Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,104

manifest says that there were north of twelve hundred souls aboard.”

“We’re lucky they didn’t just send the whole lot of them in one endless wave,” I grunted.

“Maybe not so lucky,” Shay replied, tone pensive.

“Eh?” I asked. The number of coils we’d dropped was staggering, though the brunt by far had fallen to Korben’s nano-virus. And even then, the rest had come in waves. It had taken more than just skill and superior firepower—we’d needed a large dose of luck to be standing where we were at the moment.

From my peripheral vision I saw Shay waving a resigned hand from where she still hunched over her tablet. “I know it was fortunate that you didn’t have to face more of these… things… all at once, Carter. We watched what you had to do.” She was quiet for a long moment, and I felt a bit of a sinking in the pit of my stomach. I had my own doubts about what I’d done, and I knew that sleep was going to be long and hard coming for a while. Somehow, it made it worse that others had seen it secondhand. “It was terrible. Truly terrible, and I’m sorry you had to go through it.” That wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. I felt a warm and uplifting swell of relief pass through me at her words.

“But that’s not what I was talking about,” she continued. “What I mean is, I don’t think it was luck that Bliss sent only a small portion of the available total coils to deal with you. I think it was a conscious choice. A matter of self-preservation.”

“Explain,” Korben cut in to the channel. It should have come across as curt, but somehow, his calm, urbane voice made it seem more like a request than a command.

“For fuck’s sake,” Shay ground, her own patience apparently eroded by the killer’s interjection. “You people have been saying from the start that Bliss is a distributed intelligence. Just what do you think it’s distributed over?”

“A colony of nanobots,” Korben replied, no sign of irritation at Shay’s shortness showing in his own voice.

“Yeah,” I grunted, seeing where Shay was going. “That’s where it started. But you said this thing was a virus, and then it spreads. And we’ve got about a thousand people it’s spread to.” I looked over at Shay. She might have been perfectly comfortable with the entirety of the conversation taking place over the comm, but I felt an almost physical need to be looking at her as I asked the next question. “Are you saying that Bliss isn’t just controlling the coils but is… I guess the only word is distributed… over them?”

“Exactly,” Shay replied. As if sensing the weight of my gaze, she finally put her tablet down and walked over to us. “I’m not one hundred percent certain how the nano-virus works—Genetechnic wasn’t overly forthcoming with that information. We know it can survive conditions that would kill ordinary coils—the footage from your own branch is proof enough of that, Carter. But we’ve all been talking about this thing like it’s some sort of hive mind—a queen with a bunch of drones. Only, that doesn’t make any sense.”

I was shaking my head now, finding it difficult to follow my much smarter companion’s line of thinking. “Why not?”

“Because that’s not how processing works,” she said. “Look, if you go back to the early days of computers, before we had quantum computing, if you wanted more operations per second, you either needed to build a better processor or string a bunch of them together, working in parallel, breaking up a task across multiple chips. But all those different parts, whether they were one supercomputer, or a distributed network, were all working on one thing, one objective. Working as one entity. I think Bliss is like that. We’re not dealing with a queen and a thousand drones. We’re dealing with a single creature that has a thousand different arms. Or hands. Or whatever. Each with their own functioning sub-network to provide a little autonomy in how they go about completing their part of the task.” I could hear the wonder in her voice, though I didn’t pretend to understand it. “It really is like a virus,” she marveled. “Not a medical virus though. An old-school computer virus. The kind that would infect a machine and then slave it to a broader network of thousands of zombies, using them to make denial-of-service attacks or mass spam campaigns. Only, in this