Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (26 page)

“But you can’t be sure,” she said, reluctantly. And
she
couldn’t be sure either. Joshua was a nice lad, with a growing crush on her that she found somewhat embarrassing, but Master Faye was a devious despot. Why
not
try to plant a command in her mind? “What do you suggest we do?”

“I will be assuming command of the operation on the ground,” Jorlem said. “The AIs have proposed a direct scan of your mind when you return to orbit. It would allow us to be sure that you were not under outside interference.”

“Except you couldn’t be sure, because of the magic,” Elyria said, bitterly. “A full scan might reveal nothing.”

“We know,” the AIs said. “We do not see any other choice.”

There was a long pause. “We have been scanning Joshua ever since he entered the shuttle,” they added, changing the subject. “There are a number of oddities in his body, particularly a very faint tendency to disrupt advanced technology. Nanotech simply refuses to work inside his body, for example, and focused scans return thoroughly abnormal results. We have been forced to rely on less advanced technology.”

Jorlem scowled. “Is he disrupting technology in purpose?”

“We do not believe so,” the AIs said. “The level of disruption seems to coincide with his moods, which have swung backwards and forwards ever since he entered the shuttle. That is not surprising – he is almost certainly suffering from a variant of culture shock – but the link with the disruptions is alarming. The effect might damage a shuttle if we attempted to take him to orbit.

“Physically, his body is rather strange,” they continued. “He is strong and healthy in appearance, but his heart is under some considerable strain and there are a multitude of other minor problems. A human who exercised regularly would build up the muscle and the supporting structures; Joshua appears to have only concentrated on his muscles. In many ways, he looks like a child who has managed to reprogram his supporting nanites to redesign his body.”

Elyria winced. As fashions changed, the Confederation’s citizens redesigned their bodies to match. Something that would be mildly eccentric in an adult could be very dangerous for a child; everyone was told horror stories about the girl who had tried to improve her breasts, or the boy who’d tried to give himself a much larger penis. The medical nanites were supposed to prevent it, but there was ample incentive to try to hack into them and reprogram the list of authorised changes.

The AIs displayed a hologram in front of her. “We would be very surprised if he lived past forty without a major heart attack,” they said. “His heart is simply incapable of coping with the strain placed on it. By his own admission, he has been using magic to improve his body. We believe that he has been enhancing his muscles without either the knowledge or the awareness to improve the rest of his body to match. This would be consistent with the observed level of medical knowledge among the rest of the population. They know about broken bones, but not about stress placed on one’s heart. Nor, for that matter, do they understand germs and their role in spreading diseases. A single contaminated source of water could lay waste to an entire town.

“Another oddity lies in his reproductive system. Put bluntly, he is producing sperm at a terrific rate, with a consequent effect on his hormones. It has not been difficult, studying the footage recorded by the snoops, to confirm that he has a strong interest in girls. He stares at them more than the average young lad born on Darius. Given his position, it is something of a mystery why he doesn’t get sexual contact...”

“He said that Master Faye forbade him to make permanent relationships,” Elyria said. “Do you think he tried to improve his genitals?”

“We do not believe so,” the AIs said. “All of his other ‘improvements’ have been far from subtle. We would be expecting him to produce a much longer penis rather than an increase in sperm production. Indeed, we don’t think they know that much about their reproductive organs. Many primitive human societies correctly identified some issues – such as the link between periods and pregnancy – but shrouded it in taboo that prevented proper analysis. This improvement was done by someone who knew a great deal more about the human body.”

“Master Faye?” Jorlem asked. He hesitated. “But if he was the one who
banned
permanent relationships, why would he want to make sexual contact inevitable?”

“Unknown,” the AIs said. “Perhaps he wishes the young man to impregnate as many women as possible, rather than merely forming a link with a single female. However, given his position, he would have little problem lining up females for Joshua to impregnate. It will remain a mystery until we receive more information.

“We have scanned his genetic code through taking DNA samples and have analysed it thoroughly,” they continued. “There is very faint evidence of limited DNA hackwork done in the very distant past, which confirms that they probably left Earth during the later years of the First Expansion Era. They certainly don’t have the biomods that became standard at the same time as the First Interstellar War, even on worlds that intended to escape from technology. It is highly unlikely that they left Earth any later than 3000AD.”

Jorlem leaned forward. “Is there something...
alien
in his genetic code?”

“We have not been able to locate anything inhuman in his DNA,” the AIs said. “There are trace elements of items common to Darius, but those would be fairly prevalent all over the planet. However, when he works magic, there is a very definite shift in his brain patterns. We are unable to study this more closely without the risk of causing considerable harm.”

Elyria nodded. If a brain-probe failed halfway through the procedure, it would certainly cause brain damage, if not outright death. And Joshua wasn’t backed up at all.

“So we have a mystery,” the AIs concluded. “As far as we can tell, there is little difference between Joshua and the rest of the population, yet only a relative handful of them can work magic. Why are some singled out for power?”

“Perhaps we should just ask him,” Elyria said. “He did say that Master Faye detected his first brushes with magic and offered him training.”

“That doesn’t answer the question of what makes him special,” the AIs said. “What separates him from the rest of the common herd?”

Jorlem frowned. “I assume that you have run comparisons?”

“We will be taking DNA samples from nearby humans,” the AIs said. There was no need to bring them to the shuttle. A tiny drone, disguised as an insect, could perform the DNA extraction without being noticed. “Once we compare them, we should be able to identify any major change... maybe they’re lacking something instead of Joshua having something additional.”

“You mean like the Thule serfs,” Jorlem said. “But if that was the case, why do magicians appear at random?”

“Unknown,” the AIs said. “The force behind magic may be selecting random people and gifting them with power. Or there may be something else going on.”

Elyria held up a hand. “What have you been able to learn from his magic?”

“More puzzles,” the AIs said. “He generates a ball of light – nothing but light. It doesn’t even seem to be a different temperature to the rest of the compartment. He generates fireballs – there is a definite rise in temperature, but the fire doesn’t burn his hands. He produces illusions – they appear to be nothing more than holograms. He produces objects... actually we believe that he sucks energy out of thin air to produce them.”

Elyria frowned. “You mean he doesn’t actually produce something for nothing?”

“We think that his magic works on the same basis as a fabricator,” the AIs said. “It would be easy for us to duplicate some of his magic, it’s just less energy-intensive to suck up raw matter and transform it into more useful materials. There is no need to rearrange matter at a quantum level to produce almost anything that he might want. He could just do it at a molecular level.”

They paused, significantly. “However, given an unlimited power supply, there is no reason why he
needs
matter to serve as the building blocks of his items,” they added. “It is possible that his magic actually taps hyperspace, like a core tap.”

Jorlem blanched. “If that were true,” he said, “they’d have blown themselves up long ago.”

Elyria couldn’t disagree. Core taps were dangerous, even to the Confederation, and each one had three RIs charged with overseeing it. If the tap destabilised, enough energy would leak into normal space to shatter a planet – or a planetoid. The Peacekeepers had never lost a planetoid in combat, but they’d lost two after incidents with their core taps. If it wasn’t for the fact that Peacekeeper starships needed an independent energy supply, they would have hidden the core taps elsewhere and used QCC links to transfer the power to the starships, wherever they were. She honestly couldn’t see how a mere human mind, even one that had been heavily enhanced, could handle a core tap.

“They may have something else doing it for them,” the AIs offered. “They do not appear to have any understanding of molecules at all, yet they have no problems rearranging matter at the molecular level. We could only do that through sharing information on the precise structure of what we wanted to produce, or designing it ourselves, but they lack the ability to do either.”

“That would tie in with their medical spells,” Elyria offered. “They just issue generalist instructions and something else handles the specifics.”

“Achievements through ignorance,” the AIs said. “How can they do
anything
like that?”

“It has happened, in human history,” Elyria pointed out. “We didn’t evolve knowing how to produce the first AIs, or hyperdrive, or planetoids...”

“Darius appears to have been settled long enough for them to rediscover spaceflight,” the AIs pointed out, tartly. “The two factors stopping them are magic and their cultural problems. We wonder if any of them did research into the origins of magic.”

“We could ask Joshua,” Elyria said, although she doubted that Master Faye had told him very much. “Or see what we find when we scan Master Faye’s library.”

“He refused to allow us to remove the books,” the AIs reminded her. “Dacron will have to glance at them all, page by page, and then relay it to the rest of the team.”

Elyria nodded. Ten minutes with the books, in the shuttle or the space station, would have provided them with all the information stored between their covers. The books she’d purchased from the bookseller were already being scanned, although they hadn’t done much more than confirm their speculations. And prove that human romance novels were universally bad.

“That should provide us with more information,” she said. “Have you managed to unlock the language he uses for magic spells?”

“Not as yet,” the AIs said. There was a hint of annoyance in their words. “As far as we can tell, it bears no resemblance to any language known prior to the First Expansion Era, but we cannot be entirely positive as we do not have complete records of that era. You humans managed to lose a great deal of your history during the Time of Unrest.”

Elyria nodded. “It was a brutal time,” she said, knowing that few colony worlds, even the ones that had fallen back into barbarism, hadn’t gone through their own Time of Unrest. If humanity hadn’t developed the warp drive, the story of the human race might have come to a sudden and unpleasant end. “But we learned from it.”

Jorlem picked up a datapad and glanced at it. “You cannot identify any words?”

“Not with sufficient precision to be sure of a match,” the AIs said. “Languages evolve over time, Colonel. The handful of similarities may be nothing more than coincidence.”

There was a pause. “Elyria,” they added, “we would like you to participate in an experiment. Would you agree to be frozen again, briefly?”

Elyria had anticipated that question, although she had expected it to be longer in coming. They needed data for analysis – and as the only person who had been exposed to magic, they could risk her more easily than anyone else. Not that there would be any question of
forcing
her, of course. The Confederation simply didn’t work that way. Besides, there was no need; the only way to gain status in the Confederation was through achievement and cracking the mystery of Darius would be one hell of an achievement. There was plenty of incentive to swallow and let him freeze her for the second time.

“Fine,” she said, unable to hide the tremor in her voice. What would they suggest next? “I’ll do it.”

She allowed Jorlem to precede her back into the medical examination room, where the AI drones were orbiting Joshua and scanning him constantly, monitoring his brainwaves. The researchers were already explaining what they wanted from him; Joshua, to his credit, looked reluctant to do anything to her at all. He finally looked at her and asked if it was really what she wanted, causing her to smile and nod. They
did
need the experimental data.

“Do it,” she said, before she could change her mind.

Joshua flexed his hand, muttering a single word... and she froze. Again, she tried to move and couldn’t, not even her eyes. The AI drones moved to her position and poked away at her, scanning her brainwave patterns even as they prodded her with a needle. There was a faint stab of dull pain when they drew blood, but it had an eerie dreamlike quality. The whole experience was still terrifyingly unpleasant.

“Your implants are still functional,” the AIs said. “Can you use them?”

Elyria tried – and discovered that she couldn’t. The spell, or whatever it was, seemed to prevent
all
voluntary actions, even ones that were purely mental. She couldn’t understand why she could still
think
, let alone anything else. And why didn’t it prevent her from breathing, if it was holding her in a state of total stasis?

“Curious,” the AIs said, finally. “Your brainwave patterns appear to be normal, but your body is simply unable to move. There is no apparent damage to account for it.”

“The spell holds its target in place,” Joshua said. There was an odd note in his voice. “Do you wish me to release it?”