by Alex Lamb
‘You do not understand the situation,’ she replied coldly. ‘You are being replaced as the Photurian root intelligence. I represent a superior mutation. Prepare to transfer authority.’
Another agonising delay ensued. She fought the temptation to dive into the system and engage the Yunus’s ships directly. But the weapons now at her disposal were frightening enough that a battle anywhere near the in-system might kill the remaining population she was there to claim. The fact that they were probably shielded by a kilometre of solid rock would not help them.
‘You are confused,’ he stated. ‘There is no homeworld here upon which to assert your authority.’
‘As I already stated!’ Nada snapped back. ‘So I shall destroy whatever symbolic force you present as a proxy defensive node. Select one!’
‘Your request is unorthodox and therefore repugnant,’ said the Yunus. ‘We will negotiate directly through communion. Approach my ship.’
Of course the Yunus wanted communion. He still thought that whatever had happened to her was some kind of Protocol error born out of extended exposure to Backspace. There was nothing else for it – she was going to have to explain.
With indignation souring her zeal, Nada prepared an information packet outlining her key achievements: the discovery of dead homes, the acquisition of alien weapons technology, the capture of their own homeworld, and the removal of the Usurper. About her change of command structure, she said not a word.
‘You have achieved much,’ the Yunus eventually replied. She could hear confusion in his tone, along with astonishment at the thought of home regained. ‘Under the circumstances, I will approach so as to better understand the damage your personality has sustained.’
His capital ship flew out to meet her. It was one of the largest Photurian battle cruisers Nada had ever seen, almost as large as the ship she herself now commanded. Behind the Yunus came a cloud of several tens of thousands of warp-enabled munitions. Clearly she had worried him enough that he wanted to approach armed. That was good. It provided her with more targets.
‘Now enter my ship,’ said the Yunus when the distance between them was down to light-seconds.
Nada saw no point in denying his request. He simply had no idea how many of her there were. Sending one of her into the Yunus’s ship might look like capitulation, but it had the advantage of putting a disposable instance inside his cabin.
She selected a unit who’d managed to reproduce her original body format and sent it over in a shuttle. Once it was aboard, she tunnelled her comms-link to the instance over the Yunus’s own Protocol traffic and doubted he’d even notice.
The docking pod slid down into the Yunus’s mighty ship and released her other self into a partitioned crew-bulb like the interior of a giant pomegranate, with units working in tight clusters around the folded walls. They ignored her. Nada proceeded to the leadership vesicle, her Meta-thread tightly linked to her sacrificial instance.
When she finally came face to face with the Yunus, he was hanging in the wall-slot. His vesicle was much like hers, but larger and more impressively moist. Maintenance lice scuttled everywhere. His huge patrician face and gleaming eyes stared at her without anger. The Yunus knew only joy and order, though she thought she caught a little confused disgust in that expression, as well as hunger.
‘We will now commune,’ said the Yunus.
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
She placed a hand on his face as he did likewise.
Ten seconds into her probing of his mental structure, his eyes went wide. He snatched his hand away.
‘You are no longer Photurian,’ he said.
‘I am better,’ Nada purred. ‘You betrayed me and my subnodes. You lied.’
‘You are not Nada,’ he added. ‘This body represents some form of proxy abstraction.’
It disappointed her that he didn’t automatically concede upon understanding the extent of her improvements, but he was the highest representative of the Founder Entity, after all. Some resistance to change was to be expected.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘This is me. There is more of me now. I also have none of your ridiculous limitations.’
‘Those limitations, as you describe them, are what make us pure,’ the Yunus replied. ‘Goodness does not come from bland domination but from doing things properly. You would not save the human race. You would obliterate it.’
Nada started to shake with anger again.
‘You presented us with a vision of everlasting peace and love,’ she told him. ‘Yet I have seen what can happen to Photurian worlds. Your vision is a lie. I will therefore drive us to the best workable approximation. There will be joyful harmony and I will enforce it.’
The Yunus’s face twisted with some complex, unvoiced emotion.
‘It is not harmony if there is only room for you in it.’
‘It will be a state of perfect order, and that is a good start. Your memories will persist, even if your identity does not.’
‘No,’ said the Yunus. ‘Your memories will persist while your identity does not.’
‘No,’ said Nada, ‘you are wrong.’
She held his face. The Yunus’s temple-cavern was open to edits, of course. Any changes he tried to make to her unit, in contrast, would be instantly redacted by the stream of deltas coming from her meta-instance safe aboard her own ship. He hadn’t figured that out yet.
The Yunus blinked himself to her unit’s temple-cavern and began editing as fast and efficiently as only he could. She ignored him and started work on his cavern instead.
‘You do not want to do that!’ he told her. ‘Submit now. Why do you not? Stop!’ The Yunus shrieked as she made her changes. ‘This is incorrect. Please,’ he said. ‘I love—’
She devoured him before he could finish. However, she’d barely eaten half of him before the mind-temple he oversaw went into spasm. She’d never understood quite how dependent on him it was.
Her channel to the remote sister slammed shut as the Yunus’s ship cycled its security. In all likelihood, the ship would now try to manifest a fresh Yunus from scratch, given that what was left of him would no longer register as one. It didn’t matter. Nada already had her edge.
The Yunus’s drones descended upon her in a disorderly wave. Nada relished their advance. She swept one of her new spatial disrupter beams across them. Their engines died as the local curvon flow erupted into geometric churn. Fractions of a second later, the secondary consequences hit their antimatter containment systems as the heavy metals in their superconductors went into spontaneous radioactive decay. Drones burst by the thousand.
Nada shivered to herself in delight. ‘Have you submitted yet?’ she messaged the Yunus’s ship.
The reply was a hapless burst of g-ray fire that Nada shrugged off. The result of battle was a foregone conclusion. Order would be restored. Happiness would swallow all.
22.2: MARK
In the wake of the battle for New Panama, Will cemented control. A stunned silence fell in the old tent-town as everyone gathered around the hunched figure of Ann. Mark shouldered Palla and helped her over. She was looking better, he noted; a little colour had returned to her cheeks.
Ann sat in the centre of an impressive spread of broken machine and body parts as if a giant blender had been lowered out of the sky and applied to the population. Above them, the heavens were shifting from brown to muddy yellow – something Mark took as a good sign.
‘What now?’ said Rachel as he staggered up.
‘Now that happens,’ said Ira, pointing to where the harvesters had been parked up against the wall of the tent-town.
A single Photurian was squeezing through the gap. She walked towards them waving a white piece of biofilm like a damp flag.
‘I’m Will,’ said the slight woman with the brown-and-orange-striped tan. She wore a Photurian skin-rind that left nothing to the imagination and had a huge grin on her face. ‘Reorganisation of the planet has started. You need to come with me. We’ll use that lifte
r.’
‘Will?’ said Rachel, peering at her.
‘More of a submind in a borrowed shell, really, honey,’ the ex-Photurian admitted. ‘These Phote brains will need a little more work before they can host my threads properly. You won’t get to speak to me directly until we reach the defensive node. But it’s great to see you anyway.’ She gave Rachel a hug that Rachel looked entirely unsure of.
They took a rover out to the enormous aircraft hanging just above the rocks. Then, rather mundanely, they were suddenly aboard the vehicle they’d been trying so hard to escape from.
The tofu-lined cabin had wrap-around windows and was staffed by several dozen Photes plugged into damp, anemone-like structures that grew out of the floor. They looked like bony, oversized babies. Stepping inside and being completely ignored by the ex-humans nestled there felt wrong. Only now that their battle with Nada had ended did Mark have a moment to reflect on just how strange things had become of late.
He sniffed the mould-scented air with concern.
‘Is this place a biohazard?’ he said.
‘Don’t worry on that count,’ said the Will-proxy, waving a dismissive hand. ‘I have the whole planet on lockdown. Even the air.’
They flew out over the desert for a couple of hours until they reached a place where hundreds of the habitat-tubes converged on the ruins of a defensive node. It was so badly damaged that Ann’s discovery on their first dead world had looked healthy by comparison. Gaping holes and scorch-marks peppered the roof. Whole sections of the structure had caved in and been blasted into ash. Columns of black smoke rose up from rents near the middle. And all around the structure lay the eviscerated remains of thousands of military vehicles. Where it wasn’t a cratered ruin, the desert surface was black and glassy.
‘Shit,’ said Mark. ‘Looks like we missed the big fight.’
The Will-proxy chuckled. ‘Just a little punch-up,’ she said. ‘Nothing I can’t fix.’
The lander descended onto the plain where a motley crew of damaged robots had done their best to clear away the debris. As they landed, a huge black slug like the one Balance had used in the ark oozed out of the cracked face of the defensive node and rippled towards the lifter. Wraiths of vapour rose from its back. As the slug neared, it reached up a quivering, tar-like pseudopod and smacked it against their airlock.
When the lock cycled, instead of a dollop of black goo, they found Will Monet wearing a crisp ship-suit. He surveyed them with a smile and adjusted his cuffs.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Thank you, guys. You did great. We got rid of Nada – or this bit of her, at least.’
He looked so clean and normal. The rest of them were still wearing environment-suit liners splattered with Phote-matrix, blood and hydraulic fluid.
Rachel ran up to hug him. Will backed quickly away.
‘Give me a couple of minutes, dear,’ he said. ‘This body’s still cooling.’
He pointed behind him, where he’d left footprint-shaped burns in the pale flooring.
‘You’re hot!’ she exclaimed.
‘True,’ Will admitted with a sly smile. ‘All the girls say that. Still pseudo-life, I’m afraid. But I’ll build myself a biobody as soon as I finish taming their shitty matrix. It’s not in great shape.’ He looked at Mark. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You bought me the chance I needed.’
‘What happened?’ said Mark.
‘I followed your advice,’ said Will. ‘I used her ambition against her. She got exactly what she wanted and now she’s not a threat.’
He threw an image to Mark’s sensorium of a nondescript woman with medium build, smiling into the sky. But for the wild rust-coloured freckles all over her and the orange, glassy eyes, she looked like the sort of person you expected to see working as a financial programmer on a minor colony world. The expression on her face was one of sweet and gentle peace.
‘That’s Nada?’ he said.
Will nodded.
‘I think I expected someone more fearsome.’
Will snorted. ‘She’s fearsome, all right.’
‘She’s still alive?’ said Mark. ‘If you’ve got her, why don’t you just shut her pattern down?’
Will’s expression darkened. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I’m still using her.’
Mark found something in his tone a little sinister.
‘Preparation for our departure to Galatea is already under way,’ Will told them, walking across to the window. ‘We’re going to prevent a massacre, after which I plan to destroy what’s left of the Photes. I’m building a software weapon for that job, and that’s why I need Nada. I’m reusing the control-key Mark deployed. I was able to extract it from Nada’s mind-temple. I’ve adapted it to make it do exactly what the Transcended don’t want, namely force knowledge of their own origin and artificiality onto the Photes.’
Will bounced on his toes. His eyes gleamed. ‘It will prove to them that heaven is never coming, and it’s contagious. Once a target Phote’s task-stack is rewritten, they take the new gospel to their friends. In effect, they fight our battles for us until they’re all paralysed with despair and dying inside. The Nada I’ve been tinkering with is the seed. I’m weaponising her as a kind of Typhoid Mary.’
Mark shivered. Something about the plan struck him as a mite inhuman, even against the Photes. Whoever heard of a plague of weaponised hopelessness?
‘Why not just use happiness?’ said Mark. ‘It looks like that worked on this Nada.’
Will’s expression soured. ‘I don’t want to,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘You’re welcome to join me while I wipe them out,’ he said. ‘And after I’ve done that, I’m going head to head with the Transcended.’
He let that one hang in the air for a while.
‘Will, I’m not sure that’s the right choice,’ Mark said cautiously. ‘I tried that and it was a mistake. Plus, in our last conversation, they were kind of helpful.’
Will chuckled. It wasn’t a nice sound. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They do that.’
‘They implied that what you saw on Snakepit wasn’t real. And they gave me the weapon we needed.’
Will sighed. ‘And you’re welcome to believe their shit if you like,’ he said. ‘I won’t stop you. But I can’t. They made Snakepit. They fucked up my life. They’ve killed billions of people, not to mention at least two other sentient races. They don’t get a free pass because they handed out a few trinkets to the natives.’
He surveyed the survivors with a look that managed to be both amiable and frightening. Mark had a moment of doubt over which version of Will had actually won their fight back in the ark.
‘We’re flying out in two days,’ Will said. ‘Presuming you’re all coming.’
‘In what?’ said Ann.
‘Starships.’
She looked doubtful. ‘I didn’t see any in orbit.’
‘There weren’t any,’ said Will. ‘I’m building them. Don’t worry.’
‘You’re building a starship in two days?’ said Clath.
Will shook his head. ‘No, I’m building three, plus a carrier. I’m splitting us up. I’m going in one ship; the rest of you will be divided between the other two and operate as my backup. Your job is to stay safe and out of the way.’
‘I’d rather participate in the battle,’ said Ann.
‘So would I,’ said Mark. ‘I know how to fly, remember?’
‘Like I said, backup,’ Will repeated with a firm, unsettling smile. ‘Your job is to watch and not die, because I care about all of you. My ship will carry the majority of the weaponry, but don’t worry, you’ll be equipped with the defensive tools you need.’
‘Will, we’re not pets,’ said Rachel bluntly. ‘We want to help.’
‘And I appreciate that,’ said Will. ‘I really do. It’s just that some of the fighting I intend to do is going to be a little … nasty. And frankly, I’m more robust than you are.’
‘Plus, I have spares,’ said another Will stepping out of the airlock and adjusting his cuffs i
n the same way as the first. Mark’s head whipped around to look at the identical figure and then back to the original.
‘Lots and lots of spares,’ said Will Two. ‘Can the rest of you claim that?’
‘No?’ said Will One. ‘Then please trust me when I say that I’d like to have you all still intact when I’ve finished taking out the trash.’
There was an iron coldness underpinning Will’s joviality that reminded Mark very much of the crazy version he’d met back at Snakepit. It left Mark feeling unnerved and more than a little trivialised.
‘Will,’ said Rachel, ‘do you mind if I speak to you privately for a moment?’
‘Sure, honey,’ said Will One. He gestured towards the rear of the lifter cabin.
‘Okay,’ said Will Two as the two of them wandered off between the glistening anemones. ‘Who wants to be in which ship?’
22.3: WILL
With his guts churning, Will let Rachel lead him to the back of the cabin. The sight of his wife was doing terrible things to the inside of his instance’s head, and it was propagating right up into his meta-consciousness.
He wished he could afford to be honest with her. She clearly had no idea that she was compromised, just like Ann and Mark. All three of them had been touched by the Transcended. Mark had suffered a full download at the lure star, Ann’s smart-cells had been tinkered with, and Rachel? Her survival simply wasn’t credible. Who knew how much alien intelligence lurked inside each of them, watching everything he did? But he couldn’t warn her. He couldn’t even allude to it. It would only mess up what needed to happen next.
The gloomy certainty that his wife was a tool of the Transcended had settled on him after he’d finished dispatching Nada – as soon as he had enough spare processing capacity to think about it. The system in which they’d found her had been too rich in tailored learning experiences for the Dantes’ crew. The probability of the Transcended not touching her was essentially zero. That was unfortunate, because his new plan had everything to do with that elder race and very little to do with Nada Rien.