Paradox

Maria

Date: May 2854

The ship was dark, quiet, nearly devoid of power and completely free of movement or activity. She closed her eyes, and let herself drift, free of gravity and outside force. It was peaceful, soothing, and she sighed as she let all external influence slip out of her mind.

Music? She lifted an eyebrow and some soft sounds began to play. They softened, became as the sound of quiet wind over a flute, small taps on the white keys of a piano, so soft she would never have heard them if there had been any sound in the chamber, but as it was, they filled her entire awareness.

Which was as well, since she created them. She wondered if the air was actually vibrating or if the music was only in her own mind. Would an observer be able to hear anything?

It didn't matter: the only other human for thousands of light years was the dreamer, unaware of the universe around her, as she had been for several years already.

She turned her attention to the aft bulkhead, several meters beyond which was the cryochamber. As she had done many times before, she slipped into the cryochamber (not moving physically from her location, but shifting her awareness) and watched the dreamer.

She watched the fine traceries of thought growing treelike from the dreamer's mind, expanding, running tendrils of unknown energies into the universe around her. She could not read them, unless she wanted to dig deeper into the other woman's mind, an intrusion she would not commit. Even if she had had no moral qualms against invading the other's thoughts, she did not know what energies she would be tampering with, and she had known the dangers of tampering with things she did not understand years ago.

So she was content to watch what little she could see. Flashes of thought, of emotion, occasionally images. An image flashed before her and she recognized it from its brief burst. It was the day she had met Eidolon, among the corridors of Fantasma, many years ago...

She turned away, returning to the chamber where she rested, and turned her thoughts outward, to a distant world and an even more distant time...

-----

Date: March 2834

Alone with her thoughts, she raised a hand to the chessboard, contemplating her move. The computer was a tough opponent, but she was beating it across the board this game. A group of knights and bishops staked out a desperate defensive sphere in one corner, all that remained after her decimation of the ranks of pawns and rooks.

She looked down at the cat who was regarding her with skeptical yellow eyes, as if to warn her against the foolish move she was thinking about. She smiled faintly, and the cat made a soft purring growl and tilted its head to one side. She made the move, putting the queen square in the middle of the defensive zone, in one block that was unprotected. The cat twitched its tail in apparent irritation.

The computer flashed the next move on the screen, and she arched an eyebrow. The computer had moved one knight forward, placing her queen in check, and requiring her to make a move to a less advantageous position. It was a trap she should have caught instantly.

Something was distracting her, though. Her thoughts were elsewhere, elsewhen. As she looked upward, past the kilometers of rock over her head, past the sun and stars, she closed her eyes, slipping upward through rock, hydrogen, and vacuum, watching crystal and plasma and atoms slide by, whirling around in spirals as her passage disturbed them.

A world, a ship, a black hole, that did not even exist except in her own mind, and she reached out to join herself with that mind and found out that it was separated by more than time. It wasn't even hers. Another mind, an essence like she had never before encountered, sent an amused reply to her contact, and she rocked backward in her chair. Fragments of rock blasted her and she yelped, feeling the grit cut at her face. She looked down and saw that her queen had detonated, leaving little more than a stone stump glowing red with heat, burning the surface of the board. She was fortunate she had not fully regained her powers, or else the whole sanctum might have gone up.

She looked up, saw a human figure standing at the doorway to the Sanctum. Anger filled her: how dare anyone not a Ghost disturb her here?

The woman smiled faintly, the kind of smile one gets when they know another's thoughts. "Maria," she said.

Maria sent a probe at the other woman, and blinked as it was deftly turned aside. The contact was familiar--

"No," she whispered. "This is impossible-- you cannot be here."

The woman smiled. "We will work out the temporal mechanics later," she said. "And since you already seem to have a pretty good idea of how things work, I don't think we should have to worry."

Maria shook her head, speechless.

The other nodded gravely. "We will meet again." With that, she turned and left Maria with her thoughts.

She knew the woman's name, and she ran a search through the colony records. She was indeed resident, and lived on Level Three in one of the end tunnels.

But no matter how many times she tried to find her over the next few months, she was nowhere to be seen.

-----

Date: November 2843

"Damnit... goddamnit!" Ko'ah cried as he collapsed backward against the Ops wall. "Can't... hold it!" He gasped for air, hyperventilating, trying to catch his breath while crackling energy exploded from his body in all directions, lashing out into the walls and floor before going to ground.

Somewhere on Polynya, Jehrico was having similar difficulties. Ko'ah heard his voice, faintly, as he reported he had lost contact with the solar core. His power had not developed as far just yet, so he was trying to serve as eyes for the Ghosts, as they were putting all their energy into their task.

"Del?"

"Here," came the reply, faint like Jehrico's but mostly because she was distracted. She remained the strongest of them, now that Maria had disappeared. Ko'ah cursed softly. Damn her. How could she leave them at a time like this? "Link me to ground," Del said.

"It'll kill us both," Ko'ah muttered a half-hearted protest, but shrugged. He closed his eyes, stretched his awareness down, down to Mercury's iron core. The planet's intense presence filled his senses, crushing him. He took a deep breath, drew some energy from the core. Later, the removal of heat would trigger quakes on the surface, but since the surface would be destroyed soon it didn't matter anyway.

Black space: Mercury fell away from his eyes as he shot upward, toward the brilliant white light of the sun. His grip still firmly on Mercury's core, he reached out for a dark sunspot. But it wasn't a sunspot, but rather a black shape orbiting just above the star's surface. He touched it.

Impossible energies coursed through him, dissipating in the core, and he gasped with the raw power of it. With the energy came the sensation of Delithita's thoughts running through him for a bare instant, thoughts as chaotic and powerful as the energies they were dealing with.

"Link complete," he thought, and felt Del's instant acknowledgement.

"I'm drawing all light and energy within range," Del told him, and indeed she was. In his mental eye he could see her, a dark shape against the sun, a spinning vortex like a black hole. "Storing it in the core..."

Ko'ah winced as a flow of power shot through him, this time not tinted with anything Delithita. This was pure, raw power, lifeless and brilliant like the sun it came from. Del's contact was still there, though, a comforting presence to his left, above, something, feeling close enough to touch though she was really millions of kilometers away.

He stole a tiny bit of the energy he was transferring and fortified his own resources with it, then turned to Delithita and projected POWER-hi there!-KISS-zap!-hehehe at her. The vortex she was controlling reversed its spin as she whirled.

"What was that for?"

"Luck."

Amusement-wicked glee-annoyance-worry. "If we survive this, you're in for it."

Ko'ah shook his head. "Let's do it. You ready?"

A pause, and her voice became distant as her focus narrowed down to a point. "Ready. Hang on."

Energy--

Ko'ah's consciousness whited out in a blaze of black light.

-----

Date: March 2854

Maria came to full awareness in an instant, as if an electric shock had jolted her. She had been dreaming, she realized, and though the state was a galaxy vaster than it had been before her transformation it was a bare atom compared to the state the dreamer was in.

Her thoughts, her memories-becoming-history and history-becoming-future, were running on a deeper plane than Maria could imagine inhabiting, a plane she would never want to inhabit. She wished she could at least get a taste for the experience, but no matter how she tried it was beyond her. Sometimes, though, the barest fraction of the dreams invaded her own sleep, and she was caught up in a universe not her own.

She busied herself trying to place that sensation she had felt just as she awakened, it worked-we did it-victory-exultation. Delithita's touch, and several others of the Ghosts. Energy, discharge, and a well-deserved egotistical admiration of their own power. Certainly they deserved it, they accomplished--

What?

Maria closed her eyes again, tried to remember the flickering, fading pattern of the dream. It was difficult enough to remember one's own dream.

There was light, a blackness that became light, if only for awhile.

Maria nodded. Ah yes... when Delithita, Ko'ah, and Jehrico jumpstarted the sun, to delay the final collapse and supernova by just a few more weeks...

They had saved themselves, the human population of the Ghost system, even some of the Cybrids, though not deliberately.

Maria knew that they had accomplished something of far greater import, had seen it in a forgotten dream. But what it was was beyond her knowledge. The dream was not her own, and the dreamer kept her secrets...

-----

Date: October 2601

Madrid was a busy place. People everywhere, flitters and larger cargo hovercraft whizzing back and forth across the central plaza. No one knew what the plaza had originally looked like; it had been destroyed utterly during the Devastation six hundred years ago. The new plaza was a sleek, black surface half a kilometer wide, streaked with random pieces of white marble. The plaza housed the main commerce of the city, as it had for three hundred years. The shops were small, so it seemed surprising that this small area generated ten times the revenue as the rest of the city combined. The modernistic towers around the plaza, though, were where the goods were processed. Chains of small trucks could be seen on the outer rims of the plaza, delivering their treasures to the shops where the people would purchase them.

Maria looked across the plaza to the west gate, near to which the European Alliance main surgical center lay. Once upon a time, Prometheus had delivered an address there, on the history of Spain and its projections on what had gone on before the Devastation. While not especially interested in history, Maria had paid attention. One of the greatest pains of any Spaniard, or, similarly, Italian or Englishman, was the loss of centuries of Spanish history. Whatever it was that caused the Devastation, it had torn the heart out of Western Europe, even worse than it had the rest of the world. The Chinese had retained their culture, as had the aboriginal Australians, and by sheer grit and diversity, the Americans. So when the Cybrid offered a resurrected novel by a long-dead Spanish writer, one of the first novelists ever, indeed, she had been stunned, and very grateful for the AI's gift to her people.

She had seen the thing face-to-whatever, right here in the plaza after the address. She had dared to get close enough to actually touch the sleek, black metal casing of the being, and in that contact, she felt something.

She had drawn back, with a terrible sense of unease. While Quixote was all well and interesting, there was more, much more, to this mechanical intelligence than anyone knew.

A sprightly old man in a gray singlet had been in the crowd with her, and he turned to her when she drew back from Prometheus. "Do I know you?" he had asked in a thick American drawl.

Maria had glanced at him, gave him her name. The man seemed to recognize it, for he said, "Ah, the sister... delightful. Come with me if you would, my dear..."

Maria had stared at him for a moment, and something in his eyes told her he was used to being obeyed, and would doubtless give her adequate reason to comply if she balked.

So she had followed him to the surgical center. It was strange, to enter her place of work where she was quite high up the food chain, and be very obviously under the command of another. She took him to her office, and he closed the door behind him and locked it.

What he told her then changed her life forever.

Maria held her small computer pad against her forehead, feeling the irony there. The computer was mechanical, designed for long life, and she was weak, organic flesh that would die out in a tenth of the time the machine would last. But now she would outlive the machine.

It was her sister's suggestion, she had been told later. Maria had never approved of Rosalia's decision to join the military, until she decided that it was indeed a good place for her. Rosalia's commanding presence, her canny diplomacy, and most of all her formidable intelligence and insight, made her well suited for her career as a military officer. Up to middling-high command rank before she was thirty, she now commanded a small fleet of naval vessels on the Mediterranean. Her influence extended even further, and during her last visit to Madrid, she had mentioned a top-secret job in America that would "change the world". And then she had listened to a broadcast that was playing, something about Prometheus chatting it up with the pope, and growled low in her throat. "Blind as bats but they'll learn soon enough," she had muttered.

Her job was apparently as some kind of assassin. Maria had been horrified to learn of this... until she discovered exactly why she had taken the job. Prometheus's minions were arranging "accidents" for some of the most brilliant political and scientific minds on the planet, while simultaneously projecting a tight public-relations mask. Petresun, the old man that approached her, had created the Cybrid and knew what it planned. And he and his allies, who included Rosalia, were trying desperately to fight back without being seen.

Maria rubbed the back of her neck. Her head seemed so heavy, like she had had her cranium stuffed with bricks. She knew it was just a psychological quirk; the porous organomech brain weighed no more than her organic one had. But she felt its weight.

She was going to the spaceport, to meet up with someone who had some data on skewed troop movements in the American Southwest, troop movements that would have to be reorganized. Prometheus, it seemed, was drafting false military orders to divert forces away from certain areas of the planet, and the Brotherhood was doing its best to repair the damage before the Cybrid struck. Maria would relay the contact's information to an officer friend she had in Madrid, who would then send a communiqué to a friend of his in the Phoenix metrozone police force telling him to see to it a riot started in a nearby city, preferably Tucson. That would force the NAPsters to divert some troops back into the area, which would at the very least annoy Prometheus.

This cloak-and-dagger stuff was irritating, but it felt good to be doing something that would help the world on a larger scale. She still maintained her position as the head of neurosurgery at the EASC, but only for six months of the year. The rest of the time she was an agent for the Brotherhood.

She wondered if she would ever get the chance to rest and enjoy her immortality.

Her musings had distracted her long enough to get her to the spaceport, and she automatically showed her ID to get in and purchase the ticket she had reserved a week before. Her mind on a kind of autopilot, she wandered into the vast complex, where shuttles were taking loads of passengers to the ships in orbit, there to the other side of the planet, or to Luna, or even to the new colonies on Mars and Venus. As she stood waiting for her shuttle to arrive, she looked up at the vast, slotted dome over the complex, feeling a strange disquiet.

Prometheus would strike soon, she knew. And then they would see if their preparations paid off. If not, she would likely be dead within a year, along with the rest of the human race. Or, if not dead, hooked up to a Cybrid processing network like a microchip, robbed of volition. It was not a prospect she cared to think about, but it wasn't what was bothering her.

She didn't know what was bothering her. She had the strangest sensation that she was being watched.

She shook her head. She was in the Brotherhood. She probably was.

-----

Date: March 2854

Maria opened her eyes. Memories, so vivid when dreaming, so fleeting otherwise. Just awakening, she could remember every detail of the Madrid spaceport, down to the numbers on the shuttles whizzing by, down to the precise time she boarded her shuttle to Mi Ami. And she remembered vividly the sensation she had felt, of being watched.

Now, at least, she knew where the sensation came from, and a three hundred year-old question was at last answered. She was being watched right now, inasmuch as "now" was relevant anyway. She looked upward toward the night-dimmed light panel that provided the only illumination other than the distant stars. "It has been interesting, has it not?" she said to the ceiling. "And now I know."

The only response was the sensation of observation vanishing. She smiled thinly. She had made her point, and crossed that boundary. No longer would she be watched. She would be sure to remember, in the long, long years to come.

Fully awake now, she sat up in bed, wondering why she even bothered to sleep, much less to sleep in human form, much less in a bed. Perhaps the two-hundred-odd years she had been fully human had simply carved the habit into her being. Perhaps she missed what she had lost and was now trying to recapture what she could. Perhaps... and there she ran out of thoughts, as the ship's main reactor powered up for another burst.

She gazed out the window to the clouds of red and gold stars of the galactic core. It was a beauty no human had ever before observed. Not even the other Ghosts, searching futilely for her at this point, had reached these depths of the galaxy, where the stars were ancient and the worlds were barren of life, where they existed at all. A few gas giants here and there. Gas clouds. But few solid worlds. It would take a long time to reach that explosion of new stars near the core that was her destination.

It didn't have to take long, of course. She could toss the ship the entire twenty-thousand-light years into the central core in minutes. She didn't need to do little hundred-light-year jumps through the vast void.

But she did anyway, so she-- and the dreamer who was even now lost in another universe, her body but not her mind frozen in cryosleep-- would have the time. The time to remember, to think, and to dream.

She stared at a point near the surface of the local star. Gases began to spiral out of the star's atmosphere, into space, spinning around and collapsing into a black point a million kilometers away from the surface. The ship, traveling near light speed, zipped past the star with barely a dent in its hyperbolic orbit, and flew straight into the wormhole's maw.

Light-flash-stars-shift-where are we now?

She closed her eyes and let the wormhole behind her collapse into a normal black hole, and stared out the window at the stars nearby. Similar to the region she had just left, perhaps a few more bright yellow stars, a few less nebulae nearby. Space, in all its glory, silent, vast, lonely.

She wished she had someone to talk to on this journey, someone who could answer back, at least. The dreamer was lost in her dreams, and there was no way to contact anyone else, not now. She would be alone for quite some time still, so for the hundredth time she suppressed her line of thought and turned her attention elsewhere.

The Ghosts were still searching, far, far behind in the inner Sagittarius Arm, scouring the Carinae Nebula. It would be a long time before they finally decided she was nowhere nearby, before one of them discovered the trail she had left behind. Until then, they would search as best they could as they rebuilt their world-- again, with the help of the Carina Zone Guard, Tarazedi Alliance Canopus Tetrax, Imperial Knights and Terran Defense Force survivors and so forth, and the hindrance of the Paradigm Sect Cybrids, the Liberated Elite, and the other forces that would eventually rise up yet again and challenge the CZG-Ghosts leadership.

Strife and chaos seemed to follow the Ghosts everywhere. Maria half-wished she could be back in the fray, helping out as best she could. The other half of her lay back down in the bed with a slow sigh, and slowly drifted away among the silent and peaceful stars.

-----

Date: December 2857

"Your universe is done," Maria noted as Eidolon put down her pen and set the book aside. The other woman nodded, smiled contentedly. "So now what do you intend to do?"

"What do you think?" came the reply. "I'm going to create it again."

"Another singularity?"

A laugh. "No, I'll just start over with this one."

Maria raised an eyebrow. "A paradox."

"Certainly. A nice, convoluted mess if you think about it. But don't; you'll get a headache."

"I think I'm already getting one..."

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