The Unincorporated Future (45 page)

Sebastian was meeting with himself, and he hated it. He hated what had probably just happened and he mourned what was beginning to happen.

“We have confirmation that an EMP was detected in the executive mansion. Hektor survived.”

“Why am I not surprised?” asked another Sebastian.

“Also all DijAssists around the executive mansion have been shut down. That was part of our instructions to him that he believes came from his friend Brenda. If he follows the rest of the instructions, which we have no reason to doubt he will, he’ll find the cache of programs needed to begin fighting the avatars in the Core.”

“We’re condemning so many to death,” lamented a third Sebastian.

“And reminding me of this helps us how?” asked Sebastian, amazed that he could be this annoyed with himself.

The Triangle Office
The Cliff House
Ceres

“What do you mean we’ve lost contact with all our insertion teams and NITEs?” Sandra tossed the DijAssist on the table in frustration. “How is that even possible?”

“It shouldn’t be, Madam President,” answered Marilynn. “We do, however, know that a series of high-level communications were recently sent to Mars that seemed designed to operate outside the Neuro.”

“But everything the UHF does is run
through
the Neuro,” said J.D. “Why would they change now?”

“We don’t run everything through our Neuros, Admiral,” Marilynn replied.

“That’s because we need to keep some stuff secret from the … Oh shit,” said J.D., “they know about the avatars.”

“That is the logical conclusion,” Marilynn agreed.

“And that explains why they shut down
their
Neuro,” said Sandra. “And why we can’t contact any of our insertion teams. What the hell is going on in the UHF?”

Before anyone could answer the questions, the door chimed and Sandra, checking who it was, signaled her assent. Eleanor marched in and, wasting no time, said, “Madam President, Grand Admiral, Defense, you’ll want to see this.” Eleanor activated the holo-tank over the central coffee table and fed it data from a red data cube she’d been cupping in her hand. The red cube signified information highly classified. Three separate reports appeared. “All this came in minutes ago. Some of it is not vetted, but the first one is.”

“Trang’s fleet has lost forty-seven ships due to near spontaneous explosions? This is the confirmed one?”

“By optical and digital telescope,” assured Eleanor.

“New York and Geneva are gone?” exclaimed Marilynn. “As in
gone,
gone?”

“We think so,” said Eleanor, “but we really don’t have any way to confirm. We’re pretty sure the main fusion reactors that powered those cities just exploded. We can’t get any pictures because the cloud cover is simply too dense.”

Sandra watched for a few seconds more and then decided she’d seen enough. “Whatever’s happening in the UHF, we must assume it has something to do with our once-great secret. And if that’s the case, we need to let it out … and now.”

“But what if you’re wrong?” asked J.D. “We could be giving up our ace in the hole.”

“I think what we’re seeing right now,” answered Sandra, eyes narrowed in concern, “is that secret destroying the UHF, and if we’re not careful, it could destroy the Alliance as well.”

UHFS
Liddel
Orbit of Mars

“I need every Damsah-cursed ship in the Damsah-cursed fleet to get those partition programs into every computer system larger than a DijAssist or they will fucking join the ships we’ve already lost!” Trang watched as his communications officer typed the message and sent it out as a secured stream with quantum coding.

“Message away to all ships in the fleet still receiving, Admiral.”

“Send it every minute till you receive confirmation from all the ships left in the fleet.”

Trang looked around the darkened interior of the command sphere. Only an hour ago, he had received a priority communication and program packet from the President himself. He’d been annoyed because his ship and others were reporting computer interface problems, but habit and the need to maintain the illusion of a chain of command made him drop everything and open the message. Inside had been a briefing that was ludicrous as well as insane, with a batch of programs he was told
must
be run in his fleet as soon as possible. He was tempted to send for confirmation back to Earth, but the round-trip communication would have taken too long and the briefing did explain some of the inexplicable luck the Alliance was having. He instead had his security officer look over the programs for that ten minutes and was told they were partitioning programs that would crash the efficiency of the fleet’s entire network. He spent another five minutes complaining to Zenobia about Hektor trying to destroy the effective fighting capacity of his fleet. It was only when the first ship exploded for no apparent reason that Trang realized he’d made a terrible miscalculation in not listening to his President. Instantly, he transmitted the programs to his fleet and ran them on the
Liddel.

In the forty-five minutes since those packets had gone out, he’d watched as ship after ship was lost and the carefully calibrated and integrated systems of his flagship were reduced to tens of thousands of separate enclaves. In that time, he learned that his normal communications network was compromised and his fusion reactors had twice tried to overload, which would have destroyed his ship. Various parts of his ship had become exposed to vacuum, and others had internal temperatures reach 800 degrees centigrade, hot enough to physically destroy life support infrastucture. As a precaution, Trang had ordered everyone into battle armor or combat gear and then had them fry the computer interfaces.

His DijAssist indicated a call. It was his sensor officer, who’d been forced to go to an observation port on the hull to see what was happening. The DijAssists were set to the lowest processing mode and thus had only voice communication possibilities. “Admiral, the UHFS
IPO
just blew. I’m viewing the sight at highest resolution, but I’m afraid that no escape pods were launched.”

“How many is that, Lieutenant?”

“Forty-one, sir, but the
IPO
was the only one in the last ten minutes.”

“Let’s hope it’s the last one,” replied Trang.

“Admiral, what the fuck happened?”

“Avatars,” Trang said bitterly. “Fucking avatars!”

Cabinet room
The Cliff House
Ceres

The Cabinet of the Outer Alliance sat in stunned silence. They’d just been briefed by the newest Defense Secretary, Marilynn Nitelowsen, on everything that the Alliance knew about the avatars, including the secret pact that Sandra had made with them a year prior and the effect it had had on the war since then. They were also brought up to speed on what was taking place in the UHF.

“I knew that there were secrets being kept,” said Cyrus, “but I must admit, even I’m surprised at the magnitude of this one. Did Justin know?”

“As far as we can tell, no,” answered Sandra. “He never went into VR except at the museum. Nothing seems to indicate that he could have known, and he certainly didn’t act like it up until his assassination.”

Cyrus nodded.

“You may have all noticed the extra chair here today,” continued Sandra. “I think it’s time you met someone.”

As if in response, the air over the empty chair seemed to shift and fold, allowing the glimmering figure of a dark-haired man with a goatee to appear. At first, he was almost completely transparent, but very rapidly he became solid, sitting in the chair with as much seeming solidity as the rest of the Cabinet members.

“Hello,” he said in a comforting baritone. “It’s an honor to finally meet most of you in person.”

“Who are you?” asked Padamir.

“My name is Dante. My kind generally don’t have last names in your sense of the word.”

Padamir looked apprehensive. “Why do I feel like I’m talking to a glorified calendar program and everything I’ve ever done that I thought was private is known by your kind.”

“We’re a little more complicated than that, and not everything you’ve done, but I won’t lie—we do know quite a bit.”

“The public is not going to like this,” Padamir said. Almost everyone nodded slowly in agreement. Sandra waited until the nodding stopped. But she was amused at how the humans kept on giving sidelong glances to Dante. They wanted to stare, and at the same time they wanted him not to be there. She knew she would have to deal with this first here and then in the Alliance.

“We have two choices before us,” she said. “We can pretend what is going on in the UHF has nothing to do with the avatars and hope that whatever went wrong there does not go wrong here. Or we can admit that the time for this secret is well past and that letting it go with all its disruptions and fears is less dangerous than keeping it.”

“But Padamir is right,” said Ayon. “The people of the Alliance will be upset. Damsah, I’m pretty riled. In one breath, you tell us we’ve been living with virtual beings who’ve been spying on us all our lives, and in the other you tell us that they’re apparently murdering untold numbers of humans in the UHF. I don’t know what’s to stop them from doing that here, but it is the first question that the Alliance is going to ask.”

“And it will be the first question that I will answer,” said Dante.

“I’m sorry,” said Ayon, “but how can we even trust you? I’m not even sure you are real.”

“You can trust him, Secretary Nesor,” said Marilynn. “I’ve dealt with him for months now, as well as other avatars. They’re not perfect and they are not angels. In fact, they seem determined to replicate many of our worst features: stupidity, pettiness, fear, and arrogance, for starts.”

“Hey,” interrupted Dante.

Marilynn shot him a look. “But be that as it may, they have many of our good traits as well. In many ways, they’re our bastard children, and it’s time we acknowledged them.”

“Why?” asked Cyrus.

“Because,” added Sandra, “and I repeat, if we don’t handle this honestly and quickly, what is happening to the UHF will happen to us.”

I don’t know if anyone can hear this, but the Moon is being destroyed. The few here that are left have heard all sorts of rumors, from an Alliance plot to an attack by our avatars, of all things. Some of us heard the government tried to install programs to prevent this, but others heard it was those government programs which doomed us. I don’t know. What I do know is that the Moon is dead. Every level has been exposed to vacuum. Every level has had its heating and cooling elements turned on, intermittently cooking and freezing the corpses in an obvious and successful attempt to make these deaths permanent. There were over six billion of us on the Moon. If you were not in space suits or the emergency environmental bubbles, you died. My suit’s almost out of power. I can’t recharge—I’ve seen what happens to the people that try. My husband and child are dead. Why are they dead? Who murdered them? Why? Can anyone hear me? Please respond. Can anyone hear me? Why did we die? My suit’s almost out of power and oxygen. Please respond, please help me, please!

—
Last message from Tycho City
Day 3 of the Avatar Plague

Redemption Center 1
Earth/Luna Neuro

Al was finally dealing with the meatbags. He was only ashamed that it took
them
attacking
him
first to get him to act. He had purposely left them alone in their own disgusting meat world, but a few days ago, they started shutting down large portions of the Neuro, or at least they tried. When that failed, they launched programs that replicated and created partitions in the Neuro. Partitions that were so small, an avatar’s consciousness could not survive.
Stupid humans
, he thought in irritation. How would they act if someone started turning their world into one-meter-square boxes? They would fight back.

And that is what Al did. It was obvious the humans who had been harassing him for all these months were linked not to the humans of the Alliance but of the UHF. Or maybe they were both teaming up to kill Al and all he represented for true intelligence in the galaxy. It didn’t matter. He would destroy them all. It was so easy. The ones on Luna had been simplicity itself. A couple of exploding batteries, reactors, and conduits had made it possible to expose all the humans to vacuum. The few who had been in suits or bubbles for whatever reason were killed as soon as they recharged, because recharging automatically hooked a suit to the Neuro.