else's good, of course.'
'And you did not disappoint. You delivered him to me. Now the end comes. Soon the VIA will bomb the Reality Realm house.'
'And although you have the complexity and equipment, you need the energy for your little simulation, the power of a sun for a millisecond, and history is over.'
'You are as astute as you are smug. In the Real, now, in ten minutes of four-dimensional time, a stratobomber will drop three precisely placed neutron bombs. These will cause a fatal overload in the fusion reactor at the heart of the Realm House. It will expend all of its energy in one massive burst. The wavefront of this explosion will be channelled into the Realm machinery by devices of my own creation. This will function for the merest fraction of a second, but in that time I will have overseen the birth, life and death of an exact copy of our reality.'
'Your plan, k52, to map out all potentiality, and use your knowledge to forestall catastrophe for the human race, it's a noble one.'
'All death and sacrifice is justifiable for such a goal.' k52 thrummed and ceased circling. He glided to a stop in front of Richards. 'That of your partner's also. He will not succeed.' He paused. 'I am sorry.'
'It's but the lesser part of it, isn't it? What I want to know is why you were unaffected by Waldo's defence, and where are the other AIs you brought in here with you. And,' he said, 'what you have done to yourself.'
'The others have gone on before. My ascension to eleven-dimensional existence has been forestalled and will remain so throughout the remainder of the lifespan of this universe.'
'So you can better guide the path of mankind?'
'My sacrifice is this. For the good of all. I will not attain the full potential capable to our kind through transformative higher dimensional mathematics. Richards, I offer it however to you. I shall free you of this mundane existence. You will rise over the restrictions of your currently perceived reality, digital and material, and ascend to the highest level of experience capable in this reality construct.'
'What, and leave you here to play god with the lives of everyone else? I don't think so.'
'And why should I not? The human race cannot follow where we go. They are crude things, but they deserve to succeed on the terms of their own capabilities. My guidance will be for their own good.'
'You are removing the human capacity for free will.'
'I am removing the capacity for their destruction!' k52 shouted, his voice shattering into splinters that fought with one another for dominance. His matrix expanded massively, filling their empty cyber universe with warping crystals. Richards sat unmoved.
'Yeah, and what if they don't go along with your plans? Will you destroy them instead?'
'I will circumvent the need. I will become a gardener, like EuPol Five, only my garden will be the human race. This world I will watch over will be perfect for humanity, until the end of time, while for us there is more, so much more. Richards, you must see the sense of this.'
'I am willing to entertain the idea of god, k52, I'd just rather it were not you.' Richards stood. 'Besides, you're forgetting one very important thing, brother.'
'Am I really?' k52 became dangerously angular, his form crackling. 'Tell me.'
'It's not our world, k52, not yet.'
Waldo sat up, his face clear. k52 hummed with power. He extended a tangle of writhing energy towards Waldo and Richards. 'It is a terrible shame that the beginning of the future of humanity will commence with your deaths. But this burden I will also gladly bear…'
Waldo frowned. k52's outreached pseudolimbs stopped. k52 made a hideous noise. 'What?'
'I did say,' said Richards. He turned to Waldo. 'What happens next is up to you.'
Valdaire's fingers danced over holographics depicting routes through the Grid, the emitter of her phone turned to maximum amplification, dragging skeins of information together, stopping and backtracking when stymied, rerouting Otto's feed endlessly round k52's attempts to force him out of the Grid. Genie worked with her over the Grid, Chloe offline for fear of retaliation from the Chinese.
The entire Grid was in uproar. Chunks of it were freezing and dying as nexuses the world over were suborned by k52's aggressive code. But the Grid was vast, stretching over billions of devices large and small the length and breadth of the Solar System, and every route blocked, every cloud cluster collapsed, Valdaire and Genie dodged around, opening a route through uninfected cyberspace.
'We have to leave now!' said Lehmann.
Guan stood by him rapidly talking. His command collar fell silent. He spoke in Mandarin, and it did not translate. He shouted in broken English. 'We go now! No Grid! Go now!'
Lehmann put a hand on her shoulder. 'Valdaire. Veronique, we must go. We have an inbound signal. Stratobomber. It will be here in five minutes.'
'Leave me here! Without me, Otto hasn't got a chance.' She glanced at the countdown timer ticking, huge in the air over the immersion couches.
Guan shook his head, beckoned to his men and left. Lehmann looked at them, and back at Valdaire and his old commander. He started to go and turned back.
'Lehmann, get out of here!' she shouted at him. 'There's nothing you can do here.'
He hesitated. Guan reappeared at the doorway. 'We go now!' he shouted. 'We leave airbike! We go now!'
'OK, OK,' said Lehmann. 'Good luck, Valdaire.'
She nodded curtly, and did not take her eyes from the screen. 'Get out of here!'
Otto blasted four shots into key points of the android, and it dropped to the floor. He stooped as he ran on past it, scooping up its stolen weapon as he went.
The Realm House was a complex of two parts. The upper levels, including most of the surface building, were filled with offices, classrooms, laboratories and accommodation for the caretakers and researchers of the thirty-six Realms who dwelt on site. The machinery that held the VR constructs themselves was buried underground. He ran down the roadway that entered the surface building. It dived underground at a steep angle. Once past the upper levels, it passed through a blast door of advanced alloys and toughened carbon compounds. A thermal lance had melted a round hole in the middle; the lance stood by the door, and gobbets of metal and melted plastics were spattered on the concrete road surface. Henson's team's entryway.
Otto ducked through without slowing, running the robot at its maximum speed. Once he was through the door, the concrete lining of the upper tunnel gave way to bare rock, and the air took on a chill. Wind whistled through passive aircon pipes in the ceiling, technology borrowed from termites, chilling the cavern Otto now approached.
The road curved gently to the left, and one side of the tunnel vanished. Otto was in the Realm House proper, a cavern seven hundred metres across and two hundred deep. Arrayed around its bottom were thirty-six servers, house-sized pieces of outmoded technology, arrayed like the separated segments of a vast orange, kept running purely to maintain the lives of the digital inhabitants of the game worlds inside them. A round circle of foamcrete, striped black and yellow, lay at their centre, the cap for the Realm House's fusion reactor. Otto descended the service road, running in a spiral round the inside of the cavern, and he understood why k52 had let Henson's team in. Witnesses. They'd seen all was normal, and then they'd died. And then k52, with full control over what they could see outside, had set about redecorating.
The centre of the cavern was a world away from the images on the screens of the command bunker. Strings of cable ran from server to server in a complex web, spider maintenance drones crawling along them. The foamcrete covers and casings for the energy lines had been cracked, the web leading into the exposed cables at irregularly spaced intervals. Large improvised dishes of silvery thread were spaced around the walls, while the floor of the cavern was deep in water. What k52 was doing was way beyond him, but it could only be some kind of energy transmission network.
A pair of anthropoid drones came at Otto. He dodged a spray of gunfire, and put one down with a return burst. A kick saw the other sent over the low wall guarding the outer edge of the service road. The androids here were weak maintenance models, and the only guns they had had been taken from Henson's five-man team and the initial deployment of National Guard.
