Battlemind (29 page)

Beside his chair was a glossy, black contact plate. Kara reached out her hand, focusing her mind as a single tendril grew from her palm and plunged into the interface.

She couldn’t enter Ran’s world, but she could, in effect, look over his shoulder. She caught a burst of music—early classical, she thought—with powerful rhythms and stirring, martial melody. Visually… she wasn’t certain what he was watching. It appeared to be a ViRdrama of some sort.

“Ran? It’s Kara. Can I interrupt?”

“Of course,” she heard him say, the voice distant, in the back of her mind. “Hang on a sec. Program freeze. Save as Ferris One.”

His eyes blinked open as the silvery tendrils melted rapidly back into his head, and his skin resumed its normal, natural tone and texture. “Hey, Kara,” he said, grinning up at her. “What’s the word?”

“Sorry to interrupt,” she told him. She gestured toward the interface plate. “What was that, anyway? Classical?”

He nodded. “John Williams. One of the great pre-Imperials. This is an old ViRdrama version, played with three-veed clips drawn from some two-vee flat projections that originally carried his music. Great stuff.”

“I never cared much for three-veed stuff. It doesn’t feel as natural as sims designed to be full-sensed from the start.”

“I don’t know. Some of those old filmmakers could still create a pretty powerful emotional effect, even when they were limited to two dimensions. But I’m mostly linked to the stuff by the music.”

“I didn’t know you were into classical,” she said, smiling. “You just never cease to amaze.”

His grin grew wider, and he reached for her, pulling her to him. “Stick with me, kid. I’ll astonish you.”

They kissed.

“So,” he said after a long, warm moment, “you didn’t come here to check upon my taste in music and archaic popular sims.”

She traced her finger down the curves of his cheek and chin. “Well, not really.”

“Is it the fight coming up?”

She nodded. “I suppose so. I always get a little tight before a big one.”

“Nothing to worry about. It’s not like we’re going to be fighting the Webbers in person.”

Her smile faded, and she drew back from him a bit. “You ever hear of RDTS?”

“Sure, but that’s psych-stuff. Not nearly as big a down-grudge as getting killed, right?”

“Wrong.” Kara didn’t like Ran’s cocky attitude, though she knew that it was a common one among striderjacks. Too many people she knew, too many friends were lost now in one or another of the psych ViRworlds. “I’m not ready for Nirvana. I like
this
world just fine, thank you.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nirvana might be kind of fun, from what I’ve heard. You want to D-L in and check it out together?”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No. Been meaning to, just to check in on Daniels and some of the other guys. Never got around to it, though.”

“Yeah.” She stood up again. “Listen, I’m heading up to the ship’s mess for some chow. I’ll see you later, for final briefing, okay?”

“Well sure, but—”

Kara turned abruptly and walked off. She’d come here looking for some companionship, maybe even some intimacy with Ran before
Gauss
completed her preparations and they had to go into combat, but his flip attitude about Remote Death Transference had soured her. She liked Ran, liked him a lot. Their relationship was far more than casual, and they’d talked more than once about contract pairing. But damn it all, sometimes she just couldn’t figure out what was going on in his head.

Virtual worlds.
They represented, in quite a literal way, an entirely new universe opening for humankind, a universe as real in its rather specialized and artificial way as the original universe was physically. Down the centuries, people had been entertained and informed by a variety of media, first with live actors on stage, then through presentations on an electronic display screen, and finally through realtime downloads directly into the viewer’s brain, this last such a perfect simulation of the real world that it had been popularized by the term ViRsim, a Virtual Reality Simulation.

The next step, evidently, was turning out to be an inversion of the old processes. Rather than packaging entertainment and downloading it into the viewer’s brain, the viewer himself—or, rather, the software, the biological programming that comprised his or her thoughts, memories, and identity—could be downloaded into a computer network where it could live, if that was the appropriate word, apparently indefinitely. Further, the network could be programmed to provide all of the sensations and experience of a real world; complex AIs, using chaos-directed programming routines of their own design, could come up with virtual worlds as surprising, as challenging, as intellectually and physically stimulating, even as dangerous, as real worlds.

More and more people were choosing to “emigrate” to the virtual universe. Commercial firms competed with one another to see who could make the most challenging and realistic environments, which included anything and everything from recreations of Earth at various eras in her history, to a dazzling array of realistic and scientifically accurate planets, to fantasy worlds where magic worked and the laws of physics were changed or challenged, to places—other dimensions, other existences—where all of the rules of ordinary existence had been changed. In most cases, the travelers simply stored their bodies in coffin-like life pods that kept their physical selves alive while their minds roamed their chosen alternate reality.

Many, however—and if the medes were to be believed, the numbers of people opting for this route were growing at a fantastic rate—simply never returned to their organic bodies. The downloaded software, once running in its electronically created surroundings, could be supported indefinitely. Some called that option the new frontier; others thought of it as legal, high-tech suicide with the promise of immortality. Downloading personalities was fast becoming a technological substitute for the purely metaphysical concept of heaven.

In a sense, that was what had happened to Dev, save that he was still able to freely interact with humans stuck in the real world of physical law and physical limitations. Kara remembered her conversation with Dev some time before, when he’d counted himself among the first of humanity’s “virtual humans.”

Kara had been headed for the
Gauss’s
main mess area, but she decided on the way that she wasn’t really hungry enough to make the chore of eating worthwhile. She rarely was before combat, the tension building in her gut making any thought of food nearly unbearable. Instead, she headed for the nearest communications center. There, commods were arrayed in gleaming, metal-and-plastic ranks, affording a privacy that the couches down in the rec area or the smaller, open conning modules for teleoperating warstriders couldn’t provide.

Taking the nearest unoccupied module, Kara palmed open the hatch, sat down, and swung her legs inside. The door slid shut as she lay back and extended her Companion’s tendrils to interface with the commod’s electronic circuits. As she linked in, she summoned a destination menu.

She selected the list of available virtual worlds, then from there linked in to Nirvana.

There were basically two approaches to the ViRworlds, depending on whether you simply wanted to visit or were going to move there permanently. Visitors could enter any world at any time through a commod like the one Kara was using; indeed, communications modules had been creating virtual worlds for centuries now, settings and scenes—such as the imaginary dinner atop a New American oceanside cliff—where two or more people could
seem
to meet in a virtual reality middle ground, when in fact both were lying in padded life support modules, imagining the visit with the help of artificial intelligences and internal computer connections.

Those who wanted to enter a virtual world permanently, or those who had no choice, had their minds downloaded—scanned, replicated, and transferred to the ViRworld system like any other packet of data. The body might be stored for later use, but most permanent ViRworld residents were those either who’d lost their bodies, or whose bodies were so badly damaged that even the best somatechs and nanosurgery couldn’t get them working again. More and more people on the verge of physical death had opted to try downloading as a means of cheating death, of living—in theory, at any rate—forever. No one knew if the process conferred actual immortality, but most scientists working in the field felt that downloaded lifespans would be limited only by the lifetime of the machine generating the environment in which they existed. If the computer networks supporting those downloaded systems ever crashed all at once, it would be a kind of electronic genocide; so long as technic civilization endured, however, the individual mental patterns would survive.

It was, Kara reflected, a potential immortality like that of the Gr’tak, where the pattern of mind remained the same, even though the organic bodies wore out and were replaced along the way.

Reaction to the new technology had been predictable. There were plenty of willing emigrants to the virtual worlds, evenly divided between young people who questioned the values and the worth of the universe they’d been born to, and older people who were looking for a way to cheat death. There were plenty more, however, who felt that emigration to a virtual world was nothing more than an elaborate form of suicide.

Kara opened her eyes and stepped into Nirvana.

The light always took some getting used to. Most available virtual worlds were idealized versions of Earth or other man-habitable planets, but Nirvana had been crafted more imaginatively, a combination of an imaginary heaven and an equally imaginary far-future civilization, where buildings were constructed of pure force, and the inhabitants moved through a dazzling, golden light by the power of thought.

A young woman floated before her, her form all but lost in light and vapor. “How can we help you, Kara?” They knew who she was, of course, as soon as her Companion accessed the system. The figure before her was in fact the analogue construct for one of the AIs creating this world. Kara had been here visiting before.

“I’m looking for Willis Daniels, please,” Kara replied.

“I’ll have to see if he’s available, if he wants to have company. Excuse me for a moment.” The hazy figure vanished, gone with the speed of thought.

Kara glanced down at herself. The ViRsim persona she was currently using was her analogue image, wearing her gray Confederation uniform. Many of the inhabitants of Nirvana, however, lacked even the illusion of solid bodies… particularly those suffering from RDTS.

Most of the military personnel who’d suffered remote death transference problems had ended up here, in Nirvana, where few of the visible bodies held much substance. The emigrant’s bodies were always Naga-patterned, of course, if there was anything available to be patterned, with the idea that they might be recreated later, possibly through cloning from samples of the person’s cells. Unfortunately, the majority of these people seemed to have lost hold of their body’s shape, to have lost the
idea
of a body, and they had trouble projecting anything even remotely like an image of their former selves.

She could sense the technic ghosts adrift in the fog around her. Nirvana had been intended by its programmers as a kind of high-tech heaven, a place where the bodiless could enjoy existence of a sort until a way could be found to join them with bodies once more. For Kara, however, despite golden light and floating, ethereal forms, the place seemed more like a foretaste of hell, doomed souls wandering endless vistas, bodiless, powerless, cut off forever from the world of the living.

“Hello, Captain.”

She tried to focus on the voice. It was Will’s voice, but there was no face, no body to attach to it. Instead, there was a kind of
solidity
to the air and light a few meters in front of her, a concentration of awareness somehow made more than insubstantial. She smiled at it. “Hello, Will. How’s it going?”

“Well enough, Captain,” the voice replied. “It ain’t too bad here. Better than being brain-dead, I suppose, like poor Pritch.”

She nodded, feeling a little unsteady. Pritchard had come out of the battle at the Core with his mind gone, with no hope of downloading or retrieval.

“So.How you getting on without me?”

She sighed. “Not so well, really. I wish we still had you on the roster. There’s a battle coming up. A big one.”

Kara sensed the ghost’s amusement. “The Web is attacking Earth.”

“You know?”

“Hey, we may be ghosts in here, but we’re not completely cut off from the real world. We’ve been following all the excitement coming in through the Net for hours, now.”

“What do you think? Can we stop it? Stop the Web from destroying Earth, I mean?”

“How the hell should
we
know?” He sounded bitter. “There’s nothing we can do about it here.”

“You can tell me what went wrong on Core D9837.”

She could feel his wry smile, even if she couldn’t see it. “There were too damned many of them, and not near enough of us.
That’s
what went wrong.”

“They’re using the same tactics at Earth. Three groups, targeting Earth, Mars, and the sun. We’re marshaling everything we can to try to stop them, but it doesn’t look good.” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “Actually, I was also wondering about access to the Overmind. Dev—Dev Cameron—has been trying to make contact with it, try to get it to help, but without success.”

“It’s in the battle. Taking part.”

“So I’ve heard. It switched on an old asteroid-defense system and seems to be wearing down the enemy some. But Dev can’t talk to it. Can’t even seem to get its attention. You’ve been in here for a while. Can you sense… anything? The Overmind’s presence on the Net, maybe?”

“Even if we could, the Overmind wouldn’t listen to
us.
We’re ghosts, remember. Shadows.…”

“You’re men.”

“We were.” She sensed a terrible longing in the words.

“You still are. Mind is what makes a person, not the body. Body shape and size, color, weight, age, none of that makes a gokking bit of difference. It doesn’t even matter if you
have
a body. It’s what the body has evolved to recognize itself and deal with the universe, the mind, the soul, if you want. That’s all that matters.”