Sid-bot balanced itself on one side to rotate its lower gimbals. “I like to think there’s a heaven.” A breeze ruffled the enclosure, shaking loose a flurry of white-and-yellow tea blossoms that gently settled around the gorilla and robot.
“If what Mohesha is saying is true,” Zoraster ventured, “then you’ve got your heaven. A copy of every human mind that has existed is in that nervenet somewhere. Endless life and meeting of passed loved ones.”
Pushing itself onto its other side, Sid-bot rotated its other gimbals. “Maybe.” It stopped and de-focused its optical lens to stare into infinity. “But if it’s possible that something exists, does it really matter whether it exists here or not? Whether we can actually see it?”
Zoraster frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“I mean, if there are an infinite number of universes, then if it’s possible to imagine something, isn’t it the same as actually existing somewhere?”
The Grilla rolled his eyes. “You have a messed up way of looking at things. Saying everything is true also makes nothing true. There need to be limits.” Zoraster thumped the ground with one giant hand. “How’s the signal doing?”
This splinter of Sid’s mind was connected through a ground-based mesh network of insect-bots that stretched to the border of the African Union. It was low bandwidth, but information was steadily seeping back and forth.
Sid-bot checked the feed. “The network map is really starting to come together.” The plan was working. They were tracking data flow through the crystal network.
“Good,” grunted Zoraster. It was the first indication the plan was working. “So do you believe all this stuff Tyrel is saying?”
Sid-bot nodded, the gears in its neck whirring back and forth, and then wagged its head side to side. “It’s hard to dispute the evidence—”
Zoraster interrupted him. “You Atopians just nearly wrecked yourselves fighting a giant storm that didn’t exist. How can you be sure this isn’t more of the same?”
“You’re right, but we tested for that. There are too many proof points, too many interconnected instances. And in a way it didn’t surprise me.”
The Grilla frowned. “What didn’t surprise you?”
“We’ve found life on Mars and Titan—our solar system is teeming with it—and one in five stars out there have planets in habitable orbits. There’s got to be trillions of eyes staring back at us from out there, but not a single transmission or evidence of any kind?”
“Except for that POND signal,” Zoraster noted.
“Yeah, except for that.” Sid was still working around the clock on that, but nothing yet apart from a repeating nine-element sequence that hinted it was a warning signal. “So we’ve finally been contacted by other life, one way or the other. I’m relieved.”
“Relieved? These things want to kill us.”
“Maybe, but like they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Mohesha thinks nervenets are an example of convergent evolution, that any intelligent organism will eventually develop and integrate into their minds, just like they’d always develop eyes of some kind. I think she’s right.”
Zoraster sat in silence, absorbing this. “You’re a strange kid.”
Sid-bot affected the best smile it could. “Thanks.” He shared more of the network diagram. “You can look at this nervenet like a virus that can infect both people and machines.” The shared display, a geographic map of the world, crisscrossed with glowing lines. “We’re getting a peek at its command-and-control structure. Once we start to locate the nodal points, Mikhail and the Ascetics will hunt them down, begin exorcising them—”
Zoraster nodded. “And if Bob can cut the head off, we might have a chance of stopping it. Why don’t we just kill anyone that’s connected in this map?” He pointed at the nexus nodes that were already lighting up.
“People infected by the nervenet didn’t do anything wrong.”
The smile slid from Zoraster’s face. “You’re right.” He rolled forward to get up onto his knees.
“I could do some cutting off right now,” said Zoraster, leaning to stare down the barrel of the rifle sight. “Just one shot, and boom, no more head on this part of the snake.”
The moment he uttered these words, the Allied compound disappeared in a brilliant flash. His internal systems only just protected his retinas in time to avoid being blinded. Sid-bot jumped up. The monitoring feed coming from the headquarters winked out, and a second later a shockwave ripped through their enclosure, shredding it in a thundering concussion.
“Zoraster, what the hell did you do?” messaged Sid-bot.
The roar was still reverberating through the valley, a mushroom cloud was climbing into the sky above the spot where the Allied buildings had been just seconds before. Shaking his head and coughing, Zoraster pushed himself up from the ground. Tea blossoms were swirling around them in a cloud of dust. “Didn’t do anything,” he groaned, holding his side. Something had hit him.
A swarm of attack drones rose from the roiling clouds on the other side of the valley. They headed directly for the spot where Sid and Zoraster were hiding.
“Zoraster!” pinged Sid-bot across all of the Grilla’s emergency channels. “You gotta get moving!”
The whine of incoming fire rained down around them. Zoraster looked at the advancing drones, then back at Sid-bot and smiled. “Call me Furball, kid, and don’t worry, I’ll—”
The transmission cut.
Sitting in the White Horse Pub in UnderMidTown, Sid put his beer down. “Zoraster? Are you there?”
There was no response.
In a viewpoint from a weather satellite, hundreds of miles above India, a smudge of smoke spread across the Arunchal valley. An alert pinged Sid’s networks, and he opened the channel, expecting to see Zoraster’s face, but instead he found an image of an oceanic tanker.
Bob had arrived at the Atopian perimeter.
11
His chalk squeaked across the blackboard as Bob finished writing out the minimum critical parameters for fissile actinides. His hand ached. The board was filled with equations. With a flourish he underlined the result. The chalk snapped in his fingers, the broken end tumbling onto the threadbare Persian carpet of his study. He turned to his guest. “So, you see?”
A rakish man, his hair slicked back, leaned forward. His freshly pressed suit squeaked against the polished leather of the copper-studded wingback chair he slouched in. “Are you sure?”
Bob stared at the decimal point of his result. Just a mote of calcium carbonate stuck against the sheet of porcelain enamel of the blackboard, but it represented something that would change billions of lives. “Yes.”
In an ornate mirror behind the man in the chair, Bob saw his reflection: an old man stared back at him, a fringe of white hair circling a balding head, bushy black eyebrows above thick jowls, and an unkempt suit. He dusted the chalk dust off the arms of his jacket.
There was a quiet rap on the door. “Would you like some tea?” came the muffled voice of his wife.
“No, Margrethe, but I think we might get some air,” said Bob. “The children could still go and play in Tivoli, why don’t you bring them out?”
Bob glanced at the man in the chair, who nodded. Outside the windows, fluttering yellow leaves fell from bare trees in a gust of wind. Winter was coming.
“Please bring our coats,” Bob called out.
Getting up from the chair, the man walked close to the blackboard.