Tethered Worlds: Unwelcome Star

by Gregory Faccone

  "I can pull the specs from the thresh history cylinder."

  "Fast, Max. Something bad's coming our way."

  The formerly obsolete attack built quickly. Jordahk observed the animated icon. It resembled a series of dominoes felled by water. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth. It had a rhythm. He'd never seen its like.

  His intuition told him he needed to get to the drone core. He fired the moment the attack completed. Its style and detail were of an ornate, bygone era. On the grief VAD, the octal spotted it with a start. For a second, his disgusted expression faded.

  Like a wave of water, it slammed into the front of the drone mansion. But it wasn't water; it was the five lines of a musical clef densely populated with notes of blues and greens. It dissipated on the bricks in a splash of discordant sounds, but a ghostly afterimage, like an echo, passed through. It reconstituted within the mansion and continued toward the center repeating the ghostly process at every interior wall. All the while it emanated offbeat pseudo-musical strains. At the center it bounced off the drone's sanctum with a gonging note. It traveled faster now, back through the interior, out to the façade where the whole process started over.

  It rebounded back and forth between bricks and sanctum, resonating and gaining power. The surfaces weakened with each pass. The mansion interior was being razed.

  Jordahk was nearly as dumbfounded as his opponent. He heard sounds of amazement from the crowd. No doubt the sight was like seeing someone riding a horse at a lightwheel race, and winning.

  The octal unblocked audio and spluttered from the grief VAD. "What the drak is that?" His amazed expression softened the tone.

  "Continue to mute commands, but otherwise allow two-way, Max," Jordahk said before addressing the octal. "A rhapsody cascade."

  Cranium adopted a quizzical expression. "A rhapsody cascade?" He shook his head in disbelief. "What is this, a docuVAD on thresh history?" He barked muted commands. The rhapsody cascade continued unrestrained. After a moment, the octal's expression flattened. "Is there any way to stop it?"

  "You'd have to shutdown one of the bouncing surfaces to break the resonance, I think. This is my first experience with one of these, too." Despite the fact that Cranium was his opponent, Jordahk couldn't resist talking shop with someone skilled.

  The octal had no good choices. Take down the brick façade, and the mansion—or what was left of it—would be wide open. Leaving it up would buy time, but the entire structure was weakening with each bounce. He had to protect the sanctum, so he dropped the mansion façade.

  The rhapsody cascade had grown larger. Without the bricks for containment, it flooded outward for the last time, passing the mansion boundaries. It broke into its component notes, which flitted away in a bird-like twitter.

  The drone mansion was too weak to stand. With the octal's resources totally invested elsewhere, the interior walls could not be reinforced. They collapsed, leaving the drone's battered sanctum exposed.

  "Haven't seen one of those in action for decades," Max said. "Those were the days."

  Jordahk thought of Max's time with Otto Gen and was proud to be next in line, keeping a piece of history relevant. "We've got to examine that core set up." He sensed time running short. A core was the most solid element in a compy. Its density would take time to unravel.

  "You don't want me to concentrate on taking it down?"

  Jordahk closed his eyes, and flexed hot hands. "No. Bore a hole in the sanctum just big enough for probes."

  "He'll be able to close it pretty fast, and probes won't do much."

  "Apparently, he doesn't have the cycles to spare." Jordahk noticed the octal would no longer meet his gaze. "Plus, I want to look around while we still have time." Something was hidden; he could sense it.

  A few uncontested pinpoint attacks on the drone's sanctum bored an insignificant hole into which Max squeezed probes.

  "Map out every nook and cranny, Max. Quick."

  Core architectural information flooded in as Max's probes scattered. Then it stopped.

  "Wha—" Jordahk blurted. All of the core's features became opaque. "That's impossible. Is this what he's been calcing?"

  "No. His output's still absolute zero."

  Jordahk shook his head. Think. It had to be some sort of masking illusion.

  The octal stood silent, buying time. Sweat gave his tats extra sheen. He sensed his opponent's gaze and lifted his chin with a defiant expression that dared Jordahk to see through his trick.

  "We tried something like this once against father and Highearn," Jordahk said. "They unraveled it pretty fast with that weird probe technique. Remember it?"

  "I'm down to our last couple years of thresh history in active, and it's not there."

  Max was struggling to stay potent. As more and more of his systems were taken offline, the remainder were constantly reallocated and re-tasked.

  "I still have access to the history," Max said, "but I'll have to shuffle to refresh it."

  The octal was currently hitting them with exactly zero. Whatever his coming death strike was, it still required one hundred percent dedication.

  "Do it quick," Jordahk said. "We need that technique."

  Max's stats shifted. "Here it is: probe fractionation. If we have the seconds, I can pull it off."

  Jordahk watched how the technique worked. "He can't stop us until his monstrosity's done. Force as many probes as you can into the drone core while you calc the technique."

  Max sent more probes through the tiny hole. They sought out the farthest corners of the masked core. When the technique pinged ready, each probe flashed and split into eight microprobes. The tiny progeny spread even farther, filling the smallest junctions. Then they all melted abruptly. As they did, their expanding pools dissolved the masking technique.

  Jordahk realized finally what he'd wanted to find—the conduit connecting the drone and prime cores. Making it unusually wide could give the octal his tremendous yields. But that kind of width was exploitable. The octal had tried to hide it.

  "Max, I'm seeing two conduit entrances. They can't both be real."

  "I'm not sure either. The left has stronger infrastructure."

  Jordahk swiped his brow, his hand coming away wet. The left did seem more likely. "Did he anticipate we'd see through the masking trick?" he mused.

  Concentration-breaking alarms blared. Jordahk only allowed the direst alerts to sound so loudly. His time for thinking through the conduit conundrum was over.

  Every human and AI aboard the Monte Crest focused on a fat icon moving across the street toward Max. It was an old-fashioned bomb shape marked with an equally old-fashioned radiation symbol.

  Jordahk blinked and gawked. "An, e-nuke?"

  The term repeated like a wave through the shocked onlookers. Whatever they expected, whatever they hoped for, no one anticipated this. E-nukes weren't prohibited, but they were considered bad form. Creating them was difficult, and their destruction was indiscriminate. An e-nuke was rarely seen outside octal gang wars.

  The sheer mass of the black shape bent Max's remaining interior walls. Information flashed quickly as the AI scrambled to protect systems.

  Instinct trumped Jordahk's outrage. He leaped to frantic action, and a decision based on intuition rather than evidence. "Mark the conduit entrance on the right! Yes, the unlikely one." Scant seconds remained to help Max brace for impact. "Pull this back into the core. Were going to need it. Forget about those." Desperate choices all.

  An e-nuke was like a rhapsody cascade in its old school theatrics. When Max's interior walls bent to the breaking point, a dazzling flash emanated from nearly every VAD. It dissipated, revealing a yellow sphere of destruction expanding in every direction.

  The octal lowered his head. He sub-vocalized something for Jordahk's ears only. "I didn't want it to play out this way."

  Then, as if the sound actually took longer to arrive, a loud thrum filled the room. The leading edge of the sphere flooded every open space. Every exposed p
robe was incinerated. The indiscriminate yellow wall of destruction slammed into constructs on both sides of the street. The octal's prime mansion façade shattered in an explosion of ebony bricks.

  Even a sanctum couldn't withstand the devastation wreaked upon it by the direct hit of an e-nuke. Max's remaining interior walls melted away in layers. An e-nuke tweaked valence bonds, causing true and permanent damage. The only options were to shunt the destructive power or shut down impacted systems.

  The octal chose not to save the drone by shutting it down. Instead, he used every last bit of its computational power to protect his prime side.

  The e-nuke's power atomized the drone's perforated sanctum, revealing the spherical core. It deformed from the intense blast pressure. Jordahk had never seen an AI die this way. If any personality remained in the lobotomized drone, and it was anything like Max, this was a welcome final release.

  The drone core squashed into an egg shape. Hairline fractures spread. It kept processing to the end when it gave out a sickening squawk. A crack split into a gaping fissure, and the core was rent asunder. It blackened and faded, totally inert. The power of the multi-core violator AI was broken.

  Now it was one-on-one. Jordahk's sanctum was failing. Both opponents lost ground to the continuing blast wave. Sporadic VADs on either side of the thresh ball turned to noise and blinked out.

  "The sanctum's not going to hold," Max said. He sounded stoic. The last of it dissolved away in flaky debris leaving Max's core exposed to the direct onslaught.

  "A smelting e-nuke!" Jordahk couldn't help expressing exasperation. He had to hold out. The octal was also getting crushed, the destruction waves atomizing everything down to his inner mansion walls. "Do we have enough infrastructure left to lay pipe to the cylinders?"

  After a short delay and uncharacteristic electronic sounds that made Jordahk uneasy, Max answered with a distorted voice. "I can do it."

  Both AIs were shutting down exposed surfaces in layers as they overloaded to prevent permanent damage. "All right," Jordahk said, "the number cruncher first. Hurry."

  The pipe completed, and destructive force poured into the number cruncher cylinder. It was a small drain trying to handle the volume of a lake.

  Max configured the cylinder to last as long as possible. "It's approaching valence tweak."

  "Let it burn." Jordahk sounded a little resigned himself. "Ready the next pipe."

  With a flash and a glimmer that ran from top to bottom, the number-crunching cylinder failed permanently. No longer shunted, the e-nuke's force melted away more layers of Max's core. Everything that gave him personality was nearly exposed. Then the e-nuke hit the second pipe.

  "I know you don't want to lose our thresh cylinder," came Max's modulated voice. The cylinder was dispersing as much destructive power as possible, but it too, would soon fail. "Let me shut it down before valence tweak."

  Jordahk liked that gift from his father, but Max was more important. He blinked, glancing past all the VADs. Out in the real world, everyone was on edge. The situation and the crowd could break either way. He knew Aristahl was counting on him. This encounter was going to define his future, for better or worse.

  "Let it fail. But after the top valence tweaks, shut it down. Maybe Barrister can restore some of it."

  The thresh cylinder glowed brightly, then failed with a glimmer. It had done its job. The blast continued to burn away Max's outer core, forcing more systems offline. Mercifully, the torrent ebbed.

  Apparently, the octal did not have cylinders to absorb excess energy. By the time the destruction relented, his mansion was gone. His sanctum was the new front line.

  A sigh of relief passed through man and machine, even the octal. But not the splotched bruiser. The time pinged eight minutes, and Jordahk was still in the thresh. The wager board highlighted Mr. Splotch in red. His entire stake was lost.

  Few wagers remained unresolved. The hands foreman had insurance covering his stake if neither opponent capitulated. Of course, Aristahl and Jordahk's bets remained. If the battle continued just 60 seconds more, all wagers would be fulfilled. The thresh would end. Jordahk and Max could call this one—a win?

  Cranium tried to ignore the bruiser, whose red splotches and flexing hands portended unpleasant consequences. That was coming no matter what.

  The octal's angry expression flattened. "Not bad, grime." The derision was gone from his voice. "An unfortunate delay for me, but still not enough to save you." Yellow probes pounded onto Max's core.

  "Fight them," Jordahk said. Max had neither the resources to defend his core for 60 seconds nor the power to take down the octal's remaining structure.

  "Should we hot block?" Max asked. That was a last-ditch active defense into which every last cycle was poured.

  "No, not yet." The marker out in space where the drone's core used to be caught Jordahk's eye. He knew Max always kept Otto Gen's favorite static torpedo specs active. It was an AI personality quirk that humans would call sentimentality. "Do you think you can calc up Otto Gen's torpedo?"

  After a slight delay, Max's modulated voice said, "It'll take about twelve seconds at current load, and I won't be able to defend."

  "Go. It might end up buying us time."

  The old icon filled sporadically. Considering how the octal was blindsided by the rhapsody cascade, Jordahk suspected the old torpedo would be equally unfamiliar. The octal didn't waste time calcing something big. He pressed with a stream of small attacks once Max's defense dropped.

  First yellow probes, then a couple of pulses smashed into Max's dense core, penetrating the surface. Jordahk's plan wasn't going to work. All their fighting would lead to an ambiguous loss. It wasn't right. Then the torpedo pinged ready.

  Jordahk jumped at his last gambit. "All right, Max, full defense. Lay a hot block, and make it hold! I'll fly the torpedo in."

  In specialized scenarios, an admin flying an attack manually actually penetrated farther than an AI. Artificial personalities acted on experience and data, whereas a human's snap intuition statistically avoided more traps. The first place Jordahk's intuition was going to pay off, or not, was his guess about the conduit. Either he was going to fly that torpedo straight into the real deal or a dead end.

  The torpedo launched with a virtual jolt, and a VAD hemisphere appeared around him. It compressed more than 180 degrees of computer world into his vision. Though still an abstraction, the representation was more starkly computer-like, devoid of the mansions veneer. Jordahk maneuvered his hand, and the torpedo followed suit. The old school attack burned phosphorescent blue, leaving a long streak behind.

  He liked virtual flying. The acrobatic maneuvers were a lot more dramatic, and easier on his stomach. Flying through the black space of offline compy, he approached the star of light that was the marker. On either side of him a few white probes pulled alongside. Those wingmen were all Max could spare, but at least he wasn't flying alone.

  The torpedo plunged into the marker. A probe raced ahead and expended itself on the wall at the end of the short passage. The wall shattered into virtual shards. Jordahk sped through the debris and beheld a long, glowing tunnel.

  "I was right."

  Jordahk called for a computer world rear view. In it, Max's core hung like a blue moon in space. One reddened section was pounded relentlessly by ramming probes and exploding pulses. Debris tumbled into space. Suddenly a glowing blue-white patch covered the entire damaged area.

  "Max's hot block," Jordahk mused to himself. As if to confirm, one of his probe wingmen faded away. Max was pouring every cycle left into it. The assault on the hot block eased up. "He's finally concerned about me."

  Glowing yellow cubes tumbled down the tunnel. Jordahk maneuvered the old heavy torpedo with abandon to avoid impact and premature detonation.

  The communication buffers between the opponents were breaking down. "Give it up, grime," a condescending voice said. "You're never going to make it."

  The octal no longer bothered to mute hi
s commands. Jordahk knew what was coming next. A squadron of yellow probes raced straight for him. One of his three remaining wingmen scrambled ahead and took out a number of them in suicidal impact. Jordahk careened wildly around more cubes and dodged all but one of the intercepting probes.

  It impacted with a virtual jounce, but the torpedo did not detonate. He kept his speed up despite a thickening slalom of obstacles. A small indicator popped onto his virtual display. The prime core was growing larger, and numbers ticked down.

  "Hang in there, Max." Jordahk's AI had stopped talking, but he knew it was watching.

  The buzz of the octal's commands grew more desperate. A red warning circle blinked around a target racing to meet Jordahk. He put the torpedo into a dive and pulled up, practically scraping the tunnel bottom. Above him, Max directed the last probe wingman into the oncoming pulse.

  The collision caused a powerful detonation in the confined tunnel. Jordahk was buffeted as the blast front hit him. He struggled to maintain control, and still his torpedo did not detonate.

  "Veritas! They don't make them like this anymore." It didn't have the explosive yield of a modern torpedo, but it was tough.

  The conduit was breaking apart from the shock wave. Like a slow chain reaction, the tunnel fractured into cylindrical sections on either side of the explosion. Jordahk's speed was just enough to stay ahead of it.

  "What the hell kind of torpedo is that?" After a pause, the octal continued with exasperation. "Did you raid a museum for this thresh?"

  The distance ticker continued to wind down. Jordahk saw the growing sphere of the octal's prime core. The tunnel ran unimpeded past all of the mansion's defenses right into its heart. He just needed to hold it together for a few more seconds.

  The annoying yellow cubes rearranged themselves like a tube around his torpedo. It cut into Jordahk's maneuvering room. Before he could swerve out, a pulse bore straight into him.

  "This is it."

  With a scintillating flash the virtual flying hemisphere blinked out. Jordahk was back before his shrinking sea of VADs. The conduit where he flew was displayed as a thick, glowing pipe penetrating his opponent's prime core. The leading edge of his static torpedo explosion traveled down it.