Battlemind (13 page)

For several centuries, now, the standard means of interpersonal communications had been the ViRcom, virtual reality communications. Through cephlinks—and more recently through Naga symbionts—two or more people could climb into separate comm modules and meet in a virtual world run by the AI communications software moderating the exchange. For each person in the link-up it was like stepping into another world, one where you could interact on several levels with the others. The system had soon gone far beyond mere communications, of course, and begun serving both as an entertainment system and as a means of doing business. Virtual dramas, sex fantasies, games, and adventure role-playing were all accessed through the commods. Nowadays most people carried one or more analogues resident in their personal software, versions of themselves in different dress or personae, as well as AI-driven secretaries that could field incoming communications and handle day-to-day routine business without bothering the original, or primary, personality.

Once, the limitations of the speed of light had hampered direct conversations across distances of more than a few light seconds. The advent of I2C had changed that, however. During the last two years, I2C technology had begun revolutionizing all forms of long-range communication. Linking together the various business and government computer networks employed by the worlds throughout the far-flung Shichiju and Confederation systems had been the first big step, but other forms of personal communication had swiftly followed, including both standard ViRcommunications and the use of hubots.

“Communications,” a voice said in Kara’s ear. “Please upload any necessary clearances at this time.”

She’d been granted a twenty-four-hour pass—all of the members of her company had been promised a twenty-four after Core Peek—and the clearance number would reserve for her more than the usual one- or two-hour session inside the pod. A menu unfolded itself in her mind, and she quickly checked off the appropriate boxes… standard communications, ship-to-New America, no game-play, no special software prostheses, with hubot transference at the far end through the Be There agency in downtown Jefferson. The monitoring AI took only milliseconds to grant her request and open the necessary I2C channels.

With the last of her choices complete, the menu in her head vanished as she gave the Go command, and she was plunged into a static-fired darkness. In a sense, at least, her mind hurtled twelve hundred light years, instantly.

The Imperials who’d developed I2C had tried hard to keep it secret, of course; had they been successful, they would have won an immediate and overwhelming military advantage over the tiny, scattered forces of the Confederation. The Confederation’s freewheeling, free-market approach to all technology, however, had guaranteed that I2C would find a much broader application, one that was very quickly transforming every aspect of human life almost as completely as the revolution in xenosymbiotic biotech.

Until the advent of I2C, for example, hubotraveling had been limited to the surface of one world or, at best, to orbit. Now, hubots could be ridden anywhere from anywhere, so long as the appropriate I2C electronics and computers were in place.

The static cleared. She opened her eyes… expecting to see the interior of a hubot rental agency. What she saw instead was the looming, dark violet sky of Core D9837, the pale, ragged spiral of the Great Annihilator, the thrust and gleam of the alien buildings on the horizon.

Kara screamed…

Chapter 9

An entire world can reside comfortably within the spaciousness offered by a few geloyabytes of computer memory. Run either by an outside controller or by a dedicated AI, that world can be as richly detailed as necessary, both through data provided from outside sources, and through the mechanics of chaos theory. It has been suggested, in fact, that more humans will one day live in imaginary, virtual worlds than might at that time inhabit so-called reality.

—Worlds Without End

J
ENNIFER
W
ARD
-H
ARDING

C
.
E
. 2570

… and immediately, with some effort, brought herself back under control. This had to be illusion, a ViRcom illusion of some sort.
Had
to be. She was standing on the broad, open, radiation-baked plain where her company had made its last stand hours before. The ground underfoot was charred by the nuke she’d set off, crunching like broken glass beneath her boot as she took a hesitant step forward. She felt a hot wind on her cheek, and a prickling sensation on her skin that might have represented the ambient background radiation. No, if she were
really
standing in this place without any protection whatsoever, she would have been dead before the nerve endings of her body had time to react.

Instead, this was some sort of elaborate ViRdrama, one almost certainly drawn from the information she herself had gleaned from Core D9837. The question, though, was not so much how she’d gotten to this virtual place as who had intercepted her en route from Nova Aquila to New America.

Her first thought, in fact, was that the Web must have done this; it was impossible to stand on that plain and look up at the black-hole accretion disk hanging in the sky and not feel—despite the impossibility of her survival in that place—that she’d been physically dragged here.

And you know that can’t be, Kara,
she told herself fiercely.
You haven’t
really
gone anywhere, no matter what it might feel like.

She closed her eyes for a moment, reminding herself consciously that her body was still lying in the life-support corn-mod capsule back aboard the
Gauss,
that her mind—most simply defined as a kind of complex, multilayered program running on the organic computer she called her brain—had not really left her body. These images she was seeing, the sounds she was hearing, the sensation of crunching gravel underfoot and heat caressing her skin, all were being played inside her brain through her symbiotic interface. It could as easily be the fictional display of an AI running an entertainment ViRdrama, or the setting for a ViRcom meeting with someone.

She opened her eyes. A tall, slender figure was approaching her from the shadows of the nearest of the alien structures. Though she could see it only in silhouette at first, the movements were too much those of a human for it to be one of the Web machines. She stood her ground, watching as it drew closer.

Then the figure walked into the brighter circle of light around Kara, and she gave a small, involuntary gasp. She recognized the lean features, the Confederation Navy uniform, the erect bearing and manner… and she knew who had intercepted her, even if she didn’t understand the actual mechanics.

The figure was Dev Cameron’s.

Involuntarily, she shuddered. Though she’d worked with him before, she still hadn’t completely reconciled herself to the existence of this…
being,
a technological ghost, the ghost, in fact, of the man who once had been her mother’s lover, who was her half-brother’s father. During the last battle between the rebel Confederation and the Imperium, twenty-seven years before, Dev Cameron had been physically aboard a DalRiss cityship, helping to direct an assault against Imperial naval forces. His mind, however, had been dispersed across a vast network of Naga-DalRiss computers and communications nets, a program resident in the entire, interlinked network rather than on any one, limited node.

When the DalRiss ship housing Cameron’s body had been destroyed, his body had been destroyed as well. Somehow, though, the mind had lived on, resident within the complex and interwoven communications links connecting the nodes of the rest of the DalRiss fleet, a high-tech ghost.

“Hello, Kara,” Dev said, and his smile was most un-ghostlike, precisely the same as the one she’d seen in holographs of the man made before his “death.” “I’m glad you came through Core Peek okay.”

“What do you want with me?” she demanded. “Why did you…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Why did you
abduct
me?”

Dev shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kara, if I startled you. But I needed to speak with you, and I needed to do it away from others who might be listening in. I’m currently resident in the data banks at Jefferson University, with access to New America’s planetary communications center, so when I felt your transmission coming through, I thought I would snag the opportunity to waylay you, as it were, and have a brief talk. Do you mind?”

Yes, damn it, I
do
mind,
she thought.
I mind the arrogant presumption, I mind being mentally kidnapped, and I mind being scared half to death.

“I2C links are supposed to be untappable. How the gok were you
able
to ‘waylay’ me? Sir.”

“Please, I’m not a
sir.”
Dev’s face twisted as he spoke, though whether the expression represented wry amusement or displeasure, Kara couldn’t tell. She was beginning to realize that one reason she disliked having to deal with this… this
ghost
was the fact that in so many ways it was no longer human.

Kara didn’t mind working with nonhumans, with
genuine
nonhumans, that is, the DalRiss and the Naga. They were strange, they thought in strange ways, and it was sometimes hard to understand them, even when the AI-directed translation programs interfacing with them were apparently operating perfectly. Words and concepts like devotion, duty, mercy were quite different for the DalRiss than for most human cultures and were nonexistent for the Naga, who “thought” in many ways more like complex computers working in parallel than like humans. But they were
alien.
You expected that.

Dev Cameron, though, had once been human… and the image he was projecting for her benefit now, that of a tall, young, gray-eyed, smiling human male, supported that idea. For over twenty-five years, however, he had existed as a complex software program operating within the confines of an alien symbiotic computer communications network. The world that network defined was a very large one, but she couldn’t understand just what it was he was experiencing. The Dev-ghost had tried to explain it to her once… “like swimming in an alien sea,” he’d said—but that told her very little. Once, Kara had downloaded herself into an Imperial computer network while engaging in a covert operation, and the sensory symbology being used there had been that of an underwater world. That had been alien in itself, and yet it had been designed by humans. An
alien
sea must be quite different, but Kara couldn’t understand what that difference might be.

More than that, though, was the knowledge that the thing that Dev Cameron had become no longer thought like a human. Whether that was because his mind had changed over the past few decades, or simply because he’d experienced things no human had ever experienced before, she wasn’t sure. She did know that speaking with him, on any level and on almost any subject, frightened her.

It was an emotion that she did not at all like.

She was aware that Dev had been patiently waiting there as conflicting emotions had chased one another through her thoughts. It struck her that a moment or two for her, a human, was actually a lot longer for Dev—who no longer relied on chemical reactions in the neuronal relay race that made up a given thought. She was pretty sure that he thought a lot faster than ordinary humans, though how much faster that might be she had no way of knowing.

“Okay,” she said at last, when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to answer her. “What
should
I call you?”

“How about Dev? That’s my name.”

That
was
your name,
she thought, but she didn’t verbalize it. “Okay,” she said. “Dev. How did you manage to kidnap me?”

“I’d hardly call it kidnapping, Kara. It’s not like I’m holding you for ransom, after all.” He smiled, obviously trying to turn it into a joke.

“Gok it, answer my question!”

Dev looked startled, as though he was genuinely surprised at her anger. Suddenly he reminded her of Daren; both Camerons seemed to share an inability to… to empathize, to feel what someone else was feeling.

“You’re right, of course,” he said finally. “The I2C
is
untappable, but I didn’t need to tap it. The main Confederation linksite for New America is at the University of Jefferson; incoming I2C communications are downloaded here and then retransmitted to the rest of the planet by normal electronic feeds. As soon as the carrier signal alerting me here to your arrival was retransmitted from the university, I knew you were coming and, well, sidetracked you.”

“Okay. That’s how. Now why?”

He hesitated, as though considering how much to tell her… though his electronic thought processes were substantially faster than hers and any hesitation must be purely for show. Possibly, she thought, he did it to reassure her that he was still human. Too much of that kind of thinking was entirely too twisty for Kara’s peace of mind. It was better to accept everything at face value, rather than try to interpret each glance, expression, and nuance.

“I saw the reports you transmitted a few hours ago,” he told her. “Both about Operation Core Peek, and the wayward probe on the
Gauss.”

“What!—that stuff’s classified!Level Blue!” It wasn’t that she distrusted the Dev-ghost. Hell, his intervention with the newly awakened human Overmind had won the Battle of Nova Aquila and probably saved all of humankind.

Her problem with Dev, she was pretty sure, arose from the fact that she couldn’t
read
him, couldn’t understand his motives or what he was thinking or why he was performing a particular action. If his thoughts really were significantly faster than hers, if he really had instant access to immense volumes of information, then holding a conversation with him was like talking with a smug and self-assured super genius; there was always the feeling that he was condescending to speak with you… and that he was speaking with you at all only for obscure and probably insulting reasons of his own.