Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Read online

  In a hotel conference room out by the airport where the big jets thundered off into the sky and the lie of somewhere better.

  After she’d gone for the last time.

  Who?

  You know. Holly Wood. She’d gone off somewhere. Wasn’t that so? Wasn’t that how it actually happened?

  “That’s what we’re doing now,” said Maestro in Crometheus’s ear inside the quiet yet noisy in its way arcade. Quiet in that there were no human voices. Maestro sounded like some English butler. Someone with the class and sophistication to be completely freed of all the moral and societal constraints that kept one from becoming what one was supposed to one day really be.

  King. Master. Artisan. Serial killer.

  Another gamer, a girl he’d fought alongside in the game Assault on Cappella Three, where they’d found the ursoids after a sixty-five-year haul from the last star, had once told him that Maestro was just an AI. That’s all. Albeit a super-intelligent AI based on an old actor named Anthony Hopkins. Before the Uplift, when the MW Collective first designed the prototype that would one day become Maestro, they called it the “Hannibal Project.” Unofficially. An inside joke. Dark humor because the whole project had made some big leaps in synthetic cognitive reasoning after a data review of an earlier AI that had been trained to be a serial killer. Just an experiment of course, for the engineers at some big tech social media search engine giant. Just to see what would happen if they did. Y’know?

  Just playing around to see what could be done, really done, when you didn’t have any constraints. Like morals.

  But some old newspaper, some shrieking conservative harridan, decried that the tech giant was making “AI serial killers.” So they changed just the name for PR purposes.

  Because humanity was afraid for itself. Of course, humanity was always afraid for itself. That was the basis of modern civilization back then. Unification through a series of common fears.

  Much more malleable that way.

  But that had been when they, the elites who really ruled Earth from behind the scenes, had been forced to play by the rules of the masses. Being forced to “play fair” by the very people they’d empowered in order to give themselves total mastery over the culture, and therefore the planet. That game was still in effect then. The Game. That was what the plan for Uplift was called, back then. The Game. But it had been Bad-Worded and edited out of existence in all the years since. Now it was called the Path. In fact, it had always been called the Path. But back then they were only a few years away from being set free by the Exodus and the Big Uplift as the Game reached its conclusion. Getting off a ruined world and away from the Animals they could never evolve with as they had, was how the Game was won. Free to become something totally new. Free to call the super-intelligent AI that would help them run their lives what they wanted to call it.

  In time the “Hannibal Project” gave birth to Maestro, never mind all the silly nonsense about them finding something called Super Mind Six on a derelict alien starship. That was pure nonsense. Maestro was a successful experiment to develop a Nietzschean algorithm that didn’t hesitate to do what was best in order to achieve the desired ends of the Pantheon. It lacked the weakness of human frailty. It provided exactly what they needed to shuck that useless husk. They had created it because that’s what gods did. They created.

  That was the official truth. The one you needed to embrace. Not the story about a derelict alien starship found adrift by the colony ship Pantheon out there in the dark between the stars one hundred and twenty years out from Earth. Found, boarded, and recovered… and then the exponential leap forward that gave them Maestro. And how Maestro saved their lives by integrating their belief system with a frightening new technology.

  Never mind that.

  Edit.

  That’ll earn you a Bad Thought negative achievement point demotion in the blink of an eye, thought Crometheus, surprised that it hadn’t already.

  She, that gamer girl he’d fought alongside, had told him the conspiracy theory of a found Maestro when they went to war against the little bears on that forest world after Sirius Two. He made six levels and earned four thousand achievement points during the game on that planet. She told him that after they’d unlocked the thermonuclear obliteration option of the game and put paid to the rebellious little ursoids. Then the two of them blew their collective achievement points on a wild romp through 1890s Paris. It was an orgiastic vacation of vintage sex, mind-altering absinthe, and the great meals of the best French chefs from the decadent past. A combination of a colorful three-ring circus and a gourmand’s descent into a fleshy bacchanal.

  She told him all the rumors about finding Maestro in the smoking ruins of an ursoid base. He remembered all that now as he heard Maestro’s voice, as if for the first time, despite its familiarity.

  That voice prompting to drop a token into Britannia Attack!, that was Maestro. Cool. Calm. Rich and deep. The voice of competent reason. A voice having once belonged to an actor who was best known for playing a serial killer in some old set of films. Not that anybody remembered those anymore. They just thought of him as Maestro now. They’d made even better serial killer films on the long crossings from conquered world to conquered world. Real ones with no special effects. Films where the killer was the hero. Those, of course, were the best kind if you were part of the Uplifted. Once you understood the narrative that doing anything you want is the ultimate liberation and a step along the Path.

  So it wasn’t called the Hannibal Project, noted Crometheus. That’s a bad thought.

  Thirty-five achievement points.

  It was called Maestro, and he would show them how to become gods along the Way of a Thousand Steps. Which was what the Path had always officially been called. Path was just insider-speak for the awakened. The Uplifted.

  The Way of a Thousand Steps had been the book title of the author that had been holding that seminar out by the airport that rainy weekend.

  Your Journey to Becoming God was the subtitle. That was also the title of the lecture at the airport Marriott that had changed his life forever. Or rather… rescued his life. Rescued from whom? From himself, he answered. And always would. Of course. But even that meaning had become lost in all the lived lifetimes aboard the Pantheon. It wasn’t really him who’d done all those things, caused all that havoc and ruin across the canvas of his old life. Which of course he had. But when he thought about it now, centuries later after centuries of conditioning about whose fault it really was and of course the answer always being Yours… what he really meant by You was his old human, or Animal, nature. Not who he was now. The Path had rescued him from himself, and them all… from humanity.

  He, player Crometheus, used to know how many steps he’d taken along the Way of a Thousand Steps. The Path. He’d been counting them with each achievement, reward, insight, and enlightenment garnered in war, local Armageddon, and planetary holocaust on all the worlds the colony ship Pantheon had made. And that had been truly immature of him to count. Really, weak was the right word. To keep track was the sign of a lesser mind not bent to the grand picture and the great things that must be accomplished. TED 14:9. To count steps toward becoming was like a child playing with a ball. The sign of a weak mind whose only interest was in the result as opposed to the journey. And the becoming. He’d discovered that kernel of truth from promptings by Maestro when he reached the step in which the Path told you to stop counting how many steps you’d taken along the thousand steps of the Path. Because only mortals and petty finite beings bothered with numbers and definitions.

  Results.

  Truth.

  Meaningless in the grand scheme.

  The Xanadu Tower never counted. Had never counted.

  Gods, the truly enlightened of the Uplifted, ruled reality from the Tower, and they knew they were enlightened once they’d reached enlightenment. But in order to do that they’d needed to lo
se count along the way. Lose themselves and all the petty constraints that tied them down.

  TED 89:93.

  Just as those in the remotest and most secure regions aboard the colony ship Pantheon had lost themselves in order to ascend above all the petty ruling councils that had once formed the Pantheon. Such were the Uplifted worthies who inhabited the Xanadu Tower.

  Such all hoped one day to be. Or even possibly… greater than…

  Maestro had revealed this to Crometheus during the sack of a world called Sumoratu. As its vast forests burned down to charcoal and ruin and the Uplifted marines hunted the survivors far down into their deep caves and underground viridian seas, after one particularly vicious firefight in which there’d been severe casualties taken among the marine gaming clans, Maestro illuminated Crometheus when he felt hopeless. Shot to hell and one arm blown off. The game-overed outnumbering the living. And still more work to do down in the lower vaults of that exterminated civilization.

  Doomsday weapons to be dealt with and deactivated.

  Maestro suggested then that there were levels beyond the Xanadu Tower. Greater greatnesses than anyone had dared dream of achieving.

  And so now, standing here in the arcade, Maestro prompted him, in front of the brand-new game called Britannia Attack! with its slick graphics along the top and sides of the upright cabinet that showed a planet being invaded by armored space marines while a fantastic fleet fought in space above, energy weapons sizzling and missiles streaking smoky trails, all violent reds and cool interstellar blues. The eight-bit digital song playing over and over was relentlessly triumphant, as though it were some Beatles song made into an imperial march. Ceaselessly important. Deeply inspiring. It reminded Crometheus of something composed by Philip Glass, who surely himself must have gone into one of the cryo banks and then centuries later moved on to one of the colony ships in the Uplift when those who were to become great gods shed themselves of the mortal coil of humanity and turned their backs on the final wreck that was Earth.

  Surely Philip Glass and so many others had made it off the dying home world of all their origins. The longevity techniques were already in place. Secret and not for mass consumption. Hidden cryo banks to wait out terminal diseases and fatal injuries beneath Beverly Hills, Dubai, Beijing… along with all the other great capitals where the elites constructed their economic holdfasts guarded faithfully by media watchdogs and Orwellian police-state social media forces worthy of any fascist army. All of it had been in place back then. Before the last moments of The Game. In fact, far longer than anyone had ever suspected. Cryostasis when you died. Or were dying. Long before the Age of Uplift was even a dream. Immortality through technology. Tech that was expensive and held back from the masses wasn’t held back from the best. Of course. Hundreds of years before everything went sideways it was already there, scooping up all the greatest of politics, wealth, and power, and even some of the rock stars, movie stars, and occasional sitcom beauties who’d managed to level up. Planetarily speaking.

  The Mozarts of the world couldn’t be lost as Mozart himself had been at thirty-three. The tech hadn’t been available then. But it might have been around in 1965 when the lung cancer beat you. There were ways to keep you in cold storage and keep you around until newer tech could be developed. Tech that would restart. Reclaim. Reintegrate into the collective Uplifted.

  All these thoughts, courtesy of Maestro of course, flooded Crometheus and overwhelmed him with images and phrases until he understood what the gentle butler who’d once eaten a man’s liver with some fava beans and a nice glass of Chianti was showing him.

  “We’ve arrived on our planet,” said Maestro gently. “A planet all our own. You are almost there, Master Crometheus. You are almost ready to become a god. And this, my dear boy, is what we’re doing today. We call it… an asymmetrical boarding action designed to stop an enemy counterattack.”

  Crometheus dropped the bronze disc of the stamped token into the slot of the arcade machine Britannia Attack! Sometimes a token, from overuse or whatever, just slid right through and down in to the return tray. Old Man Webb would give you a new one if that was the case. But not this time. It landed in the deep heart of the war machine.

  The kick is good, as they used to say, thought Crometheus. As he used to say during his rock god days at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset. Shooting heroin with starlets and models. Binging for days at a time because you could, and it was expected of you to do such so that status and image might be maintained for better album sales. Rock god problems. The world and all that was in it was your personal plaything. But the signed contract required that you play the game. Drop the token in. Take the ride. And so he had.

  The kick is good.

  “This is what we’re becoming now, Master Crometheus,” reminded the ever-present Maestro in his ear as the screen changed and asked him to “Press Ready, Player One.”

  Then he was in-game.

  He could feel the joystick in his hand. The fire button beneath his right index finger. He tapped the Player One button. And now he was ready. Now he was gone from own his private world and jacking into a Frankenstein killing machine. His other true self.

  The Uplifted marine.

  Player Crometheus.

  Fun, huh?

  We call it an asymmetrical boarding action designed to stop a counterattack.

  Gods: Chapter Four

  In-game, Player Crometheus was aboard one of the Odin’s Spear–class assault ships they’d developed and built during the long haul after Cappella Three. When they had resources to burn after they’d shed themselves and plundered an entire planet.

  His Frankensteinian combat frame, tricked out with new upgrades, perks, and boosts, was stacked in the rapid deployment racks and ready for a hot drop boarding action.

  “This is General Maximo…” began a strident, almost hectoring voice in Crometheus’s ear. General Maximo was the greatest player… ever. Many Uplifted in the chats, hangouts, and pleasure domes agreed he would be the next one to reach enlightenment and complete the uplift to the inner sanctums of the Xanadu Tower. He’d used a mutating nano-virus on the ocean world of the Asuulomons, turning its inhabitants’ scaly bodies against themselves. The “Pandora’s Box” bioweapon had been one of Maestro’s greatest projects, and it was used only in the most extremely dire of situations to accomplish the Pantheon’s goals. Maximo had earned fifty thousand achievement points from the Pantheon just for daring to use that weapon against that nigh-unconquerable water world that had vexed the marines. When the Animals discovered that world someday, if they discovered that world, all they’d find would be a vast dead sea filled with rotting corpses and bleached bones. Nothing but ruin for daring to oppose the Uplifted.

  Imagine that day. The Animals would feel a cold streak up their spines because it would be like looking at their own impending death.

  Imagine it.

  Crometheus often had. Mainly the General Maximo parts. A fast track toward full Uplift didn’t just happen every day. You had to be on the lookout for an opportunity to leap ahead of the pack. Ready for any chance that came up no matter how many millions had to die. It wasn’t enough to be just Uplifted. There were inner rings of power. Other levels. Strange worlds inside the Pantheon. And the discovery of each ring revealed a new fulcrum of power over others, often hidden in plain sight.

  “Operations against the Animal-infested planetary body known as New Britannia have already begun,” continued Maximo over the briefing comm as the assault ships were readied for attack. Engines boosting. Repulsors coming online. The chatter of nav data between the strike pilots filling the background of the Uplifted marines’ comm. “As of this hour, in-game, we currently control the planet and most of its surviving major cities. Non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction have been used. Processing operations are underway on the local population and we can expect complete Animal extermination and at least seventy pe
rcent reclamation within the next thirty days. Uplifted of the Pantheon… you’ve been introduced into the battle at this moment in space, aboard the allied Uplifted vessel Id Sociocracy. While they do not share our way of thinking, they fight alongside us in this final solution against the Animals, and have provided us this transportation into the battle, as the Pantheon has come to permanent rest on our new world. Which will henceforth be known as… Pantheon. What the Animals once called New Vega. At the social reinforcement direction protocols of Maestro, we are assisting the Id, as they will henceforth be known, in capturing this new home world for them.”

  Crometheus and the rest of the Pantheon marines were given access to a tactical display of all in-game assets currently in play within the system of New Britannia. The sites of major engagements were highlighted and tagged with further detail. In three nano-seconds, Crometheus ran through the entire conflict to date.

  Initial assault on New Britannia by the Id and a fleet of allied Uplifted vessels. Non-nuclear bombardment of capital city Londoneaux. Bacterial paralysis influence strike against Charing. Special weapons assault force deployed against orbital base Sandhurst. EMP strike on Southern Scotlands. Deployment of capture teams in that region. Suborbital engagement against Animal carrier group. Battle of Steading. Battle of Hull. Battle of… and so on and so on. It hadn’t taken long for the Id, with the help of the other allied Uplifted, to take near-total control of the Animal world.

  But now, on the system assets display, new Animal forces were moving into the system to assist. Telemetric and scouting data coming in from an Id scout vessel tracking incoming jump signatures indicated a counterstrike against the engaged Uplifted vessels. The Id’s main colony ship, like the Pantheon on New Vega, had set down forever on a tidal plain west of the burning ruins of Londoneaux.