Allied Powers by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2022-12-31T06:00:00+00:00

17

He wasn’t real, of course…or at least he wasn’t an actual, physical being. It was a projection, probably holographic but maybe something even more complicated, something with heft and solidity. I’d never tested it. He was an artificial intelligence, and not the tame sort we’d been experimenting with for decades. He was a sentient system, Pinocchio turned into a real boy.

“Well, okay, then,” I went on. “We know about the closed, time-like loop. Is that what started all this? Did the Elders somehow…come here from the future?”

Graham folded his arms and regarded me like a teacher patronizing a particularly slow child.

“That sort of passage through the loop is impossible. The most that they were ever able to accomplish was to send a signal back.”

Graham paced around us, weaving through the three of us, and I edged away from him, still unsure whether I’d feel anything if he touched me and not wanting to find out.

“As I understand it,” Julie said, sounding unintimidated by the…thing, “the way a closed, time-like loop works is, you can only send anything back to the point that the loop was created.”

“And did your physicists come up with this theory,” Graham asked her, cocking his head to the side in a catlike motion, “before or after they were aware of the existence of hyperdimensional travel at effective speeds faster than light?”

Not many people were able to leave Julie nonplussed, just me and now, as far as I knew, this dude. I wanted to high-five him, but again, didn’t want to know if that was possible.

“The how is not really important,” I interjected before the thing made Julie mad at it. “The why is.”

I looked around instinctively for a chair, frowned when I didn’t find one. I could have set the suit to support me, but for some reason, I really wanted a chair. And a table. I think I’d been hanging around Mike with all his meetings in the ops center too much.

“You yourself said the why of it,” Graham replied, spreading his hands. The fingers were long and agile, like the AI imagined himself a concert pianist. “This universe was doomed to heat death. The ones you call the Elders wished it not to be so.”

“Why do all the pictures of the Elders look like us?” Quinn demanded. It was a good question, and one I was going to get around to, but there were so many other questions I’d wanted to ask first. “Like humans, I mean?”

“Can we have a table?” I blurted, knowing he could do it. “And chairs? I feel stupid standing around here.”

And they were there. I didn’t know how, but more importantly, I didn’t know when they came into existence. It wasn’t like they appeared, or popped into being by magic. It was as if they’d always been there. The table was large and round, seemingly constructed from polished oak, while the chairs were padded leather, looking as if they’d been built for the office of a Nineteenth-Century oil tycoon, except two of them were big enough to support Svalinn armor.

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