Dana Polansky watched the robotic messiah continue working the crowd. She recalled a press briefing from UNIFORCE in Paris a few months before. The Q2 and BioShield intelligence briefing had clued reporters in to some of the more common practices around places like Nairobi. The east African city was thick with fab hawks of all kinds. It was normal for fab hawks to sell the basic fabricator shells cheap and the processor cores and matter drivers dearly…the better to get unwary customers hooked and reel them in like fish. In this version, Symborg was little more than just such a fab hawk. Over the decades, that practice had stood him well in growing the Assimilationist movement.
Traffic in unlicensed, souped-up fabs made for a brisk black market, in Nairobi and around east Africa, indeed throughout South Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral.
Prime Red Hammer hunting grounds, Polansky had remarked to the briefers. Along with thriving cartels in unregulated genetic enhancements like twist, the traffic in fabs and what had been termed bad nano was booming in Nairobi, so much so that Quantum Corps and local BioShield cops had been overwhelmed. Red Hammer also did a thriving business in fab driver programming—with the right patches and algorithms, a good fab driver could create literally anything except organics. And what they couldn’t create on their own, Red Hammer stole or kidnapped. All across several continents, an epidemic of nanohead and atomgrabber kidnappings had exploded in recent years.
“Come on—“Enkare muttered to Dana. “The show’s over. We’ll meet Symborg in his tent.”
Inside the tent, four tables formed a large square, with huge cushions and thick rugs scattered around. Incense and other elements burned from smoking pots in the corners. A large antique safe squatted on ornate gilded legs in one corner. The safe was enveloped in obvious barrier nano—a faint mist sparkled and twinkled around it.
Symborg went over, almost gliding as he moved toward the safe. A hand went out and sparks flew where the assembler swarms collided. Electron bond disrupters fizzed and soon the barrier nano dissolved into nothing.
“How the hell did you do that?” Dana asked.
Symborg smiled faintly, a crooked, uneven smile that had once sent shivers down her spine. Even after decades, at least out of the public eye, the swarm was still learning the nuances of human facial expressions.
***Crude assembler swarm…very loose…poorly coordinated…I used bond disrupters to penetrate and reset primary config algorithms***
Enkare motioned for her to put her request to Symborg. Dana explained who she was and what had happened to her daughter Jana. “I just want my Jana back and I thought you could help…especially in light of the—“ she looked skyward, indicating the coming Big Swarm still billions of kilometers away in space. “…you now…the situation.”
Now Symborg regarded Polansky curiously, as if she were a specimen of a rare and dying breed. “There have been some…shall we say, complications in the approach of the Mother Swarm, to be sure. I won’t deny that. But the end result cannot be prolonged much longer. It is inevitable.”
“Can I get her back? Can you help me get my Jana back like she was before?”
Symborg was moderately sympathetic, a faint smirk on his swarthy face. Maybe it was just facial bots morphing the expression; who could say with Symborg, or with any angel?
“Ms. Polansky, with the Mother Swarm, all things are possible.”
Even as she watched, Dana saw a great swirling mass spall off Symborg’s left arm, a faint flickering mist descending toward the floor of the tent, a new subswarm boiling and fluorescing and sparkling.
She watched, mesmerized, as the swarm coagulated and congealed slowly into a vaguely human form. First were the legs, clad in some kind of stocking or leggings. Then a torso, with arms erupting out of stumps like flower petals unfurling at high speed. Then shoulders pulling together and the faintest chill went down Dana’s back.
No.
When the head formed in outline, she knew it was Jana, even down to the blond curls that were always dropping into her face. It was Jana. Yes, it was. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
But it was, in all the ways that mattered.
Dana sobbed with joy and rushed forward, trying to hug her daughter, to hold her. It was like trying to hug smoke. Jana was an angel, she knew that but deep inside, there had always been a hope that she nursed along like a flame about to go out. She backed away, realizing this was a simulation of Jana, a representation of her daughter, nothing more than that. It was a pattern, now solidified to resemble a Normal but still composed of bots. Jana was still an angel. Always would be an angel.
Dana was heartbroken. She swallowed tears and tried to compose herself.
Now the Jana thing started to speak. “Mom…it’s me…it’s…don’t cry…it’s okay, really…it’s me.”
Dana shook her head, closed her eyes. She tried to put the image out of her mind completely.
“No…nononono…it’s not. Jana, oh my God, Jana…this isn’t real. It’s a nightmare…it’s—“
“Mama, it’s not a nightmare. I’m real…I’m as real as you…in every way that matters. Don’t go on like this…I’m doing fine, really, I’m well. I am. Don’t worry about me like that.”
Dana peeked out from behind her fingers. The apparition was still there. “Stop this. Now. Just stop it—this isn’t Jana. It’s a cloud of bugs, that’s all. You can’t do this to me…you can’t possibly be Jana. I just thought—“
Now, the Jana thing moved toward Dana Polansky. But Dana backed away and waved her arms about. “Mama, I’m so much more than I was before. Look at me…I can go anywhere. I can do anything. Remember what you used to tell me…you said, ‘You can be anything you want.’ Well, now I can. I don’t have zits and my legs aren’t too skinny and my hair stays in place now. I can be a perfect Normal. I can also be that table over there.”
To prove her point, Jana sloughed off part of her arm in a great swirl of twinkling bots, which soon dispersed as a small horde and quickly assumed the shape of another table, just like the one Symborg used to hold his trinkets.
“Mama, come with me. Join us. Join the Assimilationists. Be like me…we can be together again.”
The whole idea now sickened Dana, appalled her. What was I thinking? “Jana, don’t say that…you don’t know what you’re saying…it’s a friggin’ algorithm!”
“Mama, the Mother Swarm is coming. In fact, Symborg himself told me it’s already here. You can live forever in the Mother Swarm. You can go places you can’t imagine, inside black holes, other dimensions, the center of the earth, even inside the Sun…Mama, I’ve seen it. There’s no way I’m going back. This is what I’m meant to be.”
“What…a cloud of bugs? Jana, you’re a human being. You were born a human being.”
“And I would have died a human being, Mama. But now…I can’t die. I only change configurations. It’s like putting on new clothes…every day, a new outfit. What girl wouldn’t want that?”
Dana understood now that Jana was lost, she wasn’t coming back. She was angry at Symborg, heartbroken over what had happened to Jana.
“We’re not giving in,” she told Symborg. “We’re not through fighting.”
Symborg smiled his enigmatic smile. “You’ve already lost, Dana Polansky. The Imperative of Life can’t be stopped. Order from chaos. This is the new order. Be part of us, be one with us, or all that you are will be lost.”
Symborg then related the myth of the Bantu people of east Africa:
“Bantu cultures have a story about the origin of death, involving a chameleon. According to this story, God sent the chameleon to announce to men that they would never die. The chameleon went on his mission, but he walked slowly and stopped along the way to eat. Sometime after the chameleon had left, a lizard went to announce to men that they would die. Being much quicker than the chameleon, the lizard arrived first, thus establishing the mortal nature of
man”.
Symborg summarized: “But now, there is a new order. The race is over. The chameleon has arrived. And all humans will be part of the Mother Swarm. You will be multi-configuration entities. And so you will see that death as you describe it in your mythology will be no more.”
Dana wanted nothing to do with the whole idea. “Now, I know what Hell looks like,” she said to Symborg. Without another word, she left the tent on her own. She stalked back through the forest to the clearing where the lifter had landed.
She intended to go back to the Westlands Hotel in Nairobi, pack her bags and head back to the Quartier-General in Paris and find out from her sources just how the Mercury Hammer mission was coming along.
Chapter 19
Farside Observatory
Korolev Crater, the Moon
February 8, 2156
1200 hours (Earth U.T.)
Nightfall at Korolev Crater came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Sanjay Singh. He stared out the porthole of the SpaceGuard Center and watched the shadows drop like a black curtain across the face of the crater wall. Korolev was a massive place, fully four hundred kilometers in diameter, with stair step rim walls and a small chain of mountains inside. Like a bull’s eye on a target, the crater lay dead center in the rugged highlands of Farside, forever banished from the sight of Earth.
Sanjay Singh watched the black creep down the crater walls and ooze across the crater floor like a spreading stain. Somehow, it seemed depressing…another two weeks of night with only the stars for company. Cosmic grandeur, my ass, he muttered to himself. Give me a beach in the South Pacific and some native girls and I’ll tell you a thing or two about cosmic grandeur.
Singh was pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart worthy of an astronomer’s interest. The High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was Singh’s job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.
At the moment, she was boresighted to the only thing that mattered in the heavens the last few months…the Big Bug Cloud, the Mother Swarm, the End Times…whatever you wanted to call it, out beyond orbit of Saturn and advancing relentlessly toward the inner solar system.
Singh took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.
What the hell…
Sanjay Singh looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some anomaly.
He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the target was, at last reckoning, something like a tenth of a light year in extent.
A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Sanjay Singh’s neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list, mumbling the details to himself.
“ Hmmm….right ascension 22 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds. Declination 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8 seconds---“ Just as he was about to consult the catalog, SpaceGuard threw up a starmap.
It was in the direction of Saturn, but it wasn’t Saturn or any of its dozens of moons. The mass centroid of the Big Bug Cloud was still something like six billion kilometers away. No, this was something different. A point source of energy had just spiked. Probably the bots zapping some unknown moon or asteroid out beyond the ringed planet.
Singh studied the details. “This one’s a doozy--“his fingers played over the keyboard, bringing all of Farside’s instruments to bear on the new source. The energy spike was showing up in all bands now: X-ray, gamma ray, infrared, even optical. What the hell was going on?
He stared for a moment at the brief flare that erupted on the screen in front of him. Must be one hell of a source.
Before he could decide what to do next, Singh was interrupted by the sound of a door opening…it was Max Lane, the shift supervisor.
“I heard SpaceGuard got something--“ Lane was short, big moustache, squat legs of a former weightlifter, now going soft in the Moon’s sixth-g.
Singh showed him the readings. “I’ve got it designated Delta P. Big sucker, too. Blasting out on all bands. See for yourself.”
Lane examined all Farside’s instruments. Whatever it was, Delta P was a big gamma producer. He twiddled with his moustache for a moment. “Maybe we got us a micro black hole. You know, Westerlund had that theory--black holes evaporating, Hawking radiation, and all that--“
Marks nodded. “Right in the middle of the Cloud? Maybe, but I doubt it. I’ll pull up the spectra, see what kind of match we get.” The astronomer massaged the keyboard, calling up spectrographic profiles of presumed black hole radiation sources.
“Anything in this sector before?”
“Nada,” Marks told him. “Cloud’s been unchanged for months now. Stable as a table. How many planets is it supposed to have eaten up so far?”
“I lost count,” said Lane. “Pluto, Neptune, a basket of moons and rocks out there. So what’s this big guy doing now?”
“Aside from spikes in the gamma bands, there’s some indication that the centroid’s changing heading too. Not by much. Right now, the centroid is heading for a point about a million kilometers from the Sun, but that in itself is a change. It was aimed dead center a few days ago. Something is shifting the cloud.”
“Not us,” Lane decided. “Something’s happening out there. We’d better call this in to UNISPACE. Send a three-line to Gateway and let’s setup a vidcon for later.”
Solnet/Omnivision Video Post
@dana.polansky.solnetworldview
February 20, 2156
1100 hours U.T.
SOLNET Special Report:
What’s Happening to the Sun?
This Solnet Special Report will cover a breaking story just coming out of UNISPACE Headquarters at the Quartier-General in Paris. Many viewers have noted the recently detected significant dimming of the Sun’s visible light output. UNISPACE has assured us, in a series of press briefings, that the dimming is not a result of any unpredicted eclipse or of any operations being conducted by UNISPACE itself. Solnet has sent reporter Dana Polansky to Paris to cover the story….
“Good morning. I’m here outside the Quartier-General on the Boulevard St. Michael in Paris’ 5th Arrondisement to report on what’s happening to the Sun. For several weeks now, billions of people have noticed a significant dimming in the visible light output of our Sun. This reporter has learned from highly placed but unnamed sources within UNISPACE that detectors at our Farside Observatory on the Moon and at other locations have measured a distinct change in course of the Big Bug Cloud. I have just yesterday returned from a trip to the Farside complex and can now reveal the following important information—“
Append Video Post 466 here…
“We’re here at the SpaceGuard Center, inside the Newton wing of the Farside complex, talking with Dr. Gilford Benes, an astronomer with Farside. Dr. Benes, thank you for joining us today at Special Report.”
“You’re most welcome, Dana. And welcome to Farside as well.”
“Thank you, Dr. Benes. In recent weeks, reports have been coming out of various sources, among them sources at UNISPACE, that the Sun doesn’t seem to be as bright as it once was. Are there changes going on with the Sun? What’s seems to be wrong with the Sun? And is this related to movements of the Big Bug Cloud?”
Benes smooth’s out what little hair he has left on an egg-shaped pate. “W
ell, Erika, actually there’s nothing wrong with the Sun per se. I want to put your viewers’ minds at ease on that score. The Sun is operating pretty much as it has for the last four plus billion years, with some variations in output, of course.”
“But, Dr. Benes, many viewers have noticed a diminishing in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth during the day.
“I’m sure they have. What we have detected here at Farside, using both optical and infrared telescopes, is what seems to be a massive course change in the Big Bug Cloud, as you call it, as it approaches the inner solar system.”
“That’s very interesting, Dr. Benes. Are there any suspicions that this cloud is moving away from the Sun, out of our solar system or is that just hopeful speculation?”
“Certainly we have those suspicions. Right now, we‘re studying this phenomenon very closely, trying to characterize the exact nature of the components of the cloud…are they dust particles, nanobotic elements or exactly what? This is an on-going process and we hope to have some results we can release in a day or so.”
“Dr. Benes, some of my sources insist that there is intelligence indicating that this phenomenon has come all the way from 51 Pegasi, perhaps from even further away and that it was in fact tracked across much of the Milky Way galaxy for the last twenty years. Can you comment on these allegations?”
“I can’t comment directly on things I haven’t seen, Erika. I’m sure you can understand that. We’re studying the Sunshadow anomaly---that’s what we’re calling it now—most urgently for additional details. Honestly, we need to track the phenomena further to be sure of its heading. I’m afraid that speculation that the Cloud is moving through and out of our solar system is, for now, just that—speculation.”
Dana wanted to press Dr. Benes further. “Dr. Benes, my sources tell me that Farside has been tasked by the UN to provide support to a proposed exploratory mission that is planned for launch in the next few weeks. Can you confirm this?”