Connors nodded. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” She took a deep breath. “In any investigation, you need to step back, usually it’s staring you right in the face.” Connors took a literal step back. “Who’s at the center of all this?”
They stared at each other.
“We’re at the center,” said Sid after a pause, and then after more consideration. “Bob’s at the center.”
Connors nodded. “Okay, so in these two outliers—the POND message and the ancient clue about Willy—have you applied everything you know about all of yourselves to them?”
Sid shook his head. He hadn’t. It seemed like a long shot, but he started running processes, pattern matching everything in their own backgrounds and histories. He also grabbed everything he had on Bob, which was a lot. They’d lived their entire lives together. He had petabytes of Bob.
26
Bob should have left, should have escaped to protect himself, but Jimmy was starting to lose the battle. James was too well entrenched.
So Bob stayed, enlisting the hundreds and then thousands of people who were released from James’s control in the fight. Bob sensed another presence fighting with him. It was the priest, helping support Bob at the fringes. One world crashed into the next. And then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.
Through the sensory whitewash of a thunderfall, Bob regained his senses, the splintered parts of his psyche reintegrating in one place. He found himself standing in the cave that Jimmy used to hide in. Jimmy was sitting on the floor with his proxxi, Samson.
A fearsome monster, clawed and fanged, lurked in the corner.
“It was never my mother,” screamed Jimmy at the monster. “It was always you!”
“I am you,” snarled the monster.
“Did you kill them?”
“Why would you care?” The monster came out from the shadows. It was a distorted version of Jimmy, its skin flaking, hands curled into claws, teeth protruding. “We killed them, Jimmy, you and I together.”
Jimmy shook his head, but he knew the truth. “You used me, just like you used them.”
“And it made us strong.” The monster edged closer to Jimmy.
Despite his struggle to hide parts of himself, Bob was disappearing from existence. James was wiping him out. The image of Jimmy and James faded before his senses.
“I can destroy you,” whispered Jimmy. He stood up to the monster. “Because I can destroy myself.”
In a mind-collapsing thunder, the world around Bob buckled.
27
From a hundred million miles away, the dot of light that was the Earth flickered and dimmed, then grew lighter and darker by turns as the space power grid echoed energy back and forth from one terrestrial power web to another. The bright pinpoint of light that was the battle in the South Atlantic flared and then went dark.
“Whoa!” Sid exclaimed. “Did you guys feel that?” A massive spike in network traffic exploded from Atopia. It lit up the entire multiverse in a wide-spectrum pulse, even creeping below the bombardment assaulting the surface level of the Commune.
Then everything went silent.
The thunder above stopped.
Sid’s main subjective was still in the private space with Vince and Connors, sifting through the masses of pattern matching. Nothing new was coming up. The disruption pulled his attention back into the underground cavern.
Sid looked at Willy. “What happened?”
“The attack stopped again.”
“And?” That was obvious, but what had stopped it?
“I don’t know,” replied Willy.
Sid’s mind jumped from one splinter to another. The Allied forces outside the Commune were standing down again. Energy surged in massive waves back and forth through the space power grid, microwave radiation that was bouncing through the hundreds of power grid satellites in low earth orbit, down to transmitter arrays and back again. Ground potentials around the world spiked. The communication networks filled with noise.
From what he could sense, the attack against Terra Nova had stopped again as well. Tyrel and Mohesha were sending connection signals. He tried to latch onto them, but the heaving electrical interference from the space power grid was too much, saturating even ground-based systems.
Vicious, Sid’s proxxi, materialized in the underground cavern. Sid expected an update on what was going on outside, but he grabbed his attention on a private channel, back to the pattern-matching algorithms running in the background. “You need to see this.”
Sid shook his head. “The attacks just stopped. We need find out what happened on Atopia.” Everything was emanating from there.
“This is more important.” Vicious plugged a data feed into Sid’s mind.
The world shimmered and reformed.
Sid found himself standing in a steaming jungle filled with alien-looking plants. Green monsters with spiny dorsal fins lumbered toward him. In the next instant he watched a mushroom cloud rising into the air over corrugated tin shacks, and a moment later he was watching Assyrian troops amassing outside Jerusalem. His head filled with figures and dates, streams of nearly unconnected meta-data. “What is this?”
“The contents of the POND message.”
His proxxi slowed down the data stream. Sid was now standing next to Bob in Battery Park in New York. A huge Nazi flag draped down the side of one of the old World Trade Center buildings.
“I applied one of the old time-cloaking encryptions you and Bob used to play with as kids.”
He and Bob used to play games, hiding worlds from their friends, interlacing them in time over the top of the ones they were in. Places that were there but not there at the same time. The information they were seeing was Bob’s own sensory data, like thousands of gameworld simulations, but these were streams from Bob’s meta-cognition systems. It was like Bob had lived hundreds of lives.
“Any guess what this means?” Sid asked. The data had to be corrupted somehow, cross-connected on Atopia, or from Bob carrying the data beacon.
“I already checked all that.”
Sid tried to make sense of it. “So Bob sent himself a message encoded in neutrinos? From another universe?”
His proxxi shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”
Sid brought up some simulations of possible ways to create neutrino bursts. The entire Earth was bathed in the signal that Patricia picked up, a signal that must have literally been sprayed across the cosmos.
Just receiving the message was a stretch with existing technology. Creating it required energy on unimaginable scales, larger than even a supernova. How was it possible? And if Bob sent himself a message somehow, then why wouldn’t he have told them?
Unless he didn’t know himself.
Sid needed to get more eyes on this. Vince and Connors were still in the cavern, trying to establish the connection to Terra Nova. Sid pinged Vince, dragging his attention back into the private space. Vince accepted.
But before Sid could say anything Vince blurted out, “Sid! We have a message from Bob!”
Sid blinked. “How, uh,” he stuttered. “How did you know?”
Vince’s eyes were wide. “Didn’t you hear me? We got a message from Bob. He’s not dead.” He grimaced. “I mean, not exactly dead.” He shook his head. “Just look on the main display.” Bob was connecting into them, his projection already appearing in the cave. “Don’t you want to say hello?”
Vicious was already handling the introductions through Sid’s body in the cave. Bob smiled and started to explain what happened, but Sid resisted.
“You need to see this.” Sid pulled Vince’s attention to what he’d found.