Battlemind (15 page)

“Maybe not. It depends on how the universe is wired.”

Her brow furrowed. “When we were looking at the probe, the
probes,
I should say, Dr. Norris was wondering what would happen if we decided not to send it out. If we changed the history of the second probe, in effect. Would it disappear?”

“I submit,” he told her, “that we need to find out. And that’s why I waylaid you this way. We need to mount an expedition through the Gate and into time. Actually, I wasn’t thinking so much about traveling into the past and changing it. You’re right. That could have, um, unfortunate consequences for us, if we weren’t careful. I was thinking of going into the future. For information.”

“A recon op into the future?” She pursed her lips. “Wow. I’m not sure I’ve even got a link with all this yet. In any case, I can’t make a decision like that.”

“Exactly why I intercepted you.”

“You want me to—”

“To convince your people of the importance of this. To get them to put together an expedition that can go through the Gate into the future.” He frowned, a shaping of the image that he held before his thoughts in Kara’s mind, like a mask. “And it’s got to be carried out in secret. I’m worried about our Imperial friends, and what they might think. Or do.”

“The Imperials?” It was Kara’s turn to frown. “You really think they’d be against this?”

“I’m concerned about
densetsu.”

The word, depending on how it was used, meant tradition or traditional. Specifically, and in this context, it meant the Japanese tendency to prefer traditional, tried and true means of doing things. They were already gravely concerned, Dev knew, about the new dependency on Naga Companions among the cultures of the Periphery, and they frowned on such new faces of technology as virtual worlds, patterning, and personality downloading.

“Time travel would
really
shake them up,” he continued, “especially if they began wondering if gaijin were dreaming of rewriting history, rewriting it, perhaps, out from under Imperial Dai Nihon.”

“Yeah. If we use it against the Web, we could use it against the Empire.”

“Tampering with history that way may not be a good idea,” Dev said, “as any techfantasy ViRdrama buff could tell you. But yes, the Imperials may be concerned about us using time travel against them.” He hesitated. “That’s why I wanted to meet with you this way. I know the Imperials are watching closely everything you’re doing at Nova Aquila. They’re taking part in the Unified Fleet, I think, as much to keep an eye on you as to watch the Web. This is not the soundest or warmest of alliances, you know.”

She laughed, the sound brittle. “You’re telling me that? Most of my striderjacks hate them, and they hate us just as much.”

“I’ve been trying to keep tabs on them by accessing their milnet.
Something
is brewing in their high command, but I don’t know what.”

She grinned. “You interest me. You can tap the Imperial Military Net?”

“Parts of it.” In truth, he’d ranged through much of that virtual world of data and flickering communications links, probing and exploring. There was much the Imperials knew that they had not yet shared with their gaijin allies. Dev was still cataloguing that data, establishing its limits, and learning how best to verify it. It would be an important addition to the Confederation’s data net someday. And it might prove to be an invaluable part of the Overmind.

At the thought, Dev could feel the faint, far-off shudder of the Overmind, a slumbering superconsciousness residing now within the vast and far-flung network of human computer systems and communications links. Called into being two years before when a kind of critical mass of separate consciousnesses had linked together during the Battle of Nova Aquila, it had emerged as an entity similar to Dev, though on an immense scale, a patterned mind resident on the Net composed of billions of separate minds.

The Overmind’s intervention had won that battle, as it took over and shut down vast numbers of Web machines within the space of a heartbeat. Since then, it had been… sleeping was the best analogy Dev could think of, though the word was unsatisfactory and imprecise. It was more as though the superintelligence had retreated into the distance, somehow, waiting, perhaps thinking about problems utterly beyond human comprehension. Dev could sense its presence… or sense its potential, at least.

“Time travel,” Kara said, looking thoughtful. “I’ll be damned.…”

“The whole idea may be impossible still,” Dev told her. “But it’s worth investigation. Basically, the idea would be to see what the future knows about the Web. Who wins? Why? If we win over the Web, maybe we can learn how it happened and save some false steps… and maybe the loss of another star system. If the Web wins in the future, well, we might learn what mistakes we made, and how to avoid them.”

“We?”

“I’ll be coming along,” Dev told her. “You don’t think I’d get this thing started, then wait here while the expedition sets off, do you?”

“But how could you…?”

The image grinned at her. “I’m pretty adaptable. I’ll need a pretty large memory to reside in, but a Naga-DalRiss node would work fine. First we need to talk to the New American government about organizing an expedition.”

“New American government. By that you mean my mother.”

“She would be an excellent place to start, yes. If anyone could get a project like this moving, it’s Katya.”

“I’ll talk to her, certainly. I can’t make any promises.”

“I’m not expecting any.” He hesitated. “I will say one thing, though.”

“Yes?”

“There is a need for haste. If time travel
is
possible, remember how we learned about that possibility in the first place.”

Her eyes widened. “The Web—”

“Might already have time travel. You know, there’s a mystery in what we’ve seen so far. At Nova Aquila, they appear to be tunneling gigatons of plasma off into nowhere, using what appear to be timelike paths near the Stargate. At the Galactic Core, they’re dropping whole stars into the Great Annihilator… but the twisted space-time fields at the thing’s center might be used for time travel, just like a Star-gate. Where are they sending it?”

“You think they could be sending it… into time? Why?”

“Unknown. One unknown among many. Also, they don’t appear to be that… imaginative. But if they
do
already use the Gates for time travel—”

“They could use that against us first.”

“If they consider us a serious enough threat, Kara, that’s exactly what I mean. Mankind, Imperials and Confederation both, might find ourselves wished right out of existence by a time-traveling alien machine intelligence.

“And there wouldn’t be one damned thing we could do about it.”

Chapter 10

Of course, those early experiments and entertainment center rides created no more than the illusion of telepresence, a shadow of what was to come later. The person at the Earth-side theme park could see what the robot he was driving “saw” through its camera, and simple feedback controls allowed him to sense the tug and bump of the rover through the joystick control that steered it.

Never, though, was there any sense that the driver was actually
on
the moon. He still felt a normal, one-G gravity as he sat in his chair. When he looked away from the television screen, he saw his decidedly Earth-bound surroundings, the crowds of tourists watching him, the tourist-centered hype and glitter of the theme park structure he was seated in. Not until the development of nanotechnic cephlinks were the bonds of mind and body truly severed, creating the illusion that the operator had acquired a new body.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the popular hubots
—
teleoperated human robots
—
that first appeared in crude form in the late twenty-first century, but which by the twenty-fourth century had acquired tremendous sophistication and sensory sensitivity.

—
The Physics of Mind

D
R
. E
LLEN
C
HANTAY

C
.
E
. 2413

She smelled morning and felt sunlight on her face. “Just relax,” a woman’s voice said. “You’re on New America now. Everything’s fine.”

This is more like it,
Kara thought.

Kara opened her eyes and found herself looking into the face of a young somautomata technician. The viewall beyond showed a reassuring view of the ruggedly mountainous New American countryside—the Cascades north of Jefferson, she thought—with Columbia, New America’s huge, close moon, rising immense and golden in an early morning haze.

“How are you feeling?” the tech asked. Her hair was red—not a natural auburn but a pale, brick red—pink fuzz with long earlocks twisted into luminous red, blue, and green DNA spirals, representing, Kara supposed, the latest fad in hair styling. Her breasts were bare above a smoky, translucent haze that clung to some parts of her body and swirled revealingly about others; the ends of her earlocks were weighted to keep them dangling first to one side of her nipples then the other as she moved, as though to call attention to generously large and buoyant assets that were almost certainly Companion-enhanced. The skin of her fingers and hands was Companion-refashioned in deep emerald, opalescent scales that faded away to normal skin halfway to her elbows.

Another technician stood behind her, ostentatiously male, nude save for the electrorganics embedded like black filigree in the skin of his left arm, shoulder, and chest, and with his head startlingly reshaped into the golden-eyed and unwinking head of an enormous bird of prey—a technofashion incarnation, Kara thought, of the Egyptian god Horus.

Kara closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. She’d not been home in a good many months now, and it was hard to keep up with the lightning pace of fashion in the Confederation, especially in the cities.

“Captain?” the woman asked. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes,” Kara said. “Just getting my bearings.”

“Hubot projection can be a shock at first,” the technician agreed. “Just take your time to get adjusted.”

Kara didn’t bother telling the woman that it wasn’t the sensation of remote telepresence that was strange to her. It was her and her co-worker. She had plenty of experience with telepresence… in places and across distances that these two most likely had never dreamed of. Apparently they both assumed that Kara was inexperienced with this sort of thing.

“We’re still not sure why your signal was delayed,” the hawk-headed man said. His speech was crisp and clear, despite the horny, razor-edged beak. “We had your carrier signal and were alerted that you’d entered transference mode, but it was a full two minutes before your download actually came through. Do you remember anything happening just now, after you linked in on your ship? Anything at all?”

From the tone of his voice, he was worried about some sort of legal action. Interstellar hubot transference was still pretty new, and lots of people, even—or especially?—those who used the equipment, still regarded some aspects of its workings to be mysterious.

She decided that the simplest way to divert the questioning would be to lie. “Not a thing,” she said. She shrugged. “I imagine that the transmission gear aboard
Gauss
needs better calibration.”

“Maybe.” The man sounded doubtful. “But we definitely had a transmission alert, meaning you should have arrived within the next second or two. Not two minutes.”

Had she only been with Dev for two minutes? It had felt much longer than that… a result, she realized, of conducting a dialogue in an electronic media where thoughts were not constrained by the agonizingly slow cycling of chemical neurotransmitters.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “I didn’t notice any delay at all. I’ll talk to someone when I go back aboard.”

The hawk was silent for a moment, the head cocked slightly to one side, as though the man were listening. Kara guessed that he was tapping a download from his Companion. Usually you could tell when someone was doing that, from the vacant or somewhat distant unfocusing of his eyes, but this Horus-persona, she was finding, was impossible to read.

“Well, we can’t find anything in our readings here,” he said after a moment, “so I suspect you’re right. And… if there is any problem with the link, you know, there’s really nothing to worry about.”

Lots of people, Kara knew, were afraid of what might happen if their robotic body failed while they were riding it, but she could dismiss those fears. She’d been there. When a teleoperated warstrider was destroyed, the comm link was cut and the operator woke up in his or her original, organic body.
Usually.
She was reminded of friends and comrades consigned to virtual worlds and suppressed a small shudder.

Still, the problems there seemed to have more to do with the effects of being in combat than with the simple fact of having your remote sensors cut off. There was nothing magical about telepresence save the way the human mind worked in the first place, which was more than enough magic for her.

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” she told them both.

“Of course!” the red-haired woman said brightly. “Come on. Let’s see how you like your temporary body.”

It felt quite normal. Kara was seated in a large, back-tilting chair like the acceleration seat of a high-G shuttle. Looking down, she saw that the hubot’s body was anonymously unisex, a meter and a half tall, trim, almost delicately petite compared with her own tall, rangy, and long-limbed org. When she raised an arm, she did so with fluid movements and very nearly the same range of motion as a human. She held her hand up before her face. It was startlingly lifelike in texture, but with a faint, gray-silver cast to it and no wrinkling, hairs, or blemishes at all. The fingers were long, slender, and supple, the fingers of a pianist, and when she lightly touched thumb to each fingertip in quick succession, they moved just as easily and felt just the same as the fingers she’d been born with.