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Authors: John Meaney

BOOK: Absorption

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Blinking her smartlenses to magnify, Alisha lipread Helsen’s words.

‘—to make the call, Greg. Now we wait to . . . Look, there she is.’

Shit.

Alisha double-blinked back to normal vision. Helsen was waving at her.

They were talking about me.

She advanced toward them. Helsen came to meet her, while the man - Greg, presumably - stayed where he was.

So she won’t have to introduce you?

‘Alisha. I was wondering if you’d been able to contact Rashella Stargonier.’

‘Yes, although that’s not her name.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘She’s Luculenta Rafaella Stargonier now. A recent change.’

Trained to notice minutiae, Alisha noted the dilation of Helsen’s irises, a fifth of a second before she looked down to her right.

Surprised pleasure?

It was an odd reaction.

‘But you’ve talked to her,’ said Helsen. ‘Did she say yes?’

Now her tonality was lower and slower, as if fighting hesitation. As if puzzled by something.

‘No, but she didn’t turn me down outright. I’ve got to do some work to impress her.’

‘Well . . .’

‘And I’d like to do it. In fact I’m determined to, Dr Helsen.’

‘Good for you, Alisha. Let me . . . Let me know how you get on.’

‘Of course, Doctor.’

‘Then I’ll let you go. See you tomorrow.’

Helsen turned and walked away. The man, Greg, was already gone. Maybe waiting to meet up with Helsen out of sight?

Why would he do that?

But it was strange, the disappointment in Helsen’s voice, as if she had expected more from Alisha’s call to the Luculenta.

I wish Roger was here.

Speaking of strange, why had he seemed so withdrawn and jumpy the night before leaving on holiday? And on a sudden offworld trip with his parents, so soon after the semester’s start.

Until he returned, she would have to do the research by herself, which she was surely equipped to do. A lifetime of hothoused education, in her father’s clanking steel house with little else to do but study, had left her capable of speeding up her thoughts for extended periods, just as an athlete will effectively slow down time under stressful conditions.

Her old schoolfriends - her few friends - had thought her a genius; but the truth was, her primary talent consisted of working hard.

So it was time to prove herself yet again.

Rafaella let him loose inside her, the memory of Daniel, and she arched back on her flowing carpet, screaming with ecstasy, shuddering, and finally laughing as the absorption took hold, an opened dam releasing the flood into a large, welcoming lake: turbulent at first, then a deep sense of changes in the dark spaces where sunlight did not reach.

Part of her contained a memory of flying the quickglass glider, staring down at the Rafaella-figure from altitude, and wondering not so about her so much as her ecologist-gardener, Greg Ranulph.

Did Greg plant the plexcore?

Or were his suspicious actions related to something else? And if so, were they in fact innocent? She remembered, as Daniel, devising the new query algorithms, knowing they were not yet proven.

That was something to determine fast. She created some netSprites - with even more ease than before - and set them loose in Skein to find out what they could about Greg Ranulph.

Her forebear, Rafael, had hesitated before striking in Skein; but she felt so much more confident, particularly with Daniel’s knowledge of the peacekeeper instruction sets, and besides . . . the hunger was inside her, and she could handle more minds, maybe three or four.

Maybe more.

She laughed at her own greed.

From among all the Luculenti she had dealt with in the past, she chose the top eight, ranked according to another algorithm devised on the spot. All of them were highly ranked, successful in business and in learning; all lived in Lucis City or the environs; and all were here on Fulgor right now.

Yes. Do it.

Rafaella loosed her code.

In Lucis City, Chen Hu-Seng stopped what he was doing to gape at the shocking intrusion in his mind. Two kilometres away, Dianne O’Mara dropped five simultaneous corporate takeovers in mid-transaction, then severed all links in Skein - all save the one she could not close, the ultra-high-bandwidth channel linking her to Rafaella Stargonier.

Arne Svenson suddenly fell as he was demonstrating a somersault to his gymnastics class. Typically he composed poetry in three simultaneous languages while he taught them tumbling skills. His attention was already engaged fully; when Rafaella snapped her link into him, he was done for.

Stephanie Argentum and Yukiko Kaku were in the same physical room, checking over the suborbital flyer Yukiko had designed for aurora research over the south pole. They jerked, stared at each other, then fell, their plexwebs already overwhelmed by vampire code.

Dev Boaz was arching back in orgasm when the code struck. His non-Luculenta partner whimpered at the unexpected strength of her own climax. But Dev continued to shudder and moan before giving a final exhalation, then slumping.

And then the woman was screaming, as her world turned awful.

Scott Talwin was in contemplation, kneeling in
seiza
, buttocks on heels. His consciousness roamed through abstract mathematical spaces, exploring theorems in social topopsychology, the emergent laws that governed thinking driven by the spatial relationships of real and virtual cultural settings.

His model predicted increasing behavioural flexibility from a certain segment of the population who were most comfortable with the latest morphing architecture, driven by the quickglass floating cities of Molsin, now increasingly popular on Fulgor. So far the data matched his predictive model.

At the edge of his awareness was a hint of—

No!

—darkness, pain and chaos magnifying to total agony.

Then death.

While all this was happening, Hailey Recht, the final chosen victim, was fighting back.

She was a Skein designer, an associate of the Via Lucis Institute who knew the LuxPrime protocols - even the ultra-secure financial interface, the bedrock of all transactions, each amount a vector in multidimensional space. All parts of her conscious, subconscious and superconscious minds were in alignment, like a fully committed athlete with exact technique. She braced herself against the attack, holding back the ravening code.

Furiously, she worked in Skein. The virtual world depended on a physical substrate of a trillion billion processors across the face of Fulgor: inlaid in quickglass walls and quickstone floors, every smart artefact sharing its power. If Skein was an ocean of computation, then Hailey Recht was a dolphin, a virtuoso.

Suddenly she was blinded. Rafaella’s code - already Hailey knew the identity of her attacker - slammed through every plexweb portal, cutting her off from Skein. This was devastating, but not the end. She was still a code designer extraordinaire; and she retained the computational arena that was her own mind.

Milliseconds passed.

Still she fought, for an entire tenth of a second. And kept on fighting.

Half a second elapsed.

By now she had pushed back the advance but the bulwarks were straining, and it was hard to keep shoring up the barriers. The vampire code grew stronger and smarter by the picosecond. She was going to die. Reaching out in the physical world, desperate to write Rafaella Stargonier’s name, she trembled and—

Two seconds.

—fell back, eyes rolling up, and her corpse slumped.

Now, on the floor in Mansion Stargonier, Rafaella truly writhed and howled, filled with painful joy, the torture of ecstasy, memories and awareness of eight more minds - such superb minds - torn apart and blended with her own dark core, her intentions strengthening with every second, her evolving self faster and more powerful.

Call her Rafaella; call her human. These are approximately true. Labels attach to referents more complex than the words.

Reality changes.

The part of her that was Rafael flowed like howling blood throughout her; the part that had been Rashella added pitiless ambition; while the part that once was Hailey Recht remembered expertise the others never dreamed of, a mastery of Skein.

Powerful and different, vastly complex, there was only one simple categorisation that applied to the emergent gestalt.

She/it was a predator.

TWENTY-TWO

LUNA, 502013 AD

Gavriela slept, and stared at her surroundings: a high-sided hall, a glistening table surrounded by high-backed chairs . . . and two beings of living crystal, a woman and a man, watching her.

—
I’ve dreamed of you before.

The woman’s smile was a gleam of fluid transparency.

—Welcome back, Gavriela.

—And your name is Kenna. I recall.

Then she re-examined the hall, while tuning in to the feelings of her own crystalline body, noting the lack of breathing.

—We’re in a vacuum?

—On your Earth’s moon. Of course.

The other being was a man, lean and muscular, a scar along one crystal cheek.

—I don’t recall you, I’m sorry. I’m Gavriela.

—My name is Ulfr, good lady. So you are a warrior?

—I hardly think so.

She was asleep somewhere, and yet this was real.

—Not somewhere, somewhen. Half a million years ago.

Could Kenna read her mind?

—No, but I understand what you need me to understand.

All of this was impossible; yet all of it contained an immediacy, a heightening of every sensation that told her it was happening.

—I’d forgotten my previous time here. Will I remember this one?

—Perhaps, but the part of your mind engaging in this conversation is not the part that controls your most conscious waking thoughts.

—Could you explain that more fully?

—Wait. We’re not all here yet. Ah . . .

The vacuum shimmered as if refracting light, rainbow spectra washed and flowed, and for a second Gavriela thought she saw two outlines, one of them odd -
antlers?
- then the other solidified into a crystalline man while the first was gone.

—Roger ?

—Gavriela?

Kenna stepped between them, reflections sliding across her body, looking from one to the other.

—You’ve interacted directly already? This is a good sign, my friends. And our comrade here is Ulfr, a warrior
.

Roger held out his fist; Ulfr grasped his crystal forearm. Roger understood, and returned the clasp. Then he turned to Kenna.

—How can we be here now, and yet alive in the past?