Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “I’m not sure,” Elyria admitted, when he asked. “Baseline humans should be asleep for several hours, but your people have been meddling with your own bodies. And the gas wouldn’t affect a Confederation citizen at all.”

  “Then we kill him,” Joshua said. He stepped forward, ready to bring his foot down on the Scion’s throat. “There isn’t any other choice.”

  Elyria stared at him. “He’s harmless!”

  “He’s harmless now,” Joshua said. “When he wakes up, he won’t try to take us alive. We have to kill him now, while we have the chance.”

  Looking at her, he felt a sudden hot flash of envy. It was so easy for the Confederation; they didn’t have to destroy their foes and lay waste to their worlds to win. Their technology allowed them to take prisoners and isolate them permanently, if necessary, or keep criminals under control without having to risk other lives. And they didn’t have to worry about mad magicians who might be capable of so much more than rational magicians.

  Maybe they could have blocked the Scion’s access to his powers, or simply taken him into orbit, if they’d had a working shuttle. But they didn’t.

  “Leave him,” Elyria said, finally.

  Joshua swallowed hard, but obeyed as they continued to head further down the valley. The rain was starting to fall again, sending streams of water running past their feet as they walked onwards. Joshua glanced behind them nervously, realising that they were in danger of being struck with a flash flood, and then led her up the side of the valley. They would find it harder going to pick their way through the trees, but it would be safer than the valley if the rain kept falling.

  “Crap,” Elyria said, suddenly.

  Another flash of lightning blazed through the sky, revealing three more cloaked figures surrounding them. They had to have used very capable stealth spells, Joshua realised; he hadn’t sensed their approach... he realised his own mistake and swore out loud. Elyria had left enough of her blood back in the shuttle to allow a small army of Scions to track her.

  He lifted a hand, intending to cast a diversionary spell while shoving Elyria away from them, but it was too late. There was a single brilliant flash of light and the world plunged into darkness.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dacron was dreaming, or so he thought. Humans often had nightmares, but it wasn’t something an embodied AI experienced, not when AIs had no subconscious to provide the spur for bad dreams. But he was still having strange images flashing through his mind, images that brought with them an indefinable sense of dread. And then his eyes snapped open and he found himself looking up into the face of Master Faye.

  The magician looked... tired. No, Dacron realised, it was more than that. He’d been trying to use his magic to peer into Dacron’s mind, only to discover that most of his memories were flickering impressions of what it had been like to be part of the AI Gestalt. Even Dacron had trouble comprehending the memories and he’d been an AI. Master Faye would have been confronted with a blinding haze of endless thoughts and unlimited power. None of it would have made sense to him.

  “I am awake,” Dacron said. He had clearly been damaged, because part of him wasn’t sure if that was actually true. His body felt heavy, almost uncomfortable. “What have you done to me?”

  “You had a sensitivity to the magic field,” Master Faye said. He sounded very tired. “I have warded you to ensure that you cannot use magic in this room.”

  Dacron said a spell out loud. Nothing happened, not even the faint sense of mighty powers shifting around him when he intentionally mispronounced a handful of words. Master Faye gave him an odd look, and then smiled when he realised that his wards had worked. It struck Dacron that Master Faye hadn’t been certain that his spell would work, which was odd. Surely he’d know by now how to keep someone else from working magic...

  “It will all be over soon,” Master Faye added. “Your settlement has already been destroyed.”

  There was nothing in his voice to suggest that he was lying. “You are provoking people vastly more powerful than yourself,” Dacron said, calmly and rationally. “The Confederation covers a span of space you cannot even begin to imagine, with technology that can duplicate most feats of magic and weapons that can turn your entire star system into debris. What exactly do you hope to gain?”

  He studied Master Faye closely. The magician would also know, he suspected, that Dacron and the AIs had solved most of the mysteries behind the magic spells. Given time, he was sure that the AIs would find ways to magic-proof technology and allow the Confederation to operate on Darius without impediment. And then the whole social system that kept the Pillars on top would be broken, easily. Away from Darius, they would have as little power as the rest of the human race.

  “You must not be allowed to challenge stability,” Master Faye said, finally. “We have to prevent you.”

  “I would not describe your world as stable,” Dacron pointed out, mildly. At least he could ask the direct questions now. “Your history consists of islands of stability that inevitably collapse into chaos, while magicians struggle for power and the common folk keep their heads down. I would have thought that you would be glad of the chance to ensure that your people have a better life in the future.”

  “Stability must be maintained,” Master Faye said. “We must rule.”

  “But why must you rule?” Dacron asked. He kept his tone level. “Human history is full of groups who believed that greater strength gave them the right to rule. And groups who believed that people with one skin colour were superior to people with different skin colours. Your magic does not confer wisdom – and even if it did, would you still have the moral right to rule?”

  Master Faye studied him, thoughtfully. “Does your state not have a legend about mice attempting to bell the cat?”

  Dacron didn’t recognise the legend, so he shook his head. “The mice were afraid of the cat,” Master Faye said, sounding more normal, “so they had the bright idea of putting a bell around the cat’s neck to inform them when the cat was nearby. But then they had the problem of actually putting the bell on the cat’s neck without the cat’s cooperation.”

  “You mean that your Minors could not restrain you if you wanted to do something they didn’t want you to do,” Dacron said. It was an attitude thoroughly alien to the Confederation – but then, the average Confederation citizen was no more or less powerful than everyone else. “Can you not see that they need to make choices about their own destiny?”

  “Their choices are meaningless,” Master Faye said. “Stability must be maintained.”

  Dacron’s eyes narrowed. He should have seen it at once. “Who am I talking to?”

  Master Faye looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Your society has rules and yet the magicians are above the rules,” Dacron said. Joshua had been quite willing to violate taboos as soon as he’d come into his magic. “You shouldn’t have enjoyed several decades of unquestioned rule without a few hundred Scions coming to try to take the city from you.”

  “I am powerful,” Master Faye said, flatly.

  “But not powerful enough,” Dacron said. “Some outside force has been tampering with your society.” He smiled as he put the pieces together. “You have stability, but you never climb any higher along the scale of technological development. You have a tradition of cities being taken by force, yet the number of takeover attempts seem to be very small compared to the number of Scions. And yet there is a pattern in which successful cities eventually fall to mad magicians who undo all of the good work of their predecessors.”

  He paused. “And you have a taboo against breeding new magicians,” he added. He wasn’t sure how that fitted into the mystery, but he was sure he would solve it sooner or later. “I think we offered you something that convinced the outside force that we could no longer be tolerated on Darius.”

  Dacron’s smile widened. “What would happen, I wonder, if you and the other decent magicians were
rejuvenated?”

  “I control myself,” Master Faye snapped. “Do you think I would allow some outside force to control me?”

  “Your actions make no sense,” Dacron pointed out. “Even from a purely selfish point of view, lashing out at us is insane. You surely want to live for hundreds of years – and besides, you have to know that we would be able to crush you.”

  He met Master Faye’s eyes. “And I think you care about your people, more than you want to admit,” he added. “You take your duties seriously; you thrashed Joshua for violating their privacy... why would you do something that threatens them as well as yourself? Your actions make no sense.”

  Or perhaps they made too much sense, he thought, in the privacy of his own head. The damage inflicted on Joshua’s mind might just be a side-effect of part of his mentality interacting with the quantum foam. It was quite possible that the unknown force behind magic could interfere with the thoughts of magicians, maybe even control them directly, without ever having to show itself. Joshua demonstrated that magicians lost their scruples very quickly. Maybe they were guided in a specific direction... that might explain the oddly repetitive nature of Darius’s history.

  It was possible, he decided, for a human tyrant to resist his people wanting to be free. Human history was certainly full of examples, but Master Faye hadn’t seemed to be one of those. And the stability he kept mentioning wasn’t stable at all... not from a human point of view. An AI, on the other hand, would see a certain stability as the system played out, time and time again. No, he wasn’t entirely in his right mind.

  “Your theories are absurd,” Master Faye said, as he stood up. “Your people will be banished from our world.”

  Dacron looked up at him. “And how do you intend to enforce that?”

  Master Faye tossed him a single furious look and walked out, leaving Dacron alone. There was no time to waste; Dacron tested his chains and found that they were solid, too strong for even an enhanced human body to break. He pulled at them anyway, wondering if he could pull them right out of the wall, but nothing happened. The prison cell had clearly been designed to hold other magicians.

  Curious, he thought, as he started to concentrate. Humans spent most of their adolescence learning to control the biomods as they matured inside human bodies, but Dacron had had only a few short months to learn. Even so, mastering the use of painkilling nerves was simple enough. All he really needed to do was flex his thoughts in a simple manner...

  Bracing himself, feeling his arms going numb, he pulled at the chains as hard as he could. For a long moment, it seemed as if he would fail, and then he saw the bones in his hand start to break. A baseline human would have been screaming in pain, but Dacron felt nothing apart from the frozen numbness that had overwhelmed him. Once his hands were free, he stood up, silently relieved that Master Faye hadn’t thought to chain his legs. It would have made escape much harder.

  The outside door was made of wood, but one solid kick broke the lock, allowing Dacron to stumble out into the corridor. A servant turned to face him, her eyes going wide, just before he kicked her and sent her falling to the ground. He kicked her a second time, in the head, then stopped – dead. His biomods were already working to repair the damage he’d inflicted on his hands, but the serving girl had no such augmentation. Broken bones always took longer to heal than anything else, even with augmentation. The realisation that his human response – his very aggressive human response – had crippled an innocent victim chilled him to the bone. She might remain crippled for life.

  Or maybe there was another option. Outside the prison, his magic worked; rapidly, he cast a healing spell, followed quickly by a protective spell. Master Faye’s book of spells had outlined it for him, but the AIs had managed to improve it considerably. Unlike the one that Master Faye had shown him, it provided far more powerful protection and was a great deal harder to break. Dacron looked down at his hands, wondered vaguely how much damage he’d done to himself even with biomods designed to adapt quickly to changes in the local environment, and then realised that it didn’t matter. He had to get to the base... perhaps Master Faye had been lying when he said that it had been destroyed. Or perhaps Jorlem had managed to pull the team out in time...

  The main door refused to open when he pulled at it. Dacron kicked it savagely, but it didn’t break. An attempt to break one of the windows failed too; he generated a cutting spell that should have sliced through the wood and stone like a fission blade, but it simply bounced off Master Faye’s wards. Shaking his head, Dacron turned and headed for the stairs. He would just have to convince Master Faye to lower the wards, or kill him. Two more servants appeared, running towards him with deadly intent, and he stunned both of them with simple spells. They fell to the ground and he walked past them, knowing that Master Faye presumably already knew that he was free. It would be relatively simple to adapt the wards to warn their creator when someone attacked them.

  Master Faye appeared in the door to his study, staring at Dacron. “How... how did you escape?”

  Dacron smiled. Naturally, no one on Darius could have broken his own wrists to powder just to get out of a trap. Unless someone had remarkable pain resistance spells, ones that didn’t numb the mind as well as the body... he shook his head as he faced Master Faye. The Pillar looked badly shocked, one hand half-raised in a defensive posture, the other by his side, as if he were having problems coming to terms with the fact that Dacron was a very real threat. To him, Dacron had only spent a day learning magic.

  “I used magic,” Dacron said. It might as well have been magic, as far as the locals were concerned. Sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. “For all of your power, you do not really understand what you do when you work magic. We were able to deduce it.”

  Master Faye glared at him, but he didn’t attack. Of course he wouldn’t, Dacron realised; he believed that Dacron had broken out through using his own magic, an impossible feat for a normal magician. And it certainly looked as though he hadn’t broken his own bones to escape.

  “You cannot do this,” Master Faye said. He sounded dazed, so dazed that Dacron was unsure to whom he was talking. Dacron... or the hidden force behind magic. “You’ll destroy the stability of the world.”

  Dacron held out a hand, fighting down the purely human impulse to tear Master Faye limb from limb. “You can work with us,” he said, flatly. “We don’t need to fight.”

  He sensed the wave of magic a moment before it manifested, a sheet of fire that lashed out and raged against his protective bubble. Dacron watched it dispassionately as Master Faye barked a set of words, striking his wards time and time again. But there was nothing subtle in what he was doing, no attempt to hack his way past Dacron’s protections. He was just trying to batter them down through brute force.

  It said interesting things about the source of magic, Dacron decided, as he took a step forward into the raging firestorm. If it had been as smart as even the first AIs, it would have been able to realise that refusing to accept Dacron’s commands would have left him helpless and vulnerable. Instead, it seemed more inclined to work with the bigger picture, even if that meant that the smaller details were often ignored. But perhaps it was attempting to minimise its own involvement, for fear that it would be detected. Manipulation was never so effective if the intended target knew what was being attempted.

  Master Faye lifted his voice in a chant, summoning waves of energy out of nowhere to slam against Dacron’s shields – and then lash into the floor. It crumbled under Dacron’s feet, threatening to send him plummeting down, just before he jumped forward and crashed against Master Faye’s own wards, shoving the magician falling back into his study. Master Faye stumbled backwards, his eyes wide with fear and hatred, and scooped a stone knife off his desk. It plunged into Dacron’s protections and sliced through them, opening a gap for Master Faye to exploit.

  Dacron cancelled his protections and watched the knife fall to the ground, conjuring a second
set of wards before Master Faye could finish his killing spell. No human could have shaped the thought so precisely. He saw a brilliant flash of green light strike his shields and rebound off it, slamming into Master Faye. The magician fell backwards and hit the ground hard enough to shake the building. Dacron stepped forward and checked his pulse, keeping one hand on his throat just in case. There was no need to fear. Master Faye was very definitely dead. A quick check revealed no obvious cause of death.

  Standing up, Dacron walked over to the bookshelves and scooped up the books, carrying them in his arms as he left the room. Outside, the building was starting to shake; magic had held it together and those spells were falling apart with the death of their creator. Dacron jumped down through the hole created by the fight and headed for the door. Just before he could leave, he heard the sound of sobbing. Master Faye’s servants were no longer bound by control spells.

  “Take what you want and leave the building,” Dacron advised. Normally, there would be a new Pillar to lay claim to Master Faye’s wealth and property, but he didn’t intend to rule. The servants could take all the money they wanted, if they liked. “And then I suggest just letting it collapse.”

  He walked outside and headed towards the building Master Faye had assigned to them. It wasn’t a long walk through the city, even though he was carrying the books. People glanced at him in alarm – they hadn’t realised what had happened to Master Faye, at least not yet – but gave him a wide berth. He rounded the corner to see a pile of rubble where the building had been. The City Guardsmen were laying out the bodies with practised ease. Dacron watched, unable to believe his eyes, as he realised that Master Faye had butchered his own servants too. What had they done to upset him?