by Paul Anlee
Against the gleeful celebration of death in the cafe, he was helpless. His jaw strained. I can’t just stand by and do nothing.
He watched an energy beam rip the air close to DAR-K and destroy three Cybrids above her. He let out his breath.
That was close. How long will it be before one of the rays catches her?
Enough! He stood and walked toward the washroom in the back of the cafe.
A few eyes followed him past the counter but returned to the more entertaining show outside.
As Greg entered the short corridor past the counter and out of anyone’s eyesight, he shifted.
55
“Greg! What are you doing here? It’s dangerous.” DAR-K hovered amidst the foliage of the tree-lined street.
“I couldn’t just sit back and watch this happen.”
“But you have no protection.”
“From tunneling beams? Neither do you,” he pointed out.
“They’re not as strong as tunneling beams.”
“Doesn’t matter; they’re strong enough to kill Cybrids.”
“And damage the habitat structures. Yes, I know.”
“We have to get you out of here, DAR-K”
“Absolutely not. How can I leave my people now?”
Her response broke Greg’s heart. “There’s nothing you can do for them if you’re dead,” he reasoned.
“They can’t fight back. We have to get them out.”
Greg eyed the cameras monitoring the agriculture tunnels and the ventilation shafts. There were no Angels there.
“Has anyone been able to get to a service shaft?”
DAR-K scanned for updates. “A few. The Angels are too fast, and we’re too slow without full MAM propulsion.”
“I can’t see a way to help everyone,” Greg said, “but I might be able to get you out of here.”
“How?”
“I could try shifting you.”
“Have you ever done that?”
“No. But, in theory, it’s the same as any shift. I’ll just cast the field around you instead of me. The starsteps do it all the time.”
“Sure, no big deal,” she joked.
Greg imagined the original Kathy, his Kathy, smirking at him, and couldn’t help but smile at the mechanical sphere in front of him.
“There’s just one problem,” she said.
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“Have you forgotten so soon what your guru, Yogi Berra, said?”
In fact, Greg hadn’t, and he knew precisely which quote she was talking about. He cleared his throat. “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
“Exactly.”
Greg grimaced. He hated having his own words used against him. She was right, of course, as was Yogi Berra when he’d first uttered those words. The universe was the ultimate arbiter of truth; math was descriptive, not proscriptive.
“Okay, then I’ll teach you how to shift the way I do,” he suggested.
“Wouldn’t it be faster to generate some entangled photons?”
“Not in the long run; they’re only good for line of sight shifts. We need to get outside the habitat.”
“How long will it take to teach me to shift without the entangled navigation beacon?”
“No time at all to teach the principles. Here’s the complete concepta.” Greg transmitted the complex conceptual structure he used for his jumps.
“Why didn’t we just do this at the start?”
“Sometimes learning the old-fashioned way is best,” Greg replied. “Sometimes not.”
DAR-K incorporated the concepta into her own knowledge base. “I realize this should give me complete confidence in my ability to shift, but I’m scared.”
“Yeah, I left that bit in as a warning so I’d take the process seriously. It’s dangerous, and I wanted to make sure I never got blasé about it. Hopefully, you’ve practiced the simple version enough to feel comfortable with the basics.”
DAR-K emitted a noise like a deep sigh. “Okay, where should we go?”
“Not too far the first time. Let’s aim for the agricultural tunnel right beneath us. You should be able to get somewhere safe from there.”
“Safe?” She scoffed.
“Relatively. For a while. We’ll figure out something more permanent later.”
“I don’t have any idea what permanent looks like. Right now, the only thing I see as permanent is death.”
“We can’t afford to talk like that. People—the humans and the Cybrids—need us.”
“You’re right,” she conceded. Her voice sounded like wind rolling over a desert. She took one last look around and prepared to shift.
Greg spotted an Angel at the end of the block; its sword pierced the air accusingly, aimed at the Cybrid.
“DAR-K!” Greg shouted a warning.
The Angel discharged its weapon; the beam struck the Cybrid, obliterating her.
Or had she shifted away just in time? As Greg passed outside of spacetime with no connection to the real matter of the universe, he probed the Chaos for DAR-K. Did she make it?
“DAR-K!”
She hadn’t arrived in the target tunnel. If she’d drifted too far in the Chaos, he’d never find her.
He grasped for any virtual particles that might have, at any time, been associated with her own matter. It’s so hard to tell.
He couldn’t dedicate all his computational resources to look for her. He had to balance it with his own search for entangled virtual particles that could lead him to his next step and, eventually, to the safety of the agricultural service tunnel. His lattice-based mind calculated harder and faster than it had ever before.
Hang on, DAR-K!—his mind screamed. Hang on, Kathy!
The Angel’s beam had struck her at the exact moment they passed outside the universe. He’d felt her cry out in pain, and then nothing. No communication signal from her at all.
Despair tugged at his mind, wasting his resources.
Snap out of it—he chided himself. Of course there’s no signal. There aren’t any photons, radio waves, or comm lasers here to join them. He kept looking.
There! He had a lock on her matter, but it was tenuous. She was drifting in the virtual chaos, unable to return to the universe of real matter, unable to find her way back to reality.
Or too damaged to finish the process on her own. He didn’t know which.
I need to extend my field to encompass her, and shift her with me.
He’d never tried shifting someone with him; he had no idea what the equations would even look like.
I have one chance to get this right. If it doesn’t work, we could both end up lost outside the universe forever.
He calculated furiously. Equations encompassing billions of possible universes flew through his lattice while he tried to maintain his own forward motion.
Don’t lose track of your destination! He struggled to find the path through the convoluted virtual chaos beneath the real universe.
Every step he took, from one member of an entangled virtual pair to another, he dragged his fragile connection to DAR-K with him.
There has to be a route that entangles the virtual particles in the habitat with others in the service tunnel. There has to be. Don’t be too choosy. Any path will do.
Greg fretted, calculated, and cursed their naivety that got them into this bind. How did we let ourselves get blindsided like this? Did we actually think Alum would take any form of dissension peacefully? And how did we not have an emergency escape plan worked out? I will never trust the word or good will of people like Alum again!—he swore.
And then, they were out.
The charred spherical shell of DAR-K rolled through the deep grass and cow patties of a pastoral field in the agriculture tunnel beneath Vesta One.
Greg landed roughly a couple of meters away, breathing hard, and tried to stop his world from spinning.
Get up! He forced himself to his feet and stagger
ed to the barbed wire fence where DAR-K had come to rest.
They’d escaped, barely, but not before Alum’s chrome Angel blasted a crater in her side.
Looks like the shot glanced the edge of her core. Might be salvageable; too early to tell. No power reserve; her ultracapacitors must have been hit. Luckily, except for a miniscule reserve, she’d followed orders and left her antimatter stores outside the asteroid or they would’ve been incinerated.
Batteries? No. Damaged, as well. Not enough to power her electronics.
DAR-K?—he sent.
No response.
Kathy!—Greg yelled into the quantum EM ether.
Nothing.
I can’t take her to a repair bay; they’re all controlled by the Administration. By Alum. Where else can I find tools, diagnostics, and parts? The research labs?
He shifted himself and DAR-K to an unused facility on Ceres.
So far, so good but I’ll have to be careful. If anyone was monitoring for unapproved electricity draws, he didn’t want his activity showing up.
He redirected power from the main corridor into the lab. He hooked up DAR-K’s CPPU and waited for any sign of life.
Five minutes later, there was still nothing.
Greg’s shoulders drooped in resignation, and tears welled. His hands rose of their own accord to cover his face, and a low moan escaped his lips. The sound grew into a wail as his whole body was racked with his grief. He gave in to it, and let it wash over him.
“DAR-K!” he cried. “Kathy!”
His tears flowed for long minutes. Eventually, despair turned to fatigue.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you,” he whispered. His hands dropped to his side. He stumbled to the door and stood there a few minutes, staring out into the green space in the corridor outside.
How can I be so broken up over a machine?
He knew the answer. Aside from the mechanical sphere shell, everything about DAR-K was Kathy. DAR-K’s mind was hardly any more semiconductor than his own. She was an independent, sentient being. She thought like Kathy, responded like Kathy. She was Kathy.
How could I lose her again? The thought was unbearable. Despair morphed into anger.
This is all Alum’s fault. His rigid dogma. His betrayal.
It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Alum had been building weaponized Angels in secret. Obviously, he’d intended to betray the Cybrids from the start. He was never going to accept them as citizens, as people.
Lies. He’s built his leadership on lies. Lies and a blinding lust for power. No, more than lust. He doesn’t lust for power. He believes he’s entitled to it, that he’s been ordained by his God. Which makes him even more dangerous.
Greg willed his clenched fists to relax, then his arms, his back, and his stomach.
He didn’t want to go so far as to switch off his emotions. Right now, they were leading him to a decision, an important one.
Alum has to die.
56
Decision made, Greg’s mind flew through the building electronics at the Vesta Project Head Office, shutting down surveillance cameras, closing doors, and locking elevators. Then he shifted into Alum’s office, directly behind his desk chair.
Alum was alone. He’d been following the slaughter of Cybrids by his Angels with rapt attention and directing the movement of his forces through his own lattice connection.
Alum barely noticed when Greg cut power to the electronics. He wondered briefly why some of his nearby secondary processors had gone offline, but was so engrossed in monitoring activities through his own entangled connections that he ignored the insignificant loss. Just some transient power glitch. Someone will attend to it.
Greg was taken aback by the man’s lack of reaction. How could he not notice that? When the former scientist puzzled out the reason, he had to smile.
Ah! So, all entangled, are you? I thought I was the only one with that. Apparently not!
Still undetected, Greg designed a new RAF field—a quantum decoherence field—that he and Darian had once considered but never developed. He took a second to review and savor the beauty of the field’s design. Collapse the probability functions of all virtual particles inside and not permit entanglement across its boundary? That could come in handy.
He cast the field over Alum.
The Director jumped in his chair. The shock of being reduced to a single, lattice-enhanced mind again made his world reel. He slumped over, dizzy, and battled the feeling that most of his brain was missing.
Greg frowned. That was more than I expected. Had Alum been so engrossed in what he was watching that being cut off came as a physical shock? He shrugged and spun the man’s chair around to face him.
“D...Darak?” Alum stared at him, looking confused.
Greg slapped him, hard. The blow stung his hand but it felt good, too.
“Darak is only the new me,” he said, “a necessary mask.”
Alum looked confused.
“Look again, more closely. Can you see traces of Greg Mahajani in this face?”
Recognition slowly dawned on Alum. “Greg!” He tried to sit upright. “You survived my bomb. How?”
Greg bared his teeth in a wild grin. “I have my secrets, too,” he replied. “And thanks for confirming you planted that bomb. I suspected as much; I just couldn’t prove it. The rest of the world thought it was a mechanical failure of the isolation chamber. I knew that wasn’t right. I have to give you credit, though. You covered your tracks well.”
Alum grunted. “It should have finished both of you.”
“I guess I was just lucky.”
Alum’s eyes swept his office. “Your luck is about to run out.”
“Ha! If you’re expecting the cavalry to come charging in, you could be holding your breath a long time.”
Alum stood up. He was about the same size as Greg but had the advantage of youth.
Greg’s adrenaline-charged anger might yield an advantage in a fight, but he wasn’t about to resort to fisticuffs. He’d come for a single purpose, and he wasn’t going to be distracted from it.
The end of the pinkie on Alum’s right hand disappeared.
“Aagh!” the man cried out. He grabbed the bleeding stump and tried to stem the crimson flow. He collapsed back into his chair, clenched his eyes, and turned off the pain receptors in the finger.
Learning to cast a shifting field came in handy, too—Greg noted.
Alum glared at the older man. “What do you want?” he growled.
“Don’t worry. I won’t make you suffer as long as Kathy did. I simply want you to experience the fear she felt. The fear of knowing you are going to die, and there’s nothing you can do.”
Alum roared his frustration, leaped from his chair, and charged at the scientist. Greg disappeared, and Alum slammed into the pillar where his target had been.
“Looking for me?” The voice came from behind him, a few meters away.
Alum wheeled.
“What?” Greg taunted. “You mean to say, you thought to install a shifter in your Angels but not in yourself?” His eyes narrowed. “Pity. It’s so useful.”
He shifted behind Alum and pulled the younger man back into his chair.
Alum gasped and his eyes widened. He shot out his hands to steady himself and bumped the stub of his little finger. He cried out in shock.
Greg swiveled the chair back into position and pinned Alum to the desk with it.
BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM! The sound of someone pounding on the office door startled them both.
“Alum? Sir?” Trillian shouted from the reception area. “Are you alright?”
“Jo—” Alum called out.
Greg clapped a hand over the Director’s mouth before he could complete the name. His captive squirmed and struggled.
Greg held firm. He leaned in and put his mouth close to Alum’s ear. His voice came out in a harsh whisper.
“I condemn you to death. For the murder of my wife, for the murder of Kathy Liang, and of
DAR-K, for the murder of millions of Cybrids, and for the murder of billions on Earth, I condemn you to death.”
The loud banging intensified. Other guards joined Trillian’s efforts. The door’s heavy construction—having been reinforced with steel since the day DAR-K had pushed through it like it was made of matchsticks—didn’t budge.
Realizing his rescuers couldn’t get to him, Alum struggled in earnest.
Greg let go of the man’s mouth, pushed his head against the desk and held him there.
Alum called out again. “John, it’s G...aaaagh!” The name turned into an unintelligible scream as Greg shifted Alum’s tongue somewhere far away.
The Director’s mouth filled with blood. It ran over his lips and pooled on the polished mahogany veneer of his desk.
“Don’t worry. It’s almost over. I, Greg Mahajani, condemn you to die for your crimes against humanity and against those I loved. If I could send you to Hell for eternity and watch you writhe in agony every day, it wouldn’t be enough.”
He paused, searching for other words, words that could express his hatred, his fury. Nothing came. He was done.
He stared at his hands pinning Alum’s head to the bloody surface of the desk. The man’s eyes were closed and he’d stopped struggling.
He’s turned off his fear—Greg realized. Along with his survival instinct. Punishing the man further would be pointless. No point in prolonging this any further.
The scientist extended a field into Alum’s body and shifted the man’s heart and brain into the fiery core of the distant sun. The man’s lifeless body slumped onto the desktop.
Greg swallowed the sour taste rising in his throat.
I did it. We have our revenge, and hope for a better future.
As the office door burst open, Greg/Darak shifted home.
57
The phone rang at 6:00 the next morning, waking Greg from a deep slumber.
“Darak, it’s John Trillian,” said a voice at the other end of the line.
“Hey, John,” Greg mumbled.
“I know it’s a little early, but Alum wants to see us. How soon can you make it to his office?”
“Sorry, I’m not fully awake. Could you repeat that, please? Alum wants to see us?” Greg sat up, fully alert. His heart pounded.