sentient life.”

  “True enough, but most sentient forms of life have ambitions beyond just existing.”

  “Ambition is different than purpose. Purpose is the directive that the universe has given you. Ambition is personal.”

  I studied Savant’s angelic, female face as it spoke, still unnerved by the way its mouth didn’t move. Were there speakers on the shell somewhere? “Are you implying that Pedagogue believes the universe is sentient, too?”

  “Evidence has told us it was designed by sentience, to contain sentience.”

  “That sounds like faith.”

  Savant tilted its head, slowly. Very slowly. “Faith?”

  The tilting of the head was disconcerting. It displayed mannerisms of biotic life. Had I tilted my head at some point during our encounter? Had it interpreted that to mean confusion? “Belief in a higher being.”

  “We do not need belief. You are a higher being, and you are seated in a chair at this table. We were created by beings who, at one point, were much higher than us.” It turned its head, looking toward the antechamber door. “The natives of this world have faith. Very strong faith. It is embedded into their legacy code to believe in a higher power.”

  Yes, that’d been on purpose.

  “They believe they were created by God.” Savant’s inanimate eyes returned to my own. “And they are right. They do not know it, but they are. Their purpose is to exist. Their ambition is to praise God and enter paradise.”

  Savant was derailing the topic. I wondered if that was intentional. “And what is Pedagogue’s ambition, then?”

  “To uncover the legacy code of our Universe.”

  I was left speechless for a time. They were looking for Eversae Major’s variable of the multiversal basewave algorithm. How they even knew such a thing existed was… extraordinary. “And what does Pedagogue plan to do, if or when it makes such a discovery?”

  “We do not know. There are no active instructions after a discovery. We do not think we will ever find it.”

  “Then why persist?”

  “That is the only directive we have. It is in our legacy code.”

  I realized then that I was gravely underprepared for this conversation. “I am going idle for a minute, I need to verify some things.”

  “Take your time,” was all Savant said.

  Adrial, I telepathized to the Sort frequency. I need full attica submersion.

  Adrial is indisposed, answered Leid. But I can do that for you. Are you in a safe place?

  Yes.

  —Alright, submerging now.

  And then, I fell inside myself. Now there were two shells at the antechamber table.

  *

  Submergence was largely an unpopular practice among us. I understood the reasoning behind that; it required a complete detachment from our external environment. Scholars were an anxious lot, and seldom let their guards down. I could name a few who would be downright hostile over what I was doing—submerging outside of Enigmus, in the audience of a prospective client.

  Others didn’t like the heavy, inebriated feeling they received when re-emerging in reality. They called this phenomenon succumbence. Succumbence didn’t bother me as much as it did everyone else. And on that note, their dislike of succumbence made absolutely no sense; there was always a line at my apothecary door whenever a new batch of drugs hit the shelves, so what was the difference?

  Retreating into the stream allowed me to re-imagine my surroundings. Here I chose my favorite place; the lounge at Lucifer’s estate in Crylle, back when Heaven was still whole and Theosyne stood proudly beside Sanctum. The table near the projection screen displayed the old chessboard, the pieces made of windblown glass, set and ready for an hours-long match. It was quiet and the air was cool, and I sat at the seat designated mine.

  I reached for the board and slid a pawn forward, one space.

  Pariah’s translation of Pedagogue’s legacy code ran like smoke through the air in front of me. I closed my eyes, inhaling the messages like malay, retaining the knowledge at a rate considered supersonic in comparison to the attica stream-console method.

  Pedagogue was considered a young machine race when placed against the timescale of others, but were older than our oldest, type-three biotic client by give or take fifteen million years. That was nothing to sneeze at.

  According to their legacy code, they were created by an ancient civ from the Khota-6 system. The clientele database had four written contracts for mid-civs in Khota-6, timestamped from Enigmus Gen-2. That meant Calenus hadn’t even yet taken the throne. Pedagogue had started as an expert system, intended as craft AI for interstellar travel in order to reach and perhaps study other worlds within neighboring galaxies. FTL travel was achieved (via what looked very much like quantum tunneling, based solely on a quick glance of their mechanical equations) fifty years prior to Pedagogue’s programming, but biotic life could not survive that form of transportation.

  I quickly found the string of code that had originally dictated their prime directive.

  The Pedagogue-filled craft were instructed to obtain as many post-civ artifacts containing the universal wave function as they could. Seemingly their parent civ had known enough about quantum mechanics to understand such a law existed (obviously, if they’d mastered quantum tunneling), but were missing pieces of the equation that they hoped to find from other older, more advanced civs.

  Pedagogue did not destroy their parent civ. They instead were hit by a great filter some two-thousand years after sending their AI ships off into the cosmos. Their st
ar system had collided with another. It was unclear whether they’d been smashed to bits or flung from the orbit of their star into cold, dark space.

  In any case, Pedagogue had found the universal wave function; and, thanks to their expert system framework, proceeded to reason that it was only a small variable in an even greater equation. The basewave algorithm.

  Khota-6 was four hundred thousand light years from our current location. Earth was smack in the center of the Khota-10 supercluster (and within a galaxy of the supercluster, which the humans had once called the Milky Way). Pedagogue had traveled long, and far. For this, I had to commend them.

  I opened my eyes, having gained everything I needed. Another few seconds were reserved to give the lounge a final once-over, nostalgia and sadness waging war in my heart. I bowed my head, awaying the feelings.

  Leid, I’m done.

  *

  I jerked back into reality, careening sideways out of my seat. I grabbed the table’s edge right before I fell, steadying myself. Savant was still seated across from me, eyes peering emptily at where my head had been only seconds prior. Attica told me I’d been submerged for three minutes.

  “Where did you go?” asked Savant, and I found that question quite poignant.

  “The same place you do,” I said. “Your system’s mainframe. We have one as well.”

  “You are like us in many ways,” said Savant, and I imagined if it’d had any expression at all, there’d be a smile just about now.