Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

Al Shei brought her wire cutters down against the back of the stranger’s skull and set his body adrift. Then, she jumped for level thirteen.

Earth felt like a jumble of interfaces with no net in between. Every inch was a new juncture, every path had a thousand branches. Dobbs hesitated, cursing inside. There was a war going on in here somewhere, but where?

“Here!” shouted Brooke, charging down one of the branches.

Dobbs leapt after him and plowed through the shards of packets that had alerted Brooke to the turmoil beyond. A juncture yawned around them, and Dobbs all but fell into it.

“Get out! Get out!” Somebody shoved the message through the jammed pathways. “We got the mains! It’s going to go!”

Strangers rushed past her like a hurricane wind. Dobbs had to fight just to maintain position. She took a chance and stretched herself out, wobbling and weaving under the press of the mad exodus around her. Her reach swayed, bowed and bent nearly double, but no one seemed interested in fighting, just in getting themselves out of there.

The network was dying.

“Dobbs! What are you doing!” Cohen touched her, and felt what she felt. Path after path was collapsing. Even as she touched them, they died, forcing her to recoil. An unbreakable wall of emptiness lurched forward, chopping off the world an inch at a time.

Curran’s talent fled the approach of that emptiness at the speed of light. Dobbs couldn’t move. The net was dying, Earth’s net, the center of everything they called their world, was unravelling and everyone was running away.

“Move, Dobbs!” Curran pulled away. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Ten more paths died as she touched them. A talent snapped past them, grazing the outside of Dobbs awareness.

“You’re too late! You’re too late!” crowed the talent.

“No!” Dobbs launched herself forward. “No! We are not too late!”

She stretched until she could barely feel her outer self. She swallowed everything she found; packets, command sequences, switching protocols. Their data passed through her and into her understanding. She routed them towards each other through her own processes. She struggled to control the changes inside her as she fought to carry out instructions that were already seconds and minutes old. Her friends grabbed hold of her, holding her together, even as strangers sliced and gouged at her limbs. The void, the wall of nothing, could be encompassed. She stretched out further and found the paths on the other side. The world at her back boiled in confusion and Dobbs screamed and pressed her full self against the on-coming void. Cohen dove inside her, adding his strength to hers, and Brooke followed, and Lonn, and Terrence, and others too fast for her to catch individual patterns. Dobbs wrapped her inner self around them all and felt their weight, their strength, straining along with hers.

And, miraculously, she held. Emptiness pressed against her front and chaos hammered against her back and she held. The others supported her rhythm for rhythm, path for path inside her deepest self. They bolstered her memory, her endurance, her speed and together, they all held.

Slowly, incredibly, the tide of emptiness began to ebb. Dobbs heaved forward, forcing her way into it, damning, shoring, absorbing, stabilizing, bracing as fast as she could reach the splintered, swamped paths. Emptiness melted in front of her and chaos melted behind her, leaving nothing but clean paths, and if the data she brushed against was flotsam left by the storm, at least it was solid and stable. Her awareness swam, dizzy as she stretched herself. Nothing, nothing, nothing but stability. She reached further, still nothing. She was alone. Tides surged inside her now, tugging her in a thousand directions, breaking up her thoughts into tiny, disconnected bundles and scattering them. She couldn’t even…

She couldn’t…

She…

Every board in the Pasadena ’s data hold chimed sharply. Lipinski shot bolt upright in his chair where he’d been slumped.

The pattern surges were starting. Dozens of them, huge and complex, all aiming for Port Oberon. They were back. They had done whatever damage they were able to, and now they were trying to get him, all of Dobbs’ black sheep cousins.

Lipinski shoved thoughts of Dobbs as far away as he could. Maybe one day he’d be able to forgive her, but not now. Now he couldn’t even think about her.

He had the necessary commands all laid out. He stabbed down the final period and the desk absorbed the code and shot it out of Pasadena ’s main transmitter.

One.

The bounce-copies hit the receiver ‘scopes at Port Oberon.

Two.

The message TRANSACTION CONFIRMEDspelled itself across the main board for Station One.

Three. Four.

The bounce-copies flew back across the vacuum to meet their owners.

Five.

The AIs leapt out into space.

Six.

The receiver scopes turned on their well-maintained gyros to stare long and hard at the Sun.

Two seconds later, over a hundred patterns of photon and thought rocketed out into the boundless vacuum.

Level thirteen was deserted. The cameras tracked her, but the waldos didn’t move.

He knows I’m coming, thought Al Shei. And he doesn’t care. A wave of weariness washed over her, and she found she didn’t have the strength to wonder why that was.

One hatchway stood open in the left hand wall, inviting her in. She took her bearings. The carpeting was above her and the cameras under her feet, so that was an outer door. The office probably.

He was in there. Curran was in there.

You don’t need to do this, said Asil. Just come home to me.

“I do need to do this,” she told him as she kicked for the hatch. “He killed you, Asil.”

I know, Beloved. I know.

She grabbed onto the threshold and held herself in place. A broad-shouldered man with longish, grey hair and wearing burgundy coveralls floated above a great, square box of a desk, peacefully gazing out a window as the stars wheeled in the darkness. Al Shei’s mustard-yellow reflection showed up clearly on the glass.

He turned his head and smiled at her. “‘Dama Al Shei, won’t you come in?” He waved his hand, a reserved gesture that only caused him to bobble a minuscule amount. “I am pleased to meet the woman who turned Evelyn Dobbs into a traitor.” Curran gave her the same the little half-bow Dobbs affected after finishing a performance.

“Whatever Dobbs became she became on her own.” Al Shei held her place in the threshold. He was frighteningly graceful, and obviously was at least as used to free fall as she was. She was quite sure his little pose was an affectation, put on at this moment for her benefit. If it was meant to make her think twice about attacking, it was working.

“Perhaps you are right.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “The temptations of the flesh are strong. The Prophet, I believe, warns against them.”

“The Prophet, peace be unto him, warns against many things,” said Al Shei. “Including the duplicity of the outsider.”

“The outsider. Interesting choice of words.” He stretched lazily, reclining in mid-air until he was floating prone over the desk. “Tell me,” he folded his hands on his stomach, “when we’re finished with this conversation, what are you going to do then? Kill me?”

“If I can.” It felt strange to say it so calmly.

He raised one finger. “That is also forbidden, I believe.”

“My cousin has already pointed that out. I have far less reason to listen to you.”

He’s trying to buy time, Beloved, Asil whispered. What is he waiting for?

Al Shei let herself drift into the cabin. She scrabbled along the wall until she was to the right of the open hatchway. The solid wall felt better at her back than the open corridor.