Guy Haley - Omega point

Thirty kilometres behind them, the bright dot of the bomb streaked groundwards, toward the army base.

He turned his face away and shut his eyes as it detonated. The light from the explosion burned white through his eyelids.

A shockwave hit them seconds later, tossing the airbike about like a leaf in the storm, Valdaire wrestled with the machine, managing, somehow, to keep it level, and then they were away from the blast front.

Valdaire turned round and smiled a tight smile. "I think we're clear," she mouthed.

Otto nodded. He looked back as fire raged through the taiga under a towering mushroom cloud.

It really was time to go the fuck home.

In the Real, over Nevada, a second remotely controlled stratobomber screeched down from the edge of space. At ten kilometres up, it dropped three bombs that little in this world could stop. They exploded as airbursts above the Nevada desert, a threeheaded mushroom rearing into the sky as they each vapourised a circular portion of scrubby land.

This physical destruction was not their principle purpose

A surge of EM energy blasted the area, frying electronics of every kind for kilometres in every direction. Although stymied by the ground, of such force was the gamma wavefront that the pulse irradiated the Realm House, the attack's target.

The faraday cage in the walls of the Realm House shorted. Spider drones fizzed and died. Cascades of sparks showered from the hardened servers as the sheer magnitude of the EM pulse overwhelmed their protective measures.

The governing machinery of the fusion reactor under the servers was scrambled. Power surged into the tokomak, overloading the reactor. It went critical within picoseconds, and, picoseconds later, a star lived and died violently in Nevada, heaving millions of tonnes of earth up into a low dome lit from within, the mass collapsing into itself to leave a crater of white-hot glass.

The entire contents of the Reality Realm servers were wiped clean nanoseconds before the Realm House was utterly destroyed. But not before k52's damaged web focused a portion of these energies in a manner that physicists would not fully understand for another few centuries. Somewhere that was not in the Real, nor in the digital ghostworld of the Grid, thirty-seven universal histories played themselves out, twelve billion years each, in mere nanoseconds of Real time, free of interference from man or thinking machine; a dead nerd's gift to totality.

He did it for his sister.

Cricket's was cool and dark, buried deep in one of the less wellheeled levels of the Wellington arcology of New London, far enough from the area damaged when k52 blew up Richards and Klein's main office to remain open. Antique sporting gear hung from the walls in odd juxtaposition with gelscreens and fashionable decor, bringing with it smells of leather and old wood to fight with the prickly tinge of EM energy that saturated everything in the modern world. There were a lot of screens. Cricket played on all of them.

Richards and Klein did not much care for cricket. But they liked the place anyway. They sat there at the bar, annoying the head barman by drinking fine single malts in whiskey sours, with ice, of all things.

They had had a dozen or so already. Neither of them was drunk, because neither of them could become drunk, or rather one could, but with difficulty, while the other could appear so but it was a lie, like so much else about him.

Otherwise, they were happy.

"What troubles me," said Otto, hunched and somewhat morose, though calmer and more at ease than he had been for the last few weeks, "is that it is only by chance that we won over k52 — if the construct of Waldo's had not been there, he would have achieved his goals without a problem. What does all this mean for the world, if k52 nearly succeeded but for a fortuitous happenstance?"

"Nice English, Otto." Richards' sheath drank down a goodly slug of cocktail, tinkled the ice in the glass, then tipped a cube in, sucked it and crunched down.

"I aim to improve my vocabulary without recourse to the Grid."

"Well, good." Richards smiled plastic teeth through plastic lips. "But it wasn't chance."

"Fate then? I do not believe in that."

"Damn right, that's k52 talk. What I mean is this, Otto. Waldo's world was what tripped k52 up, yes, and it was kind of handy that it did. What I'm talking about is why it was there at all. Thing is, old buddy, it was there because a brother loved his sister so much he was willing to go to jail for her, to throw everything in his life over, and eventually to die."

Otto shrugged. "He felt guilty."

"Exactly!" said Richards emphatically. "There's a complex brew in there, guilt, anger, arrogance, but also a whole lot of love. I won't be so trite as to say love saved the world, and we were lucky…"

"We often are," interrupted Otto.

Richards grinned. "That's why we're the best. But seriously, man, love, family ties, shame — all that chemical stuff you meat people have whizzing round in your systems — " he rattled his glass in a circle, carbon plastic finger pointing at his head "- we'll never have that. Never. We're superior to you in some ways…"

Otto opened his mouth.

"Now come on! Don't disagree, you know it, but we'll never have all that. How many million years' worth of evolution made you? Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-three geeks and who knows how many doughnuts made me. There's no comparison."

"Doughnuts?"

"Geeks like doughnuts," pronounced Richards, with all the solemnity of a priest. "Fact. But listen, family ties stopped k52 from realising his plans, Otto. That's not small beer, it's not chance. We machines might surpass you in many things, but we will never be you, and that is why you will survive." He smiled. "With a little help, of course."

"You forget your father, Richards."

Richards frowned, his softgel face crinkling awkwardly. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I do."

The bartender put another glass in front of Richards on the uplit bar, a paper coaster underneath. Richards saluted the man's scowl, pushed back his hat and downed the drink, ice cubes and all. "I've got to get back, someone to see. I'd just go from here, but I've wasted too many sheaths recently. I don't want to leave this one lying around; losing these things is costing us serious money."

"Hughie?" said Otto, and sipped at his whisky.

"Hughie," confirmed Richards. " Gehst du nach Hause, oder bleibst du hier?"

Otto held up his glass in salute and smiled a rare smile. Funny, he thought, how Richards could coax that out of him, for all that he annoyed the shit out of him. " Ich mochte eine weitere." He took a sip. " Guten Nacht, Herr Richards," he said.

Richards stood and set his hat on his head, turned up the collar of his trenchcoat, ran a robot finger round the peak and gave a little smile. " Bitte, mein Freund, es ist einfach Richards."

And he left Otto to it.

Otto rattled his ice round his empty glass. " Er geht mir auf den Sack," he said, and shook his head.

"What was that, sir?" said the bartender.

"Nothing," said Otto. "Get me another, would you?"

Richards took his sheath back to their garage, thankfully one hundred floors below the radioactive sphere of nothing where their office had once been. He shunted himself back into the Grid, popped over to his virtual office to see how the regrowth of his facsimile of ancient Chicago was going, and went over the plans for their reconstructed office. Then he put in a request to see Hughie.

For once, he was piped right into Hughie's garden. Hughie sat at his wirework table, his arms crossed and face grumpy.

There was no cake. It was going to be one of those meetings.

"I suppose you feel oh-so-pleased with yourself," said Hughie.