“Von Neumann machines?” Nayar said. In case the others didn’t know, he added, “They act like self-replicating nanoprobes.”
“Which are completely theoretical,” Harley said.
As always, Weldon spoke to the practical matter. “Well, they’re here now. Can they be killed?”
“Since you think she knows, ask her!” Bynum pointed to Camilla.
“Hey, listen,” Sasha said, “we have a limited ability to communicate with this girl. I mean, I don’t give a shit if what you say is filling her head…. If she can’t tell us in our limited German, it’s useless. Second, she’s nine years old. She’s been through an incredible trauma—”
“I have some idea what it’s like,” Bynum said.
“You were an adult,” Sasha said. “And you woke up in a world where you already had some idea what had happened to you, where people spoke your language—” For a moment, Gabriel thought that the tall redhead was going to punch the newly reborn White House man.
But, Revenant or not, Brent Bynum still possessed the ability to read a situation, then adapt. “You’re right,” he said. “I apologize. I just…have this information boiling inside me. It’s like I have to tell you and right now, or I’ll just explode. And you’re supposed to act on it, too.”
“We are acting,” Weldon said. “In a few minutes, we’re going to eradicate those bugs,” he said, pointing out the front of the Temple. “Then we’ll get to dealing with the, ah, what did you call them? Larger aggregates?”
Harley turned to Nayar and Gabriel. “Could you gentlemen find out where our weapons program is?”
They headed for the ramp.
Gabriel Jones didn’t believe in magic. ESP, Tarot, or his particular bugaboo—astrology—none of those subjects had ever impressed him as worth a moment’s thought.
Not that he didn’t appreciate wonder, not that, in spite of a hard-won stone-cold atheism, he didn’t subscribe to the biblical preaching that there are “many mansions,” that there were things human beings did not know or understand about the universe—and maybe never would.
The real problem was that all these systems seemed too easy. Think it, do it. Turn over the right card and you know the future. Speak a few words and a woman falls in love with you.
Really? How? With no cost? No use of energy?
Nevertheless, like anyone who was fascinated by the universe as it existed, who had watched Star Trek, he had an appreciation for Arthur C. Clarke’s statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
By that standard, after a few hours’ exposure to the wonders of the Temple, Gabriel Jones was now an official believer in magic.
Just a few hours ago, he had been so out of it—so close to death—that he had no memory of how he had moved from his lonely corner of the first floor of the Temple to this third-story marvel…what now looked like a state-of-the-art chemical laboratory.
“We carried you,” Vikram Nayar told him.
He returned to wakefulness there, lying on a composite slab of some kind, one plasticlike tube sucking blood out of him, another feeding it back in, Jaidev Mahabala perched on the stool.
“Don’t tell me Bangalore had this stashed away,” he said, happy to be able to offer a lame but spirited joke.
Jaidev was the engineer in charge, busy continuing his exploration of the various panels. He took Gabriel’s remark seriously. “Of course not. The Temple system constructed it. And if you look closely, you’ll realize it looks nothing like a dialysis machine. But it does seem to be making you better, correct?”
“Feels good, I’ll say that.” Gabriel had had only a handful of encounters with such machines, so he had no real idea of what older or foreign models might look like. And in truth, most of this one was hidden inside the “cabinets.”
Nevertheless, with every few heartbeats, or more likely, every few cubic centimeters of cleansed blood, Gabriel could feel his strength returning. “With all the things the group needs, this really wasn’t a priority—”
“In one sense,” said one of Jaidev’s colleagues, “this was a good test, to see if we could progress beyond the replication of food, water, and basic tools to more complex items.”
“I’m glad you did.”
Jaidev shook his head as he continued to uncover various screens on the panel, and screens within them. He reminded Gabriel of a teenage boy scope-locked on a video game. “First, you’re going to need this again. Second, we could reprogram the machine into something entirely different.” The engineer rapped his knuckle on the countertop. “Everything apparently starts as plasm. And with the proper commands, it can be reshaped into extremely complex devices.”
“I wonder what goodies you can make that we don’t know about,” Gabriel said, suddenly seeing possibilities. “Okay, it’s 3-D printing to the nth degree. I just don’t really understand it—”
Jaidev smiled. “When we first got here, we found walls, surfaces, blank panels. We simply started touching them to see what would happen. We got light. We got…these command panels.”
The second engineer chimed in with enthusiasm. “They don’t have words, but they have symbols and figures.”
“The Architects seem to organize data and functions from the top down…from simple to less simple to complex.”
“It’s quite a leap from a Crock-Pot to even a coffeemaker.”
“Remember,” Jaidev said, “this habitat was designed to adapt to whatever beings enter it. Something is scanning us for body mass, temperature, chemical composition, then rearranging everything, from soil to air to plants and structures, to match those needs. So the system is preloaded for human beings. It was really just waiting for us to—”
“—to start touching things.”
“Still,” Gabriel said. He obviously had the evidence sticking into his arm, but he was curious as to how passionate, and informed, Jaidev was on this subject. He was, after all, the human race’s only expert on Keanu design and fabrication.
The other, older engineer—Daksha was his name—was, if possible, even more enthusiastic. “Look, Dr. Jones, we had no ability to design a dialysis machine. We simply entered commands in the medical area of the panels…essentially telling the system, do things that people here need. The system recognized your problem and adapted. We have other devices here now, too, and we don’t really know what they’re for, or for whom!”
“Sounds like ESP,” Gabriel said.
“We don’t understand what part of the electromagnetic spectrum they’re using,” Jaidev said.
“—Or even if it’s electromagnetic.”
“I think we’ve already seen that the Architects have access to…information in states that we do not.” He smiled. “But, truly, it was almost like typing two letters on your computer, and having it finish the word for you.”
Scratch that disdain for ESP or telepathy.
“Remind me, I have something to show you,” Nayar said, the moment their feet hit the ramp.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure yet, but—”
They were already emerging on the second floor, where they found Jaidev and Daksha as busy as fry cooks in a fast-food joint. They were checking on various assistants who came down from the floor above carrying containers and what looked to Gabriel like pesticide sprayers. Weapons for use against the Reivers.
Then they sent them below.
“How’s it coming along?” Gabriel said, one of those fatuous-but-necessary phrases people in his job had to use.
“We’ll know soon,” Jaidev said. “Meanwhile, let me show you this.”