“Are you ready?” one asked.
Paul smiled. “Oh yes.” The last couple of weeks had been busy ones, itself a blessing at his age. First the devastating news of possession.
Then the slow response, the determination by himself and the others at his elite West End club that they should not become victims of the beyond. The web of discreet contacts put out, offering an alternative for those who could pay for it. His solicitors and accountants had been tasked with shifting his substantial holdings into a long-term trust that would pay for maintaining his stasis. It didn’t cost much: maintenance, rent, and power. Even if the trust was badly bungled, he had enough money in the bank to keep himself secure for ten thousand years. Then once it had been arranged, there had been the arguments with his children and their swarm of offspring, all of whom had adopted a quiet waiting policy to obtain his wealth. A brief legal battle (he could afford much better lawyers than they), and that was it, and here he was: a new breed of chrononaut.
His habitual dread of the future had faded, replaced by a keen interest in what awaited. When the zero-tau field switched off, there would be a full solution to the beyond, society would have evolved radically to take knowledge of the afterlife into account. There might even be a decent rejuvenation treatment available. Possibly, humans would have finally achieved physical immortality. He would become as a god.
A flicker of greyness, shorter than an eyeblink …
The pod cover lifted, and Paul Jerrold was slightly surprised to see he was still in the Lancini. He’d expected to be in some huge technological vault, or perhaps a tasteful recovery room. Not right back where his voyage through eternity had started. Unless these new, magnificently advanced humans had re-created the Lancini to provide their ancestors with the psychological comfort of familiar territory, a considerate way to ease their introduction to this fabulous new civilization built in his absence.
He glanced eagerly through the big, dirty window opposite. Dusk had fallen across the Westminster Dome. The thriving lights of the south bank glimmered brightly in front of the steel grey clouds smothering the vast arc of the dome. A projection of some kind?
The pair of medical staff attending him were somewhat unconventional. A girl leaned over the pod, very young, with amazingly large breasts squeezed up by a tight leather waistcoat. The adolescent boy standing beside her wore an expensive pure-wool sweater that was somehow wrong on him; his face was stubbly, with animal-mad eyes. He held a loop of power cable in one hand, plug dangling loosely.
Paul took one look at the plug, and datavised an emergency code. He couldn’t get a response from any net processor; then his neural nanonics crashed. A third figure clad in a jet-black robe slipped out of the gloom to stand at the foot of the pod.
“Who are you?” Paul croaked in fright. He levered himself up into a sitting position, skinny hands with their bulging veins gripping the edge of the pod.
“You know exactly who we are,” Quinn said.
“Have you won? Did you defeat us?”
“We’re going to, yes.”
“Oww shit, Quinn,” Billy-Joe protested. “Look at these old farts, they ain’t good for nothing. No soul’s gonna make them last, not even with your kind of black magic.”
“They’ll last long enough. That’s all that matters.”
“I told you, you want decent possessed you gotta go to the sects for bodies. Fuck, they worship you. All you’ve gotta do it tell them to bend over, they ain’t gonna put up no fight.”
“God’s Brother,” Quinn growled. “Don’t you ever think, shithead? The sects are a lie. I’ve told you, they’re controlled by the supercops. I can’t go to them for anything, we’d just give ourselves away. This place is fucking perfect. Nobody’s going to notice people going missing from here, as far as this world’s concerned they stopped existing as soon as they walked through the door.” His face jutted out of the hood to grin down at Paul. “Right?”
“I have money.” It was Paul’s last gambit, the one thing everyone desired.
“That’s good,” Quinn said. “You’re almost one of us already. You don’t have far to go.” He pointed a finger, and Paul’s world howled into pain.
Western Europe had hooked eight AIs in to London’s communication net, which gave him enough processing capacity to review each chunk of electronic circuitry in the arcology on a ten second cycle, providing it had a net connection. All processor blocks, no matter what their function, were datavised on a fifteen-second rota and examined for suspect glitches.
He wasn’t the only worried citizen. Several commercial software houses had gripped the marketing opportunity and offered possession monitoring packages. It consisted of a neural nanonics program which sent a continual capacity diagnostic and location datavise to the company security centre, who would alert the police if the user suffered an unexplained glitch or drop out. Bracelets were also spilling into the shops which did the same thing for kids too young for neural nanonics.
Communication bandwidth was becoming a serious problem. Western Europe had used GSDI authority to prioritize the AI scanning programs, leaving them unimpeded while civil data traffic suffered unheard of capacity reductions and switching delays.
The visualization of the arcology’s electronic structure was a theatrical gesture, impressing no one. It stood on the table of the sensenviron secure conference chamber like an elaborate glass model of the ten domes.
Fans of coloured light rotated through the miniature translucent structures with strobe-like repetition.
South Pacific studied their movement as the other B7 supervisor representations came on line around the oval table. When all sixteen were there, she asked: “So where is he, then?”
“Not in Edmonton,” North America said. “We kicked their asses out of the universe. The whole goddamn nest of them. There’s none of the bastards left.”
“Really?” Asian Pacific said. “So you’ve accounted for the friend of Carter McBride as well, have you?”
“He’s not a threat to the arcology, he only wants Dexter.”
“Crap. You can’t find him, and he’s just an ordinary possessed.” Asian Pacific waved an arm at the simulacrum of London. “All they have to do is steer clear of electronics, and they’re safe.”
“Got to eat sometime,” Southern Africa said. “It’s not like they’ve got friends to take care of them.”
“The Light Bringer sect loves them,” East Asia grumbled.
“The sects are ours,” Western Europe said. “We have no worries in that direction.”
“Okay,” South Pacific said. “So tell us how you’re doing in New York? We all thought the police had got them that time as well.”
“Ah yes,” Military Intelligence said. “What’s the phrase the news anchors keep using? Hydra Syndrome. Shove one possessed into zero-tau, and while you’re doing that five more come forth. Emotive figures, but true.”
“New York got out of hand,” North America said. “I wasn’t prepared for that.”
“Obviously. How many domes have been taken over now?”
“Figures of that magnitude are unnecessarily emotive,” Western Europe said. “Once the possessed base population climbs above two thousand, there’s nothing anyone can do. The exponential curve takes over and the arcology is lost. New York is going to be this planet’s Mortonridge. It’s not our concern.”
“Not our concern!” North Pacific said. “This is bullshit. Of course it’s our concern. If they spread through the arcologies this whole planet will be lost.”
“Large numbers are not our concern. The military will have to deal with New York later.”
“If it’s still here, and if they don’t turn cannibal. The food vats won’t work around possessed, you know, and the weather shields won’t hold, either.”
“They’re reinforcing the domes they’ve captured with their energistic power,” North America said. “The arcology caught the tail end of an armada storm last night. The domes all held.”
“Only until they complete their takeover,” South Pacific said. “The remaining domes can’t barricade themselves in forever.”
“New York’s inevitable fall is regrettable, I’m sure,” Western Europe said. “But not relevant. We have to accept it as a defeat and move forward. B7 is about prevention, not cure. And in order to prevent Earth itself from falling, we have to eliminate Quinn Dexter.”
“So like I asked, where is he?”
“Undetermined at this moment.”
“You lost him, didn’t you? You blew it. He was a sitting duck in Edmonton, but you thought you were smarter. You thought your dandy little psychology game would triumph. Your arrogance could have enslaved us all.”
“Interesting tense, there,” Western Europe snapped. “Could have. You mean, until you saved the day by closing down the vac-trains, after we agreed not to screw each other over.”
“The President had a very strong public mandate for closing them down. After Edmonton’s High Noon firefight, the whole world was clamouring for a shutdown.”
“Led by your news companies,” Southern Africa said.
Western Europe leaned over the table towards a smiling South Pacific, his head centimetres short of the simulacrum. “I got them back, you moronic bitch. Banneth and Louise Kavanagh returned to London safely. Dexter will do everything in his power to follow them there. But he can’t bloody well do that if he’s trapped in Edmonton. Six trains, that’s all that got out before your stupid shut down order. Six! It’s not enough to be certain.”
“If he’s as good as you seem to think, he would have got on one of them.”
“You’d better hope he has, because if he was left behind you can kiss goodbye to Edmonton. We have nothing in place there which could confirm his existence.”
“So we lose two arcologies. The rest are now guaranteed safe.”
“I lose two arcologies,” North America said. “Thanks to you. Do you realize how much territory that is for me?”
“Paris,” South Pacific said. “Bombay, Johannesburg. Everyone’s taking losses today.”
“You’re not. And the possessed are on the run in those arcologies. We have them locked down, thanks to the sects. None of those will escalate into a repetition of New York.”
“We hope,” said India. “I’m managing parity at the moment, that’s all. But panic is going to be a factor in the very near future. And that works to their advantage.”
“You’re quibbling over details,” South Pacific said. “The point is, there are methods of solving this problem other than obsessing over Dexter. My policy is the correct one. Confine them while we engineer a permanent solution. If that had been adopted at the start, we would have lost the Brazilian tower ground station at most.”
“We didn’t know what we were dealing with when Dexter arrived,” South America said. “We were always going to lose one arcology to him.”
“Dear me, I had no idea this was a policy forum,” Western Europe said. “I thought we were conducting a progress review.”
“Well, as you’ve made no progress …” South Pacific said sweetly.
“If he’s in London, he won’t be found by conventional means. I thought we’d established that. And for your information, total inactivity isn’t a policy, it’s just the wishful thinking of small minds.”
“I’ve stopped the spread of possession. Remind us what you’ve achieved?”
“You’re fiddling while Rome burns. The cause of the fire is our paramount concern.”
“Eliminating Dexter will not remove the possessed in New York or anywhere else. I vote we devote a higher percentage of our scientific resources to finding a permanent solution.”
“I find it hard to credit that even you are playing politics with this. Percentages aren’t going to make the slightest difference to the beyond at this stage. Anyone who can provide a relevant input to the problem had been doing just that since the very beginning. We don’t need to call in the auditors to verify our compassion credentials, they’re hardly quantifiable in any case.”
“If you don’t want to be a part of the project, fine. Be sure you don’t endanger us any further by your irresponsibility.”
Western Europe cancelled his representation, withdrawing from the conference. The simulacrum of London vanished with him.
The cave was at the lowest level of the endcap caverns, protected on all sides by hundreds of metres of solid polyp. Tolton felt quite secure inside it; first time in a long time.
Originally a servitor veterinary centre, it had been pressed into use as a physics lab. Dr Patan headed up the team which the Valisk personality had charged with making sense of the dark continuum. He’d greeted Dariat’s arrival with the joy of a long-lost son. There had been dozens of experiments, starting with simple measurements: temperature (Dariat’s ersatz body was eight degrees warmer than liquid nitrogen, and almost perfectly heat resistant) electrical resistivity (abandoned quickly when Dariat protested at the pain). Then came energy spectrum and quantum signature analysis. The most interesting part for a layman observer like Tolton was when Dariat gave a sample of himself. Patan’s team quickly decided an in-depth study was impossible when the fluid was being animated by Dariat’s thoughts. Attempts to stick a needle into him and draw some away proved impossible, the tip wouldn’t penetrate his skin. In the end it was down to Dariat himself, holding his hand over a glass dish and pricking himself with a pin which he’d conjured into existence by imagination. Red blood dripped out, changing as it fell away from him.
Slightly sticky grey-white fluid splattered into the bowl. It was carried away triumphantly by the physicists. Dariat and Tolton exchanged a bemused look, and went to sit at the back of the lab.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tear off a bit of cloth from your toga?” Tolton asked. “I mean, it’s all the same stuff, right?”
Dariat gave him a flabbergasted look. “Bugger. I never thought of that.”
They spent the next couple of hours talking quietly, with Dariat filling in the details of his ordeal. The conversation stopped a couple of hours later when he fell silent, and gave the physicists a cheerless glance.
They’d been quiet for several minutes, five of them and Erentz studying the results of a gamma spike microscope. Their expressions were even more worried than Dariat’s.
“What have you found?” Tolton asked.
“Dariat might be right,” Erentz said. “Entropy here in the dark continuum appears to be stronger than in our universe.”
“For once I wish I hadn’t said I told you so,” Dariat said.
“How do you know?” Tolton asked.
“We have contended this state for some time,” Dr Patan said. “This substance seems to confirm that. Although I can’t give you an absolute yet.”
“What the hell is it, then?”
“Best description?” Dr Patan smiled thinly. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing? But he’s solid.”
“Yes. The fluid is a perfect neutral substance, the end product of total decay. That’s the best definition I can give you based on our results. A gamma spike microscope allows us to probe sub-atomic particles. A most useful device for us physicists. Unfortunately, this fluid has no sub-atomic particles. There are no atoms as such; it appears to be made up from a single particle, one with a neutral charge.”
Tolton summoned up his first grade physics didactic memories. “You mean neutrons?”
“No. This particle’s rest mass is much lower than that. It has a small attractive force, which gives it its fluidic structure. But that’s its only quantifiable property. I doubt it would ever form a solid, not even if you were to assemble a supergiant star mass of the stuff. In our own universe, that much cold matter will collapse under its own gravity to form neutronium. Here, we believe there’s another stage of decay before that happens. Energy is constantly evaporating out of electrons and protons, breaking down their elementary particle cohesion. In the dark continuum dissipation rat
her than contraction would appear to be the norm.”
“Is evaporating? You mean we’re leaking energy out of our atoms right now?”
“Yes. It would certainly explain why our electronic systems are suffering so much degradation.”
“How long till we dissolve into that stuff?” Tolton yelped.
“We haven’t determined that yet. Now we know what we’re looking for, we will begin calibrating the loss rate.”
“Oh shit.” He whirled round to face Dariat. “The lobster pot, that’s what you called this place. We’re not going to get out, are we.”
“With a little help from the Confederation, we can still make it back, atoms intact.”
Tolton’s mind was racing ahead with the concept now. “If I just fall apart into that fluid, my soul will be able to pull it back together. I’ll be like you.”
“If your soul contains enough life-energy, yes.”
“But that fades away as well… Yours does, you had to steal more from that ghost. And those entities outside, they’re all battling for life-energy. That’s all they do. Ever.”
Dariat smiled with sad sympathy. “That’s the way it goes here.” He broke off and stared at a high corner of the cave. The physicists did the same, their expressions all showing concern.
“Now what?” Tolton demanded. He couldn’t see anything up there.
“Looks like our visitors have got tired with the southern endcap,” Dariat told him. “They’re coming here.”
The first of three Confederation Navy Marine flyers soared across Regina just as twilight fell. Sitting in the mid-fuselage passenger lounge, Samual Aleksandrovich accessed the craft’s sensor suite to see the city below. Street lighting, adverts, and skyscrapers were responding to the vanishing sun by throwing their own iridescent corona across the urban landscape. He’d seen the sight many times before, but tonight the traffic along the freeways was thinner than usual.
It corresponded to the mood reported by the few news shows he’d grazed over the last couple of days. The Organization’s attack had left the population badly shaken. Of all the Confederation worlds, they had supposed Avon to be second only to Earth in terms of safety. But now Earth’s arcologies had been infested, and Trafalgar was so badly damaged it was being evacuated. There wasn’t a countryside hotel room to be had anywhere on the planet as people claimed their outstanding vacation days or called in sick.