by Paul Anlee
She couldn’t lie still any longer. She got up from the bit of floor she called a bed and paced past the window to Hell. She went over the numbers, over the data, over her logic.
Two different pictures of flames? On a hunch, she examined their digital encoding. Primes. They’re both primes. She did the obvious and multiplied them together. She ran the result through her RSA decoding algorithm, converted to hexadecimal, and then to assembler.
Well, I’ll be damned! It’s the BIOS routine for interfacing my concepta to my trueself computing substrate.
She’d been trying to adjust her interface routines for some time now. If she could get it to link to Alternus’ quark-spin lattice instead of the Standard processing substrate, the boost in processing power would be huge. But it was proving impossible, and, besides, messing with her own interface routine was risky. If she got it wrong, she’d be disconnecting her concepta and persona from either computing substrate and scatter her self—her essence—out among the electrons of the universe.
Now, Darya had given her the most difficult part, the code. There were still lots of other parts she didn’t recognize, though. With any luck, the routines would link her BIOS to the inworld BIOS; that would be the key to unlock her computational powers on Alternus’ own lattice.
She dove deep into her mind, calling up her gold-tinged concepta and persona structures. She drifted among directed graphs of conceptual data. On a plane below her, she placed the jade-colored code of her own BIOS. On a plane above, the BIOS of the Vacationland inworld, complete with intrusions from Alternus. She could interpret some of the machine code but not all; she hoped it would be enough.
There it was. Darya’s code spun slowly, tantalizingly, in front of Mary’s virtual visual field. Mary grabbed it in her virtual hands and flung it at the interface code it was intended to replace. It slipped into place with a satisfying snap.
The physical world wavered. Oh, no! She almost added a hasty, Goodbye, but then everything snapped back into brilliant clarity.
The new BIOS code shot a gleaming arrow from the lower plane to the code in the top plane. She hadn’t thought to look at that area before. She couldn’t see where the arrow connected; it was shrouded in gray mist.
More of Darya’s security? Ah, yes. If I can see how the new code connects the two disparate operating systems, Trillian will be able to see it from his external vantage point, too. Good idea to put a lot of security around that.
She felt faint for a second, and then her thinking processes came back with a leap in speed and clarity. She was filled with a mental vigor that had evaded her since capture.
That’s it! I’ve connected to the quark-spin hardware of Alternus. Oh, ho! It’s game ON now, Trillian. Get ready for a little turnabout!
26
Darak and Brother Stralasi hovered within visual range of an enormous, glittering planetoid. The maelstrom of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, provided a stunning backdrop some light years away. Incandescent, swirling gases and closely-packed stars reflected off the shiny surface of the Deplosion array element.
“Why steal this one?” Stralasi asked.
Darak looked away from the asteroid, and millions of bright yellow points appeared in the sky.
The monk was only somewhat impressed. He recognized Darak’s “magic” by now. Lattice projection—he guessed.
“These are the present locations of all elements of the Deplosion array,” Darak explained. “They’re roughly evenly spaced around the center of the Home galaxy.”
A red dot flared briefly amidst the background stars.
“Home World is here, a few tens of thousands of light years away.”
Stralasi shrugged his shoulders dismissively. The Home World star was otherwise impossible to discern among the crowded star field. Anyway, Crissea was on Eso-La, somewhere outside the galactic plane and far away.
Darak continued, “If I select the twenty Deplosion generators that are farthest from their nearest neighbors, we get these.” All but nineteen yellow dots and the halo around the nearby asteroid disappeared.
“If you only need three, why not just select the best three?”
“I don’t like to be predictable in any unnecessary way,” Darak answered. “I randomly selected three from these twenty, in case I’m wrong and Alum has some way of detecting what we’re doing. As you might have guessed, this is the first one chosen.” He pointed directly in front of them.
“So how long will this—”
The stars blinked out.
“—take? Oh.”
They were floating in deep, black, empty space, but not where they’d been seconds before. Stralasi looked around to orient himself.
Looks like back near Eso-La—he noted. The metal asteroid-sized artifact had apparently accompanied their shift, and now floated a few dozen klicks away.
“I don’t see the Eater,” he pointed out.
“It’s about a light-week away in that direction,” Darak indicated the other side of their bubble, opposite the planetoid.
“Why here?”
“I’ll need a few days to reprogram the field generators,” he answered. “The Deplosion Array programming is complex; it can’t be easy to collapse an entire universe. Altering something that complicated will require a little time.”
“And Alum has no idea this is gone?”
“I’m sure by now he knows it’s gone off his grid. He can connect directly to all of the generators by comm-shifter, a device that sends optoelectronic signals through a shifter. I’ve deactivated them on this one’s array element. He’ll know it’s offline, but he won’t be able to tell if it the problem is due to device failure, outside interference, or damage. No doubt, someone will be sent to investigate.”
“In that case, shouldn’t we get the—” Stralasi began.
“—others?” Darak finished the monk’s utterance as the stars near Sagittarius A* repopulated the sky.
“I do wish you’d warn me before doing—”
“—this?” Darak asked. They were back in the black sky of the ESO galaxy again.
Stralasi rolled his eyes. “Are you quite done having fun at my expense?”
Darak grinned mischievously, “Maybe. Maybe not. Just one more to go. Coincidentally, it’s labeled Number 2, the second generator ever added to the array. I don’t know how it got placed so far from its nearest neighbor. Maybe it drifted. Regardless, as long as it’s still functional….”
In a flash, they were back in the Home galaxy, in the midst of the Milky Way, looking at an enormous asteroid. Metallic cladding covered half its length.
“This one’s…different,” Darak remarked.
“It doesn’t look at all like the other two,” Stralasi agreed.
Darak tilted his head to one side. “Peculiar.”
Stralasi did a quick visual check of nearby space. “Not Angels again?” His voice cracked a little.
“No, not Angels,” Darak assured him, and pointed toward the clearly synthetic end of the planetoid. “That end houses a perfectly normal element of the Deplosion array. The other end..,” his finger traced the length of the rock, stopped, and tapped twice into empty air, “there, is riddled with tunnels and caves in the natural bedrock.”
“Maybe it was some kind of converted colony,” the Good Brother suggested helpfully. Hopefully.
“Maybe,” Darak acknowledged. “They appear to be empty.” He cocked his head the other way. “Hmm. That’s…odd.”
“Odd? How so?”
“I’m not sure. There’s no electrical activity in any of the tunnels at all. I would’ve expected some construction or maintenance Cybrids to have extended their activities a little bit outside the Deplosion generator. But there’s nothing outside the metal hull. It’s almost as if the tunnels were shielded to prevent EM emissions.”
“Maybe it was shielded for use as a research station,” Stralasi suggested.
“That’s possible, but that k
ind of thing is usually limited to specialized labs or observation chambers. With this one, it’s like the whole place has been designed to hide something.”
Stralasi did not like the sound of that. “Perhaps we should select a different element.”
“No,” Darak said. “This one will do fine.”
* * *
Timothy spent hours wandering around aimlessly inside the roughly carved corridors of Secondus while Darya brooded. He’d already been all over Darya’s secret asteroid base; there was nowhere left to explore and he was bored. He’d inspected workshops and machinery he didn’t understand, picked up parts of instruments, examined them, and tried to imagine their function.
Darya had gone into one of the observation rooms, a shallow cave with one side open to the stars. He studiously avoided the area, giving her space and time to think about Mary’s predicament.
He still didn’t fully understand what had happened inworld, but he knew better than to pepper Darya with his questions. Seeing Mary lying there in the dungeon, chained and helpless as four Trillians subjected her to torture, had been unbearable.
He’d only known Mary a few days, only met her for the first time a few months ago, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He couldn’t imagine what Darya must be going through. She and Mary had been close friends, co-workers, and co-conspirators for millions of years. Seeing Mary in such anguish, and not being able to rescue her must be excruciating for Darya.
So, why didn’t Darya charge in there, fight off the Trillians, and save Mary, if she were truly such a good friend? What good was a flash of light? He had to admit, he was more than a little disappointed in Darya. She was smart—brilliant, really—fast, strong, and confident. There had to be some explanation for this sudden, apparent helplessness. He could only guess that she’d calculated she couldn’t win a direct fight there, not with Trillian in such wide control of Vacationland.
Complexities, wheels within wheels, that I could never understand.
He set down some contraption he’d been pretending to inspect and drifted to another instrument. He pushed a few virtual buttons and twirled virtual dials, pretending the machine was on. Maybe I’ll have better luck in the garden—he thought.
By Casa DonTon standards, Darya’s humble garden could hardly be thought of as a garden at all. The small, climate-controlled room housed a few unremarkable plants, insects, and birds. Over generations, the winged arthropods and aves had adapted to the much lower gravity of Secondus than their ancestors had been used to on Origin. Their flight was more about propulsion and maneuvering than about staying aloft. Still, they buzzed around him, and they sang, and they gave Timothy a sense of what it might be like to be human in a world of life.
Perhaps the dark vacuum of so much empty space is starting to weigh on me. Why did God fill His universe with so much of it if He intended His creation to be a gift to humanity? It’s almost as if He intended to give the whole thing to beings better suited to it, beings like the Cybrids.
He meandered down the long tunnel leading to the garden, deep in the core of the asteroid, when the alarms went off.
He had no idea what the clamor was about, and he didn’t know how to access Darya’s control system for more information.
Find Darya!—was his only thought. Maybe she needed him.
He sped back up the tunnel into the main labs and took the corridor toward the surface. Darya would be near the observation room. Some of his tentacles extended from their ports involuntarily as he imagined himself arriving just in time to be her swashbuckling protector.
I wish we were inworld. I have weapons there. Not to mention experience fighting. He had no idea how a Cybrid might fight in the real universe.
He turned into a side corridor and almost collided with Darya racing toward him. They swerved and pulled to a stop meters from each other.
“Are you okay?” Darya asked simultaneously with Timothy’s “What happened?”
“I’m alright,” Timothy replied. “Why are the alarms sounding?”
In answer, Darya spun and headed back up the tunnel she’d come from. “Follow me. I’ll show you,” she transmitted as she sped off.
Timothy went after her.
They reached the observation room and Darya pulled close to the opening. “What do you see?”
Timothy scanned with his visual sensors near maximum. “Not much. A few stars, some gaseous clouds.”
He hesitated, and recalculated to check his archives. “Wait! Where are all the stars? The sky here should be filled with light.”
“I don’t think we’re ‘there’ anymore.”
“What do you mean? Where are we?”
“Somewhere far away, and dark,” Darya answered. “This could only be Alum. I think he’s found us.”
* * *
“That should about do it,” Darak announced.
“Do what?”
“All three Deplosion array elements are in place. I’ve returned their supervisory Cybrids back to where they came from, and I’ve disconnected Alum’s direct control and communications from them.”
He inspected the last array element, an odd partly-natural, partly-artificial hybrid, with satisfaction.
Stralasi was getting used to sifting through Darak’s deluge of information to arrive at a point he could grasp. “So, everything’s ready for you to begin your work, then?”
“Almost.” Darak stared at the natural, rocky end of the asteroid.
“That’s still bothering you, isn’t it? True, it is a little strange but I can’t see why it should interest you so much. Does it really matter to your present purposes where it came from or why it’s riddled—no pun intended— with tunnels, so long as it’s empty and serves your needs?”
Stralasi waited while Darak considered the question. Surely, Darak had a ready answer. Lately, though, the man had taken to inserting thoughtful pauses into his conversations. Almost as if he’s practicing at being more human.
After a few seconds, Darak answered, “I’ve sampled some 453,287 array elements, statistically speaking, a more than valid sampling of the total population. This is the only element with this configuration. Coupled with its obviously ancient construction date, and its improbable location, I’m curious about its history.”
“I guess that would make it interesting. What are you planning?”
“I’ve already queried the control systems in the synthetic portion. They don’t see anything unusual about their configuration.”
“I sense a ‘but’ is on the way.”
“But…they’re also unaware of any remaining natural asteroid connected to the constructed portion, even though all their maneuvering systems clearly compensate for the extra asymmetrical mass. Someone has tampered here.”
“Hmm,” Stralasi said, “that is intriguing. How could no one have noticed it before? Wouldn’t someone have spotted the discrepancy between the plans and the actual?”
“You’d think so, but someone’s hidden their tampering very well. They’ve hidden the presence of the natural part from the constructed part, and hidden what’s inside the tunnels.” Darak inserted another of his thoughtful pauses. “I think we need to go inside.”
“Inside the array element?”
“Maybe later. First, I want to look in those tunnels. Would you like to come?”
Stralasi didn’t answer immediately. Have I had enough adventure for a while? What about simple curiosity? How risky could a bunch of ancient, abandoned tunnels be?
He thought of the other places he’d considered risk-free but had turned out to be the opposite. Still, Darak made a good case. This array element, this asteroid, was interesting.
The monk shrugged. “Why not? Sure.”
Before he finished speaking, they were in a long tunnel that opened into some kind of cavern. No, it was a room. Some kind of workshop, judging by all the machinery and components lying about.
“This isn’t very old,” Darak remarked, “and some of it is still activ
e. This area is exceptionally well-shielded; I detected no working electronics in these tunnels from outside.”
Stralasi started to ask a question, but Darak held up a finger. “A moment, please, Brother,” he said. He cocked his head, as if listening to the wind.
Brother? He hasn’t called me Brother in months—Stralasi thought. He held his tongue and waited.
“It appears we’re not alone,” Darak stated, breaking the silence.
They floated down the corridor away from the workshop. They accelerated until the occasional features of the tunnel wall moved by too fast to distinguish. They passed several branching tunnels before turning down one of them.
“Why are we moving like this?” Stralasi asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier to simply shift to wherever the other person is?”
“With all this shielding, their location is a little difficult to pinpoint. Moving through the tunnels this way is helping me to triangulate their position. I don’t think they’re shifting; they seem to be moving by some form of rocket propulsion.”
They went another hundred meters, turned down another branch corridor, and turned again a few kilometers later.
“A-ha, I have them now,” Darak said. He shifted himself and the monk into the middle of a cave that opened into deep space.
Two Cybrids floated near the mouth of the cave.
One of them moved forward, and its tentacles whipped out menacingly.
“Stay back,” it said.
“We will not harm you,” Darak replied.
“Not without a fight,” the Cybrid in the rear said.
Darak shook his head—I know that voice.
He squinted to better see the Cybrid who’d just spoken, and addressed her. “At the moment, your friend is the only one exhibiting any aggression.”
“We both know what little use that is,” she replied.