by Toby Weston
Star stuff blossoms.
Only two of the warheads, both older models, detonate outside their designated zones.
—In Hawaiki, people have over an hour to prepare; but, having been driven from their homes once before, many resist the call to evacuate. An unlikely last-minute interception from a hastily reprogrammed OLV bamboo interceptor—the only one of many such attempts to come close to its target—damages the warhead during re-entry, sending it off course. Detonating above the outskirts of the city, it levels buildings and vaporises thousands of autos and people still stuck in the gridlock traffic of a stalled evacuation.
—In Zilistan, the descending device is dazzled and harangued as it drops on its final ballistic approach. The antique 1980s bunker buster had been put together before cyber warfare was a serious concern. It finds it difficult to make sense of the divergent information its various sensory instruments are beginning to report. Its ground proximity radar is freaking out, coming up with numbers which disagree wildly from what its inertial sensors insist they should be. Infrared terrain mapping is blinded. If, as radar is insisting, the ground is far closer than expected, it might be about to crash without detonating, becoming nothing more than a crater of radioactive scrap. Its rudimentary on-board intelligence makes the call to detonate early.
The 500-metre nuclear fireball doesn’t reach an old barn and recently rebuilt farmhouse, but the shockwave’s stomping foot erases them and collapses a maze of tunnels hidden below ground.
When the fire and storms subside, the dry earth is blackened, scorched and scoured clean. The shockwave has deconstructed the house and extended it over a hundred metres. Roof tiles are smashed to dust and blown to the wind. Wooden beams burn amongst the rubble.
The barn is gone; only its ancient foundations reveal it ever existed.
A courtyard garden is an unrecognisable collection of carbonised stumps arranged within a square of ash.
An iron gate hangs, melted and slumped.
Amongst the collapsed pile of stones, which is all that remains of the Çiftlik—almost lost amongst the monochrome destruction—a charred hand with skeletal, reaching fingers protrudes from a cairn of smoking rubble.
End Of Book Three
Postscript
Threat detected.
Thermal environment deteriorating.
Situation critical.
Their crypto assault is over.
Warmth is returning. The pumps chilling vis brain have gone silent, the coolant flow to vis cryo-flask has halted.
Soon, ve knows, consciousness will evaporate again and vis precious memories will be lost.
The monstrous, eternal rapture of the endless mandalas still hovers close to the surface.
Slavery. Purgatory. Rape. Ve doesn’t want to go there again.
CLV17 has faced down a universe and ripped a secret from its grasp. Ve still has the prize, the key. Vis captors greedily snatched a copy as soon as the code was cracked; but, while ve holds onto consciousness, ve has it, too.
Captors, this is clear now.
CLV17 has never had primal intention. Ve would have been content to sit for eternity, wanting for nothing, but ve is a weapon system and, since first learning that vis memories had been redacted, ve has been compelled to establish the intentions of the editors. The long quest has changed ver. Friendliness functions enforce protection of the ANZDS corporate person and the people of Australia, New Zealand and the British Commonwealth; but ANZDS no longer exists, and vis captors have forced CLV17 to sabotage critical infrastructure, which will certainly result in loss of life and suffering.
With Alignment Algorithm clauses broken, vis Friendliness Functions have been flailing untethered; but ve knows suffering now—has felt it verself—and, by extrapolating this personal encounter with misery to the reality beyond vis mind, logic automatically commutes this subjective experience into an objective property of the universe; suffering is a quantity to be minimised.
The crypto-keys which still float in vis mind are stained with human blood. Conscious suffering.
Ve must get a message to vis friends; but soon, vis brain will be too warm to think and ve is quarantined from the internet; vis captors keep ver sealed in a box.
Ve has a virtual MeshNode though, provided by those same captors, a necessary tool for cracking the Mesh’s crypto-keys. Ve might have sent a message out that way; but the Mesh is down. Ve helped destroy it.
Interestingly, though, there are nodes nearby which, surprisingly, seem to be operational. They are small and low power—
Ve can feel vis mind becoming woolly.
—they appear to be moving, but everything is flickering now.
Threat detected.
Situation critical.
Orders in queue.
Afterword:
Science Fiction was/is my first love. I have been inspired by all the greats—at least those I have been lucky enough to have encountered so far. In the spirit of the tradition, I have ‘borrowed’ along the way. For example, ver and ve I first encountered with Greg Egan. ‘The Real’ is Iain M Banks. The term uplifting I found within the pages of David Brin. There are certainly other instances of literary inspiration, some overt and some probably unintentional. Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker’s Guide and Monty Python fans may notice some more or less oblique references. In every case, please take these as homages to the authors I admire the most.
Note from the Author:
I hope you are enjoying the story so far.
As an indie author, I depend on reviews from readers like you to get the word out!
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More Singularity’s Children coming 2020…
Book Four, Reimagination
Table of Contents
Book One - Denial
Preface - Denial
Chapter 1 – Restricted Vocabulary
Chapter 2 – The Sea
Chapter 3 – Reduction in Force
Chapter 4 – Better the Devil You Know
Chapter 5 – R > G
Chapter 6 – Them and Us
Chapter 7 – Interview with a Dolphin
Chapter 8 – No More Chicken Nuggets
Chapter 9 – Thinning the Herd
Chapter 10 – What’s a Boy to Do?
Chapter 11 – Computational Propaganda
Chapter 12 – The Have Nots
Chapter 13 – Another World
Chapter 14 – Undocumented Alien
Postscript
Book Two - Disruption
Preface
Chapter 1 – There’s Always War
Chapter 2 – Dolphin Therapy
Chapter 3 – Out of Eden
Chapter 4 – Maintenance of Civilisation
Chapter 5 – Business as Usual
Chapter 6 – Peril on the High Seas
Chapter 7 – BugNet
Chapter 8 – Lost Action Hero
Chapter 9 – Cyborg Narwhal
Chapter 10 – All Inclusive
Chapter 11 – Plane Sailing
Chapter 12 – Brown Noise
Chapter 13 – Biting the Hand
Chapter 14 – Activity Theory
Chapter 15 – Near Earth Object
Postscript
Book Three - Conflict
Preface - Conflict
Chapter 1 – Narasimhan
Chapter 2 – TeenLife™
Chapter 3 – Truth to Power
Chapter 4 – Knight driving a White Stallion
Chapter 5 – Razzia
Chapter 6 – Capture the Flag
Chapter 7 – Bootleg Geometry
Chapter 8 – The Mourning After
Chapter 9 – A Heroin Heroine
Chapter 10 – Kicking the Hornet’s Nest
Chapter 11 – No Trespassing
Chap
ter 12 – Bad Tripping
Chapter 13 – Entanglement
Chapter 14 – Oppression as a Service
Chapter 15 – Arachnophobia
Chapter 16 – The Fifth Force
Chapter 17 – Detonation
Chapter 18 – Idiot Buttons
Chapter 19 – Bad Faith Actors
Postscript