The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "Look," said Buford, patiently. "Ari wants to open the compartment to some professor who's working on the terraforming project on al-Saḥra'. She told you that. So she came to me about opening it, which was also what we decided would be the proper procedure, years ago. The problem is, we can't even have a rational discussion about it, without it devolves into bullshit-speak. So I need the compartment opened in order to make reasonable decisions about it. I will tell the President, and his successors, regarding my change of mind in this regard. I doubt the President will want the compartment opened for the same reason Presidents for the last seventy-five years have never wanted it opened, after they were told about it and warned away from it."

  "I'm going to fall back on the old Jewish thing of asking three times if you're really fucking serious about this," replied Wolff. "It's not 'wait, you want us to cut the ends off our dicks?' stuff, but it's bad enough that Delaney has recurring nightmares about it, in addition to the ones she already has from her PTSD. So first time: Do you really want me to open the compartment to you, with the understanding that it's really, really, bad shit inside?"

  "Yes," said Buford.

  "Second time: It's the end of the world and the shit is hitting the fan, big time. Still want it?"

  "Yes," said Buford.

  "Third time: It's an elder race and literally they are coming for the Simulation because they want to create new races to build a galactic fight club. And that's no shit. Still want in?"

  "Yes," affirmed Buford, getting annoyed. "Wait. Did you say 'galactic fight club'?"

  "I did," replied Wolff. "As in, 'there goes the fucking neighborhood.'"

  "Okay," nodded the other man, "let's go find us a SCIF, and you tell me everything you know about this shit."

  Wolff nodded in return, and pulling a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, handed it to Buford.

  "What's this?"

  "A petition. You want to join our lodge? Chris and I will recommend you highly."

  Von Barronov nodded, with a grin.

  "You two are bastards."

  "No, sir," von Barronov shook his head. "We've met each other's parents."

  Buford rolled his eyes. "Git," he pointed to the vault door.

  ◆

  The SCIF, conveniently located in the third sub-basement of the Pentagon, but directly below Buford's offices in the E ring and reached by an express elevator, also conveniently had a holoscreen projector installed for the conference table. Once they were in and the door was shut, and the SECURE signs were lit, Wolff said, "Sir, we have a recording of the meeting at which we were informed of this problem. It might be simplest to run that recording and then answer any questions you may have."

  Buford nodded. "Go."

  Wolff pulled a small case out of his pocket, opened it, and removed a data chip, which he then placed in the projector's data slot.

  "Compartment code-worded Aftermarket Complexity. Identify," came a computer-generated voice.

  "Wolff, John C., Lieutenant General, USSFM Intelligence Directorate. Voice code, Alpha Six Niner Baker Oscar Two Eight Three."

  "Voiceprint and voice code accepted for Wolff, John C., Lieutenant General, USSFM Intelligence Directorate. Second identification required."

  "Von Barronov, Christopher L., Major General, USSFM Intelligence Directorate. Voice code, Baker Five Six Charlie November Six Five Zero."

  "Voiceprint and voice code accepted for Von Barronov, Christopher L., Major General, USSFM Intelligence Directorate. This compartment is unlocked. Please identify those present."

  Wolff did so.

  "Buford, John NMI, General, USSF Commandant, is not authorized for this compartment."

  "I so authorize," said Wolff.

  "Second authorization required."

  "I so authorize," said von Barronov.

  "Query: Add Buford, John NMI, General, USSF Commandant, permanently to this compartment?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  "Third authorization required."

  "Wolff, Ariela R., Colonel, USSFM 1st Battalion Commandant. Voice code, Gamma Eight Four Oscar Frank Six One Niner. I so authorize," said Ariela, firmly.

  "Voiceprint and voice code accepted for Wolff, Ariela R., Colonel, USSFM 1st Battalion Commandant. A quorum being present, Buford, John NMI, General USSF Commandant, is permanently added to this compartment."

  "We will add his voice coding later," said Wolff.

  "Confirmed. Compartment is open, please state your business."

  "Play the recording on this data chip."

  "Confirmed. Playing."

  A holographic image of the meeting between Ariela, Wolff, von Barronov, Yuz8!rfk, Ejr3@lt, and the Guardian Beam – the physical manifestation of the sentient computer running the Great Simulation – appeared before them in the middle of the table.

  "This was right after the meeting at the ancient shrine on Shizzle," Wolff explained to Buford. "Beam appeared and took us to a special chamber below the shrine, which contained a portal to a station he had in geosync. He explained to us why he had brought us together. It's rather fascinating, and frankly it will make you angry until you understand the deeper implications. Ready?"

  "Yes," said Buford, impatiently. "Go."

  "Play it, Sam," said Wolff.

  "Query: Who is Sam?"

  "Fucking no sense of humor. Play the vid."

  "Playing."

  ◆

  And when it was over, Buford, who had grown quietly angry during the give and take and Beam's obfuscations, was simply, grimly, silent.

  The others gave him time to digest. He started to say something a couple of times, and stopped, still thinking.

  "So you see the structure of the universe," he said, finally.

  "In effect," agreed Ariela. "It's mutable if you can learn to see it, but fine control takes a long time. Let me show you an example of fine control. SCIF, play my vid capture."

  "Playing." It was a short capture from a nano drone, showing the "rug" being pulled out from under Professor Bisset. Buford didn't laugh, but his mouth corners quirked up and his eyes were shining when it ended.

  "Who else has that level of control?" he asked.

  "Nobody," said Ariela. "Well, maybe Delaney is close, but she's erratic. Dad and Yuz8!rfk haven't had time to work on manipulation, and neither have Uncle Chris and Ejr3@lt, who also had the burden of learning to see the entire Mesh in the first place. Fred," she looked daggers at her husband, "can barely see the first layer."

  "And the geyser?"

  "I wasn't paying attention," admitted Ariela, "and while visualizing the changes to the Mesh that would be needed to create the equivalent of a borehole, the Mesh obliged by actually creating it."

  "Is it alive?" asked Buford.

  Ariela shook her head. "I don't think so, I think it's just sensitive to control, and if you don't want it to do what you're thinking, you have to be more careful than I was. Delaney apparently cleaned out a lock cylinder once that was full of grit and wouldn't let her insert the key far enough to turn it. She 'saw' the cylinder, and the grit inside it, and simply visualized the cylinder cleaned out and shiny new. She said if she'd had her head right in front of the lock, she'd have gotten a face full of dirt when it blew out. And that was only the second time she'd even seen the Mesh."

  Buford nodded. "On the trip back to 2017 to find the other Chinese agents in their stasis chambers. I remember something in the report about the key to the last building giving difficulty."

  "I'll make sure you get a copy of the private report she made to me," said Wolff. "It includes the three instances during that assignment when she saw the Mesh. I couldn’t have shared it with you before now, but I made her aware that it was compartmented the first time she saw it, which I was responsible for anyway."

  "Understood." Buford nodded again. "So how do I get started seeing it? Short of filling out a petition and joining John and Chris's lodge?"

  Ariela bit her lip, and considered. "Um. Sir, look
at the tabletop."

  Buford did. "I see a wooden tabletop."

  "Okay, now think about its structure. Concentrate on it and try to look beneath the surface, or between the layers, or whatever works." Ariela thought some more. "Consider the tabletop as a geometric object rather than a real-world object."

  "Hrmf. Something like Platonic idealism, where the table is a shadow copy of the ideal form of a . . . fuck!" Buford closed his eyes and shook his head.

  "I think he saw it," von Barronov confided to Wolff, who laughed.

  "This is one of the reasons why Masonic teachings help," said Wolff. "Pythagorean philosophy holds that the essential nature of all things is accurately described by mathematical formulae and proofs, these being eternal truths. Plato took that and ran with it, and said that our knowledge is innate rather than experiential, and in order to discover that knowledge we must be introspective and logical to come to a state of true knowledge." He shrugged. "Masonry is more interested in Pythagoras because of his contributions to geometry than it is in Plato, but it's a hop, skip, and a jump from an understanding of the Pythagorean universe to an understanding of how Plato saw the world, imperfect as he thought it was."

  Buford grunted. "Well, I'm not going to sacrifice a hecatomb," he said, "but, 'Eureka!'. And you see this all the time?"

  "No," replied Ariela, "because it's not a natural way of seeing. You have to think about it to see it. Closing your eyes helps with that. Manipulating things is sort of a way of thinking about how you want the object or objects to behave. Like this." She pointed at a glass of water on the table in front of Buford. It trembled a little and slid about a foot toward the center of the table, where it stopped. "Again, that's what we call 'fine control'," she added. "And which so far, only I seem to be able to fully handle."

  "What's the difference between what you're doing and telekinesis?"

  "I'm actually deforming the Mesh that underlays the physical world to do that, or more to the point, telling the Mesh to deform itself," said Ariela. "It has nothing to do with some soi-disant mental power that can move objects through space without regard to their relationship to the spatial Universe. Difficult to explain when telekinesis doesn't actually exist, but there you have it. I mean, even when we pick the glass up by hand, we deform the Mesh, because it has to follow the object to which it's bound. But any animal can do that; it's just Mesh on Mesh. It takes a well-honed talent to manipulate objects merely by changing the shape of the Mesh in the immediate neighborhood of the object." She smiled, thinking of the geyser and her immediate reaction to it. "After all, God told Moses to speak to the rock, not to bash it with his staff."

  "Okay," said Buford, "I think I understand the Mesh. Now. What's all this about the Darkness? And the Abyss? When did you encounter them before?"

  "It was part of the breakdown I had when we were way uptime, near the end of my native timeline, and Dad inadvertently let slip that I wasn't entirely a creature of free will," explained Ariela. "I fell off the edge of the Universe, into the Abyss, or nearly so – I was able to hold on with one hand long enough for Dad to realize what was wrong and give me some of his time essence, so I could grab on with the other hand and pull myself back out." She shrugged. "I realize that's highly-anthropomorphic, but that's what my experience of the End of Time was."

  "The Abyss is really just the anti-Universe that formed out of the other half of the Big Bang," said von Barronov. "It's an antimatter universe, not inside-out, just reverse physics from our Universe. Black holes here exit through white holes there, and there's energy transfer, as Beam said."

  "And the Darkness," said Wolff, "are the other race of Old Ones who were apparently around at the time the Originators flourished, but who were so far away the Originators never discovered them. Which is probably just as well, as they don't sound like very nice folks."

  Buford snorted. "Sounds like Arisia and Eddore, to me."

  They all looked at him, mouths agape.

  "What?" he growled. "I've read science fiction since I was in short pants, why the hell do you think I joined Space Force?"

  "We don't have any plans to produce Lenses," pointed out Ariela, "nor am I going to mother a bunch of Children of the Lens. You can just forget that shit, right now."

  They all laughed. Then Ariela suddenly got big-eyed.

  "No!" she gasped, and shut her eyes, tightly.

  "What?" said Fox, worried.

  "No, no! No more children!"

  Now Fox really looked concerned. "Ari? Are you having a vision?"

  Ariela nodded, and opened her eyes.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  "I saw," she husked, "our five children."

  "Five?"

  "Five," she confirmed. "I even know their names. Raven and Delaney, of course . . . but then the other three. Yehudit, Devorah, and Yael."

  "All blondes?" joked Fox.

  "Devorah was, is, will be a redhead," said Ariela, distractedly. "Fred, the three are all named for ancient Hebrew warrior women."

  "So?" Fox didn't see the connection. Wolff was starting to get the gleam of understanding in his eyes. The other two men were, like Fox, clueless.

  Ariela sighed. "They're all going to be fighters in the War of the Darkness. Even Raven."

  "That's not good?"

  "No, it's not." Tears started to form again in her eyes. "Fred, at least two of them are going to die . . . and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

  Fox finally got it. "That's . . . definitely bad."

  Ariela gulped for air. "And Daddy . . . "

  Wolff looked at her and nodded, as if he'd always known what she was about to say.

  "In the end, remember I said Delaney would save us all?"

  "Yes, honey, I remember."

  She shook her head, sadly. "She isn't going to be able to save you."

  "Well," said Wolff, unsurprised. "Looks like I'll finally get my ticket punched to Valhalla, after all."

  Chapter 3

  Visions, Whiskey, and Piracy, Arr

  "The last vision she had was the first," said Wolff. "It was twenty years ago, when Delaney had her first PTSD incident."

  "What did she say she saw?" asked Buford.

  They'd let Ariela out of the SCIF so she could clean herself up and get her head back on straight. Wolff thought about it for a moment.

  "She said, 'the child who defies the darkness will save us all,' or something like that," he replied. "There was more to it, but that's the gist. It's certainly allegorical. One interpretation of Delaney's name is 'child of dark defiance'. At the time, I understood that vision as being that Delaney will be the last defense between ourselves and the Darkness, and she will be the instrument of their defeat. How that will happen, I haven't a clue; but I think she has it in her to be a very strong manipulator of the Mesh. It's possible she could do something like drop their entire fleet into the Abyss, when the time comes. But I don't know; I don't get the visions, and I can't interpret anything Ariela sees like that." He sighed. "I gather even Beam can't."

  "Her visions are vague just like those of any of the Biblical prophets," said von Barronov.

  Wolff shook his head. "More so. Because the redactors of the prophetic books had a reason to be more specific. I mean, if someone were to write such a book a thousand or ten thousand years from now featuring Ariela's prophecies, they might provide more detail simply because they would have had time to come true, and those details would be known. But this is ridiculous speculation, because we have to deal now with whatever her visions tell her and she then relates to us. The interpretation of the visions is all on us."

  "If she sees Delaney as being capable of that," said Fox, "why would all the other worlds and all the other geometricists be needed? Why do our other daughters have to be caught up in this?"

  "I don't know," Wolff shrugged. "To clean up the mess? Beam said the Darkness are careless about damaging the Mesh, and could be creating a spacetime rift right now that would eventually have to be r
epaired. Or maybe they're just needed to hold everything together while Delaney and her sisters do their thing. I have no idea what I would be doing to get myself killed," he added, "but I'm sure it's not difficult to get oneself killed in a space battle."

  "And it's just a vision," observed Buford. "Could be it's wrong."

  "True enough. Of course, we've not had a chance to see one come true, yet."

  The door chimed. Buford looked up at the security camera pointing at the hallway outside the SCIF. "She's back."

  Fox got up, walked over to the door, and opened it after disabling the various security measures and the SECURE light turned off. Ariela walked back in, hair and what little makeup she wore restored, and an apologetic look on her face.

  Fox shut the door again and re-enabled all the security measures.

  "I'm sorry," said Ariela, with a weak smile. "I'll try not to let that happen again."

  Buford shrugged. "Visions will come as they may, I suppose," he said.

  "And did again, in the washroom," she replied. "I hope this isn't going to be a regular thing, but I saw al-Saḥra' with blue oceans and green continents, from orbit, just as though I were really there." She sighed. "It was beautiful," she added.

  "Any idea when?" asked Wolff.

  She shook her head. "No. Just a feeling that it was a long time from now. Maybe decades; maybe a century or more. Or longer."

  "I suspect," Wolff said to Buford, "that we need to adjourn this meeting and get her away from the SCIF. Too much magnetic energy and other crap going on, and I'll bet that's what triggered the visions."

  "Possibly," agreed Buford. "Some people do have problems with it. All right, Colonel, you may read Dr. Smith in to the compartment. I will inform the President. By the way, how did things go with the mullahs?"

  "Still working on that," said Ariela. "I brought Mullah al-Mubarak around to the 'that might be possible' stage, that which might be possible being bringing the idea of slow and gradual reform to his Council, along with the idea that the world does not have to be a dry, baking desolation in order to try his people and please Allah." She grinned. "Though it may be interesting getting the folks in Mecca to part with a piece of the Black Stone of the Kaaba for their Islamic brothers on al-Saḥra'."