To Hold Infinity (34 page)

He ground to a halt, appalled.

Additional organic brains?

“Oh, God—” said Dhana.

Kerrigan was puffing open the unconscious man's tunic, and rolling him onto his side in the chair. He tugged the tunic down, revealing the man's upper back.

Over one shoulder blade, his skin was stretched out, almost translucent, over the bulging deformity—

Inside the bulge, something moved.

From behind Tetsuo, there was a retching sound. Dhana. The vomit-smell hit Tetsuo, but he could not turn to look.

Two large, grey eyes, completely blind, beneath the skin. A furless modified rat, slightly flexing its almost transparent body. The main arteries from its heart led directly into the man's torso: two bodies plumbed together into one.

“OK, Kerrigan.” Tetsuo forced his voice to remain steady. “That's one of the extra processing centres.”

“Looks that way.” A grim smile.

Five processing centres, in the display. Two plexcores, two brains, and—

“So where's the other one?”

 

Wings spread, it soared. Tiny shifts of configuration: spreading feathers, as it rode the thermals.

The condor flew high above a sweeping range of purple ice-capped peaks.

Brevan's voice: “This is from a surveillance drone, set to follow the bird's flight.”

He was piping up the image from the basement lab.

“The mountains are the Ranfidari Range,” he added. “Three hundred klicks south-east of here.”

Three hundred kilometres.

The unconscious man was interfaced with the condor's brain, as well as his embedded rat.

Impossible—

Tetsuo must have spoken aloud, for Kerrigan replied, “Not really.”

The lab animals were bred—and engineered—for interfacing. That's why they were all Terran species, despite the terraformer's location at the hypozone's edge.

“The rat-implant—” The subcutaneous rat seemed to turn at Kerrigan's gesture, though the man remained unconscious. “—proved the interface could work. Locally, if you like.” Kerrigan pointed at the condor in the display. “Then they added another, remote, brain to the nexus.”

Tetsuo, speechless, shook his head.

Obviously, only a small part of the condor's brain was interfaced. Just a light touch, allowing the organism to function.

If a small, secret group inside TacCorps had gained some of LuxPrime's proprietary VSI tech—If they cracked the protocols completely, they could scan Luculenti thoughts, maybe even influence them…

“No, that's not it,” Tetsuo muttered to himself. “Maybe that's a later goal.”

To increase your plexcore nexus, to any size you want. Such vistas of intellectual potential…He felt a vertiginous sense of potential, poised for expansion. To grow your mind, without limit…

Wasn't that why he'd undergone the upraise?

But, but—

There were good reasons for the LuxPrime legal limit. The greater the nexus size, the greater the chance for transition effects, for the evolution of new patterns of thought, for
nonhuman
thought to occur.

And, always, the increasing overhead of communication flow between the plexcores—

“
Kuso!
” muttered Tetsuo. “
Merde!
”

Kerrigan looked grim, but said nothing.

Tetsuo clenched his teeth. “
Ikkene!
” He had really screwed up.

Why hadn't he seen it sooner?

Why would Rafael have been interested in sponsoring some ragged-ass Earther for upraise? Why, if not for exclusive comms-tech which could be put to such perverted uses?

Tetsuo turned away.

He stared out of the control-centre's window. In front, sparse green grass led to the dark Terran-species forest. To his left, the escarpment's edge. Beyond the sharp drop, roiling tan clouds indicated the start of the hypozone.

“Dear God—”

Bloody fool.

“—What have I done?”

 

Tetsuo's fingers flickered through rapid control gestures. Shards of light fell, blossomed into cubes and tesseracts: flowing text, rivers of colour and twisted volumes of state-space maps. Spinning icons inviting further options.

“I don't understand.” Dhana was at his left shoulder. “What's this got to do with you?”

Tetsuo, intent, seated in front of the display, said nothing.

“There are two technologies at work here.” Kerrigan, standing on Tetsuo's right, answered for him. “VSI tech, to link plexcores and brains together. And mu-space comms.”

Tetsuo's speciality.

“Wait, wait.” Dhana was insistent, wanting to understand. “Why mu-space comms? How is that involved?”

Tetsuo sighed, and turned his chair to face her.

“Look,” he said. “You know you can stimulate a small portion of the brain and produce a sharp sensation: a clear memory of an event, a piece of music, even a smell.”

Dhana nodded.

“OK, but actual thought isn't localized like that.” Tetsuo started to point at a phase-space display, realized it wouldn't illustrate his point without a lot of explanation, and turned back to her. “Thought is spread out across a brain like a wave function. Not exactly holographic, but kind of.”

“Uh, OK.” Dhana's gaze flickered back to the still-unconscious man. “And if you have plexcores, a thought is spread out across brain-plus-plexcores.”

“Across the nexus, right. Where was I?”

“Comms—”

“Well, yes. One component of that guy's nexus is the condor's brain—part of the condor's brain, anyway—and the condor's three hundred klicks away.”

“OK.”

“But at lightspeed, that's a microsecond comms delay each way. Which means—”

“—they're using mu-space comms,” Dhana finished for him. “Instantaneous.”

“Near as damnit.”

“And…What?” Dhana's voice tightened. “You did consultancy for TacCorps?”

“No.” Tetsuo's face was grim as he turned back to manipulate the image. “For my good friend, Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega.”

 

Akisu
. Hacking, into the comms-ware. Tetsuo's fingers flew, and he gave instructions in a rapid-fire mutter, while instantiations of AI logic-trees branched like spreading ferns of glowing code through twenty holo volumes.

“Got it.”

He pointed to a pale ovoid, representing the main driver procedure. Its shell peeled back, unfurled into a solid maze of code.

“There.” His thumb and forefinger formed a circle, and the display zoomed in. “The documentation caption.”

It read,
Copyright © ident: 400IA2.001.Tetsuo Sunadomari2472. All rights reserved.

“Kerrigan?” Tetsuo asked softly. He could sense both Kerrigan and Dhana staring at the text.

“Mm?”

“How did you know my mother's a biologist? And that TacCorps were using my ware?”

A pause. Then, “Don't worry,” Kerrigan said. “I don't think you're responsible for this.”

“I should bloody well hope not.”

There was a strained silence.

“Nice bit of negative publicity for TacCorps.” Dhana's tone was thoughtful. “Going to give it to journalists before the demos?”

“During.” Kerrigan nodded towards the display. “Tetsuo, can you download a copy of that image to a crystal, while we take some pictures of Federico's man, here?”

“Yeah.” Tetsuo slumped in his chair, suddenly exhausted. “I guess so.”

“Welcome—” Kerrigan gave a tight, wry smile. “—to the revolution.”

 

Steam rose from Yoshiko's cup, curling lazily up through the shaft of late morning sunshine which poured through the wide window.

The window overlooked a pond, and the rest of the Sanctuary's grounds. Beyond the black iron railings, out on the green, children were running and playing.

“More?” asked Jana, and poured daistral from a jug.

They were seated in a pleasant polished-redwood dining area; it formed an interior balcony, overlooking the dojo Yoshiko had seen last night.

“Here you are.” Jana blinked as she leaned into the sunlight, and handed Yoshiko the cup.

Jana looked more comfortable when she leaned back into comparative shade. Her triangular, slightly pinched face made her look like a slim feral cat, relaxed but alert.

Down below, in the clean wooden dojo, a practice mat was rolled up against one wall. Any lingering traces of exertion must be subliminal, but Yoshiko somehow knew that Jana and Edralix had been training hard this morning.

Yoshiko, on the other hand, had slept for sixteen hours. On waking, she had tried to call Lori: still unavailable. So was Septor.

Since then, she had sat here in a borrowed robe, sipping nutty daistral and eating dried fruit, trying to think of nothing.

Edralix climbed the stairs up from below, his gait athletic and springy. He sat by the window, pale skin glowing.

“Is this the one?” he asked, handing an infocrystal over to Yoshiko. “It was in your jacket pocket.”

“Thank you.” There was a slot on the low redwood table, and Yoshiko inserted the crystal. “Yes, that's the one.”

The crystal from Tetsuo's house.

Swirling blue. The diagram of a Luculentus mind.

Stolen info?

“Oh.” Blue galaxies of reflected light sparked in Jana's eyes. “That's interesting.”

While Edralix adroitly manipulated the display, Yoshiko explained about Rafael. Vin had been lying, dead or dying, on Yoshiko's bed. Rafael had seen the diagram displayed on Yoshiko's bedside terminal, left in memory from previous use.

“He just stared at it, really coldly.” Even the memory of it chilled Yoshiko. “He looked ready to kill. And his voice—”

No, not his voice. His eyes.

She had seen that inhuman, reptilian depth in his eyes, and known instantly that he was responsible for what had happened to Xanthia. And to Vin.

“Got it.” Edralix was almost humming to himself. “Interesting, that someone's decrypted this completely.”

A kaleidoscope of flaring light washed over them, as Edralix rapidly manipulated variables, flicking through choices of axes, selecting three or four parameters at a time.

“How many state variables are there?” asked Jana.

“Eighty-three primaries.” He added, almost with relish, “That's recorded physical variables. There's an impressive list of derived functions, which is much greater. They're probably the sensible things to plot, as well.”

A smile twitched across Jana's face.

“You mean this is going to take a while.”

“Well—”

“If only my NetAgents worked in Skein—” Yoshiko held up her left hand. Her wedding band and the one remaining tu-ring, the one which had been too tight to remove, glinted in the light. “—I might have been able to analyse it myself.”

Edralix froze the display, and leaned forward through a torn sheet of light, a strange attractor in an unlabelled phase-space, and looked at
Yoshiko's tu-ring. Its status light burned dull orange, as it had since her arrival on Fulgor.

“It's probably just a matter of protocols. Didn't they say anything about NetEnv devices at spaceport immigration?”

“No. Unless I missed it.”

“Groundlings,” Edralix muttered. “Er—”

“No offence,” said Yoshiko, as Jana laughed.

“Um, here's some descriptive text, but—” He paused, as a tesseract of text opened up, sheets of glowing metallic green script in four orthogonal emulated dimensions.

“Don't worry.” Yoshiko tried not to sound proud, for these Pilots could visualize many more dimensions than she. “I ken FourSpeak.”

“Hmm. OK.” Edralix was intent on the instructions now, his embarrassment forgotten. “Well, here goes.”

The phase state display which sprang up was similar to before, but now revolving cubes of text and informational cartoon-graphics and InfoSprites floated and hovered among the pulsing sheets of light.

“That's better.” Jana touched a sprite, and it began to talk about ion concentration gradients in a high crystalline voice, while supplementary script unfurled. “Now we can see what the pretty pictures mean.”

They explored the diagram in minute detail. After twenty minutes, during which Edralix three times used another terminal to check technical explanations, they ground to a halt.

“That's it.” Jana leaned back in her seat. “Next one, I suppose.”

Jangling sheets of light tumbled and rearranged as an entirely new diagram, all silvery grey spaces and torn violet attractors, grew into being. A host of sprites and icons formed.

Yoshiko stared.

“How many variations are there? We could spend weeks checking every combination of parameters. Just what are we looking for?”

Edralix looked up at Jana, and shrugged.

Jana's eyes glittered.

“Something worth killing for,” she said.

After three hours, they called a halt, and Jana fetched carbo-chews and more daistral while Edralix obeyed her instructions to relax.