“How much time do we have?” she asked as she plummeted into the atmosphere above San Antonio.
“Aldous, how much time until impact?” Rich asked.
“Three minutes and fifty-one seconds.”
“Did you copy that?” Rich asked Djanet.
“I did,” Djanet replied, picking up speed as she rocketed toward the surface. “This is gonna be another close one.”
“As usual,” Rich replied. “I don’t think we know how to do it any other way.”
29
“Destroy the universe?” James reacted, sighing as he fought back the impulse to roll his eyes. “That clinches it.”
“How so?” the A.I. replied.
“Are you serious?” James responded. “It’s 1. She sounds like a broken record. ‘Fear the future’ is her mantra, her excuse for assimilating world after world.”
“Perhaps, but it still doesn’t explain the stranger’s reluctance to kill us,” the A.I. pointed out. “1 would have no issue with terminating us, and it appears this stranger the candidate speaks of certainly had it within his power to do exactly that.”
“Uh...hello?” Thel piped in. “Unless I’m misreading the situation, we’re as good as dead right now anyway. We’re in the mainframe, we can’t escape, and the Earth is the androids’s for the taking. And if they take the Earth, there’s no reason for them to keep the mainframe.”
“She’s supremely confident, and let’s face it, she should be,” James added. “She didn’t need to kill us.”
“And what of the entity that spoke to us through Kali?” the A.I. reminded his companions. “Why heal us? And what of what she said about James, that the beauty of the universe was within him?”
“I don’t know,” Thel admitted. “Weird, mocking flirtation? Or maybe she wants to keep James as a trophy. He is the smartest man alive, after all. Maybe she wants to preserve his intellect so that she can exploit it.”
“To what end?” the A.I. countered. “Her mandate is quite clearly to keep humanity from progressing technologically. It’s in her best interest to eliminate James and to eliminate the candidate and myself as well.”
“Not if she has us trapped,” James replied, “or if she thinks she does.”
“Thinks?” Thel reacted. “Are you suggesting you think we can escape?”
“Look, 1 has cut us down to size here by cutting our core neural patterns off from the mainframe,” James explained, “but in the brief time that I had control of the operator’s position with the A.I., I managed to put contingencies in place.”
“What sorts of contingencies?” the A.I. asked, surprised.
“Old-timer, for one. His new body is capable of connecting with the sim and providing a bridge for our patterns to escape, but it means we’ve got to find a way to get a message to him.”
“Well, that’s a problem,” Thel pointed out. “How the hell are we going to make contact with the outside—”
“James Keats, this is Aldous Gibson,” a voice suddenly cut into the sim, speaking to them as easily as though they had a connection through their mind’s eyes, stopping the trio in their tracks. “Can you hear me?”
“Aldous!” James shouted in surprise. “Is that really you?”
“What’s going on?” the candidate asked, unable to hear the voice.
“Help, hopefully,” Thel explained to him.
“I’ve taken over the operator’s position,” Aldous informed them. “I’m leading the resistance to the android collective, but in the interest of time and honesty, I must tell you that I won’t be able to fend them off much longer. One of their largest ships is on a collision course with the mainframe. Only three minutes remain before impact.”
“I can stop them,” James proclaimed. “Aldous, can you get me out of here and put me back in control of—”
“I’m afraid not, James. Whoever is responsible for cutting you off from your bodies and trapping your core patterns in the sim used a trapdoor code that is so encrypted, that even with the processing power of the mainframe at my disposal, I can’t break it in the time remaining. We’re going to lose this battle, I’m afraid.”
James’s hand went to his forehead as he covered his eyes, the ramifications of Aldous’s grim forecast too overwhelming to bear.
“There is hope, however,” Aldous continued. “I’ve been able to construct a solid state core that is small enough that I can transport it away from ground zero by hand, but it has enough processing capability to contain the sim. I’m transferring the sim out of the mainframe and into the core as we speak.”