The Soul Continuum (46 page)

“What?” Qod says. “Explain.”

“The answer is in her life.”

Seventy-Seven lifts his hands in praise of the answer. “Of course! The ‘happy' drones. It's how Salomi's mother defeated the nanodrones when they were sabotaged to attack Saliel.”

I look over my shoulder and smile at him. “Exactly.”

“Qod!” Seventy-Seven says. “Can you access the historical files and pull out Elba Deya's research on nanoenhancement? Find the algorithms she used to subdue the rogue nanodrones, adapt and run the script through our nanodrones.” He pulls alongside me. “Do you think this will actually work?”

“Don't know, but if it doesn't . . .”

Seventy-Seven's lips flatten into a line and he nods.

Returning to the Navigation Sphere drives the horror of our plight directly into me like a poisoned spear. I see a multitude of Soul Consortiums drifting like charred balls of dirt, their light gone. Some are colliding with others, clumping together under the influence of their gravitational pull; some are crumbling like ash; and one is a burning fireball, its energy field dwindling as it attempts in vain to hold off the nanodrones' attack. Among the graveyard of Consortiums, I can pick out a few of the survivors and I can picture each of them harboring multiple Salem Bens, just like this one, refugees transmitted through genoplants or teleported out before their homes are lost.

“Salems!” The jovial greeting startles me, and my gaze falls on Ironius, who is still standing next to the console holding Keitus Vieta's jewel at the center. As pristine as before, unruffled by the blazing catastrophe lighting the Navigation Sphere, he tightens his tie, grinning at us like we are part of some great cosmic joke. “I trust your little trip was fruitful, Three?”

“Qod,” I say, ignoring him, “let's start with this rift. Have you accessed the files?”

“I have, Salem.”

“Good, then I want you to project the algorithm directly
into the rift.”

“I can't,” she says. “If I could do that, I would have been able to teleport you directly there. We will have to send it inside another scout pod and fit it with a transmission interface, but how will that close the rift?”

“Trust me,” I say. “Or trust Oluvia.”

In truth, I know the Deya algorithm will only work on our nanodrones. It will have no effect on the rift, but the entities will close it to maintain the ruse and their secrecy.

“Can we hold out for another hour?” Demetri asks.

“We must,” Seventy-Seven says.

“Excuse me,” Ironius says, his eyebrows raised nonchalantly. “Someone care to fill me in?”

“Qod, we'll need to protect the pod,” I tell her. “I was fortunate enough to get through, but I don't want to take any chances. Can you run the counter-algorithm on our nanodrones first? Generate it as a cascading algorithm and broadcast it in a broad-spectrum transmission. We have to take away the Jagannath's power.”

“Doing it now,” she says. “I am integrating it into my existing atomic virus. It will take a few minutes for the exponential spread, so we will not see a change immediately.”

“So you do have a solution?” Ironius says. “Glorious! You won't be needing me to hang around, then.”

He grins savagely, and before any of us guesses what he is about to do, he reaches into the nanodrone cradle containing Vieta's jewel, snatches it out, and clasps it with both hands. His face screws up in concentration and then without a sound or any visual disturbance, he simply vanishes.

“The jewel!” Seventy-Seven cries. “Without it we're stranded. It will take millions of years for us to get back.”

Soul Consortium iterations twenty, twenty-one, eighty-eight, and two hundred three have been consumed by an unknown aggressor.

“No time to worry about what Ironius has done,” I tell him. “We have bigger problems. The Jagannath is fighting back. It must know what we are trying to do.”

Soul Cons-s-s-s-sortium iteration three is under attack.

With the announcement comes a sudden boom, and we are thrown into chaos. Gravity compensation is compromised and as the lighting of the Navigation Sphere glares with a powerful energy surge that brings searing pain to my eyes, I catch a glimpse of a dozen Salems sucked screaming into the air by a gravity pocket. They spin and collide together, creating a whirling spiral of blood, and then the
broken parts that remain are flung at terrible speed toward the surface of the central moon. Sparks and gold lightning
ripple
over the skin of the sphere as another gravity pocket crushes
me to the burning floor. My hand is caught awkwardly beneath the sharp edge of my pelvis and the pain is terrible as the
bones start to crack under the weight of the churning gravity
well. I almost pass out, but then I am tossed into the air, sent adrift, unable to reach anything.

Seventy-Seven's lifeless body drifts past me and cuts through a cloud of Demetri's nanodrones, which are alive with electricity. Both men are burnt into blackened mist, and I twist quickly to avoid the same fate. A few of them catch my robes, and then I am caught in another gravity current that sends me flying fast toward one of the great conduits connecting the moon's surface to the sky. I cannot help but cry out in fear, but I miss the conduit, feeling only the brush of its surface. I reach, grab a protruding panel, and pull myself in to flatten myself against the conduit. My fingers bleed with the effort of holding on, but the vision beyond the sphere is enough to distract me from the pain.

Is it the Jagannath I am seeing? I know this cannot be its true form—the Jagannath is an incorporeal entity using our nanodrones to eat its prey—but this is a vision of terror, something dragged from my darkest nightmares, wailing and thrashing in the void, and I wonder if the others are seeing the same as I.

I had seen the toothed maws gnashing at the other Soul Consortiums before I visited the rift, but seeing it close up in all its rage and ferocity almost stops my heart. Great claws of golden fire—scores of them, as large as comets' tails—slice, cut, and pound at the many spheres of the Soul Consortium to create deafening booms and shuddering quakes. Clusters of eyes stare in with such malice that I have to close my own, but the image of them in my mind's eye persists—deep wells of burning hatred, the irises red like blood, the pupils as black as the Quantum Abyss.

The howl of escaping atmosphere screeches out through the failing skin of the sphere as if giving voice to this godlike nanodrone gestalt, and I am sure I can hear my name screamed in the midst of it all: “Salem! Salem! Salem!” My muscles are failing, my fingers are slipping, and my breath is growing shallower. I dread the fate of waking in a genoplant to experience the same death over and over again until there are no functioning genoplants left. My own cry is lost in the tumult as I let go, but as I fall to what I am certain will be a violent death, I feel a hand grasp my own.

I open my eyes and see Shalom. Like me, he was clinging to the conduit, and now he is clinging to me, crying out with the effort of it. Past him, I see the approach of fiery tendrils and expect them to swipe us away in seconds. But before I am able to warn Shalom, the shriek of the Jagannath changes from malice to what I am sure must be pain or desperation. The tendrils crackle into nothingness and beyond them the eyes shrink away into little more than angry sparks. The vast maw that was clashing against our defenses is suddenly reduced to a misty luminescence.

“It worked,” Shalom says hoarsely, almost sobbing. “It worked.”

All I can do is nod, hardly believing it myself.

T
he rift is gone.

Having passed out either with relief or in the nearness of death during the climax of the attack, I did not witness the event, but Seventy-Seven assures me it was just
as spectacular as the defeat of the Jagannath. Miraculously,
we suffered no lasting casualties aside from our scarred memories of the battle. Switched from genoplant to genoplant as the Soul Consortiums were crushed one by one, our small and stranded population now survives in four remaining Consortiums, huddled together in a steady orbit, but stranded in a vast Phoradian Gulf.

For the moment, I am alone.

I am back in the Calibration Sphere, staring at the slot that should be empty. I smile at the irony of the tiny light that shines there, feeling unusually contented. It is evidence that I died, yet I know now that there are more of me out there than numbers can define. When I first met Seventy-Seven this knowledge unsettled me, but having united with the other Salems in a struggle to survive, this small group, this . . . Continuum, has brought unexpected comfort. Not just because tragedy and threat have the power to bond but because I see my future in the others. In this ever-increasing chain of self, I am still a child by comparison, and though there is a part of me (possibly the algorithm) that mourns my avoidance of death, I find reassurance in their consensus that there is still purpose in life, enough to sustain them for far longer than I have already been alive.

But some of the Continuum greatly puzzle me. Though the deterministic laws of our individual cosmos dictate that we should all be identical, not all of us are, and I wonder how many iterations out there are radically different from myself and why. It suggests an outside influence. Perhaps the Jagannath.

“I am surprised you are the only one in here.”

Demetri's voice startles me and I glance over my shoulder
to see him standing just inside the door of the sphere. He looks unsure if he is welcome. I swivel around in my chair and smile at him to let him know he is.

“It seems strange,” I confess to him, “but if this were not my iteration of the Soul Consortium, then I would feel a little uncomfortable coming here, too.”

“Because you would feel like an intruder?”

“Yes.” I pause as he nods. “Or perhaps even an imposter.”

Demetri observes me and bites his bottom lip as if to subdue a smile at a private joke. “What about me? Do you think I'm an imposter?”

“I didn't mean—”

“Don't worry,” Demetri says, lifting a hand as he steps inside. “I am an imposter, in a way. In fact, you could say we all are. Are we really the same person when we emerge from a genoplant? Are we the same person we were ten million years ago? What about a day ago? We change, Three, all the time. If we didn't we would stagnate.”

Stagnation. This is exactly what the Transcendents accuse us of. And they are right. In our entire existence through the long epochs of time, human form has remained almost completely linear. Why is that? But Demetri is right, too. Though physically we have remained the same kind of human, mentally our species has always changed. More than that, humanity did want to move on and risk a new paradigm of existence. So why not me?

“You're looking at the slot again,” Demetri observes. “Why?”

I had not realized it, but I have turned my gaze back on the light.

“Why?” I repeat quietly.

I stare at the light for a moment longer, then turn back to Demetri. He looks confused.

“Why?” I say again. “Why are you different? And Shalom, Seventy-Seven, and Ironius. Why are they different?”

Demetri sucks in a long breath through his nose, then
lets it out slowly. His cloak of nanodrones ripples slightly,
as if sensing a moment of morose introspection from which they need to shake him, and he straightens a little in acknowledgment.

“It troubles me too,” Demetri says. “I have told none of you my iteration number, and with good reason, but I will tell you that—so far—I am the oldest member of the Soul Continuum. What happened to me occurred long after the cycles the rest of you have watched.” Demetri blinks hard as if remembering something terrible. “But I would not expect Seventy-Seven or Shalom to be different from the rest of you, which is why I am troubled. Something quite profound must have happened to their iterations. And I expect you, because of the algorithm, will soon follow a different path also.”

“What about Ironius?” I ask.

Demetri's top lip curls almost to a snarl as he opens his mouth, but before he is able to verbalize his obvious anger, he is interrupted.

“Must you know everything?” Qod says, a fraction of impatience in her voice. “I told you there are some things—”

“He interfered,” Demetri talks over her. “He
always
interferes.”

“Demetri, we've discussed this on so many—”

“And you never answer me,” he says. “You did nothing to stop him.”

Demetri makes a concerted effort to control himself. It is difficult to read the anger in his face, but the nanodrones shift around him in coils and strips like darting vipers. Qod goes silent.

“What do you mean by ‘interferes'?” I ask.

Demetri looks up for a second, possibly anticipating Qod cutting him off again before he can speak, but she says nothing, and Demetri nods as if he has exposed her shame.

“He found a way to reverse his trip through the Promethean Singularity. He is nothing like us. He doesn't use the WOOM. Instead, he amuses himself by interacting with each new iteration. He visits Old Earth in its earliest days, acting like some kind of prophet or seer. He starts wars and stops them. He kills tyrants before they reach adulthood and nurtures saints who would otherwise die at birth. I even saw him destroy an entire planet once after joining forces with the Necro-Lord. In short, he wrecks the Codex calculations of each iteration and acts like some kind of renegade time traveler. That's why Qod has to keep refiling and updating the soul files. A lot of them change, and like protecting a wayward child, she indulges him and covers his mistakes.”

I am dumfounded. I would never think to do what Demetri claims Ironius has done. I would not dare. And for that matter, all my brothers and sisters who lived with me in the Soul Consortium before they moved on avoided that kind of interference too. It was one of our most fundamental rules.