The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [84]
There were four aliens now, then five…and they kept on coming.
They seemed to be popping out of nowhere — but that too was a necessary fiction. Even if the AI were trying its damnedest to show me the truth, the most it could do was register presence as soon as it became detectable. If the alien ships — or could they possibly be creatures? — really were popping out of some kind of hyperspace, this was all that the AI could show me.
If, on the other hand, the aliens were merely coming to the attention of Child of Fortune’s sensors, having moved unobtrusively by perfectly orthodox means to where they were first apprehended, all the AI could show me was what it was showing me. There was no way to determine where they were actually coming from, or how they were avoiding detection until they became manifest.
The aliens could certainly move. I had no idea how fast we were going, but I figured that we had to be accelerating at one gee or more. We were already way past the velocity at which we could make sharp turns, no matter how expert our cocoons might be at preventing momentum from crushing us to pulp — but the attackers didn’t seem to be laboring under that kind of inconvenience. They were hurling themselves all over the sky, like icons in a combat game.
It was all absurd, and plainly so.
It was absurd to suppose that a fleet of alien space fighters was bursting out of some kind of space warp. It was absurd to suppose that they were shooting at us, and hitting us, without actually smashing us into little bits of molten slag. It was absurd to suppose that aliens, or anybody else, would go to such lengths merely to harass or destroy a man whose messianic status was entirely a matter of human estimation. Or me. Or even Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.
But melodrama has its own attractions, its own button-pushing power over those emotions that even the cleverest IT can’t muffle.
It’s not just us, I thought, as more squiddy things popped into existence, swarming across the whole vast starfield. It’s the whole damn system. We just happened to be out here. They’re invading the whole solar system. They’re going to annihilate the entire population. It’s finally happened. After a thousand years of cultivating a false sense of security, it’s finally happened, in the very same week that I finally get out of jail.
It was the last — and, admittedly, least — improbability that derailed the train of thought.
It’s an illusion, I told myself. It isn’t even a good illusion. It’s a practical joke. Someone’s playing with me, treating me with contempt. Niamh Horne’s playing me for a sucker, and she’s playing Adam Zimmerman too. But I don’t believe it, and neither will he, if he’s got any sense.
I thought I owed it to myself not to be taken in. I owed it to myself as a man of the twenty-second century and a designer of virtual experiences not to be a gullible fool. Adam Zimmerman had grown up in the twentieth century, when TV was flat, and came in a box. If all of this had been set up to fool someone, he was the one, and he was the one on whom it might just work — but I had higher standards.
It’s all fake, I told myself, sternly. That much is definite.
The hope that it was all an illusion, all a third-rate VE space opera, was further encouraged by the fact that I couldn’t feel any effects of the shots that were supposedly striking home against the hull of the Titanian ship.
I suspected that I ought not to read too much into that