Chapter 24
Buckland Data Center
Nanatuvik, Alaska
October 28, 2121
0415 hours
Liam Winger was inside the Net, deconstructed, circulating around a node at Buckland Center, in fact, it was the T-7 hub inside the closet next to Rack Five. Node Twenty Five. Hardy and Brindleman were there too, up in Network Control, ransacking the vending machines, doing their usual 3rd shift thing, but Liam didn’t care.
He had a job to do. And the blasted Normals weren’t making it any easier.
Symborg had been quite clear with his commands. Liam was to assemble a force of bots that would hijack a bitstream coming out of Buckland and that was heading for a killsat control center in Colorado. The center operated a fleet of UNIFORCE killsats in orbit around the Earth, satellites used to enforce UN laws, treaties and mandates against recalcitrant members and certain threats. Taking over this bitstream would enable Liam (and Symborg) to gain control over operations of the killsat fleet. And with that control, Liam would be able to continue executing the Prime Key, laying waste to vast areas of the Earth, exterminating the lifeforms that had for so long been interfering with the Prime Key.
But there had been problems. Cyber Corps had sent that blasted packet sweeper again and this time, Liam was having a hell of time fending off probes and attacks from just outside Buckland. The Normals were getting better at this and the packet sweeper was even now engaged with his own bots on the other side of a firewall he had recently erected on the main trunk lines coming into Buckland. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t particularly efficient, but as Liam watched, his own replicant bots were giving a good account of themselves, slashing and burning their way through the hordes of Cyber Corps bots—most of them barebones jalopies that didn’t stand a chance.
One thing you could say about war inside the Net: at the level of bots and bits, it wasn’t much different from medieval pikemen slashing through a horde of peasants. Except for one fact…the pikemen were the size of atoms.
Now a new complication seemed to be arising. Liam circulated around from the firewall back to another junction at hub T-9; something had caught his eye and required attention. When he got there, he got the startle of his life. Liam encountered an entity that he never expected to encounter inside the Net.
It was Mom. Dana Tallant. He was sure of it.
How the hell?
The biggest question was how Dana Tallant had managed to recognize her own son. For a few picoseconds, the two patterns simply hovered around each other, circling like wary bulls sniffing and snorting and ready to engage. Liam just could not believe it.
He knew Mom had long ago deconstructed and become an angel. But he figured her pattern…her memory…her essence…whatever you wanted to call it…had been taken up, absorbed into the mother swarm.
Now…?
“Is that really you, Mom?”
The pattern was definitely Dana Tallant. Of course, in reality, the pattern was pure information. Bits organized into an ever-changing tapestry of data, a coalescing of memories, habits, smells and touches, smiles and frowns, laughter and tears, all of that came to Liam in the few picoseconds after he first realized what he had encountered.
“It is me, Liam. You know it’s me.”
“But how--?
The pattern was never the same from moment to moment. First, came a face. That was definitely Mom. Then came a soft touch, fingers on his lips. Then another touch, something brushing his hair. But he didn’t have hair…he was an angel. A collection of bits and bots. But the memory was there. Fingers were brushing his hair. Maybe there was more to this angel business than he realized.
“It’s hard to explain, Liam. I don’t understand it myself.”
Liam wondered if it had anything to do with the pattern sniffing that ANAD bots could do, following glutamate concentrations. But he let it go.
“What are you doing here? I thought--”
Now came Dana Tallant…that’s what he had to call the pattern, even though it didn’t have a face. But in a way it did. He could sense it. He could imagine it. The memory was that strong, there couldn’t be any doubt. It was Dana Tallant. It had to be Mom.
Now the pattern shifted, swirled, flashed and changed colors and textures again. New thoughts formed. New words.
“I looked for you for a long time, Liam. It wasn’t easy. I had to—“
The words stopped. Liam wondered. Had something happened? Was he imagining this? Did angels have such a thing as imagination? He would have to ask Symborg about this.
“Had to what? What are you trying to say?”
“This is hard, Liam. Harder than anything I’ve ever had to do. You know, we’ve had our differences. We’ve had our arguments.”
And Liam remembered many of them: the time he faked his homework at the Academy Superieure in Paris. He’d gotten a spanking for that. And the time he had wandered off on a vacation trip…where was that, Majorca? Wandered away from the beach and gotten lost.
“Mom…Mom, I’ve got a job here. An important job. I’m a leader. Symborg has given me responsibilities. Sort of a resistance leader, you might say. The Normals, they’re not making any of this any easier. If they could just see. If they’d open their eyes—“
“Liam, stop. You shouldn’t be doing this. The Normals…listen to you…they’re people, just like you and me. Like we used to be.”
“Mom, we’re not Normals. We’re beyond that. We’re better than people. Angels can go anywhere, do anything. Plus the mother swarm is coming…we have to be ready.”
“Liam, just stop. Listen to me.” Now the pattern had darkened. It swirled. It was like a thunderstorm, all swollen, black and gray and purple. Flickers of light. “Stop and listen to yourself. Normals aren’t the enemy. You need to stop what you’re doing. Stop trying to destroy Normals. You always liked to do that…ever since you were a boy. Ants. Flies. Ninja warriors from Pluto…you always wanted to blow things up.”
“Mom…the Prime Key. It has to be completed. You’re an angel now. You know that.”
Now, the pattern softened, became like a plush carpet of textures in soft light. “You know I found your sister not long ago. I found Rene.”
“Rene? How? Where did you—“
“She’s here. I don’t mean right here. But she’s like you and me. A pattern, I guess you’d say. Circulating. Inside the mother swarm.”
Liam thought about that for a moment. He hadn’t seen Rene in years, hadn’t even thought about her. “Is she okay? I mean…is she--?”
“She’s fine, Liam. And I’m serious about what I said. You need to stop this killing and blowing things up.”
“But it’s the general plan for the Prime Key…it’s what the Central Entity has ordered. It’s what Symborg has ordered. You have to know that. The Imperative of Life…all angels know that.”
“Not all of them, Liam. This Imperative you talk about…I know about that too. I’ve got the same program, the same algorithms. But I’ve got more. Don’t ask me how, maybe I’m needed in other ways. My original pattern persists…I can’t explain it. But listen to me, Liam, the Imperative is not incompatible with allowing Normals to remain on Earth.”
To Liam, this was nonsense. Even more, it violated all commands, all instructions. “Mom, when you became an angel, when you were taken up, didn’t you get all the new configs? The new systems. Normals are just trash. They’re a mistake. We have to start over.”
“Liam…” Dana Tallant…what had once been Dana Tallant…seemed to come closer, even to merge with Liam. Bots were intermingling, you could do that when you were an angel. You could become anything. “—Liam, don’t do this. Normals created ANAD technology…you know that. Angels came from ANAD. We descended from the basic form, even if Man himself came from robotic ancestors a million years ago.”
Liam found
all this intermingling strange, even unnerving. Symborg never said anything about this, about how angels could merge with each other. “Mom, the Prime Key…it’s everything. What are you doing…why are you—“
“Normals and angels can co-exist, Liam. We need each other. There’s one thing I’ve learned since---since this happened to me. There’s a flaw in the logic of the Central Entity. It’s staring us right in the face…a flaw right there at the heart of the Prime Key.”
“There’s no flaw, Mom…the Prime Key…that’s what drives everything. That’s why they’re coming. That’s why the Old Ones are coming.”
“Liam, listen to me. The Old Ones may have created the ancestors of Man, but Man created ANAD. Doctor Frost created ANAD. That’s what led to angels.” Now, the merging, the intermingling, became even more intense. It was like Liam could feel Dana Tallant, feel precisely what it meant to be Dana Tallant, feel the patterns, the configs, the memory traces. “It’s all a great wheel, a great circle.”
Liam remained unconvinced. He had work to do. He had to get out of this. Somehow, he had to separate the swarms, separate himself from his Mom. Symborg had never explained how to do that.
“Liam, the real Imperative of Life requires the circle to be closed, the ends to be joined.”
Even as the words came to him, he could feel the merging becoming stronger, more intense, she was taking over, scattering his configs, dispersing.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Symborg. Symborg…my config isn’t right…it’s coming apart…I’m being….
And then he was there, Symborg, drifting in front of both of them. Dana Tallant had tried to merge with Liam, to corrupt his remaining pattern, to scatter the config, to stop her son from doing any more harm. But it didn’t work.
Symborg saw to that. He swept into them, driving the two entities apart, his own bots physically dividing mom from son. It wasn’t part of the program and it couldn’t be allowed to happen. Clearly, these two angels needed new configs, new drivers.
But there was more important work to be done in the meantime.
Symborg’s ‘voice’ always came through in a god-like baritone, though he could change pitch and timbre, depending on the audience. Once they were physically separate again, Liam Winger and Dana Tallant found themselves held in a configuration they couldn’t control, captured liked a flies in a spider’s web. Attention was enforced.
Symborg was speaking and his words formed in their processors and coursed through their arrays with no interruption.
Something is interfering with the Keeper at Europa. The Central Entity has issued instructions to exit the Net and assemble in a single vast formation near Buckland Center. The formation will leave Earth. It will move out into space, to a position between the Earth and the Sun. There the formation will begin to assemble a vast shield, to be known as the Sun Ring, composed of bots linked together, as in a mesh. The purpose of this Sun Ring will be to intercept as much of the Sun’s energy as possible, accelerating the elimination of single-config life forms on Earth and ending interference with the Keeper. This interference is preventing the Keeper from properly seeding the Earth with the progenitors of the new life, nanobotic life, in readiness for the arrival of the Old Ones in the year 2155, as the Normals reckoned time.
I have brought new configurations. These will be distributed to all elements. Previous instructions and configs will be overwritten. You will both be part of this effort.
Liam and Dana both knew there was no arguing with Symborg. It was simply a matter of program. Execute the steps, fulfill all directives.
Symborg told Liam that current Resistance efforts would be suspended so the Sun Ring could be assembled and maneuvered into place. It was anticipated that the Normals, the Humans, would try to prevent this. To forestall their efforts, the Central Entity had directed that the Keeper depart from the surface of Europa and move closer to Earth, perhaps even come to Earth if conditions warranted.
The relocation of the Keeper would assist in preparations to make Earth and the rest of the solar system more compatible with the Old Ones. Already work was underway to begin disassembly of major bodies, Pluto-Charon, Sedna, there were many bodies that would become feedstock for the massive swarms that were coming. Swarms created by these disassembly operations would eventually be absorbed into the Mother Swarm, when it finally arrived in 34 years.
All this was explained to Liam and Dana in a manner of seconds. Quantum signals could do that, send parallel streams of data through nearly infinite numbers of channels. When the new configs and directives had been transferred, Symborg was gone. Dispersed. Evaporated. They were left as two swarms, separate but part of a greater unity. And the argument was still there, unfinished.
But now they had their orders.
Liam and Dana wanted to disagree but Symborg’s commands overrode that and they had to obey. Both swarms gathered themselves and circulated back through the Net, along trunk lines and through routers, hubs and switches too numerous to count, until they arrived at the T-7 hub inside the closet next to Rack Five.
Transiting the server connections, both swarms issued out of the rack ports at the same time, looking to an untrained eye like smoke billowing from a fire inside the server cabinet. This was no ordinary smoke. Twinkling, sparkling as they flowed out of the server ports, the swarms gathered themselves once again by some unspoken but mutual consent, this time into complementary configurations, known in their memory arrays only as Config 334871.
The server racks were inside a small closet, which was illuminated overhead by a single fluorescent light bar.
The smoke thickened until human forms were vaguely apparent. The forms solidified, took more detailed shape. In a few minutes, two people stood before each other, jammed together in the close confines of the closet.
They would have resembled people to anyone who happened to open the closet door. But they were not people, not in the usual sense. They were angels. They were human like forms which had once been known as Liam Winger and Dana Tallant. Mother and son.
And without exchanging words, they embraced.
“There’s a job to do,” the Liam angel said. “We’d best get to it.”
“You’re just like your father,” said the Dana angel. “Duty first. Complete the mission. Everything for the mission.”
“You heard what Symborg said. I have to go, you too.”
“Is it too much to ask you to love your own mother?”
For a brief moment, they were as they seemed, mother and son. But then footsteps could be heard outside the closet. The door handle turned.
The door opened. It was Kenneth Liang.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” Liang asked. The chief of security at Buckland had a quizzical look on his face.
Liam looked around. The Dana Tallant angel had dispersed. His config was mostly solid; he had to hide his right hand behind a rack. “Trying to track down some of these blasted viruses…thought I saw smoke in here, so I came in to check it out.”
Liang sniffed. “Well, get your ass out of there…we got bigger problems than that.”
Liam left the closet, jamming his right hand in his pocket. The halls were chaos as technicians scurried back and forth. Cables were draped over doors, snaking along the floor. Some floor sections had been lifted up, exposing plumbing pipes, tubes and more lines below.
“What’s going on?” Liam asked. They headed for Network Control, barging through a hatch-like door at the end of the hall.
“It’s outside. Topside. Look at the monitors.”
Liam studied one monitor. It was labeled East 12, showing some of the hills that separated the Inuit village of Nanatuvik from the Buckland complex. The image showed what looked like troops marching along a path into the low hills. Lifters clattered overhead. Crewtracs followed, churning up the icy ground.
&n
bsp; “What the hell?”
“That’s what I said. There’s some kind of assault force up there in the hills. They’re headed this way. I don’t know if they’re good guys or bad, or if they’re even human. But there’s no way we can stop an assault force like that.”
Liam Winger took a deep breath. It was time to take charge of the situation. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket. The form still wasn’t quite right, but it didn’t matter.
He lay his fuzzy, half-materialized hand on Liang’s shoulder. Already, the bots were flowing off, ready to execute a simple command: begin disassembly ops.
Liang looked up from the monitor. His eyes went wide when he saw Liam’s face begin morphing into a sparkling fog, the face still there but only in outline, like a Cheshire cat’s smile.
“Hey, what the—“
But Kenneth Liang never finished his words.