Singularity's Ring (37 page)

Authors: Paul Melko

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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Moira awakes hours later. The sun is setting and we are considering whether to drive on or to sleep. At her sigh, we rush to consense, but we are stymied. Her eyes open,
but she is not there. No chemical thoughts emerge from her wrists. She stares at us as if she can’t quite understand who we are.

“I must commune,” she says, and then looks around.

Moira!
Meda yells. The panic that has slowly eased away is back in her mind. Manuel slows the tractor, overwhelmed.

“Moira,” Strom says. “Can’t you join with us?”

She cocks her head, thinking. “No. Return me to the Community, please. The current situation is beyond parameters.”

Oh, no!

The tractor stops beside an outcropping of stone. We are passing through a region of mesas, once jungle-covered hills and now empty rock. Even at sunset, the heat overwhelms the air conditioner, which strains to keep all six of us cool.

Leto’s brainwashed her!

“Moira! You’re not part of the Community. You’re part of us. Try to consense. Please try,” Meda says.

“No. We must return to the Community. Leto needs us to open the Ring.”

“What?”

“Leto can’t open the Ring without us.” She focuses on Meda. “Without you.”

“He came from the Ring. Why does he need us?”

“The Ring is closed to him. It will not open. He has tried many things. He knows the Ring will open for you.”

“Why us?”

“We reactivated the Ring AI when we came down from Columbus Station.”

The four of us are dazed. The Ring had been empty, devoid of anything save machinery. It had responded to us when we first arrived at the GEO Ring Elevator, but we
had assumed that the response was automatic. There had been no other response, no indication of anything but an empty shell.

“The Ring AI is … with us?”

“The Ring AI is nascent. It is weak without human incorporation. Thought is linear and circumscribed. Human thought augments AI thought.”

It is why Leto is adding so many people to his cult. It will enhance his own AI.

“Leto has his own AI?”

“Of course. I need to return to it to commune.”

“Where did he get his AI?”

“He brought it with him when he left the Ring. It has been nascent until recently. Return me to the Community.”

“We will not. You belong to us,” Meda says.

“Not anymore.”

At the Ring base elevator, there will be tools for us to link,
Quant sends.

We can attempt to free Moira from within.

Strom opens the first-aid kit and finds the sedative. He injects Moira quickly, before she can see what he is holding, and she passes out.

It is better not to have to listen to her.

We decide to stop for the night. The terrain has become too rocky, too steep in places. We pass deep cuts in the dirt, eroded gullies from flash floods. If we fall into one of those, we will not be able to get the tractor out.

The desert is cold after the sun sets. Quant sets the tractor to idle and we huddle near the exhaust. It is like a hot, wet breath. But when we step away, the water vapor that has collected in our clothes sucks the heat from our bodies.

Even so, Moira, who has awakened but said little, walks a little ways into the desert. Meda watches her, then follows. Later we collect her conversation with Moira.

“You realize he’s done something to your brain.”

Moira nods. “Perhaps that’s so. But I feel valid now. My existence seems correct.”

Meda stumbles for words, something she never does when she is with us. “You’re programmed to feel that way.”

“You’re programmed to feel the way you do too.”

“This is a silly argument. It doesn’t change the fact that you were my sister and now you’re some automaton.”

“It’s all about you, isn’t it.” It sounds just like the old Moira. Meda pauses.

“Yeah, it’s about the pod. It’s about Apollo. I want you back.”

“You were in the Community. You know how it feels.”

Meda remembers she and Leto building a castle, making love. There was power inside the box. She realizes then that the box was the AI. She had assumed it was just some device to allow interaction.

“That was with just two people,” Moira continues. “Imagine it with ten thousand. Now imagine it with an AI that can synergize with you on your every thought. Now imagine our entire pod within the Community. You scratched the surface. So have I. But all of us, together, with the AI would be the greatest power in the world. Pods, built for consensual and shared intelligence, would augment the AI even more than individual humans can by orders of magnitude.”

Meda is silent. She is used to listening to her sister for counsel.

“Is it about power?”

Moira looks at Meda. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“It’s about knowledge and understanding, rebuilding the world, making a mark in science and biology.”

Moira coughs a laugh, reminding us that this is not the Moira we know. She would not do that.

“Did you know there are spacecraft within the Ring?
They could be launched in twenty-four hours. We could reach the Rift in weeks.”

“Leto would never let us go.”

“Of course he would. As soon as the Second Community is complete.”

Meda bites back a scathing reply. She says, “What about Eliud? His mother abandoned him to join the Community?”

“The Community is voluntary. Eliud chose not to.”

“He’s twelve! He can’t make those decisions.”

Moira shrugs. “With the Community AI as your companion, you can.”

Meda is angry, more angry than she’s ever been with her sister. She turns away, but doesn’t come back to us. We are watching from the tractor, silent. Later she comes back to us, and we interfuse her memories with ours. We want desperately to merge with Moira, but we wonder if we’ll ever be able to rationalize her thoughts. We are on the verge of invalid consensus.

At dawn we climb into the cabin. Moira doesn’t speak, so we do not sedate her. Quant drives the tractor through the line of mesas. We envision the green jungle, the waterfalls spraying over the escarpments. All we see is sand and rock.

The elevator is closer. From there we will be able to get anywhere.

Can we let Moira in the Ring?
Quant asks.

Why not?
Meda sends.

She’s part of the Second Community now. She might allow Leto in.

How?

If she uses her interface within the elevator.

Nonsense,
Moira replies; her statement doesn’t cause consensus. We have doubts now.

Quant realizes first that the elevator is on the other side
of the river. We will have to cross again. There will be people and the possibility of discovery. But when we reach the banks of the Congo, it is nothing more than a trickle seeping into the cracked mud.

A shepherd with a flock of dusty sheep looks at us as we drive through his water. These are the dregs. After one thousand kilometers, this is all that’s left of the river from the sea. Perhaps someday the water will reach this far, or the water will flow in the right direction.

An hour later, Manuel spots the plumes of dust on the horizon.

Someone following us.

Fast,
Strom sends.
Faster than us.
He calculates when the vehicle will overtake us.

Quant gooses the accelerator and we move faster over the salt flats that had once been a lake. Manuel glances at the speedometer and guesses we’ll reach the elevator before the pursuer.

I think we can make it.

Moira is watching the plume behind us as well, her face feral. She looks at the speedometer too, then seems to shrug.

Watch her,
Strom advises. It hurts him to treat Moira as an enemy. He anticipates her grabbing the wheel and trying to tip the tractor. He moves to shield Quant.

Instead, Moira opens the door of the cabin and steps out onto the ladder. Manuel has to climb around Strom in the cramped cabin to get out the door, and before he can, Moira is kicking at the hydrogen pump.

Careful!

Manuel is climbing down to the platform below the cabin when the shroud on the pump breaks loose and liquid hydrogen erupts from the pump, condensing water out of the dry air in clouds.

Moira falls from the tractor and, as we coast to a stop,
we see her rolling in the sand. Then she is up and running toward the approaching plume.

Crap!
Quant cries.
She’s hosed the hydrogen flow. The engine is off.
Quant turns a valve, cutting the flow from the tank.

Strom tapes the burn on Manuel’s hand. It blisters where the hydrogen vapor has touched him.

Strom and Meda watch Moira run.

We need to catch her,
Meda sends, desperate.

We need to regroup, with or without her,
Strom sends.

We’re nothing without her.

Nonsense!

Quant is on the platform with a wrench, bending the shroud back to see the damage. The pipes and pump inside are white with frozen water vapor. In that confined space the temperature goes from forty to minus fifty Centigrade. His wound bandaged, Manuel is with her, his hands in the tight space.

Strom watches the approaching plume. It is a car of some sort, not an aircar, not one of the other tractors. Meda watches Moira’s figure slowly disappear among the rocks.

Strom measures the distance to the elevator, looming so high now that it seems about to topple onto us.

Quant dredges her memory for how the pump should be coupled to the engine intake. Manuel has the manuals open and is paging through it to find something that might help. He finds a diagram of the pump, but it is from the wrong angle. He turns the page and Quant sees what needs to be done. She directs Manuel where to squeeze, where to pull. In a minute the shroud is back on.

Quant opens the fail-safe and tries the engine. Nothing. She taps the hydrogen gauge and tries again. The tractor rumbles, then stalls. The third time, the engine catches and we are accelerating slowly.

Too slow,
Quant sends. She’s compared the current acceleration profile with the old one.

The engine isn’t responding well,
Manuel replies.
Particles in the pump? Bad patch? Who knows?

This ain’t no starship,
Quant says.

The arborobot lurches then picks up speed. Quant is standing on the accelerator, her head hitting the roof of the cabin. She hopes that whatever is clogging the hydrogen intake will clear.

Whoever is following will overtake us in twelve minutes,
Manuel sends.
We’ll reach the elevator in twenty-two minutes.

If they have weapons, or if they have more than one vehicle, they will force us to stop,
Strom sends. He considers what in the cabin will work as a weapon, finding little.

Meda looks at the elevator in front of them. The one in the Amazon was covered in jungle, surrounded by trees. Its true size was hidden. Manuel looks too, seeing it as a hand that grabs deeply into the earth to hold the Ring in place. The elevator is not just an access point; it is a stabilizer. Strom looks at the elevator and sees tensile strength. Quant looks and remembers the beautiful three-dimensional map of the anchor site in the Amazon, the multicolored levels that drive deep underground. It is Meda who sees the small metal structure, overshadowed by the elevator. What Moira would have contributed to this intuitive leap, we do not know.

The outbuildings! We can enter through there,
Meda sends.

Standing alone on the desert is an alternate entry to the elevator base, providing access to the underground structure. It is only a few kilometers away.

We can make it,
Quant sends.

The tractor chugs meter by meter across the sand and
rock. Behind us, we see that there are a dozen vehicles, though two have taken the lead.

Gas-burners,
Strom sends.
He’s desperate.

The outbuildings are just a few hundred meters away now. Leto’s lead car is almost on us.

With a clunk the tractor stops, its engine dead.

Out and run!
Strom sends. He has Eliud in his arms. He hands him to Manuel who reaches the sand first, then he lifts down Meda and Quant.