But even so, the power of the RoboGaia system of the native Belladonnans was formidable. There were one hundred anciens – none ever died, no new anciens were ever born – but there were more than one billion Belladonnans, and all of them were well fed and well housed. All the crops were grown by Belladonnans; all the livestock farms were tended by Belladonnans; all the food was cooked by Belladonnans; all the shops were owned and run by Belladonnans. The anciens were masters of the planet, but they were massively outnumbered by their slaves, and those “slaves” were sustained by the vast armies of robot minds and robot bodies.
And thus, as I had deduced within my first few hours on the planet, there were significant flaws in the conspiratorial empire run by the anciens. They controlled the President, they owned the police, they had absolute power over the army and space fleets. But they exercised no control over the boring bureaucracy of Belladonna. For why would they – they who were as gods! – bother with such tedious minutiae? Why should they care about the computer programs that make the moving walkways move? And why bother understanding or controlling the system that ensures that the streets are always cleaned, and the bins are always collected?
Masters of the universe tend to have other priorities: it is the very definition of power not to know the names of one’s staff.
And so a lowly clerk like “Jack Wingfield” was allowed a remarkable amount of autonomy. My supervisor was bored with her job; my colleagues just punched a time clock to be eligible for state benefits. And thus I, the lowliest of clerks, working twenty-four-hour days for month after month after month, had the de facto freedom to introduce changes.
Initially, they were small changes. I speeded up the moving walkways, by a tiny amount. I manufactured flying buses that had a small green flash on their bonnets, instead of a small red flash, with an engine noise that was half a decibel louder. And my work passed undetected.
So I became bolder. I started manufacturing flybikes that were slightly larger. Then very much larger. I oversupplied flybikes and stored the excess in warehouses in the deserted old Industrial Zones. I manufactured millions of them. I built them with engines powerful enough to achieve escape velocity; I built them with add-ons like super-surround-sound music systems, and perfume buds, and rockets, and missiles, and forcefield generators.
And then I started manufacturing them by the billion.
And then I took over full operational control of the transport systems – the walkways, and the flying buses and taxis. I identified the power source for the forcefield cables that held up the anciens’ super-fast cable cars, and took that under my control as well. I reprogrammed the fabricator factories in orbit around the planet so that they too could be remotely controlled by me. And at every stage, I created a fraudulent datatrail to mislead the Belladonnan Quantum Computer about what was happening on the planet and in her cyberverse.
And then I took control of the army’s equipment and supplies computer program and introduced small changes there. I supplied them with Bostock Batteries that leaked energy. I re-equipped them with plasma cannons that functioned as large flashlights. I ordered the repainting of all their nuclear missiles, using paint of such high density the missiles would not fly.
It took nearly a year to do all this, a year in which I went to work, worked all day, went home, worked all night, then went back to work again.
And at the end of a year I had built an army with which I could defy the evil regime of the anciens.
At 0.800 June 15th, on a Saturday morning, an alien armada appeared in the sky.
One moment, the skies were blue and cloudless; the next, the heavens darkened, and there were millions of spaceships looming above Belladonna, visible as tiny sparks of light. It was as if the stars had moved themselves out of the sky and were aiming to colonise the planet.
There had been no warning of the invasion: the spaceships had appeared from nowhere. And, as they moved closer and closer still to the planet, it could be seen they were vast and ugly ships, with leering teeth painted on their bows.
The planet’s space fleet was mobilised, and contact with the aliens was made. But a hostile message sent by the aliens over the MI channels – “SURRENDER OR DIE” – gave the Belladonnan space fleet full justification to launch a pre-emptive strike.
Twelve Belladonnan admirals commanded the space war, under the overall operational control of the Belladonnan Quantum Computer. Missiles were fired; defence satellites were armed and turned into orbital missile launchers; and from the ground silos, a dense hail of plasma beams and anti-matter pulses rained upwards into the sky of Belladonna.
And, as part of standard operating procedures, the industrial RoboGaia on Belladonna became fully integrated with the Space Defence Computers on all the battleships and space missile systems. A unified central computing brain was created: the intention being that the needs of the planet’s infrastructure should, in times of war, be subordinate to the needs of its defence forces.
However, I used this opportunity to stage a reverse takeover: the industrial RoboGaia took control of the space defence network. A single mind now controlled all the computers on the planet and in space.
And the mind behind this vast computer network was mine.
Now, despite the cybersecurity systems that had been installed, all the space battleships were controlled by me. And all the missiles in the orbiting and planetary silos were controlled by me. All the satellites were controlled by me. Even the Belladonnan Quantum Computer was programmed to obey only my instructions, and not those of the computer programmers, or the President, or the anciens.
I have, of course, a cybernetic intellect of vast scope, combined with the lateral and imaginative thought-processing systems of a human mind. In effect, this gives me a brain the size of a planet: and so I was now quite literally able to control every piece of machinery and software on all of Belladonna and in the regions of space that surrounded it.
I was Belladonna.
After a while it became apparent to the anciens that the planetary defence systems were failing. The bombs were exploding in empty space; the plasma beams and anti-matter rays had found no targets.
The alien invasion was an illusion.
By the time the anciens had realised what was happening, I launched my own forces.
There were a hundred spires in Lawless City; and suddenly all were besieged by flybikes and flying buses and empty police cruisers. Like bees swarming, they swirled around the spires, hurling bombs and forcefield-neutralising rays and plasma beams at the spires. Meanwhile, missiles from the ground silos directed at the alien armada were falling out of orbit, and crashing down to the planet – where they all, without exception, crashed down upon the spires.
I saw it all in my mind’s eye, via the Belladonnan Computer’s micro-cameras – trillions of them in all – and my own armies of dragonflies.
And as I watched, the flybikes swarmed and spat missiles and bombs fell out of the sky. The forcefields around the spires glowed, and flickered, and flickered some more, and finally disappeared. And the missiles continued to crash and the bombs continued to explode.
And slowly, one by one, the spires started to topple. Their forcefields fizzled and flickered, and the supporting skeleton of the buildings ceased to exist. Black rocks started to fall off their sides. Their walls crumbled.
One by one, they fell, and jewelled black-rock boulders crashed to the ground, like the marbles of some whimsical god.
In a battle lasting nearly five hours, in which legions of aerial domestic vehicles became deadly weapons of war, all one hundred of the spires were cut in half or smashed into pieces, or reduced to rubble.
This proved my hypothesis; the anciens were invulnerable, but their buildings were not.
The armed forces were now scrambled, and the police and emergency services were ordered to help. But a message went to each and every one of them on their MI implant: this is a morally justifiable coup. We are on your side. It’s the anciens
we are fighting, not you.
The anciens fled into underground bunkers. They were unable to escape into space on their forcefield elevator cables, for the tips of the spires, where the space elevators were housed, were utterly destroyed. Those anciens on board the orbital penthouses were trapped, cut off from their oxygen and food and energy supplies – for my space defences were now being used to block all transmissions from the anciens’ own solar panels and robot spaceships.
A brief space war raged, but the ancien space navy was puny by comparison with the Belladonnan forces. Thus, I took control of space. And one by one, the anciens who were trapped in orbit returned in manually operated emergency liferafts which crashed in the savannahs.
With the spires destroyed, of course, the anciens had lost their independent AI computer network. A day earlier, they had possessed one hundred AIs of phenomenal power, and could have easily defeated the Belladonnan Computer in a cyberwar. Now, they had no AIs, and no access to the Belladonnan Computer.
They did have, in their underground bunkers, stores and supplies and some weapons. But beyond that, all the anciens possessed were the clothes they stood up in.
Within a day, I had captured Lawless City; within two days I had taken control of the other cities and the ranches and the wilderness areas too.
Now it was time to negotiate.
Vishaal stared at my holo image and slowly recognised me, despite my radically different humaniform body. And then he actually smiled.
“What do you hope to achieve?” Vishaal asked.
“Defeat,” I said. “We surrender. We have fought you and conquered you, we have destroyed your homes, and we have humiliated you. Now we surrender.”
“So leave us be. Leave this planet. Find another place.”
Vishaal subvocally laughed.
“You think we would do that?”
“Why not?” I reasoned. “It’s a big universe.”
“We daren’t risk the fifty-fifty again.”
“You have technology beyond our comprehension. You can surely find a way around the fifty-fifty. So go. Go some place else. Terrorise another planet. But not ours. Because if you stay,” I said, “I will ensure that this whole world will know you were defeated, and you will never again be anonymous. Never unknown. All will know you, and fear you, and hate you.”
“What if we destroy the planet when we leave?” Vishaal asked.
“That,” I said, “is a risk I am willing to take.”
I walked through the City Park. I could smell the summer lilacs and the roses and the one-hundred-and-fifty-seven other species of flower which grew there, and I glanced at the white crocuses that surrounded the oak trees like tiny warriors. I passed through a tunnel of richly coloured rhododendrons. Above me, flybikes hovered.
It was dusk, and the stars were starting to appear in the sky.
I was assessing my chances: would my strategy work?
The anciens had an unbeatable weapon of infinite power, and thus could never be defeated in actual warfare. But I now controlled the planet’s computers and, hence, the planet itself. I could stop the walkways and ground the flying cars. I could close down the fabricator plants. I could deny the anciens access to every aspect of their modern technological society.
And thus, the anciens were rendered helpless. Once their supplies ran out, they would not be able to buy more food, for the computer system would not recognise them, and all their credit had been cancelled.
They could not use their own super-fast cable cars, for those had been de-powered. Nor could they hire a taxi, or get on a bus, for they had no means to pay fares. The only way they could survive was to hide in their bunkers, or sneak out at night in Quantum Warrior form and steal from hapless citizens. But that would leave them exposed, and desperate.
And so, for all their power, the anciens were trapped.
But they still had their astonishing weapon. At a blink of an eye, the anciens could become Quantum Warriors, and could kill us all.
But was it worth it for them? Would they really destroy the planet, just to spite me?
I heard someone shouting. And I looked around, and saw that a group of people were staring up at the sky, in a strange state of hysteria. So I looked up too, at the twelve moons of Belladonna, clearly visible in the star-cluttered evening sky.
Then I realised that there were only eleven moons: one of the moons had vanished! I marvelled. Surely they wouldn’t—
Then the earthquake hit, as the twelfth moon crashed into Belladonna. The grass beneath us shuddered and ripped. Bodies were hurled into the air, where they crashed and collided, and there was a screaming all around.
The winds swept the city that night, all night, with a searing power, blowing downwards on the city, as well as in every sideways direction.
Hailstones made of rocks crashed into the streets. Gales as sharp as knife-blades cut through bodies and buildings.
There were only five moons in the sky now. The anciens had hurled them one by one like pebbles at the planet, and the tidal systems were out of kilter. The seas were flooding, typhoons roared across the planet’s lakes.
I had seen a man flayed as he sat eating his breakfast. His skin had flipped inside out, so bare capillaries were exposed to the world. He died in agony but no one paid any heed. Far more terrible things were happening every minute of this night of awful doom.
I walked across the city. The winds were shaking the trees and leaves were raining down but when the leaves fell they did not fall, but hovered, and sometimes turned into floating mulch, then back into leaves. A flock of birds covered the sky, a trillion birds, ten times a trillion birds, but when I looked again the sky was blue.
A flying bus exploded.
The walkway belts snapped and dozens of pedestrians were hurled into the air and landed in a heap. Then they spontaneously combusted, and burned to death, terribly.
Panic stalked the streets. This was no natural disaster. It was an unnatural apocalypse. People were afraid to stay at home; and they were afraid not to stay at home.
My dragonflies and the Belladonna Computer’s cameras showed me everything that was happening in the city. Only the central districts were affected, the Fourth and Fifth Cantons. The outskirts were still safe. And the wilderness areas were untouched.
But thousands of people were being affected by the anciens’ assault. They were beset by preposterous and unlikely natural disasters, and they were also – improbably, and ludicrously – accident-prone. People constantly walked into each other and bumped heads. Chairs collapsed when you sat on them. No one dared drive for fear of crashing, despite the extensive anti-collision software on every vehicle. And a bizarre plague possessed many of them: the Belladonnan tremor. One moment, your hand would be a healthy normal hand, steady as a rock: the next moment it would tremble and shake and sometimes not be there.
Blindness was becoming commonplace. The City Hospital was inundated with patients screaming that they could not see, only to be met by doctors and nurses who also could not see.
And yet they could see – their eyes were entirely healthy – it’s just that tonight, in some parts of Belladonna, the light wasn’t travelling in straight lines any more.
One man, a chef, almost set fire to his kitchen and constantly collided with the waiters and the other chefs, who were invisible to him. Eventually he realised the source of the problem was that he could only see things as they had been yesterday.
My dragonflies continued to give me detailed visions of the horror. I saw women and children ripped into pieces by exploding hardglass. I saw dogs with five legs, and horns. I saw streets that became snakes and saw maddened people walking on roads of eyes. And even when the improbability started to ebb and wane, people still died, in rage-filled riots and homicides motivated by panic and hysteria.
At dawn the walkways were littered with the bodies of dead men and women and children, and the streets ran red once again.
In the course of the following da
y, things went back to normal. But the death toll was appalling. Buildings were warped and distorted. And in many places, human flesh had become merged with sidewalks and buildings; I saw a wrecked police cruiser made up entirely of human faces.
I hadn’t expected the anciens would go this far. But it had always been a contingency, and my resolve was not weakened.
I no longer went to work. I rarely went to my apartment. I walked the streets, merged with the RoboGaia, aware of everything that was happening, waiting for the anciens’ next assault.
The citizens of Belladonna were shattered by their night of chaos. New religions were being formed. Endless speculation about the causes of the temporary collapse in reality were proposed. And many of the theories tallied with the truth.
For in a quantum universe, anything can happen. The rules of probability do not apply. And the mind-boggling uncertainty that prevails at atomic level can apply just as easily at macrocosmic level. It’s just that, for reasons which defy rational analysis, the world happens to behave as if it is consistent and credible and “real.”
Usually, but not now, not any more.
For the Quantum Warriors had a power that allowed them to cut the ties that bound reality. The impossible was possible: if it could happen, it assuredly would.
The following night, the chaos descended upon us again… and again the night after. And again the night after that.
Miracles became a matter of course. Some of those who died in ghastly accidents experienced a spontaneous remission, and came back to life.
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