Chapter 519: Eternity (1/2)
Herod stared out the window of the star-tram as it sped along the magnetic 'tunnel' at hypersonic speeds. Below him were vast fields of grain, tended to by robotic agricultural units. Above him was an ocean, sparking and blue in the light of the two fusion reactors moving along their own magnetic tracks.
The two areas were separated by roughly five hundred thousand miles. The only reason he could see them with any clarity was the auto-focus in the windows of the startram, and the fact that he was currently moving through the thin layer of vacuum between the two atmospheres.
It wasn't the first time he had ridden this route.
Herod kept having nightmares in the eyeblink between full wakefullness and moving into maintenance mode to defrag, recompile, and kernal check. In the split second before the dream generator kicked on, he had been suffering a nightmare.
The same one.
Over and over.
Every time he was sitting in a startram car. Wally was next to him, even more rusted and battered. The hazardous environment frame and protective gear he was wearing was worn, scuffed, dirty. His boots were battered and scuffed, the soles thin, the laces replaced by narrow strips of plas. His tools were mismatched, scuffed, scratched, rusted in places. Grips were worn almost smooth, sockets were rounded rather than sharp at the corners, drivers were warped and rusted.
Every time he looked up and saw his own face in the glass of the window across from him.
His face was wrinkled. His hair gray. A long beard down his chest of iron gray and bone white. His eyes were surrounded by red, puffy flesh, his eyes bloodshot and weary. His nose and cheeks covered with the thin spider-tracks of broken capillaries.
In the nightmare, he knew there was just one more thing to fix and maybe the automatic systems would finally completely kick in.
Right before he woke up he often suffered another dream. Of pushing a massive boulder uphill, of struggling, straining against it, moving it stubbornly inch by inch, only to have his strength fail and the boulder roll back and crush him, leaving him screaming and maimed in the dirt of the trail he had been pushing the boulder up.
Herod knew he needed to talk to someone about it, about the dreams, but couldn't bring himself to.
Nightmares like he was having were one thing.
Sam-UL's existence was something else.
Herod looked down and patted Wally's head. The little maintenance bot looked up, blinked, and gave a chirping sigh as he leaned against Herod's leg.
”Harry, are you there?” Sam asked over the datalink. Herod could hear the tightness in his voice, hear the barely resisted madness.
”I'm here, Sam,” Herod said.
”Things are lighting up. The more stuff we fix, the more urgent requests for repair we get. We've got a major one, tied into the SUDS, the Gestalt System, and the Educational System,” Sam said.
”What is it?” Herod asked. He closed his eyes and sighed. He couldn't remember the last time he had more than a few hours off.
Yes, he could. It was when they'd sent a message to that General. How long ago was it? Years? Months?
He checked his chrono out of habit and sighed when he saw that it was flashing error codes and had a 'local time' underneath that said he'd been here nearly twenty years.
”Herod?” Sam asked.
”I'm here,” Herod answered.
”You drifted off for a moment. I need you to repair something.”
”What is it?” Herod repeated.
”I'm not sure, exactly. I don't know what most of this stuff does,” Sam admitted. ”Something called the Cross Species Consensus Individual Insertion Array. It sounds important.”
Herod nodded. ”Yeah. How long till I get there?”
”It's important enough that it's on the Alpha Layer, near Earth-Prime. It's on Atlantis,” Sam said.
Herod sighed, a weary long-suffering sound. ”Of course it is. Am I going to be able to access Atlantis this time or am I going to end up running away from pre-Glassing combat robots again?”
”When I accepted the repair request, it kicked out a security header for you. The system is weird on Earth-Prime,” Sam said.
”I'm pretty sure that it's the initial section that they built,” Herod said. ”Atlantis was destroyed in the Mantid Attack, if I recall correctly.”
”Yeah. The Lost Continent. Completely obliterated by the Mantid,” Sam said. ”Supposedly, a high-tech utopia that everything they had is all lostek.”
Herod nodded. He'd heard the stories. ”I used to scoff at the idea of Pre-Glassing TerraSol having tech that the Confederacy didn't have.”
”Then we got here,” Sam said softly. He giggled, then laughed, then started screaming and sobbing.
It took a few minutes for Sam to get himself back under control.
”Better?” Herod asked.
”Little,” Sam said, his voice quiet.
”Funny thing is, all of this is ancient tech. Even if it is technically lostek, it's all ancient. There's actual semi-conductor systems. Some of the quantum arrays have less than ten qbits and are a thousand times more massive then anything we have currently,” Herod said. He chuckled. ”Hell, my watch, before it grew legs during the Bang, had more qbits than the majority of the 'supercomputer arrays' we repaired.”
”It's funny, but if I start to laugh I'll start to scream and I don't know if I can stop this time,” Sam said softly. His voice grew low and menacing. ”And when I start screaming, I want to kill you so badly. So, so badly.”
”I know, Sam,” Herod said, looking out the window. ”As soon as we're done, you'll kill me.”
”Yes, yes I will,” Sam whispered. ”There will be nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide. I'll let you run, let you feel all the fear as you know I'm coming for you and you can't stop me. You live at my sufferance, at my largess, but that generosity shall not last forever, Herod.”
Herod stared out the window as Sam raved at him.
In a way, he was starting to miss Dee.
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”Dammit, the self-check failed again,” Herod said, staring at the screen. Data was flowing by. Everything was working right, but it still kept throwing back ”SELF CHECK FAILED. ALERT MAINTENANCE. ERROR CODE: GURU MEDITATION ERROR 22-04- 8400000C.000054D9” which made no sense.
”Any ideas?” Herod asked, looking down at Wally, who had finished the grisly task of shoving bones into his chest and grinding them up for mass.
Wally beeped and looked around. He blinked a few times, then looked back and gave a low, sad whistle.
”Me either,” Herod said. ”Let's see. We'll do a RUNSTEP command, see what we can find.”
Herod stood there, watching each section of the bootup run, while Wally stood next to him. Cooling arrays were in tolerance. Power was stable with correct voltages. The fact that the system used whole volts instead of micro or millivolts still startled him.
The old systems were horrific power hogs.
RAM checked out. It still used the old byte system rather than the holographic platter system, so it took Herod a second each time to convert the amount of memory.
It seemed almost ironic to Herod that this system, which he had no idea what it did, had less memory than a pocketcomp RAMstik you could win in a box of cereal. He had a Charlie MooMoo RAMstik on his keychain back in the black box that had a trillion times the memory of the entire system and it was smaller than Herod's finger.
For a moment Herod daydreamed about sitting in the Black Box and watching a few episodes of Charlie MooMoo. He could use some animated comedy amusement.
”THERE!” Herod suddenly blurted out. He didn't tap onto the next instruction, just looked at what had happened.
Process Call to Species Divergent Neural System Amalgamation Splicing Array Failed
Process Call to Primary Processed Packet Processing Injection Processor Array Failed
DEEZ NUTZ FAILURE AT ADDRESS 0x80071AC3
Process Call to Recursion Interruption Buffer Failed
SHUTTING DOWN
Herod stared at it.
”All right. They're words. I recognize them as words. They're put in statements and descriptions,” Herod suddenly leaned forward and banged his helmeted head against the side of the massive computer array. ”But what does it mean?”
”Herod, are you all right?” Sam suddenly asked.
Herod sighed. ”I need you to look up a couple arrays and a buffer system. Tell me if they're nearby,” Herod said, then recited the error codes.
”Wow, those don't show up on a search or a list of functions and equipment, you literally have to do queries on those systems to get them to show up,” Sam said softly. ”It's a high security area.”
Herod sighed. ”Of course it is. Why, it's perfectly logical. A high security area. On an artificial continent modeled after a continent destroyed 8,000 years ago. On the surface of a Dyson Sphere, built 8,000 years ago in secret. In a secret dimension. Around a repeatedly failing Big Bang that nobody knows about. Why, a high security area in such a well known area makes complete sense!”
Herod took a deep breath.
”I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE!” he yelled.
”Herod, easy, easy, man,” Sam said.
Herod slumped, leaning face first against the computer array, which was somehow vibrating smugly.
”How long have we been at this, Sam?” Herod asked softly.
”According to the systems I'm accessing, less than a year has passed at the Black Box,” Sam said.
”How long, Sam?” Herod repeated.
”Um, the system where I'm at, which is temporally shielded? I've been in here about, oh, five years.”
”How. Long.”
”Two hundred sixty three years, five months, fourteen days, ten hours, six minutes,” Sam said softly. ”You've been working to repair the SUDS for three hundred years, Herod. Time moves differently for you than it does for me. I'm out past the Gamma Layer, you're doing most your work at the Alpha and Beta Layers, where time moves faster.”
”Of course it does,” Herod said, squeezing his eyes shut.
”That's why your defragging and kernal recompiles are taking longer and longer.”
”I'm getting old,” Herod whispered. ”Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, dreams are forever, look upon my works, ye joyless ones, and despair, for lives lived in happiness shine brighter than the stars and endure long after your misery has passed unto death.”
”The Tyrant Disney,” Sam said softly.
”Yes,” Herod answered. ”Three hundred years. Three hundred years have gone by.”
”Not exactly,” Sam said. ”Just for you. Personally. And Wally.”