Downing muted the pickup, smiled at Alnduul. “How convenient. We didn’t even have to ask them to bring Caine to a communications console. You have a fix on him?”
Alnduul shrugged. “It has never wavered. And the system test is positive. The imbedded device is functioning and signals that it is proximal to appropriate equipment.”
“Then send the Trojan bug.”
Downing reactivated the audio pickup as Alnduul calmly depressed one, and then two more, of the buttons on his control vantbrass.
Hu’urs Khraam sounded impatient. “Mr. Downing, what is the message?”
“My apologies for the delay while we located it, First Delegate Khraam. Caine, the message is from Nolan Corcoran.”
Caine was even more stunned than the Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh who surrounded him. From the land of the dead, Tereisias speaks to Ulysses—well, Odysseus. “From Nolan?”
“Yes. It reads: ‘You were right about the Trojan horse, Odysseus. Thank you. And I’m sorry.’”
“Thanks?” And “Sorry?” “That’s all he wrote?”
Downing’s response sounded sly, even ironic. “Yes. That’s all he wrote—”
Darzhee Kut watched Caine, who stared at the communications panel as if it would provide a more satisfactory explication of the cryptic message. But Downing’s voice—and evidently, signal—ended abruptly, almost as if he had been cut off.
And then, as if suddenly stabbed or stung, Riordan clutched his left arm—
—God! The pain rose as if a volcano were erupting from inside Caine’s forearm. It was blinding, deafening, suffocating. It began hot, then became so searing that he looked at his arm, expecting to see it glowing white, incandescent, on fire, vaporizing.
But his arm was still there, unaltered, even as the searing cascade of agony seemed to rise past its own limit and burst through to—
Numbness. The arm—it didn’t really feel like his arm anymore—twitched once, a spasmodic flexure of his forearm muscles. Then a quick flip of the wrist. Then two more.
And then the whole arm was thrashing like a hooked fish dropped in the bottom of a boat. But still numb. Caine had the horrible sensation of having an alien animal attached to him at the shoulder, a creature with a mind and frantic will of its own.
The Hkh’Rkh were staring at him, their crests rising slowly. The Arat Kur were staring, too. Except the communications operator, who swung back toward his console with what looked like alarm. One of his screens had gone blank. And then in rapid succession, two more—right before the holotank image of the globe winked off.
And then Caine understood Nolan’s message—and his apology. It’s me. My God, I’m the Trojan Horse, the Timber Pony. I’m the weapon. Nolan and Downing didn’t just accept my idea. They made me the instrument of it. But when?
And then he knew: Mars. Just before we left for the Convocation. They put something in my arm on Mars, after the Russians attacked me. But no, that wasn’t a real attack; it was staged, just so they could get me into an operating room—
The main map, and half of the remaining computer screens suddenly went dark.
At a gesture from First Voice, two of the Hkh’Rkh were in motion toward Caine, claws wide, metal-jacketed points glinting. They either didn’t want to waste time drawing their weapons, or perhaps they wanted the primal pleasure of eviscerating their treacherous foe. The Arat Kur were motionless, too surprised to stop their rash allies from sheathing their claws in Caine’s torso.
I’m the instrument of the destruction and duplicity that I myself suggested. And now I’m going to die for it, either from this thing in my arm, or their attempts to stop it.
He waited the half second it took for the two Hkh’Rkh to get close, watched them rock back slightly into a doglegged crouch. The posture that presaged their most powerful leaps—
It’s so easy to suggest actions that “other people” will have to carry out—until you become one of the “other people.” So how does it feel, genius, to be the arms and legs and mouth doing the dirty work?
Caine saw the two Hkh’Rkhs’ legs stretch into a forward-boosting blur. He feinted left, snap-rolled right. With any luck, the Arat Kur might—
And then all the lights went out.
When it activated, it did not know what it was. Being a virus, it had no consciousness. But it felt a vague possibility of attaining self-awareness, like an infant struggling to speak, or a creature poised on the evolutionary brink of intelligence, attempting to cross that terribly fine, yet infinitely momentous line.
It began as a tickling of mesons, arising out of the vacuum of quantum entanglement into which they had been sent by a Dornaani communicator. And because the mesons had not existed in normal space-time between the Dornaani communicator and the Arat Kur communicator in which they reemerged, they could not be intercepted, blocked or jammed.
Like most simple parasites, the virus began its life cycle ready to feed. As it entered the foreign data stream, it quickly detected wireless connections to many suitable hosts within striking proximity, all of which were using a code upon which the virus had been trained to feed. It selected the most promising of these hosts—a communications console with heavy outgoing traffic—and spent what little power the Dornaani communicator had left to also send itself directly into the targeted system as a tiny burst of subparticles which reassembled as electrons and quanta arrayed as a string of code.
Once inside the host, it blinked awake, free of the mechanical chrysalis that had held it dormant in a human arm for four months. Now afloat in a sea of consumable code, it traveled quickly, looking for computing, memory, and storage components. It followed along and over the cataracts of the primary data stream, disguised as native code, building itself as it went. A large, diaphanous membrane of subroutines—evolved to probe and penetrate the host’s systems—grew out from the initial, largely regulatory tier, which behaved akin to a defensive cytoplasm. It responded to the encounters of the membrane, noting each contact and patrolling for a counterintrusion while sending all its observations back to a new third tier: a nucleus of experience-based information that grew exponentially with each passing second.
So when the antibodies of the host awakened and realized the threat implicit in this ballooning entity, which was identified as being part of its own body (yet could not possibly be so), they assaulted the permeable membrane. But once they penetrated it and entered the reactive cytoplasm, the parasite’s nucleus cannily observed how the host’s antibodies attacked. And it was the same nucleus which then determined how best to counterattack those attackers, evolving routines that were now immune to the host’s thoroughly analyzed antibodies. And in each encounter, the parasite learned more and became a bolder predator with fewer natural enemies. Having learned how to overcome and consume all the prior antibodies, the virus quickly discerned that most of the remaining ones were simply variations upon those overwritten themes.
With increased size and competence came increased appetite. Hungering after larger memory nodes, the virus awakened out of its pupate stage to realize that not only could it defeat the native code, but rewrite it in its own, evolving image. And with that awakening came an agitation, almost an excitement, for it could feel how these steps were not merely making it larger and stronger, but more complex. From dull sensation, it evolved toward a pseudo-awareness of its own purpose: to become still more aware. It speedily infested and reconfigured crystals and matrix-cores, expanding its pseudo-neural net, consuming voraciously, growing ever more powerful.