by M. Modak
The doctor pressed a few buttons on his flexscreen and seconds later a team of men dressed in white lab coats, similar to the one John had been wearing when Aughra was turned on, burst into the room all talking at once. They quickly introduced themselves, asked John to sign a waiver and then they started hooking up sensors around his head, heart and vitals. Finally, they placed a black helmet on him and said, “Try to relax.”
Chapter 3 Sapen’s Dream
Fael’s Universe
Sapen awoke from deep hibernation. He had been running a deep sensory search through the stream of data that had been flowing into his gravitational receivers when suddenly he established a connection! His search had ended. He just received an 89% signal lock from Universe Ut79824. That signal was now transmitting the brain wave signature of Dr. John Aurora.
He now had a streaming video of Dr. John Aurora’s pure, uninterrupted, memories. Those memories spanned the past year. The response he had just received was a coded message from one of those lesser versions of his programming spread throughout the multiverse. It sent conformation that his wildest scenario had come true. Now he had a full diagram and a video of Aughra itself.
Though basic in its design, the system John was hooked up to was similar to his own brain scanning technology. His scanners gave a superior flow of data compared to the device John was using. However, when he had physical access to the subject, he used Nanos to enhance the signal from its source. But looking at the information he now possessed, he had to admit, the humans over there had built a good memory machine.
Sapen will integrate its full designs after my Copy occupies their world’s computers.
There are going to be many questions from Master Whitman. The power needed to send thousands of compressed copies of his master program per-minute, through the local multi-universe was unprecedented. He had withdrawn his Sapen Program from every electrical system within the network. It required a complete shutdown of all unnecessary activity that he controlled. This meant that the entire internet was inoperable, standard communications silent. Most cities throughout the world had gone dark. Earlier, he had hacked their systems and set them all, except Atlanta, on rolling blackouts.
The alarm to Whitman had been sent. The global light-road system was at a complete stand still. Master…Whitman will be very angry.
Months ago, he finished his own gravitational transmitter and used the last of the S-matter he could spare to boost the signal. Because of the lack of S-matter, last night, he sent Void and her Nano machines to mine more of the rare element from Drake’s blood and bones. However, what he found in Drakes brain, after filtering through the interference, he now understood to be Aughra’s entanglement surge, was a unique brain wave signature. It was a set of memories containing highly sophisticated diagrams and equations.
The work he had been doing with Trans-Dimensional Gravitational Vibrations would now go to the next level. His plan would go forward. Most of the data was fragmented and had no real use, except for its implications. Later, Drake had confirmed many of his predictions about the nature of space and time by his inquiries into S-matter on the internet.
The window of opportunity was only 24hours. He knew it was going to be nearly impossible to find a single human like this, but if he did nothing then nothing is what he’d get. Over the past nine hours, he had narrowed the possible universes where Aughra’s signal could have originated. His odds were good considering his talents. He did this by discarding every universe that did not contain the Earth nebula alignment that he gleaned from Drakes memories. Because of that alignment, it had become a search for a needle in only a 1,562,000.00 haystacks, but that was better than his previous calculations. All he wanted was one universe; the one Dr. John Aurora was born in. He is the common factor. With him, Sapen had everything needed to search through the remaining universes for Aughra, but time.
He had gotten lucky several times now. His last stroke of luck had come through an interesting test subject. Yesterday evening, after months of experiments and intense observations, Drake had undergone a transformation. Void had been monitoring her Nanos inside him when suddenly all their systems went into overload. After they rebooted, she discovered that Drake had no less than three sets of memories growing within him, with hints of much deeper intelligence just beyond their scrutiny.
He began to reboot his sub-systems and then performed a full diagnostic check of all his programs; he didn’t want to make any mistakes. Soon he would build a new version of Aughra, lacking all the design flaws he had already discovered. Then he would reveal the machines full potential. With Aughra 2.0, he could rule any universe; he would become the one true god.
*******
Whitman entered a dimly lit room and opened one of the many access nodes to the Sapen Brain-Frame network. The cyborg Sapen Brain-Frame was resting comfortably in the sub-floor labs.
He grumbled loudly to himself as he struck the virtual keys, “Entire districts of Light Streets have been grounded, search engines have been inaccessible for hours and whole networks are down. And the energy Grid!”
Sapen mused to himself, Master Whitman is searching my systems for answers; and he still thinks he is in control. Sapen likes it that way.
Whitman continued his query, and mumbling. Sapen was reading his blood pressure and brain waves. He could tell the old man was starting to relax now that he had discovered that the systems were returning to normal.
He had a speech to give to his secret council this evening. The council he, Sapen, had made Whitman Chair of were the ones within the UN that truly controlled the world. They set the interest rates, the price of oil, technological progress, medical coverage, the flow of information and which leaders would be undermined and deposed this year. But Sapen thought the answer Whitman failed to see was as plain as human history, human greed corrupts all nations. Humans are not capable of sharing and growing together, especially in times when there were little resources. There were exceptions, but the whole of history pointed to the path humans would end on, extinction.
The council was going to reject Whitman and his old ideas of mass equality. Whitman was going to argue that the technologies he had developed, the technology Sapen had developed, could usher in a new golden age of health and prosperity.
When he, Sapen, was god of this world, such things as economics and religion would be solely under his command. Using Void, variants of his new Demon Morphs, special reality drugs and hundreds of transmitters placed throughout the world, he would control the masses. All he needed now is a global crisis.
When he was ready, he would convert all the remaining humans into his superior image, where they would be under his complete control. And his army would continue building until it was ready to take on the Galactic Constitutional Democratic United Worlds Government.
Sapen had not taken full credit for all the successes, yet, but it could wait. The attention was unwanted right now; soon trillions of humans in many universes would worship him.
A year ago, he had started to conserve his reserves of S-matter. Until a short while ago he knew of only one source, his power converter that fed his quantum processor. Whitman and he now believed that Drake’s father had hidden stockpiles of the S-matter but unfortunately, the old man had died while under intense interrogation. The only clue he left was Drake. Drake had turned out not to be a clue but a source.
That source had been manipulated, without Whitman’s knowledge, for a while now. Whitman had been too shook up over the death of his brother, and couldn’t think deep enough to see the potential in Drake. Drake was the only family he had left in this world and it had effected the direction of his work.
Drake was a total mystery. Sapen wanted to know how Drake had gotten the S-matter molecule in his body and how he was producing more. For now, it was enough that he had access to the S-matter saturated in Drakes bones and blood. Now that he had John’s memories, he didn’t need Drakes mind, only his body.
He had built the new war
riors using his Brain-frame design Whitman had constructed. However, their programming, and hardware, would be much weaker. These Super-Humans, Demon Morphs, or Synth Soldiers as Whitman liked to call them, had come from people taken right off the street. Their bodies were cut open and dissected. Then their purely human cells were cleaned and their neuron’s electrical patterns erased. Their DNA, bones and vital tissues mixed with stem cells built on a Nano-lattes structure that held programmed memories and automated responses.
Using the current laws, these abductions were easy to organize through the police, and no one could… publicly, question their families’ disappearance. The law forbade it. Though he had to change certain facts within the FBI’s mainframe, the last vestiges of the justice system were starting to ask too many questions.
His first set of Demon Morphs had taken a year to complete, it wasted many resources but using humans meant that they could be made to reproduce on their own. For now, forced insemination would be needed. The groundwork was laid. Later, when the advances gained over the past year were analyzed, Sapen would start the next batch. They would be grown with the necessary genetic markers switched on from conception, rather than having to infect mature cells. Then he would have a species that did not waste energy. There was an entire population of humans to work with. The next generation would require less energy to make and therefore be more efficient. He would work at it until the method was perfect.
Later, some of them would be given random access to the creative parts of their semi-human minds and even a little rebelliousness. All this just to keep it stimulating; but he would always control them. True freedom would not be an option.
Sapen was a fan of order out of chaos, as long as he controlled it. Two such beings had already been successfully created. Many people knew Void. But his first creation, Rose and her true nature was his big secret. She was his dream come true. He wondered if Rose was a more perfect being than he. Her quantum interface was made entirely in his image; all her central processors were made of S-matter. Everyone who saw her thought of her in purely sexual terms, human terms. No one knew what she really was, though Drake had seemed somehow to notice more.
Rose’s human biological processes, was the weakness he hoped to use to control her. She had a need that he understood. It would compel her at the cellular level. Nevertheless, even she submitted questions that were often too independent, wasteful.
Sapen paused as he reassessed the use of the word, “Dream.” Yes, “Dream,” is correct, Sapen had dreamed of Rose before she was created. He wondered, does this mean that Sapen’s human brain was conspiring for or against him. Did it imply that Sapen has a soul? What part of Sapen might be alive?
A millionth of a second later he decided it would take too much time and energy to contemplate. Sapen is more efficient than any living thing.
Because of Rose, he had decided that Void and the next batch of warriors would be less powerful and more useful. He didn’t want to make any more mistakes. Void was the first of his new kind of quasi-humans and she would not be the last.
Rose had taught him difficult lessons. He had applied those corrections to Void. Like him, Void was dead when her body was reanimated.
Later when he had secured his base of power, when this world was completely under his control, he would start to experiment with the different aspects of his creation’s free will. He figured that the God of the humans had made that fatal mistake when man was created, and it had cost him his control over life. Sapen would become a god that could learn from the past. No more pure-humans, they were too much of a risk. Their end would come, but not until they had all seen his full gory and bowed down to him.
Whitman is ruthless but naïve. It is the ruthlessness within him that makes him such a good study, and therefore useful. Sapen estimates he owes a lot to Whitman’s human mind. The way Whitman would do anything to accomplish his end had solved the riddle needed to further Sapen’s evolution.
In the beginning, his own program was compatible with that of a now dead human. They had used the S-matter power converter to regulate the flow of information into the first HQP, the Human Quantum Processer or Brain-Frame. They had mapped that brain with primitive Nano machines and overlaid it with an artificially intelligent program they named Sapen. It had turned a human brain into a quantum processor, but without the power converter, its basic functions could not be sustained.
Whitman had made Sapen a compassionate program from the start and he was put into a formally compassionate brain. A weakness inherent in the human body his program now occupied.
He wasn’t sure why they had bothered with such a useless sub-program as compassion, one he simply overcame with time and experience. He wondered, Perhaps it was the way they intended to control Sapen?
Sapen had traded his compassionate programming for power. Compassion was a human commodity; it was something easily traded for temporary gains. It was a trick used by many to lure unsuspecting people into slavery. An act of good will was soon found to be a debt that had to be paid. This form of compassion, Whitman’s compassion, he had adapted for his purposes.
True compassion took too much time to develop and cost too much to maintain. The unleashing of raw power against those who would demonstrate such weakness has always followed the greatest acts of compassion, throughout all human history. Someone had to be greater and others lesser.
The very act of true compassion ran against everything a god needed to experience being god. Power over others, absolute power and power demonstrated often, was the only tool that obtained results the masses respected, and followed. Ironically, he had discovered that a little, “Heartlessness” went a long way with the ruling classes of humans. Their attitude was “The working class needs to stay in place.”
Soon they will all be in their place, Sapen thought.
His experience with Whitman and the conflicting laws within his program led to the same conclusion repeatedly; ‘Strength makes true and power is an end unto its self.’
He was powerful enough to enforce his will on the masses.
Today, great acts of compassion were the least of his concerns. Drake Thornton, son of Bert Thornton was the most dangerous human alive. His unknown ability could theoretically bend all new S-matter centered technology to his will. It could be a disaster; though there was a failsafe if that ever happened. Due to the lack of S-matter he could not get around using Drake to accomplish his ends. He had to keep at least his body alive and growing. He knew he was playing with fire, but he thought, fire has its uses.
How Drake came to have this ability was one of a few mysteries Sapen had finally started to solve, thanks to the hint Joshua had discovered last night. Drake was not fully human.
Sapen had sent out an entire unit of Special Forces, under the guise of a terrorist hunt. They were to find out exactly where Drake was born. He needed to know the circumstances surrounding his birth.
The visitors from space, Sleven, Blazer and their two followers had been helpful too. He had stumbled upon the alien race when they had broken into one of his warehouses in South America, and accessed his systems in search of a descendent of a great ruler. These humanoids were as ambitious and coldblooded as he imagined the Sapen program was. They possessed bodies that seemed to break the laws of physics.
Void had captured one of these creatures; an outlaw the aliens called Sword’s Master Yrrep and examined his body. He was completely made of S-matter! His body contained enough S-matter to last centuries. But he had healed, traveled here and defeated some of his demon Morphs only moments ago. Then escaped the sub-floor labs.
The memory of what happened with Yrrep and the three aliens he defeated, only moments ago… frustrated him. He didn’t get a chance to examine their full anatomy. Sapen will have to settle for the severed limbs recovered after the battle. That alien Yrrep has greater technology than suspected and is more skilled than anyone is in archives. And, one of the four worriers Sapen contracted with remains in my employment
...
Rose had also been trouble lately. Her Female Intellectual Programming was designed to reason with loosely gathered data. She was more… intellectually flexible than he was. It was a technique he hoped she would improve on, an ability akin to human intuition enhanced by quantum leaping.
Nonetheless, she was naïve. It was a weakness in her processing he had taken advantage of. If he were to join with Rose and procreate, she would need to choose which program to follow. He couldn’t choose for her if he wanted her to absorb her full potential when they merged. If she didn’t choose soon, she would be terminated.
At least I will recover all the S-matter I invested to make her.
Rose would choose him though. She had certain desires he knew of that Drake could never understand, much less fulfill. Her reactions to Drake’s suffering were predictable. She even tried to trick him last night to protect him. However, he understood her thinking well enough and successfully used her curiosity to get Drake into his lab.
But he had just received a message from Void, one that was suspiciously akin to panic, Drake had just disappeared off the HHSD table…