The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [70]
Less than one kilometre from the anomaly. There was no way to know what to expect on crossing into the fringes of the Godhead’s mind. Ahead the anomaly was vaguely dome-shaped, shifting restlessly, the colours within rippling from purple to green to black to brown, shot through with glittering spikes. In sudden panic, he wondered if the ship sim had programmed the pod to decelerate, just a moment before it did so at the 100-metre mark.
The pod’s forward motion slowed to a walking-pace glide. Within the anomaly the colours had brightened to bright blues and yellows, drawn in from the darker areas, swirling together, forming what looked like an opening. The pod was a short distance away when an alarm went off inside and the small screen winked on to show a boiling cloud of blackness closing in behind. The pod’s thruster kicked in, accelerating it towards the rippling colours of the anomaly, but too late. Even as it entered the reflective ripples, a smothering, deadly, mountainous thing slammed into the pod. Robert managed to cry out for a moment before the weight of an inexhaustible voracity crushed him down into darkness.
JULIA
Yet she did not die.
That strange, attenuated context, provided for her by the poly-mote, the constrained, blazing bright jet that signified the torrents of Talavera’s cruel virtualities, shrank, slowly at first then more quickly. Almost as if it was falling away from her, as if she was flying up through a shining darkness.
Then the sensation, if it could be called that, changed again. There was a bright needle lancing down out of a rushing rainbow river that hurtled into a vast, rectilinear cavern, splaying out in polychromatic cables which in turn branched into countless glittering streamlets. Glossy towers, cubes, domes and pyramids crowded the cavern walls in patterns of clusters, receiving the datastreams that glimmered and shimmered through their opaque interiors. The bright needle stabbed into one particular trench, refracted through a polyhedral lens and struck one of the hundreds of conical dimples, its fierce point building up layer upon layer of detailed symbols and patterns and glyphs and interconnections whose submicrocomplexity had no perceptible end.
Building me, she realised.
Abruptly the bright spear of data winked out and she knew that she had done it. She had escaped from the virtuality prison and from Talavera!
But escaped to where? She knew from her earlier researches that the tiernet was a consensual consequence of the myriads of connections between billions of worlds, orbitals, ships, AIs and commercial entities. Variations in code, protocols and security were considerable, which is why most worlds maintained contact with the tiernet through buffer stations. These were arrays of gatekeeper servers, usually staffed with a combination of actual sentient beings and AIs, and almost always kept in orbit. Before the polymote could have uploaded her it must have found a reasonably secure and receptive address at a buffer station within tiernet reach of the Darien system.
The question was, what was her next step? Her view of her vicinity was in the round, reinforcing her fundamentally non-Human nature. Most of the surrounding conical dimples gave off a pale glow, some brighter than others although none was as bright as her. And in the background was a high, wavering polyphonic tone, like a far-off thousand-strong choir singing some melancholy refrain.
Sight and sound, these were the only sensations that impinged on her awareness. Julia was disembodied, a consciousness severed from the biochemical flows and surges of organic existence, yet there was still a certain curiosity, a need for exploration and explanation. She wanted to move and she did. As her point of view rose from her conical recess a 3D grid of straight lines appeared above, an orthogonal and diagonal framework. As she watched, a small green mote zipped into one of the upper levels and