Convergence

by David M Henley

  Oh, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I was born for this.

  I’m sorry, Elix. But I have to stop you.

  No! Elix’s dancers froze, tensing up like animals after a loud bang. You leave us alone, or they’ll get it.

  Alright, Elix. I’ll move away. There’s no need to hurt anyone. Pete raised his arms.

  Go on. Go. And let us dance. I am their god and I am kind.

  You are not a god, Pete said, stepping back as if leaving while letting his mind sink deeper into Elix’s.

  The boy took another gulp of the syrup, always touching the bauble he kept in his pocket, rolling it around in his sweaty fingertips — then he felt spiders crawling on his hands. He tried to shake them off, throwing the bottle to the floor and jerking his other hand out of his pocket and flinging the spiders off him. As they left his fingers, the moment ended and he saw himself throwing the precious bauble wildly into the crowd.

  ‘Noooo!’ he screamed and threw himself from the stage.

  Sorry, Elix, Pete thought to him before overwhelming the boy’s mind and pushing him into unconsciousness.

  The people in the room stopped and looked around. Strangers in each other’s embrace stepped apart quickly.

  Pete made his way through the confusion and found the bauble amidst their feet. As he touched it, he instantly felt the surge of the connection, the wellspring of his mind pushing through a small hole into a far bigger world.

  His mind joined a river that spread over the city. He strode from consciousness to consciousness and made a number of things happen at once. Every Servicemen he could reach he made disarm themselves and he directed a squib to land on the street to collect him and get him out of the area. When any Citizen thought to flag anything to Services, he changed their thinking; changed their focus, distracted them with something else. He walked out through the crowd, turning heads away from him.

  The squib lifted off and Pete stared down at the metal ball in his hands, his mind pouring into it like a waterfall. I am the water, he prayed, flowing his mind out through the city. The baubles had spread far, churned out of minifacs that the psis had taken over. With this one bauble alone he could connect to anyone within a kilometre and each addition amplified his range until he could feel nearly the entire city.

  At last I am free of these cages! For so long now I have not been a person. I am used like a tool and then put back in a box. I am not empty. I am not a thing to be turned on and off. I will be free. I will go where there are no cages. No walls. No locks.

  Each person was just another show, filled with thoughts and emotions. The more people Pete jumped through, the more similar they became. The same worries, the same fears. It was not unlike switching streams on the Weave, but in full sensorium.

  He could feel them beneath him. The millions. The multitude. Every sensation they felt, he felt. Every emotion they had, he shared. Worry. Panic. The sense of impending doom scratching at the walls of their hearts. Afraid that the silence of the Weave was a sign that the darkness had come again.

  The people were unnerved. They didn’t know themselves without the Weave. They fidgeted and felt exposed without their blanket of data. The comfort of knowing what was happening in the world, and what would happen next, had been taken from them. Everything was now uncertain.

  There is nothing to fear, he said to them, and exuded a share of his calm. We mean you no harm.

  I don’t mean you any harm, he thought to himself. Those like Elix and Risom make their fears perfectly justified. These baubles aren’t just the keys to psi freedom, they may become locks on a cage the norms might never be free from.

  Is this world better than before, or is it just better for me?

  He didn’t know.

  Is this the world you want, Tamsin?

  In the end, cracking the code was relatively simple, once Takashi knew what he was looking for.

  He and Cindy, followed by Spoon, trudged up two levels to visit a Services hub where many other Citizens stood in line to talk with a representative. It took two hours of waiting — and a little hakking of those around him to keep him occupied — before they reached the front desk.

  ‘How can I help you, Citizen?’ the Serviceman asked.

  ‘My name is Takashi Shima. I would like to talk with my brother.’

  ‘I am sorry, Shima san. We cannot send messages at this time. We ask for you to wait pat—’

  ‘Yes, wait patiently and return to our homes. I’ve heard that already.’

  The desk sergeant maintained her composure and looked placidly back at him. ‘Is there something else I can help you with, Citizen?’

  ‘Could you at least send a message that I tried to contact him? And let’s not forget,’ he leant forward to speak confidentially, ‘I am a Shima.’

  ‘Of course, honourable Shima san. A message has been sent.’

  Takashi nodded, while the sylus hidden in his pocket recorded every bandwidth and environmental integrant for later processing. ‘I don’t suppose you could connect me to the Prime, either?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, Citizen. The Prime is extremely busy right now.’

  ‘Can you put a request for connection through?’

  ‘Okay, I have put the request through, Shima san. Please, there is no more I can do for you at this time.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant. You have given me all I need,’ he said with a little smile. ‘I’ll just stand over here, in case you hear back from them.’

  ‘As you wish. But we probably won’t hear anything today. We can contact you at your residence, if you prefer.’

  ‘I prefer to wait,’ Takashi said over his shoulder and went to stand discreetly in the corner.

  He watched the next applicant step forward to report not being able to contact her grandparents since the blackout. The conversation was short and followed a similar pattern to Takashi’s.

  His sylus continued to record the ambient noise — even though it did just look like static — and began processing. Within the noise, if the Servicemen had put his requests through, he knew there had to be some transmutation of his name and Citizen number, as well as the recipients’ names; that is, the Citizen numbers of Abercrombie Pinter, and Takashi’s brother, Ryu.

  Codes look like noise until you can translate them. By repeatedly capturing the names and numbers of each enquiry, he could construct a plaintext key to give him a foothold to begin identification — presuming it was only a one-step cypher and that the main stumbling block would be identifying the communication from the surrounding noise.

  As he waited, he collected more of these noise samples and added them to the program until it could soon detect the beginning and end of a communication: a short blip of noise that repeated — noise should never repeat. The process was slow and there was a lot of data to crunch, but once he had tagged one bit he could discard the real noise and focus, and then … it was like a singularity. An omnidirectional shattering of the nothingness. Data and files boiling out like geysers. Let there be data, he thought.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said and turned away.

  Cindy and Spoon followed him out of the waiting room and started towards the stairs down to home. Takashi couldn’t wait to get back and he pinged his teenage army with the encryption code and told them to spread it and start wiping and loading his new Weave to the world. Before he had made it down to their level, the kids had already automated the process.

  As the omnipoles reconnected, like a daisy chain of lights switching on, he started to be able to access all the eyes and sensors that he was used to. His network shot outwards to other zones, and then other megapolises, like arrows, and each revealed a different story of what had taken place since the Weave went down.

  At first, it was too much to take in and impossible to decide what events to focus on. Many had witnessed an altercation of some kind: Services arresting a resistant Citizen, or larger events like substations exploding and whole buildings collapsing.

  In this area of
Yantz, most Citizens had assumed the worst-case scenario when the Weave went down and no connection could be raised with the satellite network. They were just waiting for what would happen next, continuing with their daily lives as best they could.

  Rumours had spread. ‘We are at war with the psis.’ ‘The psis brought down the Weave.’ ‘The third Dark Age is beginning.’ ‘A new age is dawning.’ ‘Services taking control of the Will.’ ‘The Will must be freed.’ ‘Pierre Jnr is coming.’

  Roma had become a battlefield. Guerrilla groups fired rockets between or from the rooftops of buildings, aiming at Services centres. Services hit back and tracked each group, targeting them for drone swarms. Takashi watched them from an omnipole eye, the predatory flocks sinking low into the streets, and then rising moments later to hunt from on high.

  In Alaska, Services had overreacted and had begun masking those Citizens suspected of psionics or psionic leanings. The population retaliated and overwhelmed them, locking known Services personnel in warehouses and taking control of the ecosystem.

  And then there was West …

  Connectivity was patchy but there were enough cameras to see that something very strange was happening. The Citizens moved in droves. Many filed into the dymo-gyms and began a coordinated march on the treadmills, others worked to douse the many fires that had started up and to repair necessary machinery. None of them spoke. They moved in silence and made no physical attempt at communication.

  In places where people still lay sleeping after a gas strike, they began to stir, standing groggily and then shambling off to join the nearest of the human packs in whatever endeavour they were currently pursuing.

  He rewound the streams from West before it fell and the symptoms of the escalation were clear to Takashi. First came the pro-psi propaganda, and then came the preachers and crowds with unspoken, but united, intentions. When an area began acting in coordination — which had no predictable timeline, but must indicate a point of critical mass of telepathic connection — it was too late for any Services response to stop it.

  The same pattern was starting to take hold in other ecosystems too. In Tokyo2, the Citizens openly pledged their allegiance to the psis. Even Servicemen took off their weapons and uniforms to join the movement, raising banners and spraying the psi symbol on windows and walls. Kalgoorlie was almost a complete greyout. The people had demolished the majority of the omnipoles, rendering Takashi blind and deaf to most of what was taking place. The few remaining poles showed empty streets, only detritus lurching in the breeze. Paint and chalk scrawls were writ large over the walls:

  Pierre Jnr is our saviour.

  Psi Freedom Now!!

  As soon as Takashi had an active connection to every major ecosystem, he authorised a command line change to all routers to remove the Services code lock, and purge. At one moment the world was blacked out and cut off and then with as much warning as its disappearance, the Weave returned.

  Like a bursting dam, the backlog of streams — blocked for fifty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes — rushed into the system. It hadn’t been quite sixty hours, but the people were starved of their connections and desperate to regain them. Two and a half days of locational activity and personal streams began clogging the network with nearly a trillion and a half hours of data.

  There was too much for any one person to absorb, though that didn’t stop Takashi diving in to find out what had happened, and let his avatars run loose like a pack of wolves searching out any notable changes that had occurred in the data.

  The first change they highlighted was a rise in psi-tolerance literature. The Teachings of Pierre Jnr — a pamphlet of recycled mantras and prayers where the word ‘God’ or ‘Buddha’ was substituted with Pierre’s name — was copied everywhere, translated across all mediums and languages. Believers worked tirelessly to bombard every forum and public space with the same syndrome of messaging.

  Pierre will walk with us.

  Our hand will always be in his.

  Pierre’s will, is our will.

  Pierre’s love, is our love.

  He will bring peace upon our minds and all will become one.

  One with Pierre, one with each other.

  Let us now pray for the dawning of a new age.

  We pray that those who are trying to stop our lord will fail.

  We pray that Pierre will deliver us and complete our transcendence.

  If you are weak, give him your faith.

  If you are strong, give your strength to him.

  Rise all, rise up. Watch the skies for the dawning of the new age.

  People started claiming they had been visited or touched by Pierre Jnr and they described their encounters with awe-filled performances. ‘He came to me in a vision’; ‘I saw him in my dreams’; ‘Praise Pierre Jnr, he has shown me the light’.

  Takashi discounted them as delusional and/or attention seeking, but these people carried their messages outwards, telling anyone who would listen. Some went so far as to stand in public squares and amplify their voice for the masses around them.

  ‘He is coming. He is walking amongst us. He brings peace and joy.’

  ‘Pierre Jnr has come. Hail the dawn of Pierre Jnr.’

  Takashi watched the collations grimly. He felt there was something he should do about it, but his thoughts murled and he just kept watching as new information fed into his stream.

  Shima Palace did not respond to his pings. Takashi tried to find out what was taking place inside, but not only had they failed to establish their own network, they refused to connect to the new Weave. He suspected, in their paranoia, that they might have gone so far as to sever the wiring to make sure no one could hakk their way in.

  Reverts! he thought. How do they think retreating is going to help them? Telepaths don’t need the Weave.

  They weren’t completely greyed from him though, not now that he had some surveillance back. Data comes and data goes, all you have to do is watch. Squibs came and went frequently from the rooftop. Near-constant deliveries of meats, fruits and decorations. They landed, unloaded their boxes and pallets and lifted off again almost immediately, with enough time for the couriers to go into the palace and receive new shopping lists.

  Other visitors stayed longer and he tagged and reverse-searched the visiting faces. Some he recognised as longtime family associates who had been allied with his parents since before he was born, but near the end of the day the Shima’s were visited by the Grimshaw alpha, and his wife. Both were dressed in ceremonial gowns …

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘What’s funny?’ Cindy asked. Since he had connected and immersed himself she had been leading him by the hand back to Cybermesh, making sure he didn’t trip on the stairs.

  ‘They’re going through with it.’

  ‘With what?’ she asked.

  ‘Sato’s wedding. I can’t believe it. In the midst of the chaos, the Shimas are going to hold a wedding.’

  ‘What? You’re funning me.’

  ‘No. They’re doing it. They’ve got the food and the guests are gathering.’ How can I be related to people so stupid? ‘Don’t they understand? Everything connects to everything. This is …’ he trailed off.

  Takashi stumbled and Spoon’s quick arm stopped him falling over the side. The robot pulled him back upright, but he was flashbacking to yesterday … staring at the glass Cindy had drunk from. Most of the liquid remained, as she had only sipped a little before slumping over. As it cooled, its colour began to separate. The green-blue dividing as the heavier elements sank to the bottom to form a colour gradient from light to dark.

  ‘Everything is connected … everything has weight,’ he started, then stopped. The pieces slipped into place and Takashi understood. He stood still and stared up at the clutch of towers around them. Determined trunks spearing the sky, heavy with the roots of the unplanned majority, and vine-covered with pipes that steamed and hummed with humanity.

  Cindy pulled on his arm to get him away from
the edge. ‘Takashi, take me home.’

  ‘Spoon?’ Takashi spoke, his voice throaty.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’re inside already, aren’t they?’

  ‘Can you clarify your question for me?’ the robot asked.

  ‘The psis. Or Pierre Jnr. They’re inside the palace.’

  ‘That is possible.’

  ‘No way,’ Cindy exclaimed.

  ‘Something bad is going to happen. Where’s my brother?’

  A handsome man in a grey and silver suit looked straight into the camera hovering before him. He took two quick breaths and then gave the command for the recording to go live.

  ‘Welcome to Civic Snapshot, I’m Sam Palyky. To anyone watching, now or in the future, the Weave has come back online after three days of blackout and people around the globe are now reconnecting. We are currently in hour three, waiting for the built-up data to process and the Will to return.’

  The presenter wiped his hand over his stubble. He hadn’t had time to shave, wanting to be one of the first commentators to get their show back on the air.

  ‘I’m talking with APL founder, Mortimer Gold, in Uganda.’ On cue, his stream connected to a sunroom in Kampala, where a much older man sat tapping impatiently. ‘Morty has just returned to a chairing role with the Anti-Psi League following the tragic loss of Nigel Westgate.’

  ‘May he rest in peace,’ his guest spoke up. Morty had a voice that sounded as well-worn as the skin of his face, cheeks riven with deep, slow-cooked wrinkles that ran outwards from his manic blue eyes.

  Gold was a bit of a risky guest, but one who should get some views. He had a reputation for repeatable soundbites and since he had been in self-imposed seclusion for the last decade, revitalising the parks, this would be the first interview he had given to the Weave in ten years. It was quite a coup for him.

  ‘Yes, thank you for connecting and giving us your time.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Also joining us is Dedes Salord, chair of the Egalitarian Statistics Council. Dedes, thank you for joining us.’ The show’s stream immediately associated with the speaker’s … she was sitting in front of a window in Jakarta and behind her the dense city lights twinkled.