Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  It was not there to mine any resource, not even to reveal some secret or ancient archeological find. There was nothing below but rock: ever harder, ever denser rock as the machine delved ever deeper. And it was this dense core matter that the great machine sought.

  It was seeking purchase.

  Its ten great, burrowing drills were grinding into the dirt and rock to get to the core of the planetoid.

  For this was not Earth. It was a moon. Not ours, that would have been too large even for this machine’s epic need. Too large and too obvious.

  No, this was a moon that orbited around another planet, a planet so often featured in our dreams of space. The Red Planet. Mars.

  Unlike Earth, Mars has two moons. One very small and more distant, though still much closer than our own. And the other, larger one moving at incredible speed and very close to the planet’s surface. So close, in fact, that if it had been anywhere near the size of our moon it would have ripped the very planet apart.

  Phobos. And on it, in it, drilling down into its core, was the other of the Mobiliei’s gifts to our solar system: the last of its kind. The last in a long string of great machines sent out to prepare a highway, not for people but for information.

  It was drilling into the surface to construct a massive relay, or rather to turn the entire moon into one. It was drilling to weave its great, nanotube cables through the superstructure of Phobos and attach itself to the moon at a fundamental level. It was a long process, one filled with error and recalibration. The machine had to fine-tune the moon, find precisely the purchase and angle that would allow it to vibrate the great rock like a bell, allowing the machine to send out its signal across the cosmos.

  And it was a process that was being repeated by a thousand such machines in a long line back to Mobilius. Some were already complete, having had more luck than most. Some places along the line had not had a planetoid to harness, and so the investment had had to be made in sending a string of larger probes, and the long acceleration and deceleration that had been required to get them into place along the line.

  And even then it would not be complete. It would never be complete. For it was a line between two ships that were constantly moving apart, and it would require constant adjustment, paying out, and adding to.

  But this machine, large as it was, was still in essence just a relay, a beacon like the hilltop fires of old, a line of flame anchored at one end by the massive hub at Mobilius and at the other by this one, here in our own solar system.

  Once the chain was complete, years from now, it would allow the leaders of the race coming to eradicate humanity to have an open line to their new colony on Earth. In the meantime, this particular link in the chain worked with a more immediate purpose, to send a signal to the coming Armada that would soon be within its theoretical range.

  To relay news of the Agents that the Armada believed were even now preparing us, infiltrating and weakening us. And from the satellites that the Armada thought still orbited our mass.

  Its work was nearing completion. Its anchors were almost deep enough, almost ready. Soon it would be operational.

  Chapter 4: Of One Mynd

  Neal sat down in his own office, stretching his legs. He did not need to plug in; he was connected at all times via the inch-wide dome that was attached to the gelport at the back of his neck. It needed charging occasionally, but one of his many assistants saw to it he always had a fully charged node, and thus was always able to connect whenever he needed to.

  Assistants. He had many assistants now. Still getting used to that. He contemplated the fact for a moment, then initiated his connection to the network.

  Neal: ‘good morning, minnie.’

  Minnie:

  Neal: ‘no, minnie, i am fine. i have jim’s full briefing package here and he is on his way to give me my morning status update. ¿is there anything you particularly need my input on?’

  Minnie:

  Neal: ‘good, then can you connect me with district two, i want to talk with william and mynd.’

  Minnie:

  They did not say good-bye, she would be online throughout any conversation he had. The need to keep even Minnie in the dark during the Resonance Dome’s construction was past now, and as part of her daily routine she had one of her many subsidiary AIs monitoring any and all communications coming to and from Neal and the rest of his leadership team, if only to make sure she was up to date on their latest thoughts and decisions.

  Far away to the south, another mind was alerted to his request for contact, a request only in the manner that it could be delayed for maybe a moment or two, and even then only if there was a very, very good reason. But there was no delay, and Mynd came online a second later.

  Mynd:

  Mynd was very different from Minnie, not only in terms of origin but also in terms of purpose. He was the child of Neal’s mind and that of another scientist who was even now finishing up another task so he could join them. That alone made him a very different being than Birgit and Amadeu’s free spirited AM child Minnie, but he was also far more focused in his purpose.

  Where Minnie was everywhere and nowhere, her many minion AIs parsing vast volumes of data in their daily job of running the world-spanning enterprise Neal was at the head of, Mynd was, by comparison, singularly dedicated, his focus limited to one place, one island.

  Neal: ‘¿is william available? i want to talk to him as well.’

  Mynd:

  Even as he asked the question a data packet was bobbing gently but persistently at the limit of Neal’s field of etheric vision. Its title was simply ‘EAHL.’

  Neal smiled.

  Neal: ‘yes, mynd, i would like to see that very much.’

  The packet expanded suddenly and overwhelmed Neal, but he was ready for it, and even starting to enjoy the drug-like rush of Mynd’s ‘data packets.’ Suddenly he was above Deception Island once again.

  Whereas before the island had been as clandestine as such a thing could be, the great harbor at its center was now a hub of activity. The USS Truman was even now pulling into the big bay to take its place as the center of operations for the district. But it was only one of seven big ships in the harbor. The rest were cargo ships, laden with raw materials to feed the gaping maw that dominated the small peninsula jutting into the several-mile-wide crater.

  The first of the massive Dome’s creations was long since airborne, its first mission the stuff of future legend, its power providing the backbone to Neal’s newfound military body. But its second creation was coming online now, and it was, in many ways, even more impressive than the first. Less spectacular, perhaps, but still the stuff of dreams only a few years ago.

  It was spiderlike, and it would be the first of four such behemoths. Whereas the Skalm had been singular in purpose, the EAHL would be versatile; where the Skalm had been a scythe, the EAHL would be a fist, as capable of thumping as it was of grasping. It would carry us back to the stars, and it would do so on six great plumes of fusion fire surrounding its central cargo arms.

  It was not an attractive beast, indeed it was ugly at an instinctual level, making your skin crawl when viewed from a distance. The six great engines that surrounded its center could pretty much lift any weight that the team chose to laden it with. But the central mass of the ship had a network of spindly arms lining its underside, like so many insect-like claws and fangs, ready to grasp and hold whatever cargo it was tasked with delivering.

  It was fully eighty meters across, a scale that was difficult to grasp as it was wheeled on a great gantry from the Dome’s open mouth. Had Neal wanted it to, it could have straddled one of the cargo ships in the bay, grasped it, and lifted it clean out of the water, such was its power.

  But it had no such mission. Its first payload was a
lready waiting for it, being unloaded from the hold of one such ship to be grasped in the EAHL’s claws and taken straight up, into space.

  Neal: ‘i see the cable is ready. that is very good. very good indeed.’

  He made a mental note to thank Madeline for her team’s hard work there, and without comment Minnie took the instruction, rippling it outward to Neal’s various assistants and secretaries to be added to his to-do list and then his schedule.

  But his attention remained on the EAHL, and Mynd sensed this and took him inward, to its still dormant engines, waiting to be given life. This was not the unhinged and irrational Skalm, and it would not take Birgit’s level of technical genius to jumpstart this beast, but they were still waiting for their second stringer, as it were, to get up to speed before she attempted to turn the key on the EAHL.

  Neal: ‘¿how is moira doing, is she feeling more comfortable now?’

  Neal spoke of Moira Banks, the Canadian wunderkind they had found among Birgit’s graduate student roster. A protégé and a prodigy, even if she was yet to feel as comfortable with the second moniker as Neal and William were in applying it to her.

  Mynd:

  His acquiescence was unspoken, a permission given from directly within him, and in a moment he was at their virtual sides. William, embodied in the ether as he was now in life as well, in an avatar; and Moira, only twenty-seven but wise beyond her years, an old soul, her avatar imbued with all the reticence she felt toward the task she had found herself lumbered with.

  Moira: ‘neal! wow! hi! still getting used to the whole ‘materializing out of nothing’ thing.’

  Neal: ‘yes, it is strange, isn’t it. if it makes you feel any better, most people will not be able to creep up on you like i can in here. but membership has its access privileges, if you know what i mean.’

  It was a geek joke, and it found its audience here, a virtual ripple of laughter following among the three lifelong academics.

  William: ‘hello, neal.’

  Neal: ‘william. ¿how goes it?’

  William: ‘i think it is safe to say moira here is … and i hope you don’t mind me blowing your cover on this, moira … still a little freaked out.’

  Moira did not mind at all. In fact, she wished everyone would say it, and that it would impact even a little the high expectations they all seemed to have for her. Neal was understanding, sympathetic even. That said, he was long past being willing to wait for anyone, no matter what their level of freakedoutedness, or whatever they chose to call the reticence of those who seemed to think any of this was an option.

  He tempered whatever frustration he may have felt, however, recognizing that this young woman was not the real source of his anger, and instead answered calmly, if a little patronizingly.

  Neal: ‘no, no. that is totally understandable, moira. and indeed even encouraged. i can tell you that birgit was equally nervous when she first initiated one of the fusion cores. but you have started small, just as she did. and i hear from madeline that she has reviewed the core turnover and tritium breeding rates and is very comfortable with your level of skill. high praise indeed, coming from her!’

  Moira blushed, and her control over her virtual self was so embryonic that the emotion bled through. But it was an endearing sight and Neal’s mood softened a little to match his patrician tone.

  Neal: ‘truth be told, i understand from birgit that she was not prepared for the sensation herself, even with her knowledge of the process.’

  It was true, and Birgit had said as much in her conversations with Moira via their syrupy-slow laser link to Terminus Station.

  Neal: ‘but she has also told me you are ready. as ready as anyone can be. and if there is anyone whose opinion i take seriously here it is hers. more even than your own sense of how prepared you are. now, william and mynd here assure me that you will be being actively monitored in real-time, and madeline will be online as well, with a team of control specialists back at District Three. they will get you through it, and help you should you get in trouble.’

  Neal wished Madeline or one of her longer-term team members could handle this themselves, but Madeline had been clear that this was not a question of the broad scientific method she brought to her leadership role, but of a precise and detailed knowledge of the incredibly complex process in question. Whoever was in control needed to understand the forces at play at the muscle-memory level.

  Moira managed a nod, and put on a simulacrum of a brave face, and Neal smiled in response.

  Neal: ‘i am sure you will do fine, moira. i mean that. i would not give you charge of this if i did not believe in you, and if madeline and birgit did not believe in you as well.’

  OK. Enough of this pandering, thought Neal, and his right brain filled with purpose once more and Mynd reacted, initiating systems and sending protocol starts out across the island and to TASC’s distant districts, like neurons pulsing around the globe-spanning enterprise.

  William quickly sensed by the new flow of information starting to cloy at his senses that Neal was done here. William was being called elsewhere, called by the very man standing in front of him smiling.

  William: ‘err, ok. Moira, we are going to pick this up again later. if you want to continue running simulations with mynd and madeline, i think neal wants me to quickly catch him up on some other tasks.’

  Neal did. And with shared smiles and some final platitudes they left the woman and her slightly deer-in-the-headlights expression to her models.

  Neal: ‘good. she will be fine. you are all going to see to that. and even if i don’t have total confidence in her yet, i do have it in you.’

  It was a compliment and a threat in one, and it received only the quick mental acknowledgement it required. William knew what Neal wanted an update on, and he did not wait around.

  William: ‘ok. let’s talk about our friend the bionic man!’

  He said it with some relish, and Neal could not resist a grin to match William’s own. Mynd, watching and listening, was equally intrigued, if less boyishly enthused as they.

  William: ‘the best way to explain is to show, as we always say. ¿so why don’t you just take a look? i’m bringing phase nine online now. i’ll meet you out there.’

  And with that they were gone, through the ether and out the other side, back into reality once more. But this was an augmented reality, like the view from within a battleskin. But this was not a skin, it was an entire body.

  Neal stood now in a broad aluminium shed, one of the many that dotted the bay at the center of Deception Island. He stood still, almost impossibly so, his lack of command signals leaving the body he was now possessing completely without movement.

  Hand. He brought it up. It was not a hand as he knew it. It had only two fingers opposite a fat thumb. One finger looked like a black, pointed version of an index finger, the other was much thicker, matching the powerful looking thumb that faced it. He flexed his digits. They moved with a dexterity that was at once amazing and frankly disgusting. He could fold them back all the way, to touch his wrist, a wrist that could rotate 360 degrees.

  He shivered at the sight, and the tremor ran up the spine of the machine body like it was mocking him.

  Neal: ‘mynd, give me an outside view of the machine.’

  But before he could answer another view was approaching. It was William, the paraplegic, crippled from the neck down, walking into the room on equally bionic limbs. Mynd co-opted the view from William’s suit as Neal had requested and now he saw both machines simultaneously as they approached each other.

  William was a crumpled form wrapped and enveloped within a machine skeleton. It was akin to a battleskin, only to facilitate easy access it lacked the armor plating, and as such was able to remove itself at will from William’s body and then climb back on him again. He rarely took it off in the day, but he still slept in his natural form, his suit waiting next to the
bed to take him up once more when he awoke.

  Where William’s suit was all exposed synthetic muscle and skeleton, Neal’s was pure night black. A shadow of a form, almost spindly by comparison to William’s bulky suit.

  Its form was also distorted. Its arms were too long, its legs a little too short, and its head but a simple black cylinder the size of a pineapple. Its torso was a thick block, designed to contain and protect its processors, fusion core, and the subspace tweeter that allowed it to be controlled. It did away with the need to support a human body inside itself and replaced that with greater muscle mass, more power, and, in its Popeye-esque forearms, greater weaponry.

  It was an evolving form, adjusting with each version to discount some of the vagaries of evolution in exchange for greater power and flexibility. Phase Eight, a taller, bulkier version, had formed the core for the avatar which part of Minnie even now inhabited as she played with Banu. But by shortening the legs and lengthening the arms they had allowed this version to fall forward and run on all four limbs should it want to, extending its top speed to up over a hundred miles an hour over even rough terrain.

  William had been working on it for months now, since even before the earth-shaking events that had brought down SpacePort One and killed so many of their colleagues and friends.

  Neal flexed his legs a little and was caught off guard by the speed with which the Phase Nine responded. Even as he lost his balance and fell backward, William was backing away, wary of the sight. It took a long time to adjust to the quickness of the machine, and William reached out to Mynd via his spinal node and asked him to intervene, before Neal did some damage.

  Neal’s stuttering response sent one leg flying back in an attempt to regain his footing and the Phase Nine was suddenly thrown forward toward William. Luckily Mynd took control before they connected, stopping Neal from trying to control his own landing and instead helping William wrestle the machine to the ground.

  Neal’s laughter and muted apology came through their shared connection and was met with equal mirth from William, who said out loud, “That’s no problem, Neal. It is quite the machine. It takes a while to get used to it.”