A Game of Universe (6 page)

Pain snapped me out of the trance, sharp throbbing from my leg. Whatever drugs Fifty-five gave me were wearing off. I knew what to do though. The device on my leg was a small robot doctor, a blue shield. It could heal me.

“I have to move,” I told it. “Override safety protocol, no sedatives, highest priority to reconstructing bone tissue, then take care of the infection.” The robot bleeped, and injected a leg full of medicine, then went to work on my bones; I smelled something burning.

I removed his goggles, his clothes, and found a transport ticket. Satisfied, I got up and limped away, defying the squeals of protest of the blue shield.

I left the mindless man for the lermix.

To his Umbra Corp I went. My application to their academy was accepted with the second highest score ever. Every record of my existence was wiped clean, and my DNA was subtly altered. My name and face were lost. I disappeared from the police, from everyone. I was given a new life. I was reborn.

It was after the indoctrination ceremony that Fifty-five whispered to me—first in my dreams, then with growing regularity he emerged in my thoughts. He coached me, and suggested ways to advance my career.

I thought I had gone mad.

Hardly mad,
remarked the psychologist.
A bit disoriented, but not insane. Now, if you wish to share additional recollections with me, I am certain I could ease your suffering.

You mean find out what makes me tick? I’ll pass.

I shuffled through water that was half as deep, walked among odors half as pungent, yet the memory was as sharp as ever. Time does not heal all wounds, especially when you carry the people you’ve murdered inside your head.

The passage split: one branch descending, one ascending. I took the one up and that emptied into an access tunnel, filled with air conduits, blinking optical cables, and the dust of decades. I stopped and listened to make sure no one followed me.

Silence.

I was under the landing fields and close to the hanger Virginia had pointed out. Above me, a ventilation duct snaked up, marked storage heating. A quick burst from my pistol and I had a hole large enough to get in. The tube wasn’t big, about half a meter in diameter, but I fit and started climbing. My shoulder ached.

I squirmed inside the cylinder until I came to a filter and grate. This I burned off, and found a deserted office. Half a cup of coffee sat on a white plastic desk. I got out, stretched, drank the coffee (it was cold), and noticed a sign flashing on the door that said: “With customer, back in one hour.” Outside was the impound hanger.

I released the tension in my muscles, took two deep breaths of fresh air, and assessed my position. Sister Olivia had played her hand early. Obviously. Omar and E’kerta would be more subtle. A bomb. Poison. Perhaps a nanoassassin. The hero Gustave worried me. A nagging feeling about him festered in my thoughts. I calmed my mind, shuffled, then stacked my personas. Fifty-five I placed on top. His keen eyes and paranoia I needed. The psychologist came next with his intellect and capability for analysis. Then Medea, in case I needed her. The gambler and Celeste for company, my silent Master, and last Aaron, the alien king, whose thoughts were so different from human, they pained me to focus upon.

Overhead, the artificial sun dipped behind a bank of equally artificial pink clouds and made the shadows fade. Casually, I strolled out, and heard Virginia arguing with a man inside: “It’s too much and you know it.”

“The drive has only thirty hours logged on it,” he retorted. “It’s practically new!”

There were rows of yachts parked, polished and gleaming with chrome and gold details. All their prices were clearly labeled. The ones in the back looked a little neglected. I smiled insincerely at the plaid-jacketed salesman, then asked Virginia, “Have you found something?”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Maybe”—then cast a frigid glance to the salesman—“but there’s nothing here that’s worth half the asking price.”

“Can you give us a few moments to discuss this?” I asked him, then to Virginia I whispered, “Show me.”

She led me to a sleek ship, low to the ground, a compressed oval of emerald super alloy with twin insect eyes bulging forward. Its price tag read: four and a half million.

“This one,” she said, “is the best among the bunch, a custom sloop. It has a space-cutting turbine, but unfortunately little room inside. With the two of us, and all that baggage you’re lugging around, we’ll barely fit. She’s the fastest thing here, though.”

I noticed my bags were stacked to the side of the craft.

“It’s impractical,” I remarked.

“The man who owns this won’t need practicality. He could afford to have his baggage sent ahead of him.”

“It won’t do.”

She sighed. I could tell she had her heart set on this one.

“Are there any others?” I asked.

“One other,” she said, frowned, then admitted, “no, two.”

“Is there a problem with the second one?”

“Let’s look at the first one, maybe you’ll like it.” She turned without answering my question, and walked to a larger craft, enameled red and chromium yellow. Written in bold gold letters on her tail was
Sun Dancer
. It bristled with antennae and arrays, fingers of alloy that reached forward, a blackened nose, and twin drone racks mounted fore and aft.

“She’s a sturdy vessel,” Virginia explained, “decent weapons, excellent communications, but the computer is a little small for its mass-folding drive. It’s slower than the first one, but it is large. Room and quarters for twelve. It’s probably an older corporate model. You want to take a look inside?”

“It requires a larger computer?”

“Faster,” she corrected. “The mathematics involved in folding the ship’s mass into higher dimensions are tricky. We might be able to refit her, but that will take a day, at least.”

“What about this last one?”

She said in a hushed voice, “You don’t want that one. It’s bad luck.”

“Show me,” I insisted.

Shaking her head, she nonetheless took me to the back of the hanger. Here the older models were mothballed, covered in grime, and lonely for someone to fire up their engines and take them away from this boneyard. Tucked behind the ion engines of a rusting tanker was Virginia’s third ship.
I felt something about this one, a cold tightening in my stomach, a sense of déjà vu. I had seen this ship before … been a passenger on it. But when?

The psychologist informed me:
Déjà vu is an illusion brought on by the mind’s ability to jump to associative conclusions. It has no basis in reality.

The ship, despite my misgivings, was gorgeous. Three wings arched back like the fins of an angelfish, black and wispy. Each contained a recessed oval, bulging slightly through the metal skin, placed midway along its length, three mass-folding generators. I’d never seen a ship with three before. The body was a teardrop of black metal with recessed x-ray lasers, and a magic circle of silver runes inscribed on her nose to ward off attacks.

She looked fast just sitting there.

That feeling of familiarity wouldn’t go away. I knew this ship. On the other side was a painted mascot, I knew without looking, an angel. Only this angel didn’t have white wings and a golden halo. She was a lascivious nymph, nude, wings like a parrot, long and rainbow-colored, and a silver crown upon her head.

I strode to the prow, and sensed the static pull of the magic circle. On the port side, indeed, the mascot was; her wings were spread wide, and wind blew through a long mane of blood-red hair. Her name was etched in calligraphy:
Grail Angel
.
Normally, I abhorred happy coincidences like this. They usually turn out to be neither happy, nor coincidental.

What do you think now?
I asked the psychologist.
Déjà vu
still unreal?

Remarkable,
he whispered.
Perhaps your mind, despite its corruption by primitive beliefs, has become clairvoyant.

At least take a look at what you’ve been dealt
, insisted the gambler.
To throw away an inside straight, the namesake of our mission, would be spitting in Lady Luck’s eye!

Virginia saw me staring at the thing, and whispered, “It’s haunted. Can’t you feel it? I put the screws to the dealer, and he told me it showed up here, drifting in orbit, without a crew.”

“Is the computer large enough to run three mass-folding generators?”

“There was never a computer large enough or fast enough to handle the interactions of three mass-folding fields. I’ve seen some theoretical papers on two fields—folding already folded masses—but three fields is an intractable problem.”

“We don’t have to run all three, do we? Can’t we use one at a time?”

“Well, I suppose—”

“You said it was found without a crew? Where did they go?”

She shrugged.

“And how long has it been here?” I asked.

“Thirty-four years. Like I said, the casino found her in orbit and towed her in. The mechanics say there’s nothing wrong with her, but all things considered, no one wants to touch the thing. She could be a military unit, a spy ship, maybe? Who knows?”

“Let’s see the inside,” I said, and keyed the outer hatch.

Virginia sighed, but followed me in.

No one had been in here for a while. It was dusty. Everything was made from a lustrous gray metal inlaid with panels of briarwood that was in need of a good polishing. There were three separate sections apart from the bridge, which we wandered through from the back to the front. In the aft was a storage room. Racks and securing webs ran along every wall, the floor, and the ceiling, holding nothing but a cargo of dust bunnies.

The next section must have been the crew’s quarters. There was a triple bunk bed (each with its own built-in virtual units), and a table made from the armor plate of a battleship with P-7 stenciled on top. It looked like a good place to play cards.

The last room was the captain’s quarters. It was larger than the other two put together. The carpet was thick wool and embroidered upon it was a replica of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I trod lightly upon the host of heaven. In one corner was a set of empty shelves, a red leather reading chair, and a small table for setting one’s pipe or drink upon. A bed with a satin comforter the color of blood and a cracked headboard sat along the far wall. The walnut headpiece had been carved into a skull and crossbones. I tested the mattress: firm.

In the captain’s bathroom was a marble tub that sat on four cast iron gargoyle feet, with a water recycler underneath. Three people could sit in it without bumping into each other. Sculpted upon its outer rim were porpoises, whales, sharks, even a few mermaids swimming together, and galleons being tossed about like so many toy ships. I ran my hand along the inside of the tub, enjoying the luxury of the cool, smooth stone.

“All very nice,” Virginia said a bit sarcastically, “but let’s take a look at the important parts, like the mass-folding generators and the bridge before you buy a bathtub with wings.”

I reluctantly agreed and we continued our tour.

Unlike the frilly captain’s quarters, the cockpit had a practical design. Systems and displays easily within reach and clearly labeled. On the right was the pilot’s form-fitting wraparound, and Virginia tried it on for size. To her left was a seat for the copilot, and behind that a third terminal.

Virginia examined the systems, then told me, “She has triple backup for the life support, weapons, communications, computers, and as you saw outside, propulsion. The computer has an advanced architecture, rated at double prime, which is more than enough to handle the equations for one mass-folding generator.”

I asked, “Is that a trace of approval I hear?”

“It’s a fine vessel,” she said carefully. “I can’t believe she is thirty-four years old.”

The salesman poked his head through the hatch. “She’s a gem, isn’t she? And only four hundred thousand.”

Virginia looked at me, shocked, and whispered, “Something has to be wrong. That’s a quarter of what she should be worth.”

“I want to see the generators working,” I told the salesman, “and I want every system double-checked before I even consider buying this scrap heap. And then, I don’t think I could offer you more than three hundred fifty.”

“Yes sir,” he said, and scrambled across the hanger to rouse his mechanics.

“And get someone in here to clean her up,” I shouted after him.

“You’re not seriously going to buy this Flying Dutchman are you?” Virginia asked.

“Let’s get my bags.”

5

V
irginia went through her checklist. The cockpit came alive with virtual displays; scattered stars and dusky blue nebulas floated in midair, then a miniature
Grail Angel
appeared with overlapping circles of probability, ripples on a pond. She sat centered in this miniature galaxy, one hand on a trackball, the other manipulating a matrix of crystals. The real activity, however, took place inside her head. From her double-star insignia shone a beam that linked her bioware to the ship’s computer. It flashed across the instruments, touched the displays, gathered data, and gave commands.

While the
Grail Angel
had been cleaned, Virginia turned the ship upside down searching for some reason not to buy her. Everything worked perfectly. She claimed all the components looked new, even though the ship was thirty-four years old, and warned me not to buy it, calling it a “ghost ship.” To ward off evil spirits, she hung her plastic four-leaf clover on the console.

“All ready,” she declared. “Destination?”

“The Needles free trade colony.”

She fetched the coordinates, muttering, “Out of one scum hole and right back into another. You never said anything about smuggling contraband. I could lose my rating.”

“Smuggling is not our purpose,” I assured her. “I’m going to visit a colleague.”

The man who constructed the thought shield?
the psychologist inquired.

Yes,
I replied.
His name is Quilp. If he is alive, I believe I can persuade him to manufacture me another. Then we shall pay a visit to your master-psychic, Necatane, and see if he knows the location of the Grail.

The Golden City tower gave us clearance, and the
Grail Angel
rose like a bubble through champagne, through the artificial sunset, and past the atmospheric barrier. On the other side of the field that kept the air clinging to Golden City, the warm sky instantly turned black and filled with stars.

“Why are we traveling so slow?” I asked.

“Mass-folding generators are touchy,” she said, “especially near gravimetric potentials.”

“You mean planets?”

“Planets, suns, moons, even Golden City back there can scatter our low-mass wave function.”

The aft display projected the artificial planetoid, a ball of glitter and neon, silver and gold, and sparkling diamonds. Virginia then initiated the number one mass-folding generator. Our mass dwindled (although I felt nothing); the
Grail Angel
unfurled her sails, caught a quantum wind, and plunged into icy waters of indigo ink. Golden City vanished.

It was good to be underway, and better that I had some distance between myself and my deadly competition.

“ETA to Needles colony: twenty-four days, seven hours,” Virginia told me. “Relativistic time: twelve hours, forty-seven min—” The beam of light from her insignia froze on the display. She jerked her head away.

“Is there a problem?”

“Maybe. An irregular code in the secondary memory core,” she said. “It’s growing.” She reconnected. “It is a single file, no passwords, no customized shells, and this is curious, the system log indicates it’s new, created fourteen seconds ago.”

Smells like a virus to me,
Fifty-five said.
Someone sabotages our navigation, and we drift in space, or end up in a different galaxy.

Pure speculation. Our pilot checked the ship before we left.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“It’s nothing I’ve seen before,” she said and broke the connection. “If I had to guess, I’d say a virus. I’ll purge it before it’s done expanding.”

Like I told you,
said Fifty-five.
Whoever planted it knew you’d buy this ship. You shook the tail to the impound yard, but our girl here is another story. She could work for the competition. There might be a clue in the code, the real date of creation, or a locus of insertion.

He had a point, a paranoid point, but a point nonetheless. “Let it be,” I told Virginia. “I want you to isolate it from the operating system.”

She chewed on her lower lip, then said, “I can secure the core, but it would be safer to get rid—”

“—No.”

A furious burst of light discharged from her insignia. It pierced the displays, flickered through the spectrum, cold ultramarine to smoldering crimson. “Done.” She glared at me. “Computer control transferred to you. If the virus gets out of hand, you alone have the authority to erase the secondary core. Dump the entire system and we can reboot from backup. You have eight minutes before the code turns viable.”

I examined the mysterious virus. It displaced the entire secondary memory core. How did Virginia miss it when she inspected the ship? My suspicions germinated.

“Make certain,” she said, “to place the purge command in the super user’s shell.” She leaned over to show me. Her breast pressed against my arm.

Celeste whispered into my ear,
This spunky one desires you. There was no need to throw herself into your lap to show you. She wants to touch you.
Celeste drew my attention to Virginia’s flesh pressing mine (albeit through the intervening layers of plastic and metal of her pilot’s suit), and she flooded my mind with fantasies of dragging her aft, and making love under the skull and crossbones headboard. Hunger simmered inside Celeste; it boiled over, and I became aroused. Indeed, to be with Virginia … what would it take to win her favor?

Favor? A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou?
Celeste smirked.
You were never the romantic. Take her! She is begging for it. Twelve hours to kill. Don’t you want her?

More images from Celeste: silk cords and bound limbs, the flick of a riding crop, ice, electric current, and candle wax, bodies sliding over one another.

“Leave it alone, Celeste.”

I installed the purge command, concentrating solely on that task; otherwise, Celeste might possess me. Not only had Omar and the gambler run my body ragged, but I had stayed up the previous evening reading the Grail database. I was dead tired. Celeste had a weak will, but this was her area of expertise. That gave her an advantage I was unwilling to test.

Virginia returned to her wraparound seat. With her touch gone, the passion in my blood cooled.

I told her, “To access the computer use the password, Osiris.” There was a second password that locked Virginia out and gave me control of the ship. Fifty-five was right. How far could I trust her?

Upon the center console, a new display materialized: a hollow cube of faint black lines. Tiny shapes animated in one corner, triangles, squares, and pentagons, and they filled with shades of green, and blue, and yellow. A diffuse glow appeared in the center of the cube and made it look like stained glass.

Virginia probed this display with her beam of light. “It’s a visual of our mystery program,” she said. “It’s compiling itself. Complex. I can’t tell what it is, or what it’s up to.”

The expansion of colors in the cube accelerated. A mosaic of turquoise and jade covered half its surface. I rotated the display and saw the inside crowded with volumes of glowing color too; they quivered as if alive; pulsed with a heartbeat.

I’d seen this before, in a dream perhaps. In its luminous patterns I saw radiation, and biohazard, and nanoplague warning symbols, and trouble. “Very well. I have changed my mind. Show me how to purge the secondary core.”

“Too late,” she said. Her eyes were glazed over, staring deep into the computer system with her bioware. “It’s in the folding subroutines.”

“I thought you isolated it?”

“I did. Something
inside
our computer bypassed my isolation procedure, maybe a second virus. Whoever installed this knew what they were doing.”

“Then we’ll dump the entire system.”

“Not with this code inside the folding subroutines. Without the proper unfold cycle, our wave function will scatter. We never resolve. We die.”

The cube drew more lines, faster. I held my breath and watched. Colors of grass and dandelions and robin’s egg saturated the air.

Fifty-five hissed,
Dump the core, quick! Take your chances with this unfolding cycle. This virus could set our course to the edge of the universe and lock us out. It might shut down life support. We could be dead either way.

The last line on the cube connected; it flared neon red; it exploded.

The spectrum of colors bleached to brilliant white, dividing the cockpit into splinters of hard shadow and dazzling light. For several seconds I saw nothing but dots swimming before me, then my sight returned. The cube sat there, quiet and pulsing with abstract patterns.

Virginia whispered, “It’s not doing anything I can detect. We’re still on course.”

The cube startled me. It spoke: a male contralto voice that demanded, “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?” Its words made four green hexagons shift upon its surface like the tiles of a puzzle.

“I am Germain, owner of this vessel,” I said. “What are you?”

“Forgive me, Master,” it humbly replied, “but my courtesy subroutines were only now accessed. I am Setebos, an artificial intelligence, and your faithful servant.”

“No AI unpacks, compiles, and initiates itself,” Virginia said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, madam. I assume you are the pilot of the
Grail
Angel?
Do you prefer to be addressed as madam, madam captain, or miss?”

“Captain will do,” she said curtly. “Explain how you got in our secondary core?”

“My records indicate I have always been here,” he replied, “nested in directory two-zero-seven. When the mass-folding generator engaged, I woke up. It is my duty to refold the fields for optimum performance, and, naturally, any other duties you command.”

“That directory didn’t exist a moment ago,” she whispered to me.

Erase it,
urged Fifty-five.

I thought you were the one who wanted to find out who put it here?

“What happened to this ship’s last crew?” I asked the cube.

“I’m sorry, Master, but that information is unavailable to me. This is the first time the mass-folding generators have been engaged in a non-test mode. I was just born.”

“But you claim you will do anything I ask?”

“If it is within my ability, yes Master,” Setebos replied. “I am here to serve.”

“What if I told you to erase yourself?”

A cluster of blue rhombuses broke apart, rotated ninety degrees, then settled into a starburst pattern on the cube’s surface. “I regret that I cannot. I have a directive that prevents self-annihilation. However, I shall be delighted to give you complete instructions, so you may erase me yourself.”

“AIs don’t talk like this,” Virginia said, “not the ones I’ve heard before anyway. I don’t trust it. I suggest you turn it off. The mass-folding fields run perfectly without it.”

The light inside Setebos’s cube dimmed and quivered like a flickering candle. “Madam captain,” he said in small voice, “I have taken the liberty to reconfigure the mass-folding fields. Please, if you would care to inspect them, I can prove my worthiness to you.”

“You can’t do that with the generators running! We’ll be ripped apart! Who told you to take control of my ship?”

“A thousand apologies,” he squeaked. “I shall install a command chain in my action path. Do you desire me to return the fields to their previous state?”

Without answering, she summoned the schematic of the wave function surrounding the
Grail Angel.
Previously, the ship looked like a stone in a stream, ripples of probability stretching to infinity fore and aft. Now, one end didn’t radiate into space; instead, it was a whirlpool that vanished into nothingness. It had been folded, twisted to a point.

“How fast are we going?” I asked her.

The beam from her insignia flashed into the main computer. She frowned, then said, “I’ve recalculated thrice. Our ETA to Needles is now five hours and three minutes.”

“Setebos,” I inquired. “Are you using one field or two?”

“Two, O wise Master. I have computed a crease for the locus of—”

“Can you use all three simultaneously?”

The puzzle cube shifted rapidly, simple figures fragmented and collected into smaller asymmetric bodies; specks of yellow swelled in the mosaic of light, and a few grains of blood red emerged, then Setebos halted and returned to his normal soothing blues and greens.

“Forgive me, Master. I am unable to solve the necessary equations. Shall I try again?”

I asked Virginia, “Is it safe to run the ship at this speed?”

“Like I said, it’s not a question of speed,” she replied. “The ship can handle it. But this AI has me worried. It shouldn’t be able to solve the mathematics of a twice-folded field.”

“Are there any dangers? Complications or relativistic effects?”

“None that I can detect.”

“This AI makes the
Grail Angel
more efficient, faster. It stays. If you detect any anomalies notify me immediately. Until that time, I would appreciate your cooperation with Setebos.”

“I don’t think that’s a good—”

“—I’m not paying you to think. I am paying you to pilot this ship. Now do as I wish.”

Her lips tightened. Her left hand balled into a fist. “You’re the boss.” She glanced at her hanging lucky four-leaf clover, then glared at me. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I was suddenly uncomfortable with Virginia, suspicious of her honesty and good intentions. She showed up precisely when I needed a pilot, and I didn’t believe in coincidences. Fifty-five’s seeds of doubt sprouted like weeds. She could be a spy for Omar, maybe even for Sister Olivia. Although I saw no crucifix on her person, she was superstitious. I had to learn more about her.

“How, exactly,” I asked her, “did you know about that last card? In the Universe game.”

“No one bets like you did against a master-dealer without a nova up his sleeve.” She was silent a moment, then looked up, licked her lips, and whispered, “You’re not supposed to know this, but pilots above third-class have special implants.”

“Your implants, I know about. Every pilot has them.”

“These are different. They enhance our reactions in ship-to-ship combat. They extrapolate the future based on a present data set. And there is an additional augmentation in one out of ten of us, precognitive powers, what you might call good guesses. That’s how I knew you were going to cheat. I couldn’t prove anything, so I kept my eyes glued on your cards.”