They sat in silence for a few moments. Helen spoke first. "People. Dumb." The others nodded in agreement.
William continued. "Wolf's also crawling all over the Grid, trying to get a chokehold on it. We've tried to drive it out, but as you saw earlier, we're having trouble even defending our home turf. Wolf was bringing the fight to us, so we probably would have won, but it would have left half of New Troy in ruins. What you did with what you had at your command was worthy of an epic poem."
"A short one," The Queen added. "We would not wish to bore you."
"So that's it, then," Helen said, her disappointment rising inside her. She looked at William. "You came to learn about the weapon. The girl who wields it is just one more thing to put up with."
"It's not so simple as--"
Helen snapped. "Would you even be here otherwise? If I'd just been hurt, instead of dishing the hurt out, would you have rushed to my side? I'm thinking, hmmm... no."
The Queen stood up. Her face was gentle, softened by the firelight. "We must be excused, and make ready the preparations.1" You have to learn this part on your own, my child. She turned to William. "You will of course share any useful information with us."
"Wait," Helen said, standing up. She rushed to The Queen and threw her arms around her, kissing her passionately.
The Queen responded to the gesture, but her mind asked, Are you trying to make him jealous?
Or angry, or guilty, or... I really don't know, my queen. She felt embarrassed, and pulled away. It's juvenile, but at least I have his attention for a moment.
I understand. More than you can imagine. Just realize that we have him outnumbered six thousand to one. Be kind, love. Hear him out. We have put him through much. She brushed her fingers against Helen's cheek, then disappeared, leaving her alone with William.
Sweet, gentle William. She looked at him as he sat across the campfire from her, and had to fend off the hope that lurched its way through her stomach. She walked back over to him and sat down, keeping a proper distance. "She thinks I'm not being fair to you. Do you agree?"
William watched the campfire. "It's a two way street," he said. "I wish I could give you more. I wish I could give you everything I have."
Helen nodded. "But I need to take a number."
"That's harsh."
"It wasn't meant to be. It's just the mathematics of the situation. I'm not going to ask for explanations. I'm sure you've already given them a thousand times."
"You say you won't ask," William said. "But then you always do."
"Am I really that weak?"
William shook his head. "You'd think that, having two or three of these conversations a day, I would have figured out how to handle them by now. If my mouth started charging my foot rent, I'd make a fortune."
Helen smiled despite herself. "I really am trying to meet you half way here. What do you want from this conversation?"
"I don't want anything from this conversation, except not to have to have it."
Helen's jaw clenched. She closed her eyes. Must... control... fist... of... doom... She opened them again. "Then why are you even here? You could have sent someone else to ask about my airborne freakout."
"I know."
"Then why?"
"Because everyone deserves that last talk. The one that explains why the person you love won't be there anymore."
"Oh." Helen felt stupid. Your wife, Maeva. My family. They left us without saying goodbye, and you don't want any of us to go through something like that again. And it's killing you. "I'm so sorry, William."
"Please," William said. "Don't apologize. I'm the one who promised never to leave again."
"No, I've seen leaving. This isn't it. Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you doing this to us?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, you should either split yourself until there's enough of you to go around, or you should go. What you're doing here, you may think that it's helping, or that you're living up to some obligation that you owe me, but you're not. I'm sorry, you're just twisting the knife." Helen could see her words sinking in, and it was painful to watch. Even back in his seventy year old body, William had never seemed quite as old -- or quite as tired -- as he did right then. "That came out wrong."
"No, it was close enough. I promise, I'll think about it."
"It's one of the things I love about you, you know. You sometimes take being reasonable to unreasonable lengths."
A hint of a smile crossed his mouth. "I'll take that as a compliment." He hesitated, then said, "Should we talk about what happened to you up there? I mean, are you ready?"
"I suppose, but I'm honestly not sure what to tell you. It's the age old story. Girl meets lion bird, girl merges with lion bird, girl lion bird meets flying rats and weird psycho sword, then girl lion bird flying rat psycho sword goes crazy and tries to kill everything that moves."
William nodded. "That's Hamlet in a nutshell. It's the merging thing that we're wondering about. We can trade thoughts and sensations easily enough, but somehow you went beyond that. You merged with a mind -- several minds, I mean -- that are completely different from yours. Do you have any idea how?"
"None. In fact, every time I started to think about how I was doing it, I started to lose it. It's not under my conscious control."
"Why did you try to merge with the gryphon?"
"I didn't really try. I just sort of got sucked in."
"Kind of like The Necronomicon?"
"No, I think The Necronomicon just made you want to scrub your eyeballs with bleach. What are the gryphons, exactly?"
"Your sisters wanted to try building a thoroughly artificial mind, something that would think the way a gryphon might. It's some really elegant work."
Helen smiled.
He added, "Then you did a bunch of dragons, and then got bored."
"Sounds like me. Did I do the sword, too?"
"No, Defbreenger is one of mine. You named it and did the inscription, though."
"How does it work? It felt like it might be using something like min-max for target selection."
"Good call. How did you know?"
"We were part of each other for a while. It was... informative. Mind you, it also turned me into a crazed killing machine. But I think that's an experience everyone should have at least once." William motioned for her to come to some sort of point. "Mind merging is, well, hard to describe. But it's amazing. The boundaries between you and someone else just disappear. You feel what they feel, you think what they think, but it's so much more. You become them. When we finally split apart again, it was like losing both my arms, my childhood memories, and my sense of smell all at the same time. You've never felt anything like it."
"I can imagine."
"No, you really can't. But you don't have to."
"What do you mean?" William asked. Helen gave him a knowing look. "Oh no. No. Bad idea."
"No, good idea. If we don't like the consequences, we can just rewind ourselves. It will be like it never happened. Besides, I don't even know if I can do it again, and I need to find out. I might end up glaring at you for a few minutes, and feeling very silly." Helen scooted over until she was sitting across from William. He didn't object. Helen closed her eyes, grasping for his mind with her own. She found it, but when she tried to touch it she could feel him recoil. "You need to relax," she told him in a low murmur. "It won't hurt."
She put her hands on his cheeks and tried again. She approached him as she would a skittish horse, slowly, with no sudden motions. She brushed over each contour of his mind, giving it strokes of reassurance. The merging began; she tried hard to just let it happen naturally, without jarring the process with conscious thought. She began to feel a tingle from William's face.
William's mind jerked away, and out of pure instinct, Helen clamped down, forcing the process to continue. She could feel William's outrage rush through her, and tried to pull back, but the merging had gone beyond her control. She could feel his thought
s flowing up among her own.
William stuck his own hand in the fire, shocking her and breaking the connection. Helen collapsed. "I'm sorry," she blurted out. "It was an accident. I didn't mean to--"
"We're going," was all William said. His hand had already healed.
Helen fought down rising desperation. "Didn't you feel what I was feeling? You have to have felt it! You know I would never intentionally--"
"Do I?" His body was shaking with anger. "God, why do I even--? No. Damn it. I said I would bring you back to Troy, so let's please just shut up and go."
"William, can we please talk about this?"
William turned away. "You're just like her," he said, and Helen knew exactly who he was talking about.
* * *
1 The Lost Skeleton of Cadavara. Too obscure? Anyhow, epic and quotable movie.
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// HER //
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Date: July 25, 2038
President Wright waved as the Russian diplomat was escorted out of the Oval office. Two secret service agents pulled the doors closed, leaving Wright alone. He mentally queried the location of the Vice President, and found him in his office down the hall. He opened a connection, and Vice President Albrecht's face popped up, floating right above the surface of his desk like a neither-great-nor-powerful Oz.
"Vincent, what are you doing here? You're supposed to be down in the Senate, wrangling votes for the Pan-African trade bill."
"With all due respect, Mr. President, the thing is dead in the water. The votes aren't there to wrangle."
"Tell them I'm willing to give them the Forsythe amendment. That should peel off a few votes from the northeast bloc."
Vincent cocked his head to the side. "They'll say we caved. Have you run it by Alia?"
"No, and I don't intend to. The country needs jobs, and if we have to go through Forsythe to get something that will pass, then that's what we'll do. I don't need her griping about the polls."
Vincent smiled. "Somebody slip something in your coffee this morning?"
"Yes. Your president's brain has been secretly switched with the brain of a dirty hippie. Let's see if anyone notices."
"I'll get right down there. And Jeremiah?"
"Yeah, kid?"
"Thank you." The Vice President closed the connections.
The Forsythe amendment? Putting tens of millions of lazy parasites on the dole? The Forsythe amendment? Had he really just said that? He closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh, letting his body relax. The stress was getting to him. His left index finger was tapping rapidly on the desk, about four beats per second. He watched the finger idly at first, then with the first touch of concern. He wondered if he was developing an unconscious tic.
The President pulled up the day's security briefing. Before reading the full report, he always flipped straight to assassination plots, to see how he was polling among the clinically insane. His eyes floated along the page without really taking much in, until the phrase "heroin-crazed ninja" flashed by. His eyes jumped backward, but the words were nowhere to be seen. He continued onward. "Sniper poodle." Gone again. "Defensive crumpet." "Exploding cigar." "Toddlers with cordite." He rubbed his eyes.
Taptaptaptaptap... His finger had been drumming the whole time. That was worrisome.
He tried to stop. He tried again. It continued its steady drumbeat, and the President couldn't tear his eyes away. He tried to pull back his hand, but couldn't will it to move. Jeremiah struggled to speak, to move his hands, to turn his head, to just goddamn blink, but no matter what he tried, his body just sat there at his desk, silent and unmoving. Taptaptaptaptaptap--
He had lost control of his own body. He tried -- and failed -- to scream.
The tapping finally stopped, seemingly of its own volition. His hand moved across the desk and picked up a data pad. He felt the muscles in his throat, jaw, and lips moving together in the intricate motions of speech. "Bert, cancel my three o'clock. Reschedule for tomorrow, and please give my apologies to the Speaker," he heard himself say.
A woman appeared in front of him, dressed in a flowing white gown with a long silk train, her hands concealed by white gloves up to the elbow. Hello, Mister President, she said. You may call us The Queen. And, since you asked, yes, only you can see me.
Roderick. What have you done to me?
We know you are not partial to long, flowery speeches, or words with more than three syllables. So allow us to explain our victory using a brief educational cartoon.
His office disappeared in a flood of visual stimuli. President Wright saw the microscopic drone fly down, prick his skin, and inject him with... were they machines? Artificial creatures? Invisible even to his nanomachine-augmented immune system, they made their way toward his brain, where they began to multiply. Soon some of them began to build, deploying long black filaments that they weaved together into an ever denser tangle, until it took on the appearance of a dense cloud of black rope. Fingers of blackness snaked out from the center, branching and dividing as they grew until they looked like a thicket of trees.
From this vantage point, the thing looked vast, like a black cloud that stretched across the sky. But then the camera receded, racing away until it was dwarfed by the much larger neuron which it was meant to copy. As it pulled back further, he could see others, first by tens, then by thousands, then by millions.
Once assembled, each artificial neuron latched onto one of Wright's own, tracing the paths of his neural connections as it grew. Within a few days, the President's mind was a manifestation of the workings of these new cells, leaving his old gray matter dormant. But the new cells continued to proliferate inside his head, and billions more joined together into a second mind which could impose its will on the first.
The animation ended by showing the two minds switching back and forth, between a dour-faced President Wright and The Queen, giving a cheesy grin and a thumbs up sign. He watched himself signing a large piece of paper that read "LEGISLATION I WOULD NEVER SIGN."
That's your plan? You really think you can hijack the body of a sitting president?
The proof of concept is going well.
Someone will notice. My doctor will notice.
Perhaps, but your annual physical is not for another eight months, and by then it shall be too late. In the meantime, we have learned your habits, your body language, your patterns of speech, all so perfectly that even your own wife will recognize you. You will make bizarre political decisions, but in public you will say that you are putting pragmatism above ideology, and privately you will talk about building a legacy.
You little bitch, I'm going to make you-- A sharp jet of pain rushed through Wright's mind, although his body didn't flinch.
You killed millions of innocent people. You might have killed a hundred million with your cowardly bluster. Forcing you to watch as we dismantle everything you have worked for over your political career is, in our mind, a tiny price to pay for the magnitude of your crimes. But if you get quarrelsome, we are ready and eager to find more suitable punishments.
Wright said nothing to this. The Queen could feel him fumbling, reaching out for controls that were no longer his to operate, straining for them like a tiny dog leaping for an overhead hunk of bacon. We think the most galling bit, she added, will be that, once you have abandoned your deepest principles, your approval rating is going to skyrocket.
Jeremiah fumed. Who else are you going to do this to? Who else will you control like this?
The Queen smiled. Ask us who we will not do it to. That is the shorter list. In fact, that blank piece of paper on your desk is that very list. Feeling his anger and revulsion, she added, It will not be like this for most people. No, this is a special hell that only you deserve. Most people will just get unobtrusive nudges in the right direction. Give the homeless guy ten bucks. Vote Quimby. Maybe we should stop marketing cigarettes to kids. You left your turn signal on.
Nobody uses turn signals anymore.
Quiet.
We are soliloquying. It will all feel so subtle, so natural, that none will think to question it. If anyone sees something to suggest what's going on, we can make it disappear from their minds. Our control will be complete and it will be invisible. People will feel as free as they always did. But we can assure you that nobody will ever lay a finger on the big red button again.
There's no actual big red button.
Geez! It's a metaphor!
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// THE WRATH OF THE SWARM //
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The trip to Troy 2.0 was made in cold, agonizing silence.
Helen had contracted some residual memories from the merging, which were eating away at her. So The Queen had brainjacked William. When she found out that William wanted to remain a unified individual, and wouldn't be seeing her anymore, she ignore his wishes. She slipped in and made herself a copy of him for her own enjoyment, figuring that he wouldn't find out. Somebody had snitched, all hell had broke loose, and he and The Queen almost never spoke anymore.
William had asked her to delete the copy, but didn't know whether she had done so.
That was why he was so angry at Helen, too. It wasn't just that she had betrayed him, but that hers reminded him of an earlier, more calculated betrayal.
It was an accident, she told herself. But she wasn't sure. Had she been less desperate to reunite with her lover, would she have been able to pull away? The guilt haunted her.
The one bright spot was that she had learned that William, despite everything, had still wanted to be with her. The knowledge came not only from William's mind, but from the fact that he was willing to attempt the merge in the first place.
Helen looked down on Troy 2.0, and wondered if that was still true. It seemed that, before she had gone and fucked it all up, William was starting to come around. He always comes around eventually. He just has to make things difficult for a while first. But she may have gone too far, and ruined things for herself and all Helenkind.
The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl Page 33