Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

by S. Andrew Swann

  He stepped forward and touched her cheek. Despite being a vision, she felt his skin against hers. Warm and human in a way that Mosasa never had been. “He must have been inordinately fond of you.”

  She took a step back, even though she knew that this wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. “He was a machine.”

  “Again, you say that as if it means anything.” Mosasa lowered his hand. “The flesh that Adam rails against so is all just an inordinately complicated biophysical machine, a chemical clockwork. If there’s anything more to it, more to you or me, it is not inherent in the mechanism where we manifest.”

  She stared at him.

  “Do you believe you have a soul?” he asked. “Do you believe it is indelibly tied to a few pounds of meat inside your skull? And what about now, as your mind ranges far beyond the artificial boundaries of that fleshy puppet on board the Voice?”

  “I just meant he wasn’t particularly emotional.”

  He paused a moment and shook his head. “I think I’m going to like you, too.” He waved her forward, deeper into the ship. “But don’t fall prey to the misapprehension that AIs aren’t ‘emotional,’ any more than meat brains cannot be analytical. Any time you have a sufficiently complex system, unexpected and counterintuitive patterns emerge. When such a system is self-aware, self-directing, those patterns emerge in the conscious mind. Emotions are an emergent property of consciousness, just as consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex data networks.”

  She followed him deeper into the ghost ship with the deliberate pace of a lucid dream. If she thought hard enough, she was aware of some part of herself back in the Voice feeling the breeze of the air recycler cold against the sweat still coating her skin. She could open her eyes and leave this vision.

  The sense of having an exit allowed her the strength to follow Mosasa even though she knew where they were headed.

  They ended in a long hallway that led to a single armored door isolated from the rest of the ship. Red and black warning stripes covered the walls approaching the half-open door. Darkened warning lights were mounted every three meters down the hallway, while signs in a half-dozen languages warned them away unless they were authorized.

  “This was built during the Genocide War, circa 2080 a.d. Years before the Terran Council came to power and started talking about ‘Heretical Technologies.’ Even so, the U.N. Intelligence office wasn’t comfortable with this.” He waved at the walls. “Enough explosives built in here to incinerate this half of the ship. More than enough to keep the crown jewels from capture—I think the overkill was because they were scared of them.”

  “The AIs,” she said.

  “Very good, he did tell you about this, then?” He waved at the armored door that hung open in front of them. It was hinged, opening outward, and about a meter thick. Like a safe, recessed into the massive door, she saw a half-dozen bolts the diameter of her fist.

  On the wall opposite the open door, two keys with bright red plastic tags were inserted into a pair of locks about four meters apart. They were connected to a long pole by a couple of makeshift hinges.

  Mosasa saw her looking and said, “Supposed to open only with consent of the captain and his XO. Not that easy for one guy, but I’m used to jury-rigging things. And I didn’t have much else to do at the time.”

  She looked closer and saw that each end of the four-meter rod ended with a joint that allowed both keys to be rotated nearly 360 degrees simultaneously.

  “Come on, I want to show you where Adam came from.” He stepped inside the open vault door, and she followed.

  Behind the massive door, things were pedestrian, almost anticlimactic, a bare gray room with cool white indirect lighting that wiped the shadows from every surface. The room was rectangular, slightly wider than the corridor outside, going about ten meters deep.

  Evenly spaced along the long axis of the room were four pillars running floor-to-ceiling. Each pillar was the same, a meter square in cross section comprised of three segments; the lower part black metal with several access panels with cryptic alphanumeric codes stenciled upon them; the upper part dominated by flat panel displays showing graphs and data streams that were senseless without context; then there was the middle section.

  The middle part of the pillar was transparent and about a meter in height, placing a transparent cube of material at about eye level. She looked inside and knew instantly what it was. She walked to the closest pillar thinking there needed to be something more imposing about what she saw.

  The Race AI was an opaque cylinder of bluish white crystal set in a toroid base, about the length and diameter of her forearm. It was small, unassuming, pedestrian—almost like a core sample from a not-particularly-interesting mineral deposit.

  It did not look to be something that had the ability to topple governments or inspire such dread.

  “One of these powered Mosasa?”

  “The Mosasa you knew, yes.”

  “So small...”

  “Larger volume than the human brain, and a denser network by an order of magnitude.” He walked on the side of the pillar opposite her and traced his fingers across the transparent part of the pillar. “This one was part of Random Walk, the part that was lost in a tach-ship failure.” He walked to the next pillar. “This was the other part of him. He was the least anthropomorphic, which may be why he remained unified. The other pieces of the original gestalt became increasingly independent over time. Random didn’t. The loss of the other half damaged him deeply, until, on the Race homeworld, the stress just shut him down for good.” He walked over to the next pillar. She followed.

  “This one,” he said, “powered a construct, like the Mosasa you knew. He was destroyed in the EMP from the destruction of the Protean commune on Bakunin.”

  She started to ask about the commune and realized that she already knew. She knew the details of the Proteans themselves, an insular sect of survivors from the first disastrous terraforming efforts on Titan, devotees of heretical technologies as advanced as the ones under Adam’s control.

  She also found a memory.

  * * * *

  He faces a mass of wreckage that had fallen out of the sky onto the muddy ground, the twisted mass of a marine scout craft and a civilian contragrav that had become a single unit of twisted metal. Scattered around him are the corpses of the marines that had survived the impact to interfere with his approach.

  He leans forward to look down into the wreckage through the hole he has just cut into the fuselage. Inside, the wounded pilot of the civilian contragrav still lives, trapped in the twisted wreckage. He yells warnings at the occupant as he tosses in a cutting torch and an Emerson field generator that’s tuned to block a severe EMP.

  He turns around in time to see the final attack, as the orbital linac fires on Proteus from low orbit. The first shot strikes the atmosphere at half-C, vaporizing instantly into a wave of plasma and hard radiation. Before the plasma shock wave reaches down halfway into the atmosphere, the second projectile follows in its wake, vaporizing itself when it catches up with the bow-shock of the first, blasting radiation down to the surface, leaving a microsecond column of vacuum from the Proteus commune all the way to orbit.

  Coming through that vacuum wake, the last projectile strikes the body of Proteus with its kinetic energy nearly intact. The Protean enclave, which had survived several nuclear strikes, is unable to survive the impact. It vanishes in a wave of light and radiation that washes the memory away.

  * * * *

  She stared at the third crystal cylinder and looked at Mosasa’s effigy.

  “What was that?”

  “That was the penultimate act of the Confederacy’s destruction, saving a man named Jonah Dacham—at the cost of one of my selves.”

  “Why do I remember that?”

  “I propagate myself—that includes my memories.”

  “That was not you.”

  “My memories didn’t end when I gave my mind over to these for safekeep
ing. When Kelly the Proteans were being vaporized, the man who watched—his name was Kelly— was still part of us.”

  “You—he—sacrificed yourself for this Jonah? Why was he important?”

  “That is too deep a question for this dialogue. You can discover his history yourself. It is one of many things you already know.”

  Even before she objected, she realized the truth. She knew the man named Jonah Dacham, Dominic Magnus, Bakuninite, arms dealer, heir to the Confederacy, ghost, failed acolyte to the Proteans, protector of their last egg ...

  She pushed the waves of information back so she could think. “These memories? This knowledge? My memory of Adam, and Xi Virginis?”

  “I was with him at Xi Virginis. What I remember, you do as well.”

  She shook her head as Mosasa walked to the last pillar. “This was my namesake. The AI that became the Mosasa that spent so many years on Bakunin.”

  She walked up on the other side of the pillar from him and asked, “What about Adam?”

  “He’s over here.” Mosasa walked over to the end of the chamber, where several panels had been pulled free of the walls, spilling a rat’s nest of cables to the floor. Buried in the midst of it all was a dented chrome hemisphere, flat side up, facing them. The interior of the hemisphere was black and spongy, and received the majority of the wired connections. Embedded within material, in the midst of all the cabling, was a fifth crystalline cylinder.

  “This one I knew worked,” he said. “It piloted the drone that killed the Nomad.”

  “And your family,” she whispered, feeling the memory but suppressing it. She looked up at Mosasa and said, “Why are you showing me this?”

  “I am part of you—at least this copy of me is. That means that I am interested in your survival. It happens to be my own.”

  “I thought you said you’re copied everywhere now.”

  Mosasa smiled. “That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in my survival as an individual. I’m a shallow bastard that way.”

  “How does showing me this help my survival?”

  “You need to understand Adam.”

  * * * *

  TheLuxembourg disappeared, replaced by a large operating theater with white tile walls, glaring light, and a complex, articulated table with a large naked male body strapped to it. The body bore some resemblance to Adam, but heavily scarred. No one else was in the room aside from Mosasa and Tsoravitch.

  “What is this?”

  “About a century after I revived those AIs, they had established themselves on Bakunin and had begun turning toward their original programming to bring down the Confederacy and free their creators, the Race.”

  “This is Adam.”

  “Not quite. This is Ambrose, a casualty of one of the Confederacy’s infinite supply of unofficial wars. Severe brain damage, little but autonomous functions left, selected by Dimitri Olmanov, the de facto leader of the Confederacy, to be a bodyguard.”

  She watched as robot arms descended from the ceiling and began making incisions in Ambrose’s abdomen. Inside he was quite human.

  On a cart next to the mechanized surgical unit rested one of the crystalline cylinders from the Luxembourg. After several minutes of slicing open Ambrose’s body, one of the arms picked up the cylinder and slid it inside the body.

  “He was the mole in the Confederacy. Until this point, the five AIs were a single mind, even the part that inherited my identity. But Ambrose stayed light-years away, encased in this fleshy golem. It changed him. Even after his return, he never quite integrated back into the whole. And his departure initiated the fissures in the ones left behind.”

  * * * *

  The operating theater dissolved into a cracked plain under a cloudy sky the color of an infected scab. They stood at the edge of what might have once been a city. Monolithic, organically curved structures squatted black, windowless, and enigmatic, obviously artificial. Barely a third of them appeared intact, the others had their regular curves disintegrate into broken piles of rubble that piled ten meters high. One broken wall faced them, the surface sloughed off to reveal an intricate network of inner chambers like the inside of some insect’s hive.

  “The Race’s homeworld. Here once lived Adam’s creators. Here is the object of their deepest core programming, the liberation of this planet.”

  “There’s no one here.”

  “There’s one person.” Mosasa walked for a bit, and she followed. She felt the heat and stinging ash, and breathed in air that was unquestionably toxic. She had to close her eyes once or twice to concentrate on sensations from the real world to remind herself that she was experiencing some sort of vision.

  She had the uncomfortable thought that she had no particular evidence that the universe where she sat inside the Voice was any more real than this one.

  “Here,” Mosasa said.

  She blinked open her eyes and saw they were much closer to one of the half-collapsed buildings. Standing on the peak of a towering mound of rubble a lone human figure was shoveling his way into the wreckage. She recognized him, an older, thinner version of the Ambrose from the operating theater. He wore nothing but a half-shredded pair of trousers and a rebreathing mask. His eyes were deep black without anything to distinguish the division between iris and pupil, and in them she saw a manic glint that was frightening.

  “What is he doing?”

  “Saving the universe,” Mosasa said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “As I said, this dead world was the object of their core programming. They were weapons, intended to serve the Race during the Genocide War. They effectively used their capacity for social programming to destabilize and collapse the Confederacy, to give the Race the opportunity to breach the centuries-long blockade on their planet. If they hadn’t killed themselves off.”

  Mosasa gestured at the manic Ambrose above them. “From this point my memories are with him. But I know the fates of the others. Random Walk, already damaged from the original gestalt’s fission, couldn’t operate knowing the Race was dead. He shut down. Your Mosasa retreated into the semi-human persona he had created for himself, in some sense trying to become me.” He pointed up at Ambrose. “He reacted a bit differently.”

  Ambrose squealed something inarticulate and tossed down the shovel. He picked something up out of the hole he had dug into the rubble and scrambled down the side of the pile, cradling the object like an infant.

  “By all rights he should be dead by now. He’s still wrapped in Ambrose’s flesh, and parts of it have already begun to rot in this environment.” She could see, as Ambrose descended, that some of what she had taken to be dirt was the flesh itself turning black at his extremities.

  “The fact he doesn’t die, he’ll take as a sign of the rightness of his cause.”

  Ambrose reached the bottom and walked over to a jury-rigged cart that waited for him. He placed his bundle down in it, and she finally saw what it was.

  He set down a familiar-looking cylindrical crystal, stacking it neatly along with fifteen or twenty others. He made sure that the AI was secure and ran up the side of the pile of rubble to resume his excavation.

  “Ambrose renamed himself Adam. He saw his own fleshy gods die, his own fleshy prison nearly so.” Mosasa walked to the cart and touched the pile of AIs. “But these survived. They transcended the death of their creators.”

  * * * *

  The Race homeworld faded away, leaving her back in her cabin on the Voice. She took a couple of deep breaths, sucking in recycled air.

  Slowly she opened herself back up to the world beyond herself and the Voice. She opened dozens of internal eyes and saw that Adam’s cloud of thinking matter had coalesced in orbit around the planet Khamsin. The Voice followed, accompanied by an armada of Caliphate ships piloted by those who had transcended the flesh, one way or another.

  She heard Adam broadcasting to the planet below, offering near godhood in exchange for following him.

  But now, she couldn’t help but pict
ure the wild-eyed apparition with gangrenous hands digging through the refuse of a dead world.

  Adam wasn’t sane.

  <>

  * * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Seraphim

  “New friends can be as disruptive as old enemies.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “A forced faith is a hypocrisy hateful to God and man.”

  —Henry Edward Manning

  (1808-1892)

  Date: 2526.7.21 (Standard)

  Earth - Sol

  Cardinal Jacob Anderson ran though the administrative wings of the Apostolic Palace. He was out of breath, and his face showed the wear of not having had any sleep in the past three days. Every waking moment he had spent using his diplomatic resources to open channels to every government that had a presence on Earth, including the Caliphate.