After eight hours, the visuals became nearly as meaningless as the icons of one of those repetitive, but addictive, pattern-matching games. Though, in this challenge, he had the added complication of managing his power levels and supply lines.
Ryu’s simulations began finding the clones more quickly. The manifestations left a broad trail of unusual activity in their wake, lifeless wasters who could barely find the drive to eat. An alert spiked in West. Mass coordination, with trajectory. A thousand people were moving as one. Then another alarm went off for a larger group.
‘We have located a possible manifestation,’ one of his selves reported.
‘Where is it?’
‘A Services block in northern West. It’s not behaving like the other ones.’
Pierre Jnr is doing to us what we are trying to do to him, Ryu thought. He knows everything about us and targets where we are strongest. Our factories and communication hubs. We’ve been trying to eliminate him like a virus, but he is doing the same to us.
He didn’t know if there was one Pierre Jnr clone or more, or if he was supported by any psis. It didn’t matter. He would gas the whole zone, triggering the building fail-safes, and bomb from the air until not even an elephant could breathe the air and stay upright.
Then he would send in the drones and the annihilators. The AMs had been programmed with Pierre Jnr’s DNA and would seek out the boy’s body, then cremate it in a disruption-incinerator.
One collection at a time, he told himself. Slowly but surely the threat will be removed.
‘Expand.’
‘There is a definite cohesion. The field seems to be about three hundred metres across.’
Ryu looked at the statistics. This was the same reach as the last clone they had encountered. Is this their limit? Is this their full blast radius?
‘Can you determine a centre?’
‘Negative. Eyes on the scene are dropping out as it moves.’
‘We need to get some drones in there.’
‘The patrols are knocked out before reaching them.’
‘It’s a Pierre.’
‘Most likely,’ his simulation agreed.
The simulation waited for real Ryu to give him the next order. Both watched the slanting of the red dot, fattening at the front and thinning to a tail, like a drop of blood trickling across a window.
‘What is the command?’
‘Same as the other ones. Gas and then send the AMs in with his scent. Target the head. Let’s assume he is at the intersection of its widest points.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Thirty Servicemen stood at the stem of the airbridge of block 467, facing down a mob of Citizens approaching through a cloud of knock-out gas.
From the chest camera of Sergeant Regis, Ryu watched Pierre Jnr approaching. A grey gas mask covered his face from mouth to eyes. While his followers keeled over, except for the few who also had masks to protect them, he walked calmly forward.
‘Fire, damn you. Shoot him!’ Ryu shouted.
He pushed his orders into the sergeant’s helmet. ‘Kill him!’
The man didn’t react. He lowered his weapon and moved out of the way of the boy in the mask.
Ryu swore and his simulation gave him a reproachful look. ‘We’ve lost them. Freeze the armours and line up the jets.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the avatar said.
The soldiers stepped aside and turned to follow behind Pierre Jnr. Then there was a blur. A light carved through the footbridge and the cameras Ryu was watching through began to fall towards the ground, people and stone tumbling together.
A remaining camera tracked the falling clone, and showed the robot slashing at him with an arc laser.
It missed and when Pierre stopped falling and levitated upwards, the robot and the rubble continued to drop towards the ground.
Above there was a puff puff puff as a supersonic jet released three powder bombs that rained corrosives over the footbridge with the aim of destroying Pierre’s gas mask.
He watched as Pierre Jnr began clutching at his face. His flesh was burning and bleeding. It must feel like a hundred matches being extinguished on his skin. He began clawing at himself, trying to tear the pain away while his followers collapsed and thrashed as he did, in perfect unison with his self-mutilation.
‘Now,’ Ryu said, ‘gas him again.’
The jets made another pass, dropping another payload that detonated into purple smoke.
‘I have you this time.’
Then his cameras cut out. The dots on his map glowed out.
‘What’s happening? Get me visuals.’
The closest to the scene was four hundred metres above, a swarm on standby. Below them, the clouds and smoke and rubble and bodies and hulks of vehicles had become part of a spiralling snake; its body churned through nearby buildings, smashing them and adding their pieces to its mass.
Ryu watched it divide into two massive arms, which, together, began pummelling everything around them.
‘Raze it. Fire everything.’
From a safe distance the jets formed a ring and unloaded their arsenal. Missiles hurtled towards the rising golem, exploding within it. Let the clone be crushed …
At some point the floating rubble dropped. One of the hundred rockets must have got him, or the corrosives and gas had finally overwhelmed him.
The image from the drones above was of a blackened and smoking pit. ‘Oh, mir, what have I done?’
La Gréle woke up to find Pinter sitting beside her, tears and sweat running down his cheeks.
For Pinter, the dreams just kept getting worse and he became afraid to sleep. The visions wouldn’t leave him even when he awoke: moments when light hit the battlefields, painting landscapes of monsters versus men in machines. His memories became confused, with nightmares of Pierre Jnr emerging over the melee as a mountain-high golem and destroying them all, the resistance and the Örjians, with a single fist.
‘Darling, what’s wrong?’ she asked.
He shook his head numbly. ‘It’s happening again. It can’t happen again.’
She sat up and hugged him to her chest, soothing his mind and stroking his hair. For the first time she thought about revealing herself to him. She wanted to whisper darling into his thoughts and, maybe, they could work together to stop this thing. She nearly did it.
Pinter was already thinking along a new thread. He had once defined ‘war’ to himself as a period where nobody was really in control. A state of being when conflicts multiplied in a reactive cycle, triggering more violence and retribution. The reactive spiral fed off itself, getting more aggressive and out of control until no single action could stop it. Not even a conscious governing body could halt it, and it ended only when it had eaten itself, destroyed so much that the reasons it began no longer existed. It was one force against another, the psis versus the non-psis. Is this now war? he asked himself. Is it too late to stop this?
Bless the man, that he didn’t want it to end up that way. Even if part of his reasoning came from the conclusion that the non-psis couldn’t win.
‘We have to surrender,’ he whispered.
‘Abe, you shouldn’t be talking to me about this.’
‘I am Prime. I can choose who I talk to.’
‘Would you really surrender?’ she asked.
‘We can’t. The Will wouldn’t accept it.’
‘But there is no Will while the Weave is gone.’
‘That’s not true. The Will is always there, we just don’t know what it is at the moment.’
‘Then how can you be sure? The Will may have changed. They may want peace too.’
‘The Will always says it wants peace. But Pierre Jnr …’ The Prime took a moment to sigh out his breath. ‘Pierre Jnr has been cloning himself, possibly for eight years. He could be controlling the Will.’
Gretel gasped and said nothing. She had to pretend to be speechless.
‘I think he could have been controlling the Will for a long time.’ The Prime
shook his head. ‘But if that were the case, why would I feel such a dilemma, now? If Pierre Jnr has been controlling the people for so long, surely he would be controlling me as well. And I don’t feel controlled.’
‘How would you know?’ she asked. This was dangerous territory. She needed to steer his thoughts away. ‘You’re right though. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Well, as long as Pierre Jnr acts logically, we can assume we are safe. For now.’ His soft, sad smile returned. The wry grin of the older Pinter on the young face. ‘I should get back to it.’
‘Have some breakfast.’
‘I’ll eat with the troops.’
They kissed and Abe stood up tall, stretching towards the capsule ceiling. With a wan expression he dressed quickly and strode outside.
She could feel his mind becoming more resistant to her control. It seemed to react more strongly each time she disappeared his conclusions or steered his thoughts into new ideas for him to follow. He spent more and more time seeking isolation.
Outside Quintan was waiting by his door, chatting with the two guards. Together they walked down the slope to where the troops had lit seven or so campfires and were huddled around the flames in groups.
Pinter headed to the closest circle and the Servicemen stood as he approached, saluting him with a fist over their chests.
‘At ease, soldiers.’
‘Thank you, Prime.’
‘What’s the explanation for these fires, Ten?’ Pinter asked.
‘Morale, sir,’ she answered. ‘The camp is a little too dark with the lights off.’
A typical Services encampment would be floodlit, but after noticing how Kronos seemed to lift its feelers out towards the light, it was deemed a security risk and they had reduced to weakly glowing lines of lumens to act as paths. The clearing they occupied was almost pitch-black with the moon blocked by clouds. The paths disappeared in humps and faded until they reached the lamps of a capsule or row of tents.
He thought about the black mass that was off somewhere in the darkness. A hundred square kilometres of rippling … something.
‘I suppose Kronos can’t see the fire through the trees,’ he said.
‘No, sir.’
They stood rubbing their hands awhile, sipping from their mugs and giving each other sideways glances. None of the soldiers were really sure how to act around the Prime. Or the Scorpion.
‘May I have a mug of what you’re having?’
‘It’s just caf, sir.’
‘That’s fine. Good on a cold night like this.’
They scooped a cup of dark water from the saucepan. Pinter accepted it gratefully and then took a sip. He tutted at the taste and reached inside his jacket for a flask. He unscrewed it with his teeth and poured some into his mug.
‘Anyone else?’ He offered it around and they gratefully added the liquor to their cups. Who wouldn’t take the chance to break regulation with a living legend?
‘Can you tell us what’s happening, sir?’ someone asked.
‘The Weave is down and we’re still guarding the black monster,’ Pinter answered.
‘You don’t know any more?’
‘I know some more, but it wouldn’t make you feel better to hear it.’
The flask made its way around the group, only the crackle of the flames filling the silence.
‘But, you do know more?’
‘Three —’ the Ten snapped at him but was cut off by a gesture from the Prime.
‘It’s alright. I said at ease and I meant it. Yes, I do know more and we are managing each situation. There is cause for alarm, but not for panic. I will tell you when it is time to panic.’
He grinned and they smiled back.
‘I’ve interrupted your downtime enough. I thank you for your hospitality.’
He handed his mug to the nearest soldier, saluted, and then walked back up the hill towards his capsule.
On the way to his command pod, they passed an omnipole with a signboard. Amongst the notes and the core commands of the camp was one of those damn posters of him that seemed to be everywhere. There was his young self, the Prime in the prime of youth, and a quotation chosen from his memoirs: ‘There were two sides and one had to lose.’
‘It always amazes me how removing the context of a statement completely changes its meaning.’
‘You don’t say,’ Quintan said. He’d heard the same statement, or similar, a few times already.
The quote had become something of a motto for a certain kind of soldier. It came from the testimony of Captain Abercrombie Pinter, given during the first hearings of the World Union in 2120. He had himself used the extract as the opener for The Peace Maker, his three-part autobiography and one of the most copied files on the Weave. The longer version read: ‘There came a moment when there was no other choice. There were two sides and one had to lose. It wasn’t going to be mine.’
‘If I have one regret, it is having written that memoir. I should never have agreed to it,’ Pinter said.
‘I’ll be sure to write that in the biography I’m working on.’
‘Don’t you dare.’
He left Quintan at the security door and went into the command room alone. The full sensorium of vision, sound and mock-tactility was directed into his brain: somewhat like putting on a visor but also as if he, his actual body, had stepped into another place.
West was erupting in psionic incidents and around the planet there were growing signs of similar levels of unrest. He sent messages through his symb, calling for status updates. He pinged Ryu, but received no response.
Why aren’t I doing anything? the Prime asked himself. Soldiers have to wait, commanders can’t afford to. Leaders can never stop to rest. They are always planning and organising. Orchestrating the actions of others — soldiers waiting for you and for what comes next. If I’m waiting, who or what am I waiting for?
La Gréle took a seat outdoors on a regulation canvas folding chair and pretended to read in the way that she had trained herself. She pushed through the words at a regular pace while her mind watched through the Prime’s eyes. She made him pay particular attention to the mystery robots when they appeared.
Services had thousands of sightings of the androids now. They were throughout the Union. All built to the same shape as the one who had rescued Peter Lazarus and his squad from the Pierre clones.
In this day and age, keeping such a large-scale manufacturing project secret should be impossible. The only convincing hypothesis Pinter had thought of was a secret branch of Services that he hadn’t heard of before in some unknown location, possibly off-planet. A splinter group beholden to none but themselves?
Neither of them could think who, other than Services, would have the resources.
He knew he should be doing more. Perhaps he shouldn’t be leaving the entire psi situation up to Ryu Shima. ‘Every war is different,’ he reminded himself of his own words, then shuddered at the thought of what a psionic free-for-all, with Pierre Jnr clones in their thousands, might look like. There has to be a way to stop this from happening.
A ping came in from Geof Ozenbach, the first of his hourly reports after his sleep cycle.
‘What developments have there been on the Kronos project?’ Pinter asked hopefully.
‘Some. We have a new method for shrinking it, with a radioactive salt, but the amount we would need to reduce even the Busan Kronos would cause significant environmental impact.’
‘How significant?’
‘We don’t have the means to scale-up at the moment. It would take some months to build the infrastructure. And even then we couldn’t be sure. Kronos is also likely to be underground in places we couldn’t reach without excavation.’
‘Keep working on it,’ the Prime said. ‘What else?’
‘I wish to try communicating with it again.’
‘Geof … we have been over this. You know what happened last time.’
‘Yes, but we know more about it now. We are reasonably sure
it has a program, just not much of one.’
‘What do you intend to do? Educate it?’
‘Yes, sir. In a manner of speaking. If I can get it to grasp the nature of its existence —’
‘You would be creating the largest AI in human history.’
‘Not necessarily. With the right command layer it could become no more AI than a symbiot. It would be harmless.’
‘Do you have any evidence to support this?’
‘No. Only a summation based on —’
Pinter held up his hand. ‘Get the evidence. Make contact if you wish, but let me know first so we can be ready.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll see you in an hour. Dismissed.’
Pinter left the command pod after midnight and on a whim went up to the viewing platform and stood in the quickly cooling breeze. He watched and thought about his predicament. His mind cranked over in cycles, at one moment thinking of the Pierre Jnr clones, then the psionic relays that were spreading throughout the world, then the strange robots and, finally, the black mass he could see under the moonlight.
Gretel let his thoughts stay where they were and came out to join him, taking an extra jacket for him to put on. ‘What are you doing out here? Is something happening?’ she asked.
‘No. There is no reason to be alarmed. I just find watching Kronos relaxing.’
‘I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not. That thing scares me,’ she said.
‘It scares me too. That’s why I like to keep an eye on it.’
She shivered. ‘Come back down. You need to sleep.’
He followed, pulled along by her insistent hand. Gretel was always close by and he was glad she had decided to stay. It was like he lived in two worlds: one when he was away from her, ordering the world around, his mind bifurcating and processing as fast as he could; the other world that existed when he saw her and he calmed.
Pinter didn’t sleep any more. He stimmed his way through three cycles until his symb warned him that he would have to rest. When he made it inside, he hung up his jacket, kicked his boots off at the door and fixed himself a drink.
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