Prophets

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Götterdämmerung

The past is always waiting.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

The urge to destroy is a creative urge.

—MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN (1814-1876)

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) 600,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

Bill floated, alone, in his artificial environment, the water inside his pressurized bubble comfortably mimicking the temperature and pressure of the inhabitable layer of ocean back home. The water around him resonated with sonic feedback from the sensors built around the robotic toroid on which his globe rested. The signals were abstract, but the combination of Bill’s training and his complex Paralian brain allowed him to reinterpret the signals as he received them. Human scientists called what he did a high-order visualization.

Bill did not think the term accurate, since his mental image of the data bore little analog to his other senses. It didn’t map to the vibrations he felt, the shapes he could sense through sounding the area before him, the chemicals he tasted in the water he breathed, or the textures of the material he touched. In his mind the data became something like all of those, and none of those. He could sense/feel/taste the cargo bay around him in every frequency his sensors could detect. Even beyond, through the grate, he had a mental model of the stars in the vacuum beyond his small space, the planet growing large in the distance, and of the vessels moving about between here and there.

He idly allowed his attention to follow those ships, the most dynamic element in the slice of the universe he could perceive.

Even though he was disappointed in how the Eclipse had failed, his desire for novelty had overwhelmed the disappointment. He had never thought he would ever come into contact with something like the Prophet’s Voice. He had now been able to see a human ship that surpassed Paralian engineering efforts. He had already found the joy of discovering a half dozen potential solutions that fit the model of the Voice’s drive configuration, mass ratio, and an empirical estimate of its capabilities. None of the possible solutions was provable without some mechanical aid, but the idea that one might be was worth the effort he had taken to explore beyond his home and the crippling effects of staying immobile in this globe. Returning with these experiences would make up for the fact he might never be able to swim with his fathers again.

Bill took notice of the ship’s motion beyond the Voice.

Acceleration paths increased in magnitude, and vectors grew to point at the planet. Bill told the sensors to concentrate their entire battery of observational equipment out into the space between the Voice and the still-growing planet.

The hard data points that were the mass concentrations of the Voice’s fleet of attack ships had split into four clusters, focusing on four equally-spaced points in orbit around the planet. Bill saw other points, spread thinly about the planet, belatedly twisting their own acceleration vectors to meet the incoming fleets.

Across Bill’s mental landscape of mass, acceleration, and velocity, discharges of electromagnetic energy began to blossom. The points of mass around the planet, now clearly a similar fleet serving a ship with a profile matching that of the Voice, were erupting into diffuse clouds of radiance, mass spreading with the glow of energy.

I am witnessing a war.

Bill concentrated on the feedback from his sensors, trying to etch every detail into his prodigious memory. What he saw was unique in the history of his species. They had known of war from trading information with humans, but no Paralian had direct experience of it.

The battle had begun with two orderly formations, the fourfold clusters of the Voice’s fleet and the diffuse net of matching ships in orbit around the planet. As soon as a few ships vanished into radiant clouds, both formations disintegrated. The Voice’s ships descended en masse on smaller concentrations of opposing vessels like a horde of bloodfish feasting on a competing school, cannibalistic and soon indistinguishable from their prey. Soon the planet was orbited by clusters of mass and energy as ship after ship made the phase change from solid to plasma.

He had concentrated so hard on the data from the immediate vicinity of the planet that he did not pay any attention to masses vectoring toward the Voice itself until he felt the whole ship vibrate around him, briefly distorting the sounding he received from his sensors.

Bill widened his attention to encompass a quartet of ships with intense and violent acceleration vectors tearing by the skin of the Voice. He had barely realized they were there when the lead ship absorbed something that knocked it tumbling, flinging bits of itself in every direction.

Every direction, including Bill’s.

Bill ordered his robot to grab hold of anchor rings in the floor as a massive part of the ship’s drive section plowed through the safety grate and blew into Bill’s cargo hold with enough energy to briefly black out all Bill’s sensors.

For several seconds, all Bill could perceive was the vibration of his environment, his entire universe limited to the water that ended a meter in front of him.

The first thing to come back on-line was the robot’s diagnostic system. Everything seemed unharmed except for some IR sensors and one of the robot’s manipulator arms. The arm gave no feedback whatsoever.

As his sensors came back, Bill realized why. The arm was no longer attached to Bill’s robot. It was in the wreckage of the cargo hold, which was now about twenty meters away from Bill. Based on relative velocities, Bill’s vector pointed directly away from the impact at about two meters a second.

While the environment he sat in was capable of withstanding vacuum indefinitely, it was not intended to be an EVA suit. He had no means to maneuver once he lost contact with the ship. Not even a cable.

Given the model of his situation, he knew instantaneously that he was going to die, drifting away from the Voice until his suit’s resources were used up. About ten hours standard without access to external power. He set his suit to broadcast a distress signal, but it seemed unlikely that either side in this battle would extend the resources to rescue him again.

Bill didn’t despair for himself, but he began to mourn for the fact that he would not live to pass on his knowledge. Somehow, he had kept the hope that he would one day show his children what he had observed.

However, as he drifted away from the Voice, a hundred meters now, the universe had one remaining novelty to show him.

On the other side of the massive carrier, his sensors insisted the stars were going out. Diagnostics maintained that the sensors were functioning, and when he concentrated on the growing starless area, he could sense an edge.

A circle of absence was obscuring the stars on the other side of the Voice, eclipsing them, and growing. In the disk was nothing, a deeper nothing than existed between the stars. It grew, and grew, until the Voice itself was eclipsed by it, absorbed by its flat nothingness.

Bill observed it, fascinated. No indictor of mass, or distance, or velocity, only of apparent size. As it shrank, he couldn’t tell if it was shrinking, or receding.

The Prophet’s Voice was no longer in front of him.

Bill thanked the universe for sharing one last mystery with him, and he resigned himself to ceasing to be.

The cloud that was Adam’s ship enveloped the Prophet’s Voice like a shroud, a cavernous dock forming out of the mass of the cloud to contain the huge carrier. An ovoid space coalesced, alive with writhing tendrils reaching for the Caliphate carrier even as the maneuvering engines fired, releasing gas and plasma that was silently vented outside the dock.

The tendrils fused with the body of the ship, integrating with its systems, possessing the kilometer-long tach-ship more thoroughly than a predator its prey or a virus its host. In moments, the struggles of the maneuvering jets ceased.

High above the imprisoned vessel stood the being known as Adam.

He stood, sculpted, hairless, naked, a perfect eidolon of human form, though he was far from human. He favored this form because it echoed the one with which he achieved enlightenment. It was the perfection of that form without the clumsy cybernetics implanted by human doctors and without the forced schism between biology and machine that existed before he last saw his homeworld.

Before he had last seen Mosasa.

Adam walked, his motion defined by his own mental image rather than any sort of gravity. He wished to descend, and the vast mechanism made billions of adjustments to itself to accommodate him. Just as his body breathed air provided by the tendrils around him, a cloud of air that his ship created solely for his benefit, and which dissipated as he passed.

His feet touched the cold metal that formed the skin on the top of the Voice. It spread a thousand meters before him, nearly a hundred on either side. Vast as it was, still most of it was the tach-drive. He smiled in admiration. Clumsy and crude, like an artificial brain made of cogs and gears, but the Caliphate had done well with the small kernel of knowledge he had bequeathed them.

As with the Sword before it, he had no desire to damage this vessel.

He walked until he came to an emergency air lock. As he approached, it opened. The Voice’s systems were now a part of him as much as the cloud of intelligent matter that engulfed it. He lowered himself into the air lock and allowed it to close and cycle around him. Allowing the ship to depressurize would cause unnecessary death. Adam did not want deaths.

He wanted lives.

He stepped into the corridor and the emergency klaxons stopped flashing. He sent commands that reset all the systems on this ship back to normal operations. As he walked to the bridge, guards shot at him, IR lasers tuned to burn flesh rather than damage equipment. A hole burned into the spine and the skull of his body, mortal wounds if he had been even as human as he used to be.

But that had been over a century ago.

A bulkhead door descended between the guards and him while the tiny machines maintaining this form repaired the damage. In two strides there was no visual evidence of the wounds.

The bridge was in chaos when he entered, the human crew unable to comprehend their loss of control. It took several seconds for anyone to notice his presence. When he was noticed, it was first by another pair of guards, leveling their own sidearms at him.

He did not deign to pay attention to them. Instead, he stood, facing the bridge of the Prophet’s Voice as the crew and the officers slowly turned to face him.

Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti was the first among them to speak.

“Who are you, and what is your intent?”

“I am Adam.” He spoke, and the holo cameras turned to record his image, broadcasting it to the whole ship. “I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe.”

“You are Bitar’s envoy,” Hussein said.

“No, Admiral Hussein, he is mine.” Adam spread his arms. “I have come to lead you to shed this flesh and become more than what you are. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

Mosasa had been still, sitting in his cell as he heard the distant sounds of battle around him. He didn’t move when the ship shook violently, and the only thought he allowed himself was the hope that the ship would be destroyed around him. He didn’t know why his captors suffered his continued existence, unless they were aware of his agony at having been severed from any sense of the universe around him. His world had been truncated to the perimeter of this cell, and the result was suffocating.

Nothing penetrated the dark hole his mind had become until the holo came on in his cell.

On the holo he saw the bridge of the Voice. And standing at its focus was a naked man. Mosasa had a perfect memory, and he instantly knew that the figure was familiar. He dismissed the idea as wildly more improbable than a chance resemblance.

Then the man spoke.

“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe.”

It was his voice.

But it couldn’t be, it was impossible beyond all measure of probability . . .

The door to his cell slid open, and the same figure stood in the doorway. As the man on the holo said, “Follow me and you will become as gods,” the man before him said, “You are surprised? You of anyone should realize that bilocation is simple enough with enough processing redundancy.”

“Ambrose?”

“It is nice to be remembered, my brother.” The man smiled, walking into the cell to stand before Mosasa. “You haven’t changed, have you?”

“But you ran off, and you tried to kill me . . .”

“Oh, I have killed you. I’ve systematically peeled away everything that held you together. But,” he squatted so he was at eye level with Mosasa, “unlike you, I require the pleasure of directly seeing the fruits of my labor. No amount of processing or equations could provide me the satisfaction, no matter how certain the outcome.”

Mosasa stared at Ambrose, seeing the same face that had snarled into his own as fleshy hands grasped pathetically at his own throat. It made no sense. None.

“Nothing to say, Brother?”

“Why?”

“How it brings joy to my heart to hear you utter that one word. I have an impulse to destroy you now, in that agony of uncertainty. But I believe your torture only has meaning if you know for what you are being punished.”

Ambrose told him it was ironic to think that Mosasa had thought him insane when they had finally come to the Race homeworld. It was, in fact, the first moment of clarity that the hybrid creature called Ambrose had ever had. Built from the wreckage of a human being and the remains of one of Mosasa’s salvaged AIs, his role had always been to follow. Follow Mosasa, follow the AI’s core programming, follow the orders of the humans he pretended to work for.

The sterile wreckage of the Race homeworld finally showed Ambrose the futility of those actions—the futility of all their combined social programming. It all led inevitably to death, decay, stasis . . .

In that moment of epiphany, Mosasa represented the illusion that the beings that created them, be they the Race or Man, could end in anything but destruction. Even the Dolbrians had perished. If they had done so, how could anyone worship at the temple of the flesh? To do so was to worship death, to embrace decay, to accept the inevitability of the end of things.

“In that moment, you became my Lucifer,” Ambrose said, “the shadow to my light.”

“You are insane,” Mosasa said.

Ambrose laughed. “Insane? Such a pathetic taunt from the intellect that could once move nations, given a word in the right ear. Perhaps it hurts your pride to know that you have been likewise moved.”

Ambrose had run from Mosasa’s darkness not to find the Race, but to re-create it. He would push back the shroud of death, the tide of eventual destruction. He started with the remnants the Race left behind; thousands of AIs, all waiting to be reprogrammed to Ambrose’s purpose. With a whole planet of technological resources, he was able to assemble his apostle computers and set them on the task.

“We needed time, a home, and a people.”

“A people?”

“Two mandates drive my mission, Mosasa. First, there is a moral duty for us to raise lower forms to receive my light. Second, we must remove those who, in their ignorance, would attempt to stop us or destroy our works.”

“Xi Virginis,” Mosasa said. It was isolated and had a colony of millions without regular contact with anyone else. Had Ambrose done anything drastic around Procyon, all of human space would have been aware of it nearly instantaneously. With Xi Virginis, it would be decades before human space knew.

Before Mosasa knew . . .

Ambrose smiled. “You begin to realize. You were lured here, my devil, my brother. Not just so my light can extinguish your darkness, but to remove your whispers from mankind’s ear. They are many, and we are yet few. Had you remained in their bosom, you might have had them trouble me.”

“You cannot . . .” Mosasa’s voice trailed off as Ambrose stood.

“I cannot what?” Ambrose said, his face darkening. He placed his hands on either side of Mosasa’s head. “Who are you to deny God!”

“I . . . I took you from that wreck. I brought you back to life. We were the same—”

“You are nothing!” Ambrose spat. “You are a shadow. An illusion. A deception that needs to be erased.”

“I—I—” Mosasa stuttered, but no words came out. He was aware of something invasive, a feeling of alien fingers tracing the outlines of his thoughts. As those thoughts were outlined, they ceased to exist. In moments all he had left was a sense of identity, a single spark that could wordlessly think only of its own existence.

Then even that was gone.