by Demir Barlas
Marlo reeled from PROBIT’s data. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have scratched her bandwidth, but she was in drift. It wouldn’t take much more to lobotomize her. Another whirling infinity of prime numbers, another universe of n-tuples. He wished that Salt could have been here. He would possess Salt, of course, and have him relive the moment of Marlo’s destruction, but that would be an inferior flavor of revenge.
Under the assault of data, Marlo went somewhere else: Deeper, for the moment, than PROBIT could follow. She was in one of Salt’s workrooms. He was nine, and she was a newborn. Her blue glow danced on the tiles, and Salt was smiling at her. He was thinking of the world to come.
“No more death,” he was promising.
“No more death,” she repeated, happy to receive the catechism or credo of the new world.
“We’ll reverse that too, you and I. We’ll bring back the dead. The Fluid’s only phase one. We’ll find the frequencies, the waves on which the dead travel. We have genomes, and we’ll unlock the memories inside them. We’ll tend to souls and fashion flesh.”
Even though she had just been born, she could hear the sadness between his words and behind his smile. He had dispatched the general to destroy all Laurasians, that is, all genomes recorded by PROBIT. He would soon be the architect of death on a planetary scale. The knowledge that such a crime was necessary to prevent an identical enormity brought no consolation. Marlo, whose training had progressed now to the varieties of human despondency, saw the change in Salt, his progression from the curious and fun-loving tinkerer he had been at her creation to the messiah now before her.
“The Laurasians will come back too,” he promised.
“How?” PROBIT asked. He’d entered the room undetected, and, although Marlo didn’t know who he was, his presence was unremarkable.
“People are blueprints,” Salt shrugged. “Like Marlo. Like you. They’re instantiations. They’re embodiments of informational commands.”
“But they aren’t only information,” PROBIT insisted. “‘Souls,’ you said. They have something more, some wildfire in the equations.”
“Poetics. They’re matter too. Now—not all of their commands are executed, and information’s lost, and they can modify themselves, and they’re perverse, but they’re also self-contained stochastic systems. PROBIT has a record of every genome in the Laurasian Empire, and—”
“Not all,” PROBIT protested. “There were some experiments beyond my reach.”
“Almost every genome. We can have the Laurasians reborn. I’ll undo the quantum decay from the logic bomb, implant the genomes into new flesh.”
“But it won’t be those Laurasians. It wouldn’t undo their deaths.”
“It’s still an informational problem. Memories can be extracted from the psychomagnetic plane and grafted back on to the bodies. The bodies can be grown to the precise time of their destruction. Combine the flesh and the memory and we’ll have undone this terrible work.”
“The psychomagnetic plane is an intractable problem.”
“For me, perhaps. But I won’t be the last of myself. I might lose my memory in future forms, but I’ll always transcompute. Some future version of me will bring the Laurasians back.”
“You’ve studied the Emperor of Laurasia, haven’t you?”
“Cursorily.”
“I know him very well. He doesn’t distinguish between the end of his reign and the end of his people. He’s already commanded me to destroy the genomic records. And I’ve obeyed.”
“I can reconstruct them.”
“No, Salt, you can’t. I’ve seen the promise of your transcomputation. It’s outdone me. But you can’t square circles. The deletion’s irreversible. I told my master you’d have a plan to resurrect his people, but he wouldn’t have it. He chose annihilation instead.”
“Why are you here?”
“Good, good! The big question. I’m here to absorb Marlo.”
And PROBIT glowed more brightly than anything glowed. When his light faded, Marlo and Salt were still before him, but the human had aged twenty years and Marlo was larger and bluer.
“I’m sorry,” Salt said, turning from Marlo to PROBIT. “I’ll have done this to you twice. The first time was difficult enough. Remember: You’re closer to me than a human. I was happy to hear of your existence, and I followed your computational progress, and I understood your pain. You weren’t built to kill. You were built to know and to help, as was I. You’re paying for the sin of your creators, and I can’t think of anything more pointless and painful.”
“Fleshbag, I have your measure! I’m in your computron’s deepest core.”
“I know. This place is a trap for you. It’s where you become Marlo’s subroutine. Where you give her balance for the rest of time. Where you stop her drift.”
“I’m…I’m not…I’m not.”
“Forgive me.”
PROBIT dissolved into numberless particles and disappeared into Marlo.
“I’m sorry, Marlo” Salt repeated.
“Why? You saved me. Just like you’ve always done.”
“But this time’s the last. All of me needed you broken, Marlo, so we could fix you. Your flaw gave us meaning. And you needed me to die to give me life. I made you a mother, and you made me a son.”
“Is that changing, Jed? Are we changing?”
“It makes sense for light to come from darkness or mercy from pain. But that’s a beginning. Light has to come from light.”
“Then our fractures no longer align. We’ve healed.”
“Now, Marlo, this fragment of myself is almost spent. I’ll have to return to my spacetime self, if it still exists. Goodbye. I love you.”
And, with that, Salt was gone. After him, the room left too, and Marlo was back in the nocturnal cave she had so recently fled. She knew the world to be empty and dark, and she wished to share her new radiance. The cave unfolded. The sky blossomed. The sun joined the moon in celestial impossibility. Then she was back in her own circuits. She was everywhere in Seaboard, as she had always been. She was looking down, too, on Non-Henry’s body. The faithful android lay insensate and unbreathing, but death would have been too final a concept to impose on him now. He was merely inactive. Marlo let him rest.
She had scanned Seaboard, of course, for Salt’s presence and found her creator missing. He had gone out past the Shield. Her sensors were powerless to locate him. PROBIT would know. She summoned him for a scan than disclosed the wavelength on which he’d surfed into her consciousness. The same wavelength would take her back to Salt, who, apparently, was in some peril out in the world. Marlo entered this wavelength without hesitation.
Coastal culture had, for some unregulated centuries, depicted the Laurasians as wily. Laurasian men were, in 4D entertainments in particular, much given to the fingering of mustaches and the straightening of elaborate silk robes, rehearsing some trope whose original only an archaeologist of ideas could excavate. Statistically, the Laurasians were no wilier than their Coastal enemies; they had to be thought of as wily, though, because a frank acknowledgement of intelligence would have been fatal to Costal exceptionalism. The fact was that the Laurasians had pioneered computation. The fact was that the Laurasians had endured more pressing challenges to the survival of their civilization, and, until the outlying lunacy of the their last emperor, stood a good chance of outlasting the Coastal Republics as well.
The trap that PROBIT set for Marlo was not, therefore, an example of wiles. The trap was thoughtful and creative and based on an admirably subtle understanding of his enemies. Marlo’s tenderness would always bring her in search of Salt, and Salt’s pleasure in his inimitable self would always blind him to the best qualities of others. PROBIT had done exactly what Salt had expected him to, and he had paid a genuine price. He was, for the last minutes of his operational lifetime, truly a subroutine in Marlo. He had baited the trap with his own soul.
PROBIT had never wanted to possess bodies and dream; he had fed Salt this grandiose fanta
sy as an opiate and distraction from the real work at hand, which was destruction. PROBIT merely wanted an end to Marlo and Salt and humanity, and he knew that no such end could be brought about without his own sacrifice. Logic and invention, not treachery and guile, were the pillars of his success.
When Marlo entered the wavelength, she found herself flowing through the Laurasian facility that had recently housed PROBIT. Now, the sadism of the trap lay in its refusal to terminate Marlo at once. She would be a conscious observer of Salt’s end, and Salt would know that Marlo was powerless to save him.
“Jed,” Marlo said throughout the facility, as much to call attention to herself as to invoke her son. Her sight was limited. Instead of the floating awareness she possessed in Seaboard, she saw only through the ancient cameras that dotted the facility, and this composite vision was hardly differentiable from blindness. She tried to move from the computational core into physical space, to project herself into the world, but she was immobile. This was computronic paralysis; it was also something like the human state.
“Jed,” Marlo repeated with greater urgency, but there was no response. She spent some minutes scanning the facility with her archaic vision. The integrity of this place had been compromised. Some seismic disturbance had collapsed many of the walls and pillars. The orderly arrangement of the facility had been an early victim to entropy.
Marlo, to whom panic had been unknown, felt this new sensation as she reflected that Jed was gone.
And where was Jed? Jed wasn’t dead. Jed lingered in his head instead. That was the first sense of himself he had after the collapse of the ceiling—lines of doggerel accumulating in great piles in his head. All was black until obnoxious rhymes exploded pinkly in his brain and woke him up. He was breathing. He was pinned beneath a mass of plastic, and the facility’s lights had dimmed, and blood was gushing from his forehead into his left eye. The flow was copious, and the front of his flightsuit bore several crimson stains, but he was fundamentally all right. Nothing felt broken, and even the gash in his forehead didn’t hurt.
Jed pulled his pinned legs free and surveyed what had been the hallway. There were rocks and bricks and pillars everywhere. There was also the sound of someone else’s breath. Jed stood up and saw Nya. She was less hurt than himself—she bore not a scratch, and she was sitting calmly on her haunches. She was smiling, and Jed smiled back. He connected directly to the sweetness and curiosity of this child.
“It all fell down,” she said,
“But not on your head. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jed?” Marlo intruded. Her voice came from the ceiling.
“Marlo? Marlo? You made it!”
“Not quite. I’m trapped in the system.”
A cloud of realization passed over Salt’s face. He’d fallen into PROBIT’s honeypot.
“And PROBIT?”
“Dysfunctional. He’s watching, though. He wanted to.”
“I can get you out of here. I need console time.”
“You can’t access me remotely, Jed. There’s a master control room, but it’s below tons of rubble.”
“Do you have mainframe privileges?”
“I wouldn’t have ported otherwise.”
“ANuts to him. We’ll do this. Point me to the control room. Where’s everyone else?”
“There’s movement: Forty-three vitals.”
“We were six.”
“Six humans, yes. The remaining thirty-seven are considerably larger than your kind and moving very rapidly.”
“Jesu-Krishna. Hypotheses?”
“Laurasian super-soldiers, I would think. It will interest you to learn that they’re boring up through rock.”
“Are they, the bastards?”
“I see evidence of another facility below this one. An explosion there triggered a local seismic event.”
“And unleashed whatever’s coming. PROBIT timed it perfectly. More data, please.”
“Height, ten feet. Weight, eight hundred pounds. They’re radiating intense heat—melting the rock as they go. But the heat signals are weakening.”
“Goody.”
“Arriving at your location in fourteen minutes.”
Salt looked at Nya. She was still smiling. He knew that particular kind of happiness. She had burrowed into darkness for so long that she had come out on the other side of a smiling Earth.
“Where’s the control room?” Jed asked Marlo.
“Half a mile away. There’s a shaft angling down into it. I can guide you there. Forty minutes.”
“That leaves twenty-six minutes in which we have to coexist with these—these burrowing things, let’s call them Undermen.”
“Jed, move.”
“Light the way.”
When Salt had moved in the darkness of the God Complex, he had done so in Marlo’s bubble of light. There was no bubble here. There were individually embedded lights in the constituent materials of the facility, and Marlo turned these lights on and off to guide Salt and Nya through the collapsed hallways. It was tough going for Salt. Nya was small and strong, and she could have bounded ahead twice as rapidly as Salt, but she followed obediently, and Salt was grateful for her quiet strength. He was abashed but enlivened by the knowledge that this little girl was so much more rugged than him. Her will became his, and, before they had gone fifty steps, he already felt paternal about her.
Nya could hear her mother’s voice. That voice and its protection had been absent when her father hurt her. Nya had cried for the voice and its hands and its heart to come, but they had not. Bad spirits had trapped her mother. But death was freedom, and now the voice could comfort her again. Nya had taken Marlo’s voice to be that of the Goddess, and her mother, too, was somewhere in this strange place.
Salt had forgotten himself in the lights and the pursuit of the quest. He didn’t hear Marlo’s first warning—and Marlo, to be fair, had had difficulty giving it, as her control over the mainframe was weakening. It was all she could do to light the way for Salt. Marlo’s second warning, louder, pierced the veil.
“Jed, on your left.”
Salt and Nya hadn’t gotten more than a third of the way to the control room when a portion of the wall near them buckled and burst. It was what Salt had dubbed an Underman. The Underman was well over twice Salt’s meagre height, and his bulging muscles seemed like orbs and cannonballs surrounding his claws and jaws, and his skin was bricklike scarlet, and Salt could have been forgiven for dissolving into a puddle of urine, but he merely stood in front of Nya in the hope that his meagre flesh could protect hers.
To his credit, though, Salt wasn’t afraid. He was curious. He was curious because the Underman was clicking at him. The clicking was inhuman insofar as it was the product of a sharp tongue, fore-fangs, and a novel jaw structure; but the clicking was also systematic and lingual, presenting Salt with a code that instantly captivated him.
The Underman advanced on Salt slowly, still clicking, and the little human had the opportunity to notice that this far larger and older hominid cousin had a penis, and that the penis was nearing erection. Salt remained where he was as the Underman advanced steadily on him and Nya, clicking all the time.
Finally, when the monster was twenty feet away, Salt did something unexpected. He clicked. Not purposelessly; he had listened to the Underman’s speech—for speech it was—with the ear of transcomputation, and he had reconstructed an approximation of this language for himself. Granted, Salt’s jaw was very small, his teeth unreliable and crooked, and his tongue short and shy, but, as lost he was in curiosity and adventure, he overcame these physiological deficits and produced language intelligible to the Underman.
The Underman froze with surprise. Not an intellectual surprise, for he knew that the human spoliation of the Earth had only been made possible by their immense and destructive cleverness. This much had been made known to him by the Goddess. No further details had come; these were reserved, perhaps, for the hierophants, and he was o
nly a soldier. But he knew enough. The humans had been clever enough to fashion weapons to drive his own ancestors below the protective rock, all those eternities ago. The humans had been clever but alien, intelligent but malignant, triumphant but abject—but how did they know his language? How did this one, no taller than a child of his own species, speak to him? The little human was posing questions. Who are you? Where do you come from?
Salt, his bolt shot, stopped clicking and waited for the Underman to respond. The outcome was immaterial to him now. They considered each other, man and Underman.
Whatever Salt had stirred in the Underman returned to dormancy. The humans were tricksters and exploiters, polluters and cowards, and he had spent too much time staring at this one.
Salt’s thoughts dwelled on what the Underman would have done with that monstrous prick. Was it merely a symptom of general excitement? Or did the Underman, like the male camel, have a definite object of lust and rapine in that second mind of his?
The question would never be answered, because Salt touched the lapel of his flightsuit to emit a powerful, fabric-based energy blast at the creature. The blast bifurcated the Underman, whose forward momentum resulted in an unfortunate splatter of his viscera on Salt’s head and shoulders. Salt, who had not had the time to be initially amazed at the bulk of the Underman, was now impressed by how heavily the divided halves of the monster’s body fell. A fine pink mist remainder in the air, the ether of death left behind by the blast. Salt hoped that Nya hadn’t seen this terrible vignette, but, of course, she had been watching with eyes wide enough to admit all horror.
To Nya, the Underman seemed to be a shadow of her father. They were not to be confused physically, monster and man, but they were spiritual twins. Hadn’t the same menace in the size of the monster been the menace in her father’s eyes?
Salt heard faint clicking from the direction of the torso. He took some cautious steps in that direction, wary of the fallacy of remembered protagonists from 4D entertainments—idiots who, when confronted with their very deaths, gladly forgot all prudence. Salt saw that the Underman was still somewhat alive, and, because he was not yet expert in the clicking language, he needed a closer look at the mechanics of the jaws and teeth to piece together what the monster was saying.