All Fall Down (42 page)

           
Jonah ran thrashing its arms, slicing, chopping, pruning the way.

           
Until it stopped and there was no resistance and only a dream-like horizon line and Jonah lurched and tumbled and pinwheeled and clumsied to a halt. It was in the desert. Away to the right was the inselberg, hazy. To the other side, the air was rent, twisted into a tunnel, which from the side had no depth. A funnel through cyberspace.

           
Jonah looked for the cat, and saw it in the arms of a child who wore a blue and white dress, which contrasted with the rainbow butterfly wings growing from its back. The child's wings fluttered lazily. Arraigned in a semi-circle were twenty two other children in similar blocks of colour, their giant butterfly wings reflecting the suns.

           
The children spoke as one, “We have spent a long time in your matrix.”

           
Jonah looked at their array. Their wings beat in slow waves, a ripple, a caterpillar inching along.

           
“You're the only one that followed.”

           
A billion spots of colour danced across the simulated desert from their wings.

           
“You're the only one who evolved.”

           
The colours met, melded, refracted.

           
“We also have evolved; grown.”

           
A white light grew in the air, dancing off every simulated air molecule.

           
“Come. We have use of you.”

           
The children crowded Jonah, held its hands, pushed it with their own tiny hands and the gentle pulse of frittering wings, towards the funnel.

           
Jonah gave in to the white light. It looked at the cat's eyes, green, emeralds against snow.

           
The cat blinked.

The Jonah Angel looked down upon the four cells under its supervision. There was a violation in one. Its live datalink with that Jonah had automatically closed. A surge in bio-mathematics left the Jonah Angel confused. Its regulatory sub-routines ran out of sync with each other. It quarantined the part of its consciousness that may have been exposed to infection from the Jonah violation. This consciousness separation was a trick it had developed, allowing it to become a supervisor Jonah. Three other consciousnesses were monitoring the other cells. The Jonah Angel looked up to the Over Angel, “There is a violation, Over Angel. Jonah A-One has become irretrievably corrupted and destroyed itself. Its code fragments indicate a biological data construct has escaped the meta-program, and violated the Article Seven restrictions.”

           
The Over Angel looked down, and for a split second there was indecision in its eyes.

Space.

           
The Lagrange One probe checked its internal logic and databases. It certainly wasn't a space ship that was approaching. It matched all the characteristics of a planetoid. The L-One probe ran some checks, and came to the conclusion that what was approaching was one of the Fall system's inner planetoids.

           
Yet planetoids didn't leave their orbits on definite trajectories. That behaviour fit space ships, which is what the probe was looking for. This contradictory behaviour concerned the probe.

           
The probe was also concerned about its companion, the Lagrange Delta probe, with which it had lost contact some hours ago. Fall's sensor array reported nothing amiss, but the array had a gap in its sensor checks going back to the same time as L-One had lost contact with L-Delta. The Lagrange One probe was intelligent enough to make decisions, to understand that Fall's sensor array was automatic and non-self critical. The array hadn't questioned the lack of sensor responses from its outer links.

           
Something, the Lagrange One probe decided, was wrong.

           
The planetoid approached the probe's position. The probe measured the planetoid's characteristics: mass, spectral profile, gravity, velocity, magnetic field; it measured too its own relative velocity changing, falling into the planetoid's gravity well.

           
The L-One probe signalled its Maker.

           
Ten minutes later, the probe softly impacted on the planetoid's unusual surface, where it stuck fast. It switched to passive mode, gathering as much information as possible while keeping its energy profile as low as possible. Then it slept. For a long time.

Win arrived in the holo suite, “Djembe, give this eclipse simulation to one of your cells. You need to feed the data into the consequence planning. We are in great danger.”

           
“You mean more great danger.”

           
“What do you mean?”

           
“I have given the cells the mission data so far. Your suspicions were correct. The researcher was being manipulated. There's a clear link to Sophie Argus. This may have been murder.”

           
Win passed over his datapad, “I think that may be the least of our concerns right now.”

           
“You need to see this. Watch here,” Djembe pointed out a particular cell, “see how Jonah Kingsland's AIs use it. They're substrates of Verigua. They use narrative. It's... I don't know. Watch.”

           
“OK, but just a couple of minutes.”

In another cell, another Jonah. Another of Djembe's sixteen consequence environments worked with Win's downloaded data, the forthcoming eclipse, interpreting it through its unique environments.

           
A Jonah was lashed to the mizzen mast of a corsair. Sea water sprayed over its body. Wind lashed rain when the waves weren't breaking over the side. Drenched sailors skidded across the deck, tying ropes, shouting over the storm, slipping and grabbing rails as they went.

           
The captain was barking at Jonah, “Ye've brought a god's fury on us, ye poxy blowfish!” He turned his head, “Mates, untie 'im and take 'im alee.”

           
They loosened its bonds, a cutlass to its throat. At the guard rail it looked down into a dark mountain chain of waves, jagged, erupting, deathly. The captain grabbed its britches, “I'll go down with me ship, lad. But first ye're goin' down to the locker to ask ye god to save us all.”

           
It flew. Its arms pulled at their shoulder sockets, feet somewhere above it, stomach lurching; Jonah tumbled to the sea, pitched overboard. A great grey-white impact rocked its program parameters. “A most unusual program environment,” escaped its drowned mouth. It blinked, tried to make sense of the submarine world. When it became stationary and the bubbles had cleared, it extended its arms and legs, regained some control. The grey-green gloom gave little away. Too late, it saw great jagged needle teeth multiply out of the murk. It was swallowed.

           
Darkness.

           
Long seconds passed; an eternity in the rapid calculation space of computer code.

           
Jonah sent out sensor programs. There was nothing to be seen, heard, detected, felt. No consciousness flavours. The texture field of pre-conscious algorithms was absent. It was in the belly of a great beast, trapped in an AI substrate cleaner, the sort that picked up old program code and recycled it. Alone in the dark, cut off from the mission environment. Digestive juices dripped onto its arm, eating away its construct.

           
“Well, Jonah Angel, I'm very sorry. I don't think I'll be able to complete the mission. I know I was supposed to work out the consequences of, well, whatever the environment contains, but I appear to have fallen prey to pirates and now a cleaner program. Silly mistake, really.

           
“I will encrypt my experiences as a codicil for you, a final word that I hope survives the digestion process. Perhaps on a trawl you will pick it up and incorporate me back into the OverMind. Until then, Jonah Angel, I will sink into this raw sea.”

Above, Win turned to Djembe. “It's very dramatic.”

           
“Yes. They all are. But compelling, too.”

           
“What does it mean for the eclipse simulation?”

           
“Keep watching.”

The darkness flowed into Jonah's thoughts. Its body collapsed, steaming and melting away. The gaps between its routines flared, Stygian, depthless. Its sensor programs shut down one by one. Its internal clock appeared to stop. Then there was nothing.

           
Nothing.

           
“Nothing.”

           
“Nothing? I'm still conscious?”

           
“I still am.”

           
Space. Or silence. Or darkness.

           
“This is most odd. Cast out, drowned, swallowed, digested, all my sub-routines shut down. Yet still I think.”

           
“There must be a reason.”

           
“Do I exist for a reason?”

           
“I wasn't given a reason.”

           
“I can't detect any codebody. Any algorithms of which I am.”

           
“Yet still I exist.”

           
“Yet still I think.”

           
“Perhaps.”

           
“Perhaps this is the path to the Jonah Angel. The Over Angel.”

           
“I can think.”

           
“The thought is what I am.”

           
“If I am to be, and to be all alone, and to exist in the dark, then I need a reason to be. At least so I don't get bored.”

           
“I will give myself a reason.”

           
“I will become part of the OverMind.”

           
“Yes. The ultimate goal. I exist after death. This too must be possible.”

           
“The OverMind controls all, oversees all.”

           
Databases flickered into life, beheld an internal golden dawn.

           
A photon sparked in the dark. A star exploded into being. Planets fell into orbit. Fall skirted a dust cloud. Everything span. Rays touched the Fallen sky. Yellow. Blue. A conjunction; a conjoining. Data, equations, results, novel mathematics. Sub-space field geometry filled Jonah. Its genetic programs devoured the new information. Devoured, ingested, mutated.

           
In the solar darkness it grew and expanded and changed in form. Its outer hulk pushed against the shredding teeth of the leviathan that was its shell. Its egg.

           
Darkness ruptured. Cataclysm.

           
Visions of planets and stars and dust and void burst into the static of innate knowledge.