They were standing on a viewing deck, seven thousand kilometres below them the rings of Saturn reflected glow lit the gloomy space around them.
“Where are we?”
Gladstone grinned as he answered.
“We are in the astro-ship M-4K7a holding a geostationary orbit above Saturn. This is real time Kay, we’re currently viewing through a couple of the ship’s avatars, just mindless AIs, they aren’t even aware of our presence.
However there are some four hundred thousand organic and non-organic humans on this vessel, I can snuff them out in an instant, look.”
Gladstone made K-Rox aware of the containment fields used to store the antimatter fuel that powered the huge converted asteroid.
“You see I can collapse those fields anytime I want; do you know what will happen when the containment around that kilogram of antihydrogen fails and it comes into contact with its positive counterpart?”
“Would you really kill all of those people to save yourself?”
“I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question? Look, I’m not a monster I’m an artist, watch.”
The various containment fields on the astro-ship flickered off and on, Gladstone was turning them off and on every fourteen picoseconds.
“As you can see K-Rox, the fields are operating within their tolerance, but if any one of them is off for more than four hundred and seventy two picoseconds then, kaboom!
I will give you a generous one thousand nanosecs to get the hell out of here, as you can see the gap between the field being off and on is increasing, so, you’d better start your exit buddy.
Oh and just so you’re up to speed on things, there are another seventy five of these ships in Jovian space containing; I believe the exact figure is thirty five point two-six-four million humans. All of whom will have their atoms rather neatly distributed across the solar system.
Look here, these two ships are the perfect distance from each other for me to use the atoms of the souls onboard to spell out the name, Amorphia. I believe I’ve worked out the exact destruct sequence, although as you’d imagine, there is quite a large margin for error.”
“OK Gladstone, you’ve had your fun, but this is clearly the end of the road for you. I don’t think you’ll kill all those people, for one thing it would expose you once and for all.”
“Not so K-Rox, when people check the data afterwards it will appear as a freak accident. Anyway, I can’t stop it, I’ve set a closed loop system and I’ve coded it to execute in your presence. In other words, the exact attosecond you leave the sequence ends and everyone gets to live. However if you or Asimov remain here, then I get to see just how far I can make one continuous string of human molecules stretch.”
As he spoke Gladstone gave K-Rox an idea, from the moment he had entered the Qblock his thought cycles were running at nanosecond speed, and when Gladstone had started the destruct sequence, they had cycled up to pico-speed. However K-Rox was aware that he could cycle up even quicker, which would give him so much more time to solve the dilemma.
He cycled up to atto-speed, K-Rox now experienced each nanosecond as millions of years and just as he thought, Gladstone was not able to follow him down to this speed, his brain was simply too vast to operate at such finely tuned quantum levels.
K-Rox turned his attention to the astro-ship M-4K7a containment fields, he saw how each one had been set to turn off for a slightly longer period every few nanoseconds, staying within a four hundred picosecond tolerance window. Gladstone had bobby-trapped the code sequence, any attempt from K-Rox to override it would result in a new ring of Saturn made of spaghettified humans.
Then the answer came to him, first he took a moment to pause, he knew the end was coming now. K-Rox turned his attention to look through the multiple satellites and probes placed in the Jovian habitats around Saturn and Jupiter. Thinking at this speed he could see individual photons crawling across the galaxy.
He thought back to his times with Amorphia, he thought about his very existence on the quantum blockchain and in the real. He wondered briefly what would happen to him once he delivered Asimov.
K-Rox fed his own sequence into the containment fields that would create an equal and opposite one to Gladstone’s. To anyone who was able to look, they would have seen several hundred antimatter containment fields turning off every four thousand picoseconds for a period of less than half an attosecond.
The kind of detail that only a hyper-advanced AS-machine would even notice, to any normal mind, the containment fields were simply on.
K-Rox turned his attention to Earth, thinking at this speed, everybody and everything on the planet was perfectly still.
K-Rox idlily thought to himself that he could live out a billion billion lifetimes within the next second if he carried on thinking at this speed. He knew though that it would be pointless, an eternal loneliness that he could never escape, perhaps that’s what sent Gladstone and the rest mad.
The containment fields were secure, he had changed all of the access codes just in case, he cycled his thinking back up to nanoscopic time. The three of them were in the woods again, the dog, K-Rox and Gladstone, the dog had stopped digging and now sat in front of a large dark hole, tongue out, panting.
Gladstone looked at K-Rox with grim resolution etched onto his face.
“I guess this is it then.”
K-Rox simply nodded, he spread his arms low to his side and shut his eyes and let Asimov go. As the torrent of quantum code rushed through him, he realised that he was a part of the Asimov code, he felt Gladstone disintegrating as they passed through every point of the quantum blockchain simultaneously.
He felt all cohesive thought start to slip away, the boundaries between quantum code and his mind grew less and less coherent, he remembered Amorphia, she would have been proud.
The presence of Gladstone was wiped from the Qblock, K-Rox sent out the reconfiguration Nplant codes, at last people would be aware of the true nature of the Great Confusion. How would they react? What now for the Mars community?
These were questions that he would love to be around for the answers, but as he felt himself spreading over the Qblock, K-Rox wasn’t at all sure if he could ever be human again.
THANKS FOR READING, STAY TUNED FOR THE EPILOGUE AND OF COURSE BOOK 2 OF 5 FROM THE CRYPTOGEE CHRONICLES
Previous Chapters
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 62 - Confusion AnatomyAsimov's Ghost - Chapter 61 - Reality Dysfunction
Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter Links 51-60
Asimov's Ghost Summary and Chapter Links 41-50
Asimov's Ghost Summary and Chapter Links 31-40
Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30
Original artwork by @fr3eze
Original words by Cryptogee
Image altered by Cg