by Paul Anlee
“Almost?” Darya asked. Has Trillian deactivated everyone but Mary and himself?—she wondered. What would that gain him? Ah! Empty worlds would make it easier to detect intruders.
If so, that could definitely be a problem. It had been hard enough popping in and getting out last time, when Alternus had been full of people.
Darak pursed his lips. “Possibly. It’s difficult to tell without knowing more about your hardware.”
Darya ignored his not-so-subtle hint. “Can you connect me directly into Vacationland?”
“I think so. Where do you want to be?”
She had to give that some thought. Where would Trillian least expect her to appear? Where could she have a few moments to check for Mary’s presence? Where could she be safe from discovery?
“How about one of the quantum cabinas?”
“Clever.” Darak’s tone signaled his approval. “It’ll be hard to track your exact location in there. I can put you on the doorstep, but you’ll have to randomize the entrance yourself once inside.”
“What’s your channel bandwidth?”
“Enough for a high-fidelity connection,” Darak answered, a puzzled look on his face. “Why?”
“Because I’m not merely connecting,” Darya said. “I’m going in.”
“What do you mean, you’re going in?”
“I have to transfer my entire persona inside.”
“Are you crazy? Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous”
Darya held firm. “I won’t have full access to the simulation hardware unless I go inside. Without that, I’ll be too vulnerable to Trillian.”
“Then tell me how to connect properly,” Darak said. “I’m coming with you.”
“There could be Securitors or Angels waiting down there,” Stralasi objected, his eyes scanning the planetoid. “Is it wise to go inside and leave us unprotected out here?”
“The monk is right,” Darya said. “Timothy and I can check out the inworld while you two stand guard.”
“I agree,” Stralasi said. “I’ll feel much safer with you here if there are Angels near—”
Darak held up a hand and cocked his head to one side. “What’s this?”
“What?” the other three asked in unison.
“Activity in the docking crater. It looks like someone’s awake down there. A single Cybrid is rising out of the bays.” He cocked one eyebrow at Darya.
“It could be Mary,” she said. “I gave her everything she needed to escape from Trillian. She had enough time—”
“Oh-oh,” Darak interjected. “She’s got company.”
Before Darya could reply, the four of them shifted to within a dozen meters of the solitary Cybrid.
It was engaged in a struggle with a Securitor. Tentacles extended from the two mechanical beings as they grappled with each other. The Securitor, the larger of the two, opened its weapon ports. And then, mysteriously closed them again without blasting the unknown Cybrid into gaseous components. The Securitor retracted its tentacles and powered down.
Darak. Darya glanced at Darak to confirm. Clearly the man had hidden depths and complexities, but was he on their side? Right now, it didn’t matter. She rushed to the Cybrid’s side.
“Mary!”
Darya’s querying ping was met with an instantaneous joyful response, “Darya!”
“You made it.”
Had they been humans, the old friends would have shared happy hugs. Instead, they met in a tiny local inworld and greeted each other virtually. Mary’s smile, Darya’s tears, and Timothy’s ear-to-ear grin were nonetheless as real to them as if they’d met in an actual alpine meadow.
Uninvited, Darak took himself and Stralasi into the tiny inworld, too.
Timothy shuffled his feet awkwardly. “I’m so happy you’re out of there, Miss Mary.”
Mary squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you, Timothy. I’m glad to see you, too.”
She grasped Darya’s hands in hers and peered into her eyes. “Thank you, for giving me the tools to get away.”
“I’m glad you figured it out,” Darya replied. “Is Trillian still inworld?”
Mary’s face darkened with guilt. “He’s gone,” she said glumly. “I only wanted to lock him up but he was intent on killing me, the same way he killed Gerhardt.
“I tried to warn him not to do that. I really did. I even told him I was using an Ouroboros program, that it would turn his own actions back on him. I warned him. I told him it was unpredictable. Dangerously unpredictable. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He kept trying to kill me, and it backfired on him.
“His death was my fault; I should have known better.”
“Oh, Mary. How can you feel bad? That man was pure evil. Cruel and uncaring. He brought his death on himself.”
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Mary answered. Tears welled in her eyes as she looked away at the horizon.”
Darak couldn’t let Darya’s assessment pass without commenting. “Trillian only carries out Alum’s wishes. Why do you call him pure evil?”
Darya wheeled angrily on the man. “Do you think Alum ordered him to torture Mary? Do you think Alum told him to subsume all those people in New York? Do you think Alum told him to move all those personas into storage? No! He chose those actions on his own.”
“He exercised more independence than I would’ve expected,” Darak admitted.
“And who are you?” Mary asked.
“Sorry,” Darya said. “This is Darak Legsu.”
“Is he the reason we’re not near Sagittarius A* anymore?”
Darya nodded. “He claims to be.”
“Then what kind of man is he?”
“He appears to share many of Alum’s powers.”
“Alum’s powers?” Mary exclaimed.
“Abilities,” Darak corrected.
“At any rate, he says he brought us here. We’re in the ESO 461-36 galaxy, by the way.”
“Ah. That explains why the sky’s so dark. What does he want with us?”
“Hello. I’m right here, and I don’t want anything,” Darak protested. “DAR-K...Darya and I were once friends, long ago, but she’s forgotten. I know why, and I can restore her memories from that time if only she’d trust me to do that.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Mary asked. “To gain her trust by rescuing me?”
“Apparently, you don’t need rescuing.”
Darya laughed and placed her virtual hands on her hips. “So how will you win my confidence now?”
49
“We’ll start with something simple.” Greg and DAR-K floated in the middle of one of the incomplete habitat tunnels on Pallas. Greg’s spacesuit was all that protected him from the hard vacuum of the uncapped asteroid tunnel.
“I can’t understand why I would keep this from myself,” the Cybrid said. She was referring to her memories of Kathy. Why would Kathy have kept it from her synthetic self in the first place?
“And why would you simply accept that you didn’t need to know? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?” Greg prompted.
“I can understand that Kathy might have felt the RAF caused a lot of trouble when no more than three or four people understood the theory; and I can see why she thought it best to limit the spread of that knowledge.”
“At least you received the enhanced IQ. DAR-G didn’t even have that.”
“Yeah. Still, it could’ve been useful to have someone who could counter Alum and his knowledge.”
“You want God-like powers? The ability to alter the laws of nature? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it’s magical to be able to alter nature. But it’s limited magic; it merely gives you another set of tools. You still have to build technology on top of those altered laws. It’s not like the unlimited magic that could do anything you imagined, like they depicted in the old movies. And whenever there are people involved, things don’t always turn out the way you expect.”
“Okay
. But, the ability would have been a nice addition.”
“Granted. Of course, Kathy never predicted the extent of Alum’s treachery, whether it was intentional or just opportune.”
“You’re still not sure he was responsible for killing her?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. The evidence could point to that, but the implosion of the Eater containment could just as easily have been completely circumstantial.”
“Pretty convenient circumstance.”
“Yes, I’ll give you that. The timing, with Alum’s move to take over the Vesta Project, is rather suspicious. But I’m not sure we could have done anything about it, even if we could’ve proven it was all Alum’s doing.”
“You could have eliminated him,” DAR-K’s voice held no trace of emotion.
Greg grimaced. “I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do. Especially if you don’t have indisputable proof of their crime.”
“You could turn off your emotions.”
Greg looked away. “I’d want to feel it when I took my revenge. I’d want to see the life drain out of the person responsible for killing you. Killing Kathy, I mean.”
DAR-K slowly extended a tentacle and placed it on Greg’s shoulder. “I understand.”
The two of them floated wordlessly for a while, attached by the single, slender metallic stalk.
“Well, whatever reason Kathy had for keeping knowledge of the RAF from me, I’m glad you reversed her decision.” DAR-K retracted her appendage.
Greg shrugged. “Thanks for being open to it. I don’t know if it’ll help or not. Alum’s power is mostly political or religio-political, not technological. At the very least, it gives us one more tool at our disposal.”
DAR-K bobbed once in agreement. “We can turn our technological superiority into strategic advantage.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“I’m a little scared.”
“I remember the first time I ever shifted. I was terrified.”
“You’ve told me how it works. But how does it feel?”
“Shifting with an entangled particle pair feels like nothing. When you do it without the safety of a sure navigation beacon, it gets more difficult.”
“And scarier,” DAR-K said.
“Much scarier,” Greg verified.
“It’s okay, I’m ready,” she said.
“Alright. To start, we’ll use entangled real particles only. That’ll limit us to moving at light speed. Later, we can explore entangled virtual particles that will remove that limit.”`
“I’m looking forward to FTL.”
“Yeah, well, it’s dangerous. Not the shifting itself; that’s the same. But the navigation gets harder. So you’ll want lots of practice before you try FTL.”
“Okay, for now,” she teased.
DAR-K was too eager to get on with the real thing. Her eagerness pushed at Greg. He continued.
“The device I installed earlier has two main components. The first one, the enhanced parametric down-conversion part, generates two beams of polarization-entangled photons. One of the beams is captured internally, while you aim the other one…that way.” Greg pointed down the length of the habitat.
“Like this?” A dim beam of light pointed to the south.
“That’s right. Only about one percent of those photons are entangled, but that’s more than enough.”
“And the dust in the tunnel lets us see the beam?”
“Yes, I chose this place on purpose. Seeing the beam’s just for training, though; it’s not necessary for the shifting to work. Now, if you pass the stored photons through your polarization filter, the other half of the entangled pair will be instantly set to the opposite polarization.”
“How will I know that it worked?”
“That’s where it gets tricky. The Mahajani virtual photon phase comparator—“
“You named it after yourself?”
“I made it. What else was I going to call it?”
“I’m kidding. It’s a good name for a device you invented.”
“Whatever. So, yeah, the virtual photon phase comparator picks up the virtual photon streams that are generated by the polarization collapse at your filter, and it computes a distance and direction to the entangled photon source. That’s the navigation part.”
“That’s not so hard. It’s all automatic.”
“It gets trickier when you go FTL. You’ll have to scan for a bunch of different hypothetical virtual particles, and the calculations get exponentially more difficult.”
“You do it all the time.”
“True. Maybe we’ll tack on a quantum Floating-Point Unit to your CPPU.”
“That would help me run the calculations faster. Normally, I could fit the math unit in, but my CPPU is kind of packed.”
“Mm-hmm. Okay, so that’s navigation. Once you have a direction and the distance to the target, you activate the shifting function on your new built-in RAF device. It’ll generate the necessary field to disengage you from both the Higgs and EM quantum fields. Then, all you have to do is follow the signal to the other entangled particle and shift back into this universe.”
“Like this?” DAR-K asked, from a position over a kilometer away.
Greg shifted to her position. “Exactly!”
“Wow, I did it. You were right; it felt like nothing. I was there, and then I was over here.” The shift was practically instantaneous, as far as I could tell.”
“You sound a little disappointed.”
The Cybrid chuckled. “I do, don’t I? For something so amazing, you’d think I’d be ecstatic. There was no sense of travel at all. I was there, and then I was here, with no time passing, at least, down to the resolution of my CPPU clock.”
“Once you travel with exotic pairs of entangled particles, it gets a little trickier.”
“Exotic pairs? That sounds exciting. I’m ready!”
“Whoa! Hold on a second. We’ll do this a few more times. Then, we’ll practice stacking jumps, one on the other, in rapid succession. Free-shifting is fun, but it’s too dangerous without a lot of practice on single and stacked jumps.”
“How long did you practice?”
“Months, and I knew the theory. Heck, I developed it, and it still terrified me.”
“I’m ready; I want to try it soon.”
“And you will. The Grand March is in two days. Why don’t you focus on that, first, and then we’ll practice more shifting right after you win your Cybrid rights?”
“I guess it won’t hurt to wait a few more days. In the meantime, I can practice what I’ve learned so far.”
50
Millions of Cybrids quietly infiltrated the fifteen inhabited asteroid colonies. As Alum had requested, they first dumped their antimatter mercury reserves into special repositories outside.
Just not into the repositories he’d expected.
The day before, DAR-K’s team hastily, and secretly, constructed new containment pods on the asteroid surfaces, positioned near hundreds of minor access ports into agricultural and service tunnels far from the main polar entrances.
Just before the Grand March, small groups of Cybrids moved through the same support tunnels, and gathered by the tens of thousands near service shafts at the habitat’s polar regions.
Alum knew something was wrong almost right away. His integrated sensors confirmed the sentinel Angels’ reports that far fewer than the anticipated number of Cybrids were gathering at the poles.
“She lied!” he thundered.
Trillian jumped up from his set of monitors in the adjacent office and ran into the Director’s office. He’d been following the situation near the polar entrances as well.
“Where are they?”
“In the service tunnels,” Alum answered. “They must have come inside, a few at a time, through secondary entrances.”
“What are they doing in the service tunnels?”
“Collecting near ventilation and service shafts, I ima
gine.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious, John? They’ll go up the shafts and into the habitats.” Alum’s brow furrowed in concentration. “I cannot permit this.”
“How did they know to avoid the main entrances?”
“I don’t have time to think about that right now,” Alum answered. “Either they discovered our intentions or they made a lucky guess. It’s of no importance.”
“But the Angels can’t operate in the habitats. Not the way we planned.”
“Quiet! I’m working on it.” Alum closed his eyes, making deeper contact with the disparate sections of his mind scattered across Vesta, Pallas, and Ceres.
He was still getting used to being a distributed being. It was a challenge, coordinating the parts of his mind housed in the various regular and enhanced Cybrid brains, but worth the effort.
If he focused his attention, he could access the computational resources of millions of lesser cognitive machines, formulate conceptual problems into moderately independent parts, and allocate sections of his enormous dispersed brain to work on them. In essence, he had a dedicated ultra-super computer at his fingertips.
They’ll broadcast their demands in a loop. Can I jam their transmissions?—one of his higher centers thought.
He modeled dozens of ways in which the Cybrids might send their manifesto to the human population. They’ve got too many ways to connect to the networks; I won’t be able to block them all without extreme measures. Damned open access—he cursed.
Do I just give in, let them win? There has to be a way to teach these ungodly machines to never defy the Lord’s People. To never defy me.
The Angel’s weapons were engineered for gross devastation in the depths of space. Unleashed in the habitats, they would cause mass destruction, likely killing millions. Millions of people, that is. Who cares about destroying Cybrids? We need to reprogram them, anyway.
There has to be some way to dispense with the Cybrids that will look justified, and set me up to lead the habitats forever. Alum examined his science and technology database.