CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
"Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another." - Author Unknown
Command Post.
"Tracking two signals now, Mother-General. Jana's back with us. The explosion they were in earlier must have knocked hers out temporarily. His was weak then, but it's stronger now. A lot stronger."
"Keep tracking as long as you can. Keep us undetectable if you can," she said to a man sitting at a console.
"Deploying diversion signals worldwide. Random."
Another voice announced to all, especially Mother-General. "Add noise. Stir," he added with a smile.
"That'll buy us some time, but not much."
"Get the Reverend. We need to tell his people their sky is falling, too."
Kieran had never been in the command post. Always in the field, closest to the action. Questions flooded her brain. I always thought that Makr was constantly manipulative. Hopefully, Mother-General is one better, she thought.
The commanders were filing in from Nests scattered throughout the underground complex Kieran had called home since birth. She didn't know many of the twenty or so commanders Mother-General had assigned throughout the city to damage the Cyber whenever possible. Coming from different Nests, they had all been engaged in learning the skills and strategies of waging war. They had been thoroughly trained on how to destroy the technology their ancestors had so proudly designed.
There were only eighteen out of twenty present. Two of her commanders were missing: Captain Greg Jackson and Captain Carlos Montoya. She had already waited a few extra minutes, hoping that Carlos and Greg were just held up and were late. Apparently that was not the case. When the rest of her leadership was seated, she began:
"This is the moment we've all been waiting for. The final battle you might say. We've identified key factories, power stations, uplink sites, and operations centers—wherever we think Makr has been concentrating refitting and updating efforts. We aren't alone.
"Makr was created and developed in this city not far from here. This is why this particular Nest is where it is. Captain Montoya's Nest is closer still, which is probably why he is not here today. There may be too much Cyber activity, making it hard for our Shadows to fly from that Nest anytime soon. The rest of the planet is going to be our one big diversion, but ultimate success or failure rests on our ability to attack the source and destroy it.
"I know this is an awesome responsibility, but someone has to take it on. If we fail, you can blame me. It won't matter much. I'm sure I'll be long dead. If we've underestimated the extent of Makr's evolution, the human race might be dead as well.
"In a few short hours, we will be striking entire factories with our wave explosives. We've been experimenting with different kinds of explosives and disruptors. I’m proud to say we have a powerful weapon right here. All of you. You are our most potent weapon.
I know some of you have been working independently to develop new weapons. Good. We'll see if they work. We will target any high-density Cyber activity. At the same time, we will knock out the power stations that serve Makr and His cyberts the most. We want to keep Him busy. If we knock out power stations, we'll be in the dark, too. Not so bad for us since we're used to operating that way.
"We've also developed sonic wave weapons that isolate and confuse Cyber communication signals as well as disable most cybert operating systems within a five hundred yard radius for a time. You can thank Captain Jackson for that if you see him. I hope you do see him; his unit is responsible for weapon acquisition and development. He and all his Shadows have disappeared. Your weapons officers have had training on the latest weapons from Jackson's cache, and all have instructions on identifying suitable targets. Be careful, if his group has been captured, you won't have the element of surprise or weapons of any value.
"Captain Carlos' group up until now has been engaged in terror activities. I'm still not sure you can terrorize artificial intelligence, but it's a little early to tell. If we can't confuse the cyberts with random terror acts, at a minimum we will have disrupted normal refitting and modification operations. That will mean fewer cyberts equipped with the latest software and hardware for us to do battle with. Pray that the Cyber army you face has not learned our latest tricks and has not yet been refitted with countermeasures.
"In addition to our Shadow communications, we'll use primitive radio waves to maintain contact with groups outside our Shadows. We will change frequencies and codes every hour. We have the Evangels to thank for that capability. Most of the electronic gadgets and machinery you see around here are human made, or at least human modified. They developed the radio equipment and gave us trained operators who know how to use it. No offense intended, Davis, but I hope we can trust you and your people to keep up. It's going to get physical and fast out there, so you'll need to... We need you beside us at all times."
"No offense taken, ma'am." It was the radio operator. "I think you'll find when it comes to this final action, we agree on more than we disagree."
"Well, let's hope you hate the Cyber as much as we do."
The moment she said it she knew it was a mistake. Evangels were the one group that believed Symbiosis was the way to peace. Mother-General looked deeply into the radio operator's face as if trying to read his mind. Her concern was obvious, but she knew she had no choice; the Evangels must be part of the revolution if it was to succeed. Waste any more time and the cause would be lost permanently—not to mention she'd lose her children to Makr's wrath.
"I know hating anything is against your religion, Davis," she continued. "Perhaps, strongly resent is a better way of saying it."
"Mother-General, please be assured, my fellow Evangels and I will do as we are ordered. We take our word seriously.
"As do we, Davis. Thanks for reminding me."
There. That is that, she thought. The day would tell.
"Ladies and gentlemen, that's the plan, at least," she said. "Before you leave to do the very important jobs you all have to do, there is one more thing.
"Since the homing signals have ceased in his quadrant, we must assume Carlos' group's in immediate peril. They will be under scrutiny since they are so close to a factory complex; they are probably surrounded as I speak. We cannot communicate with them from here without allowing Makr to triangulate position, giving both our locations away. So we'll have to do it in person. Since I can't spare any of you commanders, I will be moving my headquarters to Carlos' Nest. I need twenty volunteers—one or two from each of your organizations should do it. Colonel?"
She addressed her chief of staff and directed him to take over volunteer recruitment. "And a radio operator. Davis?"
Davis nodded.
The room was silent. Her senior officer, her chief of staff, held up his hand to stem the rush out of the room.
"Mother-General, I realize Carlos is your son, but you can't risk being so close to Makr's cyberts. We can't afford to lose you."
"Not true, Colonel. I've done my job. I got us here. You're my chief tactical officer as well. You're in charge now of this great battle that is before us. I trust you'll get us through it. Carlos' father, my second husband, trusted you. I see no reason I shouldn't. My job is to fight alongside my children."
In her mind they were all Carlos' brothers and sisters.
"Carlos won't like it, Mother-General."
"I don't think he'll care much for his mother horning in on his territory, but he'll have no choice. I'm the only mother he has."
"We are your family, too. Since the day we became people of the Shadows we became brothers and sisters and we pledged never to go far from the Nest. Has something changed?"
Mother-General chuckled a bit. "Safety in numbers. That's why we live in Nests, Colonel, but baby birds grow up. It's time we grew up, too, don't you think? Carlos will understand. He might not believe what he sees right away, but he'll understand in the end. After all, the lesson came from him. He made me real
ize something I had forgotten for a while, and that is all of you are my children. Come, get on with it, Colonel, time's wasting."
The colonel hesitated, but he knew her too well to argue.
"Okay, you all heard her. Jana's signal is weak. Harry's is still strong. It won't be long before Makr detects it. We have no choice but to mobilize early. Kieran, I need you to take Greg's second reconnaissance team. He's been gone way too long. We have to assume he's been captured or killed. His first team, too."
"Co-ordinates coming in, ma'am. Subjects are moving away from Carlos' nest."
"What?" Mother-General was shocked.
They couldn't have got past the cyberts that must have been surrounding the Nest by now. What have I done? Have I killed them, too?
"There's no doubt about it. Looks like they're definitely leaving the Nest," the colonel said.
"In more ways than one," said Mother-General under her breath. Harry, why couldn't you have waited a little longer? We would have been ready then.
"Commanders in the main," Mother-General ordered. "Everyone out...except you, Kieran, I need to talk with you."
The room emptied quickly. The colonel was talking to the radio operator as all the others were gathering the portable equipment. The eighteen commanders, their staff and an equal number of technicians filed out. When they were alone, Mother-General was first to speak.
"We almost had them back."
"You were tracking them? How? Why?"
"I'm telling you all this because I have to tell someone. The 'how' isn't important now. I just hope I haven't gotten them both killed."
"We have to find them. If you're tracking them, you could be leading Makr right to them?"
"If they'd stayed put, the natural interference of the Nest could have confused the signal enough to keep the Cyber away."
"Really?"
"That's one of the theories."
"Perhaps. They don't even know their part in all this." Mother-General was a bit distant.
"Mother-General, please tell me what's going on here."
"That's why I asked you to stay." Mother-General took hold of her hands as she faced her. "You're close to Carlos, as close as anyone can be, so I'm hoping you'll understand."
Kieran nodded. This was not the military woman and second mother she had grown to know, she thought. She'd listen, but she wasn't sure she was going like what she was about to hear.
"Twenty-seven years ago before Makr was Makr, I lived Inside with my first husband and two children. Ray was involved in building the most sophisticated Cyber server, a Cyber designed to connect itself to other Cyber, to evolve and adapt, and to reason like a man. It was the last part that never really worked. The Bio factor. That's us. Humans are so unpredictable. You can get close with probability curves, but not exact. Give humans the same data, and unless the rules of science and math are invoked, like two plus two equals four, the responses will vary. Objective material: great! Subjective material: sometimes. That's where the Bio cyberlinks came in."
"Wait a minute. Let me try to finish this. Both Harry and Marlene—you know her as Jana—became cyberlinks. Different areas of responsibility, but same connections?"
"Yes, that's right. Harry is one of my sons. He was lost to me when he was young. And, yes, Jana's my daughter. We called her that as a young child, but when the State took her away, they addressed her by her first name, Marlene."
Kieran dared to speak, but because she had been lied to and mislead she felt not fear of the mother-general: "You've been acting strangely ever since I came back from the Nest. So that's why you wanted to know how Harry was doing. Why didn't you tell me Harry was your son?"
The answer was from the mother, not the general who answered, "It was irrelevant. None of your business, at the time, my dear," she admonished Kieran, and then continued.
"I didn't know Jana was still alive. We had lost her signal. After the Touchables' massacre, it had become so low, nearly undetectable, that we thought she'd died. But she didn't die. Her chip must have been slightly damaged at that time."
Mother-General was a little excited for a brief moment. "She didn't die! Oh, what's the use, I'm afraid they'll both die now." She became strangely quiet, dazed. "I never even got to know them."
"Just a hunch" asserted Kieran, "but don't rule those two out. Both are plenty tough."
"Carlos is right about you. You are bright. I've misjudged you. I always thought he was just in love with you."
"Did he ever..." Never mind. Her mind was swirling with new information, and possible answers. "There's something I don't understand. The chips. We thought they were from Makr. They aren't, are they?"
"Yes and no. Makr thinks they are. Systems hardware ID says they are, but they're not—they're variations, prototypes of an earlier version. In fact, Ray designed them, but State rejected them because they put the human factor back in the program so that the Cyber could not have total control. Remember, this was the final Matchmaker version. No more biotechs. Only the State politicians made the decisions here on out and, of course, they failed miserably.
"I wanted to protect my children. I never liked the cybertechnology. I felt it morally wrong. I feared it. It was making us like the machines—cold and distant. I wanted Ray to take advantage of what he knew and protect the children, but he wouldn't listen. He believed that the symbiosis of Bio and Cyber would help humans achieve a higher plane of existence—one we could never achieve on our own. We would control our own world again with the help of Cyber, this time built inside us. Sounded nice, but I was always the skeptical one. Sounded too good to be true. The whole idea of combining the best of the machine and the best of man to create a super BioCyber didn't feel right either.
"That was back when we got the chips at eight or nine. Some people even had them implanted earlier than that so their children could have the extra benefit of an unremarkable childhood. We even celebrated the implantation of the chips as the first step to our perfect symbiosis. Shit!
"Ray wouldn't substitute the chips. We had the time then. We could have done it, but he refused. I couldn't believe he'd give over his family for the Matchmaker Cyber project. We fought. Repeatedly. Harry was six or seven. I resisted leaving for his sake as long as I could, but as children reached eight years old, State made it harder and harder for parents to postpone or delay implanting the chips. There were simply no good reasons any more. Jana was only five. I knew she'd be safe for a while unless they changed the mandatory age for the implant.
"I knew it was only a matter of time and I was right. A few months later, five became the age for the mandatory implant. That was it! I had to leave, finally and forever. I left with Jana and Harry. I took the chips with me. I knew that the State and the damn master Cyber would know if I didn't have them implanted so I did—out here, but not the latest chips; I had the old chips implanted so they would have more control. There were only a few of us Outsiders then. It was easier to lay low. Cyberts had hardly any interest in us. Then when the timing was right, I slipped the children back Inside. Without testing them again and according to Ray's specs, no one - not Cyber, not Bio - could tell the difference."
"The children didn't know?"
"No. Used a little mind wipe, just a little, so they wouldn't remember anything that would connect them to me. I had learned a few things being married to a Cyber genius.
"Unfortunately, I think the mind wipe was much more disturbing to Harry than Jana. Harry was older; he remembered some things. After the mind wipe, he still remembered bits and pieces. We thought it was impossible for that to happen. Harry, for some reason, had the ability to resist SensaVision suggestions. That's all a mind wipe was—suggestions. He resisted enough to make it incomplete. Afterwards, he was plagued with the thought he had been re-born. That was an accident, but in some ways he was right. I had to make him forget me. It was better they didn't know until the time was right. If none of this had worked, or if I'd been killed or taken by Makr, they'd be innocent. They'd n
ot be blamed.
"I sent Jana back to Ray soon after I sent Harry back, but the Shadows I sent to escort her were discovered by Cyber along the way. They never returned. Jana never made it back to Ray; the State found her wandering the Shadows and placed her in a Cyber nursery. If anyone was re-born, it was probably her. It was only a few months ago I found her again. So hard to believe she's a grown woman now."
Kieran was moved by Mother-General's story. There were tears in both women's eyes. It has to be awful to give up your children, Kieran thought. Then to have one of them completely disappear again once you'd found them.
"Well, we're all in this now," Kieran said. "We have to finish what you started. If you succeed, you'll be a hero to all. If you fail, no matter. We're all doomed anyway."
"Maybe it's not as bad as all that. The deception has worked until now. Makr received the information He needed in the form of direct external stimuli, while we were able to listen in as Makr adapted. By being so close to the mainframe, both Harry and Jana...or Marlene... are unknowing spies."
"There is a problem, I think," Kieran asserted.
"We know that. They're running away from their protection..."
"No, that's a problem, but not the problem I'm talking about," she insisted now. Kieran's blue eyes suddenly took on an odd fire, an intense quality; the color was hauntingly striking.
"What? What else could there be?"
"You said you had the chips implanted in both children? What did the chips look like then?" Her eyes were even more piercing in their examination of the mother.
"Why, I told you they were special. These were double-sided..."
"Mother-General...your son's chip is a cubed shape with more instructions than we've ever seen. A cube, Mother-General, " he stammered. And Marlene's...er...Jana's is double-sided, but it's twice the size of any chips we see today. How is that possible?"
"Not the chips I put in... Makr must have known all along. I see I have been blind."
"Dare I believe this possible?" She grabbed Kieran's arm almost desperately. "Tell me, daughter. Swear! How do you know this?"
"The scanner, Mother-General, I saw them myself. Here's the problem as I see it: If you didn't do this, then who did?"
"Yes, that is the problem."
Makr knows all about us. The realization hit the older woman in her thoughts.
It had been a long time since she had thought of herself as anything other than Mother-General. More tears formed in her brown eyes—eyes that had not cried even when one of her own sons had been killed. Is it time to cry for all of them now?
Buzzing? What's that buzzing?