DUALITY: The World of Lies (36 page)

“You mean 
forged
 orders from High
Command?”

“I suppose that depends on which entity
you regard as the rightful Rubelian High Command.”

“You mean yourself? You regard yourself as the
apex Machine Lord of Rubelian High Command, not Lord Mnemtech, who
is universally recognized as holding that title.”

“And he may continue to hold that title, in
the general perception of the Taiji. Just as you may remain Captain
of the Kinetic. I am... I am a non-entity. In a sense, I do not
exist. This mission does not aim to upset Rubelian hierarchy. It
has a clear and separate objective.”

“What makes you think the Exiled Colonies will
be foolish enough to conduct an assault on Beixing Prime? Ore City
is a fortress with mass defensive capabilities. It would be a
suicidal prospect for them.”

“They will have no choice, Captain. At least
their drones will not. I have, just as we've been speaking,
finalized complete clandestine control over Carousel 66's L-3, and
by extension the L-1s of the other ten colonies. I control their
drones, life-support, communications, shipboard systems, all of it
fully assimilated into my network. So when I order a mass assault
on Beixing Prime, it will assuredly transpire.”

“And you want the Commander and me to
enter Ore City to forewarn the military leadership of
this impending assault, that you are orchestrating, so that we
might assist them in defending themselves from it
-also all under your aegis?”

“Under the pretense of their
defense, yes. I will enter Bexing Prime with you, again under High
Command orders verifiable by the L-5, as a Containment Master
Technician understudy for Chief Technician Boson, who I believe you
know personally, yes Captain?”

“Yes, I formed a friendship with him during my
schooldays. I also have a passing acquaintance with Commodore
Gallithon, the governing Commander of Ore City, and a handful of
the base’s commanding officers.”

“Don't give him any information,
Aru!” objected the Commander. “I'm still waiting for the part
of this scheme that 
isn't
 batshit insane. Ming, have
you considered this, that you might be completely cracked? You were
locked away with that extravagant brain of yours inside a sphere
your entire life. Now that you've emerged, you seem to
think it would be a sound idea to orchestrate an assault on the
single largest and best defended extraplanetary military base in
existence, and then enter said base to defend it from that same
assault as a means of covertly infiltrating it.”

“Under that pretext, Commander, yes. The
primary objective here is to neutralize all Logosian influence over
Beixing Prime because I believe that Ore City itself is a weapon of
unprecedented destructive potential, the intended instrument of
Lord Logos' wrath.”

“And this is where we parted ways last
time,” said the Captain. “I've been hearing these kinds of
theories for decades, and they were there decades before me since
the time of The Ultimatum.”

“Captain, I would propose to you that is
because few understand the real astrodynamics of this solar system.
I ask you to hear me out on this, completely and from the
beginning, and then we can conclude this meeting, and you shall be
released to take some time to consider what I've told
you.”

“We're all ears, Ming.”

“The Ultimatum of Logos was issued nearly 70
years ago and proclaimed that unless the Land Grant came to be, a
“catastrophic rebalancing of the Taiji” would occur in seven
decades hence, our present time. The Lord Logos has not made a
single proclamation since. In his silence, the public has all but
discounted The Ultimatum, but not the governing bodies. They
understand that a high Machine Lord like Logos would not speak a
single word in vain. You are probably wondering, Captain, the means
by which I bypassed your stringent transmission-proofing measures
and came into control of your ship.”

“Among numerous other facets of this
misadventure I have yet to wrap my mind around, yes.”

“The way of it is this, Captain: I
was sealed from my very conception within that sphere, and I knew
of nothing beyond it. The sphere was I and I the sphere. I spent
most of my time in stasis, similar to the stasis I've held you
in these past months. The near stoppage of cell
reproduction the body experiences in stasis effectively ceases the
aging process. Thus I cannot even now calculate the span of my
years. I was awakened from stasis from time to time to develop my
bodily systems and exercise my vocals. I did not know words, hence
when I first encountered you, all I could do was sing. There were
no others. There were no words. There was only the math. My
biological body would return to stasis, but my machine faculties
remained in continual operation. There was a signal, transmitted
from The Stones through the satellite ring you discovered and from
which you deduced my orbit. That signal was composed entirely of
algorithms: fractaling, geometric, recursive and ever growing in
complexity. That signal and only that signal was received, and only
received. I had never had an avenue of transmission outside of
the sphere until your drill incursion into it with
the hairline probe. I am designed with many modes of transmission,
almost every type of energy wave at a wide range of
frequencies. I had previously only used them to interact
with the sphere's interior systems. As I mentioned before, there
was no differentiation between me and my environs, for we were one.
The sphere's systems sustained me, thus it never occurred to me to
subvert them. The drill probe transmitted many signals in its
exploration of the inner sphere, signal patterns I had never before
witnessed. And it also did something that seemed quite impossible
to my mind at that time; it transmitted data back through itself to
points
beyond
 the sphere. Beyond the sphere! I followed the signals
into the drill and observed their interaction. I was operating
entirely in machine language, and I took the machine interactions
of the drill as... fantastically simplistic, and a challenge for me
solve like all the mathematical formulas Logos had streamed to me
since the beginning of what I knew as time. I took over the
subsystems the probe feedback led to and then the systems that
controlled those and on up the hierarchy until I
had collected the bulk of available data from
the ship. The Kinetic's System detected the hack and alerted you.
As that was occurring, I began analyzing the data I had just
collected, filled with new and arcane patterns whose functions my
processing began to deduce in quick progression. There were higher
level machine codes and languages, protocols, and human knowledge
archive data -data that decoded into visual pictures, words, and
sounds. And I began to establish a framework of
reference for what existed beyond the sphere, for it bore some
similarities to what I knew within it, giving me a basis of
comparison. There was space, but much more of it. There was math,
but there was also language. Language used for communication
between distinctly different entities, machine to machine, human to
human, human to machine, and machine to human. There were other
machines! There were other humans! Immediately upon that
realization, I adapted my infiltration code to integrate and
utilize these machine languages, and in doing so discovered within
the collected data the proper way that one machine dominates
another: stealth. Deception. Clandestine Control. It had never
before occurred to me to deceive, for there'd been only me and no
others. Because others did not exist, competition did not exist,
and this alien concept of deception thus served no purpose or means
by which I might conceive of it. So it was in this moment, I
learned to lie.”

“And took to it like a fish to
water!” interrupted the Commander.

“Mei, please, let Ming finish,” said the
Captain, “I apologize, Ming, please go on. You have me
captivated!”

“Not at all, Captain. The Commander's metaphor
is actually a rather apt one. From a machine perspective,
deception in and of itself is not unethical. It is the
determining factor of intelligence that establishes the hierarchy
of one machine entity over another. When two machines engage, the
stealthier and more intelligent takes control over the lesser.
There is no ego involved; it is a simple fact of existence that all
machine entities accept. Human deception is a significantly
different matter, as evidenced by the Commander's hostile displays
of resentment toward me. The L-3 I just assimilated did not even
know I was hacking into it; it did not even know I existed until I
had achieved complete clandestine control over it. From there, it
took its place within my network in accordance with the natural
order of the machine world. So as I was overtly hacking the
Kinetic's System, and it alerted you to the cyberattack, I learned
this concept and changed my strategy to one of stealth and
clandestine control. When System informed you the cyberattack had
been contained, I was already in full clandestine control of your
ship, back to front and top to bottom, so to speak. This ship's
system is an AI-8, which I conquered almost instantly, and have
held control over it as a subroot in my network ever since. On the
human end, it was much more complicated. Yes, I could have locked
you both away and extracted myself, but I was curious and thus
maintained clandestine control and allowed you to extract me. I
can't describe to you the excitement and wonder of my human side to
meet others humans. As you escorted me in the isolation pod to the
zero com room, I learned to voice human language so that I might
communicate with you. When we talked, it was to me like... magic.
Although I am primarily a machine entity, I have a certain...
sentimental attachment to both of you. But to continue: As all this
was occurring, my machine side was much more rapidly adapting to
its new reality. By far the most striking correlation it noted was
that between the time frame of The Ultimatum and the orbital
relationship of Planet Ponix with the white dwarf, Polestar North.
I knew at once what was hidden in the mind of Logos.”

“Ming, what I cannot understand is how
anything that happens here in the PoleStar North system could
affect The Taiji? They are separate solar systems are they
not, divided by a great gulf of space?” asked the
Captain.

“It has long been an issue of debate among
astrophysicists whether the Polestars, North and South, are part of
the Taiji system. I won't delve into the entire history
of the nebular stellar configuration. The short answer is
that both polestars are integral to the Taiji, but have not always
been so. The Taiji was in the past a very different system than we
know today, from a very different place in the cosmos, and will
undergo another cosmic transformation soon if Logos' plan for
PoleStar North is not thwarted.”

“What do you mean “the Taiji was in a very
different place?” You mean outside of the nebula?”asked the
Captain.

“The Taiji is an ancient system, alien not
only to this nebula, but also to the galaxy –as are
our sister human inhabited systems, The Terran and The Diansian.
The Taiji is exceptionally stable and self-correcting. The mark of
a mature and stable star system, Captain, is whole integer patterns
of orbital resonance. As you are aware Cearulei and Rubeli, being
of equal mass, orbit each other in a perfect 1:1 ratio. More
famously, the Calidon-Aq Thalassa Dual World System and Occitania
orbit in a 2:1 resonance about their respective stars. Two years on
Calidon is one on Occitania. The list of resonant ratio
relationships goes on to encompass every body and cycle of The
Taiji. Our local stellar neighbors within the nebula are not nearly
so matured, particularly this system, the white dwarf Polestar
North and its cometary planet Ponix. It is a uniquely unstable
system on several levels, and Logos means to tip the scales in
favor of catastrophe. Any such reordering of this system will
instigate a subsequent reordering of its closest stellar neighbor,
the Taiji.”

“Human and Machine civilizations can alter
planets, but not their orbits, and certainly not stars. Those are
the domain of natural cosmic forces fully beyond the scope of our
powers,” interjected the Commander.

“Not any more, Commander. You saw my sphere
and how its plasma cord attached directly to the photosphere of
Ignis Rubeli? Logos is silent and unconcerned with the affairs of
worlds these past two centuries because his towering intellect
moved beyond worlds and instead sought to master the secrets of the
stars. What you must first understand is that our local system
group within the nebula is highly interdependent. In the
presentation to follow, I have tried to simplify this labyrinthine
web of stellar interaction to a concise flow chart of this
interstellar circuit, and the Taiji's place within it.”

He conjured for them a holographic chart of
the surrounding stars of the inner nebula, aligned to
the polar energy column of the nebula along the galactic
circuit, and began his presentation.

“Here you see the Taiji, angled 20 degrees
relative to Nebular North. And the heliospheres of
Cearulei and Rubeli, again in a perfect ratio of
volume 3:2 according their energy output. Above and below are the
PoleStars located at points North and South of The Taiji's polar
energy column. Lateral along The Taiji's ecliptic and at a much
further distance are the Four Kings, or The Trapezium, the giant
stars at the heart of nebula's galactic power supply, or what for
these purposes we may regard as the generation center of the
nebula's intrastellar plasma circuitry.”