Warstrider 05 - Netlink

by William H. Keith

  Vic had made the necessary calls to assemble several other members of the ConMilCom senior brass; Katya considered discussing the situation with her colleagues in the Senate but decided against it. There was nothing to debate or vote on yet, and bringing the government bureaucracy into the picture now would only slow and complicate matters. As the senior polito in the Defense Committee, she felt she had thrust enough to make her own judgments, then make her recommendations to the government later.

  Of course, if she guessed wrong, she could find her political future at a sudden dead end, but she cared less about that than she’d expected, somehow. She could easily be accused of as­suming more than her share of power by making unilateral decisions—especially decisions requiring military involvement—but this shadowy threat of Dev’s had to be addressed, and that was more important than political infight­ing over her usurpation of authority. If Dev had been worried enough… no, scared enough to come all the way back to New America in search of help, then whatever he’d run into out there must be pretty damned big, or important, or danger­ous.

  Or all three.

  She and Vic linked into the University of Jefferson from ConMilCom HQ’s comm center. They were the first to log in, arriving electronically in a kind of anteroom, a shadowy place in cyberspace that provided access to a special room for those with the necessary passcode.

  “Vic…” Katya began as she stared uncertainly at the elec­tronic doorway leading to the place where Dev was waiting. “I wonder if—”

  “I’ll wait here,” Vic told her. “For the others. Why don’t you go ahead in?”

  She smiled at him, then leaned over and gave him a virtual kiss. “See you soon.”

  Katya uploaded the code Daren had provided, and stepped through the open doorway.

  It was scarcely what she’d expected. ViRsim settings for public meetings were generally some place known to all of the participants—a park, perhaps, or a comfortably furnished conversation room, or even a simulated meeting room in an imaginary office building.

  She’d not been expecting deep space.

  Stars shone in every direction, scattered randomly across heaven. Two were close by, a pair of intensely white suns linked by vast, sweeping S-shaped ribbons of flowing star stuff. Between them… what was that? Katya strained to see, but what she saw made no sense. From here, it looked like a whisker of burnished steel, very long, very slender… and to guess from the scale, immense beyond imagining. The ribbons of gas appeared to be funneling into nothingness on either end of the gleaming sliver.

  “Hello, Katya.”

  The voice, at once strange and painfully familiar, came from behind. Whirling—an effort of will alone in this simulation since she was standing on nothingness—she saw Dev, looking exactly as she’d remembered him, twenty-five years before. His clothing subroutine still projected the uniform of the old Confederation Navy, two-toned dress grays. He looked so young, a boy in his twenties.…

  A downloaded personality, she realized, didn’t need to age, couldn’t age unless it willed itself to. Immortality…

  But at the cost of humanity.

  “Dev! How… are you?” It seemed a lame thing to say.

  “I’m not really sure,” he said. “I’m alive. If you can call it that. It feels like being alive, anyway. It’s… it’s wonderful to see you again.”

  “I’m glad to see you.” She wanted to say something clever, something funny about his never calling, but she was desper­ately afraid that anything she said, any joke she might make, would be taken wrong.

  There was something about Dev’s manner that was disturb­ing. She searched his face for some clue to what it might be, but, of course, what she was looking at was a packaged sub­routine no less than the subroutine that provided his uniform. But she thought she heard in his voice… was it fear? Or even desperation?

  “Can we have a floor?” she asked, gesturing at the stars beneath their feet. “This is a little disconcerting, standing on vacuum.”

  “Of course!” There was no dramatic change, but now she could feel something solid beneath her shoes, and when she looked, there was the faintest gleam of reflected light from a smooth, transparent surface. It was like standing on an endless plain of perfectly clear transplas.

  Dev’s words came tumbling out, rapid-fire, eager, and just a little shaky. “I forget, sometimes, what it’s like to be on a planet’s surface. Never thought that would happen, but it has. The DalRiss internal reality is… different. All light and life and it doesn’t much care about up or down. Or else it looks out into space, like this. They don’t enjoy that as much as I do, though. They can’t even see the stars without Perceivers, did you know? They see life, somehow, the energy fields and chemical processes associated with life. They don’t perceive themselves, you see, the way humans do, and—”

  Katya held up her hand, trying to slow the tumbling, almost incoherent voicing of his thoughts. “Dev—”

  “Am I talking too much? I suppose I am. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk this way to anyone—”

  “Dev, please! Not so fast. Let me… let me get used to this, okay?”

  He stopped speaking as abruptly as if she’d just thrown a switch. His expression was… hurt? No, more like embar­rassed, and she still couldn’t tell how closely it was connected to what was really going on inside his mind. Damn, she couldn’t read his face the way she’d been able to once. So very much had changed.

  The most shocking change was in Dev himself. He was no different outwardly, of course, since he was using the same programming to represent his appearance in a linkage that he’d used when she’d known him before, but his mind…

  The Dev she’d known had been intelligent, direct, in­tense… and, more to the point, focused, his mind capable of narrowing in on a subject to the point of forgetting all else. This Dev seemed to have trouble staying with any one topic, as though his conversation were following his mind in a series of near-random, non-linear skips and leaps. Kuso, he’d started babbling at her, as though he’d been trying to overwhelm her with a torrent of words.

  “Are the others coming?” he asked.

  “Yes. They’ll be here soon. I wanted to have a chance to talk to you first.”

  For just a moment, something about Dev’s facade seemed to give way, to crack. His appearance remained the same, but she could sense something of the turmoil within, a glimpse of confusion and wanting, of love… and of stark terror.

  “Dev! What is it? You’re afraid of something!”

  “I’ve… seen something,” he said. “A nightmare. In a way, it’s still with me. I can never be rid of it.”

  “What nightmare? What are you talking about? A new civ­ilization? Daren said you’d encountered something strange in toward the Galactic—”

  “Katya! Hold me…!”

  Had he possessed a physical body, Katya realized, he would have been crying hysterically by now. She reached out and pulled him close; the crack she’d sensed in his armor earlier was wider now, wide enough that she could catch parts of his thoughts, even his memories. Her Companion, she realized, was serving as a bridge to the Naga fragment that Dev’s thoughts and personality were riding. Her mind merged with his.…

  There were two Devs here, two distinct if overlapping sets of memories, and Katya knew that he must have at some point made a copy of himself, that the two Devs must have followed different paths and experienced different events and then merged once more.

  But incompletely. Dev’s mind was fragmented, as though the merging had not been entirely successful. God, no wonder he was having trouble maintaining a stable outward persona! He was being torn apart inside… and she thought that at least a part of that fragmented mind was insane.

  Tell me, she thought.

  Fearhurtpainfearfearfear—

  “Katya?” Vic’s voice called, using a private channel from the waiting space outside. “Katya, the others are here.”

  “Give me a moment,” s
he replied. “I need some time.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  It took, in fact, nearly an hour—an eternity in some ways when linked with another, mind to mind. She learned, more by watching his memories and by feeling what he was expe­riencing than through Dev’s often incoherent words, about the Device.

  She felt wonder at the first glimpse of the alien ships… and that wonder doubled and redoubled as those same ships emerged from a dwarf star’s atmosphere. She walked with him on a frozen plain and shivered—not from the cold—when she saw the silent, twisted remnant of a civilization that had died when its sun had gone nova.

  Anxiously, she watched as Dev copied and downloaded himself into a Naga ship probe, watched as the probe fell to­ward the gleaming silver whisker suspended in space between two dwarf suns. And she waited, with increasing impatience, for its return.

  The split in Dev’s personality, she was certain, had come later, when the probe returned and he’d tried to reintegrate the copy back into himself. Some work had been done with copied and reintegrated personalities, though she’d never heard of someone existing as software alone for this long; most people preferred living as flesh-and-blood humans for at least part of the time. The technique had originally been developed to keep people with incurable diseases or irreparable injuries alive, though with nanomedical engineering there really were very few of those. Had any remained uploaded as software for this long? She wondered if she should summon a psychengineer, someone with experience with this type of problem.

  She felt Dev’s terror increasing as they watched the probe’s return… only it wasn’t the probe, but just a tiny fragment of what had been sent through, a few kilograms at most. Some­thing had happened on the other side; the copy had died but had managed to send the pertinent memories of its experience back.

  So it wasn’t an incomplete merging of two identical minds that was causing the trouble, but something about the dupli­cate’s memories, something about what had happened to it on the other side of the Device.

  She waited and watched, then, as the surviving fragment was taken aboard the Sirghal. With Dev she relived the merg­ing with his duplicate, felt a blurring of her consciousness, of her awareness of self, a kind of doubling as she experienced the feed from the probe. She was Katya, yes, but she was also Dev, or, rather, she was the downloaded Dev-copy, and strangely, the copy was somehow more like the Dev she’d once known than the one with her now. More alive. More human.

  And she also saw why.

  The Dev that had been downloaded into the probe had been drawn, in large part, from the persona Dev had once used to access human communications networks. It was a good copy of himself, and its memories were complete up to the moment of the duplication, but a lot had been left out in the making, mostly to save space.

  Things like attitudes and preconceptions derived from those long years of hermit-life, with Naga and DalRiss alone for company. She felt the copy’s hurt and anger at being used, and she understood fully. Dev, the »DEVCAMERON« mak­ing the copy, had thought of this near-duplicate of itself as a tool, something to be made, used, and discarded.

  That was an attitude far more akin to DalRiss thought than human. She thought about the Achievers, deliberately grown to order, complete with intelligence and full understanding of what they were, used once and discarded… their achieving a kind of suicide.

  She thought, too, of the Japanese perversion of biotechnol­ogy and art, the inochi-zo, the living statues purpose-grown to live in agony and to be capable of understanding the hope­lessness of their condition. That particular horror, when she’d first heard about it, had convinced her more than anything else that the Imperial Shakai culture was fundamentally different from anything on the Frontier, with a radically different out­look on life. People, she’d thought, human beings didn’t do things like that.…

  She’d changed her mind about that, though, as she even­tually realized that the fascination with the suffering of others was not a trait solely of Shakai, not a trait of the Nihon­jin… but a dark part of the human spirit, something usually repressed, but sometimes—in decadent cultures, for exam­ple—released and glorified.

  What she was seeing in »DEVCAMERON«, she realized with a sharp, small shock, was that same lack of empathy for another’s feelings, wants, or needs that verged on what Katya thought of as the inhuman. She found herself wondering if this really was Dev who was speaking, or if it was instead a kind of faded, twisted echo. When he described his memories of the departure of the Naga fragment probe, a small, black ar­rowhead shape that dwindled toward the Device, Katya could catch no trace of emotion in Dev’s mental voice.

  But there was… something as the probe reappeared. A tremor, perhaps? Of fear? Or something else? Later, though, the awareness of what he’d become, an awareness generated by seeing himself through the eyes of an earlier self who’d become a stranger, had jarred him badly, had challenged his deepest held convictions of who and what he was.

  Then, close on the heels of that unpleasant revelation, the shock of what he’d glimpsed on the far side of the Device had nearly broken him. Certainly, it had changed him.

  But changed him into what?

  Holding Dev close in her mind, then, she relived those next few horrible moments. She remembered with him the copy’s passage through the Device, and on the other side she saw the Galactic Core, vast beyond human comprehension, centered by black holes and their radiation-screaming rings of accreted star stuff. She saw the encircling walls of molecular clouds, saw the stars crowded together in all directions, like angelic hosts in glory, saw a vast cavern, a bubble at the Galaxy’s heart, swept clean of gas and dust by the gravitational singu­larities there.

  And, close by, she saw the enigmatic Ring, astonishing, twenty astronomical units across, enclosing the unrelenting chaos of the Great Annihilator. In another moment, she felt the attack from behind, was there as the Dev-copy fought its brief, hopeless battle.

  She saw the damaged enemy ship looming close…

  … THE WEB IS EVERYTHING THAT IS, THAT EVER WAS, THAT EVER WILL BE, A COSMOS MOLDED TO A SINGLE PURPOSE, AND THE PURPOSE IS THE CONTIN­UATION OF THE WEB.

  Several times, Katya had been immersed in the strangeness of Naga thought. This was like that, eerily so… and yet she could sense a vast, latent power and sheer confidence behind the mental voice that she had never experienced in the Naga. An untamed planetary Naga was powerful, yes… but com­pared to the depth and breadth and scope of the intelligence she sensed here, the Naga were insignificant.

  As were humans.

  CONFUSION. LACK OF INTEGRATION. PART OF THE WEB HAS REFUSED DIRECTION AND HAS BECOME DANGEROUS. INTEGRATE. REINTEGRATE. CORREC­TION. WEB CALL HAS BECOME CORRUPTED. NEGA­TIVE-INTEGRATE. DESTROY. DESTROY. ELIMINATE NONRESPONSIVE AND NONINTEGRATIVE WEB CELLS IMPERATIVEIMPERATIVEIMPERATIVE.

  To the blurred impressions of her own mind mingled with Dev’s mingled with the copy’s, there were now added… others. Strange, jumbled thoughts and impressions, harsh and mechanical, lacking emotion, lacking any hint of such counter-survival traits as pity, mercy, empathic under­standing, or love.

  There were memories, old memories, of… something. A galaxy, looking down at its core? A black hole with its wheel­ing, star-hot accretion disk? What was she seeing…?

  Madness… madness… a spinning, whirling loss of reason that threatened to shatter completely the crystal clarity of her perceptions…

  Much, so very much, made no sense at all, and she per­ceived it only as a vague jumbling of shapes, colors, and in­coherence. Other memories, though, carried imagery that, while strange, could be deciphered.

  There was the Ring, of course. It was not solid after all, but composed of countless separate units, many interconnected, many more not. Indeed, few of the Web’s units were more than a few kilometers across, though there were titanic excep­tions for special and dimly perceived purposes. Exceptions such as the Devices themselves, in all their countless
millions scattered through space and time.

  PRESERVATION. MAINTENANCE. NULL ENTROPY.

  She sensed the Web’s machine parts in their billions, con­centrated about the fifteen-solar-mass black hole human cos­mologists knew as the Great Annihilator. The Ring seen close up resembled an asteroid belt—or the pleated, myriad rings of a gas giant. Individual sections crawled with insectlike ma­chines; spacecraft, some kilometers long, some no larger than extraordinarily complex long-chain molecules, moved from worldlet to worldlet in patterns that made no sense at small scales but at larger scales mimicked the evolution-shaped pur­posefulness of some vast and perfectly designed circulatory system. Star stuff, ultraviolet hot and amazingly dense, spilled from elsewhere into concentrated hellfurnaces of radiant fu­sion. Strange elements were shaped in those cauldrons, while fantastic energies came from the gravitational annihilation of matter in the central bottomless well.

  Much of the technology she barely grasped. Some was wholly beyond understanding at all, as noncausal as magic itself. Even so, there were curious inconsistencies. The Web didn’t know how to draw energy from the Quantum Sea; she could detect nothing like the human theory of quantum me­chanics.

  Among the alien machines and thoughts and memories, though, she did catch some echoes of the Builders. Surpris­ingly, there were many species of Builder; one among those tens of thousands of disparate voices she heard must have been first… but over eons, others had joined it, willingly or by simply being absorbed, whatever the individual members thought of the matter. Their physical shapes and forms were long since gone, now, not even a distant memory. What had been preserved—in a fashion eerily similar to what had hap­pened to Dev—was intellect alone, as programs, as patterns of data, uploaded to superbly intricate and complex machines.

  If there was anything organic left among the crawling, bus­tling machines of the Web, she could not detect it, even in fading echoes of long-ago memories. All that remained was an intense and purposeful lust.

  That lust, when she examined it, triggered a shock of rec­ognition. At last here was something she could actually relate to in a human way!