“You’re preaching to the temple singers,” Arun said, sipping his drink. The advantage of simulated alcohol was that its effects would vanish when Arun exited the MassMind, or earlier, if he so chose. “I am perfectly aware of the requirements.”
“Sorry,” Tabitha said, finally. She felt oddly ashamed of herself, as if she was revealing her origins. It was a MassMind conceit she rarely allowed herself. “I just…”
“No worries,” Arun said, firmly. He summoned an image of the Killer starship and studied it thoughtfully. It was a real-time link from Star’s End, showing the alien starship illuminated by lights mounted on remote platforms and thousands of humans and Spacers crawling all over the hull. “Even if this fails, we do have the starbombs.”
“The Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator,” Tabitha corrected. The joke had once been funny. Now it was just sad. “If we have to dismantle half the galaxy to get at them…”
“We may have no choice,” Arun said. His voice was terrifyingly dispassionate, contemplating destruction on an unimaginable scale. “Patti was right about one thing. If the Killers do come gunning for us, they could wipe out most of the Community within a few days. That would be the end of the MassMind… and any hope of striking back at the Killers.”
Chapter Eleven
Her body lay suspended in a shimmering column of blue light.
Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi looked down on it from high above, her mind dazed and unsure, even, of where she was. It was a good body — had been a good body, part of her mind whispered treacherously — and it had served her well. She had worn the oriental features of her ancestors, but she had never chosen to follow the dictates of fashion, from an extra eyeball to immense breasts and thighs. The body she’d been born with had suited her well enough — and there was little room for such distractions in the Defence Force. Watching it being dismantled by a mad surgeon was almost more than she could bear.
Where am I? She asked herself, feeling her thoughts quickening as her body died. As she watched, long needles continued to plunge into her, exploring every curve and crevice of her body. Strange tubes probed between her legs. Beams of focused gravity made her body twitch and jump at will. Powerful blades, glittering silver despite the eerie alien light, grew out of the walls and reached towards her skull. She cringed mentally as the blades cut into her head, sending blood and bone spurting everywhere, but there was no pain. It was almost as if it were happening to someone else.
Before her eyes, her body was systematically taken apart. No human, she liked to think, could have inflicted such injuries without some degree of feeling being involved, but there was no sense of malice, or even of curiosity, in the movements. The Killers didn’t seem to care; they were examining her body because they thought they should examine her body, not because they were interested in her. The entire process made little sense to her. They could have formed a cloud of nanites and explored her insides without needing to rip her body apart, yet they had chosen instead to do it the hard way. Why?
And where was she? If that was her body being dismantled, then where was her mind?
It hit her suddenly and she almost laughed, catching herself just in time. The MassMind recording implant, a record of all she had been, hadn’t failed after all. The Killers had reached into her head to scan her mind and accidentally dragged her out of her body! They couldn’t have done it on purpose… could they? The early years of the MassMind hadn’t been as easy as history suggested; not everyone wanted to have copies of themselves running in a giant computer, open to interference from anyone with malicious intentions. She felt creeping fear as she realised that the Killers could literally reprogram her at will — their computer network wouldn’t have any of the safeguards built into the MassMind — yet relaxed slightly as she realised that the Killers didn’t know she was within their system. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but it seemed logical. If they’d known she was there, they would have moved to erase her from her position.
She concentrated, trying to recall what she knew about entering the MassMind. She’d gone inside it as a visitor, but that had been a different experience altogether. The human mindset couldn’t really cope with the actual nature of the MassMind, so the governing minds and AIs created an entire string of advisors and averters to assist the newcomer in exploring the network. A new personality would be gently assisted to adapt to the MassMind — the MassMind could have absorbed the entire human race in an afternoon, but it could take years to get them all accustomed to their new status — but there was nothing to assist her inside the alien network. The Killers wouldn’t want to assist her in settling in, would they?
Her lips — imaginary now, although she found it comforting to still imagine that she had a body within the network — twitched in amusement. She’d been granted a priceless opportunity and she was complaining about it! She could learn more about the Killers than anyone else; given time, she might even manage to transmit information out of their domain and into the human MassMind. It should be possible, assuming that the systems weren’t too different, to transmit a signal out… or perhaps trying to interfere with the system would draw attention from local intelligences. The MassMind had police AIs that prevented personalities from abusing the network and there was no reason to assume that the Killers didn’t have their own security measures. They would view her as an intruder and seek to remove her from the network. Hell, she decided, they might even blame her on one of their rivals.
If they had rivals…
She took one last look down at her body — now little more than a gory mass — and started to look around. The MassMind was warm and welcoming, but the alien system was so vast as to be beyond her comprehension; she seemed to drift within waves of data and vast slow thoughts. She latched onto one of the thoughts with her mind and allowed it to speak to her, but it was impossible to make sense of it. It was alien as hell. In the distance, she could hear — her mind interpreted it as hearing — the sound of a massive heartbeat. Despite the danger, she wanted to go there…
And she was there. There was no sense of transition; there was just a jump from one place in the network to another. The heartbeats — and the vast network of strange thoughts — were much louder, yet she had no idea what was happening, or where she was. It dawned on her that she was looking at it from the wrong angle and allowed herself to slide into the thoughts… only to see, suddenly, a creature floating at the centre of a vast web. Her mind made it look like a giant spider — spiders had survived the destruction of Earth, along with many other lower forms of life — facing away from her. If it had seen her, she knew it would have leapt at her and swallowed her up into its multiplicity. It might not even have bothered to realise that she wasn’t a Killer.
She spread her mind as wide as she could, trying to listen to the thoughts, or build up a picture of just how the network worked. The MassMind was a vast decentralised network spanning the galaxy. The Killer network was focused on the spider — either a Killer linked into the network or a very strange AI, she decided — and yet there were echoes and pulses within the network that suggested that there were other nodes… no, she realised; they were echoes. The Killer was literally talking to itself.