“You have many questions.” Tyrel brought the meeting to order. “As do we.”
Willy was there, his virtual presence wedged between avatars of Bob and Sid, with Sibeal and Vince flanking them. There wasn’t time for celebration at their reunion. The presence of Mikhail Butorin hovered in a dark patch of the light. He smiled at Vince.
Tyrel formed an image of an oceanic platform. It was Atopian in design, but looked nothing like Atopia itself. Its surface was angular, jet black. A schematic of its capabilities sprung up around it. “Allied battle platforms are encroaching on the African Union in physical space. The deadline for allowing UN weapons inspectors access to the space power grid facilities has lapsed.”
Connors wasn’t invited. An agent of the Alliance was too risky to include, even one that appeared friendly. Back in the barn in Louisiana, as night fell, she was playing cards with Vince’s proxxi by candlelight. Vince kept a splinter of himself watching over her.
Tyrel looked around the table. “The time to act is now, my friends.”
“With all due respect,” Vince said. “I’m still going to need some convincing of this ‘friends’ part. We’ve risked our lives to get here, and you’re the ones that nearly killed us and our families when you infected Atopia with that reality skin. Seems to me you brought this on yourselves.”
The battle platform gave way to a flood of situational data. “This fight is not of our choosing, but of necessity.” He looked at Bob. “We need the information Patricia left you, and we need access to the data in Willy’s body.”
Bob stared at Tyrel. Patricia’s instructions were to deliver the data she collected here, but had she known what they were up to? Who to trust? He shook his head. “With the greatest of respect, Vince is right. Before we share anything, you need to convince us that we’re with friends.” He glanced at Vince. “Explain why all this is necessity.”
Data flowing into the sensory focal-point of the meeting slowed to a stop, went blank, and was replaced by pinpoints of light spreading up and down, left and right into infinity, ordered in irregular but repeating patterns.
“You’ve seen these crystals,” Mohesha said, her presence rising to the center of their thought-space. “A complex alloy of metals that enables the stable flow of sub-atomic quantum states between neighboring atoms.” Data was uploaded into the shared cognition of the meeting space. These quasi-crystals could hold information at quantum scale, transmit and transform the information.
“A computing device,” Sibeal said. “One that can sense neural potentials.”
“Yes.” The matrix of pinpoints of light faded. “Self-replicating, difficult to distinguish from natural mineral.”
“Unless you know what you’re looking for.” Sibeal caught Mohesha’s attention. “Do you have anything to do with it?”
“We only recently discovered the crystals, but it confirms what we’ve suspected for some time.”
“And that is?”
“A truth glimpsed by secret societies in the past.” Tyrel took back the focal point. “Something we hadn’t the means to understand until now. Now it is almost too late.”
Bob pulled their attention to him. “Is this something from space?” Natural quasi-crystals were found in meteorites, and his first thought was the POND signal. Did Tyrel know about it? He hadn’t shared the information yet.
“Possibly, but we think the crystals are ancient, regenerating from the deep past.”
The mind’s eye of the meeting space opened up into a field bordered by strange-looking trees, and giant animals with green skin stood eating ferns at the edges. None of the plants or animals looked recognizable, not of this Earth.
“We suspect there was a technological civilization of Earth before, two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the Great Permian Extinction that wiped out life for tens of millions of years.”
The meeting space shifted to alien-looking bipedal humanoids, with mottled green skin, walking through soaring structures. The viewpoint retreated upward, revealing a city of skyscrapers twinkling beside an ocean. Bob stared. Somehow he’d seen it before.
“They developed systems similar to our synthetic reality technologies. We think this is convergent evolution, that biological and memetic evolution will push technological civilizations to produce synthetic reality systems in the same way that an eye will evolve over and over again. Like an eye, nervenets are evolutionary adaptations that allow organisms to see, to perceive the true fabric of reality.”
The space around them grew dark.
“When their world ended,” continued Tyrel, “their technology persisted, self-replicating, building itself into the fabric of the Earth. Like the wikiworld we use, it’s been constantly recording. A memory of every human is contained in this machine, every person that ever existed, but apart from this function, it’s been dormant.”
“Dormant?” Bob said. “So it’s woken up?”
“They’ve been waiting.”
Bob waited. “For what?”
“For sentience to arise once again.”
Silence.
“Why would it be waiting.”
“Not it,” Tyrel said slowly, “they.”
“They?”
“Because their world did not just end, it was destroyed.”
“So what are you saying? How does this relate to Jimmy?”
“Because he is evidence of the truth that has long been suspected.” Tyrel returned the meeting space to the gardens on the surface of Terra Nova. “The Great Destroyer has returned.”
Part 3:
Treachery
1
The orange glow of sunset faded behind bearded silhouettes of cypress trees lining the bayou. Fireflies began their mating dance as darkness fell, winking between the Spanish moss that draped into the waters, while a symphony of crickets and spring peepers kept rhythm with the wind that swayed the treetops.
Vince and Connors started a fire in the hard-packed earth under cover of the barn roof. There wasn’t much they could do about heat signatures, but avoiding direct overhead visual observation was something.
“So what happened in the meeting?” Connors asked Vince again.
Vince knew she wasn’t happy about being excluded, but then she couldn’t do much about it. Now she wanted answers.
He slid another branch into the fire. It was muggy, but the heat would be soon replaced by a damp chill. Not only that, but they had to eat something. Strips of catfish sizzled on an improvised grill. Trying to avoid Connor’s questions, Vince had gone fishing as soon as his primary subjective returned from the Terra Novan Council meeting. Standing knee-deep in the muck amid lily pads and cattails, he let some of his smarticles loose in the water. A fat catfish had swum obligingly into his hand within a few minutes, after he flitted into its mind and asked it to come.
What happened in the meeting? Vince wasn’t sure how to answer this. The Terra Novans believed there was some ancient technology at work—the nervenet—similar to but more sophisticated than existing synthetic reality systems. They said that when Saint John sat in the cave on Patmos Island and wrote down the Apocalypse, he had connected to this old machine. What he wrote down wasn’t as much a prediction, but a description of what had happened before, and what would happen again, like an echo.
Humans had been connecting into this nervenet for thousands of years, but it took a certain “society of mind” that only religious ascetics, who practiced meditation, managed to achieve. For the Terra Novans this explained why prophets described moving into other worlds, out-of-body-experiences, and talking to gods who were just imprints of ancient intelligences trapped in this nervenet.