Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘No, the worst that can happen is that you succeed and open a bridge to Red Space, and the gravitational forces involved tear Pangea apart. Or perhaps you just decompress the entire planet and collapse the atmosphere.’

Zabilla looked pained. She had to admit that opening a bridge was her greatest fear due to the unknown interplay between the gravitational forces at play when opening a wormhole, and how that would interact with Pangea’s own gravity. All bridge drives had a fail-safe against bridging too close to planets. This was also the reason bridge points were always so far from planetary and stellar bodies. The Church had always warned of the catastrophic results of planetary bridge points. The comment about decompressing the planet, however, was sheer ignorance. Sadly, she thought that before she realised the Absolute would be monitoring her.

‘Would it perhaps be better to do it in space?’ she suggested.

‘Too much of a security risk. We would make ourselves vulnerable to attack by Consortium Elite.’

‘Seeder tech tends to be intuitive. I don’t think it would allow catastrophe.’

‘It is a lot to gamble on a guess.’

‘There’s some evidential basis for my guess, but I’ll be honest with you, I’m out of ideas. If you don’t want to do this then you may as well get Gilbert Scoular down here – perhaps he can make the cocoon look prettier.’ Assuming that Scoular had been cloned since I killed him, that is , Zabilla thought.

The avatar stared at her. Dracup did a good job of hiding his concern.

‘Very well,’ the avatar finally said. ‘The Absolute says that you play this Game well.’

Zabilla nodded. She didn’t even feel relief. If anything, she was more worried than she had been before. It was a desperate move to stay in the Game rather than anything approaching scientific method. She tried to suppress the feeling at the back of her mind that this was a searing indictment of just how irresponsible the Absolute was. It was willing to risk everything, all its people, the Game and itself on some pretty wild speculation.

The security was mostly human, as interlopers had hacked the heads in the past. They were some elite unit of the Absolute’s Toy Soldiers and there were a lot of them. Not to mention S-sats, though Zabilla could not understand why they would be any more secure than the heads. Perhaps they were on some kind of isolated control ’face. They were in the large open space where the G-car had first landed, a hangar made of poured reinforced concrete. The reinforcement in the concrete was a nano-process that bonded the individual molecules more tightly together. They were also protected or watched by the bunker’s automated weapon systems: turret-mounted strobe guns, smart munitions batteries, infrasonics, attack nano-swarms and virals. Zabilla didn’t see any Elite but assumed they could be there quickly if anything went wrong. It felt like overkill, but Zabilla was aware, intellectually anyway, that it was not.

She had watched the craft come down on the elevator platform. It was an old Rapier-class, three-person, long-range strike craft. The fighter/bomber was a decommissioned antique from the Art Wars that had been in the collection of one of the more successful players, though the truly great players frowned upon interests outside the Game. Zabilla thought the three nacelle-mounted Real Space engines made the craft look a little like the tridents she’d seen used by gladiators in the murder arcades. The Rapier fighter/bomber was one of the smallest classes of craft that had a bridge drive.

The cocoon was brought in on small AG motors and guided over towards the craft. Zabilla, with Dracup’s aid, had been using the full extent of her S-tech knowledge to repurpose and reprogram some of the Absolute’s S-tech collection. She also had a length of tendril-like biotech cable, the best money could buy, grown in a ’sect Hive habitat, to act as a connection. The avatar, who was there watching, did not want the cocoon going inside or even getting too close to the ship.

In theory, it was as simple as attaching the nav comp to the cabling, to the S-tech interface and then to the cocoon. That was the easy bit. Then they had to somehow make the nav comp give them diagnostic information on the cocoon. By this point Zabilla wasn’t even sure where this ridiculous plan had come from. She must have been desperate when she thought of it, though she was struggling to remember the genesis of the idea. It was now apparent that it was pointless. It wouldn’t work. She’d been clutching at straws.

The avatar turned to look at her.

‘Self-doubt is not an attractive quality, let alone in a player of your calibre.’

‘I… I’m… sorry,’ she said. Images were coming to the fore in her mind. Not images, memories that had been hidden from her. They had worn some sort of camo suits. The grotesques had seemingly come from nowhere. At first she had thought they were morlock-rights activists or even losers. She saw the needle and knew she was about to be wiped.

‘This is tremendous waste of resources, not to mention a security risk,’ the avatar continued.

‘There’s something wrong…’ Zabilla started.

Dracup turned to look at her. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Too soon.’

The Absolute actually shifted in its nutrient bath. More then fifty feet long and around ten feet thick, the Absolute resembled something between a slug made of human flesh and a giant phallus. What passed for its mind and its nerve endings were laced throughout the organism’s entire form. Once human, it had redesigned itself to take signals from hundreds of thousands of experiential broadcasts at any one time – the ultimate receptor of sensation. A creature designed specifically as a sensualist. It now realised that something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

It could feel its avatar neunonically give instructions to the AG motors suspending the cocoon to return it to the secure lab, to the automated defences to open fire and to the S-sats to do the same. All of them were ignored.

The Absolute itself tried to take control of Zabilla and Dracup if for no other reason than to find out what was happening. Even if they had been meat-hacked it would make an example of them. Instead it found that the experiential link was simply missing.

The Absolute squirmed and splashed around in its tank. This was exciting but it couldn’t be allowed to lose. It wasn’t what the Game was about. It was about pleasuring itself. The Absolute used the experiential link to take control of ten thousand of the best electronic security and warfare specialists on Game and in orbit. It opened the most secure computer system on the planet to all of them and had them move in unison to retake control of the bunker’s automated systems.

All the while it was playing back one of Dracup’s hidden memories before the experiential link had been severed. It saw Dracup programming diagnostic routines into the lab’s equipment. Even deep in his subconscious Dracup hadn’t been aware of writing the code after he had examined the bunker’s electronic security, also subconsciously. The sophisticated security hack had been laced throughout the new diagnostic routines that Dracup had been developing consciously.

It was a shame they hadn’t been players, the Absolute thought. They played well. Just as long as they didn’t win. It had to win. That was the only rule of the Game.

Dracup took control of the automated weapon systems and the S-sats. The avatar became a prism of light as every strobe gun targeted it. The rotating barrels of the fast-cycling lasers filled the air with lines of red and threatened to overwhelm the avatar’s energy dissipation grid. Then every AG-driven smart munition hit the avatar. The powerful automaton ceased to exist and was replaced with a sizeable crater.