Strictly speaking, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She is no physicist, no geologist. The actual nature of the forces she is tapping matters as little to Daisy as the manufacturing details of a computer. All are technical fields that other experts studied, analyzed, and then reduced to beautifully simple, publicly accessible world-models.
Daisy knows all about models. She’s stolen many choice ones recently, from her now-extinct cousins, from her ex-husband’s employers, from all those clever males who thought they knew so much. She deals with the Earth’s interior now through such software intermediaries, as an enchantress might coerce nature by commanding demons and sprites to do her bidding for her. She treats the roiling, surging channels of superconductivity far below as she formerly did the highways and byways of the Net, as yet another domain to rule by proxy, by subroutine, by force of will.
In minutes a terrible storm of death has been unleashed across Java. Now she directs her attention below again, gathering yet another bundle of energy to focus against that funny, strange mirror some called a “singularity,” crafting yet another death cyclone to unleash this time on an obscene so-called “civilization” force-grown in a desert—Southern California.
But what’s this? In a faraway quarter, Daisy senses a presence where she’d thought all competition vanquished. Where only the dead were supposed to reign!
At the briefest of commands, her familiars streak to check out this effrontery …
Alex rocked back in dismay. For an instant the whirling sphere had conveyed a sudden, vivid illusion of slitted lizards’ eyes! Only by quickly switching channels, sending his machine spinning along a new axis, did he make that looming presence vanish from the glistening globe.
He breathed raggedly for a moment. All right. Don’t let it shake you!
But it was impossible to escape the sense of loneliness. Always, before, he’d had scores of skilled workers to help him. True, they called him “wizard” and “tohunga.” But press flacks and Nobel committees to the contrary, no scientist with a grain of honesty ever claims he “did it all alone.”
And yet, that’s exactly what I’ve got to do now.
With a shuddering sigh, Alex pictured the Earth’s involute interior, now livid with convecting magnetism, strung and laced with man-modified channels of surging current. Those currents had grown more finely filigreed every day since his first, tentative scans so long ago, in search of Alpha and then Beta. Now they were a jungle of connections through which he must find a way to do battle.
No more delays. You’ll have just one chance to take them by surprise.
And so, with desperate determination, he triggered his best shot.
Again, for the briefest instant he thought he saw a glitter of scales sweep across the spinning sphere, which were chased off by a ripple of tawny orange and black. In an eye-blink the apparitions were gone and the battle joined.
The explosion feels like an abrupt amputation. Suddenly, one of her captive resonators vanishes from the Earth’s surface, as if an arm or leg had been sliced away, cauterized by actinic heat.
“Damn!” Daisy cries. “It’s that meddler on the island again.”
She must put off for a little while her next project—scourging the ancient hub where Asia and Africa and Europe meet, where man first took up the cursed profession of farmer. This new nuisance must take priority over even that too-long-delayed correction.
She swings on-line those extra resonators seized after the cleansing of Tokyo and Colorado Springs. This should take only a few moments.…
Sweat nearly blinded Alex as the near miss swept past. For an instant he’d felt as one might if Beta itself were nearby—yanked by tides so strong the fluids in his head surged like the Bay of Fundy. He shuddered to imagine what the surface of Rapa Nui must look like now, outside the narrow, frail zone of protection he’d erected. He hoped silently it was large enough to include Teresa, elsewhere aboard tiny Atlantis.
Then Alex was too busy even for hope. He parried another blow, reflecting the beam directly back to its point of origin. That had no effect of course—not on these bands. By now he knew all those sites were being operated by remote control.
Actually, this antihuman resonance is simple. Given a little time, I could easily devise a counter …
Unfortunately, there was no time. Warding off increasingly furious attacks took nearly everything he had, though at one point he grabbed a spare instant to send forth another remise, narrowly missing the Saharan site, knocking its resonator out of alignment before having to pull back and duck a fresh four-way assault.
This can’t go on, he thought. His new sphere was nimbler than any other machine, and he could tell he was better than his opponent—somehow it felt like a single opponent. But the enemy could attack from many sides at once, while sparing other resources to continue the horrible program of mass murder.
This can’t go on, she thinks. With a tiny corner of her attention, she sees on a house monitor that her ex-husband has arrived. With Claire and a neighbor boy, he pounds on the front door, calling for her. They look worried, but nowhere near as much as if they knew the truth.
So. Let them stew. By standing where they are, they have earned places among the ten thousand. Good. That’s all the courtesy she owes them. Anyway, Daisy has more immediate concerns.
A bunch of clever soldiers has launched a kamikaze raid of zeps and small planes toward the Colorado site, loaded with explosives and meant to impact in great numbers. They hope to achieve a knockout blow by sheer firepower.
Daisy is less worried about this pathetic attempt than about the clever men and women on one of the space stations, who are wrestling an experimental solar power beam away from its designated target, reprogramming it to focus on the Saharan cylinder.
Then there are the hackers … a number of them now suspect the Net itself is being used to control the death machines. More dangerous than official authorities, the amateurs are worrisome indeed—the undisciplined ones, whose curiosity and skill doom any secret to eventual discovery.
She doesn’t need long-range secrecy, though. Only an hour or less. So she sends little surrogate voices to whisper to the best of them, offering “helpful” rumors and other distractions. “Keep them busy for a while,” she orders her familiars.
The clever boy on Easter Island is stymied for a moment. Daisy returns to crafting another death angel, this one to send toward Central America, where there are still a few forests left to save. Those stands of trees will serve as good seed stock for ecological recovery, once the human population is gone.
There! Now it’s time to turn back to her main enemy and eliminate him finally, completely. Then the Earth’s interior will be hers, and hers alone.
In the morass of demanding input, she must draw the line somewhere. So Daisy ignores what is going on to her left—on the movie-enhancement wall—where Hercules and Samson still struggle with their bonds as she had left them doing so long ago. She doesn’t notice that the straining heroes have been joined by an interloper. A great cat strolls onstage. Scarred and wounded, but rumbling low with feral interest, it strokes against the movie heroes’ legs, and then sits at their feet, watching her.
“I can’t hold on!” Alex cried out, parrying blow after buffeting blow. Knowing full well there was no one to offer any aid, he prayed nonetheless. “God help me!”
Then, in a foxhole conversion—
“Mother … help us!”
It was an involuntary shout. But the subvocal made no such fine distinctions. It amplified his words in focused gravitational waves, pouring reverberating echoes toward the core of the world.
Small datums suffuse through and among all the excited energy states, stimulating amplification. His words pluck vibrating resonances along magnetic threads where liquid metal meets pressure-strained, electrified rock. They spiral as throbbing tintinations round and round dizzying moiré connectivities, interlacing with prior inputs—those insistent probings and palpations
which month after month had forced changes in ancient rhythms, driving them faster, faster, ever faster.
Beta responds; its geometrodynamic foldings crimp and flower through intricate topologies. New, angular reflections of his words cascade from the singularity, diffusing into more directions than mere Euclidean equations can describe.
Complexity meshes with complexity. What had been done to these realms for so long had wrought fine patternings, soft, impressionable matrices ripe for newer, even more intricate templates, such as had been delivered only hours before in a tunneling from Africa. Patterns for a tentative model based on the most complex thing ever to exist under the sun—
A human mind.
Tendrils pervade the meshed brilliance … channels of flow connect it with the outer skin, where sunlight falls and entropy escapes into black space, and where creatures have already laid down a thick, fertile webbery of data. Pulsing gigabytes, terabytes, whistle as they slide up and down a multitude of scales. All the outer world’s libraries, its storms of ferment and distraction, the noise of all its pain … these link up in sudden coherence, into that single prayer.
“ … help … us …”
Two giant patternings … above, the Net; below, those prominences of supercurrent, rising and falling in new order … these are now linked, intertwined. There is no dearth of data, of mere information to pour into this new matrix, this new singularity of metaphors. Each time a beam of tortured space rips apart some screaming human up above, another testimony joins the torrent. And yet, the thirst to absorb grows undiminished.
Is there a theme? Any central focus to unite the whole?
“ … help us … somebody!”
Much of the information is incompatible, or so it seems at first. Some declarative facts counter others. Priorities conflict. Yet even that seems to elicit something like a thought … like a notion.
Competition … Cooperation …
Hints at a theme—something that might come out of such writhing, whirling complexity, if only the right template were found.
“ … help us … Mother …”
Crystallization, condensation … amidst all the driving, opposing forces, there must rise something to arbitrate. Some convenient fiction.
Something to be aware and choose.
Two candidates emerge above ail others … two contenders for awareness. Two designs for a Mother. Upon a hundred million computer displays and several billion holovision sets all programming is preempted by a stunning vision—a dragon and a tiger, facing off. All prior encounters have been preliminary, allegorical. But now they roar and leap with the power of software titans, driven by terawatt inductance, colliding in an explosive struggle to the death.
Million-amp currents thrash against each other, driving channels for new volcanoes as mere side effects to the birthing of a mind.
Alex screamed as sudden, unimaginable pain tore at his temples.
“Jen!” he cried, and then collapsed, arms cradling the housing of a sphere whose song rose in pitch as it spun faster, faster, faster …
Now she knows the truth—that the Net she has always thought a grand domain is only a province, a tendril of something larger. A being. An entire world. All it lacks is a guiding consciousness to bring it order!
She had resigned herself that the Net would end with the passing of Homo electronicus. Ten thousand hunter-gatherers couldn’t maintain anything so complex. She wouldn’t want them to.
But this new matrix will need no communications satellites, no pipelines crammed with optical fibers, no microwave towers or engineers to maintain them. Daisy wonders at the beauty she foresees once her task of winnowing humanity has been completed. There will be no limits to what she might accomplish through this medium. Ancient gods could only have dreamt of such power!
She’d rechannel aquifers and move rivers. She’d use sere bursts of energy to break apart man’s chemical poisons, festering in dumps and sewers. She’d shake down dams and dissolve the empty cities, resurrecting the wasted topsoil hidden beneath parking lots. Under her guidance the world will soon be as it was before being brought near ruin by humankind.
Logan and Claire have stopped their futile hammering on the front door. Distractedly, she detects them via another monitor, clambering onto the roof in search of a way to reach her. There they might find entry somehow—or worse, disturb the antennae through which the next few minutes’ climactic struggle will be fought. Daisy reaches for a switch that will send deadly current surging through hidden wires.
But no. Her hand stops short. She knows her cautious husband. He’ll be judicious, polite, careful. In other words, he’ll give her plenty of time.
She checks her gravity resonators and sees they are doing well. With the Easter Island foe apparently knocked off-line, there will be no threats to her machines for several hundred seconds at least. By then it will be too late to interfere meaningfully with her accelerating cleansing of the continents. So far her death angels have barely reaped millions, but that would speed up with each new one she ripens and unleashes forth.…
A whirl of color yanks her attention to the left, and her eyes widen in surprise at the sudden, silent battle depicted there—between a dragon and a great cat! What’s this doing on her simulation wall? This came from no TwenCen movie! The rending, tearing creatures bellow in mute, nostril-flared agony, amid flying scales and smoking fur more vivid by far than any real image.
Daisy suddenly recognizes the tiger motif of her worst enemy, whom she had thought already dead. “Wolling!” she gasps.
In an instant she knows the portent of this struggle. It isn’t just resonator against resonator anymore. The computational power of all those nodes below, outnumbering the combined circuits of all the Net—that was the ultimate prize, and someone else was after it! Whoever succeeded in establishing her program first would have it all!
Furiously Daisy turns to unleash all her minions. All her slave resonators swing inward, concentrating their power.
Teresa was reminded of an old riddle—
“The last man on Earth sits alone in a room. There is a knock on the door …”
At the unexpected sound, she dropped her tools and ran to the hatch. There, peering through the little, round, double-reinforced window, she gasped on seeing the familiar, absurd mustachioed visage of Pedro Manella. Teresa swore and yanked the hissing door release. “I thought you were a ghost!” she cried as he stepped inside.
“I might be, had I not taken shelter under your wing, so to speak. I only just gathered the nerve to try the stairs.”
“Are there any others? I mean—”
Pedro shook his head with a shiver. “It’s too horrible for words.” He looked around. “Is Lustig here? I assume so, since you and I are still alive.”
“He’s in back, fighting whatever it is. If only there-were some way to help him—”
She cut short as the ship suddenly moaned around them. The deck rocked left, throwing her against Manella. Then Atlantis swayed the other way.
“Quakes!” Pedro cried. “I thought we’d finished with such simple-minded stuff.”
His wit wasn’t welcome. Teresa pushed him away and moved with a wide, catlike stance across the rocking deck. “Got to check on Alex. He could be …” Then she stopped, blinking. “Oh, no.”
The colors. They were back with a vengeance.
Teresa screamed over her shoulder at Manella. “Find a place to tie yourself down!” As the shaking grew in intensity, she fought her way through the airlock to find Alex slumped over at the resonator. She barely had time to strap him down before all hell broke loose.
Not far below Rapa Nui lay a hot, slender needle—an ancient, narrow plume of magma—part of the mantle’s grand recirculation system. This very needle had made the island many millennia ago, piercing through a scrap of crustal plate to erect this lonely outpost in the sea. For quite some time since then, however, it had lain quiescent.
Now the boil is squeezed by sudden,
transient, titanic forces, pinching molten rock up the confined funnel at awesome pressures, driving it toward those old calderas.
And yet, even at the same moment, something else flies through the same space, traveling just ahead of that explosive constriction … something less coercive, subtler, whose fingers of laced gravity unfold like an opening hand.
Instinct took over amid the dazzle and roaring noise. Somehow she made it up the quivering ladder to the command deck, where she launched herself into the pilot’s seat and began flicking switches by pure rote. “Oh shit!” she cried, hearing the fateful prang of metal bolts popping free under strain. The ancient shuttle’s fractured spine complained with a horrible shriek as Teresa felt a sudden surge of acceleration—the seat-of-the-pants sensation of being airborne.
It can’t be! This ship can’t fly … this ship can’t fly … this ship can’t fly …
The wings couldn’t bear launch loads. She’d seen X rays of the shuttle’s broken back—the reason Atlantis had been abandoned on a forlorn island in the first place.
An island that no longer existed, from what little she could see as she strained to turn her head. Atlantis rose atop a pillar of flame, but there was no rocket. Instead she hurtled just ahead of a towering volcanic plume, reawakened and roaring where only moments ago a tiny Polynesian islet had quietly defied the waves.
Grimacing from g-forces, Teresa nevertheless gripped the cockpit control sticks and felt a strange joy. Perhaps, in some corner of her mind, she had suspected all along it would come to this. Suddenly she feared nothing. After all, wasn’t this the best of all possible ways to go? Flying? In command of a sweet old bird that should never have been left corroding on a pedestal, but should only die in space?
Even the visceral sensations were grand. She felt as she had as a little girl, when her father used to throw her into the air, and she had known, with utter certainty, he would be there to catch her. Always there to sweep her out of harm’s way.