DUALITY: The World of Lies (26 page)

“Oh my God, Aru. This is too much. What was
Logos trying to accomplish here?” said Mei. It was shocking
beyond anything she had ever heard of! Why anyone would do this to
another human being? Or to whatever extent human this entity was.
According to the mediscan readings he must be a very fully
integrated cyborg despite his entirely convincing outward human
appearance. But, borg or no, this was just exceedingly
cruel.

“We wish to help you,” she told him,
considering his bare feet and indicating the chair. “Please sit, I
will fetch you some slippers.”

He walked smoothly to the chair, but he
bungled his first attempt to rest himself on it, knocking the chair
over and falling ass first onto the floor.

Mei moved to aid him but Aru stopped her with
a hand gesture and a slight shake of the head to indicate that he
wanted to let Ming do it for himself. Ming did manage to pick
himself up from the floor and stand once again erect. In slow
methodical steps he bent first his knees, then his torso, grasped
the chair and set it upright. He stood beside the chair looking
down at it for a while then bent his knees up and down to practice
the action of sitting. Once it seemed proficiency was attained, he
executed it reasonably well and was seated.

Mei knelt and gently placed the slippers on
his feet and then poured him a cup of water. Ming fixated his gaze
upon the water, sitting still and silent.

“Raise the cup to your mouth and sip
it,” she instructed him.

He grasped the cup and lifted it, spilling a
bit of water then steadying the cup again. Ming froze in that
position and looked at Mei. “Yes, that's ok. Keep
going.”

He proceeded in a squaring fashion to raise
the cup and draw it to his lips. He tilted his head back slightly,
then the cup. Water spilled all over his chin and down the front of
him. He then placed the empty cup back down precisely at its
original location on the table.

“Please stay right there,” she told Ming
and pulled Aru out into the foyer. She closed the inner zero-com
room door keeping an eye on Ming through the view panel, who sat
unmoving.

“He may require around the clock
care,” she told Aru.

“We need to get more information out of
him.”

“I don't think
he 
has
 any information. I think all the information he
possesses, the entire extent of it, is what he learned from Kinny
during the hack.”

Aru thought about this. “You could be right.
If that's true, we must be vigilant, because it would require an
extremely high level of potential intelligence to process all that
so quickly. Think about that: one hour not knowing what a word is,
and the next composing and voicing complete sentences. So maybe
this isn't about what he knows but about who he is -and what he's
capable of.”

Through the glass they saw Ming return to
motion. He lifted the carafe and poured the water shakily but
accurately into the cup without overfilling it. Then he lifted the
glass to his mouth, adroitly took a sip, and set it back
down.

“You see, he always gets it on the second try.
I can't imagine Aru. His mind must be in shock, overwhelmed by this
sudden deluge of information, the full scope of reality suddenly
thrust upon him.”

“It's beyond anything we can relate to. At
this stage he is docile and cooperative, but he may turn as this
awakening continues. We can't let him come into contact with Kinny,
and we can't leave him alone for long. One of us stays in the room
with him at all times, caring for him and garnering whatever
information they can interacting with him. The other stands on
deck, checking into this window every half hour. We switch off
between the two in shifts.”

That made sense. It was imprudent for both of
them to remain in the zero-com room. Short of shaking the entire
ship, Kinny would have no way to notify them if anything came up on
deck.

“We'll need to sleep at some
point.”

“We sleep when he sleeps. I'll haul in the bed
from the other zero-com and bunk in here with him if that's what's
required. I'll authorize you to full command, and you can camp
yourself right on the bridge.”

“Ok. Let me take the first shift in here. I'm
guessing I'm better with small children than you are. Would
you go rustle up some food and clothes for him? Heaven knows
how he's been eating in that sphere, so bring a selection of bland,
soft foodstuffs. Make sure you transfer the food to analog foodware
and EMP everything thoroughly in this foyer before this door
opens.”

“Aye, Commander,” Aru nodded and set off on
his errands.

She returned to Ming, still seated and well on
the way to mastering the skill of water drinking. He was handsome,
she thought, or would be if he learned to carry himself like a man.
She touched his arm lightly. He looked at her hand but was not
otherwise responsive to the gesture.

“Do you have any idea why Logos created you?”
she asked.

“Yes. I have a... theory.”

“Go on.”

“My body is the vessel through which he
intends to… reincarnate himself. If that is the proper
term.”

Mei was not expecting such a grandiose reply,
but went on to consider it. It made a certain sense at the outset,
but it also begged many more questions. “From my Dharmic
understanding, that is not how reincarnation works. You would have
to be conceived after he has died, and his soul would be born into
you. Unless that is all true, that Logos is dead, and you are
already his reincarnation.”

“Reincarnation in the Dharmic sense is a
dubious principle which is scientifically unverifiable. I mean that
I have been designed to accommodate a transfer of his aethereal
essence and neural network unto myself. Now that I have been
corrupted, however, this may not be feasible.”

“Aethereal
essence 
is
 soul,” she pointed out. Reds even knew how to
detect and quantify it, track its movement from its base in the
hypothalamus to its dispersion upon death, but in typical
anti-spiritualist Rubelian fashion they refused to equate it
to “soul” and defined it as a “requisite energy component of life,
that dissipated on death never to reform or return.” Because Reds
were die-hard atheists, by and large. So she should not be
surprised to find that quality hard-wired into the man-child seated
before her. Being Blue or Red had nothing to do with heredity; it
was entirely determined by which star's electric field you were
born under. Considering Ming's proximity
within
 Ignis Rubeli, and
assuming he had been conceived and matured there, that would by
literal definition make him the reddest Red in
existence.

“It is only a theory,” he said. “I do not
know the mind of my creator in any definitive sense, but I may have
insight into it that others do not.”

“What insight?”

Ming looked suddenly suspicious. “How did you
and Captain Psyron know where to find me?”

“I'm sorry I cannot reveal information
proprietary to this mission to you.”

“I understand. Secrecy. Deception. These are
necessary when groups of humans come into competition,” he
said as though another lightbulb was going on in his head. Then he
added, “I am your prisoner. That is why you have me in here where I
cannot communicate with your ship's network.”

Mei wasn't sure if that had been a question or
a declaration.

“Well, Ming, let's not call you a prisoner.
Think of yourself as our special guest, and we will be here to look
after your special needs. You know, you hacked our system
earlier, so we cannot allow you any further access
to it, as a security precaution.”

“That is wise,” agreed Ming.

“But we also want to help make you happy and
comfortable. Tell us what you need and we will do our best to
provide it to you.”

“I have downloaded a portion of your systems
General Knowledge Library. I would like you to provide me with the
rest.”

“I'm afraid that's not going to be possible.
As I just told you, we cannot allow you access to the ship's
systems.”

“You could have System put the library on a
mobile storage device and bring it to me here. Once I have consumed
the data, you may destroy the device.”

Mei thought about it. “I will have to discuss
that with the Captain. Is there anything else you
require?”

“There is one more thing I would like you and
the Captain to do, but I'm afraid you will regard it as
a pretentious request.”

“There is no harm in asking,” she told
him.

“May I show you something,
Commander?”

“Please, Ming, go right ahead.”

He stood up and held his right hand face down
at an angle high over the table. A sudden beam of light burst forth
from his palm and a bright holographic display appeared instantly
on the table with a rendering of the Taiji. A blinking icon
indicated the Kinetic's position and a tracking line of its current
course to Occitania.

The image looked different than System's
standard holograph displays. It rendered instantly, and the
resolution was so high it didn't look like a holograph at all, it
looked physically tangible. This didn't make sense. Holographic
projections have to be cast from at least three different spacial
points, yet here was Ming doing it from only one.

With a flick of his hand he expanded the image
to contain the neighboring stars of the Taiji, with a blinking mark
on the nearest of them, Polestar North, the white dwarf with the
planet sized cometary body, Ponix. A secondary course line of the
Kinetic curved off in a flight path toward it. He further enlarged
the display to show the upper reaches of the nebula to the four
massive stars of The Trapezium. Then, all of this was overlayed
with an electrical circuit chart outlining the current flows
between the Taiji, the Pole Stars, and the mighty
Trapezium.

She couldn't understand the charts. They were
too alien and complex. They looked something like the lucidical
circuit diagrams she had been familiarized with during her training
at Navcenter. She and all her classmates had failed to really wrap
their heads around the intricate diagrams. Even the professor had
bumbled his way through explaining them, chalking it up to more or
less a machine realm of knowledge that navigators were only
required to have a passing familiarity with. What she was looking
at now was far more complex.

It was also concerning that Ming had the
in-built sophistication to project that much data via holograph
through just his body and with no network channels to draw from. It
raised the troubling question of what more he was capable of doing
in here.

“This is only a rough diagram I've compiled
for the purposes of this display. I will need more data to refine
it to accuracy. You asked what insight I might have into the mind
of Logos, and this the most significant. You see here marks the
imperial projects around Polestar North, the orbit of Ponix and of
the L-5 controlled Fleet base, Beixing Prime also known as “Ore
City.” If this project is allowed to continue, Logos may be able to
reverse the current flow of the circuit, both electrically and
aethereally, through the Taiji. That, in turn, would cause
catastrophic large-scale natural disasters on every planetary body
in this solar system. Thus, I would request that Captain Psyron
change this ship's course to Polestar North, where we may
investigate the operations at Beixing Prime with the intended aim
of sabotaging this project.”

It was now Mei's turn to look blank and
stupid. Ming had just gone from a slapstick imbecile who battled
chairs to proposing a new and epoch mission for the Kinetic, the
scope of which she was left trying to fathom.

M
ystic
Mountain Sages! How could ones as wise as Indulu and Jokhon believe
such mythical nonsense? Uncle told him the legend had been relayed
by his father and Gahre’s grandfather who had heard it from his
father, and he from his, and so on. It went back so far that the
origin was untraceable, but just based on what he had been told he
could figure that it spanned a minimum of 400 years. As if a human
being could live that long! It was utterly, totally
absurd.

But Arath, that
was 
real
 and waiting to be discovered -a half a world away. The
young Gahre had been biding his time in the cornfields the past two
weeks, feigning shame and repentance to Elder Panthus, all the
while waiting for the authorities to let their guard down. This
time of year there was not much work to be done in the fields, the
crops having long since been sown. He was charged only with
monitoring the thousands of free-roaming ducks used for insect
control in the fields and checking the hydration levels and
reporting them to the agriculture office. The ducks, as it turned
out, were very tasty. He converted a shack on the periphery of the
land into an impromptu smokehouse, where he'd smoked and salted
over a dozen, stripped the meat and compressed it into waxcloth.
Such rich fatty travel rations would last him weeks.

Today he was testing some new gear: a harness,
clips and anchors, on the vertical ledges where the flat farmland
began to give way to the rising western mountains. It was a twenty
meter ledge, the most challenging he could locate in the nearby
foothills.