The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  “I know. But there were risks someone had to take or the planet wouldn’t be safe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Remember shortly after Vesta was approved, when the attacks from the unintegrated parts of Darian started to taper off?”

  “That was you? How?”

  “You were in Shanghai setting up the Cybrid factory. I booked a hotel room at Harrison Hot Springs. I dropped my lattice defenses and opened up. I figured the internet bandwidth there was a little restricted and I’d be able to handle whatever Darian threw at me. I…integrated him into me.”

  “You what?!” Kathy exclaimed.

  “He always affected me more than you. It was impossible to think with him constantly hammering away at my mind. So, I invited him in.”

  “Greg, do you have any idea how dangerous that was? I could have lost you. I never wanted to be married to Darian Leigh.”

  “I know.” Greg took another deep breath. “It wasn’t easy. He was strong. So many memories, so much knowledge. But I did it. I know everything Darian did.”

  “But his memories….”

  “Yeah, some of those gave me trouble. I tried partitioning him off, keeping him completely separate from me, but that didn’t work. Dual personalities in one brain, no matter how big, are not a good idea. So I let go and just accepted it all. There’s only ‘me’ now.”

  “So did you still love me? Did you still love Kathy after that?”

  “Why would you ask that? Nothing could stop me loving you. And Darian was our biggest supporter. He was so proud that he’d played matchmaker.”

  Kathy was confused. She opened her mouth to correct him, and instead, smiled. “I’m sure he was,” she said.

  She had no memory of Darian having any role in their relationship besides supervisor, boss, mentor, and maybe friend. But it wasn’t hard to figure how Greg might have needed to alter some of Darian’s downloaded memory to preserve his own feelings for her, and his memory of their relationship.

  “I figured, once one of us could give Darian’s concepta and persona a home, his attacks would fall off. And they did, a little. Not completely. After I integrated the immediate data, I hunted down the rest of his residual data floating around on the internet and deleted him.

  “Which would’ve been about the time things started getting easier for me.”

  “Yes, after that, we could do our work without losing our minds.”

  “You took a huge risk, Greg.”

  He stared into his wine. If it had been the other way around, if she’d done what he did, what would he be saying to her right now?

  “Thank you.” She cupped her hands over his. “Really.”

  He looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you at the time.”

  “It’s just as well; I never would have agreed to it.”

  “Me, either,” he laughed, and let out a sigh of relief. The worst was over. “So, thanks to the integration, I became an instant expert on anything Darian ever worked on. It’s not all clear, but I did learn more about what happened to him.

  “Before he disappeared, he designed a virus to grow the RAF generator in his own head. That’s how he found out his theories worked; he generated his own RAF. Remember, when he called us? He was on his way to the lab so we could test it properly. That’s when Larry killed him.”

  “Larry? Larry killed Darian? Why would he do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know that for absolute certain. Darian’s memories are all hazy at the end. But I do know that Larry was there that morning. I’m also pretty sure he gave his dendy lattice to Reverend LaMontagne. I don’t know how Alum got hold of it, but I can imagine a number of ways. None of them good.”

  “You think Larry killed Darian, and you never thought to tell me?” Kathy’s voice was strained and angry.

  Rightfully so, I guess—Greg thought. “Well I never had any proof besides Darian’s memories.”

  “Darian’s impeccable memory,” Kathy pointed out.

  “About other things, yes, but they’re all confused about what happened that night. I guess he didn’t have time to fully integrate them into long term memory. Anyway, I didn’t think it mattered anymore.”

  “It matters,” she said loudly. “You should have told me.” She pushed her chair back, and went to stand at the rail.

  Left in the wake of her anger, Greg starred at the raven hair tumbling down her back. “I know, I should have told you,” he mumbled under his breath.

  “What did you say?” she said, and whirled back to face him.

  Greg swallowed hard. “I know I should have told you,” he repeated louder. “But there was no way I could without telling you how I knew. Then you’d know what I did, the risk I took.”

  Kathy glared at him. “I would have killed you.”

  Greg could only nod.

  “It’s a lot to take in, Greg. I can’t believe Larry would do something like that. What else have you been keeping a secret? What about your shifting ability? What did you do, hide a pair of entangled particles so you could save your own hide if needed?”

  “Ouch. No. But I guess I deserve that, after all the other secrets I’ve kept. I don’t have any secret entangled particles. My method is more difficult, more dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Well, you know how space, all space, is filled with virtual particles? Everywhere you look, there are entangled pairs of virtual particles.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they don’t last long, but you can use them.”

  “Sure, but they’d only be good for jumps of a few hundred meters or less. You couldn’t use them for longer jumps, like from Earth to Vesta or such.”

  “Actually, you can go a few klicks at a time. And a long jump is just a bunch of small jumps.”

  “With a huge risk between each! You’d need to recalculate and find another pair so fast. If you missed, you could get stuck in outer space.”

  “Correct. Or in no space at all. You could find yourself stranded outside the universe. I did say it was dangerous.”

  Kathy stared at him, without uttering a word. He gave her time to process the implications, to cool off. When the furrows in her brow relaxed a bit, she spoke only one word.

  “Why?”

  “Why do something like that? Or why didn’t I share it with you?”

  “Both.”

  “I did it because without it, we’d be stuck at light speed forever. My travel is only limited by how fast I can find new entangled virtual pairs and calculate a shift field. I’ve optimized a good section of lattice exclusively for that. It’s down here.” He patted his tummy.

  Her eyes drifted down. “Seriously? Gut neurons?”

  “Sure. Why not?” he answered. “As to why I didn’t share it with you, would you have wanted to do all that? Body changes? Dangerous travels that took you outside space?”

  “Maybe. Okay, probably not. But you should have given me the choice, Greg.”

  “You’re right. I should have. But, to be honest, I don’t know if I could’ve put you at such risk.”

  “And yet, you took that risk for yourself. What if I lost you and never knew why?”

  “I’m sorry. I never thought of that.”

  “Not even with your enhanced IQ?”

  “Apparently, enhancing intelligence doesn’t always enhance imagination,” he replied contritely.

  “Apparently.” Kathy stared off into the distance.

  Greg followed her gaze, sitting with the silence for a moment.

  “So you’re planning a protest march?” he said after a while.

  “Pretty 2020s, isn’t it?” Kathy grinned.

  Do you think it will accomplish anything?”

  “I've ensured it will. During my audience with Alum, as you put it, I made him promise to give Cybrids the vote after the march.”

  “Wow! How’d you manage that?”

  “By using the only language people like him ever understand, a threat. I told h
im I’d take all the Cybrids away, and we’d build our own independent colonies in space.”

  “That would be the end of humanity.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think I could carry it through; I just had to convince him that it was a possibility. Fortunately, we won’t need to find out. Alum caved.”

  “I don’t like this, Kathy. I don’t trust the man; I never have.”

  “I know what you mean. He’s strange, even more now than ever. He seems…darker.”

  “Were you serious when you said I should run with you? Me? A candidate for Vice-President?”

  “Perfectly serious. We have to counter Alum somehow. He’s the spiritual leader and de facto Director for most of the people here. Who else would have a chance against him? Humphrey?”

  “Before today, I’d never heard of Humphrey,” Greg admitted.

  “Nobody has. But everyone knows Kathy Liang and Greg Mahajani. We designed this place. I supervised the construction.”

  “It would be tough to resurrect both of us from the dead.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “No, not impossible.” Greg looked reluctant.

  “Just promise me you’ll think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it. And you, be careful with your Grand March.”

  “We’ll be careful. Especially now that we know about the Angels. Do you think at least some of us should carry weapons?”

  “It’s up to you, but I don’t think going in there armed would go over well in the habitats. If you want my advice, don’t give Alum and his Angels any excuse to portray you as a threat. Don’t make it easy for them to justify turning to force.”

  Instead of getting the Securitors program shut down maybe I should have turned them over to our side.”

  Greg laughed. “That would’ve served them right but I know you; you could never do something like that.”

  “Never is a long time.”

  “You are who you are. Subverting an entire personality like that for your own ends, that just isn’t in you.”

  “No, it’s not in me.” Kathy’s chest rose and fell. She inspected their empty wine glasses and her eyes drifted to the beach below. “Okay, so that concludes our business. Now, what?”

  Greg followed her gaze. “Wanna go for a swim?”

  “That would be nice; and then we’re going to go build me my own internal RAF generator. I want to be able to shift, too.”

  26

  “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.”
<
br />   “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.”