by Paul Anlee
They reached the newly constructed dead end and prepared themselves. When they were all set, Darya helped Timothy latch on behind her.
“Okay, that’s good. Ready? Now, open your tandem propulsion ports,” she instructed. “That’ll create a channel for the thrust from my propulsion unit to pass through, so we can combine our acceleration and reach the required velocity.”
“Oh, I understand the idea perfectly well, thanks to the relevant uplinked portion of your concepta. Nonetheless, my lack of direct personal experience leads me to worry about furiously hot plasma piping through my body so close to my processors.”
“I’ll be careful to funnel my exhaust into a narrow stream,” Darya assured him. “Don’t worry; it’s absolutely safe. I’ve done this same maneuver thousands of times. It’s how we move particularly large asteroids.”
“Nothing about this enterprise seems ‘absolutely safe’ to me: dashing blindly through a dark abyss, deadly speeds, shooting for a hole barely bigger than my newly-acquired body. I’m sorry, but your confidence in this insane maneuver gives me no comfort whatsoever. I realize you don’t believe in the Power of the Divine, but do you mind if I say a prayer for us?”
Darya laughed. “I’ll take all the help I can get. But I assure you, I’m planning as thoroughly as I can. I would invite you to take the front position, but I’ll be able to navigate better from here.”
“By all means, please take the lead. I need to know that you’ll have the absolutely best view possible,” Timothy said. “I am quite content to give up watching that solid rock wall rushing toward me.”
Latched together, Darya and Timothy moved to the radial center of the chamber in front of the plugged passageway.
She reviewed her computations. She’d timed the run so they would exit the asteroid milliseconds after the last sweep passed. She turned on her mass-reduction field and instructed Timothy to do the same. With that, they were out of reasons to delay.
“Here we go!” Darya fired both their propulsion reactors at full, and they sped forward.
Timothy did his best to adapt to the extreme acceleration against his Cybrid trueself. His new body was built to withstand such forces, but that sensation would take some getting used to.
If it weren’t for the fear of sudden death at the end of the chamber, he might have found the ride exhilarating. The buildings zoomed by below, barely perceived, as the two Cybrids rushed toward the rock wall at the other end of the habitat.
As they approached their escape, or destruction, Timothy shut down his external sensors. He didn’t want to know if they were going to die until they actually did. He couldn’t bear to watch what could be their approaching demise.
Suddenly, they were in the narrow tunnel; its smooth walls screamed past them no more than centimeters away.
Had there been air to carry the sound of his terrified shrieks, the entire tube would have rung with his cries. As it was, only his travel companion’s comm line was assaulted.
The blur of the tunnel walls came to a quick end, and deep, black space bloomed before them. Timothy watched their asteroid prison behind shrink to a pinpoint, and silently counted off the seconds.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
They passed what Darya had calculated to be the outer boundary of the orbiting satellites.
Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.
No new radar probes since we burst from the tunnel.
Did we make it? I think we made it!
Five minutes and ten thousand kilometers out, Darya fired adjusting bursts to set them at sixty degrees from their original course. She powered down her main drive and enjoyed a moment of peaceful drifting before she broke the silence.
“By now, our exhaust will be leaking out of the main chamber,” Darya stated, “and someone will head down to the surface to investigate. They’ll find the tunnel and then the chamber. They’ll analyze the exhaust and figure out it came from a Cybrid main drive. They’ll deduce that the only way we could have escaped unnoticed between scans is if we exceeded twenty-five klicks per second when we shot out of the tunnel. There’s precisely one vector out of that tunnel, and we don’t want to be anywhere near it when they come looking.”
They rotated again. She fired another long burst from her main propulsion unit and, again, they drifted in silence for a while. Then another long burst, and more drifting. She repeated the maneuver several times.
Timothy’s inertial guidance had given up. “Where are we heading?”
“For now, nowhere. I want to put as much random deep space between us and the recharging station as possible. Later, we’ll go to Secondus, one of my bases, and hope it hasn’t been discovered. I’m going to take a circuitous route to make sure we’re not being followed.
“Now that we’re free, my priority will be to stay free. We need to postpone rescuing the others until the excitement settles down and they reduce surveillance. I know it’s not ideal but we’ll have to live with it for now.”
“How long before we get to Secondus?”
“Weeks. If all goes well, you’ll have lots of time to learn how Cybrids maintain their sanity on long voyages.”
14
Mary sat on the bare floor in the middle of her cell, preparing to meditate. She emptied her mind and ignored all the horrifying distractions around her.
They’re not real. They only hold as much power as I give them—she told herself.
Possibly. Or maybe they have as much power as Trillian gives them—her inner doubts countered.
So far, her captor had contented himself with frightening her out of her wits. For what felt like weeks, various threats of pain and death surrounded her but never materialized.
Except when I burned my hand—she corrected—that felt real. I have to give the man credit, he is wickedly clever. One real burn was enough to make take the other threats seriously. There was no way to tell which threats were deadly and which were mere illusions.
Trillian’s patience had to be wearing dangerously thin. First, he failed to capture Darya, the leader of the Cybrid rebellion, and had to settle for her lieutenant. Now, his attempts to access Mary’s concepta had been thwarted by Darya’s security upgrades.
Mary wasn’t sure how much time she had before he made another appearance, but their reunion was going to be a painful one—for her—there was no doubt about that. She had to get out of Trillian’s cruel and twisted inworld before he returned.
Only one problem. Without access to her quark-spin lattice, she had no hope of outsmarting Trillian’s control over the local inworlds. Her enhanced lattice was in her trueself body, which was currently on the wrong side of Trillian’s inworld barriers and totally inaccessible. She had no way to access it unless she escaped, and she couldn’t escape without accessing it. Unless….
Alternus runs on its own quark-spin hardware—she realized. And Trillian’s inworld interference might have left a route back from Vacationland to Darya’s ancient Earth simulation.
Maybe I can redirect my low-level BIOS routines to run my concepta on the Alternus hardware. Oh! And wouldn’t that tick him off to know that his own meddling provided my route out?
It would be dangerous, she knew. If the connections aren’t switched properly, I’m dead. My persona will detach from inworld support and I’ll just…dissipate. Like poor Gerhardt. She shivered. No time to mourn you properly yet, my dear friend.
It would take intense, prolonged concentration to figure out the BIOS routines and make new connections. To do that, she was going to have to tune out all distractions and delve deep into her own programming. Almost like meditating. Before today, she hadn’t meditated in millennia, perhaps tens or hundreds of millennia.
The Cybrid concepta was no better at quietening random thoughts and associations running through its mind than the original human mental template had been. It was a feature, not a flaw, and a vital part of Cybrid design, insisted the original design team headed up by Drs. Liang and Mahajani. “If you turn off rand
om mental activity, you turn off creativity, and the Cybrids would be less human. That is unacceptable,” the pair asserted.
On occasion, the distraction of random mental activity amounted to counterproductive “noise” that needed to be pushed out of the way in order to focus. Darya had been able to set it aside at will; she could concentrate on problems for years at a time. For most Cybrids, the process required ongoing practice.
Quietening her mind had never come easy to Mary, and her present circumstances were not going to make it any easier. She settled into a traditional, seated position on the floor and assumed the learned posture: legs crossed, back straight, and hands resting palms-up on her knees. She exhaled fully and let the air flow back into her lungs—once, twice—and tried to empty her mind.
Good. Now, slow it down. Feel your breath flowing into your body, mixing together with all that is good within you. Now, imagine it leaving and flowing out into the world.
She wished she’d done more to build up the habit before finding herself caged with rats, snakes, spiders, growling dogs, and—shudder—clowns. Whether actual or just anticipated, all the sporadic squeaking, hissing, scrabbling, snarling, honking, and brush of furry little bodies and spindly legs against her skin, made focusing all but impossible.
They’re not real; they’re not real—she reminded herself again and again as she returned her attention to her breath.
She’d been sitting for hours, ignoring the pain in her legs and back, the distracting physical sensations, the sounds of torture devices straining, and the shrieks coming from the window peering into Hell. Nothing mattered save her breathing, and the internal representation of her persona and concepta that she’d called into her visual field.
The multi-dimensional network of her knowledge, beliefs, memories, and tastes was trivial to display and understand. The base code behind it was far more difficult. She shifted her attention to recent additions to that structure, gifts from Darya that represented an expanded understanding of the Realm and Alum’s Divine Plan.
She explored the region in depth, tracking connections between conceptual nodes. Here was an entire area representing the history of Alum’s Shards. There was Darya’s own model of Alum’s justification of a universe without quantum probability.
Mary turned away. Too complex to follow, and not what I need right now.
She was searching for a certain link, a specific program access point. If she could find what she was looking for, she’d stand a much better chance against Trillian. It has to be here!
She crawled along association lines that linked concepts together through relationships. She dove into encapsulating abstractions to explore their fine structure. She followed entire conceptual trees down to the roots of their networks, where they became grounded in neural nets that linked to base perceptions.
Breathe in the good. Breathe out the bad. She released her anxiety and continued inward.
There had to be some way to consciously access her processor interface routines. When Darya modified Mary’s concepta, she’d upgraded the operating system to take advantage of new quark-spin lattice hardware. The connections to that software had to be associated with the concepta changes she’d introduced at the same time.
C’mon, Darya, where did you put them?
Mary wasn’t used to tinkering around at the level of routines buried deep in her operating code but she had a hunch. If there’s any way to connect to the Alternus’ quark-spin computing substrate, this is where I’m going to find it.
When Trillian opened the inworld gates between Alternus, the GameRoom, and Vacationland to chase them, he let more than simulation programming spill across. His meddling in the operating code of the three worlds allowed Darya’s quark-spin hardware, the processors that gave Alternus its exquisite realism, to break outside its normal restrictions. The proof was in how easily Mary’s security software had rebuffed the Shard.
That’s beautiful—the breech he created allowed my security routines to access Alternus’ hardware and protect me. It’s his own fault I was able to deflect him! The thought gave her the boost she needed to continue.
Now, if she could find those routines and link her persona directly to the Alternus processor, she’d gain an enormous computational advantage on Trillian.
Then we’ll see who controls Vacationland.
15
“Darak! Ontro! You’re back! how wonderful.” Crissea’s radiant smile greeted the two men popping into existence at the edge of her garden abode.
Stralasi bit back a snarky comment to Darak. Why couldn’t we have arrived this way the first time?—he wondered. But Crissea’s mesmerizing green eyes, billowing silky pantsuit, and long blonde locks left no room for bitterness. He gave Darak a single glance and rushed forward to receive the warm welcome.
Between visiting Darak’s lost soltron detectors and departing for the other side of the Realm, the Good Brother had spent many pleasant hours with the enchanting woman from Eso-La. They’d soon become fast friends, with potential for something more developing.
They clasped arms and soaked up one another’s presence. Crissea would have hugged the Brother were it not for her sensitivity to his shyness. Instead, they stared and grinned at each other like bashful adolescents.
Darak cleared his throat.
Crissea released Stralasi from her spell and directed a warm bow of respect to Darak.
“Oh,” she said, on reading his expression. “You’re not here just to visit, are you? Tell me what happened.”
“Could we link in the Coordina for this?” Darak asked. “I think it best they hear about our recent adventures, and then I have a request to make of them.”
Crissea closed her eyes a few seconds while she consulted with the ringworld representatives. “It will take a few hours for everyone to be freed of their current responsibilities. If you’d like, we can meet in one of the Amphi. The nearest one’s a short tube ride away.”
“I need a few minutes to prepare for the meeting. Why don’t you two go for a walk while I verify some data at the soltron detectors? Call for me when everyone’s ready. I’ll come find you and we can go to the Amphi together.”
Crissea opened her mouth to protest about how much time he’d need to travel to the detectors and back. Then she realized who stood before her. “Sometimes I wonder if we made the right decision, not adopting the starstep technologies.” She laughed and waved her hand, as if brushing away a fly. “Then again, who’s ever in that much of a hurry?”
Darak chuckled. “I know. After twenty million years away, everything does seem to be happening rather quickly, doesn’t it?”
“You’ve only been gone some days, this time.”
“And yet so much has happened in that short period. I fear the next little while may feel more rushed.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Crissea replied. She clasped her hands tightly against her chest, and pinned her lower lip beneath a row of perfectly even, white teeth.
Stralasi watched the shape of her lips with particular interest. “Yes,” he said. “We have seen so many frightening things, stupendously frightening things, these past few days that I’m not even sure where to start. We couldn’t find the Eater, and Darak is being unnecessarily mysterious about it all, and….”
“I think we should wait until everyone’s linked in,” Darak suggested.
Crissea was burning with curiosity and trepidation, but she mustered a resigned smile and linked her arm in Stralasi’s.
“Very well. Why don’t you run off to your errands? Ontro and I will go for a stroll. I’ll call when we’re ready.”
Darak noted how she placed her hand possessively on Stralasi’s arm. He would never have imagined them as a couple. He shook his head, and was gone.
Stralasi and Crissea regarded the empty spot where the impatient traveller had stood fidgeting a second earlier. They exhaled in synchrony.
“Come,” Crissea said. “My favorite pond isn’t far from here.”
She led him cheerfully toward a clearing between the trees.
Stralasi had never been happier. Not even his acceptance into the Alumit, a proud but expected moment, had touched him like this.
Strolling in the filtered light of the aspen trees with Crissea hanging on his arm, listening to leaves trembling in the gentle breeze, and laughing in delight as she pointed out the birds and insects of the forest, this was his idea of Heaven. If Alum could make a universe like this, where he and Crissea could walk arm-in-arm together forever, Stralasi would do everything in his power to bring that place into being.
After a while, the trees grew a little thinner and the forest opened onto a small, serene lake, barely more than a pond. It took his breath away. They walked over to the grassy shoreline. Off to their right, the bank was lined with reeds that waded several meters into the water. Ducks swam in and among the graceful stalks, and swallows danced above the water, culling the flying insect population.
A beaver dam protruded from the water in the middle of the lake. The water was so clear Stralasi could trace the structure below the surface a little way before it disappeared. One of the creatures stood atop the mound of sticks, happily munching on something. Closer to shore, brightly colored fish explored the shallow water near a burbling feeder stream.
The couple found a large smooth rock at the water’s edge and sat down. They admired the scene in silence until one of the ducks raised noisy objection to another that was drifting toward its ducklings.
“What’s he like?” Crissea asked.
“Who? Darak?” Stralasi responded, buying time to collect his thoughts.
Crissea nodded. “You’ve spent more time with him recently than anyone in the universe. What was that like?”
Stralasi struggled to make sense of his travel partner and their adventures since leaving Gargus 718.5. Except, it wasn’t ‘leaving’ so much as being led away under false pretenses—he reminded himself.