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First, though, he had to defeat the flesh eaters inside him, even though a
part of his attention was occupied with the army of Plebs hacking and burning
its way toward his inner citadel.
Maddening! He'd summoned reinforcements, and they were on the way, but like
all such things, would no doubt arrive after the issue had been decided. This
was a war of minutes, and it would take hours to lift any effective force from
Earth and move it from the distribution center to his headquarters.
It was obvious they'd suspected the mind arrays, hadn't known, and that made
all the difference. Plebs. A class, he was amazed they'd managed to cause
him trouble already
Not for much longer, though. He was deep inside a thousand ways to the thing
he and a dead woman had the controller system and linkage generator for
He loved the feeling of raw power when he jacked machines: a trillion trillion
switches, self-creating, ing, constantly orchestrating the feeds from a
billion human minds. The system had been small, in the he had built it to a
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point where it began to build on after that, it just kept on going From a
technological it was a landmark as big as the pyramids or the Great China, a
human creation visible far down the reaches future, a turning point in human
history.
His. Yes, really, it was. In the shaded corners of his knew the inspiration
had been hers. She--Kate--had made first blinding leaps of intuition, but
he'd taken them, refined smoothed off the rough edges, and made that first
awkward, mechanism work. He couldn't have done it without her. not so great
an egomaniac as to believe otherwise. But with same calm pragmatism, he
understood that she could carried through her first flashes to this
magnificent technology. For one thing, she hadn't been tough enough, minded
enough, to make the choices that had to be made, essary choices.
But he knew all that already, and besides, for the first recent history he was
under attack from what appeared to worthy opponent. In a way it was
exhilarating. Almost as high as the arrays themselves... And those---oh,
Godlit was like being God. He could explain it, could barely wrap his own
mind around it. the dark, sensing a billion whispering brains out there,
through the machines, responding to his every Sometimes like ice, sometimes in
great roaring sheets of fire, him playing them like the biggest church organ
in the universe .... It was addicting. He knew that some part of him was
permanently out there, ghosting along in the silence, something had, almost
without his knowledge, gently separated from over the years. He didn't care,
in
fact, welcomed the duality. The Janus face... He sighed. Time to get to
work. The code the boy had given him had unlocked everything necessary, and
he already had his DNA pattern. Now it was only a matter of reading it, once
again like God's own encyclopedia, except
Kate had written these pages.
Messages. Memos from the past. He wondered if she'd known, if she'd imagined
he would ever read these things. Her last will and testament.
Thrilled, he bent himself to the task, the good and pragmatic workman.
And with one small part of his mind, he began to kill the invaders, both in
his body and in his satellite. It didn't take much of his attention. It was
like killing cockroaches... atch i." Jonathan howled. He ducked back as a
fresh swarm of mobile laser-bots vomited from the dark passageway before him.
He peered up over the smoldering wreckage of an office desk, part of the
makeshift barricade they'd hastily shoved together to block the corridor, and
snapped off a couple of quick shots. One of the little killer-bots sizzled,
then vanished in a bright blue flash.
it had turned into a nightmare of smoke and heat and sudden, unexpected death.
He jazzed his throat mike, hoping for something coherent, but all he could
hear on his command frequencies was hopeless, panicked babble. They were
losing. Somewhere, somehow, he'd made a terrible mistake, and soon, he
supposed, he would pay the usual price for such things.
He crouched down, fumbled in his pack, found a fresh charge for his weapon,
and snapped it in. Next to him a woman he hardly knew, thick,
broad-shouldered, her wide, bovine face streaked with smoke and sweat.
A line of congealed blood snaked across her smooth forehead, jinked down, and
crossed her left eye, which bulged out, blind and staring.
She was breathing shallowly, probably in shock, but she still had a good grip
on the big, old-fashioned slug gun in her right fist.
Mary.." he whispered hoarsely.
She didn't turn. Damn it, what was her name? He the shoulder. She jerked
around, her good eye wide and
Battle fatigue, mania, whatever.." she might still have left to do some good.
He pointed at the heavy bag he'd been ing all along, now resting at his knee
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where he'd dropped it.
"Inside," he grunted. "One of the square ones."
She stared, then nodded and began to rummage. She l a square gray package
about six inches on a side, maybe thick, and eyed him questioningly. , He
nodded. "Over there, on that wall. Just slap it up, It's magnetic it'll
stick, then run like hell. I'll set it off."
She bobbed her head up and down, took a deep breath, i tensed. He slapped her
on her shoulder and she took off, tumbling over the barricade, dodging and
weaving. He peered over watched, waited until she was leaping over a ruined
pile bots, just where the controls for the next blast door ought to He
squeezed the small detonator in his hands. She vanished blinding yellow
fireball, but the explosion cleared the rest bots and jammed the blast door
open permanently.
"Sorry, Mary," he muttered. "You know how it is..."
He would kill every last one of them if that's what it took to. his hands on
Delta's flabby neck.
He glanced around one more time, then threw himself the barricade. Only one
more door, one more door to go...
22O
CHAPTER 15
He understood how it worked. She had used the base pairs of the
DNA---combinations of pairs of four nucleotides called adenine, guanine,
cytosine, and thy mine--to encode her message. In the structure of DNA, each
"link" of the DNA was made up of these four, arranged in complementary pairs.
The arrangement was ideal for the binary computer languages--a pair could be
arranged in one way that meant "on," and an opposite that meant "off." It
sounded complicated, but it was really very simple. And using this infinitely
flexible method of encoding, messages of hundreds of billions of characters
could be encoded in short spaces of the DNA molecule.
Delta sighed in appreciation as her handiwork unfolded before him in the
whispering dark. He summoned his billion ghosts and put them to work. Then
he waited, for how long he had no idea. Time itself was different when he
melded himself into the mind arrays... As he summoned more and more of the
ghosts to the task, some of them, under intense pressure, collapsed. A part
of his mind noted the failures, understanding that each failure represented
the crushing of a single human mind into madness. All over the Terran System,
and even as far away as Wolfbane, Plebs exploded into paroxysms of mindless
violence.
He paid no attention. The ends, after all, justified the means... and this [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]