“That’s about as useful as tits on me,” Stills said.
Sending a direct microcurrent from an electroplaque into his brain, Belisarius went savant. It felt like shutting off one set of lights and turning on another. The telemetry pictures became simple to him, puzzle pieces with more obvious interrelations. The presence of the empty, personless shell beside him bothered him less.
“Cassandra,” he said. He did not want to break her out of the fugue, but he wanted to communicate with her. Ached to do so. He stepped close to Cassandra, pressing against her fugue suit, their breaths mingling. In the hyper-intellectualized awareness of savant, Belisarius understood that this ought to have been intimate, but in many ways it was closer to hugging a piece of meat.
Cassandra’s quantum intellect drew graphs in the holographic workspace, inspiring new ideas in him, new wormhole geometries. He moved his fingers—twitches and clenchings writing new equations and geometries onto their work space. Even in his normal state, Belisarius could have mentally pictured five dimensions. In savant, he could picture seven- and eight-dimensional objects and complex state space geometries. The rendering programs had notations made just for the Homo quantus that allowed them to go past even this, to see the eleven-dimensional geometries that approached the complexity of wormholes.
The quantum intellect in Cassandra’s brain stopped drawing models. It produced no output for the one point eight seconds after Belisarius had finished drawing the new geometries. It processed his idea. He’d drawn a model of a wormhole whose throat was constructed of six-dimensional tesseracts.
The quantum intellect took his graphs and expanded them, deriving more detailed shapes with dizzying speed. It was hard to keep up. The intellect in Cassandra’s body was processing many operations in parallel, using superimposed qubit and qutrit variables which could assume multiple values simultaneously.
A fugue suit alarm lit gently in the center of their work space. Rising temperature. Thirty-nine point nine. The suit compensated, running cooling water through tubes around Cassandra’s head, neck and back.
Then, the rapid drawing and writing on the workplace stopped. The basic shape Belisarius had drawn was still there, but instead of approximations, hard, quantitative solutions arrayed themselves around the graphic. Not a proof, but a compelling argument for thinking that the throats of wormholes, at the small scales, were indeed constructed of microscopic six-dimensional tessaracts, and that additional volumes and directions of space were hidden in the walls themselves, possibly used to bind these building blocks of space time together.
The blinking light flashed slightly faster. Forty point one degrees.
Belisarius drew the trajectory for an induced wormhole burrowing through space from the bow of the Túnja to the wormhole being held in place by the Boyacá. The complexity of the trajectory was beyond his ability to express, even from within savant, but it wasn’t beyond the intellect occupying Cassandra’s brain to understand what he meant.
Throbbing magnetic fields penetrated the freighter, pressing against Belisarius’s magnetosomes, the strength of it near-dizzying. And still the magnetic field strengthened, piercing space-time again. The displays showed graphics of the penetration, its granular structure, macroscopic shape, and apparent distance and direction. Then the probing end of the induced wormhole contacted the wormhole produced by the Boyacá. And held.
The wormholes connected in a Y-shape.
Neither collapsed.
The blinking light flashed orange. Forty point nine degrees.
Belisarius issued the order to stand down the wormhole induction. The wormholes vanished as the great magnetic field on the bow of the Túnja shrank. Four hundred thousand gauss. Three hundred thousand gauss. One hundred thousand gauss. Fifty. Thirty.
Belisarius dropped out of savant to a feeling of momentary embarrassment. He stepped away from Cassandra’s body, not remembering when and why exactly he’d gotten so close. He shut down the displays. Cassandra was still in the fugue. Her perceptions were spread over an expanding sphere several light hours in radius, all the volume that could have been folded into quantum superposition in the hours that she’d been in the fugue.
Belisarius did not want to hurt Cassandra in any way, but he did not want her to stay in the fugue any longer. From his electroplaques, he sent a direct current through the lines of magnetosomes in the cells of his arms, creating powerful magnetic fields, strong enough that Belisarius could measure the moving particles and fields around her.
He observed the fields, collapsing the superposition of states around her. Her far-flung perceptions shrank, gently, but quickly. She, like most Homo quantus, could only enter the fugue with effort. Her breathing changed.
“Cassie?” he said.
Her breathing became a panting. He held her by the shoulders.
“Cassie?”
She groaned. He put his arm around her.
“Did you see what we just did?” he asked.
She nodded. Sweat had climbed from her scalp to individual hairs in zero g. He held a couple of anti-fever gel meds before her mouth. She took them. Her lips touching his palm startled him. She didn’t seem to notice. She hadn’t experienced any of what her brain had done in the fugue. She couldn’t have. Cassandra the person had not existed for those hours. But she could review the memories of what her brain had seen and sensed and done, and she could try to understand it all. It was like revealed knowledge. Belisarius missed this like a recovering addict.
He held her tighter, comforting, and she let him, leaning her head on his shoulder.
“I saw,” she said finally, smiling.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
BELISARIUS HAD BEEN playing peacemaker between Saint Matthew and Marie for the last three weeks. After Marie had destroyed his first body, Saint Matthew had come complaining to Belisarius again.
“She sent me holographic flowers!” Saint Matthew said. “I thought at first that she’d made the smallest, smallest, smallest possible beginning of an apology, but they blew up, transmitting a computer virus in the pixilation of the blast pattern. It was an AI-specific virus!”
“That’s pretty clever,” Belisarius said.
“She tried to kill me!”
“Were you harmed?”
“Of course not. Nothing she could design could get past my immune system, but I’m worried about her somehow harnessing her carelessness to stumble onto something really dangerous.”
“Saint Matthew, you’re the reincarnation of a biblical apostle!” Belisarius said. “You can’t handle a cashiered Congregate sergeant?”
“She knows I can’t really hurt her due to my programming. It’s only a matter of time before her clumsiness ends me. If you won’t stop her, I will.”
So Saint Matthew had stormed out of Belisarius’s room and had used his own diminutive automata to run a control signal down to near Marie’s lab. Then, he’d used Del Casal’s carbon nanotubule technology to grow microscopic fibers into her lab to interface with her computers. Through this, he’d sent one of his prototype viruses, hacking her computer interfaces to permanently use the stern face of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew. The virus further tracked her movements and communicated them to Saint Matthew, safe in his lab. Marie had been apoplectic, especially since Saint Matthew had modified the frozen face hovering above his body to show a great, satisfied smile that Caravaggio never would have painted.
“Is the mad AI smiling?” Del Casal had asked Belisarius a few days later.
“He’s dealing with some difficult personal growth,” Belisarius said. “It’s probably best not to get involved.”
Saint Matthew still wore the painted smile today, but fearing retribution, he had sealed his lab from the rest of the mine four days ago. The only way they could work together was for Marie to join Belisarius in his room and for Saint Matthew to appear in hologram.
“Are the viruses and automata ready, Saint Matthew?” Belisarius asked.
Specifications of small
, insect-like robots spilled in the holographic display beside the image of Saint Matthew in his lab. Six-legged and large enough to carry several terabytes of information, or something the size of a button, they could move and act independently for hours before their batteries ran down. The programming algorithms for a pair of viruses displayed along the other side of the grinning, angelic head.
“I’ve cross-checked the viruses against known Puppet hardware and software,” Saint Matthew said, “as well as anything they may have bought in the last years, and extrapolated their possible capabilities based on very optimistic assumptions. These viruses are capable of locomotion through networks, and from the initial network of infection, should be able to find their way past firewalls to the Puppet fortification grid and cause major problems there for a few days. With some modification, these will work on Union systems and probably Congregate ones as well, although not for long.”
“Sounds like a good job,” Marie said sweetly.
“It is a good job,” Saint Matthew replied. “Are you ready to say sorry for how you treated me?”
“No. Are you?”
“Why would I?”
“Because I snuck new experimental explosives into your lab.”
“You did not!” Saint Matthew said, but the painted holographic head looked wildly about.
“I can also control the environmental systems. They’re pretty hackable.”
The AI made a squeak of fear and suddenly air rushed out of the lab in a blustering cloud.
“Environmental systems don’t matter,” Saint Matthew said, “when I can survive in a vacuum. Your gas-phase explosives are pretty easily side-stepped, aren’t they?”
Marie was still smiling sweetly. Sparks started appearing in the joints and exposed electrical systems of Saint Matthew’s body. The AI shrieked again. “What’s happening?”
“I made a spider automaton like yours and had it paint a new explosive onto the sensitive systems of the body you’re riding,” Marie said. “Low pressure causes it to undergo a conformational change into something highly volatile.”
Little flashes of light and expanding black smoke felled Saint Matthew’s body. The AI uttered a series of religious expletives as he went down. His spider automata rescued the service band from the body and carried him away.
Belisarius turned to Marie after switching off the link. “Is there no way we could channel your creativity in other directions?” he asked.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE AIS OF the Anglo-Spanish Banks were wholly artificial things, electronically grown and printed on inorganic templates by iterative processes that mimicked embryonic stages. And if reports were to be believed, some of them achieved a limited but highly functional sentience. The Congregate did not pursue true artificial intelligence. The Scarecrow and other mobile AIs were constructed out of a kind of petrification process of living brains.
The process began with a few very select end-of-career intelligence operatives who were put into life-support baths. Nano-machines followed every axon and dendrite, constructing semi-conducting fibers that replaced the existing neurons and were far faster. Year by year, the electronification process went on, not just copying the neurology, but expanding it, adding processing networks and memory capacity, until the petrified brain was a new intelligence, neither human operative, nor artificial intellect, but a hybrid. Faster than human, more cunning than AI, and riding a weaponized body. Pasts dropped away, identity didn’t matter, leaving only the relentless pursuit of the secret enemies of the Venusian Congregate. They wielded vast physical power and broad legal and operational authorities, and were preceded by terrifying reputations.
The only thing they could no longer do anymore was move in secret. They could not pass for human. This didn’t bother the Scarecrow. It had hundreds of spies, some deeply embedded in long-term covers for secrecy. And it had platoons of augmented human assassins, pur laine Venusians, ready to act at any time. But sometimes a Scarecrow needed its intellectual strength on site. And so in the middle of this night, he skulked, accompanied by local Puppet authorities and a discreet team, while he simultaneously shut down electronic surveillance around him.
The Puppets led him to the art gallery in Bob Town.
It didn’t look like an art gallery.
They found a wall of metal embedded in the ice of the Free City. It was fitted with bay doors large that would be large enough to let through small trucks and forklifts. The cold bricked ground was well-travelled, stained with machine oil and tire tracks. The icy ceiling of the lane, seven meters above, had been dented in spots where trucks or cranes had lifted too high. A well-used area.
“This was an art gallery,” the Scarecrow said.
Duggan-12 turned to another Puppet, a police lieutenant who looked like he’d been rolled out of bed.
“It’s a warehouse,” the police lieutenant said, consulting a grimy pad. He scrolled through dates and dates and dates. “It’s been a warehouse for years.”
The Scarecrow focused his cameras on Majeur Bareilles. She stepped forward, showing her own pad.
“Our records show that from 2510 to 2515 this was an art gallery, and as recently weeks ago,” she said, “it was owned by a human off-worlder known by several names. Juan Caceres. Diego Arcadio, Nicolás Rojás and Belisarius Arjona.”
The police lieutenant scanned for the names, predictably finding nothing. He shrugged.
The Scarecrow sent a command into the door mechanism, overriding passwords and activating physical locks. The doors parted, releasing a powerful cold. The Scarecrow stepped forward, followed by Bareilles. The Puppets held back from the -60°C.
The Scarecrow sent a command and big industrial lights clicked on, showing a narrow walkway around a wide circular pit plunging down a hundred meters. From the very bottom, crates and crates were stacked on a central shelving space that could be accessed from all angles by forklift arms. They all seemed to be labelled “L-6 Protein Bath Nutrients, Dehydrated.”
Duggan-12 came up behind them.
“Someone is stockpiling bath nutrients for bioreactors until the price comes up,” she commented.
“It’s a Puppet merchant,” the police lieutenant offered from behind them. “James Barlow-17.” He showed a picture of a smiling Puppet. Not Arjona, or Caceres, or Arcadio or whatever his real name was.
Bareilles walked along the edge of the pit, examining the walls and ceiling, pointing.
“Wiring stripped,” she said. “Contains no computers more sophisticated than forklift operators.” She touched the wall with a finger, then looked at where the chill had bitten it. “Acid,” she continued. “The DNA is probably all gone.”
“Acid-washing is a common preventative measure for storing anything that can be used in bioreactors,” Duggan-12 said. “Contamination.”
“Someone tried to tempt our eyes with a big haul of Middle Kingdom spies,” the Scarecrow transmitted to Bareilles. “So he’s hiding something more valuable than that. Our teams may pull something out of this former art gallery.”
“Whatever identity he’s using, he’s somewhere in Epsilon Indi, and probably still on Oler, monsieur,” Bareille sent. “We’ll have eyes on him shortly.”
Chapter Thirty
THAT NIGHT, BELISARIUS’S door buzzed. He rose from his star-gazing and turned on the lights. When he opened the door, Del Casal stepped in and shut it behind him.
“Gates-15 is no mutant,” the doctor whispered. “There is nothing missing from his biochemistry or microbiomes. He is suffering from constant withdrawal symptoms.”
Belisarius’s stomach did a tiny flip-flop. He’d been careful so far. Gates-15 knew very little.
“Does he know you know?” Belisarius asked.
Del Casal’s spine stiffened. “Nobody else could have figured this out, Arjona. Because of my... particular experiences in working with the Numen, I am probably the only one outside of the Puppet Free City who could have figured out all the markers and responses
.”
“So he is a spy,” Belisarius said. “This is good.”
“Good? The heist is blown. I thought that once I told you, you would kill him. If you do not want to get your hands dirty, I can kill him. Better yet, we have soldiers on the crew who could make it the work of seconds.”
“We now have a shill who thinks he can take our pot away because he holds the strongest hand,” Belisarius insisted. “This is how we get the Puppets to bet the house.”
“You cannot be serious!” Del Casal said. “This is not an acceptable risk. I already barely believe that any of us will survive this plan of yours. You do not make all the choices, and not one this big.”
“Would you ever play poker as part of a committee?”
“Do not insult me, Arjona. I do not appreciate whatever comparison you are making.”
“I’m playing against the psychology of the Puppets. You more than anyone else can understand what it is to stare down someone across the table.”
“I bet my stake, on my cards, against my opponent.”
“That’s what I’m doing, Antonio.”
“And if the Puppets do not swallow your bluff?”
“They will,” Belisarius said. He felt an icy certainty slipping into his voice.
Del Casal crossed his arms and stalked slowly around Belisarius’s room, disbelief written into his frown.
“Why are you even doing this, Arjona?” he demanded. “Your intelligence is off the scale. You could have been anything. You do not need to be a con man, certainly not in a con this risky. You have made enough money off your cons to live well, and you are no thrill addict.”
Belisarius stepped close.
“No, I’m not a thrill addict,” he whispered, “but I’m the equivalent to a fugue addict. I’m driven to commit psychological suicide over and over until I don’t come back, all to analyze more and more data. I found out twelve years ago that confidence schemes are complex enough to tie up my brain, to keep it stimulated. And because there’s nothing mathematical or geometric in a con, the urge to drop into the fugue falls away. This is keeping me alive, and I very much want to stay alive.”
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