“Me either,” said Pepper.
They both stood there, surveying the entire valley.
“Should we be worried?” Kay asked. Had he already died? Been swallowed by one of the wolves, or the Doaq?
Pepper frowned. “It bugs me,” he said thoughtfully.
In the floor of the valley, the ground convulsed. Another cloud of yellow spheres floated up into the air, looking for targets.
Chapter Forty
Tiago woke up.
That, in and of itself, was a startling and suddenly terrifying thing.
He lay in a soft, white bed. He sat up and put his feet over the edge and touched a floor that wasn’t too cold, nor too hot. He stood up and looked around.
The room was colored a featureless white on the walls, which had small cubbyholes filled with strange purple plants for decoration.
He kept turning, and stopped as he faced the last wall.
It was clear glass. It looked out onto a vast spiral swirl of an entire galaxy that was tilted slightly away from him. He could make out individual stars that hung free of the central glob.
He looked up. The roof was also transparent.
Something massive hung overhead. It was … artificial. Like the picture in a magazine he’d seen of a massive orbital space station. But he couldn’t quite grasp the scale. Behind it was something else, stretching out near a star. A wisp of something leading back from a star.
He blinked.
No, there was a star, and the filaments reaching out around it were structures. And deep inside of them other stars glowed, as well as black discs of wormholes. The stars had been rearranged, wormholes moved around, and it was a megastructure of some sort. He could glimpse patchworks of sky and earth on some of the insides of the wisps. Whole entire worlds carpeting them.
Flickering firefly lights bloomed and blossomed randomly in the distance. Tiny pricks of light.
“Welcome to the Overwatch,” said a chorus of voices behind him.
Tiago turned around, and took a step back. Five bipedal creatures with completely transparent skin had appeared out of nowhere. Faint luminescent sparkles rippled around under the skin.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Where am I?”
“We are a speaking individuality of the Structure attached to the Overwatch. We are assigned to your Concern. Our speaking individuality has decided to call itself Workgroup Black Tusk by consensus.”
“My concern?” Tiago asked, screwing his face up in confusion.
“The worlds you came from. The network of wormholes you live amongst. We are the Overwatch for your Concern. We are Workgroup Black Tusk,” the five members said.
Tiago stepped back, suddenly thinking about those moments he could remember from right before the moment he’d woken up. The wolf leaping into the air, jaws extending to swallow him. “You’re with the Doaq. It eats and kills us.”
“These are physicalized subroutines and constructs of the Overwatch. They gather raw intelligence for the Overwatch. The Doaq, as you call it, is no more than the subroutine that self references as Director of Acquisitions for your local Concern.” There were silicone bones deep under the Workgroup Black Tusk’s transparent skin. Silver and bronze filaments filled their insides. They all had heads, filled with more swirling translucence. Like permanently stirred-up snow globes. No eyes. No mouths. The sound of their speaking came from deep within their chests.
Tiago didn’t like it. “I was eaten,” he insisted.
“No, you were brought to the Overwatch via wormhole. In order to understand your race, we have brought many of your kind here. The Structure seeks to study and understand you. Acquisitions gathers the physical data we need. But there is a problematic side effect.”
“What’s that?” Tiago asked, his insides flipping.
“No one voluntarily leaves the Structure once they have encountered the neural mimetic structures of it. It has always been thus,” Black Tusk all said together to him, as one.
“No one ever leaves the Structure,” Tiago said, and looked around. That sounded like a threat. Like going over to the League, where they tried to make sure you could never defect to the Xenowealth. The League was totalitarian.
This Structure sounded far worse.
“Not voluntarily,” they told him. “We could force an individual out of the Structure, but the Consensus is that it would be cruel and unusual. There are some who volunteer to be on standby, in the event it is necessary against an imminent threat to the Structure. They would have to be willing to bear lower bandwidth and social isolation. But unless the Structure was threatened, who would voluntarily trade immortality and the Structure? It is madness.”
Tiago didn’t understand half the things they were telling him. But he’d been struggling to do his best. He remembered some of the things Thinkerer had said. “You are all zombies, with your minds all connected together by machines, right? Like the ones that tried to take over the planet Chilo?”
“That was a militarized Structure spore. It was cut off. Isolated. Barely cognitive. Connected via improvised low-bandwidth. What was done to it was an abomination. The Structure, however, is the result of millennia. Hundreds of species coming to the apex of their technological development.
“It begins with voice. And then pictographs and paper. Press. Electrical communication. Bandwidth increases. More can be communicated. And then, it explodes, accelerates. Neural bandwidth, direct cognitive exchange, where minds can speak to minds using machine interfaces. The mingling of consciousness accelerates; it’s no longer mimetic concepts but pure will that is exchanged. Commonality becomes made real. That is the Structure.”
“It sounds terrifying,” Tiago said. “You’re going to suck me into that?”
“It looks scary from the outside. We accept this. The Xenowealth, however, looks similar to you from your viewpoint of Placa del Fuego. They have live votes and techno-democracies using technology, and it makes them look machine-like and over-invested in a dream world you can’t even see. You are to the Xenowealth as it is to us, but on another scale. But most importantly, you need to understand that we are at peace with ourselves, and at peace with you.”
“Then why are you invading us?” Tiago asked.
“We’re not,” Workgroup Black Tusk told him. “If we’d wanted to invade, we would have walked among your worlds and offered you a chance to plug into the Structure. The Overwatch has been here for years without invading. We have offered individuals a chance to taste the Structure when brought here by our agents, which has allowed us to understand and study your kind. We prefer to keep your area of the wormhole network as a … wild area. A place for ideas to gestate and be sampled. And as individuals, you do have the right to exist in a manner of your preferring. We acknowledge and grant it.”
“Then why the fighting around the fake wormhole?”
“The area is weaponized. There are individualist civilizations that exist in the Structure. Huddled, nationalistic clumps that have linked up. They believe the Makers found a different path to technological transcendence, and they believe the Structure is a threat.
“But even their own members slowly join the Structure. Because of that willful attrition, the individualist’s models show them that the extinction of individualism will happen within a century or so. They’ve decided to preempt the extinction of individualism with a war, while they can still make one.”
Tiago thought that sounded familiar. “That’s the Rebellion. That’s what Thinkerer told us.”
“Two months ago the individualists lost their bid to control a major portion of the Structure’s physical assets and isolate themselves on the existing infrastructure. So now their plan is to break through the Overwatch and into your worlds, and take them. They can retrench, isolate themselves, and rebuild if they cut themselves off. We are currently defending against this thrust, but have been cut off from support.”
As if to drive this home, something boomed in the distance. The entire room trembled
slightly. One of the Workgroup Black Tusk members screamed and slumped to the ground.
“We’re under multiple levels of attack,” the remaining four said. “It won’t be long before the individualists invade your worlds again.”
“Again?” Tiago held onto that world. “What do you mean, again?”
“The last time the Overwatch failed, the race you called the Satrapy tried to break off into this area. We began a bid to regain this area. We invested five percent of the entire Structure’s productive output as a civilization to launch a new wormhole back into this Concern. It was a controversial Consensus, and nearly failed to become Consensus. But we arrived to find you’d overturned the Satrapy, and Consensus was to leave the Concern fallow. But now the individualists are coming again.”
The Satrapy was the worst thing to reave through the Forty-Eight worlds. More of their types were going to rip through this wormhole.
It had taken so much to throw the Satraps off. And everyone was still recovering. What was this next wave of aliens going to be like?
“So what are we going to do about them?” Tiago asked, looking at the now four members of Workgroup Black Tusk.
“There are three likely simulated outcomes. One: they break through into your worlds and take them for their own. The Structure comes later and roots them out. Collateral damage would be extensive. Two: they break through and shut the wormhole down behind them. The Structure would not vote to use five percent of its gross output again to go after them. Three: your civilization shuts down the wormhole and leaves us all alone. There is a small, ten-percent chance the Overwatch will beat back this attack. But these individualists are fanatical, and far more dangerous than the Satraps ever were.”
“Then let me go,” Tiago said, “back to my people. To shut down the wormhole. They have a device to do it with, left over from the Satraps. What do you need to do? Absorb me to the Structure? Give me what I need to go back.”
“If we absorb you it would be unfair to send you back as an ambassador. That is why we’re here to talk to you. A low-bandwidth conversion. An exchange of verbal positions, and ideas, for you to carry back. By not making you a part of the Structure, your own people on the other side should trust that you were not compromised or coerced.”
“That sounds great,” Tiago said. “Thinkerer already has the wormhole destroyer in place. Just send me back.”
“You would like to explore the option of returning immediately?”
“Fuck yeah,” Tiago said.
“Then be aware, the device you call Thinkerer is not your ally. Do you understand this? It seeks to close the wormhole only after the individualists come through, when they break through the Overwatch. You must act quickly. You must argue our position, and look for the false actions of Thinkerer. It will be dangerous. If you feel this is too dangerous, we can offer you access to the Structure. You can join the Overwatch. Even with our battle here, we will not die. Our consciousness is backed up in real time to other locations. But if you return to the other side, you may lose your consciousness in the events that follow. Do you accept that risk?”
“Let’s go,” said Tiago.
His friends needed his help.
Chapter Forty-One
The wolves were running up the dusty streambed in retreat.
Until ten minutes ago, the drones had provided air support. They’d zipped around, destroyed anything airborne, and scoured the ridges despite the withering chatter of fire laid down by the now thousands of League soldiers gathering up there.
The drones had filled the sky, but over the last hour they’d slowly contracted to the area around the dusty pond. They zigzagged through air, swirled around each other, and acted to protect the area in a tight hemisphere of boiling yellow.
The wolves huffed up the stream, Pepper right behind them. Kay followed with a small team of League soldiers, rifles up and covering them from all directions. They’d given her a small pistol, but she preferred letting them do the shooting. It wasn’t her style. She could point them in the direction they needed to be firing.
Pepper skidded to a stop, feet kicking up dust as he stopped. The wolves didn’t. They leapt into the air. Long bounds that took them clear of the pond’s rocky banks up into the air, and then down toward the dusty bed, nose first.
They plunged through and disappeared.
More wolves slunk from the other banks and dashed forward to disappear as the yellow drones spun overhead.
“They’re retreating?” Kay panted as she caught up to Pepper.
“Or something worse is coming through,” he said. He looked up at the drones. “They don’t seem interested in us anymore.”
“They were looking for something,” Kay said. “We’re the sideshow.”
Pepper put a leg up on a rock. “I think you’re right,” he said thoughtfully. “But what were they hunting?”
They watched the wolves jumping into the dirt and disappearing. Pepper even threw a few rocks in with them. The drones left them alone, circling overhead like buzzards.
“Nashara will have the big thrusters working again soon,” Pepper said. “See if you can get these League soldiers to set up some big guns around the pond. Just in case …”
A green bubble burst through the fake image of the dust bed and rose into the air. Inside floated a boy.
The League men aimed rifles at it, but Kay held up a hand. “Don’t shoot!” she shouted with a crack of authority. She glanced at Pepper. “It’s Tiago.”
He squinted. “He was eaten by one of those wolf things.”
“I know.” Nashara had killed all the wolves in the cockpit, smashing their bodies to tiny bits of cogs and gears that had been designed to work in the dead zone.
“They took the boy,” she’d growled at Kay, and she’d leaked anger and impatience, which had surprised Kay.
The green bubble wobbled through the air. Yellow drones moved to surround it, bumping it along toward the edge of the pond. It burst once clear of the wormhole. Tiago slumped out of the air to hit the ground and bounce.
He lay there, still.
Pepper approached him and kneeled down. He put a finger on his neck. “He’s alive.”
Tiago coughed and sat up. “I am,” he said, and spat green fluid out onto the ground. “I …”
One of the wolves burst out of the trees toward them. “Wolf!” Kay shouted.
“Don’t shoot!” Tiago ordered. He staggered to his feet and held up a hand. “Stay.”
The creature’s large mouth snapped shut, the wormhole scrunched down somehow in its throat, and it obediently sat on its haunches. It regarded them with electric blue eyes.
Pepper shot it right in the center of its temple. The wolf slumped onto its side with a sizzle.
“Damnit,” Tiago snapped. “I made it sit. You didn’t have to kill it.”
Pepper ignored him and walked over to the wolf. He picked it up under one arm. “I want to study this thing later,” he said placidly. “Besides, I don’t know who it, or you, now, Tiago, really work for. Do I?”
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Kay said to him, with honest and undisguised wonder in her voice.
Tiago stepped forward and looked in her eyes. “I shouldn’t trust you,” he said. “But I’m going to have to. Because you’re going to have to trust me now. You’re going to need to look at me and believe everything I’m saying. I’ve been to the other side of that wormhole.”
“We saw you come out of it,” Pepper said. “I believe that. But that doesn’t mean I trust what you will say next.”
“This weaponry isn’t trying to hunt us,” Tiago said. “It’s hunting the Thinkerer and anyone it thinks is helping him. Which, until I talked to them, was us.”
Kay glanced at Pepper. Tiago really believed what he was saying.
“There is the very strong possibility that Thinkerer lied to us,” said Tiago. “What’s on the other side of that wormhole isn’t invading. Something else is trying to come through from beyond
them. And Thinkerer is helping it. We need to get to Nashara now or something alien, and worse than the Satraps, will be coming through the wormhole.”
He looked over Kay then. “Look at me. You tell me if I don’t believe what I’m saying. Right here, look at me.”
And she was. Studying every muscle in his face. She glanced at Pepper, thinking about the fact that Thinkerer was still missing. A seed of doubt blossomed inside her. “He really believes it.”
“I know.” Pepper said thoughtfully, and hefted the dead wolf under his arm. He turned his back to the dusty pool and the drones hovering overhead and started walking back toward the Saguenay. “It’s time we took a look around for Thinkerer.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Tiago was still coughing green liquid up as he jogged after Pepper. It felt strange to be back in the valley when just a few minutes ago he realized he had been light years away in some other galaxy. He had seen the Structure. Now he returned with information about Thinkerer. Information Nashara and Pepper might not choose to believe.
Hadn’t Thinkerer gotten them here? Helped them get the Saguenay up the mountain?
In just the short time since he’d left things had changed. He recognized the League soldiers everywhere. Pepper and Nashara must have reached some sort of agreement, but he realized as they walked about that it was Kay the soldiers all nodded at. Had she somehow wriggled her way into being in charge of an entire League army?
He couldn’t put it past her.
And it didn’t matter, he reminded himself. What mattered was the larger picture.
“We could be very wrong about Thinkerer,” he told Nashara in the cockpit of the Saguenay.
For a long moment she just stared at him. And he realized when she’d last seen him he’d been eaten by one of the wolves. There was some sort of emotion there. Relief, shock. Then a wariness. He’d come back from the other side, after all.
The Apocalypse Ocean Page 20