Rae told her small ship to release itself from its Meme counterpart and shove off. The two turned in near tandem and began to accelerate along the same course, heading for Earth. She marveled at how quickly the deal had been concluded: human diplomacy would have taken days at least, even under the pressure of impending attack, but with the hierarchical Meme, when the Number One made the decision, all others fell in line. SystemLord had spoken, so it would be done.
Almost a day passed, the journey to Earth slow enough even under the hundred gravities or more that the living ships and their protective gravitic fields could sustain. Rae wondered what it must be like to use a lightspeed drive; a trip from planet to planet would take just relativistic moments inside the ship, and only minutes to hours outside. Within her bio-VR cocoon, she could make the trip seem that quick, but such was an illusion.
Ever since the digital revolution began in the twentieth century, the virtual worlds of the mind seemed to dance counterpoint with external reality, streaking ahead into realms of fantasy and science fiction, only to fall behind as some great technological breakthrough reversed the field. What mankind – mindkind, to coin a term – conceived could be first envisaged in VR, and then created in the real world, sparking even more imaginative virtual realms.
In the beginning was the Information, she quoted to herself wryly.
When the two vessels approached Earth’s planetary system – no longer mere moon and monde, but a dense whirl of orbitals, satellites, captured asteroids and comets belying the damage the Blue Planet had suffered five decades ago – they diverged: the Meme toward its menacing constellation of eight looming Destroyers, Rae to plunge into the Pacific Ocean.
Once settled below the waves, she proceeded in submarine mode to the main insurgent base at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Made of the same living bioplasm as all Meme ships, it was as comfortable there as it would have been in space. More, perhaps. Here, easily digestible biomass, water, oxygen and minerals were abundant. As the pure Meme left the administration of planets – including the suppression of rebellion – largely to underlings, and the Blends and their reluctant enslaved humans had access to recovered technology hardly progressed from the twentieth century, they had never found the hideout.
Had the liberation of Earth played out as Rae had expected, the resistance movement would have eventually spawned enough military forces to seize the planet in a coup. In fact, when Conquest attacked the Meme scant weeks ago she had beamcast an encoded message to be passed to her son Charles, to get his people ready for the long-awaited campaign.
He was about to get a surprise.
Embracing Charles as she entered the base, Rae looked over his shoulder to see a fascinating lineup. Spooky Nguyen, the dangerous little sneak, she knew, of course. A giant gray biped, looking like nothing so much as a hippopotamus on two legs towered over an upright clothed cat rendered less than huge only by the size of the other.
Then she saw the last figure, and her knees weakened.
“Mother?” Charles asked, holding her up as she swayed.
“Ezekiel,” she breathed, kissing Charles’ cheek absently as she stepped out of his embrace and then opened her arms to her eldest son. Tears poured down her cheeks as she stroked his hair. More than nine decades had passed since she had seen him, and only now, when she smelled him with the exquisite senses of a Blend, did she remember how much she missed him. Without thought she opened herself to him, their skin-to-skin contact exchanging molecules, passing a richness of shared and new memory that threatened to overwhelm her.
“Enough,” he murmured to her after long minutes went by and the others began to grow restless. “There is time to catch up later.”
“Yes,” she replied. “We will.” Turning to the others, she said, “I apologize, but...”
“No need to explain,” Spooky said. “But I will tell you, we’re eager to be updated, and get moving on the liberation that Charles and we have planned out. He wanted to start days ago, but I convinced him to wait until you arrived.”
“It’s well you did,” Rae said, reluctantly letting go of Ezekiel. “I’ve brokered a truce with the Meme. A loose alliance, really. It would have been premature to start taking over by force what we’ve just inherited by diplomacy. The Skulls aren’t happy about it, though.”
Spooky laughed, humorless. “Diplomacy is merely war by other means. Without the danger of these Scourges and the threat of our superior technology, the Meme would have laughed at you.”
“The Meme don’t laugh much, but I agree with your meaning.”
Spooky said, “And I’ll take care of the Skulls....” He looked at Charles. “So now we implement the plan.”
“You sure you want to go through with it?” Charles asked.
Rae spoke up. “Go through with what?”
Ezekiel and Charles broke out in similar smiles. “Oh, you’re going to love this.”
***
In the belly of the undersea base, behind walls that opened only for Rae and her descendants, Spooky entered a cramped, humid chamber. A man of lesser certainty and strength of will might have glanced over his shoulder at his comrades standing discreetly back, but he ignored them, just as he ignored anything not relevant to his own goals and desires.
Spooky had once ruled Australia with the iron fist of the covert Direct Action organization, as first among the Committee of Nine, a junta cloaked by the velvet glove of a civilian government composed of unsuspecting Edens. Had he wished back then he could have eventually taken explicit control of the entire world, but that would have left him little time for any enjoyment in life, and among other things, he was a careful connoisseur of pleasure.
That made taking the step he now contemplated even more enticing. He’d always seized every opportunity to acquire the latest advances in technology to enhance his personal lethality and power. When combat nano was perfected, he had gladly embraced it, reveling in his newly turbocharged body. Then, after the bugs were worked out of human-implanted cybernetics, he’d gotten those upgrades, eschewing only anything attached to his brain, at least until robot surgery was perfected and he could program the procedures himself.
Now Spooky stared at the next step of destiny in the form of a quivering pool of amoebic protoplasm. So this is a Meme, he thought, captured long ago from the remains of a salvaged Meme ship and hidden here for decades. I can beat it, he told himself. I’ve never met my match in willpower, or in ruthlessness. If Sofia Ilona, a mere young woman of no particular achievement, can remain herself and yet become something greater by blending with a Meme, I can certainly dominate this pathetic bowl of jelly.
Yet he balked for some time at this irreversible step that would mean the end of Tran Pham “Spooky” Nguyen and the birth of something – someone – new. Any man would have such concerns.
He calmed his mind and meditated, using Dadirri deep listening techniques taught to him long ago by Maka, an Australian Aboriginal mystic. Then he transitioned to a Zen combat state akin to that used by the greatest of martial artists, a mental place where thought was banished in favor of pure action and reaction. No-Mind, it had been called, or Void, a zone he easily inhabited when contests grew physical, he intended to use it for his first, and hopefully not his last, psychophysiological combat.
Stripping off his clothing, Spooky stood naked in front of the pool. “Do not interfere, whatever happens,” he said to those within earshot. “If I die, it will be my own fault, and if I become something impossible to tolerate...kill me quickly and cleanly.”
Without further words, he stepped forward.
At first the baglike skin of the unknown Meme resisted him, and then it flowed around his legs, and he felt, heard and even saw thoughts form near him, concepts that seemed to be his own yet did not originate from him. Who? What? Why? These things and many more whirled around and through him, yet he clung to his calm center.
Where the thought-memes intruded, probing, he slid away, much as he would have avoided a physical attack. Where they retreated, he advanced, verbalizing firmly and repeatedly, you must blend with me. Spooky’s will brooked no defiance, demanding the other mind submit. Begin the process. You must blend.
The dams of the Meme’s resistance sundered, not so much breaking as crumbling like saturated earth. As memories flowed into him, Spooky realized the nameless creature before him had existed in a state of weakened despair for many years, its only diversion the interrogations that Charles supervised. Every escape attempt had been met with the pain of electric shocks. It had been utterly defeated long ago.
Once it realized blending with this creature represented a way out, its recalcitrance shattered and the Meme tried to process the underling, by methods it had learned long ago but never employed. All Meme prepared for the day when they would blend and pass on to the next stage of life, the paradise of sensations formerly denied, a rich emotional garden matched by exquisite physical delights only hinted at in received, secondhand memory. This one embraced the transition like a terminal cancer patient welcomed an overdose of opiates and its gift of oblivion, or a man imprisoned finding a dangerous exit.
Hope springs eternal, even in a Meme.
Only when the process was fully underway did it face the fact this underling was no blank clone or mind-wiped planet dweller. The underling had a mind of its own, along with a towering will that loomed so far above the Meme’s as to bring it to awe and despair. Those emotions filled it for the few moments before it forgot who it was and became someone else.
Hours passed in assimilation. He who had been merely Tran Pham Nguyen wondered how he could ever have thought so highly of himself in his previous state. Now possessing alien memories stretching back millennia, the core of who he was remained Spooky Nguyen, now expanded like a demigod. Hubris threatened, then subsided as his sociopathic calculation ruthlessly blocked fantasies of glory, of his ego’s desire to bend all to his will.
That way lay madness, Nguyen knew. In a cosmos so recently revealed as infinite, becoming the supreme ruler of a nation, a continent, a planet or even a star system revealed the falsehood of its own path. Whatever he took for himself, more would always lay outward and beyond his reach. In a universe of billions of galaxies, each composed of billions of stars – all perhaps comprising billions of universes or dimensions – such unbridled ambition seemed pointless and self-defeating. Long ago, Spooky had decided to deliberately turn away from that path, seizing power only to ensure his other goals were accomplished, and then relinquishing his authority without regret.
A trite adage came to mind: fulfillment isn’t having what you want, but wanting what you have. Most truths could be boiled down to cliché, no less valid for that.
When finally he ascended from the pool, he smiled, knowing himself a benevolent godling. The others looked on, and the one called Trissk held an automatic weapon pointed at his chest.
“Don’t worry, Trissk,” the new man said. “I’m still me, but more.”
“I can see that,” Rae said with an insouciant grin, and he remembered he was naked.
“I thought I’d keep my own face and build, but decided some additional height would be in order. People often equate height with authority.”
“Yes, they do, though when I blended, it was more about wanting to be beautiful,” Rae replied. She tossed him a yellow robe, and he slipped it on.
“Thank you. And, to answer some of your questions up front, when I said I was still me, I meant it. Rae, when you blended, it was voluntary. Ilona and Raphael contributed more or less equally to the result. Not so here. The Meme provided to me was pathetic, downtrodden, beaten. I absorbed it and incorporated it, turning its own abilities against it once I gained control. I’m no more a different person than if I had database chips implanted in my head. That said, I understand Blends like to take on impressive and unusual names to awe the common folk.”
“Yes, they do,” Rae said. “Charles here was once known as Charlemagne, then Raven, while my daughter Leslie called herself Llewella. Then there’s Apollo, Benedict, Shiva, Musashi –”
“I understand. There is value in an impressive name when matched with an equally impressive reputation. I thought quite deeply about what to call my new self. I settled on Spectre.”
Ezekiel barked a laugh. “Perfect. Like Spooky but with more gravitas. Very cool.”
“Trissk, would you lower the weapon please?” the blended man now calling himself Spectre said.
Silently, the Ryss did so, and then padded over to stand in front of the Blend. Trissk took in a deep breath through his feline nose, and blinked. “You smell precisely the same. That cannot be an accident.”
“It’s not. I have full control over my biochemistry now.”
The Ryss stared at Spectre for a long moment. “I accept this.” He put out his paws for a Ryss-style handclasp with the Blend. “Just don’t ask me to do it.”
Spectre laughed. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I would taste you,” Bogrin said, moving ponderously over and holding out a hand.
Spectre reached and touched, and then froze as the biochemical connection was made. Almost, he sprang to battle as he felt the light intrusion of thought passed along nerves and via complex molecules. Yet the conversation that took place was deep and rich with overtones, and he realized at that moment how hard it would be to lie to another Blend while using this method.
But he resolved to learn.
After exchanging pleasantries with Bogrin, Spectre stepped back and waited, knowing the conversation had been more than a hello. “Did I pass the test?”
“It is he, Spooky, or Spectre, as he calls himself now,” Bogrin said. “He is too young yet to block my survey. I am satisfied.”
“Excellent,” said Charles. “Then can we please get started on taking over the world?”