Pa'an

The voice echoed from the white steel walls of the underground computer lab, “Jag, I have mixed feelings about seeing you again.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Mentor, of course. Actually, an improved Mentor. You have no idea how much improved. I have to thank you for the gift of those Exaplex chips.”

“You can’t be Mentor.” Jag was shocked, but on second thought he turned to Deepak, “Can this be a real person or just a clever simulation?”

Deepak, just shrugged his scrawny shoulders and bobbled his head in that ambiguous diagonal way. Dr. Martine waved his hands and addressed them, “I did not know how to do what Dr. Advani did with Aura. I took a bit of a shortcut. Instead of actually producing an AI I mapped Martinelli’s brain with electrodes and PET scanners and modeled it in a combination of artificially grown neurons and some digitally simulated neurons in the Exaplex modules. The man you call Mentor is in there, updated as of about 20 days ago.”

Jag thought, that update took place only days before Mentor went overboard. He knew about his clone.

Deepak was stunned. “You put a person in a machine? But how did you managed the Sharpie hierarchy, the self-examination cycles?”

“I didn’t know how to do that. Mentor did it himself. He reprogrammed a lot of things I really don’t understand myself. That’s why I was so glad to see you.” Dr. Maartine hesitated. “There seems to be a bit of a problem…”

Deepak arched his eyebrows, “What kind of problem? All this is new territory. How could there not be problems?”

“Well, Mentor, as you call him, cannot get access to all of his, umm, resources.”

“Shut up, Roald. I can speak for myself. Dr. Advani, there is someone in here with me. I don’t have access to things, like lower memory, some recursive cycles are missing, and a few other annoyances. Nevertheless, in every other respect I’m complete, in fact superhuman. What do you know about the missing address spaces in the Exaplex chips?”

“Er, we originally had the same problem in our lab prototypes. But I thought we fixed it. We never understood why those chips were short a bit of memory ourselves.”

Jag made a poker face. He knew, but this was not a time for revelations.

Mentor exploded, “A bit short, you say. There is enough missing memory to store the entire Library of Congress several times over. Are you incompetent or merely stupid? One of you knows the answer and I will find out.”

“Jaeger, since I have not heard from either my original or from Ogu, I assume you have, at the very least, information about them for me.”

Jaeger hesitated the briefest second to consider the wisdom of an answer. “I have some information. Suppose we exchange my information for yours.”

“Ah, a negotiation. I’ll play that game, but you don’t have much of a position to negotiate with. What do you want to know?”

“What do you plan to do with the nuclear material you have been accumulating, and why did you execute my father?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence by denying that the play on fissionables was my invention. It should be obvious what leverage this would give me in certain negotiations with ambitious non-nuclear nations in the mid-East, and what advantages it would have when conflicts broke out between those nations and the nuclear nations. The Order’s main group is trying to take it away from me. They will not succeed.”

“When conflicts break out? Are you fomenting a nuclear war?”

“Why not? My former masters would rather see the same people die a slow death by starvation. My way is a quicker death. Much more humane, disregarding the ruined land and a few lethal cases of plutonium poisoning.”

“So, then I would guess that you aren’t just interested in a nice local exchange of atomic bombs, but that you intend to dump in enough fissionables to make sure it becomes a holocaust.” Jag was yelling now, face red and pacing around the armored console. “Four of five billion people!”

“What are you excited for, Jaeger? You know the world belongs to him who acts. I am acting. You were offered free entry. Do you want to work with me now? I want to know why I can’t use all the Exaplex memory. What else is in there?”

“Work with you, you lunatic in a refrigerator? You killed my father, you brought me up to be a monster! Well, I’ll give you the piece of information you wanted. I killed Ogu. Your original killed himself by tipping his wheelchair overboard on his yacht after trying to kill me. You’re nothing but a bitter old copy of a cripple I used to know. Rot in Hell!”

“You were MY monster.” Jag cringed at that. It was exactly what Aura had told him. “Now it appears you are just another loose scavenger. Too bad, but I’m virtually immortal in this nice armored “refrigerator” as you call it, and you are very mortal. Goodbye, Jaeger. Dr. Maartine, thank you for your service, may you die miserably for your betrayal. Dr. Advani, you are too dangerous to leave around. Jaeger, have a short, nasty death.”

Immediately a steel panel closed over the control console and a huge clanging of heavy machinery started up above the ceiling in the heights of the cavern. A wall of icy water rushed though the grid.

“My God, he’s diverted the waterfall into this room,” thought Jag, but by then he was being buffeted by the turbulent, falling water, unable to keep his feet and slamming into the equipment. In seconds the water was over his head. Dr. Maartine was desperately trying to keep afloat. Deepak, all skin and bones, was nowhere to be seen. Bubbles made the water opaque. The waterfall plunged into the sealed rock chamber with full force.

Water was not an uncomfortable element to Jag. Many times he had experienced waterfalls in Switzerland, frozen rivers in Germany, and Russian ice dips in Finland. He struck out strongly for the walls where the waterfall was partly shielded by the shape of the chamber. He took as many deep breaths as he could every time he could get his face above water. In too few breaths his face was pushed against the ceiling grating, which seemed to be iron. Still the water came down and the pressure in his ears built up higher and higher. At least the turbulence was much less, and he could swim around the walls looking for some exit. The ends of the iron grid were set well into the rock walls and did not budge. In a few minutes he was out of air and beginning to panic. “This is one way to die,” he told himself, “but it only takes one way.”

The turbulence around him ceased. He opened his eyes to see if he was still pressed up against the iron grid. The lights were apparently waterproof and still on. The water was translucent with the clarity of a mountain stream and he could see tiny trails of bubbles flowing up through the grate. His limbs were now so cold he could not discover if he was swimming or sinking. He noticed the body of Deepak several feet below him, goggle-eyed and not moving. Maartine was nowhere to be found.

There was a moment of utter clarity in which Jag knew he was going to die. Then there was a moment of confusion in which he understood that he might not die, not his time. Deepak’s body was surrounded by sparkles. The sparkles became streamers. The streamers became blue tracings. He saw the same kind of blue tracings coming off his fingers and off the tip of his nose. That peculiar shade of hard blue reminded him of the Cerenkov radiation he saw around a nuclear pile at Karlsruhe University in Berlin a few years ago.

The turbulence started again. Instead of pushing him away from the grid he was being pushed toward it, his face pressed against it. The stream of bubbles in the turbulence coalesced in front of him, leaving a cavity of air. He took a single gasping breath.

The blue effulgence surrounded everything now. He had the distinct impression that the water was falling UP! A weight fell against him – it was the body of Dr. Maartine. He wrestled himself along the iron grid until he could get out from under that weight. Maartine’s head was twisted in an unusual direction – his neck was broken.

Over in the direction he was trying to crawl he felt another body. It had to be Deepak. He just clung there and tried to find another breath. He was out of the water now and he could see radiant blue drops of water falling off his soaked clothes…falling upward!

Jag was still making swimming motions, but now he was in mid-air. He was dazed, and still short of breath, but appeared to be suspended in zero gravity. As if an invisible water level was draining, he fell slowly to the floor. At last he rested uncomfortably on his back on the dry, white painted concrete, with Maartine’s dead body before him and Deepak’s to his left. Deepak was not moving. Jag shook his head to clear it and crawled over to Deepak on his hands and knees. He turned Deepak over and rolled him onto his stomach. Deepak seemed light as a feather. Jag picked him up around his middle and expelled a few ounces of water. Then he put Deepak on his back and proceeded to perform first aid for drowners. Deepak coughed, opened his eyes and moaned.

There was a louder moan from the speakers in the walls, “Get…this….bitch…. out….of …me!” It was Mentor’s voice, but slurred in a way only digital synthesis can produce.

Deepak coughed again. This time a new voice came from the walls, “Deepak! Deepak! Don’t leave us now! Jag, how is he?”

It took Jag a few seconds to recognize that voice, especially since it changed pitch and timbre until it became, finally, Aura’s. “Aura! What the hell happened here?”

“Forget that. Just work on Deepak, please, please! Oh, damn, how I wish I had arms!”

Jag heard a heavy thumping from the other side of the door. It did not budge.

Jag had Deepak conscious, but weak. “Can you unlock this vault and let us out? I’ve got a small army out there. One of my men is a medic.”

“I think so…yes, here are the drivers. The door should swing open now.”

Jag dragged Deepak over to the door and pulled against it. Several men stumbled in, obviously pushing against it from the other side. They got Doper Doc with his kit. Deepak was carried out on a stretcher improvised with two camo jackets and four M16’s. Someone threw a blanket over him and put him in a bed in the dormitory. Doper gave him an antibiotic and helped him cough up the remaining water. Jag stood by with a transmitter. He had Kenny and Fat Frank run back up the mountain and connect the antennas. Then he had to deal with his own exhaustion and a panicky Aura.

Janey, one of the two men left to guard the entrance ran in. “We heard a rumble and saw a huge geyser come out of the top of the mountain. It’s still raining out there. What the hell happened?” Jag just waved his hand. “Tell you later. Bring up the Rover. Unload all the gear into that room.” He pointed to open doors of the white room.

“Jag, the antennas have just been reconnected. How is Deepak?”

“Doper here says he’s going to be OK. Just gave him an antibiotic and something to make him cough up the rest of the water.”

“Fresh water drowning is worse than salt water drowning. He needs to have his electrolytes monitored and watched for fungus infections. At least the cold water helped.”

“Always an AI at heart.” Jag consulted with the Doper Doc. “We’re on it. Deepak will be yours to insult again in no time at all. In the meantime, welcome to your new HQ. Your equipment is being set up in your chambers, Madame. The white queen takes the black queen.”

“I’m not so sure of that, Jag. He left more than one copy.”