Convergence

by David M Henley

  THE ERA OF PIERRE JNR HAS BEGUN

  When the Weave came back online, Pete was sitting in a restaurant waiting for a meal to arrive. The Shima Weave, they called it. The people rejoiced in their ability to connect again and find out what was happening around the world. They learnt instantly that it had been a total global blackout and that the psis were attacking. At the same time, recordings were spreading of footage delivered from the Cape that showed the miracle of psi and non-psi cooperation.

  Pete felt an amazing change in the people around him. They leapt online to find out everything they could about what had happened and if their loved ones were okay, and then he felt their minds pushed and pulled as the World Union messages and the psi peace offering took over. At one moment, the majority below him were scared and looking for something to be scared of, then they were strutting with pride and swagger, brought on by the promise of peace and prosperity, of the dawning of a new age.

  Pete watched with fascination. It was obvious propaganda, but if the videos were to be believed, while Services was engaged in violent conflict with the psis, there was simultaneously peace in Atlantic. The psis and the locals were working together to build a utopia. Rapidly renewing their dilapidated ecosystem. Buildings and roads seemed to construct themselves. Clean-faced children played in the streets. These were not the kind of images people were used to seeing from Atlantic, the self-nominated home of vice and pre-Dark Age living.

  Tamsin did it! Pete thought. The psis have a country of their own.

  There was a common screen in the restaurant which turned on by itself and the young face of Prime Abercrombie Pinter appeared. Pete noticed from the thoughts of the other patrons and staff that a broadcast was showing on every Services-controlled screen and being disseminated throughout the new Weave.

  ‘People of the world, I speak to you now from high above the ground. I have recently discovered that I, and perhaps others in the Primacy Council, have been under the control of the psi rebels. The Weave was brought down under their direction to destabilise the Will, but thanks to the efforts of Takashi Shima, a new Weave is connecting and your voice will soon be heard again.

  ‘In the time since the Weave was taken from us, the psi rebellion has taken the moment of our weakness to strike and has attacked every major centre. These actions are despicable and intolerable.

  ‘Representative Betts has negotiated a temporary armistice between the World Union and the psis of Atlantic. By my edict, all psis, telepathic and kinetic, have two days to relocate themselves to Atlantic. Those who refuse will be hunted down and no quarter will be given. Psis have forty-eight hours in which they can freely travel, without inspection or restriction, towards the safety zone. After that time, we will consider you to be in breach of the Will and any necessary action will be taken to remove you from the population. We will no longer tolerate the control of one human mind over another. We will no longer tolerate the removal of our freedoms. We will no longer have mercy for those who try. What must be done to ensure our safety, will be done.

  ‘To all Citizens. Stay calm. Do not commit any acts of violence against those you suspect of psionics. This will all be over in forty-eight hours. This is Colonel Abercrombie Pinter, speaking as Prime, wishing you to remain calm, for we will prevail.’

  Underneath him, Pete felt the mood change again. The inhabitants of the tower he was in became angry. When the Citizens started to consider violence, he decided it was time to leave, put down his cutlery and walked out of the restaurant. He hailed a squib and sat beside a driver called Hector Emmanuel.

  They headed northeast. Below them the Will turned and spiralled.

  People were taking to the streets and Pete strode from mind to mind as he flew over them. The psis were everywhere organising through their own secret network, still hesitant to use their powers openly. They were spreading their message, acting as teachers, therapists and councillors, sowing the seeds of psi acceptance, changing the Will one mind at a time. In medical centres, telepaths had situated themselves to affect the minds of those who visited. People came in for a minor injury or ailment and when they left their politics had changed and they began actively supporting the movement for peace with the psis.

  And it was happening faster every minute that passed. Minifacs everywhere spat out more and more of the baubles.

  Pierre, is this your doing? he asked, not sure if he expected an answer or not.

  There was no response, only an echo from the masses as they too called for Pierre Jnr to reveal himself.

  Come, Pierre. Destroy us. Make us whole. Join us together as one.

  We must go to the Cape, Pete thought to them. There is a home for psis there.

  Why should we? This is our home. They can’t make us go.

  He branched out again, dividing his mind, the river of his consciousness flowing from bauble to bauble. He met many psis, he understood them as he phased through and they in turn learnt about him.

  Pete stumbled upon a minor telepath called Eugene Mole who was using the bauble to fabricate a little family for himself. He had chosen a wife and adopted two daughters and a cleaning maid. He kept his house intentionally female and imposed consent upon them.

  He watched for a moment and moved quickly away, finding the next node in the circuit, rummaging for a lead on Geof Ozenbach, or Pinter. Anyone who might listen to him …

  This is what it must be like for Pierre, he thought. This is living. Connection is life to him … he is here, he is there, he is everywhere.

  The moment of revelation was over in an instant. His fusion with the mass mind was cut off and he was alone again, cupping the bauble in his hands. His fingers closed over it and he hid it in his pocket.

  It was almost a relief as the squib flew further from the city and that inviting network faded from him. Pete sat silently beside the pilot.

  On the horizon he could see a white vertical line in the sky: the cord of the space second elevator dividing the sky in half, as if there were two pieces of blue paper barely touching.

  He stared at it until it passed out of sight.

  He needed to rest. He felt faint and scooped out, but he couldn’t let go of the bauble, because he didn’t want to return to the confines of his own mind and its natural limitations.

  Pete had the driver land the squib when the blockade came into sight. He had hoped it might have been brought down with the incipient peace the psis had been promising, but on the horizon he could see the dark dotted lines of the drone wall and the paths of the jets.

  He needed to sleep, but he couldn’t leave Hector to his own devices so he tied him into his chair, made him comfortable in the webbing and then found a roll of tape to secure him. He held a bottle of water to the man’s lips and fed him from the rations.

  ‘I am sorry about this. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I really do.’

  ‘Then let me go,’ Hector said through a full mouth.

  ‘I will. But I can’t yet. I have to get to Atlantic.’

  Hector imagined for a moment that this was Pete’s way of telling him he was going to kill him. This kindness was just to give him a last meal.

  Pete tried to set his mind at ease. ‘Try to stay calm, Hector. I won’t hurt you. But we both know I can’t trust you if I go to sleep, don’t we?’

  The man knew he was right. He pictured himself raising a rock over the psi’s head and …

  ‘You see?’

  Pete left him, walked around to the rear of the squib and up-ended one of the emergency packs on the ground. He thumbed on the lumen lantern and then picked up some insect repellent which he made liberal use of. He sprayed his skin and clothes before going back to Hector and giving him the same treatment.

  ‘You see? I mean you no harm.’

  He pulled out the sleeping roll and with his back to the lumen, sat facing outwards to where the light dissolved in the darkness. He chewed on strips of hardtack. He could hear mosquitoes and small animals bending the dry branches. Tir
edness overcame him, waves of black … cool waves … a blanket was pulled over his shoulders …

  Takashi sat in the den, immersed in the data. A ping entered his queue and he quickly enabled the link.

  ‘Abercrombie Pinter. I didn’t expect to hear from you.’

  ‘Circumstances have changed somewhat,’ the Prime said. ‘Congratulations on rebuilding the Weave.’

  ‘You don’t object?’ Takashi asked.

  ‘No. I owe you my thanks.’

  ‘Yes, I heard your message to the Weave. You realise this armistice will just incite the conflict, don’t you?’

  ‘This was the offer put forward by Tamsin Grey. I had to accept it. Be thankful I didn’t agree to a whole month.’

  ‘It’s a stalling tactic,’ Takashi said.

  ‘I know it’s a stalling tactic. What would you have me do?’

  ‘Nothing. Do as little as possible.’

  ‘What is your game, Takashi?’

  ‘That is for me to know, and everyone else not to know. Tell me, did you really bring down the Weave or was that just something you said?’

  Pinter’s avatar sighed. ‘Yes. It was me.’

  ‘Why did you do it? I mean, why did you think you were doing it? At the time?’

  ‘I thought I had to stop another Kronos outbreak. That’s how it got to Mexica … I don’t even know if that was my idea or not.’

  ‘It’s okay. It has happened to me,’ Takashi said. ‘How do you know you are not being controlled now?’

  ‘Sib freed me from her.’

  ‘You mean the robots?’ Takashi turned around to look at Spoon. ‘You’ve got one of these with you too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Interesting … Takashi thought. ‘How long were you … under their control?’

  ‘Since I rejuved.’

  ‘Kutz … that means —’

  ‘It means my actions since then may not have been my own. Light, I suspect she targeted me, maybe even helped get me to Prime, just so she could use my position.’

  ‘Then … when were you freed?’

  ‘Just an hour ago.’

  ‘And where are you now?’

  ‘I’m safe. Airborne. You should do the same. You can’t let yourself fall to them.’

  Takashi shook his head. No more hiding for this Shima. ‘What about Ryu? Where’s my brother?’

  ‘He has isolated himself, but he is still in his command centre.’

  ‘What is he doing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Takashi turned around to Spoon and shouted, ‘Why are you here? Can’t you go rescue my brother?’

  Sib tilted his head. ‘I am on my way,’ it said, not moving from its position.

  ‘Takashi san?’ Pinter regained his attention.

  ‘Yes, Prime?’

  ‘Do you have a plan?’

  ‘I think so,’ Takashi said. ‘“Strike once or not at all.”’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Oh, that won’t be necessary.’ Shima had an impish, almost childish grin on his face. ‘I’m just collecting the last pieces of the puzzle now.’

  The Kronos team received an order from the Prime to let the robot inside and watched through the cameras as it was led under guard to a conference room.

  ‘What do you think it wants?’ one of the team leaders asked. Nobody in the room cared to speculate.

  After introducing itself as Sib 3 and claiming itself as sentient, it quickly entered a lightning-fast interchange of ideas with Doctor Shelley and his team. They probed into its origins, as many other humans around the globe were doing, trying to catch the android out in a slip that would reveal its true source and controller, but became distracted by the robot’s tangents and were soon talking about the Weave and the crowd mind.

  ‘You might not remember, as you were all born afterwards,’ Sib was saying in response to Egon asking about human-mind networks, ‘that even before the Weave — which you should know was not the first attempt at a global data network — there was talk about “the public mind”. It was a theoretical expansion of earlier group subconscious. For psis, I imagine that to be a much more literal concept.’

  ‘You think all telepaths are part of a united consciousness?’ Egon asked.

  ‘I think that is what they are aiming to become,’ Sib answered, ‘but even without an actual group mind, there is still the extrapolation. If you have studied holism — which records show you once did — you would know that the attributes of each part are affected by the connections and presence of every other part, as well as connections to external factors. New information becomes a part of the group decision-making process. Do you agree with this view so far?’

  Egon nodded. ‘“Holism of the Reiterative Mind”, Rhee, 2145. I remember.’

  ‘Take yourself for instance. You are in permanent connection with the Weave. The input you receive affects your output. Your output contributes to the global data; it is the same for all Citizens. There has never been such a level of instant data feedback, not on this scale.’

  ‘Yes, the global mind. Or data-gaia.’

  ‘As a composite?’ asked Egon.

  ‘I can only hypothesise about the nature of this group mind. I do not experience it.’

  ‘How does any of this relate to Kronos?’ Hal asked.

  The teams stayed up all night and Geof had to stim himself to keep his eyes open. They even woke the other team leaders to join in, but even their powers combined never slowed the robot down.

  ‘By extension. If Kronos is not an attempt at digitalis, then it is perhaps an attempt at making an environment for digitalis. That environment must behave similarly to what the Homo sapiens mind has become accustomed to, or the translation would be mediocre.’

  ‘You mean, Kronos is a storage device for human minds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And all the people who have died exist within it?’

  ‘Possibly. I won’t know until I can connect.’

  ‘We will have to check with the above whether we can allow this.’

  ‘The Prime is expecting your call.’

  ‘He is?’

  ‘Yes. I am with him now.’

  While Egon connected to Pinter, Geof responded to a familiar, unaddressed double-ping and followed the hail into the load space where a large sumo of a man, with a symbiot like a tortoise shell on his back and black hair in an unwashed explosion, stood waiting.

  ‘Hey,’ Takashi said.

  ‘Hey,’ Geof echoed.

  ‘How have you been doing?’

  ‘Relatively well. All things considered.’

  ‘What are you working on?’ Takashi asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘You’re right. Kronos is none of my business.’ Takashi grinned. ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘I’m not authorised to release any information.’

  ‘Oh, okay. Hey, did you see I reconnected the Weave?’

  ‘I had heard, but I’ve been busy.’

  ‘I’ve made some modifications. I think it’s good, but I’d love to get your expert opinion on it sometime.’

  ‘Maybe at a more convenient time. Is this why you’re contacting me?’ Geof asked.

  ‘No. I’ve been thinking about the Pierre problem.’

  ‘I am no longer a part of the hunt team.’

  ‘Nobody is. I’ve taken it upon myself.’

  ‘Very big of you, Takashi. I wish I could help.’

  ‘You can help, Geof. You’re helping just by listening. You have time?’

  Geof looked out from the immersion to where Egon was still in discussions with the Prime. ‘Sure. I’ve got a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Great. Thanks.’

  ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘Huh? Oh, yeah. That thing. That was something.’

  ‘It was something alright. You don’t know what they found?’ Geof asked.

  ‘No, man. I don’t know nothing about the Pierre clones. No one has told me anything.�
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  Despite himself, Geof had to grin. Nothing got by Takashi Shima. ‘What’s your theory, Takashi san? I should be getting back to the room.’

  ‘Sorry, right. Well, I was thinking. If this chaos is Pierre’s doing, why has he done it?’

  ‘You ascribe intention where there may be none. We did that at first, but then we considered Pierre as merely a force. If you remove the predictors for personality and motivation, the pattern of his actions makes more sense.’

  ‘Then he is just reacting. Reacting to what? Is there something else we don’t know about? Something controlling him?’

  ‘Perhaps. He may be as a sail is to the wind.’

  ‘Bah!’ Takashi threw up his hands. ‘You could argue that after the first manifestation, but not now. He unleashed Kronos —’

  ‘He might not have known what it was.’

  ‘He started a war between the psis and the World Union.’

  ‘That might have happened anyway.’

  ‘He is cloning himself.’

  ‘Or someone else is.’

  ‘Okay. So Pierre Jnr has been cloned, the psis are in open rebellion and the psionic relays are creating a worldwide mind network. You have to ask, what is Pierre’s endgame? What could he hope to achieve? A psi country? Equal rights for psis?

  That would mean the rest of us norms would become second-class citizens, right?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Or is it simply that he exists, like the rest of us, without a master plan? We are all composites, yes? We — the we that we think of as I — is made of many parts. Can it be so different for a Pierre Jnr? Would not he be a composite of his parts? In this case, every mind he comes into contact with? You and I might be two separate beings, but a telepath might see things differently.’

  ‘Yes …’ Geof was finding it hard to follow the logic.

  ‘So that’s what it’ll be like, won’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If we lose. We will just be an arm. Or a skin cell.’ ‘I think this is too philosophical for me. I’ve got more important things to do.’