Prophets

“Who are you planning on shooting?”

“Anyone who tries shooting us, for starters.” She ran to the open doorway and looked around for more guards. She didn’t see any in evidence, and with the cameras dead, she was probably unobserved. The air smelled rank with smoke and ozone from the mining lasers.

Yeah, we wanted to do something about that, didn’t we? she thought privately. If the things were automated, she could pinpoint the control center and get in to hack—

Over to her right, where the Protean egg/seed was, there was a violent flash of purple light and a blast of hot air. Hot embers and gravel shot by the doorway and Tetsami had to duck inside to avoid being pelted. When the light faded, a nasty mechanical whine filled the air.

“What the hell?”

“We’re too late. They blew it up.”

Tetsami wasn’t so sure about that. She ducked outside to look in that direction.

They hadn’t blown it up.

The matte-black ellipsoid hadn’t moved, but the ground around it had. It now floated at the center of a ten- meter-diameter crater that was nearly hemispherical. The perimeter of the crater encompassed the area where the heavy mining equipment had been. Of the mining lasers, or the tons of earth that had been underneath the Protean seed, there was no sign. As Tetsami watched, the near-mirror surface of the hemispherical crater crumbled as the soil began collapsing back into the hole.

“Somehow,” Tetsami whispered, “I think it didn’t need our help.”

The mind focused on the anger, a stable rock in the swirling maelstrom of emotion that filled its empty world. Whatever was responsible for the destruction of Xi Virginis—whatever intelligence was behind the cloud that had damaged the egg—that entity had to pay. The mind didn’t know how, but it clutched to that single desire.

The mind would see that entity cease to exist. It would erase it from the face of the universe. It would destroy the thing on an altar of the mind’s righteous fury.

With the anger, came focus and a dim awareness of the universe outside the egg.

The mind could not use all the egg’s senses at once, but it realized that if it focused on a narrow array of the sensory capability, it could see, after a fashion. Despite the subjective eternity in which the new mind had floated in the dark womb of the egg, it had in fact only been 2.38 seconds since the mind had revived.

As slow as the new mind moved in comparison to the old, it still had time to assess the presence of the mining lasers pumping terawatts into the egg. That energy had been absorbed and used by the lowest autonomic functions of the egg to repair the physical damage. The lasers themselves, as pure energy weapons, posed no threat to the egg itself.

However, the mind knew their purpose. The beams were an attack.

Like the cloud.

The mind reacted before it even understood the ramifications of the act. It extended one of the quantum fields enveloping the egg out to a diameter past the extent of the mining lasers. Space rippled, tore, and reformed in a shell around the egg, letting out a flash of light as a sphere of matter ten meters in diameter was twisted elsewhere. The energy required to destroy the lasers was barely balanced by the release of energy caused by the vanishing matter.

What have I done?

The mind did not understand its own actions. It had acted without thinking and had done something violent, aggressive, and probably counterproductive. Reviewing the record of the incident, it could see that human beings had piloted the lasers.

It had been under no risk, but it had killed nine people.

The anger leeched out of it as it wondered what it had become.

Tetsami heard Flynn’s panicked thought, “What the hell IS that thing?”

Tetsami started taking slow steps backward. She knew what it was, conceptually, but seeing the thing there, a matte-black hole in reality hovering over the crater, ignited a visceral fear. One nasty thought in her direction, and both she and Flynn could cease to exist.