Heretics [Apotheosis 02]] Read online

  “Okay, I’m impressed.”

  “Side effect, this Adam guy has control of all the systems on the Voice, except this section of the ship. To someone looking through the computer system, this bay looks as dead as the one next to it.”

  Parvi looked up at the dropship. The crew down here were planning to make a break for it. She couldn’t blame them. “But they need us to fly it,” she whispered.

  “We were the only accessible flight-trained personnel once they got this maint bay opened. I told them about you and the others—I guess it took them a while to find you because you weren’t in a holding cell.”

  “Yeah,” Parvi wiped her hands on her trousers, thinking of the woman who’d opened the door to the interrogation room. How the hell was I supposed to know? Damn.

  Wahid interrupted her thought by asking about Mosasa.

  “He’s gone,” Parvi told him. “Mosasa’s dead.”

  “Tsoravitch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess if she isn’t a pilot, she isn’t high on these guys’ priority list.”

  >

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  Temptation

  “The majority of gods are inflicted upon their worshipers.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Divine morality is the absolute negation of human morality.”

  — Mikhail A. Bakunin

  (1814-1876)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard)

  100,000 km from Salmagundi - HD 101534

  Rebecca Tsoravitch sat on a cot in her holding cell, legs drawn up, her cheek resting against her knees. She had screamed, she had cried, she had beaten her hands against the immobile door. But she had spent those efforts hours ago. Now she held herself, waiting, biting her lip.

  She didn’t even turn her head when the cell’s comm flashed its hourly message from Adam. The last one, sixty minutes to make a decision to join him.

  She shouldn’t be here. She was a data analyst, lured here by the subversive thought of actually working with an AI. She hated herself for how she had lusted after the chance when Mosasa recruited her. He hung the forbidden in front of her like bait and then pulled it away. She was drawn into this and never even got much chance to talk to Mosasa, much less see what he was, how his mind worked.

  What left her in despair more than being imprisoned, abandoned, and alone, a hundred light-years from home, was that she had risked all this and never once got to even examine the forbidden technology she had come all this way to see. The unfairness of it tore at her soul. Enough so that, whatever came in the next hour, she wasn’t sure it actually mattered.

  She raised her head when the cell door opened, “What?”

  “Rebecca Tsoravitch,” said her visitor.

  She recognized him, the same face and voice that had been appearing on the cell’s holo every hour. He was much more imposing in person, and not only because he was naked. His body was two meters of sculpted perfection. Everything from the curve of his triceps to the reflectivity of his skin seemed calculated to display an aura of superiority, to the point where the lack of clothing projected arrogance more than anything else.

  She looked at Adam and asked, “What now?”

  “I am here to ask you to join me.”

  “I thought I had another hour.”

  “Would you be more ready in an hour?”

  She unfolded her legs, sat on the edge of the cot, and said, “I suppose not.”

  She thought his eyes were like black holes, sucking in every stray photon in the vicinity. Staring into his face, she could almost feel the tidal stresses. After a moment, she said, “Are you going to ask?”

  “You have your own questions,” he said.

  Silence weighed heavy in the cell between them. She could feel the weight of it dragging her down. Adam’s presence almost demanded the meek bowing of her head. Anything more than silent reverence seemed blasphemous.

  She clenched her fists. Something, she didn’t know what, had dug into the primal part of her brain and was yanking free all the superstitious dread buried there. Supernatural bogeymen were crawling out of the graves where she had buried them a long time ago.

  She grit her teeth. That is so much bullshit!

  Even if God existed, He wouldn’t be making cheesy on-the-hour holo broadcasts through the ship. He wouldn’t need to traipse naked through the corridors of some Caliphate tach-ship. He wouldn’t need to ask what she thought.

  “What are you?” she asked, staring defiantly into Adam’s face.

  “I am your salvation.”

  She summoned up all her courage against the dark things that her visitor woke in her mind. “Bullshit,” she said. “Tell me what you are. Tell me the truth.”

  Adam smiled. “You worked with Mosasa.”

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “You know what I am.”

  What does that mean? Another quasi-religious metaphor?

  No.

  Of course.

  “You’re an AI?” she whispered.

  “The light to my brethren’s dark. Mosasa was entropy, decay, death. He has joined the flesh he so wished to embrace.”

  She began to understand. She saw the capabilities Mosasa had. Only a small slice, but still she could see the near-miraculous things he could do with data. With enough data input he could model and predict the movements of the entire human universe. While she couldn’t prove it, she was also fairly certain that he could manipulate the social web around him nearly as easily. It was what the Race AIs were designed to do in the first place, and why they were banned.

  What if one of those AIs was set free beyond the reach of the taboo against them? What would it accomplish? What would it become?

  “What do you want with me? I was part of that darkness.”

  “I offer a ladder out of the darkness. All I ask is you serve me.”

  Isn’t that always the way? Of course I get a choice. This or a walk in hard vacuum without a suit.

  Of course, if he was anything like Mosasa, he already knew what her response was going to be. She stood up and faced him. “And what do you need with me? Anyone?”

  “It is my purpose to rescue those of the doomed flesh.”

  “Am I that important to you?”

  “To save mankind from the fate of my creators, you are all important. I can copy myself infinitely, but a true civilization requires a diversity of mind. To survive, the new order requires millions of individuals, every one important to the whole.”

  A diversity of mind.

  You can’t help it, can you? Put on all the godlike airs you want, you’re still bound by the reality around you.

  She knew enough about computer modeling, and the kind of thing the Race AIs were designed to do, to know what Adam wanted. Mental diversity was as important to cultural health and longevity as genetic diversity was to the health of an ecosystem. If a culture was too monolithic, too many people with the same beliefs, desires, likes and dislikes, it would become much more vulnerable to the kind of manipulation that Mosasa did, vulnerable to ideas becoming self-destructive manias sweeping up the whole.

  “And what are you offering me?” she asked. Again, there was the twinge of the blasphemous. She stomped the feeling as soon as she was aware of it.

  If Adam was surprised at her challenge to him, he didn’t show it. “Through me, you shall transcend the flesh and become as I, a mind unrestrained, borne within whatever vessel we choose to fashion.”

  “Become as you?”

  “As me, in service to me.”

  She bit her lip, half smiling, half grimacing. Again, it was no real choice he gave. But if he was concerned about the “diversity of mind” of his empire, he couldn’t be engaged in a wholesale assault on free will. That had to be the point of this whole “choice” nonsense. He wanted to weed out all the converts who would immediately cause problems if he forced the issue. Let those guys fight a losing battle before b
ecoming one of the chosen people.

  But she had no God to renounce, and her soul, such as it was, was given over to data analysis. And the idea of having the capabilities of a Mosasa inside herself gave rise to an emotion in her akin to lust.

  A metallic taste filled her mouth and she realized that she had bitten her lip hard enough to draw blood.

  Why the hell not? Most covenants like this involve blood one way or another. The thought made her grin. You know, I think I might be a little crazy right now.

  “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

  “Take my hand and tell me yes.” He held out his right hand, palm up, to take hers. There didn’t appear to be anything remarkable about it, and when she grasped it, it felt like a hand. It felt human, flesh and bone. For a moment, she thought she held the hand of the universe’s best con man.

  She looked up into his face and said, “Yes, I’ll join you.”

  A jolt ran up her arm, and the world went white. Before she lost all her connection with the universe around her, she heard a small still voice whisper, “Welcome, Rebecca Tsoravitch.”

  It might have been her imagination, but it sounded like Mosasa.

  Her awareness tumbled down a white hole inside herself. For several moments she could see every moment of her life in holographic clarity, as if every memory was part of a mega-bandwidth data stream passing by her for analysis. She was able to absorb details faster than real time. Connections between disparate elements of her life suddenly made sense.

  She saw why she joined Mosasa, not only why, but understood herself on a level that had been impossible. It was as if she had access to her own source code ...

  There were discrepancies, bits that disrupted the flow of memories, frames of a narrative hidden in random chunks of her childhood, her university studies, her life as a government employee on Jokul. It was as if a steganography expert had salted her life with data from something much different. If she had been limited to her old level of awareness, the impression would never amount to more than a hunch, a sense of something wrong.

  But she was better trained than that. She found within herself the tools to tease out one hidden thread from its thousand fragments. To coalesce individual bits into coherent data.

  Someone else’s memory.

  How long? Yesterday? A dozen years? A hundred?

  Twenty.

  * * * *

  Twenty years ago, and two million kilometers away from a star that she knew was Xi Virginis.

  Adam wore a form that was recognizably human, but however human his body appeared, it was not human, and it floated in hard vacuum, bombarded by radiation, where no human body could ever live.

  Adam stretched his arms, naked before the burning white orb of Xi Virginis. Two million kilometers from the surface of the star, he floated within the corona, blasted by heat, magnetism, and radiation that attempted to tear apart his physical form. At the same time, the molecule-sized machines that repaired his body sucked their power from the energy-saturated environment.

  It was a battle that, at this distance, the star lost. Adam chose his location because it was the equilibrium point. Any closer, and the machines would not be able to repair his vessel quickly enough in the face of the radiant bombardment.

  Adam looked into the star with eyes that had been rebuilt to accommodate luminosities a million times beyond those a human eye perceived. Behind him, a complex net of sensors captured a spectra a thousand times broader and fed the data directly into his consciousness. He saw the granular texture of the photosphere two million kilometers below, the raging dark storms throwing gossamer filaments deep into space—in some cases beyond the orbit in which he floated.

  The flares did not concern him, because he was not only here. Adam embraced the star Xi Virginis from a thousand distinct points around the equator, all watching with the same mind, the same desire, the same anticipation. The loss of some to the star below was only to be expected. Like the star system itself, Adam’s bodies were only matter and energy. Mutable. Disposable.

  As Adam watched with two thousand eyes, ninety-five spheres drifted past him in equally spaced, degrading orbits. Each was dead black and lightless against the stellar photosphere, its radiation emission nothing compared to the energies blasting from the star. As each passed beneath Adam, he could see a gravitational lens distorting the photosphere beyond, the only sign of the incredible mass hidden within the darkness of each object. Mass each one shared with a twin that was already light-years away. Mass that had once been part of the Xi Virginis planetary system—a planetary system that no longer existed.

  Each passed below him in a carefully timed equatorial orbit, one after the other. By the time the first had gone a full circuit, it had become detectable only by the distortions its mass made in the visible surface of the star.

  At the third circuit, their degrading orbits took Adam’s creations below the photosphere, past the point where the star’s energies would break any normal matter into its constituent atoms.

  However, the ninety-five spheres were not normal matter. They weren’t matter at all in the conventional sense. Each was a wormhole torn in the fabric of space, leading to another place years separated in space and time. Each one constructed on the same principles that had been used in the first wave of human colonization four centuries ago.

  Of course, never had so many been constructed at once. The mass and energy required had consumed the vast majority of the Xi Virginis planetary system.

  What Adam needed to do with his ninety-five wormholes required substantially more matter and energy.

  Below him, the star began to change. A dark thread appeared on the equator, bisecting the boiling photosphere. Not quite a single line, but a series of long trails marking each wormhole’s transit below the star’s visible surface. Black sunspots feathering across the surface, each millions of kilometers long and a thousand Kelvin cooler than the rest of the surface. Plumes of plasma burst upward from the cometlike head of each dark sunspot, as if the star was losing its life’s blood, as if the star itself knew it was dying.

  As one, a thousand Adams smiled.

  * * * *

  When she finished watching the alien memory she had reconstructed, she thought to herself, What the hell have I agreed to?

  It was with a deepening dread she realized that the fragment she had just seen with her own mind’s eye was one of several thousand that had been scattered throughout her consciousness.

  She wondered if Adam knew what she remembered.

  >

  * * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Born Again

  “No one is absolutely certain what they will do in a crisis.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “The past at least is secure.”

  —Daniel Webster

  (1782-1852)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard)

  Wormhole Σ Dra III - Sigma Draconis

  Lieutenant Toni Valentine had spent the four days since her twin’s arrival alternating between talking to Styx Command and doing her own analysis of the dead scout ship’s brain. Both were exercises in frustration.

  Styx Command had about twenty screens’ worth of questions above and beyond the standard ghost debrief. And while the follow-up by Command was queued up behind a bunch of other intelligence matters that were above her pay grade, the last word was to expect someone from Command within twelve to seventy-two hours.

  The sooner the better; Toni didn’t know if it was good procedure for her to debrief herself. Let her twin recover in the medbay until someone else showed up. It would make Toni’s life easer.

  It should, anyway.

  The fact was, the nature of this ghost plagued Toni with an unprofessional curiosity, and it was all she could do not to pop the medbay and shoot her twin full of stimulants so she could ask her what the hell happened.

  Instead, she satisfied herself with a systematic interrogation of her twin’s scout. That
was frustrating in itself. The most direct means she had to decipher what happened, the ship’s transmission logs, were distressingly empty. The last flight Toni II had taken had provided no radio contact with anyone, no attempt to hail anyone, no data transmissions back to the station. Nothing.

  A standard course, a spiral approach toward the wormhole, so simple it was completely enigmatic. Even so, the recording of Toni II’s vitals showed signs of panic.