Causality (Quantum Gate Book 5)

by Eric Warren

  Gritting his teeth Frees stumbled forward down the rest of the metal stairs to a second basement with a door. He yanked it open, breaking the lock to find himself in an old car park. It looked like there hadn’t been anyone down here in years, though some of the overhead lights still worked.

  This might be a good place to recuperate. He hadn’t seen a husk in at least twenty minutes, and he was pretty sure none of them had seen him come in. On the far side of the lot was a ramp leading back up to the street and another one below it leading to another level below him. A few vehicles sat in the spaces, their tires rotted and the cars covered in dust. Charlie hadn’t been in control that long; the machines must not have used this area when they were emulating human life. Frees wondered how Trymian handled things on this side of the world. Did he allow the machines more autonomy, or was it just like Charlie’s territories? He supposed it would be hard to integrate husks from one area to another if everyone wasn’t on the same page. After all, people traveled all the time.

  He forced himself to hop across the open space to one of the vehicles and yanked the hood open. Standard battery engine. He wondered if he could find a way to adapt his own input to accept power from the battery—that was if it still had any.

  There was only one way to find out.

  ***

  “Jill,” Arista breathed, leaning in and hugging the woman. Her “skin” was so thin Arista could feel her polymorphic musculature underneath. She’d never noticed before. “You’re alive. What are you doing here?”

  “I didn’t have much choice,” she replied, taking stock of Arista. Then she glanced at the rest of them. “There’s more of you than I expected.” She looked at Blu and David. “Don’t tell me that’s Frees; what’s he done to himself now?”

  Arista lowered her eyes and stared at the floor a moment. “Frees didn’t make it; he’s somewhere out in the middle of London. I hope. If the husks reach him, they’ll tear him apart.”

  “Oh honey,” Jill replied, taking her hand and rubbing it down Arista’s cheek. “Then who…?”

  “It’s Jonn.”

  Jill’s eyes went wide. “Not the one who…?”

  “The same.”

  Jill dropped the volume of her voice. “Is his face…did you do that? ‘Cause if you did, good on you. Though I’m surprised you let him come with ya.”

  “You and me both,” Arista said.

  “Hi!” Blu walked up and stuck her hand out. “I’m Blu. That’s my dad,” she said. “And we’re from an alternate universe that’s similar to yours, but different.” She playfully narrowed her eyes.

  Jill took the hand and shook it, but with a bewildered look on her face. “Alternate universe?” She turned to Arista. “Is this true? Goodness, I knew I should’ve gone through that gate last. What on earth have you been up to?”

  “It’s true,” Arista replied. “After you went through, we had…complications. My biological father showed up. We tried to destroy the gate but were knocked to the other side. Frees and I spent the last six weeks there trying to get back.”

  “Tell her the most amazing part.” Blu nudged Arista. “C’mon.”

  Arista couldn’t help but smile. “Blu and I have the same father, just from different universes.”

  Jill stared at David. “You mean, he’s…”

  David walked over with his hand out. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jillian. Arista told us a lot about you.”

  She took his hand. “Jus’ Jill, please. So, if you’re here, where’s your father from this universe?” she asked Arista.

  “The David in this universe is dead. McCulluh shot him.”

  “Oh.” Jill grimaced. “Hon, I’m—”

  Arista put her hand up. “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it. It’s better he’s gone.”

  Jill watched her for a moment, Arista assuming she was looking for any traces that might say Arista was lying. But in her heart of hearts she knew it was true. This world was better without that ego-maniac and she didn’t care what anyone said.

  Arista turned back to the tubes that still contained Emily and Carver. “Jill…” she said.

  “Come on, I’ve got a lot to explain as well.” Jill put her arm around Arista’s shoulders. “And it sounds like you could use a rest.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “I wish I had better news for ya,” Jill said. “I’ve been tryin’ everythin’ I know, but they never responded. It’s like their minds are outside of their bodies, but the two are still connected somehow. I can’t understand it.”

  She and Arista stood at the foot of the two tubes, staring at the bodies of her parents inside. Neither of them had changed in any sense of the word. But something felt different. Missing. “Are they still alive?” Arista asked.

  “Not in any reasonable sense. I kept ‘em on life support, but there’s no way I can wake ‘em up. Their bodies went into body lock a couple weeks ago and their minds are held in the computer connected to the tubes but I can’t reintegrate the two. I’m afraid if we remove them from the tubes their cortexes will be corrupted. But I didn’t wanna do anythin’ without you here.”

  Arista took a deep breath. She focused her attention on them, looking for any sign of movement or awareness, finding none. The bodies had just become empty shells, not even supporting mental functions. After everything she’d been through to save them, this was what it had come down to. It seemed, no matter what she’d done, she couldn’t change the hands of fate.

  “We need to get their memories uploaded to the Collective Consciousness,” Arista said. “I can’t keep them like this, in a hellish limbo. It isn’t fair to them.”

  Jill rubbed her back with one hand. “If you hadn’t found ‘em there’s a good chance they could’ve stayed like this forever. Were the humans trying to save them?”

  “If Echo had anything to do with it my guess is no,” Arista said. “Especially knowing how important they were to me.” She should be crying. Wasn’t that what someone was supposed to do when their parents died? Weren’t they supposed to cry over them, hold their funeral, say their goodbyes and then experience closure? Arista didn’t feel like any of that, instead only a cold detachment. All she could think of was if they were in any kind of pain and how she needed to make sure they didn’t stay that way “Let’s get them uploaded into the Consciousness. I don’t want to wait any longer.”

  “I’m afraid,” Trymian said, stepping forward. “We can’t access it at the moment. Charlie’s taken control of the interconnected network that makes uploading to the Consciousness possible.” His mouth formed a thin line. “I expect he hopes to cut off all access so only he controls what’s added to the Consciousness.”

  “The consciousness,” Blu said. “It’s a data pool?”

  Trymian smiled. “It’s much more than that, my dear. When the three AI’s first established our plans for society and realized we were limited by the life spans a machine could have, we decided to build a massive database to accumulate the collective experiences of all machines. The hope was one day that knowledge base would grow so large and complex it would provide us with a deeper understanding of not only ourselves but the universe.”

  “But if every machine’s experiences are the same—” David began.

  “That’s how it began. We were going off what we knew, making husks like humans, programming them to live human lives in the hope that, over time, we would make adjustments and evolve. And we did, for a hundred years we managed to make it work. And now the Collective Consciousness is the single-largest repository of data on the planet. Hogo-sha and I would study it on occasion, though we both agreed we needed closer to five-hundred or a thousand years’ worth of data before we could find any real value in it. Charlie always spoke of joining us, though he never did.”

  “It’s like a machine heaven,” Blu said. “Where everyone you know and love is together forever.”

  “I suppose you could look at it like that, but it isn’t as if there are individual minds in there.
Each person’s experiences add to the whole. They become part of the one and no longer remain separate individuals.”

  “Where is this database?” David asked. “It seems like a significant target, perhaps we should find some way to protect it.”

  “It’s not housed in a physical location,” Trymian said. “That would be too reckless. A power outage from a storm could destroy everything we worked for. No, it exists across a hundred-thousand different servers, housed in the network connectivity that keeps us all together. A network that has been disrupted by Charlie.”

  “He can’t destroy the network,” Arista said. “He’d have to cut every machine off from every other machine and there’s too much infrastructure for that.” She placed her hand on the glass tube holding her mother. It was cold.

  “No, but he’s cut us here off from it. Didn’t want me accessing the Consciousness, or my comms to call for help. He probably assumed I would consult it and find a way to overpower him. Paranoid twat.” Trymian hobbled over to one of the medical stations. “Have any of you tried your comms since you arrived?”

  “Mine’s broken and they don’t have them,” Arista said, indicating Blu and David. “Jonn?”

  He broke his gaze from the two glass tubes. “I haven’t tried. No one to call.”

  “If you did, I’m sure you’d find you can’t get a signal.” Trymian picked up a piece of equipment then put it back down. “He’s managed to isolate London because I’m here. He might have done the same to Osaka.”

  “Which means Mitsu and Takai are cut off as well,” Arista said to herself. “I had hoped we could get in contact with them. Get their help.”

  “To do that you’ll have to go to Japan,” Trymian said.

  “I still don’t understand,” Arista said, turning back to Jill. “How did you even get here? You were supposed to be headed back to the production floor in Chicago.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jonn approach the glass tubes, standing close and staring down at them. She tried not to focus on him too hard.

  “I did,” Jill said. “I managed to get both of them back to the production facility, but I couldn’t get ‘em to my house. The tubes were too big to fit in the hyperloop and humans were all over the place above ground. Good thing I had my chargin’ cubes.” Her face betrayed a hint of frustration. “The humans were killin’ Peacekeepers left and right up there; I figured it’d be better to stay where I was until you followed. But you never did. And the longer I waited the more worried I became, but I couldn’t get back to you. For some reason the gate wouldn’t work that way.”

  “It was the humans,” Arista replied. “They programmed the gates to only access the colony with a special code. So no errant machines accidentally stumbled on top of them.”

  Jill nodded. “Makes sense. Damn frustratin’, though. I waited there for four days, then the gate activated, and dozens of humans came running through. I’m not sure they were happy with what they found; hundreds of husks lying everywhere. The humans scattered, keeping in small groups while not paying any attention to me. But then I saw the husks come alive, despite the fact most of them didn’t have all their parts. And they went after the humans; it was a massacre.”

  “You saw all that?” David asked.

  She nodded. “They didn’t pay me no attention ‘cause I didn’t have a heartbeat. But they slaughtered those poor people. After they were gone, I decided my best bet was to find Trymian. I’d remembered what you told me about how Charlie used those husks against you and Frees. And when Sy stayed with us she let slip there was a third target after Hogo-sha. And since he was dead, I put two and two together.”

  Trymian chuckled, both his hands pressing down on his cane. “By the time Jill tried to reach me here I had already become aware Charlie had survived his ordeal with you,” he said, indicating Arista. “But it wasn’t until Jill stormed my gates I realized you and Frees were nowhere to be found.”

  “Stormed the gates?” Arista asked.

  “I was upset,” Jill admitted, putting her hands out. “I thought he’d gone mad. I thought he might have even captured you from the humans. I just knew you two weren’t with us and it seemed like a war was going on.”

  “She came through the same gate you did,” Trymian said, “which is the closest one to the palace. I have one inside here but I disabled it; I didn’t want Charlie waltzing into my home. But once she arrived and I explained Charlie had reappeared, we decided retrieving your parents’ bodies and working on them was the best way to keep them safe.”

  “You activated your personal gate to get them?” Blu glanced at the glass tubes for the first time. They hadn’t spent a lot of time talking about her parents, but Blu seemed interested every time they did. She was probably fascinated by the idea of being raised by two machines.

  “Briefly,” Trymian said. “Long enough to get them here and shut things down again.”

  “And you’ve been here ever since?” David asked.

  “I thought if I could figure out what was happening with them,” Jill indicated the tubes, “I might find a way to contact Arista. Or at least have some good news for you when I saw you again. Because I knew you’d eventually make your way here.”

  “Did you see Jessika?” Arista asked. “When the humans came through the gate? Was she there?”

  Jill pressed her lips together. “Sorry, I didn’t. I haven’t seen her since back in the colony.”

  Arista exhaled through her nose, not allowing herself to fall down that rabbit hole. “Thank you. You did a great job getting my parents here. I’m glad I got to see them one last time.” She stood between the tubes and placed on hand on each of them, glancing over at Jonn who hadn’t moved. He glanced away and that last conversation came back to her. She and Jonn racing from the restaurant back home, trying to insert her employment candidacy into Manheim’s system so she could get hired. The smiles on his face, and the faces of her parents on the comm link as they all celebrated Arista getting the job. That’s all it was supposed to be: a simple job. Two months tops. Then enough privileges so Arista could stage a fake accident, have two new husks called from the production floor, and intercept those and transfer her parents’ cortexes over to fresh bodies that weren’t set to expire.

  And now look at them. They’d trusted her with their lives.

  “You did everything you could,” Jill said, approaching her. “No one could’ve asked you to do anymore.”

  “If I hadn’t been so careless…” Arista said, thinking about the acid that first removed her hand.

  “Don’t go doin’ that,” Jill said. “Don’t go tryin’ to change the past with your mind, you’ll never get anywhere. What’s happened happened and there’s nothin’ you can do about it. I don’t want you thinkin’ you’ve made the wrong choices.”

  “But—” she began.

  Jill put her hands on Arista’s shoulders. “Of course you’ve made wrong choices. Everyone does it. Shit, I used to be programmed to do it. But this is now, not then and you’re not doin’ yourself or anyone else any good by pretendin’ you can go back and change somethin’. You move forward, you hear me?”

  Arista squinted in an attempt to staunch the flow of tears that had bubbled up from within her. She didn’t have time to cry. Frees was still out there and Charlie had control of the Consciousness. She flexed her artificial hand. “I hear you.”

  “Good. Then let’s get to work.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  They’d left the underground room and returned to the upper levels where the rain outside had stopped and the full moon shone through the windows. Trymian led them most of the way, taking much longer than was necessary, much to Arista’s visible annoyance. Blu was impressed she was able to hold it all together despite how much she’d been through already.

  Jonn brought up the rear as usual and Blu hung back to fall into step beside him, losing what little of the conversation between Arista, Jill, and Trymian she’d heard so far.

  “Jill’s kind of a badas
s, isn’t she?” Blu said casually as they walked.

  “I wouldn’t expect anything else,” Jonn replied. “Arista doesn’t suffer fools.”

  “You knew them, her parents?” Blu asked. “Before they got…shut down or whatever?” He nodded. “What were they like? Did they take good care of her? She doesn’t talk about them a lot but I imagine it must have been strange. Though, I guess it probably wasn’t as strange for her as it is for me. Since I had a human parent, And you, you probably didn’t even have parents. Or did you?”

  Jonn was silent.

  “Am I talking too much? It happens when I get excited. I know how badly she wanted to save her parents and now she’s found them, and that’s exciting. I mean, it’s not exciting she can’t save them, but, well you know what I mean. It’s good for her. I think. Do you?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Jonn replied. “I had parents assigned to me, only my mother was still ‘alive’ when Arista turned me. She lived a quiet life in Minnesota. I had a childhood programmed into my cortex, false memories of a life that didn’t happen. Or if it did, it happened to someone else. The only thing that’s ever happened to me that’s been real has been since she gave me my freedom.”

  “And you tried to kill her,” Blu said. She wasn’t stupid. Jonn was obviously dangerous. How could he not be with everything he’d done? But there was something else there and she was determined to find out what was driving him. Was it purely guilt? Or had he really been turned by Charlie and was spying on them? She’d vouched for him. Not because she believed him, but because she wanted to understand him better.

  “It’s like I told her, I was under Charlie’s influence.”

  Blu nodded, keeping in step. “It’s funny. I’ve met two machines now that have been under his influence. But what’s strange is he never made Frees do anything. He just planted suggestions until Frees believed they were right.”