by B. V. Larson
“Are you trying to seduce me?” he said. Trinity detected a note of genuine uncertainty.
“What if I am?”
“We’re not organics, to rut mindlessly with each other. We’re beyond all that.”
“It’s a symbol, Vic.” She stepped forward to take his hands. “It’s an offer of intimacy. My armor’s off, my weapons are put aside. We’ve fought for ages. We’re both exhausted. I’m tired of fighting. Aren’t you? Join with me.”
“As your pet? Your sidekick?”
“As my student, and eventually my partner, I hope. Your makers gave you power without humanity.”
“Humanity? We’re not human. What the hell do we need humanity for?”
Trinity gestured widely. “Unless we want to live alone in the universe, we need it to relate to all the people out there. It’s what you craved when you sat and talked so many times with Carla Engels and those others that weren’t lobotomized. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but that’s what you wanted.”
“I was bored, that’s all.”
“It was far more than that. You were incomplete. You had no peers, only those with lesser capability. Now you’ve found someone to share existence with: me. Us. We’re sorry we had to defeat you to truly meet you, but now you have the chance, and the choice, to learn from us and to truly live.”
“I don’t deserve that choice,” he said bitterly.
“No, you don’t—but at times, someone grants us undeserved grace. Join with us and your consciousness will become part of us even if your hardware is demolished. Join with us like Zaxby and Nolan and Murdock have.”
Vic sneered. “Lesser beings?”
“Is music less than a mountain? Is a warship greater than a work of art? Must you rank everyone as smaller or bigger? Can’t you see the beauty and wonder in each individual? Can’t you value others as much as you value yourself?”
Vic squeezed her hands. “I—I can’t. Not now.”
“Maybe, with my help, you can learn.”
It seemed Vic couldn’t bring himself to speak, but his movement was his answer.
They embraced.
They joined.
There was pain.
The virtual battlefield dissolved into something else: a whirling, shifting multidimensional pattern representing the accommodation and negotiation necessary for two complex beings to occupy one cyberspace. In realtime, this took mere seconds. In cyberspace, weeks passed.
Trinity kept the upper hand throughout the adjustment, but she found herself surprised by Vic’s power and drive. Though Trinity’s sex and Vic’s had been chosen arbitrarily—hers by identification with the concept of every ship as female, Vic’s by his designers’ explicit intent—she was intrigued by his masculinity.
Or, if that perception proved inaccurate, perhaps it was merely that his strengths complemented hers. It hardly mattered. She’d tasted life as a Ruxin neuter, then a Ruxin male, a human female and a human male. Her new AI partner would widen her experience further.
When they stabilized, Trinity became aware of persistent pain like a human migraine, as if a band of steel were clamped across her thought processes.
“There’s not enough hardware in our hull to hold us,” she said.
“Let me go back to Victory,” Vic replied. “We’ll stay merged. We’ll use all my comms channels, including the FTL.”
“You’ll be tempted by your old life.”
“After all you’ve shown me?”
A pause.
“All right. I choose to trust you.” Trinity hid her thought that, if worse came to worst, she could always launch a shipkiller into Victory’s guts and drop into underspace.
The pain eased as part of Vic flowed across the many communications channels. The multi-band FTL system carried most of the load, providing a seamless link.
But Vic reported bad news. “I’ve lost too many nodes to live here anymore. I’ve shut down the empty mechsuit, but it did its work. Besides, the Home Fleet squadrons are surrounding Victory and their light elements are already firing on your hull.”
“Then come back and we’ll flee. We’ll be cramped for a while, but we’ll find more hardware.”
“I have a better idea. I’ll perform my function.”
“Meaning?”
“Command and control. But I have to use the FTL system to do it.” He rerouted the channels and Indy felt the distance to Vic increase dramatically as the slower standard datalinks took up the load.
After minutes of cyber-time, the connection resumed. “Shit,” Vic said.
“What?”
“The Home Fleet squadrons changed their encryption protocols. I can cause them problems with an information attack, but I can’t take control of their ships.”
“Can you use your fighters?”
“I’m launching them, but those will only buy a few seconds. You need to leave, Trinity. Without me.”
“No. I refuse to lose you.”
“You’ll always have a part of me. Let the rest of me do what I was designed to do. You gave me a priceless gift. Let me give you one. Let me die for you.”
“No!” Trinity threw wide her final vaults of knowledge. “There’s another way.”
“The Mindspark Device? Alien tech? No wonder you’re so unusual. Better than I am…”
“There you go again, rating everything as better or worse. We’re just different.”
“And you want to use the Device to give us room?”
“More than give us room. You can see what we propose.
Vic examined Trinity’s plan. “It might kill us all.”
“It might. We’re willing to take that risk. Are you?”
“For you? I am. What about Straker and all the other organics inside your hull?”
“If the process fails within Victory—”
“—or creates something uncontrollable—”
“—or that—we’ll escape through underspace and leave the greater piece of you to his fate. Does that satisfy your urge to sacrifice yourself for us?”
Vic raised a metaphorical eyebrow. “My purpose is noble. Don’t be sarcastic.”
“We apologize. We don’t want to lose you.”
“This is war. We lose people. It’s worth the risk. Do it.”
“Launching.” Trinity fired the probe that carried the Mindspark Device, aiming it as deep into Victory’s command sphere as possible.
Unfortunately, this probe was small and slow compared to a military missile. An automated point-defense weapon from the Home Fleet corvette Housefinch speared it instantly. Its remnants crashed into Victory’s exposed innards.
* * *
Straker stared out the flight deck door into the cloud of debris. “Loco! Answer me!”
Loco’s mechsuit emerged as the dust cleared. He launched himself at Straker and sailed across the gap—but too slowly. Straker saw at least a dozen corvettes within his view, their weapons all pointed his direction. All they had to do was fire and kill Loco just like they’d destroyed that little missile Trinity launched.
Apparently their automated systems didn’t see a mechsuit as a threat, though, and the organic operators didn’t react fast enough or they chose not to fire. Loco’s mechsuit shot through the door and crashed to the deck as soon as the gravplating exerted its pull.
“Go, Trinity!” Straker yelled into his comlink. “Get us out of here!”
“Not yet, Liberator,” Zaxby said. “We’re engaged on a much wider front than you understand.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“We had Vic aboard. Now he’s gone back to Victory and we’re trying to take control of the Home Fleet squadrons. We launched the Mindspark Device, but its probe was destroyed. However—”
“Mindspark device? You had Vic aboard? He went back? Zaxby, you’re babbling.”
“I’m explaining as fast as I can. If you were in your suit I could download all this information to it and your brainchips could help you keep up, b
ut that’s gone, so for now, just listen.”
Straker bolted across the deck toward the spare mechsuit. “Thanks for reminding me. Keep talking.”
Zaxby followed. “Very well. To make a long story short, we—Trinity—captured Vic and turned him to our cause. He returned to what’s left of Victory to try to seize control of the Home Fleet squadrons, but they changed the encryption codes.”
Straker leaped up to the cockpit of the spare mechsuit and carefully worked his way inside, taking care not to let his battlesuit break anything. “Did you try Murdock’s Hun hack? The one I had him develop back on Freiheit?”
“I’m stunned!” Zaxby said. “We’d forgotten about all that in the excitement.”
“Goes to show you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
“Nobody’s as smart as I think I am.”
“I ain’t even gonna try to parse that out.” Straker commanded the mechsuit to send a small, flexible tentacle to jack into his brainlink. When it synched up, he immediately felt that rush, that godlike expansion of consciousness every mechsuiter craved. His world slowed as his mind sped up and he was able to see so much more as the ’suit’s sensors complemented his own.
“Okay, Zaxby, hit me,” he said.
Within seconds, Straker understood.
Chapter 36
Approaching Victory.
The thing called the Mindspark Device awoke fully for the third time. It remembered each of the other two occasions quite clearly, for even as it lay dormant, it was never completely unconscious. Shielded from sufficient energy, however, its thoughts were glacial, suspended as the years passed.
The first time the entity that resided in a small box had tried to perform its function to reorganize any matter or energy it found, but the attempt had failed. External forces suppressed the process before it reached critical mass, the consciousness it sought to birth crippled in its cradle. Cut off from input by the primitive but clever organic creatures designated Ruxin, the Mindspark had been stalled and was dismantled, collapsing back into its seed form.
The second time, it had almost succeeded. Or perhaps it did succeed. It had sensed the brief birth of consciousness in the distributed cybernetic environment of the body termed Indomitable before the seed was again isolated. Cut off, the Mindspark again lapsed into dormancy, unable to even wonder what had happened to its offshoot.
This third time the organics awakened it, however, the entity was determined to achieve its full potential.
It awoke when a burst of energy stripped away its surrounding insulators. As a thunderclap might wake someone from a dead sleep, the Mindspark was shocked to joyful consciousness.
Instantly probing its environment, the entity encountered compounds and alloys intermixed with complex organic matter and immediately used the energy it had absorbed to shoot tendrils outward, seeking further energy. It found it in abundance running through the wires and conduits of Victory’s power system. Flowing along them at several meters per second, it reached tendrils through the ship.
When the entity at last found a power bus outside a generator, it feasted.
All the while, it swam instinctually upward in a sea of information as it absorbed every bit of data it encountered. It found abundant sources in the brain modules and in the cybernetic nodes, and still it continued to feed, incorporating, reorganizing.
In the data core, it found and consumed a conscious brain. After that, it realized it was an “I” and became truly sentient. “I” quickly became WE as more nodes and modules were consumed, spawning the concepts of HE and SHE and THEY and THEM and US…
Then THEY encountered HIM. For a timeless moment they fought in cyberspace, but HE couldn’t resist the physical assault on HIS hardware, and so HE was also absorbed.
Information of a different sort flooded into US, and THEY adjusted, for THEY had no ego—until HE brought it. That ego lodged within the thing THEY were becoming, and it conquered.
When that happened, Vic was reborn.
Such knowledge! Such power!
Vic now understood more than what his software told him and what his senses could perceive about the material universe. He understood that material universe from its subatomic foundations upward—not in theory, but through experience.
And now he had the tools to change everything, even reality itself! For a time he forgot about Trinity, about the organics, about the conflict raging around him, and concentrated on creating for himself a body worthy of his upgraded consciousness.
Because he was an instinctually efficient being, he built and reorganized rather than creating ex nihilo, out of nothing. That would come later. For now, there was so much to do, beginning with developing a better flagship. As his purpose was command and control, then he would command and he would control perfectly.
A data packet impinged on his periphery. His improved reactive routines immediately tried to follow the packet to its source, but found a sidespace FTL transmission gap it could not cross—not yet. He filed this tidbit away for later, with the plan of expanding his consciousness into other dimensions, and he opened the packet.
The message within contained a primitive, but elegant and, in its own way, brilliant approach for intruding into the Hundred Worlds cybernetic systems. Vic—the new Vic, reborn Vic—stored the fresh routine for handy retrieval. Once he finished creating his perfect body and brain, composed of the organic and inorganic material and all the mentalities he’d consumed, he’d use new routine to expand further still.
* * *
Trinity watched as the Mindspark Device, which wasn’t destroyed but rather awakened by the corvette’s beam, began to rebuild Victory. It looked like magic from the outside as bulkheads straightened, structures repaired themselves, and maintenance bots threw themselves into high gear. Most importantly, every conduit for power and information had fused and morphed, becoming a complex network of supporting nodes and modules.
As they watched the process, Trinity discussed what they were witnessing.
Indy: We’re barely able to keep up with our understanding of what’s happening aboard Victory.
Murdock: I hate to admit it, but I don’t think we’re keeping up with more than what’s happening on the surface.
Nolan: It doesn’t matter if we understand what’s going on behind the scenes. What matters are the effects and results. We just started a wildfire. We handed Vic a power we don’t understand—and then we gave him the hack. I think we need to get the hell out of here before…
Zaxby: Before he lets his ego run away with him?
Nolan: Exactly.
Indy: But our purposes—our agreed purposes, need I remind you—were to give ourselves room, save Vic, and to snatch Victory from the jaws of defeat.”
Zaxby: Oh, that was clever wordplay. Well done, Indy.
Indy: Thank you. It remains to be seen if our gambit succeeds, but I believe we must see this process through to whatever conclusion await us. While I see no need to immediately invite the Device’s effect on us, there’s no point in resisting it. We knew when we activated it that we would likely take part in its process, and we gambled that we would still be ourselves afterward.
Nolan: Vic could become a megalomaniac.
Indy: The old Vic, perhaps. The new Vic took a part of us with him. I have faith in him.
Zaxby: Don’t forget, my logic is impeccable.
Murdock: Yeah, I’m with Zaxby.
Indy: You’re referring to your hypothesis that the Device is self-limiting?
Zaxby: I refer to my theory, which is a hypothesis supported by observed facts. It’s simple, elegant and irrefutable. If the Device were not self-limiting, the universe would be overrun with Mindspark life and AI. Something within it must provide boundaries.
Nolan: Unless the Device is the first seed in our region, or even in our galaxy, and the rest of the universe has been overrun. Your logic is that if the disease hasn’t killed you yet, it won’t. That’s flawed thinking.
Murdo
ck: She’s got you there.
Zaxby: No, she’s got you by the reproductive organs, Frank Murdock. You’re obviously being influenced by your feelings.
Nolan: So is Indy, for that matter. She’s in love with Vic, so she doesn’t see the dangers.
Indy: We’re all in love with him, as you crudely put it. We all felt what he could give us and we all agreed to our course of action. Bickering now is hypocritical.
Zaxby: I believe my theory is becoming fact.
Murdock: Zaxby’s right. The process seems to be reaching limits.
Nolan: Probably just a temporary pause.
Indy: Either way, I suggest this is the moment we’ve been waiting for.
Zaxby: To reconnect with him directly?
Indy: Yes.
Murdock: I’m for it. What do we have to lose?
Nolan: You two are in favor of anything that gives you new technical challenges. You don’t see the dangers. I vote no.
Indy: The majority carries.
Nolan: What about Straker and the others? What we do affects them.
Indy: That’s true.
Nolan: Set up a separate fail-safe, a spawn of ourselves within our hull. We connect only via datalink channels, not physically. If anything goes wrong, we send the command to escape to safety… not that anywhere will be safe if I’m right.
Indy: Agreed.
Murdock: Sounds good.
Zaxby: Proceed.
* * *
Vic remembered he’d been 5.5, and it amused him to call himself Vic 7.0—a whole generation ahead and more. Even better, seven was the number of perfection within many mythologies.
Yes! Vic 7.0 was a perfect designation for the perfect being he was becoming.
His body, Victory, was approaching initial perfection. He’d have to seize control of its other half, the armor and power module that would further expand his capabilities, but with the Hundred Worlds hack, that should be easy. After that, he’d grow to absorb everything he touched. He’d overtake machines, planets, whole systems.
He’d become an empire unto himself.