Netlink

by William H. Keith

  The figure glanced at their discarded clothing, still lying in a heap next to the blanket on the ground. “I’ve interrupted you, I’m afraid. Sorry…”

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” Daren demanded. A new fear shivered up from inside him. “Are you… CMI?”

  The stranger’s eyes narrowed. “CM… what?”

  “Confederation Military Intelligence,” Taki said, her voice ice. “Or are you part of the University’s computer security?”

  “Negative to both,” the figure said. “I needed hardware complex enough to receive my persona, and this network was the best I could detect from orbit. When I downloaded, I picked up the flow of this simulation. It was the largest program running at the time… and I happened to notice that the originator was named ‘Cameron-Alessandro.’ I… I thought I’d try to step in and… meet you.”

  “Please,” Taki said, and now she sounded scared. “Please, who are you?”

  “This is a private ViRsim,” Daren added, putting his arm around Taki’s shoulders. “You can’t just come barging—”

  “I am sorry for the intrusion,” the man said. “My name was… my name is Devis Cameron. And this seemed to be the fastest way to establish communications. It’s, ah, been quite a while—”

  Daren shook his head wildly, denying it. “No! No, you can’t be! You’re dead…!”

  “I suppose I am, in a way.” He looked down at himself, hands spread. “This is the only way I can interact with people anymore. In a simulation. I’m all software, now. I kind of lost my hardware when the ship I was aboard blew up in a battle.”

  “Daren!” Taki said. “This… man is your—”

  “My biofather. Yeah. But I still don’t believe it. This is a ViRsimulation. You could be anybody. Anything. This is some kind of joke, right?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “If you’re… if you’re who you say you are… does my mother know?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about my… I mean, what about Vic Hagan?”

  “What about him? He’s a good officer, and a good friend.”

  “He’s also cohabed with my mother.”

  The image hesitated. Did it look disappointed? Daren couldn’t tell, couldn’t read the expression.

  “I… didn’t know that,” it said. “And I don’t know if he knows about me or not. She obviously didn’t tell you, so I imagine she thought it better to keep things to herself.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you should ask her.” The image’s eyes unfocused slightly, as though it were reading a stream of data. “You’re Daren Cameron?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And my son. I’m… glad to meet you.”

  “I’m not so sure I’m happy to meet you. Where the hell have you been for twenty-five years?”

  The image of Dev Cameron sighed. “Away. With part of the DalRiss fleet. They needed me as a kind of a navigator, I guess. And I needed them, the combination of their biotechnology and the Naga fragments they use as a communications net, just to survive. I, ah, didn’t expect to be gone for so long, though. Time doesn’t mean as much to us as it does to humans.”

  Daren’s eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you human anymore?”

  “Depends on your definition of humanity, I suppose. I… haven’t thought like a human for a long, long time. I think I’m a little rusty at it.”

  “What’s he mean?” Taki asked. “What’s he talking about?”

  Devis Cameron looked at her. “For a long time I’ve been associating exclusively with… with people who don’t think at all the way you do. The DalRiss have trouble even seeing anything that’s not alive. And the Naga think inside-out, and a thousand years of nothing much happening passes for them like a few minutes for us. After a while, well, the human mind can get used to almost anything. Sometimes I used to think I was going crazy. Completely norked out. Now, well, I just assume that I’m becoming more like them, and less like you.”

  “Why did you come back?” Taki asked. It was the first time she’d addressed him directly. Daren could feel her shoulders trembling beneath his arm and realized that she was terrified.

  Well, so was he, come to think of it. There was something about the unknown that always terrified when it came upon you suddenly, unexpectedly. The fact that this… this image was his own father or, more precisely, was what his father had become, did not help in the least.

  Dev Cameron’s image hesitated before answering her question. “I really need to take that up with your government,” he said. “But there’s… a problem. A very large problem, and it’s coming in our direction. It may even know exactly where we are. It’s extremely dangerous, and it’s going to take everything we have to stop it.”

  “This problem,” Daren said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. The image itself represented no threat, he was sure. If it had wanted to hurt them, it would have done so. But he was beginning to realize that the uncertainty he detected in the image’s mannerisms and expressions was… fear.

  If Daren and Taki were both afraid, well, so was the computer image of Dev Cameron. He found that extraordinarily disquieting.

  “This problem. It sounds like a new race. One we don’t know.”

  “That’s correct… though you have had some contact with them, in a way. I’d really better not go into that now.”

  “Okay. So where are you now?” Taki asked. “I mean, I know you don’t have a physical body, but, well, you didn’t just pop up in the U of J computer for no reason.”

  “I suppose I’m here… in the AI data banks at the University of Jefferson. I’m also linked with the DalRiss fleet in orbit over New America.”

  That was a shock. “What?”

  “We jumped in a few minutes ago. Some of us… I mean, the DalRiss in command of this cityship, the Sirghal, are talking to the authorities in Jefferson. I thought I’d download here to try to find…” His voice dwindled off.

  “To find my mother, you mean.”

  He nodded. “I miss Katya an awful lot.”

  “This,” Daren said, the beginning of a smile spreading across his face, “is going to be interesting!”

  Chapter 17

  How much will our understanding increase, how much will we lay to rest once and for all the cause for jealousy and strife and even war when we master the ability to link minds directly, to share thoughts, to share memories, to share even in the act of creativity? Surely on that day, we shall cease being a restless sea of competing ideals and goals and ideologies, and shall become, in fact, a single organism, one composed of countless billions of cells. The cells will be men and women, yes,but the organism, and the mind behind it, will be God.

  —That Divine Spark

  C. J. MULLER

  C.E. 2025

  “Dev… is back? He’s here?”

  “Well, I don’t know that it’s him,” Daren said. “I mean… all I know is what he told me. But he said he was Dev Cameron.”

  Katya closed her eyes. “My God…”

  She felt a terrible, whirling turmoil within. What am I going to tell Vic? was her first thought… almost as though she’d just been found out in some illicit love affair.

  No, it was worse than that. Cohab agreements, at least on New America, were rarely so narrow as to preclude casual sex or ViRsex outside the contract. With the technological separation of sex-as-fun from sex-as-means-of-procreation, the sex act had long ago become pure entertainment, whether enjoyed in virtual reality or in the real world. Hell, the question wasn’t even one of sex, since she couldn’t have sex with Dev anymore. Well, she supposed they could still share ViRsex, had either of them wanted to, but the real thing was impossible without two physical bodies present.

  But her dismay was centered on the conflict between what she felt for Vic now, and what she still felt for Dev… mingled with surprise at how strongly those feelings for Dev still clung to her emotions after all these years. She felt guilty, illogical as that seemed, guilty for h
aving somehow betrayed Vic, not with her body but with her mind and her emotions. She knew the feeling was not based on any logic, but it was there nonetheless and there was no way to deny it.

  Hard on the heels of wondering what to tell Vic came a related thought. What am I going to tell Kara? She’d never told either of her children that Dev had, in one sense at least, survived the destruction of the DalRiss ship, survived and gone… elsewhere. Daren, obviously, had already met him and was seeming to carry the evident shock well.

  Kara, though, might be a different matter, when she returned. A little more than three months had passed since the departure of the Sandstorm mission; word of the victory at Kasei had arrived at New America only two weeks earlier, and Kara, traveling by more roundabout means, would not be back before next month at the earliest.

  How would she react to this? Katya honestly didn’t know. Their relationship had always been based on honesty, but Katya had never told her that Dev, in a way, at least, was still alive. This… news could boomerang back on their relationship, make it look as though Katya had lied to her.

  In fact, she’d never talked about it because she’d wanted to hide the fact even from herself. Damn you, Dev! Why did you have to come back now?

  In fact, she’d been sure that Dev was back ever since she’d been informed by one of her aides several hours ago that twenty DalRiss cityships had materialized in space near New America and were lumbering slowly into orbit. The last time she’d linked with him, after Second Herakles, Dev had promised to return someday. But after the first year or so, she’d given up waiting. He was gone… gone.

  “Did he say anything about… me?”

  Daren was standing in front of her desk, studying a small, simple block of crystal she kept there as a curio. “That he missed you a lot,” he said, turning the crystal over and over in his hands. Katya had to resist the urge to reach out and snatch it back from him. “And that he needed to see you.”

  “Where? And when?”

  Gently, he returned the crystal to her desk. “Same ‘place’ he met me, at U of J. And as for when, well, as soon as possible. And it’s not just you he wants to see.”

  Katya felt a flutter behind her breastbone. Was it disappointment? Or relief? She honestly wasn’t sure.

  “No,” Daren went on. “He wants to see Dad, too… I mean, your husband. And someone from the CMI. And as many aides and high-ranking military types as we can muster. And xenologists.”

  Katya looked at her son sharply. “Xenologists? Why? That could only mean he’d run into…”

  “A new civilization, Mother,” Daren said, leaning on her desk. “Something… very strange, very powerful, in toward the Galactic Core. He wouldn’t tell me much, but he did say there’s some urgency attending this, some kind of emergency. Something that could affect everybody.”

  Katya raised her eyebrows. “Something that affects all of New America? Or all of the Confederation?”

  Daren shrugged. “The impression I got was all mankind.”

  So that explained Dev’s return, or it started to. He’d run into something out there that required human help or intervention.

  “And… Mother?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to be in on this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a xenologist. A good one. So is Taki… that friend I brought to your party a few months ago. If he wants to put together an expedition to go meet these people, I’m going along.”

  “If he wants to talk to military officers and the CMI,” Katya said mildly, “it’s a military threat he’s talking about, Daren. Not first contact.”

  “He specified xenologists,” Daren said with a stubborn jut to his jaw, “If you want to fight ’em, you’ve got to understand ’em. Right?”

  She sagged inside, but nodded. “Right.”

  An hour later, Katya was sitting in Vic’s office at ConMilCom headquarters. She’d taken a tube from the Sony Building to the military command facility, wanting to see him in person, in reality, and not in a ViRcom simulation. It had been a slow trip, for the streets and travel tubes all were packed by New Americans still celebrating the victory at Kasei. No one seemed to know exactly why the raid had been carried off, or what the payoff had been; the fact that ConMilCom had acquired a working I2C was still being kept highly classified, if for no better reason than that it would be smart to keep the Imperials guessing as to whether the Confederation had the device or not. A basic rule of all intelligence activity was never to admit everything you knew.

  War fever, however, had reached its highest possible pitch, higher even than in the heady, terrifying days of the Rebellion. Outside of ConMilCom HQ, Katya had paused to watch a military parade being staged in downtown Jefferson and wondered how many of those cheering people lining the way had actually been in the last war with the Imperials.

  It was extremely hard for veterans to work up quite that much enthusiasm for war, even when war was their profession and their calling.

  The enthusiasm certainly didn’t extend to Vic. He looked troubled as he digested the news about Dev’s return.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. She reached out across his desk, touching the back of his hand. “Vic?”

  He managed a smile. “How am I supposed to feel, Katya? I’ve always known I was your second choice.”

  Anger flared. “Damn it, Vic! Don’t you dare talk that way! You can’t be jealous of a man who ran off and left me a quarter century ago!”

  “Jealous? No, I’m not jealous. But… I don’t know what to say. Katya, what do you want?”

  “I’m not about to leave with him, if that’s what you’re asking. Vic, he doesn’t even have a body.…”

  “Well, if you were linked with him, in a simulated reality, that wouldn’t matter.”

  She made a face, “If that were true—and believe me, it’s not, not for me, anyway—I still couldn’t leave you. We have too much built together here. Do you think these last twenty-some years have been for nothing? That I was just marking time for him to come back?”

  “No.” He squeezed her hand. “No, I don’t think that at all.”

  “Then stop this null-headed nonsense. I’ll admit that his coming back threw me. I… I still don’t quite know how to feel, what to think. But that’s not because I still love him. I love you, and no one else.”

  Which, she realized as she said it, was not entirely true. It was possible to love two men. She’d shared a large and important part of her life with Dev, even though she’d really only known him for a few years, starting just before the revolution. When was it—’38? No, it must have been ’39. On Loki.

  They’d grown close during the long trek out to the newfound DalRiss home system. It was as though some part of their minds, no, their souls had become intertwined, partly from the adventure, the sheer wonder they’d shared. Because of that, he would always be a part of her, no matter how much space or time divided them.

  But she’d also shared almost twenty-five years with Vic, and if her decision to contract with him had originally been a way to escape the pain of Dev’s loss, it had not remained that way for long. She loved Vic.

  And she didn’t want to see him hurt.

  “And I love you,” he said, “and wouldn’t want you hurt for the cosmos.”

  The words startled her; it was as though he’d been reading her mind. Then she realized he was responding to what she’d said a moment before… and that, as often happens with people who live closely together for a long time, they shared some of the same trains of thought.

  “So,” Vic continued, getting up from behind his desk and walking over to a hidden closet, where he retrieved a gold and scarlet shoulder cloak. “Is there any indication at all about what this threat might be?’’

  “No. I gather that’s why he wants to talk to us.”

  “Well, let’s not keep him waiting then, shall we?” He chuckled. “You know, since computer hardware operates so much faster than organic
brains, I’ve often wondered if downloaded personalities experience a few years of waiting for every second in our world. Dev was always kind of the impatient sort. I’d hate for him to get bored waiting for us that long!”

  Vic had made the necessary calls to assemble several other members of the ConMilCom senior brass; Katya considered discussing the situation with her colleagues in the Senate but decided against it. There was nothing to debate or vote on yet, and bringing the government bureaucracy into the picture now would only slow and complicate matters. As the senior polito in the Defense Committee, she felt she had thrust enough to make her own judgments, then make her recommendations to the government later.

  Of course, if she guessed wrong, she could find her political future at a sudden dead end, but she cared less about that than she’d expected, somehow. She could easily be accused of assuming more than her share of power by making unilateral decisions—especially decisions requiring military involvement—but this shadowy threat of Dev’s had to be addressed, and that was more important than political infighting over her usurpation of authority. If Dev had been worried enough… no, scared enough to come all the way back to New America in search of help, then whatever he’d run into out there must be pretty damned big, or important, or dangerous.

  Or all three.

  She and Vic linked into the University of Jefferson from ConMilCom HQ’s comm center. They were the first to log in, arriving electronically in a kind of anteroom, a shadowy place in cyberspace that provided access to a special room for those with the necessary passcode.

  “Vic…” Katya began as she stared uncertainly at the electronic doorway leading to the place where Dev was waiting. “I wonder if—”

  “I’ll wait here,” Vic told her. “For the others. Why don’t you go ahead in?”

  She smiled at him, then leaned over and gave him a virtual kiss. “See you soon.”

  Katya uploaded the code Daren had provided, and stepped through the open doorway.

  It was scarcely what she’d expected. ViRsim settings for public meetings were generally some place known to all of the participants—a park, perhaps, or a comfortably furnished conversation room, or even a simulated meeting room in an imaginary office building.