War on a Thousand Fronts Page 7
Bob laughed, a thundering wave of rueful humor rolling over Tanis.
Tanis nodded. “Right, EM sensors such as my eyes.”
“This is where we move into magic, isn’t it?” Tanis asked, a touch of sarcasm in her voice.
“I suppose,” Tanis allowed. “I guess I have a mental block on this issue. Please, you were about to tell us what a beneficial algorithmic matrix is.”
“You’re serious…” Tanis said, running a hand over her head and pulling off the band holding her hair back. “My eyes bend what’s probable to be in my favor.”
“And you figured all this out while we were drifting between Estrella de la Muerte and Kapteyn’s Star, didn’t you?” Tanis asked.
“Did it?” Tanis asked.
“But I never believed it,” Tanis retorted. “Wouldn’t my disbelief make it weaker?”
Angela whispered.
Tanis shook out her hair, freshly released from its ponytail, as she glared up at Bob’s primary node. “OK, so if you can quantify this ‘luck’, where does it come from? It long predates mine and Angela’s road to ascension—which was not what I expected to have happen when our minds merged, by the way.”
“Seriously? You mean some other universe in the multiverse is influencing me?”
Tanis felt a sense of wonder sweep over her—along with the memories of a bar she had found herself in not long ago. A bar she was not supposed to recall, but which she and Angela remembered all too well.
A bar in a different universe.
Tanis lowered her head, closing her eyes as she let everything Bob had said sink in. She could feel Angela doing the same, the pair sharing in a strange feeling of comfort.
“Why am I not upset about all this anymore?” Tanis asked quietly. “I mean…I still think I resent you keeping things from me, Bob, but that’s a shallow thing. I’ve always known you keep secrets—stars, you’ve flat-out told me from time to time. But don’t you think that in this case we should have known?”
Angela replied.
“That’s weighty praise, Bob,” Tanis replied. “Tell me, now that I’m an engineered product of greater minds, how are we supposed to feel about that?”
Bob laughed again, and Tanis basked in it, realizing for the first time that Bob’s thoughts no longer overwhelmed her at times like this. Instead, they exhilarated her.
Angela said quietly.
“OK, Bob,” Tanis straightened and stared up at his node once more. “So luck and merging brains aside, why are we ascending? Human and AI minds have merged before and just became one mind—if they survived. Why is Tangel an extra-dimensional being with ridiculous powers?”
“You ‘did it to’ us?” Tanis exclaimed along, while Angela asked,
Angela shouted in triumph.
“Huh,” Tanis grunted. “So that’s by your design too, then.”
“Pyra,” Tanis whispered.
Bob sent a feeling of remorse into Tanis’s mind.
“And yet, you said humanity would not survive unless I ascended,” Tanis replied. “On the scale you measure things at, it would be a worthwhile trade.”
The words were bitter in Tanis’s mouth, and she hated the thought of them. That her elevation should cost the lives of billions made it utterly distasteful to her.
“Never have I needed such a firm reminder as to why I hate the idea of having this luck,” Tanis said with a grimace. “Still, you’re right. Rika is a very interesting person, I likely owe her my life.”
“I do,” Tanis and Angela said together.
A sigh escaped Tanis’s lips, and she closed her eyes, still seeing the room around her, but with different organs, mechanisms for sight that did not exist in the three dimensions she was so familiar with.
“I do, Bob,” Tangel replied. “I understand now. I never ‘de-ascended’. What Priscilla did only stabilized my physical form so Rika could carry me. I’ve been…taking comfort in a fallacy that I am still two people.”
Tanis looked at the light she’d seen emanating from Bob’s primary node—really looked at it. She could see his existence stretching beyond even what she could perceive. As always, he was aeons ahead of her.
She looked at the air molecules around her, gathering them into a thick column and floating before Bob’s node. She set her jaw and stepped into the pillar, allowing it to envelop her legs and support her as she rose into the air, hovering before the glowing node.
“So, why is it that I’m instrumental in saving humanity?” Tangel, the ascended being, asked. “And don’t think I didn’t notice that AIs were not listed as being in species-level peril.”
Bob’s response came in the form of a question.
COMING CLEAN
STELLAR DATE: 08.29.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Ol’ Sam, ISS I2
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Thebes, Septhian Alliance
Tangel folded her hands together as she sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Joe and the girls to arrive.
Why am I so nervous, she wondered, answering herself with, You know why. This is the point of no return.
She saw that Joe was on the path leading to the house, waiting for Cary and Saanvi, who w
ere a minute behind, having taken a different maglev to the cylinder.
He looked nervous—she could see the creases around his eyes on the ship’s optical cameras. They were just a hair tighter than normal. Not enough that a human would notice, but she did.
Unclasping her hands, she looked at them, turning them over and counting the small folds in her skin, and the folds within those folds. When she began to count the bacteria living in the cuticles on her fingers, and compare their molecular counts, she tore her gaze away.
This is ridiculous.
Over the following eighty-seven seconds it took for the front door to open, Tangel cleared her mind, thinking of nothing at all, just being. It may have been the hardest thing she’d ever done.
“Tanis?” Joe’s voice called out, as the sounds of footfalls came to her.
“In the kitchen,” Tangel called out, opening her eyes once more and smiling as her family filed into the room. She rose and exchanged embraces with each of them—even Faleena, to whom she sent a feeling of acceptance and love.
Without needing instruction, everyone sat, Joe at her side, and the girls across the table.
Tangel had considered a thousand ways to start this conversation, played each one out a dozen levels of probabilities deep. In the end, she’d been lost in options with miniscule differences when it came to how the revelation would play out.
She knew there was no other option but to ease them into the knowledge of what had happened.
“I need to tell you the full story of what happened on Pyra,” she began, meeting the eyes of each person around the table. “How it all came to be.”
Joe nodded, an encouraging half-smile on his lips. “We’ve been dying to hear it. Take your time.”
Tangel drew in a deep breath and nodded before launching into her tale.
“They’d worn us down one-by-one, the Nietzscheans. Looking back, it’s hard to believe we survived as long as we did. In the end, it was just myself, Brandt, and Ayer—the Marauder captain. We lost Ayer that final night, and Brandt—” Tanis paused, trying to find the right words. “She was a Marine’s Marine until the end. She sacrificed herself to save me.”