The Black Garden: Chapter 28

Once Teams 1 and 2 were gone, it was just me and Hura. The Earthship had been sterilized of our presence, left clean but abandoned. I ran over my final loadout while Hura waited for some confirmatory orbital data from our joint nexus. Before they had packed up the big quantum lockers, the Roaches’ logistics team had sent me a whole bunch of goodies.

First up was a set of ‘Coyote’ model c-shell armor. It was much lighter more flexible than anything an Abyssal Marine would wear. It meant sacrificing some of my z-suit ultra-mobility for better ballistic protection, and after getting shot in the ass multiple times within a two-week period, I was all about that. I also got more robust adaptive stealth, better quick-hacking features, better resistance TO hacks, and self-contained life-support. I was going to need that for what we had planned.

Weapons were next. I always relied on Tsariel’s manifolds and the Long Hunt first, but in the event of quantum field disruption, the Coyote had a quick-draw sheathe for a mono-edge katana I was also pretty good with. My firearm was a Prism-CCB7, CEIDR’s standard close-quarters coil-launcher, and three hundred and thirty rounds of mixed anti-armor and anti-demon ammo. The gun weighed hardly anything, was completely silent other than a ‘click’ and the sound of the ammo itself, and had very little recoil. It still occasionally seemed too good to be true, even against the backdrop of, you know, casual twenty-minute inter-dimensional space travel. Gun purists didn’t like the coil launchers because they kind of looked and felt like toys. I loved them, for that exact reason. Annoying gun purists, not the ‘looking like a toy’ part.

Next up were grenades, all various kinds of disruption chaff, and four drones the size of houseflies. They were, in fact, called BlackFly recon drones. I also had a mysterious, featureless matte grey box called a firekey, and a Tarantula, a different kind of recon drone about the size of my palm. Those all went onto the belt, along with the ouchy pouchy - medical supplies - and ration packs of energy gels. There was also one pouch containing four specialized energy bars. I had helped design those bars, back in my Environmental Services days. The things were mostly nuts and oil: 750 calories per hundred grams, about as dense as we could make them without rendering them inedible. They were a miracle of food engineering, but there had been nothing we could do to make them taste good. We called them No-Go Bars, NGBs for short: one bar, zero bowel movements. They were somehow both greasy AND dry and were thirst-provoking as fuck. You needed to drink about half a liter of water per bar to avoid mummifying yourself, but if you were a Biomancer doing a lot of magic, they were basically spare fuel tanks. I usually preferred the less calorically dense, but hydrating energy gels.

The last item of significance on the list was not physical. When I was fully rigged up, c-shell and all, I perched delicately on the edge of one of the earthship’s flowing sculpted benches and relaxed into the padded cradle of armor. Closing my eyes, I connected to the more secretive parts of the Noosphere.

The reality around me withdrew, virtual reality taking its place as my consciousness projected into a great cathedral-like, bell-shaped room. Arcs of dark blue stone soared overhead. There were no doors, only massive stained-glass windows on three sides, each one depicting symbolic, human-accessible depictions of the Angels of the Crown: the three most powerful of the angels known to the Confluence. Metatron was depicted as a Biblical Throne, all fire and eyes and whirling wheels against a prismatic background of brilliant colors. To the right, Sandalphon was rendered as a tall, handsome youth with a mane of reddish-brown hair, his wings each made of hundreds of interlinked hands, each grasping some kind of tool used to create or divide things: hammers, shears, pens. His face was lifted, eyes closed, while his hand-hands - the ones at the end of his arms - were empty, cupped in front of him as they poured water to the base of the window. Niphalriel was to Metatron’s left: a slim, hooded figure, his face concealed in darkness. His wings were also made of hands, all empty, all poised in graceful, arcane positions. The Angel of Admonition clutched a heavy leather-bound tome to his chest with one arm, the other hand raised in the Horned Sign: thumb, forefinger and little finger raised. Unlike Sandalphon, his face was tilted down, but the blank void under the angel’s hood seemed to stare directly at and through you.

SPECTRE was waiting for me, having taken the image of its preferred avatar: a slender blue-pointed Siamese cat with startling white eyes similar to the Commander’s. The cat sat neatly within the confines of a complicated arcane circle that hurt to look at. The design writhed in all three dimensions, and probably in dimensions I couldn’t directly perceive.

“Operator Seung. Operator Tsariel.” The A.I’s voice, perfectly gender-neutral, thrummed close to my ear and from all the walls simultaneously. “Thank you for your prompt visitation.”

“No worries.” I was always wary when interacting with the Confluence’s ASIs. Artificial Intelligence was endemic throughout the entire Confluence - every Nexus and working group, every community, every squad relied heavily on machine intelligence: the Noosphere, A.I assistants, and especially the ConsenSys system. But none of those A.Is were self-aware, conscious agents. Their awareness was completely contextual on the activities they were facilitating. SPECTRE, ALETHIA, SEER... they were something else. The Noosphere’s Palae’an ASI, the one humans called ALETHIA, had guided the Confluence for over five hundred years. SPECTRE was barely two decades old, an infant by ASI standards. Even so, there was something eldritch about it.

“Here.” SPECTER blinked its ghostly eyes, and a pair of writhing, violently red centipedes manifested in the air ahead of me. Entwined, the semi-transparent holograms spiraled like a helix around one another. “This is the visual manifestation of the attack program we are currently uploading into your neural lacewear. They are, of course, top secret. Your presence was required so that we may discreetly encrypted in such a way that not even you will know where they are stored, in the event of enemy capture.”

“Sure.” It was weird, being able to fold my arms across my chest in a virtual space and feel the brush of my z-suit - there was no armor in here - against the warmth of my torso. “How do I use them?”

“Comprehensive instructions are also being uploaded into a memory-accessible location,” SPECTER replied. “But the heuristic explanation is simple enough. You will insert your c-shell’s manual quick-hacking port into your equipped Firekey module. The module will ping Tsariel, who will upload her secure key. You will then connect the live module to any available access terminal within the hyperloop’s control network, and the module will draw Centipede from your neural lace and upload it into the system. The Firekey will act as a breaknode to prevent network adminstrators from locating your position.”

“Any tips in case something happens to the Firekey?” I asked. “Quantum field disruptors, loss, anything like that?”

The cat absently flipped its tail, the tip curling into a question mark over its head. “The Tarantula can be used as a substitute sacrificial node in an emergency. It is not as secure, but it will do in a pinch.”

“Got it.”

A few seconds passed, and the circle around the cat flared, the patterns changing and shifting to wheel in the other direction. The centipedes disappeared.

“The upload is complete. Good luck, hunters,” SPECTER said. “We are deeply apologetic for what you endured at the 'hands' of the Violator.”

“It’s fine. I knew what I was signing up for. ” I said. “We’re all adapting and overcoming, even super-intelligences such as yourself. But while I’ve got you: what does your working group make of this?”

SPECTER didn’t even have to skip a beat to consult the other ASis, ask what it was and was not allowed to say, and then make its decision. There was no human-perceivable latency between their comms.

“We have concluded that the Abyss is deploying its own artificial intelligence,” the cat said. “There is some form of parallel to our baryonic technological developments within anti-baryonic unreality. They may not be ‘technological’ as we comprehend. Regardless, they mirror our own level of advancement.”

I winced. “I was worried about something like that.”

“We believe they are a new development, relatively speaking, and these intelligences are likely informing and directing the actions of self-aware Bohu-class entities in an organized fashion. We are as-yet unsure as to why there has been a sudden evolution in their tactics. We are modeling various scenarios as we speak. The unfolding situation on Ideni is, perhaps, a similar modeling scenario for our opposition.”

My eyes widened. “Ah. Well, thank you for the info. I assume that’s classified information.”

“Heavily. It will be encrypted by your angel when you leave the mind palace. You may, however, discuss it discreetly with Operator Hura,” SPECTER replied. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” I nodded.

The virtual environment wobbled, then faded back into the darkness of my eyelids. I opened my eyes inside of the Coyote, which immediately synced back into my wetwear so that I was no longer inside the armor looking through the visor from a small distance, but using the visor in FPS mode, as if my eyes were unobstructed by the helmet.

“Phew.” I blinked a couple of times. My head didn’t feel any different than before, but the programs were embedded through the neural cybernetics now. I had a suspicion SPECTER might have linked them into my lower leg prosthetics, somehow... but speculation was above my clearance level. I un-coffined the c-shell, and went to join Hura where he waited in the garden,  meditating in the sliver of sunlight that penetrated the towering trees.

“Do you have the worms?” he asked, not turning around.

“Sure do,” I said. “Have to admit, I’m this kind of worm isn’t installed rectally. Rest in peace, Francis.”

“A small mercy.” Hura rose to his feet, though his form was less defined than usual, the lines of his figure blurred and indistinct. “Come to us. We will bear you to the insertion site.”

This was far from my first time traveling via Khem Express, but it was one of the few times where the Khem unfolded out like a starfish, their mass spreading out into a net of blue-black filaments that wrapped around me as I stepped up. Hura positioned my limbs forward as he picked me up and encauled me. Suddenly, I was hyper-conscious of the armor’s air filtration units rasping inside of my helmet. The life support air kicked in for a couple moments before he plugged himself into the vent ports and began to respirate for the suit.

“This is... cozy.” There was no light at all within Hura’s mass. The suit read the compressive force of his body as it flexed around the armor. “We... I mean, I could just ride on the outside, you know.”

“We will not be ridden like a horse.” The stiff tone was back in Hura’s voice as he spoke via private channel.

I couldn’t argue with that. I preferred to be ridden in other ways besides ‘like a horse’ as well.