Reggie and his brother were employed by Ms. Parvi and the BMU to help recruit new blood. Signing up for the BMU was something that Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick would do even without the extra incentive.
He also felt a level of security when Ms. Parvi confirmed many of the details of Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s history. Mallory’s cover seemed to have stuck, however rushed it had been.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mysteries
Knowledge is not the same as intelligence, and having too much of one often leads to having too little of the other.
Sometimes it’s smart to know when to be a little ignorant.
Tjaele Mosasa sat in a small building in an aircraft graveyard on the outskirts of Proudhon. In the office around him, holo displays crowded the walls. The displays showed unfiltered broadcasts from across all of human space, chattering in every language of the human universe. The data from the signals varied in age from several days to several decades depending on whether Mosasa’s receivers were leeching a tach-comm broadcast or a slow light speed signal that wasn’t intended to communicate beyond a planetary system. The off-planet broadcasts cycled through signals every few seconds based on some custom filtering algorithms. A dozen other screens showed text data scrolling by quicker than any human would be able to read.
The data flowing through the office, flowing through Mosasa, came from every aspect of human civilization. News broadcasts, soap operas, technical user manuals, tour guides, classified intelligence briefings, personal tach- comms, telemetry data from satellite diagnostic systems, pornography, patent applications, want ads, suicide notes, tax returns, census data—
If someone, somewhere, digitized some scrap of data, it was Mosasa’s goal to route it through the hardware in this room. Even when he wasn’t present here, he had encrypted transmissions broadcast to receivers implanted in his body.
Mosasa absorbed the data on a preconscious level. The software that formed the highest level of his consciousness, the part of him that thought of himself, was too complicated, slow, and unwieldy to process all the information he gorged on. That duty was reserved for an older part of himself, the part that was designed to process the data, to model it, to give him a view of the universe beyond this office.
The individual holo broadcasts, reports, novels, technical manuals no more impacted his conscious awareness than a single photon. However, like a photon, he didn’t need to be aware of any particular data element for it to contribute to his image of the universe.
The core of Mosasa’s preconscious mind assembled the unending stream of data into a view of the human cultural and political universe just as his eyes assembled an unending stream of photons into a view of the physical office around him. Both views were completely arbitrary constructions of Mosasa’s brain. Both were concrete and unquestionably real.
He saw the twist and political outlines of the Alpha Centauri Alliance as well as the plastic cases holding the holo screens mounted on the walls around him. He could feel the proxy tendrils of the Vatican pushing toward the Caliphate as concretely as he felt the engineered leather of the chair he sat on.
And from a dozen different subtle directions, he felt something pressing into fringes of human space. Information was leaking in from outside . . .
Mosasa knew about the colonies in that direction of space. He knew about them since their founding. He was old enough to have personally known some of the people who had founded them.
He had also known that they didn’t interact with the main body of human space. For a decade or so, those colonies’ only impact had been the knowledge of their existence in the upper levels of the Caliphate, the Vatican, and their proxies. Mosasa had seen that knowledge channel human actions on the highest levels, a stalemate where those in power did not act for fear of prompting their rivals to act. It was a stable equilibrium that should have endured for decades more.
Something was tipping the equilibrium. Some unseen stream of data was feeding into the equation. Some unknown was moving the Vatican and the Caliphate. Mosasa saw the resources moving, but not the reason.
But like a black hole moving through a galaxy, he might not see the source of the distortion, though seeing the effects was enough for him to give the location of the unknown.
