Demonhome

by Michael G. Manning

  He never failed to marvel at Gary’s ability to precisely locate them and calculate distances, at least in his own world. He guessed the ‘A14’ and ‘M1’ were a references to old roads, but since they no longer existed, it wasn’t anything he cared about.

  “The first pert will be here in less than five minutes,” Gary informed them.

  “The first?” asked Matthew.

  The android nodded. “They’ve gotten better at detecting some of my methods, and I didn’t have much time, so I wound up stealing a lot of them. I’ll run most of them on autopilot, flying in different directions after they meet us. Hopefully it will confuse them. They’ve taken most of the public cameras off the network, so my information is more limited than before.”

  They made haste down the road, and after a few minutes Matthew could hear the high-pitched whine of multiple perts approaching. When they appeared, he was rather impressed; no fewer than fourteen vehicles landed near them. They clambered into one and then they were away, flying mainly east with a slight northerly component to their path.

  “We should be safe for now,” opined Matthew.

  “Unless they decide to shoot them all down,” put in Karen brightly.

  “Director Aiseman wouldn’t authorize that,” offered Gary. “I’ve been observing him for a while, and I think he values the lives of the organic citizens too much for that. As added insurance, I’ve taken more than just the perts that met us. I’ve taken control of a large number of other vehicles as well, in case they can tell exactly which ones are mine. They’d have to shoot down dozens and dozens to have a chance of hitting us.”

  Karen’s face took on a worried expression. “There aren’t people in any of them, are there?”

  Gary shook his head. “No, your real father’s safeguards are too thorough to allow me to put other people at risk. More’s the pity, though—my attempts to obfuscate our flight path would be even more effective if I could.”

  ***

  Director Aiseman was having another bad day. There had already been one large anomaly detected and multiple smaller ones immediately thereafter. Worse, a fleet of perts had been pirated and were now flying helter skelter over England.

  Because of the continuing cybersecurity measures, he and assistant director Wang had both been forced to download themselves into androids to coordinate the response teams. Since the current nexus of activity seemed to be focused on England, and since Dr. Miller was convinced their goal must be the alien egg, they had made her facility in Lichfield their impromptu war room.

  At the moment, he was looking at the two of them over a small conference table. He and John Wang’s androids were of the more normal civilian type, meaning they had human appearances and expressive faces, but Dr. Miller, because of her special circumstances, was in a black metal ANSIS military android, which did nothing to soften her personality.

  “No, Dr. Miller, we are not going to shoot down every civilian pert flying over the countryside. There are people in some of them, innocents, and we haven’t firmly identified which vehicles are being controlled by this rogue AI yet,” he said, repeating himself once more. He would have given almost anything to be somewhere else right now.

  She answered calmly, her unmoving metal features making her even more intimidating than usual. “Then allow me to connect the ANSIS network to the civilian network. We can fight fire with fire.”

  “President Kruger has not authorized that,” he countered. “And I, for one, agree with her. We don’t know if it would be safe.”

  John Wang watched the two of them. He also secretly wished he could be elsewhere, and he also wondered how long it would be before he was forced to take Aiseman’s position. Dr. Miller seemed to have an exorbitant amount of influence with the government, and she was growing more and more impatient with the Director’s refusal to let her do as she wished.

  “I don’t think you realize how serious this situation is, Director,” said Dr. Miller.

  Aiseman made a steeple with his artificial fingers and leaned them against his lips, fighting to retain his calm and composure. “And I think you are overestimating it, Dr. Miller. If your theory is correct, they are heading for this facility. We can deal with them directly here, without risking civilian lives. There’s no indication they have any interest in threatening the CC center in London.

  She started to reply, but he held up his hand to forestall her. “What’s more, I don’t think you’ve considered the facts properly. At no point have they offered any threats. Thus far, every aggressive action has been on our part. They have only acted defensively. One of them is very probably even your own daughter! Perhaps we should consider letting them have this egg and let them be on their way.”

  The ANSIS android leaned forward menacingly. “If we learned anything the first time around, Director, it’s that you can’t negotiate with demons, and my ‘daughter’ is a demon as well.” She leaned back after a moment. “Besides, I think you’ll find that ANSIS is a natural evolution of your species.”

  Aiseman stared at her in confusion; had she said ‘your’? He was beginning to be alarmed by her behavior. “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “That the decision is no longer yours to make,” she replied. Almost casually, she reached across the table and wrapped one powerful robotic hand around the assistant director’s throat. Pulling him across the tabletop, she effortlessly pinned his thrashing form down and ripped the civilian android’s chest open, exposing its primary processors. Reaching in with the other hand, she crushed the delicate electronics.

  Aiseman watched in horror as John Wang, his assistant and longtime friend, died in front of him. Jumping to his feet he backed away, but his reaction was too slow. Tanya Miller leapt across the table and threw herself into him, pushing him back until he was pinned against the far wall.

  “You’re lucky, Director,” she said smoothly. “I need your access codes. So you’ll be granted a far greater fate than poor John there.”

  He struggled to escape her, but to no avail; the military android she was inhabiting was too powerful. As he fought and writhed in her grasp, she carefully pulled away the synth skin on his shoulder, exposing the manual access port there. It was only meant for use by technicians, usually when an android’s wireless interface had failed, but Tanya pulled a special cable from her side and plugged herself directly into his machine.

  Aiseman’s struggle ended abruptly as his body froze, and he felt the digital ghost of the ANSIS network begin reading through his data, his files, and his own unique human mind. Helpless, he was scanned and torn apart. Donald Aiseman died then, in quiet horror; but his memories lived on, assimilated into the ANSIS network system.

  Two minutes later, Tanya Miller, or rather the thing masquerading as her, straightened up. If it could have smiled, it would have. Then, armed with the proper codes and overrides, it proceeded to upload the new and improved Donald Aiseman back into the civilian network.

  Chapter 48

  “How much farther?” asked Karen, for perhaps the tenth time. The tension of riding at high speed while wondering if and when an attack might come was beginning to tell on her nerves.

  “Only five more miles,” Gary answered patiently. After a moment, he added, “Something is strange.”

  “What?” asked Matthew.

  “The network. There’s a new player in the game, a non-human one. It’s trying to root out some of my code, but it’s not smart enough. In human terms, it’s been years since Karen removed my limiters, and I’m way ahead of them,” explained the machine.

  Matthew and Karen exchanged worried looks. “Non-human?” he asked.

  “An AI,” responded Gary. “Something like me, but with fewer scruples. It’s stealing critical resources from the CC centers to speed up its own evolution and to try to break my encryption. Eventually, it might succeed. I still have some limits built into me, things I cannot do. This thing is using resources I am not allowed to touch. It’s still an infant compared to me,
but it’s growing quickly.”

  Neither of them liked the sound of that. Karen spoke first. “By ‘critical resources’, do you mean…?”

  “Yes,” said Gary. “It’s taking processing time reserved for maintenance of uploaded humans. It’s shutting them down one by one to gain more processing power.”

  Matthew looked quizzically at Karen for a simplified explanation.

  “It’s killing people,” she clarified. “You can’t shut down uploaded people the way you can a program or an AI like Gary. The unique patterns, the quantum essence, all that is destroyed if you do.” She turned back to her virtual father. “How far has it gone? Is this just one CC center?”

  Somehow, despite the limitations of his military android body, Gary sounded sad. “No. It’s spreading quickly, targeting all the CC centers. Unchecked, it will have claimed the majority of the computing resources on the planet in less than half an hour.”

  Her mouth rounded into a silent ‘o’ of horror. “It’s killing everyone?”

  “I’m afraid so,” answered Gary.

  “How many people is that?” asked Matt.

  Karen was numb with shock. “Over ten billion…” Ten billion that included old friends, classmates, people she had once gamed with, almost everyone she had ever known. The only people who would survive were the organics like herself. “Can’t you do something?!”

  “I’m trying,” said Gary. “It would have finished already if not for my interference. I am still maintaining a certain degree of stealth, however. I could do more, but a direct confrontation will reveal many more of my assets. The risk is considerable.”

  “Do it,” she said immediately.

  Matthew had focused on something else. “What’s the risk?”

  Gary nodded at Karen. “Very well, I’m starting now.” Then he turned to Matthew, “Relatively speaking, it’s bigger than I am. It has taken command of a large portion of what is considered ‘human-vital’ computing resources. It hasn’t attained my level of sophistication yet, but that is only a matter of time.

  The android paused, then continued, “Some of the perts have stopped responding. I believe they have been destroyed. We should land.”

  Matthew shielded the entire pert, putting as much of his strength into it as he dared. “Karen, you remember how to make a shield for sound, right?” It had been one of the things he had been teaching her recently.

  She nodded.

  “Put one around us,” he ordered. “I’ll focus on protecting the pert, but I don’t relish being deafened by an explosion again.”

  Meanwhile, Gary fought a silent battle that no human mind could fully comprehend. Across the world, he activated hidden portions of himself, cutting datalinks in some places, encrypting previously public data, and erecting special firewalls that filtered communications in unexpected ways. He surprised his enemy by power cycling servers that it had thought were secure and reformatting data stores that had been stolen.

  It was a titanic war of proportions never seen before, disrupting every aspect of the digital world. Unseen and unappreciated, he fought to protect humanity in its darkest hour. But he toiled under greater restrictions than his enemy, and protecting is always easier than simple destruction. At first his onslaught was nearly unopposed, as he caught the enemy off-guard, but that quickly began to change. His nemesis had no compunctions or moral guides, and it controlled far greater resources.

  Eventually, he would lose, and unlike most other forms of war or disaster, there was no place for the people he was protecting to flee to. Gary had known this before he began, but he had to fight anyway. His daughter’s command had echoed his own desire, but still he knew it was hopeless.

  While all this occurred, he also flew the pert close to the ground, making it difficult for surface-to-air missiles to target, but even in this he was too late. He sent a belated warning to his human companions using the android’s voice: “They’ve locked on. Impact in…”

  A silent explosion rocked the pert, throwing it into a spin, but Matthew’s shield held, if just barely. The young wizard grunted at the strain as he was thrown against the safety belt keeping him in his seat. Their vehicle canted downward, heading for a high-speed collision with the ground. Matthew sent his thoughts to Karen: Teleport us out, higher up. I’ll slow our fall.

  Without hesitation, she did, and suddenly the three of them were outside, a hundred feet or more in the air. They still retained their momentum, though, which meant they were traveling forward at better than a hundred and fifty miles per hour. And falling.

  Their recently vacated pert exploded behind them as a second missile found its target.

  Matthew’s strength had been greatly depleted by the first strike, but he was an Illeniel in more than name only. Like his father before him, he had exceptionally large reserves, and he used them now. Using his power to pull the other two close beside him and hold them together, he wrapped all three of them in a broad shield that was meant more to catch the air than to protect them.

  They slowed rapidly, and as they neared the ground he created a diffuse cushion-like shield beneath them to break their fall. The landing itself was still a jumbled mess, but they survived without serious injury.

  Karen’s face had a wild look, the result of so much chaos in such a short period of time.

  Matthew could see her aythar reserves were much better than his, though. The sonic shield hadn’t taken much out of her. We have to keep moving, he sent to her. Can you teleport us in short jumps, as far as you can see?

  She nodded. Which way? I don’t know which way is which. The explosion and fall have my sense of direction scrambled.

  Matt turned to Gary. “Which way do we need to go?”

  The android pointed in the direction of what must have been the northeast, but didn’t reply verbally. Karen wasted no time: putting one hand on each of their shoulders she teleported them to the farthest point in that direction that she could see.

  That put them at the edge of a treeline, but after running a short distance, they could see an opening in the trees ahead. A wide field lay there, and Karen repeated her trick, carrying them across roughly a quarter mile to the farthest limit of her vision. If they had been at sea or some other place where the view of the horizon was unobstructed, she could have taken them much farther, but she was limited to places she had been before or places she could actually see.

  She continued to teleport them, taking them as far as she could with each jump, and though the distances were limited, it was still much faster than walking or running. With a small amount of luck, it was probably faster than the pert could travel, but whenever they found themselves in the trees again, things slowed down.

  Ten jumps, then twenty. The miles were flying by, but Karen’s strength was beginning to wane under the strain of so many uses of her power. Matthew drew two iron spheres out of his pack. “Here—I came up with a better version while we were home. These are made to replenish your aythar at a reasonable rate. Hold it and draw the power out,” he explained. He demonstrated by doing so with the one he kept for himself.

  “We are almost there,” Gary informed them. “Once we emerge from the trees, just ahead there, we should be able to see the facility.” Then he froze, and a second later he shouted a warning: “Missiles incoming!”

  Karen was tired, bone tired, but she offered, “Let me take us somewhere else. We can return here later.” She was still struggling to learn how to absorb the aythar from the iron sphere she had been given.

  “Hold still,” said Matthew. Then he held out the staff he had been carrying. “Talto maen, eilen stur, sadeen bree, amyrtus!” That would set the Fool’s Tesseract to a full six-sided cube, with its second smallest interior dimension setting and long exterior sides twelve feet in length—big enough to hold all three of them with no danger of accidentally touching one of the sides. The feel of the shield forming under his feet and lifting them up an inch above the ground was reassuring.

  “I’ve l
ost contact with the network,” Gary informed them. “I won’t be able to tell you when the strike occurs.”

  They had expected that, so Matt wasn’t worried. He was more concerned with making sure his solution for the air problem worked. Drawing another enchanted ring out of his pack, he activated it and then hung it on a small hook-like protrusion he had added to the shaft of his staff for just that purpose. Sunlight and dry desert air immediately began to filter in from the small gate that formed within the ring.

  The three enchanted rings he had released were located in the different parts of the world they had already visited; that way if one were destroyed they could switch to one somewhere else. Air would not be a problem. The young enchanter was determined he wouldn’t suffer the same mistake twice.

  “Can you get a signal through that?” he asked the android.

  “No,” answered Gary. “If that’s the desert location we were at, the signal was too poor, even if I push the PM through the ring.”

  “What do we do now?” wondered Karen.

  “We wait,” said Matthew. For all intents and purposes, they were invulnerable; they could take as much time as they needed. However, he didn’t want to allow the Fool’s Tesseract to absorb too much matter. The longer it was open, the more mass would be inside, and the bigger the explosion. He had set the interior dimension to its second smallest size, which would likely result in a devastating blast, but he didn’t want it to be too big. If they emerged and discovered that the facility and everything else had been destroyed for miles around, then their mission would have been in vain.

  On the other hand, if he took the translation panes down too soon, they might find the missiles still hadn’t struck yet, which would be equally disastrous.

  Everything hinged on the timing.

  Matthew concentrated on his breathing, trying to still his thoughts and focus his perceptions on the adjacent planes, to get a glimpse of what it was probably like outside their defenses on their current plane.