Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  “Hey, Sis! How was the Galactic Core?”

  “Hot.”

  “Yeah, it’s been hot on Dante, too.” Dante—DM-58° 5564 II—was a world in the Shichiju, home of the Dantean Communes, a species of communal organisms that Daren had been studying for some time now. Their particular mys­tery was whether or not they could be classified as sapient; certainly, their intelligence was of a radically different order from human or DalRiss, enough so that communications with them might be forever impossible.

  “I meant hot as in radioactive,” Kara said, faintly exas­perated. Daren, frequently, couldn’t see beyond the limits of his own rather narrow field of vision, and he was self-centered enough that he could rarely empathize with the problems of others. Assigned to the Gauss as part of the xenobiology team studying the Web, he’d nevertheless con­tinued with his own work as well, researching the question of Commune intelligence.

  “Ah.” Daren shrugged. “So, did you military types find anything useful in there?”

  Kara bristled. She sometimes had the impression that Daren didn’t think much of the military, or of its ability to gather data or solve problems. “We picked up a thing or two,” she said. “I’ll be uploading to the milnet later.” She turned to Vic. “You were right, Dad, about what Dr. Norris had. It was weird. I think I’m going to want to file a report on that, too.” She cocked her head. “Unless it’s classi­fied?”

  “Oh, it’ll be classified. Lately they’ve been classifying how many times the senior staff has to go use the head. But with I2C, there’s no chance of an intercept. You’re right, of course. ConMilCom ought to know about this.”

  “Know about what?” Daren asked.

  “Classified, brother dear,” Kara told him sweetly. “Not for civilian download.”

  “Your mother was worried about you, Kara,” Vic said, as though stepping in to head off a confrontation. “I passed the word to her that you were okay as soon as I knew, but I imagine she’d like to hear from you herself.”

  Kara brightened. “I was planning on paying her a visit. I’m off on a twenty-four as soon as I finish my reports.”

  “ViRcom?”

  “Hubot, actually. I figured since they’ve put the system in for surface leave, I might as well use it.”

  Teleoperated hubots, humanoid robots ridden by the op­erator’s linked-in mind the way a striderjack rode a war­strider, had long been popular on Earth and some other worlds of the Shichiju, a means of visiting other places and conducting face-to-face business on the planet without ac­tually leaving home. The robot’s electronic senses provided a full range of sensory input, giving the rider the feeling of actually being there, and concessions on Earth and else­where had long rented travel time to popular historical sites and tourist playgrounds.

  With the development of I2C for other than strictly mil­itary applications, hubotravel, as it was becoming known, was growing more popular than ever.

  Vic nodded. “Well, have a good time. Give your mom my best, and tell her how much I miss her.”

  “Yeah,” Daren smirked. “And don’t do anything that’ll make you rust.”

  “You should know,” she told him. Since hubotraveling had become available to researchers with the Fleet, he’d been using them to visit the wet, hothouse world of Dante. She teased him sometimes about turning into a rusted, tin-man statue on the beach next to some Commune hive.

  It was five more hours before Kara could get off duty and make the trip down to Gauss’s communications lounge. As she stepped into the large, softly lit chamber, filled with the white ceramic commods that always reminded her of coffins or modern-era sarcophagi, she saw that most of the pods were occupied. Gauss boasted a crew of several hundred, and the comm modules provided access not only to conver­sations with loved ones back home, but to entertainment as well.

  Selecting one of the empty pods, she climbed inside, snuggled back into the padded seat that adjusted itself to fit her contours, and let the cover hiss quietly shut. Her Com­panion had already begun growing endpoints, which quested sightlessly toward the pod’s link contacts.

  For several centuries, now, the standard means of inter­personal communications had been the ViRcom, virtual re­ality communications. Through cephlinks—and more recently through Naga symbionts—two or more people could climb into separate comm modules and meet in a vir­tual world run by the AI communications software moder­ating the exchange. For each person in the link-up it was like stepping into another world, one where you could in­teract on several levels with the others. The system had soon gone far beyond mere communications, of course, and be­gun serving both as an entertainment system and as a means of doing business. Virtual dramas, sex fantasies, games, and adventure role-playing were all accessed through the com­mods. Nowadays most people carried one or more analogues resident in their personal software, versions of themselves in different dress or personae, as well as AI-driven secre­taries that could field incoming communications and handle day-to-day routine business without bothering the original, or primary, personality.

  Once, the limitations of the speed of light had hampered di­rect conversations across distances of more than a few light seconds. The advent of I2C had changed that, however. Dur­ing the last two years, I2C technology had begun revolu­tionizing all forms of long-range communication. Linking together the various business and government computer net­works employed by the worlds throughout the far-flung Shichiju and Confederation systems had been the first big step, but other forms of personal communication had swiftly followed, including both standard ViRcommunications and the use of hubots.

  “Communications,” a voice said in Kara’s ear. “Please upload any necessary clearances at this time.”

  She’d been granted a twenty-four-hour pass—all of the members of her company had been promised a twenty-four after Core Peek—and the clearance number would reserve for her more than the usual one- or two-hour session inside the pod. A menu unfolded itself in her mind, and she quickly checked off the appropriate boxes… standard communi­cations, ship-to-New America, no game-play, no special software prostheses, with hubot transference at the far end through the Be There agency in downtown Jefferson. The monitoring AI took only milliseconds to grant her request and open the necessary I2C channels.

  With the last of her choices complete, the menu in her head vanished as she gave the Go command, and she was plunged into a static-fired darkness. In a sense, at least, her mind hurtled twelve hundred light years, instantly.

  The Imperials who’d developed I2C had tried hard to keep it secret, of course; had they been successful, they would have won an immediate and overwhelming military advantage over the tiny, scattered forces of the Confedera­tion. The Confederation’s freewheeling, free-market ap­proach to all technology, however, had guaranteed that I2C would find a much broader application, one that was very quickly transforming every aspect of human life almost as completely as the revolution in xenosymbiotic biotech.

  Until the advent of I2C, for example, hubotraveling had been limited to the surface of one world or, at best, to orbit. Now, hubots could be ridden anywhere from anywhere, so long as the appropriate I2C electronics and computers were in place.

  The static cleared. She opened her eyes… expecting to see the interior of a hubot rental agency. What she saw instead was the looming, dark violet sky of Core D9837, the pale, ragged spiral of the Great Annihilator, the thrust and gleam of the alien buildings on the horizon.

  Kara screamed…

  Chapter 9

  An entire world can reside comfortably within the spa­ciousness offered by a few geloyabytes of computer memory. Run either by an outside controller or by a dedicated AI, that world can be as richly detailed as necessary, both through data provided from outside sources, and through the mechanics of chaos theory. It has been suggested, in fact, that more humans will one day live in imaginary, virtual worlds than might at that time inhabit so-called reality.

  —Worlds Without End


  JENNIFER WARD-HARDING

  C.E. 2570

  … and immediately, with some effort, brought herself back under control. This had to be illusion, a ViRcom illusion of some sort. Had to be. She was standing on the broad, open, radiation-baked plain where her company had made its last stand hours before. The ground underfoot was charred by the nuke she’d set off, crunching like broken glass beneath her boot as she took a hesitant step forward. She felt a hot wind on her cheek, and a prickling sensation on her skin that might have represented the ambient background radia­tion. No, if she were really standing in this place without any protection whatsoever, she would have been dead before the nerve endings of her body had time to react.

  Instead, this was some sort of elaborate ViRdrama, one almost certainly drawn from the information she herself had gleaned from Core D9837. The question, though, was not so much how she’d gotten to this virtual place as who had intercepted her en route from Nova Aquila to New America.

  Her first thought, in fact, was that the Web must have done this; it was impossible to stand on that plain and look up at the black-hole accretion disk hanging in the sky and not feel—despite the impossibility of her survival in that place—that she’d been physically dragged here.

  And you know that can’t be, Kara, she told herself fiercely. You haven’t really gone anywhere, no matter what it might feel like.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, reminding herself con­sciously that her body was still lying in the life-support corn-mod capsule back aboard the Gauss, that her mind—most simply defined as a kind of complex, multilayered program running on the organic computer she called her brain—had not really left her body. These images she was seeing, the sounds she was hearing, the sensation of crunching gravel underfoot and heat caressing her skin, all were being played inside her brain through her symbiotic interface. It could as easily be the fictional display of an AI running an entertain­ment ViRdrama, or the setting for a ViRcom meeting with someone.

  She opened her eyes. A tall, slender figure was approach­ing her from the shadows of the nearest of the alien struc­tures. Though she could see it only in silhouette at first, the movements were too much those of a human for it to be one of the Web machines. She stood her ground, watching as it drew closer.

  Then the figure walked into the brighter circle of light around Kara, and she gave a small, involuntary gasp. She recognized the lean features, the Confederation Navy uni­form, the erect bearing and manner… and she knew who had intercepted her, even if she didn’t understand the actual mechanics.

  The figure was Dev Cameron’s.

  Involuntarily, she shuddered. Though she’d worked with him before, she still hadn’t completely reconciled herself to the existence of this… being, a technological ghost, the ghost, in fact, of the man who once had been her mother’s lover, who was her half-brother’s father. During the last bat­tle between the rebel Confederation and the Imperium, twenty-seven years before, Dev Cameron had been physi­cally aboard a DalRiss cityship, helping to direct an assault against Imperial naval forces. His mind, however, had been dispersed across a vast network of Naga-DalRiss computers and communications nets, a program resident in the entire, interlinked network rather than on any one, limited node.

  When the DalRiss ship housing Cameron’s body had been destroyed, his body had been destroyed as well. Somehow, though, the mind had lived on, resident within the complex and interwoven communications links connecting the nodes of the rest of the DalRiss fleet, a high-tech ghost.

  “Hello, Kara,” Dev said, and his smile was most un-ghostlike, precisely the same as the one she’d seen in ho­lographs of the man made before his “death.” “I’m glad you came through Core Peek okay.”

  “What do you want with me?” she demanded. “Why did you…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Why did you abduct me?”

  Dev shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kara, if I startled you. But I needed to speak with you, and I needed to do it away from others who might be listening in. I’m currently resident in the data banks at Jefferson University, with access to New America’s planetary communications center, so when I felt your transmission coming through, I thought I would snag the opportunity to waylay you, as it were, and have a brief talk. Do you mind?”

  Yes, damn it, I do mind, she thought. I mind the arrogant presumption, I mind being mentally kidnapped, and I mind being scared half to death.

  “I2C links are supposed to be untappable. How the gok were you able to ‘waylay’ me? Sir.”

  “Please, I’m not a sir.” Dev’s face twisted as he spoke, though whether the expression represented wry amusement or displeasure, Kara couldn’t tell. She was beginning to re­alize that one reason she disliked having to deal with this… this ghost was the fact that in so many ways it was no longer human.

  Kara didn’t mind working with nonhumans, with genuine nonhumans, that is, the DalRiss and the Naga. They were strange, they thought in strange ways, and it was sometimes hard to understand them, even when the AI-directed trans­lation programs interfacing with them were apparently op­erating perfectly. Words and concepts like devotion, duty, mercy were quite different for the DalRiss than for most human cultures and were nonexistent for the Naga, who “thought” in many ways more like complex computers working in parallel than like humans. But they were alien. You expected that.

  Dev Cameron, though, had once been human… and the image he was projecting for her benefit now, that of a tall, young, gray-eyed, smiling human male, supported that idea. For over twenty-five years, however, he had existed as a complex software program operating within the confines of an alien symbiotic computer communications network. The world that network defined was a very large one, but she couldn’t understand just what it was he was experiencing. The Dev-ghost had tried to explain it to her once… “like swimming in an alien sea,” he’d said—but that told her very little. Once, Kara had downloaded herself into an Imperial computer network while engaging in a covert op­eration, and the sensory symbology being used there had been that of an underwater world. That had been alien in itself, and yet it had been designed by humans. An alien sea must be quite different, but Kara couldn’t understand what that difference might be.

  More than that, though, was the knowledge that the thing that Dev Cameron had become no longer thought like a human. Whether that was because his mind had changed over the past few decades, or simply because he’d experi­enced things no human had ever experienced before, she wasn’t sure. She did know that speaking with him, on any level and on almost any subject, frightened her.

  It was an emotion that she did not at all like.

  She was aware that Dev had been patiently waiting there as conflicting emotions had chased one another through her thoughts. It struck her that a moment or two for her, a hu­man, was actually a lot longer for Dev—who no longer relied on chemical reactions in the neuronal relay race that made up a given thought. She was pretty sure that he thought a lot faster than ordinary humans, though how much faster that might be she had no way of knowing.

  “Okay,” she said at last, when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to answer her. “What should I call you?”

  “How about Dev? That’s my name.”

  That was your name, she thought, but she didn’t verbalize it. “Okay,” she said. “Dev. How did you manage to kidnap me?”

  “I’d hardly call it kidnapping, Kara. It’s not like I’m holding you for ransom, after all.” He smiled, obviously trying to turn it into a joke.

  “Gok it, answer my question!”

  Dev looked startled, as though he was genuinely surprised at her anger. Suddenly he reminded her of Daren; both Cam­erons seemed to share an inability to… to empathize, to feel what someone else was feeling.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said finally. “The I2C is untappable, but I didn’t need to tap it. The main Confed­eration linksite for New America is at the University of Jef­ferson; incoming I2C comm
unications are downloaded here and then retransmitted to the rest of the planet by normal electronic feeds. As soon as the carrier signal alerting me here to your arrival was retransmitted from the university, I knew you were coming and, well, sidetracked you.”

  “Okay. That’s how. Now why?”

  He hesitated, as though considering how much to tell her… though his electronic thought processes were substan­tially faster than hers and any hesitation must be purely for show. Possibly, she thought, he did it to reassure her that he was still human. Too much of that kind of thinking was entirely too twisty for Kara’s peace of mind. It was better to accept everything at face value, rather than try to interpret each glance, expression, and nuance.

  “I saw the reports you transmitted a few hours ago,” he told her. “Both about Operation Core Peek, and the way­ward probe on the Gauss.”

  “What!—that stuff’s classified! Level Blue!” It wasn’t that she distrusted the Dev-ghost. Hell, his intervention with the newly awakened human Overmind had won the Battle of Nova Aquila and probably saved all of humankind.

  Her problem with Dev, she was pretty sure, arose from the fact that she couldn’t read him, couldn’t understand his motives or what he was thinking or why he was performing a particular action. If his thoughts really were significantly faster than hers, if he really had instant access to immense volumes of information, then holding a conversation with him was like talking with a smug and self-assured super genius; there was always the feeling that he was conde­scending to speak with you… and that he was speaking with you at all only for obscure and probably insulting rea­sons of his own.

  “I have the appropriate security clearance,” Dev said. His tone had taken on a slightly acid edge, as though he were lecturing a child. Or an overly officious bureaucrat. “Perhaps you should see it.”

  She was about to agree… but then she realized the fu­tility of demanding to see anything in a virtual environment which he controlled. In any case, Dev’s official clearance had to be a lot higher than hers. He’d been a senior officer within the Confederation almost thirty years ago, before his… death. It stood to reason that he would have access to stuff a mere striderjack captain didn’t even know existed.