by Dan Simmons
“When I self-destruct my AI persona,” said Johnny, “the shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time …”
“Entry to the Core,” whispered BB, his eyes glowing like some antique VDT.
“It would be very dangerous,” stressed Johnny. “To my knowledge, no human operator has ever penetrated Core periphery.”
BB rubbed his upper lip. “There’s a legend that Cowboy Gibson did it before the Core seceded,” he mumbled. “But nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared.”
“Even if you penetrate,” said Johnny, “there would be insufficient time to access except for the feet that I have the data coordinates.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” whispered BB. He turned back to his console and reached for his shunt. “Let’s do it.”
“Now?” I said. Even Johnny looked taken aback.
“Why wait?” BB clicked in his shunt and attached metacortex leads, but left the deck idling. “Are we doing this, or what?”
I went over next to Johnny on the couch and took his hand. His skin was cool. He showed no expression now but I could imagine what it must be like to be facing imminent destruction of one’s personality and previous existence. Even if the transfer worked, the human with the John Keats persona would not be “Johnny.”
“He’s right,” said Johnny. “Why wait?”
I kissed him. “All right,” I said. “I’m going in with BB.”
“No!” Johnny squeezed my hand. “You can’t help and the danger would be terrible.”
I heard my own voice, as implacable as Meina Gladstone’s. “Perhaps. But I can’t ask BB to do this if I won’t. And I won’t leave you in there alone.” I squeezed his hand a final time and went over to sit by BB at the console. “How do I connect with this fucking thing, BB?”
You’ve read all the cyberpuke stuff. You know all about the terrible beauty of datumplane, the three-dimensional highways with their landscapes of black ice and neon perimeters and Day-Glo Strange Loops and shimmering skyscrapers of data blocks under hovering clouds of AI presence. I saw all of it riding piggyback on BB’s carrier wave. It was almost too much. Too intense. Too terrifying. I could hear the black threats of the hulking security phages; I could smell death on the breath of the counterthrust tapeworm viruses even through the ice screens; I could feel the weight of the AIs’ wrath above us—we were insects under elephants’ feet—and we hadn’t even done anything yet except travel approved dataways on a logged-in access errand BB had dreamed up, some homework stuff for his Flow Control Records and Statistics job.
And I was wearing stick-on leads, seeing things in a datumplane version of fuzzy black and white TV while Johnny and BB were viewing full stimsim holo, as it were.
I don’t know how they took it.
“OK,” whispered BB in some datumplane equivalent of a whisper, “we’re here.”
“Where?” All I saw was an infinite maze of bright lights and even brighter shadows, ten thousand cities arrayed in four dimensions.
“Core periphery,” whispered BB. “Hang on. It’s about time.”
I had no arms to hang on to and nothing physical in this universe to grasp, but I concentrated on the waveform shades that were our data truck and clung.
Johnny died then.
I’ve seen a nuclear explosion firsthand. When Dad was a senator he took Mom and me to Olympus Command School to see a FORCE demonstration. For the last course the audience viewing pod was farcast to some godforsaken world … Armaghast, I think … and a FORCE:ground recon platoon fired a clean tactical nuke at a pretend adversary some nine klicks away. The viewing pod was shielded with a class ten containment field, polarized, the nuke only a fifty-kiloton field tactical, but I’ll never forget the blast, the shock wave rocking the eighty-ton pod like a leaf on its repellers, the physical shock of light so obscenely bright that it polarized our field to midnight and still brought tears to our eyes and clamored to get in.
This was worse.
A section of datumplane seemed to flash and then to implode on itself, reality flushed down a drain of pure black.
“Hang on!” BB screamed against datumplane static that rasped at my bones and we were whirling, tumbling, sucked into the vacuum like insects in an oceanic vortex.
Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, black-armored phages thrust toward us through the din and madness. BB avoided one, turned the others acid membranes against itself. We were being sucked into something colder and blacker than any void in our reality could ever be.
“There!” called BB, his voice analog almost lost in the tornado rush of ripping datasphere.
There what? Then I saw it: a thin line of yellow rippling in the turbulence like a cloth banner in a hurricane. BB rolled us, found our own wave to carry us against the storm, matched coordinates that danced past me too quickly to see, and we were riding the yellow band into …
… into what? Frozen fountains of fireworks. Transparent mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal process bubbles, glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and armies of black-pulse phages.
“Shit,” I whispered to no one in particular.
BB followed the yellow band down, in, through. I felt a connection as if someone had suddenly given us a great mass to carry.
“Got it!” screamed BB, and suddenly there was a sound louder and larger than the maelstrom of noise surrounding and consuming us. It was neither klaxon nor siren, but it was both in its tone of warning and aggression.
We were climbing out of it all. I could see a vague wall of gray through the brilliant chaos and somehow knew it to be the periphery, the vacuum dwindling but still breaching the wall like a shrinking black stain. We were climbing out.
But not quickly enough.
The phages hit us from five sides. During the twelve years I’ve been an investigator I’ve been shot once, knifed twice. I’ve had more than this one rib broken. This hurt more than all that combined. BB was fighting and climbing at the same time.
My contribution to the emergency was to scream. I felt cold claws on us, pulling us down, back into the brightness and noise and chaos. BB was using some program, some formula of enchantment to fight them off. But not enough. I could feel the blows slamming home—not against me primarily, but connecting to the matrix analog that was BB.
We were sinking back. Inexorable forces had us in tow. Suddenly I felt Johnny’s presence and it was as if a huge, strong hand had scooped us up, lifted us through the periphery wall an instant before the stain snapped our lifeline to existence and the defensive field crashed together like steel teeth.
We moved at impossible speed down congested dataways, passing datumplane couriers and other operator analogs like an EMV ripping past oxcarts. Then we were approaching a slow-time gate, leapfrogging gridlocked exiting operator analogs in some four-dimensional high jump.
I felt the inevitable nausea of transition as we came up out of the matrix. Light burned my retinas. Real light. Then the pain washed in and I slumped over the console and groaned.
“Come on, Brawne.” It was Johnny—or someone just like Johnny—helping me to my feet and moving us both toward the door.
“BB,” I gasped.
“No.”
I opened aching eyes long enough to see BB Surbringer draped across his console. His Stetson had fallen off and rolled to the floor. BB’s head had exploded, spattering most of the console with gray and red. His mouth was open and a thick white foam still issued from it. It looked like his eyes had melted.
Johnny caught me, half lifted me. “We have to go,” he whispered. “Someone will be here any minute.”
I closed my eyes and let him take me away from there.
I awoke to dim red light and the sound of water drippi
ng. I smelled sewage, mildew, and the ozone of uninsulated fiberoptic cables. I opened one eye.
We were in a low space more cave than room with cables snaking from a shattered ceiling and pools of water on the slime-caked tiles. The red light came from somewhere beyond the cave—a maintenance access shaft perhaps, or automech tunnel. I moaned softly. Johnny was there, moving from the rough bedroll of blankets to my side. His face was darkened with grease or dirt and there was at least one fresh cut.
“Where are we?”
He touched my cheek. His other arm went around my shoulders and helped me to a sitting position. The awful view shifted and tilted and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick. Johnny helped me drink water from a plastic tumbler.
“Dregs’ Hive,” said Johnny.
I’d guessed even before I was fully conscious. Dregs’ Hive is the deepest pit on Lusus, a no man’s land of mech tunnels and illegal burrows occupied by half the Web’s outcasts and outlaws. It was in Dregs’ Hive that I’d been shot several years ago and still bore the laser scar above my left hipbone.
I held the tumbler out for more water. Johnny fetched some from a steel therm and came back. I panicked for a second as I fumbled in my tunic pocket and on my belt: Dad’s automatic was gone. Johnny held the weapon up and I relaxed, accepting the cup and drinking thirstily. “BB?” I said, hoping for a moment that it had all been a terrible hallucination.
Johnny shook his head. “There were defenses that neither of us had anticipated. BB’s incursion was brilliant, but he couldn’t outfight Core omega phages. But half the operators in datumplane felt echoes of the battle. BB is already the stuff of legend.”
“Fucking great,” I said and gave a laugh that sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a sob. “The stuff of legend. And BB’s dead. For fuck-all nothing.”
Johnny’s arm was tight around me. “Not for nothing, Brawne. He made the grab. And passed the data to me before he died.”
I managed to sit fully upright and to look at Johnny. He seemed the same—the same soft eyes, same hair, same voice. But something was subtly different, deeper. More human? “You?” I said. “Did you make the transfer? Are you …”
“Human?” John Keats smiled at me. “Yes, Brawne. Or as close to human as someone forged in the Core could ever be.”
“But you remember … me … BB … what’s happened.”
“Yes. And I remember first looking into Chapman’s Homer. And my brother Tom’s eyes as he hemorrhaged in the night. And Severn’s kind voice when I was too weak to open my own eyes to face my fate. And our night in Piazza di Spagna when I touched your lips and imagined Fanny’s cheek against mine. I remember, Brawne.”
For a second I was confused, and then hurt, but then he set his palm against my cheek and he touched me, there was no one else, and I understood. I closed my eyes. “Why are we here?” I whispered against his shirt.
“I couldn’t risk using a farcaster. The Core could trafce us at once. I considered the spaceport but you were in no condition to travel. I chose the Dregs’.”
I nodded against him. “They’ll try to kill you.”
“Yes.”
“Are the local cops after us? The Hegemony police? Transit cops?”
“No, I don’t think so. The only ones who’ve challenged us so far were two bands of goondas and some of the Dregs’ dwellers.”
I opened my eyes. “What happened with the goondas?” There were more deadly hoodlums and contract killers in the Web but I’d never run across any.
Johnny held up Dad’s automatic and smiled.
“I don’t remember anything after BB,” I said.
“You were injured by the phage backlash. You could walk but we were the caupe of more than a few odd looks in the Concourse.”
“I bet. Tell me about what BB discovered. Why is the Core obsessed with Hyperion?”
“Eat first,” said Johnny. “It’s been more than twenty-eight hours.” He crossed the dripping width of the cave room and returned with a self-heating packet. It was basic holo fanatic fare—flash-dried and reheated cloned beef, potatoes which had never seen soil, and carrots which looked like some sort of deep-sea slugs. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
“OK,” I said, “tell me.”
“The TechnoCore has been divided into three groups for as long as the Core has existed,” said Johnny. “The Stables are the old-line AIs, some of them dating back to pre-Mistake days; at least one of them gained sentience in the First Information Age. The Stables argue that a certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core. They’ve promoted the Ultimate Intelligence Project as a way to avoid rash decisions, to delay until all variables can be factored. The Volatiles are the force behind the Secession three centuries ago. The Volatiles have done conclusive studies that show how humankind’s usefulness is past and from this point on human beings constitute a threat to the Core. They advocate immediate and total extinction.”
“Extinction,” I said. After a moment I asked, “Can they do it?”
“Of humans in the Web, yes,” said Johnny. “Core intelligences not only create the infrastructure for Hegemony society but are necessary for everything from FORCE deployment to the failsafes on stockpiled nuclear and plasma arsenals.”
“Did you know about this when you were … in the Core?”
“No,” said Johnny. “As a pseudo-poet cybrid retrieval project, I was a freak, a pet, a partial thing allowed to roam the Web the way a pet is let out of the house each day. I had no idea there were three camps of AI influence.”
“Three camps” I said. “What’s the third? And where does Hyperion comp in?”
“Between the Stables and the Volatiles are the Ultimates. For the past five centuries the Ultimates have been obsessed with the UI Project. The existence or extinction of the human race is of interest to them only in how it applies to the project. To this date, they have been a force for moderation, an ally of the Stables, because it is their perception that such reconstruction and retrieval projects as the Old Earth experiment are necessary to the culmination of the UI.
“Recently, however, the Hyperion issue has caused the Ultimates to move toward the Volatiles’ views. Since Hyperion was explored four centuries ago, the Core has been concerned and nonplussed. It was immediately obvious that the so-called Time Tombs were artifacts launched backward in time from a point at least ten thousand years in the galaxy’s future. More disturbing, however, is the fact that Core predictive formulae have never been able to factor the Hyperion variable.
“Brawne, to understand this, you must realize how much the Core relies upon prediction. Already, without UI input, the Core knows the details of the physical, human, and AI future to a margin of 98.9995 percent for a period of at least two centuries. The AI Advisory Council to the All Thing with its vague, delphic utterances—considered so indispensable by humans—is a joke. The Core drops tidbits of revelations to the Hegemony when it serves the Core’s purposes—sometimes to aid the Volatiles, sometimes the Stables, but always to please the Ultimates.
“Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the Core’s existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron—a nonfactorable variable. Impossible as it seems, Hyperion appears to be exempt from the laws of physics, history, human psychology, and AI prediction as practiced by the Core.
“The result has been two futures—two realities if you will—one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”
Water dripped on tile. Somewhere in the tunnels nearby a mech cauterizer’s warning siren echoed from ceramic and ston
e. I leaned against the wall and stared at Johnny.
“Interstellar war,” I said. “Both scenarios demand an interstellar war?”
“Yes. There is no escaping that.”
“Can both Core groups be wrong in their prediction?”
“No. What happens on Hyperion is problematic, but the disruption in the Web and elsewhere is quite clear. The Ultimates use this knowledge as the prime argument for hurrying the next step in Core evolution.”
“And what did BB’s stolen data show about us, Johnny?”
Johnny smiled, touched my hand, but did not hold it. “It showed that I am somehow part of the Hyperion unknown. Their creation of a Keats cybrid was a terrible gamble. Only my apparent lack of success as a Keats analog allowed the Stables to preserve me. When I made up my mind to go to Hyperion, the Volatiles killed me with the clear intention of obliterating my AI existence if my cybrid again made that decision.”
“You did. What happened?”
“They failed. In the Core’s limitless arrogance, they failed to take two things into account. First, that I might invest all consciousness in my cybrid and thus change the nature of the Keats analog. Second, that I would go to you.”
“Me!”
He took my hand. “Yes, Brawne. It seems that you also are part of the Hyperion unknown.”
I shook my head. Realizing that there was a numbness in my scalp above and behind my left ear, I raised my hand, half expecting to find damage from the datumplane fight. Instead, my fingers encountered the, plastic of a neural shunt socket.
I jerked other hand from Johnny’s grasp and stared at him in horror. He’d had me wired while I was unconscious.
Johnny held up both hands, palms toward me. “I had to, Brawne. It may be necessary for the survival of both of us.”
I made a fist. “You fucking low-life son of a bitch. Why do I need to interface directly, you lying bastard?”