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 tin-tinations round and round dizzying moire connectivities, interlac-ing 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 undimin-ished.
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 all 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.