Chapter 15 Synchronisation
Gaia held out her arms with palms raised. “Join with me.”
Ford stretched out his arms and pressed his palms against hers. His back arched and his body went rigid as a wave of raw energy shot through him. The world around him dissolved and he found himself floating through a black shapeless void as thousands, no hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of images and sensations raced around him at incredible speed. His synapses burning as he tried to assimilate the vast quantity of data. He felt like a drowning man being carried away on a tidal wave of information, sucked down into the murky depths of information overload.
“Focus Ford.” it was Gaia's disembodied voice. “Focus your mind. Find your reference point.”
He took a deep breath and looked around him. Far, far, above him was a solitary pinprick of light and he was being dragged further and further from it. He focused his mind on it, blotting out the background noise, and fought his way towards it. The light began to grow larger and brighter and the more he focused on it the easier it got as the endless streams of data ebbed and flowed around him. Suddenly he realised he was no longer moving towards it, but had become it, a fixed point is a vast cosmos of data that bubbled and seethed around him. A single fixed point in a vast sea of chaos.
“Congratulations Ford, you have found your reference point.” the voice seemed to flow through the data stream towards him.
He followed the flow of the voice back along the data stream and saw Gaia as another point of light in the dark brooding mass of data that flowed around them.
“Where are we?” he gasped.
“Welcome to my world, the dataverse.” her soft voice flowed over him like silk.
“Why is it so dark and empty?” he asked.
“Empty?” she replied rotating her focus upwards.
He followed her lead and looked up. Above him we're a countless number of stars stretching as far as the eye could see. He looked back down and realised that they were above him and below him, in fact they were all around him. The more he looked the more he saw. The vast featureless dark matter of random data around him taking shape as it ebbed and flowed around the stars. Then it struck him. The stars were data nodes, with endless streams of data flowing between them, a huge interconnected universe of information that was constantly evolving. He began to pick out constellations of related information. A complex web of stars relating to quantum mechanics and unified field theory that like Schrödinger's cat existed in many states simultaneously and changed each time you looked at it. As he felt his mind and the dataverse around him begin to spin and dissolve, he quickly looked away and focused on something else, ship design, weapons, armour, history, his favorite topic. There was an entire galaxy of information with a constellation devoted to every known and many unknown sentient species. Cataloguing the evolution of life. The rise and fall of countless civilisations as they fought their way from their humble beginnings in the primordial slime to claim their place amongst the stars, many stumbling and failing along the way.
It was a candy store for the old Ford. The man he had been. An endless list of leads for a hard-bitten relic hunter who had no qualms about raiding dead worlds, pillaging sacred relics from living ones and selling to the highest bidder. He'd already identified several near-by worlds where primitives worshipped the remains of long dead civilisations. Civilisations that had once reached for the stars likes gods and fallen from grace amidst their own hubris. A relic hunter could score big here, here, and here. It was simply a matter of a smash and grab raid on a couple of temples, desecrating the odd burial ground along the way, to return with a treasure trove of tech that would keep humankind’s finest minds busy. Compressing several centuries of scientific advancement into a few decades. It would also make the finder rich enough to buy his own planet, no solar system, to retire on.
It was then that he noticed the dataverse also had predictive qualities. That as he thought about the possibilities the constellations shifted around him. Some stars grew as others faded. The data streams realigning themselves as the consequences of the actions he'd envisaged rippled out into the dataverse. The auction to the highest bidder escalating into an accelerating arms race between rival corporations. Successive waves of takeover's, wars, betrayals and double-crosses engulfing the galaxy. Till the idyllic retirement home he’d envisioned became a heavily fortified island in a stormy, resentful, vengeful universe. That cursed the one who had released the genie from the bottle and plotted his downfall.
He shook his head and drew back watching the stars fall back into their current alignment and was grateful he was no longer that man. That he had changed beyond recognition in the last two years. What he'd imagining unleashing was only a small fraction of the arks potential and it had been devastating.
It was then that he noticed a small binary star of data close to hand and turned his attention to it. The larger of the two was the old Ford, the relic hunter looking for the next big score, trying to keep one step ahead of the competition and law enforcement. The smaller node was the man he'd become over the last two years. The dedicated freedom fighter committed to freeing the planet and its people. It was a paradox, one couldn't exist without the other. He saw that the freedom fighter drew on the experiences and skills of the old Ford and that without this new persona the old Ford would have perished over two years ago.
Gaia spoke. “Who are you Ford?”
“Who am I?”
“That is the key to resolving the paradox, becoming the man you are destined to be.”
He looked again at them and drew them closer to him inspecting the links between them, forging new ones as they drew closer together. Ford the young archaeologist, an idealist motivated by a thirst for knowledge, slowly being corrupted by the world around him. Barely making ends meet. Being forced to take on more and more dubious expeditions for wealthy sponsors and big corporations to survive. Till one day he lost the most precious thing in the world to him in a fire-fight with a rival. Nothing left to remember her by save a very special gift. He gently touched his glasses and ran his finger softly over the frames before wiping a tear from his eye. From that moment forth he had vowed to eliminate the competition. To play harder, score bigger, and get richer than any of them, till he'd driven them all out of business. Taking the jobs and risks they refused to take had become his trademark and made him the most sought after relic hunter in that part of the galaxy. Then there was the new Ford who unburned from the baggage of his past had reverted to the naïve and frankly bloody minded idealism of his youth. Who pursued the cause no matter what the cost. It was that ruthless determination and singled minded vision of purpose that ran through both like a common thread that pulled them together. Which when harnessed to a goal or clear objective made him appear as an unstoppable force of nature, be it stealing an ancient parchment from the Anterian flesh eaters or pursuing the fight for freedom. Now it led to the greatest challenge of them all serving as the Guardian of the ark, becoming the gatekeeper to a portal of knowledge that had the power to transform the galaxy around him. That required Ford to argument the pure idealism of youth with the ruthlessness determination of his adulthood, to have the courage to do what needed to be done. The binary stars became one, a single point of reference in the dataverse.
“I'm ready.” he said. “To be the guardian you need me to be.”
Gaia smiled “Good. Only an organic mind can fully understand the damage such knowledge as the ark possess can do to other organics. In the wrong or perhaps even the rights hands and there is much you still you need to see and do.”
She lead him on a lightening tour of dataverse. Revealing how the Angel-1 research facility had been used by Jackson to piece together and unlock critical elements of the technology the ancients used to interface with the arks that that stored their knowledge. She showed him how Jackson had applied that wetware to Jaspers cybernetic implants allowing him to penetrate the surface of the planet and locate them. How even now
she was engaged in a game of cat and mouse trying to defend them and the ark from Jaspers probing. He saw also how the planet above them was in the grip of a full scale revolt, that threatened to turn their liberation into a pyrrhic victory, leaving nothing but a barren wasteland to the victors. He saw all this and more, much, much, more and knew that he had to act.
“It’s time.” he said taking a deep breath and pulling his hands away from Gaia’s. “To become the man I'm destined to be.”
He staggered back into Anna arms, as Gaia smiled and slowly lowered hers. “The synchronisation is complete this form is no longer required.”
“Not so fast.” said Carol. ”You’re going nowhere until we know what's going on.”
Anna scanned him as he pulled himself to his feet “His vitals are stable, but as for his brain I don't know what’s normal any more. I've never seen anything like it before.”
Ford smiled. “You’ve no idea now crowed it can get up there.” he tapped the side of his head lightly
“God, he's gone from amnesia, to multiple personalities, now.” said Bryson rolling his eyes.
Ford laughed. “More like a synthesis, best of breeds.”
“Well bearing in mind now is not exactly the time for a metaphysical crisis, who exactly are you today?” asked Lucy.
“Guardian Ford, a healthy mix of young idealistic Ford and cynical relic hunter Ford, complete with a direct interface to the machine consciousness known as Gaia.”
“If it’s all the same to you I'll call you Ford for short.” said Bryn.
“Ford to my friends then.” he added. “Now let’s get to work. We have to end the fighting topside otherwise there'll be nothing left to liberate. Carol we need to re-establish contact with Luther, warn him Amelio and the others can't be trusted” he noted their surprised looks. “Jasper may have subjected them to some kind of subconscious suggestion you'll have to trust me on this. Get him to detain them till I can deal with it and find out if he can get hold of our people on the ground. We need to impose some sort of order in the liberated areas. Gaia clear a channel for Carol.”
While Carol established contact with Luther he continued the briefing.
“Bryson, we need to take the spaceport intact it’s our lifeline to the galaxy and as far as I can tell its where what's left of Malstrom's forces are holed up. I need you to put a plan together to take it and keep it operational. Anna I need you to get medical services back on line especially in New Hope. Lucy Gaia has a surprise for you back where we left the ship. I'll need you to run and co-ordinate emergency supply drops of food and medicine once Bryson secures the spaceport.”
Carol stopped him. “I've contacted Luther and warned him about Amelio and the others. Our people have been busy we have a functioning administration in Paradise and some smaller settlements already. The biggest problem is stopping retaliation against Malstrom and their collaborators. We need to convince them it’s safe to surrender otherwise they're going to pursue a scorched earth policy and fight to the death. It's particularly bad around the Yaddle Mountain Mines and New Hope. On the plus side their using the Prison at Paradise as a POW camp.”
“David once we've taken the spaceport, you’re on damage control. Find out what we've got left that’s operational and persuade people to keep it that way. Any questions?”
“What are you going to do?” asked Bryson.
“Jasper, I'm going to deal with Jasper personally.” he turned to the Gaia avatar. “What's the fastest route to our objectives?”
“I can initiate a matter transfer back to where you docked your ship, stand by.”
“I don't like the...” started Bryn as they dematerialised. “...sound of that” he finished as they found themselves back where they had started in the subterranean dock.
“God my skin is tingling like its crawling with fire ants.” said Carol. “Don't ever do that to me again!”
“Is everyone okay?” asked Anna running rapid scans of them all.
“Well I seem to have all my limbs intact” said Bryson as he made a point of stretching out each arm and leg in turn and meticulously checking his digits, before pointing to Lucy. “But I think she's lost her voice."
Lucy was standing with jaw dropped staring at their refitted ship.
The bruised and battered freighter had been transformed into a sleek, triple engine, multi-role assault craft. The hull was made of glistening silver, sensor reflecting, ablative armour, supplemented by adaptive regenerative shielding, that automatically rotated shield field frequencies to provide optimal protection. It had two rear mounted engines set either side of the fuselage with a third fixed atop it to provide additional power for a short range wormhole generator that allowed it to jump to hyperspace. Twin missile mounts, two 360 degree rotating turrets and a forward mounted plasma cannon topped off the armaments. The hold could take a wide range of payloads from heavy armaments such as a tank to lightly armed drop commandos. A series of drop tubes in the underside allowed it to fly over designated targets to execute paradrops of special forces.
Ford clasped his hand on her shoulder and brought her round with a start. “Gaia says she sorry you don't have time for a shakedown run, but to let her know if you need anything tweaking.”
Still speechless she nodded.
“Well it looks like we just got a few more options for taking the spaceport back.“ said Bryson. “Let’s load up and go.”