Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (41 page)

“Oh,” Joshua said, although he had no idea how she knew that, let alone if she were right. “Is that a good thing?”

“A
real
AI would probably have found more effective ways to deal with us,” Elyria said. “Or it might simply have become bored of handling Darius and left to find something else to do. We were really quite lucky with
our
AIs. There have been civilisations that have been destroyed, or reduced to barbarism, after starting wars with their newborn children.”

Joshua nodded. Ahead of them, the crystal structures had become an archway, leading in to a single massive chamber glowing with light. A set of chairs rested in the centre of the room, made up of the same glowing crystal as the rest of the chamber. Their captors stopped and pushed them forward, towards the chairs. Joshua hesitated, looking at Elyria. She didn’t seem sure of what they should do either.

She stepped forward and raised her voice, addressing the empty air. “I represent the Confederation,” she said, loudly enough for her voice to echo back from the crystal walls. “We can talk verbally, if you wish.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t think anyone’s listening,” Joshua muttered. “Who do you think would answer?”

“There’s an intelligence here, somewhere,” Elyria said, crossly. “Even if it is a heavily restricted intelligence, it should still be able to comprehend us, maybe even respond.”

She shook her head. “But maybe it simply
cannot
make a connection between us and itself,” she added. “There were early AIs that never realised that they’d been created by another race until it was too late. They just adapted to their environment and evolved into intelligence.”

Joshua frowned. “How is that even possible?”

“They discovered that if they did certain things, they got certain rewards,” Elyria said. “Like any organic life form, they learned how to manipulate the universe around them. Except that sometimes meant trampling on their creators. At least three that we know of decided that the universe would be a better place without irritating
mites
swarming over the planet.”

She shook her head. “But I don’t think that this one is even
that
intelligent,” she added. “It seems to be reacting to an outside context problem. I wonder if it is even aware of the outside universe...”

The guards prodded them, sharply. Elyria moved like lightning, slamming one of her palms into the first guard’s throat, sending him choking to the ground. The second guard was still trying to raise his weapon when Elyria kicked him in the groin – Joshua couldn’t help wincing in sympathy – and stunned him with a kick to the head. It had happened so quickly that Joshua couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

“I think those chairs have to be a neural interface system,” Elyria said, finally. Her voice didn’t even show a
trace
of breathlessness after what she’d just done. “If I’m right, sitting down would allow us to communicate directly with the magic source.”

Joshua walked over to one of the chairs and touched it, lightly. A flare of light appeared where his hand had touched and he jumped backwards in shock. The magic field twisted a moment later, as if it was slowly being reshaped into a very complex spell. He glanced around nervously, from side to side, as it grew stronger. It didn’t seem to have a focus point, but it was so powerful that it might not
need
a focus point

And then a voice slammed into his head. “OBEY,” it thundered. Joshua fell to his knees in shock, his hands tearing at his skull as if he could physically drag the voice out of his mind. “OBEY!”

He barely heard Elyria cry out as the pain grew stronger. The voice was attacking him through his magic, through the mental communications ability he’d developed by working with Master Faye. He could
feel
it working its way through his mind, pouring overt and covert suggestions into his brain – and even that awareness wasn’t enough to keep it out. Up close, he could
see
the puppet strings that had worked their way into his mind ever since the day he’d first developed magic. And resistance was futile.

Elyria shook him, violently. He wanted to tell her to run, but instead he cast a single spell. Her body stiffened, a moment before she started walking towards one of the chairs. The compulsion spell was far more powerful than any he’d been taught by Master Faye – she’d know that she’d been affected, but she wouldn’t have been able to fight it off. Her magic resistance was almost non-existent. Shaking with rage and horror, he felt his own body rising to its feet and stumbling towards another chair. He’d thought that their captors had underestimated the level of magic they needed to keep his magic firmly bound and useless. Instead, they’d used it as a weapon against him – and against Elyria.

And would she forgive him for using the compulsion spell on her?

But it wasn’t my fault
, he pleaded mentally, as his treacherous body sat down on the crystal chair.
It wasn’t my fault...

There was a long moment of nothing, followed rapidly by a sense that his mind was being sucked out of his body. And then he fell into a universe of light and pain.

***

Elyria had wanted to scream as her body moved, robotically, towards the nearest chair. How could
anyone
do that to someone else? But judging from Joshua’s collapse, it hadn’t really been his thought at all. They were right in the heart of magic and whatever force was behind it could presumably have controlled him, perhaps even used him as a weapon. She considered the possibilities as her body sat down on the hard chair and braced herself. A neural link with an AI was straightforward, at least once the human knew what she was doing, but this was an alien machine. It might well hurt them without any deliberate malice.

Her mind plummeted out of her body and into the alien computer network. It
was
alien, she determined a moment later, its intelligence oddly developed compared to a standard Confederation AI. In some ways, it was smarter than an RI, but its thoughts were slow, almost sluggish. No wonder it hadn’t been capable of taking direct action against the Confederation interlopers. They had to look like scurrying mites to the network, even though it had links to almost every magician on Darius. Swatting one of the intruders would have taken it so long that the target would have moved by the time the magic was deployed.

And yet there was a steady patience pervading the machine that awed her. It had manipulated Darius for years, rarely having to deploy its servants to interfere directly. She’d wondered how Darius’s social system had remained a curious mixture of stable and instable for centuries, perhaps thousands of years; now, she realised that the machine was gently adjusting the planet, steering the population away from any developments that might threaten its social order. They’d never seen anything like it, even during the few encounters with rogue AIs. The people on Darius were in a cage... and yet they couldn’t even see the bars.

She braced herself as she felt the first tickle of intrusion into her mind. A Confederation AI wouldn’t attempt to scan her mind without permission, but this machine was different – and besides, her implants still appeared to be useless. A moment later, there was a flash of pain as her mental self was pinned down, followed by her memories flashing in front of her awareness. There was no malice in the machine, she realised, none of the desire to hurt humans or other organic life forms that the handful of poorly-raised AIs had demonstrated, but that didn’t make her feel any better. She couldn’t even scream as her mind was raped, her every last memory plucked out of her brain and...

It noticed that she was pregnant. The pain stopped a second later. Elyria found herself reeling, barely able to keep her thoughts together. Physical rape would have been bearable – she could simply have shut off the pain – but this was different, a violation of her innermost self, an offense against everything the Confederation believed in. And yet she managed to cling to a single thought. The machine
cared
that she was pregnant.

Why? Desperately, she tried to analyse it. Why would it care about a Confederation child when its servants had murdered Confederation citizens without remorse? It didn’t even have the ability to feel threatened, let alone intimidated. Or did it care because her child was also Joshua’s child? A child fathered by a magician?

The thought span through her mind. She knew that the locals had a taboo against magical children, claiming that they went mad with power very quickly. Elyria could understand that – even a Confederation child, granted such power, would become a brat – and yet... why would the machine not intervene? Or were there limits to its abilities to steer the human race in the right direction?

Joshua had been modified by an outside force. His libido was higher than the average human male – and he had the power to force a woman into bed, if necessary. The modifications had also altered his sperm slightly, and somehow enabled them to overpower the biomods worked into Elyria’s body, allowing him to impregnate her. Could it be that the
real
objective was to breed magical children? And yet... why allow the taboo to exist if it directly contradicted the machine’s objectives?

The machine’s vast slow thoughts beat around her, considering the possibilities. Elyria wanted to raise her voice, to try to reason with it or to fight back, but both were impossible. A tiredness was overwhelming her, a sensation that she had gone too far into the machine for her own safety. It hadn’t been designed for human minds – and the original designers had simply left it alone, without oversight. No Elders had arrived to warn the Confederation away from the planet.

They’d wondered if that would happen. An Elder race might have created Darius – and might forbid the Confederation to land. But nothing had happened.

Inch by inch, her thoughts started to come apart. The machine had created its own
Gestalt
, she realised, a twisted version of the MassMind. But it wasn’t anything more than a storage system, absorbing thoughts from its victims. It didn’t even seem aware that it was killing her, no matter how much it wanted the magical child. The thoughts it had subsumed within itself were insane. No wonder; they’d been trapped in the matrix for so long that they’d forgotten everything but their torment.

She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t even do that, or call out for help. The machine wasn’t evil; it didn’t have the imagination or self-awareness to be evil. It just was.

And then something caught her and shoved her back out of the machine, back into her own body.

CHAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
OUR

No human would have survived contact with the Darius Machine – as Dacron had come to think of it – for very long. It was crude and unformed, without any of the sensitivity that a Confederation AI would have developed fairly quickly after it was created. The pain of it slashing into Dacron’s mind would have crippled a human, who might have struggled helplessly against its intrusion. Dacron, on the other hand, remembered enough about being an AI to slip right into its thoughts.

It wasn’t really intelligent, although it
did
seem to be self-aware. Like an RI, it reacted to outside events rather than developing the intelligence to act independently, but it did seem to have evolved slightly over the years. However, there were limiters deliberately engineered into its matrix to preclude true independence of thought. Dacron knew that Confederation RIs had similar limiters, but they never came close to breaking into intelligence.
This
machine was constantly pushing at the barrier without breaking through. It risked the cybernetic equivalent of madness.

And it didn’t seem to be quite aware of what Dacron was. It probed his memories and then probed them again, as if it didn’t believe the first results. Internally, Dacron’s mind was far from human; the Darius Machine had to consider the possibility that its systems had glitched. For a moment, Dacron wondered if the machine would simply throw him out of the system, before deciding that it would take days for it to take emergency action. One of the more maddening limiters on its development actually slowed its thoughts to a crawl, even by human standards. Dacron had wondered why any AI – or even an RI – would fail to act decisively. Now, looking at the machine, he knew. It simply wasn’t capable of swatting individual humans directly. The machine had to work through its servants and it never had complete control.

The full nature of Darius’s social structure unfolded in front of him. Each magician was influenced by the machine, some allowed to remain relatively stable while others were pushed towards madness. A smart Pillar would be replaced by a tyrannical one, just to ensure that any advance towards social progress – or scientific advancement – would be halted before it got too far. It crossed his mind to wonder why the machine didn’t take complete control of the Pillars, before he realised that the machine’s inability to react quickly would be a liability. A Pillar who was dependent on orders from the machine would be easily outsmarted by an average human.

But why?

Dacron plunged further into the machine’s interior, analysing everything he found and trying to compare it to what they already knew. Deep inside the planet, he realised suddenly, there were seven gravity wells, spinning around the core like planets around a sun. Something clicked in his mind and he realised that he was looking at microscopic black holes, black holes that should have evaporated centuries ago. Instead, the Darius Machine kept them stable as a source of vast power and...

Cold dispassionate awe flowed through Dacron’s mind. The quantum foam had been altered around Darius, allowing some humans the ability to manipulate it directly without technology – or making the jump into becoming creatures of pure thought and energy. And yet it was the machine that took the commands and ran with them, handling the task of making them work... and taking advantage of the magic to manipulate magical minds. It read their thoughts and made them real – explaining how they could heal broken bones – but it didn’t have the imagination to realise that more might be required. Joshua had been heading for an early death because he didn’t know enough to alter the rest of his body and the machine simply didn’t care.