by Paul Anlee
Alum looked away.
“My concerns in the greater universe must have slipped through. How else could she have conceived of this image?” He mumbled to Himself. “She’s had absolutely no outside contact.”
His eyes returned to the design below, not really seeing it anymore but knowing by heart every millimeter of its detail. His vision was focused inward, on the interplay between His thoughts and this perfect universe He had created.
No matter. Soon everything outside of Heaven will be gone. It will no longer be able to effect what I’ve created here—He thought.
He looked at His children gathered around Him on the rocky plateau. He scanned the surrounding forest, filled with veg and anima people in all stages and varieties.
Life is sacred here. It is loving, collaborative, and connected through brotherhood and sisterhood. As it should be.
He looked further away, where the terrain stretched into an expansive plain.
An optical illusion of the light of Heaven playing on the intricate landscape of this universe.
He alone knew the convoluted, packed structure that underlay Paradise. It was an astoundingly brilliant design if He did say so, Himself.
To think that umpteen eons ago that young upstart, Darian Leigh, had challenged the notion of Intelligent Design of Yov’s universe!
Now, how had Dr. Leigh put it? Something to the effect that, so little of the universe appeared to be habitable by humans, Yov would’ve had to think His people exceptionally vain and stupid to require such an enormous waste of space just to demonstrate how special they were.
Fool. Yov, the God of My father, wasn’t real—Alum harrumphed.
A tiny part of Alum, the ancient part of Him that still remembered being the Reverend LaMontagne, cringed at such blasphemy. But Alum knew better. He knew the difference between an imaginary Creator and a real one.
My universe will not be filled with random happenstance and unhappy accident. I will create a perfect universe, one lovingly crafted by its God, one that will endure in perfection forever.
His attention returned to the inexplicable representation of old Earth in the clearing below. Inexplicable in that Mirly should have had no knowledge of Earth, the Eater, or anything outside of this perfect model of Heaven and her place in it.
Alum sighed.
Not quite perfect.
Not yet.
4
“Have you decided?”
Darak’s eager question welcomed Darya back to the physical world as if there’d been no pause in their conversation, as if she’d never left his side.
Physically, she hadn’t. Nor had he moved since she’d withdrawn into the virtual environment she’d set up to meet with Mary’s and Timothy’s Partials.
So, how did he know we were done?—Darya wondered. Can he intercept line-of-sight laser communications?
She left the questions unspoken.
Darak and Trillian sat facing each other on a pair of benches they’d scrounged from a little-used storage room.
Darak, yes, but that’s not Trillian across from him—she prompted herself. Trillian’s body, that body I see sitting across from Darak, is no more than a shell. And inside that shell is Darian. Dr. Darian Leigh inhabits the Shard’s body, now—she recited while she fought to overcome her instinctual response at seeing the face of her former adversary.
Whatever they were talking about, their focus and body language was intense. The broadband channels were silent. She tried but was unable to decode the furious communications passing between them.
They must be using QUEECH—she guessed. She’d heard about Quantum-Encrypted Entangled Channels but she’d never had any luck using the technology.
Another advantage that goes with being a God.
Darya examined Trillian/Darian for any hint of the cruel Shard that had previously occupied the body in front of her. The man’s face looked as open and innocent as that of a human baby.
Darak cocked an eyebrow at her. “Well?”
“We’ve decided to trust you,” she sent back. Her transmission was flat, neutral—guarded—and she made no attempt to change it.
He stood up, not bothering to mask his readiness to move forward.
“...for the moment,” she added quickly. “More trust will come with further evidence of your intentions.”
His excitement dimmed and he rolled his eyes in exasperation.
“What else can I do to convince you?”
“I’m glad you asked. We’re going to confront Alum at the Deplosion Array, and we need your help.”
Confront Alum. Even as she registered her own words, doubt nibbled at the edges of her confidence.
This is insanity. Even in the little things, our capabilities are so pathetic. What were we thinking? We’re no match for the Living God and His Angels. But if we don’t wage war against them soon, we’ll be dead anyway.
“You do realize that confronting Alum will bring you nothing but death?” Darak replied.
His warning echoed her own insecurities. She eyed him closely. Is he going to resist? Can we count on him to side with us?
She stood her ground.
“His Angels aren’t invulnerable. Your own story proves that,” she countered.
“So you’re asking me to hold off Alum while you battle His Angels?”
“Just stop Alum from interfering...if you can.”
Darak’s eyes gleamed at her implicit challenge. He transmitted a cynical grunt. With no air in Darya’s lab, there was no noise, just the electronically transmitted suggestion of noise.
“I can do that. Only the Wing Commander and the top five lieutenants carry direct links to Alum. I’ll send them a few dozen light hours away while you engage the rest of the Wing.”
He looked at the two Cybrids hovering in the corridor. “You’re going to need a much bigger army.”
Was he trying to be funny? She wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t in a joking mood.
“And better weaponry,” she replied with no trace of humor. “Any weaponry, really. I don’t fancy doing hand-to-hand combat against Angels with energy swords.” She extended half a dozen tentacled manipulators.
“You’ll be no match for them if you have to use MAM drives to maneuver. You’ll need to be able to shift instantaneously through space as they do,” he counseled.
“You can provide us with these capabilities.” It wasn’t a question.
Darak shook his head. “No, not directly.”
“But you’re a God, or so you claim.”
“There are limits to my capabilities,” Darak admitted, “and for the record, I never claimed to be a God, not even a small-g god. I may be able to alter the physical laws of nature but that doesn’t mean I’ve explored all possible technologies within any particular set of physical laws.”
“So you don’t know everything?”
He held out his empty hands to either side. “I don’t know everything and never claimed to. I’d describe myself as moderately capable, but neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Will that be enough for you?”
“If you can provide weapons, defenses, and maneuverability to match the Angels, that would be God-like enough to me.”
Darak walked over to a lab bench and picked up a microchip lying on its surface.
“Those things I can do. Rather,” he said as he turned the chip over in his hands, “I have friends who can provide all of these things at my direction.” He gently returned the chip to the table.
“I sense there will be conditions,” Darya said.
“Only one. I want access to the computational substrate you developed for your inworld.”
Darya said nothing.
Taking the silence as an opportunity to make his case, Darak pressed on. “I’m familiar with dozens of ways to implement computer hardware, and easily as many architectural configurations. But one can’t know every possible technology, not even in a single universe. That particular hardware, for example, is unfamiliar to m
e. It’s unique. And you seem reluctant to admit it exists at all.”
“A woman needs to keep some secrets.”
“Ha! Okay, sure. But you don’t think I’m offering enough in exchange?”
She shrugged. “Tell me, why is it so important to you?”
“Modifying the matrix of reality is computation intensive. I like to explore anything that might give me an advantage in that. I’ve seen some of the real time computations you’ve been able to achieve in your inworld simulations. Your hardware is very fast.”
“If knowledge is power, then speed is...what?”
“Effectiveness. Capability to use that power. Ages ago, a scientist named Alan Turing showed that anything computable could be computed by a remarkably simple machine: a tape and a moveable read/write head.”
“That sounds excruciatingly slow,” she interjected.
“Yes, but theoretically, it had as much computational power as your nano-silicene lattice. You just had to wait eons for anything useful to come out of it. Knowing how to do something and doing it quickly are two sides of the computational coin.”
Darya bobbed twice in agreement.
“Very well. Build my army, give us weapons, defenses, and the power to shift as efficiently as the Angels, and I will tell you about the quark-spin lattice.”
“Quark-spin? But how do you...,” Darak began.
Darya interrupted, “All in good time. After our first victory.” She extended a tentacle. “Agreed?”
Darak stared at the proffered manipulator. He held out his hand and they shook.
“I don’t believe an agreement between Cybrid and human has been sealed by handshake since the original Vesta Project.”
“It seemed fitting,” Darya answered. “Only, this agreement is between a Cybrid and a God. I’m not sure any such deal has ever been made.”
“Ever made? Yes,” Darak replied, “but it was a long, long time ago, and the deal wasn’t honored for long.”
“Oh?”
Darya waited for him to elaborate but it was Darak’s turn to hold back.
He eyed her expectantly, with a hint of sadness.
“What? What is it?” she asked.
“You really don’t remember?” he replied.
Mystified, she consulted her archives. Nothing.
“Darya, you made the deal. You and Alum.”
“Me? With Alum? What deal?”
“To share responsibility for governing humanity.”
“You’d think I’d remember a deal like that. It must have been made before I was damaged.”
“Not long before.”
“How did it turn out?”
There’s no gentle way to say this—Darak thought. Best to be direct.
“Not well, I’m afraid. It led to your death.”
5
“I think the Supervisor has gone insane.”
Darak stood inside the Alternus simulation at the south end of Central Park, looking across Columbus Circle to the jumbled skyscrapers and beyond. Darya, Mary, and Timothy stood beside him in their usual inworld avatars.
Buildings jutted out at bizarre angles. Segments of roads, sidewalks, and bridges sprouted from their walls.
Darya laughed. “Maybe it has gone insane. Trying to keep all of this straight would be enough to drive anyone insane. You can thank Trillian for this mess. He pulled Alternus into the ten-dimensional maze I constructed in the GameRoom.”
“10-D? You don’t say!” Darak said as he adjusted his visual processor to the correct number of spatial dimensions.
“Ah, yes, I see. Okay, that’s better. Except for her.”
He pointed out a figure running erratically along a portion of road that floated freely twenty meters above the ground.
Darya and Mary followed Darak’s finger to see a jogger blink out of existence in the middle of a section of hovering pavement. To follow her progress, they switched to a 10-D visual filter.
“That can’t be right,” Mary said. “I thought you said everyone was in storage. She shouldn’t be here. Maybe the Supervisor has been damaged a little by all of this.”
“More than a little, I’d say.” Darak waved his hands and the scene around the four dissolved into the complex concepta of the Supervisor’s program.
Darya moved in for closer assessment.
Something was very wrong with the code. The normally elegant arcs and nodes of a well-organized thought structure were snarled up in a tangled mess.
“What a mishmash!” she said. “I hardly recognize this as the Alternus simulation I wrote.”
Darak stepped forward and was soon equally engrossed in the code.
“I think we’re looking at the internal workings of three entirely different Supervisors, all jumbled together here,” Darya suggested. “I see bits of GameRoom and Vacationland code mixed with my Alternus routines. That alone would’ve been bad enough, but these three were each overseeing entirely separate worlds with conflicting physics. On top of that, the local Alternus Supervisor was running on my quark-spin hardware while the other two were running on normal inworld CPPUs. No wonder that it’s all such a scramble.”
Mary puffed out her cheeks and exhaled noisily. “This is going to take forever to sort out. I vote we scrap all three and re-initiate.”
Darak shook his head. “If you do that, you’ll kill billions, everyone the Supervisor is holding in archive.”
“Billions?” Darya’s eyebrows puckered in a tiny frown. “There were only a few hundred million Fulls in Alternus.”
“That is odd,” Darak said. “This particular asteroid has been isolated from the Sagittarius A* inworld network—”
“—so there should be only a few hundred-thousand of us in the local copy of Alternus,” Darya finished for him, “not billions, not even millions.”
She waved at a segregated part of the confused program. “And what about this? Did breaking off this part from its integral whole affect the cognitive stability of the Supervisor?”
“Maybe,” Darak answered. He reached up and pulled down a tangled knot of code from above. “Or maybe it was this.”
He drew a large circle around a portion of the Supervisor program that included some O/S-level machine code in the midst of its higher-level concepts.
“Ouroboros!” Mary recognized her handiwork.
Darak regarded the code in silence for a few heartbeats. “A pretty nasty version, I’d say,” he commented. “This machine code penetrates deep. Trillian would have been ripped to shreds.”
“I warned him, “Mary said. “I told him it was purely defensive code but it could be deadly if he didn’t stop.”
Her eyes flicked to Darak’s face, caught a momentary glimpse of his disapproval. She kicked at the virtual ground beneath her feet.
“He was torturing me! What else could I do?” she blurted.
Darya turned from the sea of code and hugged her friend.
“It’s okay, Mary. That must have been awful for you. You did what you had to do to survive,” she soothed.
Darak turned back to the code, and highlighted a few links in red.
“Darya’s right. Besides, you couldn’t have known how badly Trillian compromised the Supervisor,” he said. “Look at this. The Shard integrated his own persona so deeply into the simulation that your Ouroboros routines affected the Supervisor itself. See? Right here. Oh, and again, over here.”
Darya and Mary inspected the indicated section more closely.
“What a mess. Can’t even call that spaghetti code,” Darya observed.
“I can extract the Ouroboros instructions, if that’ll help,” Mary offered. She examined the interconnections between her program and the Supervisor code. “At least, I think I can.”
Darak reached one hand deep into the routines, pulling first this way, and then the other. Links snapped and conceptual nodes spilled out onto the floor as he yanked.
“Hey!” Mary protested as he ripped her code from the larger concepta and let it fa
ll. It sputtered, dimmed, and dissipated as they looked on in shock.
“Was that wise?” Darya asked.
“I know what I’m doing,” Darak replied. “The basic Supervisor design isn’t much different from the first one I programmed.”
Mary’s jaw gaped. “You worked on inworld programming?”
“Vacationland was mine.”
Darya consulted her archives and shook her head. “But Vacationland is the oldest of inworlds. Are you that...”
“Ancient?” Darak laughed. “Yes, indeed.”
He turned his attention to the Alternus Supervisor concepta. “I was the original inworld designer. I naively believed the simulations would help the Cybrids remember their human origins and that it could help keep them from going insane. I never dreamed anyone would twist the inworlds that way.”
“You said you knew Trillian,” Darya said. “How could you think this would be beyond him?”
“No, I guess it was inevitable under the right circumstances. And it was inevitable that the circumstances would become right at some point. Let’s get your people out of here, and then we’ll shut down this mess.”
Darya followed links in the routines. “Where are they? The people, I mean. I don’t see any reference to archived personas. Do you?”
“Look in the heap,” Darak replied. “Trillian must have de-instantiated everyone in a hurry. But they’re still in there, not reclaimed yet. Yep, there they are, over there. See?”
The trio flew through the Supervisor’s inworld data. They came to a stop in front of a suspiciously neatly-ordered group. Each node of the group contained a link to miniaturized persona/concepta networks dangling below.
Darya breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, you’re right, that’s them! As soon as we’ve constructed new trueself bodies, we can upload everyone.”
Darak drew in a deep breath.
“I’m afraid it’s not going to be quite that easy,” he said. “Look at this.”
He waved a hand and multiple thin lines changed to bright red, showing extensive interconnections among the various personas.
“What the...?” Mary said.
Darak moved closer to inspect the nearest elements.