Transcendence (85 page)

Just then, the hotel shuddered as a bomb exploded outside, perhaps even in the building somewhere. “Let’s go,” he repeated.

Janus’ heart raced as she realized the urgency of their mission. Could they even do anything? Was Jack right?
No! enough of that kind of thinking. That boy’s pessimism is contagious
.

She concentrated instead on finding Miru in her thoughts.

Soon, she senses Jack’s mind within hers. Opening her eyes, she finds herself upon the sea once more, beneath the heavy luminescent globes of the others who have come to this place and been transformed. Brine air fills her senses, the warmth of the water, Jack’s arm beneath her back as they float. One part of the sky looks different; a tiny sphere hovers just out of reach above them—glowing pigments shift across its surface, amorphous, not ordered like the life-moments she glimpses within the other spheres.

Is that Blackjack?
she wonders to Jack. She senses his unease at recognizing that his name sounds like that of the man who had caused such pain in Jonathan’s life, the man Jonathan brought here to die.

“
I don’t want to find out,” he says. *But I don’t think so.*

They focus again on locating Miru. Momentarily, the scene shifts so Janus and Jack don’t move toward Miru in the sky, nor does the sphere fall down to them; instead, it is as if they engaged a fivesen splice and are bodiless in Miru and Pang’s version of artifact-space. Galaxies spiral all around them, stars sparkling like many-colored gems. Janus notices that just beyond the galaxies lies a kind of grid.

“
What’s that?” she asks.

“
Ah, friend Janus! Friend Pehr! Welcome.” Following the greeting is neither a lecture nor a passage through memory-scenes, but rather a sudden transfer of information. No words, no images, but after Miru has finished—
How long did that take? seconds? less?
—Janus knows all Miru, Pang, and Byung have learned. She senses Jack’s confusion; he resisted the deluge.

“
It’s all right,” she tells him.

“
Blast!” he says.

“
Let’s go,” Janus says to the three scientists. She feels Jack’s presence fading as the other four begin to unfix from this mindspace to one of the points on the grid. *Pang thinks it has something to do with the theorized Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect,* she tells Jack. The words mean nothing, so she explains with a picture:

Pehr feels himself again entering the artifact for the first time—only now, he’s also observing the transformation. His mind remains intact though his body shatters to pure energy across the finite, but four-dimensional, space within the artifact. The only thing keeping him in contact with 3D existence is his mind, his desire to remain alive, and cooperating with at least one other mind who has also entered the space.

“
That’s why I nearly perished,” Miru says. “We become quantum information. We can reappear anywhere in the universe of classical information—of 3D existence—where we have a mental connection. Particularly people.”

“
Only people,” Pang says. Miru’s mind pulsates good humor. *Well, we’ll test that later.*

“
That’s the map, what I thought was a city’s crystalline corridors,” Miru tells me, Pehr. *As long as we contain deep information about a place—someone’s mind, that is—we can teleport our quantum information to that point. It defies no physical laws because, in artifact-space, finite time and space has no meaning or relevance. We encompass all that we have learned, all who we have loved.*

“
That’s why the artifact destroyed Lonny,” Janus realizes. He loved no one, and was unwilling to share himself enough in mindspace to discover love. . . .
“He could have become solid again had he connected to one of us, right? He would have teleported to any one of our
. . .
what should we call them? Nodes of existence? I see.”

*But we first must shed the shell we’ve grown around our minds before we can even think about that step. And if not
. . .
the quantum information disperses.*

Pehr feels lost, confused, stupid. He senses the artifact space closing around him, his body beginning to coagulate somewhere back in the 3D world. Desperately, he reaches out to Janus and opens his mind as fully as possible, the way Miru showed him during his first passage through worlds of their minds.

It works. The rest of the team resides within him now, and though he begins to fade when he tries consciously to grasp what it is the others seem to have internalized, all he need do is provide the motive energy and mental direction Miru prized that first time they met. He feels powerful again, useful, and they move as one into the first stage of their plan to save the human species from self-destruction.

*We may not be vulnerable to the war,* the new voice of Byung says, *but we must have a world to return to.*

In the Hilton hallways, men and women run past Jonathan, screaming or gaping in silent terror. The lumnisheets which run along the ceiling in wavy lines flicker, casting dull red light onto the faces that seem blind to him. He opens his feed option box and subscribes to a newsfeed BW.

Nothing but a dead splice opens before his eyes. Frowning, Jonathan shuts it down and opens Edufeed. When even that feeds nothing but dead air, he begins to grow tense.
No feed? How can that be? What’s happening outside?
Jonathan shuts down the splice and option box, and seeks the building’s server. In a few seconds, a maintenance-system overlay drops into place before his eyes. A 3VRD model of the triangular building flashes to life, its internal skeleton burnished aluminum, every floor served by a massive computer with smaller ones in every room. White clearly outlines each hallway, green each elevator shaft, maroon each residential room, and gold marks the communal halls—like dining-alcoves and convention feedchambers.

Programmers must have spent a lot of time on this landscape, as opposed to that of érase’s—

“
Fuck that,” he mumbles. He shakes away images of an emaciated girl shoving him out of a dropshaft. . . .

An ornate overlay surrounds Jonathan as he accesses the floor’s server. But when he subscribes to the
Daily News
BW and asks for any information not directly related to life inside the Hilton, only the words, “Sorry, out of order. We will have this service online soon,” blink before him. Jonathan’s heart races. His head is a deserted warehouse, desolate except for the echoing cries of memory and something dripping into a puddle.

When he realizes his feet have stopped before the Captain and Pilot’s room, relief warms his tingling fingers. He knocks. When he gets no response, he 3-verds a greeting. Nothing. He keys open the door.

The room is empty. Wall projections glimmer like melting sheets of plastic: Their minute AIs are trying to do their job but unable to get the feed they need, as if they’re as terrified as Jonathan with a silent head.

He closes his eyes and concentrates, as before, on finding his Captain. But fear and unease stand in the way. He can’t help but keep opening his eyes to see if someone has crept up and is about to assault him.

“
Crash it!” Growling, he closes the door, locks it, then slides the manual bolt into place. There. Once again, he seeks Captain Jackson. After two deep breaths, he’s able to exhale without shaking.

Jonathan hears a sound like sand hissing down the concrete shore of the Mississippi, and his body melts into nothingness. Only for a moment do his instincts fight to keep his body from exploding. Then he is pure feed, personified, sending toward the one man for whom he had made room in his world before things began getting so crazy yet so full-out peak.

Miru squinted against the harsh light of a spacecraft and struggled to orient himself in its zero-
g
. A narrow but long, curving hull stretched out around him, whitewashed with tarnished metal ribs ringing the space. Stacked, plastic-wrapped crates, tubes lashed together with cable, and smaller packages held in place by nets filled most of the hold. Two space-suited figures seemed to be asleep, lazing amid a tangle of elastic mesh.

As his body rotated, Miru caught sight of the three men and one woman of his group—all naked—and allowed a brief grin. The room was cold! Janus wrapped her arms around herself and seemed to be seeking something among the crates near her feet. Pehr had already caught a grip of one large net that looked like a spiderweb, and was pulling himself toward an airlock door. As he was doing so, a space-suited figure emerged from the lock, holding a small handgun wired to the suit.

“
Who are you?” a man asked, via commcard, in Filipino. Miru had a moment of déjà vu, recalling the voices of fishermen who had sometimes visited Ryukyu Floating Island in his youth. The two other crewmen jerked awake in their fastenings. Pehr had climbed nearly down to the armed man.

Byung, who knew one of the crewmembers, replied in the same tongue:

“
My name Byung. I’m friend of Ngoyu Lee. Tell him.”

“
Byung?” asked a disembodied voice.

“
Yes!” said Byung, using Vietnamese.

One of the two crewmen who had been sleeping hurried out of his fastenings and pushed off the ship’s hull toward Byung, floating in midair a few meters away.

“
What’s the meaning of this?” the first man asked.

“
This is an old friend,” Ngoyu said, “a TritonCo Citizen.” He changed back to Vietnamese, but kept the BW open for all to hear: “How’d you stow away without our knowledge? Why? And why are you naked?”

That encouraged laughter from several people. The first, stern, voice intruded:

“
You cannot remain on board. We don’t have enough lifesupport for more than the five crew already aboard. Fools!” He waved his gun.

Pehr edged closer. Miru tried to locate his friend’s mind and say,
No, stop, don’t provoke these people!
But Pehr was too focused on his physical actions.

“
Ngoyu,” Byung said, “let’s talk.” His friend removed his helmet, revealing tousled hair and a dark, smiling face. Their mouths began to move, but nothing crossed the airwaves. Faint conversation reached Miru where he floated. Soon, Ngoyu’s smile faded and a frown replaced it. The talk grew animated.

The armed man pushed himself farther into the hold, still unaware of Pehr, lurking just around the corner of a stack of boxes. Miru began shaking his head, No, hoping Pehr would glance his way just once.

Then the armed man jerked, sending his body up in a spiral toward the “ceiling” of the squat spacecraft.

“
What have you done?” the man roared.

Miru turned to where the man was looking and saw that Byung had already taken his friend into artifact-space.
Good, good. Hurry back!

“
Miru, what’s happening?” Pehr commed—
In English, damn him!

“
Pehr, be quiet—” he began.

“
What is this? An American?” The armed man had now reached the ceiling, pushed off, and was careening toward Pehr.

Pehr saw this and gripped the netting beside him. When his pursuer was within a few meters, he tossed himself toward the man, feet first.

Miru gasped as the clear tip of the weapon glowed white. A small disk of skin on Pehr’s bare chest quivered, turning red. By the time Pehr’s arms had crossed over the injury, it was beginning to ooze drops of blood. His writhing body sailed past his assailant, whose booted feet shoved Pehr away from collision.

“
Stop that!” Miru cried. “Don’t shoot!” Damned violent humans!

Janus cried out in pain, but Miru saw it was only mental anguish; she still looked healthy. People began to seek protection. The other suited figure fumbled in its belt, seeking another weapon, Miru thought. Pehr’s body rebounded off a wall, angling toward Janus. She glanced toward the crewmen, then moved to intercept Pehr’s trajectory.

At that chaotic moment, Byung reappeared within arm’s reach of Miru. He looked panicked. “What has happened to Pehr?” he asked.

Miru nodded toward the armed man, who jerked upon seeing Byung’s return. He raised the weapon again. “Nobody move!” he screamed. His words held a note of static, the volume overwhelming a retro transmitter.

“
We must leave now,” Pang commed. Byung glanced from Pang to Miru, nodded. Miru nodded to the two of them, watched them vanish, but remained, himself.

Pehr’s body had nearly reached Janus now. Miru commed her: “The instant Pehr is in your arms, join me!” And he, too, allowed himself to fade out of this place, from the poorly planned mission.
Damn the bloody human mind!
he cursed.