DUALITY: The World of Lies

by Paul Barufaldi

  Mei wasn't sure if that had been a question or a declaration.

  “Well, Ming, let's not call you a prisoner. Think of yourself as our special guest, and we will be here to look after your special needs. You know, you hacked our system earlier, so we cannot allow you any further access to it, as a security precaution.”

  “That is wise,” agreed Ming.

  “But we also want to help make you happy and comfortable. Tell us what you need and we will do our best to provide it to you.”

  “I have downloaded a portion of your systems General Knowledge Library. I would like you to provide me with the rest.”

  “I'm afraid that's not going to be possible. As I just told you, we cannot allow you access to the ship's systems.”

  “You could have System put the library on a mobile storage device and bring it to me here. Once I have consumed the data, you may destroy the device.”

  Mei thought about it. “I will have to discuss that with the Captain. Is there anything else you require?”

  “There is one more thing I would like you and the Captain to do, but I'm afraid you will regard it as a pretentious request.”

  “There is no harm in asking,” she told him.

  “May I show you something, Commander?”

  “Please, Ming, go right ahead.”

  He stood up and held his right hand face down at an angle high over the table. A sudden beam of light burst forth from his palm and a bright holographic display appeared instantly on the table with a rendering of the Taiji. A blinking icon indicated the Kinetic's position and a tracking line of its current course to Occitania.

  The image looked different than System's standard holograph displays. It rendered instantly, and the resolution was so high it didn't look like a holograph at all, it looked physically tangible. This didn't make sense. Holographic projections have to be cast from at least three different spacial points, yet here was Ming doing it from only one.

  With a flick of his hand he expanded the image to contain the neighboring stars of the Taiji, with a blinking mark on the nearest of them, Polestar North, the white dwarf with the planet sized cometary body, Ponix. A secondary course line of the Kinetic curved off in a flight path toward it. He further enlarged the display to show the upper reaches of the nebula to the four massive stars of The Trapezium. Then, all of this was overlayed with an electrical circuit chart outlining the current flows between the Taiji, the Pole Stars, and the mighty Trapezium.

  She couldn't understand the charts. They were too alien and complex. They looked something like the lucidical circuit diagrams she had been familiarized with during her training at Navcenter. She and all her classmates had failed to really wrap their heads around the intricate diagrams. Even the professor had bumbled his way through explaining them, chalking it up to more or less a machine realm of knowledge that navigators were only required to have a passing familiarity with. What she was looking at now was far more complex.

  It was also concerning that Ming had the in-built sophistication to project that much data via holograph through just his body and with no network channels to draw from. It raised the troubling question of what more he was capable of doing in here.

  “This is only a rough diagram I've compiled for the purposes of this display. I will need more data to refine it to accuracy. You asked what insight I might have into the mind of Logos, and this the most significant. You see here marks the imperial projects around Polestar North, the orbit of Ponix and of the L-5 controlled Fleet base, Beixing Prime also known as “Ore City.” If this project is allowed to continue, Logos may be able to reverse the current flow of the circuit, both electrically and aethereally, through the Taiji. That, in turn, would cause catastrophic large-scale natural disasters on every planetary body in this solar system. Thus, I would request that Captain Psyron change this ship's course to Polestar North, where we may investigate the operations at Beixing Prime with the intended aim of sabotaging this project.”

  It was now Mei's turn to look blank and stupid. Ming had just gone from a slapstick imbecile who battled chairs to proposing a new and epoch mission for the Kinetic, the scope of which she was left trying to fathom.

  The Long Way

  Mystic Mountain Sages! How could ones as wise as Indulu and Jokhon believe such mythical nonsense? Uncle told him the legend had been relayed by his father and Gahre’s grandfather who had heard it from his father, and he from his, and so on. It went back so far that the origin was untraceable, but just based on what he had been told he could figure that it spanned a minimum of 400 years. As if a human being could live that long! It was utterly, totally absurd.

  But Arath, that was real and waiting to be discovered -a half a world away. The young Gahre had been biding his time in the cornfields the past two weeks, feigning shame and repentance to Elder Panthus, all the while waiting for the authorities to let their guard down. This time of year there was not much work to be done in the fields, the crops having long since been sown. He was charged only with monitoring the thousands of free-roaming ducks used for insect control in the fields and checking the hydration levels and reporting them to the agriculture office. The ducks, as it turned out, were very tasty. He converted a shack on the periphery of the land into an impromptu smokehouse, where he'd smoked and salted over a dozen, stripped the meat and compressed it into waxcloth. Such rich fatty travel rations would last him weeks.

  Today he was testing some new gear: a harness, clips and anchors, on the vertical ledges where the flat farmland began to give way to the rising western mountains. It was a twenty meter ledge, the most challenging he could locate in the nearby foothills.

  He tapped the anchor into the stone with care and patience. This was his third vertical ascent on this particular ledge today, and he had taken the time to remove the anchors on each descent. There would be, after all, no permanent stakes in place for him when the defining task came, so setting them was as vital a skill to perfect as the motion and rope-work.

  A familiar voice hollered up to him. “Son of Danu! Get back to your fields! You don’t have the build for rock climbing!”

  Indulu. Gahre swung about in his harness and spotted him. “Yet here I am, mastering it!”

  “Where did you get that equipment? The village is forbidden to you… and you have no coin!” Indulu shouted back.

  “I snuck in through the dark of night, roused trader Yohad from his sleep and bid him sell me his finest climbing gear. My lack of coin did cause him hesitation, but when I showed him a voucher of payment bearing the seal of none other than the very Counselor Indulu himself, I found myself served at once!”

  “Then I've a right to know of that which I fund, young one!” Indulu hollered in return. “You are considering an expedition into these mountains perhaps?”

  Gahre laughed as he swiftly and artfully repelled twenty meters and descended before Indulu with a dramatic, cat-like landing. “Nay, Honored One, I intend to climb a wall.”

  “One much higher than that ledge,” Indulu sighed. “When will you depart?”

  “When the redmoon Oberion next wanes.” Gahre reached into his sack, pulled out a leather case, and unfolded its contents. “Trader Yohad also procured for me this intricate trail atlas of the known world, Honored One. Through the forest to the southeast, I reach the Cathalanian township in two weeks by foot. From there…”

  “Nay, young one.” Indulu shook his head and drew his finger northward along the map. “You will be found out for certain. I tell you, travel a northern route through the hinterlands and from there cross the badlands into your homeborn lands of the Zenith realms. The Order has little presence there. Go eastward through Zenithia until reaching water. Then secure passage on a fishing vessel to reach the far shore of the Mercantile Sea.”

  “Is that wise, Honored One? Zenithia may be my birthrealm, but I remember very little of it. By all accounts, they are exclusionary peoples, wary of strangers.”

  “Highly xenophobic, yes, but they are civi
lized folk. So long as you cross the palms of a few local officials and take care not to involve yourself in their affairs, your passing will be smooth.”

  Gahre wondered what exactly he would be crossing anyone’s palms with. “I will trust, Honored One, that yours is the wiser of the two routes.”

  Indulu barely seemed to hear him. “From there, you will be in your arboreal element, trail to trail all 2300 kilometers to Pyre, foraging as you go. Pyre, you can see, borders the Sea of Sand. There are oases here and here. But as I’ve already told you, it can’t be crossed.”

  Gahre diligently marked the locations. “With all due respect, Honored One, I shall prove you wrong.”

  “The first oasis may be reached by resilient men. It is at times inhabited by nomads, who will charge you a high fee for its water, or just rob you outright and leave you to die. The second oasis is more than thrice the distance from the first as the first is to hydrated land. Most explorers who have sought it have died. The few who made it to the far oasis did so by burying stores of water drawn from the first oasis along its route. The distance from the second oasis to the outskirts of the Far Forest is again thrice that from the first to the second, and has never been conquered by man. That span is too dry and vast, even for the winged ones. If a man were to spend a year or two hauling containers and burying what little extra water he did not consume at further and further eastward intervals, it might be done. But to attempt it on a single crossing is suicide.”

  “Time is on my side, Honored One. I will seek the favor of the locals and learn the ways of the desert.” Gahre eyeballed and traced along in marking where Indulu had shown him the outskirt of the Far Forest on the very edge of the map. “Where is this wall?”

  “Here.” Indulu indicated a spot in the air well to the right of where the map's edge ended, and ran his finger north to south. Gahre flipped the page and penciled it in on the other side.

  “Where shall I scale it?”

  “Anywhere and nowhere. The height is uniform the whole length.”

  “Surely there is a gate, a river, something?”

  “As impassible as the desert.” Indulu reached into his robe and withdrew a fat pouch. He extended it to Gahre.

  “What is this, Honored One? Coin?”

  “1000 in coin, 4000 in gem. Take it.”

  “Honored One, that is a small fortune. You have financed me enough, I cannot accept this.”

  “It is not from me. It is from the account of Danu, your father. His salary has accrued for decades in my custody. There is not a doubt in my mind he’d want you to have it for such an ambitious undertaking.”

  “Why does my father not collect his salary for many decades?”

  “Because he serves under Logos and is privy to his secrets, he cannot communicate with us. And, surely, he cares not in the least of money.”

  “Who is this Logos?”

  “An ascended master of unmatched intellect and longevity, Logos is the Emperor of The Realms of Ignis Rubeli. He is considered a demigod.”

  “And in what manner does my father serve this supposed deity?”

  “That, my son, is not just Forbidden Knowledge, it is a highly guarded state secret unbeknownst to most of the High Council, who consider Logos to be the enemy of this world, Occitania.”

  “Our world has an enemy and my father serves him?”

  “No, young one! The relationship between Red and Blue is multifaceted and deeply interwoven. Because, just on the most graspable level of understanding, they are militarily mightier than we. There is a longstanding issue between the stars that Logos means to rectify, by some as yet unknown but catastrophic instrument. Danu, therefore, acts as the Emperor’s… spiritual advisor, advocating peace on our behalf.”

  Gahre felt a growing unease inside himself. “I can’t understand, Honored One, why a divine being would have the inclination to harm our world in the first place. Is it not said that the wise ruler fosters life, peace, and abundance? I can only wonder if we have not wronged him somehow.”

  Indulu closed his eyes and spoke to Gahre’s puzzlement. “Abundance, I have darkly learned, is the predecessor of peace. Perhaps you can’t comprehend it, young one, for there is not even a word for famine in the Pangea.”

  “So define it for me. It is… an Arathian word, I take it?”

  “Yes, and it means ‘mass starvation’.”

  Gahre gave his mind a moment to construct the implication of this discourse and finally sighed with understanding. “Then you have taught me a truly abhorrent term, Honored One.”

  The Prisoner

  When Aru returned with the garb and food, Mei was waiting anxiously for him in the zero-com foyer with the inner door sealed.

  “Is there a problem, Commander?”

  “Let's just say our baby has done a lot of growing up since you were last here.”

  “You mean in the past fifteen minutes?”

  “Yes. Aru, I don't think we should be going in there at all.”

  “Huh... what? Well, we have to, don't we? He needs to be clothed and nourished and the like.”

  “You don't understand. Look!”

  Aru peered into the viewing window. The cyborg was standing amidst of a mass of projections, animated and complex, with long mathematical formulas of dizzying complexity. The sight was reminiscent of the time he visited the control chamber of the Machine Lord Mnemtech. Just being reminded of that encounter with Mnemtech sent a raw chill down his spine.

  “How is that possible? There's no holographic matrix set up in there.”

  “They spring from his body, Aru! And that's not all. He is insistent that we change course with the Kinetic and destine ourselves for Beixing Prime, in the PoleStar North system. Something about Logos and a secret plot to reverse the energy flow in the Taiji.”

  Aru shook his head and blinked. “What??”

  “You heard me. He's full-scale maniacal. He wants to infiltrate Beixing Prime and take it over. And he thinks Logos created him as a vessel to transfer his soul and mind into.”

  This being, whatever he was, they could sure he was a creation of Logos. The last verified creation of Logos was over 2 centuries ago when Mnemtech was sprung upon the Taiji and the Emperor went silent. Aru was not sure how, but there had to be some reason for this second creation. As implausible as what he'd just heard sounded, taking that creation's words at face value was nothing to discount.

  “Well,” he considered, “that kind of makes sense though, doesn't it? I mean the second part. Logos is centuries old, and if he does still live his body must be in a state of incurable decay. So he has created as a core super-consciousness in a new body, without allowing its mind or soul to develop, so that he might inhabit it, and through which he can continue to live and rule.”

  “There's no such thing as human to human soul transfer, Captain Atheist. And that's coming from me, the loony Blue girl who actually believes in souls.”

  He could hardly believe he was suggesting it either, but neither Logos nor Ming fit a strict definition of what constituted a “human.” “Among humans, no, but in the machine world...”

  “Machine soul and human soul are entirely different suppositions. Machine soul is imbued by the intent of the human or machine creator, whereas human soul is aethereally divine and imbued by the cosmos, not something that can be manipulated in a lab.”

  Aru would have preferred to leave the cosmos out of this, but there was no skating around that stuff with Mei.

  “Well by that logic, he is already imbued then, by his creator, Logos. And like his creator, he is a hybrid of both man and machine. I would love to get him under a proper internal scan and see what kind of hardware he's packing, but there's no way to do that without involving System.”

  “I'm telling you, he's dangerous, Aru! We broached the concept of lying and deception and his eyes lit up like he was having some kind of an epiphany. Sure he seemed harmless enough right after we extracted him, but he's developing and fast. I mean, if h
e can project holographs, don't you think there is a high likelihood he is as well bodily weaponized in some manner?”

  A very high likelihood, Aru was starting to think. Maybe she was right; maybe he needed to be contained under even more stringent security measures than they had in place now. But how?

  “He hasn't tried to harm us yet or made an aggressive overture. And the bottom line is that if we don't open that door, he doesn't eat or drink, and we arrive in Arath in two weeks with a dead man. I'm going in there to hear him out. Then I'll try to set things straight and make the rules of his detainment clear between us all.”

  “I'll stand guard here.”

  “No, I need you on the bridge.”

  “I'll unseal the outer foyer door after you've entered so Kinny can contact me in the unlikely event of a bridge emergency. As things stand, I'm far more concerned about you being alone in there with him.”

  “That's against zero-com room protocol.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck protocol. I'm going to be armed and ready to come in there after you the moment anything happens.”

  Wow, she truly was disturbed by this entity. Aru didn't have that same imminent sense of danger regarding Ming, but Mei was right. Even as a dumb human, he was still a high level machine intelligence. And his lack of humanity combined with his rapid ongoing evolution of mind now that he knew that, well, reality existed, made him unpredictable at best. The cut and dry of it here was that they had their orders and this mission was essentially already in the bag. All that remained was to deliver the prisoner back to Arath and into the custody of Service Intelligence. And after all they'd been through to get to this point, he wasn't about to let anything undermine this one last simple step.

  Aru approached Ming swiftly and sternly, audibly stomping his heels in an authoritative stride. Ming had paused his tactile holographic tasks to face him, this time with his mouth closed and all the upright confidence his poise had previously lacked.