Pa'an
Queen’s Castle

In no time at all Aura’s dress dummy, replete with wig, torc and gown, was set up and Reilly, Honker and Big Brent were standing around making comments: “Looks like Jaeger has a fetish.” “More like a blow up sex doll.” “Yeah, but with class.”

They were lucky Aura’s dress dummy was not connected, but Sara was wiring in the console to the white cabinet.

“Gentlemen, that’s my avatar, and if you like me, I’ll be real nice to you. If you don’t treat me like the lady I am, I just might have that little waterfall piss on your shoes again.” To make her point, the gears clanged above their heads. They jumped a foot in surprise at the voice, looked up and shut up.

By nightfall Aura’s equipment was connected and her avatar functional. A makeshift medical facility was set up in the mess room and the mercs were assigned to shifts and properly garrisoned. Their vehicles were rolled into the cavern, guard stations were reinforced with both Barrets, and Mouse and Flintlock were ensconced down the gravel road. The queen’s fortress was established. But where were the opposing players?

Aura’s first task was to secure the many fragments of Mentor’s codelets behind a firewall and revoke all his permission codes. This was a huge job, even for an AI. A human personality is diverse, enormous and interconnected even when it is not expanded by having access to high-speed communications channels, satellites, and Exaplex modules. There was also a lot of critical intelligence information buried in the data streams and habit patterns. Unfortunately, most of the important things were hidden, deeply encrypted, or simply missing.

Well, she thought, more of that later. Right now Deepak was a priority, Zovo was a priority, and there was the little matter of finding and disabling more copies of Mentor. Oh yes, and the little matter of impending atomic Armageddon.

And finally, “What the hell happened in here with that reverse waterfall?”

Jag, Leathers and Honker were huddled together in one corner of the inner sanctum they now called “the white room” while Sara, half asleep, was lounging on a chair behind the console trying to make sense of the new readings.

Jag and Leathers started. Honker had only heard Aura speak once before, and he was not sure where the voice came from. Jag had mostly dismissed the drowning incident from his mind and was brought up sharply by the memory of blue lightning and water cascading upward.

“Honker, meet Aura. She lives in the white box over there, sort of. We’ll get her voice wired up to her avatar eventually.”

“She is real? Not a recording?’

“Yes, you big lug, I am very real,” Aura replied, followed by a stream of epithets in Catalan, which no one but Leathers followed. “Now lets play nice and tell us what you saw.”

“One moment, big metal noises, then the waterfall stopped. Lots of gurgling, like a rock in a river. Then the geyser started at top of mountain and tried to drown all of us outside. We tried to open the main doors but they are strong. We were bringing up breaching gear, but then doors unlocked and we opened them, finding you all half drowned.”

“Yes, that pretty much covers it, except for the blue lights. Did I mention I heard an evil chortle as the water reached the ceiling?” Jag pointed at the iron grid overhead.

“Water got that high in here?” Leathers was studying the iron grid with alarm.

“And more. It felt like another 30 feet or so piling up over me. I was sure that was the end.”

“I got a few cycles to see what was happening and saw Deepak’s body floating past my camera. I was kind of panicky. I triggered a worm which subverted Level 5 recursion and then I went after Mentor’s personality core. But then I was in a fight with that old bastard and couldn’t get more than a glimpse of what was happening. The next thing I knew there was Deepak on the floor and a person Mentor was calling Maartine dead and you and Deepak coughing your brains out. I never felt so helpless as an AI before.”

“You mean you didn’t have anything to do with the gravity reversal or the blue lights?”

“Not me.”

“Then who did?”

“Hmmm. If it was Zovo, that tricky, darling little tennis ball has powers he was hiding. Otherwise, it’s a mystery. I can’t find any physics to explain it. It’s just too much of a coincidence, too improbable. Improbable? Hmmm. I need to process that a bit more.”

“Jag, we need to make sure that damned waterfall stays out on the mountain where it belongs, I think.” Sara, across the white room echoed that sentiment.

“Let Aura take care of that. We need to find a few thousand tons of weapons-grade fissionables. Aura, see if you can find any clues to where they might be.”

“I don’t have the bandwidth to do that kind of search from here. But I bet I can find at least a few of Mentor’s copies. I suspect he hid that information in a spread code among his clones. I’m on it now.”

One of Leathers’ soldiers carried Kaiser’s doggie crate into the white room. Poor Kaiser had been confined in his crate too long. He whined to be let loose and Jag came right over and let him out. The small doggie wobbled a bit unsteadily over to the white cabinet and peed on it.

Jag laughed. It was a fitting comment.

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