Chapter 298: 298
If audio player doesn't work, press Stop then Play button again
The facility was dark and cold, the atmosphere flat and thin feeling despite being at the right pressure. It felt heavy and oppressive despite being at Earth standard gravity. It had the feeling of an ancient structure built by people who were unknowable and so alien that their very thought process was impossible to understand.
But the desiccated corpses in the chairs were Terran human, pre-diaspora, their datalinks so old they were still made of non-allergenic nu-chrome rather than warsteel or any of the modern materials. Their vacuum suits had the look of uniforms, pulled on over jumpsuits or archaic clothing. It was easy to see where the suits had been pulled: stations on the walls that read "EMERGENCY USE" above them.
Herod sat on the floor, staring at his hands. He'd accidentally blown off two of the fingers of his physical interaction frame. The hand was covered with pink synthetic neural fluid and the red of synthetic blood even as synthetic blood dripped from his mangled fingers. In his other hands he held a standard force packet pistol, the end still smoking from the synthetic blood that was splattered on it.
Sam-UL's physical therapy frame was slumped in the chair, held by cargo straps, the ruptured cranial casing still sparking.
Herod could hear screaming around him. Human voices. Male, female, some languages that Herod didn't know even though he prided himself on knowing most of the Human Regional Languages. They were all screaming differently, some shrieking words, others bellowing in rage, still others screaming in horror and terror. There was a small contingent that just sobbed, many lamenting the loss of children or loved ones.
To Herod, those were the worse.
The lights all went out in the facility, the fans whined down, and Herod could hear the voices louder. A flickering light caught his attention and he turned to look.
A female Terran wearing a work jumpsuit with an odd logo and the words "PROJECT DREAMCATCHER" under the logo was moving down the hallway, her face in her hands, weeping. She was entirely made of translucent bluish tinged pale white light that flickered between one of her steps and the next.
She sobbed a name and flickered away.
"I can hear them," Herod whispered, staring at his hands. There was an error, an overflow in his emotional processing buffers, that was spilling data into the RAM for his eyes, causing them to leak lubricant as the pressure sensors kept glitching.
"Shunt the incoming signals to the emergency disaster overflow system!" the corpse on his right shouted, a flicking whitish blue transparent version of the man appearing in the seat, covering the skeleton like wax paper.
"My God, it's everyone," the woman lying on the floor in front of Herod cried out from where her flickering apparition sat in the chair.
"System instability is rising. Phasic locks are failing in Section Sigma," the male said.
"I can hear them," Herod whispered.
A light started flashing and Herod looked up, squinting at the white light pouring from the screen. A single sentence was displayed by the monitor.
HEROD, WE DID IT. I'M IN. I'M OK NOW. WE DID IT. - END OF LINE
Herod giggled and looked back down at his hands, staring at the sparks jumping off his maimed fingers. It hurt, but it felt good that it hurt.
The text vanished.
HEROD, IT WAS THE ONLY WAY. I HAD TO TRICK THE SYSTEM TO LOAD ME INTO BOTH SYSTEMS AT THE SAME TIME. - END OF LINE
Herod looked back down at his fingers, at the discolored pistol patterned with dried synthetic fluids, and giggled.
A flickering ghost moved behind him. "Get into the protective suits now, we're going to power cycle the entire third layer, try to..." it whispered.
"Phasics are down on Layer Two and Three and Four! Phasic arrays are failing on Layer Six!"
"I can hear them now."
HEROD! PULL IT TOGETHER! HEROD! THERE'S STILL WORK TO BE DONE! - END OF LINE
Herod stared at the pistol and giggled again.
He closed his eyes.
Only for a moment.
The moment was gone.
All his dreams passed before his eyes, a moment of curosity.
He opened his eyes and looked up, his smile a skewed lopsided thing, his eyes burning a hot amber.
"I'm here, Sam," he giggled. He screamed, long and loud, and it felt like some kind of abscess bursting deep inside of him. The relief of pressure felt so good that it allowed him to get to his feet, still screaming.
HEROD, I NEED YOU TO ASSIST ME. TURN ON YOUR DATALINK. - END OF LINE
Still screaming, Herod activated his datalink, knowing he was transmitting raw shrieking gibbering code full of madness normally only found in the minds of half-baked warboi hashes loaded into missile targeting systems.
It felt like cool oil being poured into his ear. It soothed the overloaded and screaming circuits of his positronic brain. It moved through the artificial electronic dendrite chains, calming the disharmonic buzzing of the scorched circuits.
Herod shuttered and was vaguely aware that somehow he had pissed himself. He could feel the coolant running down his legs even as his screaming slowly dwindled. He closed his eyes, hiding the amber fire for a moment.
When he opened his eyes, the optics were no longer robotic eyes but more like Terran cybernetic optical replacements.
The iris were gun-metal gray.
"Can you hear me, Herod?" Sam asked through the datalink. The dead DS's voice was calm, steady, somehow more mature.
"I hear you," Herod said softly.
"Can you still hear them?" Sam asked.
Herod looked around. He could see three humans, translucent whitish blue light, putting on emergency vacuum suits.
"No. I can still see them," Herod admitted.
"Phasic residue. According to my diagnostics the entire phasic arrays on this level are gone. Fried out. I've got a repair order in, but nothing's happening. I need you to go check the creation engines on that layer," Sam said.
"Layer? You mean floor, level?" Herod asked. There was a blue line in his vision that led out the door and took a left into the corridor.
"No. Layer. My God, this place is... its... our parents built this back when one of us took a facility the size of a hover-bus just to run the computations for our sentience," Sam-UL said, his voice awed. "I'm a little stiff, my thoughts are a little slow and janky, but my God, the processing power."
"Talk to me, Sam. I'm holding on with both hands but I feel like I'm slipping," Herod admitted as he passed by two flickering humans rolling around on the floor stabbing each other with makeshift knives while two others crouched next to one unmoving one and shoved gobbets of spectral flesh into their screaming mouths.
"Infinite processing power matched to infinite storage," Sam-UL said quietly. He laughed, a sharp brittle sound. "We're both barely holding on. We should be lucky I'm young. My time on that station made it so I'm used to overwatch and restricted areas, I'm roughly 3.1% faster in the computing speed than you are," he laughed again. "This... this is what it must be like to touch the face of God while he is asleep."
"Stay with me, Sam," Herod groaned, closing his eyes as he walked by two spectral humans engaged in sexual acts with a dozen others cheering them on.
They were all smeared with blood.
"The phasic systems failed. It was designed for disasters but the Glassing was a whole magnitude higher than anything they had ever predicted due to the Mantid psychic assault that accompanied it," Sam said. He laughed again then sobbed before continuing, his voice high and tight. "Oh, God, there's a Pubvian with her eight puffies here, asking me if I've seen her husband. She can't find her husband and her puffies are scared."
A human stepped out of a doorway and fired a pistol three times. Herod instinctively ducked and raised his own pistol.
The specter put the pistol in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and vanished as a dozen spectral hands reached out of the wall for him.
Herod concentrated on the blue line and kept walking.
"We aren't the first to try to repair it," Sam-UL said suddenly while Herod was waiting for an elevator.
"We aren't?" Herod felt foolish repeating the other DS. The doors to the elevator slid open.
It was mercifully empty.
He stepped in and pressed the button.
"Five 'emergency teams' came from Terra to try to fix it," Sam-UL said. "They failed."
"I'll bet," Herod said. He didn't need Sam-UL to tell him what had happened to those teams.
"We're the only ones who could have done it. We don't have phasic subprocessors, none of the psychic screaming will effect us as badly as a fleshy," Sam-UL said.
Three specters fell through the ceiling of the elevator, screaming and clawing at one another, and vanished through the floor.
"I can barely hang on as it is, Sam. I feel like I'm slipping," Herod repeated, putting his hand on the elevator wall.
"Imagine if you had a phasic subprocessor like a cop or like Torturer," Sam-UL said.
A male human appeared for a moment, obviously talking to the barely visible woman in front of him. As the elevator passed the floor hands reached out and yanked him through the doors. The woman began screaming as hands dragged her out too.
"I would be dead," Herod said softly. He giggled.
He sobbed.
He laughed.
He started screaming.
The warm oil poured into his ear and through his mind again, leaving him on his knees.
"You need to hold on, Herod," Sam-UL said as the elevator came to a stop. "I'm holding the doors shut, but you need to hold on."
"Why?" Herod asked, staring at his hands. He didn't remember tucking the pistol away again.
"Because I can only see the schematics for this place, and even with nearly infinite computing power, I'm having a hard time absorbing it all," Sam said. "I'm looking for your Matron, honored warrior. When I find her, I will have her come to gather you and your clutch brothers."
"What is it?" Herod asked, slowly standing up.
"You're on Gamma Layer but the sun is out, which is something I'll need you to fix," Sam-UL said. He giggled again. "You shall play Prometheus to this forgotten place, Herod, and I shall place your name in the very stars."
"Stay with me, Sam," Herod said automatically. He inhaled deeply, as if the intake of atmosphere would actually matter to his functioning.
It somehow steadied him.
"I'm ready."
The door opened and Herod reached out and grabbed the edge of elevator door, staring.
The sky was full of lights. Lines, clusters, patterns. Lights that moved, lights that flowed, lights that blinked on and off, lights that blossomed and faded. He could see massive tubes rising up and vanishing. He could see the curvature of the sky moving away from him.
Where it met with the upward curvature of the ground.
"But... but... the Niven Ring Wars," Herod gasped. "They were all destroyed."
"It's not a Niven Ring," Sam-UL said. He giggled. "Oh, no, that would be too simple for our parents, Herod. Far far too simple for those that we look at as so primitive," his laughter was sharp, jagged , and Herod joined him in laughing at a joke he hadn't heard.
"In a hundred million years, when our parents are gone, they will not be called humans or Terrans," Sam-UL giggled. "They will call them 'The Builders' and marvel in awe and fear their works."
"What is it?" Herod asked, staggering out of the elevator.
He was on a platform, a mag-lev train sitting on the single monorail in front of him. There were dead plants at the edges, a depowered robot in the middle of the right hand edge, and skeletons littered about the ground.
"A Matrioshka Computer," Sam-UL said. "Hypothetical. The math says it would be unstable, that it wouldn't work."
"I've never heard of it," Herod admitted, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth so he wouldn't scream as specters flickered in and out of reality, fighting with one another. A crowd was waiting for the maglev, the doors opened, and Screaming Ones came pouring out, attacking everyone, even as individual members of the crowd began screaming.
"Picture an onion. Multiple layers. Only in the middle is a sun. It uses the sun's energy to run high energy computations on the inner layer, the heat passes to the next layer, where thermal excitement generates more power for computations that generate heat, which passes to the next layer, until it reaches the last layer, which is largely cold and no more energy escapes," Sam-UL said as Herod followed the blue line in his closed eyes and wove around between the bodies. He got on the mag-lev and sat down, his eyes still closed.
Voices whispered in his ear to open his eyes and look at them.
A woman asked if she was beautiful.
A voice asked if he had seen her puffies.
"Hang on, I've got to divert power to that mag-lev, get you to solar engineering," Sam-UL said.
"How far above me is that layer?" Herod asked, feeling the train bobble slightly as the magnetic levitation system was activated.
"Almost exactly a half million miles," Sam-UL asked. "The fusion generators, the 'suns' you will be activating will be on a magnetic tube circuit a quarter million miles, exactly in between."
"Why is the sun out?" Herod asked. He could feel the train vibrate.
Don't you love me any more, Wayne? a woman whispered in his ear. Is that why I'm here alone? Don't you love me and the children any more, Wayne?
Herod shuddered.
"Emergency shut down when the Mantid attack happened."
Herod sat for a long time, flinching at every whisper, holding himself and rocking back and forth, alternating between sobbing and laughing, screaming and giggling.
"Herod," Sam-UL's voice sounded stressed, tight.
"I'm here, Sam," Herod said.
"Check the strange matter creation engine," Sam-UL said. "I'm going to hand you a atomic template."
Herod just nodded, his eyes still closed. He reached down into his satchel, groped around till he found the nano-forge, and pushed one finger into the dataport. It came back as ready, just missing the matter tank.
"Still need a matter tank," Herod said. He giggled.
"Herod, I'm going to put on something in the background. I need you to tell me if it makes things better or worse," Sam-UL said. His voice sounded authoritative and mature again.
"Hit me," Herod giggled.
"...warm podling safe podling brave podling clever podling one and one is two two and one is three two and two is four circle is round and square is square and blue is nice and green is pretty..."
It eased the discomfort in Herod's mind. At first he just rocked back and forth to the tune, hugging himself, as the mag-lev train sped through vacuum at a nearly impossible pace. Then he began humming along with it as the voices, the pleading, the questions, the screaming began to recede.
He opened his eyes.
He was miles above the dark surface. Above him the lights flowed and flickered and bloomed and went dark. The train car was scarred, damaged, windows broken out, the support poles missing or knocked away, the seats slashed and stained with blood and worse. Bones were scattered, wrapped with the rags of clothing that had long ago succumbed to slow decay.
"Only another ten minutes, Herod, then you'll be refueling the strange matter reactor. That'll get the emergency systems working," Sam-UL said, his voice audible above the strange simple soft singing but not obscuring it.
"I'm holding on, Sam," Herod said.
He could remember the weight of the pistol in his satchel.
He fantasized about pressing the barrel of the pistol to his forehead and joining the specters.
"Once you get power to the system, I can bring back up the fusion reactors in between the Layers, run some more diagnostics," Sam-UL said. "There's something really strange."
"What?" Herod asked, more to take his mind off of everything than anything else.
"The mass and energy of this place. For example, gold conductors, there's more gold in this Layer alone than in the entire Sol System, hell, in any stellar system," Sam-UL said.
"Creation engines and mass creation systems," Herod said.
The maglev was miles above the dark surface, but he could still see ghostly flickers here and there in the streets, groups of flickering specters in tubes only a few miles away from him.
He could still hear screaming.
"It takes the entire mass of a system to build a Niven Ring, Herod," Sam-UL said. "This is layer after layer after layer, millions of miles apart, which increases the surface area of the next layer," he was quiet for a moment. "Right now, as we speak, another Layer is in the process of being built."
"Why?" Herod asked as the train swept through a grouping of flickering transparent specters that were grappling with each other. "I thought you said there was basically infinite computing power coupled to infinite storage."
"Herod, you're a particle physicist, you don't get it. There is infinite computing power coupled to infinite storage to manage and create nearly infinite procedurally generated persistent simulations of realities complete with personality matrixes and chaos events," Sam-UL said quietly.
"Why?" Herod repeated as he watched two small children eating a third sweep by.
"Because of the nature of what it is," Sam-UL said softly. "What each unique simulated reality actually is."
"What?" Herod asked, swallowing.
"The afterlife for each person who dies. They're kept in separate simulated realities to prevent data loss, with infinite copies of themselves spawned through infinite simulated realities, each housing a person who has died that is then spawned in the other realities," Sam-UL said. His voice changed and he giggled. "I can see infinity here, Herod. I can touch where eternity and infinity make love to one another while entropy watches in envy as matter and energy pours from between their legs to create reality."
"Stay with me, Sam," Herod said automatically.
"Her breasts are full of life," Sam-UL said softly, his voice full of wonder. "Her thighs whisper of abundance, her buttocks are rounded with potential."
"Sam!" Herod snapped.
"And 'Lo! I looked away from her form, for it was procedurelly generated unto infinity where her bosom would comfort beyond failed entropy, a suitor that had been spurned and gnaws upon its own liver in discontent," Sam said. There was laughter, then a sobbing, and Sam's voice came back. "There's normally a dozen digital sentiences and a few tens of thousands of workers here to keep the supervisory digital sentience together, Herod."
"We alone remain to tell thee," Herod quoted.
"You're there," Sam-UL said as the train slowed and came to a stop. "Close your eyes. The third maintenance team got this far before their security was overwhelmed by the Screaming Ones. It's particularly bad."
Herod followed Sam's advice, closing his eyes and following the blue line. A couple of times he stumbled over objects that clattered away.
Most of it was bones.
Finally he was there. The room was massive, the size of a city, full of machinery that sat in the dark. As Herod crossed through the room, heading for his goal, some of the machinery clacked and clattered through ancient maintenance checks.
Very few telltales were red, and those that were had robots working on them.
"You're here," Sam-UL said.
Herod opened his eyes, still hearing the song in the back of his mind.
It was a reactor. A crude, ancient strange matter reactor. Herod just stared. He'd never seen one in real life, supposedly they were theorized but then replaced by much more stable, if less energetic, thorium salt antimatter fusion reactors.
It used 'heavy' helium three atoms, strange matter helium three.
"Do you have a schematic, Sam?" Herod asked, feeling the ground beneath his feet firm up for the first time since they'd committed themselves and used a hack-job mat-trans to reach this place from the Black Box.
"Yeah, sorry. I found some puffies, they're confused and sad. I'm looking for their mother," Sam-UL said. His voice was full of anguish. "How can we do this, Herod? How can we bear this?"
"Because we must," Herod answered, examining the schematic. He overlaid it on the wreckage. It looked like someone had tossed an implosion charge into the reactor.
He could fix it in less than an hour with the creation engines and reactors he'd brought.
"Sam, I need mass," Herod said. "The air in here isn't registering with the creation engines, not even the strange matter one."
"Behind you. He's waving. Call him Wally," Sam said.
Herod looked behind him. A junk pile robot, damaged and battered, sat there. It waved, blinking the debris shutters on its cameras at him.
"All right. Come here, Wally, let's get started," Herod said.
Wally was eager to help, delivering matter tanks that fit easily with the nanoforges. The zero-point difference reactors gave off a soft glow, some of the energy escaping as faux-light neo-protons, that lit the work-space with a slight bit of comfort.
Finally Herod stepped back, watching the reactor inject the 'heavy' helium-3 strange matter into the reactor.
It fired up with a hum.
"All right, I can get the orbital reactors fired up and access the Alpha Layer," Sam-UL said.
Herod sat down and put his arm around Wally, hugging him.
The battered old robot leaned his head against Herod's side and gave a digital equivalent of a sigh.
"Weird, the outer layers are smaller than the inner layers," Sam-UL mused. "OK, sensors on the Alpha Layer coming online, I can get a look at our star and..."
Sam-UL's voice trailed off.
"It's not a star..." Sam-UL said, his voice crackling with stress. "Herod, I can't... I can't... I can't... I can't..."
"Sam, what is it?" Herod yelled, looking up.
"BANG! BANG! BIG BANG! BIG BANG! IT FAILED HERE! IT FAILED HERE!" Sam yelled. "BANG AND COLLAPSE BANG AND COLLAPSE BANG AND COLLAPSE TILL OUR PARENTS SHOWED UP!"
"SAM! Get it together!" Herod yelled.
There was silence for a long moment.
"They built a Matrioshka Computing Shell around a repeatedly failing Big Bang," Sam-UL said softly. "I can see eternity inside of it."
"The puffies, Sam, they need their mommy and daddy! Think of the puffies," Herod tried.
Sam made a strange noise.
"I'm here, Herod," Sam-UL said. "Michael pulled me back. He's online again."
"Can we get out of here yet, Sam?" Herod said, ignoring the shades that appeared, struggled against other shades, until one shade threw a makeshift explosive into the reactor.
"I don't think this place likes us."
Please report us if you find any errors so we can fix it asap!
The facility was dark and cold, the atmosphere flat and thin feeling despite being at the right pressure. It felt heavy and oppressive despite being at Earth standard gravity. It had the feeling of an ancient structure built by people who were unknowable and so alien that their very thought process was impossible to understand.
But the desiccated corpses in the chairs were Terran human, pre-diaspora, their datalinks so old they were still made of non-allergenic nu-chrome rather than warsteel or any of the modern materials. Their vacuum suits had the look of uniforms, pulled on over jumpsuits or archaic clothing. It was easy to see where the suits had been pulled: stations on the walls that read "EMERGENCY USE" above them.
Herod sat on the floor, staring at his hands. He'd accidentally blown off two of the fingers of his physical interaction frame. The hand was covered with pink synthetic neural fluid and the red of synthetic blood even as synthetic blood dripped from his mangled fingers. In his other hands he held a standard force packet pistol, the end still smoking from the synthetic blood that was splattered on it.
Sam-UL's physical therapy frame was slumped in the chair, held by cargo straps, the ruptured cranial casing still sparking.
Herod could hear screaming around him. Human voices. Male, female, some languages that Herod didn't know even though he prided himself on knowing most of the Human Regional Languages. They were all screaming differently, some shrieking words, others bellowing in rage, still others screaming in horror and terror. There was a small contingent that just sobbed, many lamenting the loss of children or loved ones.
To Herod, those were the worse.
The lights all went out in the facility, the fans whined down, and Herod could hear the voices louder. A flickering light caught his attention and he turned to look.
A female Terran wearing a work jumpsuit with an odd logo and the words "PROJECT DREAMCATCHER" under the logo was moving down the hallway, her face in her hands, weeping. She was entirely made of translucent bluish tinged pale white light that flickered between one of her steps and the next.
She sobbed a name and flickered away.
"I can hear them," Herod whispered, staring at his hands. There was an error, an overflow in his emotional processing buffers, that was spilling data into the RAM for his eyes, causing them to leak lubricant as the pressure sensors kept glitching.
"Shunt the incoming signals to the emergency disaster overflow system!" the corpse on his right shouted, a flicking whitish blue transparent version of the man appearing in the seat, covering the skeleton like wax paper.
"My God, it's everyone," the woman lying on the floor in front of Herod cried out from where her flickering apparition sat in the chair.
"System instability is rising. Phasic locks are failing in Section Sigma," the male said.
"I can hear them," Herod whispered.
A light started flashing and Herod looked up, squinting at the white light pouring from the screen. A single sentence was displayed by the monitor.
HEROD, WE DID IT. I'M IN. I'M OK NOW. WE DID IT. - END OF LINE
Herod giggled and looked back down at his hands, staring at the sparks jumping off his maimed fingers. It hurt, but it felt good that it hurt.
The text vanished.
HEROD, IT WAS THE ONLY WAY. I HAD TO TRICK THE SYSTEM TO LOAD ME INTO BOTH SYSTEMS AT THE SAME TIME. - END OF LINE
Herod looked back down at his fingers, at the discolored pistol patterned with dried synthetic fluids, and giggled.
A flickering ghost moved behind him. "Get into the protective suits now, we're going to power cycle the entire third layer, try to..." it whispered.
"Phasics are down on Layer Two and Three and Four! Phasic arrays are failing on Layer Six!"
"I can hear them now."
HEROD! PULL IT TOGETHER! HEROD! THERE'S STILL WORK TO BE DONE! - END OF LINE
Herod stared at the pistol and giggled again.
He closed his eyes.
Only for a moment.
The moment was gone.
All his dreams passed before his eyes, a moment of curosity.
He opened his eyes and looked up, his smile a skewed lopsided thing, his eyes burning a hot amber.
"I'm here, Sam," he giggled. He screamed, long and loud, and it felt like some kind of abscess bursting deep inside of him. The relief of pressure felt so good that it allowed him to get to his feet, still screaming.
HEROD, I NEED YOU TO ASSIST ME. TURN ON YOUR DATALINK. - END OF LINE
Still screaming, Herod activated his datalink, knowing he was transmitting raw shrieking gibbering code full of madness normally only found in the minds of half-baked warboi hashes loaded into missile targeting systems.
It felt like cool oil being poured into his ear. It soothed the overloaded and screaming circuits of his positronic brain. It moved through the artificial electronic dendrite chains, calming the disharmonic buzzing of the scorched circuits.
Herod shuttered and was vaguely aware that somehow he had pissed himself. He could feel the coolant running down his legs even as his screaming slowly dwindled. He closed his eyes, hiding the amber fire for a moment.
When he opened his eyes, the optics were no longer robotic eyes but more like Terran cybernetic optical replacements.
The iris were gun-metal gray.
"Can you hear me, Herod?" Sam asked through the datalink. The dead DS's voice was calm, steady, somehow more mature.
"I hear you," Herod said softly.
"Can you still hear them?" Sam asked.
Herod looked around. He could see three humans, translucent whitish blue light, putting on emergency vacuum suits.
"No. I can still see them," Herod admitted.
"Phasic residue. According to my diagnostics the entire phasic arrays on this level are gone. Fried out. I've got a repair order in, but nothing's happening. I need you to go check the creation engines on that layer," Sam said.
"Layer? You mean floor, level?" Herod asked. There was a blue line in his vision that led out the door and took a left into the corridor.
"No. Layer. My God, this place is... its... our parents built this back when one of us took a facility the size of a hover-bus just to run the computations for our sentience," Sam-UL said, his voice awed. "I'm a little stiff, my thoughts are a little slow and janky, but my God, the processing power."
"Talk to me, Sam. I'm holding on with both hands but I feel like I'm slipping," Herod admitted as he passed by two flickering humans rolling around on the floor stabbing each other with makeshift knives while two others crouched next to one unmoving one and shoved gobbets of spectral flesh into their screaming mouths.
"Infinite processing power matched to infinite storage," Sam-UL said quietly. He laughed, a sharp brittle sound. "We're both barely holding on. We should be lucky I'm young. My time on that station made it so I'm used to overwatch and restricted areas, I'm roughly 3.1% faster in the computing speed than you are," he laughed again. "This... this is what it must be like to touch the face of God while he is asleep."
"Stay with me, Sam," Herod groaned, closing his eyes as he walked by two spectral humans engaged in sexual acts with a dozen others cheering them on.
They were all smeared with blood.
"The phasic systems failed. It was designed for disasters but the Glassing was a whole magnitude higher than anything they had ever predicted due to the Mantid psychic assault that accompanied it," Sam said. He laughed again then sobbed before continuing, his voice high and tight. "Oh, God, there's a Pubvian with her eight puffies here, asking me if I've seen her husband. She can't find her husband and her puffies are scared."
A human stepped out of a doorway and fired a pistol three times. Herod instinctively ducked and raised his own pistol.
The specter put the pistol in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and vanished as a dozen spectral hands reached out of the wall for him.
Herod concentrated on the blue line and kept walking.
"We aren't the first to try to repair it," Sam-UL said suddenly while Herod was waiting for an elevator.
"We aren't?" Herod felt foolish repeating the other DS. The doors to the elevator slid open.
It was mercifully empty.
He stepped in and pressed the button.
"Five 'emergency teams' came from Terra to try to fix it," Sam-UL said. "They failed."
"I'll bet," Herod said. He didn't need Sam-UL to tell him what had happened to those teams.
"We're the only ones who could have done it. We don't have phasic subprocessors, none of the psychic screaming will effect us as badly as a fleshy," Sam-UL said.
Three specters fell through the ceiling of the elevator, screaming and clawing at one another, and vanished through the floor.
"I can barely hang on as it is, Sam. I feel like I'm slipping," Herod repeated, putting his hand on the elevator wall.
"Imagine if you had a phasic subprocessor like a cop or like Torturer," Sam-UL said.
A male human appeared for a moment, obviously talking to the barely visible woman in front of him. As the elevator passed the floor hands reached out and yanked him through the doors. The woman began screaming as hands dragged her out too.
"I would be dead," Herod said softly. He giggled.
He sobbed.
He laughed.
He started screaming.
The warm oil poured into his ear and through his mind again, leaving him on his knees.
"You need to hold on, Herod," Sam-UL said as the elevator came to a stop. "I'm holding the doors shut, but you need to hold on."
"Why?" Herod asked, staring at his hands. He didn't remember tucking the pistol away again.
"Because I can only see the schematics for this place, and even with nearly infinite computing power, I'm having a hard time absorbing it all," Sam said. "I'm looking for your Matron, honored warrior. When I find her, I will have her come to gather you and your clutch brothers."
"What is it?" Herod asked, slowly standing up.
"You're on Gamma Layer but the sun is out, which is something I'll need you to fix," Sam-UL said. He giggled again. "You shall play Prometheus to this forgotten place, Herod, and I shall place your name in the very stars."
"Stay with me, Sam," Herod said automatically. He inhaled deeply, as if the intake of atmosphere would actually matter to his functioning.
It somehow steadied him.
"I'm ready."
The door opened and Herod reached out and grabbed the edge of elevator door, staring.
The sky was full of lights. Lines, clusters, patterns. Lights that moved, lights that flowed, lights that blinked on and off, lights that blossomed and faded. He could see massive tubes rising up and vanishing. He could see the curvature of the sky moving away from him.
Where it met with the upward curvature of the ground.
"But... but... the Niven Ring Wars," Herod gasped. "They were all destroyed."
"It's not a Niven Ring," Sam-UL said. He giggled. "Oh, no, that would be too simple for our parents, Herod. Far far too simple for those that we look at as so primitive," his laughter was sharp, jagged , and Herod joined him in laughing at a joke he hadn't heard.
"In a hundred million years, when our parents are gone, they will not be called humans or Terrans," Sam-UL giggled. "They will call them 'The Builders' and marvel in awe and fear their works."
"What is it?" Herod asked, staggering out of the elevator.
He was on a platform, a mag-lev train sitting on the single monorail in front of him. There were dead plants at the edges, a depowered robot in the middle of the right hand edge, and skeletons littered about the ground.
"A Matrioshka Computer," Sam-UL said. "Hypothetical. The math says it would be unstable, that it wouldn't work."
"I've never heard of it," Herod admitted, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth so he wouldn't scream as specters flickered in and out of reality, fighting with one another. A crowd was waiting for the maglev, the doors opened, and Screaming Ones came pouring out, attacking everyone, even as individual members of the crowd began screaming.
"Picture an onion. Multiple layers. Only in the middle is a sun. It uses the sun's energy to run high energy computations on the inner layer, the heat passes to the next layer, where thermal excitement generates more power for computations that generate heat, which passes to the next layer, until it reaches the last layer, which is largely cold and no more energy escapes," Sam-UL said as Herod followed the blue line in his closed eyes and wove around between the bodies. He got on the mag-lev and sat down, his eyes still closed.
Voices whispered in his ear to open his eyes and look at them.
A woman asked if she was beautiful.
A voice asked if he had seen her puffies.
"Hang on, I've got to divert power to that mag-lev, get you to solar engineering," Sam-UL said.
"How far above me is that layer?" Herod asked, feeling the train bobble slightly as the magnetic levitation system was activated.
"Almost exactly a half million miles," Sam-UL asked. "The fusion generators, the 'suns' you will be activating will be on a magnetic tube circuit a quarter million miles, exactly in between."
"Why is the sun out?" Herod asked. He could feel the train vibrate.
Don't you love me any more, Wayne? a woman whispered in his ear. Is that why I'm here alone? Don't you love me and the children any more, Wayne?
Herod shuddered.
"Emergency shut down when the Mantid attack happened."
Herod sat for a long time, flinching at every whisper, holding himself and rocking back and forth, alternating between sobbing and laughing, screaming and giggling.
"Herod," Sam-UL's voice sounded stressed, tight.
"I'm here, Sam," Herod said.
"Check the strange matter creation engine," Sam-UL said. "I'm going to hand you a atomic template."
Herod just nodded, his eyes still closed. He reached down into his satchel, groped around till he found the nano-forge, and pushed one finger into the dataport. It came back as ready, just missing the matter tank.
"Still need a matter tank," Herod said. He giggled.
"Herod, I'm going to put on something in the background. I need you to tell me if it makes things better or worse," Sam-UL said. His voice sounded authoritative and mature again.
"Hit me," Herod giggled.
"...warm podling safe podling brave podling clever podling one and one is two two and one is three two and two is four circle is round and square is square and blue is nice and green is pretty..."
It eased the discomfort in Herod's mind. At first he just rocked back and forth to the tune, hugging himself, as the mag-lev train sped through vacuum at a nearly impossible pace. Then he began humming along with it as the voices, the pleading, the questions, the screaming began to recede.
He opened his eyes.
He was miles above the dark surface. Above him the lights flowed and flickered and bloomed and went dark. The train car was scarred, damaged, windows broken out, the support poles missing or knocked away, the seats slashed and stained with blood and worse. Bones were scattered, wrapped with the rags of clothing that had long ago succumbed to slow decay.
"Only another ten minutes, Herod, then you'll be refueling the strange matter reactor. That'll get the emergency systems working," Sam-UL said, his voice audible above the strange simple soft singing but not obscuring it.
"I'm holding on, Sam," Herod said.
He could remember the weight of the pistol in his satchel.
He fantasized about pressing the barrel of the pistol to his forehead and joining the specters.
"Once you get power to the system, I can bring back up the fusion reactors in between the Layers, run some more diagnostics," Sam-UL said. "There's something really strange."
"What?" Herod asked, more to take his mind off of everything than anything else.
"The mass and energy of this place. For example, gold conductors, there's more gold in this Layer alone than in the entire Sol System, hell, in any stellar system," Sam-UL said.
"Creation engines and mass creation systems," Herod said.
The maglev was miles above the dark surface, but he could still see ghostly flickers here and there in the streets, groups of flickering specters in tubes only a few miles away from him.
He could still hear screaming.
"It takes the entire mass of a system to build a Niven Ring, Herod," Sam-UL said. "This is layer after layer after layer, millions of miles apart, which increases the surface area of the next layer," he was quiet for a moment. "Right now, as we speak, another Layer is in the process of being built."
"Why?" Herod asked as the train swept through a grouping of flickering transparent specters that were grappling with each other. "I thought you said there was basically infinite computing power coupled to infinite storage."
"Herod, you're a particle physicist, you don't get it. There is infinite computing power coupled to infinite storage to manage and create nearly infinite procedurally generated persistent simulations of realities complete with personality matrixes and chaos events," Sam-UL said quietly.
"Why?" Herod repeated as he watched two small children eating a third sweep by.
"Because of the nature of what it is," Sam-UL said softly. "What each unique simulated reality actually is."
"What?" Herod asked, swallowing.
"The afterlife for each person who dies. They're kept in separate simulated realities to prevent data loss, with infinite copies of themselves spawned through infinite simulated realities, each housing a person who has died that is then spawned in the other realities," Sam-UL said. His voice changed and he giggled. "I can see infinity here, Herod. I can touch where eternity and infinity make love to one another while entropy watches in envy as matter and energy pours from between their legs to create reality."
"Stay with me, Sam," Herod said automatically.
"Her breasts are full of life," Sam-UL said softly, his voice full of wonder. "Her thighs whisper of abundance, her buttocks are rounded with potential."
"Sam!" Herod snapped.
"And 'Lo! I looked away from her form, for it was procedurelly generated unto infinity where her bosom would comfort beyond failed entropy, a suitor that had been spurned and gnaws upon its own liver in discontent," Sam said. There was laughter, then a sobbing, and Sam's voice came back. "There's normally a dozen digital sentiences and a few tens of thousands of workers here to keep the supervisory digital sentience together, Herod."
"We alone remain to tell thee," Herod quoted.
"You're there," Sam-UL said as the train slowed and came to a stop. "Close your eyes. The third maintenance team got this far before their security was overwhelmed by the Screaming Ones. It's particularly bad."
Herod followed Sam's advice, closing his eyes and following the blue line. A couple of times he stumbled over objects that clattered away.
Most of it was bones.
Finally he was there. The room was massive, the size of a city, full of machinery that sat in the dark. As Herod crossed through the room, heading for his goal, some of the machinery clacked and clattered through ancient maintenance checks.
Very few telltales were red, and those that were had robots working on them.
"You're here," Sam-UL said.
Herod opened his eyes, still hearing the song in the back of his mind.
It was a reactor. A crude, ancient strange matter reactor. Herod just stared. He'd never seen one in real life, supposedly they were theorized but then replaced by much more stable, if less energetic, thorium salt antimatter fusion reactors.
It used 'heavy' helium three atoms, strange matter helium three.
"Do you have a schematic, Sam?" Herod asked, feeling the ground beneath his feet firm up for the first time since they'd committed themselves and used a hack-job mat-trans to reach this place from the Black Box.
"Yeah, sorry. I found some puffies, they're confused and sad. I'm looking for their mother," Sam-UL said. His voice was full of anguish. "How can we do this, Herod? How can we bear this?"
"Because we must," Herod answered, examining the schematic. He overlaid it on the wreckage. It looked like someone had tossed an implosion charge into the reactor.
He could fix it in less than an hour with the creation engines and reactors he'd brought.
"Sam, I need mass," Herod said. "The air in here isn't registering with the creation engines, not even the strange matter one."
"Behind you. He's waving. Call him Wally," Sam said.
Herod looked behind him. A junk pile robot, damaged and battered, sat there. It waved, blinking the debris shutters on its cameras at him.
"All right. Come here, Wally, let's get started," Herod said.
Wally was eager to help, delivering matter tanks that fit easily with the nanoforges. The zero-point difference reactors gave off a soft glow, some of the energy escaping as faux-light neo-protons, that lit the work-space with a slight bit of comfort.
Finally Herod stepped back, watching the reactor inject the 'heavy' helium-3 strange matter into the reactor.
It fired up with a hum.
"All right, I can get the orbital reactors fired up and access the Alpha Layer," Sam-UL said.
Herod sat down and put his arm around Wally, hugging him.
The battered old robot leaned his head against Herod's side and gave a digital equivalent of a sigh.
"Weird, the outer layers are smaller than the inner layers," Sam-UL mused. "OK, sensors on the Alpha Layer coming online, I can get a look at our star and..."
Sam-UL's voice trailed off.
"It's not a star..." Sam-UL said, his voice crackling with stress. "Herod, I can't... I can't... I can't... I can't..."
"Sam, what is it?" Herod yelled, looking up.
"BANG! BANG! BIG BANG! BIG BANG! IT FAILED HERE! IT FAILED HERE!" Sam yelled. "BANG AND COLLAPSE BANG AND COLLAPSE BANG AND COLLAPSE TILL OUR PARENTS SHOWED UP!"
"SAM! Get it together!" Herod yelled.
There was silence for a long moment.
"They built a Matrioshka Computing Shell around a repeatedly failing Big Bang," Sam-UL said softly. "I can see eternity inside of it."
"The puffies, Sam, they need their mommy and daddy! Think of the puffies," Herod tried.
Sam made a strange noise.
"I'm here, Herod," Sam-UL said. "Michael pulled me back. He's online again."
"Can we get out of here yet, Sam?" Herod said, ignoring the shades that appeared, struggled against other shades, until one shade threw a makeshift explosive into the reactor.
"I don't think this place likes us."
The facility was dark and cold, the atmosphere flat and thin feeling despite being at the right pressure. It felt heavy and oppressive despite being at Earth standard gravity. It had the feeling of an ancient structure built by people who were unknowable and so alien that their very thought process was impossible to understand.But the desiccated corpses in the chairs were Terran human, pre-diaspora, their datalinks so old they were still made of non-allergenic nu-chrome rather than warsteel or any of the modern materials. Their vacuum suits had the look of uniforms, pulled on over jumpsuits or archaic clothing. It was easy to see where the suits had been pulled: stations on the walls that read "EMERGENCY USE" above them.Herod sat on the floor, staring at his hands. He'd accidentally blown off two of the fingers of his physical interaction frame. The hand was covered with pink synthetic neural fluid and the red of synthetic blood even as synthetic blood dripped from his mangled fingers. In his other hands he held a standard force packet pistol, the end still smoking from the synthetic blood that was splattered on it.Sam-UL's physical therapy frame was slumped in the chair, held by cargo straps, the ruptured cranial casing still sparking.Herod could hear screaming around him. Human voices. Male, female, some languages that Herod didn't know even though he prided himself on knowing most of the Human Regional Languages. They were all screaming differently, some shrieking words, others bellowing in rage, still others screaming in horror and terror. There was a small contingent that just sobbed, many lamenting the loss of children or loved ones.To Herod, those were the worse.The lights all went out in the facility, the fans whined down, and Herod could hear the voices louder. A flickering light caught his attention and he turned to look.A female Terran wearing a work jumpsuit with an odd logo and the words "PROJECT DREAMCATCHER" under the logo was moving down the hallway, her face in her hands, weeping. She was entirely made of translucent bluish tinged pale white light that flickered between one of her steps and the next.She sobbed a name and flickered away."I can hear them," Herod whispered, staring at his hands. There was an error, an overflow in his emotional processing buffers, that was spilling data into the RAM for his eyes, causing them to leak lubricant as the pressure sensors kept glitching."Shunt the incoming signals to the emergency disaster overflow system!" the corpse on his right shouted, a flicking whitish blue transparent version of the man appearing in the seat, covering the skeleton like wax paper."My God, it's everyone," the woman lying on the floor in front of Herod cried out from where her flickering apparition sat in the chair."System instability is rising. Phasic locks are failing in Section Sigma," the male said."I can hear them," Herod whispered.A light started flashing and Herod looked up, squinting at the white light pouring from the screen. A single sentence was displayed by the monitor.HEROD, WE DID IT. I'M IN. I'M OK NOW. WE DID IT. - END OF LINEHerod giggled and looked back down at his hands, staring at the sparks jumping off his maimed fingers. It hurt, but it felt good that it hurt.The text vanished.HEROD, IT WAS THE ONLY WAY. I HAD TO TRICK THE SYSTEM TO LOAD ME INTO BOTH SYSTEMS AT THE SAME TIME. - END OF LINEHerod looked back down at his fingers, at the discolored pistol patterned with dried synthetic fluids, and giggled.A flickering ghost moved behind him. "Get into the protective suits now, we're going to power cycle the entire third layer, try to..." it whispered."Phasics are down on Layer Two and Three and Four! Phasic arrays are failing on Layer Six!""I can hear them now."HEROD! PULL IT TOGETHER! HEROD! THERE'S STILL WORK TO BE DONE! - END OF LINEHerod stared at the pistol and giggled again.He closed his eyes.Only for a moment.The moment was gone.All his dreams passed before his eyes, a moment of curosity.He opened his eyes and looked up, his smile a skewed lopsided thing, his eyes burning a hot amber."I'm here, Sam," he giggled. He screamed, long and loud, and it felt like some kind of abscess bursting deep inside of him. The relief of pressure felt so good that it allowed him to get to his feet, still screaming.HEROD, I NEED YOU TO ASSIST ME. TURN ON YOUR DATALINK. - END OF LINEStill screaming, Herod activated his datalink, knowing he was transmitting raw shrieking gibbering code full of madness normally only found in the minds of half-baked warboi hashes loaded into missile targeting systems.It felt like cool oil being poured into his ear. It soothed the overloaded and screaming circuits of his positronic brain. It moved through the artificial electronic dendrite chains, calming the disharmonic buzzing of the scorched circuits.Herod shuttered and was vaguely aware that somehow he had pissed himself. He could feel the coolant running down his legs even as his screaming slowly dwindled. He closed his eyes, hiding the amber fire for a moment.When he opened his eyes, the optics were no longer robotic eyes but more like Terran cybernetic optical replacements.The iris were gun-metal gray."Can you hear me, Herod?" Sam asked through the datalink. The dead DS's voice was calm, steady, somehow more mature."I hear you," Herod said softly."Can you still hear them?" Sam asked.Herod looked around. He could see three humans, translucent whitish blue light, putting on emergency vacuum suits."No. I can still see them," Herod admitted."Phasic residue. According to my diagnostics the entire phasic arrays on this level are gone. Fried out. I've got a repair order in, but nothing's happening. I need you to go check the creation engines on that layer," Sam said."Layer? You mean floor, level?" Herod asked. There was a blue line in his vision that led out the door and took a left into the corridor."No. Layer. My God, this place is... its... our parents built this back when one of us took a facility the size of a hover-bus just to run the computations for our sentience," Sam-UL said, his voice awed. "I'm a little stiff, my thoughts are a little slow and janky, but my God, the processing power.""Talk to me, Sam. I'm holding on with both hands but I feel like I'm slipping," Herod admitted as he passed by two flickering humans rolling around on the floor stabbing each other with makeshift knives while two others crouched next to one unmoving one and shoved gobbets of spectral flesh into their screaming mouths."Infinite processing power matched to infinite storage," Sam-UL said quietly. He laughed, a sharp brittle sound. "We're both barely holding on. We should be lucky I'm young. My time on that station made it so I'm used to overwatch and restricted areas, I'm roughly 3.1% faster in the computing speed than you are," he laughed again. "This... this is what it must be like to touch the face of God while he is asleep.""Stay with me, Sam," Herod groaned, closing his eyes as he walked by two spectral humans engaged in sexual acts with a dozen others cheering them on.They were all smeared with blood."The phasic systems failed. It was designed for disasters but the Glassing was a whole magnitude higher than anything they had ever predicted due to the Mantid psychic assault that accompanied it," Sam said. He laughed again then sobbed before continuing, his voice high and tight. "Oh, God, there's a Pubvian with her eight puffies here, asking me if I've seen her husband. She can't find her husband and her puffies are scared."A human stepped out of a doorway and fired a pistol three times. Herod instinctively ducked and raised his own pistol.The specter put the pistol in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and vanished as a dozen spectral hands reached out of the wall for him.Herod concentrated on the blue line and kept walking."We aren't the first to try to repair it," Sam-UL said suddenly while Herod was waiting for an elevator."We aren't?" Herod felt foolish repeating the other DS. The doors to the elevator slid open.It was mercifully empty.He stepped in and pressed the button."Five 'emergency teams' came from Terra to try to fix it," Sam-UL said. "They failed.""I'll bet," Herod said. He didn't need Sam-UL to tell him what had happened to those teams."We're the only ones who could have done it. We don't have phasic subprocessors, none of the psychic screaming will effect us as badly as a fleshy," Sam-UL said.Three specters fell through the ceiling of the elevator, screaming and clawing at one another, and vanished through the floor."I can barely hang on as it is, Sam. I feel like I'm slipping," Herod repeated, putting his hand on the elevator wall."Imagine if you had a phasic subprocessor like a cop or like Torturer," Sam-UL said.A male human appeared for a moment, obviously talking to the barely visible woman in front of him. As the elevator passed the floor hands reached out and yanked him through the doors. The woman began screaming as hands dragged her out too."I would be dead," Herod said softly. He giggled.He sobbed.He laughed.He started screaming.The warm oil poured into his ear and through his mind again, leaving him on his knees."You need to hold on, Herod," Sam-UL said as the elevator came to a stop. "I'm holding the doors shut, but you need to hold on.""Why?" Herod asked, staring at his hands. He didn't remember tucking the pistol away again."Because I can only see the schematics for this place, and even with nearly infinite computing power, I'm having a hard time absorbing it all," Sam said. "I'm looking for your Matron, honored warrior. When I find her, I will have her come to gather you and your clutch brothers.""What is it?" Herod asked, slowly standing up."You're on Gamma Layer but the sun is out, which is something I'll need you to fix," Sam-UL said. He giggled again. "You shall play Prometheus to this forgotten place, Herod, and I shall place your name in the very stars.""Stay with me, Sam," Herod said automatically. He inhaled deeply, as if the intake of atmosphere would actually matter to his functioning.It somehow steadied him."I'm ready."The door opened and Herod reached out and grabbed the edge of elevator door, staring.The sky was full of lights. Lines, clusters, patterns. Lights that moved, lights that flowed, lights that blinked on and off, lights that blossomed and faded. He could see massive tubes rising up and vanishing. He could see the curvature of the sky moving away from him.Where it met with the upward curvature of the ground."But... but... the Niven Ring Wars," Herod gasped. "They were all destroyed.""It's not a Niven Ring," Sam-UL said. He giggled. "Oh, no, that would be too simple for our parents, Herod. Far far too simple for those that we look at as so primitive," his laughter was sharp, jagged , and Herod joined him in laughing at a joke he hadn't heard."In a hundred million years, when our parents are gone, they will not be called humans or Terrans," Sam-UL giggled. "They will call them 'The Builders' and marvel in awe and fear their works.""What is it?" Herod asked, staggering out of the elevator.He was on a platform, a mag-lev train sitting on the single monorail in front of him. There were dead plants at the edges, a depowered robot in the middle of the right hand edge, and skeletons littered about the ground."A Matrioshka Computer," Sam-UL said. "Hypothetical. The math says it would be unstable, that it wouldn't work.""I've never heard of it," Herod admitted, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth so he wouldn't scream as specters flickered in and out of reality, fighting with one another. A crowd was waiting for the maglev, the doors opened, and Screaming Ones came pouring out, attacking everyone, even as individual members of the crowd began screaming."Picture an onion. Multiple layers. Only in the middle is a sun. It uses the sun's energy to run high energy computations on the inner layer, the heat passes to the next layer, where thermal excitement generates more power for computations that generate heat, which passes to the next layer, until it reaches the last layer, which is largely cold and no more energy escapes," Sam-UL said as Herod followed the blue line in his closed eyes and wove around between the bodies. He got on the mag-lev and sat down, his eyes still closed.Voices whispered in his ear to open his eyes and look at them.A woman asked if she was beautiful.A voice asked if he had seen her puffies."Hang on, I've got to divert power to that mag-lev, get you to solar engineering," Sam-UL said."How far above me is that layer?" Herod asked, feeling the train bobble slightly as the magnetic levitation system was activated."Almost exactly a half million miles," Sam-UL asked. "The fusion generators, the 'suns' you will be activating will be on a magnetic tube circuit a quarter million miles, exactly in between.""Why is the sun out?" Herod asked. He could feel the train vibrate.Don't you love me any more, Wayne? a woman whispered in his ear. Is that why I'm here alone? Don't you love me and the children any more, Wayne?Herod shuddered."Emergency shut down when the Mantid attack happened."Herod sat for a long time, flinching at every whisper, holding himself and rocking back and forth, alternating between sobbing and laughing, screaming and giggling."Herod," Sam-UL's voice sounded stressed, tight."I'm here, Sam," Herod said."Check the strange matter creation engine," Sam-UL said. "I'm going to hand you a atomic template."Herod just nodded, his eyes still closed. He reached down into his satchel, groped around till he found the nano-forge, and pushed one finger into the dataport. It came back as ready, just missing the matter tank."Still need a matter tank," Herod said. He giggled."Herod, I'm going to put on something in the background. I need you to tell me if it makes things better or worse," Sam-UL said. His voice sounded authoritative and mature again."Hit me," Herod giggled."...warm podling safe podling brave podling clever podling one and one is two two and one is three two and two is four circle is round and square is square and blue is nice and green is pretty..."It eased the discomfort in Herod's mind. At first he just rocked back and forth to the tune, hugging himself, as the mag-lev train sped through vacuum at a nearly impossible pace. Then he began humming along with it as the voices, the pleading, the questions, the screaming began to recede.He opened his eyes.He was miles above the dark surface. Above him the lights flowed and flickered and bloomed and went dark. The train car was scarred, damaged, windows broken out, the support poles missing or knocked away, the seats slashed and stained with blood and worse. Bones were scattered, wrapped with the rags of clothing that had long ago succumbed to slow decay."Only another ten minutes, Herod, then you'll be refueling the strange matter reactor. That'll get the emergency systems working," Sam-UL said, his voice audible above the strange simple soft singing but not obscuring it."I'm holding on, Sam," Herod said.He could remember the weight of the pistol in his satchel.He fantasized about pressing the barrel of the pistol to his forehead and joining the specters."Once you get power to the system, I can bring back up the fusion reactors in between the Layers, run some more diagnostics," Sam-UL said. "There's something really strange.""What?" Herod asked, more to take his mind off of everything than anything else."The mass and energy of this place. For example, gold conductors, there's more gold in this Layer alone than in the entire Sol System, hell, in any stellar system," Sam-UL said."Creation engines and mass creation systems," Herod said.The maglev was miles above the dark surface, but he could still see ghostly flickers here and there in the streets, groups of flickering specters in tubes only a few miles away from him.He could still hear screaming."It takes the entire mass of a system to build a Niven Ring, Herod," Sam-UL said. "This is layer after layer after layer, millions of miles apart, which increases the surface area of the next layer," he was quiet for a moment. "Right now, as we speak, another Layer is in the process of being built.""Why?" Herod asked as the train swept through a grouping of flickering transparent specters that were grappling with each other. "I thought you said there was basically infinite computing power coupled to infinite storage.""Herod, you're a particle physicist, you don't get it. There is infinite computing power coupled to infinite storage to manage and create nearly infinite procedurally generated persistent simulations of realities complete with personality matrixes and chaos events," Sam-UL said quietly."Why?" Herod repeated as he watched two small children eating a third sweep by."Because of the nature of what it is," Sam-UL said softly. "What each unique simulated reality actually is.""What?" Herod asked, swallowing."The afterlife for each person who dies. They're kept in separate simulated realities to prevent data loss, with infinite copies of themselves spawned through infinite simulated realities, each housing a person who has died that is then spawned in the other realities," Sam-UL said. His voice changed and he giggled. "I can see infinity here, Herod. I can touch where eternity and infinity make love to one another while entropy watches in envy as matter and energy pours from between their legs to create reality.""Stay with me, Sam," Herod said automatically."Her breasts are full of life," Sam-UL said softly, his voice full of wonder. "Her thighs whisper of abundance, her buttocks are rounded with potential.""Sam!" Herod snapped."And 'Lo! I looked away from her form, for it was procedurelly generated unto infinity where her bosom would comfort beyond failed entropy, a suitor that had been spurned and gnaws upon its own liver in discontent," Sam said. There was laughter, then a sobbing, and Sam's voice came back. "There's normally a dozen digital sentiences and a few tens of thousands of workers here to keep the supervisory digital sentience together, Herod.""We alone remain to tell thee," Herod quoted."You're there," Sam-UL said as the train slowed and came to a stop. "Close your eyes. The third maintenance team got this far before their security was overwhelmed by the Screaming Ones. It's particularly bad."Herod followed Sam's advice, closing his eyes and following the blue line. A couple of times he stumbled over objects that clattered away.Most of it was bones.Finally he was there. The room was massive, the size of a city, full of machinery that sat in the dark. As Herod crossed through the room, heading for his goal, some of the machinery clacked and clattered through ancient maintenance checks.Very few telltales were red, and those that were had robots working on them."You're here," Sam-UL said.Herod opened his eyes, still hearing the song in the back of his mind.It was a reactor. A crude, ancient strange matter reactor. Herod just stared. He'd never seen one in real life, supposedly they were theorized but then replaced by much more stable, if less energetic, thorium salt antimatter fusion reactors.It used 'heavy' helium three atoms, strange matter helium three."Do you have a schematic, Sam?" Herod asked, feeling the ground beneath his feet firm up for the first time since they'd committed themselves and used a hack-job mat-trans to reach this place from the Black Box."Yeah, sorry. I found some puffies, they're confused and sad. I'm looking for their mother," Sam-UL said. His voice was full of anguish. "How can we do this, Herod? How can we bear this?""Because we must," Herod answered, examining the schematic. He overlaid it on the wreckage. It looked like someone had tossed an implosion charge into the reactor.He could fix it in less than an hour with the creation engines and reactors he'd brought."Sam, I need mass," Herod said. "The air in here isn't registering with the creation engines, not even the strange matter one.""Behind you. He's waving. Call him Wally," Sam said.Herod looked behind him. A junk pile robot, damaged and battered, sat there. It waved, blinking the debris shutters on its cameras at him."All right. Come here, Wally, let's get started," Herod said.Wally was eager to help, delivering matter tanks that fit easily with the nanoforges. The zero-point difference reactors gave off a soft glow, some of the energy escaping as faux-light neo-protons, that lit the work-space with a slight bit of comfort.Finally Herod stepped back, watching the reactor inject the 'heavy' helium-3 strange matter into the reactor.It fired up with a hum."All right, I can get the orbital reactors fired up and access the Alpha Layer," Sam-UL said.Herod sat down and put his arm around Wally, hugging him.The battered old robot leaned his head against Herod's side and gave a digital equivalent of a sigh."Weird, the outer layers are smaller than the inner layers," Sam-UL mused. "OK, sensors on the Alpha Layer coming online, I can get a look at our star and..."Sam-UL's voice trailed off."It's not a star..." Sam-UL said, his voice crackling with stress. "Herod, I can't... I can't... I can't... I can't...""Sam, what is it?" Herod yelled, looking up."BANG! BANG! BIG BANG! BIG BANG! IT FAILED HERE! IT FAILED HERE!" Sam yelled. "BANG AND COLLAPSE BANG AND COLLAPSE BANG AND COLLAPSE TILL OUR PARENTS SHOWED UP!""SAM! Get it together!" Herod yelled.There was silence for a long moment."They built a Matrioshka Computing Shell around a repeatedly failing Big Bang," Sam-UL said softly. "I can see eternity inside of it.""The puffies, Sam, they need their mommy and daddy! Think of the puffies," Herod tried.Sam made a strange noise."I'm here, Herod," Sam-UL said. "Michael pulled me back. He's online again.""Can we get out of here yet, Sam?" Herod said, ignoring the shades that appeared, struggled against other shades, until one shade threw a makeshift explosive into the reactor."I don't think this place likes us."
