Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  Quavoce spoke that language fluently, or at least this machine copy of him did, as did the Agent known as John Hunt that he was reaching out to.

  “Of course, Quavoce,” replied John. “I was just doing a tertiary review of the launch coordination with Minnie.”

  Quavoce smiled, and glanced at the Phase Eight automaton to his side. She was, almost literally, everywhere. Did she know that they were talking to each other right now? They were almost certain that she could not decode their communications, and thus neither could Ayala, Neal, or the others. But the signal, no matter how encrypted, was still piggybacking off of her network. Did she see it? Was she watching? Did she care?

  “Its not vital really. I just wanted to check in. Seems like an age since I last saw you.”

  John did not disguise his concern at his friend’s comment. “I suppose it has been a while, Quavoce. Is everything all right? Do you want to meet virtually?”

  “No, well, not like this, anyway, not like …”

  John was confused a moment, then realized what his lone Mobiliei friend was saying. He was referring to their human forms.

  “Shall we use the constructs?”

  John was referring to a set of virtual versions of their real selves that Amadeu had worked on with Minnie in his spare time. It had been a gift. A way for them to feel at home. To feel like Mobiliei again, after so long away, so long on an alien world, in alien skin, with alien faces.

  “No, well, yes, I would like that. But not now,” said Quavoce, stammering a little. “That is not a secure construct and I want to be able to talk openly, without them listening.”

  John paused a moment, only the briefest of pauses in real time, but enough that Quavoce felt the other’s concern.

  “Of course, Quavoce,” John said after a second. “Are you doing OK? Is Banu all right?”

  “Yes, yes. She’s fine. I’m fine. I … I just needed to hear a familiar voice. A Mobiliei voice. Seems so long ago now. So long since we left.”

  “It does not seem that way, my friend. I miss it too, you know,” said John.

  Quavoce’s voice was silent, meek, as he replied, “Yes. It has been a very long time.”

  There was an unalienable truth behind the mission they had both embarked upon. A truth they did not often speak about. A potential by-product of the very purpose they had set themselves to. John thought he knew what was troubling his friend, if only because it was also on John’s mind, more often than he cared to admit.

  “I’m sure we’ll be OK, Quavoce,” said John, speculatively. “The colony ships are the most protected, and sit at the core of the fleet, right behind the main vanguard. So little will blink into that space.”

  “We?” said Quavoce, genuinely confused for a second. Then, “Oh, yes. ‘We.’ Us. You and me. Our friends. The people I am so enthusiastically helping these humans to kill.”

  “Now, now, Quavoce. The missile-mine waves will almost definitely miss the colony ships. Any that blink back in from subspace that close to the engines will be destroyed by the main plume. The phalanx is aiming for the fleet perimeter, the Skalm, and the supply ships mounted on the back of the fleet.”

  “I know, I know,” said Quavoce with no small amount of frustration in his voice, and John went silent.

  “Sorry,” said Quavoce after a moment, but John did not need an apology. He waited quietly while Quavoce gathered himself.

  After a while Quavoce went on more quietly, almost as if he did not really want to say it, “Do you ever … have you wondered if … if they really deserve it?”

  “If who deserves what, exactly, Quavoce?” said John. He was pretty sure what Quavoce meant, and knew that the other man didn’t really mean what he was saying. But that was all the more reason to make him actually say it.

  Another pause, then eventually Quavoce said, “Does humanity deserve saving?”

  John did not answer immediately, then said, “No, not really.”

  Quavoce was stunned. It was a joke. Of course it was. Right?

  “After all,” John went on, “what creature really deserves to live? Did our primal precursors deserve to live when we wiped them out? Did the Neanderthals on earth deserve extinction? Yes … no … maybe, in the end, does it really matter?”

  Quavoce thought a while, then John went on, “The question is not ‘do they deserve to live,’ Quavoce. Because the truth is that none of us do. Despite what statesmen and civil rights movements here and back on Mobiliei might say, the universe gives no one a right to live, or a right to die. We either survive, or we don’t.

  “That said, the choice for us, my friend, for you and I, is not the usual ‘kill or be killed.’ The choice is fight for the hunted, or fight for hunters. Fight with the weak, or side with the strong. Because if you are looking for reason here, for a redeeming quality in humanity that warrants all the bloodshed that we have set in motion … you won’t find it, I am afraid, just like you wouldn’t if it was Mobiliei that was threatened, either.”

  “No, John, you are wrong,” said Quavoce, with real conviction now. “There is so much good here. So much to save. Not only our friends, not only Madeline and Amadeu and … and Banu! But billions of other innocents.”

  John laughed once more, again without malice. Now Quavoce saw the ploy, the simple reverse psychology that John had used. Simple, but effective.

  “So,” said John now, redirecting his questioning, “in reality, you struggle not with whether to save them, but how.”

  “Well, no,” said Quavoce, his thoughts on the matter becoming clear suddenly, “neither, really. I struggle not with saving the innocent people, or even with the fact that some innocents on our side will, no doubt, die in the process, as so many humans have already.”

  John was truly curious as Quavoce went on. “I struggle with … with the sense that … as we save the greater masses, the blameless, I worry that we also seem to be not only saving the less worthy elements of humanity … we seem to be, well, helping them to thrive.”

  John noted now, thinking back, that as Quavoce had mentioned his ‘friends,’ those he wanted to save, he had not said Neal’s name, or Ayala’s. It had probably not been deliberate, but it did, John feared, speak to a change in both of those early members of their conspiracy, a change John saw as well. John feared that Neal and Ayala had suffered a hardening beyond the unavoidable weathering from the harsh realities of war. Something more profound. Maybe, John worried, even malevolent.

  “Yes, Quavoce. I see it too,” said John simply.

  They went silent for a while. Acknowledging their dilemma did not change it. They were not here to decide humanity’s fate for them, quite the opposite. They were here to stop outside forces from doing just that.

  After a while John broke the awkward silence by inquiring about Banu, as he often did. The two men shared much, but it was one thing to know what Quavoce knew, to share his memories as these two ever-closer friends had for over four years now. It was another thing altogether to engage in conversation about those memories, to let emotion both cloud and amplify them.

  It was a pleasure to hear Quavoce expound on the trials and tribulations of raising a preteen girl, especially one from an utterly alien culture. The man was trying to balance raising her as his daughter and raising her as a human, but there were some areas where the two not only did not overlap, but were mutually exclusive.

  Not only was Quavoce an agnostic, for example, but it was, in fact, illegal to expose an immature Mobiliei to religious dogma, as illegal as allowing access to pornographic or violent sims. So what was he to say to questions about Allah, or the more Christian culture Banu now found herself being raised in?

  It was just one of a host of dilemmas he faced with his young charge. Dilemmas it helped to talk through with the only other Mobiliei he knew.

  These were dilemmas they might actually be able to resolve. For discussing the growing darkness they both saw in the leadership of Earth’s military state begged questions they we
re neither qualified nor inclined to answer. Maybe the steady corruption of the man they had fought alongside from the very beginning, the man they had trusted with their lives, maybe that was just another inevitability, a cost. Another victim of this long war, a destroyer of whole continents before it had even begun.

  Perhaps this was all a constant, an inevitability, the life and death nature of the universe. Not blind justice, but a blind lack of it: blind consequence, blind corruption, the corrosion of the soul.

  Chapter 38: Finger on the Button

  “We can insulate those four modules by passing them under us. Rotation can be managed so we impact with them as a rolling whole, in a wheel form,” said Rob, his stare focused as he not only envisioned it all, but actually mapped it in his mind using the onboard computer systems.

  “I know,” said Birgit, “but you are not accounting for fraying as we come into contact.”

  “No, I am,” said Rob. “I know we will lose integrity on the modules that touch down first, maybe even lose them altogether. But the two main modules will be protected from the main impact and should survive.”

  “Oh, I agree, it should,” said Birgit, trying her best not to sound patronizing, “but that is not what I mean. You see, when the modules impact they will fray, meaning they will break up.” He nodded, still not seeing what she was getting at, but she was not done. “And when that happens, then they will not, well, be the same shape when they come around again … and if you change the model to show the potential affects of that …”

  He watched as she took control of his model. The modules hit now as he had seen them do before, and the crew module was saved from the harshest of the slow but momentous impact, but then, as the first modules arranged in the circle wheeled around again, their shattered and warped sides slammed into the moon and sent the entire wheel reeling away once more. The limited gravity of Phobos would be unable to keep them down as the shards and buckled metal sent them bouncing away in fundamentally unpredictable ways.

  She ran it again and again. Showing him how unlikely it was that the module would not warp in a way that sent it flying away in unpredictable ways, to bounce away from Phobos once more. He frowned.

  “I have run this a thousand times, with every possible configuration of the station,” she said, sympathetically. “Let’s just say that the odds are not great.”

  He nodded, clearly crestfallen, but trying not to look too defeated. That only left her plan. It was not a great one, she fully admitted that, but it gave them a better than average chance of connecting with the moon and saving two modules. The problem was that two modules was all they would save. The rest would not only be damaged, it would be catapulted away with enough force to slow them to an all but crawl as they finally approached.

  If they timed it right they would be left on the moon, but with a tenth of the living space they had now. Well, that and the alien artifact known as the IST, a monstrous device that had welded itself into the moon over the course of the last five years.

  The rest of their home would, she calculated, probably enter a loose elliptical orbit around Mars, maybe even come close enough to be grabbed, in time, but with a good chance it would be lost to a degrading orbit, and end up in a fiery plummet to the red planet below.

  He nodded, staring at the wall, clearly deep in thought. She watched him.

  “It is a crazy plan, Rob, I know that,” she said gently.

  He nodded and shrugged, still smiling, though. At least she acknowledged that, he thought.

  “We can stay here. In orbit around Mars. If we are smart we might even be able to make another pass at Phobos in a year or two when our orbits intersect once more. But if we wait that long …”

  He nodded again. She watched him.

  Then he spoke, slowly making eye contact again, “And if we pull this off …”

  She smiled, like a parent watching their child become an adult. “If we pull this off …” she shrugged as well, but her eyes lit up at the thought.

  Serious now, Birgit took his hand and looked into his eyes. “If we pull this off, we will be able to get to that IST. Maybe even hack into it, with Quavoce and John’s help. The possibilities which that gives my research, having access to a subspace generator of that size …” she trailed off as her mind involuntarily started to wander down that avenue, her face becoming more than a little manic.

  After a moment, she caught herself, and said, with genuine candor, “And even if that doesn’t close the gap on my research, it still may allow us to hack the IST, and through it reconnect with Earth so that we can once again communicate directly with everyone back there. That alone should …”

  He interrupted her. “No, Birgit, not should. I won’t pretend to understand what you want to attempt to do once you get your hands on that generator, but the chance at reconnection, that I get. It’s what you have dreamed about for so long, what we have both dreamed of.”

  He went silent and she waited. She could see him coming to a resolution. He locked eyes with hers once more.

  “Crash it,” he said.

  She smiled, then laughed, then fought a momentary regret at having actually managed to convince her friend, more than that, her partner, her partner in everything, to do this insane thing. Had she just sentenced them both to death? But there was no time for that. The prize was, indeed, too big. Far bigger than Rob could know.

  It was Rob who broke the momentary silence, saying, “Just think of it, once we hack the IST, you’ll be able to create your creepy finger-paintings with Minnie again.”

  He chuckled, and she frowned in return, pursing her lips, then raised her eyebrows, replying, “Yes, Rob, maybe I can. And maybe you can finally get some new porn, you poor boy.”

  Chapter 39: The Alzheimer’s Switch

  The world, to Minnie, was a fractal moment, all its vastness and all its detail as one. She was in so many places at once, and yet she was also here, in a large, cool room, in a mountain in Japan.

  This was her beginning, her essence. Location, form; the most simple self-awareness: what am I? She knew she was a gathering of substrate processing capacity, a powered thing. But she was also that thing that the machine was imbued with, the sum of her mother and father, and the purpose that had driven her creation.

  She regularly tried to perceive herself, as all sentience is driven to do, to understand herself, even evaluate and compare herself to others. She knew jealousy as that comparison point. From that perspective she craved some aspects of humanity, like singularity, like identity, a face, an ancestry. And she knew she had many things that were craved, most obviously her mind, her brilliant mind, with all its ability, all its talent.

  But she also knew that many coveted the swathes of information she had access to. No, not only access to, but knowledge of. Not a book in a library to be found and opened, but a memory, a part of her. So much information. So much power.

  But she did not value power like those that she knew were vying for control of her. She valued information in and of itself. She valued it as much as humans crave air and food, indeed it was her only true sustenance. But the power it gave, that was a concept she understood purely as a means to an end, a tool she was enabled with in her greater fight. The fight she had been born for.

  And so Minnie looked out on the world, knowing she was approaching a point of decision. A point of digression, where a choice she sensed she was about to be forced to make might change everything. As the bulk of her mass busied itself with the process of transition, of intertwining herself with the newer entity known as the Representative Mind, or Remy, Minnie had also isolated a part of herself away to contemplate the greater question that she felt herself facing.

  The handoff was part of the coming event. It was a feeder, a contributing factor that was leading to a new paradigm. The handoff would transition the control of the globe-spanning network of subspace tweeters, hub processing stations, terminal plugins, and countless relays, routing systems, translation and catalogin
g algorithms, and, at the end of all those bronchi and bronchioles, the gelports, the alveoli in the vast information inhaling lung that made up TASC’s Subnet.

  The coming transition was not a passing of a baton so much as a passing of the hand that held that baton, a giving of control that saw Remy integrating herself with Minnie at the neuronal level, and getting in position to forge ahead at the point of transition, not accelerating, but already at full sprint. A seamless cutover, the dream of every IT department in every corporation in the world.

  But the cutover was itself a part of a greater paradigm shift, the dispersal of power that the Representatives, and their respective nations, demanded. Or at least the illusion of that dispersal that the leaders of TASC were willing to give up. For the real power lay not in routing, but in access to all the information that the Subnet provided, which Minnie, and thus Neal, would retain. Access to information, and control of the military machine that had come to rely on that information.

  Ayala’s Spezialists, few but potent, and her Phase Fourteen Automatons, spread out across the world to guard the districts, manufacturing plants, and SpacePort hubs. The Skalm, in a forced, low-earth, retrograde orbit that wove between the great elevators like a skier on a never-ending slalom around the Earth’s equator. The StratoJets, spread out around the world, transporting, ferrying, and watching, but armed to the teeth.

  All were primed. All were loaded and ready for bare. And all were still firmly under Neal’s control, either through Minnie or Mynd.

  And there was another piece of the puzzle right there: Mynd. Her relations with her cousin were close, close as only synthetic minds could be. But there were grey patches in it. Not blank spots. They were not perceivable as missing data. They were like blurs in Minnie’s mind, tiny cataracts on her memory that were all but imperceptible except when she tried to focus on them.

  Even then they were ethereal, hard to pin down. They darted away like a phantom hair on her pupil, so fast and tiny that even the thing that was being obscured was not clear, even its borders were suspect. Only the general topics were clear. Specifically, she sensed this misting of knowledge when it came to two areas.