“Duh, Indafi. Any of those pelting asteroids is far more likely to take out the moon than the Earth and we aren’t going to fare too much better without it, even if the Earth can avoid taking a direct hit.”
She gave him a guilty look. “Something like that.”
She wasn’t giving him the complete story, but he’d worked for the government long enough to know, that just translated to “business as usual.” It wasn’t worth bending his mind out of shape sweating problems he couldn’t solve, when he had one in front of him that he just might.
Indafi studied the screen and her modifications to his nanites. “You’re trying to train them to feed off of zero point energy? That’s impossible isn’t it? For another thousand years or so—at least!”
“Natty solved this problem a while back with Laney’s help, but the application was different. All I’m trying to do is modify the practical application. We tweak it one way, like this, and it bolsters the energy shield we’re looking to throw around the moon, so no matter how big the asteroid body hitting it, or how dense it is, the amount of ZPE energy siphoned from the void is just enough to vaporize it.”
He fought to keep up with her tweaks, to even understand their nature. “I can’t quite follow your thinking,” he said, sounding fretful.
“That’s probably for the best. You might want to forget what you’ve figured out so far. There are people who will torture you in ways you can’t even imagine to pry that information out of your head. You live in a far more primitive world than we do.”
He gave her another wary look.
“Now, tweak the nanites this direction, and we can use the same ZPE source as a feedstock for the nanites, so they can grow the Tesla Towers as rapidly as they need to to replace any or all that have been damaged. So,…”
“If the shield is knocked out somehow, and the towers destroyed, both may just be down for seconds, until new towers can take their place.”
“Less,” Ariel said. “In my universe, seconds can be eternities when fighting against AIs.”
Another hard look pulsed from his face to the back of her head like a laser blast. He was DARPA funded, for Christ’s sake. Who could be living in a world more futuristic relative to his own? Then it dawned on him. He craned his head back to Natty. Natty Youngman! The wunderkind behind most of DARPA’s top secret projects before he went AWOL, completely dropped off the map—sometime after entering the Amazon jungle, never to be heard from again.
Shiiiiit!
He craned his head back to Ariel’s monitor. “You did it!”
“Actually you and Natty did most of the heavy lifting on this one. Your nanites, specialized to feed on pure electrical energy, were easy enough to modify so they could absorb ZPE, at least in the timeframe that we had. It’s not like we had access to our most advanced ZPE nanites down here.”
“Why not?”
“Mother is reticent about releasing tech that can readily fall into Kang hands, after seeing how well they made use of legacy tech left over by a galactic civilization far more advanced than we are. They’re not the brainiest lot, but they know how to work from found technology and prosper by it like nobody’s business. I guess you could say we’re in a race to beat them at their own game.”
“Mother?”
She hesitated. “It’s what we call the supersentient AI overseeing the Nautilus—our spaceship. She’s sometimes referred to more cheekily as Nauti—that’s a play on words—as in N-A-U-G-H-T-Y, and trust me, you don’t want to know how she came by that nickname.”
He smiled, but he couldn’t imagine that he was hiding the pain of the shock in that smile any.
“Luckily for us, she still hasn’t recalled access to her supersentience, which is what allows us to think this fast under pressure. I mean, we’re good, but we’re not that good. We’re talking about birthing a galactic civilization here in less time than it takes to get a handle on the contagion of these space cockroaches we call the Kang.”
“Galactic civilization?”
Again she hesitated. “Soon the earth will be reunited with the Milky Way Galaxy. Soon after that, if things go well, but less than ideally, we will be teleporting the entire galaxy—straight into an intergalactic war.”
His jaw dropped. “You can’t do that. Even if you could, you can’t fight a galactic-scale battle, even if you have a galaxy full of worlds, when only one of them is populated.”
“We plan on populating the galaxy overnight.”
He froze temporarily. “Just how far into the future are you people?”
“Not as far as you think. A few seconds in Singularity State is a hell of a thing. A few minutes, far less the few hours we’re taking to sort through all of this, not just with one Nautilus supersentience in Singularity State, but in concert with the innumerable versions of herself in alternate timeliness—well that’s something even scarier.”
He swallowed hard. “Can I walk through the portal into Narnia with you?”
She smiled ruefully. “Afraid you don’t have any choice. But I’m not sure that in a galactic-scale civilization the Nautilus will necessarily be the happening place to be. You might try one of the other planets with bioprinted humanoids so advanced each one of them will blow your mind, or any number of space stations we’re appropriating from the Ethereals.”
“The Ethereals?”
“We’ll save that topic of discussion for our next date.”
He smiled, a little too willingly.
“Look, I know things look like they’re moving fast now, but when that trans-galactic war starts in earnest…” She checked her watch. “…in, oh, I don’t know, another five minutes give or take, you’re going to have to figure out how to do your part to save this world and perhaps many others from a galactic empire that was designed for nothing but war from the get go, not for embracing life in all its many splendored forms.”
He nodded. “You’re the most delightfully mad person I’ve ever met. If I can’t marry you, I think I will visit the nearest asylum and settle for what I can get. I had no idea what I was missing out on.”
She smiled a little more in earnest this time. Her face seemed to say, “You poor guy.”
“I get why the military hired you,” Indafi said. “With your skills, I can see them overlooking your schizophrenia.”
She smiled more darkly this time, as if she were afraid of causing a psychotic break in him.
She well might, Indafi. It’s not like you have a better explanation for how the stars in the heavens changed on you. That’s one hell of a testimonial to the merits of her reasoning. Just because your brain and the brain of every other scientist here has been too freaked out by the asteroid bombardment to process any of that, doesn’t weaken her case any.
***
EARTH
INSIDE THE UFO
Laney careened over the ice field just beyond the HAARP compound like one of those pond skimmers in her two-person UFO. Its sleek shiny black surface made it out to be some exotic deep sea sponge.
She smiled at the rate at which the Tesla Towers were growing up out of the ground. They were outpacing her in the UFO. Granted, she was keeping her speeds to “sub-UFO” velocities so she could take in the surroundings.
The other sight that brought a smile to her face was the way the Tesla Towers skewered the Kang’s marching army, still on the move, impaling them by the thousands in midstep, before the trunks grew out their “plumage” at the top—the Tesla coils. The dead Kang made for a great field full of scarecrows, and quite the morale booster for the human troops on the ground, which would need one right about now facing down these kinds of numbers. The nanites coating those towers must have had some additional modifications to make them Kang-proof.
The towers’ ability to grow that rapidly was courtesy of Laney’s hack of the nanites Ariel, Indafi and Natty were all playing with, from different angles, for different purposes, overlying various functions to its hive mind—a hive mind, that as it grew bigger and mo
re powerful, could nest smaller hive minds within it devoted to one or another task fulltime. Laney’s corner of the puzzle involved tweaking the nanites so that as they were growing faster, irrespective of whether they were replicating on the moon or on Earth, they were also making the Tesla towers harder, yet more flexible, more immune to exotic weapons. And in the event they were still blasted senseless, the dormant, traumatized nanites, would still retain the memories they needed to regrow themselves and the towers.
Eying the Kang scarecrows high on the towers, Laney flashed on what had been done to the Christians once upon a time, and to the people of Transylvania thanks to Vlad the impaler. The images pelting her brain sobered her some.
Laney scanned the ice field below for signs of microbial life. Even out here, there were lifeforms aplenty, extremophiles refusing to be told where not to go. She could do little with them on her own in the timeframe they had, but plugged into Mother’s supersentience, the union allowed Laney’s mind to accomplish far too much in far too little time. Mother had shut down access to the space warping technology they’d stolen from the alien ship on The Star Gate mission for fear of it falling into Kang hands. But truthfully, that was a blessing in disguise. Few could handle that kind of empowerment for long without going mad.
Laney brought her mind back to those extremophiles. She tweaked their genetics on the fly, using the spaceship to pulse radiation at them that mutated their genes—specific genes, leaving the rest alone. Thereby she continued to add to Earth’s war arsenal.
One version of extremophile could now stop the Kang by causing them to lose the friction they needed to walk on ice, causing them to slip and fall. And once they made contact with the ground, they’d coat themselves further with the extremophiles, making it all the more hopeless to move. Needless to say, the extremophiles had been modified further by the radiation bursts from the UFO—like lovely pulsing lights—to reproduce posthaste to spread the effect like rippling waves extending in all directions from the pebble dropped in the water and growing to tsunami intensity.
Tens of thousands of Kang went down where just thousands had fallen to the ploys of Omega Force and Alpha Unit earlier, surpassing what had even been accomplished by Mother beaming in additional Omega Force clones.
But still the Kang kept coming.
Their numbers seemed inexhaustible.
Speaking for Team Good Guys, it was so hard to get their minds, conditioned to fighting wars on a planetary scale, to truly fathom what coming up against a galactic-scale army was like. The numbers of drones the Kang could afford to lose with absolutely zero negative impact to their war effort was virtually limitless; if anything Leon and his people were furthering the Kang’s aims by exhausting themselves, by throwing themselves at the enemy, when Earth’s defense forces’ numbers were far more precious.
The countless fallen Omega Force clones on the ground below suggested to what extent even bioprinting bodies fleetly from countless Nautili was a futile enterprise. It could take the Nautili years to fill a galactic civilization—even employing Dead Zone tech and throwing it at the task, not just the Nautili, from the various timelines.
Years they didn’t have.
Earth’s defense forces would be lucky to last any time at all when the two galaxies came careening into one another.
And by “last” she meant whichever worlds and space habitats managed not to collide into one another, and to fall under the radar by just being too remote, too far out on the farthest arms of the spiral galaxies.
She brought her mind back to the problem at hand and tried to hold on to the old adage: “Evil wins battles, never wars.” She kept whispering it to herself, turning it into a mantra.
Natty’s avatar materialized in the copilot’s seat beside her, the real Natty, or rather the Natty doppelganger belonging to Clone Team Two, back in the underground HAARP compound. “Anything I can do to help?”
“I was just thinking about you.”
“Hmm. Fancy that.”
She smiled. “You think you can build us black hole bombs with a single nanite, keeping the blasts contained just enough to swallow up one Kang soldier per nanite?”
The avatar gasped. “Tall order, even for one such as me with such god-like abilities.”
She smiled, temporarily amused by her husband, which was seldom the reaction that he got from her. “You don’t think being plugged into Mother’s supersentience has anything to do with that?”
“Perish the thought. A crutch for the feeble-minded only.” He was keying away madly at his terminal as he talked. “Though to be fair, I’m only here because the Alpha Unit team of Al, Sphynx and Spectre, tasked with hacking this UFO and Patent’s numerous weapons’ solutions, allows me to be. And it appears one of Patent’s solutions already includes nanite black hole bombs. It really is hard to out-mad that guy. I doubt Al, Sphynx, and Spectre will hack their way through to all his weapons solutions in time, but we ought to still be able to do some damage.”
“What’s the real you doing, out of curiosity?” she asked.
“Oh, he’s bolstering the HAARP shield about the Earth and the one we’re preparing to throw around the moon to make both immune from asteroid bombardment—of any kind, far less these small stones they’re throwing at us. And he’s hacking the moon artifact to sync it with the entire Milky Way Galaxy, and preparing to teleport the whole thing out of harm’s way—forever—by which point it will be more aptly referred to as the Gypsy Galaxy.”
“No help from the likes of Ariel, Skyhawk, Satellite, Leon, Cassandra, Omega Force, Alpha Unit, Theta Team?” Laney asked. Natty rubbernecked her direction intending to silence her with his best annoyed face.
“Minor ensemble players at best in my little drama,” Natty protested, refusing to have his thunder stolen.
“And when Gamma Group, Psi Force, Chi Corps and the Epsilon Ethereals enter the fray, supplementing the other Special Forces units, and of course, who could forget Zeta Force and their ring leader Thor…?”
Natty sighed dramatically. “I suppose sooner or later I’ll have to promote some to major ensemble players just to keep the field of minor ensemble players from becoming overcrowded.”
Laney smiled. “Just not yet.”
“Let the commoners steal what glory they can. They’re living off the crumbs on the table after my mind has gorged itself on the goddess Techa’s banquet offerings of the imagination.”
She shook her head, smiling more warily. “Patent, Corin, Solo, Frog Doll…to say nothing of the latest recruits, Hailey and her father, Dillon. Hailey and Dillon may well reduce you to minor ensemble status, at least regarding the problem of making your Gypsy Galaxy idea real.”
He gave her his ugliest glare yet. “Forgive me if I recruited a few bit players to save the entire Milky Way galaxy, even if it’s a tale best told by idiots. I hope whoever’s recording my life history has the sense to keep it to a first person narrative and never entirely leave the inside of my head. As to Hailey and Dillon…They’re specialists that volunteered themselves for a problem right up their alley; as of yet there’s no sign either has anything like my resilience for tackling any and all problems.”
“You mean like Skyhawk?”
Natty twisted up his face. “The experimental physicist to my theoretical physicist, the yang to my yin, speaking kindly.”
Her smile was growing more sarcastic. “How’s the chip off the old Techa block doing with those black hole nanites?”
“It’s getting the things inside the Kang that’s the problem, so they can collapse those hulks down to nothing from the inside. I can see Patent hadn’t quite counted on an enemy with such impenetrable hides when he designed the nanite black hole makers.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” She got to work on the problem at her end. “Even the lowly fruit fly can track a scent for miles that’s less than one part per million. And I do believe one of our nanites has a bit more brain power than that.”
“So?”
&
nbsp; “I’m training them to fly between the scales of the Kang, where they’re most vulnerable.”
Natty grimaced, watching her hands fly over her keyboard. “Huh, well, I suppose if you feel determined to take such an obvious approach. Personally I feel persecuted by the obvious.”
She bit off a smile, admitting she was growing less charitable with them as she went along. He could wear on her pretty quickly, even when he was doing well, all things considered.
Laney remembered the days when he hid in one of his travel suitcases from Omega Force—the Special Forces unit assigned to protect him—when he first met them on their little trip into the Amazon jungle.
His idea of thinking under pressure back then was trying to concentrate with the soundtrack entitled “Endless Rain” turned off.
Even now he preferred his womblike enclosures like that underground bunker that was the HAARP compound, or this UFO with its nextgen tech that would respond to a nuclear blast like a sailboat catching a refreshing breeze.
“Time to see if this baby works,” she said.
“Whoa! You mind giving my avatar a chance to get out of here, you know, in case it doesn’t?”
“You can’t kill an avatar, Natty. Even more to the point, you’re not undone by the thought of possibly losing me?”
“Let’s not pretend we don’t get along with our avatars better than we get along with one another in the flesh.”
Her expression grew grittier still. She hated it when he was right. “That’s because I can dial down your more annoying quirks with a few key strokes.”
“Really? Well, I’ll have you know, your avatar is tireless in bed. I never get any of this, ‘Seriously, Natty? Stop trying to prove you’re still not a day over sixteen.”
Refusing to get off this Ferris wheel, he said, “You could be more sympathetic about the sheer terror the idea of aging bestows on me. You know what aging does to genius? It shuts it down better than my pee pee fending off the notion of getting clap all on its lonesome, without my higher brain to fortify it.”
She snorted, refusing to let the laugh come out.
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