Agnosis – Ch. 10

<– Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 –>

They took up their places again in Lily and Danek’s sitting room. Dorian took the seat across the fire from Lily once more, so he could feel the warm stones against his back. It turned out to be evening, late evening, but still the same day. Dorian appreciated this fact. It made him feel like he was doing something productive, not wasting his time. His life was in shambles, but he hadn’t even wasted a full day before setting about putting things right. He told himself these things even if they did happen to be lies.

There were more lamps burning than there had been in the morning, and the room had taken on a cheerier aspect. This was partly in his mind, the product of a cleansing sleep and emotional distance from the events of the morning. Already, it seemed like a lifetime ago, and that, despite his lies, was dangerous thinking. The mind was too quick sometimes to divorce itself from pain.

Danek had set out a light meal of sandwiches, cheese and beer, the sort of meal Lily had once put out for them. He and Dorian and Amara ate standing around the dining room table. But Lily didn’t join them, and instead contented herself with a thick, grey paste which she sucked from light plastic tubes, eaten quietly and, it seemed, self-consciously as she alone on her mat in the corner. After the meal, Dorian had brought out his gear and between them, he and Danek strung a long roll of optical cable between the ex-connex router in the kitchen and the jack-pack Korski compiler that sat open in its case at Dorian’s feet. Lily winced when he flipped the power switch.

“That looks like military surplus,” Danek observed, leaning so far forward in his chair that Dorian expected him to tumble out of it. There was a greedy look in his eyes. The silver glow from the small monitor shone in his pupils like living sparks. “What is that, a T-212?”

“I wish. It’s a 186. Sometimes when I hit a ham-fisted site where they’ve deeply nested the seenop, the throughput is like trying to suck a meatball through a catheter tube.”

Danek grunted in understanding. “What filters are you running?”

“Just vanilla corporate Zydek on the surface. But I’ve augmented this unit with a cache processor that executes an anonymous second tier coreshield system using Shadowruption’s Vortex suite as the base. I added a few scripts and surprises of my own deeper in, but it all executes under the Zydek umbrella so it’s practically invisible to any curious sysops, and it doesn’t show up in most log configurations. The Strand sig is competent low-tech. Something you’d expect a geezer to run from home.”

“Pfft.” Danek snorted. “That was still state of the art military hardware when I joined TechTac back in the Stone Age.”

Lily laughed, but her voice was strained, as though she was fending off a headache. “Maybe you should let Tyrus run it, Johnny. He’s waxing nostalgic.”

“The idea,” Dorian explained, “is that it isn’t supposed to remind anyone of the military. Low tech enough that it won’t attract much attention on the random surf, but not so low that it looks like an interesting antique. I’ve altered some of the reg files just to be safe. They point to a cardboard persona I maintain on one of the public networks, so if anybody tags my id for later investigation, they find a plausible and distinctly uninteresting profile with a documented user hx.”

“Get on with it, already,” Lily said. “We trust that you’ve taken the proper precautions.”

He nodded once and set to work. Danek and Lily ran a standard rental ex-connex through a public network provider. There were billions of them in circulation, mostly temporary service ports for folks fresh off the zap or otherwise un-arrayed. Dorian unhooked the keypad from the Korski’s housing and pulled it into his lap. Legs crossed, watching the small monitor screen, he began to scrabble his fingers across the board, navigating the Korski’s ancient operating protocols and command driven connection apps. He used a standard public key to access the Strand, the sort you could purchase by the minute from retail kiosks in any major zap station concourse. Danek watched over the top of the screen with wary interest, divining what he could from the upside down text scrawl. To placate him, Dorian fired a signal flare that bounced his location pointers off a dozen far flung routers so that he was no longer just an anonymous connection, but an anonymous connection originating from Boardman’s Dome. Danek eventually sat back and let him work.

Lily chuckled dryly.

“This won’t take long,” Dorian assured them without looking up. “I’ve got most of the exploits I need to back door into my foam pre-loaded on this machine. I use the Korski sometimes when I’m planning on doing something particularly egregious that I don’t want traced back to any of my registered accounts, and I rebuild the core every couple of months so that it doesn’t look like the same box to anyone who gets curious.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Amara said. “Am I just being dense?”

“It means that you should all stop watching me and talk amongst yourselves for a bit. You’re making me nervous.”

Danek drew himself out of his chair. “I’m getting more beer. Anyone else?”

There were no takers, and he banged off into the kitchen, grumbling in the way he had all those years ago in the service. Busying himself with small, repetitive tasks was the manner in which Danek had always coped with stress. Dorian found comfort in the old habits for some reason. His fingers danced faster across the keys as he navigated the backbone of the Sting, nearer and nearer to his foam’s ip, plinking through standard firewalls and sentinel scripts like a fairy dancing across moonlit grass.

Lily gave Amara an apologetic look. “I’ll have to apologize. I’m not much for small talk, dear, unless it’s muttering to myself these days. And it’s hard for me to concentrate with the infernal racket that machine raises. Forgive me if I’m shouting.” She stroked the sides of her head with her hands. “It’s just so hard to hear myself think.”

“I can take this in the other room, Lil.” Dorian said, grimacing. “You should have said something.”

“I’ll be fine, John. Keep working.” She was quiet for a moment, then added. “I always liked watching you work. You get so serious.”

“I like it when he chews on his lower lip,” Amara said. “Isn’t it cute?”

“Talking about me was implicitly excluded in the talk amongst yourselves bit.”

“He’s sensitive, too,” Amara said, an aside to Lily.

“All artists are. It’s what makes them so charming.”

Danek returned, still grumbling, and dropped heavily into his chair. “Who’s charming? Talking about me behind my back again, eh?”

“John, dear.”

“The boy has chicken legs and the attention to hygiene of your average mollusk. In fact, I’ve known a fair number of mollusks who were more physically and intellectually charming.”

This assessment met with a raucous chorus of giggles.

“I have an idea,” Dorian muttered at them. “How about we take this time and set our obviously under-utilized thinking caps to the task of sorting out what happened this morning instead of using our powers for evil? That would be good.”

More giggles, except Danek, who boomed great shouts of laughter like a mortar assault. Gradually, the merriment died away and silence descended on the room. The only sound was the steady, rapid click of Dorian’s fingers.

“Let’s not all jump in at once,” Danek said, serious now.

Amara lowered her gaze to the floor and frowned, uncertain or embarrassed.

Lily sighed. Dorian heard unwillingness in her voice. “Bring it out again, if you would.”

Amara looked distinctly unhappy with the request, but Lily fixed her with a hard and implacable gaze. Her shoulders drooped, a bit, but she finally nodded her consent. She turned her head to the side as though the act itself was abhorrent to her, and withdrew the quae-ha-distra. Dorian looked up at that, unable to check his interest, despite himself. They all watched it, the way it glimmered and shone, except Amara. She held it as far from herself as she could, almost as if she wanted to hurl it into the fireplace.

Lily made a loud, wet exhalation. “Do you know what it is, Amara?”

“I know what’s inside it, or what it does,” she whispered back. “But I don’t know what it is, really.”

Danek, sounding both awed and angry for sounding awed in the first place, said, “I don’t care so much what it is as how it is. Explain that to me and I’ll be happy. Because what I’m seeing is still impossible.” He looked to Lily for confirmation. “It is impossible, right?”

But Lily wasn’t watching the orb this time. She sat with her head tilted carefully away from the orb so that she faced the wall, listening and nodding her head in a steady rhythm. After a time, she said, “It’s curious. Can you hear anything from it, Tyrus?”

“No.”

“Get closer. Tell me what you hear.”

He obeyed, but tentatively. It was clear that going too near the orb made him nervous. “Nothing,” he announced after a few seconds. “What do you hear?”

Lily shook her head. “It isn’t quite as clear as it was this morning, but I’m probably just catching interference from that blasted compiler. I was fairly certain then, but I needed to hear it once more to be sure. I can hear…what? Music of a sort, I suppose. It reminds me of singing.” She sat in silent thought, running her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Do you remember George something-or-other, Tyrus? He was a Captain, I think. We used to go over to his house in Dayreme. His wife’s name was Nina.”

“Taute. George Taute. I remember.”

“They had that dinner party on Foundation Day, it would have been twelve or fourteen years ago, and he did that thing with wine glasses. Played them with his fingers. They made this music after a fashion. Clear, ringing tones, the pitch dependent on how much water was in the glass.”

“It was hideous, as I recall.”

“That’s what this sounds like, except that it isn’t hideous. It’s beautiful. Lighter, somehow, more resonant. The notes are perfectly, splendidly orchestrated.” Lily listened for a few moments longer, then said, “It’s a type of sonic vibration. Akin to what Captain Taute called his Music of the Spheres.”

Danek rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Okay. I’ll grant that it emits sound waves, even though I can’t hear them. You’re the expert on ambient noise in this family. That still doesn’t tell me anything useful. It doesn’t explain how it was able to translate from a coded Strand artifact into a physical object.”

“I suspect that it does. Sound waves are potent forces if properly harnessed. Directed sonic pulses have been used for quite some time in heavy mining operations to pulverize stone and bore deep shafts, especially in unstable atmospheric conditions where there’s too much risk with explosives. So we know that sound waves translate to energy just like other waveforms. What I’m proposing is that this code that Raville passed to Amara in a virtual experience was designed to interface with her array in such a way that it produced a precise combination of sonic vibrations. Those vibrations, that energy, iterated throughout her body, led to a consistent pattern of self-organization which ultimately constructed a replica of the virtual orb from Amara’s physical material.”

“Like a tumor?” Amara asked weakly.

“That’s a reasonable comparison, though I wouldn’t take it to a terminal conclusion, dear. The vibrations would have to be very specifically orchestrated, but it’s possible that they could be used to disrupt normal cell divisions and encourage a pre-determined pattern of mutation.”

But Danek held up his hand. “No, that doesn’t make any sense. She’s flesh and blood, Lil. That thing is something else. A crystalline compound of some sort, or even ordinary glass as far as I know. You can’t transmute flesh to a non-organic material just by fiddling with vibratory rates, not without nanomech intervention.”

Lily frowned at him, her lips twisting in a marred, uneven line. “Amara, forgive me if this is a personal question, but how many times have you been reconstituted?”

Amara looked stunned. “Twice.”

“And you mod semi-regularly, I assume?”

“Yes. A few times a year, depending on fashion.”

“You patronize upscale mod facilities, the sort with certified program designers and full medical support rather than chop shops. I don’t keep up with the latest advances, but I’d guess that your current modification wasn’t cheap. It came with full support systems, integrity maintenance protocols and–” Lily appraised her piercingly. “A young, single girl living in the city, in a neighborhood that isn’t exactly a war zone, but isn’t safe to walk in alone at night, either, yes? Did you pay extra for the diagnostic node?”

“It was part of the package. The physicians recommended it–a sub-catastrophic intervention device. Self-activating if my system registers sufficient trauma.”

“And being a dutiful employee of the Archive, you make certain to keep your personnel record up to date. Your mod history and your security images, your medical records.”

Amara nodded, but said nothing.

“What are you getting at, Lily?” Tyrus asked with a touch of exasperation.

“Stardust, Tyrus,” Lily said quietly. “She’s made of stardust and crystal. Processed silicate wafer re-engineered on the nanoscale into cognate organic material using her own packaged genetic pattern as the blueprint. She carries a standard, if dormant, programmable diagnostic node and a reservoir of med application nanomech drones specifically engineered for rapid dispersion and recombinant system construction. Probably not sufficient in and of themselves to make something as complex as the quae-ha-distra, but enough to greatly assist with the task begun by the sonic folding. This could be a technical design decision, or it could simply be that the genetic material is somehow inherent to the nature of the orb, something it needs to function as it should within the constraints of her physical universe. But the point is that everything Raville’s script needed to translate the artifact from virtual existence into reality was already a part of you, Amara. You were a perfect physical candidate.”

Amara chewed her lip. She gazed sidelong at the orb in her hand, torn between fear and wonder. “But that can’t be right. I wasn’t perfect. I was lost in there. I was worse than lost: I was overwhelmed. Wouldn’t John, with all of his crazy scripts and modifications, wouldn’t he have been a more logical choice?”

Lily dismissed the argument with a sour expression. “I wonder about Michael Raville, your Michael Raville, I mean. Caught up in his virtual prison for year after year, able to commune with the memory of gods, but not the gods themselves. Cut off from the divine touch. That’s a grievous thing to a man, who was made to worship. Men have a way of conforming themselves to their gods over time, obeying the urge to be pious until the man that they were vanishes and the man they believe their god would have them become takes his place.”

“You think Raville was being controlled by the Exousiai? That they chose me despite what he wanted?” Amara looked like she was on the verge of screaming.

“Perhaps not directly. But I would suggest that they influenced him, and that his story of being translated into the realm or the dimension of the Exousiai changed him fundamentally, in ways that he does not yet even understand.”

Amara answered this pronouncement with silence, still and profound. Lily softened her gaze and continued, nodding. “Yes, dear. You’ve been there also, and it may have changed you as well. You cannot touch the infinite without being transformed. Set it aside. There’s nothing you can do to change it now. You were chosen, that’s what matters. Raville might have chosen Johnny for perfectly logical reasons, but in the end, I think that logic wasn’t the motivation. Inside his own environment, he could have found ways to force John to accept the orb if he’d wanted to badly enough. I have to believe that. But he had just as ready access to your personnel data as he had to John’s, and something inside him compared Johnny’s compatibility with the orb against yours and chose you instead. Raville may not have even fully understood what he was doing.

“It seems likely to me he didn’t foresee this event, this thinning of the walls between the imaginary and the real. He was trying to pass knowledge to you, that was his conscious agenda. But he also knew that John could use that same data to do more than just carry out his desire to prevent war with the Exousiai. I don’t think he expected to give you a permanent key to his storehouse, and I don’t think that’s anything he would want. He wants to be able to control you out here just like he did in there. The physically manifested orb represents something new, something he didn’t count on. You want me to tell you why? I can see the question in your eyes, dear. I don’t know why. But it’s happened for whatever reason, maybe even because the Exousiai themselves willed it. You have to discover what it means, both of you, because it is the only element in this scenario that your opponents haven’t predicted and have not prepared themselves against. If you can figure out what it is and what it means, it may be a secret strength that can assist you when you need it most.”

“Or hurt you,” Danek tossed in. “If what you’re saying is true, Lily, the orb’s value depends on the intentions of the Exousiai and what they hoped to accomplish by giving it to her.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that Raville used me.” Amara snapped her hand closed over the orb, squelching its light. “I believed in him, and he used me.”

“It changes everything, Amara. John warned you that he wasn’t to be trusted,” Lily said. There was no sympathy in her tone. “You made the choice to be used, and it doesn’t matter if it was Raville who did the using or the Exousiai through him. You chose, these are the consequences. Deal with them.”

Danek sighed. “It doesn’t matter who chose her. The object remains. We need to know what it is, what it’s purpose is.”

Amara squeezed the orb until the flesh over her knuckles was taut, as if she wanted to shatter it. “It’s a portal,” she rasped. “It’s a door to another universe, to a place where gods walk and mind is being. A place filled with lightning and peals of thunder that are both somehow the speech of living, immortal gods. It is a world bursting with terrible, mighty, incomprehensible things. Madness and terror.”

Abruptly, as if suddenly recalling an experience she had forgotten, she calmed herself. The internal struggle rippled along the clenched muscles down to her fists. Her iron grip on the orb softened noticeably and she drew a breath that caught in her throat. Amara folded her arm and held the quae-ha-distra against her chest so that she cradled it against her breast like it was something precious. The light radiated against her downturned face, bathed her in its glow. “But it’s also beautiful and wondrous. Vast, rolling landscapes filled with light and glory and knowledge. The Exousiai are ever there, formless and yet immanent. The heaven and earth are filled with them, with their being and their voices and their song. A single, unified chant, a monad of ascendance which binds all things. There is no loneliness, no separation between you and me, them and us. Just ultimate, all-knowing, all-being oneness and the slow integration into that unity. It feels like home, a perfect and endless home, and being torn from it was like death. A death of emptiness and amputation that never, ever ends.”

Amara lifted her eyes and considered each one of them individually. There was something there, Dorian saw, an unspoken plea for comprehension or for an explanation that even Amara couldn’t fathom. A plea to be known without the need for explanation, without the distance of words and symbols and metaphors, because there was no language sufficient for the task. She had been in a land beyond language, a realm of pure and numinous thought, and words…words were just the debris humans piled against the infinite to make it comprehensible. “Lily is right, I suppose. It doesn’t matter who decided it should be given to me. It doesn’t even matter how it came to be inside me out here, off the Strand and in the real world. Even if we’re exactly right with our deconstruction of the method, it doesn’t signify. Because explaining the mechanism, the technical aspect of how something comes to be doesn’t begin to touch the ineffable why of it. Describe it all you want, understand the science, but that’s just another form of useless reductionism. Even if we never learn how it came to be, the isness of it, its fundamental being, remains as a divine mystery.”

Lily nodded. She nodded, Dorian realized, because she was always the first to understand the difficult things, the things that required human feeling. She softened her expression into a grimace that was both deeply disturbed and wholly compassionate. It was a look Dorian hadn’t seen on her in years. For just an instant, he saw her again, the old Lily he had known all those years ago. The beautiful Lily. “You’re right, of course. Understanding how the universe began doesn’t do anything to help those of us who have to live in it. Seeing a diagram of the wonderful, impossible complexity of our own genetic code doesn’t help us fit more comfortably into our own skin any more than a picture of fire will keep a man from freezing to death. We’re asking the wrong questions.

“It’s never been about what and how and why all of this has happened. It’s not about anything that we can parse into facts. It’s about purpose. What do these Exousiai want of us–as individuals and as a species? What are you supposed to do? What information does the orb exist to impart to you?”

The Korski spat a sudden, strident beep, and they all jumped. Dorian peered at the screen, then raised his head and said, “I may have found the answer to one of those questions, at least.”

“Tell me,” Amara said.

Help me.

He could taste her need as if it was inside of him, as if she was part of him. And she was, he supposed. He had known her, back at the Archive while she slept, seen more clearly into her being than she would have ever allowed him on her own terms. He had scrolled through her like a long and complex text, understanding in part, experiencing without context, glimpsing through a glass darkly. But he had experienced her all the same, and what is a man, but the sum total of his experiences? He would carry her inside him until the end of his days, just as he did every man whose living package he had ever corrupted, every enemy combatant he had been assigned to virtually assassinate. All of them were crammed together in a dense corner of his own rusting and moldy memory palace, stacked next to the secrets he kept and the things he could never say to her or to anyone else he had ever invaded.

His throat tightened. “Before…after we had met with Raville and he had given you the orb, he helped me gather some of the tools I’d need to…to assist you in extricating yourself from the place where you had gone, from the foam where Raville’s understanding of the Exousiai exists in a phenomenalist form. That environment, he said, was constructed on the pattern of his memory palace. A render of a real space. A simulated experience of a state of being. But because it was a construction, there were ways that it could be exploited. Because it was code, there had to be an underlying structure that could be grasped and manipulated independent of the application. I was able to enter the foam construct the orb created through a back door and extract the file structure into my own archives in a non-executable format. As code and documents. Raville told me that if I wanted to understand, if I wanted to help you, I should look for a particular file. He said it was the key to everything.”

“Have you found it?” Amara asked hungrily. He thought she might lunge at him.

Dorian chewed his lip and cast a glance at Danek. “I have, yes, but it’s not quite that simple. It’s an artifact of some sort, like he said, but it’s also an integral logical unit in the system architecture. Meaning that it’s code, yes, but it’s also an interface of some sort, a context dependent oracle. It’s meant to be unpacked inside the environment, and it can only be fully unpacked that way.”

“Wheels within wheels,” Lily observed.

“But it’s code,” Amara growled. “It’s text. John, understanding text–that’s what you do! What does it say?”

“No, listen to me first. I’m telling you that it’s dangerous. I look at this code, and even the text is encrypted. It’s layers on top of layers, standard routines enfolded into multiple external applications. I can see one level, but I know that there’s more to it. There’s a maddening depth of complexity that I can’t tap with just the code in front of me. Out here, it’s just a document, it’s a dead thing, an imperfect artifact that’s only a simulacrum of the thing it represents. In there,” He pointed to his head, “it’s alive. It has a shifting essence, a metalayer of meaning that’s been split off, parsed into discrete strings and distributed all across the architecture. It’s meant to be experienced, comprehended in a way you can only get at inside the environment it was constructed to serve. It would be like trying to imagine someone’s personality from the text of their package encoding. It’s too vast, too complicated. Without context, I can’t even know what it is.”

Lily nodded curtly. She would get it, of course. “You’re saying it could be a bomb.”

“It could be, yes. I can’t say what it is for certain, not without days–weeks–of analysis to sort the subroutines out and recompile it into a linear code object. Maybe even longer.”

“Time that you don’t have,” Danek said, sighing.

Dorian knew what he was thinking. This was a bridge they had come to before. They’d crossed it once, and lived to regret the decision.

“Raville made sure we wouldn’t have time,” Amara said. “He wanted us to be in a place where we had to trust him. He requires a leap of faith.”

“And the only way you can experience it properly, I assume,” Lily added, “is via the Strand, and through the intervention of the orb, which is something you both cannot do without the enemy finding you and something you fear to do because of the orb is an artifact which you do not fully comprehend.” She spoke in a harsh, unyielding tone, but Dorian heard also the awareness of a delicious irony. The New Resurrectionist in her recognized a spiritual test when she saw one. He thought that she might laugh, and eventually she did, a steady, quiet stream of bitter amusement. “Oh, he is a clever and capricious god, this Michael Raville, real and encoded, living and electric, flesh and packet and wave. A god of the left hand and the back hand.”

Amara turned to Dorian. She cupped the shimmer of the quae-ha-distra in her hands like Pan clutching at a wood sprite. “What do we do?”

Dorian dropped his eyes back to the Korski. “We run.”

“Run?”

“Yes. We get out of here. We find a place to hide until this blows over and Raville forgets about us. We stay off the Strand and out of communication, avoiding all the digital avenues he might use to track us. I know how to live off the network. We can get by. In the meantime, I’ll work on this code and figure it out, and then we’ll take it to the authorities.”

Danek grunted. “Except that you forget Raville is the authorities.”

“Fine. Then we won’t do that.”

“And what will you do about money? He’ll have your banking transactions tagged at the source.”

“There are ways to get rupees off the network if you know where to look.” And you aren’t afraid to get a little dirty.

“So you’re willing to become a fugitive and a criminal?” Danek arched an eyebrow. “That’s some excellent tactical planning, boy.”

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to stay alive, yes. It’s better than sitting here talking about setting off virtual alarms in a proprietary foam environment until Raville’s assassins find us,” Dorian barked back. “At least it gives us a chance.”

Danek gave him a thoughtful look. “Has it occurred to you that you’re going about this whole thing the wrong way?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You remember a few years ago those techies on Ono Majoris exposed the price fixing of silicate wafer among the conglom suppliers. That led to a big investigation by media outlets, government agencies, the works.”

Dorian nodded. “They flooded Strand cafes and p2p networks with datastreams.”

“Maybe your problem is that you’re taking this too personally. Maybe the way to get yourself out of the spotlight is to redirect it at the principals. Throw it open to some healthy public debate. It might slow them down. It might even give them bigger problems to deal with than just you.”

“The Ono Majoris Data Consortium had hard physical evidence,” Dorian said. “What have we got? The rantings of a potentially soured upload package. There’s no credibility there. People wanted to believe that the silicate distribution congloms were ripping them off because it explained why their level of prosperity wasn’t meeting zap pundits projections. To that extent, the OMDC really had a soft sell. People are not going to believe in this. It would get relegated to the fringe conspiracy community, and as much as those folks are fun to poke with sticks, they don’t have any political power, and without real evidence, they’ll still be in their little chat forums arguing the legitimacy of our claims long after we’re dead.”

“And in the meantime,” Lily said, “the plans of the actual Raville move toward fruition and war with the Exousiai comes nearer to reality with each passing day, if your Raville is to be believed.”

Dorian scowled at the suggestion. “I can’t say I really care about the delusions motivating either version of Raville. I’m just trying to keep us alive, Lil. But I have an obligation to protect the integrity of the Archive’s reputation. Even if Danek’s plan was sound, we’re talking about spewing the Strand with highly speculative data released under the onus of the Archive’s credibility. I am not going to drag them down with Raville’s madness.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Do you expect me to believe him? That there’s this massive secret mystical history that explains humanity’s technological leaps over the last few decades?”

Lily tilted her head toward him curiously. “And why not?”

“Tell me, if you were an omniscient super-consciousness, would you really have implemented things like nano-assembly and zap and foam dynamics the way they have been? Would you really have given it to a bunch of glory mugging cranks who would turn right around and sell out to the highest megaconglom bidder instead of just bequeathing it outright to mankind as a whole? That doesn’t sound like any way to elevate the species to me.”

“You object to the strategy of implementation, thus they must not exist. The same thing could be said for the logic incarnating a God in a manger, delivered of a virgin in a backwards rural Israelite sheepherding community. But that seems to have worked out well enough.”

Danek cleared his throat and gave Dorian a subtle headshake–the all-knowing eye. Some points of debate were not up for criticism.

He proceeded cautiously. “That’s completely different, Lily. Raville is using these advances as evidence to support his claim that they were all alien inspired. He may believe that, but it isn’t sufficient. One of the fundamental qualities of human experience has always been our willingness to tinker with and build upon other people’s ideas, the slow and steady progress from stone wheels to supercomputers, punctuated by paradigm shifts and dramatic advances that revolutionize our societies. There’s nothing mystical about it, and there never has been. Figuring things out is what our species does. That Raville believes it’s some sort of quasi-divine inspiration only demonstrates that he was a little mad to begin with. He’s constructed a vivid fantasy of divine appointment, because that’s what men have always done when their intellect amazes even themselves. God is just the name for misunderstood scientific principles. Six hundred years ago he would have been up in a tower rattling on about aether and angels and other circumspectly pious Roman Catholic visions that explained the forces of interplanetary gravitation. But when we stopped believing in God, we traded it in for a belief in super-intelligent benevolent aliens…and when we debunk that myth, it’ll be something else we haven’t even imagined yet. The Apocalypse of John didn’t come to pass, and neither will the Apocalypse of Michael Raville. The sooner we stop giving encouragement to wild-eyed prophets looming up out of the desert, the sooner we’ll start realistically attending to the basic suffering and violence and inequalities that mark our existence.”

Lily laughed gaily at his intensity. “What a magnificent screed! You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you? God doesn’t exist. Aliens and angels don’t exist either. It’s just the glory and depravity of man cast in guises we can more readily accept. This doesn’t change the fact, of course, that you told me Raville showed you the report that the Marines are on their way to Phi Sophia, and that the actual Raville is there awaiting their arrival. Someone out there believes the Exousiai exist, and if we judge by the firepower that’s been dispatched, that someone has been mightily persuaded. If all of this is merely Raville’s mad fantasy, there’s no harm to anyone, except perhaps the great scientist’s reputation. On the other hand, if you’re wrong, and they do exist, the Apocalypse of John and the Apocalypse of Michael Raville may find many passages in common. Are you really content to allow events to proceed unhindered when you’ve been given an opportunity to stop it?”

“What other choice do we have, Lil? Even if we understood this code and what it’s telling us to do, the task is too big. We can’t stop the forces that have been set in motion. It was a fool’s errand in the first place.”

“You always have a choice,” Lily responded. “You just seem to want to deny that you’re making a choice at all. Getting swept up by the flow of history is a choice, John.”

“We can choose to do this,” Amara said in a quiet voice. “Or at least we can try. Maybe we were chosen for a reason.”

Dorian scrubbed at his face and groaned in frustration. “We were chosen because we were handy, and because we were foolish enough to get ourselves involved with a wad of runaway code I should have just purged from the beginning. Don’t you go all mystical on me, too. Look, even if I stipulate that the Exousiai exist as Raville describes them, we don’t even know if the war matters! We don’t know what the actual Raville with his accumulated wisdom and study of these beings might know.”

“Raville told you that his knowledge would be stored inside the foam,” Lily pointed out. “Are you willing to find out? That’s really what this is all about. You take the risk, you learn what you need to know to go on.”

“And maybe we find out that the war is a good thing,” Dorian countered. “Maybe we want the Exousiai destroyed.”

“We can’t destroy them,” Amara said, as flat and emotionless as stone. “I’ve touched them, John, and Raville’s choice makes no sense to me. They’re too mighty for any weapons we possess. They can burn us out of the universe if they choose, and any time that they choose.”

“You haven’t touched them. You’ve been thrown into a simulated experience of them. You saw only what a forty year old package of Raville believes them to be. You want to assume that they exist, so we’ll even add that he only saw what they wanted him to see, which means that none of it is necessarily based on any actual reality. It’s all just copies of unreliable experience data.”

Amara’s jaws tightened. “So I’m just wrong, is that it? Raville scammed me. Ask yourself this question, John. Did I experience only an illusion drawn from the demons that haunt Raville’s mind, or did I break through that illusion and touch the true gods directly? How can you know what happened to me inside there? How can you make assumptions about an experience you’ve never had?”

“You sound just as crazy as he was, Amara. For God’s sake, it was code. Even he told me it was code!”

“It was experience. And it was real to me. What am I supposed to believe? Your narrow definition of what text can be or what my own senses tell me?” She opened her fist, and the orb shone white and blinding like the dense, vibrant core of the universe itself. “This was code too, remember? It was word made flesh.”

He was running out of arguments, out of ways to dissuade her. Amara’s intense, reasonless insistence wore on him like a rain of hammer blows. How did one begin to logically argue against faith? “You really want to do this.”

“Yes.”

“Despite the fact that Raville’s men are hunting us. Despite the fact that using the orb, getting on the Strand–everything we have to do–is just like firing off a flare announcing our location. They’ll find us, Amara, and they’ll kill us, and still, you want to do this?”

“We wouldn’t have been given the information if it wasn’t sufficient to help us. We can’t just ignore it. Like Lily said, we have to walk the path he set before us.”

“You’re willing to trust him?” Dorian felt like he was shrieking. It was crazy. They had all gone crazy. “Still? After everything he did to you, you want to believe him now?”

“We have to find out,” Amara said. “We have to know. Especially if it wasn’t Raville who chose us, but the Exousiai themselves. The future hinges on this event. What humanity will become is being decided there, and we have the opportunity to have some say in it, to represent someone other than scientists and soldiers and powerful men determined to maintain the status quo you say you hate so much.”

He threw his head back and gazed at the ceiling, lost for words, but looking for some, building himself up to a major rant. Across the room, Lily gathered her limbs beneath her and lumbered into motion. With her limping, pained gait, she dragged herself over to him and held herself there, staring at him. He did his level best to ignore her.

“Look at me, Johnny.”

He wavered for a moment, but couldn’t deny her in the end. He owed her too much. He stared into the deep, shifting patterns of her blank nanomesh screens, eyes like moonlight on dark water, and shook his head. “I can’t do it, Lil. Not again.”

“No one is asking you to do anything on your own. It isn’t your decision to make. She bears the orb. She’s the one who suffers with it and what it all means, and she, ultimately, was the one they chose, whoever they turn out to be. Amara believes in these beings, these Helpers, and believes that war can be averted if the right choices are made now. All you’re being asked to provide is technical support. Do you understand?”

“Belief is not enough,” he said. “She can’t believe in something she doesn’t understand. None of us understand it and we’re talking about blundering ahead with only a bunch of good intentions and wide-eyed hope to guide us. How do we know we’ll be doing the right thing instead of just making it worse? Which version of Raville should we believe?”

“She believes that she can help. Sometimes all you can do is believe and let faith guide you.” Lily brushed a claw against his chin gently. “Sometimes you’re required to make hard choices because no one else can. You believe and you do your best, even if the outcome isn’t the one you’d hoped for. But at the end of the day, there is no blame apportioned for those who believed. If you let your fear of making monsters paralyze you, many good things that otherwise would have been are lost from the world. Do you understand?”

Dorian pulled his head free and looked away. “That’s not fair.”

“Listen to me. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of the price of believing, because you can’t tell what the right thing is. Sartre and Kierkegaard had it all those years ago. Sometimes you just have to make that leap of faith. It’s nothing new. We all make leaps of faith every day. We assume that if we make the correct choices today, tomorrow–that if we don’t do something that botches the coherent narrative of our lives–that at some point all of this human misery we call living will make sense. Our whole lives are about making sense of the tragedies and chance encounters and the people we’re given to know. We assume that we’ll ascend eventually to some higher plane where all those interconnections suddenly make cosmic sense and we’ll see the big picture like God does. That’s faith. Unfounded, unadulterated faith in what we’re becoming. We walk it out by believing that our actions have consequences and the universe will ultimately reward us for making the right choices. It’s the same impulse that led us to God in the first place. And if you strip away all the technological and mystical mumbo-jumbo of the Exousiai, it’s the same impulse that has led Raville to the crossroads where he is now. Don’t paralyze yourself with fear over making the wrong leap, John. Just do what you can do. Just make the leap and trust that you’ll work it out in the end.” She smiled at him, and hideous as it was, he loved her for it. The weight and uncertainty lifted from his shoulders. If somewhere the gods were keeping score, they would note that he’d still never won an argument with her.

He dropped his head into his hands, defeated. “I hear you.”

She squeezed his shoulder with her third hand, warm and reassuring. “And I hear you. I know you’ll do the right thing when the time comes. You always do, John, whether you believe it or not. Now, get your gear together, and set up a workspace in the kitchen. You’re both going to need a comfortable place to work, and if I have to listen to that machine chattering at me any longer, I’m going to go insane. I’ll have Tyrus put on some more coffee.”

<– Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 –>