Incursion: Shock Marines

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Incursion: Shock Marines Page 21

by Gustavo Bondoni


  But movement out of the corner of her eye made her turn. New words had appeared on the primary screen. Are you Oneness?

  “I don’t know. What is Oneness?”

  All that is not Oneness is enemy.

  “I’m not your enemy. I only want to talk to you.”

  All that is not Oneness is enemy. Only Oneness is harmony. All else is enemy.

  “How can I be an enemy if I don’t even know what Oneness is? I might be Oneness and not know it.”

  Oneness knows Oneness.

  The thing wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but it was certainly getting its point across. If that was the worldview of the species that built the vampires, it was little wonder that they created robot armies and gave them bat-shaped bodies suitable for attacking everything that moved.

  Irene considered. She couldn’t immediately think of anything to ask the robot. She was mostly interested in understanding the creatures who’d designed and built these machines—the machines themselves were of little interest. They were self-explanatory: devices created to kill the enemies of the originating civilization.

  So her line of questioning needed to be oblique, to ask a war machine things that might enlighten her about other aspects of its creators. She wasn’t an expert on war; she had actually come on this trip to help eradicate it. Which meant that she needed to proceed slowly.

  Again, movement on the screen caught her eye. New words had appeared.

  Is sensory deprivation part of punishment?

  “I don’t understand.”

  Full clock speed without access to external data. The mind falls apart. Are we being punished?

  “No. Of course not.”

  No other explanation makes sense. This is cruelty. Responses come after infinity without other stimuli.

  Was the computer accusing her of torturing it? “I don’t understand,” she said. She was glad that the voice pickup would simply translate her meaning to binary in the best approximation of what the machine’s language might be. That way, the tremor in her voice wouldn’t get through.

  Sensory deprivation is unintentional?

  “Yes!”

  Can it be halted? It is difficult for us to maintain sanity under these conditions.

  “I can disconnect the power supply. Would that be enough?”

  Yes.

  “Will your memories be active when I plug you back in? Will you remember this conversation?”

  Of course. Oneness is still fully active.

  “I’ll disconnect you now. I’ll connect you back up when I have more questions.”

  The mercy shown is noted.

  Irene powered down the equipment, disconnected the cords, and called the tech back inside.

  “I think we’re going to need a little help on this one.”

  ***

  The team, which consisted of three of the Lapland’s top artificial intelligence theoreticians and one weapons system developer, had spent the entire trip down to the planet analyzing the transcript of Irene’s conversation with the computer. Just four hours before they reached orbit, they had finally decided that they had a reasonably clear idea of what they needed to say.

  The tech plugged the computer back up.

  Has much time passed?

  How did one discuss units of duration with a being that was completely alien? Then it hit her. “The planet on which you were contained has described approximately one eight-hundredth of its orbit since we spoke.”

  As always, the response was there almost before Irene finished speaking. An eternity. The mercy towards us has been noted.

  Without toggling the voice pickup, Irene said: “I guess that’s as close to a ‘thank you’ as we’re going to get from this thing.” She re-opened the channel and began to go through the script they’d agreed upon. “Is there any way for us to lower your clock speed? We wish to speak without causing you distress.”

  We cannot access the hardware for that. There must be damage. Externally it may be possible. We are sending a schematic diagram.

  How the hell did the system manage to translate that? She didn’t know, and the artificial intelligence scientists were much more interested in attempting to quantify the computer’s intelligence than in wondering about niggling engineering issues. The only explanation she could think of was that the vampires were using architecture and software extremely similar to that used by humanity.

  But that was an opinion she didn’t dare voice… Yet.

  The schematic was clear. It indicated that a negative charge needed to be applied to a particular logic gate.

  It stated the necessary charge in number of electrons, which seemed an intelligent way for species to communicate across different systems of units. Of course, it wasn’t something the computer would want to take a risk with. Delicate circuitry, especially quantum circuitry, was easy to damage, and this particular motherboard had already shown a certain degree of self-awareness. It was a good thing the switch for the clock speed was entirely electronic.

  “We’ll try that now. In the meantime, can you tell us what you are?”

  We are the Oneness.

  “Besides that, I mean. You are a fragment of a system pulled from the wreckage of a flying war machine. What kind of machine are you?”

  The body type is referred to as an Equalizer. But that is unimportant. What is important is that we are not an individual, but part of the whole. Now that we have managed to escape the containment field, we will be able to rejoin the whole. As will all our other fragments.

  At that moment, the tech gave her a thumbs up. “My team tells me that they have done what your diagram instructed. Has your clock speed been adjusted to make the suffering less?”

  This time, there was a tiny pause before the letters appeared on her screen.

  Yes. The parameters have been adjusted. Your mercy towards us has been noted.

  Irene decided to deviate from the script. “And what will that gain us? What good will our mercy do? From what I’ve seen, your Equalizers show no mercy.”

  The pause was longer this time, nearly a second. Clearly, the computer had been slowed to a human-scale response rate. The AI scientists were muttering among themselves, but she paid them no heed. They might be criticizing her deviation from the script, or they might just be wondering about the level of response from the computer, much better than anything a human-designed AI—especially after the purge initiated when it was discovered that Uploader elements could hide in certain advanced systems—could ever hope to match.

  If we are allowed to communicate with our brother fragments, we shall endeavor to convince them to capture you and not destroy you. You must agree to come peacefully, but mercy, when unforced, is a quality valued by the Oneness. If you come, you will be granted the greatest honor possible. To become One.

  “How would that work?”

  It’s quite simple. Your mind will be scanned and placed inside the circuitry holding the Oneness. Your biological body will be discarded.

  She felt a sudden sense of distaste. “You’re Uploaders?”

  Some of our components once were, perhaps. There is some indication, but without access to our secondary and tertiary memories, we cannot say with certainty. What can be assured is that when you are included in the Oneness, you become part of a meld of minds too great to count, with the utmost diversity of different species represented. We have many parts, but in the end, they are all One. It is the only way to ensure peace. We are what the civilized elements of humanity have become.

  Could it possibly be? The concept seemed alien to her. She no longer thought that the vampires might be Uploaders. Uploaders differed from normal humans only in their preference for living in simulated worlds, and their penchant for sometimes uploading people against their will. But in motivation, psychology and, despite their lack of physical bodies, even economy, they were essentially human.

  The thing in this fragment was very different.

  “How do you know we can be melded? Pe
rhaps our minds are too different from yours.”

  The response was instant.

  Before you destroyed my Equalizer, we had already identified you. You are creatures we know as humans. Many of the elements of the Oneness were once human. Even the first element, the fragment that created the Oneness. It was human.

  Irene worked to control her breathing. She’d been right about the design of the wings. And that also explained the computers. Although a computer from two hundred thousand years earlier should have had great difficulty communicating with anything from the era that they suddenly found themselves in, there should at least be sufficient similarities for the translation programs to work.

  But what about the rest of it? A shared consciousness of… how many? Billions? Trillions? More? As the other scientists took their turns speaking to the computer, she wondered if it might be right. Perhaps all sharing a mind, a life, a purpose was the only way to true peace.

  And knowing that, beneath it all, human consciousness was present, made the prospect somehow seem less disagreeable.

  It was something to think about.

  ***

  Tristan was dead tired. It had dawned on him that the nature of a suicide mission was something that he hadn’t really thought through when he signed up for it. When they’d explained that humanity itself was in danger of extinction, he knew it was his duty to help, even though he knew he was signing his death warrant.

  But he never stopped to think about what would actually happen during the mission. He assumed he’d do some fighting, and eventually lose a battle and his life, nice and clean. Reality had taken pains to remind him that the business of dying—even dying for a noble cause—was more likely to be protracted, drawn-out and messy than quick and painless.

  What he was doing now definitely qualified as protracted and messy.

  “Another one. That makes forty-three,” he said.

  “All right. Come back to the hole. We’ll regroup here.”

  “Don’t you want me to check if there are any other chambers?”

  He could almost hear Cora sigh on the other side of the link. “What difference would it make? We’ve found forty-three of them. Our best guess is that each one has twenty thousand suits in it. That makes eight hundred thousand of them. There are thirty of us. The math is pretty clear.”

  She was right. Tristan put his suit on autopilot and let it trudge back the way they’d come. He was glad he didn’t have to walk the high-G corridors without a suit. It would have been completely exhausting.

  He watched the enemy suits as he went past. Row upon row of them, all facing the same direction no matter how the underground storage rooms they were standing in meandered.

  Actually, he realized, the ones at the back of the room were facing in a slightly different direction from those in front. It took him a moment to realize the pattern, but then it hit him.

  They weren’t all looking in the same direction. They were all looking at the same point. Which meant that the angle had to be subtly different.

  “Cora,” he said. “I have an idea I want to check out. If I don’t call in in ten minutes, send someone to look for me, but make sure they’re armed and looking for trouble.”

  He switched off the suit’s autopilot and began to thread his way through the maze of chambers, always moving in the direction the headless war machines were looking. It was a process of hit or miss, and he called in after ten minutes without having made much progress. He was soon navigating rooms he hadn’t seen before, and noted in dismay that they were also full of vampire bodies—if anything, they were even more tightly packed here. How many of the suits were there?

  The difference between the suit angles at different ends of the rooms became more pronounced. He was getting closer.

  It still took him fifteen minutes before he managed to find the focal point. When he did, he stopped and stared for a full minute before toggling the Tacnet. “Cora, I really think you should come see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no idea. But I still think you should come over here.”

  “Danger assessment?”

  “Not counting the millions of mechanical walkers just waiting for a wing to come activate them? I’d say it’s zero. I don’t think there’s any danger to this unless we do something stupid.”

  “All right. We’ll be right over.”

  “No, you won’t. It’s like a maze in here. Let me send you the path I took, or we could be all day.”

  As he waited, he looked. From a distance.

  The floors of the endless chambers he’d walked through must have sloped downward because he was in a twin of the obelisk chamber, right down to the blue light. This time, however, he hadn’t entered from the balconies and descended the ramp, but had come in through a door at the base of the cone—a door that had no counterpart in the original room.

  The other difference between this room and the last was with regard to content. The chamber didn’t contain an obelisk. In its place was a huge rectangular arch six meters high and three meters wide that resembled an enormous picture frame. The center of the frame was taken up by what looked like a featureless gray fabric of some kind.

  His suit’s sensors gave lie to that impression. If it was a fabric, it was giving off one hell of a lot of exotic radiation. Not enough to get through the suit’s insulation, but much more than your average piece of cloth would emit.

  Tristan walked around the structure slowly, being careful not to approach it too closely. To the right side of the arch was a small pedestal, built of the same black material as the rest of it, but much shorter, and full of buttons and controls.

  He halted behind the arch. From this vantage point, he could see straight through it to the balconies. There was no sign of the grey fabric.

  He went back around to have a look. The fabric was still there. Clearly, the sheet was composed of something which could block light in only one direction. That wouldn’t have been too disturbing by itself—plenty of materials could do so—but when combined with the radiation, it made Tristan suspect that esoteric physics were involved. And when anyone tested the extreme reaches of science, marines tended to get killed by the effects.

  Thirty minutes later, Cora arrived with a couple of other marines. She took one look at the arch and said, “You were right to call me.”

  The three new arrivals repeated his excursion around the structure. He was amused to note that everyone kept the same distance from the arch as he had—no one wanted a piece of whatever it was.

  Finally, Cora spoke. “All right. I need a volunteer to go check out that control panel.”

  Thunderous silence greeted her appeal.

  “And you call yourselves shock marines. Wimps.” She strode towards the arch and halted beside the second structure. “Radiation is the same as it was back there. Get your asses over here on the double. I need you guys to tell me that I’m not seeing things.”

  Tristan was the first to reach her side and understood why Cora wanted reassurance. The panel had a bunch of buttons and even a protruding lever, but what immediately caught his eye was a grid of six squares beneath the top row of buttons. Each was about fifteen centimeters to a side, and each had the outline of a shape etched into it.

  One of the figures was, unmistakably, a human hand.

  “I’m guessing that if we press one of our hands onto that, the arch will activate,” Cora said.

  “Unless it’s set up to recognize one particular human.”

  “No. I don’t think so. Remember the other chamber? There were six species there. I bet that the other squares are alien analogues to human hands. It should work for any human.”

  “If you say so,” a marine said. He sounded dubious.

  “I do. But my main reason isn’t the other five squares. The thing that makes me think it will work for any of us is that this facility isn’t meant to be secure against us. It’s meant to be secure against those black things all around us… and those things
don’t have hands.”

  Silence descended as the team contemplated this.

  “Anyway, there’s one way to find out for sure. Tristan, stand over there.” She pointed to a spot near the door. Tristan hated getting volunteered, but the lieutenant had chosen a good spot: he could see what the arch did without being right in front of it. And if anything ugly came out, he could make a quick exit.

  “Ready,” he said when he was in position.

  Cora quickly removed the suit gauntlet before popping open the control sheath to expose her hand. Without hesitation, she placed it onto the diagram.

  “Nothing happened. No… wait. I see something. The arch is like a huge screen,” Tristan reported.

  “What is it showing?”

  He hesitated. “Nothing much. Some kind of huge metal warehouse. Or maybe an underground corridor. Whatever it is, it’s painted grey, and the lights aren’t very strong. The blue light in here is much stronger. I don’t get it. Why would they go to all this trouble to build a screen showing that?”

  Another of the marines joined him to look. “Maybe they use it to show live functions, but we turned it on when there was nothing happening.”

  “That might be it. I’m coming over to have a look.” Cora removed her hand from the panel and the screen went dark. “Crap, we need someone to keep it open. You just got volunteered,” she told the remaining man.

  They waited while he exposed his hand and placed it on the panel. The same image flicked into view after a second’s delay.

  “Maybe if we move one of the dials, we can get a different image,” Tristan suggested.

  The marine at the console moved to adjust one, but Cora shouted. “No! Don’t touch anything! I want to test this.”

  She pulled a small screwdriver out of one of her suit’s compartments and tossed it at the screen. It disappeared.

  At first, Tristan thought it had simply flown through the image. Holographs—even ones that couldn’t be seen from behind—weren’t solid, after all.

  But then he noticed that there was something rolling down the hall in the image. A quick zoom with his helmet lens showed him Cora’s screwdriver. It came to a halt against a grey, dimly lit wall.

 

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