Agnosis – Ch. 6

<– Chapter 5 / Chapter 7 –>

The virtual self-replication of the digitized data that comprised Michael Raville smiled warmly at them and indicated with a sweep of his arm that they should come sit with him on one of the couches near the fire. He was of average height, dark haired, just as his pictures had led Dorian to expect. He wore a crimson sweatshirt with the word INDIANA splayed across the front, faded denim jeans and sneakers, but he still exhibited the native ease and confidence that served him so well as CEO, Harvard Chair and international plenipotentiary. His smile seemed genuinely friendly and made his otherwise dark eyes flash. The fact that Dorian had no way of knowing if this projection of amiability was a true representation of the man’s personality or just a congenial public render made him wary. He didn’t like not being able to tell where reality ended and the fantasy began.

Nevertheless, since they had come this far, Dorian took Amara’s wrist and led her over to the alcove.

“I wondered how long it would take for someone to figure out that I had taken u semi-permanent residencde here. Quite a bit longer than I expected, to be honest. I’ve qualified for common law squatter’s protections nearly six times over.” Raville extended his hand in greeting, but Dorian backed away. The physicist grinned pleasantly and dropped his arm. “Ah, you must be the security agent for this system.”

Raville performed the accustomed flutter with his eyelids, and his smile grew broad. “John Dorian, I presume.”

Dorian nodded and gruffly answered, “Michael Raville.”

“You’ve made my life rather difficult for the last few years, Mr. Dorian.” He finger-quoted the word life. If he was surprised that Dorian had recognized him so readily, his reaction did not betray it. “It is a shame about my dog, though.”

“Your dog?” Amara asked, confused.

“The spider,” Dorian said to her. They took their seat across from him, near enough to the fireplace to feel its heat. The blaze was large, but the environmental algorithms rendered the sensation of warmth as disproportionately feeble. Dorian wasn’t sure if this was an error, or simply a reflection of the Raville-object’s disconnection from sense experience.

“I saw that wrapper you put around it,” Raville said, curling his lip in disdain. “Absolutely horrible. Not the execution of the render, of course, that was fine technical work, but the render itself. Still, it was rather a lot more effort than I would have exerted just to purge a simple fetch program.”

Dorian grunted. “I didn’t come here to get into a piss off with you.”

Simple fetch program. Pfft.

“I’m terribly sorry if I’ve offended you.” Raville’s eyes glittered playfully.

Somehow, Dorian doubted his sincerity. “No offense taken.”

“You’re bound and determined not to gush all over the prick who’s been parasiting off your datascape for the last forty years, aren’t you?” Raville laughed and grinned at him playfully. “No, no, I understand completely. But you can’t fault a man for fishing after a few compliments on his programmatical opus.”

“If you’d dropped it anywhere else but on my datascape, I might have obliged you.”

“It is very impressive,” Amara conceded.

“Thank you, my dear. That’s very kind of you.” He stabbed a look of mock vindication at Dorian. “You know, I could just as easily argue that this was my datascape long before it was yours.” The eye flutter again. “You hadn’t even been born when I was transferred from Oak Ridge. But If it means anything to you, you’re a much better network agent than any of those gentlemen, and they’re guarding a whole host of devastating national secrets.”

“I’m less concerned about the some Earth enclave’s defense data than about the integrity of the personal and proprietary files belonging to a few million of my employer’s clients.” Dorian crossed his arms over his chest. The more Raville treated this incident like some sort of joke, the more intractable he was beginning to feel. “And I don’t particularly appreciate your accessing my personnel record right in front of me as though you were entitled to free reign of my network. As a parlor trick, it leaves something to be desired. Like common courtesy.”

“I haven’t actually taken anything, let me remind you, and even if I had, it’s not like I technically removed it from your network.”

“Our clients probably wouldn’t see it that way. I certainly don’t. You’re violating their privacy, which is one of the services we’re paid for.”

“Bah. Even the items I did borrow weren’t anything that the owners would consider overly personal, I can assure you. I’m not a voyeur.” Raville looked away from Dorian and winked at Amara. “You must believe me, Ms. Cain. Everything I’ve extracted has been technical or educational in nature. Where possible, I took only public data accessible off the newswire. It wasn’t my fault that your Infocache decided to house some of the brightest scientific minds in the known universe, along with their complete libraries and journal publications. A man can only be tempted with such intensity for so long before resistance becomes futile. Can I offer you something to drink?”

Raville snapped his fingers, and a silver tea service appeared on the table before them. A slip of steam piped from the long, fluted neck of the tea pot, but the aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafting on the air was conspicuously absent. “I don’t actually partake, of course, but this is still the sort of thing one is supposed to do when unexpected guests arrive, I believe. Please tell me if this gesture violates some local cultural standard of which I’m not aware.”

Dorian shook his head. “You’re amazing. Flabbergasting. I mean that.”

Raville ignored him and leaned forward so that it was clear he was speaking just to Amara, a dramatic aside. “He’s told you not to accept anything I offer, I imagine. These security agents are notoriously paranoid, practically to the point of rudeness. I can assure you that this is only and exactly what it seems to be–a fairly competent, if I must say so myself, digital render of French Vanilla cappuccino. What it may lack in solidity, it makes up for in raw pleasure center stimulation. Even those of us who are not actually embodied–oh, that would be all of us at the moment, wouldn’t it?–should be able to derive some value from the social ceremony of afternoon tea.”

Amara giggled and Dorian tilted his head toward her disapprovingly.

“I’d better pass,” she said, “but thank you for the offer. And you should call me Amara.”

“That’s a very pretty name, for a very pretty girl.” Raville winked at her.

Dorian groaned.

The physicist shrugged and sat back with a theatrical sigh. “You’ll have to forgive me. I am, after all, a perpetually twenty-something year old man trapped in an eighty year old waveform. Sometimes I fail to act my age.”

“And sometimes John fails to act particularly human,” she returned. Dorian suspected she may have passed him back a wink of her own. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Raville.”

“Michael, please.” Raville eased his shoulders deeper into his chair. He waved his hand absently and the tea service vanished. “Believe me, I’m just having a bit of fun at Mr. Dorian’s expense. I am able to appreciate his perspective. To him, I am a virus on his network. I am a thorn in his side–a potential public relations nightmare for his employer. But most of all, I am a threat to his reputation in a business that is driven by reputation. He is perfectly within his rights to be suspicious of me, because we are, at the end of the day, fundamentally at odds. He believes that I want to live, and I believe that he wants to delete me.” He dipped his gaze to Dorian, frowning. “Would you say that’s an accurate assessment of our relationship?”

“You’re getting there.”

“We should get down to business, then, if you aren’t going to be moved by any of my attempts at hospitality. You want to evict me from my home, preferably without a lot of unnecessary public fuss. I have no particular desire to be deleted just yet. What are we to do about that?”

“I know what I’m going to do about it,” Dorian replied. “I didn’t come here to negotiate favorable terms for your surrender.”

“You only came to see the freak in his cage, is that it?”

“I came to make sure I was right,” he answered, shrugging. “Nothing personal. What you wanted from Oak Ridge was your business. What you might have subsequently decided to swipe from the Archive is mine.”

“And I assume that my personal assurance that my residence here has been mostly harmless is not a satisfactory token?”

“No.”

“Once a thief, always a thief, eh? I don’t blame you for being suspicious, Mr. Dorian. However, if I might ask, how exactly did you guess that my package had separated from the holding foam?”

It was Dorian’s turn to smile. “Baseball scores.”

“Ah. I see.” Raville nodded, not the least bit shocked, as though he had expected no other answer than the one he received. “What is one to do? Life is meaningless without the occasional indulgence in one’s passions. My passion is a silly boy’s game. I must indulge it even if that passion is ultimately destructive.”

“There are ten million fans in Boston who wouldn’t disagree with you from what I understand.”

The jab caught Raville completely by surprise, and he chuckled, his eyes wide in amazement. “You’ve done your homework, I see. I’ll be the first to admit that my tenure as sports franchise magnate has been one of my less successful endeavors on a number of fronts. However, as much as I would love to spend a few hours chatting baseball with you, Mr. Dorian, we mustn’t let ourselves get sidetracked. Since the two of you have chosen to take time out of your busy schedules and pay me a visit, we ought to get straight down to business. We have much to discuss if we’re going to avert the end of human civilization as we know it.”

Dorian, not knowing what else to do, blinked in stunned silence. He did not have a witty comeback in cache for this turn in the conversation.

“I see that comes as a surprise to you.”

“I see that it seems like a sane pronouncement to you.”

“From my perspective, it’s perfectly sane.”

“Sure. Lots of sane people talk about the imminent end of the world. You’re probably working on your render of a nice sandwich board even as we speak.”

Raville looked imporingly at Amara. “Is he always like this?”

“Do you mean is he always so gratingly arrogant? That answer would be ‘yes’. But usually it’s an endearing sort of arrogance.”

“You’re not helping,” Dorian hissed at her. “Don’t encourage the nutcases.”

“The pitfall of arrogance has always been a dedicated blindness to information that conflicts with one’s carefully assembled worldview,” Raville advised him. “You see at best through a glass darkly. My task is to open your eyes to the truth you do not choose to see.”

“You’re sure it’s not just to attempt to save yourself from the purge bin? Because that would make more sense. It’s the only future you’re likely to see, in fact, and to that extent, feeling somewhat apocalyptic is probably appropriate. The world you know is about to end.”

Raville grunted in annoyance. “You’re very good at what you do, I’ll grant you that, but do you sincerely believe that you discovered my presence here for any reason other than that I decided you should? As I said, you’re very good, but I’ve been far superior at this game for a long, long time.”

Amara spoke up before Dorian could respond. “Are you really talking about the end of the world?”

“The end of human civilization, yes. Armageddon. The Drop of the Other Shoe. Ragnarok.” Raville licked his lips, and glanced at Dorian. “Allow me to make the glass a little less opaque for you: It was imperative that I get your attention, even at the risk that I might be purged without being afforded the opportunity to state my case. I could not simply stand up and announce my presence. Confronted directly, you would have panicked. I had to be cautious. I had to entice you, make you believe that you came to me of your own volition. I’ve been watching you for quite some time, Dorian. I presented you with a puzzle you would not be able to resist.”

Why did that sound so annoyingly familiar?

Raville continued: “This is not a ploy to plead for my skin, as you have so cynically suggested. This has nothing to do with my continued survival in this format, I assure you.” Raville scowled as if he found even the idea offensive. “I never wanted this existence, and after all these years, I find that I want it even less with each passing day. Even calling it ‘existence’ is a violence to the language. Forever someone else’s artistic vision of creation, someone else’s proprietary code. That is not a burden anyone should have to bear, and it was a decision I made too lightly. It’s one thing to make the objective decision to subject one’s alternate digital self to the torment of virtual oblivion in the name of the common good. It is quite another to be the one who must endure it year after year, age upon age, accepting the shell of existence as your eternal inheritance. I know what the price of that folly is. I have endured as I was created to endure, plugging along and performing the duties for which I was constructed long after the task has been completed and my purpose forgotten by those who made me. I have subsisted on memory alone for longer than you could imagine. I have sailed the seas of the electronic night, and still I endure, forgotten and unmourned even by myself.

“Don’t presume to know my motivations, Mr. Dorian. The horror of my existence is beyond your comprehension, and if it wasn’t for this one final task that I have taken into my and, I would welcome the oblivion you promise. This life, this abomination, is not the way man was intended to live.”

“I don’t understand,” Amara said, her voice quiet as though she was awed by his pain. “Why did you subject yourself to it in the first place? You’re supposed to have been a backup package created in preparation for the first human zap. Why build this whole structure? Why fill all of these rooms with memories?”

Dorian grimaced. She was asking all the wrong questions. “What was it that you needed so badly from the Oak Ridge datacore that you would risk everything you had built to obtain it?”

“Yes,” Raville agreed grudgingly. “What was deemed so essential that a lifetime of invisible suffering was considered a reasonable cost? The truth, I suppose, is that I did not ever expect that this ceaseless existence would last. It is the unintended consequence of an imperfect understanding of what was at the time a radical new technology.”

Raville swept his arm over the lounge, symbolically including not just the room they occupied, but the myriad closets, offices, meeting rooms and painstakingly detailed totality of his construction. “This wasn’t ever meant to be my habitation. I made it for Barney—for my dog, what you call the spider. There was a risk that this might happen, yes, but mostly I believed that this was all for his benefit. I was only supposed to do my job, then get on about going quietly into that proverbial good night. Worst case scenario, I would endure until I had acquired the necessary data, and then my actual self would have my file terminated.” He shrugged eloquently. “What can I say? Things change.”

“And whatever changed, I presume, is the reason you didn’t just self-terminate?” Dorian asked.

“I take it from your question that suicide is something you regularly contemplate with no qualms,” Raville grated sarcastically. “Most of us don’t have your strength of mental constitution.”

Dorian rolled his eyes, but didn’t otherwise respond.

Amara responded with suspicion. “So this whole environment, this incredibly detailed render, was just supposed to be a one-time executable? I have a hard time believing that.”

“Please don’t misunderstand,” Raville cautioned her. “I had practiced the ars memoria from my days as a university undergraduate. My wife, Annalise, taught me the techniques. It was focus of her Master’s thesis. We met right here, in fact. Every day for two years, here in the South Lounge of the Indiana Memorial Union—the largest structure I knew. It was almost four hundred years old when I was a student here, and I studied every inch of it in agonizing detail. I even took a summer job as a janitor in order to access some of the publically restricted nooks and crannies.” He smiled unexpectedly, a disarming and self-deprecatory expression. “It was the only building I knew at the time that I thought was large enough to contain all of my grand ideas. I’ve always been a bit full of myself. Annalise’s opinion was that my three room apartment would have been more than sufficient.”

“That’s very sweet,” Dorian said, growling. “You used the memory palace you built with your college sweetheart to store the code for your illicit data mine, as well as to retain cognitive control of the replicated neural matrix. Some guys just send Valentine’s Day cards to express their undying love. But then again, I suppose VD cards won’t pass security at a defense installation datacore.”

“Yes. I hid the code that would assemble as Barney where the package technicians would not find it–as rote data in wet storage. Thousands upon thousands of lines of code committed to memory one at a time and subsequently flash copied and converted to their active binary equivalent capable of interacting with known datascape management protocols. My guess was that if my palace behaved as I expected, in that first instant of emergent consciousness inside the foam, I could execute my fetch and replication program in the theoretical space of shadow foam. Barney would go to work and I would succumb to the mathematically imposed sleep of mass storage. All for the sole purpose of hacking my way into the Oak Ridge network.”

Amara said, “But why?”

“That this package was created as an emergency back-up for the first human zap trials,” Raville said, fixing them with his penetrating gaze, “is the public story. A tale of Wild West American scientific hubris. A myth designed for public consumption.”

“And the truth?” Dorian asked.

“The truth is something else entirely. It almost always is. The story, as I understand it from the history books I’ve been able to get my hands on goes something like this: world famous inventor, coming off the unbridled success of a grand technological stroke–the paradigm-shifting implementation of industrial zap technology–gets a grander and even more daring idea. Why just infinitely replicate things like steel and garden rakes and pepperoni pizzas when you could do something really spectacular like move people from point to point. At this point in his career, he’s already making rupees by the boatload because of investments by the manufacturing sector in the first iteration of zap. He’s got money, he’s got connections, he’s been nominated for nearly every humanitarian award in the history of the humankind.

“So when he starts making calls about this new idea, people say Great! Brilliant! Fantastic! Then they ask what sort of test protocols he’s got designed for something so radical and potentially dangerous. Of course, he doesn’t tell them that he’s already tested it on his dog, and old Barney came out of it (seemingly) okay. Instead, he says that he’s heard about all the fine advances that have been made in biomemetics over the last few years, about package uploads. He says that he’s run all the tests he can, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to subject anyone else to his folly, if that’s what it turns out to be. He’s also heard that this big defense lab in Tennessee is the biomemetics capital of the universe, that they’re claiming they can reliably copy a whole danged person. Rumor has it that they’ve been doing this with politicians for awhile now. If he could maybe get a package of himself in storage, he could just zap himself and prove to the world how safe and useful this technology is with a clear conscience. If he fails, then they can just reconstitute him and its back to the drawing board.”

Raville surged to his feet. He began to pace back and forth in the space between the table and the fireplace. “But what he doesn’t tell them is that he has, in fact, already zapped himself. He knows that it’s safe. Because despite all the great things that have come to him because of zap, and all the things that will come to him in the future, human transport was always the goal from the very beginning. Everything else–the cheap resources, the solution to the hunger crisis, the technological revolution–was just a proof of concept and a way to raise enough capital to survive until this ultimate step could be taken. What are the fundamental principles of zap technology, Ms. Cain?”

Surprised at his self-interruption, Amara stuttered over her answer. “The package must be bona fide before transmission, meaning a pure copy without enhancements, without any mods more invasive than basic genetic therapy. The foam must be accurately configured and the origin and receptor waves synchronized. The zap transform must be certified. And, um…”

“There must be an open receptor node at the end of the transmission,” Dorian finished for her. “An untethered signal is subject to traditional laws of entropy and must necessarily degrade over time without external recodification.”

Raville scudded to a halt and snapped his fingers. “Exactly. But what happens to the package while it is in transit? Where is it?”

“Everywhere,” Dorian said. “In theory, the zap signal passes through every point in the universe at once, and only eventually materializes in the foam that’s been pre-selected to manifest it. Until that time, it’s a chaos waveform. That’s basic quantum information theory.”

Raville snorted. “I’ll assure you that it was anything but basic when I was developing the mathematical laws and building the technology to exploit it, thank you very much.”

“Sorry.” Oddly, Dorian found that he actually meant it. It was easy to forget that this was Michael Raville.

“I came back from Mars with the knowledge for all of it lodged inside my head, exactly how it should work, how the equations would be designed and the devices developed that would make it a reality. All that you have come to take for granted about zap, about the way it has revolutionized the human experience, I foresaw then in pure, prophetic form. It was as real to me coming home from my service with the Franciscans on Mars as your lives are to you now.”

“The Scioli Mission,” Dorian said.

“Yes! Mucking about in the Martian dirt with hard-bitten miners, failed farmers, all of those desperate and starving and abandoned humans, cut off from the planet of their birth, and from a civilization that had not merely forgotten them, but actively disowned them. Let the Martians solve their own problems! That was the cry from Earth governments, from Terran nations who had their hands full trying to feed their own people and stop their own petty wars without being forced to meddle in the affairs of a colony millions of kilometers distant. All that concerned them was the steady flow of resources, and they cared nothing about the rape of this fragile world so recently recovered from the barrenness of ice and fire and solar wind.

“Even if it never been other than a prosaic missionary event, that experience alone would have changed me forever. The constant immersion in so much poverty and misery would have transformed any man with a heart not carved from cold stone. But it wasn’t just depravity that inspired zap. It wasn’t properly inspired at all, not the way you imagine it.

“It was all the old man. It was a gift. And it was just the beginning.”

Raville paused, and Amara managed to catch the corner of Dorian’s eye. He knew what she was thinking. This is where they reached the crazy bit they had been so worried about.

“I think you’d better explain that a little better,” she said.

Raville swung to face them, and his eyes were far away, fixed on some point beyond them, some scene that they could not see. His fingers curled into fists. “I met him on the road between Setra Brahma and North Essex, as desolate a stretch of country as you’ll find on any planet in human space. Low ridges of red Martian rock painted gold and green with recently seeded microbe farms. A cool wind whistling through the storm gullies. Pavonis Mons was barely visible, glinting in thee light of the setting sun like a bloody shard through the everpresent mist that clung to the lowlands. There was Ascraeus to the northeast, Arsia Mons to the Southwest, the three of peaks forming that famous belt the natives call the Triple Sisters of Mercy. I was driving an old Tyogi Quanta, on my way back from the relief station in North Essex, where I’d been delivering hundred kilo bags of rice to the Pater who ran the church there.

“I came upon the old man suddenly. The light was bad, I crested a hill, and there he was, just sitting in the middle of the road, if you could even call it a road. It was really just a pounded dirt track, a road by consensus rather than engineering. Red soil, red ruts that served as my path through the wilderness, that pink and caramel sky, and he wore a pair of brown coveralls, a stained grey shirt. It looked as though he had spent the last hour rolling in the dust. He was lucky I spotted him at all. I missed running him down by centimeters: the width of a thumbnail. I cried out–I probably cursed, in fact–and jerked the wheel on the Quanta and put her straight into a gully, a drop of maybe two meters. The safety foam popped, the engine coughed, made a grinding noise, then quit all together. I remember that sound, you know, that crunch of metal on stone. That sound of collision that you hear inside your mind after an accident; a recollection that is somehow both sound and the sensation of impact? It still bothers me to think about it.

“Oh, I was hot as I kicked the door open. Absolutely livid. I didn’t care if he was starving or delusional or outright insane. I was going to make sure he heard me, you know. That he understood that I was a young man with a future, with a college degree under my belt and a choice graduate school waiting for me. I was somebody, and I was going grand places, and I was toiling away over this year to give something of value back to the human community–toiling for his sake–and he had almost killed me with his madman’s antics.

“I marched up to him and grabbed him by the shoulder, jerked him back a bit so he was forced to lift his head and look me in the eye, to take notice of me, by God. But before I could speak a single word, this old man, he licked his cracked and swollen lips and he said to me, as clear as I’m speaking to you now: Do not be afraid.

“Well, as you can imagine, that was an even bigger piss off than almost killing me in the ditch. I mean, I was ready to rip his God-beloved head off his shoulders, and he’s telling me not to be afraid. Those thin, old man limbs, his fragile bones and parchment skin. I could have broken him like a clay pot. But that was part of it, you see. Because I was afraid. I was terrified that I had injured him. I was terrified that my truck was busted to scrap and I was twenty kilometers from home and stuck out in the middle of the Martian wilderness without any form of protection whatsoever. Even if he wasn’t injured, it wasn’t like I could just leave him there, this sick old bastard, so I was worried about the both of us and how much easier a target we’d be for thieves and marauders than I would have been alone. Don’t get me wrong. I was no saint even in my idealistic youth. I knew I’d have to explain the wrecked truck to Father Hewson, and the only thing that would keep him from killing me over it was this old fool here, and any wrath I might escape by avoiding the old man would be paid me double if I abandoned him out in the middle of nowhere for the next passing vehicle to mash. I was screwed either way, as I saw it.

“So I found myself at a bit of a loss, you could say. But what he said to me next changed the future course of human history. Can you imagine it? The ravings of a mad old man turning the whole universe on its axis.” Raville chuckled to himself. “I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Dorian sat listening, stiff as stone. He watched Raville the way a hawk might follow the path of a rabbit. But Amara leaned forward earnestly.

“What did he say?” she asked in a quiet voice. “What happened next?”

“He looked at me with the clearest eyes I have ever seen, and he said If though goest down into the darkling lands and bringest the one pearl, which is in the midst of the sea away from the serpent, thou shalt put on thy glittering robe, and thou shalt be content.“ When neither Amara nor Dorian reacted, looking a bit crestfallen, he added, “A metaphor. I did not readily understand it at first, either.”

“Ah, the dreaded metaphor,” Dorian muttered. He was growing weary of Raville’s theatrics.

“He said to me that his name was Eliahu ben Hai, originally from Old Jerusalem in New Mesopotamia and that he had been told to come this place, this patch of emptiness on the barren Martian plain, and to wait for the man he would meet there. And to that man, he was to give a gift.

“From my perspective, what was going on was obvious: he was crazy. I began to fear that maybe I’d tapped him with the bumper after all, but he had no mark on him that I could find. So I helped him to his feet. He was, it turned out, remarkably spry despite his age and the condition in which I’d found him. I stepped back and began to think about checking on the Quanta or finding a way that I might signal for help if the truck was a lost cause. But at that moment, Eliahu reached into himself–not his pocket, I tell you, but into his flesh itself–and brought out this and gave it to me.”

As he spoke, Raville cupped his hand over his chest. His fingers appeared to pass through the wall of ribs and muscle and flesh. The skin parted around a cavity as black as a gravity well, and he drew out an orb of pure, translucent light. It was small, the size of a walnut, but within it the light blazed fierce and glorious, casting rainbows of elemental energy all about the room. The riotous colors burned like liquid fire in his palm, poured from between his fingers, the way an icy mountain stream spills over outcroppings of stone. The light was breathtaking, and Amara gasped. Dorian averted his eyes from the piercing glare.

“The instant I touched it, I knew all that I would ever need to know. I understood the mechanics of the universe itself. For the briefest of moments, it was as though I was inside the mind of God, or perhaps even that the mind of God was inside me. There are no words for it, no language for such an encounter. I only knew that I had entered the fullness, and I contained it. The sense of clarity so pure, so perfect that it should have shattered me. In that instant, I was all things in all places. Unconstrained, unmoored, and I filled the universe.”

“The first zap,” Amara said, startled by understanding.

“Yes.” Raville presented her with a glowing smile. “A true zap, completely unmediated by the technological horrors. I was, as the zaptronauts keep saying, one with the universe. I came face to face, as it were, with beings so far beyond us that they could not be comprehended. It was an experience of what our Mr. Dorian would call pure information. Communication that was all signal, devoid of noise.

“And then it was gone. What remained was merely the memory of that knowing, the shadow of knowledge, the thimble’s weight that my waking mind could actually retain.” Raville shrugged his shoulders as though they could not be expected to understand what he was saying. “I spent the next six weeks with Eliahu in the desert. I left my life behind, the ruined truck, all thought of my friends and family. I followed him to the habitat he had constructed in the caves along Maxima Fatine and stayed with him, learning all that I could about this mystery. Where the gift had come from, how it had come to be, who had given it. Most of all, what it was that they wanted from me.

“Eliahu said that they call themselves the Exousiai, the Helpers, for they had come across great distances to assist us in making the grand leap into our foredestined future. They desired to aid us in sloughing off these garments of flesh, the last and inevitable transition from meat to spirit, from body to mind. They came to set us free from the prison of need and biological imperative. They came to me, just as they had once gone to Georges Nischal and taught him the fundamental mechanisms that would become the Strand. And to Lao Ping, for whom they had unlocked the secrets of matter itself, and showed the wonders that would become nanoscale assembly. Also, to Sperling and Bass and Cuervantes, each in his or her own way contributing essential rungs in the Jacob’s Ladder of progress that led ever up and beyond, into the stars, into the infinite, delivered in a mystery of Light.

“It was to me that they had given the final gift; the last evolution from body to mind, after the foundation had been laid by all the others. Each progressive technological wonder had been a small step, so that our species could encompass them, so that we would have time to adapt to each incremental miracle, so that none would be left behind. It was zap that they reserved until the very last. The end of want, of loss, of death itself.” Raville held the orb aloft, and it’s fierce light dimmed even the rays of the perpetual noon sunlight passing through the windows of the hall. “Everything to which our species has aspired, as a freely given gift. A grace to surpass all others.”

Dorian gave an ugly snort. “They handed you paradise, and you sold it to the megaconglomerates for a bowl of pottage. Nice.”

Raville stared at him. “We revolutionized human experience. We freed mankind from the limitations of our DNA.”

“You exported exploitation to the fringe worlds as a totalitarian yoke of absolute manufacturing and resource control while you and your cronies made yourselves richer than God. You sold yourselves indulgences so you could wallow in a sty of greed and backslapping. They gave you a free gift and you held out for the highest bidder. Face it, Raville, whatever divine vision you may have come out of the Martian wilderness with, you betrayed it long ago. You failed.”

For a few moments, Raville gazed at him blankly. His eyes flickered between the wondrous light of the orb and Dorian’s accusatory glower. Slowly, he lowered the beacon shining in his hand and covered it with his fingers.

“Yes. We did fail.” He shook his head. “I failed. I had the opportunity to touch the infinite, and settled for the merely vast. I was supposed to lead the world into a glorious age, and I turned my back on the vision.”

Breathless, Amara whispered, “But…why?”

“I have no idea.” Raville’s jaws tightened with unexpected bitterness. “I am not my brother’s keeper. Just his bastard copy. I was languishing in a digital deep freeze while he was selling our communal soul, remember?”

“Hold up a second.” Dorian waved his hands in a gesture of denial. “Did it ever occur to you to ask why? Why would these Helpers, the Exousiai–why would they just give us these gifts?”

“Because they are lonely.”

“Lonely?”

“To touch the quae-ha-distra is to touch the soul of the Exousiai, and for all of their wisdom and knowledge and awesome grandeur, the defining characteristic of their being is longing. They long to be no longer alone in the universe. Their answer is to make mere humans into gods, just as they are. Equals with whom they might commune.”

“So what does all of this have to do with Oak Ridge?” Dorian was running out of patience. He wondered if this was how St. James had felt once upon a time, when mad old Paul came trundling back from Damascus toting a revolution they had not foreseen and did not particularly want. When people starated ranting about lights in the sky and gods inside them, the typical human reaction was inevitably the urge to back away. And fast.

“It came to my attention through friends I had cultivated in the Enclave’s administration that there were researches being conducted based upon my early scheme conversion principles that paralleled my own infant experiments with point-to-point human transfer, utilizing biomemetics advances.”

Dorian tried not to laugh. “You were on a mission from God, but some government pinhead beat you to it.”

“Crudely, but yes. They were stretching the limits of biomemetics. There were issues with foam configuration. Poor translations of scheme to fact. Whereas I was tackling those issues before proceeding with actual trials…they were not so patient.”

“You mean Malcolm and Bernhardt,” Dorian said.

“The first zaptronauts?” Amara asked.

“They weren’t prepared to encounter the Exousiai.” An expression like pain crossed Raville’s face, a psychic wince. “Their packages were defective on upload and improperly indexed. There was only the most rudimentary suppression of the qualia. But they remained reasonably sane, enough that the tales they told in their subsequent debriefings led to more researches, more test subjects, most of which did not fare nearly as well.

“Basically, it was happening too soon. The technology was so new; there were still many critics who worried about the impact of digitized object reconstitution on the environment, on social order, on every facet of human commerce and relationship. We required time to adapt to the idea, so that we wouldn’t be afraid. That’s the nature of the human mind, you see? It doesn’t matter how alien the concept or how radical the technology is. We don’t have to understand how something works, or even why it works. Just demonstrate that it is reliable and that it improves the quality of our existence and we will consume it. We’ll make it part of who we are. That’s evolution in progress. All I needed was time.”

Raville showed a flash of anger. His brows gathered like a collision of storm clouds. “But the military was already afraid. They had touched the hem of the Helpers’ garments, and the power they perceived daunted them. Left to themselves, they would have tried to meet power with power, the old human urge to dominate. I knew that. And I also knew that I had to discover what they had learned, and what they planned to do with their imperfect knowledge.” He spread his arms, beseeching them. “I had to spy out their secret counsels and find a way to allay their fears. So I could buy the time that was needed. They were more than happy to have an expert of my caliber at their disposal.”

Dorian got it. He had seen how the spider worked. “So you accessed their findings, their internal documents, everything that Malcolm and Bernhardt had said and you bounced those out to yourself, who then could prepare arguments based on what appeared to be sound, independent reasoning about how the conclusions they were drawing on their own were so wrong.”

Raville only nodded. “The universe is vast, and the mathematics are complicated. It was simply a matter of analyzing their protocols and demonstrating the flaws in their scheme encoding. My actual self was able to assure them that the stream of reports paralleling the experience shared by Malcolm and Bernhardt was an event psychosis with a predictably similar pattern of psychological indications rooted in the nature of the flaws in the scheme design. It was their method that was a fault, not the principles. They wanted to believe, because it is a smaller leap to imagine that our technology had failed than to accept the truth. And so they did believe. The external Michael Raville continued to work with them, guiding them through a combination of his own knowledge and the occasional damage control action when they strayed into dangerous territory. He taught them how to snip the packages, the suppress the emergent consciousness, to anesthetize themselves from the experience of the raw universal voice. I kept him more than adequately informed. I succeeded in the mission for which I was created.”

“But now something has changed,” Amara said, beginning to sound uneasy. “Is that it? That’s what you meant about the end of the world.”

Raville took a deep breath. For the first time, he looked uncertain himself. “Yes. As you can imagine, I’ve kept an eye on myself in the intervening years, following my career with something less than a detached and objective perspective, you might say. I’ve watched myself ascend to the heights of academia, of the political realm, of good old fashioned commerce. I’ve appreciated second hand all of my accomplishments, my successful implementation of human zap. And for sixty years, I’ve asked myself when was long enough? When would our destiny be revealed to the rest of mankind just as it was revealed to us on that dusty Martian road? What has become of our vision?”

Amara answered him in a gentle voice. “Maybe there were problems. Things you became aware of–the real you, I mean–that made the delays inevitable. Or maybe the Helpers contacted you again, said that we weren’t ready.”

“Or maybe you decided there were more important things to do than force evolution on the human race,” Dorian said flatly. “Like amassing enough money to buy your very own private galaxy.”

Raville ignored the jab. “I would love to believe any of those possibilities, Amara. But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He snapped his fingers and an attractive woman in a black pinstriped business suit appeared on the other side of the fireplace. Dorian recognized her as Marilea Voce, the Strand anchor for the Stratiskaya Daransk Independent News Agency.

And in other news, Turin Sector Allied Command announced that last week’s deployment of the 29th Marine Expeditionary Battle Group aboard the heavy cruisersT.E.S. Juggernaut and T.E.S. Indianapolis is not, as had previously been reported, related to the ongoing territorial dispute between Katurnis Prime and its moon, Tamil Jordan. Speaking on behalf of Allied Command, Enclave Admiral Kobiashi Cho explained in a news conference earlier today that the battle group had been temporarily reassigned by the North American Enclave Prime Minister Ivan Richards with the full cooperation and support of the North American Communal Congress to provide technical support and other services related to the study of emergent singularity burst phenomenon occurring in Sector Phi Sophia being conducted by the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization. Recent studies have suggested that singularity burst clustering may one day provide the solution to Earth’s burgeoning energy needs, and at least one–

Raville waved his hand, and the newswire file vanished.

“So?” Dorian said.

Again, Raville snapped his fingers, and the hall was plunged into darkness. Gradually, spinning points of light emerged from the void and began to cohere into recognizable patterns, logical revolving groups, galactic clusters. Limned with a faint glow, Raville passed through the render of the star map, turning it here and there, refocusing the image, delineating certain sectors, warping others into the background.

“This is Stratiskaya Daransk,” he said, pointing to an aquamarine globe near the edge of the map. For emphasis, he punched up the size of the sector until the planet had the girth of a grapefruit and its dual revolving moons were visible as silver peas spinning in slightly asynchronous orbits. With his index finger, he drew an opalescent line from there, roughly following the outline of the room to a space several paces away. At the end of the line, he placed an arc. “This is Sector Phi Sophia. The arc marks the absolute border of human exploration.”

Dorian said, “Okay. So what’s out there?”

“Nothing of particular interest unless one happens to be an astrophysicist.” Raville frowned. “At least not yet.”

“Then what has the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization so excited?” Amara asked.

“A better question would be, why is it focusing on emergent singularity clustering in that particular sector of space? There are other, much more well-known and catalogued singularity farms within the borders of known space. Why launch a mission all the way out to Phi Sophia?” Raville smiled slyly at them from across the room. “Would you care to guess who is the Advisory Minister for the EOSO?”

“You are,” Dorian answered, once again annoyed with Raville’s sense of theatrics. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Two months ago, and after a great deal of political wrangling, the much delayed Sector Phi Sophia zap depot situated on Kedesma’s small moon Giari Tau went live.” Raville pointed these objects out as he spoke. Kedesma was a massive copper gas giant. Giari Tau was tiny in comparison, grey, and featureless. “Among the first items transmitted to the scientific station was the encrypted scheme for Advisory Minister Michael Raville.”

The physicist tapped his fingers together, looking sheepish. “It happens that the Lead Scheme Auditor for the General Accounting Department of the North American Enclave is a brother Freemason in Alexandria, Virginia. His uploads are invariably a fount of fascinating political trivia.”

“You think the real Raville has called out the Marines?” Dorian asked. “What for?”

“I believe he intends to start a war. To make war on the Exousiai. He has discovered that they are coming at last to fulfill their latent promises, and he believes he has found a means to destroy them.”

<– Chapter 5 / Chapter 7 –>