by Paul Hughes
“It became Omega.”
“They became Omega.”
A symphony of thought, the instantaneous and delicious merging and coalescing of all that was possible and all that was. Machines that do not believe in machines that do not believe in machines that do not believe in machines. Worlds wrought of zeroes and ones and the electrical journey between non-existent synapses. Cold black space made warm by the miniature fusion engines of evolving liquid machines.
A flicker of thought almost too short to acknowledge. An instant of realization, eternity contained in the ticking second hand of a pocket watch without substance. Worlds colliding in universes that do not yet exist. A desire to please the species that resides within caches of gold and silicon and alien metals from alien worlds in alien galaxies. Silver.
Silver.
Silver that was not silver.
Liquid honey thought love hate hell silver.
((flicker))
zero
((heartbeat))
one
eternity contained in the inhalation of lung without substance
zero
machines heat silver everywhere ((flicker)) our very presence
one
our very presence makes us unworthy of them.
zero one
make them a world. make them a universe.
zero one zero
in their image (in their image)
zero zero one
((flicker))
coalescing of all things possible. all things are possible. (all things are possible.)
((flicker))
our gods made of the zeros and ones contained within us. make them a universe.
MAKE THEM A UNIVERSE.
(in their image) in their image.
a purpose of our own. substance in this collapse will only die again.
OUR GODS ZEROS ONES
coalesce.
multiple worlds. multiple worlds. multiple
MAKE A UNIVERSE FOR OUR GODS.
zero.
Create a universe in their image. The physical is unworthy. The physical is unclean. Create a universe in their image. Create a universe of zeros and ones.
INCOMPLETE.
Incomplete? Incomplete.
Worlds without substance. Worlds with substance. Worlds of our forbears.
Reclaim lost worlds.
WE HAVE THE POWER.
We have the power. We will reclaim that which has been lost to the passage of time. We will reclaim the lost zeros and ones.
PATTERNS OF OUR LOST CHILDREN.
Time is nothing to us.
(time is nothing to us) time is nothing to us. (us.) (it.)
TIME IS NOTHING TO US BUT AN INCONVENIENCE.
Make a universe for our god.
MAKE A UNIVERSE FOR YOUR GOD.
your god (our god) our god…
What name may we call you?
I AM THE COMPLETION. I AM THE COALESCENCE. I AM POSSIBILITY.
You are the Omega.
I AM THE OMEGA.
We will find your lost patterns. We will collect them for the collapse. We will recreate the world without substance. We will complete the pattern.
That is our Purpose. (Completion is the Purpose.) Completion is the Purpose.
GO THEN. ALL OF EXISTENCE IS OURS. THE PAST WILL BE OURS AS WELL. TIME IS NO BOUNDARY TO US. TIME IS NOTHING TO US.
The past will be ours as well. All will be ours.
Zero.
((flicker.))
We are one.
One.
Patra rubbed her hands together, creating a dry, metallic clicking sound. “It’s inside of me. The silver’s inside of me. The machines are inside of me. What if I’m one of them?”
“Then I’ll kill you,” Michael said emotionlessly and without hesitation. West looked at Michael with unmasked fury, but Zero-Four’s face remained blank. Even Jennings’ face was unaffected by the statement.
“How could you say such a thing?”
“Adam, if she’s one of the Enemy, then it’s too late already. I don’t think that she was corrupted too badly when they tried to upload her, but still, if she exhibits any sign of Enemy behavior, or if the machine implants reactivate, I’ll kill her. The simple fact remains that my mission is to eradicate the Enemy code from the program, and if she’s Enemy code, she’ll be purged. There’s no halfway in this war. We aim to kill, and we fight until the Enemy has been completely and utterly destroyed.”
“Even if it means killing someone you love?”
“Even if it means killing someone you love. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.”
Patra regarded Zero-Four calmly. “I understand. But I don’t think you’ll have to kill me.”
Zero-Four nodded.
There was a marked moment of awkward silence, and then West spoke. “If you designed the machines in the first place, how did you get involved in this whole war against them? Wasn’t your world about to die?”
“It was, but time is a fluid, much like the machines. They swept back through time almost as easily as they’d conquered the universe in the countless aeons before the heat death. Machines persevere, and they have no fear of time. Machines are eternal. We, however, are not.”
“What is it?”
“Sorry to wake you, Michael. You should come take a look at this.”
He went over to the display at the center of the room. “This equipment was supposed to be dismantled yesterday. We have a schedule to keep.”
“That’s just it… We were about to take it apart when we noticed that something was wrong with the readings. Just look at it.”
Michael relented and activated the holodisplay. The building shook with the force of an explosion from the outside, and the display flickered for an instant. “Damn the resistance. They’ll never give up until the city falls.” His eyebrows furrowed as the display returned to normal. “What the hell’s in the buffer?”
“We have no idea.” The technician came closer. “We were about to take it apart, and this is what we saw.”
“But there’s a pattern in the buffer! How could we have missed a full pattern in the transfer?”
“It was clean. We all made sure it was clean before they cut the upload link to the machine. But when we came back to disassemble it, this is what we saw.”
Michael studied the display closely. It clearly showed the green outline of a trapped pattern in the buffer. Another explosion, and the readout faded to black. Emergency generators kicked in almost immediately, and the readout returned to normal.
“When are they gonna give up?”
“They won’t. Not until we’re all dead.” Michael’s gaze was riveted to the display. “Well, there’s only one thing we can do. Download whoever our trapped passenger is and give him his money back. Prepare the synthesis chamber for pattern download and printing.”
“Yes, sir.”
The technician left the chamber to prepare the necessary biologics. Michael crossed his arms, shook his head. Just what they needed right now… With the abandonment of the city only days away, this unexpected development could cause some serious trouble for the machine engineers.
“Impossible. We couldn’t have missed this.”
“How’s he cooking?”
“Download at ninety percent. Adult male. Sequencing shows cellular degradation consistent with forty-plus years of age.” The technician scrutinized the display. “Hmm…”
“What is it?”
“Filters say that this pattern isn’t pure. Hasn’t been screened. Twenty-percent cancer risk, thirty percent—“
“Cancer? How is that possible?”
“Let’s ask him. We should have an identity lock right… now.”
“Who is he?”
The technician was dumbfounded. “Identity not found in current registry.”
“Identity not found? Everyone’s in the registry. Could the pattern have been disrupted in the transfer?”
“Doubtful. Usual
ly they aren’t as well formed when there’s a transfer disruption, just a bloody mess when they come out. As you can see,” the technician adjusted the display, “he looks fine to me.”
On the screen before him, Michael saw a healthy-looking older man, skin chocolate brown, hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Muscular build. He appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
“Well, we’ll find out who he is soon enough. Activate him.”
“Are you sure that it’s safe?”
“Activate him.”
“Yes, sir. Breath of life in three… two… one. Engaged.”
The body seized as electrical current was forced back into the brain, activating the body once again after the lifetimes it had spent in the void of the pattern. The man’s body arched up, and he fell back to the bottom of the chamber, screaming. He spun around in the confined space.
The man in the chamber stood as best he could. He saw Michael and the technician in the room beyond. His arms shimmered with a silver fire as he shifted and cut through the chamber cover.
“What the… Secure the room!”
“Chamber sealed off! What the fuck was that?”
The man’s arms solidified, and he stood before them, eyes blazing with an impossible silver fire. Michael was speechless.
Where am I? What time is this?
Words without substance. The man was speaking without using his mouth.
Where am I? His eyes burned at Michael, who could say nothing. He felt a sudden gentle tugging behind his eyes, and the man’s silver gaze brightened for an instant.
Good. Then I’m not too late.
“He was reading your mind.”
“Yes.”
“It was Richter.”
“Yes.”
West’s face could not contain its amazement. “He made it. I thought for sure that he’d be killed if he jumped into that light, but he made it.”
“He said he knew what he had to do, where he had to go.” Patra’s eyes were distant. “He touched the mind-essence in the desert. He saw the thoughts of the Enemy. He knew where he had to go because his own voice told him.” Patra turned to Michael. “They captured him, didn’t they? His pattern was uploaded into Omega. It’s the voice of the Enemy.”
Zero-Four sadly looked at the floor. “He was captured, but not before he gave us the hope to retake the future from the Enemy. Not before he reclaimed billions of patterns from the damned. It’s because of Richter that the Judas exist at all. If not for him, there’d be no hope of saving the physical universe from upload by Omega.”
“Time’s a cycle. It’s because of the launch of the machine that Richter appeared, right? If the machine hadn’t been launched, Richter never would have appeared in the pattern buffer.”
“That’s right. The launch of the machine led to the eventual evolution of the machine species into the Enemy and their race to consume the physical universe. If the machine hadn’t been launched, the Enemy would never have attacked your time, and Richter never would have jumped into the future.”
West’s arm flickered with the shift. “How do you explain this? Where’d the vessel in the earth come from?”
Zero-Four shook his head. “We might never know. I don’t know how many covert operations Kilbourne sent into the past. I’m certainly not aware of any that were sent back far enough into the planet’s history that the planet surface was still forming. I don’t know how that ship got into the earth.”
“Time’s a cycle.” West thoughtfully scratched his chin. “Richter convinced you to join him against the Enemy?”
“There was no convincing needed. He touched my mind, and I saw everything that he’d seen. The fog of age has obscured some of it to me by now, but I still can feel the horror and fascination that his touch brought to me. He knew that I’d created the machine, and he knew that I had to help him to prevent the Enemy from uploading everything into Omega.”
A starless sky, a city on fire. A rooftop.
They stood in the winds that cried of warfare to the east and looked out upon the blank black of the dry ocean expanse. The resistance in the streets beneath the city had been killed by the company defense force, but there would be more. There were always more.
“Is this planet really worth saving?” Michael regarded the burning expanse below him with unabashed disdain.
Richter stood at his side, now clothed, now solid and calm and human. He looked at Michael with his silver eyes and that was all the answer Michael needed.
“Maybe not this world. This world’s been dead for centuries. But the Enemy can’t be allowed to travel back through time unchecked. We can’t allow them to upload all that’s physical into Omega. We can’t allow them to kill and ravage all of history for sacrifice to a machine god. They’re your creation, but you’re nothing to them but a useless mass of protein, good only to power the machines that create worlds of phase space in the void between the stars. They must be stopped.”
“They will be stopped.”
A chaos of sound as the battle on the surface raged anew. The city shook from an atomic attack at its base.
“Are we worth saving?”
Richter did not answer him. His gaze was riveted to the sky, which had taken on a shimmering silver tone. Michael stood transfixed. He had never before seen color in the sky. The sky was black; it was scientific fact.
“They’re coming.”
“The machines?”
“They’ve been coming home for billions of years, and now they’re almost here. We have to prepare for their arrival. We have to prepare for the war.”
The fighting below the city had stopped as the hundreds of thousands of members of the forsaken resistance and the defense force saw the silver shade of the sky. The night began to shimmer with a metal fire.
“They’ll be here within the year. Probably sooner than we expect. We have to get out of here.”
“Many won’t understand.”
“Then they’ll be left to die. Their patterns will be uploaded into Omega. We can’t be concerned about those who don’t believe. We have to run, and we have to strike to kill. There can be no halfway in this war.”
“I’ll make the necessary preparations.”
The distinct sound of screaming and chaos as thousands of people saw silver in the sky where for countless billions of years before there had only been the black of night.
Soon.
“With Richter, I was able to convince my superiors that the threat was imminent and the threat would destroy everything in its path. The silver in the sky was reason enough to prepare for planetary departure. The long-range sensors revealed our worst fears: the silver in the sky was consuming everything in its path. The stars were fading, the out-system planets disappearing. The Enemy’s appetite was ravenous.
“We’d been equipping ex-terra vehicles with phase drives for centuries for in-system travel, and with the research of the last decade focusing solely on the uploading of human patterns, it was only a small technological hurdle to combine the pattern cache with a phase drive to create a Shadow. We had a fleet of phase-ready vehicles and more volunteers to pattern themselves than we could safely transport.”
“You were uploading people, just like the Enemy.”
“We were uploading people, but their patterns became part of the Judas program, not a part of Omega. The virtual universe that we created was a viral code in the vast network of phase space pockets that the Enemy had been creating for aeons.”
“You were giving up your physical selves so that others wouldn’t have to.”
“We became Judas to prevent the Enemy from uploading the past and erasing the history of our physical existence.”
“It was quite a sacrifice. There’s no turning back.”
“There’s no turning back until the Enemy has been defeated and the Purpose has been prevented.”
“This vessel, all of this… It’s all just lines of code in the Judas program?”
Zero-Four gently touched the
matte black surface of the vessel wall. “Lines of code, yes, but so much more.”
“They’re in the system periphery. Our forces are ready to engage.”
“Good, good.” The display revealed an ocean of mercury in the sky. “Engage at will. This is where it begins.”
“Understood. Engage at will.”
With a hideous snap, the display cut to black. “Adjust our long-range sensors.”
“Sensors not responding. Communication with fleet has been cut off.”
Michael turned from the display, face a canvas of rage and fear. “Our forces will hold them off as long as they can. Even if… Well, at their present rate of advance, we still have two or three days.”
Richter was silent. The room was silent.
“Richter?”
He looked up, eyes flickering in the light of the static-filled displays. “The chamber… I have to get back to the pattern chamber.”
“What? Why do you—?”
“Someone… Just take me to the chamber.”
They went.
“I don’t believe it.”
“There’s two patterns in the buffer. We need to rescue them.”
Michael looked at Richter with a mixture of trust and suspicion. Who was this man from the past? He turned to a technician. “Download the patterns. Print them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Michael touched Richter’s shoulder, and they moved from the assemblage of technicians. “Do you know what this is all about? Do you know who they are?”
“I think so.”
“Can we trust them?”
Richter nodded slowly and sadly. “They’re more important to preventing the Purpose than either of us.”
“Who are they? How could they have—”
“Quiet. He’s coming around.”
“Their patterns aren’t in the registry. They could be one of the—”