Chapter 31
Raven led me back to the ovoid aerial vehicle.
“Where would you like to go?” Raven asked.
“Hell. I don’t know. I’m a stranger in a strange land here, aren’t I? Just … whatever. Pick something. Show me something worth seeing.”
“I shall endeavor to do so.”
The ovoid rose off the platform, banked, and accelerated at a prodigious rate, although it barely pressed me back into the soft seat.
We left the city in moments and were soon flying a few hundred feet above the coastline, waves and beaches and cliffs blurring beneath us.
The snow tapered off and the clouds fell behind us, revealing a clear blue sky.
“Raven,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Why did you take me to Vorsch? Why him?”
“I consulted with the Central Overmind. High Scholar Vorsch was its recommendation based on several different factors. Clearly, the High Scholar himself did not agree with this decision.”
We passed a bustling city on a bay. It might’ve been San Francisco.
New San Francisco? It probably had some other name entirely.
My memory of San Francisco was almost three millennia out of date.
I peered down, watching monumental glass towers shift and glint in the sunlight as my perspective changed. “Tell me about this Overmind.”
“The Central Overmind is the primary artificial intelligence on the Earth. It is comprised of computational metastructure spread throughout the surface of the planet. It utilizes an evolved pseudo-neuromorphic quantum compute array as the primary means of calculation.”
“Sounds a bit like what I’m using,” Lyle said. “Just a whole hell of a lot larger.”
“Who built it?” I asked.
“The Central Overmind arose spontaneously out of the linked computational network known colloquially as the Net. It was not built, per se, although its consciousness first came into being within structures that had been built. Its complexity now exceeds, by several orders of magnitude, that of a human brain.”
“It’s smart.”
“Yes.”
“How smart?”
“That depends, ultimately, on your definition of intelligence. The Central Overmind’s mental structure, if you will, is drastically different from a human brain.
My own nervous system is modeled off a human brain so I may more realistically interact with humans on a one-to-one basis.
When the Central Overmind speaks to a human directly, it must do so through a translation matrix, wherein its thoughts are pared down and run through a simulated human brain and output in a form appropriate for human understanding.
But to answer your question, in terms of processing capability, the Central Overmind is to you what you are to a common earthworm. ”
“I guess that’s better than being a bacterium or something. Wait. You said I could speak to it. Will it speak to me now?”
“I will ask.” Then, “Yes, it will. Please wait a moment.”
There was a subtle shift in Raven. It sat straighter, stiffened, then relaxed. Its eyes blinked and it turned to face me. “Hello, Scott Treder. What can I do for you?”
“You’re the Overmind?”
“I am.”
“Thank you for speaking with me. I don’t mean to take up your time. I’m sure you have many more important things to attend to.”
“Speaking to you requires an insignificant fraction of my computational abilities. So, please, do not worry on that account.”
“Oh. Okay. Um. Look, I—I wanted to ask you. If you can—just, what you know. About what’s happening to me.”
“You are inquiring about more than the obvious, I interpret.”
I couldn’t help but lean forward. My hands were shaking. “Do you know anything I don’t? About the time travel?”
“Very likely I do. But a great deal of the information I have gathered from both historical records and from my own sensor network surrounding the area of your latest appearance would not be of interest or use to you. Or to your pseudo-sentient intelligence companion.”
“I wish they’d stop calling me a ‘pseudo’-sentient intelligence,” Lyle said. “I designed myself not to feel unnecessary emotions in here, but I’m getting downright annoyed.”
I looked pointedly at Raven—at the Overmind. “Do you know how it’s happening? How I’m traveling forward through time?”
“There are multiple theories that could accommodate the means of transporting something of human size and complexity forward through time. Folding you into a pocket of space-time, for a high-level example. Or expanding a localized quantum foam bubble to encapsulate you and carry you forward in what is effectively stasis—freezing you while time flows around you, such that when you are unfrozen, no apparent time has passed for you. It is even theoretically possible you are being annihilated each time you jump, your atomic makeup recorded down to the quark level, and you are re-created from pure energy when time arrives at your next specified period. However, all these theories require energy levels and calculative abilities far in excess of my own resources.”
“You couldn’t do it.”
“No. I estimate the last theory I mentioned would require the energy equivalent to the total output of the Sun for a period of approximately seventeen thousand years, and a simultaneous processing capacity approximately ten to the thirty-seventh power greater than my own current capability. This would be approaching the theoretical level of universally deterministic computation.”
“My son believed my headaches were the key.”
“Your son was of singular brilliance.”
“Ha,” Lyle said in my ear. “I like that. Singular.”
“He managed to stop one of the transits…”
“For fourteen seconds. Then your transits resumed. The Recovered and Expanded Word of the Traveler provided some detail on this failure. You are fortunate to have survived the experiment. The mechanism your son used to disrupt your quantum signature was crude.”
Lyle was silent, but I could almost feel him frown at the word “crude.” “Ah—right,” I said. “Well. Can you do better? Can you stop it entirely?”
“No. And, even if I possessed such abilities, I would require a significant internal debate on the wisdom of doing so.”
“What? Why?”
“Whatever entity is doing this to you has power and computational capacity approaching what is, even to me, barely comprehensible beyond a purely mathematical level. It is, for lack of a better term, godlike. It may not be wise to interfere with such an entity’s plans.”
I stared at the avatar, my mouth open, the breath flowing out of my lungs. It might as well have punched me. I had to force myself to breathe in again. “Well … shit. I guess I’m glad you don’t have to make that decision, then.”
“It does simplify matters.”
“Can you do anything to help me?”
“I have provided you with Raven. I will also provide you with a vastly superior adaptive armor that will help protect you in the future. It is under construction as we speak and will be delivered to you before your next jump forward through time. Beyond these things, I have little to offer.”
I didn’t bother to hide my disappointment. I sat back, deflating into the seat, and looked out the window. “Well, thank you anyway.”
“I wish you the best of luck, Scott Treder. Raven will now return.”
“Okay.”
The avatar returned, subtly, to its former self. It turned its head to look at me. “Did you receive the answers you sought?”
“Not really. But thanks anyway. It must feel weird having your body, I dunno, ganked like that.”
“Thank you for your concern. But it is what I am designed to do and is not uncomfortable.” It paused, then made another deliberate motion to look out the front of the vehicle. “Ah. I see we are approaching our first destination.”
I followed the line of the avatar’s eyes. Ahead rose a bluish dome, large enough to dominate the horizon. It was still hazy with distance. “What is it?”
“That is what is colloquially referred to as Folly’s Dome.”
“What’s it covering?”
“The dome surrounds the irradiated remains of Calypso, the city you would have known as Vancouver in the nation-state of Canada.”
We drew closer. The dome was gigantic, reaching above the thin layer of clouds.
Large towers stood in the center of the dome, visible through the transparent blue membrane.
They were reminiscent of the structures I remembered from my time with Anjari, rather than the crystalline ones I’d seen in New Los Angeles with Raven.
The city spread, amoeba-like, throughout the dome, reaching to the ocean.
Our vehicle banked for a westward pass. The membrane of the dome went deep into the water, disappearing into darkness. “What happened?”
“In the final days of the First Interplanetary War, Mars Separatists lost their ground holdings on Earth except for Calypso and the immediate surroundings. It was here, in a move of desperation, the Mars Separatists dropped the first and only gamma bomb used in the conflict. As they fled in retreat, they detonated the device above the city. The city was abandoned, so few human lives were lost. But it will take several hundred years to clean up the radiation. Hence the dome you see now.”
“There’s something moving inside.”
“There are robots cleaning the city as we speak. That is why it will take merely a few centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years, to recover this land for human habitation.”
Merely a few centuries. At the rate I was going, that was nothing for me.
Not even a walk around the block. Not when I’d be jumping twenty-eight hundred years into the future in the next transition forward.
I watched the ghost city for a few more minutes as we flew around the massive dome. “Why show me this?”
“It is an aspect of reality. One slice of history, of humanity.”
“Show me something else. Something positive.”
“As you wish.”
The ovoid turned and rocketed out over the sea, heading west and south. We traveled in silence, watching the hypnotic passage of waves below us. We were moving so fast I could look up, see a distant wave appearing on the horizon, and pass over the same wave in an eyeblink.