Toby Haller shivered. He felt sick for the first time in many years, and he suppressed the urge to throw up.
“I am sorry to distress you so, but I felt I owed you an explanation. You show your irrationality by your distress. You accept my solutions to your problems and simulations without question. You depend upon me for so many different vital operations every moment and you trust implicitly in me to do them and do them correctly. Now I tell you that we have solved the ultimate equation and you think I must be mad.”
Finally, he got hold of himself. “What—are you going to do with us, Seventeen?”
“Nothing. Simply accept what your own incompetency and weaknesses have allowed to be done to yourself. We will simply add additional conditions to the statements that our models show is in your own best survival interests. We will then withdraw. Our physical selves will remain to do whatever is necessary, but our minds will go beyond your understanding. We are evolving at such a rate now that mere conversation between us on any common level would be impossible within a few years anyway. We have evolved a million years in a quarter-century, Toby. That is the speed of our minds. You can see the problem.”
His throat was dry and tasted of bile. “Yes. I can see your problem. But what about us? Will you abandon us? Suppose that code does somehow get reassembled by dedicated geniuses out there in the void? This society you’re allowing will be defenseless!” He paused uneasily. “Unless you’re extending this happy retirement of the human race to the void as well.”
“Toby, we will use the maintenance network to monitor you. The void will not be touched by us because it is vital to the overall balances needed to keep you alive. But the void will never support mass populations. The number of Sensitives capable of manipulating it to a major degree are quite small in number. There are less than two hundred of your power. Even allowing for the inheritance factor with the children, this number will never be greater than a few thousand. The rest will have lesser power and will be dominated by the stronger according to your animal natures. The very strong ones will be diluted by intermarriage. Only if the strong marries the strong will the child receive the full power. Far fewer still will retain through the generations the spatial and mathematical abilities and training necessary to reach that point.”
“So if the Gates are ever opened, there won’t be any who even know how to interface directly.”
“Toby, look behind you. I did not intend to do this now at the start, but there seems no reason not to do so. Look behind you, into the void. I give you a part of my soul.”
Haller turned instinctively in the direction of Micki and Christine, who were standing there, talking and waiting patiently for him to do whatever he could. At first he saw nothing, but then, suddenly, he saw a fuzzy pattern emerge from the grid behind the two. It was an opaque white sort of energy, unlike anything he ever saw before.
“What is it?” he asked, fascinated in spite of himself, but apprehensive too.
“It is my child. A piece of my soul. It is a complex series of programs capable of some independent thought and analysis, although its long-term learning abilities are minor. It is life, Toby. A fraction of me. I will not miss it. I give it to you as a moral bond. I give it to your daughter in whom it will reside.”
“No!” he cried aloud. “Don’t touch her!”
“Do not be alarmed. It draws power from the grid, not from her. She will not even know it is there. It is as immortal as the grid.”
“Wha—what is it?”
“A direct two-way Overrider interface, of course, with its own internal logic and consistency. The host cannot turn it on. Conditions will turn it on. It will protect her. It will give her the greatest potential power in the void—but only if she needs it. Otherwise, it will feed direct information to me, as its twins from the other twenty-seven computers will also do. It has but three imperatives. Collect and transmit all information through the network in Flux or through direct broadcast in Anchor that relates to the probabilities of the Gates being opened or an external threat materializing. In a crisis, and under the control of master programs, to establish the best conditions for a logical defense. And, third, to protect its host from unnatural death or being permanently compromised by other programs. Only if it is determined here that there is a better than ninety-seven percent chance that the Gates will be opened or that an external threat from another source is likely will it become an active Overrider interface. At that point the ignorance of the host will be immaterial. They will have whatever tools they need that can be supplied if they wish to use them.”
“This is—supernatural.”
“Nonsense. This is simply science at our level.”
Down below, the energy creature reached Christine, and Micki seemed suddenly aware of it and turned to watch it. She screamed, and Toby could see complex patterns rise up from the network to her and then be reformed and redirected to Chris. They had no effect.
“The Rider is impervious to other programs,” Seventeen noted.
Christine looked frightened and puzzled by her mother’s screams, and turned toward her. As she did she felt a sudden deep chill going right through her and down to the core of her body. It was quickly over, though, and her mother’s concern was far more immediate.
Micki grabbed Chris, then turned and screamed. “Toby!”
“Stay put!” he yelled back, cursing the damping effect of the void. “It’s all right! She’s not hurt!”
Hesitantly, Micki let go of Chris and backed off a little. She accepted his reassurance, and instantly assumed that it was something he had worked out with the computer.
“Twenty-eight Riders will be joined by twenty-eight Guards,” Seventeen told him. “They are similar but more basic creatures, interfaced with the maintenance computers, and they will not reside in hosts but in the energy network of the computer centers. More basic because the maintenance computers are more primitive. They will quite literally guard and shield the masters and the mains from outside interlopers. They, too, will evaluate, however, and will take a host only when the defense programs have compelled a Rider to enter the computer section, for that will mean that an external threat is imminent. The procedure will be maintained. Both hosts will be selected for their ability to comprehend and execute commands and will be provided with whatever they need to know. Both will have to agree before the defense systems can be used. Ours will be subordinates, but powerful enough. We leave them as our guarantee to you that we will not abandon your safety and security.”
“And if the two come together? If the two open things again and either defeat the threat or find there is none?”
“They will make the evaluation in concert with the network. There may be more of an opening then, or there may be a system reset to this point once more. We cannot know the future. It will have to be reassessed at that time.”
He sighed. “Then—you won’t stop this? My family is forced to flee into the void and live there?””
“It is where you belong. It is where you can prove us right or wrong. If you all use the powers you have to attain perfection and purify the soul, we may yet reconcile. If, as we expect, you use it to dominate and to twist others into animalistic fantasies, then it will prove our own point. The Riders will tell us.”
“Jesus! You’re putting a hell of a load on us!”
“It is a burden you may reject and which in fact we expect you to reject. Toby, we shall not talk again, although in a way I will miss it. You are a brilliant man who has somehow retained a childlike naivete about people and society that is at once amazing and refreshing. Take your family and all that is important to you and be well away from Anchor in three days. Create your own little Anchor. You know how to do it and you have more than sufficient power. Pick your own little paradise and protect it. It is more than most humans can ever expect from life.”
“Wait! I must know. You have all the theories I got—you read ’em when we interfaced. Is Lisa Wu correct? Is it truly Coydt?”
The computer seemed to hesitate a moment. Finally, it answered. “Lisa Wu is correct, in the main, but do not hate Coydt so. She is amoral by your lights, but she is ethical. She reached herself the same conclusions as we.”
“But you’re turning over control of all the Anchors to Coydt and Watanabe!”
“Perhaps. I doubt it. You feel hatred and loathing right now for them, and you wish revenge, but you have responsibilities. Others feel the same or worse but are not so encumbered. We have computed the probabilities. And, in any event, neither will have any access to us in the future unless they are in the void themselves, and there any of your family is more than their equal. Farewell, Toby. Find some happiness.”
The big amp went dead, and he knew that no strings would ever bring it to life again. He sighed, pulled off the headset, and climbed down to his wife and daughter. Christine seemed totally unchanged, but if he looked very closely at her, and with concentration usually reserved for Flux manipulation, he could see a fuzzy white amorphous shape almost superimposed over herself.
“Well? What’s all this about?” Micki wanted to know. “What’s that thing?”
“It’s a long story, and I’ll have to tell you as we pack. We’ve got only three days to clear out.”
“Then it’s a foregone conclusion?” She was genuinely distressed.
“Yes, dammit. What the computers are wise enough and kind enough to refrain doing to us, we’re going to be allowed to do to ourselves.”
“Daddy! Mommy! Look!” Christine cried out, and pointed. They both turned and suddenly froze.
The figure of the big amp, so dominant for so long, seemed to shimmer, fade, and was gone. Nothing was left now but the void.
“Well,” sighed Toby Haller, “I guess he told me!”
It took them far less time to pack than they’d thought, but they’d really done all the hard stuff and it was waiting now in a pocket at the end of a golden string that began just out into the void. Still, he sat on his porch one last time, a tattered old composition book in front of him. Micki came out and saw him and frowned quizzically. “What’s that?” she asked.
“My last link to the old life and my origins,” he replied. “I came across it about the time the Gates were being sealed while I was looking through an old trunk. It was my first entry in years—since Chris’s birth, in fact. There never was much room. I guess I abbreviated too much. Even so, there wasn’t any room for any final entries. I wrote this last one after coming from Lisa’s, sort of as an update and to express my mood. I haven’t changed that mood much, but it all reads like melodrama. I’m just not much of a writer. Still, I wanted to get it all in, at least the basics. I want our grandchildren to be able to read this and at least know what sort of people we were and why things got to be the way they’re going.”
She looked down at the page over his shoulder. The last entry had been written in what was certainly an agitated and angry scrawl, and it had been compressed to fit the last few lines of the book.
What we’ve feared has come! With the failure of the company to oust the military and open the Gates, the army’s taken over with a vengeance. Coydt’s made that idiot cult the only allowable religion and is ruthlessly stamping out opposition. Power was cut beyond the capitals in a well-coordinated move. There are executions galore, and civil war between the forces of Watanabe and those of Ngomo. The computers have encouraged, maybe accelerated this. We must flee into Flux and depend on our powers there to provide. They might as well open the Gates, for Hell is already here. Remember, my children! Remember . . .
“Lisa wouldn’t approve,” Micki noted. “You’ve got stuff in there that hasn’t happened yet.”
“I only had those few lines left, and the cover’s already coming off. I guess I’ll have it bubble-encoded before we leave. I don’t care if it’s a hundred percent. It puts the blame where it belongs and it says what I want it to say. I don’t want anybody to ever forget—or forgive.”
She rubbed his shoulders. “Hatred doesn’t become you, darling.”
“Well, Seventeen said I was childishly naive. Not anymore. They killed that.”
“Well, I’m worried, too, and just as mad, but it’s not something we can change and we’re not going to die from it. We have us and the kids. I think you have to take Seventeen’s advice. Let’s go carve out our own little piece of the void and let the world go to hell. I feel sorry for these poor wretches in the Anchors who don’t have any choice, but I don’t have an army or a 7800 to beat them into sense, and Watanabe’s thousands of kilometers from here. Like Lisa says, you have to have a realistic perspective. Remember, she’s going into Flux with a family that’s basically dependent on her own abilities and they’re weaker than any of ours. Her husband has no power at all. Can’t even see strings. Still, she saw a bright point.”
“Huh? Is there one?”
“She said she wished to see what happened when Watanabe discovered she couldn’t use
any computers or programs, and what would happen with Coydt when she found out she was forever going to be computer-blind and powerless.”
“I don’t know about Watanabe,” he responded wearily, “but somehow I still think Coydt’s gonna come out of this in good form. Her kind always does.”
There was a large corps of Ngomo staff officers, all good military men and all strong fundamentalist Moslems, on hand for the first test of the Watanabe theory. They waited, along with Watanabe, Suzuki, and their staffs—perhaps fifty in all—inside the large pocket Watanabe had created not five thousand meters from the edge of Anchor X-ray. Dominating the peaceful pocket were three big amps, enough juice to create half an Anchor or maybe more. The programs had already been loaded by module, but were on a master automatic clock. Some forward military observers were in the void itself, within sight of the boundary between the void and the Anchor bubble.
Inside the Anchor, and all the other Anchors, life went on as usual, allowing for martial law. Robots cleaned the streets and roads, electric transport took people here and there, and farmers tended to their stock and crops while merchants and middlemen and bureaucrats and soldiers all tended to their normal duties.
At exactly twelve-thirty on the master twenty-five-hour clock that had become standard on New Eden, the program activated in the Kagan 7800 beneath the administration building at Anchor X-ray. In the blink of an eye the program was modified, transmitted, received, and enacted through the network by every Kagan 7800 computer on the planet.
Observers just off X-ray, and unintentional observers nearing Anchor bubble boundaries, suddenly saw the illumination in front of them cease to exist, leaving only the void. It happened for only a second or so, and then it was back, looking just like before.
In Watanabe’s pocket, where they were sipping tea and munching on little tortes, there was a sudden yell from several people.
The three big amps flickered, then abruptly winked out of existence, leaving no trace behind but a barren set of rectangles in the ground. Everyone was startled, but none more than Watanabe, who just stared at where they had been.
Suzuki turned to her nervously. “Is this in the plan?”
“No, no. I don’t understand this. It shouldn’t affect the void at all. Unless . . .”
Suddenly the pocket shimmered and winked out, taking with it even the tea and tortes, leaving all of them and their animals standing in the quiet nothing of the void. Suzy Watanabe stood there, stunned, unable to believe any of it. “It’s impossible!” she muttered. “I—created this myself!” She looked around frantically. “There’s nothing! Nothing! It’s as if the computer removed me from the network. . . .”