Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (29 page)

Joshua smiled. “And my siblings look a little like me because they share the same basic code?” he guessed. “But why does my youngest sister have ginger hair? No one else in the family has it.”

“Some elements of the genetic code are recessive,” the sphere said. “It is possible that the precise coding for ginger hair skipped a generation, only to reappear in your sister. We would have to run a complete scan of your family to be sure.”

There was a pause. “Have you ever attempted to use magic to improve your sexual potency?”

Joshua flushed at the question. “Master Faye told me never to even
try
anything like that,” he said, embarrassed. “He said it always ended badly.”

The sphere tilted again. “Did
he
ever do anything to you that might have improved your body?”

“Only a handful of healing spells,” Joshua said, tightly. “What is wrong with me?”

“Your reproductive system is going like a rocket,” the sphere said. “That is not natural, even for the teenage human male. And there are a handful of very subtle changes where your power is hardly
subtle
.”

There was a pause. “There is a second oddity,” it added. “Have you ever attempted to use your powers to break down your body into a quantum waveform and materialise elsewhere?”

It required several explanations before Joshua grasped that they meant teleporting. “No,” he said, finally. “There are magicians who can teleport, but I never even started to learn the skill. I’m not even sure if Master Faye can teleport.”

He looked at the sphere. “Why?”

The sphere gave the odd impression of trying to decide what, if anything, to say. “Most of the damage inflicted on your body by your powers is easy to repair,” the sphere said, finally. “We are willing to do the repair work now, if you agree. However, deep-focus scans reveal faint damage at the quantum level. This damage is alarmingly comparable to teleporting accidents where the pattern was stored in the buffer for longer than a handful of microseconds.”

Elyria winced. “I thought that could be lethal,” she said, finally. “What exactly is happening to him?”

“There is a very faint degradation in his body at the quantum level,” the sphere said. Joshua didn’t understand what it meant, but it sounded ominous. “We believe that there is a very real possibility that his powers are slowly killing him, or driving him insane. In some ways, the effect is comparable to the damage caused by electronic simulation of the pleasure centres. The addict feels fine, right up until the moment he collapses.”

“I’m not insane,” Joshua insisted.

“Worse, the damage is beyond our ability to fix,” the sphere added, remorselessly. “Reassembling a human body on the quantum level is difficult; repairing one is almost impossible.”

“But Master Faye isn’t insane,” Elyria said, sharply. “Self-interested, yes, but he isn’t insane...”

“It is possible that the more powerful magicians manage to learn how to prevent further damage, without actually knowing what they’re doing,” the sphere said. “However, we are unable to repair the mental damage inflicted on Joshua. The operation would have almost no chance of success.”

Joshua swallowed, hard. “Am I going to die?”

A thought struck him. “Can’t you give me the same rejuvenation treatment you offered Master Faye?”

“The damage is at the quantum level,” the sphere said. “It’s unlikely that rejuvenating your body will cure the damage. The simplest solution would be to copy your brain pattern and upload it into a clone body; however, reading your brain patterns might be difficult, given the level of damage inflicted on your cells.”

“This makes no sense,” Elyria protested. “How can Master Faye be walking around seemingly sane when...
this
is happening to him?”

“Quantum-level damage is often unpredictable,” the sphere said. There was a pause. “It is possible that the damage never really becomes dangerous, although we regard that as unlikely. The increasingly unpleasant behaviour of many Scions and Pillars may be a result of mental warping caused by their powers.”

There was a pause. “Joshua,” the sphere asked, “how did you act when you first got your powers?”

“Master Faye taught me spells,” Joshua said. “I practised with them; once I knew how to use them, he taught me more spells.”

The sphere bobbled from side to side. Joshua was starting to realise that it was pretending to shake its head. “How did you behave?” it asked. “How did you
act
?”

Joshua cringed. There were memories he wanted to forget, not share with outsiders. But if there
was
a problem with his body, they could help him...

“I broke a number of rules,” he admitted, finally. “And I was beaten for it, just like any other apprentice.”

Elyria gave him a droll look. “We have our own apprenticeships,” she said, dryly. “Which rules did you break?”

“He taught me how to spy on people,” Joshua said, wondering if she would ever smile at him again. “I spied on a handful of girls I knew. And a bit later I cursed a boy who had picked a fight with me every week since I was nine. Master Faye whipped me until he drew blood for both actions.”

“Curious,” Elyria said, after a moment. “There is no check on his power, yet he keeps yours firmly under control. Why?”

“He said I needed to learn discipline,” Joshua explained. “And that as long as I was his apprentice, what I did reflected on him.”

“It is possible that the discipline you learned helped to mitigate the damage you were doing to your body,” the sphere said. “It is also possible that your actions were driven by emotion rather than thought; the average human male, granted the ability to spy on his fellows, would certainly
consider
acting as you did. However, we are unable to be sure until we run Dacron through a quantum scan of his own. We would have a baseline to compare to his current status.”

Joshua blinked. “Dacron is learning magic?”

“And doing very well, apparently,” the sphere said. There was a long pause. “We can repair most of the damage to your body. Do you wish us to proceed?”

“Please,” Joshua said. He held up his hand a moment later. “Will this prevent me from using magic?”

“We do not believe so,” the sphere said. “However, it is impossible to be absolutely certain.”

Joshua braced himself. “Do it,” he said. Healing spells always left him feeling uncomfortable, and he still had nightmares about a visit to the doctor when he’d been eight years old, before he’d come into his magic. “Get it over with.”

There was a long buzzing sound. “Much of the damage has been repaired,” the sphere said, bare seconds later. “Customised nanotech has been inserted into your body to deal with the remaining damage. This will be followed by a standard rejuvenation package comparable to what we have offered your Master. We would advise you not to attempt to
improve
your body in future. It is unlikely to do you any favours.”

Joshua stared at the sphere. “It is
done
?”

“The majority of the damage has been repaired,” the sphere said, patiently. “We used manipulator fields to work on your body from the inside. The remaining damage will take a few minutes longer.”

“Don’t ask for an explanation, or we’ll be here all day,” Elyria advised. “They love to show off.”

“We learned it from you,” the sphere said. There was a faint hint of amusement in its tone. “You created us, after all.”

Joshua blinked. “What are you?”

The sphere seemed to bobble in the air before starting to explain the basic concept behind artificial intelligence. Joshua couldn’t follow half of the explanation, but it seemed clear that the spheres were operated by a single intelligence, one that humanity had created. And there was
nothing
like that on Darius, nothing at all.

“Magic,” he said. The whole concept seemed insane. “Just... magic.”

CHAPTER
T
WENTY-
F
OUR

“The magic appears to cause technological glitching,” the AIs said. “The more complex the spell, the more extensive the glitch.”

Dacron nodded. They’d set up the lab in the building Master Faye had offered to them, running tests from the dawn of the scientific age right up to the Confederation’s own scientific level. Once they were set up, Dacron had started to cast spells to see what stopped working. The snoops and other high technology failed almost at once. Some of the older tech lasted longer before starting to fail. The only thing that worked consistently was chemical-powered technology.

“But none of the glitches make sense,” he said, crossly. “Why does the magic interfere with the flow of electric power, but not with the electric current in a person’s brain?”

“Unknown,” the AIs said. He’d spent the last hour detailing the magic words he’d learned for them, a harder task than it seemed as even
thinking
of them tended to produce odd results. Dacron was starting to think that the real challenge for magicians was memorising them, and then not actually
thinking
of them when they weren’t trying to cast spells. “We assume that there is an intelligent agent behind the magic somehow.”

Dacron nodded. At least the AIs had been able to suggest other possible magic words. The magical language didn’t seem to match anything in their databanks, but they were already analysing it and suggesting other possibilities. Each of the magic words was actually a combination of instructions to the magic,
just
like a primitive computer program. The real question was why something so advanced wasn’t self-aware. Or maybe it was and it was simply not interested in talking to the Confederation, or the AIs.

That wasn’t uncommon among alien artefacts. The Knowledge of Sigma VIII was an AI, albeit one created by an advanced alien race, that had either died out or become an Elder race, rather than humanity, but it was reluctant to talk to the Confederation. It shared knowledge with those who asked for it, in exchange for additional data for its stores, yet it never discussed its own origins. Or maybe it just liked being mysterious. The AIs had wondered if the Knowledge’s creators had actually taken a different attitude to AI than had humanity, but there was no way to know. Its creators had never been identified.

“It is possible that there
is
an effect on human minds,” the AIs said, and briefly ran through what they’d discovered through studying Joshua. “However, we are unable to account for the precise nature of the effects. The most likely conclusion is that they were caused by exposure to something comparable to a teleporter field, perhaps his observed self-fabrication capabilities.”

Dacron nodded. A human would have been terrified at the prospect of damaging himself – although observed human behaviour suggested that this never actually stopped anyone – but he knew that he would return to the
Gestalt
. It didn’t really matter if his clone body was badly damaged; after all, he could simply be re-embodied in a different body. Far better that he be risked than anyone else.

“I have observed that fireballs do not burn me when I summon them,” he said, thoughtfully. “It is possible that magicians instinctively avoid hurting themselves with their own magic if they understand the danger.”

“Fire is very understandable,” the AIs agreed. “That would also account for the damage inflicted on young Joshua through ignorance. It is possible that a more precise awareness of the human body would have allowed him to avoid damaging himself.”

There was a pause. “We have other spells we wish you to try,” they added. “Listen carefully.”

Dacron listened, and then cast the spells. They seemed to work very well, without problems, although the third spell prevented the radio implant from working for a chillingly long moment. Dacron watched in considerable awe as a small wooden stool became a chair, before the magic faded away and the radio came back to life. Carefully, he sat down on the chair and felt it creak under his weight. The stool had never been very large and – he assumed – it lacked the mass to make a solid chair.

“If you alter certain variables, it doesn’t try to generate matter out of the magic field,” the AIs said, with a hint of heavy satisfaction. Dacron found it harder to understand how the spell had worked, even though he thought he understood all the variables. “We suspect that leaving those variables out would have led to the spell either taking energy from the magic field or simply scooping up matter from nearby sources.”

“Which might be dangerous,” Dacron said, thoughtfully. The Scions were effectively isolated from the towns and cities, unless they chose to try to take over by force. It could be that Scions simply didn’t have the discipline to keep their magic under control and were forced out to learn it, or die well away from civilisation. “You could kill someone with such power.”

“Or cripple them for life,” the AIs agreed. “We are still experimenting with the language matrix, but we believe that we understand it now. The user interface, of course, is still a puzzle.”

“Even a silly RI can understand spoken instructions,” Dacron pointed out, dryly. RIs had processing power the earliest AIs couldn’t even imagine, but they could never make the jump into intelligence. “For all we know, the power behind magic picks its favourites and gives them access to the user interface.”

“But what separates a magician from the rest of the population?” the AIs asked. “We have sampled thousands of humans over the last few hours; none of them were particularly different from Joshua, at least genetically. There does not seem to be a common DNA strand linking magicians together.”

“It would be hard to be sure until we get the blood samples,” Dacron said. “Could it be that Joshua is Master Faye’s
son
? Or a distant relative?”

“We do not believe so,” the AIs said. “Joshua was certain that children born to magicians developed magic at a very young age and went mad with power. He certainly
didn’t
go mad, although he acted poorly by our standards. We have also checked his genetic code against that of his parents and siblings, without isolating anything that makes him different from them. It is possible that the choice was completely random. An alternate possibility is that
everyone
can do magic, but only a handful succeed in tapping into the magic force.”