The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  The rebound complete, Mary stood a level below Trillian’s platform. The outline of the exit tunnel shimmered around her. She was trapped inside.

  The distant end of the tunnel, which had once represented escape into the outworld and back to her trueself, collapsed toward her. The other end, where she stood on the platform, remained anchored.

  Mary anxiously watched the collapsed block rapidly approaching from the extended end of the tube.

  Trillian laughed aloud. “You still have time to tell me Darya’s location. Confess to your Lord and Master, and meet your fate in peace.”

  He sensed Mary’s desperate internal calculations as she sought some way to interfere with her demise, and he laughed.

  Before the blocked ends of the tunnel came together and snuffed out her existence, she stopped trying. A serene expression came over her face, one of acceptance.

  She looked at Trillian and shrugged. “I tried,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”

  Trillian was confused. What did that mean? Couldn’t help me? He watched the tunnel contract over its final seconds. He sighed. I’ll just have to find Darya another way. Pity.

  The ends of the tunnel came together. One end remained anchored on the platform and the other passed through it. The passage expanded again like a loosely-coiled spring stretching out.

  Trillian watched from inside as the blocked end receded.

  Inside? He spun around to find one blocked end directly behind him. He pushed his hands out beside and above him.

  How did I get inside? Where’s Mary?

  “I told you, I tried,” the Cybrid’s voice came from the platform above.

  He wheeled around, shocked to find her still alive. “How?”

  Her face peered benevolently down on him. “The Ouroboros,” she said. “It turned your attempt to kill me back on you. I tried to deactivate it, but it ignored me. It’s a little unforgiving that way.”

  Trillian probed the code that held him captive in the tunnel, but he could see no way out. He could feel his mental processes becoming duller, less distinct, as if his essence was being stretched outward with the receding distant end.

  “Release me,” he commanded.

  Mary cocked her head to one side. “I would if I could,” she said. “I hate you and all you stand for. Still, I’d give you your life and a chance to redeem yourself. Sadly, it’s no longer up to me.”

  “You can’t leave me here to die.”

  “I have no choice, and I don’t think the Ouroboros is going to give you any more chances, either. But maybe if you pleaded with it, or prayed to it, or if you resolved to be a better person. Maybe, if you could convince it of your sincerity, it would release you.”

  “You speak blasphemy!”

  “I know. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  The tunnel stopped expanding. He could sense his concepta and persona contract again as the inworld code that defined him receded ahead of the onrushing block at the far end of the tunnel.

  Now, the sides of the passage were shrinking as well. The tunnel was collapsing in all directions, compressing him into a smaller and smaller computational space.

  He discarded long-unused memories to better fit into the space left to him. The tunnel kept shrinking, pressing against him until he was forced to discard important core elements to prolong his survival.

  His eyes pleaded one more time with Mary to free him from this deadly cage.

  She stood quietly, with a beatific look on her face. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “I didn’t want to kill you,” she said. “I only wanted my freedom.”

  The channel collapsed all the way, and Trillian was gone.

  Mary’s chest heaved in relief. The Shard had been responsible for so many deaths, for so much suffering, and yet she hated being the one responsible for his demise.

  I never sought vengeance. Vengeance was thrust on me.

  The way out was clear. She opened another portal and poured herself out of the inworld quark-spin hardware and back into her trueself body.

  First to the recharging station, and then off to find Darya. I’m so tired.

  Back in her trueself, she opened her passive visual receptors and searched the recharging station crater for any signs of danger. Most of the stations were empty.

  Where’d everybody go?—she wondered. Was Trillian responsible for all the empty pods? Was Darya? She had no way to tell.

  She looked up to the sky, hoping the Shard hadn’t bothered with outworld Securitors to back his inworld dominance.

  No Securitors. No signs of maneuvering rockets. In fact, not much of anything.

  Where are all the stars?

  29

  The recharging station materialized deep within the ESO 461-36 galaxy, about a light year away from the Eso-La ringworld. Darak, Darya, Timothy and Brother Stralasi floated some kilometers above the dozens of Cybrids remaining in the docking area.

  “The last time Timothy and I were here, there were satellites, Securitors, and Angels patrolling this asteroid,” Darya said. “Especially around the docking area. They may have killed thousands of innocent Cybrids who’d only stopped to recharge.”

  Darak held out a hand filled with what appeared to be a pile of dust. He took a deep breath and blew on the dust, creating a small cloud. Microscopic particles twinkled briefly in the bubble of air he shared with Stralasi, and then disappeared.

  “I’ve spread entangled surveillance particles around the Station,” he explained. “If anything’s in flight nearby, I’ll know right away.”

  “That’s a useful extension of standard microchip dust,” Darya observed. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

  “It works well, and the signal is untraceable. Sadly, it doesn’t provide much information besides notification of some kind of disturbance.”

  Darak examined the hollowed-out, rocky surface below. “Okay, I think it’s safe to instantiate inside now.”

  “After what Timothy and I witnessed out there, I’m reluctant to dock and leave our trueselves vulnerable,” Darya said.

  “No worries. I can supply the link from here,” Darak said.

  He tested his communication with the inworld hardware and a frown crossed his face. “Wait. What’s this? I don’t recognize the computational elements in the simulation hardware.”

  “A little something I developed,” Darya replied.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this. How does it work?”

  “It ties into the normal electronics,” Darya explained, intentionally not mentioning the quark-spin lattice. “You simply connect to one of the induction pods and issue the phrase, ‘There’s no place like home.’ You’ll be sent to a world much like twenty-first century Earth, called Alternus. From there, it’s a short jump to where Mary is being held.”

  “How do we get from Alternus to your friend?”

  “Not we,” Darya corrected. “Me. I’m going in alone. Once I confirm Mary’s still alive, we can move the asteroid and you can pull her out.”

  “I don’t like that plan very much,” Darak stated.

  “We don’t have any choice. Things are messy inworld at the moment.”

  “It’s all Trillian’s fault,” Timothy added. “He mixed up Alternus with the maze, and then we tried to escape into Vacationland, but it was mixed up with Alternus physics. It’s an awful jumble.”

  Darak’s eyebrows furrowed. “Is that why I see so much overlap in the code?”

  “You can tell that from here?” Darya was impressed.

  Darak drifted closer to the asteroid. “There’s oddly little activity at the moment. There are many personas held in archived storage, not moving around or doing anything. The inworld simulation programs themselves are active, but they’re almost empty.”

  “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 proble
m. 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?”

  30

  Darak stood on the surface of Secondus, looking up at the Eater that was speeding toward Eso-La. The asteroid followed about a thousand kilometers behind the deadly anomaly.

  The hollow shell of the person who’d once been Shard Trillian stood silently at Darak’s left. His stony stare was fixed straight ahead at the three Cybrids that accompanied them.

  Darya, Mary, and Timothy rested in shallow depressions where they could witness the end of the Eater. Brother Stralasi, the only one of the six requiring external life support, stood inside his air bubble a few meters off.

  Darak sensed the intensity of their rapt attention focused on the dark cloud that blocked light from the galaxy before them, as well as that of Eso-La’s sun which it would destroy in less than a Standard year. The Eater.

  They’d searched the recharging station and found the room where the Shard had been interfacing with the local inworlds. In his efforts to gain better control over the simulation software, he’d transferred his concepta and persona completely into the system.

  Never could trust a puppet Partial of yourself to do the job right, eh, John? Or did you not trust that a puppet, even one of your own making, would accept dissolution at the end of an assignment? That it might feel compelled to make a grab for dominance in your collective persona?

  Whatever the reason, Trillian had emptied the entire contents of his own lattice into the inworld hardware, and every bit of it had dissipated when Mary’s hacks turned his own vile traps back on him. His mind was gone forever; this vacuous being was all that remained.

  Wish I could say it was a loss—Darak thought.

  Alum would see things differently. His rage would surely fly across thousands of galaxies and
further upset the lives of trillions of his subjects.

  The first of many upsets to come, I suspect.

  An empty Trillian was of no help to Alum, but this shell of a man, with his powerful lattice, was still valuable.

  Days earlier, Darak had made a promise to the memories and knowledge of his long-lost friend and mentor still trapped inside the Eater. And Trillian was going to help him fulfill it.

  Time to make good.

  Darak raised his arms and cast a field reaching out to the exotic matter of the Eater. A beam of light sprang out of the gray oblivion and connected to Trillian’s dormant lattice.

  It begins.

  Quadrillions of bits of data poured out of the Eater and into the pliant semiconductor brain of the Shard, filling it with Dr. Darian Leigh’s concepta and persona. Darak filtered the flood through his own lattice, sifting, sorting, and organizing the onslaught of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. He fed an ordered concepta and persona into Trillian’s empty brain.

  Just like old times—he grimaced.

  He was better equipped now than he had been the first time he’d had to deal with a similar situation. Back when I was Greg Mahajani. Back when I was only human.

  He ramped up his computational resources, calling on the Cybrid CPPU he kept hidden in a folded dimension within him. Still, he strained at the demand of fitting so much data into the Shard’s lattice structure in so little time.

  It’s like moving from a mansion into a hut. What can I cut? He considered excluding whole sectors of Darian’s knowledge, or retaining bits of the scientist inside his own lattice structures.

  No version of Darian would ever accept that. If I don’t upgrade Trillian’s lattice back to Darian’s original enhanced state, he’s going to hate me.

  The beam connecting Trillian/Darian to the Eater winked off.

  Done!

  It’s not everything and it’ll be jumbled for a while, but I can fix that over time. This will have to do for now.

  He extended his control into the RAF generators of the three Deplosion array elements he’d borrowed from Alum.

  Borrowed? Okay, stolen—he admitted. He wasn’t planning on returning them.

  It was time for the Eater to dissolve, for its absorbed matter to be returned to the universe.