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No less than four copies of Bill assembled on the main floor of the Venus Gate array. The large area held massive amounts of smart matter, a fusion engine in modular pieces, high-powered lasers, and canisters of aggressive multi-purpose nanobots.
Bill-1 signaled that he was opening the portal. He had commandeered Casa’s Space Strider that she had sent earlier towards the Earth to serve as a transport gate to the Venus hub. She had been grumpy, but as she was still celebrating the mounting influx of credit from Mars Terraform she turned off her cognitive annoyance loop and queued another gate pair to begin the journey as a replacement.
The portal stretched wide out to the darkness of space. Only the dense layer of active foglets in the Gate Array terminal prevented the atmosphere from being sucked into the void. He pinged the group.
“Gate initiated. I’ve confirmed with the navigation projections that it is still 2 days from Earth and set on an elliptical flyby. Ready for stealth probes.” Bill-1 spoke.
“Stealth probes away!” Bill-4 yelled, as 6 packets of smart matter shot out and their small ion engines ignited as they crossed over into space. The probes vanished effortlessly into the darkness.
The probes began unfurling. Each would interpose itself between the gateway and major population satellites, Earth, Luna, the LaGrange O'Neils, and Mars. They would paint a false image of background stars and radiation, hiding the construction of the Shadow Gate. Bill-1 kept the count down and called out.
“Time! Activate stealth. Deploy the tent.”
Bill-3 had altered his body for vacuum EVA. He pushed the large train of supplies through the gate and held onto the caboose to ride through. He hollered just before leaving.
“See ya’all in a couple hours!”
He slid through the foglet layer and floated through the small pocket world. The paired gate trees had an octet of manipulator arms sliding about on rings, carefully maneuvering the packets over the extra-dimensional threshold and out into the big empty. As the first smart matter exited it ballooned, spreading, and hardening into a much bigger structure.
Bill-3 danced about helping the packets into their positions by hand or via access control of the gate pair arms. An ad hoc space station grew and filled with devices and supplies. It resembled the fast-motion growth of a fungus more than a space construction project, but that was the new normal with nanotechnology.
Like a conductor, the improvised station expanded again and again. The other Bills continued sending more and more supplies. Eventually, Bill-2 came riding through between the fusion plant modules.
“Ho! Mind the nacelle array. Placement ready?” he asked.
“What took you so long? It's been ready for over half a minute. Come on, I’ll help!” Bill-3 said. The pair bounced and spun, as athletic and fast as the most able normal human but far stronger and more precise thanks to augmentation.
“Final lock and set. Ready for ignition?” Bill-2 yelled and triggered the engine without waiting for a response. The sapphire viewing pane lit with the Cherenkov glow as it hummed to life.
“Hah! Three minutes ahead of schedule. Sending for the rest of the Bills. We can set environmental while we begin the Casimir staging.” The other two Bills shot into the work space, their bodies configured for advanced manipulation and resembling fractal bush robots more than humans.
“Fuck you guys! That's cheating!” Bill-3 jeered. He shook his head; he couldn't spare the time to reconfigure. He signaled his digital clone to help commandeer the free utility foglets to shift the loose equipment into place.
An hour of competitive construction between the four Bills and their digital clones, all running with amped thought speed and multitasking with skills-driven memory, precision, and calculation yielded a temporary but fully functional station with a Shadow Gate ready to be activated.
Bill-1 sighed, looking around. Rows of weaponized nano, racks of fully charged energy weapons, and a suitcase nuke on a Deadman switch. The other Bills slowed, all realizing the massive task list was fully depleted save one.
All the Bills had arrived at the same conclusion earlier. To understand and potentially combat the unknowable threat Apex insisted was coming, they would need to assess the lifeforms of the Shadow Earth. A space-based approach was selected to enable reconnaissance.
While Bill fully expected to get samples eventually, he wanted to prepare appropriately and carefully. He saw how quickly the MIT team was overwhelmed. Even his friend and Marriam’s lover, Dr. Anika Sharma...the Samaritan nicknamed Flux, hadn’t been able to mount a proper defense.
“I guess it's time to close our portal to Venus and send it away for safety. Can anybody think of anything? Any last-minute thing at all?” Bill-1 asked.
The Bills glanced around at each other, their expressions a mix of satisfaction and anticipation. Bill-3 frowned.
“We already triple-checked everything. We’ve enough mass and smart matter to make anything we need from our maker files. We've got our defensive measures, probes, lab equipment…what else could we need? Let's do it.”
Bill-1 sent the signal to close the gate to the Venus array and loaded it into the probe railgun. With a pulse of power, the probe shot out. It would begin a circuitous trip, looping the Earth and Luna in a complex dance before eventually arcing away to intersect with the ShadowGate Station’s trajectory in another week.
“Alright, time for our digital brothers to earn their keep. Fire up the gate!”
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Dominic Masterson swirled the cold beer before downing the last sip. The jingling, clinking, and musical noise from the game floor created a constant background noise around him. The lounge area was filled with players, NPC gamblers, robots playing the part of dealers, pit bosses, and waitresses.
The games and money on the floor were real and essential to buying equipment, entry into challenges, and ultimately passage into the next Labyrinth stage. Unfortunately, the credits required were daunting. Table stakes in the faux casino would never get a player anywhere. Big achievements and bets were the only way to make further progress.
Dom was frustrated. He was the last player from his team, The Roughnecks. He had been playing the game for three months. He was so close. The entry cost to the final level of the Labyrinth was steep, but one really big score would get him there. Credits weren’t freely given in the Lachesis realm. They had to be earned, generally by beating them out of other players.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Beyond the lounge, the Viewing Den lurked down the hall with a smoky atmosphere lending to the illusion of a Las Vegas venue. Massive displays showed the active challenge levels and bettors lined up to wager for and against the players. When a team or individual challenge went live, non-combatants could still make credits by betting on the outcomes.
All of Lachesis’s Challenges were broadcast to the other groups. Keeping secrets was impossible as everyone could research their potential opponents. Of course, the upside was that the challenges themselves could be previewed and teams could prepare better for them.
The challenges varied in type and most would evolved to suit the teams. The major themes had been labeled: Pandemonium, Stronghold, Death Race, Urban Assault, Drone Storm, Battle Royal, Talent Show, and Escape Room. Most challenges fit into those types, although Lachesis sometimes introduced something new.
Most of the displays were quiet as the challenge teams had been whittled down and only the last survivors remained. These games had consequences, and some challenges or losing your credit stack would result in being permanently ejected from the Labyrinth.
He looked around and spotted the leader of the MVP Leaderboard team, Sonny McGuire. Sonny’s team was still here in force and had helped Dom clear out the last couple of teams. They were capable, and so far Dom had allied with them more than against.
That would change. There wasn’t enough credit for everyone to pass the final gate. If it was between him and anyone else, Dom would choose himself. Betrayal was almost a certainty, but the timing was the trick. Dom needed a target. Stagnation was doom. Like a shark, he needed to keep moving.
He seriously thinking of challenging Sonny right then when the rare triple-gong sounded. Dominic smiled and yelled out to his distant friend/enemy.
“Fresh meat! It's about time. Which team do you think got through first? Bets?”
The self-proclaimed game master and team leader with chiseled good looks smiled. Sonny answered the call.
“You know the feed from Clotho’s stage is asynchronous by design, right? The remote viewing of the coming teams rarely shows the full picture and only provides the highlights.”
“I know it, but we all make our luck and character matters too. I'll put up 10,000 credits on that Utopia team. The dog-man had been ripping up those levels so much the AI had almost sidelined him. He’s holding more secrets than just that magic bag of holding of his.” Dom advised.
“Fuck you! That was my choice. If you take Utopia, then I need at least 2:1 odds.”
“…15k to 10k, take it or leave it. If an oddball comes through we float it, the bet holds until one of our choices comes through.”
“Deal! I think Clotho put the mutt through the ringer. I'll be surprised if that team isn't the last in this wave. I’ll take that DAIE team. Those guys are playing for keeps.” Dom leaned back in his chair, drawing a deep breath.
The Lachesis levels of the Labyrinth were a complex game. The release of a fresh wave of competitors was always a source of excitement and tension, especially during critical moments like this. The newcomers would take time to figure out the harsh truths of the level and Dom needed to find a mark to make his bid for the final toll. Newbies were always targets, even if they didn’t know it.
As the clock ticked down to the next big reveal, the anticipation in the room was palpable. The triple gong had pulled the survivors out of the dorms and side rooms. Bets were called out across the lounge as the hungry competitors gathered. They held their breath, waiting to see which team would emerge from the foundation stage first.
The doors opened, revealing the first team of new potential marks.
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“My god. Where are all the stars?” Bill-3 moaned. The Shadow-gate’s energetic portal hummed and crackled with excess energy from the disparity of zero-point energy. None of the other Bills rose to the question, all of them were deep in contemplation reviewing the data their initial probes had returned.
Bill’s first impression weas how dim the entire galaxy was. The stars were all much weaker in luminosity. Some huge swaths of stars were missing entirely.
What in the world could be the cause? I wouldn’t expect a perfect match to normal space, but the gravity wells are impressed on both dimensional spaces. That should encourage a lot more synchronicity than I’m seeing here. Something fundamental is off.
The shadow verse’s solar system was so different that Bill was aghast. Everything here seemed to betray signs of intelligent modifications and global-sized mega-engineering. Starting with the biggest stellar object, shadow-side Sol; the sun had dimmed considerably due to several observable factors.
Bill’s probes had spent over a day collecting detailed images. There were huge shards of material that swarmed close to the sun, blocking the light. They danced about in complex orbital patterns, tacking and banking between the forces from the solar wind and gravity.
The concept of capturing the energy of the sun completely had long been considered an impossible goal, requiring more material than existed in the planetary bodies. A Dyson sphere wouldn’t work, but partial measures did work apparently. Bill was viewing a functioning Dyson Swarm.
Bill had observed two major solar events. One was a CME, a coronal mass ejection that seemed to be targeting the planetary mass at shadow Venus. The sun shards seemed to be directing and maybe causing the ejection events. The other event was a scintillating array of lasers at play between the shards, only visible when they interacted with the solar corona prominences.
The energies accumulated and focused on the northern pole of the sun, blasting materials off and siphoning them into space. Bill’s sensors couldn’t determine what was happening, but his deep memory stores included theories about stellar lifting; using similar methods to strip the sun of metals and fuel. The method cooled the sun and provided building material, presumably to construct more shards. All evidence of intelligent manipulation.
The gravity well marking Mercury’s location was a roiling mass of flowing gas and metallic liquid. Venus on this side of the divide had clear signs of activity. Bursts of light and electromagnetism bloomed across the surface, most seemed to be moving away from the region about to be incinerated by the incoming solar event.
The thing, sitting where Mars would be, was a massive structure twenty times the little planet's size, but it was slightly translucent, reminding Bill of nano-foglets structured but with extremely low density. Jupiter and its moons seemed to be a war zone. Massive arcs of energy discharge and blasts of radiation were at play on the surface of the gas giant and amongst its moons.
Saturn’s rings were still there, but they were solid and patterned. They seemed to reach into the upper decks of the planet's atmosphere, scooping up gasses. The edges of the ring glowed with power, occasionally shooting out projectiles.
And then there was Neptune. In this universe, Neptune shone like a mini-sun. Bill’s probes listened in as the thing blasted out high-energy that was informationally-dense across every conceivable bandwidth. Bill was now intentionally jamming the signal. He’d lost six probes to intense signal and trying to parse the information. Something inside the signal corrupted the probes, taking control from him. He had ordered the self-destruction of two more that had listened in and were acting funny.
The Bills shuddered inside the space shack at the gate. The other side was alive. Everything was alive! The worst was Earth and Luna. These were the closest and the Bills’ sensors had collected a lot of data.
Earth’s surfaces were populated by megastructures and ruined cities like nothing even made by humans. The dark and blasted plains and mountains seethed with movement. Creatures of enormous proportions, true kaiju, battled on land and in the seas.
Luna was a slithering nest of tubules writhing over the hidden surface of the moon…if there was a surface. Bill wondered briefly if it was truly snakes and tentacles all the way to the core of the moon. The Bills looked grimly about at each other. Bill-4 coughed and spoke.
“I’m glad that our theory that the synthetic life might be restricted to the planet’s surface was correct. We seem to be safe for the moment. We could collect information and keep learning new things for months.”
“If only we had enough time. We’re fast approaching the 100-day mark to Apex’s supposed doomsday. We need samples. We need to know what they are.” Bill-2 said.
“Yeah, so we can fuck them up,” Bill-3 interjected. Bill-1 sighed.
“We’re going to need more guns.”
The background noise of the temporary space habitat rose in intensity as all the matter compilers turned on and started fabricating at a feverous pace. The Bills circulated about seamlessly tending to the orchestra of equipment. The next phase would require some up-close work.
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