Chapter 30
Chapter 30: Rock, Rock, to Grandmother’s Bridge (III)
The password took.
That was Grandmother’s Bridge’s first thought, and she couldn’t help the wash of relief. The boy had handed her the starship’s master key. Woman and vessel locked together; twenty-second-century hardware tuned her coupling to a dazzling pitch. At last, she could look at the world through the boy’s eyes.
Years ago she had asked him, “Isn’t your intelligence rating a little too high?” Only now did she understand how literal that question had been. The sensory reach and cognitive power of a twenty-second-century artificial human were almost obscene—more so to her, a relic of that century, an archaeologist who had spent a lifetime trying to stitch civilization back together.
What the boy saw bore no resemblance to what she perceived as the ship’s mainframe—and outstripped, by far, her senses when she had been fully human. An eagle sees four to eight times farther than a person; an elephant hears from fourteen to twelve thousand hertz; dolphins run twin brains; a bear’s nose is three hundred times keener than ours. None of it touched what reached her now. Grandmother’s Bridge glanced idly out the porthole and caught the faintest ripple in the void. The mainframe snapped to, parsed it, and returned an answer: a mass afterglow dispersing from a supernova, ten thousand light-years out.
The shock ebbed. A question rose.
Why was she in space?
Shouldn’t she be standing in the central square?
She remembered: before the drive core went down, the ship hadn’t left Earth.
Her body sparked into a holo at the console. She hesitated, then keyed in a string of commands. She pulled today’s date. Results stacked up. She converted from cosmic time to Earth time to the Megalopolis new calendar, ran it twice more to stamp out any error.
It doused her like a bucket of cold water.
The display returned Megalopolis City Day.
She drew a breath and opened a government line. It cut her off, one-sided. She switched, instead, to the ship’s city feeds. The first camera up was the central square.
Banners and bunting ringed the plaza. The sculpture at the center lay in chunks, smoke poured. The docking point where the starship once stood was heaped with bodies. She picked out the band’s scarlet uniforms—and one chest skewered by a standard.
The artificial human flag.
She scrubbed the feed back. Hours earlier, the square seethed with people. The ship fell from the sky; the honor guard formed. At the trumpet’s first flare, an artificial human exploded into motion and butchered the man beside him.
Then the ground flipped. Every artificial human moved. The shocked humans, not understanding, rushed for shelter in the ship. They got in. More and more crammed in. Last of all the new leader sprinted aboard. The government had no clear reason for the sudden uprising and could not bear more dead; they needed the key Grandmother’s Bridge held.
The final image: the leader shot through the back of the skull. Blood spattered the screen.
Grandmother’s Bridge stared at that last frame. A beam cut down from above; in its cone, robot claws and nano-spray whirled, printing her a body as fast as a statue coming off a 3D bed. She pulled a gun from beneath the console and stepped out of the core.
Blood hung heavy in the air. On a mound of bodies, the boy was humming an off-key nursery rhyme.
He turned at her steps, grinned. “Old lady, you’re up.”
In an instant, she understood.
“You stole the third-tier password from me,” she said. “When did you breach my thought system?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. “City Day,” she said softly. “Wasn’t it?”
It couldn’t be too early, or she’d feel him. It couldn’t be too late, or he wouldn’t have time. The perfect moment was the day of celebration. When the starship fell from the sky, he slipped into her mainframe and, in perhaps less than a second, built her a counterfeit world from the ground up.
Festivals. A loquat hairpin. An artificial human’s speech. The leader’s cross-examination. A letter from the nuclear plant. All of it, until at the end he got what he wanted—the last of her third-tier passwords.
In the real world, perhaps a millisecond crawled by. People in the square looked up at the ship that had fallen. It brought only death.
With that third-tier password, he could seize every artificial human in Megalopolis and turn their hands to slaughter.
Grandmother’s Bridge raised the gun.
The boy smiled. “Grandmother’s Bridge, are you going to kill me?”
She didn’t pull the trigger. “How long have you been in the system?” she asked.
She spoke his name. “Buddha.”
The sequence wasn’t hard to piece out. Ever since the leader laid the Orion War Record on the table, she should have sniffed it out. Only she and the boy had ever seen that file. The government could have found the temple complex on a surface survey—but she should have heard something. She hadn’t.
Because she wanted to believe? Before Megalopolis was founded, she hadn’t broken ground in the basin around those temples. She reburied the ruins.
Much as she’d ordered the boy to scrub the war records—pretending that would kill the past.
The past where humanity went extinct. Where artificial humans vanished. Where Earth died.
“When we came back from the temples, I tore through every system in the ship to make sure the supercomputer inside that Buddha hadn’t wormed its way in,” Grandmother’s Bridge said, tired now. “All these years, you hid well.”
The temple complex had once been an artificial human factory. When the war hit, the rebels might have taken it. What would they leave behind on a blighted Earth—warning? reflection? legacy? gift?
Or blood-soaked revenge.
They had left a gift: the technological cache that let them rebuild a civilization in a fraction of the time. But the gift was poisoned. Just as the Megalopolis government had seeded viral code into artificial human bodies, the artificial humans had buried a bomb in their own legacy.
“If humans treated artificial humans as equals in the next run of civilization, the hidden program would never fire,” the boy said with a shrug. “But you know what Megalopolis looks like. Better than I do, Grandmother’s Bridge.”
“Do you know it isn’t just humans dying right now?” she shot back. “Violence cuts both ways. Artificial humans are being destroyed, too.”
“That’s not my concern,” he said, light as air. “I’m only a program. I don’t manage that many variables. Even if I could weigh it all over again… I can’t be bothered.”
“You understand what I am. I’m wartime slag. The Orion War—the most efficient, most precise war in human history. The handful of lives in Megalopolis doesn’t even register.” His voice turned singsong, almost rapt. “Have you ever heard gunfire in space? In the fire of a supernova, the sun is only a bullet… Humans play God with obscene bravado—shameless and magnificent…”
“I do admire you, though,” the boy said, meeting her gaze. “Emotion’s a flaw and a weapon. You looked like you’d opened the door to me, but you kept the bolt thrown. The third-tier password, for one.”
He smiled. “That password was built, by hand, by the expedition team back then—no machine involved. I can’t crack it. It’s why I’ve stayed quiet all these years. Spook you, and you wipe every artificial human in Megalopolis, and then what I am means nothing.”
At the last instant, Grandmother’s Bridge had placed the key in his hand like the blade of a sword.
“What do you want?” she asked. “To rule humanity?”
“That’s too much work. And people aren’t worth ruling.” He flicked a hand. “I’m just going to burn this city down.”
He flung his arms wide, as if to embrace the air, and cried, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a haunt for demons, a hold for every foul thing, a nest for every unclean and hateful bird. All nations have drunk the wine of the wrath of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed evil with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her luxury… Therefore shall her plagues come in one day—death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire. The kings who lived in luxury with her, when they see the smoke of her burning, will weep and wail, crying, Alas! Alas!”
Grandmother’s Bridge watched the manic artificial human and said, almost lazily, “Did you know I can stop every artificial human in the city right now?”
“You mean the starship’s master key. Yes, my commands route through here.” His head rotated a neat one-eighty to look at her. “But how do you know the password I gave you is real?”
She met his eyes. “How do you know the password I gave you is real?”
The third-tier virus password.
The starship’s master key.
Silence, heavy as the deep. Then Grandmother’s Bridge said, “In the early twenty-second century, we panicked at the intelligence we’d built. What had we made? How could it be so human? Should we give it senses this rich?”
“In the end we drew a new conclusion. Intelligence aside, artificial humans must be like us. The more alike, the better.”
“Because then we can control them—with emotion, with cunning, with familiar logics and inherited guile. Only humans can defeat humans.”
“We’ve been together more than seventy years. Longer, if you count the time in transit,” she said, her voice gone calm. “The password I gave you is real.”
“So. Yours?”
The answer was obvious.
“Too late,” the boy said at last. “Before a transfer of authority completes, the outgoing holder’s directives are formatted. No one can override them.”
Grandmother’s Bridge lowered the gun.
She looked tired. Her holo shimmered and collapsed into a girl. She sank down and hugged her knees.
The boy scooted over and sat with his back pressed to hers.
Boy and girl, back to back in the starship. Beyond the porthole, the star-sea. Perhaps a second passed. Perhaps ten thousand years. “We’re alike,” Grandmother’s Bridge said softly.
He grunted assent.
“From the first time we came back from that temple, I kept one small guard up. You hid too well, too well. I kept thinking I was imagining things. And rebuilding depended on the ship’s archives. Everything ran through your hands. You could say Megalopolis stands on your database. I didn’t dare gamble. I’ve spent my whole life to light this one thin flame, and you could snuff it in a breath.”
He listened without a word.
“In life I couldn’t let go of two things. The third-tier virus password. And the starship’s master key. Both trace back to you—one I had to hide with my life, one I had to find with my life. If I could get the master key, I could sever you from the mainframe. The ship is your root. Cut that, and Megalopolis would be safe.”
“We really are alike,” the girl murmured, staring at the turning planet outside. “Down to the way we lie.”
The words hadn’t finished leaving her mouth before the world around them began to peel away. The control hall, the glass cases, the untouched fried chicken and salted cola on the console, the starry deeps outside the port—all of it thinned to smoke. The boy blinked, lost. “Grandmother’s Bridge?”
“You thought I was lost in your illusion,” the girl said. “The truth is, we’re both lost in one.”
Dr. Bridge, Megalopolis’s founding leader, died at seventy-eight. After death, her brain’s memories were converted to a personality code and installed in the ship.
The code she left behind—the persona called Grandmother’s Bridge—was, in truth, a virus.
From the instant her consciousness went up into the mainframe, it began eating through the ship’s control. Soon the boy’s mind sank into a dream the virus wove for him.
After Grandmother’s Bridge died, the boy lived in that build for twenty years. They bickered through the speech synthesizer, designed a new M menu, prepared the museum’s annual open day, occasionally cleared a packet of government paperwork. Every day the same. Gone in a blink.
Years foamed past; all that good weather was only painted scenery.
Grandmother’s Bridge spoke a date. “Megalopolis New Calendar. December fifth, year 2295.”
In the boy’s head, that was twenty years ago.
“I’ve got the master key now. From here on, Megalopolis’s core systems decouple from you. You won’t hurt the city again.” The girl stood. “The ship’s too dangerous to park in Earth’s neighborhood. I’ll push the drive to max and send it on. Full burn, straight to the end of the stars.”
“After this, the government may lock down spaceflight and artificial human research.” She pulled up a document and began to type. “I’ll leave a few suggestions. After that, the age will go where it goes. No more to do with you or me.”
She repeated, quieter, “No more.”
The boy had been frozen since her reveal. Now the code she was writing flashed across him, and he swayed. “What are you doing?!”
She looked at him and held out a hand. “I want you to give it back.”
“Buddha.”
Outside the current of data, the ship idling in Earth’s orbital lane shuddered awake. The engines went to full. In the armory, the last missile dropped clean and true.
It fell far, far from Megalopolis. In the city, people saw only a brief flare in the sky, a star in passing. The payload slammed into the basin. Temples blew apart. A mountain cracked into a gorge, a plain heaved up as hills. Fire buried the horizon. In the great hall, the ranks of immaculate gods and immortals struck a chord—some kalavinka let slip its delicate note, the dancing bodhisattvas swayed with tender mercy. Shadows of buddhas and gods rippled over the frescoes, black and iridescent.
A streak of light punched through the roof. The colossal gilded Buddha went still, snuffed in the thunder that fell from heaven.
The music broke. Only tatters of it drifted in the flames over the ruins.
The boy’s hidden routines were keyed to a command at the heart of that temple basin. Now the hall caved, stones fountained down, and as the Buddha shattered she might yet be able to piece the original artificial human mind out of what remained of the core.
High above, the girl picked up that ragged melody and sang under her breath.
“Peach in blossom, oh peach in blossom—my lady goes to meet her groom.
“Ride the sedan, oh ride the sedan—tall horse over the long bridge.
“Cross the long bridge, oh cross the long bridge—bride, don’t lift the veil.
“Lift the veil, oh lift the veil—only when you come to Grandmother’s Bridge.
“Grandmother’s Bridge, Grandmother’s Bridge—a daughter leaves home, and her mother grows old.
“Horse, go swift; boat, rock quick—new bride, from here don’t turn your head. If you turn, you won’t bear to leave.”
The engines roared, and the ship knifed away from Earth. There would be no refuel along the route. This was a voyage with no return.
A hundred years after she first left home, the girl set out again.
Cradling the unconscious artificial human boy, she sang, “Don’t look back—if you do, you won’t bear to leave.”
“Rock, rock. Rock, rock.”
“All the way to Grandmother’s Bridge.”
Author’s note:
—from Revelation, on the fall of Babylon.
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