by Paul Anlee
“What the...?” Mary said.
Darak moved closer to inspect the nearest elements.
“I can’t tell if it’s the Ouroboros program or something that Trillian set up for his own perverse reasons.”
“They’re all interconnected,” Darya observed.
Darak nodded. “It’s almost impossible to trace all the links. This could take months to untangle.”
He traced a few lines between networks. “There are way too many links here for it all to be tied into one local instance of the inworld. It looks like he might’ve stored or copied Fulls from some of the other stations into here. Or worse. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is not good. I think he threw the Partials into storage with the Fulls.”
“But there are billions of Partials!”
“Exactly. He’s intermingled parts of everyone’s concepta space, Fulls and Partials alike. We can’t assume any single element contains an integral person, or only one person. This cross-connected tangle of links is the only thing maintaining their integrity, such as it is. If we sever any of these links, people will be lost. Unless you know some defining characteristic of each of your local Full instantiations that can help narrow it down, we’ll have to trace every one of these connections.”
He looked hopefully at Darya.
“I don’t know everyone in Alternus,” she protested. “There’s no single defining factor I can identify.”
“Okay, so we’ll have to do it the hard way.”
“That’ll take too long,” Mary said. “We don’t have time. We need an army to attack the Deplosion Array, and now.”
Darak shrugged.
Darya’s eyes swept across the archive array.
“Find a few million real people buried in the midst of billions of Partials,” she muttered, “and delicately untangle their minds from all of the others.”
She covered her eyes with her hands and let out an exasperated breath.
“Or...” she left the word hanging.
“Or, what?” Darak asked.
“Or…we could make everyone a Full. Cut the cross-connections, sort out the results, select what’s still viable, and give them all personhood.
“What do you think?” Darya asked.
Darak clasped his hands behind his back and paced in a circle.
“Can you do it?” Darya pushed.
“Can I do it?” Darak echoed. “Yes, it is feasible.”
He completed another circle and stopped, facing her.
“But?” she prompted.
“But should I? That’s a harder question. This number of Partials has never been promoted to Fulls all at once, as far as I know.”
“We need them.”
“No, you need them,” he corrected. “Or you think you do, in order to take inadvisable actions that will do little more than raise the ire of the Living God.”
Darya braced herself. Here’s where we discover whose side Darak is really on.
“Controlling a portion, any portion, of the Deplosion Array will do more than make Alum angry,” she pointed out.
“Perhaps,” Darak conceded. “It’s not clear that He couldn’t just regroup and build an array elsewhere, or find a different route to His ultimate goal.”
“You said you’d help us.”
“Mm.” Darak looked upward, seeking inspiration. Or maybe, patience. Either way, he found nothing of any help.
“It’s not without risks,” he said after a moment. “There’s a screening system in place for a reason. And that’s under the best possible circumstances, when Partials are developed under carefully controlled conditions with Full parentage. Advancing this many all at once under chaotic circumstances and without Full parentage would be sheer recklessness. It could be disastrous. We could end up with an army of psychopaths.”
Darya softened her voice. “I agree that it’s risky. But don’t forget, we’re facing the ultimate risk. If we do nothing, Alum wins and He will destroy the entire universe. Our universe. Their universe. We all lose. We lose everything.”
“Reformats,” Darak corrected, “not destroys. Re-creates.”
“Whatever you want to call it. Our universe will no longer exist. We will no longer exist.”
Darak rocked on his heels and stared at the floor.
“Fine,” Darya spat. “Don’t concern yourself with our battles. I’ll promote them to Fulls myself.”
“Have you ever done that?”
“No. I’ve never served on a Parental board. But I know the principles and it doesn’t seem all that hard. Trillian promoted Timothy—accidentally, mind you—and Timothy’s fine.”
“Billions at a time and each one of them a jumbled mess,” Darak replied, shaking his head. “The odds of making a maladjusted persona or worse, an insane one, are terribly high.”
“It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” Darya answered. “We can weed out any unsuitable personas during training.”
Darak took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he capitulated. “If you’re that determined, I’ll help you.”
“Don’t go out of your way,” Darya shot back.
“If it means saving the universe from a few billion psychotic, weaponized Cybrids, I insist. We can reassemble their conceptas, raise them to Full personas, and give them new bodies. Bodies fit for war.”
Darya’s eyes shone triumphantly.
6
Darak lifted Darya’s brain ever so gingerly from her trueself body.
Was the fact that she’d allowed him to do this a reflection of her growing trust? She’d insisted he be the one to put her offline and physically transfer her brain into her new body.
Am I finally winning her over or is this just another test?
“I have to lead the way,” she’d said. Although, truth be told, she didn’t.
“You know, physically transferring your CPPU, your brain, isn’t necessary,” he’d countered. “We can build you a new quark-spin lattice and transfer your persona into that. It would be less risky.”
She declined, offering no explanation.
All of the other newly-reconfigured Cybrid minds salvaged from the damaged Alternus inworld were being digitally transmitted directly into their new substrates. The Esu, the people of Eso-La, had already constructed a million new CPPUs—Concepta-Persona Processing Units—that were ready to accommodate the rescued minds, and they were adding more to that number every day.
Darya and Mary were the only two Cybrids with special quark-spin CPPUs, and Darya wasn’t ready to give up the secret of their fabrication to anyone yet, not even to Darak. That meant their physical computational substrates would have to be preserved, and their brains would have to be physically transferred into the “battle-Cybrid” bodies the Esu had designed for them.
She trusts me with her life but not her secrets—Darak realized.
She’ll let me carry her CPPU, to feel it in my hands but not access it, not understand how it functions.
He winced in frustration and pushed back the urge to probe the CPPU with his built-in sensors, to flood it with analyzing radiation.
If she would’ve let me, if she would have told me how, I could have constructed new quark-spin substrates for both of them. For all of them, if she’d asked.
Still in her old body, Mary watched the procedure with intense interest from across the lab. She was next.
“From the outside, it looks the same as any standard CPPU,” she observed.
“All the way down to the atomic level,” Darak agreed. But what secrets lie below the surface?—he wondered.
Equations for boson-mediated quark-quark interactions flowed through his mind, threatening to distract him from his present task. He had so many questions!
How does she get the resolution to read or to set spin in an individual quark? How is the spin transported between different nuclei?
“I don’t think I could stand being that slow again,” Mary commented, misreading his silence. “You know, with just a normal silicene-lattice CPP
U.”
Darak shook his head and brought his attention back to what he was doing. “No, I don’t imagine that would be any fun.”
“Ha! Honestly, it was…torture,” Mary quipped.
Darak grunted. Bad joke.
She laughed a little too brightly for someone who’d been in Hell only a few weeks earlier, Darak noted. Would she ever fully recover from the trauma Trillian had inflicted on her? He could help her with that, erase specific memories from her archives if she wanted.
“Seriously, though,” Mary added, “it was frustrating to know that I could level the playing field with Trillian if only I could connect my thought processes to the quark-spin lattice of the Alternus inworld. I’m glad Darya found a way to get the solution through to me.”
Reminded of whose fragile mind he held in his hands, Darak looked at Darya’s crystalline brain.
Is there anything of Kathy left in there?—he wondered. Or of the Cybrid, DAR-K?
He reflected on his lost love and the friendship severed too soon. He’d known love again since Kathy Liang’s passing, but it would never be like his first.
His focus was drifting again.
You’re too old for this—he chastised himself.
He swiveled and carried Darya’s brain over to her shiny new body.
“Careful!” Mary warned.
He paused mid-step. “It’ll go smoother if you don’t distract me.”
“Couldn’t you just, you know, erase gravity in this region? I’d feel better knowing you couldn’t drop her.”
“Me, too. I could have simply shifted her CPPU into place. I could have shifted you both at the same time. It could have been instantaneous and practically risk free. But, no. For some reason, she wanted me to move her brain by hand and, for that, I need gravity. Besides, Kathy always enjoyed a little ceremony in her life.”
“Mm,” Mary replied, noncommittally. She’d forgotten about his history with Darya’s previous personas, originating with his human partner, Kathy, evolving into Dar-K, and now into this version of Darya who no longer remembered or trusted him.
It must be hard on him—she thought.
Darak opened the access port in Darya’s new body. It was smaller than her old one, as was the propulsion unit. More space for weapons.
His thousands of years of experience fighting the Aelu and, much later, fighting with the Aelu against Alum’s Angels had guided Darak’s decisions in designing this new battle-Cybrid model.
He’d reduced the antimatter store to a fraction of its previous size–adequate for simple maneuvering and more than enough power for every other use—and replaced the propulsion rockets with shift/jump machinery. Specialized RAF devices now powered the energy weapons and absorbed enemy blasts. The outer shell and appendages were crafted from exotic material he’d mined from another universe, material tougher than anything he’d found in this one.
Figuring out how to keep foreign-universe matter stable under the physical laws of this universe had occupied hundreds of years of experimentation much earlier in his life. He hoped it would be worth the effort.
Unless Alum has a new, improved model of His Angel, the battle Cybrids will make quick work of them. Provided the Living God Himself doesn’t engage directly in the fight. If Alum jumps into the fray, all bets are off.
Darak lowered the CPPU into the receiving cradle and watched Darya’s new body pull it deep inside.
“It won’t take her long to re-boot,” he explained to Mary. “But the rest of the upgrade, the learning process, could take weeks. I offered to reconfigure her operating system software and make it more efficient, but she insisted on keeping her old driver routines and modifying them herself. The old drivers are going to have a devil of a time interfacing with the new hardware. It’ll take her a while to reprogram and there’s no guarantee it will all go smoothly.”
“Can’t you just provide mapping to reinterpret familiar commands to the new machinery?” Mary suggested.
“You two think a lot alike. She asked me the same thing. Yes, I could do that, but it would make her slower than everyone else, when the whole idea of her unique brain is to make her faster.”
“No, she wouldn’t be happy about that,” Mary said.
“I offered to send the drivers to a third-party buffer where you could both examine them for any belief viruses.”
“What would be the point in that?” Mary asked. “We all know you could sneak something in there if you wanted to.”
True—he admitted. He had millions of years of his own Shard and Aelu experience to draw on. Even Darya’s advanced security programs would have a tough time identifying a fractal virus that was sufficiently fragmented and scattered throughout the machine code.
“In the end, we agreed that I’d have to teach her how to use her new body.”
“Teach her?”
“The old-fashioned way,” Darak nodded. “The drivers for listening and speaking are more or less the same as before, so she asked me to talk her through that. I’ll tell her where the interrupts are, the port addresses, the hardware-specific command codes, and so on.”
“And she’ll write the new O/S routines herself?” Mary said. “From your verbal descriptions? That’ll take forever.”
“It’s the only way she felt comfortable that nothing in her concepta would be altered against her intention.”
“And then, what? We’re supposed to repeat the process with all the millions of new Cybrids? Why don’t we just surrender to Alum right now?”
“No,” Darak said. “That’s only for Darya. Once she figures things out, she’ll send the entire O/S bundle to you and you can incorporate it. Everyone else will get the code I provide.”
The Cybrid bobbed once. “I trust Darya completely. If she says her code is safe, then it’s safe.”
Darya’s CPPU receiving port slid shut with a quiet click. A few seconds passed while the reboot routines ran.
“Okay, I’m back,” Darya announced as her processor made initial connections to her speech centers. “I don’t dare do anything, though.”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Darak agreed.
“I can hear well enough,” Darya said, “and see, after a fashion.”
“Your new body provides simultaneous 360-degree, 3D vision. It integrates the entire photonic spectrum, too, not just visible light. It’ll take a little getting used to. Right now, you’re processing from a small subset of all visual sensors over a narrow bandwidth.”
“That’ll be enough,” the Cybrid replied.
“How does it feel?” Mary asked.
“Thought processes are nominal,” said Darya. “But I’m cut off from a lot of the normal sensory input. I can’t feel my arms. I can’t sense the MAM fire in my belly, like I used to. To tell the truth, I feel pretty helpless.”
“I told you,” Darak said.
“Yes, you did.”
She cautiously extended an appendage a few centimeters.
“We’ll just have to figure it out one step at a time.”
7
“BUT, my Lord, Angel design has served us well for over thirty million years, from long before the Aelu Wars.”
“Thirty million years? Has it been that long? In that case, all the more reason to think about improvements, wouldn’t you say?”
Alum didn’t enjoy arguing with His Shard but He found it useful to compare His perfect thoughts against those of lesser beings. If nothing else, it predicted how inferior intellects might react.
“Does this have to do with Lord Mika’s failure at Tri-Star?”
Alum had to remind Himself that this particular incarnation of Shard Trillian standing before Him, questioning Him, was in a sense, still a young pup. The clone had been pulled from stasis only last month and was filled with the vigor and passion—and the naive impatience—of youth.
It’s always such an inconvenience to lose a Trillian, especially one as experienced as the last one had been—Alum lamented. And the process of bringing a n
ew replica up to speed is always wearisome.
“Lord Mika did not fail at Tri-Star,” He corrected his Shard, “the intruder was deceptively more powerful than he first appeared.”
Alum took a sip from His heavy ceramic mug and watched the dust rising from the herd of nanoffalo, the miniaturized buffalo that roamed the terrarium set into His coffee table.
He set the mug down on the glass above the tiny herd, casting a shadow in front of their stampede. The herd split into two streams, circling to either side of the shaded land. Alum smiled.
It never gets old, playing with tiny, living things, making them come and go, here and there. Still such a human pleasure.
In the miniature plains setting, it was an engaging game. In the greater universe, the responsibility for creating perfection was the epitome of seriousness.
Alum sighed at the recognition of His weighty responsibility, greater than anything He’d ever undertaken.
“Heaven is within our grasp,” He said aloud, whether to the nanoffalo or to him, Trillian wasn’t sure.
The Shard fidgeted.
“However,” Alum continued, “the Deplosion Array is still vulnerable. Until re-Creation is assured, the fate of the universe remains at risk.”
Trillian spread his hands in resignation. “Your wisdom will guide us, as always, my Lord,” he offered. “Do you foresee further threats from the Cybrids? Does my failure with the Cybrid rebellion threaten Your Divine Plan?”
It was inconvenient that Trillian didn’t get a chance to download his memories before he died on that recharging station. It would’ve been useful to know how the Cybrids had managed to kill the Shard. Did they catch him off guard? Were they cloaked? Did they have new technology?
Now that the asteroid had disappeared from the Realm, any clues as to how the previous Trillian was murdered were gone with it.
“Unfortunately, that business remains a mystery,” Alum answered. “But there is one thing I’m sure of: there’s no way this recent Cybrid resistance could have been organized entirely within the Realm. They have outside support.”
Alum stroked His chin as He considered his options. Things will be put back to normal soon enough—He assured himself.