Heretics (38 page)

“What is this?”

“About a century after I revived those AIs, they had established themselves on Bakunin and had begun turning toward their original programming to bring down the Confederacy and free their creators, the Race.”

“This is Adam.”

“Not quite. This is Ambrose, a casualty of one of the Confederacy's infinite supply of unofficial wars. Severe brain damage, little but autonomous functions left, selected by Dimitri Olmanov, the de facto leader of the Confederacy, to be a bodyguard.”

She watched as robot arms descended from the ceiling and began making incisions in Ambrose's abdomen. Inside he was quite human.

On a cart next to the mechanized surgical unit rested one of the crystalline cylinders from the
Luxembourg.
After several minutes of slicing open Ambrose's body, one of the arms picked up the cylinder and slid it inside the body.

“He was the mole in the Confederacy. Until this point, the five AIs were a single mind, even the part that inherited my identity. But Ambrose stayed light-years away, encased in this fleshy golem. It changed him. Even after his return, he never quite integrated back into the whole. And his departure initiated the fissures in the ones left behind.”

 

The operating theater dissolved into a cracked plain under a cloudy sky the color of an infected scab. They stood at the edge of what might have once been a city. Monolithic, organically curved structures squatted black, windowless, and enigmatic, obviously artificial. Barely a third of them appeared intact, the others had their regular curves disintegrate into broken piles of rubble that piled ten meters high. One broken wall faced them, the surface sloughed off to reveal an intricate network of inner chambers like the inside of some insect's hive.

“The Race's homeworld. Here once lived Adam's creators. Here is the object of their deepest core programming, the liberation of this planet.”

“There's no one here.”

“There's one person.” Mosasa walked for a bit, and she followed. She felt the heat and stinging ash, and breathed in air that was unquestionably toxic. She had to close her eyes once or twice to concentrate on sensations from the real world to remind herself that she was experiencing some sort of vision.

She had the uncomfortable thought that she had no particular evidence that the universe where she sat inside the
Voice
was any more real than this one.

“Here,” Mosasa said.

She blinked open her eyes and saw they were much closer to one of the half-collapsed buildings. Standing on the peak of a towering mound of rubble a lone human figure was shoveling his way into the wreckage. She recognized him, an older, thinner version of the Ambrose from the operating theater. He wore nothing but a half-shredded pair of trousers and a rebreathing mask. His eyes were deep black without anything to distinguish the division between iris and pupil, and in them she saw a manic glint that was frightening.

“What is he doing?”

“Saving the universe,” Mosasa said.

“Pardon me?”

“As I said, this dead world was the object of their core programming. They were weapons, intended to serve the Race during the Genocide War. They effectively used their capacity for social programming to destabilize and collapse the Confederacy, to give the Race the opportunity to breach the centuries-long blockade on their planet. If they hadn't killed themselves off.”

Mosasa gestured at the manic Ambrose above them. “From this point my memories are with him. But I know the fates of the others. Random Walk, already damaged from the original gestalt's fission, couldn't operate knowing the Race was dead. He shut down. Your Mosasa retreated into the semi-human persona he had created for himself, in some sense trying to become me.” He pointed up at Ambrose. “He reacted a bit differently.”

Ambrose squealed something inarticulate and tossed down the shovel. He picked something up out of the hole he had dug into the rubble and scrambled down the side of the pile, cradling the object like an infant.

“By all rights he should be dead by now. He's still wrapped in Ambrose's flesh, and parts of it have already begun to rot in this environment.” She could see, as Ambrose descended, that some of what she had taken to be dirt was the flesh itself turning black at his extremities.

“The fact he doesn't die, he'll take as a sign of the right-ness of his cause.”

Ambrose reached the bottom and walked over to a jury-rigged cart that waited for him. He placed his bundle down in it, and she finally saw what it was.

He set down a familiar- looking cylindrical crystal, stacking it neatly along with fifteen or twenty others. He made sure that the AI was secure and ran up the side of the pile of rubble to resume his excavation.

“Ambrose renamed himself Adam. He saw his own fleshy gods die, his own fleshy prison nearly so.” Mosasa walked to the cart and touched the pile of AIs. “But these survived. They transcended the death of their creators.”

 

The Race homeworld faded away, leaving her back in her cabin on the
Voice.
She took a couple of deep breaths, sucking in recycled air.

Slowly she opened herself back up to the world beyond herself and the
Voice.
She opened dozens of internal eyes and saw that Adam's cloud of thinking matter had coalesced in orbit around the planet Khamsin. The
Voice
followed, accompanied by an armada of Caliphate ships piloted by those who had transcended the flesh, one way or another.

She heard Adam broadcasting to the planet below, offering near godhood in exchange for following him.

But now, she couldn't help but picture the wild-eyed apparition with gangrenous hands digging through the refuse of a dead world.

Adam wasn't sane.

“New friends can be as disruptive as old enemies.”

“A forced faith is a hypocrisy hateful to God and man.”

—HENRY EDWARD MANNING (1808-1892)

Cardinal Jacob Anderson ran though the administrative wings of the Apostolic Palace. He was out of breath, and his face showed the wear of not having had any sleep in the past three days. Every waking moment he had spent using his diplomatic resources to open channels to every government that had a presence on Earth, including the Caliphate.

While he could communicate with every consulate, they were still at the mercy of tach-comm transmissions that would take time, more so because only a few planetary tach-comm transmitters were on-line after Sol's seven wormholes were destroyed. Even if there hadn't been disruptions in the communication network, it still would take two days for a transmission to reach even the closest planet.

Just as fast as the new Caliphate tach-ships
.

Despite his efforts, much seemed too little, too late. The various powers might have averted open war if he had brought them Mallory's information sooner. The threat of an advanced aggressive nanotech-based civilization attacking human space was enough to give everyone, including the Caliphate, pause. But shots had already been fired, and while averting a war was difficult, stopping one that was underway was infinitely more so.

He reached his offices and threw open the door. He didn't bother concealing the evidence of his haste as he caught his breath.

Inside his office, a somewhat ordinary man sat on an ornate embroidered chair. Dark hair, olive skin, with features showing descent from one of the European cultures along the Mediterranean. He sat with arms folded, flanked by a pair of Swiss Guards.

“I'd stand, Your Grace, but your guards seem a little nervous.”

Cardinal Anderson stared at his unexpected guest, the one who had set off security alerts all across the Vatican. Normally such an intruder was far beneath the notice of anyone but rank-and-file security personnel. If it wasn't for a series of alarming statements he had made when captured, Anderson may never have known the man existed.

He looked at the pair of guards and said, “Leave us.”

“Your Grace?”

“I need to talk to this man alone. I presume you checked him for weapons?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

He stepped aside and waved out the open door. “Then, if you would please wait outside?”

He waited as the guards filed past him, into the hallway. When the door shut behind them, his guest said, “Isn't this a little reckless of you?”

“Any threat they could have dealt with can also be dealt with quicker and more precisely by the automated systems in this room. And if you can defeat those, the guards aren't a deterrent, just potential casualties.” Cardinal Anderson slid behind his desk. “I would strongly suggest that their absence doesn't encourage you to make any aggressive moves.”

“Aggression is far from my intent.”

“You seem remarkably calm.”

“Should I not be?”

“You tell me. You walk blithely into a secure area in the Apostolic Palace, and when confronted by guards, you request an audience with me. Not the pope, but the Bishop of Ostia. Why me?”

“You're the Vatican's chief diplomat.”

“And what exactly did you mean when you told the guards, ‘The Other comes. It brings the change without choice or consent. It will destroy all it does not consume'?”

The man leaned back and said, “I wanted to get your attention.”

“Where did you hear those words?”

“You know the answer to that, don't you?”

“I'd like to hear it from you.”

“I've seen the same tach-comm you did.”

Cardinal Anderson stared at the man, looking for signs of who he was, where he came from. Below the surface of his desk, a holo ran the dossier on his visitor. It was remarkably light. There were recordings of his arrival at Vatican City, his entry into the palace, his entry into the nonpublic areas. There were gigs of biometric data and scans, from DNA to retina prints to electrical profiles of brain activity.

As thoroughly as they examined this man, no record of him seemed to exist anywhere else. Not in the Vatican's databases, and not in the records of any police or intelligence agency on Earth.

“So,” he asked the man, “what do I call you?”

“Jonah Dacham. I've had countless aliases, but that was the name I was born with.” Jonah smiled. “The first time anyway.”

Cardinal Anderson felt a growing discomfort in the pit of his stomach, a flaring of the unease he had felt upon watching the black figure in the tach-comm transmission.

“So, Mr. Dacham, why are you here, and why did you want to talk to me?”

“I represent a party that wishes to negotiate directly with the Vatican, a mutual defense pact.”

“What party?”

“Your Grace, only half of that message was directed at you.”

Cardinal Anderson swallowed as he remembered the final part of the message Jonah Dacham had quoted:
If any children of Proteus hear the warnings of your vessel, you must defend those who do not accept.

“You are saying you are an agent of Proteus?”

“An emissary.”

“There is no Proteus. Their last outpost was destroyed centuries ago.”

“Precisely why this negotiation is necessary. Any assistance we give you makes us vulnerable. You would destroy us for possessing your ‘heretical' technologies.”

“Such things are evil, dangerous—”

“And have coexisted with you for hundreds of years.”

Cardinal Anderson leaned back and shook his head.

Dacham continued. “You're facing a power that has not accepted the same restraint we have. Proteus is defined by its restraint. No one comes to us except by choice. We can help you defend against this Other. But only if you ask, and only if we are given something in return.”

“What are you asking?”

“Absolution by the pope.”

“What?”

“We need the pope to publicly announce that the position of the Church is that the people of Proteus are no more sinful than humanity in general. That we are as entitled to follow our path as you are yours. He needs to say that the sin is not in the technologies but what is done with them.”

“You don't know what you ask.”

“I ask nothing. I offer. Just allowing you to know that Proteus still exists is a danger to us. But what is coming requires at least this much from us. We must offer you aid.” He leaned forward. “But not if we suffer destruction at your hands.”

Cardinal Anderson shook his head. “Centuries of doctrine are not going to be overturned on the word of one man.”

“I expected as much,” Jonah said.

“And I am afraid I cannot let you leave.”

“I expected that as well. However, do not expect to gain much information from me. When Proteus reconstructed this body for me, I left behind any knowledge of the location of their colonies.”

This man was probably mad. But what frightened Cardinal Anderson was the possibility he wasn't.

“Why come here, Mr. Dacham, if you were certain of failure?”

“I haven't failed, Your Grace.”

“Oh?”

“In time, when you see the scope of the situation, I anticipate your mind will change. Even if it doesn't, part of me missed being human.”

Cardinal Anderson called the guards back and had Jonah Dacham escorted to one of the secure guest rooms, with orders to keep him there.