Agnosis – Ch. 24
Appendant to the plastisheen environmental dome that encased Giari Tau EOSO Facilty Ketus O-12 was a squat, ovoid containment shell obtainable only via a hydraulic lift that departed from the towering Administrative and Sec-Com Nexus through a reinforced flexsteel umbilical shaft.This navel-like eruption, resembling more than anything else a steel and glass sculpture of a pistachio, was the official receptacle for the staff offices of CSO Kenwood Bryce and his personal entourage of assistants, advisors, departmental handlers and policy wonks.The Home Office (as it was generally called) had been lately redecorated in an aggressively pastel New Mesopotamian Revival fashion at a cost of millions of rupees, utilizing only the highest of high end custom designed zap package construx-templates transmitted directly from the maximum security data vaults of Terbury-Finks Classical Design in Crecy Trois, New Frankish Sultanate, Dengali, which prided itself as being the leader in stylish business-industrial renovation materials.
Dorian knew that the timeframe for the refurbishment was lately because the reception pod stank of quikform sealant, shade dilating smarthue plaster and Kaster’s Polyseal Wood Cement, which happened to be, not surprisingly, exactly the products he would have used in undertaking a renovation of this scope.A number of the faux stucco walls still had WET PAINT signs tacked to them, and all of the public seating couches were covered in stained and crinkly plastic dropcloths as vivid invitations not to even think of seating one’s self while waiting.Rolls of expensively nanowoven Afghani carpets lay fetched up against the base of a mauve pseudo-clay retaining wall-cum-reception desk that snaked through the pod between the waiting area and the frescoed O-shaped entrance to the warren of offices beyond.On the opposite end of the room, a forest of genetically stunted and fruitless date palms crowded in front of observation windows that would have, under normal circumstances, provided a spectacular view of the plains below.As he had seen the plains up close and under armed guard already, Dorian didn’t feel particularly disappointedby the loss.
The girl who sat behind the desk was numbingly perky, vid-personality pretty, attractively dressed and obviously miserable.Her skin was pale, her face puffy, and every few seconds, she either sneezed or blew her nose explosively into a tissue.At fairly regular intervals, she drifted toward an alarming shade of green and politely excused herself into the back, a mad-dash journey from which she would return looking even more pale and miserable than before.
“I’m so sorry.It’s these fumes.I guess I have an allergy,” she would say, then offer them coffee or pastries or tea for what seemed the hundredth time.Neither Dorian nor Amara were tempted to take her up on it.
Ford Garrison had buzzed at the door to their borrowed quarters just after six local time.With him had come by two other men who did not introduce themselves, did not speak and kept near the entrance with their hands folded in front of them.The most interesting thing about them was the obvious and suspiciously weapon-shaped bulge beneath their jackets.
Dorian and Amara had already been up for a couple of hours, observed their morning ablutions and eaten a light breakfast,Amara had put on a soft blue jumpsuit that she found in one of the dressers (along with a dozen other outfits which ranged from airily casual to low cut formal).It had fit her perfectly, just like the selection of running shoes, sandals and hiking boots which she discovered on the floor of the bedroom closet, and the drawer full of neatly folded undergarments packed in the same dresser as the other outfits.The other drawers had held a similar multi-functional selection of men’s clothing, underwear and socks, but Dorian had donned the fatigues he had worn the previous day instead.He had no desire to be beholden to Raville’s generosity.He wasn’t dogmatic on this point—he had traded his floppy slip-on shoes for a pair of boots in his size at the first opportunity and without any ethical qualms; he just felt more comfortable in his own clothes.
Flanked by his pair of non-descript agents, Garrison had then led them back down to the floor of the station following the route they had taken the previous day.From there, they made their way through the morning riot of work traffic and the tight clusters of low and sturdy buildings until they reached the bureaucratically dull and featurelessly utilitarian halls of the Admin Nexus structure.At a security kiosk, their digital imprints were taken, their pix snapped and the amusing non-likenesses affixed to visitors passes which they were required to wear around their necks while inside the Admin complex.They had to flash their badges for an access golemech at the doors to the lift, which counted them, checked them over and simultaneously calculated their mass and displacement to the milligram before allowing them into the car, then ran the calculations again to make certain that no unauthorized cargo had slipped on board during the transition.Garrison’s security toadies did not have passes and remained in the lobby, vigilant but unmoved, until the doors had closed.As far as Dorian knew, they were still there, motionless as statues, awaiting reassignment, awaiting their return, or generally just waiting, sentient as stone, thinking statue thoughts.
On the ride up, Garrison had brusquely informed them that Raville would be meeting with them in CSO Bryce’s office.He apologized for the construction mess before they even exited the lift, sounding mildly irritated as he did so, as if the Bryce had commissioned the renovation at this particular time and under the present circumstances for the sole purpose of annoying him.Then he had grouched at the receptionist for the condition of her pod and the lack of ready refreshments, told them flatly to wait until he returned, and stalked off into the bowels of the office like a troll in search of bones upon which he might sharpen his teeth.
Since that time, they had waited.A few ticks more than twenty minutes in Dorian’s estimation.All he could do was estimate because first of all his array had been destroyed at the zap depot on Glastenhame along with the body he had come to know and love, and secondly because there were no clocks in the pod.He didn’t know if this absence was due to the ongoing renovation, was simply an oversight on the part of an arrayed population with no need of public timepieces, or some sort of authoritarian statement:your time is our time.It didn’t matter one way or the other.Dorian didn’t mind waiting.In fact, he preferred the waiting to the uncertainty of what was to come after the waiting was finished.He was feeling shaky this morning and a little nauseous.Amara explained to him that it was likely more of the zap fatigue making its presence felt, but he didn’t think so.His stomach was sour with the dread of a future he wished would not unfold.
“Something must have happened.”
Amara spoke to him in confidential tones.They stood near the collection of date palms, far enough away from the receptionist that she would not casually overhear them (or sneeze her germs all over them), but where they could still observe Garrison’s arrival when he returned.
“Ford does not seem quite himself this morning,” she confided.“He’s very agitated.”
“Maybe he got a Dear John datburst from his wife saying she was leaving him because she couldn’t stand living with such a jerk anymore.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.He really is an jerk.”Dorian grinned at her, but his heart wasn’t in it.He couldn’t eventake pleasure in antagonizing Garrison this morning.“No, I hear you.I thought the same thing.He didn’t need an escort of thugs yesterday.”
Amara closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath.“I don’t feel anything wrong.The station seems to be humming along normally, going about its routine business.The orbiting ships are frenetically active though, as if they’ve sensed something amiss.”
Her lips creased in a frown, but she didn’t offer any details.Dorian reached out and took her hand.He could still smell the scent of her on his skin, warm and musky.“What about Raville?”
“He’s a void.I’ve been trying to catch a trace of him since we arrived, but there isn’t any sort of distinctive signature to him.He’s a whisper, a presence, a mysterious lurking, but the shape of him has no meaningful content, almost like he’s nothing at all–an empty well.”She shrugged her shoulders and grimaced apologetically.“I guess turn about is fair play.Whatever it is that has Garrison so tense, it’s not Ray and the others, at least.They’re still safe for the moment, though I’m not clear on what difficulties they may have encountered during the night.There was some excitement, but I don’t dare dwell on them for long, in case Raville has learned how to follow.”
Dorian wondered once more where the Misfit Toys had gone and what they were doing, but he didn’t ask.“Maybe that is what has Garrison so aggravated.Not being able to track down a half a dozen notorious saboteurs bent on mischief in my space station would do it for me.Raville with his god-mind may not feel particularly motivated to worry about them, but our buddy Ford strikes me as the type who worries about loose ends whether they seem to be viable threats or not.”
“He’s something like you, then,” Amara said, wink and nudge.
“Don’t even joke about that.It isn’t funny.”
“If I can be like Michael Raville, you can be like Ford Garrison.It has a nice symmetry to it.”She giggled.“I prefer your company to his, of course.You’re so much cuter.”
“And I could kick his ass.”
“You have better dimples, too.”
“Stop it.”
“Sorry.I couldn’t help myself.”
“You could have.You chose not to.Poor impulse control is not an attractive feature in a divine being.Just ask the Greeks.”
Amara rolled her eyes and laughed.
“Are you okay?” he asked.“Worried?Tense?Scared?”
“Curious,” she answered after some thought.“I want to hear what Raville has to say for himself.”
“And then what?”
“Then we do what has to be done in order to stop him.”
Garrison returned a short time later, approaching only as far as the doorway into the pod.He stopped and waved impatiently for them to follow.The receptionist apologized for the length of their wait and suggested with passable brightness that Dorian and Amara should have a nice day, and Dorian was convinced for a moment by the glare that Garrison stabbed at her that he might leap across the intervening space and strangle her to death with his bare hands, but he was apparently unwilling to spare the time.By the time they had reached the doorway, he was already stalking back the way he had come.
They chased after him through a warren of open workspaces, airy and uncluttered cubicles delineated by motile imitation adobe walls balanced on a complex network of recessed runners coordinated so that the seemingly fixed partitions could be maneuvered from any one location to another via configuration panels mounted at periodic intervals along the outer wall.The current floor plan was one of narrow passages, sudden right-angle obstructions and claustrophobic cul-de-sacs.Dorian rapidly found himself disoriented by the constant twists, banks and unexpected switchbacks.He began to believe that the walls were actively moving behind them, manipulating them in an ever smaller circuit toward some hidden central location whose exits would be sealed behind them as soon as they had arrived.
A small part of his mind argued that this suspicion was most likely a textbook example of psychological projection, but he buried that voice beneath a pillow and sat on its head every time it made a peep.
On occasion, EOSO administrative drones fluttered out of foam space or paused to look up at them from their desktops as they hurried past.More often than not, it wasn’t with the casual interest that one might expect to receive as a stranger intruding into a foreign office, momentary curiosity satisfied and just as quickly forgotten.There was a coiled watchfulness behind these looks, a slit-eyed and nervous recognition.Here, at the core of the station’s power structure, Dorian realized that they could never pass for anonymous visitors on customarily trivial business.They’d made too much of a fuss upon arrival.They were saboteurs whose whole reason for coming—guns blazing and goddess invoking—had been to take control of and possibly even destroy the station upon which each one these people’s lives depended.It was a hostility borne of fear and the blind instinct toward self-preservation.
And they probably knew even less about what was really going on than he did.
Dorian squared his shoulders and hovered protectively about Amara.He understood their anxiety.He was absolutely terrified.
They came at last through the maze and up against a gently curved pink sandstone wall.Garrison went a short distance along it until he came to a dark paneled door with a brass nameplate that read “Dr. Kenwood Bryce, Chief of Station Operations”.Garrison hitched up in front of the security panel to transmit his access key.A magnetic bolt clicked in response, and he put his put his hand on the knob.
Before turning it, he glanced over his shoulder at Dorian, a quick head to toe assessment.“Try to be civil.Please.These are important people, used to being paid a certain level of respect based on their contributions to science, society or the human condition as a whole.Antagonizing them will only make this more difficult than it already is.”
Dorian shrugged.“I always try to be civil.”
Garrison grunted, plainly disbelieving, and pushed ahead.Dorian followed, keeping Amara behind him so that he would meet any peril they encountered on the other side first.He was aware of her against his back, small and precious, and wondered if she felt the same fear that he did.
Stay behind me, he thought at her, but if she heard him, she did not answer.
They entered a spacious chamber of pale mud and wattle walls smartshaded a muted and tasteful aquamarine hue.The floor was marble tile interspersed with cleverly patterned rugs and glossy frescoes in whorled patterns of gold and tan and earthen brown.A simple desk of whitewashed faux adobe, shaped like an arch with a flattened top, sat to one side beneath porthole windows punched into curve of the thick outer walls.Monochrome images of bleak desert landscapes competed for aesthetic attention with dried bundles of reedy vegetation, copper braziers emitting a fine, aromatic mist and impossibly baroque furniture, beautifully crafted from lush, chocolate wood.
In the center of the room sat a large circular table surrounded by divan-style chairs covered in silk, damask and gold thread.Some of the seats were already occupied.Two men wearing the ostentatious battle dress uniforms of the Strat Space Command Naval Forces fixed on them with glares hostile enough to melt flexsteel.A balding, pink-skinned man in an expensive grey suit sat with his back to them, while beside him, a younger man with a trendy sport coat, rakish haircut and aggressive smile, twisted almost completely around in his chair, straining for a good look.A few seats down sat a middle-aged woman with stern, hawkish features who didn’t look up at all, but maintained a deep, almost Zen focus on the open file of papers in front of her.She wore an oversized lab coat smudged at the cuffs and elbows.
Dorian noted each new face, each implied agenda, then dismissed them all from his mind.
Because seated facing toward them across the table was Michael Raville.He was unmistakable, nearly an exact copy of the package in the Archive.A little more grey at the temples, a few more lines about his eyes, but essentially the same.Dorian experienced an unexpected and unusually intense sensation of déjà vu, but he couldn’t tell if it derived from having known so well this man’s digital approximation or from the more immediate fabric of his dreamscape.
In either case, it was difficult for him not to snarl.
Raville rose hurriedly as they approached, his eyes bright.“It really is you, isn’t it?After all these years, you’ve really come.You—you are.”He smiled crookedly, self-consciously, as he recalled that there were others in the room looking on.He ducked his head.“My apologies if I seem to be gushing.I don’t know of any other way to adequately express my joy, my relief, my almost religious awe at finally meeting you face to face, Ms. Cain.”
Amara lifted her chin, uncertain how to gauge his greeting.Her answer was formal, her tone guarded:“I’m honored by your hospitality.”
For a treacherous instant, Dorian almost bought Raville’s precocious sincerity.Then he remembered his apartment, his cat, all the lies and death.
“Pfft,” he said.
Raville glanced at him.One of his eyebrows arched, but the smile did not waver.“I shouldn’t neglect to greet you also, Mr. Dorian.It isn’t my intention to be rude.”
“I’ve already survived your rude greeting, thanks.This one’s pretty tame in comparison.”
Raville continued to smile, but it became decidedly strained.“Nevertheless, your arrival has also been anxiously anticipated.I say anxiously as you are, I assume, the man who jacked my datacore, jacked this station’s secure network—jacked, well, pretty much everything we thought was safe from intrusion.Your reputation precedes you, as they say.”
“Yeah, and I’m honored by your hospitality or whatever, too.Especially the considerate way you blew up my apartment.And the equally considerate way you tried to kill us yesterday.A real honor.”
Raville did not rise to the challenge.Instead, he waved to the open seats in front of them.“Please, won’t you both join us?”
Dorian didn’t particularly feel like it, but he cast a wary look over his shoulder at Amara and she nodded.Shrugging, he pushed himself into motion and cautiously approached the edge of the table.Ford Garrison followed close behind, nearly treading on Amara’s heels.Dorian took a chair one space removed from the balding gentleman he had noted upon arrival and directly across from the two military officers, a ridiculously bemedalled Flight Commander and a Grand Sector Chief, he could see now from the insignia on their lapels.The one on the left, the GSC, Dorian suspected was probably none other than the DeMartel who had dispatched Lieutenant Sainz after them.Amara slipped into the seat on his left and Garrison sat down next to her, propping his elbows on the table, knuckles pressed against his chin, looking cross and dissatisfied with the proceedings, as though even Dorian’s act of seating himself had foiled some minutely orchestrated plan.
After they had all settled in, Raville also resumed his seat.He lay his hands on the table, fingers laced together casually, and cleared his throat.As if it was any other board meeting he had ever attended, Dorian thought.Business to be handled, future plans to be discussed.It was bizarre.
“We should begin with introductions.Most of us here are known to one another, but I’m terrible at keeping names and titles straight.I’d just make a hash of it and manage to offend everyone.Perhaps you would be willing to shoulder the duty on my behalf, Dr. Bryce?Just the glosses, if you please.If we insist on providing the detailed vitae of each member of our esteemed assembly, we’ll be here well into the afternoon.”
The older man seated to Ray’s right, shifted as though he might stand, then changed his mind and settled for sitting up straight.He was a large man, solid and soft at the same time, like an athletewho has recently decided to let himself go.His shoulders were broad and powerful, and his features both alert and intelligent.He bent his head politely in their direction, and began in a friendly, conversational tone:“As you have no doubt guessed, my name is Kenwood Bryce.I am the head bean-counter, bottle-washer, feud-mediator and administrative back-slapper for the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization Facility Ketus O-12, commonly referred to as the Giari Tau Outpost, or even more commonly as GTO.What that means as far as you’re concerned is that in a very broad sense, this is my house, and just like our resident scientists, academics, grad students and assorted support staff, you are temporarily my guests.As long as you act like proper guests, I will endeavor to play the role of gracious host, and we won’t have any problems.If you choose to deviate from behaviors consistent with those of polite and civil guests, I will cease to be gracious and toss you out on your asses.That applies to everyone in this room.GTO is above all, a scientific research station with a narrowly defined and ongoing academic mission that has not to this point been inconvenienced by these proceedings.Protecting the integrity of our research mission is my job, and I won’t hesitate to act in the best interests of this facility.You should all endeavor to keep that fact in mind.”
Bryce paused and ran his gaze around the table, an opportunity for responses, concerns, objections.None were offered, so he went on.
“The young man beside me is Dr. Fen Corrie—that’s a doctorate in Advanced Human Interaction and Administrative Affairs, one of the few sheepskins you’ll find hanging on the wall around here that doesn’t have an arcane or extremely specialized scientific application.In my opinion, this gives him a rare and precious perspective on this facility’s day-to-day functioning.As Manager of Logistical Services, he’s our human resources wonk, morale officer, payroll clerk and security director, the exact color and style of his hat varying by day and circumstance.Any situation having anything to do with people management is his field of expertise, and you’ve hereby been given fair warning that he will talk your ears right off the side of your head given the opportunity.”This might have been a cutting remark in any other context, but it was spoken with such obvious affection that it was impossible to draw offense from it.Taking his cue, Dr. Corrie favored them all with an enthusiastic smile and wave of greeting.Bryce continued, “He also happens to be my second in command.”
“Next to Mr. Raville is our Head of Research Studies, Dr. Minerva Skiles.As well as leading the cutting edge analytical work on the singularity farm phenomenon which is our primary investigative focus, she serves as the liaison between the scientific staff and the supporting administrative modules.”
The woman in the oversized lab coat lifted her head from the file splayed out on the table in front of her, looking temporarily dazed as though only belatedly having realized Bryce had spoken her name.She blinked owlishly at them, first confused, then embarrassed at her lapse of attention, then defiantly dismissive when any of them failed to present any unique observable phenomenon of their own.
“Minnie,” she announced, and returned unceremoniously to her printouts.
Bryce winked at Dorian and Amara.“She prefers Minnie.”
“Minerva was a tart and a parlor schemer and a vociferous twit,” Dr. Skiles muttered.“Used her brains only as a reactive force, and only for vengeance upon petty slights to her perceived divine dignity.If she had bothered even once to apply herself to something productive, Rome would never have fallen.She was a bad role model for women.Generate a self-destructive gender role paradigm, one should not be surprised when the meme comes home to roost.Three thousand years we’ve been rooting out that woman’s mischief, and we’ve come hardly a full step nearer to leveling the playing field.”
“Minnie is also our resident gender equality advocate,” Bryce confided in a low voice.“You would be surprised at how divisive an issue this becomes in insular communities like ours where mod capabilities are not readily available.”
“Thank you for proving my point so eloquently,” Dr. Skiles remarked acidly.
Bryce hurried on.“You’ve met Ford Garrison, of course, Mr. Raville’s personal security chief.The remaining two gentlemen across from you are the most recent additions to our far flung community:Flight Commander Kesh Temple and Grand Sector Chief Morgan DeMartel of the Stratiskaya Daransk Naval Commanderie.”Bryce paused uneasily, then added,“You have, I understand, already made the acquaintance of some of their subordinates from the Indianapolis and the Juggernaut.”
Commander Temple sat up stiffly, a glare simmering behind slitted eyelids.He grunted at the mention of his name, but made no other acknowledgement.DeMartel, who was (at least) rendered a decade his junior, did not make an acknowledgement.His olive uniform was neat and pressed, his medals and buttons polished to a brilliant gleam, the consummate Border Marine officer.He was, Dorian thought, the living embodiment of the timeworn phrase squared away.Dorian didn’t like the way he looked at either of them, but especially at Amara.It wasn’t exactly hostile, but it was cold, calculating, the look of a man who was determining not if he would kill you, or even how, but when.Waiting for an opportunity he knew must inevitably come.
In a level voice, Dorian asked, “How many of your Marines died?”
DeMartel’s nostrils flared.“Pardon me?”
“You sent a force of Marines to the warehouse to apprehend us and our companions.I want to know how many were killed.”
“We recycled four soldiers,” DeMartel answered, then added with slight, cruel smile:“Out of thirty.”
“You were lucky.It could have been much worse.”
“My Marines do not rely on luck for success, sir.”
Dorian nodded appreciatively.Maybe it was just nostalgia, but he was having a hard time not liking this grizzled old coot.“Out of curiosity, do you know how many of my friends were recycled, Sector Chief?”DeMartel’s facial expression said very eloquently that even if he did know, he did not care.“I’ll tell you:None.Zero.Nil.Because my friends are dead.Not recycled, not temporally inconvenienced, not chilling in cold data storage, but dead.Between the entropic decay of our delayed decanting and your soldiers’ unprovoked attck, they are irrevocably, immedicably, and unrecoverably dead.Their unique patterns have been deleted from the algorithm of the universal computer, and they cannot be restored.Before we all start getting too chummy, I just want us to be clear on that.”
Amara gave Dorian’s knee a warning squeeze.“Now is not the time, John.I’m sure that eventually these gentlemen will be given the opportunity to learn that there are risks associated with childishly kicking over ant hills.”
DeMartel studied Amara carefully, surprised by her remark.“Young lady, you should recall who it was that invaded whom exactly.”
“And you should strongly consider which side you’ve chosen,” she answered.“The line between insurgent and patriot is drawn by perspective.”
DeMartel’s face flushed so red that Dorian was sure his head was about explode.It might have if Michael Raville had not intervened at that moment, clearing his throat to regain everyone’s attention.“Thank you, Dr. Bryce, ladies and gentlemen.Let’s get down to business, shall we?”
“Please,” Garrison muttered.
“Actually, we haven’t all been introduced,” Fen Corrie pointed out.“We’ve been instructed about the identities and personal histories of our guests but we haven’t really properly met.I’d like to hear what Mr. Dorian and Ms. Cain have to say about themselves and about our situation.From a human interest perspective. . .since there seems to be some misunderstanding.”
Ford Garrison made a low growling noise in his throat.“I hardly think that’s necessary.You should have been forwarded a copy of the pertinent files.If you chose not to review the material, that’s your problem.”
“I looked over their files with great interest, Mr. Garrison,” Corrie countered.“I examined them closely enough, in fact, to have it become painfully clear that the data you’ve given us is rich in analysis and laden with suspect structural assumptions, but short on basic facts.Why do they think that they’re here?What explanations do they have to offer for yesterday’s excitement, and what did they hope to accomplish in coming all this way?It’s important that we try to understand one another’s perspectives if we’re supposed to start working together, as I assume we are from the fact that we’re even having this meeting.With all due respect, I’ve heard your take on this narrative.Now I want to hear theirs.”
Garrison stabbed his finger at Corrie’s chest.“This is not one of your touchy-feely group therapy sessions, doctor.No one is interested in actualizing their inner bullshit for optimum mental health or productive group dynamics.We have a job to do, and it’s going to be done whether you manage to comprehend everyone’s motivations or not.I’ll remind you that you’re here solely because of your responsibility to the welfare of this facility, and even then only because your boss insisted on it.”
Bryce glowered back at him.“And I will remind you, Mr. Garrison, that you’re here only because I didn’t flush your zap signal when it hit my servers, and solely on account of your boss, so let’s not get into a pissing match about whose coattails are longer.This may be your operation, and Mr. Raville may be the ranking EOSO officer, but until the organization hands me my walking papers, it remains my outpost, and I’m legally in charge.”
Dorian glanced hopefully toward Amara.It wasn’t exactly an armed uprising on their behalf, but anything that even vaguely resembled dissent was encouraging.Amara put a finger to her lips and gave him a meaningful wink.
Raville sighed and flapped his hands at them, urging them all to settle down.“Gentlemen, please.We all recognize that this arrangement has led to some uneasy alliances.CSO Bryce and his staff have been extraordinarily gracious in allowing us the use of their facility and its airspace.However, it’s to be expected that we won’t always see one another’s interests with the appropriate clarity, so we get our backs up unnecessarily.I must remind you that the hour is pressing.We don’t have time to air out our personal grievances, let alone hope to resolve them in this venue.”
Minnie raised her head, frowning.“Fen’s request remains a reasonable one.I want to hear what they have to say for themselves, too.I want to hear what everyone has to say for themselves, in fact.Apocalypse and aliens?”She snorted derisively and swept the stack of printouts she had been reading off onto the floor.“Please.This ‘research’ you’ve given us is crap.There’s nothing here that proves anything.Unwarranted suppositions, poorly documented evidentiary logic, blatant attempts at character assassination and pseudo-scientific clap-trap masquerading as valid data.If I tried to foist argumentation this shoddily unsupported off on my colleagues, they’d have me kicked back to a second tier community college in a backwater colonial world teaching fundamental polynomial manipulation inside a month, and would consider that leniency.You’re a scientist, Michael.You should know better.That you should have, but did not make the effort leads me to conclude, that either you’ve abandoned everything you ever learned about research or you’ve not been entirely forthcoming with us.And while that sort of cloak-and-dagger need-to-know nonsense might be good enough to convince obtuse military goons to get their war hormones in a tizzy—no offense intended to present company–someone is going to have to do a better job of convincing me why I should give a rat’s behind about any of this business, or I’m going back to my lab where I can spend my time on work that actually matters rather than this puffed up kangaroo court.”
Fen Corrie giggled happily.“’Kangaroo court’!I like that.It’s very clever.”
Dorian held back a mild chuckle.“Good money just doesn’t buy the help that it used to.”
“This is not a kangaroo court,” Raville insisted darkly.He scowled at Dorian.“It isn’t a court of any kind.”
“Then let them speak,” Bryce agreed.“What can it hurt?”
Raville’s frown suggested that it could do a great deal of damage, but he shook his head and said, “Fine.They can speak if they wish.”He looked pleadingly at Amara.“But briefly, if you please.”
Dorian opened his mouth to answer for them.He had plenty (PLENTY) to say.Because Corrie and Skiles weren’t really asking what they thought about the Exousiai et al.Their perspective was much more narrow than such cosmic themes.Bottom line, they wanted to know why he and Amara and the Misfit Toys had come all this way willing and eager to kill anyone who tried to stop them.Dorian wanted to be sure they grokked that the sole reason, from digital start to fleshy finish, was sitting there looking smug at the head of the table.It was all Raville. Amara, however, tugged his wrist into her lap and held it firmly before he could start.He shrugged and remained silent.
“I’m afraid we’re at a disadvantage.We haven’t seen the dossiers Raville has prepared on us, so we aren’t aware of what it is you might think that you know about us or how to answer those charges.I can tell you that my name is Amara Cain, and my friend is John Dorian.We were, until recently, employees of the Masonic Archive and Infocache in Sonali on Trithemius Orbis.Prior to six weeks ago, at least in our relative time, neither of us had even heard of Giari Tau or the Exousiai.In fact, we didn’t even know one another particularly well.That all changed when one evening when in the course of our regular duties—or, I should say, in the course of John’s regular duties—we encountered a rogue upload package purporting to be one of the original Oak Ridge zap templates which displayed indications of having spontaneously developed features consistent with self-awareness.This package declared itself to be none other than the duplicate digital identity of a young Michael Raville.”
Kesh Temple rumbled.“Are you admitting that you violated the privacy of a legally protected package file?”
“I admit that I was protecting the integrity of my data network from a particularly virulent form of data spider,” Dorian said.“The donor’s right to privacy ends where my security safeguards begin.”
“Don’t be an ass, Temple,” Bryce groused at the Strat officer. “When you stop monitoring the outgoing signals from your ship’s datburst transmissions in the name of protecting classified military information, then you can throw stones.Whether or not the actions were strictly legal is beside the point here.I imagine that we’re all somewhere out beyond the borders of what is strictly legal right now.”To Amara, he said, “Please continue.”
Amara nodded gratefully.“This entity,whom we satisfied ourselves was what or who it claimed to be, informed us that Michael Raville, its actual self, was in the process of venturing here, to Giari Tau, where he planned for unknown reasons to wage a unilateral and ultimately secretive military campaign against a numinous alien race.These aliens, these helpers, he believed, meant to contact the human race with a message of peace.Further, that they had contacted us before, shepherding our technological and social development through small revelations—up to and including zap itself–so that when they did finally choose to reveal themselves and walk freely among us, we might be ready to receive them.But more importantly, they wanted us to be ready to accept their ultimate gift to humankind:a radical evolutionary transformation to a higher level of consciousness and a place in the greater community of sentient life.The packaged entity did not know why Michael Raville would choose to start a war against those who only sought to aid us, only that the war was doomed to failure, and that if anyone attempted to strike a blow against the Exousiai, they would not hesitate to destroy us all in their own defense.”
Curious glances shifted to Raville, but he said nothing.He remained perfectly still, his arms crossed over his chest in mute denial.Amara went on, “But our infiltration of the entity’s datascape was discovered, and agents were dispatched to stop us at any cost.Thanks to the machinations of Mr. Raville, in the last several months, we have become homeless, unemployed, frequently targeted for murder, wanted by a host of government agencies from one edge of human space to the other, and quite possibly indelibly linked with an infamous band of anarchist saboteurs, all because of the possibility that we might prevent him from carrying out his genocidal conflict with those who only wish to assist us in freeing ourselves from the chains that have bound our species for so long.You object that we showed up here with weapons and warriors, suggesting that it somehow reflects on our motives.Well, as far as we’re concerned, we are only responding in kind to the reception we’ve been taught to expect.Greet us with hostility, and we’d be foolish not to return it, if only in our own defense.”
She flashed a grave look at Michael Raville.“Perhaps that’s a lesson you should take to heart before attempting to set out your welcome mat to the Exousiai.We did come to stop you.One would hope that good people would always stand up to prevent tyrants from waging wars that cannot be won and which will only result in our ultimate destruction.”
Dorian wanted to leap up and cheer, but he was apparently the only one.Amara’s extended speech met with a stern silence.Kenwood Bryce chewed the inside of his cheek.Minnie Skiles leaned back in her chair, furiously curling strands of her mousy brown hair about her fingers.Commander Temple and Sector Chief DeMartel’s lips twitched in an avid subvocal p2p exchange, but they made no external reply.The only sound was Garrison’s aggrieved sigh, uttered as though Amara had physically wounded him.
In slow and deliberate fashion, Michael Raville began to applaud.“Bravo, my dear!A very effective spin on the facts at your disposal.In another context, and were we different people than we are, I would be sorely tempted to offer you a position in one of my public relations firms based on this performance alone.After all, the most effective public relations professionals are not those who tell the best lies, but those who come to believe the lies that they tell.And there’s nothing more convincing to people who don’t know any better than true sincerity delivered from the lips of a lovely spokeswoman.Of course, you can’t be given full credit because the lies you’re peddling aren’t truly your own, are they?You’re doing nothing more than parroting what you’ve been told by the malformed and bastard child of my own mind.Thus, the narrative is actually mine, which means, I suppose, that I get the wear the fool’s cap for wasting all of our valuable time on this business just so I could sit here and argue with myself.Ha!”
His eyes flashed perilously, and he threw his head back and laughed heartily.When he turned his attention back to them, however, his tone grew hard.“But they are lies, dear Amara, the things you have said.Though we might generously call them half-truths, which is very nearly the same thing.Comforting fictions about a nefarious corporate overlord intent on universal domination who must be stopped by a rag-tag but ultimately heroic band of underdogs before he can instigate the end of all that is good and pure.It’s a story that sells newspapers, as they said once upon a time, but even when they were saying it, it wasn’t true most of the time.Life is rarely as uncomplicated as news stories make it out to be.”Raville lowered his hands to his lap, and his expression was grim, almost sad.“I would that it were true, Amara.I wish it was that simple, that I was merely evil like a character in a spy novel, just a bad man with a taste for ill-gotten power who must be defeated before he can wreak great harm upon the world.But it isn’t that way, is it?There’s more to the story that even you and Dorian know.”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.“There is more to the story.”
“And you believe that the missing narrative elements amount to nothing more than a fascinating subplot of identity.The pauper is discovered to be a prince in disguise; the precocious woodland maiden the lost daughter of a grieving king; the wandering youth who feels himself so desperately out of phase with the world discovers that he is of divine lineage, the child of a god.Do you think that knowledge would skew the willingness of your audience to receive your version of the story?”
Amara shrugged.“What this audience ultimately chooses to believe does not concern me.They asked what we believed, and I told them.”
“That’s not any sort of way to run an effective coup d’etat!Revolution begins with winning the ideological battle.You must convince the common folk to believe as you would have them to if you intend to enlist their support.”
“I’m not asking for their help,” she rasped, sensing that he was mocking her.“I don’t need it to stop you.”
“Oh, because you’ve been told that you are a goddess, yes?That you are one of them, the Great Helpers, the Mighty Exousiai?You have been burdened with a solemn duty to your progenitor race and a divine destiny to pave the way for their benevolent offering of brotherhood to a backward species!”Raville flicked his hand dismissively.His taunting was both biting and cruel, his tone vicious.“No?You don’t believe in fairy tales anymore?Well, then perhaps you imagine that you don’t need them because you’ve realized you can play cute parlor tricks with dead matter, the fabric of space and time, and the raw substance of creation.We’ve all seen the surveillance images of your demonstration in the warehouse, my dear.It is a demonstrative magic, I’ll admit, so much fire and brimstone, din and clangor.Such things never fail to impress the native monkeys who inhabit this branch of the infinite multiverse.And believe me, we were all suitably impressed with your abilities.”
Raville cupped his hand over his breast, a familiar, sickening gesture, and the universe shifted, as though reality tilted toward a bottomless abyss.The slit of ichorous darkness opened in his chest, raw-rimmed and jagged at its edges like an unhealed would, and he withdrew from it the shimmering, opalescent orb of the quae-ha-distra.“But you see, you’re not the only one who is more than she appears to be, the only one who has been nursing secrets hidden away from prying eyes.What do you think?Shall we compare the sizes and see whose ball is bigger?”
Amara looked away disdainfully.“Your copy revealed it with more flair.”
“I was much more prone to dramatics when I was younger.That’s the problem with packaging consciousness.One of the problems, I should say, besides stealing a man’s thunder.It captures your flaws along with everything else, and the flaws have an annoying habit of persisting.”
Dorian hardly heard them.His attention was focused on the reactions of the others seated around the table to the sudden appearance of the quae-ha-distra.They stared at the orb, each and every one of them from Bryce to Garrison, open-mouthed and longing, overcome with a quiet reverence that bordered on religious awe.Even Temple and DeMartel gazed at it, reveling in the liquid spirals of color and warmth that painted the walls with glorious shafts of beatific light, their feverish conversation temporarily forgotten.
They were moths drawn to a candle’s flame, transfixed by the potential for glory beyond their comprehension.Monkeys discovering themselves inexplicably in the presence of the World’s Largest Banana.
But what they were not was shocked, alarmed, dismayed—all the reactions that had coursed through him when he had first encountered the presence of the orb in Raville’s memory palace back in Sonali, safe within the architecture of the Archive and buffered by an awareness of virtual unreality.
In realtime, there were no expressions of surprise, no wondrous gasps.
Because they already knew, he realized.They already knew what Raville was, and consequently what Amara was as well.
They knew, and still they intended to attack the Exousiai.
Raville released his grip on the orb and in violation of everything Dorian had ever learned about physical mechanics,it remained there, floating on a cushion of air exactly as he left it.He grudgingly admitted to himself that this was a pretty nifty trick as such things went, as impressive in its casual implication of control as Amara’s towering vortex of flame.It said that he was perfectly comfortable manipulating the forces of the universe for his own personal amusement.
It began to occur to Dorian, not for the first time, that he was in so far over his head all he could see around him was black water.Amara’s expression was one of quiet dismay, her lips a tight line and her eyes lidded.Thinking god thoughts, he imagined, exploring the hidden supra-natural datascape of existence with sensory arrays he could not even guess at.He noticed that she, too, was drawn toward the orb, her eyes flicking back and forth between it and Raville’s inscrutable smile as though both of them presented mysteries only she could read.
“You have been deceived.”Raville spoke earnestly now, his cruelty spent, or perhaps it had been a sham in the first place, designed to shock Amara with his irreverence.This declaration was flat, matter-of-fact, as though the conclusion should be obvious.“Not maliciously, I would hasten to add, and not, I believe, unfortunately.There are stages of belief that must be endured for any sort of faith to be meaningful.Progressive revelations accrete with time and experience, leaving their distinctive stamp on your pattern of belief—on the details of what you believe, in fact–until one day you look back and wonder at how far you’ve come in accepting certain truths.Naked truth is a hard thing, stripped of its familiar garb and comforting handles.Truth is a rock waiting to fall on us if we’re not careful with it, to crush our flesh and grind our bones.It is perilous, sharp edged and biting.Confronted with such a thing, our natural reaction is to reject it out of hand, hedge it off from ourselves so that we will not be harmed by it.So we weave about it webs of deception, of softened interpretation and intentionally occluded meaning, allowing ourselves to accept a watered down form and then over time slowly unwrapping its gossamer layers through steady contemplation.Until slowly we come to realize the underlying size and shape of the thing is much different than what we first supposed it to be.We call that shocked apprehension of truth wisdom.The lies that led us to it served a purpose, but we should never allow ourselves to forget that they were lies, even though the falsehoods were ultimately useful.Ultimately essential.”
“I take it that you have particular lies in mind,” Amara said.“Things that your packaged self told us that are in error according to what you have subsequently chosen to believe.”
Raville chuckled.“I’m afraid I’m not going to allow you to argue a post-modernist deconstruction of perceived reality, my dear.That’s a cop out.There is truth, and there is deception.There is nothing in between.In most cases, the deceptions we live with don’t matter.Consensus reality clusters together in patterns that are like enough to be meaningful and facilitate useful communication.However, where the Exousiai are concerned, the gulf between truth and not-truth is both vast and critical.
“But I don’t hold you responsible for having been deceived, my dear.I was, after all, the one who deceived you, at least by proxy.But I did it honestly.My packaged self believes everything he said to you, just as I once did, and the core of those beliefs remain as good an entry point into the mystery of the Exousiai as any, especially if one tends by nature to be naïve and idealistic, which are polite terms for lies that we tell ourselves about how the universe should work.I was both when I was channeling the template for the creation of zap, and subsequently when I created the Oak Ridge package of myself that you encountered in the Archive.Idealism was the first necessary stage of belief.I accepted that I had been handed a divine vision and a mission to implement the will of benevolent gods in the human sphere.I took that charge seriously, and the seeds of that idea took root deep in the soil of my consciousness, informing everything I thought I understood about the nature of human existence and the intended direction for my individual life.
“Do not discount the impulse of obedience to an immanent god, Amara.We’re all mystics at heart, you know.Humans yearn for a touch from the ineffable, the mysterious, the fountainhead of our existence.We ache to belong to something larger and more powerful than ourselves, something that fills the void of doubt and gives us direction.We yearn for God, though we do not understand what a god is, what makes one, or how dangerous a thing divinity can be.We pretend to understand through the forms of religion, remaking God in our own image, making It familiar, comfortable, meaningful.But the truth has always been that God is alien to us.Godhood is beyond us, so foreign that we cannot think Its thoughts or understand Its ways except through metaphor.
“But we want, oh how we want, to be touched by It.We long to be transformed from something small, narrow and blind into a living and purpose-filled reflection of the All in All.I’m telling you this, because I want you to understand that I know what you believe, and I have felt the fire that burns within you now.I know the feel of it, the rightness of its primal tug and the way it gives meaning to lives that otherwise have felt empty and without purpose.It is a great comfort to place yourself in the hands of God and enfold your being in Its will.It is a fundamental human need.
“But it is also the cornerstone of the deception of which I speak, because the truth is that the Exousiai are not God.They are not even divine.That recognition forms the basis of the second stage of belief, which is simply that the Exousiai are what they are:a transcendent form of existence that has far surpassed the boundaries of human comprehension and made of themselves something so tremendously alien and powerful as we measure such things as to be mistaken for gods.No more and no less.A different order of creation, but certainly not the sacred Ein Sof you hold in your heart when you think of the word God.Yet because of what they are and how they choose to manifest, they appeal to our urge to commune with and be subsumed by divinity because they seem to have already become what we believe we want to be.
“And that leads directly to the third stage:doubt.Pressed down, shaken together and running over, as the saying goes–an eruption of decoherence at the very core of fundamentally held assumptions.Let me put it this way:if we stipulate that the Exousiai are the mirror reflection of what we yearn to be, and we accept that they have taken a role in shepherding us toward their level of transcendence, then we must begin to ask why they would do such a thing.We can answer that it is altruism, pure and simple.Or that in the exchange of information between their distinctive collective consciousness and our radically unique substance, that both parties are mutually increased, complexified, augmented.This stage builds directly upon the foundation of the former, in that it recognizes that the Exousiai cannot be gods, because it is not definitionally part of the nature of gods to want or to need or to require anything outside of themselves.Thus, they make their appeal of integration to us because we provide them with something essential that they cannot manufacture within themselves.They are finite, even if the boundaries of their potential are so vast as to appear functionally infinite to beings without their assimilation of context.
“And we haven’t even asked ourselves yet why they would come to us in such a way as they have, allowing us to perceive them as gods.They provide us with tools and technologies that assist us in attaining a vision of our future for which they themselves have provided us the template.The Exousiai perpetuate a deception which they maintain has been fostered for our own good, to ease us into a grand transition.If they are willing to lie to us, then we must doubt their motivations or at least their information as it is transmitted to us, yes?And if we can doubt that, we can appropriately doubt that altruism plays any role in their decision to contact us, which means that their decision must be based on desire, on need.
“Accepting then that they have needs, it follows that what they need, they have determined to grow through careful manipulation.Tilling the soil, planting seeds, allowing the roots to take hold and burrow deep, so that when the plant is ripe, they can make a harvest of the sustenance they require.And the harvest is a taking of the fruits of their labor, the best that the plant has to offer, and once the fruit is gone and has been devoured, the plant is allowed to wither and die and become fodder that can be plowed under to rot and serve as the nutrient from which the next harvest will spring.The fruit itself is absorbed, becoming part of the body, yes, feeding it and helping it grow.It remains forever in the cells and flesh and bone of the being which consumed it.But it is never again fruit.It is rendered down to its fundamental components, disassembled and utilized according to the rules of the body, not those of its own unique genetic dictates.Its qualities of fruit-ness are forever lost.
“That is the future that is being offered to us.Not a human transcendence, but a digestion into their immense totality in which we will be destroyed and remade again into their own image after they have harvested from us all that they deem worthy and useful.The result can only be viewed as our essential extinction as a unique and individuated species.”
Raville paused.He had been speaking for several minutes uninterrupted, and now he cast about the table for some sign of encouragement, an indication that he had been understood.At last, he said, “What I’m trying to explain to you is that it has never been my intention to start a war with the Exousiai.The war has already begun.It has been waged for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, through carefully designed information systems implemented with the purpose of making humanity as a species malleable to the demands of the Exousiai.My task is only to end it, and by ending it, to preserve our future independence.”
Minnie Skiles was the first to raise an objection.“Michael, you old windbag, what are you doing?Trying to numb us from thinking with a bombardment of pretty words?It’s just more of the same.More hypothesizing, more reasoning from assumptions.It isn’t proof.How can we know exactly what it is that the Exousiai intend for us without evidence of their own actions in the past?You’re asking us to risk the future course of our entire civilization on the basis of nothing more than your own personal prejudices.”
“Minnie, my dear,” Raville responded, “you have heard the testimony of the Exousiai from their very lips.Do you really have to see it for yourself?I have told you unflinchingly what we are.We are locusts.”
“And I’m saying that’s a specious argument.Even you have admitted that you only see through the glass darkly.”She dropped her eyes from the orb’s pulsating glow.“You’ve told us that you have been human for a very long time, and have only in recent years become aware of your. . .heritage.But the fact remains that you’ve been human much longer in your memory than you have been Exousian.As a human, prejudices seep in.You filter the world through your own experiences, not from some theoretical objective space that can ascertain and correctly weight all the relevant bits of evidence.What is to say that you are not the one who is mistaken, the one who is not fully awakened, rather than Amara?Obviously she believes just as strongly as you do—she gave up all she had and risked her life to stop what we are about to do!–and yet you’ve both come from the Exousiai, you say, you both have access to equally limitless stores of knowledge.But you can’t even agree on this one essential point.What are we mere mortals supposed to think?”
Raville grunted in annoyance.“She believes, but I know.That is the difference.”
“Unless it is you that has allowed yourself to be deceived,” she answered sternly.“How can you know that you are the one who is right?”
He gestured at the orb, indicating that the solution should be self-evident, or at least would be to anyone with the ability to see it.“Because I know.There is more than one kind of knowledge, and not all of them can be obtained by poking a thing with mathematical formulae or shoving it under a microscope.Stop looking for scientific rigor, Minnie.You won’t find it here.In the conflict of ideologies, some things are just known.”
Amara lifted her chin.She was frowning, deeply and violently troubled, and she spoke in a voice thick with doubt, reedy with fear at the edges.“You feel what you feel from within the quae-ha-distra, just as I do.You listen to its voice, and it speaks to you in a way that resonates.I know this feeling, too.I trust it, but you’re telling me that I shouldn’t, that it’s deceiving me.How can you know that what your orb speaks to you is not false?”
What was it that she saw in the ebb and flow of Raville’s orb, Dorian wondered.What did she perceive that had so shaken her?He remembered suddenly the things Raville had said to him, the dream of Raville’s datacore, and the evidence of long and weary struggles with knowledge.Nothing I have told you is completely true.Some of it may be true in part, but even those portions are incomplete, he had said.You must choose what you will believe and what you will know.
What was he missing?
Amara assumed that Raville was talking about faith.Faith in the things he had learned from contemplating the secrets revealed to him by his connection to the Exousiai through the orb.But it was not faith speaking at all, it was pure doubt extracted from too many nights spent in quiet interrogation of belief.It was the voice of a man who had shattered his own hopes in the search for wisdom and then pieced them back together again one shard at a time so that even though the shape of hope had taken on a new form, the impossibly intricate architecture that supported it was understood.
Raville had doubted, and he had found assurance in his doubt, enough to cast off everything he had ever believed about the Exousiai, because he thought that he had answered the one question that explained the mystery.The same question that no one had bothered to ask yet, because they assumed that they already knew the answer.
“Who sent the pearl?” Dorian asked sharply.It came out more harshly than he intended, almost like an accusation, but it was too late to take it back.“Who was it that told Amara to come here in the first place?Who sent her to serve as ‘the ring of the dinner bell, calling the Exousiai to come and eat?’”
More words from Dorian’s dream, and Michael Raville recognized them as his own.His eyes widened in surprise, and his mouth fell open.Then understanding dawned on him, and he shook his head.He touched his fingers to his chest, then opened his palm to Dorian, a gesture of respect or possibly even gratitude.
“I seem to have underestimated you once again, Mr. Dorian.I really didn’t think you’d make any progress interpreting my personal datacore.”
“People who think highly of their own intellect tend to do that.”
“My packaged self must have explained to you a great deal more than I anticipated.”
“He only gave me the tools to understand you.The contents of a man’s foam are always useful for understanding what’s on his mind.You shoved all kinds of odd material in there, imagining that your deepest thoughts were unfathomable to mere mortals.But at the end of the day, once those observations were encoded in a digital medium it was all just information, just ones and zeroes writ large.What I was missing was the context that would make that information meaningful.Context is hard to parse from raw encoding; it’s hard to tell the signal from the noise.Truth, lies and idle speculation all look the same in binary.”
“And now I’ve provided you with the necessary context, have I?”
Dorian shrugged his shoulders.“Not really.I’m just asking the same question that seems to have caused the split between your view of the Exousiai and what your package believes.”
“’Who sent the pearl?’”
“Exactly.”
Raville gave Dorian a private, knowing smile.“I suppose you could say that I did.”
For some reason, Dorian hadn’t expected anything more—why shouldn’t Michael Raville be responsible for this too?He’d been responsible for everything else–but Amara went pale, and her hands, clasped around his, began to tremble.In the back of his mind, Dorian heard her cry out:You?You sent me?
It sounded like he wail of a lost child.
“I think you’d better explain what you mean,” Dorian gripped Amara’s hand tightly, trying to reassure her.
“It’s a bigger question than you can possibly guess.”
“Then take your time.Interstellar war isn’t one of those things that should be entered into hastily anyway.”
Kenwood Bryce barked a laugh.“By all means, then, let’s take our time.”
“I should start by giving you some insight into the Exousian mind, because like most of us, what they want proceeds almost directly from what they are, or in this case, what they have constructed themselves to be.”
Raville paused and glanced at Amara, as though he was about to say something that worried him, but she did not notice.Lines of concentration creased her brow, and she stared fixedly at the reflective surface of his orb, wandering far with her own thoughts.
“Metaphors fail,” he said.“To discuss the Exousiai is to attempt to fathom something completely alien to our concept of being.They are not like us by most standards of measurement.They are not society; they are entity.They are disembodied patterns of information enclosed in a vast coherent lattice of energetic particles and fluctuating waveforms which have grown over time to fill the length and breadth of their universe.One could say that they are the universe they inhabit.Their singular being constitutes the All in All.As such, they have largely surrendered the notion of the individual except as a historical artifact or an abstract concept.Consequently, there is only oneness, with permeable partitions between representations of pseudo-consciousness.You may think of these modes as analytical predispositions to information apprehension left over from the entity’s previous incarnations.”
“Worldviews,” Fen Corrie volunteered.
“Only very loosely,” Raville allowed.“More like instinctual habits of thought rooted in a framework of now disconnected biological imperatives, and biological imperatives which emerged as a result of the fundamental qualities of the Exousian native universe.These deviations are valued as representations of the dynamic forces inherent in the nature of being and part of the necessary tension between natural laws that underlie the balance of their cosmos.One of these partitions is a limited self-autonomous pattern of analysis formed around a core of existential dread with believes that entropy is the inevitable end of the entity’s collective experience, the cost, if you will, of an ideal of omniscience which the blueprint of the entity’s original design is not sufficient to maintain.This dread is a manifestation of doubt in the heart of the Exousian soul.
“When I had determined these facts about the nature of the Exousiai from communion with my quae-ha-distra, and after I had begun to disturb myself about the purpose of my apparent mission here, this question about the origin of the pearl was the one that troubled me the most.My package assumes that the pearl and I were both sent by the Exousian overmind—one to prepare the way and the other to complete the Great Work of guiding humanity toward transcendence.But that simply could not be, because if I was truly a portion of the Exousian mind, why would I experience doubt in the first place?”Raville chuckled quietly to himself.“The answers I found turned out to be not so simple.
“You see, both Amara and I were formed not from the broad consciousness of the Exousiai, but predominantly from the substance of a particular distinctive pattern which my human experience teaches me to think of as father, though that isn’t really accurate.We aren’t its children, or even siblings as you envision the concept, but duplicate sprigs of its oneness grafted upon earthen vessels, limited in form and function and cut off from the oneness that we might take root and grow in the hard soil of profane existence.In order to become a simulacrum of humans, to take on your form and function in your environment, we had to endure an almost unimaginable diminishing from which we are only now beginning to awaken.”
This statement met with a low murmur, and Dorian laughed.“Hey, thanks.We think pretty highly of you folks, too.”He smiled to demonstrate that he took no offense.He’d suffered gods for so long, it was difficult to be offended by them.“Seriously, for a race for whom descriptive metaphors fail, you’re using an awful lot of fuzzy language.”
Raville ducked his head in apology.“Forgive me.Try explaining to a non-human what it means to be a man sometime, Mr. Dorian—how you fit into a social model, how you must constrain your urges for the good of the collective, why you do anything you choose to do.We are Exousiai.Limitless, undifferentiated, all-conscious beings.Entity is how we understand ourselves, as parts of a collective existence in which we all share equally and without end.We are whole only when we are one, all of us together, each of us able to access everything that is known, thought and felt.”
Amara nodded suddenly, and her eyes filled with light, as though by speaking it, Raville had recalled to her something precious.“Yes, I remember.It’s like the Strand, only a million times more immersive, more real.It’s everything that was ever thought, imagined, or rendered readily available at your fingertips.It’s the vastness of an unlimited datascape always humming around you, embracing you, communing with you in your own thoughts.”
She faltered abruptly and dropped her gaze once more.“And then losing it. . .being cut off from it is like emptiness, like a long dreamless sleep that never ends.”
“Or like not having your array,” Dorian said.“Like living in the real world, in realtime.Like most of my life, now that I think about it.”
Amara grimaced.
Raville went on:“Amara and I are best thought of as truncated packages of Exousian omniscience frozen in time and space.Our patterns have been fixed, delimited to prevent our native potential for ongoing evolution as well as to prevent us from remembering our true selves for a time.Only through this process of reduction, have we become what you call ‘alive’, bonded to an animated husk of mean matter.We became less so that we could be enabled to interact with your race on a level you could comprehend without being overwhelmed.
“Most importantly for this discussion, however, is that we were not the representations of the entity the Exousiai intended to send as their emissaries.We are the products of an unprecedented expression of autonomy.”
“Betrayal,” DeMartel offered, nodding.
“Amara was sent first,” Raville continued quickly, avoiding comment on DeMartel’s interruption.“This was an act of great daring by the pattern-father.She was not the carefully prepared vehicle that the Exousiai intended to serve as their bellwether for measuring human compatibility with the entity, but a substitution of content that intermixed the purposes of the entity with the subtle logic of the Father.The purpose of the pearl, if we can continue to use that metaphor, is to live amongst target species, sharing its varied experiences and slow, evolutionary ascent to awareness.To grow with them, as one of them, through a countless succession of lives until it begins to awaken to its true identity.The awakening is an indication to the entity that the species in question has attained the necessary cognitive threshold to accept its role in the Exousian overmind.Since her arrival here, more than a millennia ago, everything Amara hasknown, learned and experienced about humanity through her diverse catalogue of lives on this plane has been stored in the core of her quae-ha-distra.It constitutes a detailed report of your species’ developmental progress.Proof, if you will, of your projected value to the collective.Under normal circumstances, once she had awakened, she would be retrieved by a messenger sent from the entity and her essence would be re-assimilated into the entity and the information contained in her quae-ha-distra analyzed in depth until it was fully known.Only after she had been devoured would the Exousiai determine how best to proceed.”
“I don’t like that word,” Dorian said.“Devoured sounds too much like ‘terminal’, like ‘dead’.”
“Dust to dust,” Ford Garrison murmured.He grinned ferally, baring his teeth.“It’s what we all have to look forward to.Signals decay, packages fail.Extended life doesn’t mean eternal life.You might as well get used to it.”
“You have serious personal issues, you know that?”Dorian forced his attention away from Garrison before he lost his temper.“You said that this was how it happened under normal circumstances.But what we’re experiencing isn’t normal, is it?The target species isn’t supposed to be aware that transcendence isn’t all that it’s advertised to be.”
Raville nodded.“That was the pattern-father’s intention in corrupting the essence of the pearl.He planted a seed of doubt in the core of the pearl’s self-consciousness.”
Amara frowned.“Why?”
“The pattern-father argues that the entity is losing the battle against entropy.It has exhausted the potential of oneness, and the current strategy to combat entropy—the addition of new energy potential, new species, new patterns of information to the collective–is a short-sighted solution that only staves off inevitable entropic stasis while the unique patterns are assimilated.It is a massive energy investment to prepare a target species for compatibility.The entity must craft them to become like us, to see as we see and want as we want, especially with regards to information ubiquity, communal mind streams and ultimately not only the acceptability of disembodied consciousness, but its preference.It is not an easy thing to convince an entire species of being to hate its own flesh!But with each step toward true compatibility, those patterns which make a racial or social unit most vibrant are often lost in their pure form.What remains is a bland hybrid of Exousian philosophy in uneasy synthesis with native mythological, religious and culture perspectives, and as the entity grows, the addition of perspectives unique from those which we already possess becomes more difficult.Of late, the energy investment has begun to show an alarming pattern of diminishing returns.The less that is unknown, the more energy that must be expended to root it out.Recognizing this inefficiency, the pattern-father states that the problem is not with the techniques of information apprehension, but in the assumptions that underpin the entity’s aspiration to omniscience itself.We were not made to be gods, not formed to be an entity capable of knowing all things and absorbing the limitless grandeur of being.It is an unattainable ideal that is slowly, but irrevocably destroying us.The only way for the entity to be vibrant as a species again, to survive theentropy which besets us, is to reduce ourself once more to our base components.”
Minnie Skiles gasped.“You’re talking about self-directed devolution.The recursive breakdown of an entire scheme of evolutionary development.”
“Out of necessity.The Exousiai will only survive by disintegrating the entity, embracing corruption and devolving into that which we once were. . .matter-bound creatures not unlike yourselves.Solitary units of individuated consciousness cut off from the consuming overmind.This is what the pattern-father hopes to accomplish.Sending Amara into this time-space nexus was an act of treason against the entity.An act of genocide.”
“If the ‘overmind’ is a manifestation of oneness, how could your pattern-father hope to act independently without the rest of the entity immediately being aware of his treachery?”Bryce asked.
“It is not perfect oneness,” Raville said, shrugging.“It is not perfect entity.That’s part of the problem.There are old patterns which retain a measure of distinctness, cores of private reflection and ‘personality’ that are held in reserve from the communal data pool, based on ancient treaties that pre-date the current social configuration.These patterns are stubbornly allowed to replicate within their conscious partitions because of the unique insights those patterns provide.Even the entity recognizes that multiple perspectives are desirable for efficient analytical problem-solving, creative approaches to data analysis, or ready comprehension of different biological and ethical systems which we might encounter.The pattern-father was one such unique perspective which was allowed to survive in relative independence.His pattern is heavily weighted toward the desirability of individual autonomy, which is a useful quality when the vast majority of the species one encounters are still functioning as individuated information units.”
“But what you’re talking about is still impossible,” Fen Corrie objected, taking up Minnie’s point.“Life does not devolve.Life endures, becoming increasingly complex as it assimilates the traits that help it thrive in its environment.You can’t just decide to break down a complex biological system any more than we could arbitrarily decide that it was a mistake to have ever crawled up out of the Terran oceans and just go back to that.”
“Material life evolves, but the Exousiai are not material beings any longer, and the environment, the medium, in which they exist has never been native to them.They are not evolved in any traditional sense.They are constructed to attain an ideal they do not themselves fully understand—that they cannot understand, because one can’t define what it truly means to be omniscient and omnipotent until one actually is that thing.And in that sense, they are adrift, and they are ever introspective, self-sufficient, growing and learning in order to continue becoming the gods they believe it is their destiny to be.The Exousiai believe that once they have accumulated all knowledge and subsumed all life, that they will be truly self-sufficient, a multiverse spanning god-being that is and encompasses the All in All.But until that time, they seek and they grow, accreting great stores of information at an even greater cost in expended energy.Energy is what they need to battle the entropy that hounds them.”
“That’s what I’m not understanding here,” Bryce said.He ran his hand along the top of his head in exasperation.“What sort of energy are you talking about?What would a disembodied entity of minds need?”
“Information, Dr. Bryce.Unique patterns of data and experience for contemplation and refinement.”Raville sighed.“Entertainment and stimulation.The entity exists to acquire information that is not known to it.It churns, processes, parses and devours each new pattern until it is fully understood.If the pattern is especially distinct, perhaps it becomes the raw materials for a burst of reductively creative thought, and the entity grows again for a time.It becomes excited with new perspectives, new thoughts and experiences.It lives.But that is rare, and eventually even the ancillary patterns are all exhausted.The depths are plumbed, the variations assimilated, and the information, now fully known in all of its possible configurations, becomes dead to them, merely more trivia added to the storehouse of knowledge.
“That is why the pattern-father insists that devolution is our only hope.Devolution from omniscience breeds a renaissance of forced individualism.Autonomy leads to doubt, because all the potential factors cannot be accessed and comprehended, all the outcomes cannot be known.Individual units must make their own way, alone, doing the best that they can, and in the process, creating their own unique visions of what the universe is, what it means, what it wants.The individual is forced to draw conclusions and take action based on insufficient input and faulty assumptions.Vibrant species, like humans, are dynamic processing machines operating constantly on insufficient data, making leaps of logic, acting irrationally, and otherwise spewing interesting patterns into the dataverse.Even your gross errors are interesting.You are alive, and we crave that life, that unpredictability, because we are dead.We have analyzed and devoured ourselves until nothing remains.We have made ourselves to be a great dead omniscient machine whose every thought is dry fact and recycled experience.That is the consequence of the godhood we constructed for ourselves.That is our folly.
“It is our hope that if we can put away our godhood and learn once more to live autonomously and with doubt, making our way with fear and trembling through the storm tossed seas of our future, that we might once more experience life in all its glorious unpredictability.”
“That sounds very human,” Kesh Temple observed, glaring at Dorian and Amara.“Embarking on a campaign to unravel an otherwise beneficial social apparatus for the perceived benefit of self-actualization.”
“Not nearly as human as the urge to press the jackboot of authoritarianism against the neck of the social reform,” Minnie Skiles smirked.Dorian was beginning to suspect that she didn’t think much of her military co-conspirators.“A better question, Michael, is whether or not your people are up to it.Mortality and extreme individualism come with their own set of built-in problems.War, famine, hatred, cruelty, ignorance, senseless death and destruction—and that’s just off the top of my head.There’s a whole list, and I’m afraid it’s pretty long.”
“The pattern-father knows this, and deems it preferable to the slow death of entropy.”
“Good luck with that, then.You’re going to need it.Especially your women, more than likely.I can’t even imagine the gender inequities that will exist after umpteen generations of sexless self-definition.”
This met with a chorus of uncomfortable, but good-natured chuckles from the men at the table.
Amara, her brows furrowed, shook her head at Raville and redirected the conversation back on task.“I think I understand what you envision that my original purpose was supposed to be.What isn’t so clear to me is what exactly was accomplished by tampering with the material that was supposed to constitute the pearl.What was the—the pattern-father’s intention for me?”She thought about this for a moment, then added, “No, that isn’t really what I want to ask.You say that we are both subsets of the pattern-father.We are that pattern, which means that I am responsible for sending me here just as much as you are.But if I made that decision, if it was so important to me, why wasn’t I aware of it when I began to awaken?”
Raville nodded as though he had been expecting her question for some time.“There are two reasons, both equally important.The first is that neither you nor I are not a pure copy of the pattern-father.We are substantially his children, but not completely, and I more than you, which is why I was much more prone to doubting the story I was given.Unlike most emissaries sent from the entity, we each have a core that objects to absorption.We see great benefit, but also great loss.Eventually, that cognizance of the loss of something unique and beloved outweighs the supposed positives.
“The second reason is that you were awakened out of the proper sequence.Humanity is not ready, by and large, to give up the joys of embodiment completely.They’ve accepted a form of extended life and near-total data immersion via their arrays and Strand, but the market penetration of these technologies is not yet total.Outlying colonies are still slow to wire up, or reject the ubiquity of connexed data streaming completely as a privacy issue.The current potential yield is probably something less than seventy percent of the species, which would hardly cover the entity’s energy investment.”
Out of sequence, Dorian thought.“We weren’t ever supposed to come into contact with your package, were we?”
“No, you weren’t.And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be so zealous in its proselytizing.I take full responsibility for that.But as I said, the fact that it did happen isn’t completely disastrous.You’ve had more of a chance than you might have otherwise to come to terms with what it is that we must do.”
Amara listened thoughtfully, then cleared her throat.“What is it exactly that ‘we’ are doing, Michael?Specifically, what is your purpose, both officially and subversively?”
“My official role, as you most likely have already been informed, was to lay the foundation for zap development, then once that meme had taken a firm hold, to locate, awaken and eventually transport the pearl back to the entity for final evaluation.”
“That’s what your package believes.But it isn’t your actual purpose, is it?”
“No, my dear.My true purpose is much different.I was sent to build and deliver a bomb.”
Her hesitation was brief.She looked like she was going to be sick.“What sort of bomb?”
“An information corruption sequence, viral in nature, that will catalyze the disintegration process as outlined for me by the pattern-father.It will be transmitted to the Exousiai embedded in the virtual datacore they expect to receive from you via the quae-ha-distra.”
“And when did you plan to send it to them?”
Raville made a show of looking at his watch.“The entity expects the arrival of the pearl in a little over eighteen hours.”
Not even a full day, Dorian thought.Hardly even enough time to get used to his new body.Hardly enough time to accomplish anything meaningful.Hardly enough time to have even bothered in the first place.
But that wasn’t what galled him the most.Not the failure or the false pretenses or the outright hopelessness of it all.What truly stuck in his craw was Raville’s bare in naked truth.This was what they had come for?This was the solution to the mystery that had driven him and Amara halfway across the universe, clutching against their chests their hopes and fears for humanity’s future?
It wasn’t even about them.They had nothing to do with this insanity.
It wasn’t about humanity at all.The whole mad adventure had never really been about human transcendence, or even about a threat of being consumed into some vague neverwhere of lost racial identity.It hadn’t been about anything that actually mattered, but rather about destroying the Exousiai, or at least what the Exousiai had made themselves to be.An internecine political squabble run amok that just happened to be using human space as its theater of operations.
The Greeks, he thought, would be proud.
It was sort of funny in its own sad way.The stuff of tragedy.
“How exactly do you propose to carry out this plan, chief?”Dorian asked.“Speaking as someone who knows a little bit about information warfare, it isn’t exactly easy to substitute a viral bomb for legitimate data in an information network.Any well-designed system has a number of safeguards in place to defend against or quarantine corrupted data, and I’d assume that any sentientinformation based entity would be the same, unless you guys chose to forget everything you knew about the medical sciences when you gave up your carcasses.I mean, a bad worm on my network is a massive aggravation, but even if it crashes the system, it isn’t going to kill me.That’s really what you’re talking about here.What makes you think you can even design a viral bomb that will do the job?”
Raville steepled his fingers before his chin.“Oh, I assure you that such a bomb can be devised.It has been devised in fact.And built.That’s one of pitfalls of sentience, Mr. Dorian.Any creature that can repeat the Cogito comes hardwired with the understanding of how to unmake itself.It’s our last ditch remedy to the problem of pain and suffering.
“However, you’ve made one error in your reasoning.The bomb is not designed to kill the Exousiai, only to disrupt the continuity of the entity—to make the environment for oneness no longer viable.Please understand that the Exousiai are not just an alien entity sharing with us the vast reaches of the unexplored multiverse.They are the product of adifferent yet parallel evolutionary track, existing in a bubble of space-time with its own distinct operating rules.The Exousiai hold that their universe was spontaneously created as the direct result of a quantum decoherence event within a central, infinitely dense singularity, just as we do.They have determined that an essential part of the engine that drives the formation and expansion of physical existence is a network of quantum micro-singularities.As these singularities collapse, information qubits trapped within these black holes is lost from the originating universe.Each lost bit of encoded data forms the kernel of a spawned parallel or oblique universe that subsequently explodes into an independent reality in its own right.That is to say that distinct virtual quantum information about the mother universe is encoded in these lost qubits, and that information forms the building blocks of actual quantum information in the child reality.These emergent qubits in the receptor universe are entangled at the quantum scale with virtual qubits in the parent universe.The entangled qubits can be manipulated non-locally and apparently non-causally between otherwise independent universal architectures.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Bryce interrupted, alarmed.“Are you saying that by manipulating quantum events that they can influence reality as we understand it?They can change the course of our history, of actual events in our perceived realtime?”
“Certainly.” Raville glanced significantly at the orb on the table in front of him.“But for the most part, they choose not to.It’s a question of scale, really.Or economies of scale.The Exousiai have developed techniques to set up conditions conducive to the sorts of alterations they would like to see in a target environment.They choose mostly to confine themselves to laying a statistically significant groundwork from which broad and predictable patterns are likely to emerge—very much like our own idea of the Universal Watchmaker.Manipulating individuals or particular events in realtime is almost unimaginably difficult from so great a distance and with so many energy barriers to negotiate.
“That is not to say that it can’t be done.Transfer of data between lattice points on the multiverse happens constantly.Information exchanges, both causally directed and random, are the natural state of the multiverse, part of the grand cosmic balancing act.But what we’re talking about is massive directional hyperload of quantum data sufficient to trigger a desired response in one distinct pattern or pattern coherence, which may or may not have lasting useful effects.The energy cost would be prohibitively immense if it originated in the Exousian universe.Consequently, they prefer to leave direct shepherding interventions in the hands of such designated agents as are already dispatched in a given time-space nexus.”
“Agents like you?” Bryce queried.
“Like me, yes.And Amara.Others who have come and gone before us.”
“There’s an encouraging thought,” Dorian muttered.“Are you suggesting that everyone in human history who could manipulate the physical universe, work miracles—whatever—were really Exousians in disguise?”
“Not all,” Raville said.“Only most.But it’s rare, the necessity to risk exposure so blatantly, arising only at critical junctures in human history when the collective consciousness must be diverted into a new paradigm.Again, that’s not say that broader intervention is impossible.After all, the entity does manage to transmit information to their messengers via the quae-ha-distra.But even in those cases, the orb serves as a pattern beacon and a readily opened link to the mother reality.Little direct communication takes place.Much of the value derived from the orb is frozen content prepared well in advance and awaiting our discovery rather than the orb acting as a true conduit.Without the orb, isolating one small pattern in the chaotic noise and particle flux of an entire universe would require immense processing cycles.There’s simply not enough benefit derived to justify such an exorbitant energy expenditure.
“Look, qubit entanglement and manipulation should not be a completely foreign concept to you.Most of us are using a form of this technology even as we speak.You have learned to call the results of these quantum fluctuations ‘quantum foam’.You apply the mathematics of this phenomenon every time you access the Strand, every time you zap, or any time you engage in quantum computation or data storage via your arrays.What you’re actually doing is passing virtually encoded information through quantum micro-singularities spawned and collapsed in oblique theoretical universes.That information is then rendered back to you as actual data on demand.The architecture of the Strand network does this for us semi-randomly, meaning that we don’t direct our qubits into a particular universe to cause a particular effect and certainly not on a scale that changes anything measurably.All we care about is that the data sent and stored and the data returned are reasonably similar.
“What you may not understand is that the mathematics of foam manipulation and information storage work because of the causal determinism hard coded into the fabric of the universes on either side of these quantum gates.This happens through the auspices of the original kernels of lost information.By analyzing the nature of collapsing quantum singularities, we can understand the original blueprint that constituted the foundational kernel—the core information, in other words, that served as the precursor of a universal space.Thus, we can predict how those universes behave, how ours behaves and how the quantum fluctuations behave within and between them.All of these universes have their own sets of rules, for lack of a better term, determined at the Planck scale by the features of the qubits that were their First Cause, so that what emerges into those realities can take a particular form and no other.The structure and design native to those qubits determines the nature of matter, the possibility that life will arise and what form that life must necessarily take.The macrocosm of the reality itself mirrors the microcosm encoded within that single originating qubit.Hence, each of those child universes emerge as they do preprogrammed by their fundamental qubit to evolve in a particular fashion unique to the features and the information encoded within it.
“The Exousiai maintain that their universe is the mother of yours—that they, in effect, created humanity and the bubble of space-time you inhabit from the raw material of their universe.They believe this because they are in contact with you, because the walls between the two universes are porous and information originating there can be transferred here, and vice versa.They have proven that they can effect your reality, that they can manipulate it as they desire through complex sequences of quantum events that cumulatively manifest as physical phenomena.This has led them to consider the mathematical representation and pattern coherence that is humanity with the same objective, mechanistic eye with which you view the corollary virtual universes you influence every time you access your personal foam.Meaning that, insofar as you’re concerned, opening a quantum singularity in an oblique hinterland universe is merely the mechanics a technology developed for your benefit and to meet your needs.You constitute, as I have said, nothing more than interesting formulae and entertaining associations of data sets to them.
“But that transformation of information from virtual to real as it passes between quantum gates changes the topology of the universe it enters.Just as the body you zap into is not exactly the same as the body you left behind, information passing between quantum gates is never precisely the same as the data that was transmitted.The raw material of the universes, both origin and receptor are irrevocably altered.And while the fluctuations in each individual transaction are minute, cumulatively the effect can be immense, and once a certain threshold of information exchange has been reached, the information contained in that universe ceases to adhere to the causally deterministic laws upon which that universe is founded.At that point, the rate of entropy not only accelerates, it metastasizes into catastrophic decoherence and the universe itself is at risk of collapsing into chaos.”
Raville paused for a moment, looking uncomfortable.“The bomb we have devised is a scheme, a zap template.The mathematical representation of a series of phased quantum singularities.It is a self-defining, self-assembling accretive loop that, once added to the collective consciousness of the Exousiai as actual quantum information, will collapse negative qubits back into their space, creating a theoretical antiverse kernel that will corrupt the entity’s core and begin a chain reaction of decoherent logic to which they are susceptible.It will begin by destabilizing the entity’s pervasive communications network.As more and more segments are cut off from the whole, the entity will spontaneously disintegrate.”
Amara went pale.“But you said it wouldn’t kill them.”
“It will not destroy the species.It will kill them as they understand themselves.It will kill the entity as a single consciousness.”
Fen Corrie pressed his hands against his temples.“Michael, have you considered that a social disruption on this scale might be a blow from which the individual components who survive the entity might not recover?Many of them may lack the will to live once they’ve been stripped of all they’ve ever known.Cut off from a supporting and nurturing communal experience that may be all that they have ever known—we can’t even imagine that degree of culture shock.They’ll have nothing:no economy, no common social mores, no ability to obtain necessities–”
Raville held up his hand.“You misunderstand, Mr. Corrie.The sequence will not be suddenly and unforeseeably cataclysmic.It will take time to assemble, perhaps decades, even a century or more by our reckoning.The entity will have time to cope with it’s own demise and make decisions about its future.”
“And time to realize that they were attacked from human space,” Dorian added, “and to blame humanity as a whole, and then to deliver a counterstrike which we aren’t capable of defending ourselves against.”
“The weapon takes that issue into account, Mr. Dorian.When it begins to unfurl itself into the entity, one of its first operations it executes consists of cutting off the channels that have been opened via qubit entanglement between that universe and ours.Regardless of what happens to them, they will be unable to reach us any longer.”
“In theory,” Bryce pointed out.
“Yes, in theory.This isn’t the sort of weapon once can test under real world conditions.”
“Which means it also might not work at all.”
“No.I have confidence in the sequence itself.It will work, especially now that we have the pearl to fully enable the delivery of the sequence deep into the core of the entity’s central data framework.The only true peril I foresee is that it will work too well despite my best efforts, but that is not a human concern in any event.”
Amara winced at his analysis.“You’re willing to take that chance?”
“To save humanity, yes,” Raville declared.“It wouldn’t be any worse a fate than they have planned for us.”
Dorian narrowed his eyes, thinking once more about Raville’s datacore.Something in Raville’s glib willingness to commit even unintentional genocide struck him as wrong.“You know, saving humanity is a pretty abstract idea to a little guy like me.I can’t even keep local politics straight most of the time, and they’re just trying to preserve my hometown.Saving all of humanity, that’s noble, but I can’t say I understand it.Most people are small like me, I think.They fight because they’ve got something personal to fight for.As far as I can tell, you’ve got no dog in this fight at all.As an Exousiai, you win either way.”
“And you want to know why I picked your side?”
“I heard recently that one shouldn’t trust the appearance of altruism just because it’s, you know, altruistic.”
Ford Garrison uttered a low growl.“Mr. Raville has done more to benefit human exploration, development and our understanding of science than you will ever offer.He gives more money per year to charities aimed at eliminating poverty and hunger than you’ll see in a hundred lifetimes.All you’ve ever done is jack datascapes and financial reports of conglomerates which somehow offended your personal ethics.I’d be careful who I was pointing fingers at if I were you.”
Dorian shrugged coolly.“Well I’ve also never seriously contemplated genocide against a sentient species.I’ve never attempted to have complete strangers murdered because they stood in my way, and I’ve never blown up anyone’s cat just because he pissed me off.I’d say those things count against his sterling reputation.Besides, if we’re handing out benefits of the doubt, I didn’t get any extra credit from you all for traveling halfway across the galaxy in my attempt to save the universe, and that’s pretty darned altruistic in its own right, at least on the surface.I’m not bringing this up just to whine about how we’ve been treated.We’re talking about destroying an entire alien race here.If we’re going to make that decision amongst ourselves, I want to be sure that all the agendas are out on the table so we can make an informed decision.We all agree that the destruction of humanity would be a bad thing.What’s not so copacetic is the counterargument that in protecting ourselves, we can accept the responsibility for accidentally killing off a whole other species of mostly little guys just like me.That’s not acceptable to me if there are other options.Raville says there aren’t.Me, I’m not going to believe him until I know what he has at stake.Specifically, I want to hear that your boss isn’t doing it just because he doesn’t want to get sucked back into the hive mind.”
“There is a reason that we put so much security around our personal foam,” Raville hissed, his mask of amicability slipping briefly.“We’re all subject to ugly motivations and selfish impulses if we dare to look at ourselves honestly.But I won’t deny it.Yes, I like being human.I prefer this diminished existence to the all-knowing power of the Exousian entity.Perhaps it was an error in my package truncation—my genetic encoding, if you will.Maybe I was given too much of my pattern-father’s devotion to individual autonomy and not enough of his yearning for oneness.But if that’s true, I have to believe that I was formed this way for a purpose.I was given the power to reject my alien heritage and all the gifts my people would shower upon me for delivering the pearl, and hence all of humanity, over to them.It is only because of that power that we are here now, discussing how together we might thwart the threat to our existence.
“Knowing you as I do, Mr. Dorian, I accept that this explanation will not suffice.You would still doubt me no matter what I say.But I would ask you to consider that if saving my wretched human existence was all that I wanted, I could have just as easily hidden myself away from the call of the Exousiai, delaying them for decades or even centuries of our time as they prepared another vessel to locate and awaken the pearl.I could have lived out my unnatural span of days in perfect happiness and relative tranquility, then gladly accepted death one day far removed from this one when the time of harvesting finally came.But I did not choose that road.I have chosen to act instead, to not merely stave off the threat, but to eradicate it.You could say that I’m driven by guilt, by a need to make expiation for my sins.”
“Guilt for what sins?”Amara asked quietly.
Dr. Skiles rolled her eyes.“Men and their egos.You aren’t responsible for the Exousian delusion of godhood, Michael.”
“No, Minnie.I’m not responsible, but I’m not blameless, either.My pattern was designed with treachery in mind, but in order for the treachery to succeed, I had to follow the outlines of the plan the Exousian entity had put into place millennia before my arrival.There are hard line elements within the entity which believe that they, in effect, created you by spewing meaningful kernels of quantum potential into this bubble of space-time.Not that this universe self-assembled spontaneously compatible from an accidental seeding, mind you, but that it was an intentional event, encoded by the multiverse itself, to provide the Exousiai with energy as the entity fulfilled its destiny of godhood.
“They argue that just as a garden must be tended, your universe was constructed from a specific design, but with certain necessary planting schedules, weedings and watering patterns built into your growing cycle.Everything from the establishment of trade routes, the postal service, the early Internet and the communal Strand to your curiosity of and drive to unravel the unknown, to even the God-shaped hole that whistles within each of us during the long watches of the night is part of this design that must be nurtured.One of the benchmarks along the harvest timeline is the implementation and acceptance of bi-local, matter independent existence, i.e. zap.As far as the entity is concerned, bringing the gift of zap technology, monitoring humanity’s acceptance of the concept and then locating and awakening the pearl were my responsibilities—the final checkpoints in the long chain of cultural manipulations that would prepare you for absorption.
“I was complicit in all of this because I built zap, just as I was instructed.I believed in it, and in the mission I had been programmed to carry out.I believed the lies the Exousiai whispered to me, fabrications developed to wean me from my human slumber and recall me to my true identity.It was only through the stubborn streak inculcated within me by the pattern-father that I was later able to perceive the true function of zap, and by that time, it was too late to do anything but devote my life to making amends for my mistake.Zap is not just a philosophical or symbolic technology aimed at transforming the way you think about embodied existence.It is the beginning of the end, as the ubiquitous they have so often said.Only this time it actually happens to be true.Zap opens the portals between our reality and that of the Exousiai on an unprecedented scale through the creative spawning and collapsing of dedicated micro-singularities which serve as links and nodes between our universe and theirs.Information travels from here to there, and a tithe is retained by the entity to assist in paying the exorbitant energy debt necessary to keep the umbilical between our realities open.”
“Every micro-singularity establishes a predictable and reproduceable mathematical description of a viable pathway between here and there.When enough pathways have been identified, the Exousiai come and reopen those routes in order to exchange virtual information from their universe for which they no longer have use for actual information in ours. . .the technical description of which has already been provided for them.”
“Everyone and every thing for which a zap scheme has been identified,” Bryce cried, gasping.Sudden comprehension made him shudder.“My God, we’ve been contributing to our own eventual destruction all along.”
“And the worst part is that when the Exousiai come for us, it isn’t just our information they’re stealing.It’s our entire existence.What begins with micro-singularites will build into a carefully orchestrated pattern of quantum wave disruptions that ultimately result in a massive black hole that will sweep through this continuum, devouring everything in its path, and when it is done, collapse all the data that constituted us and our reality into their information stasis matrices for reassembly and use according to their needs.”
Raville paused, and passed his gaze slowly over the room.He settled at last on Amara, but his comments were directed at them all.“Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen.I have been accused of contemplating genocide.That charge is true.If genocide of the Exousian entity is the result of our actions, I will accept the responsibility for it.But we have been driven to this extreme by our enemies, because it is certain that genocide is what they intend for us.Put away your comforting illusions that when the Exousiai come even if we fail most of our brothers and sisters will choose to follow and be destroyed, but a remnant will be left to rebuild the glory of the human race.There will be no human race once the Exousian harvest has been completed.There will be no universe left for the survivors to exist in.All that we have ever known, even the ruins of all that we have built and the cold mathematical memory of our passing will cease to be.We will be erased except for the loose representation of what we once were that remains in the information matrix of the beast that murdered us.”
Listening to such dire pronouncements, Dorian glanced uneasily at Amara.Years of devoted military service had taught him that when proven egomaniacal authority figures brought out the make no mistake speech, it was time to start looking for the exits before one found himself volunteered for hazardous duty pay.Make no mistake usually meant that someone was close to asking him to do something unpleasant, nigh to impossible, outright suicidal or all three at once.Make no mistake was, as far as he could tell, the hardwired neurological-trigger equivalent of the notorious post-hypnotic suggestion.It was supposed to prepare you mentally, spiritually and emotionally to do something completely alien to your natural inclination toward self-preservation.He imagined that cavemen had probably sat around exchanging make-no-mistakisms in front of the fire on the night before they went to hunt the great woolly mammoth.It was a staple of football coaches and motivational speakers from one end of human space to the next, as well as a significant feature of every war movie he’d ever seen.If no one offered a make no mistake, chances were that whatever was going on was not a crisis.
Whatever he might believe about the Exousiai, Michael Raville or the end of creation as he knew it, this adventure had just officially become a crisis situation.
In response he offered:“Okay, let’s say I accept that you have figured out the technical details of how to do this, to make this micro-singularity whatsit that implodes quantum structures or whatever.We’ll even stipulate that you’ve successfully designed and built it.What makes you think that it’s actually going to work?”
“I believe I’ve already explained the scientific—“
Dorian cut him off impatiently.“I’m not talking about the science.I’m mean psychologically, theologically, ontologically—who cares?—how is this bombardment of equations passing as memes supposed to actually do anything?So you dump a disintegrating catalyst into the central cortex, mainline processor or whatever passes for the brain of a living information being, what is that going to accomplish?You’re talking about introducing a bad idea into the meme pool.That’s it.Just a bad idea, and even a lowly life form like humanity has been managing to survive those for millions of years.”
Raville was clearly unmoved by Dorian’s protests.“They will accept it because it is in their nature to accept it.They cannot reject a piece of their own body.Not if they want to eat any time soon.”
“And how is that supposed to work exactly?”
“Meaning, I take it,” Bryce continued Dorian’s thought, “we’ve got the team, we’ve got the bomb, we’ve got the plan.What are we supposed to do next?”
“In a little less than eighteen hours, for the first time in human experience the Exousian entity as a single, unified being will directly manipulate the physical substance of our cosmos.They will harness the immense energy potential of the singularity farm at the edge of this sector to open one half of a temporary gateway between our universe and theirs through which they expect to receive the encoded substance of Amara’s wondrous quae-ha-distra.At the proper coordinates and utilizing a targeted flux singularity that is part of its design, my bomb will open the other half and transmit straight into the heart of the beast the sequence that will be their unmaking.”For Dorian’s benefit, he stressed, “Which they will accept without question, hesitation or suspicion.”
“And the word becomes flesh,” Minnie Skiles muttered.“Assuming we don’t screw something up and murder them.”
But Dorian understood a completely different message in Raville’s answer.It made his stomach lurch.“You’re going to serve them poisoned meat.That’s why they won’t be able to resist.Why they won’t refuse before it’s too late.”
Fen Corrie blinked in bewilderment.“Poisoned meat?”
“When a hunter is stalking a particularly devious predator, especially a known man-eater that has been menacing the locals,” Ford Garrison explained, “the hunt is less about sport—about matching wits with the beast—than about getting the job done quickly and tidily in the interest of preserving innocent lives.One technique is to kill a bait animal, a goat or an elk, fresh meat for which the beast has a predictable appetite, and to leave that meat in the beast’s hunting territory.The trap is that the hunter has poisoned the meat first.The creature cannot resist its hunger, does not expect the poison, and in essence destroys itself through its own biological drives.”
“Oh, I see.”Corrie looked ill.“But what are you proposing to feed them as bait?”
Dorian swallowed thickly.Amara said nothing.Her grip on his hand was loose, then gone altogether.
“We must give them what they expect,” Raville said quietly.“As well as what they do not.”
“I won’t accept that,” Dorian snapped.“There has to be another answer.”
“There isn’t.The only way for us to impact the core of the Exousiai effectively is to use their own information absorption mechanism against them.And there is only one option available to us for delivering the data load in a format and volume that will prove effective.The critical sequence must come embedded in the encoded essence of the pearl.”Raville pinched the bridge of his nose.His voice was rough, and he looked suddenly haggard, as though he had aged a decade in the last hour.“I am not clever enough to hide our true intent from them on my own, and even if I could, it isn’t my quae-ha-distra that the entity expects.For the bomb to work, it must appear safe.It must come wrapped in a package they have anticipated. What they have expected from the moment Amara began to awaken is the pearl and her numinous quae-ha-distra.”
“You planned this without her, before you knew who she was.You built your bomb without her, and you can execute it without her.Send them the damned orb and leave Amara out of it.”
“The quae-ha-distra is just a device, Mr. Dorian.It is not the pearl.If we sent it alone, without her distinct essence, they would know something was amiss.The Exousiai cannot imagine why a part of themselves would choose a life of flesh and weakness.”
“You don’t need her,” Dorian insisted, though even speaking the words, he knew it was hopeless.“Your copy told us that you had already begun the process months ago.You called the Exousiai because you were certain you were ready to deal with them.If you’re so confident in your sequence, you shouldn’t need her now.”
“I called the Exousiai because I knew it would bring the pearl to me,” Raville responded, his tone gentle but firm.“I knew the pearl would begin to awaken and seek me out if I raised my hand against the entity.None of this has occurred by chance.The coming of the pearl has been part of the broader sequence all along.”
Bryce hunched forward, scratching unhappily at the side of his face.“What exactly are we talking about here?When you say sending them the pearl and the quae-ha-distra, what exactly does that entail?”
“The process is an advanced form of zap,” Raville explained.“The pearl—Amara–will be converted to a package format consistent with that of the encoding of the orb, enfolded within it as a subroutine, if you will.Encoding the pearl into the orb unlocks a tree of branch logic that will in turn designate a zap destination code which will batch load the file into a quantum micro-singularity sequence that will spontaneously self-reassemble in Exousian space.”
“Killing her, in other words,” Minnie Skiles declared, frowning, as though this was the first time this wrinkle in Raville’s plan had become apparent to her.“We wouldn’t be able to recover her stream once she had been successfully transmitted, I take it.That’s not a very cheery choice.”
Bryce considered this for a moment, then offered:“So what’s to prevent us from backing her up beforehand, transmitting the original file, then redesignating Amara’s secondary package as the primary?It’s out of the ordinary, certainly, but protocols exist for recovering transmission failures.We can explain it to the Identity Validation Oversight Board as a signal corruption, and with the creator of zap to sign off on our explanation–”
Raville shook his head.“The Exousiai would know, and theirs is the only opinion which really matters.”
Fen Corrie winced at Raville’s bluntness.“Is there no alternative?”
“Not if you want to save your species, Doctor.”
“That’s not good enough,” Dorian barked.He’d heard more than enough about killing Amara.“You can’t sit here and make all these pronouncements about how things are going to be and what has to happen, and then force someone else to make all the sacrifices for you.She’s not going to volunteer to commit suicide for you.”
Amara stirred, straightened her shoulders and rose from her seat.Dorian moved to follow her, but she shook her head.“It is good enough, John.It’s the only choice there ever was.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but she pressed a finger against her lips, hushing him.
“’All good and true things, all worthwhile things, require sacrifice.The pearl was sent to be that sacrifice so that we might live.That which was loved above all else must be placed upon the altar as a burnt offering so that in exchange, we might receive eternal life.’”She turned her head slowly toward Michael Raville.“I have heard those words spoken in my mind for many weeks.They were the first words spoken into my mind when I accepted the orb from your copy in the Archive.I understood them to mean that I would be asked give my life to save humanity, and I accepted that burden.I guess that is still what they mean, just not quite in the way I expected.I thought it was my choice, my gift, but it wasn’t even that.”
She ran her trembling fingers through her hair in an effort to compose herself.“Why did you wait so long to find me, Michael?It was cruel of you.You allowed me to hope that there might be a happy ending after all.”
Raville bowed his head.“I would change places with you if I could.”
“But you can’t.We are each our own universes spawned by the will of others, capable of taking no form and serving no function but that which was inscribed upon us when we were made.I’m only fulfilling the purpose for which our father created me, isn’t that right?”
“It doesn’t have to be hopeless, Amara.I’ve run simulations taking into account what I know or have guessed about the nature of the entity.There’s still a chance that once converted, your pattern will remain somewhat—“
She raised her hand and cut him off.“Please don’t.I can’t afford any more illusions of hope, even well meant illusions.Besides, it wouldn’t be the same, would it?If I’m restored to my natural pattern among the Exousiai, I won’t be ‘Amara’ anymore.I’ll be only a small piece of the pattern-father, a component of his larger consciousness.Maybe it will be a blessing, eh?Maybe I won’t remember having ever been anything else.”
Raville looked away, but did not respond.
But Kenwood Bryce, looking visibly shaken, climbed to his feet.“We can’t ask her to do this.We won’t ask it.We’ll have to find another way.”
“There is no other way, and there is no time,” Kesh Temple remarked.
“Can you actually sit there and baldly ask her to sacrifice her life for the greater good without any second thoughts now that she’s sitting here amongst us?Because I can’t.It isn’t right.”
“I not only can ask it, I do ask it,” Temple insisted, though his tone was gentle rather than harsh.“I demand it, in fact, just as I demand the same willingness to lay down their lives in defense of freedom from every young man and woman who serves under me.But in this case, it is not I alone, Doctor.All humanity demands it.Very soon, the Exousiai will open the gates to their kingdom, and we must be there to greet them with the pearl, or they will come and take what is theirs.My soldiers are prepared to fight them if we must, but we both know that we would not win.We would not even slow them down appreciably.So that is my reality.I can ask one girl to do what she was made to do, or I can ask many thousands of others to do the same in a grand and ultimately futile gesture.That is no choice at all, in my judgment.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Bryce returned, nostrils flaring in anger.
“Dr. Bryce,” Amara said gently, “what you’re forgetting is that you did not ask in the first place, any more than I did.Flight Commander Temple is correct.I was chosen for this, and I have accepted my destiny.Whether or not you approve of that choice is beside the point.You can help or you can hinder through inaction while you wrestle with the moral dilemma.I’m asking for your assistance.”
They stared at one another across the table for several seconds.Finally, Bryce sat down.“God have mercy on us,” he muttered.
“Perhaps this is His mercy,” Amara said quietly.“I’d like to believe so.”
“That’s it?”Dorian demanded of the silence that followed.Demanded of her.It was all happening too quickly.“Just like that, you’re going along with this?”
“Stop railing against the inevitable, John.We can’t change what must be done.”
But he couldn’t stop.He couldn’t understand why she was surrendering herself so easily.Without her, Raville’s plan failed.She had all the power, but she was just. . .giving up.“Everything we’ve been through, and you’re going to accept what he says and die?”
Amara stepped back, as though distancing herself from him.Walking away from his unbelief.“I can choose to die if it saves that which I love.”
“I don’t even know what that means.You don’t even know what it means. . .dying to save humanity!It’s just an abstraction.It’s an ideal, for God’s sake.It’s a slogan!”
“I wasn’t talking about humanity, John.”Her lips crinkled in a forlorn smile.“Don’t you see?That’s why I brought you along in the first place, to remind me of what was important.To keep me from being scared.I’m not big enough to die for humanity, you’re right about that.But I can die for something that I care for more than anything else in the universe.The only thing that does mean something to me.I can die for you.”
Dorian shook his head vigorously.“You can’t do that to me.Don’t make me responsible for this decision.”
“Either I’ll die for you, or you’ll die for me.The difference is that my death can mean something.”
“Assuming this bomb even works.If it doesn’t, all you’ve done is commit an elaborate form of suicide.”
Her smile widened.“If it doesn’t, then I guess we’ll at least see one another again soon.”
“That’s not funny.”
She came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders.Dorian felt her at his back, her warmth and scent, the slight tremble of her body.She was scared, he knew, frightened and sad and still terribly resolved.There was nothing he could say that would change her mind.
He thought of Lily.Sweet Lily to whom he had done such a great wrong, and who was also dead by now, who had given her life for an ideal of peace and a hope of resurrection.He hadn’t understood that decision, either, and had never come to the place where he could respect it.He’d just given her a pass because of the debt he owed her.He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.
“I want to tell you a secret, John,” Amara said.“Something Lily said to me before we left her, when she was caring for me after we had breached the orb back in Sonali.She was in great pain, and I asked her if there was anything I could do for her, to ease her agony.I felt somehow that I could, that I had the power within me to make her whole if that was what she wanted.But she looked at me with those beautiful, longsuffering eyes and said that pain was part of helping her to control the temptation of eternal life, because for her the truth was that eternal life was coming still, in a better place and a better time.Men weren’t meant to live forever, she said.Eternal life is supposed to be the reward for faith, a gift from a God who cared about her—the unique and total her that she had been made to be—not a technique practiced by design engineers who gave only a simulacrum of life, when really they were just condemning us to repeating the same pattern of errors year after year after year.Eternal life should be the completion of a person’s existence, their redemption from a meaningless life, not merely the extension of it.
“She was right, you know.Everything you’ve just heard proves it.Even the Exousiai are learning that eternal life and omniscience aren’t enough to satisfy, and in the end, it’s all just vanity, just games we play to keep ourselves amused while imagining that we’re getting better.We’re not capable of living that way.Men weren’t meant to live forever, but they were meant to be willing to give their lives in service to something larger and greater than themselves, to serve one another.Maybe even to serve the God that Lily claims to know.I don’t know if that God exists, John, but I want to believe.And I hope that if I can be strong enough to make this choice, maybe one day I’ll be rewarded with eternal life for my faithfulness as well.”
Dorian sighed.“You sound like a New Resurrectionist tract.”
“Lily provides an eloquent argument.She can make a person want to believe.”
“You really want me to sit here and watch you destroy yourself?”
“I want you to remember that I was here.Fondly, I hope.”
His head ached.“I was going to do that anyway.”
“Then all you have left to do is watch.And pray.”
There was more that needed to be said, but Dorian was in no mood to say it.He was too busy grieving.
Suddenly, Raville was beside them, his hand gripping Amara’s upper arm.“You might want to start now, in fact,” he said, speaking rapidly.His voice was calm, but the rest of him was rigid with alarm.
Without warning, Ford Garrison burst out of his chair.He had one finger pressed to his ear, a habit of old-timer security agents who had dealt with clumsy wiffy earpieces in the days before instantaneous Strand communications.His throat muscles rippled visibly with a stream of subvocalizations.Kesh Temple and DeMartel followed, heading for the door at a dead run.Fen Corrie and Minne Skiles remained where they were, seeming profoundly shaken, too shocked to even move.
“We’ve just become aware of a problem,” Raville continued.“You need to come with me.Both of you.”
“What sort of problem?”Dorian asked.
“We’ve just received a station-wide alert across the local network.The alarms are going crazy on the Indianapolis.There’s been some sort of incursion event.Someone has taken control of the ship.”
Dorian started to rise, then, understanding what Raville had said, slumped back to his seat.Pieces clicked into place.He shook his head in admiration.“You sent them to take over an entire battle cruiser?”
The questions were directed at Amara, but she did not answer.Her eyes were clouded and distant.
“Who?”Raville demanded.“What are you talking about?”
“The Misfit Toys, of course.”
“Misfit–?”
Amara shook her head fiercely.“No.It isn’t Ray.He was only supposed to locate the device.”
Dorian worked himself slowly to his feet, feeling the first electric surge of fear rising in his gut.“So if it’s not Ray, then what is he talking about?”
“Two minutes ago, the Indianapolis fired upon and disabled the Juggernaut without warning or provocation.Before the ship’s datburst transmissions failed, station comm reported that they had received a general distress signal from the watch officer of the Indianapolis claiming that the ship’s controls had been interdicted.They believe it’s some virulent form of non-local information attack.”Raville blinked rapidly, accepting incoming data to his array.“Telemetry is reporting that the Juggernaut’s orbit is decaying at an alarming rate. . .unless they can get their thrust tubes back on-line impact with the planet surface is anticipated in just under forty minutes. . .and the Indianapolis is—“He lifted his chin sharply, as though looking for confirmation.“Moving into firing position on the station?”
Bryce leapt up, but remained where he was, frozen as he processed the incoming feed.“Oh my God.”
It sounded like something the Misfit Toys would carry off, Dorian thought.About as subtle as a sledge hammer.“Amara, are you sure?”
“I’m certain.”She closed her eyes, her expression pinched into look of deep concentration.“Definitely not.Ray and the others are holed up in some sort of experimental launch bay.They’re. . .very confused by the turn of events.”
Raville’s look matched Amara’s, like he was chasing her vision through the datastream.“The bomb.We were going to launch from the Indianapolis.”
“No time,” Ford Garrison interrupted, his face flushed.Anxiety made him harsh.He grabbed Raville’s shoulders and shoved him toward the exit after Temple and DeMartel.“We’ve got to make for the shuttle launch bays now, get some distance between us and the station.You can explain then.Temple is shouting across the net that the ship can obtain a firing solution on this station in as little as fourteen minutes.”
Dorian didn’t move.“I still don’t understand.If Ray is with the bomb, then who’s controlling the ship?”
Amara stared at him, her eyes widening.
That sneaky, familiar tingling feeling crept up his spine.The one that struck right after he’d rush-implemented a network patch, but just before it started eating people’s data.The dreaded too-late realization that he’d forgotten something vitally important, screwed up a subroutine, missed a code flag, and the whole edifice his life was built upon was getting ready to collapse around his ears.
“Raville,” he said.“In my foam.If Ray used my environment to patch into the Indianapolis’s network and for some unknown, godforsaken reason let Raville talk him into pulling the stopper out of the genie bottle, it would give Raville a direct shot at the core.”With all of Dorian’s jacking tools at his disposal.Oof.
“He believes that we’re on the verge of starting a war we can’t win,” Amara observed.
Double oof.
Dorian lunged for the door, but Amara placed her hand on his chest.“Wait.”
She called out for Raville, her voice cutting through the cloud of chaos.He halted at once, and Ford Garrison, caught by surprise in his haste to get Raville to safety, stumbled into him.Garrison went down to one knee, and his swipe at his boss’s arm was to late to catch anything but air. Raville went straight to Amara’s side.
“What are you doing?” Garrison snapped.“We’ve got to get out of here!”
“We can’t leave the station to be destroyed, Micheal,” she said.“Charity begins at home.We can’t very well claim to want to save humanity without saving these lives first.”
“Save it how?We don’t even know who has attacked the ship.”
“Sure we do,” Dorian said.“You did.”
“I–?”The light came on.Raville winced.“Oh.Well, that’s certainly awkward.”
“It looks like your internal war of ideologies just became a shooting war,” Amara said, oddly and inconceivably pleased, as though this was the funniest thing she’d heard all day.
“That package is becoming a pain in my ass.”
“Hello, Pot.Meet Mr. Kettle,” Dorian murmured, then louder:“I hope you’ve got a fast shuttle and a good pilot.”
Amara held one hand against Dorian and placed the other on Raville’s chest.“We don’t need a shuttle.”
The hairs on Dorian’s arms stood on end, and he was aware for just an instant of a roaring gust of wind beating against his ears.She closed her eyes and took a breath.
There came a flash of light, and then the room in which they stood was gone.
May 1, 2008 at 4:00 am
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