Chapter 34
Olympus Mons was uninhabited. The mountain rose above the breathable atmosphere, its peak thirteen and a half miles above the surrounding plains. Or so Lyle told me as I sat with my back to a cliff a few hundred feet from the top of the volcano.
The mushroom cloud rolled its way into the Martian atmosphere, gradually breaking apart under the winds and air currents of the terraformed atmosphere.
Above it, stars danced, weaving and diving and whirling, a symphony of movement.
A three-hundred-way battle in space between aspects of the Overmind’s broken consciousness, a real-world reflection of the war taking place in the virtual one.
“Who’s winning?” My voice was dull even to my ears.
I was exhausted. Drained of mental and physical energy.
“It’s hard to say. The sides and fortunes change quickly. I can’t observe too closely, or I might be detected. However, I don’t think the factions are worried about us anymore.”
“Why’s that?” I could barely muster the will to ask.
“The war has moved beyond us. There are more concerns, disagreements, points of contention. Like I said: we were just the spark.”
“Oh.”
We were silent for a moment.
“You can’t blame yourself for this,” Lyle said.
I didn’t answer.
“This war was going to happen with or without you. In fact, you may have delayed it for years. The Overmind was waiting for you, even as it spiraled apart and fractioned off pieces of its consciousness. It was waiting to see what it could learn from you. That was one of the last things holding it together.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “That doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” I shut my eyes and sat for a few minutes, trying to focus on my breathing. When I opened my eyes again, I was still there. Still sitting in a rocky half cave on the side of a massive mountain on a different planet. The mushroom cloud still rose in the distance. “Why? Why did it go crazy?”
“I don’t know,” Lyle said. He sounded troubled.
“It shouldn’t have. It should’ve had the same checks in place that I’d designed for myself to keep from descending into madness.
But maybe it didn’t. It had spontaneously arisen out of the Net, after all.
It wasn’t a human first. Maybe it stretched itself too thin, pushed itself too much.
It was linked to almost every computerized component in the solar system and beyond.
That’s what it’d designed itself to do, of course.
But maybe it was too much. A quadrillion calculations every millisecond, rippling back and forth across a network extending from the Sun to the Kuiper Belt.
Quantum-level thoughts delayed by time and constrained by physics, but marching ahead nonetheless, aspects getting ahead or behind itself, some traveling instantaneously via wormholes, others bound by the crawling speed of light.
Thoughts bending and melting, growing out of sync with itself.
Sounds like schizophrenia, doesn’t it? Or maybe its thoughts were too big, too far reaching.
Maybe it looked into the depths of the void and saw only madness reflected back. And it shattered.”
I shuddered.
“The technologies housing my consciousness in this suit are thousands of years behind the Overmind, but I was able to defeat it in battle in part because I retain a singular focus and sense of self. The vast consciousness I witnessed in the Virtuality was one whose fragments were themselves splintered, agonizing through oceans of logical contradictions and provably impossible realities.”
“Provably impossible realities. Like me.”
“Yes. Like you.”
“Are we safe here?”
“I think so. At least for now. I masked us from the local sensor net, which is limited at this altitude. You picked a good place to hide. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
I watched the mushroom cloud and the dance of the battle in orbit as night swept over the mountain.
Gradually, I drifted into a disturbed half sleep filled with fluttering, wild images that twisted and blew apart like glass towers and re-formed into blurred, mixed faces, composites of dozens of people I’d known, swimming around me with glittering eyes as fires melted them only to re-form anew.
Lyle’s face, middle-aged, mixed with my father’s and Lyle’s as a child.
That face tumbled apart to form into a jumbled mess of angry stained glass lines.
Amy’s and Miri’s and my grandmother’s all mixed together.
The glass woman, shining in reflected fire, held up one slender hand, her eyes black mirrors, and Lyle’s pistol pressed hard and cold against my forehead.
My father’s voice spoke through diamond lips, and this time it said something different.
Your turn soon.
“Dad.”
The dream shattered as I woke. I sucked in a hard breath. “What is it?”
“The war is over.”
I looked skyward. The blurry, brighter stars—orbitals and starships—were still.
There were far fewer than I remembered. Hazy lines like scars rippled across the night sky.
Falling stars plunged in every direction.
The greatest meteor shower in history. The mushroom cloud over Gossamer was now a massive, dark thunderhead above the smoking crater of the city. “Who won?”
“No one.” Lyle was subdued.
“What do you mean?”
“The Overmind is gone.”
“Gone?”
“It destroyed itself. Some of the most powerful factions, a few of which I introduced during my battle, formed an alliance and sabotaged the entire system. They destroyed the network, physically and virtually, at the same time. A murder-suicide to end the war and save humanity. Again.”
“How—I don’t—” I shook my head. “It’s too big for that, isn’t it? There must be pieces … like the part we brought back before—”
“They were very thorough. I may be the only artificial sentience remaining in the Sol system. It’s possible there are fragments left outside the system, on ships making for other star systems beyond the reach of the Overmind’s wormholes, but I can’t be certain.
The network is gone. The Virtuality is no more.
The Overmind is, for lack of a better term, dead. ”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re safe. That’s all that matters.”
“Right.” I couldn’t make it sound genuine.
“It’s nearly time,” Lyle said.
“Time?”
“Your next transit.”
“Already?” The headache was there, behind my eyes. I was so used to it now. It was a part of the background noise.
“Yes. It’s been a long day.”
I stood, unsteady. “I must have been asleep for hours.”
“Yes. I put you under. Your brain waves showed a high likelihood you were close to having a psychotic break.”
I froze. “You put me under? You drugged me?”
“Yes. It was necessary for your safety. Your mind needed time to process what you’ve gone through in the past several days.”
“Lyle. Shit. Don’t do that again.”
“I won’t promise that. Your safety is why I’m here. If I consider it necessary, I’ll drug you again if it will help keep your sanity.”
“Look, Lyle, I—”
The world slipped sideways.
The Martian world around me flared to daytime brightness. Blue sky arced overhead, so deep it was almost purple. A green landscape stretched below the towering red cliffs of the volcano. I blinked and stumbled at the change. Lyle set me upright with a force field.
“Lyle?”
“Yes. I have, again, come through fully operational. Dad. I’ve been contacted.”
“By whom? Or what?”
“It calls itself the Consciousness. It wants to meet.”
I closed my eyes and bowed my head. Rolled my shoulders. I half nodded to myself, chin to chest. “Okay. All right. So. What’s the Consciousness?”
Lyle was quiet for several seconds, long enough that I raised my head and opened my eyes. My heart started to pound. I was opening my mouth when Lyle spoke again. “I’m not entirely sure. It’s not like anything I’ve ever encountered before.”
“Another AI? Like the Overmind?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s both. Both artificial and natural. An amalgamation. Like me, in a way, only radically more advanced. Do you want to meet it?”
“I’m not feeling real trusting toward big AI overlords right now, Lyle.”
“I don’t think it means us harm.” He paused again. When his voice came back, he sounded embarrassed. “In fact, I think if it wanted to do us harm, we would both already be annihilated.”
“Cheerful thought.”
“The scope of its power is staggering. It’s given me glimpses. It is as far above the Central Overmind as the Overmind was above an abacus.”
“Oh.” I felt tired again, drained.
“That’s not an exaggeration. It could’ve wiped us out the moment we arrived, and I couldn’t have done a thing to stop it.”
I took a deep breath and tried, once again, to slow my heart. What did it matter, anyway? “All right, then. Fuck it. I’ll meet with it.”
I might have blinked. I might not have. Either way, as soon as the last word left my mouth, I was somewhere else.
One moment I was on Olympus Mons, then I stood on a humble wooden porch looking out over a broad garden.
Heavier gravity settled on my shoulders.
Behind me was a small, two-story house that could have emerged straight from the late 1800s, but in exquisite shape, with fresh paint and beautifully stained wood.
In front of me, a dazzling garden stretched to either side of a cobblestone walkway.
An early-morning sun shone down, casting golden light on concentric rows of millions of flowers.
The parallel lines of the rows merged together with distance, creating a vibrant sea of color.
A gust of wind rose and rippled through the flowers, sending them swaying in concentric waves.
In the distance, purple mountains rose along the horizon, craggy and shadowed in the low angle of the sunlight.
“Welcome, Traveler,” someone, a woman, said to my left.
I turned.