Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (19 page)

There was something else about Vulcan that made it a rarity. The local ecology was biochemically similar to Earth’s. Specifically, it had evolved right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids.

Sugars and amino acids each could occur in either “left-” or “right-handed” versions, a reference to the way the atoms of the molecules fit together. A mirror image of a given molecule was called its
isomer
.

There was no guarantee that a world would evolve sugars and amino acids; across billions of worlds there were so many options, so many alternatives. But when it did, there was only a one-in-four chance that the result would include both dextro-sugars and levo-amino acids. Any other combination, and the local biochemistry would be incompatible with that of human colonists. Vulcan had proved to be one of those rare planets where humans could actually eat the local flora and fauna and derive nutrition from it. On other worlds colonized by Humankind, food was either modified or created from scratch in large nanufactories. Without them, humans would starve to death even if they were surrounded by organic bounty; human chemistries simply couldn’t derive nourishment from dextro-aminos or levo-sugars.

The Keid Colonial Administration had been created in the late 2200s with the expectation that Vulcan might become a major exporter of food back to Earth. The full impact of the nanotech revolution, however, and the collapse of Earth’s economic systems as a result, was only just being realized at that time. When nanagriculture could conjure unlimited supplies of food from the raw materials in carbonaceous chondrites—a type of asteroid rich in carbon, water, and the various elements of biochemistry—there was no need to grow crops on distant worlds and ship them back to Earth. With Earth in economic chaos, Vulcan had become an independent state, still a part of the Confederation, but only nominally tied to either Germany or Argentina.

But now
something
had happened out there, something unexpected. An alien ship had arrived and a deal of some kind had been struck. It was vital that the USNA learn exactly what that agreement had entailed.

The shuttle began shuddering as it plunged into the atmosphere, and Gray felt the sharp tug of deceleration. Through the shuttle’s viewalls, the swiftly expanding planet beneath them had swelled from a globe to a curving horizon, brilliant with sunlight and the swirl of clouds. Their voyage was nearly complete.

He did hope that there were some answers waiting for them when they reached the ground.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

0910 hours, EST

“Mr. President,” Whitney said. “The morning PICKL just came through.”

“Very well.”

Koenig finished with what he’d been working on—a speech to be delivered virtually to Congress in another two days. A vitally
important
speech, calling for national unity in the face of both the war with the Confederation and the ongoing fight with the Sh’daar. He hated the need for politics . . . for nudging the opposition along, cajoling them into his camp, instead of simply giving the appropriate orders.

He missed the Navy. Things had been so much simpler then.

Okay, he was ready. Koenig checked the time. The President’s Intelligence ChecK-List was supposed to be ready for download first thing in the morning, 0730 at the latest. When it was late, as today, it generally meant there was some important, last-minute intel tucked into the thing.
What the devil are they going to throw at me today?
he wondered.

He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and opened the inner datastream channels with his personal code. Information flooded his brain, taking the form of a particularly vivid and detailed memory . . . a memory that hadn’t been there before.

Koenig began processing that memory, then suddenly sat upright, eyes wide open. “Good God!” he said aloud.

“Sir?” Whitney asked, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, Marcus. But, my God . . . this will change
everything
. . . .”

VCC Military Hospital Complex

Colorado Springs, USNA

1125 hours, CST

“Just tell me whether or not he’s going to be okay!”

Shay Ashton felt like they’d been giving her the runaround ever since she’d shown up at the medical center that morning. No one wanted to talk with her, and no one wanted to tell her the truth.

Dr. Patricia Gonzales looked up from the datapad in her hand and gave her a long and, Shay thought, sad look. Gonzales was an ancient, a truly
old
person, with intensely blue eyes that seemed to peer out at Shay from the depths of bone-rimmed sockets beneath a web of wrinkles set in parchment skin. She was by far, Ashton thought, the oldest human she’d ever seen. How old? In her hundreds, certainly. But she was a medical doctor. Was she simply way overdue for her anagathic treatments? Or was she a Purist?

Twenty years before, Ashton had known a member of the Purist sect of the Rapturist Church of Humankind . . . her old CAG on board the star carrier
America
. What was his name? Wizewski, that was it. Captain Barry Wizewski. The Purists believed that you needed to be
fully human
if God was going to save you from hell, and that meant no tinkering with the human genome, no genetic prostheses, no anti-aging treatments. A few rejected any form of medtech tinkering, including cerebral implants, a personal choice that paradoxically left them on the outside of a human society that depended on high-tech modifications to body and brain just to interface with that society. Humans, first and foremost, were tool makers, tool
users
—and by giving up the current available tool set, the Purists, she thought, were making themselves
less
human, not more.

She hoped there was another explanation for Dr. Gonzales’s extreme age. Having a doctor who didn’t believe in nanomedicine was in her mind one step removed from having a doctor who believed in leeches and incantations.

After a long moment, Gonzales shook her head. “I
can’t
tell you that, dear. Commander Cabot’s condition is extremely serious. We won’t know if the reconstruction is successful for some months, yet.”

“Reconstruction? What reconstruction?”

“NNR. Neural network reconstruction. They didn’t tell you?”

“Doctor, no one has told me
anything
.”

They were standing in the visitors’ lounge just outside the medical center’s critical ward, the psychiatric version of an ICU. The viewall beside them was set to show Cabot on a hospital bed, his body unnaturally rigid though no restraints were visible. Up the right side of the screen marched a steady, unfolding column of words. The audio from the critical ward had been switched off—the screaming tended to bother visitors—but Cabot was talking, an unending rush of words that
almost
made sense . . . until you tried to parse them out.

“
. . .
and God is Goddess I feel You inside my brain when I can’t explain the luminous revelation of the transcendent because string theory proves,
proves
the existence of alternate realities that are manifest within the Gaia matrix that transforms our reality in ways that turn base lead into azure skies of radiant blessing that is the sacred marriage with the Divine
. . .
”

At least, Ashton thought, he no longer appeared to be convinced that things were crawling on him.

“Religious delusion,” Gonzales said, watching Ashton try to make sense of the monologue. “The technical diagnosis is delusional schizophrenia. We call what he’s doing there ‘word salad,’ and it’s fairly typical in cases like this.”

“He thinks he’s talking to God?”

“Possibly. He keeps referencing Gaia . . . but we’re not sure if he’s talking about the ancient pagan deity of Earth or the common expression of techno-transcendence.” Gently, Gonzales reached out and turned Ashton away from the screen. “Don’t try to figure it out. There’s a—a fault in his brain circuitry that makes it all but impossible for him to communicate sensibly. We record it all to look for clues that might help with the treatment, of course, but mostly it’s all scrambled-up garbage.”

“What if he really
is
talking to the Goddess?”

Gonzales stared at her for a moment, those blue eyes as penetrating as an X-ray laser. “You’re from the Periphery, aren’t you, dear?”

That
again. She sighed. “Yes. The D.C. swamps.”

“Is Lieutenant Commander Cabot your . . . your husband?” She said the word with a hint of distaste. “Or a sex partner, perhaps?”

“No.”

How, Ashton wondered, could she explain to a non-Prim? Was there any sense in even trying? Newton Cabot was a fellow Prim and a fellow former Navy pilot, nothing more than that . . . but the fact that they both were outsiders with similar backgrounds within the far larger cultural background matrix of modern society put them in the same foxhole. It gave them something in common, more powerful, more intense even than their shared naval experience. Husband . . . no. But she
did
tend to think of him as a brother.

“I meant no offense, dear,” Gonzales told her. “You seem to be . . . deeply attached to him, that’s all.”

“He’s a fellow pilot in my squadron,” she said, avoiding the issue of them both being Prims. “That makes us close, yes.”

Gonzales nodded, but her expression suggested that she didn’t quite believe Ashton.

“Official policy here at the Center is to withhold all patient information from anyone except next of kin, designated marriage partners, or people designated by the patient. Newton listed family in the Boston Periphery . . . but your name wasn’t on it.”

Ashton came close to exploding. Primitives living marginal existences at the edge of high-tech modern culture tended to bond in pairs . . . a survival mechanism when larger groups tended to be threatened by internal politics, and were harder to feed. Centuries ago, that had been the norm in human culture, at least outside of the Theocracies, but within the context of modern culture, monogamy was seen as . . . a mild perversion.

And
damn
the prudish aristocratic societal traditionalists who passed judgment on anyone who insisted that everyone hold the same beliefs, follow the same cultural mores, and live the same lives!

Gonzales must have seen the storm building behind Ashton’s eyes. She held up a hand. “Easy, dear, easy. I was simply explaining Center policy, and why you were having a hard time. I can
tell
you’re close, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

Ashton forced herself to relax. “I’m . . . sorry, Doctor. I feel like I’ve been slamming my head against plascrete walls all morning.”

“I do know the feeling. Essentially . . . the web of neurons inside Newton’s cerebral cortex has been . . . partially unwired, partially rewired. This sort of thing happens in cerebrovascular trauma—strokes—or when a feedback effect from a hostile virtual network affects the brain’s neuronal net. Fortunately, it wasn’t enough to cause major physical damage. But he is insane.”

“Permanently?”

“We hope not. There is a treatment plan, though we have to basically start him off at the beginning. We have already injected him with medical nanobots to disassemble his in-head circuitry, to take him down to bare brain, with no technological augmentation. The next step will be to inject his brain with his own stem cells, and use cranial nanosurgery to begin rewiring the neural net within his cerebral cortex. It’s called neural network reconstruction, and the idea is to break the connections that formed—re-formed, really—in his neurons when he was hit by the active intrusion countermeasures . . . the . . . what do you call it?”

“ICEscream.”

“Funny name. The ICEscream, yes. The . . . the jolt that was fed back to his organic brain while he was in the virtual simulation rewired significant portions of his cerebral cortex. It also fried portions of his implant hardware, which is why we’ve had to dissolve it. With luck, we’ll be able to regrow most of what was lost . . . and disassemble connections that are . . . are interfering with his ability to communicate with the outside world.”

“But that means he’ll be better, doesn’t it?”

Gonzales pressed her lips together, then shook her head. “I wish I could tell you, dear. At best . . . at
best
, he’ll be sane . . . but it’s possible, even probable that he won’t remember people important to him . . . that he’ll have lost some of his major skill sets, chunks of his training and experience. He might suffer massive amnesia and have to retrain from the very start, as if he’s gone back to a blank slate, like a newborn’s.”

“And the worst case?”

“He probably won’t die. There doesn’t seem to be any involvement of his motor cortex or autonomic functions. But he may be . . . in a world of his own. A world that doesn’t really relate very well to the world you and I experience.” She shrugged bony shoulders. “He
may
just continue talking to the Goddess, and not relate to the rest of us at all.”

“And you say it will be months before you know?”

“We’ll know the stem cells are replacing damaged neurons successfully within two to three weeks. We won’t know how much of his memory has been affected for another six to eight weeks. The retraining, if it becomes necessary, could take a year or more.”

“A year?”

Again, a shrug. “How long does it take a baby to learn to be human? Even with downloads, once his implants have been rechelated across his cerebral cortex, it takes time to integrate the training.”

“I . . . see. Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate your taking the time to explain.”

“Not at all, dear.” She turned and looked at the figure on the bed revealed by the ICU viewall. “I wish the news was better . . . but too often we realize that what we’re doing here is the art of medicine. We like to think of it as a precise and high-tech science, but it’s not. It may never be. Medical science does
not
have all the answers. . . .”