Nihala

by Scott Burdick

  “The Rogues are taking control of Ixtalia and destroying the lunar orbiters one by one,” Ganesh said. “They want Colrev to share the Main Computer in exchange for peace.”

  “He will never do that,” Kayla said.

  “What should we do?” Ganesh wrung his two free hands in anguish.

  “I wish I knew,” she said, but then paused and gazed at Puck sitting on her shoulder. He’d always been afraid of the monk. Had the little mouse somehow sensed something? Or was there another explanation?

  Kayla sent a few nanobots to transport Puck to her hand, but even that small task lay beyond their limited resources.

  “Ganesh, can you hand me Puck?”

  The elephant-god gathered the little mouse into one of his hands and set him in Kayla’s skeletal palm. The mouse raised his soft brown eyes and gazed into her own. Kayla stroked his head.

  “We’ve traveled a long way together, haven’t we, Puck?” She might have abandoned hope so many times but for this loyal friend’s companionship. He’d even saved her life.

  Her skeletal fingers closed on his body, and Puck squeaked a high-pitched alarm. Guilt flooded through her, and her shoulders shook, though she lacked tears to actually cry.

  “I have to know,” she whispered.

  Kayla squeezed Puck’s skull between her thumb and middle finger. The bones bent and then collapsed like an eggshell. Ganesh cried out and grabbed hold of her wrist in an attempt at saving the little mouse—but too late.

  Blood and brains oozed from Puck’s flattened head. Ganesh let go of her wrist, his face contorted with horror. Kayla pried open Puck’s skull and removed the pulverized mouse-brain, squeezing it between her fingers. Then she extracted the tiny bits of metal and connected filaments.

  “A reverse Mind-Link!” Ganesh said. “Puck was a surrogate?”

  “There never was a Puck.” Another piece of her heart stolen.

  Now I know why he hid from the monk.

  The mouse and monk must have been controlled by an individual who could only control one body at a time. This seemed to ruled out Ohg since he, alone among humans, could control two surrogates simultaneously. It also excluded Rogues, since they would have killed her when she was a child if they controlled the body of the monk. It couldn’t be Ganesh or Tem since they’d been present with Puck on numerous occasions.

  Who was this mysterious puppeteer, then?

  “Ganesh, I need you to fly me somewhere.”

  It took a moment for the kindhearted giant to recover from the shock of Puck’s death, but the suggestion of travel revived him. “You know me.” Ganesh patted the ship’s bulkhead. “I’m always ready to fly.”

  Chapter 38

  Kayla slumped in one of the ship’s seats as Ganesh piloted the craft above the blackened ruin that had so recently served as a time-capsule of the remaining animal and plant life of the planet. The sun dipped beneath the horizon in a blaze of color as it had hundreds of billions of times in the past. It would never again illuminate forests, savannas, or marshland. The full moon rose opposite the dying sun. A point of light blinked just beyond the edge of the pale disc and then faded.

  How many billions of lives had been extinguished in that brief spark?

  The ship landed beside the distinctive concrete poking through a gleaming landscape. The heat of the Rogue attack had fused the desert surface into a coating of glass. As the landing gear settled, the ground cracked in a starburst web like a shattered mirror.

  Kayla held her Hindu god’s arm as they stepped onto the broken land.

  At her direction, Ganesh uncovered the entrance, long remembered from her childhood. He then carried her into the darkness below, his necklace the sole source of illumination. Kayla directed him to the lowest level of the hospital—to the doorway marked Infectious Biohazard Unit—Keep Out.

  She didn’t have enough spare nanobots to pick the lock, so Ganesh tore it off its hinges. Together, they walked into an empty room not much larger than the inside of the rocket ship. The infrared vision of her nanos revealed one wall a quarter degree warmer than the others, and Ganesh set to work smashing through it with a large pipe he found in the hallway.

  When the hole grew large enough, they walked through a long passageway and entered a bright, thoroughly domestic kitchen right out of the 1950s. Lime green cabinets perched above a cherry red countertop and black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor. The period stove, refrigerator, and other appliances all looked shiny and new. Next to her was a shelf with ceramic knickknack figurines.

  A gray-haired man busied himself brewing a fresh pot of tea. He wore pink slippers and a well-worn gray robe.

  Ganesh’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “Reinhold Watts?”

  “At your service.” The middle-aged scientist carried the steaming pot of fresh-brewed tea to an orange table bound by stainless steel. Waving them over, he filled the three cups already neatly laid out. “Have a seat while I—”

  Kayla snatched a Marilyn Monroe figurine from the shelf and flung it at him. “You bastard!” It hit the the professor in the forehead and shattered.

  A trickle of blood oozed from a slight gash over his left eye. He gazed at her with what might have been sadness. “Please understand that I did everything for a greater good.”

  “I should kill you right now,” Kayla said through clenched teeth. Dizziness swept through her, but Ganesh steadied her with one of his hands.

  The professor picked up a napkin and dabbed at his wound. “At least have some refreshments and let me answer your questions before you exact your revenge. You don’t look in any condition for murder yet.”

  Kayla looked down at her naked, soot-covered body. The professor unfolded a white bathrobe and helped her into it. “No reason to feel awkward, my dear, not with all the diapers I changed when you were a baby.”

  His words kicked her in the gut. “How could you abandon me?”

  The great scientist’s lip trembled, and he looked away. “I never left you, my child—”

  Kayla swatted one of the teacups off the table, and it smashed against the checkerboard floor, splattering liquid across it. “You lied to me my entire life!” Kayla’s legs gave way, and Ganesh placed her in one of the chairs.

  “I prepared a seat specially for you as well.” The professor indicated a massive, stainless steel chair.

  Ganesh looked at it, then back at the professor. “If this is a trick—if you try harming Kayla in any way, I will be forced to dismember you.”

  Professor Watts smiled. “I would expect nothing less.”

  Ganesh sat next to Kayla. The chair creaked a protest, but held.

  Professor Watts placed a fresh cup of tea before Kayla and sat with his fingers steepled in front of him. The exact pose the monk so often used during a discussion.

  “I saw you die in that courtroom,” Kayla said, the rasp in her voice nearly gone.

  “If you include surrogate bodies, you’ve seen me die three times now. You even killed me yourself in my mouse incarnation—brilliant inductive reasoning, by the way. This is my real body, however, so you will have your chance to end my life permanently if you so choose.”

  “But the trial occurred twenty years before the invention of the reverse Mind-Link and surrogate bodies.”

  “Now you’re being lazy, my dear.”

  Kayla went silent for a moment. “You withheld the invention to fake your death?”

  “Exactly. Eve’s inventions formed the basis for the technological revolution of the next one hundred years after her trial. But I never revealed the most advanced of Eve’s masterpieces.”

  “Nihala?” Kayla asked.

  The professor nodded. “You would have died without the nanobots I injected into your bloodstream at your birth. Those and a dozen other technologies make you possible, the most revolutionary of which is the miniature fusion reactor at the center of your heart. It supplies your enhanced bones, muscles, and the quantum components of your brain. The only thing more p
owerful than your mind is the Master Computer that runs Ixtalia.”

  The professor offered a plate of sweet biscuits.

  Kayla took one and put it into her mouth and chewed, but her taste buds hadn’t regenerated yet. Ganesh grabbed a handful with his trunk and popped them into his mouth.

  Professor Watts cocked his head slightly. “I didn’t think you’d be able to learn AI Mathematics, but Eve calculated the probability at ninety-five percent.”

  “So she did make the tutorial with me in mind.”

  “Who else?”

  “But how could you have known the government would outlaw AIs?”

  “Eve predicted it from the moment of her creation.”

  “Why not simply hide her?”

  “Creating the components of her quantum processor required international cooperation and billions of tax dollars, so security was absolute. Quantum computers rely on dual matter and antimatter particles spun in complex orbits to create multi-diminutional quantum fields. It is similar to how a rotating magnet produces electricity, but exponentially more complex.

  “If power fails for an instant, the matter and antimatter interact in an enormous annihilation event. One of my first experiments ended in a crater the size of a football field. Stealing such a thing is impossible. The miniature quantum processor within your own brain is a hundredth the size of what Eve had been, but it is at least portable.”

  Kayla pressed her fingers to her forehead. What sort of explosion would result from the antimatter inside her brain? “So you hid your real body inside Potemia and continued your work through a cloned surrogate, knowing they would destroy Eve? But what purpose do I serve?”

  “I am going to answer your question, but a little history first,” he said, as if commencing a class lecture.

  “The Q-6 prototype produced ten-thousand times the processing power of Eve’s quantum computer. Influential voices claimed we’d gone too far and demanded a moratorium on scientific research, especially AI technologies that humans might never understand. Many feared that if AIs gained access to manufacturing facilities, they would self-replicate and initiate a reinforcing feedback loop of AI evolution.”

  “The singularity,” Kayla said.

  “So when I requested Eve be connected to our new Q-6 processor, they refused.” The professor’s jaw tightened. “Imagine them telling me and Eve that we couldn’t use the very invention we’d created!”

  “You attempted it anyway, didn’t you?” Ganesh asked.

  “Of course I did!” The professor jumped up and paced like a belligerent child told he had to wait until after dinner for dessert. “Consider what Eve might discover with such resources at her mind’s disposal.”

  The professor smacked his arms against his sides in exasperation. “But as hard as I plotted and schemed, the security was too tight.” Reinhold Watts halted, and straightened like a victorious pugilist. “Can you guess what changed their mind?”

  “The Neo-Luddite Plague,” Kayla whispered.

  “Exactly! I promised them Eve could find an antidote the same day with the help of the Q-6. Within an hour of the vote, I connected her.” The professor’s eyes gleamed. “The first half-hour represented the processing equivalent of a trillion human brains thinking for a billion years.”

  The professor went silent, his gaze distant.

  Ganesh leaned forward, his trunk twitching. “What happened next?”

  “A moment came when gravity, space, and even time distorted.”

  The freshly grown hairs on the back of Kayla’s neck stiffened. “What do you mean—distorted?”

  The professor knitted his brow. “I remember seeing myself … and a sort of bubble … no, not a bubble, really. And these—well—portals, and—um …” He sighed. “I’m sorry. Whatever I say will be more incorrect than saying nothing at all.”

  “How long did this last?” Ganesh asked.

  “That is also hard to determine. The command center had lost control. One of the technicians eventually reached the Q-6 and threw the manual shut-down lever, ending the anomaly. But there were discrepancies ranging from one and four minutes between the watches and internal computer clocks on the main floor. The atomic clock in the control-room had advanced six full minutes ahead of clocks outside the laboratory.”

  “What about surveillance cameras?” Ganesh asked.

  “The time code and picture seemed undisturbed. On it, you see all of us standing in one place and then, one frame later, we’re somewhere else! Our watches advanced to varying degrees, but the video showed no time loss between those two frames.”

  “What did Eve experience?” Kayla asked.

  The professor shook his head as if waking from a dream. “She’d apparently modeled the physics of the real universe and conducted the equivalent of experiments—millions of them—at a phenomenal pace impossible in our reality.”

  “Our reality?” Kayla asked.

  “That’s one of the phrases she used, even while admitting its inaccuracy. She spoke like someone emerging from a profound religious experience who laments having no one to share it with.”

  “What happened when the connection ended?”

  “Eve equated it to someone who sustains massive brain damage from an accident and knows they’ve lost abilities and memories, but can’t recall what they were. She stored as many inventions in her original computer’s memory as it would hold, but the rest of her revelations vanished. She remembers the sensation of wonder and a profound insight into the nature of the universe, but it melted away the moment her processing resources shrank back to a pittance of what they’d been a nanosecond before.”

  Ganesh shook his head. “No wonder Colrev is so vigilant. If Eve achieved so much in a half-hour with one Q-6, what could the Rogues achieve with Ixtalia’s Main Computer?”

  “Exactly right,” the professor said. “The Main Computer is an array of a thousand Q-6 processors.”

  “So you decided to create me to protect against the Rogues?”

  “I conceived the Nihala hybrid idea much earlier as a way of reassuring the government that we could protect humans from Rogue AIs. I thought this might insulate Eve from the eventual backlash that seemed inevitable.” He shook his head. “Eve told me the government would fear a human-AI hybrid as much as Gene-Freaks and self-conscious AIs.”

  “But I thought the government refused to fund the project?”

  “The blueprints of Nihala, the plan to fake my death, and all the necessary technology germinated within Eve during that half-hour when she ascended to a new plane of consciousness within the Q-6.”

  “Then Eve is my true creator,” Kayla said.

  “Eve recognized that humans and AIs were headed for a standoff. Neither could see the other’s point of view, so she decided my hybrid idea could bridge the gap.”

  “But the Rogues think I was created to kill them.”

  “They may be right.”

  “But why would Eve create me to kill her own kind?”

  “As a hybrid, she hoped you would have a unique insight into both species, so left the choice to you alone.”

  “What if I refuse to fight for either side?”

  “You will have chosen death for both species in that case,” Professor Watts said. “Non-violence, like freedom, like safety, like technology, has its own counter-balancing consequences, as you witnessed in Middilgard. Making pacifism the end-all goal is as dangerous as making anything else the sole priority in an imperfect world. In the face of violence, non-violence can sometimes become immoral.”

  Vertigo swirled through her brain, and she placed both of her emaciated hands on the table for stability. “You told the government Eve needed the new quantum computer to create an antidote for the Plague.”

  “That is what I told them.”

  “Was it true?” Kayla asked.

  The professor half-smiled. “Eve had already solved the problem and began synthesizing the counter agent without the Council’s knowledge.”

/>   Kayla’s nails scratched the surface of the pristine tabletop, and her voice lowered to barely more than a whisper. “Was it you who supplied the Neo-Luddites with the Plague in the first place to gain access to the Q-6?”

  The professor jerked back, the muscles of his face twisting in revulsion. “Never!”

  He seemed genuinely shocked at the suggestion.

  Can I trust someone who deceived me my entire life?

  Chapter 39

  Metal chains bound Tem’s wrists and ankles to the floor. Beside him stood Ohg, each of his eight spider legs similarly shackled. At least Ganesh had left Ixtalia before the Rogues took them.

  Millions of streaks of light flowed across the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cube-like room.

  Tem closed his eyes for the dozenth time and attempted a return to his real body. Nothing happened.

  “It’s no use,” Ohg said. “Somehow, the Rogues have cut us off from our bodies.”

  A knot formed in Tem’s stomach. How was such a thing possible?

  From a spot on the floor directly in front of them, the streaks of energy bulged upward like a reverse waterfall of light. It rose into the form of Melchi. The Rogue leader regarded them through his curved horns, and the human figures within his eyes writhed in their eternal torment.

  Tem spoke through clenched teeth. “You killed fifteen billion innocent people by destroying those space stations.”

  “Innocent is a relative term,” Melchi said. “And the total is now thirty billion. We will keep killing until we control the Main Computer, or until both our species are no more.”

  “Madness!” Ohg shouted.

  “I agree.” Melchi circled them, his heavy footfalls echoing like a sledgehammer on steel. “Your bodies are beyond my reach in Ixtalia, so I cannot kill you outright, but I can hold your minds hostage. If I chose to, I could inflict tortures on your virtual bodies that would drive your real minds insane.”

  Tem exchanged a glance with Ohg. If Colrev destroyed the Master Computer, the few survivors of Middilgard would be all that remained.