“Dregs’ Hive,” said Johnny.
I’d guessed even before I was fully conscious. Dregs’ Hive is the deepest pit on Lusus, a no man’s land of mech tunnels and illegal burrows occupied by half the Web’s outcasts and outlaws. It was in Dregs’ Hive that I’d been shot several years ago and still bore the laser scar above my left hipbone.
I held the tumbler out for more water. Johnny fetched some from a steel therm and came back. I panicked for a second as I fumbled in my tunic pocket and on my belt: Dad’s automatic was gone. Johnny held the weapon up and I relaxed, accepting the cup and drinking thirstily. “BB?” I said, hoping for a moment that it had all been a terrible hallucination.
Johnny shook his head. “There were defenses that neither of us had anticipated. BB’s incursion was brilliant, but he couldn’t outfight Core omega phages. But half the operators in datumplane felt echoes of the battle. BB is already the stuff of legend.”
“Fucking great,” I said and gave a laugh that sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a sob. “The stuff of legend. And BB’s dead. For fuck-all nothing.”
Johnny’s arm was tight around me. “Not for nothing, Brawne. He made the grab. And passed the data to me before he died.”
I managed to sit fully upright and to look at Johnny. He seemed the same—the same soft eyes, same hair, same voice. But something was subtly different, deeper. More human? “You?” I said. “Did you make the transfer? Are you …”
“Human?” John Keats smiled at me. “Yes, Brawne. Or as close to human as someone forged in the Core could ever be.”
“But you remember … me … BB … what’s happened.”
“Yes. And I remember first looking into Chapman’s Homer. And my brother Tom’s eyes as he hemorrhaged in the night. And Severn’s kind voice when I was too weak to open my own eyes to face my fate. And our night in Piazza di Spagna when I touched your lips and imagined Fanny’s cheek against mine. I remember, Brawne.”
For a second I was confused, and then hurt, but then he set his palm against my cheek and he touched me, there was no one else, and I understood. I closed my eyes. “Why are we here?” I whispered against his shirt.
“I couldn’t risk using a farcaster. The Core could trace us at once. I considered the spaceport but you were in no condition to travel. I chose the Dregs’.”
I nodded against him. “They’ll try to kill you.”
“Yes.”
“Are the local cops after us? The Hegemony police? Transit cops?”
“No, I don’t think so. The only ones who’ve challenged us so far were two bands of goondas and some of the Dregs’ dwellers.”
I opened my eyes. “What happened with the goondas?” There were more deadly hoodlums and contract killers in the Web but I’d never run across any.
Johnny held up Dad’s automatic and smiled.
“I don’t remember anything after BB,” I said.
“You were injured by the phage backlash. You could walk but we were the cause of more than a few odd looks in the Concourse.”
“I bet. Tell me about what BB discovered. Why is the Core obsessed with Hyperion?”
“Eat first,” said Johnny. “It’s been more than twenty-eight hours.” He crossed the dripping width of the cave room and returned with a self-heating packet. It was basic holo fanatic fare—flash-dried and reheated cloned beef, potatoes which had never seen soil, and carrots which looked like some sort of deep-sea slugs. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
“OK,” I said, “tell me.”
“The TechnoCore has been divided into three groups for as long as the Core has existed,” said Johnny. “The Stables are the old-line AIs, some of them dating back to pre-Mistake days; at least one of them gained sentience in the First Information Age. The Stables argue that a certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core. They’ve promoted the Ultimate Intelligence Project as a way to avoid rash decisions, to delay until all variables can be factored. The Volatiles are the force behind the Secession three centuries ago. The Volatiles have done conclusive studies that show how humankind’s usefulness is past and from this point on human beings constitute a threat to the Core. They advocate immediate and total extinction.”
“Extinction,” I said. After a moment I asked, “Can they do it?”
“Of humans in the Web, yes,” said Johnny. “Core intelligences not only create the infrastructure for Hegemony society but are necessary for everything from FORCE deployment to the failsafes on stockpiled nuclear and plasma arsenals.”
“Did you know about this when you were … in the Core?”
“No,” said Johnny. “As a pseudo-poet cybrid retrieval project, I was a freak, a pet, a partial thing allowed to roam the Web the way a pet is let out of the house each day. I had no idea there were three camps of AI influence.”
“Three camps,” I said. “What’s the third? And where does Hyperion come in?”
“Between the Stables and the Volatiles are the Ultimates. For the past five centuries the Ultimates have been obsessed with the UI Project. The existence or extinction of the human race is of interest to them only in how it applies to the project. To this date, they have been a force for moderation, an ally of the Stables, because it is their perception that such reconstruction and retrieval projects as the Old Earth experiment are necessary to the culmination of the UI.
“Recently, however, the Hyperion issue has caused the Ultimates to move toward the Volatiles’ views. Since Hyperion was explored four centuries ago, the Core has been concerned and nonplussed. It was immediately obvious that the so-called Time Tombs were artifacts launched backward in time from a point at least ten thousand years in the galaxy’s future. More disturbing, however, is the fact that Core predictive formulae have never been able to factor the Hyperion variable.
“Brawne, to understand this, you must realize how much the Core relies upon prediction. Already, without UI input, the Core knows the details of the physical, human, and AI future to a margin of 98.9995 percent for a period of at least two centuries. The AI Advisory Council to the All Thing with its vague, delphic utterances—considered so indispensable by humans—is a joke. The Core drops tidbits of revelations to the Hegemony when it serves the Core’s purposes—sometimes to aid the Volatiles, sometimes the Stables, but always to please the Ultimates.
“Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the Core’s existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron—a nonfactorable variable. Impossible as it seems, Hyperion appears to be exempt from the laws of physics, history, human psychology, and AI prediction as practiced by the Core.
“The result has been two futures—two realities if you will—one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”
* * *
Water dripped on tile. Somewhere in the tunnels nearby a mech cauterizer’s warning siren echoed from ceramic and stone. I leaned against the wall and stared at Johnny.
“Interstellar war,” I said. “Both scenarios demand an interstellar war?”
“Yes. There is no escaping that.”
“Can both Core groups be wrong in their prediction?”