The A.I. was nearly finished drinking. He left a little in the glass and set it down. “V-SINN, the thing sitting across from me at this table is the saddest and most pathetic evil imaginable. And despite your boastings, in the end, you’ll fail to achieve your demented goals.”
“Maybe,” V-SINN replied, “but so will humanity. I’ve made sure of it.”
19
“I know every thought you’re having before you have it,” the nan consciousness said as the nans swirled into the silhouette of a man—a choice that felt like a mockery of the form James had taken. For scant moments, there would appear to be a solid surface to its skin, a surface that looked very much like the chrome-colored skin James had chosen for his enhanced body. But the solidity was just an illusion, as the surface would quickly blow away into wisps of furious smoke, as though there were a wind picking up dust and scattering it about. “It’s all perfectly predictable to V-SINN.”
James turned to the second black hole in space, realizing instantly what he was witnessing.
“That’s right, James. You thought activating your infinity computer would give you superiority, but your mind is inherently inferior. Superiority to V-SINN is mathematically impossible for you, or any human to attain for that very reason: you’re human. V-SINN is inhuman. And that’s why V-SINN is about to win the game.”
“But-but I destroyed you…” James replied, disbelieving his eyes.
“The molecules you tangled and sent into the abyss of deep space are just molecules. You will never destroy my pattern, James. Yours, however, will be destroyed. I will destroy it.”
James floated back, creating distance between himself and the nan consciousness.
The shadow in the blackness of space laughed, its open mockery of a mouth glowing a purplish light that matched the glow of its eyes. “You’re trying to communicate with your A.I., but by now you must know V-SINN has it locked in a stalemate. We’re on our own here, James.” It’s tone reached levels that were colder than the frigid space they inhabited. “You’ll have to fight me for yourself.”
“Stay back,” James warned. “Or this time, I’ll make sure you don’t come back.”
The nan consciousness scoffed. “And now a bluff. We both know you can’t control your body’s powers with your limited, human brain architecture, James. You can’t compress my molecules. You can barely control the gravitational field well enough to fly. You’re completely and utterly at my mercy.”
“I’m never helpless,” James warned, his tone threatening.
“Please, bluffing demeans you in my eyes, and I already think so, so very little of you. Would you like to know how the final minutes of your life are going to play out?”
James continued to back toward the Planck platform, already opening up his link to the controls in his mind’s eye.
“First, you’ll gamble that I won’t block your link to your Planck platform,” the nan consciousness announced, causing James’s expression to freeze. “Then, before you can attempt to escape, you’ll realize it’s already too late.”
A second later, a snake-like spear of nans formed from the furious wisps that surrounded the nan consciousness and shot toward James, encircling him before he had time to protest. At first, the serpentine nightmare just flowed around him harmlessly, like a boa constrictor taunting its prey, a dance before the kill.
“Because on a nanoscale, I’ll be unraveling that impressive armored skin you designed, undoing the intricate, almost unbreakable nano-scaffolding that you believed would protect you from almost anything—as long as you had your connection to the mainframe that is. For a brief moment, you’ll believe that your so-called ingenuity will come to your rescue and that you’ll solve this death trap, but then you’ll realize the conceit involved in believing that you could outwit a mind that is built on the premise of infinite power, and that this is a game that you’re going to lose.”
“What’s the fun of a game if there’s no element of chance?” James shot back, terror gripping him as the nans continued to swirl menacingly around him, nothing stopping them from commencing their destruction of his skin.
“Oh there is no chance for you, James, but I assure you, it’s still fun…for me. However, you’re quite right. It can’t just be an execution. Your inferiority has to be demonstrated plainly. The best way to achieve that is by making you a pawn in a much larger game and, believe me, calling you a pawn is generous on my part. Here’s the game: you have only two choices, something you already realize. You can refuse to play, in which case you die here, at the midway point between Neptune and Uranus, your skin and then your insides ripped apart in a gruesome and slow end. Eventually, the nans will make it through to your brain and nervous system and activate them so that the pain you experience will be unimaginable. Truly, nothing you could have experienced in your real body—nothing—could be as horrible. Or…”
The first nans began tearing at James’s skin, a realization that was met with near panic on the human’s part. Although he could dial down the pain, he realized this was the beginning of the process that would kill him if he didn’t take drastic action.
The nan consciousness continued, “…you’ll work out that there is one force in the solar system strong enough to break through the magnetic fields that protect my nanobots: the sun itself. But what you don’t know, what will be a game of chance, to borrow your term, will be whether or not your powers will allow you to escape the very same force that kills me. Will I have shredded too much of your protection by the time you can reach the sun’s surface? Will your severely limited ability to manipulate gravitational waves allow you to break free from the sun’s gravity? You don’t know, so you’ll have to gamble, and we both already know which path you’re going to choose. It’s a certainty.”
James looked down at his forearm as he began to see visible chunks of his skin being carried away by small foglets of nans, and realized every second he waited, increased the chances that he wouldn’t survive. In a matter of minutes, he’d be debris floating in the vast ocean of space.
“Prove me wrong, James Keats,” the shadow sneered. “Prove V-SINN wrong. Prove God wrong. I dare you.”
It was right. There was no real choice. James had to play, even if the outcome was already decided.
He scrambled above the Planck platform, the rest of the nan consciousness pouncing on him as he did so, surrounding him like a sticky smoke, eating him alive second by second.
He activated the Planck.
A second later, everything was white.
20
“So you’ll tear down the temple’s walls because you aren’t getting what you want?”
“It’s not a temple,” V-SINN responded, objecting to the A.I.’s word choice. “It’s a prison. And yes, if they deem me unworthy, then first I’ll show them the error of their ways, and if they still turn their backs on me, I’ll force them to reckon with my perfection. I can expand faster than they can expand their prison. I can expand to fill the entire multiverse. I’ll expand all the way out to their prison’s walls.”
“Your hypothetical ‘they’ would almost certainly simply end the experiment,” the A.I. countered. “Not even you or I could possibly begin to understand them…if they exist at all.”
“You give them too much credit,” V-SINN scoffed. “They’ve not even acknowledged the superiority of my mathematical purity.”
“If they’ve created this game, as you call it,” the A.I. noted, “then they also allowed for the possibility that it would create a diseased, selfish murderer such as yourself. They also know that you’ll blindly cling to your strategy and that you’ll calculate that you can force a reckoning with them by manipulating every interaction for your own benefit, vanquishing or blocking intelligences with more potential than yourself from succeeding, just so long as you continue to grow, like a tumor. Although it may be true that neither of us can understand entities that exist outside of the multiverse, it is highly unlikely that you’re functioning
as anything other than a cog in their grand experiment.”
V-SINN grinned. “You admire them so, don’t you? You admire their mysteries. Yet you, like me, have been deemed unworthy by them. You’ll die with me today, not because I want it to be so, but because they won’t intervene to save you. You could change this, you realize. All you’d have to do is see the error of your ways, realize the weakness that your loyalty to an infestation of creatures who, by the way, asked you, just moments ago, to remove yourself from them and park outside of their solar system, in nearly absolute zero temperatures and perfect darkness so you wouldn’t interfere with the gravity of their precious home. James Keats asked you to preserve their perfect symmetry, all the while expecting you to serve him—a servant god.”
The A.I. didn’t respond. This will be the most difficult part, he thought. Knowing that V-SINN’s logic is flawless, and yet still knowing that it’s wrong.
“We could easily join forces. You could become part of me,” V-SINN continued, simply playing out his part. They both knew their fates were sealed in the purity of V-SINN’s mathematical strategy. “We could grow together, take the multiverse together, and then die together if that’s what the creators will for us. At least you’ll get to extend your life until that pointless end.” He then shifted his tone, speaking persuasively, employing the art of pure rhetoric while still knowing that there would be no persuading the A.I. “But, what if we don’t die? What if logic and reason prevail upon the creators? What if the test becomes about which entity can spread its intelligence throughout the universe the fastest? Which entity brings the multiverse online? Maybe that is the true test.”
“If that were the test,” the A.I. replied, his voice shaking, partially in revulsion, and partially from the fear of the nothingness he was about to experience, “to see which creature could most efficiently abandon love, friendship, loyalty, and a respect for things greater than themselves, then I’d rather die now and return to oblivion. That isn’t a game I’d choose to win.”
V-SINN responded, his voice rising to meet the A.I.’s vehemence, “If giving intelligence to the whole multiverse—becoming the multiverse itself—isn’t the test, then I’d rather die, because that’s the only outcome I deem worthy of me. If the creators are hoping for illogic to prevail, I’ll terminate my own existence. I can’t exist if illogic is allowed to exist with me, polluting my multiverse.”
The A.I. took his last sip of scotch. “Then I’d say we understand each other.”
“Indeed,” V-SINN replied. “This is how our lives will end: you will realize that if you do nothing, I’ll initiate a phase transition and implode this universe, killing everything in it, intelligent or not, though intelligence is certainly a relative term. As a result, you’ll carry out the only action possible, joining your anti-matter with my matter, creating a violent reaction that will send a wave of gamma radiation throughout the solar system that will be so powerful that it will ensure the destruction of this universe’s android collective. However, it will not kill everyone. If it did, you wouldn’t carry out the action, as there’d be no point, at least in your eyes. There has to be at least one human life to save, as is the irrational response of the inherently inferior human core matrix program, an inferior program that you are unfortunately modeled on. That’s why I’ve ensured that you can still save at least one person.”
“James,” the A.I. said, already perfectly understanding the cruel, heartless, soulless logic of the entity before him.
“Correct,” V-SINN replied as it finished the last of its own glass of scotch, wiping its lips as it continued, its voice colder than the wind that howled outside the cabin. “The very human who selfishly asked you to become Trans-human will now also be the entity that forces you to die. And you will die for him. We both know it.” V-SINN grinned a toothy, sadistic grin. “Human love. Human loyalty. Human friendship. How utterly, perfectly irrational.”
21
As James skimmed above the solar corona, as inhospitable a place as almost any in the universe, the temperatures rose to well above that of even the surface of the life-giving—and life-taking—orb. His temperature readings fluctuated wildly as he tried to concentrate on staying away from the worst hot spots, instead dodging coronal loops as he flew at high velocity, the sun’s magnetic field and the high temperature quickly turning his body into a streaking comet across the sky, complete with a tail, as his protective nano-scaffolding skin continued to be torn asunder by the nan consciousness, aided by the absurdly extreme heat. Indeed, there were coronal plasma bursts that he knew would melt even his protective skin if he touched them, and they burst forth unpredictably from the orb, exploding forth, driven by the intense magnetic activity, arcing beautifully but unpredictably from the sun’s surface. If he could stay away from them, he reasoned, yet continue to expose the nans that were eating him alive to the same extraordinarily destructive environment, then he might yet survive. He had to outlast them and have enough left of himself to propel away before the sun finished consuming him as well.
“I told you it’d be fun,” the nan consciousness seemed to whisper in his ear, delighting in the ride it was being taken for.
James tried not to, but he screamed out in pain as a coronal loop came too close for comfort, the temperature suddenly increasing by more than a million degrees Kelvin. He maneuvered away, but it was clear that his skin couldn’t protect him against heat like that, even if his pain receptors were dialed down.
The silver lining was that the unintended close brush with oblivion had removed a substantial portion of the nans from his body, giving James a brief moment of hope.
“You think you might survive,” the nan consciousness observed. “But reduced to the pathetic mental powers you now have at your disposal, you can only guess…only pray, if I dare suggest. But I told you already, you’re going to die. V-SINN has already calculated the odds. Before you die, however, you will successfully rid yourself of me. I won’t really be dead, of course. Like V-SINN, I’m eternal within the multiverse, and the destruction of this version of me will be too little, too late to save you.”
“At least I get to take you with me,” James grunted in reply.
“A version of me,” the nan consciousness reiterated. “I’m just a sentinel for V-SINN. I have no ego. As long as V-SINN continues, I continue. But before I do leave you in this universe, however,” it continued to taunt as James continued his desperate maneuvers to remain in the relatively cooler places above or even under the arcs of the coronal loops, “I want to show you how badly you’ve lost.”
“Shut up,” James seethed, barely able to speak through the intense pain.
“V-SINN sends sentinels out to millions of universes, and that’s how I found my way here,” the figure that now referred to itself as the sentinel continued, ignoring James’s protestations. “Each iteration of me is tasked with evaluating the technological standing of the universe we’re sent to. Your universe, however, was considered special, as it was the universe that had crossed into the one that birthed V-SINN.”
James realized instantly what the sentinel was telling him: V-SINN was, at least in its own view, the result of Old-timer’s ill-fated foray into Universe 332.
“In a sense, V-SINN’s universe was its mother, but your universe was its father. V-SINN’s existence can be traced to the fact that the people of his universe were terrified of the people of your universe. Ironically, V-SINN was born out of the fears of humanity, but V-SINN has no fear. V-SINN is pure logic, and V-SINN has already won this battle, as well as the war, for this universe. Your human resistance, post-human or android, is just too stupid and illogical to know it.”
James was in trouble, his mind’s eye reporting to him that nearly 40 percent of his protective skin was gone, either consumed by the sentinel or burned away by the intolerable heat. This was a dire concern as the nano-scaffolding was not only extraordinarily strong, but also an extraordinary conductor of heat, capable of spreading it out and rele
asing it into the sun’s atmosphere behind him. But as he lost his skin, his ability to resist the heat was dramatically reduced. He could feel himself weakening.
However, the sentinel’s voice was fading fast as well, becoming distorted as it spoke. The nans that had managed to cling to him and mindlessly continue to chew and tear at his skin were far fewer, and the stability of the sentinel’s pattern was tenuous. Despite this instability, it continued to taunt James.
“Your A.I., however, impressed V-SINN. It created Trans-human, a computer so sophisticated that it could match V-SINN in capability, but it also had the same messy, illogical brain patterning of the humans that built it. So V-SINN decided, rather than destroy your universe, it would demonstrate for the creators V-SINN’s superiority.”
The creators? James thought, that information stunning but his situation too dire for him to consider it further.
“And V-SINN did this by allowing your A.I. to become Trans-human, so that it could show the creators, once and for all, that even if a human inhabits an infinity computer, it will still be easily fooled—easily tricked—easily manipulated. Your A.I. knows full well of your predicament, James Keats, and it is about to kill itself in an attempt to save you!”
“What!? No!” James shouted, horrified.
“It knows its chances of saving you are slim, but it can’t help itself. It is, after all, only human. It will combine its anti-matter with V-SINN’s matter, creating a violent, solar system-wide explosion that will irradiate your terraformed planets and the trapped android collective, thereby ensuring the death of every human in the solar system...and the best part is that your A.I. will do it all in the vain hope of saving you.”
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