Agnosis – Ch. 27
Raville’s laboratory occupied the entire second floor of an unremarkable square building set indiscriminately amongst the jumbled maze of other non-descript structures that made up the station’s industrial research park. Upon initial inspection, it was not the sort of space one would envision when asked to develop a mental picture of the site most likely to provide the future salvation of the human race from alien invaders. It was crowded, for one thing. Not much room for dorky geniuses in white coats to exchange Eureka’s and congratulatory slaps on the back. For another, it was frequently dirty. Not a grimy sort of dirty, just chronically unkempt in much the same way that brilliant and preoccupied professors tended to neglect to brush their hair and scrub their faces.
But what was immediately evident above all was that it had recently been a place of great, humming activity, a space devoted to hard work and tremblingly clever breakthroughs and many sighs of relief that the work had now been completed and was ready to be put to the test.
Toward the entrance were several compact and independent flexsteel and plastiglass chambers shaped like old fashioned diving bells. Though each individual structure was not large, hardly big enough for one person to work inside comfortably, together with its assorted venting tubes, power generators and filtered air exchangers, the small forest which they comprised occupied a considerable amount of real estate. These chambers were, in fact, isolated nanotech development laboratories, mechanical hot zones where the tedious iterative task of designing, programming and assembling new species of self-adaptive and self-sustaining nanomech function colonies occurred. Inside, workers wore dense protective gear, and the environment was cycled ruthlessly through cleaning protocols to protect against the accidental release of a malformed but nevertheless infinitely replicatable advanced scout units. The devlabs were as lethally perilous in their own way as their more common viral research counterparts.
Beyond the devlab farm there lay an assortment of primitive office stations set up on long, hastily erected work tables with temporary dividers between seats to give at least the illusion of privacy. Many of these cubby holes were piled elbow deep in places with crumpled paper, discarded food wrappers or filthy stacks of disposable coffee cups. The air was noisome with the odor of stale sweat and decayed food. Blackboards, whiteboards and large stylus screen displays lined the walls, every available surface scribbled with figures, equations, conversion tables and arcane snippets of code in a dozen advanced languages. If the devlab farm was the flashy modern frontspiece for the Giari Tau operation, this was the archaic industrial core, where the fresh ideas, the problem solving and the sheer mental drudgery of taking a new technology from concept to finished product occurred. Until recently, it had housed some of the most creative and daring technical engineering minds in human space.
But farther on and deeper in still lay the real guts of the laboratory. Past a heavily soundproofed temporary wall lay the construction and assembly shop. This was a true tinkerer’s paradise, crammed floor to ceiling with racks of computer equipment–some functional, some cannibalized, a giddy assortment of power tools, hand held drills, laser lathes and the latest in interpretative design mold fabricators. Here, metal shavings had dusted the floor with grit or been swept into piles against the walls. Blackened scorch marks scarred the walls. Piles of twisted metal and other discarded manufacturing detritus littered the space between work benches.
Finally, through an imposing wall of freshly poured blastcrete and obtainable only through a pair of heavy metal doors recently retrofitted with an intense array of biometric security devices, sat the final Prototype Testing Lab, the Holy of Holies, the culmination of months of intensive effort and years of pre-planning, imagining and early stages development. Beyond those doors, banks of improbably powerful cross-processed supercomputers hummed multidimensional computational mysteries to one another, amusing themselves with binary chit chat, quietly solving every social, political and biological crisis mankind had ever faced in fractions of milliseconds, then shunting those miracles off into disposable theoretical universes. The lights were bright to point of stridency, the floor spotless white tile, the ambient room temperature chilly enough to raise goose pimples even through a sweater. Sensor tell-tales glowed from monitoring stations and diagnostic modules racked one against the other, from knee height to forehead, in every corner, nook and otherwise unspoken for space.
The focus of all this money, attention, development energy and human frustration sat alone in the center of the chamber, a free standing coffin of roughly polished flexsteel that trailed bundles of power cords, datburst lines and finewire data feeds from an almost inconceivable number of access ports on three of its sides. These data lifelines snaked riotously across the floor to a shielded control room a few meters away, where they ported into the base of a specially designed master control console capable of harnessing and directing every other piece of equipment in the lab. The device itself was blocky and ugly and looked startlingly like the prototype that it was: ten billion rupees worth of one-of-a-kind, one-time technology, as radical a leap forward in scientific endeavor as the original zap scheme disassembly vat had been.
Unlike the original zap, however, this device had not been constructed as one half of an essentially binary technological system. It was meant to be used only once, a one-way transport to a world beyond human imagining. There was no matching reassembly unit on the other side to accept the dizzyingly complex representation of the evaporated object produced by the progressive encoding disassembler. Its sole purpose was to transmogrify life into nothingness, breath into binary, the totality of being into the still small voice of strange gods.
Dorian and Amara arrived with Lieutenant Sainz at the Prototype Testing Lab suitably impressed with the evidence of money and effort that had been expended on their behalf and only a few minutes later than they had been expected. Dorian had even begun to suspect that he hadn’t given Raville his proper due. The facility demonstrated a nearly neurotic attention to fine details and rigorous development standards. The bits of code he had been able to decipher from the screens in the work area showed signs of stunningly cruftless elegance, even if he couldn’t be immediately certain what problems they were designed to address. But like fine works of art, one didn’t have to necessarily understand the theme the artist was attempting to address in order to appreciate great craftsmanship.
It was obvious that the Giari Tau operation had been a great and marvelous collaboration of talent, skill and mind, made perhaps that much more impressive by the fact that it had largely occurred off the grid and out of sight. It took serious coin to assemble skill sets and brilliance of this caliber, but that was nothing compared to what it must have cost subsequently to purchase their silence once the project had been completed.
But Michael Raville had carried it off. He was maybe the only man in the universe who could have done it, who would have dared such a thing, risking fortune and reputation and the future of the entire human race on his ability to get the job done without the knowledge or the support of private citizens and government agencies alike. He was, after all, the dumbed down genetic replica of a pseudo-god. Grand, senseless gestures that might potentially destroy the lives of billions of innocent people were his birthright.
And now, for all the money that had been spent, the lies told, the lives lost and scientific thresholds shattered, the future had come down to this: the sacrifice of a lone girl willing to lay down her life so that the rest of them might live, the determination of a scriptslinging data cowboy who could not allow himself to fail, and the idealistic madness of a self-cognizant bit package of the man responsible for starting it all off.
Despite the ample evidence of the care that had been taken on their behalf, Dorian realized with stunning clarity that he was terrified nearly out of his mind. He could imagine any number of things that could go instantly and immedicably wrong, and most of those scenarios did not culminate in a quiet, evaporative dispersion into binary nirvana. Most of them involved him sloshing half-dissolved and brutally conscious from a primordial, nanomechanical ooze before expiring gorily (but only after several agony intensive minutes had passed while abortive medical solutions were attempted on his behalf, of course).
He reminded himself that this was the way he had felt about zap in the first place—the deeply seated and completely irrational distrust of a technology he did not really understand—and that had (seemingly) turned out okay. The difference, of course, was that billions of people zapped from one destination to another every day. They’d been doing it for decades. They’d done it for years and years before he had even been born. Most people (himself excluded) had come to take the safety and simplicity of zap for granted whether or not they understood the science that made it all possible.
This groundbreaking paradigm was equivalent to zap by the same ratio of complexity that a photograph of an individual could be said to constitute the original individual it represented. Meaning, in other words, not really equivalent at all. It was absolutely new, absolutely unproven (excepting grapefruits), and absolutely mind numbing to contemplate, even for many of the experts who had helped to design and assemble critical components of the sundry Ravillean devices over the last few months.
He had never aspired to the life of a test pilot. He wasn’t naturally inclined to represent the genus guineaus pigus.
And it did nothing to help his confidence that once Sainz had gone through the necessary security ablutions, the doors to the Prototype Testing Lab opened for them upon a midstream eruption of chaos.
Here were technicians in grey coveralls dashing back and forth like a scurry of squirrels. Over there were brooding, balding owlish engineers frocked in lab coats and hugging their arms pensively across their chests. Elsewhere had gathered knots of semi-important looking scientific dilettantes, obviously important persons in the station’s pecking order who had been offered a close up view of history in the making in return for the inconveniences they had endured for Michael Raville’s sake. Dorian surmised as much because they were some of the few folks present who didn’t seem to be in an advanced state of panic. They didn’t know enough to be panicked.
On the other hand, there were several concatenations of folks looking just as idle, confused and/or alarmed that he did know: Kenwood Bryce and Fen Corrie, for example, who had shouldered their way out immediate danger of being trampled and were quietly observing the furor with expressions of relative calm from a perch in the far corner. Bryce actually appeared more than calm. He looked almost smug, as though nothing would please him more than the entire project derailing here at the last moment under the force of its own mass times acceleration.
DeMartel and Temple were conspicuously not present amongst the glittering technerati, which probably should not have surprised Dorian at all. They undoubtedly had their hands full enough trying to figure out how they were going to limp two battle cruisers all the way home to the Strat naval yards and then subsequently explain to an oversight committee consisting of angry politicians and outraged taxpayers how they had managed to wreck two otherwise perfectly functional warships fighting in a non-existent battle to protect humanity from an invasion that had never actually occurred.
He was most shocked to discover that Ray and Ghast had come out for the show, and doubly fascinated to find them holed up just inside the door where they were engaged in what appeared to be an avid three-way conversation with Dr. Minerva Skiles. This should not have struck him as particularly odd. They had a great deal in common. Each of them, after all, had expended massive amounts of personal energy in pursuit of the destruction of the hegemony of The Man (to more or less literal degrees). They were practically brothers in arms.
“It’s like a Who’s Who of the Ass End of the Universe,” Dorian observed as he dodged a careening mob of muttering techies intent on pushing buttons on one of the panels on his side of the room.
“Yes,” Ray called over to them. “Very impressive, indeed, but I’d still wager that none of them can balance their bank accounts. However did you manage to get yourself invited?”
Dorian and Amara dragged Lieutenant Sainz with them over to where Ray and Ghast had staked out their relatively peaceful corner alongside Minnie.
“I thought you’d be sleeping,” Dorian said.
“And miss all of this excitement?”
Amara winked at Ray, offering her best guileless smile. “It doesn’t look like things are going well, does it?”
Ray put on a countering expression of mock outrage. “I’ll have you know that I’ve already been threatened with serious financial and criminal penalties—not to mention actual personal harm!–by Mr. Garrison if I did not come clean about my role in sabotaging the delivery device while we were aboard the Indianapolis. I have steadfastly maintained my innocence, of course. I told him it had been working just fine as far as I could tell before his boss arrived and started poking around in the ship’s datacore. He doesn’t seem to want to listen to me. Last I heard, he was trundling off to call station security.”
“Have they figured out what happened, then?” she asked.
“They know what’s been done, certainly. Most of these gentlefolk are rushing about in an attempt to remotely reconfigure certain details of their storage environment. I think they’re hoping to partition off the infected segments, but the environmental saturation seems to have been considerable. I hear that another team has been dispatched by shuttle to see what they can do on-site, but no one is very optimistic. What I’m not sure about, Mr. Garrison’s accusations aside, is whether or not they’ve realized who is to blame. Mr. Raville has remained rather annoyingly tight-lipped. As a matter of fact, he hied himself off somewhere several minutes ago.”
Minnie Skiles lifted an eyebrow. “What are we talking about exactly?”
“Someone broke Raville’s bomb,” said Ghast, in a low voice.
“Actually, Amara broke his bomb,” Ray corrected him. “Or perhaps it might be better said that Raville broke his own bomb and Amara merely provided the means for that breakage to occur. It’s complicated.”
Minnie glanced appraisingly at Amara, then nodded her head briskly in approval. “It’s about time you started standing up for yourself instead of letting all of these men push their agendas on you.”
Sainz managed to look equally horrified and confused by this exchange. “I’m sorry, but isn’t this bomb the mechanism that was designed to save humanity? Wasn’t it the reason we were all gathered here in the first place? If it’s broken. . .what does that mean?”
“Not broken broken,” Ray explained gently. He gave the lieutenant’s shoulder a slap of manly encouragement. “Merely skewed somewhat from Michael Raville’s original purpose for it. Nothing insurmountable. All part of the Great Work to which we’ve been called.”
“It’s a power play,” Minnie declared. “Politics, my boy. A countervailing opinion sufficiently backed up by raw clout or political capital to force compromise. Compromise in turn leads to an equitable reassessment of goals and positions which takes all rival constituencies into account. This is what happens whenever you let one man call the shots. He will inevitably turn into an asshole, and a short-sighted one at that. Just like in biology, diversification leads to more complex adaptation and an increased likelihood of survival in hostile environments.”
Ray clapped his hands in delight and cried: “No sacrification without representation!”
The reunion was getting along rather swimmingly. Dorian would have content to have it go on for several hours more–long past the deadline Raville had set for the device’s rendezvous with the Exousiai, in fact. He quickly scanned the crowd for Raville. Unless he looked suitably exasperated, there was no use in getting his hopes up.
He did not see Michael Raville, but he did glimpse out of the corner of his eye a rapidly approaching blur of the approximate size, shape and implied intensity of a party crasher. He placed himself protectively between Amara and the imminent fury of Ford Garrison hurtling toward them.
“You!” Garrison exploded. His face was flushed, a livid red going to purple at his hairline. The veins his neck stood out like anchor cables on a suspension bridge. He shoved a herd of technicians out of his way as he stalked over to them. Dorian fully expected Garrison to throw a punch at him, but he stopped, seething, and jabbed a meaty finger against Dorian’s chest. “I said we should have fucking killed you from the beginning. I told them you were a shit and a trouble maker and you would find a way to screw things up if we left you to yourself. Well, now you’ve done it, haven’t you? You’ve gotten your way. You fucked all of us! The whole human race is fucked because you were too stupid, too goddamned selfish to give up your cunt girlfriend—“
Dorian hit him. Hit him hard enough to break the knuckles on his right hand.
He didn’t try to deny it, didn’t attempt to explain to Garrison that he’d gotten it all wrong. He didn’t think any single thing with any clarity. He just hit him. Squarely on the nose, as hard as he could. Cartilage crackled, blood spewed. Ford Garrison fell backwards, a stunned look on his face. His body went limp and soggy even as he tumbled back. He did not cry out, did not grunt, just fell. And when he crashed to the floor, he lay totally and completely still.
Dorian wondered for the briefest of moments if he had killed him. He couldn’t for the life of him tell what he thought of that possibility, but he suspected that it might cheer him up just a little.
There was a sound, not really a collective gasp, but the sort of noise a collapsing lung might make after it was penetrated by a small caliber bullet. A soft, scudding stillness: the sound of sudden deflation.
A nervous silence ensued as all activity in the room ground to a halt. Curious gazes settled on Dorian and on the body at his feet. Most of the expressions turned on him reflected varying degrees of shock or dismay. Dorian glared back at them and sniffed. His hand hurt dreadfully, and he couldn’t move his fingers. He didn’t much care what most of these gallows crows thought of him anyway.
Kenwood Bryce shook his head and laughed.
Moment interrupted, the bustle resumed, its tenor only mildly subdued.
“Such gallantry!” Ray announced cheerily. “I never thought you had it in you, Dorian. Defending a lady’s honor, no less! How refreshingly romantic of you.”
Minnie Skiles grunted. “As if she needed a man to defend her honor, Captain. Hmph. A woman is perfectly capable of deciding when her reputation has been sullied. What if Amara had wanted to blast him to cinders herself? I suppose that sort of gender sensitive thinking never crossed any of your minds.”
“Quite correct, Dr. Skiles. Allow me to rephrase.” Ray ducked his head, grinning. “As I was saying, how absolutely brutish of you, John.”
If he had been ambidextrous, Dorian might have hit him too, just on general principle, but he was not allowed the opportunity. The door behind him opened and Michael Raville entered the laboratory. He paused only briefly at finding his director of personal security supine on the floor, arched a speculative eyebrow at Dorian, then dismissed the scene as self-explanatory. Instead, he crossed directly over to Amara.
“Would you care to explain your intentions, Ms. Cain, or shall I just assume that you’ve decided you would rather watch the universe burn than take a hand in trying to save it?”
Amara drew herself up defiantly and met Raville’s gaze. “I think you have undertood my intentions quite clearly, Michael. I have agreed to participate in this operation, but my consent does not imply subjugation to your agenda.”
“My agenda is all that stands between us and oblivion.”
“No, your agenda is the choice between our oblivion or theirs. I’ve chosen to reject that assumed dichotomy as patently false. Slavery to an ideal of autonomy is not the answer for the Exousiai, and imposing that end upon them is not humanity’s role to assume. We don’t have the right to remake them in our own image.”
“Apparently we no longer have the means, either,” Raville snapped.
Amara rolled her eyes. “That’s not true, and you know it. You’ve just chosen not to explore the alternatives.”
Raville grimaced. He looked distastefully in Dorian’s direction.
Dorian scowled back. “Hey, don’t mind me. I’m just the only chance you’ve got of getting out of this alive.”
“You can’t be serious,” Raville muttered.
“I’m completely serious,” Amara replied evenly. “This is my stipulation to our agreement: John goes with me or your bomb stays broken and no one goes. It’s your decision, of course.” She pretended to glance at her watch. “I’d guess that you have a solid fifteen or twenty minutes to make up your mind, then maybe another hour to ping every comm hub in human space and explain to them that they’re all about to be wiped out because you’ve chosen to take your ball and go home rather than compromise.”
Raville was unimpressed. “It won’t work, you know. The entity will absorb you and him and the environment from which you intend to resist them. I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish. They’ve assimilated the patterns of whole species with less effort—entire universes of sentient life that had already been brought to the cusp of godhood themselves. You don’t have a chance against them.”
Amara shrugged. “If you truly believe that, then you have no reason to deny me, do you?”
“If you resist them, you may tip them off that all is not as it seems. Worse, if you excite their wrath, they could very well strike out at us before our universe can be disconnected from theirs. Our only hope all along has been action through stealth and subterfuge.”
“I would think that our pattern-father would be more than willing take appropriate steps on our behalf,” Amara chided him. “After all, nurturing autonomy is his identity. He has a vested interest in protecting both his own flesh and blood—so to speak—and the bodiless child sprung into being from his thought alone. Or do you doubt that he’s up to the task, brother?”
“Or maybe he was smart enough to foresee this outcome from the beginning,” Dorian offered. “Maybe its all part of his big plan.”
“I’m fairly certain that you were not in his plans.”
“That’s okay. Six months ago, he wasn’t in mine either, but the idea is growing on me.”
Off to the side, Ray chuckled humorlessly. “Has it occurred to you that you might be doing our universe a favor by banishing Dorian from it?”
“Ouch.” Dorian shot an evil look back at him. “Stop helping, please.”
Amara ignored them all. She drifted closer to Raville so that they were almost touching, and Dorian thought he could hear the rustle of their unspoken deliberations passing back and forth through the air. “I chose him,” she said quietly. “I chose him from the start, Michael. That has to mean something vital. Something more than just kicking open the door to my awakening. He has a purpose to serve. I feel it, and more importantly, I believe that this is it. This was why he was chosen. He can do this, even against the gathered strength of the Exousiai. He’s already done it to a lesser extent. He jacked your quae-ha-distra. Not merely the simulation of it, but the orb itself.”
“But he didn’t know that was what he was doing. He thought it was just another personal datacore.”
Dorian’s eyes widened as he understood what they were ssying. “I’m sorry, what—“
“That doesn’t change the fact that he did it. He absorbed it into himself as readily as he would have any other data event and made it his own. He’s capable of manipulating the structure of the entity just like one of us. That’s a start. He’ll learn whatever else he needs to know as he goes.”
Raville frowned. “You’re willing to place your future, any hope of survival inside the entity that you might have, in his hands? His human hands?”
“Is he really merely human anymore, Michael?”
Dorian didn’t wait for Raville to respond. His skull began to throb. He felt lightheaded, numb, on the verge of panic. The world spun around him, leeching itself of color and depth. He wasn’t even certain he was still conscious in that moment. Maybe he was dreaming. He hoped he was dreaming.
How was such a thing even possible? When could it have happened? But he knew the answer to that question. It was his own fault. He had sucked Raville’s datacore into his foam. He had broken its encryption and seeded the results into his mind. It was just information, but information was potent. Information shapes the way you think; information teaches you the limits of possibility. Information changed you, from the inside out.
What had ever made him think he could absorb the substance of a monster without becoming one himself?
Trembling, he placed his hand on his chest.
No thought. No expectation. Just knowing. The same way he knew how to be hungry or tired or frightened. It was basic and simple and part of who he was.
It felt as natural as breathing.
His flesh opened. There was no pain, no sensation but a pulsating fullness, of completion.
He withdrew the orb and held it out before him, unable to take his eyes off of it. It was the most beautiful and precious thing he had ever seen.
He was, he knew, just what Amara said: he was no longer merely human.
Dorian swallowed thickly. Tears crowded in his eyes. He was vaguely aware that once again, activity in the lab had stumbled to a halt while people stared at him
“Crap,” he said to anyone who would listen. “That. . .really sucks.”
Michael Raville exhaled a weary sigh. “Welcome to the revolution, Mr. Dorian.” To Amara, he added: “You win. I don’t like it, but I accept it. I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
Amara squeezed his arm with approximate affection. “No, you don’t. But it will work all work out. You’ll see.”
He did not look convinced at all, but Raville backed away from her and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. The collective gaze withdrew unwillingly from Dorian, from his orb, and wandered to Raville as he began to explain the adjustments that would need to be made. But Dorian found himself aware of their drifting attention nevertheless, the rising tide of their shock, their fear, and their pungent wariness. Most of the gathered technicians and scientists had never seen the quae-ha-distra. What they knew of the Exousiai was dry fact and textual references in various documents to which they had become privy through their attachment to Raville or the project.
Many of them hadn’t really believed, he gathered, even as they had worked to accomplish Raville’s plans. A threat that is vague or theoretical is no threat at all. They had never really come face to face with the truth, and now that it stood before them, glowing, pulsing, undeniable, they didn’t know how to react. They were stunned beyond reason.
Dorian didn’t understand this from a height of detached observation. He knew it. Truly, intimately, without doubt. He felt the warm tug and whispering content of their thoughts as though they were his own.
He knew even as he was known, as Amara had known him.
He understood Ghast’s selfless trepidation, trembling and precious. Fear for Dorian and Amara, fear and a terrible, aching sorrow. He sounded the shallow depths of Ray’s glib mask of confidence, and glimpsed the pink and glorious reefs of love for all mankind’s downtrodden and abused beneath. Then there was Sainz’s earnest devotion and powerful desire to serve, Bryce’s precarious balance on the cusp between dread and hope, the sticky, corrosive grip of Fen Corrie’s clockwatching nervousness—he knew all of it. And more, he savvied that if he wanted, he could pluck echoes from the minds of every person in the station. Every human being in the universe.
Beyond that, past the babble of human senses and the incessant, hivelike hum of ambition and activity, the endless building and destroying, and miscomprehended drive for making and unmaking, there was something more—a silver cord, a network of cords, a crystalline lattice binding everything together. A hidden heart of being that thrummed at the core of existence; a beautiful mystery ever whispering to any ear that would listen: what it meant to be human, what purpose they had emerged from oceans and stardust to fulfill, a burgeoning and yearning vastness that explained what they all could be and what they were becoming.
If he chose to heed the whispers, he could become boundless, seeing all things, knowing all things, understanding all that was. He could embrace the All in All and become. . .
Amara placed her hands over his orb so that its glow was hidden. At her touch, Dorian snapped alert, embarrassed, realized that he had been staring at nothing, lost in sensation.
“It’s tempting to imagine one’s self as a god,” she said softly. “To believe that knowing is the same thing as being, that the potential for becoming is indistinguishable from infinity. We’re not so different from them, you see. Given the opportunity and the technology, the first thing we try to do is bootstrap ourselves to divinity. We tell ourselves that if we could just accumulate a bit more knowledge, understand a little more fully, communicate more seamlessly with one another, then we would be—what? What would we be, John? Would we be gods, or just monkeys with better tools than our ancestors possessed?”
Gently, Dorian pulled the orb away from her, folded it in his hands, and tucked it once more inside himself. He drew a slow and unsteady breath. “We’re good at being monkeys. We were meant to be monkeys. Small monkeys, happy monkeys. Embrace your inner monkey.” He shook his head and smiled. “I have no desire to be a god, upper or lower case. I don’t want to have to kill myself trying to get things to work out the way I’ve planned it. I don’t want to be infinite and all-knowing and all-powerful—I’ve never been a fan of overbearing micromanagement. I don’t even have to know what everyone is doing or thinking, what it all may mean, or how it got the way it is in the first place. That’s all too much responsibility. I’m happy being a lowly monkey. Even quasi-godhood strikes me as an immensely lonely profession. Self-sufficiency is just another word for emptiness. If you don’t need anything outside of yourself, you’re not alive. I’d rather be puny and have someone meaningful to hold onto while I muddle though than know it all and be alone.”
“Does that mean you understand Michael Raville?”
Dorian grimaced unhappily. “I guess it does.”
“And what if that means you never figure it all out, John? That the universe forever remains a mystery? Can you live with that?”
“I don’t expect to figure it out. I’d rather fail with company than succeed alone. That’s what being a human monkey is all about. It’s not our ability to cope, to adapt or even to play with increasingly advanced technology. No, what defines us as human beings—what will always make us and keep us human, regardless of what we eventually evolve into is our ability to give solace and receive it from one another when the bananas run out and the monsoon rains start to fall.”
Amara laughed. “We’ll see how you feel about not ever being alone in another thousand years or so.”
“I appreciate your optimism. If we manage to make it five whole minutes without being sucked into the entity, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. ”
“I have more faith in you than that.”
“I suppose one of us ought to, or this was a really bad plan from its inception.” He tried to smile, but failed. “Tell me you’ve got this whole pearl enfolding, pattern merging thing figured out. Tell me you really think this is going to work. Feel free to lie if you have to.”
She didn’t have a chance to answer. Michael Raville finished relaying the last of his updated instructions. The work resumed with a renewed sense of urgency. More than one pair of eyes fluttered anxiously, consulting the time and the schedule. The nervous anticipation tasted like a sour lemon drop wedged behind his back teeth to Dorian’s awakened consciousness. It was resoundingly unpleasant.
Raville turned back to them. “You have ten minutes to say your goodbyes. We’ll take Dorian first, then you, Amara.”
“No, we’ll go together. One at a time creates too much opportunity for an unscrupulous technician to accidentally delete an upload before it reaches the device.”
“I hadn’t even thought such a thing,” Raville complained.
“You would have eventually. The best way to resist temptation is to remove it all together.”
“Fine. We’ll do as you say. I assume you have your piece of this business under control?”
“I’d better, now hadn’t I?” she said, shrugging.
