by Al Macy
“Are there any secrets he has? Any names I could use?”
“He has three parents, all of whom rejected him. Their names were Sadonis, Balonis, and Sirrrkt. Roll the ‘r.’”
Cronkite said, “You have one minute.”
I slapped my head repeatedly with my palm. “Think, think, think … Okay, I’ve got something. Not great. Time for some playacting. Martin, you’re Saxtoden. I’m me. Oh, crap, this is so lame.” I laid it out and told him what to say.
We began the transmission. I stood next to Martin with my hands behind my back, head down.
Martin, as Saxtoden, began. “Greetings, Saxtoden. I’m speaking to you from a parallel universe. I am you in this other universe, and things are going extremely well here.”
In the video we received, Cronkite was stationary, totally frozen. Was there a technical problem?
Martin continued. “I have here with me my personal slave, Jake Corby. He got control of the sphere and tried to kill you. Sorry about that. You and I are leaders. Just think how proud Sadonis, Balonis, and—”
The three of us slammed into the side of the sphere. I walloped my head and the lights went out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I woke up and looked around. Nothing. Total darkness. Sweat stung my eyes. I breathed in fire, as if I were in a runaway steam bath. With a fever.
Where was I? Weightless. So tired. Wake up!
The humidity made the air feel like a burning liquid. The place smelled like a locker room.
It all came back to me. Cronkite had attacked us. He broke our sphere. “Martin! Alex! Sphere!” Nothing.
I bumped a wall and pushed off, flailing my arms and legs. “Guys, wake up! Where are you?”
My head cracked into a wall. I pulled my feet around and pushed off. My hand brushed some damp fabric, but I couldn’t change direction.
I hit the opposite wall, pushed off again, and smacked into one of the twins. As we drifted together, I grabbed his wrist and tried for a pulse. Nothing. I felt his neck and found a pulse there.
I slapped him. “Alex! Martin!” I pinched his nose, put my mouth over his, and inflated his lungs. Not so easy when weightless. Again.
He coughed and took in a huge breath. “Jesus! What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
Knocking into the other twin, I snagged his shirt. He had a pulse but was unresponsive.
The first twin coughed some more. “Jake, why is the sphere off?”
“Cronkite did something to us. How do we turn it back on again?”
“We just have to wait. The sphere may reboot or it may not. Why is it so damn hot?”
I worked on his twin. CPR in microgravity in the dark. Was it getting even hotter?
The lights came on. Good! Okay, Magenta-Martin was the one who had recovered consciousness.
Cold air blasted over us. The walls dissolved.
“Aargh!” Martin and I screamed because the sun filled most of our view. Almost as big as Earth seen from the space station, its surface was mottled orange, yellow, and white. Some eruption thing extended from an edge.
Martin yelled, “Sphere, get us out of here!”
He needn’t have said that. We were already accelerating away from the sun. The crash couches came out. I strapped Alex in. Once we were all installed, the sphere accelerated even more.
Martin said, “Sphere, back to Earth. Maximum speed.”
“Message to base.” I cleared my throat.
Martin put his hand on my arm. “They won’t get it for eight minutes or so.”
I nodded. “Base. This is the sphere. Evacuate the White House. Cronkite may be headed there.” Maybe he hadn’t figured things out yet.
“So, I guess our charade failed.” I wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt.
“Did you really think it would work?”
“I don’t know. We had to try something.” I took a breath and looked over my shoulder. “I guess he tried to throw us into the sun.”
“Almost succeeded. I feel lousy.” Martin rolled his shoulders.
In his crash couch, Alex threw out his arms and coughed. “Jesus! What happened?” He leaned off his couch and looked behind him. “Whoa!”
I filled him in, and the three of us debated Cronkite’s current state of knowledge. Coming closer to Earth, the sphere displayed a live Cronkite broadcast from the Oval Office. He sat behind the desk, flags behind him on either side. A sign on the front of the desk read “The United World States of Cronkite.” The camera zoomed in.
This was unpleasant: reliving the old nightmare.
He removed his black-framed glasses. “Greetings again, dear citizens of my Earthly domain. I apologize for my absence, and I found that while I was gone, you had a threat from that sniveling coward, Jake Corby.”
Okay, so he thought my double from Human-2 had attacked him. No indication he was aware of the universe split.
“I don’t know how he got a spaceship, but he attacked me.” He giggled. “I can assure you he is now feeling the burn. He did me a favor. He showed me I’ve been underestimating the resistance movement. So now … now …”
His hand crept to his neck, and he furrowed his brow. He coughed, a sound that extended into a hiss. A fog enveloped his whole body, which shrunk in on itself. His head fell forward onto the desk with the noise of a dry sponge tossed to the floor. Saxtoden’s true form replaced Walter Cronkite’s body. He no longer looked like a ladybug. He looked like a dried mushroom. Cronkite was dead.
“Nice work, Martin!” I put up my hand.
We slapped high fives.
He nodded. “A dose of his own medicine, huh? Man, that was sweet.”
Just as Cronkite had murdered billions by covering the world with nanobots keyed to human DNA, we dispersed a gazillion bots keyed to his. Martin had dispersed them as we sped through DC. Apparently one or more found its mark.
I clapped my hands and rubbed them together. “And the best part is—”
Alex and Martin sang out in unison, “Now we have two spheres!”
* * *
“Dr. Marbecka, we’ve finished the analysis of the enemy modules from the damaged ship.” The announcement startled Marbecka out of her sound sleep.
She opened her eyes and yawned. She’d finally managed to grab some sleep time in her quarters on the zealo ship, Raptor.
“Marbecka, are you there?”
“Yes. Sorry, Jobex. I’ll meet you in the lab.”
She spent a few minutes preening her feathers, something she’d neglected recently, and then flew down the passageway and into Raptor’s main lab. “What have we got?”
“Jake was right. It is indeed a machine intelligence. An AI. We’re lucky. It turns out there’s a high degree of redundancy in the coding. For example, both the modules we recovered include software for many different modules in the system. That’s helped our analysis.”
“Is that egg-shaped craft part of the same machine intelligence as the one we destroyed?”
Jobex bobbed his head. “Yes. We think the machines are as diverse as organic life on Earth. These machines have been developing, evolving for a long time. In their universe.”
“You don’t mean evolving in the sense—”
“I do. Think about organic evolution. It depends in part on random mutations, the vast majority of which are disadvantageous. But sometimes, like with the zealo mutation or the human sickle-cell mutation, the mutations can afford advantages. Creatures with those advantages survive.”
Marbecka turned her head away, skeptical. “And the machines—”
“Instead of mutations, they have software bugs. As with mutations, a bug will almost always be a bad thing. However, some small number of bugs turn out to provide an advantage. As a result, a unit with that bug will be more likely to survive. Survival of the fittest. And the machines create new versions of themselves.”
Jobex continued, “For example, a software bug might make a machine more aggressive or result in s
ome strange new weapon. As a result, that machine could destroy its competitors and be more likely to pass on its code. Over millions of years—”
“This is bad. We could be dealing with a huge variety of different machine intelligences.”
“Exactly, but it gets worse.” Jobex ruffled his neck feathers. “Our autocorrect often takes spelling errors and corrects them into meaningful words. You can type garbage, and the autocorrect may change it into something meaningful, right?”
Marbecka stared straight ahead.
“In the same way, they have an algorithm-autocorrect feature that makes meaningful code from garbage. The result is powerful. But just as our autocorrect changes the meaning of a sentence in bad or humorous ways, that can happen with their code.”
“So, there isn’t some central intelligence.” Marbecka waggled her head.
“We’re not sure,” Jobex said, “but they do seem to be acting with a common goal, like bees in a beehive.”
“Got it. These things are multiplying like a plague of bacteria and they’re working together. But what are they trying to do, and why?”
“They are trying to destroy all the universes, and they’re doing it simply because there was a bug somewhere that was amplified by autocorrect.”
“For no reason at all.”
“Right.” Jobex bobbed his head. “It’s just a mistake.”
Marbecka took a deep breath. “What was that phrase Jake used? Damn you, autocorrect!”
* * *
Barely an hour after Cronkite died, I said farewell to my family on the roof of the Hotel Monaco, the two spheres hovering above me. There was no time to waste. At first, Sophia crossed her arms and refused to say goodbye. I’m not sure whether she was angry at me for leaving or felt that if she didn’t say goodbye, I couldn’t leave.
She finally relented, and I kissed away her tears and promised to be back soon.
I stepped into my sphere and flew in formation with the twins’ craft to the summit of Mount Rainier. I paratransitted first—I wanted to prepare the dinobirds for the appearance of Alex and Martin. I guided my sphere into the device, thinking about my trips back and forth.
The first trip with Marie and Boonie, then back to my home. The second trip, to the dinobird’s outer space, then back to get the sphere. Now the third, and hopefully final trip, to help the dinobirds defeat the attacks that were preventing them from fixing the universe problem. I couldn’t wait to be home for good.
The paratransit experience wasn’t any faster. Maybe Elon wasn’t smarter than the dinobirds after all. Eventually, I found myself in the receiving device on the celano ship. Guccio, Marbecka, and several dinobirds stood over by the control center.
Flying the sphere out of the paratransitter, I parked it over to one side, told it to stay, and jumped out through the iris door. The engineers were flicking switches, and lights were blinking off.
I jogged over to them. “Hang on, guys. We have another sphere coming.”
Guccio moved his unlit cigar to the corner of his mouth. “What? Another sphere?”
I brought him and Marbecka up to speed and checked my watch. “The second sphere will be here in a few minutes.”
Guccio crossed his arms. “Things are going to hell here. We’re still getting sporadic attacks, plus the colonists don’t believe us when we say we’re not attacking them. We’re heading to the colony now.”
“You were right, Jake,” Marbecka said. “The ships that attacked us are part of a diverse machine intelligence, and they are behind the universe problems. If we destroy them, we prevent the collision. We won’t even have to use the MegaFix Machine.”
The paratransit device began its whine. This was the first time I’d watched it from the outside.
A small orange cylinder, like the one I’d found in the gretzer’s pack, popped into existence in the paratransitter and clattered to the floor of the chamber.
I turned to Marbecka. “Why did they send that?”
She flew into the chamber, snatched it, and plugged it into the control console for the machine. “I’m guessing there’s been a change in plans. Thanks to some changes that your Elon Gray made, the straw can now control the paratransitter directly. That makes coordination more precise.”
As soon as she slid it into the console, the machine tooled up again.
“Okay, here they come,” I said.
But instead of the second sphere, a diamond-shaped object appeared. It was the size of a small car.
Guccio removed his cigar. “Is that—?”
I nodded, my jaw open. “DJ1.”
It was the intergalactic probe the ETs had sent out to find sentient life. The one that had caused everyone on Earth to sneeze simultaneously with its census-taking wave. Shaped like a teardrop diamond on its side, it was the size of a small sports car. Its top was crowded with instruments and modules like a Star Wars battle cruiser. The underside was flat and reflective.
As soon as DJ1 finished paratransitting, it zipped toward the cargo door and out into space. What was that all about?
The paratransitter cycled up again, and this time, Sphere 2 appeared. The twins flew it over by mine, popped out, and bounded over to us in the .5 g gravity. Marbecka flew into the air then settled back down.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Alex beat me to it. “We were getting ready when a message came from the ET comm center. Told us to send DJ1—said they upgraded its software with new capabilities. DJ1 came down from orbit and floated into the machine.”
Martin looked around. “Where is it?”
Guccio and I pointed to the open hatch.
Marbecka cleared her throat. “Bridge, where is the diamond-shaped probe?”
“It is getting the hell out of Dodge. It’s … uh … already halfway to the asteroid belt. It’s traveling faster than—”
He, along with every dinobird and human in the ship, sneezed. Simultaneously.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In Sphere 1, Guccio, Drenast, and I hurtled toward the Phobos colony, desperate to convince the colonists that we had not attacked them. We needed their help to defeat the machine civilization before it destroyed the multiverse. Guccio and I sat in crash couches while Drenast stood on a perch that had morphed from the floor.
Alex and Martin flew alongside us in Sphere 2. Because the walls had gone transparent, we looked like four humans and a dinobird streaking through space. The comm system allowed us to speak as if sitting together in a living room.
Drenast cleared his throat, a mannerism that dinobirds shared with humans. “From your historical documents, I learned of the sneeze event that occurred in your world. Please be reminding me of what caused it.”
“Yeah.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “DJ1 sends out some kind of wave that allows it to detect sentient beings. The wave causes them to sneeze. It did that three years ago when it first arrived in our solar system. Hopefully, the wave inventories sentient machines, too.”
“Got it,” he said. “Next query: How could the twins be identical if only Martin has the zealo mutation?”
Guccio frowned. “Zealo mutation?”
Drenast pointed a claw at the feathers on his head.
I laughed. “No. Martin’s hair is colored red artificially. He wasn’t born that way. They color their hair so people can tell them apart.”
Martin squawked and said something in celano. Where did he pick that up? Show-off.
I stared off into space, literally, and considered my role in this diplomatic mission. I’d been elected because the spheres were faster than the dinobird ships. The celano ambassador stayed behind on Raptor, too chicken to come with us.
The dusky-red disk of Mars grew until it filled much of our view. The colony rose over the horizon. In contrast to the dry, desertlike appearance of the planet, the colony’s home was a green and blue spinning ring, like a Möbius strip but without the twist. The inner surface of the ring had the same coloration as Earth, with hills, lakes, and buildings do
tting the surface. An endless river flowed all the way around it.
The ring was so close to Phobos it almost seemed to be attached.
I turned to Drenast. “Can you give us a tour guide summary of—”
“If you’ll all be looking forward and to the right of our spacecraft, you’ll see the wonderful and lush ringworld we call ‘the Ribbon.’” Drenast gestured grandly with a wing. “It acts as a bedroom community for the colonists who mine Phobos. The colony’s chief exports include neodymium, europium, terbium, yttrium, and scandium.
“Ringworld has a diameter of two hundred meters, rotating twice every minute, resulting in a gravitational force of .447 g’s at the surface. Someone from the last tour group asked me, ‘How often does someone fall off the Ribbon?’ I told him, ‘Only once.’”
He continued, “Close to Phobos, but not attached, the Ribbon has a circumference of six hundred twenty-eight meters. The center region is empty, but a thin layer of atmosphere covers the inner surface. With a plate width—”
I put up my hands. “Thank you, Drenast.”
“And the relationship with Earth?” Guccio asked.
“The favorableness of our interaction is neutral. We have drifted away—apart. Trade is controlled entirely by computer, so communication is rarely necessary.”
Three spaceships approached us, two from the Ribbon and one from Phobos. Looking like smaller versions of Raptor, ominous weapons covered their red hulls.
Drenast spoke over the radio in celano, and our escorts guided us down to the surface of the Ribbon. We landed our spheres a hundred yards from a building reminiscent of a Mayan pyramid.
I climbed out and admired the stunning view. Rising up in two directions, the lush green surfaces of the Ribbon met overhead, only two hundred meters away. I craned my neck and whistled. On the far side, small groups of dinobirds, mostly zealos, dotted the landscape, looking up at us. The endless river meandered its way around the ring, weaving through open-topped buildings.
Guards conducted us along a path in the meadow. Grass waved in a warm breeze. We entered a building and proceeded to a meeting room, also open to the sky. Who needs roofs when it never rains?