Transcendence (45 page)

And then he rose, slowly, as a snake after shedding an old skin, a man after shedding the uniform of a hired murderer. He crossed to the huddled bodies and winced as he retrieved the vest of medals. He pulled it back on.

I haven’t yet earned the privilege of being free of this.

“
Subbs—I mean Boss—something’s strange about the enemy,” Paolo said, breaking into Nadir’s narrowing river of thoughts; the magma had reached his mind, yes, but it was no longer wild rapids. He was taming it into a directed stream.
Something strange about the enemy, indeed
, he thought.
So it’s true
.

“
What do we do now?” the boy asked.

“
Cease fire on the attacking units,” he commed across the bands. “They should be almost on top of us now. We’re meat if we fight back. I’ve got an idea.

“
Guards!” he called on the private line to command. Jhishra’s men would be able to help him do this thing. He picked up his rifle and plugged it back in.

“
Yes . . . yes, Boss?” the second guard’s 3VRD answered.

“
Connect me with the classified files.” Nadir spoke as he walked toward the command truck.

“
We can’t access those, sir,” the first guard, the one who usually spoke, said.

“
If you won’t, I will. You’d better cooperate.” He stood at the rear of the truck, keeping an eye on the turret. Already, the gunfire was beginning to diminish. Good, Nadir thought, that’ll give me time.

The first guard’s 3VRD vanished, and the second’s began to shimmer. “You
shouldn’t’ve done that, sir! You shouldn’t’ve fucked with things. We were doing so well—
”

“
So well that we’re about to be destroyed? Shut up and give me access.”

The doors hissed up like a beetle’s wings beckoning him inside. Nadir caught himself feeling pleasure. He would alter the plans of whoever it was that decided such things as massacring whole villages of innocent civilians. He was not alone in the world; he couldn’t be alone in believing what was right and what was wrong. If he were, his plans would fail.

“
So it goes,” he muttered, stepping into the darkened interior of the truck. The effort is what matters.

Nadir flicked back on the server’s command landscape and rebooted its transmitter, but shut down the program which had been running for three months. It only took him a few seconds to track along the neon tunnels to the enemy servers—both of them, though only one used the same language as this one. A brief but deadly pulse—

Slam
, the command truck fired a column of microwave energy at both servers, enough to either burn them out or force their failsafes to shut down for a critical period. He tapped into the stasis files and smiled as orders from on high passed through his card to each and every headcard of the advancing army.

Yes, yes. Finally. He listened to the attack lose power and finally sputter to a halt as they tried to puzzle out why they were receiving orders directly from—of all places—War Command at Feedcontrol. Certainly they would be wondering why the world had just turned upside down.

Nadir’s face crumpled into a grin as sinister as the mask of a fossilized tyrannosaurus.

“
Live well today, boys,” he 3-verded his unit. “You’ve been steeped in death and almost drowned. But you’ll live to tell about it. The crimes end here. It’s time to set the world right, at least the little part of it we can change.” He gulped a deep breath.

A few meters beyond the ruined village milled an army wearing the blue of NKK’s Sotoi Guntai. Mingled with them was the tan of the EarthCo Warriors. Each looked upon the other for the first time and saw not the allies they had marched beside, but foes. Each would have a lot of questions, but the War Command data they were getting would clear things up. This moment of revelation might even end up in bloodshed, Nadir thought, but then doesn’t everything end in death?

He began to laugh. He raised his rifle high above him and pictured his new, little army marching across the world, spreading truth, destroying the status quo. Nothing would stop him, not bullets, not more tricked armies, not now that both sides had seen the truth. Not even warplanes or missiles, and certainly not death. He had set something in motion, and this something—truth—could not be stopped by one or a thousand men’s deaths.

It’ll be hard. But only in suffering is there growth, he reminded himself. And only in growth is there life.

“
My god, we’re alive!”

From the nearly omniscient—and safe—vantage point of his velvet-walled projection booth deep within the Feedcontrol Central complex, Luke Herrschaft and Mrs. Pehr Jackson watched a 3VRD battle rage near Neptune. Little slivers of flame shot across the room when Herrschaft set the show’s pov from a widefield external camera. His pulse raced; even though he could no longer truly pretend that this body was his, that this was Luke the man, he knew the heart in that shell which still imprisoned him was beating just as fast.

The moment stood upon the race of Man, his moment, Luke Herrschaft’s second defining moment. No, it does not yet stand upon them, he thought. The boot trembles, poised in the skies above their blind skulls. His robotic cheeks tightened with a grin as wide as the servos would allow.

Lasers reached from a torch-shaped EarthCo fighter/bomber toward a series of missiles, which drew a complicated pattern of rocket exhaust against a backdrop of pinpoint stars and varicolored moons’ orbs and crescents. One of the Feedcontrol live-action editors had done a fabulous job of amplifying the color and closeness of those moons—all of them were visible at once and each was individualized. Someone had embellished the missiles into fighters.

Only minutes before, the missiles had been fired from the atmosphere of Neptune. The EarthCo
Bounty
had not behaved in an aggressive fashion. Clearly an act of war by NKK. Clearly, for all to see. Herrschaft had only hoped for this added value.

SUBSCRIPTION: 6,049,383,427

The number increased even as Herrschaft watched. The citizens were eating it up.
They will be putty in my hands.

Herrschaft reset for interior view, and the projection booth transformed into a cramped cabin aboard
Bounty
. Two men and a woman fought frantically to stay alive, acting as if they were truly in control of their fates.

Mrs. Jackson quietly groaned. Her red velvet booth seat sat awkwardly in a corner of the cabin.

“
I don’t like personal povs in adventure shows,” she said. “I’ve been told I’m an artist.” She blushed and hurriedly finished: “I don’t enjoy assuming character povs. I prefer to create my own part, but
Lone Ship Bounty
doesn’t leave much room for that. Watching the scene from outside is better; I compose fitting—I hope—music. Do you mind?”

“
Of course not, my dear,” Herrschaft said. He set the booth’s projector for outside pov again. “Is this—”

He stopped speaking. Three others had entered the room without his knowledge. He cursed himself for tying up too much of his presence in one place and tried to compose himself.

“
Welcome, Lucilla,” he said to his assistant and, perhaps, friend. She looked weary but alert. He had only hoped she still cared enough to come. But now was not the time for sentimentality.

“
President Zauber,” Herrschaft said, extending a hand to a tall German dressed in an ultramod chenille suit. “Congratulations on the European election.”

“
Thank you,” the man said, smiling broadly intheflesh. “An honor to meet you.” Safe, Herrschaft decided. The man would be a fine addition to EarthCo’s hierarchy.

“
And President Snipes,” Herrschaft said to the third person, “Congratulations to you, as well. Although I am sorry you acquired your seat from such, ah, unfortunate circumstances.”

“
Yes,” said the US President, who was only that morning Vice President.

Herrschaft studied Snipes’ immobile face for a few seconds and decided the man was part of the plot against him. He projected 10% of his attention out to the presidential limousine’s service system and infected the microcard. It would be a simple accident, designed to scare rather than destroy; the steering servo would lock once the vehicle reached 50 kph. Herrschaft smiled and nodded, then turned to Mrs. Jackson.

“
I would like you all to meet Mrs. Pehr Jackson—Susahn—the wife of tonight’s featured hero.”

Lucilla stared at Herrschaft a little after the two men began to do their political best. Then she smiled and shook her head sadly. He didn’t understand but also didn’t like wondering, so he cut 90% of himself out of the room. He dispersed his consciousness among three control rooms, the booth, and the AI program he had set to hunt down his assassins. His view was similar to a standard citizen card’s splice, but much more fluid and versatile, mainly because he could transfer primary pov to wherever a large enough card was installed. He wasn’t hindered by biology, simple organic mechanics. Rather than in any one place, Herrschaft immersed himself in the abstract, in the historic moment he had choreographed.

Millions of kilometers away, EConaut Marshfield—“Eyes”—at last activated his optical and sensory feedback units. Forty technicians at EarthCo Feedcontrol, all dedicated today to this one series, bustled to a level of highest activity, expertly coordinating feedback from the three probe cameras, numerous shipboard cameras, and the one surgically embedded in Marshfield’s left eyesocket.

Megawatts of power were surging through Feedcontrol’s wide plain of phased-array transmitters, sending the program almost live directly into the mindpaths of the now-eight billion—and increasing—subscribers. Herrschaft accessed a ratings monitor and found that the 33% increase was due mainly to massive adfeed for the past two weeks.

He felt himself buoy up upon the crest of an evershifting empire, a god of energy riding a wave through the minds of half the solar system. They didn’t know he moved there, in them, in their shows, in their every thought and action. But he knew. Indeed, he had created them.

For just a moment, as if shattering a crystal globe as wide as a supergiant star and looking out of each fragment like tiny mirrors, Herrschaft splintered his pov across the entire ECoNet. He glimpsed all of Earth’s cities and red Mars and pocked Luna and boiling Mercury and a dozen other places simultaneously in a way not unlike his alter-ego, the Brain, might. Since he was not that artificial mind, he comprehended nothing he saw. His view was that of a smashed crystal ball, and it fell together almost as fast as he had bashed it hard against the wall of his mind.

But his imagination—though rusty and cracked—put it all together. That it was artificial did nothing to lessen his pleasure: All this, every molecule, is mine, he silently told the citizens. If not for me, you would still be crouched down on a single world like animals. I have given you the planets. I have given you a true spacefleet, placed colonies on every rock that we could grab orbiting the sun, and soon will deliver colonies on what NKK now holds. We will take it all. I have created an empire and the creatures that inhabit it, and one day we will be lords of everything our eyes can survey. The stars will truly belong to Man. . . .

Herrschaft’s immaterial face—or some vestige of his ancient human body—hardened in a grin of utter ecstasy. He completely forgot that he had been unmasked that morning, yet even if he had remembered at that instant, it would not have mattered.

He re-entered the path of feed, split into only four simple and direct povs.

>>Primary feed: Telescopic camera P2 zooms in on spaceship riding orange plume out of Neptunian clouds toward
Bounty
. Flash primary to character pov camera, focus unwaveringly upon pilot’s full breasts held high on her chest by black, luminescent cloth.<<

SALES FOR NERO BRAS, BODICES, AND OTHER LINGERIE UP 155%

>>P2 camera now clearly shows other spacecraft to be NKK design, long and narrow as opposed to spherical. An automated torpedo in feedback transforms into a manned fighter upon edited feed. Switch to right cabin camera inside
Bounty
, showing Captain’s expression of wise interpretation. Also in pov are crew members’ weapons, near at hand. They all pop snapsticks.<<

Herrschaft toggled through an ad-efficiency overlay program:

COLT, GTE, AND SINGER PERSONAL ARMS UP AVERAGE 35%

EMBRACE, BELTROPE, AND JAKK MAKEUPS UP AVERAGE 80%

PAGOS AND CYBERMOND MENSWEAR UP AVERAGE 75%

MAKK BOOTS UP *FROM NO SALES* 50,000 UNITS/MINUTE