Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “That’s good enough, we can monitor it from here.”

  “No. We can’t.” Helen closed her eyes and keyed in the start sequence by touch. “Look, according to Beauchamp, the Scale are not friendly and she is bringing them right to our new gate at Otlyan. If she loses control of them, if they slip the leash, then there’s nothing to stop them coming through whenever the hell they want.”

  “We’re a research team. If Beyond Blue is really going to use the gate to try and take over the system, that’s got to go right to XERMo,” Ivester growled.

  “Look, by the time I get back out there, our eenies should have incorporated the Golfball’s NAV particles the way the Scale did the OP particles. I can waldo one of those eenies and direct the overrun software take the Myrian NAV particles away from the Scale. We can try to make direct contact with the Scale to see if we can talk them down. If Beauchamp’s been doing it, then we’ve got the same capability.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Dougal intervened. “Five minutes, give us five minutes.”

  “We don’t have . . .” Helen started.

  “Just let us load you up with a new set of protocols for handling the eenies.” Dougal moved back to the touchwall and started transferring files before Helen could object.

  “These are from XERMo’s containment library.” Ivester leaned over the edge of the coffin. “Everything they use to bring an eenie overrun back under control. We’re going to give our eenies the biggest teeth we can, just make sure you record the data . . .”

  He looked worried. It was a look Helen was getting used to. She didn’t like it, not on Ivester.

  “And don’t die. You’re the only OP we’ve got.”

  “Not planning on it.” Helen closed her eyes, watching the countdown as the files transferred. As soon as the counter reached a hundred percent, she started the entanglement sequence. “Don’t pull me out again.”

  “The hell I won’t.”

  The sequence kicked in and Helen raced back out along the Feed to the stars.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Whereas the inside of the Scale had been full of chatter, and the NAV array had been filled with whispers and knife-sharp signals, the space Helen found herself now entangled with was absolutely, perfectly, serenely quiet.

  Something had happened to the NAV computer.

  Someone had eaten her NAV computer.

  Excellent.

  Her Insight connected, bringing up code and information in a language she understood. It was Far Reaches tech, whatever it was. Helen watched as signals were found, one by one, and stitched in to her interface. Beauchamp hadn’t been fast enough; the eenies had gotten to the NAV particles first. But Beauchamp didn’t know that Helen had already successfully waldoed a Scale once before, so her guard should be down. Almost successfully. Just how far down into the eenie food chain her NAV entanglement particles had been absorbed, Helen wasn’t sure yet. She hadn’t really expected it to work.

  Through the information in the Insight, she could see inside of the Golfball as the war zone it had become. Unlike the Scale, which moved in blobs and organic clusters, the eenies were much more regimented, organized. Each eenie connected to six sibs, which in turn connected to six sibs and so on and so forth. It was like being a knot in a three-dimensional net. A net that was strengthening by the moment. The builder-eenies had taken the new instructions with a will and were cranking out new units with a single purpose.

  Where the OP particles had been passed back and forth between Scale to Scale depending on who ate whom, the rank of eenies Helen was working with had escaped with the Golfball’s NAV particle, following her instructions. It meant she’d have a little time to work out a plan.

  Helen rapidly dug into the packets of data that Ivester had uploaded at the last minute, all of them varying degrees of deadly, each designed for a very specific kind of eenie bloom. From her place in the network, she disseminated those new instructions to the rest of the eenies, informing them all the Scale were an overrun and as such had to be brought back under control.

  “Oh, so you’re back.” Helen wasn’t sure where the sound was coming from, but she felt Beauchamp talking to her through the strings that connected her to a million sibs. The eenies must have connected to the Golfball comms for some reason, maybe while trying to reconnect the NAV particles to the computer.

  “You didn’t think this was over, did you?” Helen felt out along the wires, but the source, whatever it was, was out of her reach. Unlike Helen, who had made a direct connection to the eenies, Beauchamp seemed to be one-off. She was communicating through a node somewhere like a NAV, not waldoing like an OP. Helen queried through the network, trying to get a sense of exactly where she had landed in the interior of the Golfball. This eenie didn’t have eyes, per se; it was more like a form of echolocation data coming in from her six sisters. Her Insight took that data and mapped out the 3D space, showing she was fetched up on the wall below a little knot of Scale that Beauchamp was communicating through. In real-world terms, it was a matter of millimeters, but now Helen was riding an eenie smaller than an orchid seed. It was going to be a long walk.

  “Truth be told, I did. But I’m glad to see you’re not giving up just yet.”

  Helen didn’t like the sound of that. Forty-eight hours ago, she would have sworn that Beauchamp, while a complete and utter asshole, was not of murderous intent. She had since been disabused of that notion.

  I wonder what else she thinks she’s got.

  The computer mapped out the clusters of Scale, giving Helen a battlefield view of the various skirmishes. From the thousand-meter lens of the NAV computer, Helen had only been able to understand the broad strokes. Now, embedded as she was in the eenie army, she was intimately aware of a thousand smaller skirmishes going on, a war being fought on hundreds of fronts smaller than her fingertip. In some cases, one side was simply rolling over the other, but in other cases, both sides were drawn to a standstill. In all cases, however, the eenies were at a disadvantage.

  Let’s start by fixing that. The Scale tactics all seemed to involve surrounding and swarming, much like angry clusters of extra-stabby ants. The eenies were still doing their best to consume and rebuild, but not fight back. The software Ivester had sent along would make short work of that.

  Good thing they let me back out here.

  “Oh look, someone put on their war paint.” Beauchamp’s voice mocked her. “Do you really think that will help? I have a secret to tell you, my dear. The iLlumina aren’t programmed, not the way we do it. They’ve been evolved up, like a living organism. They can adapt without anyone telling them what to do. They don’t even really need me.”

  Next order of business is to shut her the hell up. Helen flexed her fingers, feeling the eenie she was riding respond, gathering its legs under it. It was much more agreeable to her control than the Scale had been, much more like guiding a well-trained dog than riding a waldo. It was eager to please in a way she hadn’t expected. Helen checked to see if any of her eenies had made an attempt on Beauchamp’s communications node, but came up empty.

  Now that she was looking through the “eyes” of an eenie, the bright blooms of color on the Scale made her uncomfortable, suggested they were toxic, indicative of a flaw, of broken code. They were off-pattern and as such had to be remade. Helen’s eenie built its spikes out in response to the new programming, long thin probes that were used to find or create weak points in materials. Or to disable other eenies running off-spec.

  Helen started moving, calling smaller ranks of her sibs to her, setting herself up as the top node in the lattice. They responded, abandoning fights already lost. Many of the eenies were slow to change tack, simply choosing to continue consuming the ground they stood on, continuing their endless mining of the Golfball’s inner surfaces now free of the competition. It was the Scale between her and Beauchamp that Helen had to worry about. They started t
o swarm together, clustering around the edges of the communications node Helen was targeting, forming a barrier of protection.

  “You’re outnumbered by the millions,” Beauchamp taunted.

  Helen still didn’t respond; she’d blocked out better insults from better OPs in the past. She focused instead on Beauchamp’s node, the way the Scale formed an interlocking, organic pattern as they moved into position. Her Insight analyzed the pattern, picking out weak points that replicated across the entire surface. Helen transmitted that information to the rest of her eager cluster and they all surged forward as one, ignoring, even climbing over Scale on their way. She was distantly aware that her little grouping was attracting more and more eenies. They were all sibs, and the top eenie gave the commands, which meant they’d all do as Helen asked.

  That was the trick, she realized, the ask. The Scale she’d waldoed before had been reacting to her giving commands, rather than making requests. The eenies were designed to do as they were told, but the Scale understood themselves as an independent entity.

  Ivester’s going to love that idea . . .

  Something caught Helen from underneath. She felt one leg held, then another. She issued a command to her sibs and they came together, spikes out. They couldn’t defend her against so many Scale at once, but they could make sure the entanglement particles got into another eenie. Helen felt herself being vivisected, split apart. The Insight, everything, went mercifully black.

  After a disorienting moment, Helen opened her eyes again. Her rank of eenies had pulled the NAV quantum particle before the Scale could finish her off and plugged it into a new body. The echoes of pain were still there, in her limbs, in her chest where they’d split her open to retrieve the particle. She shrugged it off, knowing she’d pay for it later in nightmares and indecisive moments. She reached out to find her rank still on the move. As they lost members, more of her siblings came to fill in the gaps, making the formation stronger, more resilient.

  “Oh, there you are. I thought we’d got you that time.” Beauchamp’s voice again. “How about this time?” Helen felt herself being caught, pinned. A part of her lattice collapsed around her, pulling in to repeat the process. Searing pain, blackness, and then Helen was awake in another new body, abandoning the previous one to be consumed. She reissued her order, focusing on getting up the wall to Beauchamp, and more eenies answered.

  “Go home, Helen. Beyond Blue owns all of this now. You’re playing in my playground.”

  Get stuffed. The thought never materialized into words. More and more of her sibs joined the push as her orders echoed outward. Her new eenies, freshly minted per Ivester’s specs with all the hooks and teeth required to bring an overrun back under control, had begun to feed in to her formation. Helen became aware of her rank not as a series of minor entities, but rather extensions of herself. She was no longer waldoing a single eenie; she was a single mind with every thought having a physical body of its own.

  Wow.

  Helen repeated her order to attack Beauchamp’s communications node, and felt it ripple outward, reaching an even greater, even deadlier number of eenies. She was still outnumbered, but now she had specialists.

  Helen lost another body, then another, as Beauchamp continued to try to break her rank. As each attack rolled over, Helen’s entanglement particles were simply attached to a new body in a staccato of sharp lines of pain and focus. She didn’t allow it to slow her down.

  Helen leapfrogged, carried forward from eenie to eenie by the surging tide. Ahead of her, Beauchamp’s command node lay bare. Beauchamp’s Scale had begun to yield, and they pulled back as if to protect themselves, opening the path. It was unexpected, and from her position, Helen couldn’t tell if she was winning, or if they were retreating. She couldn’t afford to waste a possible advantage. The only way she could see to end this was to cut off Beauchamp’s control of the Scale and recover those stolen NAV particles from Myrian23A5.

  She surrounded herself with specialist eenies, cautioning them as her own cluster moved forward. Unlike her cohort of eenies, the Scale had a will of their own. They could be bucking Beauchamp’s commands, but she had no way to be sure.

  Out in the greater universe of the Golfball’s interior, the fight was still going on. Helen felt eenies go dark, a prickle of information that burned like an arm fallen asleep. At the same time, she felt new eenies blossom into existence to fill those voids. Since she’d delivered the new programming, they’d managed a nearly one-to-one replacement ratio, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Helen, wait. . . .” The fear in Beauchamp’s voice meant next to nothing.

  Helen reached out with a million tiny fingers, sweeping over the communications module and crushing her rival in her palm.

  With a pop, Beauchamp’s influence vanished. The Scale slowed and a silver tide of eenies swept in.

  So it wasn’t just the Scale.

  Inside the perfect quiet of her current eenie, Helen felt a question emerge. Not in words she could understand, but in the commands streaming in from her sibs. It was like listening to someone speaking an unfamiliar language, but their gestures and expressions gave you the highlights. The eenies had remained connected to the Golfball’s internal communications; maybe the Scale were trying to use it as well.

  Oh, what the hell. Maybe there’s a way out of all this.

  “I am Operator Helen Vectorovich. I’d like to talk.”

  Helen held her breath, hoping for a response. She was about to give up and disentangle when her eenie spit forth a stream of fear and information she couldn’t quite get her head around. She whipped around in response to find herself faced with a fast-moving river of brightly colored bodies

  Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The response options hung in the air ahead of her. It was a simple yes or no on the surface, but Helen unconsciously understood that a dam might burst once she answered it.

  Yes/No

  Yes or no WHAT? There was no proper question associated with it, just a positive and a negative option. The darkness lessened and Helen realized she was still entangled. The eyes she looked through were not hers. The lungs she breathed with were not hers. The . . .

  Lungs? Helen couldn’t remember a waldo design that had lungs.

  Since when did the Golfball have AIR for breathing?

  She was prodded unpleasantly, knocking her out of her line of questioning. A quick turn, a glimpse of translucent silver legs that belonged on an eenie rather than a human, but she was alone in a darkened room.

  That’s not right, either. She could feel someone else in the space with her, a waiting presence like someone preparing to speak.

  Stuck in the buffer maybe? She couldn’t remember if she’d tried to cut the connection. After reading Ivester and Dougal the riot act, they’d never once missed running her through the buffer on the way out of a waldo. The buffer felt different than this, though. The space she found herself in was not trying to be something. The buffer pretended to be real, something you could wrap your head around on the way back to the meat of the real world. This was less well formed, like it needed more information. Like it was waiting for a response.

  Helen closed her eyes and cast about in her own head for a moment. No Insight, no coffin interfaces, nothing she could get her hooks into to get back to either the eenie she’d been riding or her own body, trapped in the experimental coffin back in the Recovr lab.

  One breath.

  The last thing she remembered was the stream of information from the Scale. She’d asked them to talk, without any real idea of who or what she was asking the question of.

  Oh shit. Did they take me up on it?

  Two breaths.

  As long as she was breathing, she could act. As long as she could act, she could figure this out. Something . . . Someone prodded her again. She opened her eyes to find t
he Yes/No still hanging there. She looked away, but the words moved to match, staying directly, stubbornly, in her line of sight.

  “Clearly you want me to pick an answer. So what’s the question?” she asked aloud.

  The space around her winced, some combination of a change in brightness and a shift in perception, like the sound of her voice had startled it. The response prompt flickered and vanished.

  Well, I’ve got to be somewhere. If she were stuck in the buffer, then Dougal or Ivester should be talking to her. That left the probability that she was still entangled with the NAV particle, but no longer riding her eenie. Recent experience had shown her just how the NAV particles could be transferred from nano-machine to nano-machine without her losing her entanglement connection.

  They must have picked up on what she was doing and grabbed the NAV particle out of the eenie. It was the most reasonable option.

  One breath.

  The tension and the horror of that final push to cut off Beauchamp came rushing home. Maybe, just maybe she’d pushed it too far. Total disassociation? That didn’t feel right. Dead? The Scale and the eenies both recycled everything. They wouldn’t have destroyed the NAV particles even if they’d finally turned on her. She wasn’t sure destroying the NAV particle while she was entangled would result in her actual real-life death. She wasn’t even sure a quantum particle could be destroyed, by ordinary physical means anyway.

  Two breaths.

  The chattering that had plagued her since her very first trip to the Golfball rose up, flowing outward to the walls of the liminal space around her. The room had begun to move. Not big motions, just small jitters in space, like she was seeing every particle of matter in the walls do a little dance.

  It’s all made of Scale, she realized abruptly. The space that contained her was a bubble comprised entirely of the bodies of living, active Scale. She’d been entrapped, encased. The realization snapped her out of her panicked spiral. She was still here, still entangled out at the Golfball and she was . . . imprisoned? Captured? She stretched her limbs out, tried to get them up where she could see just what she was working with. Knowing she was entangled, knowing she was riding a waldo, even though she didn’t have the Insight to outline the interface, was strangely comforting. It gave her solid ground to stand on.