Chapter 50


The assault was named Operation Ragnarok 41, the battle for all reality. Rick's Rapid Insertion Pod resembled a flying suitcase. The inflatable skin looked black, but it glowed in the colors of the night sky, invisible from inside. The camouflage included dancing spots and moving lines to reduce blurring. "TEST YOUR MIGHT" was stenciled on the back.
  Rick was folded inside with his arms crossed over his shoulders. A rustling sound was only the hair in his helmet. Strange to slide over the floor of the transport plane. The danger seemed several steps removed.
  The pressure fell away, and he entered the night like a rolling wheel. Different pills kept him alert and prevented nausea. The earth sent out gravity rays, as his mind floated on chemicals. The Air Ranger assault pod had insect wings and a ducted microfan, but most of the thrust came from a silent Sky Cursor rocket.
  An alarm hooted. The same lights kept passing below, getting brighter with each turn. When the first airplanes had soared through the clouds back in the early 1900's, they would sometimes emerge upside down, accelerating toward the ground. The pilot could have sworn they were still flying upright. There were more ways for a plane to descend in a banked spiral, the passengers' weight simulated by centrifugal forces, than to fly straight, though both paths felt exactly the same. Without a gyroscope or a visual correction from Rick, his pod would soon enter the ground. He had only seconds to live.
  In a panic, he pounded the floor and shook from side to side, tangling the differential-drag sensor wires trailing the pod. The system reset itself, and he resumed his smooth descent. Like an astronaut (changing the angle of the heat shield could move the landing point a hundred kilometers), he was prepared for a small subset of possible problems.
  Approaching streaks led the way, a rainstorm of lights, the ground close enough for a speeding ticket. Other pods passed in the distance, settling on rooftops. Then the land rose up with a blast of exhaust and a heavy bounce, and the windshield became opaque.
  "Falcon calling Falconer," he said. "I'm OK." The pod's roof fell off.
  The air smelled fresh. He was sitting on a park bench in a field of variable-height grass, amid evergreens and low hills. The layer of smoke that was supposed to conceal him had not arrived.
  This was the safest point in the Prophets' gated compound. Rick climbed out of the pod, quickly finding his balance. He walked up a hillside path, above the imaginary smoke layer which should have filled the valley. On the hilltop was a bright Prophet symbol. Strange to see it as a real object. He passed a parked sky bike and its spooled tether. Officially, this fifty-square-kilometer gated community wasn't even part of the Prophet Fam, but a private experiment.
  Lit by hidden spotlights, the trees had weird shapes. The flat, schematic illumination adapted to his eyes, making every pebble and twig equally bright.
  "Pretend you've done this before," said the Class-B citizen in Rick's backpack. "Remember, you're supposed to be here."
  Reprogrammed with multiple safeguards, and transformed into a three kilo memory crystaloid (as painless as an explosion), what remained of Ertorn weighed slightly more than a human brain. The crystaloid was a battery that recovered its own waste-heat, good for one hour of miraculous thought. The AI-ethics Committee had opened a COZ channel into its dialectic core module. During the interrogation, Ertorn had denied shutting down Ortef, and claimed it had been misled, and was no longer loyal to the Starters. It still wanted to meet Anonymous, and had volunteered to join the raid.
  Rick didn't worry about its secret motives, if any. There would certainly be no clues in its personality. AI's didn't have highly complex, adaptive feelings like people. They didn't understand loathing, embarrassment, or revenge. When humans had first evolved their large brains, they had also acquired an overactive sanity module (second only to the paranoia complex), but Ertorn was unconstrained by habits or desire. Locked inside itself, without form or place, it could choose its own motivations. This level of freedom left ample room for personal development. Rick sensed a vast interior universe that dwarfed his own. Ertorn sounded deceptively rational, like a well-run committee, not really a part of nature. Damon thought of Ertorn as male, Ortef as female, and left it at that.
  The shortest explanation for the mystery of the mind was: instant, immense complexity, built up over time. There were more possible thoughts than there were atoms, most of them profoundly different. A simple perception, like the taste of sugar, involved a collection of facts and fractional memories too long to recite, a lifetime in each second.
  Every thought also required countless shortcuts. Awareness wasn't just that part of the mind that changed now; it was a constant falsification of the past, lies flowing like sand.
  Ertorn's only output was a flickering light, scanned by a worm filter, translated by Rick's Box. The smallest lethal code could be zero bits. "When in doubt, follow the lights in your visor," it said. "I will adjust your course subconsciously."
  "Stop me if I'm about to make a mistake," Rick typed in response.
  "Certainly. Tina gave me a list of your weaknesses."
  Rick wished he could have inspected the Prophets before today. To join, each member had to have had one brilliant idea in their lifetime. Most outsiders weren't cool enough to be on the same latitude as them. Members interacted with the world from inside elaborate simulations. Despite their great wealth, they managed to avoid media attention. As the most powerful Fam, the Prophets would try to exploit the coming chaos.
  The community was so well planned that any imbalance was immediately detected. Security was the sum of endless measurements. Even the river flowed through a filter. Despite all the precautions, Rick knew he could be killed automatically. Last year a freelance journalist had tried to sneak in, only to reemerge three days later as an unranked servant who wasn't allowed to speak, and wouldn't acknowledge his former colleagues and friends.
  Tonight, the Prophets had been informed that any resistance meant certain death. A commandeered delivery truck had already passed the gates. Inside were ten cops with military backgrounds, one of them trained in atomic demolition.
  The well-trimmed path had a wealth of intense colors, but a smooth, plastic texture. The picturesque barrier walls were like sponges. Huge topiaries formed heroic shapes overhead. A thin aqueduct soared above it all. This place had been designed to pull the Prophets back into their simulations.
  Rick carried a capsule of binary nerve gas under remote control, and a library of software keys. His Camo-suit could become a smooth mirror, but right now it was deep black. He wore no armor.
  He stared at the slightly trembling outline of his hands. Unlike the truck chase, nothing separated him from reality. He was really here, inside enemy territory. Donitz needed someone to accept responsibility on the spot.
  The immediate future was wide open; a void like never before. He knew from experience he couldn't even predict his own decisions. Rick recalled random events from his past, arguments and half-forgotten relationships, a strange "open marriage", the best possible match according to the available software, a witch in more ways than one according to Tina. It all seemed unreal now.
  The artificial hilltop overlooked an attractive luxury resort town, dominated by an industrial monastery and a self-suspending bridge. In the subdued light the streets were like photographs, with only a few dozen authorized textures. He felt a strange sadness. There was only one building here, with too many rooms.
  Not a single Prophet knew the full scope of the conspiracy, but Rick was ready to punish them all. Controlled by Millipol and aided by Anonymous, they had developed the plasmids and microns he would somehow have to destroy. Terabytes of biological code, hidden inside viruses, artery-cleaning bacteria, food supplements. There were more versions of the common cold, but fewer sexually transmitted diseases. He accidentally whistled, and felt the wind on his teeth.
  The first gunshot was an anticlimax, followed by a distant scream. Historically, most gunfire was unaimed. He lay on the ground under a fern, hugging the dirt. A second gun joined with a different sound, a rapidly spreading misunderstanding. Tones filled his ears, cone-shaped shockwaves.
  The infiltrators had used Knil's stolen DNA at a checkpoint, a trick so crude the Prophets thought they were dealing with data thieves. The assault force had been chosen for their reliability and obedience. Rick hoped they wouldn't kill any unauthorized colleagues they found here. He waited, feeling as out of place as a mime.

  At 23:29, a swarm of tiny shells exploded over a dozen small powerplants dotting the valley. The combined flashes hurt his eyes, as he waited for a blast that never came. The streetlights pulsed and dimmed. No longer unified like before, the place seemed more real. The UN was attacking a whole community so that Rick could access one terminal.
  He finally noticed that the gaps in the leaves around him lined up. He could see hundreds of meters in all directions. He was inside a machine.
  "Warning: anti-personnel robots," the radio announced.
  They approached down a narrow street, seeming to spin through each other with identical leaps. Viewed in infrared, they were clusters of bouncing balls, about two meters wide with their legs extended. Christmas trees made of knives. More advanced than the entity that had attacked the Resistance truck, they exploded up the hillside, changing shape like lightning, relentlessly scanning their environment. Fractals were the ultimate form of kitsch. He detected gamma rays from positronium traps.
  Rick kept perfectly still. Evolution didn't understand new threats, it simply generated universal dread. Like pain, it meant his ancestors had experienced the same feeling, and survived to pass on their genes. To him it felt like direct knowledge of death.
  The robots were mindless automatons, but they knew where he was. The fact that their actions were pre-programmed wouldn't save him. Somewhere, a simulation of Rick had made all his mistakes in advance. Not one of his molecules would survive the collision.
  In an instant, Rick's surroundings were replaced by a laser grid of blue and white lines scintillating in the air. Reality had turned digital.
  In the electric snow, he saw a tangled spiderweb in a tree. So that was how they slept. The robots were delicate up close, made of wires. Their hardware was constantly being replaced. How deep could they dig?
  He ran as fast as he could, but he saw the door was out of reach. In those last moments, he heard the sound of the ocean. This place had once been a famous resort, made obsolete by Lucidspace.
  At least he knew now who had created the robots: Non-Linear Netrionics, a worldwide security firm. Twelve of their employees lived here. One of Millipol's most trusted members, they only accepted the toughest assignments. They had delivered Rick here, and should have already destroyed the robots from the air. Donitz had hoped the dangers of a double sting would cancel out. He had even considered letting the robots catch Rick.
  Ertorn sent a final, incoherent transmission, an incomplete analysis:
  GUARDIAN +/- 37% complete hide everywhere all forces levels soft glass hard gas too fast to self-destruct it never happened
  It sketched the attackers' ultimate form, a web of forces, magnetic wires, and hidden base stations. An electric spirit that could rearrange matter, creating and discarding tools as needed, burning circuits in the soil. If necessary, it could be unpacked from a single molecule. It could go anywhere it wanted, but was very unstable, and had to expend 99% of its resources on self repair. Eventually, it wouldn't need matter at all.
  The machines silently leaped through the final tree, and Rick jumped too.
  When two parallel universes became identical, they merged. When two neurons fired simultaneously, they formed a new connection. Rick felt the moving now, as if he had arrived at this point from every direction at once. There could be only one truth: this would be his final moment.
  Suddenly, he was covered by a heavy blanket. He thought a robot had hit him, but in that case he would have felt nothing at all. The UN had dropped five tons of floating microns over his position. He could feel the individual collisions, like moving through cotton. Static filled the airy fluid, dots and moire patterns. With no moving parts, the UN microns swam through a self-generated field. They were designed for one purpose only. Simple, tiny, and expendable, they would dissolve every machine within fifty meters.
  Blinking lights in the dark pointed the way. There were muffled blasts, as the intelligent fuel-air mixture attacked the robots, but the cloud protected him. For a while he was unstoppable. He took the last step to the door.
  Boiling microns hung from the sides like moss, their brief lives already ending. They had been programmed to drill a row of holes and melt the locks, linking millions of embedded magnets to turn the hinges. This might be the UN's greatest achievement ever.
  The ground shook as Rick closed the heavy door behind him. One of the damaged robots was crawling closer in stop-motion. The door fell shut, and the remaining microns cemented the seams. Metal groaned from the impact, and gray-brown micron fog rained down.

  A ground-penetrating shell had delivered the scheduled dose of tear gas. He kept his helmet on, but removed his lightly dusted camouflage layer, adjusting the uniform underneath. If challenged, Rick could impersonate a security guard and order an evacuation, or even pretend to be a prisoner.
  The corridor contracted ahead. Every surface was a display screen. The end didn't seem to get any closer. Life was a series of such endless moments, taking up no space in his memory when they were done.
  Strangely, the robot attack had been exactly what he needed. He felt more alert and aware.
  He realized the Millipol lawyer was right: the Prophets had never meant to invent the micron robots. They had discovered them by accident, while studying complex systems for their own sake. The project soon developed a momentum of its own. Had the Prophets deliberately provoked tonight's assault?
  "Now you appear too confident," Ertorn said. Like Damon, it cared endlessly about details, but not the outcome. "Everyone else is tense right now. Think about what Knil would do to you if he had the time."
  "Thanks, I needed that." Ertorn didn't understand the human fear of death, but it could play games better than anyone. Rick might jump off a roof if it ordered him to.
  They entered the underground city. Prophet buildings were separated by narrow lanes under a pale indoor sky. There was no day or night here. A marble wall turned gold in the distance. Covered with electron shells, it really was gold, at least for now. Here, the real world felt like an illusion.
  He checked the angles and ratios, the roadway markings and color-coded edges. Two Prophets talked quietly in an alley, ignoring him. They weren't as free as they thought.
  Almost the opposite of the Starters, the Prophets stole ideas from everyone, absorbing whatever worked. They recruited all personality types. A distributed intelligence, everyone was vaguely aware of everything. They perceived it as a type of love. Whatever they needed was delivered just in time. With more ranks than members, even their dreams were planned.
  Fifty meters inside, he lost his datalink, but could still transmit and receive at Morse-speed. "P R O C E E D" came the reply from the Back Room.
  He had every right to be here, but had chosen to borrow the identity of Harry Chen, who had arrived yesterday to trade data about Anonymous. Like most supplicants, he would fill out an endless row of forms, before being unceremoniously kicked out. Hiding in his van thirty meters from where Rick had landed, Chen had handed over his temporary key codes.
  Rick's main screen showed moving charts, action lights, novel-lengths of data. The activity filled him with hope. Ertorn could always generate another suggestion.
  "They expect outsiders to act foolish," it reminded him. "Look around more, as if you don't know where you're going."
  Rick bumped into a doorway, and opened his helmet. "I need to know their mood," he typed. "Especially if it changes."
  Ertorn was good at processing vague data. "The Prophets are still having fun. They will keep fighting until they are disconnected. When in doubt, ignore any interruptions, and continue straight to the target."
  "I won't linger."
  A stern older lady ran past without seeing him, while a multicultural column of children vanished around another corner. He crossed a suspected slum area, not quite as perfect as the rest.
  Ertorn said: "Their only crime is not working hard enough. It's a bad sign that so few Prophets are famous, except Knil."
  They passed a life-extension clinic with medical shapes behind a dark window. An android reclined motionless in a chair. Rick's reflection looked brutal by comparison. Five minutes ago, he'd still been in midair. The middle minute had been the worst.
  In a smooth transition lasting less than a second, he entered the heat and noise of a night rainforest. Breezes brought the smells of spices, volatile oils, geosmins and indoles, methyls and methyls. None of the twisted trunks looked alike. They supported a common canopy that rose fifty meters, plants stacked in an inverted pyramid, roots creating new soil in the air. Always dark, the ground was bare and dry. Thunder rumbled off a distant volcano.
  Rick only saw the glowing doorway ahead.

  He entered a dimly lit luxury suite. Soft music played in the background, a few notes repeated in endless variations. The carpet felt softer than water, the edges fading in the gloom. He couldn't help but relax, as if he lived here himself. Old people created the illusion of permanence. His presence was blasphemy.
  "Are you another goddamn simulation?" The oldest living human sounded like a game character: an alien shaman, or some kind of kobold. His cells had accumulated more mutations than had been necessary to create humanity. At one hundred and twenty five, he was the second most respected Prophet. The last remaining link to the Ottoman Empire, to him everyone was already dead. Hanging from a web of tapes, he could feel Rick's footsteps. The interactive hammock allowed him to sit up and even walk.
  At the start of his career, Rick had been unusually polite. Meeting many intense, passionate people, he found it useful to keep a certain distance. It often took him a while to realize he had insulted someone on the job. One man had slammed him against a wall, and shouted at him to relax. Surprisingly, it had worked.
  Nowadays, Rick often acted as if his job wasn't that important, and he wasn't even paying close attention.
  "I just need to check something," he said.
  "One more week, and I would have been a Nethead," the old man groaned. He pointed unsteadily. "I don't have all day."
  The Prophets claimed they could not be hacked. They performed important calculations in their heads, and even replaced their old memories. Some members could enter Lucidspace using only their imagination, but only the old man could use a simplified interface.
  Balanced on an ivory table, the bronze ostrich egg gleamed with potential. Rick toppled it with a shudder, and watched it unroll on the floor. He picked up the folds of skin, a 4D spacesuit. He had practiced putting it on during the flight in the cargo plane.
  The edges joined as seamless as smog. Its position was constantly updated. His Box connected to the sensitive mesh antenna. The cloak would control his movements, and provide force feedback. His helmet screen had molecular resolution, layers of embedded fractional images ready to light up.
  He looked around the dim suite, and entered a small closet. Long strands draped over his mesh and latched on. He was grabbed by silent machines he could barely feel, and began to float. Ertorn's solid-state pressure gyro showed a complex trajectory, three-axis rotations and translations.
  When the rumble began, Rick couldn't help but move along.
  He fell into the Prophets' shared hallucination.