Afterglow, p.7
Afterglow, page 7
Steelos shook his hand and the gem vanished into a fold in the old man’s cloak.
“You are not from here,” Ogolai commented.
Steelos arched his finger in a tribal gesture he knew meant far, far away.
“I sold the robot to a parts trader named Honneck. He lives near a monastery on Bird Island.” Ogolai drew maps of the lake and Bird Island in the salt. His detail was impressive, showing routes through salt ridges and dunes, and pools of quick-salt that should be avoided. “Travel at night and early morning to avoid flies,” he suggested with a warm departing smile.
The group gathered up their things and left Steelos sitting around the fire with some extra supplies of salted meat and water. He watched the caravan head off across the flat. The colors of their clothes and wagons blurred sideways into a flattened mirage as they moved farther away.
Slowly, he took out his pistol. It felt like a needle poised over his vein. A fix… just one last fix and then he’d be done. He lined the gunsight up on the caravan, zooming the scope in on the back of Ogolai’s head. The image-stabilizer switched on and the gun locked on to its target.
Steelos mentally rehearsed the scenario: The snap and whine of the gunshot, a second later the sight of Ogolai’s head bursting apart; the screams, grief and confusion amongst the caravan as they simultaneously mourned and feared for their lives. They would stick together as he approached them, probably digging out some ancient firearms to take shots at him. But after he’d exploded some more heads, they would panic and run, giving him a few minutes of sport as he hunted them down.
Steelos dropped the gun as if it burned his hand and threw-up his meal onto the salt. He sat, rocking violently back and forth. What’s wrong with me?
The switch stayed off and the pilgrims lived. Knoss would be pleased.
The Future-Lord would be pleased.
Steelos assured himself… he was pleased.
CHAPTER 13
The Star-River
Rex didn’t count sheep. Too distracting, they aroused a primitive urge in the canine part of his mind: hunting, herding, the thrill of the chase. Instead, he let his thoughts run free, pushing through the bushes at the end of John and Millie’s garden, around the grave with the dead dog, over the fence to circle the small lake with the gun hiding just beneath its mirrored surface, out into fields of grass, flowing, clattering, crisp and dry, humming with grasshoppers.
Moths and seeds rode the cooling breeze as stars blinked overhead. Behind loomed the orange glow from Coriolis City. The faint smell of burning tingled in his nose.
He pounded over hillocks, into gullies, and along stream beds, grass brushing his belly. In the dreams his breath was endless. His stride grew longer, leaping the gulfs between hilltops and tripping across mountains like steppingstones.
“Let me run with you tonight,” his companion, Goliath, said. The great wolfhound ran alongside, tongue flicking the dirt as the ground shook beneath his feet.
“You can talk?” Rex bounded clean underneath him and then with a sideways leap he was over and on his other side.
“Why not? You can?”
“Okay, let’s run.”
“I’ll show you somewhere new.”
Suspicion tinged Rex’s mind and he pulled up from his gallop. “You’re him, aren’t you? Del, using my memories to play games.”
Goliath bucked playfully onto his back legs before taking off at full tilt.
Rex tried to wake up, tried to escape by spinning in frantic circles, chasing the tail that he somehow assumed was the exit door for this dream.
“Don’t leave, Rex. Not yet.”
“Fine,” said Rex, realizing escape was futile. He broke out of his circle and gave chase.
Goliath tilted upwards and began running up through the air as if climbing an invisible staircase. Rex followed, surprised by how solid thin air felt beneath his feet. As they raced higher, the town became a constellation of twinkling glowworms. The world shrank. Cities formed smudges of light, spreading luminous tentacles across the gulfs of darkness between. “Networks of networks, Rex.” Goliath had shed his cartoonish dog voice and now sounded a lot more like Del.
“Where are we?”
“The Star-River. A great simulation of our world. It’s like a memory of what we’ve done and what we may still do.”
“How is it a memory if most of it hasn’t happened?”
“Did you really do all those things you remember doing?”
“You’ve been peeking, huh?”
“Reality, dreams, memories, all just simulations running on different substrates with their own, distinct perspectives. This is my god’s-eye point of view from inside the Star-River. I collapse its wave-function to focus on a singular reality out of the infinite possibilities it encodes. You can learn to do this too. Create your own view, and a memory as palpable and real as any living experience. And if you sleep and get a different perspective then you can call it a dream.”
“Universes don’t have points of view,” Rex objected.
“Tell that to the Future-Lord.” Goliath nipped playfully at Rex, distracting him from his climb so he tumbled out of the sky. Rex crash-landed and started running again, leaping up and over a vast city alight with neon signs adorning needle-sharp towers. A wave of darkness spread behind him, a shadow extinguishing every trace of light. “Something terrible is coming. You’ve shown me this before.”
“Run Rex run… don’t let the farmer get you with his gun.”
Rex ran, onwards and upwards, but the shadow gained, sweeping him along like a blast of deterministic darkness. Machines stalked the land below, ethereal structures, vast but somehow barely visible, wireframe outlines composed of web-thin strands crackling with energy.
Rex stared as a war raged. Vessels and machines smashed and merged, obliterating each other into atoms that rained back to Earth in fiery displays of radiation.
“This is all going to happen?” Rex tried to contain his terror, remembering this was just a dream, even though dreams, memories and reality were all the same thing.
“The plague grows and consumes everything,” Del’s voice boomed down from the clouds. “Do something, Rex. Make it stop.”
Rex tried to focus on the remaining city lights. He felt a spark of comprehension as they seemed to grow a little brighter.
“Your thoughts and ideas help drive this simulation, Rex.”
Rex felt the people in the simulation, real minds. Did they even know they were figments of his imagination? He saw their thoughts, desperate and terrified, clamoring for salvation and solutions. He urged them to rise-up with machines of their own, but the cost was terrible. Cities died, billions of minds blinked out of existence, and still the conflict raged, but now through different media, through information and ideas, simulations and abstractions, down through scales of technology smaller than atoms and into dimensions incomprehensible to a normal, three-dimensional mind. “No… not like this,” Rex whimpered. “There has to be another way.”
“You are Glow, Rex. You are the plague.”
“If I’m your damned plague then why are you showing me this?”
“You think I’d bring a knife to a gun fight? Maybe you’re the crucible, Rex. The vessel that holds Felix, myself, and all these other personas together. Perhaps you’re the armor that keeps us safe? Or you’re a new form of plague, a benevolent agent that seeps through humanity, countering its worst instincts.”
Rex shook his head as the craziness of it all overwhelmed. “How could I possibly stop this?”
“Play the game, Rex. Reset the pieces, run the sim. That’s what it was designed for. The answer is in here somewhere.”
The horror beneath grew in scale, threatening to rip the planet apart before his eyes. He bounded off into space, past spaceships and weapons platforms. Behind him, the world erupted sending out rings of material in a blinding flash. He kept running past Jupiter, past Neptune, farther into the darkness. There was nothing out here, no flickers of life. Startlingly, there was nothing ahead of him anywhere, an empty Universe awaiting the coming storm. No point-of-view at all… except his.
He turned and looked back, a cascade of violence and wreckage hurtled at him. He felt his life fading, the sudden realization that minds were collectives, products of cultures and networks. No mind could exist in total, death-black isolation… not even his.
Rex felt something touch his paw and looked up. Light streamed through the tiny slot window. “Wake up, Rex,” John said. “Rough night again?” He glanced at the blasted dystopia of Rex’s bed, the scattered, sweat-soaked sheets and pillows. “Millie’s up there waiting.”
Rex stumbled out, bleary-eyed, afterimages of wireframe monsters still striding across the backdrop of his reality. He climbed up the steps into the lounge. Millie stood in the middle of the room. She wore an odd smile, not the usual fear and anticipation of meeting somebody new and unexpected.
“This is my old friend Rex,” John said. “He stayed the night after some cards and beers.”
Her smile grew larger. “Rex, yes I remember you from yesterday.” Rex and John stared at her in disbelief. A fondness crossed her face. “We used to have a dog called Rex.”
“Millie?” John almost fell in his haste to embrace her. “You… you remember that?”
Rex looked around, suddenly nervous. Something was very wrong here. Millie’s memory couldn’t just come back like that. “Any visitors?” he asked.
“No,” John said, and then reconsidered. Well, there was one of the Sisters came by yesterday, I think? She gave Millie a present, a healing necklace. Wouldn’t take any money.” John pointed to the tiny phial on a chain around Millie’s neck. It shimmered as if lit from the inside by a tiny glowworm, glinting and refracting an odd spectrum of delicately changing colors.
Millie clutched at the necklace fondly. “The Sister said it would heal me as long as it remains in contact with my skin.”
Rex left them in their moment of joy and wandered out into the garden. So, the Sisters had already been here, and given Millie something to help her. A token of trust, or a threat.
A prickle of fear made him look up, out over John’s roughly manicured hedge of jasmine and dogrose bushes. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a face and heard footsteps crunching away across the gravel path down the side of the house.
“Hey, you!” he yelped, running to the hedge and peering over. The man stopped and his head turned in a weird, mechanical way as if it wasn’t really attached to his neck. A creeper of cold ran up and around Rex as a jolt of recognition seemed to hit him from somewhere deep inside. The face was young, or maybe just a parody of a teenage boy rendered in smooth, pinkish plastic. The eyes were real, alive, but filled with a crippling angst, the pain of witnessing too much, and of being a part of many things long regretted. “What do you want,” Rex barked.
The figure shuffled indecisively, its body angle suggested flight, but its bunching knuckles signaled fight. The head turned again, eyes catching things in the surrounding trees, things concealed from Rex’s vision. A crinkled smile reconfigured the face, and the boyish figure jogged easily away leaving Rex quivering with the inexplicable urge to give chase.
The words seemed to bubble up from his core, lingering in his vision before fading to nothing. They pinned Rex’s feet firmly to the ground with their cold, stern tone. Oh Trabian, what have you become?
CHAPTER 14
Storm
Keller rode out a particularly vicious storm in the lee of Nevis’s starboard docking platform. He sat clutching Hex and looking up at a decommissioned longshore bot that sat cross-legged and hunched like a dishonored samurai. Its lifting arms and feet were bolted to the deck to prevent it moving as the platform bucked and rolled through gigantic ocean waves.
He’d been immersed in a particularly tricky deep-water hull scrubbing operation when the storm warning came and caught him off-guard. By the time he retrieved Hex, his fellow workers had all left for the comparative safety of the Nevis’s main hull, and the walkway connecting the remote platform was closed.
He gazed up into the longshore bot’s camera eyes. It looked sad and abandoned, a cumbersome relic that still had its uses. His hand caressed the hard metal foot that probably weighed as much as a small house. It was lonely out here with the windmills, solar arrays, and stowed longshore machinery.
The storm came and went, a thundering elemental of air and rain that corkscrewed around container stacks whistling insane tunes for an hour before blowing itself out. He amused himself by singing sea-shanties, songs about sails, rum, and women in distant ports. Things Keller normally had no interest in at all, but which held a strange appeal when trapped out here.
The all-clear siren sounded, and the platform’s wind turbines and solar arrays unfolded and began feeding power back into the Nevis’s grid. He slung Hex across his shoulders like a backpack, saluted the longshore bot a somber farewell, and navigated the slippery walkways back to the Nevis’s inner harbor. Casima would be home now, likely signed onto virtual evening classes, studying biology. “Why biology?” he’d asked.
“Know thine enemy,” she replied.
Grimace sat on his newly erected watch-chair high above the deck, motionless as if secured to the barge. His eye cameras tracked Keller and confirmed his identification.
“I’m back, Casi,” he yelled but got no response. Heart thudding, he searched the barge, and finding it empty, descended into his lab.
She looked up as he entered. “Sorry, honey, didn’t hear you. My head was up a robot’s ass.”
He paused in the doorway, head shaking in disbelief. “How did I get so lucky?”
They kissed and Keller shrugged out of his wet outerwear and into his lab coat. He smiled at what might have been a butt-print on the oily floor. They sometimes started in the bedroom, only to end up down here. He’d lost count of how many times they showered-off at three in the morning, laughing at the dirt and oil vortex hurrying down the drain. “We have a fun new way to polish the lab floor,” he joked.
“I’ve been studying our friend here, close up.” She patted a protruding patch of the robot’s crystal skull.
“Now you’re just making me jealous,” Keller teased, pulling up a chair and slumping into the grubby padding. He enjoyed watching her work. Whether buttering toast or deconstructing a piece of robotic machinery, she possessed an enviable focus, a determination that nothing was going to be above or beyond her ability or understanding. Her sudden interest in his charred robot had caught him off guard. He couldn’t decide if he felt redundant or excited to have her along on this new ride.
“This hand has grown back almost entirely, look.” She used a pencil to lift the fingers that looked like translucent black gel with a rubbery texture. They were as long as the rest of the hand and didn’t show any sign of pointing into tips just yet. “This material is incredible, living, growing, but dead like plastic. Do you really think I could use this arm?”
“That’s the plan. We just need a control connection and then your bio-amps should be able to figure out how it drives.”
“This really plummeted from space?”
“I think it came in headfirst.” She gave him a quizzical look. “If it came down feet first then the momentum of the head would have smashed down through the body, like it does with humans falling from planes.”
“You engineers know such romantic things,” she pouted.
“So he either landed flat, which bodies don’t tend to do, or he came in headfirst.” He sat back in the chair, arm curling around her shoulder. “Ever hear of a cartoon character called Popeye?”
“Of course, love Popeye and Olive Oyl.” She attempted an accent which trailed off into childish giggles.
“I based Grimace’s head on Popeye, I figured it gave him an intimidating nautical look. I remember this one episode where Popeye has fallen out of an airplane. He’s plunging towards the ground with his pipe sticking out his mouth.”
“Oh my, the poor ground.”
“Exactly. Popeye says: ‘If I lands ons my head, then I’ll be okay!’” Keller’s accent was even worse than Casima’s. “That’s what I think our friend did. He came in headfirst and that’s why some of the body cavity is still intact and maybe not as burned-up as it could be.”
“Tough head,” she said, suddenly very interested in the skull again.
“It appears to be a single crystal, totally airtight, not even a molecule of an opening. All communication with the inside is done by shining laser light through optically transparent areas.” Keller reached up and plucked a wad of printouts from a line strung over the bot. “Here’s some scans I’ve been doing. It’s a double-thickness skull, a sphere inside a sphere. The eyebrow ridge and other features are grown onto the sphere to make it look more human, but here’s the interesting part.” He pointed to a thin, yellow rectangle around the temple area. “This is where someone broke in. Despite this material being near-indestructible, they managed to hack a rectangular hole in the side here.”
“How’d they do that?”
“Not sure. Maybe a micro-abrasion cutter. Despite what the sci-fi films might tell you, you can grind your way through anything given enough time and patience.”
“Maybe it needed a hardware upgrade.”
“The scans show shadows of rectangular objects inside, could be computer blocks or circuit boards. The chunk of skull has been glued back in place with a molecular bonding adhesive. That’s pretty strong but I might be able to melt the bond away with a very fine laser, and we can get a look around inside Popeye’s thick head.”
“What’s this bit?” She pointed to a strange mushroom-shaped growth sprouting from the center of the skull forehead.
“That’s a mystery. It grew that over the last week after I started injecting a liquidized carbon compound into the frazzled body fibers. I’m thinking of it as a kind of cancer, a bit of regenerative growth gone awry. The bot is so badly damaged that it’s reasonable to assume the auto-repair function that’s built into the very structure of this material is confused. Or some foreign body has lodged in the material causing a distortion.”
