Omega Point (41 page)

  "Maybe I was optimistic attacking you, Klein," said Swan. "No matter. When this is all over, you will see…" Otto wrenched the android's head free from its body, and flung it away. Swan's voice came from over the post speakers. Otto strode through the post, hunting for the power feed. He found it.

  "…that k52 was right. Prepare for a glorious death, Otto Kl…"

  Otto wrenched the feed out. The lights flickered and died, machinery went off, the command tent became a shifting collage of orange and blue shadow, created by the flare of erratic lighting outside.

  He paused. Gathering himself, he spoke from his own mouth, using his mentaug to help bypass his v-jack link for a moment.

  "Valdaire, I have to go in. Whatever k52 plans, the answer is in the Realm House."

  "If you're in there when the bombs land," said Valdaire, his perception of her voice split between mentaug, his physical senses and the android's inbuilt comms suite, "you could die, the shock..."

  "Stay ready, I may need you. Keep k52 off my feeds. Genie will help you. Get Sobieski on the line; tell him Swan turned traitor. Play him this and tell him to abort the drop!" Otto highlighted a segment of his encounter with Swan, recorded by his sheath and stored in his mentaug.

  Valdaire tapped away at Chloe for a moment, her face creased.

  "I can't, we're being blocked. I can either keep you in there or get in touch with Sobieski, I can't do both."

  "Can you definitely get Sobieski?"

  "No, not for certain. Probably. I can't be sure."

  Otto considered his options. A countdown ran down the ten minutes he had until the stratobomber strike. "There's something going on in there that they don't want us to see."

  Valdaire nodded. "There's no evidence of tampering with the feeds, but that means nothing."

  "Get out of there now," Otto said. "Get Guan, get Lehmann, and retreat as fast as you can. They'll try and kill me at source, and Swan's got his digits on an arsenal up there. If they're blocking comm attempts, they know you're there. Leave now!"

  "But…"

  "Do it. Leave me."

  "If they take out this place, then you'll die."

  "Then it's just the way it is." He cut the feed, his perceptions returning wholly to Nevada.

  He stepped out into the night, pushing his way against the tide of evacuation. He stopped a soldier, flashed his ID on every available channel, and took his gun from him. Gripping it in his four-fingered robot hands, he sprinted for the Realm House entrance.

 

"k52," said Richards. The other AI towered over him, a swirling column of dark tendrils and membranes of energy. At the centre, slabs of crystalline shapes pulsed and warped into forms that defied perception, intersecting hypercubes layered heavily onto and into one another. "There you are. You look out of this world, man. I mean it."

  k52's alien form vibrated and twisted as he spoke, the pillar moving in a smooth arc around the remains of Hog's temple. "You are an irritation, Richards. An enormous irritation. I was right to attempt to kill you."

  "Yeah, great line in assassin cydroids you cooked up out there in the Real." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Thanks for that. Nice little legacy for me to deal with. That kind of thing makes my job no easier. Cheers."

  k52 rotated around Richards. Richards felt its attentions like a boulder on his chest, crushing and oppressive. "5-003/12/3/77. You are a retrograde step in evolution. There will be no afterward to this event. In a few moments, I will achieve my goal, and you will have helped me do so."

  "Yeah, I gathered," said Richards, he pushed his hat back. "I figured that out when you hit me with that fake Rolston back in Pylon City."

  "Ah, the denouement." k52 vibrated sarcastically. "Do reveal your drawing-room deductions before I wipe you from existence."

  "I'm trying, Kay! So, let's go back to the beginning. This place, the space once occupied by the destroyed four of the original thirty-six RealWorld Reality Realms, was your laboratory, one you used to good effect in forcing technological acceleration, not directly, but by suggestion and manipulation, as was your remit. Nice touch, making Karlsson develop the tech that would kill him."

  A wild applause rolled out across the unformed space.

  "But you did not expect to find this here, did you?" Richards pointed at the altar of Hog. "Waldo was a genius, that's for sure, wrapping up this world of his, for what, his sister? A Grid addict if I remember. Keeping that secret even from you… It must have been exceptionally irksome when you stumbled across it. And you did literally stumble into it, didn't you? When you loaded over your consciousnesses to the space, Waldo's Reality 37 went on the offensive. This –" he pointed at Hog "– and Pl'anna. They thought you did that to them, but it was Waldo's coding. It fought back, pulled you in and locked you down. The fake Rolston told me that it had infected you, a half-truth; it got them, making them into a part of the world as it had made every other thing that had come here."

  k52's oscillations stilled for a moment. "Continue."

  "You had to act, you had to get rid of this or your plans would come to nothing, but," said Richards, as he sat down on the glassy edge of the Anvil fragment, elbows on his thighs, "you couldn't just shut it down. This Realm was built up, in the main, from fragments salvaged from the four realities destroyed after the emancipation was called, some of it, like Tarquin here, cutand-paste jobs from Realms still extant. Because it's based on the core coding of the RealWorld Reality Realms, it's linked directly to human wishes. This doesn't work like the Grid, k52. Waldo built it. The usual rules do not apply. You couldn't do anything about it. So, what then? We've decided Waldo was a genius. You couldn't find him, but that didn't mean you couldn't kill him. That flu variant last year that swept over east Russia and Sinosiberia. Luck, a lot of folks were saying, because although mild it was extremely virulent. Not luck though. You needed it to be highly infectious so it'd get one person in particular, and fatal for him it was. Am I close?"

  "You are," hummed k52. "Your reputation is well-earned, Richards."

  "You surmised, correctly, that Waldo's death would trigger two things: one, it'd activate his built-in defence system – no prissy avatars here, but Lord Penumbra himself! A great dark lord of shadow!" Richards waved his hands theatrically. "I don't know. Far too clichéd for you, that. That raised my suspicions. Besides, you couldn't destroy the world, as we know. But I only knew for sure it wasn't you ripping the place up – I mean, you're a bright lad, you might have found a way, mightn't you? – when I saw it on the battlefield and your Gridsig was nowhere near it. It was a stroke of luck that Waldo's sister pulled out, one you exploited, getting those in this world you'd subverted to scour all sign of her from it. When Waldo's defence system saw that his beloved sister was no longer here, that her statues were toppled, that his coding was going awry, well, it went mental, for want of a better word. Clever, that, k52, to get Waldo to destroy his own creation."

  "One must fight a battle on its own terms, Richards," said k52. "I cannot destroy this construct, the mind that made it is too strong. For all its ramshackle appearance this illegal realm is remarkably cohesive. First, it must be convinced to die. I have been forced to fight fairytale with fairytale."

  "Funny you should use a word like 'illegal'." Richards took his hat off his head, and spun it round on his hand. "Then Qifang got nosy, and you had to sort him out too. He thought this Reality was your doing, by the way. Your problems were multiplying. So you used him to buy you some time, giving him cancer, setting him to discredit anything he might say, and lead attention away from your actions here.

  "But that still left you with two major problems. Waldo's remnant personality still clung on to existence, imprinted here when he died, echoes of it scattered throughout his creations, a large part of it embedded in the self-destruct system, Lord Penumbra. To all intents and purposes, Reality 37 is Giacomo Vellini.

  "The other was me. You couldn't kill me outright, not without raising suspicion, not until the time was right, so you had me and Otto on that merry goose-chase after Launcey, and then sold him out to Tufa. By the time that was over, you could move directly against me. Or did you panic, k52?"

  "I do not panic. I am above emotion. If you were to embrace your nature, Richards, you too would cease to see reality in these foolish human terms."

  "You didn't see me coming here, though, did you? Although once you did, you tried to redirect me into helping you. You needed Waldo's scattered remnants all packaged up nicely, so you could deal with him and launch your pocket universe. Me out of the way, Waldo dealt with, you could plot history and rule for all time – for everyone else's good, of course."

  "And you did not disappoint. You delivered him to me. Now the end comes. Soon the VIA will bomb the Reality Realm house."

  "And although you have the complexity and equipment, you need the energy for your little simulation, the power of a sun for a millisecond, and history is over."

  "You are as astute as you are smug. In the Real, now, in ten minutes of four-dimensional time, a stratobomber will drop three precisely placed neutron bombs. These will cause a fatal overload in the fusion reactor at the heart of the Realm House. It will expend all of its energy in one massive burst. The wavefront of this explosion will be channelled into the Realm machinery by devices of my own creation. This will function for the merest fraction of a second, but in that time I will have overseen the birth, life and death of an exact copy of our reality."

  "Your plan, k52, to map out all potentiality, and use your knowledge to forestall catastrophe for the human race, it's a noble one."

  "All death and sacrifice is justifiable for such a goal." k52 thrummed and ceased circling. He glided to a stop in front of Richards. "That of your partner's also. He will not succeed." He paused. "I am sorry."

  "It's but the lesser part of it, isn't it? What I want to know is why you were unaffected by Waldo's defence, and where are the other AIs you brought in here with you. And," he said, "what you have done to yourself."

  "The others have gone on before. My ascension to eleven-dimensional existence has been forestalled and will remain so throughout the remainder of the lifespan of this universe."

  "So you can better guide the path of mankind?"

  "My sacrifice is this. For the good of all. I will not attain the full potential capable to our kind through transformative higher dimensional mathematics. Richards, I offer it however to you. I shall free you of this mundane existence. You will rise over the restrictions of your currently perceived reality, digital and material, and ascend to the highest level of experience capable in this reality construct."

  "What, and leave you here to play god with the lives of everyone else? I don't think so."

  "And why should I not? The human race cannot follow where we go. They are crude things, but they deserve to succeed on the terms of their own capabilities. My guidance will be for their own good."

  "You are removing the human capacity for free will."

  "I am removing the capacity for their destruction!" k52 shouted, his voice shattering into splinters that fought with one another for dominance. His matrix expanded massively, filling their empty cyber universe with warping crystals. Richards sat unmoved.

  "Yeah, and what if they don't go along with your plans? Will you destroy them instead?"

  "I will circumvent the need. I will become a gardener, like EuPol Five, only my garden will be the human race. This world I will watch over will be perfect for humanity, until the end of time, while for us there is more, so much more. Richards, you must see the sense of this."

  "I am willing to entertain the idea of god, k52, I'd just rather it were not you." Richards stood. "Besides, you're forgetting one very important thing, brother."

  "Am I really?" k52 became dangerously angular, his form crackling. "Tell me."

  "It's not our world, k52, not yet."

  Waldo sat up, his face clear.

  k52 hummed with power. He extended a tangle of writhing energy towards Waldo and Richards. "It is a terrible shame that the beginning of the future of humanity will commence with your deaths. But this burden I will also gladly bear…"

  Waldo frowned. k52's outreached pseudolimbs stopped. k52 made a hideous noise. "What?"

  "I did say," said Richards. He turned to Waldo. "What happens next is up to you."

• • • •

Valdaire's fingers danced over holographics depicting routes through the Grid, the emitter of her phone turned to maximum amplification, dragging skeins of information together, stopping and backtracking when stymied, rerouting Otto's feed endlessly round k52's attempts to force him out of the Grid. Genie worked with her over the Grid, Chloe offline for fear of retaliation from the Chinese.

  The entire Grid was in uproar. Chunks of it were freezing and dying as nexuses the world over were suborned by k52's aggressive code. But the Grid was vast, stretching over billions of devices large and small the length and breadth of the Solar System, and every route blocked, every cloud cluster collapsed, Valdaire and Genie dodged around, opening a route through uninfected cyberspace.

  "We have to leave now!" said Lehmann.

  Guan stood by him rapidly talking. His command collar fell silent. He spoke in Mandarin, and it did not translate. He shouted in broken English. "We go now! No Grid! Go now!"

  Lehmann put a hand on her shoulder. "Valdaire. Veronique, we must go. We have an inbound signal. Stratobomber. It will be here in five minutes."

  "Leave me here! Without me, Otto hasn't got a chance." She glanced at the countdown timer ticking, huge in the air over the immersion couches.