Authors: Christopher McKitterick
Herrschaft felt a blaze of anger rise up within him as strong as what he had felt upon seeing the reaction on the faces of his underlings after the explosion. He thrashed around among the vast arsenal at his command: thousands of deployed warships, fueled and armed as they set off to battle NKK; countless unmanned, spaceborne torpedoes and slow-moving mines; lasers, particle guns; solar collectors whose microwave beams could be momentarily diverted. . . .
But he couldn’t use those. He saw within himself that he wouldn’t do anything to harm this boy.
That’s me
, he thought. Unfinished, angry at the authorities, out for all he can get.
Someday he might save the world, as I did
. He felt sick at himself.
Luke Herrschaft, lord of all he surveyed—and soon to be lord of the entire solar system—softened like a sentimental dinosaur.
This boy is only a pawn,
he thought
, and this girl isn’t even here. But why can’t I identify them? Who’s blocking me? Who in all the worlds has such power?
The rage died out again, like a flaming wooden toy tossed into a lake.
I’ll find the real leaders
, he assured himself.
Then I shall have no mercy
.
“
You’ll land this vessel immediately,” he said as sternly as he could while at the same time feeling that he wanted to shake this boy’s hand—So capable! “You’ll turn yourself in to the authorities. Then you’ll return this vessel to its proper owners. Is that understood?”
“
Yes
. . .
yes, sir,” said the boy—Jonathan, I must remember their names; Jonathan and Nooa. Or was Nooa someone else, someone quite different than the child she appeared to be? What was it Jonathan had said? “Nooa just
. . .
borrowed” the Stratofighter. Could Nooa be his true enemy? So many questions, so many frustrations.
Damn it all, I have a war to fight!
He flicked out of the Stratofighter, back to the feedcontrol room deep underground. Atop the clean machine cabinets and glass walls between this room and others where his people worked at their stations, an afterimage remained: Stars, so many stars.
When last was it that I enjoyed the stars? My dear Gladice, what you would have given to be out there with Jonathan
. . . .
Inspiration struck him as much from need to divert his train of thought as from reasoning. He again uploaded the secret weapon with a quick press of the black button to his left, hidden amid an array of other color-coded buttons hovering over the faceless machines. The antennae came online again, and he ran a trace on the Stratofighter. In seconds, he found eyewitness accounts stating that it had launched to orbit from Minneapolis. He cross referenced the name “Jonathan” with the boy’s current location, with Minneapolis, and crossed these with a visual description downloaded from the data he had recorded during the orbital encounter.
Data began flowing across Herrschaft’s pov. He grew oblivious to the room containing the robot he inhabited. He read the story of Jonathan’s life and slowly grew sad. Though it was merely an objective account of what classes the boy took, what he purchased, psychiatric accounts of what factors had led him to be placed in feedrapture treatment, Herrschaft saw the story behind the facts. It was too close to the kind of pain he, himself, understood.
Why?
he wondered. Why has all this happened? He had never before done this, pried into the childhood of one of his subjects; usually, when he pulled up bio data, he was looking for crimes and non-value-added behaviors. He had assumed that his carefully crafted systems would work as designed and protect the youth.
Then the sadness mutated into anger.
“
But I solved all these problems a century ago. How can the children still live in such a world? What happened to the safety features I built in? Where have the police been?”
Herrschaft’s centuries-suppressed anger and pain blossomed into mindless hatred. He shot his presence out to Commodore Gallette, who hung in acceleration mesh aboard Wing D’s flag battleship
Revanche
. Herrschaft first fired a microwave pulse from one of the ship’s comm systems at the man’s card, then, while the Commodore writhed in pain and confusion, Herrschaft ordered up the vessel’s maintenance overlay, found Gallette’s cabin again in a different way, locked the doors, and set the atmosphere pumps on full-reverse. He then went back to the cabin’s internal pov cameras and watched the man die in a frenzy of thrashing.
Fool, traitor
. Certainly Gallette was in on his Stratofighter’s theft; if not, he was sloppy in security measures. Herrschaft felt a brief satisfaction as blood frothed from the man’s mouth, but that soon passed.
Next Herrschaft sent his pov to an EarthCo HY-fighter battling an NKK vessel only a few kilometers above the bright grey surface of the Moon. Lasers burned and rockets blazed. Herrschaft opened the feed to full fivesen, then flicked from ship to ship until he found one crackling with electrical fire, three seconds ago with the speed-of-light delay to the Moon and back. The pilot screamed with pain, Herrschaft screamed with pain, the Moon lolled crazily overhead, then disappeared beneath the edge of the canopy. An NKK vessel appeared so dark blue that it was barely visible against the black of space streaked with fireworks, and instantly Herrschaft felt the excruciating broad-spectrum thump which meant that the person transmitting had taken such bodily damage as to have gone into shock. He absently noted that his Feedcontrol editors had cut subscription feed at the moment of death.
Still, that wasn’t enough. Herrschaft moved to another vessel, this one on the lunar surface. It was an old freighter, its vast hold gaping like some dusty cavern after having just offloaded. Yet its crew was still aboard. Several missiles or torpedoes had blasted the ship open, for, as Herrschaft roamed the narrow passages, he saw holes gulping space with ragged metal and wire teeth, the tips sparking as electronics shorted out; reflected sunlight roared in, along with occasional lasers traced in the smoke that billowed out into the vacuum. No one but Herrschaft and maybe a few of his editors could take this now-blocked feed. Finally, he located headcard traces and put himself in the suit of one of the loader-operators.
Pain!
Herrschaft had to fight against his safety programs to maintain his presence in the body of the dying man. His legs felt afire, his head throbbed; vomit clung to the inside of the helmet’s faceshield and gathered hot and stinging in the suit’s thorax. His stomach clenched with pain and internal injury; his eardrums rang. His lungs burned and hissed with each breath, not quite providing enough oxygen, filling with blood.
A long time passed before Herrschaft realized why the man no longer moved: He was dead. Herrschaft relished the pain a little longer. At last he felt sated. His hatred was spent.
He returned to the clean, quiet room beneath the central office tower of Feedcontrol Central.
Jonathan Sombrio
, Herrschaft pondered, recalling the cold data which had painted a life of pain and loss—data to which Herrschaft’s memories had given the energy of understanding.
No, I can’t be angry with you, Jonathan
.
“
Nooa.” Herrschaft again ran cross-references but found nothing. He followed Jonathan’s trace, but this time remained in the nets, watching from around corners in the narrow tubes which connected the boy’s Citizen card to Earth and Feedcontrol, waiting for Nooa to show up. Jonathan immediately noticed; he vanished. Herrschaft followed the sparkling trace from hub to hub, node to node, but always the boy remained a step ahead, faster than the old master, lord of EarthCo.
Herrschaft found himself laughing and wondered at what a strange cacophony of emotions had gripped him in the past minutes. For surely, though he’d run from place to place and lived death twice, what felt like so long a time must have only been minutes.
“
I respect you, boy,” he called after the thinning trace of Jonathan as the boy vanished into a New York high-school feedcenter. Against his better judgment, Herrschaft made sure no charges would be brought against Jonathan for his little joyride. But he’d be watching the boy from now on, and would be sure to punish the next transgression.
Herrschaft was about to return to the stolen Stratofighter and deliver a few frightening words when he realized something. Who could possibly override the massive obstacles to steal an EConautics fighter? No one had done such a thing in the force’s history. Who could be responsible for the various unaccountable blocks and unauthorized activities that had been going on for the past few days? Who could shield a boy from the Feedcontrol Director? Who could hide from him an entire EarthCo Warrior unit in Africa? Who in the worlds could conceivably remain hidden from Herrschaft’s secret weapon?
“
So simple,” Herrschaft remarked. “Everything points at one perpetrator.” An ominous calm fell over him.
“
My Brain. The Brain.”
As the implications sunk in, Herrschaft’s calm slowly melted away. Terror began to leak into his mind.
Has
the Brain become sentient?
But a computer is only a computer, a tool. An AI might act like a person, he recalled from a lecture he had attended back in 2072, but it’s only a machine aping a man.
“
My war seems to have grown a bit more complicated.” But now he at least knew the identity of his foe, and he would certainly be able to understand it: Hadn’t my people modeled that computer’s mind after my own? Yes. It will be very simple to find out if this is truly the case.
“
In the meantime, I have a war to fight.”
Herrschaft gathered up the fragmented bits of his self and focused on making tactical decisions and staying abreast of the battle now getting fully underway between the Earth and its Moon.
Hardman Nadir stared out from the cabin of his and his co-commander’s whirlyjet at the lights blooming in the black desert. Nadir kept his mind clear by concentrating on the orchestra his audio program made of the jet engine.
Tripoli’s twin pyramidal skyscrapers glinted in the moonshine while the rest of its thousands of buildings shone and blinked with their own clutter of lights. Aircars and heavier freight vessels milled the air, groundcars crisscrossed intermittently lit roadways—all oblivious to the approaching army.
More than 10,000 soldiers now counted themselves part of the force as it marched, rolled, and flew toward the Libyan port city of Tripoli. The ARMCo light-armor battalion still rolled with them. They still operated under full feed-blackout.
Once again, Nadir frowned.
How. . . ?
he began to wonder, but cut himself off. He didn’t want to know who was helping them stay invisible to the world and its criminal governments; as long as they kept helping Nadir’s army grow and spread the word, he would not push the issue. He let the jet-orchestra wash away his confusion.
“
Boss Nadir,” Paolo commed.
“
Yeah?”
The Sotoi Guntai leader turned to watch the two converse; his Black Chinese skin glowed in the whirlyjet cabin’s dull green light.
“
Boss,” Paolo said, “what do we do once we reach Tripoli?”
Now all nine soldiers turned to hear the answer, though Nadir hadn’t noticed that their comm lines had been open. They certainly couldn’t have heard a spoken word in the roar of the whirlyjet’s engine. Nadir once again marveled at the extravagant way NKK burned fuels—but then they controlled the gas giant planets, while EarthCo mainly utilized solar- and fusion-supplied electricity. Nadir knew thousands of soldiers might be listening. Now that he was forced to answer, the words rose to his lips:
“
We seize the city’s network server, its ganglion or whatever it’s called, gain control of the power grid, then use those to infiltrate deeper into the Worldnets. If that’s not enough power to dig as deep as we need to go, we keep taking cities until we find the bastards.”
“
Is that all?” the Sotoi Guntai said. He still had not ID’d himself to Nadir, but Nadir wouldn’t press unless necessary. All that mattered was that he had made this army grow when he could have severed it before it ever sprouted.
A few of the men chuckled. Paolo looked nervously at Nadir, then, seeing no hint of malice, joined in the snickering.
“
No,” Nadir said. “We sail and fly to mainland America or Asia, wherever the betrayal originated.”
“
And then. . .” the Chinese leader prompted, the slightest hint of a smile turning his lips.
“
By then, we’d better have the world’s greatest army, because we’ll need to remove our superiors from power.” Nadir shook now, feeling the rage again rise up in him like magma—but here was not the place, not the time.