by P A Vasey
“And how’d you get a pet robot?” I said, immediately regretting my choice of words.
Adam’s lip twitched. “Cain is not a robot. Not by any measure or definition you would recognize.”
“Then what’d you call him?”
He gestured to himself, and then to me with an open hand. “You and I, these machines we inhabit, they were all created by the Vu-Hak. Their complexity is such that they require a machine intelligence to function. A non-sentient life-form buffered by fail-safes and programming constraints to make it subservient to our wishes and allow us full access to the machine’s abilities.”
“So he was a slave,” I said.
Cain’s own description ran true, but did his enslavement absolve him of the crimes committed by the Vu-Hak? Maybe …
“Cain allowed both you and the Vu-Hak access to the power of your machine,” I said. “You killed thousands of innocent people.”
Adam leaned back against the wall and his face disappeared into the shadow. The green phosphorescence of his eyes shined eerily back at me, drilling into my soul. “Cain was not the artificial consciousness in my machine. Furthermore, the Vu-Hak killed those people, not me.”
I threw him a sharp look. “We need to talk about that.”
There was silence for a minute or two, and I had to strain to hear him when he spoke.
“Yes. What do you wish to know?”
“Start from the beginning?
He nodded. “From the beginning, then. The intensity of the nuclear detonations, focussed as they were by the geography of the Trinity Crater, overwhelmed the ability of my machine to absorb the energies. I survived, but the consciousness of the Vu-Hak was destroyed.”
“How did you survive and it didn’t?”
This had always bothered me.
He paused, then: “You are aware that there is a singularity at the heart of each machine?”
Adam had given Hubert and me this little tidbit of information when we had him captive in the Black Site. It had been a throwaway line we couldn’t get our heads around. The thought of a singularity – a tiny black hole a few millimeters in diameter – on Earth and controlled by forces we couldn’t possibly understand had been so beyond us I think we all just dismissed it and concentrated on the other issue at hand.
The imminent invasion of the Vu-Hak.
Adam interrupted my musings. “Nothing can escape an unshielded black hole, Kate. The machine’s singularity was allowed to open, to flower, if you like. All the heat, radiation, light, every bit of energy from the blasts was warped into it and absorbed.”
“Down the drain of a cosmic plughole,” I said.
“Yes, but the singularity was overwhelmed for a micro-second at the end. The laws of thermodynamics are ruthless, and even a black hole cannot escape their judgment. The amount of entropy or disorder in the universe cannot ever decrease, so as the nuclear energy was sucked in, the entropy it contained could not be dismissed, and so the entropy of the singularity increased. The temperature rose and radiation – Hawking radiation to be exact – escaped.”
“Is Hawking radiation dangerous?” I said.
“Not to humans. But as the Hawking radiation was ejected, the Vu-Hak’s molecular footprint was separated from mine and destroyed. What were previously particles and anti-particle twins intrinsically linked and entangled forever, were no longer.”
“So how did you survive?” I asked with a quiet voice.
“The machine’s AI protected me. But my mind and my consciousness could only be saved by merging with those of the AI. At a quantum level, the physical molecules producing my consciousness were mapped onto the machine’s architecture and integrated in an irreversible reaction. The AI and the human became a single entity, a hybrid if you like. I am neither man, nor machine, but both.”
His head dropped, and he went quiet. The phosphorescence vanished as he closed his eyes. In the intermittent bursts of colored light I could just make out his shape, now huddled into a corner, arms around his knees.
“Adam,” I said, trepidation painting my voice with a coarse brush, remembering Cain’s words when I was waking up from my own consciousness transfer. “Cain said there’s no AI helping control my machine?”
He didn’t move, and his voice was still a whisper. “That is true, which is why you will be limited in your abilities.”
“But I have a shielded black hole in here?” I said, pointing to my chest.
“Of course: that is what powers all these machines. But you need a higher level of consciousness to fully manipulate it, hence the need for the AI. You will be able to use the motor functions, access and manipulate electronics, rudimentary telepathic abilities, but that is probably all you will be capable of.”
My face darkened and my brain stuttered for a moment as my thoughts tried to catch up. I felt undead, a zombie, a vampire, whatever.
“We did our best,” Adam continued. “We were not ready. The transfer of your mind to the machine template might not have worked at all. You might have died … for real.”
I took a metaphorical deep breath and tried to calm down. I knew where I was heading and it was nowhere good.
“How about telling me what happened when you went back into the wormhole? When the Vu-Hak didn’t invade, we thought you’d saved humanity. And sacrificed yourself. I was …” I stopped to gather myself again. “I was lost, but I took solace in the fact that it was over. But then it wasn’t, was it?”
My mind was suddenly a mess again, chaos, hurting, aching. My emotions were jagged and my insides felt tight. I had to get a grip.
I saw the green eyes move as he shook his head. “I had a plan.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
When the portal had opened for the last time at the Trinity crater last year, I had feared the worst. The alien invasion was imminent and thousands of Vu-Hak machines were about to enter our galaxy and swarm Earth, with the resultant destruction and extinction of humanity. Adam had looked into the opening of the wormhole and I’d felt the sadness drain away from him, replaced by a sense of contentment and purpose. He’d walked into the wormhole, and the portal had consumed him, and then … well, nothing.
He stood up and held out a hand, which I took. I let him pull me to a standing position and we walked to the middle of the chamber. Lights came on automatically, partially illuminating the space.
But what a space.
“What the hell have you done?” I murmured, half to myself.
We were in a high-tech cave the size of a football stadium, a black metallic roof over our heads and black metallic flooring, shiny and burnished like jewels or polished coal, under our feet. My footsteps echoed quietly and machinery hummed in the background, a soft rhythmic music. There were no desks or bench tops but there were examination couches and centrifuges and huge refrigerators and water baths and autoclaves with flow hoods. On one wall just visible behind a thin film of rising gases there appeared to be thousands of test tubes set into racks of plastic, linked by plasma or optical fibers.
Adam stopped and gestured for me to come closer. He waved a hand and a hidden mechanism triggered the emergence of a console of sorts from the floor; it molded itself to the shape of a glowing silver-blue keyboard.
“We are under the lunar surface,” he said, “at a depth of fifty-two miles, four miles under the crust, in a cystic pocket in the rocky mantle which I detected during my evaluation of this area.”
“Why do we need to be under the surface of the moon?”
“We need to keep this facility hidden from the Vu-Hak,” he replied, his face impassive. “It is critical to the survival of the human race.”
“What is it, exactly?”
He looked away again, his head tilted to one side, as if deciding what to say. “Before I tell you, I believe you were asking about the wormhole?”
His eyes were still blue-black with a faint emerald phosphorescence oscillating rhythmically in the background. I tried to probe his mind, but he was giving me
no access. He had put up mental walls again.
“What happened in there?” I said quietly.
He shrugged, somewhat too nonchalantly. “I tried to destroy the portal, knowing that I too would likely be destroyed. I thought it was worth it. I was certain that I could to do it.”
I nodded, remembering how calm he’d appeared before he entered the portal in Nevada. Convinced that he was doing the right thing, and aware of the likely consequences. “So it was a suicide mission then.”
“It was my choice. My ‘sacrifice’ was going to save humanity. Was that not worth trying?”
“But it didn’t work, did it? They’re here, on Earth, I mean.”
He sighed. “Yes, but without their machines. For now, at least.”
I looked up sharply. “For now?”
He turned to the keyboard and his fingers floated above the keys, like a conductor directing an orchestra. A holographic image shimmered into view, a swirling storm with white flakes whirling around in an angry vortex. I recognized the valley in Antarctica we’d left, the familiar dark scar of the gouge in the cliff appearing as we zoomed in through the bleached images toward the surface. The picture blurred as we passed through the layer of snow on the ground, through rocks and dirt and permafrost to arrive at another underground cavern the shape of an elongated rectangle. There, lying head to toe, were dozens of Adam Benedict-shaped machines, absent of flesh and looking like abandoned statues in their elegant silver-blue metallic carapaces.
“This is only a small fraction of the ones that came through,” he said. “But these are hidden and undetectable.”
I looked in horror at the images, thinking of the power that these machines represented. I had seen first-hand what one alone could do. But dozens … hundreds? Then it hit me in the face. “The Vu-Hak were there, in Antarctica. What if they sense the machines under the ice?”
Adam shook his head. “Cain disabled those as you left. They are useless to the Vu-Hak.”
I heaved a mental sigh of relief, which lasted only a second as another memory surfaced. My quantum-transport trip to the planet of the Vu-Hak. Standing on an alien beach watching Mike Holland die and countless thousands of Adam Benedict machines rise from the ocean.
“Where are all the other machines?” I said.
“A good question,” he replied calmly. “Possibly the most important question in a world of questions.”
His fingers danced again, and the images changed, this time zooming in through cloudy grey skies toward a deserted power station, its chimneys stagnant with disuse and scrubland and weeds growing over the roads and buildings. The picture oscillated as we passed through one of the chimneystacks and into a boxy building with broken windows and peeling paintwork. Inside was a laboratory as quiet and as cold as a morgue. Computers were silent, filing cabinets empty and ransacked. Personal effects of scientists were lying around carelessly, as if they’d left in a hurry and somehow not thought to take their bags and phones and lunchboxes.
And lying haphazardly on the floor, against walls, stacked in corners, were dozens of the machines. Silent, unmoving, a thin film of dust covering them all.
“I found some here, at Chernobyl,” said Adam. “There are more of them inside the reactor. Don’t worry, these ones are all dead too.”
“How did they get there?”
He waved a hand and the images depixelated and shimmered into non-existence. The keyboard console melted back into the glistening black floor, leaving no trace. “By serendipity, you could say.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He continued. “I was going to untether my machine’s singularity and eject it when the portal was fully open, and just as the Vu-Hak were about to come through.”
“You were going to drop a black hole into the portal?”
He nodded. “I was certain that a gravitational field strong enough to create a tunnel in a bent space such as a wormhole would be destroyed by another gravitational field in a fraction of a second. The anti-gravitation produced would be so powerful that the funnel of the new black hole would meet the wormhole and they would both collapse, destroying all the Vu-Hak, and myself as well.”
“So what happened?”
“Dark matter,” he replied.
I frowned and tried to recall that program Cosmos. My memory was hazy, but the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had waxed on about this stuff which apparently accounted for over ninety-five percent of all matter in the galaxy. Though its existence was still unproven, scientists had detected traces and clues indicating that it must exist or the galaxies would fly apart instead of rotating.
“Dark matter was a crucial ingredient for the formation of the space-time tunnel produced by the Trinity Deus device,” he said. “It served to counteract the gravitational force of the black hole from the outside, thereby keeping it open. None of this was known to Lindstrom and his colleagues, but it was required nevertheless.”
“But how did you know about dark matter?” I said.
He shrugged again. “I did not, of course. My machine’s AI, being Vu-Hak in origin, knew all their science, and this was in their archives. Dark matter is considered to be an elementary particle. Earth scientists have tentatively labelled these particles ‘gravitationally interacting massive particles’ or GIMPs.”
I suppressed a laugh. “GIMPs.”
If Adam could have thrown me a disapproving look, he would have. “I did not realize it at the time, but the AI part of me was hard wired for survival. When it realized what I was planning to do it manipulated the GIMPs surrounding the event horizon of the wormhole and directed a focused beam into the mouth of the tunnel. The result was a fracturing of the wormhole and the temporary opening of multiple portals around the globe.”
“So the machines were scattered.”
“Yes, but more than that, the Vu-Hak were separated from their machines and their consciousnesses were funneled randomly through the new portals as well. Thousands of them. The machines were swallowed by other portals, and re-appeared at various locations on Earth, thankfully mostly underground or undersea.”
“Was the wormhole closed afterward?” I asked.
Adam nodded. “The connection to the Vu-Hak galaxy, yes.”
“Permanently?”
“I believe so.”
Well at least no more would come through, as if a few thousand aggressive alien spirits weren’t enough of a problem.
“So, what happened to you then?”
“I awoke in Antarctica, surrounded by a hundred and twenty-four inert machines. I assumed it was all over because I could not sense any Vu-Hak and the AI controlling each machine was irreversibly damaged.”
“But they weren’t all irreversibly damaged, were they?” I said, fixing him with a stare.
Adam went quiet and closed his eyes. “No. One was still functioning.”
He started walking toward the far wall of the cavern, an area bereft of equipment or adornments. As I strained to see through the darkness my eyes automatically switched over to infrared. Everything became greenish-grey, and the twinkling from the equipment lining the walls became sharp pinpricks, surrounded by halos and distortion. Graphics appeared over my field of view, analyzing everything, English text providing information about what I was looking at. Scanning Adam, the text scrolling down the sides of my visual fields changed to hieroglyphics and pictures, which I now assumed was Vu-Hak language. Describing him. I wished I had an AI to translate.
“The first thing I did when I realized what had happened was to look for a place to bury the machines that came through with me,” he said. “The Antarctic was as good a place as any.”
I said nothing, wondering whether this moon-base was also in fact a mausoleum. I half expected bats to fly out of passages in the roof, and Bruce Wayne to appear, his trusty butler by his side.
“The machines were all dead,” he continued, walking on. “Just sarcophaguses really, hollow shells with my face. But still containing world-destroying techno
logy. I had to make sure they would never be found.”
“By the Vu-Hak or by people?” I said, darkly.
He looked puzzled. “The Vu-Hak, of course. What would people have done with them?”
I resisted the urge to come out with a snide remark, which would have included references to Area 51 and Roswell. What do they call it … ‘reverse-engineering’? How much of my world’s technology had been the subject of conspiracy theories and accused of being alien tech? It was easy to imagine a shady government base with scientists poring over one of these machines and using the knowledge to design military vehicles, new sources of power production, and more terrifying weaponry.
We approached the far wall, and my enhanced vision detected an oval-shaped defect approximately ten by seven feet wide. Adam raised his hand and it opened like a camera aperture into another chamber. Light flooded through from a brightly lit room with cream and white walls covered with holographic displays. Standing in front of one fast-moving colorful image was the woman, pale, shaved skull, angular features and wearing a white one-piece. She turned as we entered the room, and rested her gaze on me, an enigmatic smile appearing her face.
“Dr Morgan, you look better,” she said. “An improvement, if I may say, actually.”
I glanced at Adam, who tipped his head toward her.
“Kate, meet Cain.”
“I preferred your previous incarnation,” I muttered.
Her features melted like candle wax and her shape grew, pixelated, and morphed until I was facing another Adam Benedict-shaped machine.
“This one?”
The real Adam, my Adam, reached out and touched my shoulder.
“Cain and I are able to manipulate the molecular structure of the integument lining our machines and shape it into any form and replicate any person. If you prefer I can reshape my machine to look like me, and Cain can choose another form?”
“That would be nice,” I growled. “For consistency, at least.”
On cue, Adam’s features melted and reformed into Adam Benedict. At the same time, Cain morphed into a dark-haired forty-something male. His hair was combed back off a square imposing forehead with a few lines laid upon it. His eyebrows were impossibly straight, almost drawn on, and his eyes were rich mahogany. A pencil-thin goatee covered his mouth and chin, making him seem more authoritative than the aura already suggested. His chrome body blurred as the integument changed into fabric and clothes: dark, expensive-looking jeans and a T-shirt from some band that had been in fashion long before I was born.