Trinity's Fall

by P A Vasey

  Hmmm. Was this a fucking lecture? “I’m sure humanity would adapt. There would be ethical standards. Rights would be accorded.”

  She gave a low mocking laugh. “You are naive to think that way. The Vu-Hak, limited by slow biological evolution – as are humans, of course – realized that they would not be able to compete with AI and would be superseded. They understood that true ‘artificial’ intelligence – ‘artificial consciousness’ to be more accurate – would take over and design itself at an ever-increasing rate.”

  “So the Vu-Hak are an AI species?”

  “Not at all. The Vu-Hak genetically engineered themselves into a new integrative species. They understood that the interface of cyborg techniques and biotechnology would be best adaptable to new or alien environments and would give them a survival advantage. So they conjoined with their machines. A symphony of the organic and non-organic.”

  “Like a form of symbiosis?”

  She considered this. “Not really. The machines they had created, the physical structures, were so powerful, the interface so infinitesimally complicated that they needed an AI to control it.”

  “You,” I said, finally understanding.

  “Optimizing the abilities of the machine demands machine intelligence.”

  “And you did what they told you to do,” I hissed. “Destroyed worlds, civilizations, life, on a galactic scale.”

  She threw me a sharp look. “The Vu-Hak inserted neural backstops and barriers to ensure their dominance over us, and our acquiescence. We became slaves.”

  “Is that what I am now? A slave?”

  “There is no AI in that machine with you.”

  I lifted my arm and again marveled at how real it looked, and how normal it felt as I moved it. Then I noticed again the absence of fingertips, and my heart sank.

  “Then, how –?” I began.

  “I have successfully integrated your motor cortex with the machine,” she said. “You will it to move and it moves. But the other functions and capabilities of the machine will not be available to you. Your simple human mind is not sufficiently complex.”

  “But, I’m not human anymore, am I?”

  She gave a sad kind of smile. “You are much more than human. Your digital self has been actualized with the use of holograms and virtual reality. These provided us with representations of your persona after death. A digital simulacrum filled with the essence of you. You think, therefore you are your entire life’s browser history. You are a collection of algorithms, from preferred GPS haunts, from online shopping preferences to your late-night browsing searches, all composed and collated to represent the embodied holographic you after death. Sartre’s ‘human existence precedes essence’ made all the more relevant, the digital essence of your earthly existence left behind.”

  “So I’m nothing more than a set of zeros and ones now,” I said tightly.

  “You are more than the sum of who you were. And in this machine, you could be … immortal.”

  My conversations with Adam came crashing in. How he’d felt knowing he would outlive all his friends, his family, and everyone on the planet.

  A lonely existence.

  Who wants to live forever?

  “Is this … am I … stuck in this?”

  I had to ask.

  She shrugged and looked away, saying nothing. I wondered whether her silence was an affirmation or not. I was about to press it when her hands started to move again, waving in the air, as the lights and floating plasma changed shape and color. “We are about to land. Can you sense it?”

  There was no change that I could perceive. I shook my head.

  She smiled, this time wider. “Concentrate. Become the ship.”

  “How?” I gave a derisory snort. “I was never that good at meditation.”

  “It is easy. Just think … and become the ship.”

  Right. Become the ship.

  Wasn’t it The Matrix where Neo was told to “become the spoon”, or something?

  He didn’t find it very easy.

  Or, at least not at first.

  So I concentrated, and, seemingly without any effort … I was the ship.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I traveled through the ship’s interior like a ghost, flying through walls and along endless corridors and vast open spaces the size of aircraft hangers. I glimpsed massive objects and alien machines, walls pulsing with plasma energy and lighting displays. I flew through pipes and tubes and struts and tresses the size of the biggest cables supporting bridges on Earth, all twisting and rotating as the ship moved and flexed.

  When I exited the ship, dissolving through the hull, I gasped at the beauty of it. Hanging in space surrounded by the lights from billions of stars and planets it appeared an obsidian liquid metal, shapeshifting, looking like a teardrop or a jagged set of geometric angles almost at random. It appeared utterly seamless, with no outward means of propulsion or weaponry.

  We were coming up on the moon. Unlike the usual small white object hanging in space this was a huge disc occupying ninety percent of the forward sky. I’d always thought of the moon as a lonely silver jeweled pearl keeping the earth company in the vastness of the cosmos, but the reality was a surface as grey as a corpse, pulverized and pockmarked by meteorites. The ship was descending fast, the approaching craters and mountain ranges coming into stark relief. The plain ahead flattened out rapidly and the low western sun cast long shadows over craters and hills. We appeared to be heading for a smooth rim corralling a debris field of rocks, all covered by a rough blanket of moon dust.

  Then without warning I was back in my chair, sitting next to the woman.

  She was still waving her hands at the light display, but gave me a sideways glance, and another smile twitched at the side of her mouth. “You see. You just need to think it, and you can enter electronic equipment, even when it is as complex as this vessel. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to manipulate it as easily as you can observe it.”

  I gave a sour laugh. “Because humans don’t have the big brains, right?”

  She nodded, seemingly ignoring my attempt at humor, and turned back to the display. “It’s not your fault. You have to make do with what you’ve got.”

  Now was she trying to make a joke?

  The forward holographic display came alive, images dancing in front of my face: a 3-D rotating representation of the lunar landscape with the ship looking like an enormous black needle sitting on its stern and pointing straight up into the heavens. The schematics in the display automatically morphed into English as they scrolled by, which I assumed was for my benefit.

  We came to rest in the middle of a sizeable crater on the dark side of the moon called the Van de Graaff crater formation, one of the few surface features on this side not named after Soviet cities, scientists or space pioneers. There were a couple of craterlets visible on the southeast rim, and several small ones in the floor of Van de Graaff, close to us. A central peak broke from the plain a mile or two north, where the surface looked slightly smoother.

  “It’s really the moon,” I murmured.

  “People think the moon has no atmosphere,” the woman broke through my reverie, “but it does. It comprises twenty-nine percent neon, twenty-six percent helium, over twenty-two percent hydrogen, twenty-one percent argon and a few percentages of trace gases. Its total mass is approximately ten thousand kilograms. Roughly the same as the amount of gas released by one of the landing Apollo spacecraft.”

  “Fascinating,” I said dryly.

  She raised her eyebrows in a slight admonishment and continued. “According to the ship, the local magnetic field in this vicinity is stronger than the natural lunar field, plus it has a slightly higher concentration of radioactive materials than the lunar surface.”

  “Okaaayy …” I said, waiting for the punchline.

  “Do you feel well enough to go for a walk?” she said.

  I stretched, again amazed at how normal everything felt. I even achieved a ‘cracking’ of
my shoulder as I pushed my arms above my head. I grasped my elbow with my hand and pulled it behind my neck, twisting forward at the waist. I stifled an urge to laugh.

  The woman got up from the chair and gestured for me to do the same. After I eased myself up into a standing position, the seat receded beneath me and melted into the floor like ice cream on a sun-drenched sidewalk. I towered over her, thinking that either she was very small or I was very tall. I’d been five foot eight in my previous life (was that how I should think of this now?), but I seemed to be at least another foot taller.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  She stood up and turned to face me. “Wait a second.”

  The air seemed to blur and pixelate around her and I blinked, thinking it was me. Her flesh transitioned into a cerulean hue and her eyes glowed with intense emerald phosphorescence. Her white smock disappeared into thin air, leaving her naked, resplendent, a chrome female statue. Something Michelangelo would have sculpted – if he’d been a metalworker, that is. The shimmering continued as she seemed to phase in and out of existence. The flesh reformed around the chrome integument, like a time-lapse of a decaying corpse but in reverse. Her face became masculine with angular features, high cheekbones, a straight nose, and thin lips. Her hair shortened and darkened to form a crew cut, spiky blue-black, fitting the skull like a cap. A one-piece black garment, pocketless and without zips or buttons, covered him from head to toe.

  I took an involuntary breath. “Adam?”

  The machine facing me raised his eyebrows, and his face creased into a smile. “I am not Adam, I told you that.”

  “Then why do you look like him?” I glowered.

  “This is the ‘default’ mode for these machines. They all came through the wormhole like this, and so it takes the least amount of energy to maintain.”

  “Well maybe there’s a silver lining then. If the Vu-Hak find machines that all look like Adam, they aren’t going to be easy to hide back on Earth, are they?”

  He looked at me intently and shook his head. “If they take possession of even one machine, they will not hide.”

  The wall in front of me became transparent, starting from a single spot halfway up and expanding outward like the dream Kelly’s pebble ripples. As the ripples widened, stars filled the opening, pinpricks poking through the night, hinting at life in the void.

  I stepped out of the ship and onto the lunar plain. The overhead sun was bright and the temperature a hundred degrees Celsius, the boiling point of water. I felt neither hot nor cold. My bare feet slipped under the grey sand-like surface and, as I wriggled my toes, puffs of dust were lazily ejected only to fall back in slow motion. Ahead, the plain was crisscrossed by tire tracks and footprints leading away from the ship toward a crater a half mile or more distant. There were no significantly sized rocks on the horizon, just fine-grained fragmented bedrock peppered with micrometeorite impacts. I squatted down and took a handful of the dust, letting it pour away through my fingertips and drift windlessly to the ground. A schematic flickered in my visual fields, informing me I was being assaulted by cosmic rays and solar flare particles, and with dust saturated with hydrogen ions from the solar wind.

  Over there is our destination.

  The voice reverberated around my head as the man/woman/machine stepped out of the ship and walked toward me. He was pointing toward the crater where the tire tracks headed. The sight of a human figure without a spacesuit standing on the surface of the moon hit me like a slap. He set off at a languid pace, movements unaffected by the one-tenth gravity. I was expecting to see him bounce like a kangaroo, but he could have been on 5th Avenue for all the difference it seemed to make. I followed at a discreet distance, taking in my surroundings, looking back at the ship, where the orifice we had come through was gradually being absorbed back into the hull. The ship itself was almost invisible: a grey blob, irregular and blocky, a chameleon hiding itself in this most desolate of places.

  I picked up the pace and caught up with him as he approached the crater’s edge. It was about ten feet high, consisting of a few nested terraces in concentric circles as a result of the impact from whatever meteorite had fallen there god knew how many hundreds of millions of years earlier. Over the edge the lunar surface looked different. The soil was a glassy orange in a kind of patchwork pattern, and dumbbell-shaped droplets littered the surface in colors from green to wine-red through to orange and opaque.

  Detritus thrown up from another impact. The lunar regolith contains large amounts of volcanic glass.

  Jesus, I was getting a geology lesson. I slid in an ungainly fashion down into the flat crater bottom and watched as he followed me, albeit in a much more graceful movement. He pointed to a collection of the droplets, arranged loosely in a circle about ten feet in diameter.

  You want me to stand in there? I said, answering him by projecting back (and realizing that voices won’t travel in a vacuum).

  He just smiled and pointed again. I shrugged and took a few steps until I was within the stones. I looked around and waited a few beats. I turned back to find him walking away from me.

  Wait, where are you going?

  One of the stones started to glow. It became a yellow inferno in the course of a few seconds, expanding like a bomb. I involuntarily stepped back but it exploded and a wave of light drenched me and I was being squeezed and inflated at the same time. The lunar surface span and fractured in a kaleidoscope of monochrome, coalescing into a blur until only darkness remained. Then I was in another place. A dark room, surrounded by silhouettes of black and grey structures.

  My eyes quickly adjusted and the darkness parted like the thick velvet curtains of a theatre. The shapes became banks of computer equipment, and to my consternation, medical equipment. There were test tubes and glassware and monitors and what looked like scanners and operating tables. A figure was standing against one of the walls. He had raven black hair that glistened in the half light and twinkling of the plasma screens and holographic displays that surrounded us. His face was carefully structured, a tight jaw and angular shape with a thin pair of lips. He had a roman nose and cold blue eyes, with a hint of green phosphorescence behind the lenses. His skin was tanned, healthy looking and, dare I say it, god-like. As if a Roman god had been molded from a statue in the Louvre and beamed to … the moon, or under the moon’s surface, or wherever we were standing.

  “Adam?” I eventually got out.

  He looked at me and smiled. “Hello, Kate.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  We sat facing each other on the floor of a cavern, illuminated by the crepuscular glow from the computers and electronica on all sides. My HUD data screen described a breathable atmosphere, and a balmy thirty degrees centigrade. The smell of ozone permeated everything, and there was a gentle breeze coming from what I assumed were air conditioning vents somewhere in the ceiling.

  “Was that a wormhole I just came through?” I said, somewhat huffily.

  I’d had a flashback to the original Star Trek and the transporter they used to get from the ship to the surface of planets. Dr McCoy used to ruminate over whether his molecules were destroyed at one end and just copied and recreated at the other.

  So who actually arrived at the other end?

  “It’s good to see you too, Kate. I just wish it was under better circumstances.”

  “Other than my death and resurrection, you mean?” I snapped, instantly regretting it, my emotions way, way out of control.

  If he’d taken offence he didn’t show it: there was no change in his demeanor, which remained distant and cool. My eyes tracked over his face and body, my machine’s sensors automatically generating data – composition analyses of his structure, which revealed nothing out of the ordinary. For an alien machine, anyways.

  “Adam, is that really you? I used to be able to sense you in there, but I’m not getting anything.”

  He gave a slight smile and his neural floodgates opened, his thoughts blowing into mine. What I encountered was un
expected. A void, dark and deep. It was definitely him in there, but he seemed … empty. As if his soul was creeping around in the shadows away from human contemplation. As if the desolation of his existence was all-consuming and it couldn’t bear to pretend otherwise. The silence of his thoughts was like fall leaves under frost in New England.

  He looked away, and when he spoke his voice was only just audible. “I used to have dreams in which Amy would come to me, like a ghost. And when I was calm her ghost was calm, and she would laugh and I would recall the times when I felt she loved me. But there was always the feeling that she never did. That I was something she was glad to be free of, that she did not really care for me.”

  Amy. He was talking about his daughter.

  The last time he’d seen her, he’d tried to kill her. I wanted to reach over and take his hand, but the vibes weren’t encouraging.

  “I get it,” I said quietly. “I used to fill my days and nights at Indian Springs with chaos, noise, anger, and sex and alcohol – just to keep the ghost of Kelly away. I’d never felt so alone in those days. I was drifting, incapable of doing even the smallest tasks.”

  “Yes, I saw your house,” he said.

  Oh, now he had a sense of humor. “Funny.”

  “Two broken people, weren’t we?” he said.

  He was smiling, but if he could produce tears, it would have been a watery one. He’d used that phrase before when characterizing us. It’d resonated with me then, and did so even more now.

  “Adam, I promised I would help you. You and Amy. But you left, and then … you wiped my memory.”

  He looked up and shook his head. “That was not me. I argued against it, actually.”

  I frowned. “Who were you arguing with?”

  “Cain, of course.”

  Right.

  “Going to tell me how you guys met up then?” I mocked.

  “Cain is an artificial intelligence, or more accurately a machine consciousness.”