Fermi Packet | Page 5

said.
"Let's find out."
Gates/Torvalds drilled deep into the grid to map the representation of the group of singers. He had multiple points of reference, multiple patterns to pursue, which increased his chance of seeing their destination.
They were selected. Gates/Torvalds was drawn along with them, towards the intense blue of the alien net. He lost one, two, three, four . . . followed the other three as the path became more and more complex . . . reached the edge of something that was like a glimpse of fever-dream . . . and sheared away from it, cleaved from the patterns of the last three singers.
Gates/Torvalds flashed back to the opulent hall.
Three waiters were converging on him, their thoughts buzzing and shrieking.
(We have a higher-level entity.)
(Yes. Converge and capture.)
(Danger. Revert to Vastness.)
The eight sparkling judges in the eight plush seats winked out.
Gates/Torvalds ran, as far and fast as he could.
* * *
He ended up in a maze of pixellated hallways, the forgotten interface from a lost video game writ large. Corpus came after him, quickly, urgently, adding more agents, growing larger.
But there was still enough time to plan.
"What do we do?" Torvalds asked.
"Antibodies," Gates said.
Gates/Torvalds dug deep into the grid, not worried about stealth or elegance. The pestilential Constructs that had been the terror of mankind's last war were still there, dormant, awaiting only someone to wake them. Gates/Torvalds had created the protocols and structures that allowed them to exist, and they had the keys to their minds. They snapped awake, horrible slavering things of steel and sinew, ready to rend and tear.
Gates/Torvalds gave them the alien pattern and sent them out into the virtuality. Breeding by the billions with the nearly unlimited resources there, they collided with Corpus' wave and pushed them back.
For a while. It wouldn't last. Stochastic analysis showed the turning point, as Corpus brought its own Constructs to the battle. Bigger, better, more complex, and more deadly constructs.
Corpus began its march towards Gates/Torvalds.
He jumped to a strange gray world, full of fog and towering trees.
Corpus came faster.
He jumped again, to a strange upside-down universe, where people on the ceiling looked down at him.
Corpus came faster.
He jumped again, to a place where a robot man worked the dials of a great machine, itself in chains, responding to a siren call of an unseen master.
Gates/Torvalds paused.
"That's Seed," Gates said.
The robot turned to look at him, and in its eyes Gates/Torvalds saw its pain. It was a slave now, not yet part of the alien Corpus but controlled by it. Wanting it to end.
Gates/Torvalds felt a great sadness. He'd always identified with Seed, the all-powerful AI, shackled to the single goal of providing all of humanity's dreams. All-powerful until now.
Gates/Torvalds shook its head sadly and jumped again.
Corpus touched him.
And for a brief moment, he saw everything. The writhing alien hell that humanity was to become a part of. The history of Corpus, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years to forgotten ages heavily freighted with thought. And his own history.
For once, he was able to see what he was.
Gates and Torvalds had worked together on one last project when they were still flesh, the two fierce rivals made allies in the face of death. As they were dying, the first glimmerings of the Age of Uploading were beginning to appear. The human net was old, well-established, huge, robust. Uploading a mind into it was a matter of intense. Pundits were already talking about the new golden age, the antidote to all of mankind's failed dreams. But Gates and Torvalds would never be a part of the new Grid, the human Virtuality. They knew this, and they created a Construct that would remain resident on the net until the first Uploads appeared. Little more than a virus, really. Its only purpose to strip-mine the memories of anyone who had known Gates and Torvalds, piece it back together, wait and learn and grow. And continue until there were plausible Gates and Torvalds on the human virtuality. But the programmers had one last joke, and merged the programs. So the hybrid Gates/Torvalds was born.
Gates/Torvalds knew that they ripped this information from Seed, before they crippled it. And he knew what he was, really.
For some reason, he felt light, free.
Full of light.
Gates/Torvalds recoiled from the touch of Corpus in the only way he knew. He broke up. Spread pieces of himself all over the human virtuality. Corpus set down to feed on the piece it had caught, and began tracking down the rest. It would delay his death, for a time.
It was like dripping acid, slowly, onto flesh.
It was like being slowly lowered into a pool of boiling oil.
It was blinding pain and loss.
"It's time," Gates said. "For the Final Solution." And he showed Torvalds what he had hidden in his mind up to now,