Ode To Defiance Chapter 25

20

Leap Of Faith

In order to achieve victory you must place yourself in your opponent’s skin

—Tsutomu Oshima

Ping danced through the blast door, barely touching the ground with the balls of her feet, ready to jump in any direction. Her chura glinted in the harsh fluorescent light.

She became aware that Dash had entered behind her.

To the sides stood rack after rack of computers, punctuated here and there by monitors and the occasional table of equipment Dash surely recognized.

Before her, her opponents faced her, similarly poised for sudden movement. Sabaah stood to the right, Uwais to the left. In the center, well in front of the others, stood Jam, her knife glittering in time with Ping’s movements.

Sabaah spoke to Jam with bright malice. “Now finish what you began back on the BrainTrust.”

Ping pointed her knife at Sabaah. “You’re next after I finish with this bitch.”

Jam stepped forward. “You should not have come here. You will not survive a second time.”

Then Ping ran at her, her arms spread wide, offering herself as a helpless target to her former friend. Into the air she leapt, and flew forward.

Jam threw her knife with unerring accuracy at Ping’s heart.

At this, Ping’s heart sang. In all the time since Jam had left her, she had known that Jam was merely playing a part…except that sometimes, when Ping was exhausted by training, a dark doubt would creep into her thoughts. Now, as the knife hurtled toward her chest, her doubts fell away.

Ping twisted as she flew and snatched Jam’s knife from the air.

Jam crouched and flipped into a backward somersault, planting her feet firmly in Ping’s stomach and launching her with all her strength into a higher, faster arc. Had there been an Olympic event in pairs martial arts gymnastics, they would have surely earned a perfect ten.

Ping flipped and rotated until she flew feet first and face-down between Uwais and Sabaah, sweeping with her knives in both directions to cut them both across the abdomen.

Ping had aimed for killing blows, but although her opponents had been taken completely by surprise, their rigorously trained nearly-autonomous reflexes saved them. They twisted away, and although each suffered a bleeding gash to the side, neither died.

Ping landed and rolled backward, almost hitting Khalid. She swung her knives, but Khalid blocked with casual speed, foreseeing every move Ping might make even though he was clearly distracted. He never took his eyes from Dash.

Ping followed Dash’s instructions to leave Khalid alone. She slid sideways, bounced to her feet, and dashed into the space behind the racks of computers.

Sabaah grimaced with pain, then followed after her.

Uwais barely winced from Ping’s knife slash before turning his attention to Jam.

Jam finished her backward somersault, leapt up, and spun to face Uwais.

Jam barely spent a moment marveling at how perfectly Ping had responded to her thrown knife. It had been beautiful, but now it was ancient history. She threw her first strike at Uwais, who blocked with deft anticipatory speed.

Jam had of course been sparring with Uwais since her departure from the BrainTrust, or at least since their release from the ludicrous submarine.

Her knowledge had grown unceasingly. Uwais, big as he was, should have been slower than she was, but he was instead faster.

And she knew that he saw her next move, and her move after that, with the same clarity she saw his.

She had worked relentlessly to up her game. She was confident she had done so, although it might not matter. As in fencing and chess and many other competitions where strategy counted, the best way to get better was to pit yourself against someone better than you.

So just as Jam had learned much, so had Uwais. As she looked into the future of their battle, she saw that Uwais was at a disadvantage: the knife he held would slow him down, while Jam, having given her own weapon to Ping, was free to move at full speed.

Uwais tossed his knife aside.

The two of them moved swiftly beyond the foolishness of their first encounter with its endless strikes, blocks, and counterstrikes. Now they only started the motions, saw the beginnings of the opposing response, and shifted tactics.

The started motions became shorter and shorter and the sequences of never-completed strikes became longer and longer, until finally they stood virtually motionless. Only gestures such as the twitch of a finger, the glance of an eye, or a minuscule shift in balance denoted readiness to commit to action.

She realized she had finally achieved the state her teacher long ago had demanded of her, the state that she could never quite reach. She now watched "everything and nothing" in a highly attentive yet at the same time unfocused hyper-awareness. She knew, just as Uwais surely knew, the next time one of them moved, one of them would die.

Jam hoped she was doing her part to keep Uwais occupied. She dimly heard a crash against some wall as Ping did something and Sabaah did something else.

Silence reigned for a moment. Then Jam heard Khalid and Dash whispering to each other, thus beginning the primary battle that would unfold in whatever exotic form such a battle between two such people would take.

Jam stayed focused on Uwais, forlornly wishing that someone could give her a clue what was going on.

Dash watched Khalid raise his hand in a beckoning offer. “Dash.”

Dash made no beckoning gesture since her hands were filled with pink and black death. “Khalid.”

Khalid smiled. The power of his warm, caring personality blazed through the cavern. “You’ve learned my name.”

Dash could not help smiling back. “I’ve learned many things.”

He twitched his hand, insistently inviting her to join him. “Come with me, and we shall destroy all that is evil.”

Dash beckoned with her eyes. “Come with me, and we shall nourish all that is good.”

Khalid shook his head sadly. He began to whisper descriptions of molecular structures; this first one Dash recognized as a drug similar to phenytoin, an aggression suppressor.

He continued with a sequence of nucleotides, spliceable genes, and Dash struggled with them until she dimly grasped that these sequences could lead to the manufacture of the phenytoin molecule. Her ability to comprehend, she peripherally realized, was beyond anything she had ever experienced before.

The DNA strands Khalid was proposing were mere skeletal prototypes. To truly build them correctly and safely would require the two of them working together for decades. But the outline was enough since the result was clear.

If a virus that edited the genome in this way infected the world, how would it affect the people and their societies? For Dash the answer was now obvious: they would become unalterably peaceful.

Even before Khalid had finished mapping it out, Dash started seeing other possibilities.

Dash realized what was happening. As in fencing and chess and many other competitions where strategy counted, the best way to get better was to pit yourself against someone better than you.

Here they were, the two greatest minds of their age in unbridled conflict. Necessarily they were learning from each other, bootstrapping together to an unparalleled realm of understanding.

Dash began to whisper another sequence of DNA patterns for Khalid. With her sequences, the neurons would tighten and fire faster. Dash proposed to make people smarter.

Khalid countered, and Dash responded to his response.

Now new visions took shape in the space between them, visions of the different societies that would emerge based on the genetic variations they imposed on the people forming them. Dash knew that what she saw, Khalid also would see. The insignificant details might vary, but the crucial details would be identical.

There was no telepathy involved. If you sent messages to two high school students at opposite ends of the Earth, asking each to compute the sum of two plus two, both students would say four with no mysterious means of communication.

It was the same way two people with sufficient insight and knowledge would look at a field of solar panels in the desert, see the changing air currents, and perceive the resulting rain that would bring life to the parched land. No mystical intervention was required.

So Dash and Khalid shared visions of the fruits of their genomic labors. Whole civilizations rose and fell in the empty space between them, coalescing out of the nothingness.

A city of graceful glittering spires rose, where the people lived in perfect repose. Where even the labor of opening a door was performed by robots.

In another vision, the machinery and technology merged and disappeared into the surroundings as the bots split into two categories. One type became microscopic, too small to be seen. The others labored underground, too deep to be heard. The people wandered, carefree, through hushed woods or gathered for banquets on long swards of manicured grass.

In each of Khalid’s futures, the people of Earth achieved an easy serenity, the kind of happiness one feels when coming home from a turbulent journey. It was the kind of future that Dash, a pacifist by nature, would appreciate in a way Khalid never could.

In each of Dash’s futures, war was rare but competition and confrontation ran rife as people drove one another forward with boisterous ebullience to greater heights, different from yet similar to what Khalid and Dash were doing now. It was a world in which Khalid, even more than Dash, would thrive.

But another feature distinguished the two sets of visions, an inevitable outgrowth of the first difference. In each of Khalid’s worlds, the viewpoint was always from ground level—the ground of Earth.

In Dash’s visions, the viewpoint always came from beyond, from the habitats orbiting planets and the

munditos

of the asteroids. Always a few people were hollowing out small moons, strapping on immense engines, and setting out on adventures vast enough to span the stars.

The similarities and differences became repetitive and dreary. Dash broke the trance. “Your people are marionettes,” she whispered. “Marionettes acting on a stage built and scripted by others. Vast wealth, yet not a single dream.”

The noise of Ping bouncing along the walls chased by Sabaah crashed in on them. Khalid and Dash returned to normal space.

Khalid lunged forward to grasp the sphere holding the black powder.

Dash swiveled to keep the glass out of his reach. Whether she or Khalid moved more swiftly, no one could ever say: Ping launched herself from behind the computers and knocked Khalid to the ground.

Sabaah leapt upon Jam, disrupting her one-on-one contest of future moves with Uwais. Uwais struck, and the sickening

thunk

of a human joint twisted beyond its capacity filled the air. Jam fell away to crash down on Khalid moments after Ping lunged away from him.

Dash hurled the pink sphere across the room, intending to strike the wall.

Uwais jumped desperately to catch the spinning container, and miraculously, succeeded.

But to maintain his hold, he grasped it too tightly. The metal needles of the latticework punctured the fragile glass.

The sphere shattered, and the pink powdered erupted across the room.

Dash spoke in an altered voice, a full octave deeper and a full megawatt more commanding. “Ping. Jam. Out now.”

Ping and Jam ran for the door. Dash backed out more slowly, the black sphere clutched firmly in her hand.

Khalid touched each of his men on the shoulder. “Let them go.”

Dash stepped beyond the blast door.

Ping slammed the button that slid it shut behind them.

Dash hurled the remaining sphere against the titanium barrier. The black powder erupted, covering them all.

Ping coughed, waving futilely at the clinging dust. “Really? In the midst of escaping, you had to cover us in soot? Are you kidding me?”

Dash led them at a trot through the caverns.

Ping could not get past the black powder. “So let me get this straight: the pink powder is composed of viruses specifically targeted to Uwais’, Sabaah’s, and Khalid’s DNA.”

Dash answered while continuing to urgently check her phone for the moment when they came close enough to the surface to have service. “Correct. It’s a slow virus; they have about two weeks before they become symptomatic and die.”

Ping continued, “And the black powder is also tuned to their DNA, but it would kill them in less than a day.”

Dash barely nodded.

“So you popped the black powder to make sure they wouldn’t follow us.”

Dash acknowledged this. “They’d still kill me if they could.”

“So why didn’t they open the door and run straight into the powder?”

Dash sighed. “Because Khalid knew I’d leave the powder outside the door.”

Ping pounced, triumphant. “So if you knew that Khalid knew, you didn’t have to pop the container after all. You didn’t have to cover us in soot.”

Jam took the next step. “But Khalid would know that she knew, so he would know he could open the door safely.”

Dash laughed for the first time in what seemed forever. “Just so. I didn’t release the black powder to stop Khalid. I released it to stop the infinite deductive recursion.”

Dash came to a sudden halt. “Signal!” She studied a flying series of numbers and maps that flicked across the screen, then started madly typing a message.

As she worked, she answered a question Ping had asked long ago. “You were wondering what the metal sticks were for.”

Ping grinned. “At last. A secret about to be revealed.”

“They’re seismographic sound generators and sensors. Think of them as radar for the ground.”

Jam prompted her. “So, you were mapping these caverns?”

Dash smashed her finger on the Send button and began trotting once more. “I was looking for the caverns and tunnels forming the secret back entrance to Khalid’s headquarters.”

Ping shook her head. “How’d you even know he’d have one?”

Dash looked back at her with eyes that were wide and unseeing; or rather, they saw something that was not here in the tunnel. “I knew he had a back door because if it had been me, I would have had a back door.”

Dash ran faster as the exit appeared, a patch of soft red light from a sun that had not yet risen over the horizon. They ran out, and Dash turned and pointed north.

A squadron of fighters roared near, and a muffled flash arose as if a bomb had gone off underground and only a fraction of the light reached the surface. The ground vibrated beneath their feet.

Dash spoke with satisfaction. “So much for the back door.” She turned once more and started to run yet again. Her voice filled with urgency, she said, “Now we must depart this place before they do the same thing here.”

Minutes later the explosion repeated, closer this time. The ground shook so hard it nearly threw them off their feet.

The planes zoomed over them, and Ping, Jam, and Dash waved to them. The planes waggled their wings in a synchronous acknowledgment, then wheeled to return the way they had come.

Ping slapped at her clothes. “At least that blast shook off some of the dust.”

Jam looked at the place where the entrance had been moments ago. “So, is that it? Did those blasts kill him?”

Dash laughed. “Behind those blast doors? Of course not.” Her eyes once more looked off into a distance where no one else could go. “Nor could he have escaped through the back door before Toni’s fighters arrived. He had to stay because only in his own lab could he cure the pink virus in the time he has remaining.” She thought some more. “It’s obvious what he’s doing right now.”

Ping asked, “What?”

Khalid sat down next to his main monitor and keyboard. Best to get cracking on the cure for the pink virus while he was still in a state of elevated clarity.

It was amazing how much he’d learned in such a short time. He already missed her terribly. It was a shame he hadn’t managed to kill her.

As he brought his machines to life, he learned yet another new thing. He began to laugh, first with admiration, then with a contorted, wracking pain.

With the transcendent vision he had achieved, he finally saw a basic truth. He had never been fighting just Dash, one on one in a battle of two minds. No, he had always been fighting—

“—a great civilization,” Colin Wheeler explained in a voice that had finally gotten stronger than a whisper. “I know we haven’t heard back from them yet, but we know the outcome. Khalid had no more chance than Hannibal.”

He took a sip of the warm chicken broth Amanda had placed beside him. “Hannibal of Carthage was the greatest general of his time. He won battle after battle, but could not, no matter how many his victories, win the war against Rome. Even when he took Rome itself and sacked it, he could not win.” Colin tapped his temple. “By the time Hannibal arrived, Rome was no longer a city, no longer a place. It was a set of beliefs and principles, and it lived in the minds of all who shared those principles. So the Romans left the city behind and continued to fight until finally Hannibal lost a battle, and thereby lost the war.”

Amanda smirked. “So you’re calling the BrainTrust a great civilization? Don’t you feel a little excessive hubris coming on with that fever?”

Colin settled back and closed his eyes. “And Dash has finally grown beyond what she thought were her limits. It will all be OK now. Even if something terrible happens to me—”

Amanda coughed loudly enough to break that train of thought. “Speaking of terrible things. You told me long ago to watch out for this headline.” She lifted her tablet and began to read. “The President for Life regrets to inform his people that he has been taken ill with a minor flu and must cancel his monthly address. Rest assured that he is already recovering, and will be ready to address the nation in time for next month’s presentation.”

She put the tablet down. “You think he’s dead, I take it?”

Colin’s eyes flickered back and forth across the ceiling as he mapped out possible futures. “That’s it, then. The Dance of the Dinosaurs has begun.”

Amanda shook her head. “And while we’re on the topic…”

Colin’s face relaxed suddenly as he fell helplessly back to sleep.

“OK, then.” Amanda smiled quietly. “And don’t talk trash. You’re too ornery to die. And more importantly, it’s just not your style.”

She kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Sweet dreams, General Scipio.”

Dash pointed into the near distance where a patch of almost perfectly flat land lay. “That will be a good spot.” She started walking.

With her mind still on Khalid, she spoke in a chatty tone, which was quite odd for Dash. “You know, Khalid is now part of a very interesting experiment. He has become Schrodinger’s cat.”

Ping decided to humor her. “He’s a cat?”

Dash continued, “Schrodinger postulated that if you put a cat in a sealed box with machinery that gave her a fifty-fifty chance of living, the cat would enter an indeterminate state. She would be both dead and alive until somebody looked inside the box.”

Dash waved her hand behind them. “Khalid is sealed in such a box, and I reckon he has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. At this moment, he may well be both alive and dead.” She stopped and spread her arms, reveling in the mix of approaching dawn, receding stars, and an unlikely physics experiment in progress. “Isn’t that fascinating?”

As Dash started to walk again, Ping slowed down and Jam slowed beside her. Jam asked in a near whisper, “What’s the crunching noise in your batpack?”

Ping grimaced. “While you were standing there like a statue facing Uwais, I was running around the room collecting the central controller boards from all the compute server racks. They’re all in my pack.”

She laughed softly. “So Khalid’s got no compute power left except his personal machine. I don’t know if that’ll be enough to give him a fifty-fifty chance.”

Jam chuckled. “It’s worse than you know.” She held up a hand she had kept clenched ever since falling against Khalid in the final moments of the battle. “Men are so easy, even the super-genius ones. I don’t think he even noticed.” She opened her hand. “This is the dongle needed to log into his personal machine. He has no compute power at all.”

Now Ping had to cover her mouth to keep her laughter from disturbing Dash, who was still muttering in the distance. “You know, sometimes I think Dash is the embodiment on Earth of Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.” Her voice turned darker. “But you and I, we sometimes embody Shiva the Destroyer.” Ping thought it was good that Dash had not had to be Shiva. How damaging would that have been to her? Could she have ever recovered?

Jam giggled. “Oh, my. I just realized, we ruined Dash’s cat experiment.”

Dash had stopped to talk on her phone.

Ping offered one last comment as they came up to her. “Well worth the price.”

Dash dialed her phone again, placing it on speaker. “Chance, I need your help.”

Chance answered on a chipper note. “And I’m more than ready. You’ll never guess where I am.”

Dash answered, puzzled. “You’re on board a space capsule in orbit, a capsule specially fitted with medical equipment—the newest vehicle from yours and Dmitri’s company, Med Bays by Dash.”

Chance’s voice choked. “How’d you know that?”

Dash stated the obvious. “You told me.” She paused, thinking back. “I guess not.” She shrugged for no one in particular. “It was self-evident. I know you, Chance. Of course, at this moment, you would be in orbit with a fully equipped hospital, awaiting my call.”

Ping whispered urgently to Jam, “If she can see us all so clearly and knows our actions so accurately, how could she not know what we did to Khalid and his computers?”

Jam gave her the answer that was, frighteningly enough, necessary and correct. “She does know. But she knows she doesn’t want to know. And she won’t really know until she asks. So she will never ask. So she will never know.”

Ping responded with a kind of horror-filled wonder. “What’s really scary is not that I understood what you just said. What’s scary is that I already knew that that was what you’d say.”

They turned back as Dash’s next words compelled their attention. “Anyway, we’ll need three moonsuits so you can contain us. Khalid infected us with something new, an entirely different virus from a different base virus. Smallpox.”

Chance answered grimly. “Three moonsuits coming up as soon as we land. In a few minutes.”

Ping asked, now sick to her stomach, “Smallpox? I thought we wiped that out generations ago.”

Dash smiled gently upon her. “We did wipe it out, but when the permafrost in Siberia melted, frozen smallpox particles thawed and became available. Khalid sent someone to get samples.”

Ping shook her head. “How do you know that?”

Dash just stared at her from a thousand miles away with cold, unseeing eyes.

Ping heard the unspoken answer:

I know he did because that’s what I would have done

.

Dash put a hand to her left temple. Pain flared across her face “There’s a hollow, aching place in my head where part of me should be.” She wiped a finger thoughtlessly under her nose. It came away with a dark smear.

Ping gasped. “Blood. Is that blood?” She leapt to Dash’s side, grabbed the finger, and examined it. The morning light was not yet bright enough to distinguish colors; Ping flicked her tongue across the blotch. “Blood!”

Dash stared at her own finger in bemusement.

Where have I seen this before?

she asked herself.

Like Ping, she licked a speck of the blood. “Oh, my. I seem to have a mild brain hemorrhage. I’ll be fine.” She blinked, and her eyes almost achieved full focus. “Although I must never again try for a state of hyper-awareness like that.” She swayed and started to fall.

Jam and Ping both grabbed her. She wriggled in their hold until she got her feet under her once more. Dash smiled at the world at large. “I’m so glad we’re all together again.”

Jam and Ping put their arms around each other and her.

Suddenly Dash realized that the story would now end, as all such stories should end, with a group hug. She gave them a squeeze.

Ping jerked. “Ow!”

Jam grunted as something gave way in her shoulder.

Dash broke the hold. Driven by years of training, she snapped back to the self she had been before meeting Khalid. “What is wrong with you two?” She poked and prodded at Ping until she discovered what she sought. “Two broken ribs. We’ll need to tape that.”

She turned to Jam. After a moment’s examination, she concluded, “Dislocated shoulder. Let me fix this real quick.” She took Jam’s arm in her hands. “This is going to hurt. On the count of three.” She took a breath.

Jam steeled herself.

Dash began the count. “One.” She twisted, and they all heard the sickly

thunk

of a shoulder being reset in its socket.

Jam grunted.

Dash turned back to Ping and glanced at the batpack. “You say you always carry rope and duct tape?”

Ping nodded.

Dash moved to get behind her. “I need the duct tape.”

Ping spun suddenly until the pack faced Jam. “Let Jam get it.”

Dash smiled ruefully as Jam groped around in the pack, accompanied by grinding noises. “I thought you said your batpack was mostly empty this time.”

Jam raised her good arm high, duct tape in hand. She spoke triumphantly, saving Ping the need to respond. “Got it.”

While wrapping Ping’s chest, Dash offered them some scathing observations. “I can’t believe you two! I leave you unsupervised for a couple minutes, and you get yourselves all banged up. How can I trust you to go anywhere on your own? You need to be more careful in the future.”

Ping grunted in pain.

Jam offered a calm, logical defense. “Dash, we were fighting two of the greatest martial arts assassins on the planet.”

Dash paused for a moment to glare at her. “

That’s

your excuse? You call that a justification? Must I explain everything? It is exactly when you are battling the world’s greatest fighters that you must be extra careful!”

That shut up both Jam and Ping.

At last, Dash finished winding the tape to her satisfaction.

Ping complained, “I can hardly breathe.”

Dash rolled her eyes.

The need to administer first aid had indeed brought her back to a reasonable approximation of normal. The ache in the side of her head faded, and the nosebleed ended. Earlier she had told her friends she would be fine to keep them from worrying. Now she examined herself with more objective clinical detachment and drew the same conclusion.

The only lasting side effect she would suffer was, she still had images and visions of how to cure the latest plague virus, a problem she realized she had been processing subconsciously the whole time she was hyper-aware. She smiled to herself. They were going to set yet another record for developing a vaccine in even less time than ever before. All would be well.

She reconnected with the normal reality brought to her by her senses and felt a peaceful pleasure as she considered how solid and reliable it was.

The sun rose, following the laws of orbital mechanics. The rocket descended, following the laws of gravity and motion. The sky filled with the thunder of engines, following the laws of acoustics.

Jam and Ping huddled around her, following the laws of friendship.

Then the story ended, as all such stories should end, with a group hug.